Blizzard - Small Server Economies Need Help

Community General Discussion
1

I currently play on the server Turalyon - which, at least according to wowprogress population estimation, is about the 45th (out of 85ish) largest server in terms of population.

The WoW server select screen classifies this as a medium server - but given that we have maybe 10-15% of the server population of servers like Area 52, Illidan, Stormrage, etc. - it’s clear that calling Turalyon small is a reasonable statement.

Turalyon has a problem - we support 4 Cutting Edge raid teams, and on a small realm like ours, our economy is an absolute mess. There is an enormous pressure on crafting materials for high end things like potions, feasts - and, even worse, legendary materials - drives us to pretty extreme measures to try to sustain our ability to raid.

The Auction House is mostly barren, and controlled by a very small number of people who sustain themselves by basically buying everything of a certain type and simply making themselves the controller of that market, like a cartel. It can be rare to even see a hundred or two hundred of raw materials for legendaries, and the items themselves in many cases still cost upwards of 200k+. Rank 4 Legendaries on Turalyon are in the ballpark of the same price as Rank 6 Legendaries are on Illidan - and there are rarely more than 5 of any item listed at any given time because the number of crafters is small, and you have to scour the auction house constantly to buy materials before they show up.

Or, well, you do what a lot of these people do - there are actually people from larger servers who use their gold to buy items on a big server, transfer over to a realm like Turalyon, sell the items at a huge markup for profit, transfer back - all paid with gold - and come out at a profit in the end.

How do we sustain ourselves? Well, it’s basically by having to load up members of our guild with gold, transfer to another server, buy legendaries, herbs, etc. at substantially lower prices, transfer back, and disperse them to our guild mates. It is actually cheaper to simply devote the guild to this, suck up the price to buy enough tokens to transfer, and come back.

And how do we get that gold? You guessed it - off server gold sales through sales communities like Phoenix, Huokan, Weekly Disappointment, Gallywix, etc. etc.

Given that these things were recently cracked down upon, it’s called into question our entire ability to sustain ourselves as a guild. Are we simply not allowed to sell across server to anyone? If not, we’ve basically got a really small server with four guilds in competition of selling with each other on a server that is being drained of its gold by people with off-server gold funneling it off, combined with an extremely tiny market for what we have to sell anyways.

So, now that the topic’s been explained, we get to the real question - what do we do about it?

Well, there are several options:

  1. Cross-Region Auction House
  • This would probably be the hardest on Blizzard’s part, but the easiest on everyone else. It frankly would be a benefit for basically any smaller server, to mitigate the ability from someone to transfer over with a ton of gold, and just decide to assume control over a specific market in their auction house.
  1. Free transfers off of these servers.
  • The population of WoW is slowly zeroing in on about 5-6 servers, just let us get this over with.
  1. More aggressive server connecting.
  • Honestly if you’re not part of a “connected” sever realm in the viscinity of 10k+ players, things really suck.
  1. Cross-realm Guilds/Mythic Raiding
  • This, at the least, would make it where we could do a slow, phased over time transition and the people who wanted to move could, and the people who wanted to stay, could, and we wouldn’t feel as if we had to transfer all of our alts, etc. over to a server all in one go.

Something needs to be done either way - this current setup, especially with the ridiculously toxic legendary crafting system that forces people to just literally throw away hundreds of thousands of gold worth of materials, puts an enormous strain on smaller servers that have enough problems trying to sustain themselves before you even get into people transfering to our servers trying to make gold, as well as higher end players coming here and warping the AH severely.

7 Likes
2

You’re telling me that nobody in your guild is willing to herb/fish/mine/skin? Mats don’t come out of nowhere only to appear on the auction house, you know. You only need six characters to have every profession in the game.

9 Likes
3

Sounds like people need to pull up the boot straps and start farming. It used to be where it was a group effort for guilds to equip for content. They had player’s in the guild farm stuff for the benefit of the guild. Now it’s just me, me, me. They let profit get in the way.

It’s a free market, players let it get out of hand, and it’s not Blizzard fault.

It took a long time for it to get that bad, it’s gonna take a long time to fix it.

6 Likes
5

Especially if they do some of those 2x4 farming sessions for, well, anything. Make an evening of it, and the guild reaps. Hop on Discord, grab some Jack Daniels and BS a couple of hours farming mats. It would be curious how far a single session in a week can take a guild.

And the other thing, for the gathering trades, there’s no need to level them. You can swap from Herb one week to BS the next. In SL there seems to be no advantage to being a high level gatherer. So, the same crew can swap profs each week.

6

Well, do you have miners in your guild? Tell them to get cracking and NOT post the ore on the AH. If they refuse to support the guild, boot them. Start funneling stuff to the Blacksmiths and them work on those patterns.

1 Like
7

So, in order to farm the materials to be able to even make rank 6 legendaries in every slot, for JUST plate, you’d need a combined total of about 250,000 ore, combined with several million gold.

Without buying mats, it is practically impossible to do and I can 100% guarantee you that no guild has simply “farmed” their way to this point.

That would get you about 20% of the way through what you would need in order to fulfill the legendary crafting requirements for the guild - still have 3 more armor types, as well as jewelry.

1 Like
8

You gave up with out even trying.

We got people in my main’s guild that have all the rank 6 patterns for cloth, mail and plate and everything else They got that way because we sent them every mat they needed. It’s a concerted guild effort to gear up and especially for professions

I bet you have members that just show up for the raid and then you won’t see them til the next raid.

6 Likes
9

So many people do not realize how ‘low’ low population servers can be.

6 Likes
10

You have no idea what we tried.

No you didn’t.

Not only did you not, but if even if you did try, you either had a guild with literally hundreds of people all farming constantly or you were doing no other meaningful content within the first several months of release of 9.0 or 9.1. Not in any meaningful time for a guild intent on trying to mythic progression raiding.

You have no idea the amount of materials or the level of effort required in order to farm the materials involved to create all the rank 6 legendaries without spending any money buying the materials required - and god forbid any of those people wanted to quit the game.

8 Likes
11

Well you can always go out and farm the stuff needed during your off peak times… I mean you don’t have to buy it.

3 Likes
12

The thing about economics, if you out grow the means to sustain yourselves, that on you. And now you are paying for it. You guys got too big and too greedy. Cross Server Boosting communities wasn’t a sustainable model, as you can see. I saw that I long time ago. Blizzard cut the legs from them as I knew they would and the bubble popped.

Blizzard isn’t gonna help you out that mess, you’ll have to do it yourselves. Corporations do this all the time and they cut the dead weight and sometimes scale back operations.

2 Likes
13

Yep, when someone decides to transfer to our server, buy up literally every single piece of Desolate Leather, mark it up for 10x the price, and then buyout anyone who tries to undercut them, that’s definitely our fault.

It happens for most markets on Turalyon because the number of items being listed on the AH is so small that anyone who can get several million gold can simply come over here and run a slice of our economy as a way to funnel gold back to their own server.

There’s enough demand on Turalyon because it is one of the servers with the highest ratio of CE raiders to players, while still being small, meaning we’re a super ripe server to be taken advantage of by anyone who wants to make money.

2 Likes
15

Terminally American moment.

16

As rude as this might sound it might be time for your members to get a grip and farm themselves.

At least for consumables this problem seems like a high end problem on your particular server. Im guessing you are all 3 day+ 3-4 hour raiding guilds. It will suck but it might be time for members to farm for their own potions or for the guild to be more conservative with use if supply can’t be fixed.

The legendary items I am a lot more sympathetic towards as the the legendary system is good for only a choice few and awful for everyone else. It’s not BoEs people are buying, it’s mandatory items for performance. And if anyone says “you only need the power get a 190”… well with the hoops you jump through and consumables need why would you not want your raiders to have 70 more ilvls of stats on a piece? Sadly this one has no solution other than getting a guild crafter or praying to Blizzard (good luck).

As someone who tried, good. The system is essentially a garbage disposal for mats. I know I said get a guild crafter but it is also highly unreasonable to do so as every spec has different needs. It’s a sad state of affairs.

Good on your guild if that happened, certainly not the norm at all.

You also probably funneled them for the past year and play a lot outside of raid times to do so. It’s a massive amount of materials (as you should know) and with hyperspawns for leather being nerfed almost entirely it’s even worse. (only really good one I know still is from a WQ in bastion).

Cloth and plate might have been easy as you can game it, but mail and leather absurd with the changes, and let’s not forget you can’t have multiple people skin tthe same mob as you could with herbs, ores, or looting mobs.

Again, great for your guild it’s nice seeing one work towards such a goal and stay together, but it’s not happening everywhere. Without getting to far into it there is also factors like raiders leaving the guild or IRL responsibilities cropping up and your main crafter suddenly not being there. It’s a mess, and yes I’ve seen it happen.

17

Op,really, I’m in a small guild and a low population server If I can do it anyone can.

1 Like
18

Heyy I’ve played there since Wrath! :slight_smile: Do you remember Shado?

I would strongly be against this :-1:

This I approve of :+1:

Sure it’s easy :smiley:

Instead of this

https://i.postimg.cc/DfCqLXsf/image.png

How about this

Stop making things use so many mats, stop having these trashcan legendaries, it is Blizzards fault for designing the game in a way that pressures people to go to great lengths to do content

STOP IT

9 Likes
19

Not only that make it to the level it’s suppose to be at 60 and not 50. At least at the end of the expanse.

1 Like
20

Agree whole-heartedly with this. I am on the Maelstrom connected realms and we still have 235 legendary base items going for 60-100k gold.

I’m still waiting on that bulk transfer service.

21

GDers shilling for bad game design: example #300000000.

1 Like
22

The guilds can level their own professions and help out guildies so the rank 6 costs go wayyy down. Get mats from mission table and just playing the game (unless you guys are just raid logging).

The AH is not the original source of mats, it’s playing the game.