Friday, June 12, 2015

Waiting for the next patch

My subscription is down to hours remaining again. I might let it lapse until the next raid. My gold reserves are plenty healthy so I'm not worried about a sudden spike in the Token price, but it's been disappointing me for the past few weeks in its stubborn refusal to drop even below 22k at any of the times I checked.

I've been predicting since the beginning that the Token price will gradually decline to somewhere closer to 10k than 20k, a prediction that has so far been completely false. My judgement of the people who buy and sell Tokens might be way off, but I feel like it's also likely that Blizzard inflates the price beyond the point normal supply and demand would otherwise place it.

I should read around the WoW auction house blogs to see whether there's been much speculation or experimentation into the mechanics that control the actual Token price. I will begin my own speculation now.

I have to assume they started with an idea of how much gold they want to sell for $20. Maybe based on 3rd party gold price, maybe on player psychology and focus testing.

Then they would probably have some kind of price index that they can use to calculate inflation for each realm and adjust for it so the value of buying gold is more or less the same between realms.

Then maybe add a small variable that makes the price move by incidental amounts in step with actual supply and demand, to give players a sort-of-true impression that the price is affected by actual supply and demand.

This is what makes the most sense to me based on what I've read and observed. A price this steady is suspiciously suspicious.

I would really love to hear any competing theories though.

3 comments:

  1. Blizzard have been playing with the mechanics of price-setting quite a bit. I doubt a month has gone by where the algorithm hasn't changed. I wonder how much the price is based on any reality of supply and demand, and how much it is based on Blizzard's desire to make the graph look nice and smooth.

    I talked about one such tinkering attempt in my diary, but there have been many.

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  2. Economics isn't really my domain so I can't comment on that aspect of it, but it does bug me just a little bit that tokens have been stuck at 24k for a while now. I was enjoying snagging them for 20-21k.

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  3. Check out the wowtokeninfo site (google it), ithas graphs of the way it has developed. Its quiete clear that the algorithm has changed quiete a bit since it launched.

    As a sidenote. They are not keeping the price "more or less the same" across realms. It is exactly the same, because the wowtokenAH is global (within us/eu/etc respectively). The prices from region to region are VERY different though, with 24ish in us, 43 or so in EU and more than 100k in china (or taiwan, cant remember).

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