Interesting Metric - Blue Tracker

#1 - Sept. 18, 2018, 2:05 a.m.

Many of us for years have been using subscription numbers (even though that metric is no longer considered relevant enough to publish for this game) as the goto metric for the current state of wow. Many of us lately have also complained that there must be a different metric that is important to gauge the health of the game by and many have settled on a 'mythical' metric called euphemistically MAU or Monthly Active Users but this metric is very hard to find concrete data on as it is, if used, an internal use only type of metric that likely would not be shared by Blizzard Entertainment anyway.

I suggest a different metric to at least get a ballpark idea of the state of the game. Blizzard handed it to us and it now has enough history behind it to at least help visualize where we are. The WoW Token Price. The information is given as part of the Blizzard API and is deterministic.

I took the liberty of downloading that data in csv format from WoWhead (also available on WoWToken.info) filtered out all regions other than the North American region then charted the entire history (if I can ever find time to upload it to a cloud drive Ill edit this to give the link) and the results in my mind were quite telling.

The history starts in April of 2015 and runs to the current date of September 18th 2018 with multiple updates per day. The initial offering started at about 30k gold spiked to 31K gold then fell off to 20K gold per token. As time passes, we see a definite trend upward over the course of months and years arriving at a fairly large bump in January of 2017 that takes us through the 100K per token ceiling all the way up to somewhere in June of 2018 where the Token reaches its peak of 208K gold per token.

Then something noticeable happens around end of July 2018 the price begins to trend downward. It is not a slight slope either. It is a drastic slope. Looking at the entire history there is nothing like this decline anywhere along that timeline.

From end of July 2018 to today the WoW Token price has dropped by half.
Make of that metric what you will but it tells me that such a steep decline in such a short timeframe is not a good thing.

Ythisens

Community Manager

#35 - Sept. 18, 2018, 8:40 p.m.

09/17/2018 07:05 PMPosted by Merridae
From end of July 2018 to today the WoW Token price has dropped by half.
Make of that metric what you will but it tells me that such a steep decline in such a short timeframe is not a good thing.

This means that more people are buying the Tokens with real money faster than those buying the token with gold. Thus causing the price to fall. It unfortunately means a little less gold for your token, but the market dictates that is how much it's worth at the moment. Lot's of gold is moving around as its still the start of an expansion. It's pretty normal.

In fact it means the opposite of what you're proposing, its good for WoW as a whole because it means people are buying plenty of tokens to sell for gold. Slightly negative for token sellers if anything.

I totally see the point you're making though, in that it implies less people are buying tokens with gold. Which isn't necessarily the truth but rather the value of those selling them for gold has drastically changed causing the price to fall.

Ythisens

Community Manager

#36 - Sept. 18, 2018, 8:41 p.m.

09/17/2018 07:23 PMPosted by Swålsh
It’s because the Legion mission tables don’t give gold anymore. I was making 100K/day. Now I make like 5K a day

I think we're still a little too early to see the impact of that within the tokens but it will definitely have an impact in the long run.

Ythisens

Community Manager

#48 - Sept. 18, 2018, 8:56 p.m.

09/18/2018 01:42 PMPosted by Crepe
09/18/2018 01:40 PMPosted by Ythisens
I totally see the point you're making though, in that it implies less people are buying tokens with gold. Which isn't necessarily the truth but rather the value of those selling them for gold has drastically changed causing the price to fall.

And I think there's more to the equation than A + B = C.

It's very hard to imply or interpret player interest through a single point of data.

Definitely true as well! It's a little harder to infer fully the impact of the token within the economy as you guys don't have sight on the buying and selling rates. I'm pretty sure people can pick up on what I implied though in my explanation. :P

Ythisens

Community Manager

#49 - Sept. 18, 2018, 8:57 p.m.

09/18/2018 01:46 PMPosted by Neall
I had assumed everyone bought up the tokens to sell so they could buy their longbois and thus flooded the market with too many tokens

Can we call this the longboi effect?

Hold on, I need to send an email to make sure we properly label this token period.