Why Blizzard isn't opening a gold shop
Last year, Blizzard started an experiment with the Guardian Cub, a pet store purchase that could be bought and sold in game with gold as well, since it was Bind on Equip. At the time, a lot of WoW players (including us) saw this as an experimental foray into Blizzard finding ways to allow people to get extra gold using real life money without directly selling gold. In part, that was because Blizzard came right out and admitted that's what it was. Since that time, we've seen no new Blizzard Store purchases that were BoE in this fashion.
Since then, we've heard a lot of complaints about botters who use hacked accounts to not only steal all the gold said account possesses, but also then use it as a farming bot for as long as they can keep hold of it. Some players are even suggesting that Blizzard should simply sell gold itself, cutting out the middleman and putting gold sellers out of business. Why isn't this a good idea?
Well, poster Rathos pretty much spells it out. You can tell he gets it right because Vaneras comes in and pretty much quotes him verbatim.
Hey all.
As has been mentioned by Wocatuf, if Blizzard suddenly started selling vast amounts of in-game currency, prices of items would balloon by epic proportions. Millions of gold a week would enter the economy literally from nowhere, think online quantative easing without actually trying to sort the economy.
Blizzard selling a ton of gold would do nothing but destabilise the server's economies and end up with huge prices for everything. Take a look at the Zimbabwean dollar (or at least the fourth incarnation of the Zimbabwean dollar), one current Zimbabwean dollar is worth ten trillion trillion original Zimbabwean dollars, if Blizzard sold lots of gold people would be capping out, we'd need Platinum gold or a gold cap increase to deal with it, the disadvantages are HUGE, the advantages are none.
Gold is not hard to come by in this game, Blizzard selling gold will and should never happen.
Cheers!
Pretty much this! World of Warcraft was never designed with this kind of gold trading in mind, so we would most surely cause great damage to the in-game economy if we were to suddenly sell gold for real money :-)
And in regards to illicit gold selling, here is why you should not buy gold: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/services/anti-gold/
In short, gold selling is bad m'kay?
So it's not likely we're going to see a Blizzard gold store any time soon. So I ask, is the next step another pet or mount? An effort to get tougher on account theft and gold buying/selling? Should people who buy gold perhaps get account bans or suspensions?
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