Reminder -- Silithus Stress Test Today at 3:00 p.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. EDT

Reducing the supply of something generally increases the profitability. Like that’s day one in Econ 101 info there.

If there’s 1000 people that each want one unit of product, in this case gold, then each of those people have their own price they’d be willing to pay for it, for some it might be $1 per gold, for some it might be $20 per gold. In a perfectly competitive economy, that gold ends up being as close to the cost as possible because if the price is higher than the cost more suppliers enter the market, if the price is lower than the cost suppliers exit the economy until it reaches equilibrium. (I should note I don’t consider the gold seller economy to be a perfectly competitive one- but if it were that’s how it’d function)

If there’s only 100 units of gold though, a scarcity of supply well below the profitable demand, suppliers can price it as high as the top 100 buyers will buy at and still sell it all, that might be something like $10.

If cost were say, $1, and at equilibrium price is $1 there’s no profit. If cost remains the same across the market, but price goes up to $10 and supply is only 100 units, the profit is $900.

That’s actually completely wrong, in fact accounts are a pretty good example of being one of the closest things on the planet to being limitless, and while there’s a technical limit that’d be based on technological limitations- the ‘limit’ would effectively be how many characters can be on a realm at a time. Not only is that an extremely improbable limit for any botter to hit, but if you hit it you’d actually get rid of anyone’s ability to buy gold as they could not play the game itself due to bots taking every single slot.

Even then, technically it’s not wow accounts that are the limited resource, but server capacity.

Do you have even the slightest understanding of economics? Because the irony here is that you really don’t seem to be at even a grade school level.

If I want an actual limited resource, such as say gold, no cost in the world can make a mine I own that has 100 pounds of gold have more than 100 pounds of gold. But I can absolutely make a thousand, a million, a billion accounts for WoW if I incur the cost.

Why? Because real life gold is an actual limited resource, and wow accounts and WoW gold are not a limited resource.

They have ways around this, the most obvious of which is to just use a retail account to buy tokens with gold they’ve botted there. They may have numerous other methods, but even if we solely thinking in terms of legitimate ways that we could do ourselves, it can be done without a sub cost to them. Stealing accounts is not as common as you think, it’s not a part of their business plan, and it’s not necessary- getting to level 60 is not a challenge for them, because they don’t have to do anything- they’re bots, they literally get to 60 on their own, that’s what they do.

BUT, let’s just say for a moment that bots indeed were using a VPN to a place with a lower sub, so they did have to pay the $3 per month sub fee from pretending they’re in Argentina. That means to be profitable, a bot needs to recoup initial costs (botting software, their set up, etc…), but after that their cost per month is that $3 plus overhead costs like internet/electricity/computer maintenance split between however many bots they have running. I’m sure you don’t know how much a bot can make in a month, but it’s a lot more than $3.

No, it doesn’t. If you had taken econ, 101, you would know that. The relationship between demand and profitability is a curve, not a linear progression. If you don’t have enough goods to sell, you jack up the price to maintain profits. That reduces demand because fewer buyers are willing to pay higher prices. As supply decreases, prices rise higher and higher, until they reach a level that no one wants to pay. You can’t turn a profit if you can’t find buyers.

You’re clearly confused, if you think I’m missing the basic concepts. There are two forces at work here: The Law of Supply, which states that as prices increase, producers have more incentive to produce, causing them to increase the supply. Then there’s the Law of Demand, which states that as prices increase, buyers have less incentive to buy, so demand goes down.

All this holds in a market with unlimited production. However, production isn’t unlimited. Blizzard cut it by 75%. You can try to dance around it by claiming they’ll shift to less lucrative servers, and then transfer back, but that’s laughable. The costs required to do that exceed the cost of an additional account. Blizzard is placing an artificial cap on the supply, which is why your simple-minded obsession with the Law of Supply isn’t valid here. On your fairy-tale graph, supply indefinitely increases along with the price. In reality, Blizzard just added an inflection point where the supply line goes horizontal.

In other words, as prices go up, botters will want to increase supply, but they can’t do that because Blizzard is restricting their activity from 24/7 to 6/7. In order to get around that, they will have to buy four times as many accounts. That cuts into their bottom line, and they’re going to have to jack up prices to compensate.

Here’s what you’re missing: They’re not going to jack up prices due to increased demand. They’re going to have to jack up the prices in order to stay above water. If you had paid attention in economics class, you would know that the Law of Demand dictates that demand will decrease in response to price increases.

So the question remains: Will the demand decrease enough to decimate the bottom line, or will the botters be able to stay afloat by jacking up prices? If the latter is true, then at least we’ll see less gold selling, which will help to bring the server economies back down to reasonable levels. If the bottom line goes negative, then the botters stop, and Blizzard wins. Either way, this change is positive.

On what planet? Accounts are limited by the amount of money that you’re willing to pay for them. At $15 a month, there’s a limit on the number of accounts that you can maintain while remaining profitable.

still #icantInstance

That’s not how it works, your continued ignorance of economics is laughable. Reduced supply does let you jack up prices, but not to maintain but to increase profits- reduced supply increases profitability.

That’s reduced demand, like do you even know the difference between supply and demand? How are you able to miss such basic concepts?

That’s not what a limited resource is, I explained to you what it is. If you’re going to evoke economics in any way then know more than absolutely nothing about economics before you speak.

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Reminder: the idiotic instance cap with no UI to tell the player their count has yet to be reverted.

1:25 p.m. PDT

Our plan is to make the test realm available in a few minutes, so that testers can begin logging in and copying their characters over (or creating a template level 60 test character).

Thanks for the heads up! Also don’t listen to the whiny boosters. 30 instances a day is plenty.

Rep. Items and Gear from CC are on the PTR

Pretty excited to see the PTR tbh. First time seeing AQ live, I was a bad mage in vanilla like stacked agility for faster fireball bad.

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1:35 p.m. PDT –

The test realm is now open!

I would help but… do you guys not have a fire to extinguish somewhere else?

Need to have retail installed in order to help test? I gave up retail after TBC.

I remember Silithus being almost a stop-motion animated zone when I first arrived after the opening. Not sure what was worse, the number of players present or the number of MoBs that came out!! :slight_smile:

Glad to see that Blizzard is trying to stress test the zone. I certainly hope you have some of the same plans involved if/when TBC comes around.

Thanks.

That a nice reply coming from you shinree :slight_smile: .

In the Blizzard Desktop App playscreen, select the WoW icon on the left, then go to the version dropdown on the bottom and change your version to “Public Test Realm (Classic)”.

The Install button will then install what you need to play.

Hello kaivax. Plz free us from all the added stress from the 30 instance cap and tell us if blizzard is intending to do anything. Will they keep the 30 instance cap? Will they change it for different option. Even just knowing you guys are actually in a meeting talking about the possible option would calm the fire that is currently spreading. We do not ask for much, we just want to know what is happening.

actually it’s about 250k, just google it

see endless spam about hotfix in a thread that has nothing to do with it, but the forums enable the spammers and silence the blizzard supporters

great moderation

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There is a difference between a question and trolling.

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If that’s accurate it’s pretty insane. They just banned ~75k mostly for botting.

Is 30% of the population bots o.O…

Are you a bot? Am I?

Really though, if that’s the value based on WCL then it’s probably a pretty accurate sample overall.