AH region merge is awful

[Goatfish]

The fact that, as you said, 5 tech companies own the world is a problem with us HUMANS. Not a problem with the capitalistic system per se. A system is a system - it will do what a system does, based on the inputs you give it. The fact humanity is so fucking greedy and self-destructive is a whole different can of worms. All systems are perfect and utopic in theory, on paper. Monarchies, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, everything is perfect, THEORETICALLY. The fact we Humans show up and fuck up everything due to our stupidity and greed has nothing to do with the systems, but the humans abusing these systems.

And this is the problem. You are arguing theory, and I'm arguing practically. You can argue til the end of time about how your economic system would be perfect if people would all just play by your rules, but they don't, and it's impossible to enforce your utopian theories in practice. You seem to understand this but don't give a shit.

Have fun spewing your ideas from your ivory tower and I'll have fun actually building a working system on the ground. You've completely misrepresented me from the start, and just want claim superiority to make yourself feel better. Who am I to deny you your self-gratification? Hopefully others can see you've presented no argument, and just resorted to a gish gallup of irrelevant terms and phrases with threats of "textbooks on economics".

Edit: To anyone lost about what this is about, I'm basically arguing for fragmented markets and this other guy isn't really arguing against it, but throwing economic terminology around to sound smart. There are arguments for a larger more homogenized market, but I land on the against side for reasons you can find in this paper put out by the Bank of International Settlements. I didn't plan on going that deep since we're talking about WoW and the comparisons in a real life economy to WoW come to a difference pretty quickly. The paper is kind of a slog if you aren't used to economic reading, but it's pretty good if you do.

The long and short is they want sellers to compete against each other all in the same market, and I want entire markets to compete against each other because I think it provides better potential class mobility to be in a smaller market whereas a larger market gets dominated by larger companies in the end. To put it in laymen terms, bigger pond=bigger fish.

[Djuntas]

eh... what?
if everything is cheaper people will need less gold, and are less likely to sell tokens for gold, as they dont need that much, hence they are less likely to buy tokens...

Bro, people want costly things in WoW like boe's, gear for alts, gold sink mounts, boosts etc. Thats what drives up the wow token...Oh also other blizzard services like migration or buying games. Just because AH prices are cheaper does not mean gold is not needed. Removing ways ppl make good gold in wow will increase the token price.

[casecase89]

[/QUOTE]A free market where people decide how much to buy and sell things for is EXACTLY what currently exists. If people don't find it viable to herb/mine/fish for money, they'll stop doing it, supply will drop, prices will rise, until they hit a point where people DO find it viable to do those things for money. The fact that the bottom has dropped out of the market indicates that either nobody wants to buy those items(Which I find dubious given they're consumables and constantly used for raiding), or that people are happy to herb/mine/fish for silver, thus keeping supply high.[/QUOTE]

No, actually, they won't. Think of gathering professions as min wage jobs. What this does is that it kills the potential for commodity prices. Literally destroys it. Most, and I really mean most, have no clue on how to make the AH work for them. They will level other professions, like alchy, jc, or enchanting, but not use them to make money, only to help cover what they actually need, and would rather spend hours a week farming mats or selling tokens to make gold. How many times I've heard the term... "free money" or "pure profit" from collectors makes my head hurt.

In BFA ( i didn't play SL until blizz gave it away free ), I was using enchanting to break items down and sell enchants, alchy for pots and flasks, and inscription to make decks. I used tailoring and leatherworking to make trash items to DE and breakdown into expulsom for decks. I barked in trade chat to buy items in bulk via CoD, like cloth, herbs, and greens. I used these professions in a smart way to make gold. I would spend 2-3 hours every day or every other day, all depended on my stock and my sales, a lot of it in between queues, mythic plus runs, and afking ( crafting trash items ) while watching youtube or netflix and was generating 5 million in revenue a week, with 2-2.5 million profit per week. I stopped playing around the time the second raid hit in BFA due to working obnoxious hours at my job. In 5 weeks, I made gold cap, bought my AH mount, and then within 3 weeks I was at gold cap again, and was working on my second cap. It did take a bit of time to do this, but TSM automates a lot of it for you if you take an hour or 2 to set it up. Anyhow... this is making the market work for you.

Now with the way it is, dust prices are below the vendor price of items it takes to DE and crafting cost of the items it takes to DE it. Why would anyone DE items right now? It blows my mind, but its keeping the dust price low. They would make more gold vendoring the items... but for whatever reason, people still DE items. I have only leveled one toon, but I have found that nearly every item I got through questing or drops, it was more worthwhile to vendor it, rather than DE it. Dust price is still absolutely rock bottom. It was not like this in Cata, wod, Legion, or BFA, even at the end of the expansion. In the prepatch, it was like what we see now. Apparently it was not like this during SL, as you can easily google videos of people doing the enchanting shuffle during 9.1 and making fair gold.

At the end of the day... this is not good for the market. It is good for low pop servers, where there are maybe 1 or 2 people like me on the server, but high pops are murdered by this because crafting items will basically always be very close to the cost of the item due to how many people are flooding the market with mats, and they will keep flooding it. There are too many crafters making the items and competing with each other to do it, and since the price of the items is at the floor, it will drive everything crafted down. What kept mats from becoming worthless on high pop servers, were people like me, who bought 20-30k of a materials every few days, like cloth, herbs, etc. I was literally using 60-90k cloth per week, 50-60k herbs. I was not the only person doing this either. It kept the prices stable for herbs and cloth as we couldn't get enough of the materials. I cannot see this being the case going forward. You may smile about this, but in the end everyone loses. I play the game for the economy, other aspects of the game come second for me. I know wow, the professions, and its economy very, very well. I have played this way for a long time. As I said, everyone loses with this aside from the people willing to purchase tokens to sell them. At the end of the day, my sub is paid for years and all blizzard games are free to me, so its kinda whatever to me. If the market dies and I can't have fun making gold, at the very least it does not cost me a dollar to play for the next 3 or 4 years and I still have a considerable amount of liquid gold.

[Kalisandra]

The region wide auction house is a direct boon to the average player. We can sell quicker and buy cheaper.

As someone on a small and quiet server I'm a big fan. It's made legendary gear pieces and consumables so much more affordable. There's actually an economy now.

[Schizoide]

This late in the expansion I very rarely need to buy mats for anything; all my alts have maxed professions. My AH interaction is almost entirely selling mats from table mission boxes, and the merge has of course drastically dropped prices, so I'm making a lot less money off this. I'm fine with that and still think it's a great change.

I don't need more money, really. Now that my alts' table troops are (mostly) maxed-out I'm making around 25k raw gold/day from gold missions alone. This is way more than WoD (~15k/day) but much less than the end of Legion (~45k/day).

Really happy Dragonflight doesn't have a mission table. I hate refreshing missions multiple times per day but it's just so much gold and so easy that I can't stop myself.

[Twdft]

Imagine if in the real world no human needed to pick fruit, chop wood, or work at oil refineries.

A world with no physical labor needed? That would be the absolute dream, mate.

[Vellithe]

A free market where people decide how much to buy and sell things for is EXACTLY what currently exists. If people don't find it viable to herb/mine/fish for money, they'll stop doing it, supply will drop, prices will rise, until they hit a point where people DO find it viable to do those things for money. The fact that the bottom has dropped out of the market indicates that either nobody wants to buy those items(Which I find dubious given they're consumables and constantly used for raiding), or that people are happy to herb/mine/fish for silver, thus keeping supply high.

No, actually, they won't. Think of gathering professions as min wage jobs. What this does is that it kills the potential for commodity prices. Literally destroys it. Most, and I really mean most, have no clue on how to make the AH work for them. They will level other professions, like alchy, jc, or enchanting, but not use them to make money, only to help cover what they actually need, and would rather spend hours a week farming mats or selling tokens to make gold. How many times I've heard the term... "free money" or "pure profit" from collectors makes my head hurt.

In BFA ( i didn't play SL until blizz gave it away free ), I was using enchanting to break items down and sell enchants, alchy for pots and flasks, and inscription to make decks. I used tailoring and leatherworking to make trash items to DE and breakdown into expulsom for decks. I barked in trade chat to buy items in bulk via CoD, like cloth, herbs, and greens. I used these professions in a smart way to make gold. I would spend 2-3 hours every day or every other day, all depended on my stock and my sales, a lot of it in between queues, mythic plus runs, and afking ( crafting trash items ) while watching youtube or netflix and was generating 5 million in revenue a week, with 2-2.5 million profit per week. I stopped playing around the time the second raid hit in BFA due to working obnoxious hours at my job. In 5 weeks, I made gold cap, bought my AH mount, and then within 3 weeks I was at gold cap again, and was working on my second cap. It did take a bit of time to do this, but TSM automates a lot of it for you if you take an hour or 2 to set it up. Anyhow... this is making the market work for you.

Now with the way it is, dust prices are below the vendor price of items it takes to DE and crafting cost of the items it takes to DE it. Why would anyone DE items right now? It blows my mind, but its keeping the dust price low. They would make more gold vendoring the items... but for whatever reason, people still DE items. I have only leveled one toon, but I have found that nearly every item I got through questing or drops, it was more worthwhile to vendor it, rather than DE it. Dust price is still absolutely rock bottom. It was not like this in Cata, wod, Legion, or BFA, even at the end of the expansion. In the prepatch, it was like what we see now. Apparently it was not like this during SL, as you can easily google videos of people doing the enchanting shuffle during 9.1 and making fair gold.

At the end of the day... this is not good for the market. It is good for low pop servers, where there are maybe 1 or 2 people like me on the server, but high pops are murdered by this because crafting items will basically always be very close to the cost of the item due to how many people are flooding the market with mats, and they will keep flooding it. There are too many crafters making the items and competing with each other to do it, and since the price of the items is at the floor, it will drive everything crafted down. What kept mats from becoming worthless on high pop servers, were people like me, who bought 20-30k of a materials every few days, like cloth, herbs, etc. I was literally using 60-90k cloth per week, 50-60k herbs. I was not the only person doing this either. It kept the prices stable for herbs and cloth as we couldn't get enough of the materials. I cannot see this being the case going forward. You may smile about this, but in the end everyone loses. I play the game for the economy, other aspects of the game come second for me. I know wow, the professions, and its economy very, very well. I have played this way for a long time. As I said, everyone loses with this aside from the people willing to purchase tokens to sell them. At the end of the day, my sub is paid for years and all blizzard games are free to me, so its kinda whatever to me. If the market dies and I can't have fun making gold, at the very least it does not cost me a dollar to play for the next 3 or 4 years and I still have a considerable amount of liquid gold.

I think you might have either some nostalgia glasses on or are playing on a server which overpriced dust for far too long. For BfA and Shadowlands on the realms I played (3 high pop, 1 low pop), it was always important to check dust values before DE'ing anything - even if DE value wasn't lower, you might just lose to the 5% cut. And that's for soulbound items, BoEs were usually better sold as either mogs or leveling gear.

The average player benefits greatly from the merge because the average player was already unable to compete with someone spending multiple hours a day cancelling auctions. Now the average player can instantly sell their stuff and make gold in a place they were either unable to or, most likely, in a place where they just undercut by 50% so that the barons would instabuy to resell later.

Markets will not die, they will simply change. Think of it as Mythic AH, now it takes a bit more effort to be a baron :^)

Also important to note that entirely new markets will emerge with Dragonflight, markets which people don't have stockpiled to the moon and back.

[Drusin]

Agree op

/10char

[casecase89]

I think you might have either some nostalgia glasses on or are playing on a server which overpriced dust for far too long. For BfA and Shadowlands on the realms I played (3 high pop, 1 low pop), it was always important to check dust values before DE'ing anything - even if DE value wasn't lower, you might just lose to the 5% cut. And that's for soulbound items, BoEs were usually better sold as either mogs or leveling gear.

The average player benefits greatly from the merge because the average player was already unable to compete with someone spending multiple hours a day cancelling auctions. Now the average player can instantly sell their stuff and make gold in a place they were either unable to or, most likely, in a place where they just undercut by 50% so that the barons would instabuy to resell later.

Markets will not die, they will simply change. Think of it as Mythic AH, now it takes a bit more effort to be a baron :^)

Also important to note that entirely new markets will emerge with Dragonflight, markets which people don't have stockpiled to the moon and back.

Nostalgia glasses..? Buddy, BFA was 1 expac ago. I skipped SL until about 15 days ago. Markets change, sure, but shuffles have existed since vanilla and they have been profitable every single expansion, even in SL. As I said, google shuffles for SL and the ones I mentioned, existed, and were worthwhile. If you felt the need to look over prices every time you DE'd, I don't think you were going about it in the same manner as I was. I knew my bottom line, I knew what prices to buy greens at, and I knew the price to buy my cloth and leather at. You spoke about losing the 5% cut on a sale, but selling the greens themselves on the AH has a higher potential loss than the 5% cut of making the sale. You lose the deposit if it doesn't sell. If the item is current expac, its deposit can be considerably high compared to what you sell it for, which most of the time isn't much higher than vendor price depending on what slot it goes into, and you have a very high chance of not selling that green. How many times do you have to list it to sell it? That very quickly cuts into the bottom line. Xmog items, generally lower level, with a low vendor price, do not cost much to list compared to the price you sell them at. Island expedition items are the same, with some of them going 100k+. Now, to prove my point. Check this link or go to TUJ (theunderminejournal) yourself, search soul dust, and tell me the trend you see.

https://theunderminejournal.com/#us/area-52/item/172230

I'll save ya some time but feel free to fact check me. Soul dust, august 13th, 28 days ago, SL dust price regional average was 11g per dust. Throughout the year, it was 11-14G per unit. Look at the dust price now in game. I'm seeing 2.30g per unit right now. See the crash? Now when was the market made region wide for commodities again..? About a month ago. Dust has never crashed like that before, save for the last month of an expac, and even then, has never been like this. We are still a few months away from DF.

I've always watched the market very close, as making gold has always been most of why I play the game. I can promise, this is bad and in the end, is going to negatively effect everyone as it is simply much harder to make gold. People rely on mission tables for crying out loud. If DF doesn't have that, phew, I feel sorry for the average player.

[Posterville]

always has been, always will be