You may think that high legendary prices is more because of players selling mats at high prices or setting high prices.
but that’s not the full cost. The chunk of it comes from the badly designed crafting system
the shards needed to craft are sold by vendor for 125g each. If you take any random recipe and calculate the amount needed to get a recipe to rank 4, you’ll end up in 150 to 200k gold range
this is a hardcoded cost without taking mats into account forcing people to spend a high cost even if mats are cheaper
if you see a high priced legendary later, don’t just blame players blame the poorly designed system
Yes it’s due to the system, however it’s also due to the players. The reason they prices are so high is because the people who learned the recipes had to use so many mats just to get to that level it was a gold sink. They needed to mark them up just to recoup the cost. However it has remained high because the players realized it would sell for that price and greed took over. This is as close to a free market economy as you will ever see. The costs have been recouped for some time, and the prices haven’t dropped. So don’t just let the players off that easy.
That being said, appreciate the grind. If you were willing to put in the investment, you deserve to get paid. That’s like saying Elon shouldn’t charge 10 mil to let you go into space. It’s not like the trip costs that much. But think about the amount of money it took to get there in the first place.
Just join a guild and work together to level it. Then have the guild make them like most other people do in the game.
Prices have dropped considerably. The 200k boots i didn’t buy , went down to 90k in a very short time . Same boots are under 50k currently for 262 ilvl .
Toons I don’t raid on … have 235s I spent less than 30k on , some time ago . I can get those right now , for 10k .
For the difference in stats and dps, 235s will be fine for 90% of the players , until the higher level stuff drops back down
You are describing an issue directly caused by system design.
The other issue is that on small servers with barely functional economies, the price may be many times higher than on more competitive realms, or the item may not be available at all.
Again, a system designed problem to make it necessary for players to buy tokens to pay on their server something that costs 10x as much as on a busy server, or pay for a realm change.
That was the point in my first statement. The system caused the prices to start high. The player caused the prices to remain high. That’s what I was getting at.
The cost to continue ranking up patterns will be an issue throughout the expansion. It doesn’t go away. If a leatherworker has spent millions of gold ranking up leather and mail patterns, it’s not unreasonable to expect to get the real money he sank into it back.
In order to get the rank 4 recipe, you have to craft 45 Rank 1 through Rank 3 versions of that same slot.
That’s a HUMONGOUS amount of materials to make 45 items that NOBODY WANTS.
Crafters try and price their Rank 4/6/(soon 7) items to try and make up some of the millions of gold that they paid out of their own pocket to learn those recipes.
Blizzard should reduce the materials costs of all Rank 1, Rank 2, and Rank 3 recipes by 90% immediately, so that NEW crafters can learn these recipes and actually get into the market.
People with professions WANT to make these items. But at this point in the expansion, they CANNOT learn the patterns without losing millions and millions of gold.
A Rank 4 is the same mats as a rank 6 save for 40 Korthite Crystals. Those are 500g each right now (which is pretty much ALL players), so 20K for that, yea a rank 6 is 40K more than a rank 4 on the AH.
Mind, there should be some markup of course.
But the Rank 4 take 20 Orboreal shards, which with rep can be purchased for 100g, so that’s only 2K. The other mats aren’t extortionate either.
This right here. This is why people who don’t understand economics shouldn’t talk about economics. This is a market which is LITERALLY regulated by Blizzard’s development. The OP literally explained why AND how it’s regulated by Blizzard’s development. You even acknowledge that it was regulated by Blizzard’s development to an extent…then you threw out “Free Market Economy”.
A “free market economy” where self-styled tycoons get to do all sorts of shenanigans that would drive them bankrupt or get them a federal indictment in real life? Wow is not a free market economy. Nor is real life.
It’s pretty typical saddly. “We need the government to do something!” government does something and it becomes more expensive “We need the government to do something about what the government just did!” government does something and quality goes down “We need the government to do something about the thing government just did in response to the other thing government did!” government does the final thing and industry shuts down “cApItAlIsM fAiLeD!”
At no point in any of that did a free market ever exist.
Considering the lack of government intervention leads to economies controlled by the ultra wealthy who have complete control of prices at all levels, I’m not sure that would be an improvement in any possible universe.
That’s conjecture and theory. At no point have we ever seen this. Even the most “capitalist” system we’ve ever had, the early US government immediately taxed and regulated the market as soon as they won the revolution. The Whiskey Rebellion was a thing, which happened, in history.
People forget that the crafters want to make a profit. If legendary base items were less ridiculous to craft (both unlocking the pattern and the high material cost of the item), the price would go down.
Look at third world countries. Barter, peonage, and slavery. That is the natural order of things. In more complex economies, wealthy people buy political favors and have laws made to benefit them at the expense of the overwhelming majority.
Literally none of those are what you would call “capitalist” or “free market” economies either. Not a single one. And that’s because “capitalist” or “free market” is just as utopian an ideal as “communism”. It’s one of those things that sounds good on paper but doesn’t survive the being put into practice part, because like you pointed out, there is what is known as the “Golden Rule”. “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”