wow Gold in the Race to World First

[Starym 3,801]

 

The Mythic progress race was always pretty expensive in terms of gold spent for the top guilds, but Ny'alotha was on a whole other level, as the winning team, Complexity Limit, spent 250 million gold on it, with Corrupted BoEs being a huge factor. The Castle Nathria race is coming up this reset and I talked to three top guilds on the gold situation in this progress cycle over on Raider.IO.

As it turns out, Nathria isn't going to be that much cheaper than Ny'alotha, coming in at at predicted 170 million, with BoEs once again playing a key part. The interview also discusses the "entry cost" for a guild to be competitive in the race, the real-money influence on the race and whether Blizzard should do something to change the gold dynamics in the top-end Mythic progress. Here's a snippet:

Quote

Starym: What do you think of the real-money influence in the race that seeps in via gold requirements due to the WoW Token?

Veyloris - Complexity Limit: The fact that you can’t really convert gold back into money without getting banned sort of prevents this from being a thing. The largest influence that happens is just when people go and sell a bunch of WoW Tokens so they can buy carries from guilds, and that’s essentially just top guilds creating a demand for WoW gold with a neat service and doesn’t really affect the race.

To be honest, the real-money influence on the race is almost strictly positive in my opinion. Firstly, it gives a way for people who may not have a lot of time for the game to legitimately get gold and experience content they may be unable to for whatever reason. Secondly, it provides a great baseline for publicity. For example: despite the fact that this is an interview for WoW content, it’s pretty likely that a decent chunk of readers have heard of EVE online and their viral headlines about thousands and thousands dollars worth of ships were destroyed in massive battles. If there wasn’t a legitimate way to convert ISK (EVE’s ingame currency) to money for the sake of comparison, I’d argue it’s pretty likely those headlines don’t make it nearly as far for the simple reason that it’s a lot harder to contextualize for an outsider without such a number.

The conversion between real money and gold provides the same baseline for WoW - it’s pretty hard to find an article that doesn’t reference some real dollar amount of wealth we spent in our victory last race. It provides a way to connect our hobby with the real world - it provides a much better way to grab people’s attention than a tired metaphor. Everyone has heard some variant of “it’s like the Super Bowl / World Series of the hobby” about a thousand times, but something like “oh yeah they spent $35,000” rarely fails to draw someone's interest. In short, I think it’s good publicity and not too much else besides excellent income for Activision Blizzard.

Nexxzz - Aversion: It is a bad situation for the "non professional" guilds who don't have the resources to invest an extra 100M Gold if they want to, but with Shadowlands it's looking very promising that won't be the case again.

Impakt - BDGG: I can say for certain that we have never spent real money to buy tokens for anything guild related, just because the conversion rate is so terrible compared to the amount of gold we can make in game from raid sales. You could spend a few hours each week doing raid sales over a few months to get 100,000,000 gold saved up, or you could (at current US token prices) buy ~870 tokens at 20$ each, spending $17,000 total for the same amount of gold. The numbers are not close - making gold in game for most guilds is so much more efficient than buying tokens.

It's a pretty interesting topic, as all three guilds discuss their gold perspective, so make sure to check out the full thing on Raider.IO!

[OxO 24]

...and so the boosting, spamming and pissing everyone else off in game with their stupid *filtered* will continue, while they justify it with trash excuses like this.

 

[Thejaargh 15]

10 hours ago, Starym said:

Firstly, it gives a way for people who may not have a lot of time for the game to legitimately get gold and experience content they may be unable to for whatever reason.

I love how he switched "experience content" for "buy gear/titles/mounts".. When i raided endgame in Wotlk we sometimes just pugged a few people for the fun of it. That just never happens anymore. All endgame players now are to elitist to bring people along just for fun. they all think theire "skill and experience" is worth gold. Theire time is worth gold. This im my opinion is just an awefull mindset in a game like Wow

 

Just to be clear: People dont pay for the experience, they pay for rewards. Normal rule for payed service: Just stay at entrance or just wait till u die. 

Edited December 14, 2020 by Thejaargh

[Manbearpig 28]

5 hours ago, Thejaargh said:

All endgame players now are to elitist to bring people along just for fun.

That's mostly because the "fun" would be one sided. Might be fun to see bosses you would otherwise never see and see Dmg numbers you could never do.  But where is the fun for the endgame player? 

[Znifler 58]

8 minutes ago, Manbearpig said:

That's mostly because the "fun" would be one sided. Might be fun to see bosses you would otherwise never see and see Dmg numbers you could never do.  But where is the fun for the endgame player? 

Really? You've never brought along a friend or a random dude alongside you for some carrying fun? Just to show how good you are, or how much fun the endgame can be. Do you really need to get solid rewards for everything you do? Isn't the game about sharing experiences? I guess not then. 

[Manbearpig 28]

8 minutes ago, Znifler said:

Really? You've never brought along a friend or a random dude alongside you for some carrying fun? Just to show how good you are, or how much fun the endgame can be. Do you really need to get solid rewards for everything you do? Isn't the game about sharing experiences? I guess not then. 

A friend? Sure. A random dude? Hell no. It's just not fun making easy content harder with bad players. That's like asking an NBA player to help out in some regional game for the fun of it. Does that mean NBA players are selfish? No, they just have better things to do with their time. (Some might be selfish, I'm just trying to make a point)

Edited December 14, 2020 by Manbearpig

[Znifler 58]

4 minutes ago, Manbearpig said:

A friend? Sure. A random dude? Hell no. It's just not fun making easy content harder with bad players. That's like asking an NBA player to help out in some regional game for the fun of it. Does that mean NBA players are selfish? No, they just have better things to do with their time. (Some might be selfish, I'm just trying to make a point)

I don't think you can compare NBA to a carry in WoW. And you don't have to be Method Sco to carry someone in Mythics. 

[Manbearpig 28]

9 minutes ago, Znifler said:

I don't think you can compare NBA to a carry in WoW. And you don't have to be Method Sco to carry someone in Mythics. 

And why not? Because NBA players get paid to play? A reason would have been nice.

And who's talking about Method? "All endgame players are too elitist" so, anyone with Glad, CE or MDI.

Edited December 14, 2020 by Manbearpig

[Znifler 58]

2 minutes ago, Manbearpig said:

And why not? Because NBA players get paid to play? A reason would have been nice.

And who's talking about Method? "All endgame players are too elitist" so, anyone with Glad, CE or MDI.

I'm just saying that we've all been there, as endgame players, having fully decked chars and the possibility to help someone. Why not do it every now and then if they ask to be invited to a group? If I make a raid for pugs, I do not decline every dude who asks to join, because he has 'low Ilvl', or 'lacking exp'. They will learn, and only by playing. That which they are often declined to do because some players (^) won't let them play endgame content. And no, not everyone is in a raid guild - I'm not for example. I have my own with my friends and we aren't a full raid team at all. Don't be one of those who auto-decline low ilvl players, followed by inviting only high ilvl people, then wiping the next mythic run, due to the group having zero synergy or interest in talking whatsoever. "We just want a quick finish so we can get big loots fast man". 

[Starym 3,801]

17 hours ago, Thejaargh said:

I love how he switched "experience content" for "buy gear/titles/mounts".. When i raided endgame in Wotlk we sometimes just pugged a few people for the fun of it. That just never happens anymore. All endgame players now are to elitist to bring people along just for fun. they all think theire "skill and experience" is worth gold. Theire time is worth gold. This im my opinion is just an awefull mindset in a game like Wow

 

Just to be clear: People dont pay for the experience, they pay for rewards. Normal rule for payed service: Just stay at entrance or just wait till u die. 

Not sure if you were talking about the guilds racing for world first specifically, but if you were, getting paid gold to boost other players is literally part of the race. They have to do it to have enough gold to be able to compete (as mentioned in the interview), and if they didn't do it they would lower their chances at winning/placing high on the rankings.