Controlling the Market

Blizzard have announced their long-awaited PLEX scheme, the WoW Token. I wrote about it back in December: first about the idea itself, and then about the price. True to form, Blizzard have found a way to do this that minimizes player agency, and maximizes Blizzard's stranglehold on the world.

Of course Blizzard sets the dollar price, as it is the only manufacturer of WoW Tokens on Earth. But Blizzard has also decided that it alone will set the Azerothean gold exchange price, and once bought, the token cannot be resold. You can't decide what price you want to sell it to other players for, or what offer you will make to other players to buy it. You can't undercut other players, in order to make your sale happen earlier. You can't buy when there is a glut for resale when there is a famine. You can't bargain with other players at all. Your choice is this: sell at Blizzard's price or don't sell at all. Buy at Blizzard's price or don't buy at all.

Blizzard say that at any given moment, they calculate the gold sale price of a token dynamically, and that all tokens on sale will be at that price, but the price the seller receives is fixed at the moment of offering it for sale. How is that going to work? How can the price the seller receives be calculated dynamically when she puts it on sale, but the price of all tokens on sale be the same at any moment? There are a couple of possibilities.

1. There is a disparity between sale price and buy price. Blizzard takes a variable commission depending on the dynamically calculated price. For instance, let's say there are 10 WoW tokens for sale at 25k gold each. If I offer a WoW Token for sale, Blizzard might tell me that I will get 24k gold for it, and then Blizzard will list it at 25k, making a 1k commission. Or (as a variant of this):

2. Blizzard keeps it's price promise, and makes up the difference from its own gold mint. For instance, let's say there are 10 WoW tokens for sale at 25k gold each. If I offer a WoW Token for sale, Blizzard might tell me that I will get 20k gold for it, and then Blizzard will list it and all the others at 24k, losing 1k on the earlier, more expensive tokens. They might also take a fixed commission from the transaction to mitigate having to mint more gold.

3. In effect, there is only one token ever on sale. It is the oldest token in the queue. It cannot be undercut and will never return unsold from the AH. The dynamic price offered to new sellers is calculated depending on the size of the queue, but the price offered to buyers is the price of the oldest token.

4. A combination of 2 and 3.  The token on sale is always the oldest token, but it is on sale at the current dynamically calculated price (i.e. the price calculated for the newest token), while its seller gets the price that was dynamically calculated at the time she offered it for sale, less some AH fees. For instance, let's say there are 10 WoW tokens for sale at 25k each (and the sellers were promised 25k less commission). I offer mine for sale, and Blizzard calculates a new dynamic price of 24k for mine, less commission. The price of the other 10 are now set at 24k, and mine joins the back of the queue. When someone buys the oldest token for 24k, its seller still gets 25k less commission.

This is all just guesswork. Update: Blizzard have confirmed that it is option 4, and that there is no commision.

I don't understand why Blizzard doesn't trust its players to buy and sell these tokens normally*, nor why these tokens cannot be resold. If they are afraid of dupe bugs, they should first fix their game so that such bugs cannot occur.


* The reason stated on their blog made me laugh. They wanted to do it "without making players feel like they’re playing a game with their hard-earned money". That's exactly what we're doing when we pay our subscription.