Friday, June 22, 2012

Black Market

I suppose I have time today to write what's on my mind. Black Market AH is hotly debated between those who realise the positive effect it will have on the economy as a whole and those who hate it when other people get things.

It seems obvious to me that luxuries are something which are in short supply in the WoW economy. Gold tends to lose its value when you get past a few hundred thousand, and so the few luxury items that do exist tend to sell for stupid amounts as the buyers often don't have any use for the gold aside the few items that come along. And of course this huge sum of money existing in the economy without anything terribly useful to spend it on leads to inflation as enough players are wealthy enough to easily afford to drop huge sums of gold on the few things they want [like the latest BoEs or epic gems] without too much deliberation, leaving anyone who has not spent months building up a small fortune priced out of this part of the game.

Of course, as Theck pointed out on her blog [Theck is female, right?] luxuries and BiS Heroic raiding gear are two different things, the latter being something that provides a tangible advantage top tier raiding guilds, groups which are used to doing whatever is necessary to ensure every advantage is available to them, groups for whom it is fully within their capabilities to take control of a server's Auction House if they were given a reason to do so.

So I really hope that doesn't happen. All they have to do to fix it is restrict current tier items from dropping within the first couple of months of that tier.

A few people have brought up the idea that having more use for large sums of gold will stimulate business for gold sellers, which I can't necessarily disagree with, and I can only hope that having more opportunities to spend a spend large sum of money in one transaction will make tracking and punishing the buyers a lot simpler.

I'm really excited to see what this ends up looking like in the live game, and especially whether there will be a noticeable change in the relative pricing of things like BoEs and top tier gems.

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