
A history of World of Warcraft's gold economy - _delirium
http://meminsf.silverstringmedia.com/labour/a-history-of-world-of-warcrafts-gold-economy/
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dantillberg
I find the "WoW token" \-- where, _supposedly_ , people can buy game-time
tokens from Blizzard for cash and then resell them to other players for
virtual currency -- to be a _brilliant_ scheme. (Note: I first noticed the
concept in Eve Online, not WoW -- where did it originate?)

MMO operators have long struggled with secondary markets for virtual currency.
They often have trouble trying to sell virtual currency directly to players
because then it has the feel of "pay-to-win." And so third parties have
captured the lion's share of this market for years -- by some accounts
capturing billions of dollars annually in revenues.

But with WoW tokens (and similar concepts in other MMOs), they can market
virtual currency to players, and because other players can feel like _they
benefit, too_ by getting their subscription for free, they don't complain as
much of it being a "pay-to-win" model.

In reality, though, remember that Blizzard controls the market for both buying
and selling WoW tokens, and they can peg prices (in cash and in in-game
currency) at whatever they feel is appropriate, by either providing or
reducing supply artificially.

Yet it is the _artifice_ of "exchanging WoW tokens with other players" that
gives the whole practice an air of fairness. This brain-dead-simple scheme
will make them tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year in increased
profits that for years has been instead going to IGE and a cadre of third-
party gold sellers.

~~~
mikekchar
It's a bit different than this scheme, but I actually read a short story in
Dragon magazine about 35 years ago (very likely 1980 or 1981) about an MMO
where most people paid a subscription fee to play, but you could exchange in
game currency for play time (and could even cash out into real currency --
leading to pro players who would compete for collecting the most in game
gold). It is an interesting twist to have the players front the real world
cash.

As an aside, I always dreamed of playing the game I read about. One of the
cool things about the game was that your character continued in the game as an
NPC when you were offline. I always thought this would be very interesting way
to have player generated content, where they would have to build defences to
protect their player/gold while offline. Other players could launch raids to
try to steal it. No one has ever built a similar kind of PK system that
doesn't piss everyone off, but for me it's a kind of holy grail of MMO
functionality. I hope I see it before I die :-)

~~~
jghn
"(very likely 1980 or 1981) about an MMO"

There was no such thing at the time. There were MU* games around but MMO as a
genre was viewed as something greater than that. Games like M59 and UO were
where that differentiation really started being made.

~~~
dsp1234
In 1980-81, there wasn't even MU* games around. The original MUD1 was
"released" in 1980, _if_ you were on the arpanet at the time. The first
commercial MUD didn't come around until 1983 with Scepter of Goth[0]. So it's
likely that the story was fiction (or the timeframe is off)

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scepter_of_Goth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scepter_of_Goth)

~~~
dragonwriter
> So it's likely that the story was fiction

The phrase "short story" that was used to describe it is a term for a
particular form of fiction writing, so that was obvious from the outset.

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gambiting
The section about Diablo 3 reminds me of the article that was posted here some
time ago actually, about a guy who made a very,very decent living off the
auction house. He basically waited for people to post legendaries for sale in
the gold auction house, when they clearly wanted to sell them on the dollar
auction house - so items going for 5 gold instead of 5 dollars(5 gold is
absolutely nothing in diablo), and he would re sell them for actual dollars.
He was making like $200 a day, which in his country(Romania? Slovenia?) was
huge.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Reminds me of a 2d space rpg I played. This was an absolutely brilliant game
for me as a kid, as you could build your own space bases. And then run
blueprints, colonies etc. All the EVE stuff in a MMO game but pre-Eve. (it
launched a year after EVE but EVE didn't launch with things like player owned
starbases right away).

So at one point I was in the top 5 players in the game and had a absolute ton
of gear and actual liquidity and set up a trade hub. I never expected it but
that thing took off, I was making a billion a day and you could sell a billion
credits for about $10. Remember that this was a pretty obscure tiny game that
was generating hundreds of dollars a month for a 16 year old, and that you
could completely set up the trade hub on your base as you liked, and so I
didn't actually have to put in any work. (setting up the initial shop was a
pain). The beauty was that after a short time, 90% of my trade wasn't my own
gear that I was finding and selling. Mostly I was providing instant, immediate
liquidity to anyone. (the alternative was to spam in trade chat you wanted to
sell something, then haggle, fly across the universe to meet the guy and then
do a 'drop trade' based on trust without any form of escrow). My base offered
a safe, secure, immediate price. And that value allowed me to discount prices
and charge premiums. I was getting ridiculous 30% profit margins on other
people's intermittent trading just by being a source of liquidity (in a game
where there's no opportunity cost of money, there's no security to buy or
interest rate to get. So there were no cons to locking up my money in trades)
and gear.

~~~
bluesnowmonkey
Do you remember what that game was called? Surprised I missed out on it.

~~~
alricb
Probably Cosmic Rift:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Rift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Rift)
(shut down). Another 2D space MMO was SubSpace, but it was released in the
mid-90s.

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larrydag
Interesting. This was all learned while I played Everquest. I'm glad I never
got into WoW. It seems like all the same. In fact if you subsitute "Everquest"
with every reference to "World of Warcraft" in this article I don't think
anyone would know the difference.

~~~
kybernetyk
WoW was pretty much a spiritual successor to Everquest. Blizzard even hired a
few Everquest "power gamers"[0] for their dev team IIRC.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pardo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pardo)

~~~
scruple
Also Jeff Kaplan [0] and Alex Afrasiabi [1]. Given the origin story of WoW...
I'm not sure I'd call it the spiritual successor, per se. Though I do
understand what you're saying and it definitely took a turn towards EQ after
the people we've mentioned here came aboard.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Kaplan_(game_designer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Kaplan_\(game_designer\))

[1]:
[http://wow.gamepedia.com/Alex_Afrasiabi](http://wow.gamepedia.com/Alex_Afrasiabi)

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mentos
The opening paragraphs could be an allegory for the immigration debate in the
US.

