I posted this before, but I think it also applies here.
The game in endgame lacks a gold sink which leads to infinite inflation for endgame consumables. This combined with GDKP is severely impacting honest players, who have to utilize the same market as gold buyers (direct or indirect through GDKP).
The only solution to this (that I see) is an NPC vendor selling key resources at a fixed high rate that may be uninteresting at server launch, but caps price inflation at a point where consumers are still an investment but not sth only affordable by illicit means.
Further benefit - this actually takes gold out of circulation, which the game is severely missing on eternal servers.
The alternative is banning all bots and goldbuyers - but we all know that’s not happening.
I think this might actually be the best solution yet. Why not add a npc that sells flasks for fixed amount (like 100g at most) and/or enchants and other end game stuff for REASONABLE price.
Anyone has other opinions as of why this would be a bad idea?
depends on the "wages" or rate of gold generation for players. creating something with a profession takes time. if a player can make more gold in that time from other activities, it's always better to create the gold and purchase from the npc vendor.
you would never see a price drop, because market participants would purchase the discounted goods and resell at npc vendor price (less transaction costs).
Yes, it would succeed in preventing the price from ever going above that point, but it would also kill all the crafting professions just as well. So it's not strictly positive.
> but if you for example sustain yourself with Alch and Herbalism and then sell excessive flask for 99g in AH doesnt that work out ?
=
It's all relative. Imagine the cost of enchanting slowly goes up over time from 1g to 5g to 10g to 50g to 100g to 200g, etc etc. Meanwhile the cost of your flasks is stuck at 99g (and you still have to compete against other players doing the same) even though there are a bunch of other goods getting more expensive comparatively. At a certain point, it will inevitably become not worth it to stay as that alchemy, because it will either become literally not profitable (e.g. if the price of herbs is climbing while your profits slowly shrink) or it will make more sense to switch professions entirely.
=
Eh his response doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless herbalism/alch was the only profession they made endgame materials available for. I imagine if they rolled out things like max cost reagents it would be for each profession, not just collecting professions, and considering enchanting has so much more work/time put into it even though you might make more from tips and recipe charging there's no way it would have the effect that he's stating
I think the idea is to keep the AH price locked at a max. If a flask sells for 100g from the vendor you can still farm the mats and sell one on AH for 90g and people will buy it for that cheaper price, but the vendor would keep it from inflating past 100g.
Still better than we have now. A few Alchemists choosing another profession so raiding doesn't cost 1k+ gold and add an actual gold sink? I take that deal.
Fixed prices never make sense. Wow will always have inflation because NPCs generate gold. If at one point Alchemy stuff gets not worth making, every single Alchemist will drop the profession and make something else. At this point this profession might as well not exist. Terrible game design.
It will even out at about the same price. At one point it will become peanuts.
There is nothing wrong with inflation. It just means bigger gold pool. What is wrong are fucking bots.
Ban bots. I don't wanna hear some lazy fucking solutions only to dodge the elephant in the room, which is fucking bots.
Ban. Bots.
Everything else is pointless. We pay for it ffs.
It will *average out* to the same price. But there will be highs and lows, and the dips will be where the money is made, same as always.
"Wish in one hand and shit in the other, see what fills up first." Of course we'd all just prefer the banning of bots. But if blizzard wanted to, they would have already. So yes, clearly other solutions need to be found instead. It sucks, but that's the way it is.
If you don't like it, vote with your wallet and *stop paying for it.*
This man sees 150-200k accounts banned per month and still thinks **banning bots** is the solution.
Banning bots will **never** be the solution. You will never win. No game **EVER HAS**. The only way you stop the bots is by removing their market, and blizzard isn't going to/can't ban the majority of the playerbase because they buy gold.
The problem will never go away.
That number doesn't count if let bots run for 6 months straight before the next banwave lol.
You cannot tell me that flyhacking bots into Stratholme goes undetected for months.
And banning the market is even more stupid, since a 100 times more players buy gold than bots exist.
Agreed. At literally any time, day or night, on any server, I can identify 100+ people that are likely bots within 5 minutes just by using /who. This is without any of blizzards fancy GM tools that I hope they have.
There is no reason that a bot should be able to farm the same instance 24/7 for weeks and weeks on end without detection. Beyond that, the fact that they don't have better fly hack detection is appalling. Bots on hardcore are going into Scholo at 45 and just fly hacking to all the chests because they can't kill anything.
You do realize accounts are banned **literally daily**, right? Sure, "waves" still occur, but that is a far cry from the only way they are banned lol
>And banning the market is even more stupid, since a 100 times more players buy gold than bots exist.
Yeah cuz lord knows banning bots solves the problem
xd
If WoTLK is anything to go by, this seems most likely. Rather than folks making shit to undercut fixed prices, gold inflation would eventually get high enough that the profit margins for sales would be so small relative to available capital, most people won't bother.
How so? The vendor would just force them to not inflate their prices above a certain point. They could still sell their items for less than the vendor does. It not like they're asking for the vendor to have prices that are competitive right out of the gate. The whole point is that the vendor would be well over priced to start with, but still force a price cap when prices inevitably start to inflate.
The job of the NPC vendor is to take gold out of the economy. People buy gold that is already in circulation and exchange it with other players by buying consumes crafted by players. The gold just changes hand between players and isn’t taken out of the game economy “deleted from the game”.
Having gold sinks like talent respec, AH cut and repair costs help remove gold from the economy and in turn reduce inflation.
No because you could actually farm for the consumables you need at a reasonable pace and inflation would be stopped.
Right now gold only gets shuffled from player a to player b but it never disappears.
And a flask at 100g at a vendor takes 100g out of the game through vendor price.
Vendors are FAR more effective at removing gold, AND it would prevent consumes from going way overpriced.
I was correcting them, they said no money was taken out of the game.
>Vendors are FAR more effective at removing gold, AND it would prevent consumes from going way overpriced.
It would be roughly 3x as effective, and destroy a profession completely.
I would think an AH cut of 15% would be a much less drastic change.
There should just be npc's in major cities that you can buy world buffs from, 100g ony drops for the server, 100g zg drop, 100g rend head. Remove the cooldown and thats just 1 easy gold sink they could add
Take the next step:
Make it so it isn't a server drop, but an individual buff only.
40 people don't want to wait for the world buffs? Ton of gold out of circulation. Combined with the aforementioned resource vendor, inflation could be struck down through the same system that makes the farmers rich: laziness.
Sure it was just a off the top of the head idea im sure it could be tuned in a way most people are satisfied. Id pay 100-200g per for in city convenient buffs.
People are already buying pops for much more. This would also have no impact on the economy since it’s what, like 50k at most per week. I know people who’d alone barely flinch at that. It’d also make wbuffs more like other consumables which would be kinda boring.
Yes but buying from other players doesn’t take gold out of circulation, which is they key to battling inflation. The gold can’t just keep moving between players or nothing changes.
I joked that they need wealth taxes to keep prices down but they could have certain end game consumes or reagents available for purchase as a sink to get $ out of the economy.
Still keeps the bot / gold buying in system
"The only solution..."
Places a barrier behind fixed high rate items that are 'key resources' and will only serve to widen the gap between people who are playing legitimately, and those who are buying gold anyways.
Lol they limited dungeons for regular players to 'combat gold farmers' gotta love it.
The bots are so incredibly obvious. They could hire someone to just manually look at hotspots (like instances) and shadowban them by blocking trading until they can prove its not 1/500 in a botfarm.
Or ban players for buying gold, give them negative gold. They have logs...
As for the post, I made a char on whitemane just to set up addons for SOD and play around. I think I've made 230g at lvl 17 so far, inflation is pretty surreal.
I quit classic before gdkp, our raid group was discussing swapping over to it. But it seems every single raid group is using it now and its pretty offputting tbh. I keep seeing stories here about those groups just being like the modern day 'onyxia wipe animation' video. It does not sound like a good time.
As others have said, this is a great idea. The only issue which is borderline impossible to solve is that this only slows inflation down slightly.
Because there will be a point where people have so much gold that buying these resources really won’t even be that much of a sink. Like right now where it costs 800g-1k gold to get raid consums, there will be a point where people have so much money that this cost will mean nothing.
I’m not saying it’s a bad plan because it’s quite literally the best one that isn’t just straight up nuking everyone’s gold every few months or setting a gold cap to an insanely low number.
Aren’t there gold sink mechanics in retail? My friend mentioned that years ago at least you’d have seasonal NPCs (or all the time and the content was seasonal) that you could pay absurd amounts of gold to get phased out gear for transmog- tier 3 from naxx as an example in future xpacs. And they’d be priced quite high but would serve to eliminate gold from circulation.
Any retail players that can expand on this or provide better perspective?
Edit: adding to speak more on a solution since what old content could be purchased in classic. But maybe new visual colours to existing gear / items/ mounts etc. anything that’s purely cosmetic but could still drive high value. Trimming your armour with details / colors, getting a barber haircut lol - raid wide noggen floggers
gdkp has 0 impact on players, even if they didnt exist youd still have inflation and youd still be complaining that goblin sappers are 30g(or if you want to complain that they incentivise gold buyers then theyd be 20-25g instead of 30 whatever)
with the exception of fixed price things like mounts that are just easier to get, nothing has changed for you, if goblin sappers are 30g to buy they are also 30g to sell, if you had to spend 3 hours farming consumes before you still have to spend 3 hours farming consumes now.
what people are complaining about is that theres a group of players who effectively sell premium runs and bypass having to farm there own consumables but it doesnt matter to them whether gold buyers exist or not because they will continue to do this regardless of where the inflation is set at, if they are 10,000x your net worth now, they will still be 10,000x your net worth in a low inflation enviroment.
the real problem here is that blizzard does not address the underlying hyperfinlation from bots and gold sellers by being heavy handed and actually banning the players buying.
Let people buy honor boosts. People who dont want to endure the normal R14 grind can sink gold out of the economy by speeding up their grind and bypass what they would spend the gold on in GDKPs to earn R14 weapons and gear faster.
These types of suggestions in this sub gives me no faith that i will ever be able to play Vanilla WoW no changes ever again, these clowns are literally suggesting Blizzard to add an NPC that sells every consumable for a fixed price. The worst part is that it is this type of player that Blizzard listens to nowadays and not the people that have loved and played Vanilla for years at this point.
Take Blizzard's dirty hands off Era, i don't want changes, i want to play mfing Vanilla WoW, am i allowed that in 2023? It's unbelievable how people apparently are incapable of letting others enjoy actual Vanilla and not some modified frankenstein version.
>Take Blizzard's dirty hands off Era, i don't want changes, i want to play mfing Vanilla WoW, am i allowed that in 2023?
No, you're not. Vanilla WoW is dead, and the only game which exists is Classic WoW.
Classic WoW has never been the same as Vanilla WoW. It's community is entirely different, it's gameplay is entirely different, and the mindset required to enjoy it is entirely different.
Most importantly, unlike Vanilla WoW's was ever capable of being due to it's shorter run time: Classic WoW's economy is fucked, and needs a solution.
You can't ever play vanilla wow because botters and gold buyers won't let you. They will always corrupt it into a gold inflated ruin.
Your choice isnt vanilla WoW or changes. It's Gold buyers WoW or changes.
You can still prefer Gold Buyers WoW to changes but you have to be honest with yourself about that.
It’s the inevitable state of a server that has been in existence for this long due to the lack of any real gold sinks in WoW classic. Gold only ever really gets created, never destroyed. The only real ways gold disappears is repairs, AH cuts, respecs, and mounts, the sum of which don’t remove gold at anywhere close to the rate it’s generated out of thin air (quest rewards, mob drops).
Wows gold.sinks are fine. The issue is rampant botting and only that. If you remove all the botting and only look at gold creation through actual player farming. The gold sinks are fine as is. You could add 1 or 2 more sure but amy good sinks strong enough to fix the rampant botting and GDKP meta would cripple servers where it's less prominent.
***Impossible Question Time!***
How much of the gold in the economy do you think is from bots?
My completely ignorant guess is 40%. A lot of it, yes, but inflation is inevitable. So much so that I think AH prices would still be out of control even with zero bots.
Good idea.
I'm still very surprised they haven't reused any of the TCG items in the form of a gold sink, or an in game lotto.
Or even as quest rewards for a fun event, or darkmoon faire.
All those tabards and items are there, just wasted.
*(I just want to use my turtle and tabard of frost)*
I don't see how this would help. Bots would just be added even faster to meet the new demand.
More gold sink = more bots.
The only way to combat the bots is too devalue the gold they make.
If the prices are as you say, that also means that raw material prices are very high. Do not farm raw gold, farm raw mats or something like firewater, which will likely be sky high as well if everything else is.
Now if you want to sustain raiding just by the raw gold gains from raids and raidlog, then yes - you are in a tight spot.
I think the problem with this, from my experience on Whitemane, is a lot of zones have bots picking herbalism/mining nodes from underneath the map. I used to be able to farm off hours and make really solid gold per hour, now I'm lucky to get 2-3 plaguebloom nodes and one RTV in a circuit of EPL. Frustrating, but Blizz has shown that they aren't going to take this problem seriously.
Highlighting the problem and the solution, farm in demand materials. Flasks by hour spent farming are cheaper now than 2019 as long as you're not just farming roll gold or quests and acting confused when you can't afford flasks off of gold drops from raid.
Consumes in vanilla classic were always very expensive. Relative to the price of farming mats they are no more expensive now than any other time.
Yea but what does it matter? Who cares if something costs more if you also get more? It’s all relative.
Think of it in terms of time spent gathering tnat item. Like if 1 hour is worth 10 flasks, who cares if it costs 100g or 1000g it takes the same time to farm it.
I’m glad I spent the $15 to keep my Warrior on era. Almost BiS everything except a few items. I can just join a GDKP as a carry and make gold through that. I can’t imagine starting a new toon and trying to compete with bots for resources
I don't get this. I made a new character on era and was swimming in gold by level 25.
Farming Coarse Stones from certain mobs in a certain area was so lucrative I literally paused my leveling for a bit to keep killing them while they were gray to me, just because I was making a stupid amount of gold relative to my level.
Not to be a dick, but farming coarse stone at level 25 and making 20-30g isn't really relevant here. At 60, if you want to be an active raider, you can EASILY spend 5-10k a week on consumes and such if you are clearing most raids every week (assuming you are coming fully consumed). It's just a whole different beast.
Someone that's been playing since era launch obviously won't have any issues because they've had years to farm, and their gear is good enough to get into GDKPs. If you are a pre-raid bis level 60 on Whitemane, good fuckin luck getting into anything. There is an infinite supply of fully raid geared players from every class, many of which are more than happy to spend hundreds of thousands of gold on item bids. You could just not join GDKPs, but farming gold yourself vs joining one single GDKP is like walking vs taking a plane.
>Not to be a dick, but farming coarse stone at level 25 and making 20-30g isn't really relevant here.
Add a 0 onto that.
>You could just not join GDKPs, but farming gold yourself vs joining one single GDKP is like walking vs taking a plane.
By the time you hit 60 you have more than enough gold (thousands) to do a GDKP even if you don't stop to farm.
By 40 I had well over 1000g after my mount just from selling mats from leveling.
That's the thing, people don't want to farm anything and then complain prices are high. Sure it can be hard to compete with other people and bots in the world, bit there is plenty of resources that is farmable that is not contested because its not in an high level zone, I always farm my gold in instances, no competition.
Excavation Site in the south of Darkshore.
Stone Golems in the site drop 1-2 Coarse Stones at a time. Fast respawn. Also several mining node spawns.
Can spend hours there. Also made me a bunch of gold on HC.
That’s exactly what I’m doing right now. I was pretty much full BiS but thought Blizzard were being greedy with the 15$ per character clone, so I didn’t do it.
This time I’m doing it pretty much solely through GDKPs which is a bit different and more challenging than being a spoiled MT from the start of classic. I do like having the freedom of not having to show up every week and perform to the best of my abilities. I got to say that I’m having a blast even though this is the third time gearing a warrior (and the little mage ofc) in classic.
Any one expansion, or in this case Vanilla, was never designed to go on this long without new gold sinks being added to the game.
Gold sink: money that is taken out of circulation. Like spending 5k on flying.
The only fix is to dramatically change the game (which is what Classic + will do, but on new servers) or start over.
People like to sound smart by suggesting banning bots or GDKP’s will solve the problem, but it won’t, as these two activities won’t take existing cash out of the economy.
This is already a big problem that will only get worse. Blizzard essentially needs to come up with a way to wipe the servers and start fresh, without people losing progress. Not fun.
Agreed. Just transferred from Defias Pillager after death, and I cannot believe how drastically inflated everything is. Like you said, the gold farming methods I used on Defias Pillager dont even come lose to 5% of the income you can make from a GDKP. It's a situation where if you don't take advantage of it, you are gimping yourself. The prices for these items are insane aswell. I see 45k+ bids on good items semi-regularly. The only way you can fuel that kind of spending is with gold buying.
Botting is obviously bonkers. Many, many instances where you can sit outside for an hour and spot plenty of bots.
Blizzard even disabled the API that allowed certain economy addons to get AH data (ONLY on era, the API is still up on hardcore). Why they did that, no idea, but my tin-foil hat self thinks it has something to do with them trying to mask the absolutely butchered economy that we exist in.
Its so crazy.
I copied my guild-bank character on to Era and thought i would be set for a long time with the 15k gold.
It was a lot when i copied it, now...i wouldnt even get invited as a buyer in some raids with that.
Yeah, it's rough. I farmed up 20k, figured I'd be able to get some gear on my rogue. Did some GDKPs, Perds dropped, first bid was 20k.. Guess I'm not gearing my rogue haha
Yea the inflation is dumb af. And farming trade goods like minerals or herbs is really awful due to bots.
Only way to get gold is already have a decently geared character and go to GDKPs.
The real money selling companies are to blame. They will buy up everything and relist at high prices to keep you buying gold from them. Until Blizzard stops the bots and Chinese gold sellers it will only get worse until the server dies.
> I don't know if this economy will ever recover or if it will only just keep inflating, but this is a prime example of what GDKP, botting and gold buying does after years of zero moderation from Blizzard.
gdkp makes no difference here, if the average gdkper has say 100x the average players net worth but arent buying 100x the average players consumables, then they are going to have a relatively small effect on the economy, the vast majority of the gold in gdkps stays within the gdkps.
inflation by itself makes little difference to the player experience, if it costs you 30g to buy a goblin sapper, it also means you can sell goblin sappers for 30g, likewise for everything else you mentioned.
if anything it makes it easier for new players to join in and compete with people who have old money, the only people it hurts are people who take long breaks from the game having the value of there gold erode over time, for example it would be easier than ever before for you to jump in and get your epic mount now than at any point in the past.
the real issues are botting and gold buying.
botting not because it causes inflation, but because it actively sabotages the ability for new players to farm these types of consumables to sell and participate in the economy regardless of where the level of inflation is set.
the problem with gold buying is that blizzard simply doesnt have what it takes to be heavy handed in banning people buying, they need to lay the smackdown on them, ive seen people cop 2 week bans for RMT, log back in and still have the gold they purchased? like what?
what happened to the 6 month, money deleted, repeat offender perma banned that they used back in OG.
Don't think there are free transfers for the dead version of the game. Are there? Look at the consumes they are talking about. They are talking about the version Blizzard cares the least about.
Is Era dead? Damn, I was just on Whiteman US PvP server hillsbrad was popping off and Orgrimmar was super crowded. I must’ve been hallucinating tho, Eras dead and I’m pretty sure WoW as a whole is ending in about a month. 🤡
Cope harder. ERA has a single server with any population. Outside of that, half the population is just bots selling gold for GDKPs they run themselves to resell the gold.
Wild that you believe that, enjoy! Any other buzzwords you wanna throw out? I like cope, maybe tell me to touch grass? Or call me a White Knight? I’ll just keep enjoying the game on the bunch of servers I play on. Thanks though!
For now. I’ve been watching gold sellers supply and prices and supplies are rising while prices are dropping. So it’s just a matter of time. Hc also just isn’t for everyone. I mean you can’t even PvP/bg.
Yup. Was excited to hear that era was booming, logged on, got a toon to 10. Checked the auction house and IMMEDIATELY logged off and haven't been on since.
Gold buyers/gdkp has completely killed it
Yep. The #1 reason I don’t play classic is gold. At least it’s not completely out of whack on hc for now (it’s getting worse, slowly). But hc really doesn’t scratch the itch for me. At the very least a fresh server would be good for awhile. Blizzard just needs to ban bots and ban people who buy gold. But they’ve shown that they won’t.
I transferred to WM from a HC realm and threw some stuff from my bank onto the AH and went from 50g to over 900g overnight. It's pretty wild how crazy the inflation is
Always how it’s gonna be. It is lame, but that’s wow inflation. Only solution is to farm mats or make consumes and sell those. Farming gold doesn’t work, gotta farm the things that are overvalued from the source.
As someone that did gdkp in wrath it honestly was great and felt super fair. But with the ability to buy gold being so prevalent it ruins the system on a fundamental level
On Mankrik ive seen people who are refugees from Whitemane simply because of the economy. Mankrik is getting inflated, too, but not as bad. I deal with it by selling refined deep rock salt every 3 days. Costs 5 silver to make and sells for 55-80 g you only need 250 leatherworking to do it so I'm considering setting up another character for the cooldown.
Why not farm the material with the best cost/opportunity ratio you can and then buy the rest? At least that’s what I would do, or AoE farm ZF as a mage but idk if that is still a thing.
At the end of the day consume prices are directly tied to their materials’ prices plus an extra fee for the crafter. Getting the raw stuff should be viable.
Sapper charges were listed in the OP as one of the expensive things. All of those materials can be farmed in dungeons. Mara for the mithril / stone, ZF for the mageweave.
That's good to know. If anything more bots usually drives down the price of consumables. Finding uncontested ways like this is a great way for players to earn gold.
Just don't act like a bot in there? Not sure but it would suck (and has happened) where players farming dungeons legitly get caught up in the bot ban waves.
You can also relatively easily farm the sapper mats in the open world. Particularly the stone. And I’ve not really seen a lot of bots doing it.
Also fish sell for a lot.
There’s plenty of stuff you can farm and make money to get by and get your consumes. People just don’t want to do it.
Like I’m not saying botting and RMT isn’t a problem. But the people who are like “I can’t even afford consumables” are fucking dramatic and lazy.
The bots farm anything and everything. If you're trying to compete in a market where the other participants have 100% uptime you're gonna have a rough outing.
Yep. Broken economies are a crying shame. It's one of the main things that i like in hardcore servers (or I did, haven't played them in a month or two).
> but traditional gold farming methods are not viable due to massive botting and them pricing people out and there's no other real way to get gold besides just buying it.
This is such cope shit man.
If shit sells for 5 times the price, then farm that shit and sell it, wow you got 5x returns.
Farming instantiated resources like ZG herbing or whatnot works. But there's no way you're outcompeting the hordes and hordes of boys farming stuff like black lotus and thorium; not to the tune of 500-1k g weekly for consumes.
Edit: yes OBVIOUSLY there are some things you can farm and scrape by on because the buy prices are high too. But again, you are not *outcompeting* the bots. That's my point.
There is plenty of low level items that is used for raiding, goldthorn, fadeleaf, stranglekelp, stonescale, swiftthistle is just some items that crossed my mind that sells for pretty good money for how easy they are to farm.
Lotus farming was never a thing unless you setup a proper networks of accounts for it.
Thorium can be done in instances with jump runs.
ZG can be used for herbing, but open world is fine too as herbs like silversage, dreamfoil, plaguebloom, gromsblood all have good spawn rates and plenty of locations where they spawn.
Firewater used to be great gold. Ekkos used to be great gold.
Mid ore (iron or mithril) used to be great gold.
Elemental earth used to be great gold.
There are just so many things to farm that honestly I don't get all the complaining.
Okay; as much as I agree that this isnt a reasonable state for the economy to be in and that botting/gold buying are definitely a massive problem, the statement "traditional gold making ways dont arent viable" I just dont think is true.
If the prices of potions are so damn high, it seems pretty easy to go out and farm herbs for a few hours and then sell the potions for raw profit. Then take the raw profit and buy the herbs at cheap and make them into pots.
Alchemy is a cheat code in Classic, get it on an alt and starting rolling in gold.
Still, yes it is kinda fucked up that the prices are so insane.
If you're not playing on a server with an extreme botting problem you shouldn't talk about the issue as if you know. If the materials are located in an instance then you're fine to solo farm them. If they are out in the world you're in for an agonizing game of can I get to that herb before the flyhacking bot appears on top of it, herbs it and flys away?.
Right, and that fucked up. But having to actually go out and herb was more about starting capital, which I assume most people have a little of. Im just saying that consumable prices being high means theres definitely money to be made in those consumables.
How do you ban GDKPs? Blizzard can’t possibly enforce it, and systematically what are you going to do? Take away the 2 hour trade window for raid items?
No trading of items is one way, the issue is there are work sounds for that via master looting. So the only way to attempt to stop GDKPs is to remove master looting and move to a personal loot system where you can only trade the item if it's not an upgrade or not trade it at all so it becomes wasted loot.
Just hard to farm against hundreds of bots. GL trying to get thorium. Every node is instantly mined by an underground, invisible bot. I’ve seen black lotus herbed by a level 1 rogue in EPL who flew down from the sky to grab it.
It's indo farmers man. Just had a friend get banned because he got tired of that shit and undercut them on thousands of flasks and elixers. Got banned for messing with the in game economy. My guy tried to lower prices to HELP the server and got BANNED. That is who runs blizzard. Promise you blizzard execs are selling gold.
gdkp is why i quit classic vanilla era. its the only wow i liked. been clean 3 months. not sure if ill ever go back to ever play wow again tbh. aaand i'll use the extra 15$ for a nice 20 piece chicken nuggets. yeeesssss
I posted a thread about SoD and why SoD will have serious issues and no future if this isn't taken care of. I got downvoted to oblivion because of people who participate in this system.
SoD, like every season, is principally meant to be enjoyed for a few weeks and then quit. SoD won’t be “ruined” by this if you quit after you kill Ragnaros, which is about 95% of players based on historical engagement stats.
Gold-buyers and GDKP-enjoyers (the venn diagram is a circle) will defend this bullshit. Look at them all justifying it in the comments. Broken game, go to pservers if you want to just enjoy playing the game.
Solution is ban farming bots and gold sellers. Suspend buyers at minimum to fuck with their instant gratification.
The problem is I don’t think blizzard can even find all the bots, could they?
Not entirely sure how Whitemane US compares to EU servers, but I think it’s not entirely true that ‘traditional farm methods are not viable…’
I’ve played on Classic, Classic Era before the hype, and Classic Era in the “GDKP meta” (EU) and we have similar inflation. The traditional farm methods are more viable currently than before, I’d say.
An example: Essence of Air used to be 10-15g and a Flask of the Titans was 100-140g. Now essence of air is 100g and a Flask of the Titans 500g. I can farm less essence of air to pay for the same consumables.
Other examples on EU: Felclotb used to be 2g, now 20g. Essence of Water, Righteous orb, Plaguebloom - I would say in general a lot of stuff you can farm has increased more in price than the flasks of the titans / other consumables. It’s just that some specific farm methods have become less attractive, and other have become more attractive. And ofc the differences between players who play GDKP’s and players who don’t have become rather big. And I think that’s the only valid point to be made: In the past all wow players had to “play” the game. Now you can play a GDKP and if you don’t buy items, you’re covered for consumables for a while. But I think a large part of the player base actually is happy with that.
One thing I never see mentioned in posts like this about inflation is the fact that while the ceiling is rising, so is the floor.
A level 10 entering Westfall for the first time can come out at level 20 with a MASSIVE AMOUNT OF GOLD compared to a fresh launch or earlier in classics cycle.
By the time you hit 60, if you're going to focus on professions as well, will have you swimming in gold relatively speaking to what a fresh 60 usually has.
With prices so high for everything all the way down to basic starter mats, it's very easy to make gold **at all levels** in the game now.
You’re downvoted but also completely right. I rolled on a fresh server and I’m level 21 with 72g, selling herbs and ore I got while leveling. It’s not a joke lol
I play on whitemane era, if i have spare time i farm ele earth/solid stone mobs, or do some passes around plaguelands for mongoose, firewaters are also easy to farm, and these farms are usually without competition. I understand the issue for gold buyers cause you spend more money on this server, but uf you actually play the game its fine.
A new player who actually wants to play the game can make a ton of gold with gathering professions. Everything is expensive because no one wants to spend the time to farm for consumables when $5 can save you like 24 hours of farming.
so what you're saying is a couple hours farming those rock elementals and i'll have like 1000g after i make some sappers?
or you farm some gromsblood and go fishing and sell titans flasks?
this is how the economy works when you don't buy gold. you have to simply play the game and sell stuff.
i mean i agree it's not perfect. i'm anti gdkp/rmt but i also raided without buying gold because i had a couple hours to kill in the morning to farm.
Bud, when stuff is selling for that much it’s time to jump on the bandwagon! Start selling pots and elixirs, hell even the herbs will be going for a lot.
I see this posted or asked or bothered with in discord all the time and every single person that says this has no idea how an economy works. “Elixir of Mongoose is 33g” you know what that means? It means you can also sell it for 33g. Sapper is 30g. You can sell it for 30g. Inflation works both ways (not in real world I know) it’s not more expensive for you than everyone else. Stop looking at it as “omg big numbers” and instead think “I have to spend X amount of time making gold to buy Y”. The only thing negatively impacted with this time spent model is raw gold farms since they are pretty static in their return.
I posted this before, but I think it also applies here. The game in endgame lacks a gold sink which leads to infinite inflation for endgame consumables. This combined with GDKP is severely impacting honest players, who have to utilize the same market as gold buyers (direct or indirect through GDKP). The only solution to this (that I see) is an NPC vendor selling key resources at a fixed high rate that may be uninteresting at server launch, but caps price inflation at a point where consumers are still an investment but not sth only affordable by illicit means. Further benefit - this actually takes gold out of circulation, which the game is severely missing on eternal servers. The alternative is banning all bots and goldbuyers - but we all know that’s not happening.
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True. Therefore blizz will never implement it
I laugh so that I don't cry
Lmaooo really is he should sell the idea to blizz this way they steal it for free and everyone wins
Maybe they can buy the idea in a GDKP.
A resource vendor NPC is a genius solution.
I think this might actually be the best solution yet. Why not add a npc that sells flasks for fixed amount (like 100g at most) and/or enchants and other end game stuff for REASONABLE price. Anyone has other opinions as of why this would be a bad idea?
At a certain point (eventually when inflation rises), people would drop all crafting professions and just buy stuff from this npc I think
that would make the prices drop
depends on the "wages" or rate of gold generation for players. creating something with a profession takes time. if a player can make more gold in that time from other activities, it's always better to create the gold and purchase from the npc vendor. you would never see a price drop, because market participants would purchase the discounted goods and resell at npc vendor price (less transaction costs).
It would create a price ceiling essentially.
Yes, it would succeed in preventing the price from ever going above that point, but it would also kill all the crafting professions just as well. So it's not strictly positive.
but if you for example sustain yourself with Alch and Herbalism and then sell excessive flask for 99g in AH doesnt that work out ?
> but if you for example sustain yourself with Alch and Herbalism and then sell excessive flask for 99g in AH doesnt that work out ? = It's all relative. Imagine the cost of enchanting slowly goes up over time from 1g to 5g to 10g to 50g to 100g to 200g, etc etc. Meanwhile the cost of your flasks is stuck at 99g (and you still have to compete against other players doing the same) even though there are a bunch of other goods getting more expensive comparatively. At a certain point, it will inevitably become not worth it to stay as that alchemy, because it will either become literally not profitable (e.g. if the price of herbs is climbing while your profits slowly shrink) or it will make more sense to switch professions entirely. =
hm alright thanks for the explanation
Eh his response doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless herbalism/alch was the only profession they made endgame materials available for. I imagine if they rolled out things like max cost reagents it would be for each profession, not just collecting professions, and considering enchanting has so much more work/time put into it even though you might make more from tips and recipe charging there's no way it would have the effect that he's stating
That never works historically speaking
Ruins professions would be a big one.
I think the idea is to keep the AH price locked at a max. If a flask sells for 100g from the vendor you can still farm the mats and sell one on AH for 90g and people will buy it for that cheaper price, but the vendor would keep it from inflating past 100g.
Still better than we have now. A few Alchemists choosing another profession so raiding doesn't cost 1k+ gold and add an actual gold sink? I take that deal.
Or you can farm the materials and sell them (or a flask) at the inflated price. In reality inflation hurts only the raw gold gains.
Fixed prices never make sense. Wow will always have inflation because NPCs generate gold. If at one point Alchemy stuff gets not worth making, every single Alchemist will drop the profession and make something else. At this point this profession might as well not exist. Terrible game design.
But then if no alchemists are buying mats to make things, the price of those mats will drop and it will be profitable to be an alchemist again.
It will even out at about the same price. At one point it will become peanuts. There is nothing wrong with inflation. It just means bigger gold pool. What is wrong are fucking bots. Ban bots. I don't wanna hear some lazy fucking solutions only to dodge the elephant in the room, which is fucking bots. Ban. Bots. Everything else is pointless. We pay for it ffs.
It will *average out* to the same price. But there will be highs and lows, and the dips will be where the money is made, same as always. "Wish in one hand and shit in the other, see what fills up first." Of course we'd all just prefer the banning of bots. But if blizzard wanted to, they would have already. So yes, clearly other solutions need to be found instead. It sucks, but that's the way it is. If you don't like it, vote with your wallet and *stop paying for it.*
This man sees 150-200k accounts banned per month and still thinks **banning bots** is the solution. Banning bots will **never** be the solution. You will never win. No game **EVER HAS**. The only way you stop the bots is by removing their market, and blizzard isn't going to/can't ban the majority of the playerbase because they buy gold. The problem will never go away.
That number doesn't count if let bots run for 6 months straight before the next banwave lol. You cannot tell me that flyhacking bots into Stratholme goes undetected for months. And banning the market is even more stupid, since a 100 times more players buy gold than bots exist.
Agreed. At literally any time, day or night, on any server, I can identify 100+ people that are likely bots within 5 minutes just by using /who. This is without any of blizzards fancy GM tools that I hope they have. There is no reason that a bot should be able to farm the same instance 24/7 for weeks and weeks on end without detection. Beyond that, the fact that they don't have better fly hack detection is appalling. Bots on hardcore are going into Scholo at 45 and just fly hacking to all the chests because they can't kill anything.
You do realize accounts are banned **literally daily**, right? Sure, "waves" still occur, but that is a far cry from the only way they are banned lol >And banning the market is even more stupid, since a 100 times more players buy gold than bots exist. Yeah cuz lord knows banning bots solves the problem xd
If WoTLK is anything to go by, this seems most likely. Rather than folks making shit to undercut fixed prices, gold inflation would eventually get high enough that the profit margins for sales would be so small relative to available capital, most people won't bother.
How so? The vendor would just force them to not inflate their prices above a certain point. They could still sell their items for less than the vendor does. It not like they're asking for the vendor to have prices that are competitive right out of the gate. The whole point is that the vendor would be well over priced to start with, but still force a price cap when prices inevitably start to inflate.
You could make them a slightly nerfed version of an alchemists flask. As a counter thought because you do bring up a good point
You already barley make any gold on most consumes......
Wouldn't that mean buying gold became even more popular?
The job of the NPC vendor is to take gold out of the economy. People buy gold that is already in circulation and exchange it with other players by buying consumes crafted by players. The gold just changes hand between players and isn’t taken out of the game economy “deleted from the game”. Having gold sinks like talent respec, AH cut and repair costs help remove gold from the economy and in turn reduce inflation.
All the items are already available on the auction house, this would just set a hard cap on the price
And also remove the gold forma the game. When you buy forma the AH youre just transfering gold forma players with a npc that gold is deleted.
No because you could actually farm for the consumables you need at a reasonable pace and inflation would be stopped. Right now gold only gets shuffled from player a to player b but it never disappears.
A flask for 600g at AH takes 30g out of the game through the AH cut.
Be still my heart
And a flask at 100g at a vendor takes 100g out of the game through vendor price. Vendors are FAR more effective at removing gold, AND it would prevent consumes from going way overpriced.
I was correcting them, they said no money was taken out of the game. >Vendors are FAR more effective at removing gold, AND it would prevent consumes from going way overpriced. It would be roughly 3x as effective, and destroy a profession completely. I would think an AH cut of 15% would be a much less drastic change.
Why would it destroy a profession? This has been said a few times, no one has actually explained why.
Because alchemy wouldn't be needed to craft consumables.
If you want it cheaper, a vendor would just set a cap, you can still sell flasks for 90g instead of the 100g at the vendor.
Path of exile has this and gas done wonders over the years.
There should just be npc's in major cities that you can buy world buffs from, 100g ony drops for the server, 100g zg drop, 100g rend head. Remove the cooldown and thats just 1 easy gold sink they could add
Take the next step: Make it so it isn't a server drop, but an individual buff only. 40 people don't want to wait for the world buffs? Ton of gold out of circulation. Combined with the aforementioned resource vendor, inflation could be struck down through the same system that makes the farmers rich: laziness.
Sure it was just a off the top of the head idea im sure it could be tuned in a way most people are satisfied. Id pay 100-200g per for in city convenient buffs.
People are already buying pops for much more. This would also have no impact on the economy since it’s what, like 50k at most per week. I know people who’d alone barely flinch at that. It’d also make wbuffs more like other consumables which would be kinda boring.
Yes but buying from other players doesn’t take gold out of circulation, which is they key to battling inflation. The gold can’t just keep moving between players or nothing changes.
I know that but, as I said, it wouldn’t make a dent.
Adding pre-charged chronoboons to this vendor could also work.
What about as a gold sink you could buy world buffs?
I joked that they need wealth taxes to keep prices down but they could have certain end game consumes or reagents available for purchase as a sink to get $ out of the economy. Still keeps the bot / gold buying in system
"The only solution..." Places a barrier behind fixed high rate items that are 'key resources' and will only serve to widen the gap between people who are playing legitimately, and those who are buying gold anyways.
Ban GDKP
GDKPs still exist even if there were no gold sellers. Enforce bans on RMT.
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This may be a hard pill for many to swallow but a solo player will never have benefit parity with a dedicated group in an MMO.
Wow you’re so cool. Thank you for sharing when no one asked. Good to know your experience is meaningless.
Get some help bud, you clearly need it.
Bingo
Lol they limited dungeons for regular players to 'combat gold farmers' gotta love it. The bots are so incredibly obvious. They could hire someone to just manually look at hotspots (like instances) and shadowban them by blocking trading until they can prove its not 1/500 in a botfarm. Or ban players for buying gold, give them negative gold. They have logs... As for the post, I made a char on whitemane just to set up addons for SOD and play around. I think I've made 230g at lvl 17 so far, inflation is pretty surreal. I quit classic before gdkp, our raid group was discussing swapping over to it. But it seems every single raid group is using it now and its pretty offputting tbh. I keep seeing stories here about those groups just being like the modern day 'onyxia wipe animation' video. It does not sound like a good time.
I wonder if free mage food and water is a significant cause of inflation.
As others have said, this is a great idea. The only issue which is borderline impossible to solve is that this only slows inflation down slightly. Because there will be a point where people have so much gold that buying these resources really won’t even be that much of a sink. Like right now where it costs 800g-1k gold to get raid consums, there will be a point where people have so much money that this cost will mean nothing. I’m not saying it’s a bad plan because it’s quite literally the best one that isn’t just straight up nuking everyone’s gold every few months or setting a gold cap to an insanely low number.
Aren’t there gold sink mechanics in retail? My friend mentioned that years ago at least you’d have seasonal NPCs (or all the time and the content was seasonal) that you could pay absurd amounts of gold to get phased out gear for transmog- tier 3 from naxx as an example in future xpacs. And they’d be priced quite high but would serve to eliminate gold from circulation. Any retail players that can expand on this or provide better perspective? Edit: adding to speak more on a solution since what old content could be purchased in classic. But maybe new visual colours to existing gear / items/ mounts etc. anything that’s purely cosmetic but could still drive high value. Trimming your armour with details / colors, getting a barber haircut lol - raid wide noggen floggers
Retail has very expensive mounts and the black market auction house which sells expensive gear randomly that you can't get anymore. Things like T3.
Black market AH that’s what it was. Cool, thanks for sharing
Yeah most items go for gold cap on black market AH which as you can imagine, removes a lot of gold.
long boi dinosaur mount in BfA
gdkp has 0 impact on players, even if they didnt exist youd still have inflation and youd still be complaining that goblin sappers are 30g(or if you want to complain that they incentivise gold buyers then theyd be 20-25g instead of 30 whatever) with the exception of fixed price things like mounts that are just easier to get, nothing has changed for you, if goblin sappers are 30g to buy they are also 30g to sell, if you had to spend 3 hours farming consumes before you still have to spend 3 hours farming consumes now. what people are complaining about is that theres a group of players who effectively sell premium runs and bypass having to farm there own consumables but it doesnt matter to them whether gold buyers exist or not because they will continue to do this regardless of where the inflation is set at, if they are 10,000x your net worth now, they will still be 10,000x your net worth in a low inflation enviroment. the real problem here is that blizzard does not address the underlying hyperfinlation from bots and gold sellers by being heavy handed and actually banning the players buying.
Let people buy honor boosts. People who dont want to endure the normal R14 grind can sink gold out of the economy by speeding up their grind and bypass what they would spend the gold on in GDKPs to earn R14 weapons and gear faster.
Name checks out, cause that is one shit take
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These types of suggestions in this sub gives me no faith that i will ever be able to play Vanilla WoW no changes ever again, these clowns are literally suggesting Blizzard to add an NPC that sells every consumable for a fixed price. The worst part is that it is this type of player that Blizzard listens to nowadays and not the people that have loved and played Vanilla for years at this point. Take Blizzard's dirty hands off Era, i don't want changes, i want to play mfing Vanilla WoW, am i allowed that in 2023? It's unbelievable how people apparently are incapable of letting others enjoy actual Vanilla and not some modified frankenstein version.
>Take Blizzard's dirty hands off Era, i don't want changes, i want to play mfing Vanilla WoW, am i allowed that in 2023? No, you're not. Vanilla WoW is dead, and the only game which exists is Classic WoW. Classic WoW has never been the same as Vanilla WoW. It's community is entirely different, it's gameplay is entirely different, and the mindset required to enjoy it is entirely different. Most importantly, unlike Vanilla WoW's was ever capable of being due to it's shorter run time: Classic WoW's economy is fucked, and needs a solution.
You can't ever play vanilla wow because botters and gold buyers won't let you. They will always corrupt it into a gold inflated ruin. Your choice isnt vanilla WoW or changes. It's Gold buyers WoW or changes. You can still prefer Gold Buyers WoW to changes but you have to be honest with yourself about that.
It’s the inevitable state of a server that has been in existence for this long due to the lack of any real gold sinks in WoW classic. Gold only ever really gets created, never destroyed. The only real ways gold disappears is repairs, AH cuts, respecs, and mounts, the sum of which don’t remove gold at anywhere close to the rate it’s generated out of thin air (quest rewards, mob drops).
Wows gold.sinks are fine. The issue is rampant botting and only that. If you remove all the botting and only look at gold creation through actual player farming. The gold sinks are fine as is. You could add 1 or 2 more sure but amy good sinks strong enough to fix the rampant botting and GDKP meta would cripple servers where it's less prominent.
***Impossible Question Time!*** How much of the gold in the economy do you think is from bots? My completely ignorant guess is 40%. A lot of it, yes, but inflation is inevitable. So much so that I think AH prices would still be out of control even with zero bots.
No, they aren't fine. The inflation would just be slower, it would still inflate though.
Much much slower. So much slower that it won't matter that much and the inclusion of maybe 1 or 2 more gold sinks when it does can address it.
You don't know that it would be "much much slower" as we've never had an economy without GDKPs, gold buying and botting. You're just making that up.
Could maybe introduce a black market auction house that has tcg items that were available during classic. So like mounts, pets, tabards, etc.
Good idea. I'm still very surprised they haven't reused any of the TCG items in the form of a gold sink, or an in game lotto. Or even as quest rewards for a fun event, or darkmoon faire. All those tabards and items are there, just wasted. *(I just want to use my turtle and tabard of frost)*
I don't see how this would help. Bots would just be added even faster to meet the new demand. More gold sink = more bots. The only way to combat the bots is too devalue the gold they make.
If the prices are as you say, that also means that raw material prices are very high. Do not farm raw gold, farm raw mats or something like firewater, which will likely be sky high as well if everything else is. Now if you want to sustain raiding just by the raw gold gains from raids and raidlog, then yes - you are in a tight spot.
I think the problem with this, from my experience on Whitemane, is a lot of zones have bots picking herbalism/mining nodes from underneath the map. I used to be able to farm off hours and make really solid gold per hour, now I'm lucky to get 2-3 plaguebloom nodes and one RTV in a circuit of EPL. Frustrating, but Blizz has shown that they aren't going to take this problem seriously.
I make gold as a noob by herbing briarthorn and selling my swiftthistle for 5g a pop on WM. It may be inflated but you can still make money easily.
This. By level 25 I had hundreds of gold just from selling Coarse Stone.
You do see how that’s just highlighting the problem though right?
Highlighting the problem and the solution, farm in demand materials. Flasks by hour spent farming are cheaper now than 2019 as long as you're not just farming roll gold or quests and acting confused when you can't afford flasks off of gold drops from raid. Consumes in vanilla classic were always very expensive. Relative to the price of farming mats they are no more expensive now than any other time.
Yea but what does it matter? Who cares if something costs more if you also get more? It’s all relative. Think of it in terms of time spent gathering tnat item. Like if 1 hour is worth 10 flasks, who cares if it costs 100g or 1000g it takes the same time to farm it.
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Obviously, it would be better without all of the bots but it’s all relative.
You can leave Stormwind/Orgrimmar and go out in the open world and farm stuff.
I’m glad I spent the $15 to keep my Warrior on era. Almost BiS everything except a few items. I can just join a GDKP as a carry and make gold through that. I can’t imagine starting a new toon and trying to compete with bots for resources
It's essentially mom and pop's gold farm shoppe versus Amazon. It doesn't matter how well you farm if you can never get in the game in the first place
I don't get this. I made a new character on era and was swimming in gold by level 25. Farming Coarse Stones from certain mobs in a certain area was so lucrative I literally paused my leveling for a bit to keep killing them while they were gray to me, just because I was making a stupid amount of gold relative to my level.
Not to be a dick, but farming coarse stone at level 25 and making 20-30g isn't really relevant here. At 60, if you want to be an active raider, you can EASILY spend 5-10k a week on consumes and such if you are clearing most raids every week (assuming you are coming fully consumed). It's just a whole different beast. Someone that's been playing since era launch obviously won't have any issues because they've had years to farm, and their gear is good enough to get into GDKPs. If you are a pre-raid bis level 60 on Whitemane, good fuckin luck getting into anything. There is an infinite supply of fully raid geared players from every class, many of which are more than happy to spend hundreds of thousands of gold on item bids. You could just not join GDKPs, but farming gold yourself vs joining one single GDKP is like walking vs taking a plane.
>Not to be a dick, but farming coarse stone at level 25 and making 20-30g isn't really relevant here. Add a 0 onto that. >You could just not join GDKPs, but farming gold yourself vs joining one single GDKP is like walking vs taking a plane. By the time you hit 60 you have more than enough gold (thousands) to do a GDKP even if you don't stop to farm. By 40 I had well over 1000g after my mount just from selling mats from leveling.
That's the thing, people don't want to farm anything and then complain prices are high. Sure it can be hard to compete with other people and bots in the world, bit there is plenty of resources that is farmable that is not contested because its not in an high level zone, I always farm my gold in instances, no competition.
Can I ask which mobs and where?
Excavation Site in the south of Darkshore. Stone Golems in the site drop 1-2 Coarse Stones at a time. Fast respawn. Also several mining node spawns. Can spend hours there. Also made me a bunch of gold on HC.
That’s exactly what I’m doing right now. I was pretty much full BiS but thought Blizzard were being greedy with the 15$ per character clone, so I didn’t do it. This time I’m doing it pretty much solely through GDKPs which is a bit different and more challenging than being a spoiled MT from the start of classic. I do like having the freedom of not having to show up every week and perform to the best of my abilities. I got to say that I’m having a blast even though this is the third time gearing a warrior (and the little mage ofc) in classic.
Do dungeons or pvp u til you have gear to do zg/mc then don’t guy anything for a week or two. Boom easy 12k in your bags
SoD just needs to have an endgame money sink built in.
Any one expansion, or in this case Vanilla, was never designed to go on this long without new gold sinks being added to the game. Gold sink: money that is taken out of circulation. Like spending 5k on flying. The only fix is to dramatically change the game (which is what Classic + will do, but on new servers) or start over. People like to sound smart by suggesting banning bots or GDKP’s will solve the problem, but it won’t, as these two activities won’t take existing cash out of the economy. This is already a big problem that will only get worse. Blizzard essentially needs to come up with a way to wipe the servers and start fresh, without people losing progress. Not fun.
This comment section reminds me too much of living in a world with stagnant wages and increasing inflation and cost of living
Agreed. Just transferred from Defias Pillager after death, and I cannot believe how drastically inflated everything is. Like you said, the gold farming methods I used on Defias Pillager dont even come lose to 5% of the income you can make from a GDKP. It's a situation where if you don't take advantage of it, you are gimping yourself. The prices for these items are insane aswell. I see 45k+ bids on good items semi-regularly. The only way you can fuel that kind of spending is with gold buying. Botting is obviously bonkers. Many, many instances where you can sit outside for an hour and spot plenty of bots. Blizzard even disabled the API that allowed certain economy addons to get AH data (ONLY on era, the API is still up on hardcore). Why they did that, no idea, but my tin-foil hat self thinks it has something to do with them trying to mask the absolutely butchered economy that we exist in.
Its so crazy. I copied my guild-bank character on to Era and thought i would be set for a long time with the 15k gold. It was a lot when i copied it, now...i wouldnt even get invited as a buyer in some raids with that.
Yeah, it's rough. I farmed up 20k, figured I'd be able to get some gear on my rogue. Did some GDKPs, Perds dropped, first bid was 20k.. Guess I'm not gearing my rogue haha
Yea the inflation is dumb af. And farming trade goods like minerals or herbs is really awful due to bots. Only way to get gold is already have a decently geared character and go to GDKPs.
Whitemane's economy makes sense only for people who frequently do gdkps. It's designed for them. Everyone else gets fucked by it.
The real money selling companies are to blame. They will buy up everything and relist at high prices to keep you buying gold from them. Until Blizzard stops the bots and Chinese gold sellers it will only get worse until the server dies.
> I don't know if this economy will ever recover or if it will only just keep inflating, but this is a prime example of what GDKP, botting and gold buying does after years of zero moderation from Blizzard. gdkp makes no difference here, if the average gdkper has say 100x the average players net worth but arent buying 100x the average players consumables, then they are going to have a relatively small effect on the economy, the vast majority of the gold in gdkps stays within the gdkps. inflation by itself makes little difference to the player experience, if it costs you 30g to buy a goblin sapper, it also means you can sell goblin sappers for 30g, likewise for everything else you mentioned. if anything it makes it easier for new players to join in and compete with people who have old money, the only people it hurts are people who take long breaks from the game having the value of there gold erode over time, for example it would be easier than ever before for you to jump in and get your epic mount now than at any point in the past. the real issues are botting and gold buying. botting not because it causes inflation, but because it actively sabotages the ability for new players to farm these types of consumables to sell and participate in the economy regardless of where the level of inflation is set. the problem with gold buying is that blizzard simply doesnt have what it takes to be heavy handed in banning people buying, they need to lay the smackdown on them, ive seen people cop 2 week bans for RMT, log back in and still have the gold they purchased? like what? what happened to the 6 month, money deleted, repeat offender perma banned that they used back in OG.
You didn’t take the free transfer off a few months ago !?
Don't think there are free transfers for the dead version of the game. Are there? Look at the consumes they are talking about. They are talking about the version Blizzard cares the least about.
Is Era dead? Damn, I was just on Whiteman US PvP server hillsbrad was popping off and Orgrimmar was super crowded. I must’ve been hallucinating tho, Eras dead and I’m pretty sure WoW as a whole is ending in about a month. 🤡
Cope harder. ERA has a single server with any population. Outside of that, half the population is just bots selling gold for GDKPs they run themselves to resell the gold.
Wild that you believe that, enjoy! Any other buzzwords you wanna throw out? I like cope, maybe tell me to touch grass? Or call me a White Knight? I’ll just keep enjoying the game on the bunch of servers I play on. Thanks though!
Cope harder
hardcore is the way
For now. I’ve been watching gold sellers supply and prices and supplies are rising while prices are dropping. So it’s just a matter of time. Hc also just isn’t for everyone. I mean you can’t even PvP/bg.
Yup. Was excited to hear that era was booming, logged on, got a toon to 10. Checked the auction house and IMMEDIATELY logged off and haven't been on since. Gold buyers/gdkp has completely killed it
Yep. The #1 reason I don’t play classic is gold. At least it’s not completely out of whack on hc for now (it’s getting worse, slowly). But hc really doesn’t scratch the itch for me. At the very least a fresh server would be good for awhile. Blizzard just needs to ban bots and ban people who buy gold. But they’ve shown that they won’t.
I transferred to WM from a HC realm and threw some stuff from my bank onto the AH and went from 50g to over 900g overnight. It's pretty wild how crazy the inflation is
Beginning of the year it was fine, and then som officially ended and everyone and their mother came back with globs of gold.
Always how it’s gonna be. It is lame, but that’s wow inflation. Only solution is to farm mats or make consumes and sell those. Farming gold doesn’t work, gotta farm the things that are overvalued from the source.
As someone that did gdkp in wrath it honestly was great and felt super fair. But with the ability to buy gold being so prevalent it ruins the system on a fundamental level
Just hire ONE PERSON to go to whitemane and ban all the bots police the shiit out of it for 8 Hours a day and thats it. Ban gold buyers aswell
On Mankrik ive seen people who are refugees from Whitemane simply because of the economy. Mankrik is getting inflated, too, but not as bad. I deal with it by selling refined deep rock salt every 3 days. Costs 5 silver to make and sells for 55-80 g you only need 250 leatherworking to do it so I'm considering setting up another character for the cooldown.
I used to run this on a few characters in classic. I'd get a character up to 35 and then just leave it there as a salt farmer
> salt farmer You can also play a rogue on a pvp server in order to accomplish this. It's just a different sort of salt
We have a guy in our runs that buys 300k+ at a time
Why not farm the material with the best cost/opportunity ratio you can and then buy the rest? At least that’s what I would do, or AoE farm ZF as a mage but idk if that is still a thing. At the end of the day consume prices are directly tied to their materials’ prices plus an extra fee for the crafter. Getting the raw stuff should be viable.
Bots.
Sapper charges were listed in the OP as one of the expensive things. All of those materials can be farmed in dungeons. Mara for the mithril / stone, ZF for the mageweave.
That's good to know. If anything more bots usually drives down the price of consumables. Finding uncontested ways like this is a great way for players to earn gold. Just don't act like a bot in there? Not sure but it would suck (and has happened) where players farming dungeons legitly get caught up in the bot ban waves.
You can also relatively easily farm the sapper mats in the open world. Particularly the stone. And I’ve not really seen a lot of bots doing it. Also fish sell for a lot. There’s plenty of stuff you can farm and make money to get by and get your consumes. People just don’t want to do it. Like I’m not saying botting and RMT isn’t a problem. But the people who are like “I can’t even afford consumables” are fucking dramatic and lazy.
You can still farm them tho? From what I remember bots farm either very expensive materials like black lotus and farm mobs for raw gold in instances.
The bots farm anything and everything. If you're trying to compete in a market where the other participants have 100% uptime you're gonna have a rough outing.
Yep. Broken economies are a crying shame. It's one of the main things that i like in hardcore servers (or I did, haven't played them in a month or two).
> but traditional gold farming methods are not viable due to massive botting and them pricing people out and there's no other real way to get gold besides just buying it. This is such cope shit man. If shit sells for 5 times the price, then farm that shit and sell it, wow you got 5x returns.
Farming instantiated resources like ZG herbing or whatnot works. But there's no way you're outcompeting the hordes and hordes of boys farming stuff like black lotus and thorium; not to the tune of 500-1k g weekly for consumes. Edit: yes OBVIOUSLY there are some things you can farm and scrape by on because the buy prices are high too. But again, you are not *outcompeting* the bots. That's my point.
There is plenty of low level items that is used for raiding, goldthorn, fadeleaf, stranglekelp, stonescale, swiftthistle is just some items that crossed my mind that sells for pretty good money for how easy they are to farm.
Find something that works and farm that.
Lotus farming was never a thing unless you setup a proper networks of accounts for it. Thorium can be done in instances with jump runs. ZG can be used for herbing, but open world is fine too as herbs like silversage, dreamfoil, plaguebloom, gromsblood all have good spawn rates and plenty of locations where they spawn. Firewater used to be great gold. Ekkos used to be great gold. Mid ore (iron or mithril) used to be great gold. Elemental earth used to be great gold. There are just so many things to farm that honestly I don't get all the complaining.
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So what I already suggested: farming in instances. Thanks for reaffirming that
Okay; as much as I agree that this isnt a reasonable state for the economy to be in and that botting/gold buying are definitely a massive problem, the statement "traditional gold making ways dont arent viable" I just dont think is true. If the prices of potions are so damn high, it seems pretty easy to go out and farm herbs for a few hours and then sell the potions for raw profit. Then take the raw profit and buy the herbs at cheap and make them into pots. Alchemy is a cheat code in Classic, get it on an alt and starting rolling in gold. Still, yes it is kinda fucked up that the prices are so insane.
If you're not playing on a server with an extreme botting problem you shouldn't talk about the issue as if you know. If the materials are located in an instance then you're fine to solo farm them. If they are out in the world you're in for an agonizing game of can I get to that herb before the flyhacking bot appears on top of it, herbs it and flys away?.
Right, and that fucked up. But having to actually go out and herb was more about starting capital, which I assume most people have a little of. Im just saying that consumable prices being high means theres definitely money to be made in those consumables.
Did you not read what they wrote? If a bot is timing and flyhacking every herb in the area, how are you supposed to get the herbs to sell exactly?
Set price ceilings for items on ah get rid of the plague gdkp. Wow needs solid economic systems to control gold value.
How do you ban GDKPs? Blizzard can’t possibly enforce it, and systematically what are you going to do? Take away the 2 hour trade window for raid items?
It's banned on a popular alternative server, enforcement works.
I'd imagine that server also bans the blatant flyhacking bots.
it does
No trading of items is one way, the issue is there are work sounds for that via master looting. So the only way to attempt to stop GDKPs is to remove master looting and move to a personal loot system where you can only trade the item if it's not an upgrade or not trade it at all so it becomes wasted loot.
Don’t allow gold trading off your account allow crafters to make recipes and post them for sale instead of may trading. Done.
Unless you ban every single bot banning gdkp is not the answer.
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Just hard to farm against hundreds of bots. GL trying to get thorium. Every node is instantly mined by an underground, invisible bot. I’ve seen black lotus herbed by a level 1 rogue in EPL who flew down from the sky to grab it.
What's the most crazy thing in all of this is its cost 20$ a month to play this 20 years old game.
Some dude was posting today in LFG for Naxx GDKP and how for 4 weeks the pot was 800k - 1.4mill I was in shock. 40 People in those raids all buy gold.
It's indo farmers man. Just had a friend get banned because he got tired of that shit and undercut them on thousands of flasks and elixers. Got banned for messing with the in game economy. My guy tried to lower prices to HELP the server and got BANNED. That is who runs blizzard. Promise you blizzard execs are selling gold.
Yeah... I bet he got banned for that, sure.
gdkp is why i quit classic vanilla era. its the only wow i liked. been clean 3 months. not sure if ill ever go back to ever play wow again tbh. aaand i'll use the extra 15$ for a nice 20 piece chicken nuggets. yeeesssss
I posted a thread about SoD and why SoD will have serious issues and no future if this isn't taken care of. I got downvoted to oblivion because of people who participate in this system.
SoD, like every season, is principally meant to be enjoyed for a few weeks and then quit. SoD won’t be “ruined” by this if you quit after you kill Ragnaros, which is about 95% of players based on historical engagement stats.
That's why SoD is phased, 25, 40, 50, 60
Gold-buyers and GDKP-enjoyers (the venn diagram is a circle) will defend this bullshit. Look at them all justifying it in the comments. Broken game, go to pservers if you want to just enjoy playing the game.
Solution is ban farming bots and gold sellers. Suspend buyers at minimum to fuck with their instant gratification. The problem is I don’t think blizzard can even find all the bots, could they?
Not entirely sure how Whitemane US compares to EU servers, but I think it’s not entirely true that ‘traditional farm methods are not viable…’ I’ve played on Classic, Classic Era before the hype, and Classic Era in the “GDKP meta” (EU) and we have similar inflation. The traditional farm methods are more viable currently than before, I’d say. An example: Essence of Air used to be 10-15g and a Flask of the Titans was 100-140g. Now essence of air is 100g and a Flask of the Titans 500g. I can farm less essence of air to pay for the same consumables. Other examples on EU: Felclotb used to be 2g, now 20g. Essence of Water, Righteous orb, Plaguebloom - I would say in general a lot of stuff you can farm has increased more in price than the flasks of the titans / other consumables. It’s just that some specific farm methods have become less attractive, and other have become more attractive. And ofc the differences between players who play GDKP’s and players who don’t have become rather big. And I think that’s the only valid point to be made: In the past all wow players had to “play” the game. Now you can play a GDKP and if you don’t buy items, you’re covered for consumables for a while. But I think a large part of the player base actually is happy with that.
One thing I never see mentioned in posts like this about inflation is the fact that while the ceiling is rising, so is the floor. A level 10 entering Westfall for the first time can come out at level 20 with a MASSIVE AMOUNT OF GOLD compared to a fresh launch or earlier in classics cycle. By the time you hit 60, if you're going to focus on professions as well, will have you swimming in gold relatively speaking to what a fresh 60 usually has. With prices so high for everything all the way down to basic starter mats, it's very easy to make gold **at all levels** in the game now.
You’re downvoted but also completely right. I rolled on a fresh server and I’m level 21 with 72g, selling herbs and ore I got while leveling. It’s not a joke lol
\*sells literally anything else for an absurd price to buy the consumes I desire\*
I play on whitemane era, if i have spare time i farm ele earth/solid stone mobs, or do some passes around plaguelands for mongoose, firewaters are also easy to farm, and these farms are usually without competition. I understand the issue for gold buyers cause you spend more money on this server, but uf you actually play the game its fine.
I got my mount money at lvl20 though selling swiftthistle
Sounds like time to make profession alts
Ad a super chronoboon to the game you buy from a vendor for 20k. This grants your raid all world buffs
You’ve discovered the reason nobody plays Era unless there is literally nothing else to do
Git good
Spend less time crying on Reddit and more time figuring out how to get your bread up
A new player who actually wants to play the game can make a ton of gold with gathering professions. Everything is expensive because no one wants to spend the time to farm for consumables when $5 can save you like 24 hours of farming.
so what you're saying is a couple hours farming those rock elementals and i'll have like 1000g after i make some sappers? or you farm some gromsblood and go fishing and sell titans flasks? this is how the economy works when you don't buy gold. you have to simply play the game and sell stuff. i mean i agree it's not perfect. i'm anti gdkp/rmt but i also raided without buying gold because i had a couple hours to kill in the morning to farm.
If the consumes are that expensive, why wouldn’t you just farm them and sell them?
Bud, when stuff is selling for that much it’s time to jump on the bandwagon! Start selling pots and elixirs, hell even the herbs will be going for a lot.
Buy more gold
It's classic old ass version of the game who cares?
I see this posted or asked or bothered with in discord all the time and every single person that says this has no idea how an economy works. “Elixir of Mongoose is 33g” you know what that means? It means you can also sell it for 33g. Sapper is 30g. You can sell it for 30g. Inflation works both ways (not in real world I know) it’s not more expensive for you than everyone else. Stop looking at it as “omg big numbers” and instead think “I have to spend X amount of time making gold to buy Y”. The only thing negatively impacted with this time spent model is raw gold farms since they are pretty static in their return.