If only we had similar vanilla WoW servers that had recent launches to compare things like the economy to.
Oh yeah, we had those servers. And what do you know, layering is having the same impact to the economy as a lot of us were claiming it would.
Yeah, of course the market is flooded with garbage like copper ore and heavy hides. That stuff is always worth next to nothing (regardless of layering), especially at the launch of a new server when there’s a surplus of this stuff.
The real impact is going to be on the stuff that has huge demand and a huge farm potential.
Someone mentioned the charms from Arathi earlier and those are a great example. There’s a ton of demand for those items from all of the Warriors currently leveling up, they can be easily farmed by high levels, and layering can easily be used to speed up the farming process.
And what do you know, their value is at least a fifth of what it would be during the launch of a similar vanilla server. That’s how layering affects the economy and it’ll continue to affect highly sought after world resources throughout the 40s, 50s, and at 60.
What I don’t understand in these discussions is all of the people who post something like “layering can’t affect the economy because the amount of demand will increase equally with the rate of supply.”
It’s baffling to me how many people think about this situation for exactly one second and go rush to a forum to post their epiphany without considering that maybe economics isn’t that simple and there’s possibly something that they’re missing.
Can confirm that I’m one of the people that undercut (manually) by more than 1c because I’m just interested in offloading my inventory and not dealing with the items anymore. I see all those items selling for 70-75c/ea for a 50c vendorable item? Here comes a bunch of them from me listed at 60-65c/ea.
Someone gets a deal, I get the items sold, I’m happy.
I am not interested in taking on the risk of buying up the current priced items to raise the floor price. I am not interested in trying to “win” at the server market. I just want to offload my materials. By all means, though, buy up my items and re-list them at 69c/70c each and “win” at the market. You do you.
Its not because of layering. Its because there isnt enough money on the servers yet. Till you have a large population of 60’s who already have mounts and disposable income you could farm 24 hours a day and not make much on AH. By then if the devs keep thier word layering will be gone.
Not sure what people are smoking. The prices are always low on a new server. This isn’t a result of layering, it’s a result of everyone gathering everything.
No one has enough money to pay inflated prices, so everything is cheap.
My boyfriend’s husband is having the same issue. We really need a solution to layering. It’s made my wife and her daughters uncle father quit mining completely.
It’s like back in ffxi where people had the fishing bug in rabao and made an unholy amount of gil vendoring the items. People seem to forget about how much of the economy actually comes from vendor trash.
Things are selling at or near vendor price on the auction house because there is very little gold in the economy. A majority of people still don’t have enough silver to buy all of their skills–let alone buy something from the auction house.
This exact thing happened at launch in 2004. It’ll take about 3-6 months for the economy to be in full swing with enough circulating gold supply to warrant higher prices in the auction house. Until then, there is vastly more supply at prices nobody can afford than their is demand.
You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding something. No, you didn’t have prices like this on any fresh server on vanilla or pservers. Why? Because mats were significantly more limited.
Let me explain to you what I personally did yesterday…
I noticed the cresting charms were around 1g per piece and I’m getting close to mount, so I went to farm the elementals in arathi. They’re easy kills. After about 20 minutes, some alliance roll up in a group and start bullying the area. In vanilla, this would mean either a) my farming time is over or b) taking the time to form a group and then splitting the mobs with 4 other people while trying to pvp until one side gives up.
Instead, I whispered a buddy “layer me” and instantly teleported to another full, uncontested zone of elementals. I stayed there for another 30 minutes without seeing any alliance. Another showed up. “Layer me”. Another layer. I was able to farm 20 charms without a single fight in the time it would have normally taken to get 8. I’m obviously not the only one that is doing this. Everyone everywhere is utilizing layering to refresh spawns.
By the time I got back to the auction house, people had flooded the market. Cresting charms were down to 80s (and dropping), burning charms down to 22s (people farm those for elemental fire as well, so 60s aoe them all day). On fresh private servers those are 1-2g a piece easily. They cannot be overfarmed like this because an alliance farmer will kill you.
It would literally be impossible for this to happen without layerying. How do you not get this?
It has to be that they’re being intentionally obtuse - it is a very, very simple concept to understand. I really don’t want to have to start using this myself because it’s game-breaking and destroys immersion, but I absolutely will because of the massive disadvantage it puts me and everyone who doesn’t abuse the system at.
Massive oversight on Blizzard’s part, implementing layering. The economy is a crucial part of the game and having people be able to abuse a mechanic like layering is about as far from Classic as one could possibly imagine.
OP I REALLY hate to break this to you (no I don’t) but capitalism always, invariably, leads to a crisis of overproduction. In a video game context this is only a problem if you’re looking to exploit prices and corner markets to create a (fictional) class stratification where you are placed economically above others due to the ability of addons to find marginal methods for you to find exploitable value out of the labor of others without the same resource.
So frankly my guy I’m glad prices are low (the stakes of a video game economy don’t have life or death outcomes for real people in any case) and I am happy that you are sad.
Blockquote OP I REALLY hate to break this to you (no I don’t) but capitalism always, invariably, leads to a crisis of overproduction.
Whoa dude that’s far out where’d you get your degree in Economics from, a box of Cracker Jacks?
This has literally nothing whatsoever to do with asinine ramblings about economic theory - and while it’s certainly cute to read your sophomoric opinions on that, there is a pressing and obvious problem with people abusing a system to maximize their gains. It’s not a “capitalism” thing, it’s a “human nature” thing, and the fact that they’re doing it by exploiting a mechanic in an unintended way should be addressed by Blizzard.
Layering abuse is creating an over-supply, not “Capitalism.”
Unsurprising that someone with such a tenuous a grasp on economic theory would fail to conceive of how layer hopping to endlessly farm materials to sell on the AH would impact the average player. You shouldn’t need me to spell it out for you, and I won’t wast my time trying to do so.
