WoW Token Coming Out Soon.™

So Blizzard has officially announced that the WoW Token is coming out Soon.™ I thought they announced that already, but this soon is sooner than the last soon, by pure fact that it happened later in time. If you want to read the official Blizzard post, you can find it here.

Price Per Token
So Blizzard finally released their starting price per token, $20 USD, and the rough equivalent depending on your local currency. This is not all too surprising, and to me seems a fairly reasonable number to increase profits. They will once again be using American servers as the guinea pig, and releasing it there first. It's going to be interesting to watch that's for sure. Blizz has announced they would be determining the price, which if they weren't having independent auditors from some major accounting firm come and analyze it, well duh Blizz! I myself have just had my 6 month sub renew about a week before the original announcement, so I will be observing the price at first, and waiting to buy at an optimal time. I've got until the end of August...

The WoW Token - Gold for Game Time

As I discussed in my previous post, Blizzard is toying around with the idea of releasing a game time for gold option. Today they released a more in depth post about how they're planning to implement it. If you want to read the post in it's entirety, you can find it here.

The Gold Maker's Summary

If you (quite like me) only care about how this effects the avid gold maker, not the average player buying the token to sell for gold, it's pretty cut and dry. The tokens can be bought from the Shop (in game or otherwise) for $$$, and are worth 30 days of game time. Blizzard has not specified for how much real money (TBD), but one would think somewhere in the $15 range. 

I believe Blizzard's true motivations in doing this will show when the pricing comes out. Right now they're claiming it will cut down on illegitimate gold selling and stealing of accounts. To me if they price it over $15, Blizzard will be making a statement, because they will now be making more than they previously would have had the player who uses the token straight out paid for their subscription, and their true motivation - money, not to improve the game environment - will be clear.  

Transmog List Update March 1st, 2015

Once again, I've updated my transmog list. You can find the updated list here, or by clicking the button at the top of the page. I've been reevaluating the groups every month or so, you can give credit to this particular update to Cryan:

@PhatLewtsGold any update on the transmog list?
— Cryan (@CryanTSM) February 28, 2015

Anyway, the groups are reorganized to the most recent TSM Global Market Prices, and sorted accordingly. As always, with these new groups, ignore the defunct group, as it has dropped below my lowest threshold (or not if you really don't want to).

Mog on!

Cheers,
Phat Lewts

@PhatLewtsGold
  PhatLewtsGold

The Current State of Mats

One effects of adding the raw material traders in 6.1 is that mats now have a more solid floor under their price. For most mats this means they will go up in price, for others it won't do much (see Enchanting). Another thing this does though, that's possibly more important, is establish relationship prices between mats.

Ore and Herbs
At the time of this post we've seen the fur trader, ore trader and currently have the enchanting trader on US servers. An interesting phenomena has occurred on my server in particular, which doesn't overly surprise me, but leaves me scratching my head. Yesterday on ore's first day the prices shot up from under 1g per piece to over 2g. Even now the price is hovering just under 2g the day after. That is fine and dandy, and more expensive mats means more profit in general so I'm happy to see it. What surprises me though is that herbs have not yet equalized to ore prices.

Transmog List Updated Feb 8th 2015

Hey guys,

Just a quick update to let you know that I've updated my transmog list to show the most current and up to date information as far as TSM global source grouping. For more information, feel free to check out my last post on this at this link. Enjoy! List HERE!


Cheers,
Phat Lewts

@PhatLewtsGold
  PhatLewtsGold

Transmog: Salvage Yards/Updated List

So I've been hearing a lot of talk about how the Savage Yard is going to be a transmog killer. While it will definitely have an effect on prices of some items, I decided to do a bit of a "study" to see how the Savage Yard is effecting transmog prices.

The DATAZ!
I've compared the Historical Market (60 Day Avg) to the Region Market (14 day avg weighted to more recent data), along with some data that I pulled in November 2014. Now I cannot tell exactly when the data was downloaded, but I last edited the original file (was pulling data for another project that never got finished) on November 12th, 2014. Anyway, I've posted the spreadsheet for download and discussion over at The Consortium Forums. The TL;DR is that on average, the percent change in price of Xmog was +3.5%, the overall percent change in respect to every item summed was -6.5%. If you're wondering how these can be different, consider the following:

Item	Old Price	New Price	% Change
Awesome Xmog	2	4	100%
Cool Xmog	3	3	0%
Neat Xmog	5	3	-40%

Purchasing WoW Game Time with Gold. Legitimately.

Don't get too excited yet, because often times these sorts of ideas don't make it into the game, but recently a blue post by Bashiok wrote of a new mechanism Blizzard is considering for purchasing game time in game. From this blue post:

Bashiok

New Ways to Play
We’re exploring the possibility of giving players a way to buy tradable game-time tokens for the purpose of exchanging them in-game with other players for gold. Our current thought on this is that it would give players a way to use their surplus gold to cover some of their subscription cost, while giving players who might have less play time an option for acquiring gold from other players through a legit and secure system. A few other online games offer a similar option, and players have suggested that they’d be interested in seeing something along those lines in WoW. We agree it could be a good fit for the game, and we look forward to any feedback you have as we continue to look into this feature.

To me this would be a great option for those of us with surplus virtual currency. I think it would be very interesting to see this flesh out if it were to come to fruition. It would definitely put a cap on illegitmate means of buying and selling gold, and put a pretty solid ratio on g/$ exchange rate, which to me would be fun to watch evolve over time, and I hope it's something that some of our already favorite AH tracking addons/websites would keep an eye on.

On the other hand, I'm not convinced that Blizzard will ever end up taking this avenue at all, as they've tried other avenues in converting gold to $ such as the guardian cub in WoW and RMAH in Diablo, and have since pulled both programs. That's not to say that there's absolutely no way this would happen, but I would hope they're approaching things like this with a little more care now, and if they do introduce it that it's well thought out. One can dream!

For further discussion on this topic, check out this thread on The Consortium Forums.

Cheers,
Phat Lewts

@PhatLewtsGold
  PhatLewtsGold