Analyzing the Effects of the WoW Token Restrictions - Wowhead Economy Weekly Wrap-Up 303

Live Posted 5 days ago by SamadanPlaysWoW

SamadanWoW Token Restrictionsrequirement of having to pay at least once

In order to preserve the integrity of the game and provide a better token market to players, with an update to World of Warcraft on Tuesday, November 21, we will enable the following restriction in this region.• Players will no longer be allowed to purchase a WoW Token from the Auction House or the in-game Shop for gold if they have not spent real money to purchase and consume at least 30 days of game time (a “Time Limited License”) since 2017.This does not affect the consumption of existing WoW Tokens, however, game time provided by the consumption of a WoW Token does not count toward the qualification to purchase a WoW Token for gold.After November 21, 2023, any player who cannot purchase a WoW Token for gold in-game will need to first purchase and consume at least 30 days of game time for real money. This can be done on any World of Warcraft account across the player’s Battle.net account to qualify.Thank you.

Yes, as each bot will require an upfront payment of $15, plus the consumption of a whole month of game time (“have not spent real money to purchase and consume at least 30 days of game time”), before being allowed to trade tokens. Thus, each bot ban will have both a significant monetary and time cost.It seems good at face value but I believe its not a realistic deterrent to bots. From what i have seen the vast majority of bots are in classic WoW. The token in classic is not able to be used for balance only game time. So knowing this it seems good, but when you consider how long the bot exists for, sometimes as long as 3-6 months the amount of money the bot is able to make over time is huge compared to the cost of a single month of game time. Also not sure why they go back almost 7 years seems like its punishing players that use gold that have stayed around a long time and are clearly not bots. Or i would hope so if they have not gotten banned in those 7 years.420k+ on EU as of right now. I expect it to actually hit half a million the following dayswowtokenprices.comHrm, ppl unloading tokens in an attempt to get as much gold out of them as they can before the price drops? Maybe?Think this might drive down the prices of WoW tokens, since bot accounts shouldn't be able to gobble up as many of them.

That happened with the TW WoW token prices, didn't it? The WoW token price went above a million gold and broke the WoW token system, Blizzard added a measure to allow WoW token prices over a million gold, then implemented a measure exactly like this -- and the price of the TW WoW token now is ~700k iirc.

EDIT: So, on Sept. 10th, TW WoW token prices breached the 1,000,000 gold mark and skyrocketed upward, peaking at 1.25 million on Sept. 26th. On Sept 27th, it was 1.064 million. Sept 28th, it was 920k, and it bottomed out at 846k on Sept 30th before recovering slightly to ~900k, then trending downward to ~600k today (Nov. 17th). When did this change happen in the TW region? I forget...

EDIT 2: Apparently this restriction applied in the TW region on September 29th. Huh. Wonder why the gold price started plummeting three days before the change went through? I'd have figured it'd have went up even more as botters went through one 'last hurrah' of buying tokens to fund accounts, then dropped...

EDIT 3: Er... after a bit more reading, this restriction was announced on Sept. 9th... so that 'last hurrah' I was thinking of happened after all, I guess?wowanalytica.com
They put restrictions on Taiwan wow tokens since it reached 1,000,000 gold

It remained far lower than the Taiwan token though, which reached a worldwide record setting 1 million gold price tag last month, resulting in Blizzard actually suspending sales for several days, before releasing an updated policy requiring accounts to have purchased at least 30 days game time and have over 30 days played in order to purchase tokens for gold - new measures to try to combat the much more rampant bots and gold farming in that particular region.

No more freeloading! 😿 I haven't paid for anything since 2015. #Warcraft #WorldOfWarcraft #GoldMaking pic.twitter.com/68McbDOila

— hikons 💙 (@hikons) November 18, 2023Profession Knowledge CatchupHello,

I'm returning player to DF however I decided to go into 10.2 on different character - I was enthralled by fire mage throwing pyroblasts like it's nothing so I had to reroll from druid..

I want to start my Enchanting proffesion however the amount of Knowledge points I need to gather to catch up to others seems insurmountable especially when so much of it relies on weekly activities / rep that can be gained only weekly.

Is there really no knowledge point catchup that has been implemented with new patches ? I tried asking around on few streams but best that I got was that dragonshards of knowledge apparently drop more if you are low on points but apparently there is no good method to farm it the advice I got was to do LFR.. is that I can do? Please help

At this point this system is making me give up and just wait a year for next expansion since I don't have a chance anywayConsortium has some catch-up style knowledge points as does Loamm Niffen locked behind bartering. The one time treasures are a good source and there are new ones added in the new zone as well. Other than that it’s fairly dry. If you purchased new expansion and have access to the boost your new character will have max renown with the original factions which will give you access to a lot of first time craft enchantments. You won’t be able to instantly max but it can made quite convenient based on just focusing one of the spec trees. Personally I would choose one of the professions that has a weekly craft quest as that gives an additional source of knowledge points.
I have yet to give 10.2 a try but here's what you can hope for for 10.0 & 10.1 :

One time KP :

Consortium catch-up : 3x 5 locked behind rep & bought with mettle. Buy the consortium contract for iirc +250 rep per WQ to grind it.
10.0 Treasures : iirc 5x3 KP across the dragon isles
10.1 Treasures : iirc 4x3 KP in Zereleth Caverns
Profession quests : iirc 5 or 6 KP from the dragonshards of knowledge
Barter npc in Zereleth Caverns : 2x 5kp against barter items (requires renown & farming the caverns)
All "first craft" bonuses

Weekly KP :

Quests in Valdraken (craft + open world) : 2x3 KP (enchanters don't have them but most crafting professions can also do a "complete 3 work orders" weekly quest for +3kp)
Random treasures + random drop from a specific mob type : 2x 1KP
Inscription Treaties : +1KP
Enchanting rare in the Forbidden reach : +1KP (needs an epic item either crafted from a rare BOP drop or bought from the AH to spawn)
Random chance of dropping dragonshards of knowledge you can later trade for 50 mettle & 1KP, hence the tip about LFR.

Useful tips :

Send a work order for all your profession tools without providing the mettle but with a good tip : you'll save the 3x 300 mettle required to instead buy all the KP catch-up & professions tied to the Consortium rep
The consortium rep is Acc wide
The PvP catch-up gear recipes for previous tiers should be dirty cheap or obtainable on the pvp vendor with a few marks of honor. That's free "first craft" KP if the enchanters can craft one.
Get the crest recipes as soon as possible. They are a BoP item that allows you to upgrade the ilvl of a crafted item and only enchanters can create them.

Dracothyst Pricesundermine.exchange
Surely they'll raise a bit again later this week and into next as more players are getting into raid and starting into M+, especially on the weekend.

Please?
The stock is huge at the moment and demand is unlikely to be enough to make a serious dent in it. The price may not go up until shortly before S4, when the next lot of speculators start buying it all up in the mistaken belief that it will spike once the new season starts. Seems the best time to sell is before a major patch, these days.Demand will be significantly lower this tier because Hero Track items now cap at 3 ilvl below Aspect R5 crafted gear. So the value from crafting vs just upgrading the gear you got spamming m+ to get all those crests is much lower.

Also the crest economy matters more now, and upgrading a m+ item costs 30/45 Wyrms and 30 Aspects crests, while a crafted piece costs 60 Aspects. Aspects are more valuable than Wyrms so you're really paying a premium for the 3 ilvl you get from crafting.

All this adds up to serious PvE players only really caring about crafting their 2 Embellished items. Maybe 3 if they need to swap one out for Raid vs M+. This is way down from last season where you would see people wearing basically as many crafted Aspects items as they could get.10.2 Gold MakingPenguin2gt How Should Inspiration be Replaced?
The only thing I heard mentioned about professions is that they did not like how inspiration worked out. No one accepts lower than T5 results, so it doesn’t feel like a cool crit. It feels like you failed when you don’t crit.

My suggestion to fix this problem is to completely remove quality from crafted gear, and instead shift gear quality over to price. Crafts would always come out the same max quality, which is what happens in practice currently.

As the new differentiator, a skilled crafter should significantly reduce the material cost to the point that it makes sense to tip a more skilled crafter better than an unskilled one because it is very clear they are saving you a significant amount in material cost when you go to the AH and type in 15 vs 30 of the material. When a crafter links their recipe, it should show the required materials for them to craft it as well as the min/max amount of materials that could be required to craft it.

This also supports the ‘crafter provides the materials’ model in a much cleaner way. Each crafter can explicitly list a price for each item they can craft to compete with each other, and the buyer can easily see whether that is cheaper than buying materials themselves. A public work order with a price and no materials would make sense for some crafters to complete while being stupidly expensive for other crafters to complete, leading to the style of market they want where there is an advantage to being an expert at crafting a particular item, and not every public work order being gobbled up by the first person allowed to push the button.

I feel it would also be nice to remove material quality in this case and have it all be derived from material quantity instead. (e.g. instead of a skilled crafter being able to use T2 materials instead of T3, they can just use half as many non-quality materials.)

Material quality is cool in theory, but forcing non-craft focused players to interact with it is painful for both sides of the crafter/customer relationship. As much as I love craftsim, both the crafter and customer should be able to make sense of the system without it, which is currently not possible with the matrix of quality and inspiration breakpoints.

I was mainly thinking in terms of crafted gear above. I could see it also working for consumables, but each quality of consumable would be directly crafted with a different amount of materials. The goal here being to maintain the existing concept of much cheaper but not BIS consumables being available.
One idea I had myself was to make inspiration a stacking crit chance for each failed attempt. Say you have a 44% chance to inspire. You failed? Next attempt during that same item session is now 88% chance. Failed again? Now it's 100% chance on that 3rd attempt. This idea isn't new, I've read multiple crafters suggest this.

One idea a guild mate of mine had was to have it where, insight is no longer needed once you get high enough skill. Once you get enough skill, you can always make max quality. Instead, inspiration now has a small chance to make gear with tertiary stats once you get to that point.

It would let inspiration be relevant and would have players want to recraft to fish for their desired stat or get it recrafted if they decided to switch it up.

It's not a dps output stat, so it doesn't mess with someone and their parses for dps.I hate inspiration whether it's for gear or consumables. I'd rather have something like what you suggest or something based off professions in legion. Have a way to earn and learn different ranks of recipes - the higher the rank could mean less materials used or in the case of consumables a chance for multicraft. It feels bad to not always be guaranteed to craft things at the best rank.One problem for me is the fact the crafter plays a little role. All they can offer is a good tool and pray for RNG

When I send a WO, I ask if X gold is enough for R5. I select R4 and let they do the work. I believe the inspiration proc loss/reward should be on the crafter. Spamming recraft for a proc is faster than waiting for people to buy mats and resend the order, over and over again. It’s frustrating for both sides.Worldwide Loot Appraiser ChallengeAddon LootAppraiser_Challenge provides an additional LootAppraiser module for ingame transmog / farm challenges across realm and faction.

Dependencies:

LootAppraiser 2016.v1.6.10 or later
TradeSkillMaster (the easy way -> all modules and TSM DesktopApp with correct realm setup)
BNet connection and a full bnet list of friends ;)

DivineKateDivineKate on TwitchFurther Reading/r/woweconomyDiscord Server

Comment by GoblinaireThese goldmaking articles get more and more depressing because they seem to be written by people who are being far more optimistic than reality. There just isn't any real money to make in region-wide commodities unless it's Day 1 and you're ahead of the market. After that point, you're just competing with the botters and the people who have no problems listing things below vendor price.

Maybe the token restrictions will have a ripple effect and help kill off bots, who obviously are pushing many prices down into the ground. Until then, it's an exercise in futility.Comment by janinI've never visited one of these "news" posts regarding gold making, but the token thing interests me.

However, reading the post felt more like just reading a WoWHeads post comment thread than an actual article :pComment by MasterikNow, this in itself is not a significant change to the regular player or gold maker, Comment by AdradiaThese goldmaking articles get more and more depressing because they seem to be written by people who are being far more optimistic than reality.Comment by Adradia
However, reading the post felt more like just reading a WoWHeads post comment thread than an actual article :pComment by AdradiaFurther Reading
Most of this information was discussed and originally posted on the /r/woweconomy subreddit or in the accompanying Discord Server.Comment by TheRabbitNow, this in itself is not a significant change to the regular player or gold maker, Comment by pawpurrThese goldmaking articles get more and more depressing because they seem to be written by people who are being far more optimistic than reality. There just isn't any real money to make in region-wide commodities unless it's Day 1 and you're ahead of the market. After that point, you're just competing with the botters and the people who have no problems listing things below vendor price.

Maybe the token restrictions will have a ripple effect and help kill off bots, who obviously are pushing many prices down into the ground. Until then, it's an exercise in futility.Comment by PleegWatPrices don't go up because of a raise in supply. They go up because of a raise in demand. Apparently stockpiled gold is being converted into tokens at scale.Comment by petemagyarFurther Reading
Most of this information was discussed and originally posted on the /r/woweconomy subreddit or in the accompanying Discord Server.Comment by MasterikNow, this in itself is not a significant change to the regular player or gold maker, It clearly says if you spent real money any time before 2016 than you are finesince 2017.Comment by Peesneeze“From what i have seen the vast majority of bots are in classic WoW.”

Does that guy even play retail? Bots are all overComment by wowprowowwhy do people even care about gold in this game?

You can make 15k gold a day from world quests on EACH ALT.

And even then, there is nothing you even need much gold for besides a few enchants.Comment by the9tailwhy do people even care about gold in this game?

You can make 15k gold a day from world quests on EACH ALT.

And even then, there is nothing you even need much gold for besides a few enchants.Comment by DeadlysongAlways curious how much time these people boasting about making 100-500k a day from the AH spend on farming content -- let alone farming DF content -- every day. Crazy how much DF killed the market for so many people, yet you still have goblins in here saying everything is fine.

Work orders pay for @#$% unless you're amazing or have rare recipes for specific professions like JC, and even then it's pennies compared to what I made in Shadowlands just selling accessible blue armor. Between idiots selling things on the AH for less than vendor value thanks to the hyper-influx of supply and the crappy implementation of crafting that seems to be continuing into the next expansion, I doubt it'll get fixed. Oh well. Less time I play wow I guess.Comment by EtamalgrenEtamalgren said...me!Comment by MavvenAlways curious how much time these people boasting about making 100-500k a day from the AH spend on farming content -- let alone farming DF content -- every day. Crazy how much DF killed the market for so many people, yet you still have goblins in here saying everything is fine.

Work orders pay for @#$% unless you're amazing or have rare recipes for specific professions like JC, and even then it's pennies compared to what I made in Shadowlands just selling accessible blue armor. Between idiots selling things on the AH for less than vendor value thanks to the hyper-influx of supply and the crappy implementation of crafting that seems to be continuing into the next expansion, I doubt it'll get fixed. Oh well. Less time I play wow I guess.Comment by legapo409It's simple;

People are mass buying tokens to topup their battlenet balance to the $200 cap and topping up their subscriptions to the cap.

During the last week, the price will completely crash as people try to sell all tokens before they are worthless.

After the restrictions, the price will plummit to less than 100k because botters can no longer use them to make disposable accounts for classic (classic doesn't require expansion purchase).Comment by ThodricAlways curious how much time these people boasting about making 100-500k a day from the AH spend on farming content -- let alone farming DF content -- every day. Crazy how much DF killed the market for so many people, yet you still have goblins in here saying everything is fine.

Work orders pay for @#$% unless you're amazing or have rare recipes for specific professions like JC, and even then it's pennies compared to what I made in Shadowlands just selling accessible blue armor. Between idiots selling things on the AH for less than vendor value thanks to the hyper-influx of supply and the crappy implementation of crafting that seems to be continuing into the next expansion, I doubt it'll get fixed. Oh well. Less time I play wow I guess.Comment by rowaasr13Today EU token: 365k. So much for commercial prodigies' prognosing abilities.