I believe Blizzard can effectively end the practice of gold selling by stopping the reselling of non-consumable items by making them bind on pickup when purchased from the AH. The reasoning behind this is that resellers artificially inflate items that drive the need to purchase gold in order for players to feel as though they need it to simply play the game.
The gold players make from questing, killing mobs, and selling random loot they pickup is not nearly enough due to the artificial inflation created by reselling items.
This will effectively end the practice of sniping as well.
I believe this would kill the bots because if AH items are not overly inflated by the practice of buying to resell, then we would have organic pricing of items.
I get what you mean, and agree in large, but AH flipping is some people’s favourite part of classic wow. There is also the issue of buying consumes as a guild and passing them out in raid (for example my guild does this for flask of titans).
Would need more nuance as an idea to truly be able to be implemented
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Right. Consumable items like trade-skill materials and potions,elixirs, etc. would not be bind on pickup. Flipping I believe has leaned in favor of the gold sellers and I feel as though they are the ones using flipping to create the need for buying gold.
Another way inflation is artificially created in order to drive gold selling is via AH Addons:
For example: Item A is selling for 1 gold on average. Insert another item A with a price tag of 1000 gold. The addons take into account this asking price and give a fair market value based on that. Naturally people sell their items based on what the addon tells them is fair market and undercut from there.
This is how inflation is artificially created. And, people adhere to the faux pricing because they want what they feel is rightfully theirs based on what the addons are telling them.
Don’t see how you could implement something like this without negatively impacting other areas of the game. Buying stuff to pass out in groups/raids as mentioned above. Buying from an AH alt to mail to a main. If anything Just break the add-ons but I don’t see them ever doing something like that.
No. Stupid idea. Then I can’t buy stuff and trade it to one of my own characters. Also, buying for low and selling high is a legitimate gold making tactic and is not bound to RMT.
Real players should never be inconvenienced in any way whatsoever from Blizzard combating against RMT. Figure out a way that doesn’t punish real rule following players.
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I don’t agree but I also don’t understand. The non-consumable stuff is not needed to raid. There might be a couple of exceptions like edgemaster’s (which is not “needed”). What items do you feel like players feel the need to buy gold for, that are non-consumable?
Noting, anything that is a mat for a consumable, is a consumable because it is consumed in the creation of the other thing.
If you limit the OP’s idea only to items that can by nature soul bind then there really is no issue. Literally the only people who will cry about this are AH botters… I use that term botters liberally because the AH addons are botting even if you have to set the thing up manually. The fact that it can partly automate the functions and present bulk data, etc is a huge part of the problem.
Simply slaying most of the games addons would negate the need for the OP’s concept.
You know probably the biggest disappointment for me about Diablo 3, after having played D2 for years and that being my all time ever favorite game was that they got item trading so wrong.
I don’t think buying or selling items or a service or even gold from third parties ruins the game. People who want to force others to play down at their level by making rules that effectively kneecap enjoyment get catered to far too often, in my opinion.
And eventually the people who make the community enjoyable and the game fun to play get sick of that and leave for something else. Then all that is left is the complainers and that’s a pretty poor community with a pretty poor gaming experience.
Just my two cents.
Inflation is an inevitable part of wow because more gold is generated by completing quests, looting and vendoring than is removed from the game by vendor purchases and repairs. (This said, players quitting without using their gold also effectively removes it from the game.)
Inflation doesn’t necessarily benefit gold sellers. If you are sitting on a pile of gold, or if you are farming raw gold, then you don’t want a piece of gold to be worth less (which is what inflation does). If you instead farm and/or hoard items it doesn’t matter if gold goes up or down as long as the relative value of the items stays the same. If they are smart and adjusting their strategy, gold farmers or sellers don’t care about the value of gold for items in game, but rather the real world dollar value of the gold relative to their resources (time, compute) spent acquiring it.
Some other things to consider:
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Reselling creates a demand for items I put on the AH as a casual player not trying to maximize my AH gains. If I just put my stacks of clothes on the AH and they sell right away it’s fine for me even if the buyer is able to resell them at higher cost, they are taking that risk and meanwhile I don’t have to keep reposting and paying more AH deposits.
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The main motivation for buying gold is very simple, it’s that a typical player can’t compete with gold farmers (incl. farming bots) that spend many more hours in game, so players who want a shortcut to get stuff they want will find gold buying to be fairly cheap relative to their own purchasing power in a country like the US. It doesn’t really matter how gold sellers make their gold, it’s the imbalance between bots being cheap and having all the time to farm vs players having more money than time.
The add-ons are fine. People need to stop trying to attack the symptoms to cure the disease. That will never work.
RMT is the only problem here, not people profiting from AH flipping. The way the game works is fine. Blizzard’s unwillingness to invest in attacking the issue is the real problem. They need to actually hire people to quickly root out the bots and stop relying on player reports.
Seems to me with 20,000+ subs playing Era you’d think they could hire at least one person to just hunt bots full time. If you can catch most of them while they’re leveling then I’d imagine you pretty much solve the problem.
I agree with breaking all the add-ons. If you look at a good number of toxic things infesting the game it’s surprising how many are driven by some sort of add on. As far as AH add-ons getting rid of those will not stop people from AH flipping if thats what they like. It would however mean said people could no longer automate posting items, constantly price scan or cancel/reposting to undercut as often.
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They could regulate the frequency at which people perform AH actions to curb automation, but also what most players want with these add-ons is just to do a simple posting of an item from your bags at or below current market price without having to browse for the item, change tab, manually enter bid price and buyout price, etc.
Yup, so long as a bot can scan and delist and relist its perma cancer.
The same kinda bots (not literally the same) use the API and combat log information / weak auras and some creative macro to automate game play.
The items and/or the gold “need” is player driven as some players have difficulty with impulse control. I don’t mean to absolve Blizzard from any attempts to remove any forms of rmt. But players -and not just the bots/AH flippers and “manipulators” etc- need to take some personal responsibility for not exercising self-control.
I’ve never bought illicit gold or thought about doing so to enable any purchase including AH items. I have reported players, including people I know irl, for taking that action in violation of the ToS. There is a lot of envy masked as outrage towards people fascinated by the economic game that is AH play. Restrictions that have been suggested will only serve those that probably shouldn’t be playing this game, or doing a lot of other things, if fomo hits them this hard.
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Learning how to use the AH to make gold is legitimate game play. I don’t like the idea of breaking that as a measure to stop gold sellers.
That stack of linen cloth selling for 18k gold is pretty sus. The blue BOE dagger going for a few hundred is not.
I would be fine with API changes though, and honestly that is probably something the dev team has had many discussions about. Very hard to do without making a lot of people angry, and the reasons behind it won’t soothe that probably.
That simple posting from the bag w/o having to check the price and enter in prices is automation and should not be allowed. While it seems minor on the surface the same automation that allows that person to post that stack of cloth also allows people to rapidly post hundreds of stacks. Breaking that automation will effect the person doing a few items a little bit but will make a huge difference in effort for the person doing bulk quantities.
That’s kind of OP’s point; the AH add-ons make it super easy for a single player to buy up all stock of an item and keep posting it over and over forcing the price to be unnaturally high which in turn can push people to RMT for gold to afford said items as legit farming can be slow in classic.
AH Addons need to go… if folks want to play the AH then they need to do it manually. Given Blizzard’s stance on gameplay automation, I’m genuinely surprised they’ve lasted this long.
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All they need to do is break ah addons
any addon that can even partly automate the game in anway way needs to go away; this includes everything from addons that pre-select spells for the player to “react” to.
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