Most people who play World of Warcraft have recently noticed a huge flux in their server's economy. The general Auction House price for consumables and materials have gone through the roof and it is making it very difficult for casual players to obtain enchants and crafted materials. What is the cause of this sudden global WoW inflation? Daily Quests.
Thanks to recent patches and updates, the amount of daily quests that can be completed, and the amount available have increased considerably with the patched extension known as the Isle of Quel'Danas and the new faction, The Shattered Sun Offensive.
As it stands now, you can make over 400 gold per day just doing daily quests. So, if you do your dailies every day of the week, that's over 2800 gold each week. That means that a level 70 toon can conceivably obtain their epic flying in a short two weeks of doing dailies. Not to mention that after you do get your epic flying skill, you can then do more dailies by completing the Netherwing Ledge dailies to obtain your Swift Netherdrake mount.
Now, since the daily quests are in every sense of the word, easy money, there is less of a need for people to farm. Less farmers equals less crops, or in the case of WoW, less materials. That means that the few people who stick to farming can basically name their price on the materials they sell or the items they have crafted. Since the patches, I have seen the price of most Elixirs go up a good 15-20 gold per stack (5) and Flasks go up as much as 10g each. Don't even ask about Enchanting materials. My goodness!
So, as Blizzard continues to make this game easier and easier and more casual-friendly, it appears that they had absolutely no foresight into the damage their on-the-fly redesigning would do to the existing environment. Typically classic of big business.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Dailies Plague the WoW Economy
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6 comments:
The other thing to consider is people with multiple Lvl 70's. I, myself, have 3 - 70's and can bang thru all the SSO Island quests with all 3 toons in about 45 minutes to an hour.
Two loops of Outland for the SSO quests in BEM, Netherstorm, SMV & Nagrand give me 8--12 greens to DE for Enchant Mats.
But, I've also made a fortune working the AH as well.
Aldor Rep items have really spiked in price due to the Exhaulted Necks being so much better than the Scryer ones.
Believe it or not, my hunter friend actually grinded out all he needed to go from Scryers to Aldor just for the SSO necklace, so yeah, I can see why people would jack the prices up on rep-rewarding items. Glad my hunter is a Scryer. LOL
I thought the idea with the dailies was to have everyone swimming in gold so no one would be tempted to buy it any more, i.e. a hit to the gold sellers. Inflation may be defeating that intention, tho :P
I believe that daily's were added, primarily to allow raiders to have a quick way to get gold to cover the expenses associated with raiding, thus discouraging them from buying gold. There have been several articles on the World First guilds where they have admitted to purchasing gold to cover their raiding costs.
By putting in dailies where in a little over an hour you can net 100g, it means that players don't have to buy gold to pay for repairs.
As a casual player I love the dailies and the inflation they bring to mats. The only daily I do is gaining the advantage which is a free 16g on top of my one hour herbing run of terokkar and zangar.
This run when converted to elixirs nets me a little over 300g for one hour of effort. As more people do dailies and have more money to spend, my herbing will be even more profitable. This is due to the fact that there are only so many nodes and they only spawn at a set time.
I think it works out. Initially I was very worried about the cash influx, but on several servers prices have stabilized for the moment (somewhat like the oil market) The large issue is that there isn't much to buy in WoW aside from reagent costs.
If raiding consumables double in cost, well that's not good, but we can just as easily farm for them ourselves.
According to the trickle-down economy theory everything is affected by disruption at the top of the heap (ie 70). Now things like copper ore are selling for more, so it helps the lowbys out. On the server where I dont have a 70 main, the server economy was badly out of whack pre-2.4 (things wouldn't sell, everything was expensive). Now it's pretty stable and my leveling toon actually has some money (again, not like its that useful except for the mount).
The reality is that only a few people will go to the extreme of continuously farming for gold day after day by doing dailies. And those people really just save the gold, so its not like they are throwing their 10k gold into the economy. I've stopped doing dailies on my main, i'll do enough to keep up with raiding costs, but beyond that, nope. I'm gearing my 70 alt and for that I do dailies, but I'm putting that money right back into the economy by buying mats.
TL;DR i think it stabilizes itself by the fact that money in WoW can't really buy much, and most people will not do the dailies ad infinitum.
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