Gold Hyperinflation affecting All High End Items, not just Black Lotuses

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Price ranges on my server for the following high end items:
Black Lotus: 35-40g in September, 55-60g in November, 120-125g after BWL date announced.

Dreamfoil: 35-40s in September, 55-60s in November, 80-90s after BWL date announced.

Mountain Silversage: 40-45s in September, 70-80s in November, 90s-1g after BWL date announced.

Arcane Crystal: 45-50g in September, 35-40g in November, 55-60g after BWL date announced.

Recipe Transmute Undeath to Water: 300-400g in September, 700-1100g after November.

Edgemasters Handguards: 300-500g from September to November, 2000+g after December.

Flurry Axe: 300-500g from September to November, 1000+g after December.

Libram of Constitution: 70-90g from September to November, 100-150g after December.

Libram of Voracity: 80-110g from September to November, 200-250g after December.

I know there’s been a lot of talk about Black Lotus spawn rates and prices, but Black Lotus prices have tracked most of the other high end goods albeit a bit more extreme due to the stockpiling going on for raiding.

There is just way too much gold being generated compared to the supply of high end items.

We’re basically already approaching the types of prices that you would expect to see for high end items in BC, and I’d imagine the Epic Flying Mount cost will become trivial by the time Naxx comes out…

I know that there’s been complaints about the high cost of respecs, but that’s a necessary gold sink. In fact, we probably need more gold sinks because I’d expect a lot of people to see their gold banks reach the several thousand gold range by the time we near the end of vanilla.

The problem of course is supply of rare high end items hasn’t increased enough to match demand from the much larger populations on each server. Look at the example of Arcane Crystals, even with DM East farming helping to suppress prices, those still increased dramatically after BWL was announced.

I’m not sure what the solution here is other than trying to just point out that the problem is there’s too many players and too much gold on the servers.

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A rising tide lifts all boats.

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Yeah I want to be clear that this isn’t a complaint post. I’m just trying to point out that the focus on just Black Lotus prices is a bit misplaced given that the actual issue is that players (especially high end farmers) are much, much richer on average than we ever were in Vanilla.

That’s not a bad thing per se, it just means that we’re approaching BC sized bank accounts in a game with Vanilla’s gold sinks.

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This isn’t really a surprise. Back in September the majority of people were much lower level. Lower levels earn a lot less gold from quest rewards/vendor sales than L60 people.

Skip ahead to today and there are vastly more high level people earning more gold. I would expect prices will begin to stabilise at populations reach max level.

Another factor is that layering was removed, and most of the items you listed will have a much greater supply with layering. So as the supply reduces, the price of those items will naturally rise - but this type of price rise doesn’t mean there is more gold in the system.

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I agree with most of your points, but one of the things I think the dramatic escalation in prices shows is that there is way more gold being earned than being removed by the few major sinks in the game (especially epic mount costs which were reduced by PVP/AV down to 640g from 900g).

Back in November, we only had 3 months of net earnings, now we have 6 months of net earnings. I think it’s clear that players are much, much richer on average than we ever were during vanilla, and that’s after only 6 months of gameplay. What happens after 12 or 18 months of classic? Do we have dozens or hundreds of players on each server sitting at 5000+g which is basically what high end BC farmers would be sitting at?

I mean, there’s no way something like Edgemasters would be going for 2000+g unless people could afford to pay that kind of price.

There is going to be way more gold in the system over time just by virtue of the fact that there’s not much gold being removed other than by repair costs, respec costs, and epic mount costs (which itself declined by PVP/AV). So combine 6 months of gameplay with few gold sinks, and you end up with the current situation.

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I’ve never heard that phrase used for inflation

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Inflation is probably a good thing for players in a game like this because it means the game’s tax on us for playing (the gold sinks) become more and more trivial as time passes, since they’re fixed numbers and not percentage based like real life taxes.

Like I pointed out above, I think if we ever end up in BC or classic+, we might already have BC sized bank accounts (i.e. lots of players that can afford their epic flying mount even before we get into BC).

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  1. This is a problem, although your original post doesn’t identify it as such.

  2. The problem is caused by server overpopulation

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Side effect of more and more raw gold entering the economy with almost no gold sink in the game other than respecs or repairs. This is an anecdote but I know quite a few people that leveled up alts just to grind raw gold in dungeons.

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Prices are only going to continue to rise.

Wait until AQ40 and Naxx are out, and wipes are happening that require everyone to use a pile of potions/elixirs/food/consumables every attempt for hours.

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Yeah, that’s why I made this post.

All of the complaints about Black Lotus prices/rarity are missing that point. Okay, so if Black Lotuses spawned in clumps of 2-3 or spawned in other nodes, that would decrease the price of Black Lotuses. That wouldn’t affect the gold hyperinflation elsewhere in the classic economy.

The biggest issue right now is there is an incredible amount of gold entering the economy every day (due in large part to gold grinders/farmers) with nowhere to go except towards the high end items (the most valuable herbs/crystals/gear/mats).

Heck, we earn gold for PVPing now as well; there’s gold entering from every bg being played.

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Same thing happened in pservers, nothing new

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Did pservers have the same overpopulation issues? Because a lot of this pricing is caused by overpopulation and overly high demand relative to supply, not just min-max player style.

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Northdale had 10-13k people concurrently on, vastly more than original vanilla servers

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No - the current price inflations on my server for everything listed above is due to players making it rise. Players have significant gold reserves (im talking 10’s of thousands due to layering abuse) so far to buy out and control the price on limited stocks. Elemental earth for example - from 80s per to 2g per - purely based on the use of them in crafting elemental sharpening stones. This happened in 1 week due to a single player controlling the market - bought out ther entire ah and relisted at 500% increase - then continued to purchase all those that were listed below what they had listed them for.

The same thing has happened to arcane crystals with players/guilds now stockpiling bars for TF crafts day 1. Black lotus with the extremly limited supply and players having an entire network of alts to check for spawns + almost unlimited gold to keep the market high.

Increasing the supply wouldnt reduce the cost, all it would do is allow more access to more people to sell them for that same amount. Players are the ones responsible for driving markets - if people arnt willing to pay absurd prices they wont be listed at that - but - players are willing to spend that amount of gold.

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That’s true to a point, especially about items worth less than 5-10 gold where one player can dominate the market.

But I highly doubt that any group of players could keep Black Lotuses above 120 gold artificially if supply doubled or tripled (through the various spawn changes suggested).

The price would not go down 50% if supply doubled, but it should go down at least 15-20% in the short run. If supply tripled, I think Black Lotus prices would go down 25-30%.

That’s an enormous amount of gold to transfer to Lotus farmers on a weekly basis, it’s possible that the amount of gold being generated is so great that it can overwhelm any supply increase like it does for lower end items that have rocketed in price, but at some point, there aren’t that many players that have several thousand gold to transfer away to farmers on a weekly basis.

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There is one player alliance side controlling the lotus market. They have alts at every single spawn location - usually hidden in hard to reach places as to not aggro mobs and horde cant kill them quick enough (they log in for 20 secs tops). Warlocks (they multibox accounts) to summon close by if the spawn is up.

We ambushed this guys MC raid and wiped them (no world buffs for their raid) - this was their response.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Yojamba/comments/ewl712/40_man_horde_raid_briefly_stops_huge_entering_mc/

Pic flaunting their lotus/flask supply. BTW - this is atleast 45k worth of gold just in the lotus - on 1 player. Each lotus is atleast 125g each.

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So, I’m Whitemane alliance, one of the largest… if not THE largest server, raiding population wise. Here are the prices we have to contend with:

Black Lotus: 134-162g

Dreamfoil: 73s-1g each

Mountain Silversage: 1g 37s-1g 51s

Arcane Crystal: 70-100g

Recipe Transmute Undeath to Water: 1375g

Edgemasters Handguards: 4800g

Flurry Axe: 1600g, hasnt been seen in a WHILE.

Libram of Constitution: 150-160g

Libram of Voracity: 255-300g

I have yet to actually encounter a black lotus in the wild, they are so heavily camped they are picked within seconds. We dropped 2k gold as a guild on 25 black lotus a few weeks back and are lucky we had the capital to do so.

None of this is sustainable as it currently stands, this server is a good 3-4 times the side of og vanilla servers, yet the spawn rates of these items are unchanged. Massive oversight on blizzard’s part when they chose to create these megaservers.

Mage farming has really screwed the economy, everyone and their mother’s dog has a mage alt to create basically endless quantities of gold from aoe instance farms.

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Gradual rise in prices also has to do with a lot of people unsubscribing. Less people farming equates to higher demand, which causes inflation.

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This is a bigger impact to economies than populations. Peoples gold supplies. Level a mage, aoe grind to 60. When you hit 60 go and complete all the high level zones quests for crazy xp to gold conversion. I made 600g in 2 days when i hit 60 on my warrior doing this.