People are still fools if they buy from bots in that game. It's ridiculously easy to make money in GW2.
Eve Online had been doing that since pretty much day one. With it's PLEX system.
It doesn't impact subscriptions at all as even if you use in-game currency to buy a plex and sub your character for a month. Someone somewhere still paid the real money for that months so the net income is still the same.
I'd quite like to see it in 14 as it would actually make gil useful and worth something. If I could toss someone a few million gil that is just sitting there useless to me and get a months sub time then groovy.
Probably find it helps circulate gil massively instead of finding it just sits there and accumulates and accumulates and accumulates some more..
This seems like a good method to fight RMT and add value to the gil currency.
They should bring that here. If it's fixed prices it should be fine, it works in WoW and BDO.
WoW token is far from an abject failure. It was so successful they now allow it to be used for other Battle.net purchases. I never encounter RMT bots anymore in that game. Nobody cares about them. Why buy gold from a sketchy bot when you can get thousands upon thousands through a legit method? The seller of a token is pretty much guaranteed for it to sell within an hour, while the buyer is given an option that's not real money to continue playing a game they like. My fiancee makes a lot of gold in WoW. It's been a huge relief that if there's a point where money is tight, he doesn't have to give up his favorite game, he can just drop the gold on a completely legitimate and safe purchase.
People were convinced that WoW tokens would be the death knell of the game, unleash pay to win on us all (actually they said that for the sparkle pony too, so I'm going to disregard that), and were the worst idea ever. They weren't. They got added in and absolutely nothing about how we interact with the game changed. The increase in prices on the auction house was because of the insane amount of gold someone was able to get passively from garrisons and class halls, not from people selling tokens.
Right now a North American WoW token is selling for 167k. That's a pretty sharp drop, but that's still a healthy amount for $20. I have no reference for what RMT is selling gold for on NA servers because I have literally never seen one since the token was added.
One of the biggest obstacles of this system, clearly, is getting people to even understand how it works.
1. Gil is not added. It is moved from one player's hands to another.
2. SE still gets their money. This system is a three-way trade. The buyer receives (Crysta), the seller receives Gil, and SE receives the seller's money.
This system actually leads to SE receiving more money, because players who would not normally buy from the cash shop would end up doing so. Players who don't think the subscription is worth their money might shift their opinion.
I absolutely will not buy from the cash shop. Full stop. I will not be paying my money for anything on there.
But if I could buy those in-game items with gil, gil that is in dire need of something to be able to spend it on, I would. I'll take it all. Have all my money, SE! Rather; have someone else's.