Pretty much sums it up! RP drama? In-game feuds? Neither of those pales in comparison to what my character is experiencing in The War Within expansion. In character, Sadgati always asks these days “Where did they go?”. That is players logging out for the last time not to be seen again. This is causing utmost difficulty in progressing my character RP-wise. Hence, the 800 ton whale shark…
In an experiment, I bought every bag off the auction house then fixed the price at 20% below market for 3 days. Even with deep discounting (selling back at a total loss of over 900k gold), the bags sold very slowly. This indicates players are not staying in the game long enough to buy the bags along with players not creating new characters much.
In conclusion, WoW is bleeding players and FAST!
What are your thoughts? Are we losing players entirely or is this an indication of playstyle preference change (abandoning RP characters in favor if PVP or PvE)? Or, are players moving off WRA to go to Moon Guard?
Auction Houses I believe are now global, not server-locked. I think they did that to prevent massive price fixing.
As for why bags aren’t selling…I’m going to be brutally honest here. Even at 20% off base cost, it’s still over 2k gold for a bag with only 4 more slots than the bags I’ve had since Shadowlands.
8k gold for 8 extra slots when I have a mount that gives me constant access to a merchant.
There’s literally no reason for me to spend that money.
Also, as someone that used to main a tailor and do a little bit of AH bamboozling. New bags typically sell really well at the start of the expansion but the demand and prices will taper off pretty quickly once people have outfitted their mains and material cost goes down.
Also as Vanndrel said, since probably BfA the slot increase for new expansion bags has been pretty weak as opposed to I think WoD that had a pretty sharp increase in slots. Didn’t it go from like 24 to 32 or something? I honestly can’t remember anymore.
Anyway tailoring isn’t as lucrative as it once was, sure they’ve added armor and things you can craft but the days of getting rich hawking runecloth bags on the top of Orgrimmar bank is long gone.
There are certain things you can buy then resell to make BIG BOAT LOADS of gold! For a month before current patch, I bought kaheti slum sharks for 400g and under expecting to get 600g. Instead I averaged 1150g per shark turning a whopping 115% profit margin. Did the same with vicious bloodstone gems. Bought 200 of them at 2.2k or under then sold for 4k plus per gem. Gawd, wish I held onto the gems an extra week because they are going for 6.5k rather than 4.5k. Can’t price fix as much anymore so one must seek out items that will appreciated while knowing when to sell. WoW tokens are GREAT for this too. They go up 25% in value per box sale expansion easy. If they average 250k on TTW, they will likely average 312k on Midnight expansion. If you can snag them at 200k, great!! Good even at 250k because that is still 75k appreciation per token. 20 WoW tokens will appreciate by 1.5 million, EASY. In the case of the sharks, I knew the current raid tier was going to put all the raiding guilds out of commission for farming their matts in house, yet they still NEED the sharks!!
In my entire history playing WoW and watching Sadgati run her business as a goods redistributor, 115% or more profit margins are unheard of,…until recently. The reason for this? There are not enough non raid oriented players to farm the matts leaving far less competition.
There is a MASSIVE transfer of wealth from raiding guilds to individual bankers and sellers taking place RIGHT NOW!! One can argue this is the ultimate bell weather for indicating player population, overall.
You are absolutely right!! One thing you have to remember is niche raiding guilds have gold and more to spend!! I turned 1.4 million profit on those bad boys WITHOUT casting a fishing pole a single time. Hell, Sadgati been walking the streets trying her best to put herself out of business for a long time, yet keeps getting richer!! Before logging out, going to get 50 more WoW tokens and just let them appreciate in my bags until my return in Midnight. The gold is actually coming from raiding guilds - they are the ones buying Sadgati’s stuff.
Consumables related to content progression will hold value through out an expansion vs one time purchases like bags. That value will ebb and flow but it’s usually the more reliable.
While I appreciate the idea of trying to track sub/character growth as a player using data sets that we can compile ourselves I think at its core the metric you’ve chosen is fundamentally flawed. Moving past the fact that 3 days is no where near a long enough period to form a strong base for player trends, I do think the idea of using Bags as our metric for character growth is a reasonable first thought as usually a character only purchases the necessary bags for themself once as compared to consumables being a constant flow or transmog being a once per account purchase. How ever I believe that there are 3 core flaws in using Auction House based Bag Acquisition as a basis; Non-AH Bag acquisition, Bag Necessity, Player Knowledge.
Tailoring bags have long since surpassed the usefulness of common vendor bags and are the primary Bags for the player base, but not everyone is going to the auction house to purchase Tailoring bags. To begin with the metric of Bag Acquisition does not account for characters with Tailoring themselves or on accounts with Tailoring, I personally don’t bother with equipping most of my new characters with high slot bags until much later into their life and instead just stock them from my WB bank from a surplus of Netherweave bags I crafted when I was farming mog from BC. I cannot claim to be either average player or the epitome of my playstyle but I do think of it as a playstyle that is not in an ignorable minority of players, leading me to assume that there are a good number of characters who never interact with the AH for bags and instead supply them themselves using alts. Then comes players being supplied with bags made by other players but bypass the AH instead utilizing things such as Guilds or Communities to locate Tailors for direct transaction. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of treasure and rare merchant bags which I will touch on later.
The second point I’d like to bring up is that not every character is replacing their bags immediately upon the release of a new bag with 2 more slots. As bags have gotten bigger and bigger with each expansion the increase in slots has become less impactful. Going from 6 slots to 8 slots is a 33% bag size increase as compared to 32 to 34 being only 6%, meaning that unless a player feels that their inventory management is suffering they will be less inclined to purchase a new bag due to the diminishing returns on size increase. With the inclusion of Reagent Bags in DF to compensate for the increase in Profession Materials bag space saw a massive increase, further devaluing the incremental bag space increases. Personally I’ve even started to keep a tailor parked in SL to craft 4 Shrouded Cloth bags for characters I plan to keep around a bit longer than just the levelling experience but I’m unsure if they’ll become a main of any sort.
The last point I want to look at is the gulf in player knowledge between new and old players that drive them away from AH Bag Acquisition both from ignorance and prior knowledge. For example how many players know about the Free 34 slot bag that can be acquired in Waking Shores or the 34 slot bag in Hallowfall, heck there is another 34 slot bag behind a puzzle in The Ringing Deeps. Those alone have filled 3/4 of the general bag slots and reduce the total number of bag sales unless the player wants the 36 slot bags.
How do these bags play into player knowledge though? While the more veteran player may just go to the auction house as soon as they create a new character because that is what they’ve always done, a newer player may look online for where to get the best bags and find these 3 listed. Heck now that I know about these bags that’ll be one of the first stops on any character once they hit 70.
I think to make the call that WoW is “Bleeding” players and characters based off of the data you’ve presented is a bit of a leap, it may be more fair to assume that the player base is changing from WoW’s heyday not just in the literal player but in the player culture. One of the biggest changes from “Old WoW” to “Modern WoW” is the availability of information to us as players, where back in the day you’d have to ask the wow community directly for answers to certain questions or you’d find rumors on forums. These days where you can find countless videos, there is always someone streaming the end game raid, and Wowhead has replaced ThotBot information is so much easier to access.
I personally sell in the glacially slow Tmog market, and while I haven’t restockd my inventory in a minute I’m still averaging 2-3 sales of high ticket items a week. I think the community is doing fine, and we are currently even in a bump having had a major content patch recently released.
You can also get free embersilk bags from not playing your lower level alts for a few weeks. Frostweave bags are also ridiculously easy to farm, and I have a warbank full of 32 slot bags from the prepatch event. 20 or 24 slot bags are usually all you need for new characters. If you really want to upgrade, Legion’s 30/32 slot Shal’dorei Silk Bags are sooooo easy to make, between how good the drops are and Blood of Sargeras merchants.
All good points in your post but also wanted to bring up that honestly gold farming doesn’t feel as necessary anymore? At least for me as a casual McCasual and I wonder how others feel about it? Maybe I’m just super out of the loop on things but what even are the gold sinks nowadays? In the past it was usually a mandatory and/or quality of life purchase you needed to do like end game epic riding and flying.
Now that dragon riding is a default and pathfinder just opens up cruise control flying, what am I even trying to get gold for? I know this expansion, there’s a craftable mount with a significant material gold cost and warband bank slots. Yet honestly it was pretty easy to buy out my warband bank slots as a casual gold acquirer.
I know if you are doing progression content there’s a cost to that but I’m not so I just fart around and make some chump change on the side when I feel like it and live my life. This is probably a cursed question because Midnight all the housing stuff I am going to want is going to be locked behind big gold sinks and I’m going to cry in being warcraft poor lmao
I’ve felt this way for a long time and it seems like even more so the past few expansions
Way back when, I felt like I had to farm gold somehow. I’ve always been farming up herbs and ore to sell on the AH. I can still remember the exact farming routes:
fel iron / adamantite and once a blue moon khorium ore in Nagrand
goldclover and cobalt in Howling Fjord (so excited when Frost Lotus showed up)
elementium (sometimes pyrium!) and Twilight jasmine in Twilight Highlands
ghost iron in MOP (sometimes golden lotus!)
WOD was the first expac I really didn’t farm things up. I’m not sure I can even recall how I was making gold in WOD.
Legion brought it back and I was farming TF out of Foxflower and Leystone / Felslate on a route in Stormheim / High Mountain. I was surprised I never saw anyone on the route, because it was a really good one.
I think BFA was where I really stopped the massive farming of herbs / ores that I had always done and I’ve never gone back to it. I’ll farm up some, but it’s inconsequential; nothing like I was doing.
There’s very little at this point that I feel like I absolutely need / want to spend gold on, so I’m not sure I feel the need to.
As for the bags that OP is talking about, I’m not sure a personal anecdotal situation is really a good judge of the player base. I haven’t felt the need to buy a new bag with omg4moreslots in years. We now have a reagent bag, so there’s also that.
If you’re not spending gold, it’s also really easy to passively generate gold. I’ve never done any real gold farming, and i have about 1 million gold across my entire account just from doing world quests and selling white items and gear I don’t need.
Occasionally I’ll dump materials I don’t need onto the AH, because I don’t really craft anything. But because I’m not playing the auction house, I’m not getting the maximum I could out of it.
It’s easy to get about 40k gold on a character just by playing them for a little bit. I wanna be clear, too, that I raid. I do Content. I buy enchants and consumables. It’s just… really easy to get gold.
Since starting my cleanup on Vanilla quests in three zones (Tanaris, Un’Goro, and Thousand Needles) between just max level quest rewards, selling junk drops, and taking advantage of Tarnaris’ AH (Oh yeah by the way for us old timers, the Goblin AHs are now linked in to the rest of the AH network so they aren’t their own isolated thing any more) to sell the crafting mats that have dropped/I’ve skinned from mobs, I’ve made 70,000 gold.
In less than a week.
That’s more then I’ve ever made doing Raid/Dungeon content and I’m in Vanilla content. I still have the whole of Dragonflight ahead of me, nevermind the rest of the expansions tidying up.
The brutal honest truth as to why aquire so much gold? For me, it IS Sadgati’s game. In fact, being a goods redistributor and banker is her livelihood and what is to be proud of. OOC, there is really no reason to have more than 500k gold. There is not much, if anything to buy past that point. I can be the nice guy and help alot of poor players but…man…that will blow up in my face.
I’ve been asking that question since 2018. I wonder what happened to my Emerald Dream comrades. Will I ever see those familiar and perhaps fearful names pop up on spy again?
Some did. I was around 17 when the server was at it’s height - that would have been around 2012-2015. I think alot of folks just had kids, got married, moved on. Others I am sure stayed behind if they elevated more to PvP. I have over time though found many ED natives on both WRA and MG.