Should Gold have a lot more importance again?

[Schizoide]

Inflation is a major problem, but drastically increasing existing goldsinks isn't the right way to fix it. For example, increasing repair costs by 10x and flight costs by 100x would be unfair to poor people. I posted the below in the 2 million gold mount thread too-- this is my solution to counteract WoD garrison gold inflation.

You create a vendor that sells three very cool, unique looking, bind-on-use mounts for 999,000 gold apiece and three bind-on-pickup color-variants of the same mounts for 100,000 gold apiece, then tell players that the mount vendor will be removed from the game on July 1.

People with "normal" amounts of gold will immediately buy the three 100k mounts, removing a large amount of their accumulated wealth from the economy.

People who borderline-exploited garrisons for gold like me, making many millions of gold, will also buy the three 100k mounts and then spend all their remaining gold on the 1 million gold mounts, because as they're being removed from the game, their value is sure to appreciate in the future. So the really rich players would remove all their gold from the economy too.

I believe this is the best way to outright fix gold inflation in WoW.

[Deleted]

then tell players that the mount vendor will be removed from the game on July 1.

Plz no, removing stuff the dev team creates is a slap in the face to 1 the creators and two the sub ppl that pay for the dev team to create content.
Removing content is the worst thing ever for the players as for the creators.

For exmple the epic netherdragons you never see them anymore, some1 at blizzard put time and effort into these mounts yet they are not ingame anymore or become less and less over time to a point that they are almost removed from the game. Do you think the creator likes this? or do you think he rather want ppl to enjoy the mount he created.

[Schizoide]

If you have a better idea to remove gold from the economy without hurting poor folk, please do speak up.

[Baronthefirst]

Gold will or can be important again. It will just require new Legacy and Pristine realms with fresh economies and communities to make it so.

[SoulSoBreezy]

No, because the whole server economy is going to be obscenely inflated.

There're 500 server economies. Some are doing better than others.
Legion has a few things going for it:

Super expensive stuff that players may or may not care about
Raising the gold cap on the BMAH will increase the maximum possible value of certain hot items
A lot of incoming and returning players who haven't enjoyed the garrison shuffle may be tempted to use the wow token, which will spread gold distribution around a bit
Only gathering professions can obtain their respective mats, ensuring their lock on the market and spreading gold distribution at that end
Higher item levels lead to the natural increase in repair bills
Order Hall gold generation is at a fraction of what Garrison gold generation is

Maybe it's cause I'm decently wow-rich, but I haven't observed a problem with inflation on my server. We'll definitely see real scarcity with crafting materials, though.

[ComputerNerd]

You want to penalise a large portion because it isn't an issue for some others.
That is just wrong on so many levels.

I don't have a "tonne" of gold by some standards, and there is no poll option for flat out disagreeing with your views and not being rich.

[XDurionX]

If you had to farm gold to be able to raid regularly, the game would die. Mandatory gold sinks would kill it. But i agree they could increase the cap on optional stuff like the bmah.

[Uurdz]

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.co...verything.html

Yeah, they really should add Platinum or something.

PS: Have you heard of The Alot?

Alot is my hero, I think about alot anytime I see people write a lot wrong, which happens a lot more than you'd think! He's a pretty cool guy.

[judgementofantonidas]

that is what im thinking, the economy of every player is just completely fucked because of garrisons and the huge stockpiles of gold everyone has.

They should reset it, or make everything, especially repairs, not just a click of the mouse, 200g, forget about it, it should be a huge investment and take a significant chunk out of your money as it is something that is done regulary

yeah. garrisons really screwed people who had the market cornered on the auction house huh?

[Cæli]

If you have a better idea to remove gold from the economy without hurting poor folk, please do speak up.

-Creating a second wow token unlocked for the super rich only, sold in the AH for the same amount, but sold by Blizzard, hence gold is destroyed and not re attributed.
-By playing players are rewarded instead by items that sells quickly for an amount of money similar to what would be earned by looting/vendoring. The value of the item is fixed by blizzard and not by the player, like the token (somewhat). Once listed you're guaranteed to land a sell at the fixed price. Reattribution of gold.
-Little to no money from vendor anymore, few silvers
-Little to no money from looting, few silvers
-Little to no money from quests, 1 symbolic gold for an epic quest
-More gold sinks, expensive ones, and cheaper ones
-At some point fixed money price from vendors will be re adjusted on a 1:1 ratio compared to todays level of inflation, updating dynamically following the level of deflation

[Schizoide]

Second token: Why would anyone buy it, if it's the same price? And if it was cheaper, it would cost ActiBlizzard (real) money. Same deal with offering account services (renames, faction changes, realm changes, etc) for gold.

Valuable (but not vendorable) item rewards: This doesn't remove money from the economy, which is the whole point. Moving money between players is neither inflationary nor deflationary.

Reducing gold rewards from vendors/looting/quests: This would certainly be highly deflationary! But it would also remove rewards from the game-- those activities do need to be rewarded somehow. Also, everybody who made millions of garrison gold would be princes, while newbies and veterans returning to the game would never, ever, be able to catch up. I do of course agree that the 113g grey vendor items in Legion are a terrible, terrible, idea.

More gold sinks: Well yes, but which ones? That was what I asked.

Adjusting prices to account for de/inflation: Again, that would either screw newbies and returning players to the wall or reward people who profited off filthy garrison lucre.

[Klingers]

There're 500 server economies. Some are doing better than others.
Legion has a few things going for it:

Super expensive stuff that players may or may not care about
Raising the gold cap on the BMAH will increase the maximum possible value of certain hot items
A lot of incoming and returning players who haven't enjoyed the garrison shuffle may be tempted to use the wow token, which will spread gold distribution around a bit
Only gathering professions can obtain their respective mats, ensuring their lock on the market and spreading gold distribution at that end
Higher item levels lead to the natural increase in repair bills
Order Hall gold generation is at a fraction of what Garrison gold generation is

Maybe it's cause I'm decently wow-rich, but I haven't observed a problem with inflation on my server. We'll definitely see real scarcity with crafting materials, though.

You are still going to be dealing with at launch a lot of players sitting on multiple gold-capped characters. Returning players won't just be behind, they'll be eclipsed. Demand for crafting materials, gear, consumables etc will be at the usual start-of-expansion high as you'd expect, but it'll be a whole different order of magnitude. Regardless of future earning potential all the people swimming in their Scrooge McDuck money-bins will have a massive advantage. They'll price regular folks completely out of the market with their demand.

This is classic bubble territory in economic terms. In the end nobody wins and in the short-term poorer players, let's just call them WoW's middle-class, have the deck inherantly stacked against them. The only reasons for this are Blizzard's poor design decisions going into WoD and players valuing their lives over the last year.

[SoulSoBreezy]

You are still going to be dealing with at launch a lot of players sitting on multiple gold-capped characters. Returning players won't just be behind, they'll be eclipsed. Demand for crafting materials, gear, consumables etc will be at the usual start-of-expansion high as you'd expect, but it'll be a whole different order of magnitude. Regardless of future earning potential all the people swimming in their Scrooge McDuck money-bins will have a massive advantage. They'll price regular folks completely out of the market with their demand.

This is classic bubble territory in economic terms. In the end nobody wins and in the short-term poorer players, let's just call them WoW's middle-class, have the deck inherantly stacked against them. The only reasons for this are Blizzard's poor design decisions going into WoD and players valuing their lives over the last year.

A bubble? Would you mind humoring me as to how terms like this and the "middle class" translate to WoW?

[Klingers]

A bubble? Would you mind humoring me as to how terms like this and the "middle class" translate to WoW?

Sure, why not. I was just trying to equate it with something people deal with in a real-life economy for context.

When I used the term "Middle class" I was just talking about your average wage earners. In WoD terms they were the players not hitting their Garrisons every hour on the hour with maxed out gold perk followers for the last year. They probably played for a bit and are sitting on some gold, but nowhere near gold cap.

In terms of a "bubble", I'm talking artificially-inflated commodity during launch where demand will slump but prices spike as people exit the market all together. They'll want to level their crafting professions, see the stacks up on the AH for eleventy-bajillion gold because that's what some day-one people can pay, and they'll pretty much give up.

[SoulSoBreezy]

Sure, why not. I was just trying to equate it with something people deal with in a real-life economy for context.

When I used the term "Middle class" I was just talking about your average wage earners. In WoD terms they were the players not hitting their Garrisons every hour on the hour with maxed out gold perk followers for the last year. They probably played for a bit and are sitting on some gold, but nowhere near gold cap.

In terms of a "bubble", I'm talking artificially-inflated commodity during launch where demand will slump but prices spike as people exit the market all together. They'll want to level their crafting professions, see the stacks up on the AH for eleventy-bajillion gold because that's what some day-one people can pay, and they'll pretty much give up.

Thanks. I disagree btw =).

This isn't quite what I'd call a bubble. I've observed this simply as supply meeting demand.
The materials market wouldn't be artificially inflated; you bet there's going to be scarcity, and gatherers will be laughing their way to the bank. Prices will eventually level out but we'll see spikes here and there, probably similar to a cataclysm economy where materials really can run out.

Personally I'm counting on the garrison folk to blow their gold on stupid stuff, then realize too late that Legion won't have a gold dispenser. After nearly 12 years, the market still manages to take care of itself (on a healthy server pop that is).

[WarTV]

gold should have a lot more importance that it does right now. idk why they shifted away from gold being meaningful tbh

[Blackmist]

Gold is already important if you don't do any of the grinding.

Those of us who did all the daily crap and ran old raids get to spend it on rare shit. Those of us who didn't still get to repair and actually play the game without feeling that they need to fish up fucking Stonescale Eels for hours on end to get gold like we did in the olden days.