WoW Token and Mortal Kombat X

#WoW

For those of us in the EU, the WoW Token finally goes live tomorrow. Costing €20 or £15 (in REAL money!), the base price will be set at a whopping 35,ooo gold, 5k higher than when it went live in North America.

Market price at the time of writing has it at about 25k over the ocean, but it peaked at about 31k shortly after it went live, then dropped to just over 20k 48 hours later. Current prices seem to fluctuate between 21k and 26k. Could we see the same happen in the EU? Well, we’ll find out soon enough, I guess.

My theory? We’ve all watched the price dip massively. Some people will buy the token straight away and throw it up for auction and get their 35k, then it’ll drop massively like the NA token did. Once it falls to an “acceptable” price, then people will buy in droves, driving the price back up but, like NA, never back to the lofty price it started at.

Basically, it’ll be exactly the same.

#MKX

And here I come back to Mortal Kombat. Oh my goodness I am loving this game exponentially. Even after completing the AMAZING story mode (other fighting games should take a leaf out of Netherrealm Studios’ books. ArcSys’s too, with their BlazBlue story), there’s still plenty to do as a single player. It has something called Living Towers, which gives you 3 challenging series of fights to complete, usually with a modifier. There’s a tower that changes every hour, one that changes every 24 hours, and a third that changes once a week. Each tower gives some sort of modifier to the fight. The first hourly tower I did gave both characters the ability to regenerate health when they hit their opponent, with each progressive stage making the regeneration effect more powerful. Another had lighting strike the stage at random intervals, which seemed to help me more than hinder me, as it interrupted my opponent’s combos!

I haven’t been brave enough to step into the online yet, I think I need to practice more with Ermac, get some more combos down!

Or should that be… Kombos?

 

Oh Ermac, you wonderful bandaged bag of souls, you.

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Token

The downfall of the game WoW Token is apparently available in the US as of today, allowing you to purchase a token for 30 days of game time and sell it in the auction house for a princely sum of gold. Initial gold price will be 30k, which seems… well. $20 netting you 30k. Naturally it’s possible for the price to rise. $20 getting you 50k would be nice, but… what if it went the other way? $20 gets you 5k, oops. Better luck next time.

I’m curious as to what the EU or UK price will be. Still at a 20? £20 or Euros?

I hope not. £20 is nearly $30. £13.50 would achieve parity but I doubt that’d happen.

Anyway, that’s a thing. I’m curious how far the price of the token falls in these first days and weeks. Or rises, I suppose.

IN OTHER NEWS: #WoW

Sunbuer hit level 100 the other day, and I sorted out a transmog for her! Well, apart from the staff. I’ll try and find something pretty at some point. I was thinking the Frostscythe of Ahune, but that’s a random drop from a seasonal boss, so I’ll have to cross my fingers I guess.

#FFXIV

Ikralla Adnap hit level 20 in Rogue! Time to go do the class quest! As part of the main questline, I did my first 3 dungeons too! Sastasha, Tam-Tara Deepcroft, and Copperbell Mines. I tell you, dungeon queues are the same as WoW! 20 minutes as a DPS, but that’s where the similarities end. The people seem way more… well, nice. I announced I was a bit of a newbie to dungeons and FFXIV in general, and people were nice, and explained fights, how to use the Limit Break attack, and generally helped me through it! I even got 2 player commendations, whatever they are. I guess people like my stabbing.

It’s vastly different from Warcraft, where one time I announced I hadn’t done a dungeon before (Heroic Stonecore, way back when) and I got kicked from the group for it. Groups in WoW nowadays for some reason seem to flit from entirely silent, to outright hostile, with no middle ground and no deviation. On the contrary, people in FFXIV have been helpful, chatty, humourous.

Obviously your mileage may vary. I’ve no doubt that WoW has its saints and FFXIV its sinners, but thankfully I’ve not run into them yet.

Free to Play, Pay to Win

With the news yesterday that Blizzard would introduce a way to buy gold for cash/game time for gold in the form of the WoW Token, came the cries that WoW would be going free-to-play and pay-to-win, because as we all know, whenever Blizzard changes something, the sky will fall and everything will be ruined forever.

Free to Play?

Yeah sure, if you have shitloads of gold to be able to do so. Blizzard won’t be losing any money here though, these tokens still have to be bought for real money by people, so it moves the sub cost from you to someone else. WoW is not going free-to-play any time soon, and frankly even if it did, would that be a huge deal? When done right, free-to-play can be a really good thing, but of course nobody sees that. They hear the phrase “FREE TO PLAY” and panic. The sky darkens. Wolves howl in the distance. On the hills to the east are five burning letters.

ZYNGA.

And the whole world becomes darkness.

“I love the darkness. LIFE IS PAIN.”

 

Pay to Win?

The other main argument is that WoW will now have a pay-to-win scenario, whereby people will buy these tokens, sell them for gold, then buy all the Black Market Auction House gear and all the high item level epics and become a god among men.

I touched on this on Twitter last night, but the fact is, if you’re not very good at the class/role you are playing as and/or have no awareness of your surroundings, having better gear will not change that. Sure, you might pull slightly higher numbers due to the gear, but that won’t make you an amazing player. It’s skill, not gear, that maketh the man.

As a minor example, I was in a dungeon on my freshly 100 monk the other day. I had an item level of 610 thanks to questing in Nagrand, and I was keeping up (and in some cases overtaking) the DPS of people with gear 40 item levels higher than mine. They had the better gear, but obviously not the mad skillz I possess.

It’s the gun, it must be.

I’m by no means the best player ever, despite my bragging up there, but the point is this will make the game no more pay-to-win than the level 90 boosts did, or the store mounts/pets, or the ugly store transmog helms.

Remember those? The furore! The slippery slope! It’s only a matter of time before Blizzard start selling ACTUAL GEAR in there!

Yeah, that didn’t happen. Quit your panicking, you’re looking silly.

That don’t impress me much
So you’ve got the gear,
But you ain’t got the skill?
Now don’t get me wrong, yeah
I think you’re alright
But that won’t kill the boss on Mythic raid night!