Its certainly a buyers economy… but for many of us who pay attention we see the current auction prices vs sell prices and end up just vendoring our goods instead of selling them to players.
I vendored all my lesser and greater wands today because, after calculating AH posting deposit and the price they were going for in the AH it was more profitable to just vendor my goods than try and auction them.
Again though, great “buyers market” right now. Not going to be too healthy in the long run though.
This is entirely untrue. You get a party invite from another player and you have about a 1:4 chance that you get put in a new layer if they invite you. Go kill a group of mobs that spawn in a camp of ~10. Have a friend invite you and stay out of combat. The entire camp will respawn. It’s really busted.
I will concede that areas near the level cap are the most exploitable due to so few people being able to take advantage. However, every single day it becomes less of an issue than the last.
That’s not how layering works. When a friend sends you an invite, you get placed in their existing lair. No layers are created.
You have 100% chance of changing layers if someone invites you to a group and the leader isn’t in your current layer, you’ll switch to the leader’s layer.
The rest is exactly what I was saying, I believe if you leave the group you’ll go back to your own layer, get invited by someone else and go to their layer.
Is that confirmed though? I remember reading from a blue post that you have a default layer that you return to but I’d have to dig up that post to be sure.
Layering is “at fault”, but not in the context of people blaming layer hopping and layer abuse. I think intentionally “gaming the system” with layering is a very small percentage of effect on the economy.
Instead, think about how Blizzard has stated a "Low " population realm in Classic has more players on it than a “High” population realm did back in vanilla.
Since the only way Blizzard could deal with such an immense population is layering, this means each layer is another entire server’s worth of item drops/gathering resources for that server’s single economy. Even if everyone was absolutely honest and never abused layering, you have several servers worth of resources being obtained day-in-day out.
Server economies will continue to see inflated item availability until layering can be disabled. That said, I still think layering is necessary to allow for the long-term population health of a server.
It’s super easy to test if you have a second account or even a friend. I have a second account and I jump in and out of groups all the time, have never once changed layers because of leaving a group.
Even without the second account I have joined many groups to finish a difficult quest and I have never phased off into a different layer when leaving. This is through a week of launch and however many months of beta.
And you change layers when you enter a group with them? Then you change layers when you group with someone else, then try grouping with the friend again and change layers?
That would tell you for certain since then you’d all definitely be on different layers. Not that I’m doubting you, just doing some investigation on how it all works. It’s entirely possible I misread or misremembered what the blue post said about layering.
I’m not sure if I agree or disagree, but more supply means less demand which means lower prices and higher currency value. The main issue then becomes fixed vendor pricing for mounts, etc.
They need to break auction addons. Yes, we had them in Vanilla, but only a minority used them and we never had this many people on a single server. Now we have more people on a server than in Vanilla and way more people using auction addons. Layering may help keep zones from being overcrowded, but there’s no layering on the AH. It’s a complete mess. You literally have to use an auction Addon to use the AH, whether it’s buying or selling. Any Addon that makes its use mandatory, should be broken.
The idea is that layers are because of player numbers, so in theory 10 layers means 10 times the players. If it’s a farmed area on every layer then switching layers doesn’t increase the 10 times supply relative to the 10 times demand.
Where it hurts is when people get ahead of the pack and can farm an area that no one else is doing, then the supply outstrips the demand and they can bank the extra until demand catches up.