World of Warcraft Gold Can Now Be Used To Buy Other Blizzard Games (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It has been almost two years now since Blizzard began letting World of Warcraft players pay for their monthly game-time subscriptions using in-game gold rather than real money. Now, Blizzard is expanding that effort by letting players indirectly trade WoW gold for in-game items in other Blizzard games like Hearthstone and Overwatch. The new feature is really just a slight tweak to the WoW Token, a specialized item that can be purchased for $20 (£15/€20) in real money or for a free-floating, in-game gold price at World of Warcraft auction houses. Those Tokens can still be exchanged for 30 days of World of Warcraft subscription time, but as of this week, they can also be redeemed for $15 in balance on your Battle.net account. (European figures TBC.) That balance can then be spent on packs of Hearthstone cards, Overwatch Loot Boxes, Heroes of the Storm skins, or even downloadable copies of games like StarCraft II and Diablo III. That means that a dedicated WoW player can now fund a multigame Blizzard habit simply by earning enough in-game gold. You'd better be prepared to farm a lot of gold, though. The purchase price for a WoW Token at the auction house can fluctuate wildly -- as of this writing, the tokens have gone for anywhere from 59,833 gold to 108,924 gold in the last 24 hours, according to tracking site WowToken.info. That gives each in-game gold piece a rough value between 1/100th and 2/100th of a cent, when converted to Blizzard.net balance.

Comments

Re:Overwatch Loot Boxes?

[Calydor]

To be fair, Overwatch is exactly how you describe Quake: Whether a player is level 1 or 100 doesn't matter, the (same) characters are exactly equally strong - the level is just an indicator of how much a player must have played, thus a rough indication of potential skill level. The level 1 going up against the level 100 is very likely to get creamed just for that reason, but maybe the 100 is some guy who just plays now and then to pass the time, while the level 1 is a pro on a new account.

The loot boxes are extra fun. Of course Blizzard tries to recoup server costs on an otherwise buy-to-play game, but they literally contain NOTHING that makes you stronger than anyone else, and the ones gained for free are ... well. They're the "First shot is free!" version to give players a taste.

MMO Economies

[Daetrin]

I'll just leave these two Extra Credits videos on game economics here:

MMO Economies - How to Manage Inflation in Virtual Economies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

MMO Economies - Hyperinflation, Reserve Currencies & You! - Extra Credits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...