Why economy is so bad at bfa?

[Shakana]

Is it because people are trying to buy the dino/AH mount?
People don't want to spend much gold?
People need to remove gold on BMAH because of mounts?

Why can't we have as well something like blood of sargueras too from Legion? Reagents fish and all.
Honestly feels like everything is so pointless in bfa, even making gold, herbs now are cheap. Fish are cheap. Gear no one cares, mogs no one cares, professions are boring as damn hell. Everything feels awful. And Economy is even worse than before, i used to make around 100k each day at Legion, and at bfa i barely can do 7k-10k in a day. It's preposterous.

Honestly it isn't just me with this problem and i'm getting quite tired of the economy also. Even more at my server, it's full pop and has so much people to buy stuff but no one buys anything and just puts more and more on the AH making the price go lower than ever. Only gold i see people getting is from boosting others. Not even flipping the AH serves for anything, cause as i said, no one wants to buy, so can't play AH either.

(FOR EXAMPLE TOO, i was going for sha of anger mount on BMAH, 2M on my server, a guy booster just comes with his gold bank and puts it to damn gold cap, you can't LITERALLY compete with that. It's really unfair. Someone don't have time or patience to boost and gets wrecked. It's pointless.)

[Primohastat]

i used to make around 100k each day at Legion, and at bfa i barely can do 7k-10k in a day.

It seems that you need to be more creative. Check what is happening on your realm, recall how was it in the time when you were most successful and then adapt your money making startegy.

[Elias01]

It seems that you need to be more creative. Check what is happening on your realm, recall how was it in the time when you were most successful and then adapt your money making startegy.

So in short. Start boosting.

[Shakana]

It seems that you need to be more creative. Check what is happening on your realm, recall how was it in the time when you were most successful and then adapt your money making startegy.

I have been trying to be creative and sell loads of stuff even from past expansions i just cant seem to make anyone buy it, even battle pets that are used for current content at max level, so much stuff, and still it's hard to get anything. Even now alani mount is cheap. Great sea ray even doesn't do much, cause i spend time hours, farming that for simple 30k. And mounts as well from bfa like Nazmir one, always asking for taggers and druids. I'm most of the time not playing those. That's another thing, every farm that requires to kill alot mobs to get something, it's just "druids only", everything feels so awkward, the farming today is a joke compared to legion.

I feel like stuff from bfa is the least to give me gold, and old ones people buy but its really rare. Herbs that is what i made my living with in game, basically has been reduced too, a stack of x200 siren's pollen has been reduced to less than 1k. It was around 600+ gold. I just feel super unmotivated. And honestly i don't like boosting, and my server has already loads of community boosters.

- - - Updated - - -

So in short. Start boosting.

Ye but that should be stopped, it is something that makes you get gold out of the game conditions. I mean, nothing against boosting, but when it comes to make gold normally, like AH, it's useless, and i also work way too much to give my time to boosting people. SHOULDN'T be necessary!

[Foolicious]

Most of the stuff that sold in 8.1 doesn't sell in 8.2. Herbs, boe, fish etc. Boe's got replaced by cheaper benthic gear, you don't need a lot of herbs for flasks anymore, there is new single and raid food which replaced the old ones.
Anchorweed, enchanting mats, gems are pretty solid. But of course it all depends on your server.
Its definetly harder to make money than in legion with blizzard adding new recipes, but its not impossible.
The blood vendor from legion was the worst thing that could happen to sellers. Prices dropped 70% and more. Im glad they didn't added it into bfa yet.

[Shakana]

Most of the stuff that sold in 8.1 doesn't sell in 8.2. Herbs, boe, fish etc. Boe's got replaced by cheaper benthic gear, you don't need a lot of herbs for flasks anymore, there is new single and raid food which replaced the old ones.
Anchorweed, enchanting mats, gems are pretty solid. But of course it all depends on your server.
Its definetly harder to make money than in legion with blizzard adding new recipes, but its not impossible.
The blood vendor from legion was the worst thing that could happen to sellers. Prices dropped 70% and more. Im glad they didn't added it into bfa yet.

And i used as well in legion to make BoE from professions, and they sold on a daily basis really like 45k each, at end of legion was less ofc, but still. And i used to sell so much of that enchant material - Chaos Crystals, that was my holy grail. That's how i got 100k in a day, each day + Starlight Rosesx200.

Oh and even doing world quests with class order hall followers with gold equipped items, each time you complete a world quest with them... Everything in Legion rewarded a lot gold. Materials, followers, and even had this blood of sargueras thing.

[klaps_05]

What you can make on the AH pales with what a booster or an advertiser make. The few advertisers I know hit characters gold caps on a monthly basis. At the start of a patch the money you make is pretty insane by just selling 10s for weekly chest or 15s for more residuum. And that is just m+ boosting. Then you have pvp, raids, islands, leveling, etc. boosting too on top of it.

[Shakana]

What you can make on the AH pales with what a booster or an advertiser make. The few advertisers I know hit characters gold caps on a monthly basis. At the start of a patch the money you make is pretty insane by just selling 10s for weekly chest or 15s for more residuum. And that is just m+ boosting. Then you have pvp, raids, islands, leveling, etc. boosting too on top of it.

Ye first months of every expansion is fking insane how much stuff is expensive and tbh i made loads of gold in the beginning now it feels stagnated. And only boosting seems giving something. :/

[Marrilaife]

Only gold i see people getting is from boosting others.

Yep, basically casual player has no gold because they nuked mission tables and professions barely produce anything worth buying, so 2 sources of gold for casuals gone. Who has gold? People who buy it for $$$ through tokens. What do they spend this gold on? Boosts. The cycle completes.

Boosting also got "institutionalized", back in MOP with CM runs it was small groups of people, usually a team just advertising for themselves, same with raids, usually a guild would advertise curve boost or old mount sell (my guild used to sell Blackhand and Guldan mounts) to fund consumables for raiding. Nowadays everywhere are boosting "communities" and "discords", they take the lion share of the market and small teams / guilds can't compete anymore while the big fish are making billions. It's like shopping malls vs family business corner stores. The second ones stand no chance.

People say boosting always existed, and they're right, but it was never before so dominant, it went from something shameful and done under the table to basically half the trade chat filled with boost offers (and the other half is guilds desperately trying to recruit), the biggest loser of this system is a casual player because he has no gold to buy boost, no time / dedication to push themselves to the gear level where they can boost and probably don't have connections to join successful boosting organizations, and the worst part is, he will have to deal with all the boosted animals in his pugs afterwards, who have ilvl / score, but no clue cuz they got it afk.

And I don't think much will change, and if it will, it will be for the worse, because Activision is enthralled with how market of mobile gaming works where 99% of playerbase is an irrelevant mass and a background for whales. So yeah, in wow we have whales (boost buyers), people who provide services to whales (boosters), Blizz gets 5$ cut from every token sold and is happy, and everyone else doesn't matter in the equation.

I miss MOP where I made bank from cutting gems. However you can see what they did now. They was a great analysis on the forums, sadly I don't remember the author. But what he said was the prospect rate of green / red gems is deliberately set to low so people are forced to prospect thousands of ores for JC rings (somehow blacksmiths and other professions are nowhere near as close in mats cost for their BOP items) and then market gets flooded with redundant gems of other colors so the price got driven to the ground very fast.

Even in legion there were avenues of "obliterum shuffle" or selling your blood of sargeras for something valuable.

Nowadays your options are: grind for "minimal wage", buy gold, boost, or be an AH tycoon (usually works on medium to low pop servers, on high pop competition won't let you easily keep prices where you want them or corner / monopolize a market). Small fries of the AH went the same way as small scale boost teams - got pushed out to the point of little profitability.

Since average casual has little money, they won't be as interested in buying vanity / luxury goods like transmogs, pets, mounts, toys, "fun" seasonal items, expensive boes, etc. So the market got much smaller, compounded with the fact BFA has seen a massive sub dropoff. Some people will try to question that, since Blizzard doesn't provide numbers, but their aggressive campaigns like 2 6-month sub promos and now new RAF suggest they're really trying to get back subs and not just "1-month visitors for a new patch". And the second category of people are only present when a new patch launches, then quickly go into hiatus, so when you're in the "in between patches" period the market shrinks significantly.

Not to mention Blizzard changed how AH deposits are calculated somewhere in 8.1 or so, which basically strangulated markets for mats / consumables that aren't of the "sold within a day" category (majority of old expansion mats). I hope they'll revert it in 8.3 with the AH changes.

[hulkgor]

You can thank the near unlimited amount of gold that got dumped into the economy through the garrisons, in WoD\Legion.

No amount of money sinks will ever fix it, so, just make the most out of it.

Personally, despite not liking how it is right now, at least i got wow (and every other blizzard\bnet product) paid for, for like... ever?

[Dracullus]

BfA is literally first expansion where gold increased it's value.

[Kyphael]

I can't speak for other players, but I don't spend anywhere near as much as I used to because A) professions are dead. I only sell disenchanting mats, don't consume them myself, or any other mats. B) I have all the mounts I want save for Ashes of A'lar or Invincible. I have nearly 1,000 battle pets, all the ones I want, and then some. I just buy one or two when they're like really cheap or rare and at a good price. C) I don't have to buy gear because it's so easy to get.

I've been playing since 2008, so Auction House shiny stuff that used to make me want to spend no longer entice me, and professions are broken. The only thing I want I can't afford, the Brutosaur mount, so I don't spend my gold.

[MasterOfNone]

Is it because people are trying to buy the dino/AH mount?
People don't want to spend much gold?
People need to remove gold on BMAH because of mounts?

Why can't we have as well something like blood of sargueras too from Legion? Reagents fish and all.
Honestly feels like everything is so pointless in bfa, even making gold, herbs now are cheap. Fish are cheap. Gear no one cares, mogs no one cares, professions are boring as damn hell. Everything feels awful. And Economy is even worse than before, i used to make around 100k each day at Legion, and at bfa i barely can do 7k-10k in a day. It's preposterous.

Honestly it isn't just me with this problem and i'm getting quite tired of the economy also. Even more at my server, it's full pop and has so much people to buy stuff but no one buys anything and just puts more and more on the AH making the price go lower than ever. Only gold i see people getting is from boosting others. Not even flipping the AH serves for anything, cause as i said, no one wants to buy, so can't play AH either.

(FOR EXAMPLE TOO, i was going for sha of anger mount on BMAH, 2M on my server, a guy booster just comes with his gold bank and puts it to damn gold cap, you can't LITERALLY compete with that. It's really unfair. Someone don't have time or patience to boost and gets wrecked. It's pointless.)

it wasnt to begin with. it is now. what do you think might be a contributing factor? not exactly rocket science.

[erifwodahs]

Sell something what makes money - mounts, pets, mog items. Buy and re-sell, my guildie has no issue in making hundreds of thousands of those. Takes time and research, but if you know how to play it - you don't even need to acquire items yourself, just invest your gold and harvest it later.

[Shakana]

Yep, basically casual player has no gold because they nuked mission tables and professions barely produce anything worth buying, so 2 sources of gold for casuals gone. Who has gold? People who buy it for $$$ through tokens. What do they spend this gold on? Boosts. The cycle completes.

Boosting also got "institutionalized", back in MOP with CM runs it was small groups of people, usually a team just advertising for themselves, same with raids, usually a guild would advertise curve boost or old mount sell (my guild used to sell Blackhand and Guldan mounts) to fund consumables for raiding. Nowadays everywhere are boosting "communities" and "discords", they take the lion share of the market and small teams / guilds can't compete anymore while the big fish are making billions. It's like shopping malls vs family business corner stores. The second ones stand no chance.

People say boosting always existed, and they're right, but it was never before so dominant, it went from something shameful and done under the table to basically half the trade chat filled with boost offers (and the other half is guilds desperately trying to recruit), the biggest loser of this system is a casual player because he has no gold to buy boost, no time / dedication to push themselves to the gear level where they can boost and probably don't have connections to join successful boosting organizations, and the worst part is, he will have to deal with all the boosted animals in his pugs afterwards, who have ilvl / score, but no clue cuz they got it afk.

And I don't think much will change, and if it will, it will be for the worse, because Activision is enthralled with how market of mobile gaming works where 99% of playerbase is an irrelevant mass and a background for whales. So yeah, in wow we have whales (boost buyers), people who provide services to whales (boosters), Blizz gets 5$ cut from every token sold and is happy, and everyone else doesn't matter in the equation.

I miss MOP where I made bank from cutting gems. However you can see what they did now. They was a great analysis on the forums, sadly I don't remember the author. But what he said was the prospect rate of green / red gems is deliberately set to low so people are forced to prospect thousands of ores for JC rings (somehow blacksmiths and other professions are nowhere near as close in mats cost for their BOP items) and then market gets flooded with redundant gems of other colors so the price got driven to the ground very fast.

Even in legion there were avenues of "obliterum shuffle" or selling your blood of sargeras for something valuable.

Nowadays your options are: grind for "minimal wage", buy gold, boost, or be an AH tycoon (usually works on medium to low pop servers, on high pop competition won't let you easily keep prices where you want them or corner / monopolize a market). Small fries of the AH went the same way as small scale boost teams - got pushed out to the point of little profitability.

Since average casual has little money, they won't be as interested in buying vanity / luxury goods like transmogs, pets, mounts, toys, "fun" seasonal items, expensive boes, etc. So the market got much smaller, compounded with the fact BFA has seen a massive sub dropoff. Some people will try to question that, since Blizzard doesn't provide numbers, but their aggressive campaigns like 2 6-month sub promos and now new RAF suggest they're really trying to get back subs and not just "1-month visitors for a new patch". And the second category of people are only present when a new patch launches, then quickly go into hiatus, so when you're in the "in between patches" period the market shrinks significantly.

Not to mention Blizzard changed how AH deposits are calculated somewhere in 8.1 or so, which basically strangulated markets for mats / consumables that aren't of the "sold within a day" category (majority of old expansion mats). I hope they'll revert it in 8.3 with the AH changes.

My trade chat is only boost offers and 1 or 2 guild announcements per day.
I even had to put my spam trade chat on a separated window.

People say boosting always existed, and they're right, but it was never before so dominant

It truly always existed, even for power leveling, but in Legion it changed with m+, and now even more in BfA it's filled.
And wow tokens when they were less expensive not much people wanted to buy with their own money since it wasn't that worth it, i came back to the game when it was around 40k. Since it went from 100k-200k+ everyone is buying those tokens, and getting gold in game + boosting. I don't want to spend my irl money on tokens to get in game gold, i already give alot money to them with store stuff + monthly sub. I also work 9 hours a day, sometimes even 11hours, and i can't just feel like giving my time to boost people, but rather farming myself what i feel like it, but nothing is worth.

Professions have been turned into a joke, even Jewelcrafting was one of my favorite, it's now useless, gems are cheap. Everything is basically pointless. Just making bags, selling anchor weeds, and some inscription milling herbs pigments are good to sell too. Not even the flasks are that expensive anymore, in Legion i made around 50k in a round of a day, when people were about to go raid. Like literally they were so expensive, 1 flask was 500gold, so imagine a stack. It was really good.
Professions had a bit more utility.

Now materials, and all those things means less and less, and all the gold incoming is from those boostings + wow tokens. And i want to play a game that i want to do WHAT I WANT and play how i want, and shouldn't be needing for me to go with that flow of obtaining gold as it is now. I even got to the point i had to do LFR's pandaria to get some raw gold daily, cause it was giving me more than farming current stuff. lol And i farm as well medallions of the legion, but i have to wait shitloads of time, to just one to spawn, cause they are always killed in Tannan Jungle.

About the 8.3 patch changes for AH i actually like it. And it's a step on a right direction that they did this change also, to not use addons for AH, not really bothered about that, but rather more about people using the AH as it should be and actual play the game as it should be. Boosting is so bad even, you don't make efforts, you just buy something, ahead of the curves, and say "oh im so good" when in fact you just got boosted and you barely know fight mechanics.

Trust me, leveling boosters i don't mind much, cause i mean, lvling is already boring if you're leveling for the 9000000 time.

"1-month visitors for a new patch". And the second category of people are only present when a new patch launches, then quickly go into hiatus, so when you're in the "in between patches" period the market shrinks significantly.

It really does, it's just that tiny hype every new patch and then goes to the same thing, but economy still doesn't change much.

- - - Updated - - -

Sell something what makes money - mounts, pets, mog items. Buy and re-sell, my guildie has no issue in making hundreds of thousands of those. Takes time and research, but if you know how to play it - you don't even need to acquire items yourself, just invest your gold and harvest it later.

I think i REALLY need a good guide for gold this patch. I go to https://www.reddit.com/r/woweconomy/ and still barely see anything, and most of the posts are now for classic than retail.

[Kushana]

The problem with reagents from previous expansions is that they are no longer necessary for levelling professions. It used to be that if you wanted a Legion enchanter they had to make some progession at being a Pandaria enchanter. No longer; you leap straight to the expansion you're interested in. Reagents from previous expansions are only for completionists now.

[spleen1015]

I think it is a combination of 2 things.

Blizz isn't giving away tons of gold with the mission table.
There are less people playing.

[msdos]

Gold has no meaning in retail so it doesn't even matter. The game is 100% casual. Casuals can't make gold because they don't need it for anything anyway, don't you get it?? The boosters don't need the gold either, they're just doing it out of compulsion.

Gold doesn't even need to be a currency anymore, I'm not sure why it exists. Why does currency even exist in this game?

[Samin]

The problem with reagents from previous expansions is that they are no longer necessary for levelling professions. It used to be that if you wanted a Legion enchanter they had to make some progession at being a Pandaria enchanter. No longer; you leap straight to the expansion you're interested in. Reagents from previous expansions are only for completionists now.

Well, specific materials might still be valuable, especially mats for the Sky Golem but also all other sellable profession mounts to a lesser extent.

On the other hand current expansion (and patch) materials sell for pretty good prices. But then, when OP talks about the Great Sea Ray for 30K, I chuckle because I haven't seen it below 90K since I came back for 8.2 (over 100K last I checked) - so I guess the economy I'm dealing with is slightly different anyway.

[Chonar]

I honestly hate that boosting is a thing. I really, really, really despise it.
I hate it almost as much as multiboxers.

Acquire what you want by working for it and building up a character and your social connections? Heck no, just throw money!
Getting outskilled in PVP? Enter as a deathball-swarm of multiboxed clones and kill people with a single buttonpress one by one!
Honest material gathering? Heck no son, your multiboxed clones all mine and herb the same node!
Hone your tradeskill and advertise, creating fair competition and standing out because you're friendly, fun, engaging and/or simply offering the most for the least? NOPE nothing you craft is worth a nickel.

And all these loopholes.
"It's not illegal cause it isnt ingame material being traded for IRL money despite people buying the gold they need for it in the first place with IRL money"
"Its not illegal cause its multiple accounts being paid for and Blizzard wont ban anyone thats a big source of income like that".

Fuuuuuuuug yooouuuuu. I want people to make money by in-game means, not by outside-game-enabled ingame means. Pay to win, thats what it is. Pay-to-win? In my MMO? It's more likely than you think.