What happened to inflation? Was it all lie?

[ryjkur]

Before TBC announcement there was dozens of threads about how gold wipe would be mandatory in TBC. People said everyone is sitting with tens of thousands of gold and in TBC everyone will have hundreds of thousands or million gold because of this hyperinflation.

Now those threads have been replaced by "Please bring dual spec to game cuz it's annoying to spend 50g every time we respec"
??? didn't everyone have 20k+ gold and every herb will cost 50g+

1 hour of herb/mote farming will give you weeks of respecs because of this hyper inflation.

Or was the inflation all lie?

[VinceVega]

Well for those who have the money it won't be a problem.

But everyone seems to conveniantly forget about people who do not like classic but really like BC... which is a considerable amount of people.

[shadowroguetbc]

The inflation for sure isn’t a lie lol. Just wait until you start seeing the first primals go up on the AH.

[Viikkis]

The inflation was just exaggeration. Sure there are gold millionaires in classic just like in retail. But the problem for the average player is not so great as some claim. The economy will even itself out. If people can't afford the stuff in AH the stuff in AH won't sell -> they must lower their price. It's not rocket science.

[Taeryc]

The vast majority of people who talk about gold inflation are streamers, people at a high level and numerous other people who are not the usual player who actually only, at best, probably has a couple of hundred gold, and probably don't do GDKP's or earn much from doing them.

But... inflation is definitely a problem, though inflation also works both ways in a game, unlike in real life. In real life your money is worth less whilst you earn the same or a neglible amount more. In a game you are fully capable of selling items at the prices being inflated, consequently your average income also stays in pace. It's of course not perfect and people fall off that wagon or don't wanna farm things, which makes raw gold uncompetitive for anyone that isn't a bot, which isn't how it necessarily should be, but its not 100% doom.

There's a lot of "inflation" that comes around from people preparing for things beforehand and then absolutely wrecking the market by controlling certain resources and selling them at inflated prices at phase release etc, there will definitely be a sellers market at the launch of tbc where the people sitting on piles of gold will control the initial market and drive prices crazy for a short time, but between the average player economic generation and no doubt bots the economy stabilizes at a level more reasonable, if not necessarily ideal.

Inflation is generally bad initially for newer players, but unlike real inflation they do have the ability to earn money commensurate with the level the economy is at, but not everyone has time for that, sadly theres not much you can do without taking away player gold and its generally a damn good rule to not take away things players have earned legitimately.

As far as dual-spec goes, for those who respec - they do it and have the cash which makes it so inconsequential its not a real gold-sink, for those who do it and can barely afford it its a resentment to respec.

For the average player who wants to login and do arena or pvp in a certain spec or go farming or whatever, its an impediment to cough up 50g. They are far more likely to just logout, which drives disenagement from the game, which also means people are more likely to logout one day and never log back in again if combined with other issues.

There's no reason for the initial dual-spec implementation to not be in the game except for it being a Wrath QoL feature, but so was mirror paladin seals which is an actual true to god damn life game mechanics change.

[gaymer77]

The issue is more that the average player doesn't have these inflated numbers but a fraction of it. I'd estimate that less than 10% of the players in Classic have anywhere near those high numbers and in BC it will remain around the same amount. Because there are SOME players who do have these large amounts of gold means that people assume the average player will be able to afford such items on the AH and therefore will price stuff very high. Those very high prices means stuff stays on the AH much longer and the average player can't access such items (gear, gathering items, etc). BC wasn't exactly known for its high gold making like WOD was. Honestly a gold wipe would be ideal as it would put everyone on the same footing as each other due to duping items and bots that happened during Classic that gave some players huge amount of gold.

[hulkgor]

Grab some herbs\ores\primals, sell for super inflated values on ah, never worry about respec costs again?

[ryjkur]

Grab some herbs\ores\primals, sell for super inflated values on ah, never worry about respec costs again?

This is the way to go.

[Schmilblick]

Grab some herbs\ores\primals, sell for super inflated values on ah, never worry about respec costs again?

Good luck the bots.

[Heathy]

yeah not everyone has tons of gold, I've never really bothered to grind more gold than i've needed, in old BC I didn't get 5k gold on my priest until after I'd killed some bosses in ssc/tk. it took me an age to farm it as a healer. as a tank this time its not that different, I ran dungeons, DM E jump runs although my arcane crystal luck was better mining in the world. grinding gold solo has been kinda slow just grinding mobs for gold I got ironfoe quite early, i wouldn't be surprised if i had the first one on our server, its a beast weapon for grinding world mobs, but it still doesn't really allow me to make tons of gold. I probably make most of my gold from selling arcane crystals since i don't need them anymore and raiding without wipes, I think you get about 60g or so from doing naxx without wiping. similarly doing molten core and bwl without wiping is about 60g.

there is a balance point where, you can't list items too expensively because it ends up being easier or more cost effective to go grind that item yourself.

for example it doesn't really matter how much gold ppl have, I can't sell an arcane crystal for 100g if ppl are selling them for 30 or 50. and even if they weren't. the option to go grind it yourself, vs paying 100g, still exists to balance the point. ppl are free to list their stuff at whatever they want. i'm not forced to pay that price. at least not on pve i'm not.

[GreenJesus]

I'm a bit worried about prices for different stuff being insane since I didn't play Classic Vanilla. If I'm required to bring potions or flasks, etc will they be so astronomical in price that it's just not affordable for me to do the content? I hope people aren't expected to have gotten thousands of gold in order to do the content.

- - - Updated - - -

Grab some herbs\ores\primals, sell for super inflated values on ah, never worry about respec costs again?

Mining/herb nodes go away after the first person hits them though. I can't imagine actually being able to find any with mega full servers and bots.

[WaltherLeopold]

The issue is more that the average player doesn't have these inflated numbers but a fraction of it. I'd estimate that less than 10% of the players in Classic have anywhere near those high numbers and in BC it will remain around the same amount. Because there are SOME players who do have these large amounts of gold means that people assume the average player will be able to afford such items on the AH and therefore will price stuff very high. Those very high prices means stuff stays on the AH much longer and the average player can't access such items (gear, gathering items, etc). BC wasn't exactly known for its high gold making like WOD was. Honestly a gold wipe would be ideal as it would put everyone on the same footing as each other due to duping items and bots that happened during Classic that gave some players huge amount of gold.

so, why would the top 10% hoard all the primals and valuable materials by buying them at exorbitant prices rather than waiting for the prices to normalize for all the tourists and low end raiders to afford it?

No one I know with a lot of gold made that gold by buying really, really expensive things frivolously, I have spent collective hundreds of hours to grind my treasure of 20k, i'm not gonna spend it on 5 primals.

The whole inflation thing is a huge strawman, if you don't have the gold you probably don't care enough about your performance anyway, because if you did then you would have acquired the gold.

As for "good luck with gathering vs all the bots or w/e" is so false, almost every dungeon have herbs and/or mining nodes.

[scelero]

Grab some herbs\ores\primals, sell for super inflated values on ah, never worry about respec costs again?

no shit. I remember in TBC I would farm 5 mans to buy gems from Badge vendors to make 5K to get in on a ZA bear run. It's also paid for my epic flying as well.

Yup. JC is coming.

[Orange Joe]

The inflation for sure isn’t a lie lol. Just wait until you start seeing the first primals go up on the AH.

Supply and demand will equal it out. If people price to high supply will rise and drop the price/demand.

[Machismo]

The inflation was real, black lotus was selling for over 200g on the AH. Nobody is surprised that things which will be obsolete in a few months are going down in value.

This thread is absurd.

[shadowroguetbc]

Supply and demand will equal it out. If people price to high supply will rise and drop the price/demand.

And at the start, they will be high, and the people who DO have the tens of thousands will be buying.

[Orange Joe]

And at the start, they will be high, and the people who DO have the tens of thousands will be buying.

And? this is how economies work. If you were smart you would work on being one of the first people to farm and take some of those "tens of thousands" for yourself.

[shadowroguetbc]

And? this is how economies work. If you were smart you would work on being one of the first people to farm and take some of those "tens of thousands" for yourself.

I’m not saying anything bad about it in either way, so I’m not quite sure what you’re attempting to get at here. The guy asked if the inflation was a lie. I’m telling him it’s not, and that you’ll notice it at the beginning of tbc. If you are wanting to argue about something unrelated then find a poster who is posting the things you want to argue about sweetheart.

[Heathy]

if ppl are as prepared as they were for classic, I thought mooncloth was going to be a half decent money maker because of the 4 day cooldown, nope it went down to 9 gold a piece. arcane crystals spiked upto something like 70-80g but they went back down to 30-35, thats what they've been at for a while now since, most ppl have all the bars they need for tf's and t3. but they are kinda high churn items, 3% hit scopes require them, enchanters need rods, so they cycle but at the end of classic they are cheaper than they were in phase 1. if inflation was an actual problem they would be worth 1000s of gold, but since its piss easy to go grind 1 arcane crystal, just by, running around mining thorium veins, they'll never be worth that much gold. same with every other item in this game that you can farm from a respawning mob or node. if it takes me 1hr to grind 100 gold, I'm not paying more than 100g for anything I can grind in less than 1hr. this is a pretty simple concept that makes gold not that powerful. its nice to have, but it sure as fuck isn't the be all end all in this game. there are mmos where money has a huge impact on progression but wow just isn't one of them. its not as important as it is in other mmos like bdo gold in wow is not even close to as useful. at some point during each content phase you reach a point where you can't inject any more gold into that character to make it better than it already is. it has a limited baring on progression that you eventually finish.

flasks I don't think will be a problem with the combination of elixir masters and the fact that fel lotus simply drop from any herb in BC, primals will fluctuate but there will also be ppl who don't care about crafted gear and will sell primals. I'm pretty certain that you don't need crafted gear to progress through t4 and by the time t5 comes out, enough time should have passed to farm some crafted gear, from my recollection, the crafted stuff, the good crafted stuff, wasn't in until t5 anyway. doesn't seem like there is a time shortage. then again classic was also quite tame since there was ample time to farm each phase before the next one.

[Orange Joe]

I’m not saying anything bad about it in either way, so I’m not quite sure what you’re attempting to get at here. The guy asked if the inflation was a lie. I’m telling him it’s not, and that you’ll notice it at the beginning of tbc. If you are wanting to argue about something unrelated then find a poster who is posting the things you want to argue about sweetheart.

I stated it very clearly in my first post. The start out price will rapidly drop as supply increases due to no one but a few being able to buy them.

inflation isn't really the issue here. The issue is there are few people with lots of gold. That alone doesn't cause inflation