其实，买金币的玩家暴雪惹不起

在今天早上关于打金者的讨论中，有人建议把买家的号也封了。据新闻报道，中国打金者的数量有500000之多。这是所有MMORPG中的数量，但很明显，《魔兽世界》市场份额在其中的地位是举足轻重的。

在新闻发布会上，暴雪所公布的具体数字是在60,000-80,000之间，被封的对象只是外挂号,没有涉及手动号

现在，让我们做一个假定的数学计算题。假设在《魔兽世界》里有100,000名打金者。每位打金者每月的收入是$100.按照游戏中出售金币的广告，1000G大约要$50，但其中80%的收入被这个行业的上层收入了囊中。因此，每个打金者从这1000个金币的收入中只能得到$10；他们每个月要打10000个金币才能赚到$100。也就是说，每个月有10亿金币被出售，合5千万美元。Wow!

我们看一下买金币的人。交易的时候常常以1000个金币为单位，因此，我们假定一名典型的买家每个月购买1000金币。如果每位打金者每月产量是10000个金币，那么每位打金者必须有10位买家。于是，买家的数量就有100万；或者这么说，《魔兽世界》玩家中7个当中就有一个买金币。

暴雪封掉80,000的打金者。这是他们在创造良好的公关形象。这些打金者在一天之内又重新回来；封号并没有给暴雪带来任何的损失。因为打金者们又会重新购买新的Cdkey，实际上暴雪在封号中反而让自己赚了钱。每个新的帐号是$20，80,000个打金者号将为暴雪带来$160万收入。这就好像是暴雪在对打金征税。

把100万买家的号也封掉，这是暴雪所担负不起的。这些买家玩魔兽并不是冲着钱而来的，封掉他们的号将会彻底地伤害他们的感情，大部份被封的买家将不会再次开设新的帐号。损失掉7分之一的用户，暴雪买不起这个单。尤其是，我们可以确定大多数的买家都在美国或者欧洲，这些用户每月都将给暴雪带来大量的收入。

暴雪该怎么办呢?其实也很容易，降低学习骑术的花费，比如降低10倍。学习史诗级坐骑骑术不再需要800G，80G就够了。学习史诗级飞行坐骑不再需要5000G，500G就够了。

不可否认，打金者的存在是因为买家的存在。但是，买家的存在只是因为游戏币的贬值。如果没有昂贵的东西如史诗级坐骑要买，如果Raid 给你带来的金币比花费要多，我想，很少有人会需要购买金币。打金者也会因此失去这项工作。

原文如下：

Followup on today’s earlier gold farmer post, where Felsir in the comments suggested banning the gold buyers. According to this newspaper there are as many as 500,000 Chinese gold farmers. That is for all MMORPG together, but obviously WoW has a significant market share.

In Blizzards regular gold farmer bannings press releases the usual number of accounts banned is between 60,000 to 80,000, and that is just the accounts that have been found using bots, Blizzard doesn’t ban “manual” gold farmers.

Lets do some hypothetical math. Lets assume that WoW has a total of 100,000 gold farmers. Each gold farmer earns $100 per month (see link above). According to the spam tells I keep getting in game, its about 1,000 gold for $50, but I’d say 80% of that is kept by the companies running the gold farms. So each farmer only gets $10 per 1,000 gold, and needs to make 10,000 gold per month to earn his $100. Which means that each month 1,000,000,000 aka 1 billion gold are being sold, for $50 million. Wow!

But now lets look at the buyers. 1,000 gold seems to be a frequently traded amount, so lets assume that a typical buyer buys 1,000 gold per month. But if each gold farmer produces 10,000 gold per month, there must be 10 buyers per seller. So that would make 1 million gold buyers, or 1 in 7 World of Warcraft players.

Blizzard can well afford to ban 80,000 gold farmers. It makes for good publicity. And most of them will be back within a day, so Blizzard isn’t actually losing any money from the bannings. As they need to buy a new account key, Blizzard actually *makes* money from these bannings. At $20 per new account, banning 80,000 gold farmers nets Blizzard $1.6 million. Call it a Blizzard tax on gold farming operations.

What Blizzard couldn’t possibly afford is to ban the 1 million gold buyers. As these have no commercial interest in playing WoW, and banning would destroy the characters they were willing to invest in, a large percentage of the banned gold buyers would *not* open another account and start over. Blizzard can’t afford to lose one seventh of their player base. Especially since we can safely assume that most gold buyers are in the USA or Europe, where Blizzard earns a lot more per month on each account.

Do you know what Blizzard could do to permanently remove at least half of the gold farmers from World of Warcraft? Easy, just decrease the cost for the different levels of riding skills by a factor of 10. Learning to ride an epic non-flying mount should cost 80 gold, not 800. And the epic flying mount 500 gold, not 5000.