Blizzard stance on gold inflation and AH mount being to common

[Coconut]

someone who had 3 mill, and just barely gets to 5 mill, will not then waste literally every penny of their gold on a mount.

Really? I got down to ~ 100 gold when I bought the Yak, when I bought the Jeweled Panther, when I bought the Kyparian Rocket (the other one I was lucky enough to get from Blingtron), when I bought the Spider, and then once again when I bought the Light Frame towards the end of Legion. What do you think collectors use their gold for if not buying gold sink mounts?

also really dead economy? its super easy to make gold right now. i make tns just by putting stuff i come across on the Ah passively.

It's easy my ass. Last week I took some of the advice I found on the forum as well as some of my own ideas and went to experiment ways of making gold.

- Farming world quests, which someone suggested would give you ~ 5k in 15-20 minutes, netted me 2,100 gold in 30 minutes, on a mage, with an invasion out. I cleared all the gold world quests on the current maps. Since I had war mode off, I'll push that up to 2,500, or 5k per hour.
- Clearing the trash at the start of LFR HoF, which someone claimed to be a gold mine, netted me 250 gold in 3 minutes; about the same output as world quests.
- Next, I farmed Zinathids in Nazjatar. I was able to gather 3 stacks in one hour with a mech and gloves. They were posted for an average of 3,800 gold per stack on my AH, which was slightly promising, but would have still required and hour and a half of farming per day for the rest of the expansion to get to 5 million. I undercut that, and the next day I got all my Zinathids back in the mail.
- I used the Zinathids and some other plants I had in my bags to make a bunch of flasks, and I put them up in stacks of 5, 1,650 gold per stack. The next day, half of them sold and the others were returned in my mail.
- I checked pet prices and they were pitiful, and Island mogs, already cheap, weren't selling even with chunky undercuts (30%+ undercuts).
- Farmed Vol'dun for a bit, was lucky enough to get the Hyena mount. It was only 4 hours this time, but the total farming in that spot since the start of BFA was closer to 40. Checked the AH, those Hyenas were 390k, so I was flushed with optimism, put mine up for 360k thinking I'll do a few farming sessions in weekend. Next day, two more hyenas had appeared for 122k, and they didn't sell at that price either. And farming 30 world drop mounts isn't exactly feasible.
- With emissary quests you might be able to make 14k in a day... but only if you have 7 alts on the same server, and only if the gold reward is up, which it is maybe once or twice a week. Now, I have 13 characters at 110+, but they are spread on 4 servers and two of them are Alliance, so I can't exactly engage them all in this activity.

The things I came across of passively while doing what I've been doing during the last few months, which was completing the Mechagon and Nazjatar metas and farming the mounts there, were never worth very much. This whole "making gold is easy" spiel is bullshit, and I didn't know you for that. Maybe count yourself lucky for being on a highly populated server, or else don't sell your secrets, because even if there are things that sell on the AH, as soon as more people start farming them the demand will become saturated and prices will drop.

[gutnbrg]

I dont understand why they would remove it when its something u have to works towards to achieve...

[Unlimited Power]

I think people will be in for a surprise if they think leveling will be sped up just from the squish alone.

Blizzard has stated that you'll do an entirely new introduction quest from 1-10 and when you've finished the new zone you get to pick an expansion to level in. You'll get some special scaling that'll make you level from 10-50 if you do the every zone of the expansion you chose (or more realistically 4-5 of those zones. I doubt you'll have to do every Northrend zone for example).

So completing as little as 3 zones (BFA is a choice you can make) will get you from level 10-50 (with 50 being equivalent to 120 post squish)

Doesn't count as a mount anyways, a lot passed up on that bird.

The druid flight form from the Legion Class Hall does actually count towards the total mount count for statistics/achievement purposes despite not being listed in the mount journal. Blizzard specifically responded to concerns about druids being "robbed" of that in a blue post. It's why the mount exists as an item (even if they eventually ended up with a different acquisition method)

[Terahertz]

Pretty sure the problem with this move is that it wasn't known beforehand that this mount was going to be removed at the end of the expansion. Stuff like mage tower was already known to be temporarily available whereas nobody knew, or even expected, this mount to be a temporary addition to the game. And way would they? It's unprecedented for blizzard to remove an expensive utility mount comparable to the ones from previous expansions at the end of an expansion.

All of this combined with the fact that it costs 5m gold, which is objectively a crap ton of money to grind for, and its removal being announced more than halfway through the expansion is why people are understandably annoyed.

[Varitok]

I understand their logic, but I don't exactly agree with it.

I suppose there's possibly a bit more to it, like they want people to go to SW/Org still for auctions for whatever reason, but that's something they knew would be a consequence from the start of making this mount.

And I don't have issues with removing things from the game as long as it's said from the start that it was going to be time limited.
Things like the MoP cloak were a bit sketchy I feel like when Blizzard announced near the end of the chain "by the way this is getting removed in WoD". And now you end up with an achievement that no one can get if you don't have the MoP cloak (Ordos, he's still worth 10 achievement points last I checked and even dragging him in range so someone without the cloak can hit him doesn't give them the achievement).

This is one of those sketchy situations I feel. They should have said from the start of the expansion they wanted it to be obtainable this expansion only.

Their logic is a false scarcity to sell tokens. There is literally ZERO chance that this was for "gameplay purposes". It's an absolute scumbag move.

[Coconut]

and again, blizz tried to remove the "We remove gear" and pvp players FLIPPED THEIR LIDS to the point blizz reversed the change.
they wanted to make it so if you got 2200 rating in pvp, you could buy a new set, OR an old set.
people did not like that one fucking bit.

I remember that. Those people were a bunch of retards, why do you have to project that on the whole community?

What's worse, I suspect many of the "pro exclusivity" people are simply griefers and trolls. There is one person on the official mega thread who keeps defending the Brutosaur decision very actively... yet they don't have the Brutosaur. In fact, they have very few prestigious mounts at all, and a bunch of shitty achievements on a lvl 110 forum alt. They're like a celibate priest nagging people about sex an marriage... It's more likely that they champion this change out of a psychopatic desire to see people get frustrated than out of any genuine concern and insight about gameplay and the reward system. You're always going to have a few loud mouths like this skewing opinions.

[Gorgodeus]

You dont see a problem >.<? The only reason why it exsist is because of Blizzards own created problems, by having poor game design that increased inflation since MOP. And then there soloution is to remove the souloution to said problem. Never remove collectibles from wow should be obvious game design by now.

The mount is not a solution. In fact, it makes the problem worse. AH mount will more than make up for the gold spent. Most spending that kind of gold on an AH mount will make far more gold than without it, due to less time wasted travelling to, and using mailboxes/AH, etc.

[Jester Joe]

Their logic is a false scarcity to sell tokens. There is literally ZERO chance that this was for "gameplay purposes". It's an absolute scumbag move.

I mean, that's one way to take it sure.

But I doubt you would reach the triple digits with how many people that would shell out that much money to buy it.

Anyone who wanted to go that far for the mount would have already. Nothing was ever stopping them from doing so.

[Eapoe]

I assume you have no clue how this has changed over time and has never been by design to begin with.

Depending on the raids and your class with movement speed you can still make quite a bit of gold. The longer ones such as HFC, BRF, etc usually give about 2-3k over the course of 30-40 minutes (not the best but still quick for time invested), while the mid range ones like MSV, HoF, etc give about 1-2K. The small ones such as ToeS that take about 10 minutes give about 400-500 gold. That’s just going back to MoP raids. Older ones aren’t worth as much but can still grant about 500-1K gold per run.
Then there’s the fact that some raids can drop pets and xmog that can be sold, and while not being a reliable source of income can still contribute.
Yes, Blizzard toned down gold such as the BC gems and nerfing gold from bosses such as Flame Leviathan (man I miss that 250g drop), but it’s not like you can’t make decent gold running it. If people choose to do this, I’d suggest sticking to mail and leather wearers as they usually have the most movement speed increases vs plate and cloth.

[Soon-TM]

Every expansion should have something that gets removed after its over, while I don't like the term "prestige" items, there should be something available for people who played through at any given point. I greatly prefer something like the mage tower over removing a mount that is purchased with gold, but it is what it is.

There is nothing wrong with specific expansions-only xmogs/mounts/toys/etc. as long as it is made clear from the very beginning, e.g. the Legion's artifact appearances.

[Coconut]

Depending on the raids and your class with movement speed you can still make quite a bit of gold. The longer ones such as HFC, BRF, etc usually give about 2-3k over the course of 30-40 minutes (not the best but still quick for time invested), while the mid range ones like MSV, HoF, etc give about 1-2K. The small ones such as ToeS that take about 10 minutes give about 400-500 gold. That’s just going back to MoP raids. Older ones aren’t worth as much but can still grant about 500-1K gold per run.
Then there’s the fact that some raids can drop pets and xmog that can be sold, and while not being a reliable source of income can still contribute.
Yes, Blizzard toned down gold such as the BC gems and nerfing gold from bosses such as Flame Leviathan (man I miss that 250g drop), but it’s not like you can’t make decent gold running it. If people choose to do this, I’d suggest sticking to mail and leather wearers as they usually have the most movement speed increases vs plate and cloth.

What you are describing yields 5k gold an hour at best, meaning you would have to invest 1,000 hours of game time into farming gold for this mount. Within the time frame we have left, that is 3 hours of farming per day, no exceptions, for the duration of the expansion, close to a part time job, or equal to, considering weekends are also included. This is fucking insane. Getting 36/36 Mage Tower took nowhere near as long, and this includes leveling some classes.

[Dakhath]

There is nothing wrong with specific expansions-only xmogs/mounts/toys/etc. as long as it is made clear from the very beginning, e.g. the Legion's artifact appearances.

You'll get no argument from me. I'm not one that drinks the Activision is the anti-christ Kool-Aid, but it certainly seems counter to how Blizzard has done things in the past.

[aceperson]

First of all, here is the link: https://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/...inable-in-901/

I just haft to laugh. Cause in the next expansion I would bet money, that a new game-changing gold sink will appear. They are a bunch of hypocrites. First he says they want a slow amount of gold inflation, but then they make game systems (First being soloing raids for a lot of gold, later WOD and legion table missions and world quests etc) that creates inflation problems, and their solution is making things on a vendor cost a lot. No, the blue post doesn't say this at all. You are putting words in they're mouth with this. I don't like how we had to find out through data mining but everything the blue post said actually makes sense.

Im sorry, but damn. I can understand they dont like having Brutosaur everywhere (Removes the snowflake concept, which I personally dont care too much about), but to remove it cause of there own created problems`? I personally make a lot of gold in wow, so I bought it a long time ago, but people who want it 1-10?? years from now will always feel like they missed out. I have this feeling with say the MOP molten core anniversary event - I unsubbed for a short while it was going on, kinda didnt follow the wow news cycle in time, and poof...Nope, no core mount for you, cause Blizzard think its good design to remove content.
everything loses value when it becomes common or something out values it. that's the reason the time-lost proto drake is still sought after. because it's a rare mob that you may never find. an example of out value is the water strider. because of the strider, no other mount would see use until flying was unlocked. in this case, blizz is moving it from a vendor to the bmah so it is still obtainable, just not for a consistent price or time. i was too young to play wow when it launched and i didn't get a free statue from blizz at the 10th anniversary because of it. you don't see me whining over not getting free stuff because i didn't support them when i didn't even know what computer games were. you want the core hound mount because it's awesome AND uncommon. you can get a fel color of it from legion crafting but the original color isn't obtainable as a thank you to players who support them.

While you certainly have a right to be angry, you are angry over the stupidest part and have put words in blizzards mouth to do it.

response in red text.

[Eapoe]

What you are describing yields 5k gold an hour at best, meaning you would have to invest 1,000 hours of game time into farming gold for this mount. Within the time frame we have left, that is 3 hours of farming per day, no exceptions, for the duration of the expansion, close to a part time job, or equal to, considering weekends are also included. This is fucking insane. Getting 36/36 Mage Tower took nowhere near as long, and this includes leveling some classes.

I wasn’t comparing to the MT. I was responding to the point someone made about old raids not being good to farm gold anymore. You fallacy to the argument is also assuming old school raid farming is all you do while being at zero gold.
There’s obviously gold already collected prior to this time with the old raid farming just being a way to add to gold earned when someone has free time. Not sure if it still works but Luck Potions in HoF used to reward a fair amount of gold as well, on top of Spirits of Harmony allowing you to get crafting materials that still sell.
I never stated old raid farming was the best method for getting the mount, I simply stated it can still be a decent way to make gold. Hell, there’s even an added bonus of potential mount and xmog farming if still needed.

[Nightstalker]

Depending on the raids and your class with movement speed you can still make quite a bit of gold. The longer ones such as HFC, BRF, etc usually give about 2-3k over the course of 30-40 minutes (not the best but still quick for time invested), while the mid range ones like MSV, HoF, etc give about 1-2K. The small ones such as ToeS that take about 10 minutes give about 400-500 gold. That’s just going back to MoP raids. Older ones aren’t worth as much but can still grant about 500-1K gold per run.
Then there’s the fact that some raids can drop pets and xmog that can be sold, and while not being a reliable source of income can still contribute.
Yes, Blizzard toned down gold such as the BC gems and nerfing gold from bosses such as Flame Leviathan (man I miss that 250g drop), but it’s not like you can’t make decent gold running it. If people choose to do this, I’d suggest sticking to mail and leather wearers as they usually have the most movement speed increases vs plate and cloth.

Those numbers still aren't acurate. Been doing this since mid cata and have tracked basically every major change ever since. And i.e. making 14k gold in Cataclysm in ~6h is way more than a good 7k per hour (3xBRF/HFC) nowadays when gold value has decreased by factor 20 since then.

[Schizoide]

IMO, they should change it to BoE in 8.3 then tell players it's going away in 9.0 and no AH mounts will ever be introduced again. Now that would remove gold from the economy. I would buy three of them my own damn self.

[Marrilaife]

It's easy my ass. Last week I took some of the advice I found on the forum as well as some of my own ideas and went to experiment ways of making gold.

- Farming world quests, which someone suggested would give you ~ 5k in 15-20 minutes, netted me 2,100 gold in 30 minutes, on a mage, with an invasion out. I cleared all the gold world quests on the current maps. Since I had war mode off, I'll push that up to 2,500, or 5k per hour.
- Clearing the trash at the start of LFR HoF, which someone claimed to be a gold mine, netted me 250 gold in 3 minutes; about the same output as world quests.
- Next, I farmed Zinathids in Nazjatar. I was able to gather 3 stacks in one hour with a mech and gloves. They were posted for an average of 3,800 gold per stack on my AH, which was slightly promising, but would have still required and hour and a half of farming per day for the rest of the expansion to get to 5 million. I undercut that, and the next day I got all my Zinathids back in the mail.
- I used the Zinathids and some other plants I had in my bags to make a bunch of flasks, and I put them up in stacks of 5, 1,650 gold per stack. The next day, half of them sold and the others were returned in my mail.
- I checked pet prices and they were pitiful, and Island mogs, already cheap, weren't selling even with chunky undercuts (30%+ undercuts).
- Farmed Vol'dun for a bit, was lucky enough to get the Hyena mount. It was only 4 hours this time, but the total farming in that spot since the start of BFA was closer to 40. Checked the AH, those Hyenas were 390k, so I was flushed with optimism, put mine up for 360k thinking I'll do a few farming sessions in weekend. Next day, two more hyenas had appeared for 122k, and they didn't sell at that price either. And farming 30 world drop mounts isn't exactly feasible.
- With emissary quests you might be able to make 14k in a day... but only if you have 7 alts on the same server, and only if the gold reward is up, which it is maybe once or twice a week. Now, I have 13 characters at 110+, but they are spread on 4 servers and two of them are Alliance, so I can't exactly engage them all in this activity.

The things I came across of passively while doing what I've been doing during the last few months, which was completing the Mechagon and Nazjatar metas and farming the mounts there, were never worth very much. This whole "making gold is easy" spiel is bullshit, and I didn't know you for that. Maybe count yourself lucky for being on a highly populated server, or else don't sell your secrets, because even if there are things that sell on the AH, as soon as more people start farming them the demand will become saturated and prices will drop.

That's similar to my experience.
I'd say most people who run into surplus are people who have zero expenses. I.e. casuals.

I just recently sold out all my augment runes because hey they'll be worthless in 8.3 due to perma one. But I realized that I could sell them only because my old guild disbanded before mythic Azshara and I never had to burn 300 augment runes on progress, and now I joined a guild that already has the raid on farm.

I'd say just by raiding I was burning 20k a week easy for consumables, then count stuff like JC crafted ring, boes... It wasn't as bad because my old guild was selling boosts so we could always cover the raiding expenses. But it's a bit... degrading when you think you have to merc yourself out as a booster just to keep raiding.

Also every time someone says "making gold is easy I'm making tons" they need to define "tons". I trust a dedicated AH player that he's making "tons" meaning millions, but that playstyle requires knowledge, luck and perseverance. Knowing which server to settle on and constantly researching markets, as they tend to dry up. Posting a lot of stuff at specific hours, replenishing your mats again monitoring the prices, crafting, managing your inventory.

When a casual says "tons", I'm not so sure they're talking about the amount that would let you buy a longboi after 1-2 years.

P.S. For some weird reason every time someone says about farming x item for x price, that price is 3-4 times lower on my server. From crafted weapons to MOP ghost iron, anything, the "amazing" prices are probably either from completely dead realm, or memory from some patch day rush and such prices never hold as the time passes.

Don't even let me start on the pets, you might see a pet reposted for 30k every day for 6 months and it will not sell unless someone dumps one for 10k, then yeah, it will sell to someone who thinks they can flip it for 30k, and good luck to him because they never sell. I only post pets due to low listing fee, if I had to branch into transmog I'd swear the listing fees would eat all the potential profits.Not even mentioning every time I get a transmog from an island, it's either bracers or boots. Grr.

[FelPlague]

There is nothing wrong with specific expansions-only xmogs/mounts/toys/etc. as long as it is made clear from the very beginning, e.g. the Legion's artifact appearances.

while true, we are a year off from shadowlands, so by my standards that is long enough, as we had thing like the mage tower, and pvp season, that had less time.

[Djuntas]

I agree with them regarding inflation, it's critical to control it, but the amount of currency that enters the world needs to increase at a gradual pace. Otherwise you find people being forced to grind for raw gold. Players should end up with a small income just from playing the game normally. You don't want a deflationary economy.

That said, from the blue posts it looks like they regret adding the AH mount to the game, and want rich players to spend the 5M gold now to remove that money from the economy. The latter makes sense to me, the former not so much. But I bought mine on day 1 of the expansion so I'm cool with it. The AH mount is just incredibly convenient, I love it. Maybe they'll add one of the other several colors of Brutosaur later on, just without the AH.

It really seems like the devs started paying attention to the economy in BFA beta. I hope I contributed to that in some small way when I had a very popular (and thoroughly hated!) thread in the alpha forums asking the devs to stop the insanely inflationary gold missions in BFA. I was making 55k gold per day by the end of Legion with zero effort on my part. It was crazysauce, obviously damaging to the game and yet they let it continue far too long.

Then again, maybe Shadowlands will offer a 10M AH mount. I wouldn't be surprised.

Hey, just going through the replies. Good post. Insane earnings you had on that mission table. I sadly could just never stomach doing the app thing, as mentioned in OP, id rather just AH play.

- - - Updated - - -

Blizzard is basically saying: there will be a time where 5 million gold will be as much worth as 20.000 gold was in WotLK. This is an inflation of over 100% each year. (20,000g*2^10=2048000), assuming 10 years between release of mammoth and brontosaurus. Which is pretty outrageous. And Blizz seems to be okay with it, they see it as "healty". These are not quite venezuelian values, but we'll get there, I have faith!

Seriously. They take the easy way out here. Instead of combating inflation they combat the aftereffects. Their first mistake was to raise the goldcap to 10 million. If the 100% inflation rate stays, then they will have to increase the cap to 100 million soon.

With this statement Blizz basically says: "It's quite likely that we will make the same mistakes as in WoD and Legion again and flood the economy with more gold than the players can spend. So we remove Premium mounts before that happens."
It's no logical reasoning, it's admitting defeat on Blizzard's end.

And even their "reasoning" is off: They don't want everyone to run around with an AH. Fine. But AH does mean little without an Mailbox. And they throw portable mailboxes around like confetti. New race? mailbox. Achievement? mailbox. But you gotta sell those racechanges somehow...

Also good reply, thank you. Im glad some people understand my OP, its as much as take on inflation and economy as its the removal of items in wow.

[Uselessrouge]

took us 48 hours to farm the mount for 3 people..
back when we farmed BoE's in a group and sold them for gold then split the money by 3

You had to take the advantage when prices where crazzy :P