A big part of online games is accumulating virtual wealth.
If you're lazy you can buy virtual money with real money, paying to
not play the game that you pay for.
I did a little study of the price of 1000 gold on 168 US Warcraft servers
and came up with some results.
1000 gold costs about $150, although it's over $200 on a fair number
of servers. 1000 gold is a lot of gold. It's the price of
an epic
mount, the most expensive thing many people ever buy.
The $150 to buy it is the cost of a year's subscription to WoW.
A normal
player at level 60 can make 1000 gold in about 50 hours, or about $3 /
hour.
There's a lot of variation in the price of gold from server to server.
But I can't find any correlation between the price of gold and
anything else.
Gold costs the same no matter if you're on an old server
or new one, have a lot of players or few, or whether you're on
a normal or PvP server. I was surprised to find no correlation;
maybe the gold-for-dollars market is just really efficient?
I got the price data from IGE and realm ages and populations from the WoW census. Update: one thing I did not appreciate is
how volatile gold prices are. Since writing the above two days ago IGE's median
price for 1000 gold went from $153 to $177! I'm collecting more data
both in time and from different gold merchants to understand this better.
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