The Gold must Flow

My mind is still thinking about the ramifications of the gold-token. Blizzard has stated that they will probably change their policy with the Black Market Auction House prices, I guess they will be higher after the introduction of the wow-token. They have to do that else, who would buy a token for real money in the long run?

The normal AH will probably fluctuate a little after the introduction. There well be some new gold in the market, and some prices of high end drops may go up, but that will not contimue indefiantely. Most of the time, in what I see, price is not really determined by how much people want to pay for it, but mostly by availability. The more of something special there is on the AH, the less it will cost. The tendecy of sellers is to undercut everyone else.

And even IF people have more gold, who knows if they really want to spend it on something they have seen cheaper before? I wouldn't in real life, so I would probably won't in WoW either. But that's on the normal AH, where supply (mostly) and demand is in order. The BMAH is something differently.

On the BMAH, the startprice is set by Blizzard, which will be higher when the token comes. And this is the only place where buying a token for ingame gold makes sense, because the BMAH has a very low supply, of very rare items. And by making the startprice higher, Blizzard actuallly puts in place the part of the system why people would buy a token. The normal AH itself would probably not make enough havoc to make it work, but very rare stuff..well.

But I am still a little 'worried' about the whole system itself. I still think there will be more people wanting to use gold for gametime, then vice-versa. Taking myself as an example, I would probably buy one at the start of patch 6.1.2(or whatever it is going to be called), just to see how it works...and get an achievement probably....

But, in my example of this monday, I used 15 euros for 30k gold. It is actaully not that difficult to get that amount of gold during a month while just playing. Some gold-scavengers with your followers. The income of the salvage yards. Doing an old raid. Gold comes from everywhere.

Finding that treshold where the euros match the gold will be a hard trick to master, and will go upwards. If I buy a token, and get 30k in return. A second 30k will be less worth for me. A third even less, and there comes that point, very fast, where the euro-gold transfer will not be in my satisfaction.

But, it will be nice for people with some gold on their accounts, who haven't played in a while, they can come back for a month with goold from ages past, although I wonder, if there is much 'frozen'gold on defunct accounts.

What will happen according to my non-economic mind?

The first few months it will work nicely, but than the supply of tokens on the AH will become lower, the original sellers now have enough gold, so they are not using their euros anymore. So, to keep the system going, more gold for less euros is needed, but that will mean the gold-price will be to high for some of the people. So, it's waiting on that month, where to few people actually bought a token from the AH, so the supply is high.

The sellers of the tokens will then feel the impact. Not only did their token not sell, and in their mind that is a waste of real money. The next month the euro-gold conversion is lower.  You get less gold for something that may not even sell... so why would I do that? The believe in the system is gone, doubt rises...And you have the beginnings of a real WoW-commerce-crash.