Game time for Gold

[Bolty]

But, not really. Essentially, on the black market 1000g(BMG) = 1$. 1 month re-subscription, being the most expensive, is $15, or 15000g translated to tokens. The game token costs $20, ~20K BMG. $5 for novelty cost? I think not.

Ah, but the key element here is that your average WoW player has no idea what the black market price is for WoW gold. They don't factor that in to the perceived value of the token. They hear from Blizzard that it "should be" 30,000g so that's what they expect...then they're shocked when hours later the price has fallen over 20%.

Forums on various WoW sites have been ablaze in the last few weeks trying to guess the value the token will settle at, and most conversation has weighted to the extreme high end. This is because players spending time reading WoW fansites usually represent the more "hardcore" playing crowd and you get into an echo chamber - you play the game a lot, you have a lot of gold, and you assume everyone else does too. So of course the "millions" of players sitting on large piles of gold will drive up the token price!

As usual, a decent number of these forumgoers don't realize they're in an echo chamber and the average WoW player in fact likely doesn't have much more than 20,000g to their names. Spending just twenty dollars suddenly doubles or triples such players' current holdings - woah! I'm hearing stories of players excited that they can "now get their level 3 garrison" and I'm brought back down to Earth by the concept of a player not having the spare 5,000g to put into their garrison by this point of the expansion. I need these reminders to keep me based in reality.

It's like members of mythic raiding guilds raging on pugs or LFR for "playing poorly" when they don't realize how they're in such a minority. These players lose touch with the reality of the average WoW player: the guy who logs in once or twice a week to screw around in a big virtual world and could not care less about 90% of the stuff that I think is a Big Deal.™

I'll close with an anecdote that anyone playing this game since WotLK will remember. When Blizzard announced their first cash-shop mount, the Spectral Horse (aka "Sparkle Pony", aka "That Retarded Horse"), my reaction was immediate and strong: "who would spend real-life money on a silly mount?" That opinion was echoed all over the place in the circle of players I ran with. And yet...I logged on the day of its release and stood amazed in town as the place was completely overrun by players sitting on their new store-bought mounts. It was an absolute plague of them. And a week later, you'd see one or two around during a game session. My point is: never underestimate the number of people who are willing to drop a little cash on WoW for anything, even for just the smallest, most temporary cheap thrill.