Why is there a gold cap?

Community General Discussion
1

This serves no purpose and should be removed post haste.

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2

What is the current cap per character?

3

9,999,999 gold

4

I think it’s like 9.999 million.

I’m not sure though, I went to 7.6 and then bought long boi and a fair few other things. I’m too lazy to build again since the TSM nerf.

5

Well, I don’t have to worry about hitting that threshold anytime, but I do wonder if there’s a programming reason or a gameplay/arbitrary limitation behind it.

Thanks for the reply, Jeri

6

The only purpose I see for it is setting the ceiling on auction house and BMAH items.

1 Like
7

You greedy effers never stop, the cap originally was 214,748 gold. Now its 9,999,999. And NOW you want to eliminate it entirely. Blizz gives you an inch and you take a mile.

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8

i presume to avoid an overflow error or a rollover on whatever database field allocated

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9

I love that it was a mage that stated this. :smiley:

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10

I’m pretty sure it’s an arbitrary limit.

It shouldn’t be a programming one. If it can go to that number, they’d need to use a 32 bit integer to store it which has a limit of about 2.1 billion.

11

Interesting! Thanks for that perspective. I am computer science illiterate and that always comes back to byte me.

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12

Which used to exist, since currency is measured in copper, the old gold cap was 2,147,483,647, or 214,748g 36s 47c.

But that was yeaaaaaars ago. They fixed that issue, made the gold cap 1 million, then that was too small, so they raised it to 2 mill, and now it’s 9.999 mill, probably due to it being a nice number rather than any real technical issue.

If it followed the same logic these days, I’m pretty sure the gold cap would be something like 1.8 Quadrillion gold.

3 Likes
13

The cap per character is 10m gold but let’s acknowledge three things:

  1. Any level character can have gold cap
  2. Any level character can be GM of a guild bank
  3. Guild banks also have a 10m cap

100 (50 characters and 50 guild banks) * 10m gold = 1,000,000,000g

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14

The first player ever to reach the 214k limit got banned initially, as Blizzard thought he was exploiting somehow. (It was much harder to get gold back then - we’ve had huge inflation since.) Then after a few days they realized he earned it legitimately & Blizzard had to apoligize. I still remember that guy’s forum post. No one could believe it was even possible to earn that much gold.

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15

And here I am never getting any higher then a few k. Money burns a hole in my pocket.

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16
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17

So you don’t have to pay taxes.

18

If it was up to me, I would put the gold cap at 1million gold per account… Gold is a joke nowadays… Back then 100g was worth a lot.

19

Not like this will ever affect me but the cap seems silly. It’s easily overcome with alts. It seems to serve no real purpose.

20

I believe it was to curb gold selling originally.