Not what you might think of at first, so hear me out.
It’s about the current in-game gold economy. I know many of you will say “oh well prices are this high because the start of the expansion and we have all the raiders”
But as i recall it, our community as a whole has a motto of “don’t design the game around the 1%”. Now, raiders in general do not represent 1%, I know it is way higher than that. But it’s still not the majority of players.
Most people don’t have a guild to help them bankroll their character.
I see it like this. I have leveled up three times this expansion. A Priest, hunter, and a rogue.
My Hunter did EVERY quest. All of them. A grand total of approx. 17,850 gold.
So I would wager a new player might be lucky and have 20k gold.
Are the new players supposed to just wait a month to play the content they paid for? Why are you guys constantly setting the market prices to where only the top 10% of players can even afford it? Seriously, it just shuts down all future progress. nobody wants to pay to play a game where they have to have a second job just to afford a single piece of crafted gear.
“oh but you can just go get gear”
That takes weeks. And as many have pointed out, the loot drop rates trend toward abysmal and all but force your hand into buying at least a couple pieces of crafted gear. It took me nearly 67k gold (including tip) to buy the materials…and I already had a third of the materials just sitting in my bag.
You are making the community smaller by limiting how many people can even participate in the end game content that so many of us strive to complete. You setting prices for the 10%ers is making it hard for the other 90% of players, and it is YOU controlling the market price.
This isn’t a case of standard supply and demand, this is you DEMANDING my money for your minimal services. And even when I supply all the mats to have things crafted, you still demand like 10k to make anything.
I will say this. I had two characters near gold cap back in Wrath. I got all that gold by having two engineers. One making arrows and one making bullets. I sold them for about 5g above production cost. Everybody else was trying to charge upwards of 100g over cost.
None of them knew it, but I was distributing my arrows across four bank alts. I controlled almost the entire market and they didn’t even know it. I kept driving prices lower because it really shouldn’t be a second job.
This is a gods damned video game and you need to remember that. This shouldn’t turn into a second job. It shouldn’t take 50k gold per slot to craft my gear. It doesn’t cost you that much to learn it, it doesn’t cost you that much to produce it, and it shouldn’t cost that much to buy it. You are making the game nearly impossible for new players to get into and it is going to be a slow death by suffocation for this game if you keep it up.
The ONLY reason why people buy it at that price is because they have literally no other choice but to pay that price and you know it.
Stop abusing the market and I promise you the game will grow.
More people doing more content means more groups going. More groups going means more content. more people doing content means more people talking about content which could lead to more people coming in to enjoy the content.
This game is operating by word of mouth at this point. Everybody knows about it and either loves it or hates it or doesn’t play this kind of game in general.
We need word of mouth to be “damn bro I had so much fun getting geared, you should come play with me dude its so good rn”…
But all I hear is “this is kind of over complicated an needlessly expensive. I am thinking about unsubscribing because why pay to play a game where I can’t even catch up let alone get on par without buying gold?”
Just food for thought, and no. There is no TL;DR. This is a pretty critical point in our little home-away-from-home, Azeroth.
When nobody can buy a sword, who can afford to be a champion?