In the field of instructional design, we talk about the concept of unintended instructional outcomes. This is when a person learns something that you didn't plan for them to learn. Unintended effects plague all kinds of fields, not just instruction.
A good example of an unintended effect:
When we moved to our new home a month ago, we decided to put the cats' litter boxes in the basement. However, we didn't want to leave the basement door open all the time, so we installed a cat door, a device neither of my cats, Boo and Goblin, had ever seen. We taped the cat door flap open for a couple of weeks until they were used to passing through the "cat hole" regularly, and then put the flap down. Boo took to it like the proverbial duck to water, but Goblin took a little training to realize he could push the door open himself (he's not the brightest cat in the world). It was complicated by a small magnet that kept the door in place once down and required a little force to overcome the light magnetism, but in a few days Goblin was opening the cat door like a pro.
The unintended effect? If any door in the house is not latched tightly, Goblin opens it. And I mean, he OPENS it ... the door goes flying back on its hinges. Office, bedroom, even the bathroom -- latch it or you'll have the door fly wide open and a very proud gray-and-white cat looking at you (and anyone else who happens to be nearby).
So, what does my cat's learned door fetish have to do with WoW?
We all know about unintended effects in the game -- and I don't mean bugs. I mean events like the Great Hakkar Corrupted Blood Plague of September 2005. Or discovering that a change to a class really imbalanced something else.
Daily quests have introduced into the game a very easy way for level 70 characters to make cash, and a lot of it. Many dailies have rewards of 10-25g each. Do several of these a day, combined with high level farming, and your character can become filthy rich without the kind of effort that being filthy rich used to require. Blizzard introduced these not only as a new way to do quests and encourage people to build different factions or see places they might be ignoring otherwise; they did it to discourage people from buying gold. Why risk your account status on buying gold for real money when you can just spend a little time each day doing dailies? I can't say whether this has worked, but to judge from the seeming increasing desperation of gold sellers to advertise in game (of course, Blizzard's success at shutting down various methods of spamming adds to it as well), it's probably put a big dent in the gold farming business.
Add to this the concept of game maturity. We've hit the three-year mark on WoW, and although there are more mainstream ads out there, I haven't heard any announcement of hitting the 10-million subscriber mark. It seemed as though every time we turned around there was another announcement of another million subscribers. The number of new players will take its usual Christmas bump, but for the most part, the people who want to play WoW are already playing. This means few truly new players; although I don't have anything but anecdotal evidence to back this up, I believe that the vast majority of your sub-20 characters are alts of higher level ones, many with at least one level 70 sugar daddy (sugar mama?).
Game maturity + richer mains = rampant inflation in the AH.
People like to blame gold sellers, but gold sellers have been here since day 1. This is a relatively recent development. Inflation of certain items has always been around and is often tied to a particular game event, such as the yearly upsell of small eggs during Winter Veil or the amazingly high prices of ores and gems when TBC introduced jewelcrafting. This, however, is not tied to an individual event and seems to be getting worse.
I first noticed this when I was playing around with a human rogue on a PvP-RP server a few months ago. At the time, I chalked up this phenomenon to playing Alliance on a crowded PvP-RP server -- a double financial whammy. I've noticed that the laws of supply and demand don't necessarily follow on auction houses.
You'd think that with more people contributing to a server's economy that prices would, overall, be considerably lower. They're not. In fact, prices tend to be quite a bit less on low-population servers, and significantly higher on high population ones. This seems to be almost universal, applying equally to gear (weapons and armor), consumables (potions, armor kits, food, drink), and trade goods (metal, leather, cloth, etc).
Occasional fluctuations in particular tradeskill item markets happened all the time. This usually happened when someone tried to be a market maker -- that is, corner a particular market. You'd see someone try to buy out everyone's wool cloth and then sell it for a much higher fixed price, with the idea that they'd eventually manage to reset the price and it would always be that high from now on. In theory this can work, but it requires such a long, sustained effort to do so (not to mention some cooperation from other sellers, who are usually only too happy to undercut you by a significant percentage, hopefully significant enough that they'll make an instant sale to the reseller) and most prospective monopolists end up losing their money, their patience, or both, long before they can have any permanent effect on the market.
But for the past few months, on many different servers (I ran auction scans on several different servers of all four types, on low and high population servers) I've been seeing a disturbing trend toward rampant inflation of low level gear. And I don't mean blues, which have often hovered in the 10-20g market (higher for desirable level 19 or 29 pieces, the sweet spot for battleground twinks). I mean green armor for level 10-20s being posted for gold -- sometimes as high as five or six gold for among the most desirable items, especially agility leather, intellect cloth, daggers, and certain staves.
I've been working on my now-level 23 priest Epiphenie, and her gear is mostly an amalgam of stuff she's been made by my tailor mage and what she's gotten for quest rewards and dungeon drops (yes, I shamelessly ask my husband to have his 70 warlock rush her through low-level dungeons). I used to upgrade my stuff regularly through the auction house during these levels, where you could easily find gear for 10-30 silver. Not anymore.
The sad fact is this: people do what works. And if it works, even only sometimes, they'll continue to post outrageous prices for gear. Sure, they can get an almost immediate sale posting a level 10 +2 agility dagger for 40s, but get just one twink whose main has five thousand gold just sitting in the bank -- hey, what's 5g to them? Who cares if it's only level 10 and you'll outgrow it by that afternoon? It's easier than trying to find something else, or putting up with that white quest dagger.
So who's it hurting? It's not hurting me; I am experienced enough to know how to work around less-than-stellar gear, and I can always pinpoint dungeon drops and rewards. I try to continue to sell low level drops for reasonable prices, but I suspect that they are mostly getting snapped up by resellers rather than newbies.
The real victims here are the non-twinks: new players who just started the game and don't have a rich 70 to support their habits, as well as more casual players who don't have the time to put into getting a 70 to support their alt habits.
Of course, the good news is that the recent AH inflation cuts both ways. While I am adamant that I won't charge outrageous prices for low level gear drops, I'm perfectly happy to overcharge for metals, cloth, and leather. Those are easy for anyone to farm for themselves; anyone with a little time can make a quick round of Durotar or Dun Morogh and get 4-5 stacks of copper ore. Epiphenie, without relying on my other characters for actual money, has almost saved enough to get her mount when she turns 40.
So newbies of the world: go forth and farm. Overcharge those same level 70s who are trying to get their twinks' alchemy and blacksmithing to 300 overnight. Save your money, put up with some low level shoddy gear, and smile.
A good example of an unintended effect:
When we moved to our new home a month ago, we decided to put the cats' litter boxes in the basement. However, we didn't want to leave the basement door open all the time, so we installed a cat door, a device neither of my cats, Boo and Goblin, had ever seen. We taped the cat door flap open for a couple of weeks until they were used to passing through the "cat hole" regularly, and then put the flap down. Boo took to it like the proverbial duck to water, but Goblin took a little training to realize he could push the door open himself (he's not the brightest cat in the world). It was complicated by a small magnet that kept the door in place once down and required a little force to overcome the light magnetism, but in a few days Goblin was opening the cat door like a pro.
The unintended effect? If any door in the house is not latched tightly, Goblin opens it. And I mean, he OPENS it ... the door goes flying back on its hinges. Office, bedroom, even the bathroom -- latch it or you'll have the door fly wide open and a very proud gray-and-white cat looking at you (and anyone else who happens to be nearby).
So, what does my cat's learned door fetish have to do with WoW?
We all know about unintended effects in the game -- and I don't mean bugs. I mean events like the Great Hakkar Corrupted Blood Plague of September 2005. Or discovering that a change to a class really imbalanced something else.
Daily quests have introduced into the game a very easy way for level 70 characters to make cash, and a lot of it. Many dailies have rewards of 10-25g each. Do several of these a day, combined with high level farming, and your character can become filthy rich without the kind of effort that being filthy rich used to require. Blizzard introduced these not only as a new way to do quests and encourage people to build different factions or see places they might be ignoring otherwise; they did it to discourage people from buying gold. Why risk your account status on buying gold for real money when you can just spend a little time each day doing dailies? I can't say whether this has worked, but to judge from the seeming increasing desperation of gold sellers to advertise in game (of course, Blizzard's success at shutting down various methods of spamming adds to it as well), it's probably put a big dent in the gold farming business.
Add to this the concept of game maturity. We've hit the three-year mark on WoW, and although there are more mainstream ads out there, I haven't heard any announcement of hitting the 10-million subscriber mark. It seemed as though every time we turned around there was another announcement of another million subscribers. The number of new players will take its usual Christmas bump, but for the most part, the people who want to play WoW are already playing. This means few truly new players; although I don't have anything but anecdotal evidence to back this up, I believe that the vast majority of your sub-20 characters are alts of higher level ones, many with at least one level 70 sugar daddy (sugar mama?).
Game maturity + richer mains = rampant inflation in the AH.
People like to blame gold sellers, but gold sellers have been here since day 1. This is a relatively recent development. Inflation of certain items has always been around and is often tied to a particular game event, such as the yearly upsell of small eggs during Winter Veil or the amazingly high prices of ores and gems when TBC introduced jewelcrafting. This, however, is not tied to an individual event and seems to be getting worse.
I first noticed this when I was playing around with a human rogue on a PvP-RP server a few months ago. At the time, I chalked up this phenomenon to playing Alliance on a crowded PvP-RP server -- a double financial whammy. I've noticed that the laws of supply and demand don't necessarily follow on auction houses.
You'd think that with more people contributing to a server's economy that prices would, overall, be considerably lower. They're not. In fact, prices tend to be quite a bit less on low-population servers, and significantly higher on high population ones. This seems to be almost universal, applying equally to gear (weapons and armor), consumables (potions, armor kits, food, drink), and trade goods (metal, leather, cloth, etc).
Occasional fluctuations in particular tradeskill item markets happened all the time. This usually happened when someone tried to be a market maker -- that is, corner a particular market. You'd see someone try to buy out everyone's wool cloth and then sell it for a much higher fixed price, with the idea that they'd eventually manage to reset the price and it would always be that high from now on. In theory this can work, but it requires such a long, sustained effort to do so (not to mention some cooperation from other sellers, who are usually only too happy to undercut you by a significant percentage, hopefully significant enough that they'll make an instant sale to the reseller) and most prospective monopolists end up losing their money, their patience, or both, long before they can have any permanent effect on the market.
But for the past few months, on many different servers (I ran auction scans on several different servers of all four types, on low and high population servers) I've been seeing a disturbing trend toward rampant inflation of low level gear. And I don't mean blues, which have often hovered in the 10-20g market (higher for desirable level 19 or 29 pieces, the sweet spot for battleground twinks). I mean green armor for level 10-20s being posted for gold -- sometimes as high as five or six gold for among the most desirable items, especially agility leather, intellect cloth, daggers, and certain staves.
I've been working on my now-level 23 priest Epiphenie, and her gear is mostly an amalgam of stuff she's been made by my tailor mage and what she's gotten for quest rewards and dungeon drops (yes, I shamelessly ask my husband to have his 70 warlock rush her through low-level dungeons). I used to upgrade my stuff regularly through the auction house during these levels, where you could easily find gear for 10-30 silver. Not anymore.
The sad fact is this: people do what works. And if it works, even only sometimes, they'll continue to post outrageous prices for gear. Sure, they can get an almost immediate sale posting a level 10 +2 agility dagger for 40s, but get just one twink whose main has five thousand gold just sitting in the bank -- hey, what's 5g to them? Who cares if it's only level 10 and you'll outgrow it by that afternoon? It's easier than trying to find something else, or putting up with that white quest dagger.
So who's it hurting? It's not hurting me; I am experienced enough to know how to work around less-than-stellar gear, and I can always pinpoint dungeon drops and rewards. I try to continue to sell low level drops for reasonable prices, but I suspect that they are mostly getting snapped up by resellers rather than newbies.
The real victims here are the non-twinks: new players who just started the game and don't have a rich 70 to support their habits, as well as more casual players who don't have the time to put into getting a 70 to support their alt habits.
Of course, the good news is that the recent AH inflation cuts both ways. While I am adamant that I won't charge outrageous prices for low level gear drops, I'm perfectly happy to overcharge for metals, cloth, and leather. Those are easy for anyone to farm for themselves; anyone with a little time can make a quick round of Durotar or Dun Morogh and get 4-5 stacks of copper ore. Epiphenie, without relying on my other characters for actual money, has almost saved enough to get her mount when she turns 40.
So newbies of the world: go forth and farm. Overcharge those same level 70s who are trying to get their twinks' alchemy and blacksmithing to 300 overnight. Save your money, put up with some low level shoddy gear, and smile.
2 comments:
Inflation doesn't necessarily hurt noob players. Because they can receive a number of low level greens as drops and turn around and auction them for inflated prices. This gives them the money to buy what they need at inflated prices as well.
I could not agree with you more!
I began playing W.O.W. on a PVP server shortly before the Burning Crusade expansion. Although I was a new player, I was able to go to the auction house with my first character, a Troll Warrior, and accentuate my quest gear with the meager earnings I’d scavenged from drops and rewards (approximately 45 silver).
A year and several alts later, I rerolled a Blood Elf Mage and after visiting the auction house for some cloth with better stats, I was utterly astonished to see that the rates had skyrocketed. Items between the level ranges of 15 – 20 were going for two to three gold! Truth be told, while I have two wealthy 70s, I’m way too cheap to waste money on items that will be replaced within an hour or two of playtime.
What’s truly sad is that I’ve been flirting with the idea of creating a character on an RP server for sometime now, but knowing my new RP character will be destitute compared to the lowbie alts of various level 70s is enough to make me reconsider. For goodness sake – I’m poor in real life, now I’m poor in digital life too? No thanks!
(I’m also averse to transferring a pre-existing character to an RP realm because of real-life costs.)
PS: Your blog is extremely well written!
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