Gold Inflation

[HuxNeva]

this is insane though nobody is really doing this?

You know there are people running this scheme with over 100 alts, no?
That's what happens when you allow increasing returns and a conversion to real world money through the token system.

[Hubbl3]

I think just doing Order halls on a couple of character and just having followers set up to make 125 - 150g per WQ will suffice in making enough to get by without any effort.

In the case of making larger amounts of old so you no longer need to pay cash for Blizzard services, AH flipping is the easiest method in regards to time commitment. Addons to make reposting all your auctions super quick and can even just scan your auctionhouse on https://theunderminejournal.com/#us/barthilas to see if there's any great deals I can get and purchase on the app while sitting on the couch.

Like I said, that all requires some form of preperation, research and doing acutally something which is not "derping around". It's not a full time job, sure. No one said that making gold in WoW is hard (if you're dedicated to it).

And that a casual is able to buy flying, gems, pots, flasks and maybe even a nice vanity item he likes from time to time with doing Order Hall missions is not something I would consider wrong or bad for the game.

[HuxNeva]

I agree with you.

And my solution is simple: Introduce plantinum and retire copper.

1 Plat could equal 1,000 gold or another similar multiplier that has the effect or returning the 'feel' of the economy back to a more similar state to what it was in vanilla. The players with significant gold retain some semblance of their existing purchasing power, while the economy gets back to more normal numbers. You would still want additional gold sinks to help remove excess liquidity, but this would be a huge improvement over what we have now and not make new players feel like they are starting permanently behind the curve.

People have long since hedged on this by converting their gold to real dollars on their Blizzard account.

[Deleted]

Like I said, that all requires some form of preperation, research and doing acutally something which is not "derping around". It's not a full time job, sure. No one said that making gold in WoW is hard (if you're dedicated to it).

And that a casual is able to buy flying, gems, pots, flasks and maybe even a nice vanity item he likes from time to time with doing Order Hall missions is not something I would consider wrong or bad for the game.

What?

Do your emmisaries, get the blood enchant (sell mats) and ONE Orderhall together with a follower and some random goldquests easily makes you over 5k gold per day, pretty casually in half an hour.

I do this and could always afford your points above except at the very start of Legion, lol

The only things i would ever have to play the AH or farm for are things like the spider mount etc. not really necessary to play the game

[Hubbl3]

What?

Do your emmisaries, get the blood enchant (sell mats) and ONE Orderhall together with a follower and some random goldquests easily makes you over 5k gold per day, pretty casually in half an hour.

I do this and could always afford your points above except at the very start of Legion, lol

The only things i would ever have to play the AH or farm for are things like the spider mount etc. not really necessary to play the game

Why is it bad to be able to afford stuff you need with doing 30min of farming per day? Would the game be better if it would take 3h?

[Yunaqt]

Why is it bad to be able to afford stuff you need with doing 30min of farming per day? Would the game be better if it would take 3h?

Don't think they're saying it's bad. Just stating they're able to be comfortable with acquiring what they needed by putting in 30mins a day.
The only reason to go above and beyond is for vanity items like the spider mount for instance.

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And that a casual is able to buy flying, gems, pots, flasks and maybe even a nice vanity item he likes from time to time with doing Order Hall missions is not something I would consider wrong or bad for the game.

Essentially mirroring this point you made previously

[Caliph]

There are 16 gold quests today that'll easily net you 3k-4k on one character. that's just gold rewards and without anything else. If you want to take money out of the economy so bad send millions to an alt and delete it. For the rest of us there isn't a problem. I only have 1.275million or so left after getting to the mountacular achievement and yet the gold just keeps rolling in. I don't mind and don't find it a problem.

Not something we should worry or even care about.

[Deleted]

Why is it bad to be able to afford stuff you need with doing 30min of farming per day? Would the game be better if it would take 3h?

Yes and no.

I think it is ok that you actually need to farm and give something into the economy to get certain milestones in your progression like flying for example, i wouldn't mind if there are a bit more, we had this in classic with the mounts and flying in bc and it was great imo. sure it would take some time but if you got it it felt really rewarding, but i think that's not possible anymore since too many people have accumulated enough gold in WoD with garrisons to buy anything in the next few years (if blizz. prices it to high newcomers will thank them )

I would also like that if you couldn't "passively" generate your raid consumables like it is now, of course not like early Legion where you had to farm as long as you had to raid (my god that was a struggle to raid i hated it).

However like Blizzard often does they made a 180 and put the bos-vendor ingame as knee-jerk reaction to the way to high in cost consumables, this bos-vendor however together with the shoulder enchant more and more people got from the wardens crashed the prices like mad in the following weeks making a lot of gathering professions simply not worth a dime anymore.

I would really like to see a compromise between this, if you have to farm half an hour for a 3 hour raiding night to let your capital-gold be untouched that would be fine by me, it would also give raiding/high m+ a bit more special treating.

At the moment thanks to 2 running orderhalls i don't need to move a finger for consumables and gathering simply doesn't feel worth it.

Thats why i hope for a more reasonable gathering to consumable ratio (the early legion potions are just too expensive for a 25 second boost) but no bos-vendor in BfA and of course no passive orderhall income.
That would be fair for everyone, consumers and gatherers.

[Powerogue]

I feel like we're mostly working off the side effects of WoD's inflation. Sure I can get gold from missions still, but I need to farm order hall resources to do it, capping the amount I can passively obtain.

I think it's mostly that we don't have much to spend it on outside of the occasional ridiculously overpriced mount/pet like the mad merchant. Resources are very plentiful, especially with the blood of sargeras merchant, so I don't need to buy them off the AH often, and gold just kind of accumulates.

[Chaelexi]

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.

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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.

This guy is right on the money. As a player that has sat at gold cap in Vanilla, BC, WotLK and now hover close to it again. It takes little to no effort to get gold anymore. And there is no real way to stop this inflation as Gold is readily available through multiple avenues. And if you did reset gold, there will always be people who know how to play the system to make gold. In vanilla it was abusing dumb people in the AH and running a casino(until they made it illegal, then it just moved into the Catacombs in the Stormwind Church). So for the people saying classic servers will be better, only for a couple months but after that you will have your big fish who are sitting at vanilla gold cap and control the AH.... It was doable in vanilla and now there will be better AH mods, but I will no longer have my AH scanner that auto buys miss priced items or items that people are posting the cross faction transfer.
The only difference now is that you can make money without getting it from other people.

[Mosotti]

There's a simple way to solve the AH problem: kill the AH and other automated addons

[Noxina]

You do realize it's once in a blue moon that someone can snipe a mistake like that from AH?... Not really a reliable gold source/method for "people that cant make gold"... :P

You're wrong. People literally make the "WoW living" off of other peoples mistakes. I personally have a second account that is sniping while I play on my main account, got the sniper on the other screen and just pick up what ever good deals that pop up. And there are a lot of people who sell stuff for hundred something gold instead of hundred thousand something gold, simply because in todays society people are too lazy to type in 100 000, and type 100k instead, where the K obviously does nothing and thus they end up posting something for pretty much nothing. If you are quick enough you will catch that mistake before they get to cancel it.
Some times I'm nice to people like that when they wisper me, beggin to get their item back, but most of the time I just reply with "well, lesson learned, good luck chuck". I do after all have a family of trolls to feed.

[brbshower]

there will be plenty of gold sinks in bfa so people lose the gold to build it up again towards the end. who even cares at this point?

But there won't. Blizzard has been putting in "gold sinks" for several expansions now...typically mounts...that almost nobody buys. You want the inflation to go down, DO NOT include any type of mission table/follower system. That's why all this crap started. WoD, everyone became a millionaire overnight before the nerf to garrisons, token prices tripled going into legion and never went back down. AH prices: the easiest ore to get was 2-3 ish gold a piece, legion hit....30-40g each all because of inflation. Prices never went back down like they have done in EVERY wow expansion in the past.

It's only going to get worse. Prepare to pay 100g per herb, 200k for tokens, 100k for some craptastic crafted item that you'll replace in 2 days. It's gonna get ugly

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There's a simple way to solve the AH problem: kill the AH and other automated addons

I am 1,000,000% in favor of this. The mobile AH, addons such as auctioneer, bye. Not only do they give an unfair advantage to players able to use them(sniping, posting/buying while not even in game), but they cause havoc for the economy. I miss the good old days where people weren't so lazy and would actually post their own auctions, look up their own items online to see what they sell for...it was great. Now it's, let me log onto my level 1 and scan the ah and make a million gold.

[Teri]

There's a simple way to solve the AH problem: kill the AH and other automated addons

They already : "killed" the AH on high pop realms, its like insanely slow and unresponsive, compared to some backwater low pop realm which I can post huge amounts in seconds.

AH needs a revamp, preferable a new server infrastructure, maybe even region wide, maybe only RP realms to be seperate as their CRZ is seperate too.

[Noxina]

But there won't. Blizzard has been putting in "gold sinks" for several expansions now...typically mounts...that almost nobody buys. You want the inflation to go down, DO NOT include any type of mission table/follower system. That's why all this crap started. WoD, everyone became a millionaire overnight before the nerf to garrisons, token prices tripled going into legion and never went back down. AH prices: the easiest ore to get was 2-3 ish gold a piece, legion hit....30-40g each all because of inflation. Prices never went back down like they have done in EVERY wow expansion in the past.

It's only going to get worse. Prepare to pay 100g per herb, 200k for tokens, 100k for some craptastic crafted item that you'll replace in 2 days. It's gonna get ugly

What are you on about? All material prices have gone down during Legion. SLR was like 200g early, now its around 20-50g (Depending on time of the week), Leystone Ore is also like a 4th of what it was.

Also the token price is over 300k in EU, 100k for crafted gear with BiS stats have been the whole expansion (especially rings/necks/cloth items with pure haste - hungry Spriests..).

And in all honesty, this is no different than what it have always been, just higher numbers. But higher numbers mean jack shit, because inflatiation is a rather common thing. I remember back in Vanilla, when 100g was a decent amount to have, now you get that for vendoring 4 greens. So no, it's not only WoD garrisons and Order Halls, it is just common inflation, the same thing that is going on in our real world. Currency lose value over time, thus your salary increases at the same rate as the stuff you buy increase in price.

In the end it's percentages. The zeroes hardly matter. 1 million now, is ten thousand back in WotLK. Thus materials have increased in price as well.

Now did the Garrison start this inflation? Nope, been going on since Vanilla. But did Garrison speed things up a bunch? Yeah, there was simply too much gold generated at too fast a speed with little to no effort. I find it rather funny that Blizzard didn't learn from it, and gave up the same passive gold income in OHs.

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I am 1,000,000% in favor of this. The mobile AH, addons such as auctioneer, bye. Not only do they give an unfair advantage to players able to use them(sniping, posting/buying while not even in game), but they cause havoc for the economy. I miss the good old days where people weren't so lazy and would actually post their own auctions, look up their own items online to see what they sell for...it was great. Now it's, let me log onto my level 1 and scan the ah and make a million gold.

Then also remove all addons that aid in raiding. I remember back in Vanilla when we didn't just stare at bars to know when to move!
Oh and remove addons that enhances the UI, everyone should use the basic Blizzard UI, because it is unfair to those who don't use the enhanced ones.

Thats about how stupid you sound

Either learn how to use TSM (LOL Auctioneer), and sites that are used to compare prices, or do it the hard and slow way (which by the way, I know some goblins actually do, not everyone uses TSM)

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They already : "killed" the AH on high pop realms, its like insanely slow and unresponsive, compared to some backwater low pop realm which I can post huge amounts in seconds.

AH needs a revamp, preferable a new server infrastructure, maybe even region wide, maybe only RP realms to be seperate as their CRZ is seperate too.

They surely needs to improve the whole UI and how the AH system runs. It's pretty much the exact same slow shit that was back in Vanilla (Except now you can easier post several stacks at once).

[Djuntas]

I remember when a guild mate on TBC launch said he already had like 500g from lvling.

Inflation ftw But seriously, just nerf passive ways of funneling gold such as missions, vendor prices etc.

Have people work...well no, cause my AH playing is by far easier than using that stupid silly mobile app or clearing some shitty raid every week. Still at least AH playing etc, does not increase more raw gold into the system.

[Mhyroth]

There's a simple way to solve the AH problem: kill the AH and other automated addons

Shall we remove Weak Aura's too then ? Or what about DBM, BigWigs or Recount ? Or Warcraftlogs, Raidbots ?
Think before you post since you sound extremely salty.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Do you people seriously sit and mull over this day out and day in when playing...?

If you need to find such menial stuff to obsess over, then perhaps you're just looking for ways to be unhappy with the game? Whilst there are people not struggling for gold, there are at the same time still plenty of people whom can't be bothered to gem and enchant gear "because it costs so much gold and they'll just replace the items anyway"...

All a "gold squish" would serve would be to piss off people that have it, and make the have-not's happy for a short time until they once more started feeling left behind.

[Tiberria]

You're wrong. People literally make the "WoW living" off of other peoples mistakes. I personally have a second account that is sniping while I play on my main account, got the sniper on the other screen and just pick up what ever good deals that pop up. And there are a lot of people who sell stuff for hundred something gold instead of hundred thousand something gold, simply because in todays society people are too lazy to type in 100 000, and type 100k instead, where the K obviously does nothing and thus they end up posting something for pretty much nothing. If you are quick enough you will catch that mistake before they get to cancel it.
Some times I'm nice to people like that when they wisper me, beggin to get their item back, but most of the time I just reply with "well, lesson learned, good luck chuck". I do after all have a family of trolls to feed.

There's really two possible situations with this.

1. Someone accidentally puts up an auction at a ridiculously low price. For example, they list a BoA that's worth 500k for 500g by mistake and someone is able to snipe it for a 500k profit.
2. Someone just misjudges the market and puts up a bunch of trade goods at too high of an undercut. For example, let's say the going rate for Chaos Crystals is around 150g, and someone decides to clean out their bank and dump 2000 of them up at 100g each. Several other people go to sell their inventory, and make the mistake of further undercutting the 100g price, resulting in a large stock of the items well under the normal price. Someone playing the AH would buy them up and relist them at the going rate, generating a profit.

Situation 2 is a whole lot more like most of what actually happens for people that play the AH, whereas situation 1 is a relatively rare thing to capitalize on. Most people that do it just scan for trade materials that are listed for prices that are under the historical run rates (usually using addons or Undermine Journal, etc.), buy them up, and relist them when the prices stabilize back to norm, sometimes dealing with large bulk and relatively low profit margins. It's not so much living off people's mistakes as it is taking advantage of the dips and valleys of the market. It's kind of equivalent to buying and selling stocks really.

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But there won't. Blizzard has been putting in "gold sinks" for several expansions now...typically mounts...that almost nobody buys. You want the inflation to go down, DO NOT include any type of mission table/follower system. That's why all this crap started. WoD, everyone became a millionaire overnight before the nerf to garrisons, token prices tripled going into legion and never went back down. AH prices: the easiest ore to get was 2-3 ish gold a piece, legion hit....30-40g each all because of inflation. Prices never went back down like they have done in EVERY wow expansion in the past.

It's only going to get worse. Prepare to pay 100g per herb, 200k for tokens, 100k for some craptastic crafted item that you'll replace in 2 days. It's gonna get ugly

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I am 1,000,000% in favor of this. The mobile AH, addons such as auctioneer, bye. Not only do they give an unfair advantage to players able to use them(sniping, posting/buying while not even in game), but they cause havoc for the economy. I miss the good old days where people weren't so lazy and would actually post their own auctions, look up their own items online to see what they sell for...it was great. Now it's, let me log onto my level 1 and scan the ah and make a million gold.

I mean you can make the same argument for DBM and Bigwigs. Instead of having to memorize the sequence of boss mechanics, people can just be lazy and have timers on their screen! It's the same thing with AH addons; it just takes information that is already accessible in game and displays it in a more easy to use manner. There's nothing interesting from a gameplay or otherwise perspective to have to manually tab out to websites to price out items; that's just boring and tedious for the hell of it, and it's also not an "unfair advantage" if every one has the choice to use the addons. If anything, Blizzard should do what they often do with addons that become a core part of the game experience and actually incorporate some of the basic features of Auctioneer, etc. into the base game. Have the base AH interface show you information like historical prices of items; there's no reason it can't.

I also disagree with you on the pricing thing. Prices on consumables are way less now than they were at the start of EN progression. I specifically remember stuff like Potion of Old War costing over 2000g per potion during initial raiding, and it's now down to 150g or less per. That's over a 90% drop in pricing. No, they didn't go down to exactly the same price the equivalent items were late into WoD, but that's normal - the new stabilized price of things in a new expac is still going to be higher than it was the previous expac, because gold earnings (including stuff like gold mobs drop, quest rewards, etc.) go up every expansion, so there's more gold in the economy.

[Mosotti]

Shall we remove Weak Aura's too then ? Or what about DBM, BigWigs or Recount ? Or Warcraftlogs, Raidbots ?
Think before you post since you sound extremely salty.

It's not and has nothing to do with Weak Auras, the fights are now designed to take into account all those addons. What you can't design is an healthy economy that has an AH where everything is AUTOMATICALLY flipped by a couple of people that have the edge. Recently I wanted to buy some Goblin Glider Kit and it was 300g per stack of 20. All put by the same person. I had like 20g in total. I came back several days after and bought it with 5g. This is really stupid. Back in Wrath I was doing the Insane achievement and I had a lot of herbs so I wanted to make some glyphs to put on AH. Almost all the glyphs were posted by the same person at hundreds of gold. Not a really good game design if you ask me.