you know what you were saying, mr “no long boi can’t make gold”
I have no clue what you’re trying to say.
Warning, this is going to be a wall of text. TLDR; Blizzard is trying to do the right thing, but it’s trying to do it the wrong way.
I’m a video game developer with a background in computer science and economics. Studying and implementing in-game economies is something I do professionally (I should add that I have no connection to Blizzard whatsoever outside of playing their games in my personal time). This is just my opinion based on my experiences in the industry, I don’t have any insider information about the decision making process for Blizzard games.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with “flipping”, it’s the business model of any brick-and-mortar retailer. Sellers have the obvious incentive of earning as much gold for as little product as possible, and buyers have the exact opposite incentive. If the price of a product is too high, people won’t buy it. If people stop buying something because of price, that exerts pressure on the seller to lower prices. It’s a clash of wills: will the buyer cave and make the purchase or will the seller cave and lower prices? These are basic economic principles, nothing controversial.
So why would Blizzard take actions against basic economic theory? To answer that, we should consider the obvious effect “flipping” has on the game economy: it creates upwards pressure on the price for goods on the auction house. When upwards pressure continues to exceed downwards pressure over time, it leads to what economists call “inflation”.
From Blizzard’s perspective inflation is a very bad thing, because it creates a barrier-to-entry for new players who have not accumulated enough gold to buy goods from the marketplace. Until a new player has enough gold to do anything with it, that gold is effectively worthless. Worse, as soon as they have enough money to spend it on something, they are immediately back to being broke again.
I think this is what Blizzard aims to address with this hot fix (I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt that it’s not simply about making tokens the only viable way to obtain a longboi). They are trying to combat rising prices and reduce inflation by disincentivizing the practice flipping. HOWEVER, it’s the wrong way to solve that problem.
It’s the wrong way to solve the problem primarily because it won’t solve the problem, throttling flippers doesn’t stop flipping. Nor should it! Flipping is older than WoW and it will endure long after WoW. Flipping isn’t the problem, inflation is the problem. The reason flippers have an advantage moving the price upwards because there are willing buyers. Upwards price movement is only sustainable when there is sufficient currency to actually pay for things as costs rise, which is exactly what’s happening right now in the game. Max level players generate so much gold so quickly that they don’t really care if Peacebloom costs 3-5g each.
It’s also the wrong way to solve the problem because it punishes a subcommunity of players for a problem created by the design choices of the game developer. Max level players don’t have enough meaningful ways to spend the enormous amounts of gold they earn unless they save up ridiculously enormous amounts of gold to buy expensive vanity items (like the longboi). So what do most players do with all that gold? They pay more at the auction house.
Flippers aren’t bad people (who do you think buys all those tokens?). Their goal is to make money and they simply recognize that the average player has greater liquid capital (gold) than ever before in the history of the game. It’s natural that prices would rise. In some ways, flippers actually provide a huge benefit to the game. You know what the real economic effect buying a longboi has? It deletes five million gold from the economy, fighting inflation in the process.
Throttling doesn’t fix the problem. The ease of generating raw gold and the lack of meaningful gold sinks are the problems, throttling does nothing to address those issues.
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If I had to re-roll completely from scratch and was able to choose between a freshly started realm with no transfers in being capable or an established realm with heavy inflation - I would take the established realm every time. Because on the fresh realm, I would have to farm/buy and store for months as a hedge against inflation; whereas on the inflated realm I can hop in and start farming up stuff and selling it right away as it already has value.
It’s one of the reasons why I used to take herbalism and inscription if I started on a new realm before glyphs were made practically worthless by revamping the system. I could gather/buy herbs while leveling and sell glyphs at a nice markup, making my time investment for the income being quite favorable. Gathering professions and inscription are among the best for someone starting out. The other crafting professions have most of their demand coming from just the current expansion worth of stuff. But none of that works as well if the economy isn’t established.
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This is the best post in this very, very long thread.
The throttle is absolutely still there when posting. Super noticeable on the tmog seller toon.
This is particularly frustrating since mogs are typically the 1 and done type posts every 2 or 3 days. Not the cancel/repost every 15 minute affair that are enchants, pots, flasks, mats.
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They never said they were getting rid of it entirely. It’s been almost a month since I last relisted my stuff and it wasn’t intrusive then (around 500 transmogs). About finished with my classic auctions and heading to retail to keep my AH expires from expiring from the mail and my inventory entirely. Will update.
Ok, so I listed all 472 items and outside of a one second hiccup after the first 100 in the post scan each time, it was just fine. Though I do run two accounts and was busy on the other account for a moment so there was a few min pause in the middle where I was just standing at the mailbox with full bags.
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Canceling feels horrible any news when this will be fixed
Hey, Blizzard… me again… just chiming in to say we need AH throttle removed completely on Wrath Classic please.
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