Oh please. I don’t agree with the op at all.
I do wonder what kinds of things they’ll do to manage the gold economies in Classic. Sounds like they won’t do the WoW tokens (which is a good thing, imo), but I’m sure there will be efforts to do something to curb gold sellers in ways they didn’t do in Vanilla, which will be a change – and a not insignificant one at that.
There will be anti-bot software and automation that was developed after Vanilla that will be used, which will be another change. What about regulating Trade chat? I can’t imagine they wouldn’t use the more-automated, less-human-operated systems for moderation of those sorts of things. That could be a big difference right there.
I always laugh when people talk about having a gold farming alt, as they’re not really worth the effort…
Every class can pull 40g/ hour and likely clear 50g/hr in raid epics. Meanwhile, all but the best levelers are going to take about 8.5 days /played to hit level cap… So roughly 200 hours. That’s 8000 gold you’re now behind. Add another 2000 for professions, and mounts (that’s being conservative for most professions) and you’re at a cool 10k before you even begin to farm (and that’s not even counting time gearing up the alt so it isn’t useless). Then when you do farm, you still need to account that only the difference between your main and alt actually counts against that 10k. If your alt can farm 80g/hr and your main can only do 40g/hr them you’ve only put 40g towards that 10k per hour of farming.
Which means you don’t actually make a profit from having an alt until you’ve farmed for 250 hours. I doubt many people are actually dedicated enough for that to be a reality… TL:DR farming alts don’t really exist unless you’re a no life farmer, or you where already playing an alt charcuter because you liked that class.
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Curious to know – of this 40-50g per hour farmed, how much of it comes from vendoring items and coinage loot, and how much from selling stuff on the AH?
Depends what your choice of farms is. 40g/hr is possible just grinding choice mobs in epl or silithus.
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Yeah was just wondering if, say, most of the gold came from the AH instead of vendors you may need to wait quite a while for enough people to actually have gold to spend on stuff you want to sell. Is this perhaps a good time to start developing alts or is it more of a storage problem where you save it until the market comes later?
Or perhaps you anticipate plenty of gold-rich players buying your AH stuff relatively early after launch?
When hardcore players level alts the second time around, they feed gear from their main and have their highly geared friends power level them. I don’t know if out-of-party tagging is going to work in Classic, and I hope it doesn’t, but if it does you can reach level 35 in an evening. I’d link videos of it but I’m sure I’d be banned. Now if I’m not mistaken, I think they had addressed this style of power leveling during vanilla’s life time, and I really hope they did.
Either way, my second time through 60 is a fair bit faster with friends helping knock out entire trays of dungeon quests in 20 minutes and giving me all the gear.
However, ignoring all that, lets take your 10,000 gold amount and work with it.
A hunter farming DM Tribute at roughly 150g per hour (I’ve heard it can get higher than this) is more like 66 hours to recoup 10k gold.
As someone who will be playing more than most people, I will be playing around 66 hours inside of a single week. If I split that in two, it takes me 2 weeks to recover the cost of leveling the hunter. Two weeks of work to have a game-long extremely efficient farming class. People are predicting Classic’s life span to be two years. Two weeks hardcore leveling (hunter fastest leveling class in the game + friends helping + gear feeding) and then almost the entire two years remaining to farm with it.
Basically the only people this is viable for, in order to make up the costs, is hardcore players. The difference in their power and resources is already huge compared to a casual player. The ability to feasibly level and farm with a hunter will widen that gap even more.
Something to note about this post: I’m rolling a mage alt, and most of the methods mentioned are using a mage. Why would I do this if it hurts me? I believe it hurts the game as well.
Why build gold wealth at all if this thing peters out in just two years? Or perhaps you think of hitting gold cap as a scorecard for a side game?
I’ve never been a big believer in stockpiling, for the simple reason that gold prices are relative early on and I don’t typically farm enormous amounts of raw gold to pay for everything without playing the ah a ton (which I do for selling farmed mats as well as just playing the ah game)…
It also depends a bit on class and professions. If I main a Rogue this time I’ll end up with way more raw gold via pickpocket runs, and stockpile everything else… If I stay warlock main, I’ll probably end up selling more on the ah since many of the farms I’d do involve AHables.
Me personally? If TBC’s life span begins at the end of Classic’s, my goal is to have the gold in hand and ready to go to buy flying and then epic flying the moment I hit 70. Plus any other item I discover via research (my knowledge of TBC is so so far gone compared to vanilla, MASSIVE research is required for me when this iteration comes along. I dread the thought)
putting the cart before the horse on the classic tbc server arent you?
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Do you think that Classic will turn into another progression and expac venture? I rather picture it languishing in 1.12-ish land for at least a decade, maybe forever. There may be no economy to speak of after a few years, but I don’t foresee moving on to TBC.
I could be wrong, of course.
I think shareholders will push for it eventually.
Aside from the outlay of leveling your professions and what you have listed there wasn’t really a huge amount of stuff to spend gold on initially.
I personally 10k + what you grind along the way would be more than sufficient.Maybe abit more if you plan on buying BoE’s.
[citation needed]
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They’ll pull the plug on Classic long before you hit the decade mark of people farming 1.12. If there’s anyone actually left doing it.
Depends purely on how well they can milk the mobile/chinese markets.
If diablo immortal makes them as much as they get from hearthstone I can easily see the investors pushing for more low cost, high reward titles and push blizzard away from PC/console gaming completely.
You have to remember that most investors don’t even care what they’re invested in aslong as it gives them the returns they’re after.
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If they didn’t care that much, they wouldn’t go to shareholder meetings. People investing in companies on a large scale are going to meetings and getting involved with the product they’re investing in. There isn’t a certain amount of money they reach and suddenly they’re thinking “Alright I’ll leave them alone”, it doesn’t work that way. Instead, it’s more like “great, now how can I make MORE?”
If they ever see TBC as a path to MORE, it’ll happen. Especially since Activision runs this company.
On top of messing with the economy which it obviously does and as stated favors classes such as hunters and mages. It also takes more people out of the world itself along with allowing people to farm nearly non stop for insane amounts of gold. Magee can easily make over 100g+ an hour doing simple aoe farming of lashers in DM:E.
If it does end up staying how it is whatever I’ll take advantage of it, but I would prefer not to have to stay in an instance farming for hours just resetting an instance over and over.
Even if that happens we would still get TBC classic servers. Strictly due to the ROI on it. Its already developed content, its just cheap to get it ready, roll it out on the same base as the classic servers and bask in another 3 years of subs before that one runs out of steam.
Even if they went full mobile (which I think is a huge overreaction because the internet just cannot handle things without dialing it up to 11) they would still want that money.