that’s not how the real world works though.
It’s like saying cheap Chinese goods are good for the market, despite the people making those products never see the profits and live in absolute squalor. To that, those cheap goods put companies out of business over seas because they aren’t able to compete with the cheap labor. The company I work for buys produces and purchases imported good. The products we make come at a fraction of the cost if they were produced in the US. While we would love to produce more in the US, the cost of labor and production make it not only unprofitable, but completely unviable to sell at the cost we would need to pass on to the customer.
So, let me break it down for you.
Gathering professions are the best entry level professions for making gold. The only input you need is time and labor. The more you have of both, the more potential money you can bring in. This happens in the real world with farming as well. This is one of many reasons the US has farm subsidies.
For instance…
“Yet farm subsidies in rich countries depress market prices for farm products and induce poor countries in Africa and elsewhere to import food that local farmers could otherwise produce more efficiently. Farmers in poor countries are rightly concerned about the effects of the subsidies.”
So in the US, we are able to export are farmed goods at a competitive price because we subsidize the farmers for potential losses in the world market. Well, in this process, we also make it potentially unprofitable for poor countries to produce goods at a competitive rate. Without subsidies though, the US would not be able to compete as the cost of labor in those countries is a fraction of the cost of what we have in the US.
So how does this compare?
In wow, the entry level professions are what make up the foundation to the economy. The cost of base goods help determine the cost of finished goods on up. While you would think cheap goods would be good for everyone, they aren’t good for the people at the lowest earning bracket who rely on farming to make their gold.
Multiboxxers devalue these entry level gathering professions. Single players can’t compete with someone controlling 10 characters at once. The multiboxxers are able to produce 10x the yield with the same amount of labor. Well, there is obviously only so much that can be farmed and bought. The multiboxxer can continue to farm to the point of it being quite literally, unprofitable relative to time for the solo player. Where the solo player might have been able to earn say… 5g per stack of copper prior, now they are only earning 2g. At this point, simply questing are doing other activities that are less efficient end up being more profitable.
Multiboxxers introduce labor into the game that don’t input gold back into the economy the same way a solo player does. The multiboxxer isn’t investing back into the economy in the same way the solo player is. Especially not relative to finished goods or consumables.
To that, the multiboxxers help create a larger disparity between the earning brackets and actually help make finished goods cheaper for the top end while removing the means to earn gold at the bottom end. So while goods are cheaper in some sense, they are actually more expensive on a global scale because the larger portion of the population can’t afford them through traditional means.
There are lots of real world examples of why this isn’t good. I’d be glad to offer up some more example, but don’t for a second think that someone playing 10 toons with one set of controls is somehow good for the game…
feel free then to respond to the above.
