As far as I understand, the gold cap has remained the same as it was in vanilla classic at around ~214k. With players able to gain more gold in Wrath, I think it would make sense to raise the gold cap. It would be a QoL change for GDKP loot masters who are now reaching pot totals of >214k gold and have to trade someone in the raid a bunch of gold to keep the auctions going.
To me this is more of a sign of too much gold floating around. On the other hand cata also increased the cap per char to 1m g - 1c.
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Hi Kruffzz,
While gold is definitely more plentiful from quests, dailies, and other sources in Wrath Classic, we don’t really feel like raising the gold cap would be healthy for the game at this point. We’ve been looking at gold data across all characters and also across all level 80s, and in general even the 100th percentile average (among level 80 characters in particular) is nowhere near the gold cap. We’ll keep an eye on it and may revisit this if we start seeing averages across the high-90’s percentiles start to bump up against the cap but we aren’t very close to that point and the cap that is in place is likely still appropriate.
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The primary benefit of raising gold cap in my mind is QoL for people handling all the gold in GDKPs, so I’m a bit confused on how the data you’ve presented is a counterpoint to that, if it’s supposed to be.
So far I’ve already been in at least 2 GDKPs where the loot master had to trade gold to someone else to continue auctioning items, because they had been given too much gold by people who won auctions. And these are just regular GDKPs where the average buyer had a pretty reasonable amount of gold for a GDKP regular.
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With Ulduar releasing, I’m now seeing GDKPs with pots that are going over double the current gold cap, meaning that we have now stepped up the amount of hoops we have to jump through to do GDKPs.
I understand that some people think GDKP is a cancer or whatever, and maybe they think that the team shouldn’t cater toward players who choose to engage in this behavior. Well, I agree that GDKP does encourage some bad behavior at the moment, such as RMT. However, SR is the only real alternative to GDKP and is not without serious flaws itself. In SR runs, the worse gear you have, the more rewarded you are, as you can SR highly contested items while also picking up upgrades for free. This means that SR runs are not an attractive option for geared characters. GDKP may have its flaws, but it does not inherently break ToS and is the preferred way for a huge portion of players to enjoy pug raids, myself included.
Aggrend has said that the team doesn’t think it would be healthy for the game, which I don’t really understand. What is unhealthy about having a high gold cap? The gold cap has been the same since vanilla Classic, despite gold amounts being much lower in vanilla Classic. Did the gold cap allow for unhealthy behavior at that time? Because I didn’t personally experience any unhealthy behavior that was allowed by a high gold cap. I mean, aside from mitigating the damage that can be done with potential gold duping, I just don’t really see the point of a gold cap, especially when you can just circumvent the gold cap by transferring gold to other toons.
I also have an issue with the data that Aggrend has presented. He says the following:
We’ve been looking at gold data across all characters and also across all level 80s, and in general even the 100th percentile average (among level 80 characters in particular) is nowhere near the gold cap.
This doesn’t really make me feel confident in the team’s decision to not raise the gold cap. Let’s say I’m a really rich player. Well, most of the time, I’m probably not keeping 214k in my bags, right? But come raid night, I might put close to gold cap in my bags for a few hours if I’m planning to spend big. But even still, I’m always gonna leave enough room to accept my GDKP payout, right? Additionally, with the inclusion of MOLL-E in WotLK, there is simply not a necessity to actually have gold in your bags at any given time if you’re going to spend big. If you really need to pay 200k for an item, you can tell everyone to hold up for 60 seconds while you transfer the gold through the mail system.
In my experience, the richest people in WoW are people who organize raids, and masters of the AH. Now put yourself in the position of either of these people. GDKP organizers, if they are handling the gold, are probably not going into raids with a bunch of gold, because that would just make more work for themselves. Masters of the AH probably keep their gold on their designated AH toons, because they need to buy a lot of stuff.
Aggrend has said that they are specifically looking at level 80 characters, which seems like a very inaccurate way of gauging how much gold players have. Many players keep gold on a low level alt. I can make a lot of gold on my level 70 alt just chilling in Thunder Bluff. And just from my personal experience, the data, at least as conveyed by Aggrend, does not paint a good picture of how rich people actually are. I know several players, just in my guild, that have over gold cap across all of their toons.
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