Inflation is good for Classic Players

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I’ve read a lot of posts complaining about different prominent gold farms leading to inflation in Classic and asking for Blizzard to stop it.

I believe inflation is a net positive at current gold levels, and I will list a few reasons why.

  1. New players

Remember leveling your first character, skipping non-needed skills at trainers, avoiding buying stuff at the AH like the plague, and grinding mobs at level 43 for your first mount? It has some charm to it, true. But is is daunting.
With inflation, the prices of easily available materials rise, such as low level herbs, skins, cloths, enchanting mats. In a more inflated economy, getting the level 40 mount and all spells is easy.

  1. More alts. More specs. More fun.

Grinding for the first epic mount is an interesting experience. Grinding for the 10th is not. In an inflated economy, 1kG is not a big deal. No more poverty ponies in AV. A much bigger issue is respec costs. 100G per respec is prohibitively expensive for many players. There were many times I wanted to respec shadow and do some wpvp but didn’t because I didn’t want to farm gold for two hours to afford it. With inflation, 100G per respec becomes crazy cheap. Respeccing is way more affordable, and your class potential explodes. If you are pro dual spec, you should be pro inflation!

  1. Need based economy

Right now, many gold farms depend on raw gold being generated. That is the main contributing factor to inflation. But this farming is useless to the community. When I solo princess in mara and vendor her mace, I gain 4g. But I helped no one but myself. When I carry a lowbie and sell her ring for gold, I have provided a service to the community: as the consequence of my actions, the community is better geared. However, for it to be worth the effort of carrying someone, the gold has to be inflated enough for the price to be comparable to the raw gold generated. Right now, I can successfully charge 30G per ring drop, so I am occasionally selling carries. If the inflation puts that price to 100G, I’d do it way more often. More people would get their +hit. It’s similar with mage boosts.

  1. Natural equilibrium

Inflation happens due to raw gold generation. The more inflated gold is, the less valuable raw gold farms become. Thus less people will do raw farm, and less inflation will be generated. We need more inflation to stop inflation.

Based on this, I suggest we all bow to our mage overlords and boost a mage alt to boost mage alts untill we inflate gold for the betterment of all players due to trickle down economics.

Vote inflation 2020.

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My main complaint about inflation is that it isn’t consistent. Some things are badly inflated, other things aren’t. Most people really aren’t making much gold.

This is only true for people who have certain gathering professions and who are selling the mats instead of using them. As I mentioned before, not everything is inflated. Cloth isn’t inflated because everyone is getting boosted in places like Deadmines, Stockades, and Scarlet Monastery where plenty of cloth drops. But “skins” are badly inflated because everyone is getting boosted so no one is skinning. The only boost that gives skins is Mara, and thick leather is practically at vendor price.

Enchanting mats aren’t inflated either. If anything they are cheaper than they were in Vanilla and on the private servers. Pretty much every piece of gear below level 41 isn’t even worth disenchanting.

Moreover, I’ve never struggled with buying my skills from the trainers. And buying stuff on the AH is all relative. If people are poor, things are cheap. If people are rich, things are expensive. The real problem for new players is that since level 60’s have so much gold they drive up prices of low-level items for their alts. A blue item that would have cost 2g when the servers were fresh is suddenly 30g. And for the vast majority of new players their main income comes from quest rewards and vendoring.

So unless you level as skinning/mining or skinning/herbalism and sell every single thing you get, or you get lucky and get some twink item, the inflation hurts you a LOT more than helps you.

Blowing 100g on respecs is never cheap. And while mages can earn 400g per hour boosting, most 60’s are getting 50g per hour on a good day. Trust me, the vast majority of players almost never respec, less than 5% of the playerbase has ever seen a 50g respec.

So letting people afk while you level them to 60 in exchange for gold is “helping the community”? What if I told you that mage boosts are destroying the community because they make the world feel empty, reduce the number of people starting dungeon groups, and make it hard to even do elite quests for these “new players”?

Technically inflation only happens when people spend it. So a guy sitting on 200k gold isn’t actually causing inflation. The inflation usually happens right before a new phase, these people start cashing in all their gold, which drives up prices and puts gold in the pockets of other players who then spend more and drive up prices even more.

At some point there would be an equilibrium point. The real problem is that there aren’t enough gold sinks. People are paying mages to boost them but the gold isn’t removed, it just changes hands.

It is one of the reasons I thought Blizzard putting in a black lotus vendor for like 50-100g was interesting. It would stop the black lotus shortage, still allow people to sell the Lotus they pick for far more than they were worth in Vanilla, and it would be by far the best gold-sink in the game.

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Most people are too lazy to spend ten minutes a day at the AH.

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if inflation is good for the economy, then why didn’t the developers just make all new characters recieve 100000 gold for free unlimited times per account?
why is there even gold in the first place?

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Because they wanted players to grind mindlessly for gold to slow down their progress, thus keeping them subbed for longer. In retail you have dailies and weeklies. In Classic you have 1kG mounts. People (usually) don’t enjoy being slowed down. Thus, starting with 100kG would be good for the majority of players.

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It’s amazing to me how many people who come to classic to play the game want to do it by not playing the game. Years ago when I was playing Morrowind I leveled so quickly and had so much quality gear I became like a god before I had completed a quarter of the game. I was so bored until I discovered an add on that slowed down the xp you got in the game. I installed the add on and started over. It was the only thing that kept me from quitting the game.

How many things do you want to make the game easier? I don’t want any, in fact I’d like to see the game made harder.

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I will say though for fresh level 40s, the inflation is generally a good thing for getting that mount easily.

It’s not bad to go out and farm the fire elementals in Arathi or the rock elementals in Badlands.

Those two are very quick ways of getting the initial mount.

As for endgame yeah, you pretty much have to be a gatherer or have a mage (alt or otherwise) to compete or buy mats.

Prices are ridiculously inflated on everything right now given the amount of gold entering the economy.

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depends on what you want out of the game really. A lot of people buying level ups are in it for the raiding: the leveling process to them is just a chore before they’re allowed to have fun. I’m starting a horde toon today and my plan is to take it slow, easy, and not even guild up. might not even raid with it, idk. just pick my flowers, watch some streams, and walk the earth pretty much.

It was far more strange and mechanical in Diablo 2 TBH. The meta for “playing” that game was to pay someone to powerlevel you to 99, use one of about 9 cookie cutter talent builds with no deviation, and spam baal farms until you get your perfect item set, then do it again because that character was finished. Thing is, wow classic was born in this era, and has some of the same qualities that encouraged such play. So while people might complain, seeing it happen is completely unsurprising to me.

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Oh, come on, every new player picks either Herbalism, Mining or Skinning to level. You don’t need to know anything about the game to do so, you just need to have played an MMORPG before.

Hell, I picked MINING on my original mage character made in freaking february 2005. My friend has a druid at level 32 and he has 200g currently.

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Inflation is great for new characters that mainly deal with static costs like mount, training etc. Just sucks for max level raiders who spend money on consumes. Just make a pocket mage though no big deal

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My nephew actually did this back when Elemental Earth was 1.5g. But now that the price is like 4g+ you have 60’s camping it 24/7. And if you’re on the minority faction you get destroyed if you even get close to a rock elemental.

But I don’t think the Elemental Earth price is because of “inflation”. People are preparing for AQ so demand is shooting up. And while Elemental earth prices are increasing, elemental fire is going down. And when Naxx gets close elemental water will go up.

The private servers nerfed most of the good gold-farming spots but Elemental Earth was still the same price at this stage of the game as it is in Classic. I think it spiked to something like 7-8 gold by the time AQ released.

Most things really aren’t very inflated. A lot of things have even come down in price dramatically. Like Essence of Water used to be over 20g, now they are 7g. Essence of Earth were 8g, now they’re 2g. Most recipes/formulas are much much cheaper than they were at launch. Even most herb prices haven’t changed much since pretty much the beginning. Cloth prices have also gone down.

The inflation primarily affects items that rich level 60’s want(especially mages and warriors).

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I’m not really complaining. Just noting a difference. For me there’s this sweet spot where difficulty and fun align. Too difficult or too easy and the game isn’t fun. But I know that’s subjective. I rarely go on power level runs even when they’re offered for free and they often are on my server. I want to do the dungeons with level appropriate groups. If people want to be power leveled through the game I don’t get it but it doesn’t bother me. The only time I complain is when people use outside money to buy an advantage in the game.

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Doing that with a warrior on a new server. Tons of fun.

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14

Say what??

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Interesting, why does the alliance need fast mounts just to stay at the base and eat the loss?

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Most people have better things to do with 10 minutes. Booooring

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I think you’re assuming much. Because it seems to me that most casters still go tailoring/enchanting. A lot of people go mining because they want to level their engineering, but you aren’t going to level mining casually while leveling. You have to spend a lot of time running around zones, and you won’t even find enough minerals for engineering just leveling mining, you’ll have to spend even more time farming for the mats. Blacksmithing is the absolute biggest money-killing profession in the game.

There are a lot of people leveling with a gathering profession but they are primarily consuming the materials they find not selling them on the AH.

My first character in Vanilla was also in 2005 and was an herbalist/alchemist. I don’t even remember selling the herbs I picked until basically level 60, I either used them to level alchemy or I just made pots/elixirs that I used. My second character was a skinner/leatherworker, the only thing I really remember selling was Devilsaur.

To be fair, you’re not going to get 200g by just picking herbs/mines/skins while leveling to 32. He would have to be going out of his way to farm something or craft something for profit.

I mean, you could technically make 200g just fishing along the coast of STV, but that would take a lot of time.

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It has been extensively proven by both Austrian and Keynsian economists (as well as history) that inflation is universally bad for all economies.

So… yeah OP… no.

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Real world doesn’t have fixed price gold sinks in fiat currencies.

So no.

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Uh huh. Let me channel my 90s black girl.

Have fun with your bad self :stuck_out_tongue: