A Better Night

Perplexed

Roughly a month ago I wrote a piece about the WoW Token, when it was officially announced and seemed to be something coming into the game “Soon ™”.  There are a number of websites that index the price of wow gold, but I don’t plan on linking to any of those for reasons.  At the time of writing those sites seemed to indicate the going rate for gold was something along the lines of $15 for 30,000g.  Now the strange thing was that there were some absolutely insane outliers, like sites offering nearly 100,000g for $20.  Now this week the WoW Token has launched, and I have been watching it thanks to an extremely excellent market website showing the current token price.  Firstly I expected the token currency to drop in gold value, but not this fast and not for this long.  I expected there to be a significant rebound once players started snapping them up in lieu of making subscription payments… and we may still see that towards the end of the month.  The token started at 30,000g, raising to 35,000g and then tanking quickly down to as low at one point as 18,000g before coming back up and hovering around 25,000g.

All of this while more volatile than I had expected, doesn’t really shock me.  What does shock me is the reaction from the third party gold sellers.  Those same gold index sites seem to be painting a bizarre story.  Gone completely are those 100,000g outliers, and they have been replaced by values that are almost lock step in line with the legitimate wow token pricing.  I expected that as the wow token gained traction that the third party sellers would start offering more outrageous deals trying to tempt players into taking that risk.  Instead if anything it seems like the WoW Token is now setting the standard operating price for gold regardless of how you obtain it.  This is just puzzling to me, and I cannot fathom why this would be the result.  Now as far as the WoW Token goes, I still think we will see a significant climb in price as folks subscriptions start coming due.  For me personally the WoW Token still is not “worth” the price.  Now if I could buy one or two of them and immediately purchase some big ticket items… I might be enthralled.  For the time I already have access to the sorts of gold that it is currently worth so it is not a huge draw.

A Better Night

Tuesday night was unequivocally horrible.  I am still not sure what was wrong, but for whatever reason we were completely off our game.  We started as we often do with Heroic Blackrock Foundry, and downed Hans and Franz without much issue.  Then we moved on to Gruul and wiped until we had lost our will to live.  Finally towards the end of the night we moved on to Darmac… and squeaked by with a victory by the slimmest of margins.  Last night once again we started with some attempts on Heroic Gruul, only to end up wiping over and over once again.  I am not sure what has happened to us, or happened to the encounter… but it went from something we can do fairly easy to being damned near impossible for us.  Thankfully we chose to shift gears and take on Normal instead after a handful of wipes last night, and in a large part that made for a more enjoyable evening.  We went on to clear all of the content we have cleared before in the past, and since we were used to bashing our skulls against heroic… it seemed pretty simple.

The problem is we still have yet to touch the Iron Maidens fight, make any real progress on the Heart of the Mountain encounter…  and then there is still Blackrock.  I really want to make some traction on those fights and get to a point where we can at least say we are clearing normal.  This piecemeal heroic work is nice, but it feels like right now we are doing it in lieu of forward momentum on actually beating the instance.  This is one of those places where I am torn, because by god I really really want my heroic sword from Gruul.  Once again I am pantsless, and I am trying to keep from going through the bullshit required to craft a comparable pair.  I know the second I do… I will get a heroic drop, or mythic pair from my bi-weekly garrison crate.  I simply don’t want to deplete all the money I have to make it work.  Maybe the effect of the WoW Token will drive the price of Savage Blood down…  with people trying to sell them in order to make the gold to “make rent”.

Elder Scrolls Online Console Pre-order

One of the cool emails that I received yesterday was to notify me that for the next thirty days I had the option of purchasing a digital copy of Elder Scrolls Online for my console of choice for only $20.  This was one of the big selling points that they made several months back when they announced the official launch date of the console version.  If you purchased the game prior to April 9th 2015 on the PC you could then get a cheap copy on the console, as well as the ability to transfer your PC characters to the console version as well.  Since I was a long time alpha player, and ultimately a launch day player this was no major incentive but I am absolutely taking advantage of it.  I honestly wish more games would give you a significant discount on other platforms when they re-release the game.  For example I have purchased State of Decay on Xbox Live, Steam, and will more than likely purchase another copy when the Year One Survivor Edition comes out.  It just feels nice to have at least some sort of a break here.  As such I have already pre-purchased and am hoping that it offers a preload of the game as well.

From the day the game came out it always felt like it would potentially work better with a controller.  I will tell you the real reason why I am picking it up with the ps4 is that I hope to play it through my vita.  I spent a fairly significant amount of time faffing about in Destiny while playing on my Vita, and I cannot imagine a better experience than hanging out in bed and playing some Elder Scrolls Online.  Similarly it gives me something to do while waiting on other things to happen in other games.  Upstairs I have my ps4 set up beside my computer, and in the living room I have a PSTV so I have four places I can comfortably play some Elder Scrolls Online.  I am amped for this release and I am hoping  the game finds its true potential with the console audience.  Right now the console players really do not have that many “meaty” mmorpg options, with Final Fantasy XIV pretty much being the absolute best choice.  Elder Scrolls Online should cover a very different niche of players, and I think it will ultimately be extremely successful.