Originally Posted by
Tiberria
These posts about "gold squishes" are just actually dumb and don't make any sense. Here's the list of reasons why it won't happen and shouldn't happen.
1. If you're doing a gold squish, there's two ways to do it. One way is to just squish the gold numbers, but leave the items that generate gold (vendor trash, missions, quest rewards, etc.) the same. If you do this, all that will happen is the people that have a lot of gold because they know how to generate it effectively will just end up way ahead of the people that don't in short order. It accomplishes nothing.
2. The second way to do it is to squish everything - the vendor cost of stuff, the missions, the quest rewards, boss drops - every artificial gold generator. If you do that, you also accomplish nothing, because if you have half as much gold as someone before the squish, you have half as much gold as them after the squish, and your ability to generate gold to catch up has also been squished, so there's you're in the same relative position you were before the squish, making the entire exercise pointless. The only way you're going to "catch up" will be if you suddenly become better at playing the AH, getting gold from other players. Well, you can do the same thing with or without a gold squish.
3. A big reason why they will never do a gold squish is that they are effectively selling gold through tokens. Even if the squish doesn't affect the relative value of the gold people bought, lots of people won't understand that, don't read forums, and blue posts, and will be upset by it. Why would they put themselves in that situation?
4. Creating ways to sink gold out of the economy simply do not work. You can't drive the costs of gameplay essentials like repair costs, raiding consumables, gems, enchants, etc. in such a way that people can't afford them without significant amounts of time spent farming, because it's not 2004 anymore, and a lot of people will just quit rather than deal with that. That's the real cause of inflation - every expansion, they have to add in ways to generate gold like garrisons in WoD, missions and WQs in Legion, etc., because new players and players returning from breaks need to have the gold income to be able to support their basic gameplay needs. Take that away, and the multi millionaires won't care, because they will have the gold to pay for it, and will continue to generate more gold. It's the lower end of the spectrum that gets screwed. The richer players will then figure out ways to manipulate the hell out of those gold generators (i.e. the 10+ garrison alts in WoD), while they need to be accessible enough that the most casual of the player base can skate by.
5. The only way you can make real gold sinks is to have stuff that is entirely cosmetic, and not essential to gameplay or player power in any way, like the Legion spider mount for example. Stuff like that that the rich players can have for a status symbol, but there is absolutely no need to have is the only real gold sink that's possible. Even that's tricky, because the gold sink items have to be desirable enough for people to care about them (I have 11m gold and have no desire to drop 2m on that ugly spider I'd never want to use for example) but not so desirable that people that can't afford it feel left out, since they are still paying to play the game after all.
All in all, I don't think there's an actual solution to this "problem" that's not worse than the actual problem itself. If you want to catch up from a gold perspective, either put the time in, or get better at manipulating gold gains, or both. Don't ask for a useless system change that solves nothing.
- - - Updated - - -
If you put the time in, you can easily push ~400+ world quests a week with maybe 1-2 hours a day of playing time.
- Put a follower with 2 x 50 gold and 1 x 25 gold items on = 125g/world quest = 50,000 gold/week from that alone
- You will easily generate ~200 bloods of sargeras a week doing that many world quests, plus another 40,000 order resources if you have a 100 OR follower, so 40 more. You can typically cash in bloods for mats at about a rate of 200g/blood. That's another 48,000 gold/week and probably more if you have Alchemy (since Prolonged Power usually sells for somewhat more than mats).
- Have enchanting. Even at Enchanting 1, you can DE anything. If you DE all the epic crap you get from WQ rewards, etc, you net around 200 Chaos Crystals a week. That, plus the Arkhana, etc. from greens is another ~40,000g/week
- You probably get around another 60,000g/week from the base gold rewards from the WQ, plus vendor trash, mob gold, etc.
- You should be able to do at least 2 order hall gold missions a day for an average 2300g return each. That's another ~32,000 gold
That puts you at a total of 230,000 g/week for something that just requires a single character, or an average of just under a million per month. There's 0 reason that anyone should be complaining about not being able to make enough gold in Legion, not being able to pay for a token, etc.
The issue of course is - the casual player who barely plays outside of raids is doing like 1/20 of that or less, but still needs to be able to afford flasks and gems and enchants and repairs or they will quit the game. They can't really scale back on those gold generators without driving those players right out of the game.