Saturday, 25th of July 2009 at 03:28:51 AM
This week’s Shared Topic was suggested by Veneretio of Tanking Tips, and asks readers and bloggers alike to consider the implications of ‘reverse RMT’
I was browsing the net and it hit me, what if Blizzard implemented the ultimate gold sink. What if they allowed you to buy a month of WoW time for 10,000 gold? What would this do to the WoW economy? What would it do to the game as a whole? Would raiding suffer? Would PvP suffer?
Answering the call this week were the following bloggers
Honorshammer of Honors Code “I don’t think this would ever really happen because it exposes the truth of RMT. You really are spending something of tangible value (your money) for something without tangible value (1s and 0s in a computer server somewhere).”
Lerali of A Casual WoW Player. “The idea of converting in-game cash into out-of-games goods such as game time kind of reminds me of how gold selling sites will also offer to buy your gold. If you’re willing to go one way, I don’t really see why they would not go the other way.”
If you have a contribution to make to a Shared Topic, a suggestion of your own, or if you are a blogger who wants to join the wonderful Blog Azeroth Community, head on over to the forums!
Allowing players to straight up buy a month of play time with 10k gold (or any amount) will, simply speaking, never happen. It creates a gold sink but has a direct negative affect on Blizzard’s income, and they have many better ways to create gold sinks that don’t cost them real money.
What could possibly happen is something similar to what is already being done in EVE Online. In short, the EVE system works something like this. Player A buys a game time code that is good for 60 days of played time from CCP for real money. Player A may then trade this code (via secure in-game methods) to Player B, for in-game currency. Then Player B redeems the code, gets the 60 days of play time.
Net effect is that essentially Player A paid for his time and B’s time. The net income for the company is still exactly the same, but it allows people with disposable real income and people with disposable in-game income to balance leverage their respective assets in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Everyone wins.
Doesn’t this kind of happen in a very roundabout kind of way?