On some servers, especially smaller ones, there are oligarchs who buy out the entire AH of certain things, then sell them back, slowly and at dozens of times the original price.
This is similar to what De Beers did in real life, buy out all the diamond mines, then release diamonds slowly to make it look like there is diamond scarcity to drive the prices up immensely, when in fact Diamonds are extremely abundant and nearly worthless. This is basically an abuse of supply and demand.
Funny enough, nothing ever happens to people who effectively try to control supply and demand. Do you think something should be done to prevent AH Oligarchs? On small servers there is not nearly enough gatherers to bring the price back down.
Thereâs nothing stopping you from buying your own diamond mine either. Is this the excuse we use to give a pass to people who abuse supply and demand?
This kind of attitude is why we pay $80,000 irl for half an ounce of crystalline carbon, thatâs true value is probably $5.
" A new study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers used seismic technology (the same kind used to measure earthquakes) to estimate that a quadrillion tons of diamonds lie deep below the Earthâs surface. Thatâs 1,000,000,000,000,000 â or one thousand times more than one trillion."
People that choose to spend the entirety or majority of their time playing the auction house should be rewarded for the time and effort they put into it. This has been allowed and done for sixteen years, are we going to change it up now because one person is trying to dictate how they play?
I donât control the auction house, but what youâre suggesting is completely asinine.
Back to the point, anyone trying to actively control supply and demand in an entire market is a danger to an entire economy, in this case, the game economy.
Your tune would be different if this was irl, how about i just buy up all the worlds farms and ranches, every slice of bread is $1000, every lb of meat is $10,000. While Im at it ill buy up all the rivers and springs, a glass of water will now run you $500.
Anyone is welcome to try, itâs a free market. The thing that you donât seem to be factoring in though is that supply in WoW is infinite. A single dedicated player can force someone who has cornered a market to lower their prices.
This is exactly why I left a small server 10 years ago and never looked back. Any game I join if i see servers marked âNEW PLAYERSâ I avoid like the plague because usually they just plain suck. They usually have bad economies and few guilds doing content.
People who are against the free market, are people who are unable to compete. If you cant compete, you get left behind, and no one is to blame but you.
Everyone has a buy limit, sell herbs under incrementally and see where their buy limit stops. Once you figure that out you can sell at their top limit and still make a profit.
World of Warcraft isnât real life. Itâs a video game. If people want to play the Auction House as their, âend-gameâ then they should be able to do just that if they put in the time and effort to do so. You want the rules to change to benefit you, but it hurts players that enjoy that playstyle.
So, you want to change how itâs been done after 16 years.
Yeah⌠no, itâs not gonna happen, nor should it.
What a bad analogy. Youâre also ignoring one side of the market. Youâre assuming that all anyone cares about is just being able to sell their crap to the AH oligarch. What about the people that want to participate in an AH that doesnât just have the AH baronâs instantly buy up your stuff to repost it for 1000% itâs value? So they can buy things at their original prices?
You canât say âDurr well if you donât like it, just go farm it yourself!â because then what is the point of the AH in the first place? If your character is entirely self sufficient just get rid of the professions and the AH then. The entire point of them is to have people specialized and reliant on one another for trade. I farm this resource, sell it to a crafter, the crafter crafts an item, that is sold to a different crafter that uses that item in their bigger crafting project to craft a different item to then use or sell themselves.
Professions are dead now. Thereâs still useful things to craft but nobody wants to participate in a broken heavily manipulated economy anymore. You just got people buying gold tokens or selling carries and then buying up whatever they need since theyâre the only ones (outside of the AH oligarchs themselves) that can afford anything.
Blizzard should have went all in with the soulbind mechanic. So that if you buy an item from the AH it becomes soulbound to you. Unless you craft it into a brand new item, then youâre allowed to sell/trade it to other players. The parasitic nature of reselling doesnât belong in a videogame economy. Since most of the work is automated with addons itâs not like youâre a home reseller and buy up property, fix it, and put it back on the market for a higher cost.
It would be like if apple decided to buy all the phones of their competitors, slapped an apple sticker on them and resold everything at a higher price. Monopolies are⌠by law⌠illegal for a reason.
How long something has been going on is not an argument for continuing to do that thing. For centuries burning witches was the thing to do, imagine if they had never stopped because âits been this way for centuriesâ.