Originally Posted by
Marrilaife
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.