[trotsky]

Hasn't blizzard been previously quite aggressive about how game breaking player driven cash economies are - i.e. gold selling and the such? But now they think it's a fine idea as long as they're getting a real world cash fee? Seems to suggest they never saw it as game breaking as much as revenue stealing.

[cube13]

At one point, they were pretty protective about WoW's economy. In vanilla, there were a lot of gold sinks, like skill/spell training costs, riding skills, etc. Those are sill present, but don't impact the game nearly as much. They're mostly vanity things like gigantic bags and non-combat pets. In-game currency was relatively rare, with most endgame bosses giving less than 1 gold per person.

That changed during the middle of the Burning Crusade expansion, where Blizzard basically decided that the gold sellers won, and that they were just going to flood the market with currency. They added daily quests, which were quests that gave reputation and gold every day to top-level characters, as well as more sinks, like a character title that cost 1000 gold.

At this point, gold is basically a joke, because it's extremely easy to get with a minimal time investment. Half an hour of play can get the player anywhere between 100 and 400 gold. It appears that most of the gold sellers have moved to selling epic tradable gear and items over gold at this point.

[rexf]

Do you think that cash transactions are unavoidable?

Players sell accounts, power leveling services, items, gold, etc. There are always people who are willing to pay real cash for virtual things. Without fundamentally changing the game, you can't get rid of people meeting on 3rd party (or in-game channels) to trade cash for in-game goods/services.

As a player, it's acceptable for Blizzard to aggregate the market in-house and take their cut of inevitable monetary transactions. If they change the game to encourage spending real money to get ahead (like battlefield heroes?), then I would stop playing. If they are responsible about it (only acting as a clearinghouse, but not affecting balance mechanics), it isn't a problem for me.

[Cushman]

There's a perfectly reasonable middle ground where they know from experience that a secondary market in virtual items is inevitable, and they think they'll have more of an ability to control how that effects their gameplay if they're the ones who run it.

[viscanti]

Or they never balanced a previous game around that, and they have now. It's possible that gold selling in some games could break the game, because that game wasn't designed with gold selling in mind. If you start with the premise that players will use real world money to buy in game items, you can balance around that.