WoW Economic Collapse

Europeans can't seem to grasp the logic and everyone else seems to be baffled.

ehhhh :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Some Americans....jezus.... such a high image of themselves...
notice the " .be " in my screenname and yes...i AM offended.

Lone_bullet.BE ( belgium of you're wondering...aye, thats europe...it's the lil country 80% of the american younlings cant point at a worldmap )
 
Lone_Bullet.be said:
Europeans can't seem to grasp the logic and everyone else seems to be baffled.

ehhhh :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Some Americans....jezus.... such a high image of themselves...
notice the " .be " in my screenname and yes...i AM offended.

Lone_bullet.BE ( belgium of you're wondering...aye, thats europe...it's the lil country 80% of the american younlings cant point at a worldmap )
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Wrong thread?

Anyways, I bet those filthy Americans can't find Belgium on the map!
 
AceTKK said:
How will you respond to having your inventory bought out and immediately relisted at a higher price? You've repeatedly mentioned holding back some of your inventory, what does that mean? As soon as you put the rest up the same thing will happen again.
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If you buy his Widgets for 2g and relist them at 5g, all he has to do is immediately put up more Widgets at the same 2g price. People will go to the AH and see a stack of Widgets for 2g and another stack for 5g. Which do you think they will buy? As long as he is cheaper, you won't be able to sell any of your more expensive stock, and you will be the one losing money on auction fees.
 
dotK said:
Wrong thread?

Anyways, I bet those filthy Americans can't find Belgium on the map!
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meh ok....you got me ^^ Just let me be proud of my country, mkay ;)
It's just that...Well it's TOO common, and truely sad :(

yer yer...offtopic i know...just don't get me started and watch those words..

Lone
 
dotK said:
Anyways, I bet those filthy Americans can't find Belgium on the map!
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I'm pretty sure most Europeans cant find Kansas on a blank map either
 
Hey, great observation. Let me restate to make sure that I'm following you. Since people want arcane crystals, rather than buy bars from me, they'll just mine or obtain thorium ore and then make the bar themselves and go from there. Skip the middle man right?

Sure, that's plausible. But most people go for convienence. Why wait nine days to make and cool down your Thorium bars when you can just walk over and buy it from my friend for pennies on the dollar? (Or is that coppers on the gold?)

Excess supply will not necessarily ruin the entire thing, since the real goal is to cause a deflation. Just now, my buddy came over and he was talking about potions. He was saying that often potions will sell for less than the components that make up the potion. The reason being is that with all the alchemists making excess potions, there's a glut of 'em out there. The potions are being created because alchemists need to make them because of their profession, not because someone is necessarily trying to make a profit.. There will always be a demand potions, but the supply will always exceed it.

If there's a horde of ore out there, there's not a big concern. People will find that it's just easier to skip buying the ore and just buy the bar directly from us. Because (as far as I know) there isn't a reason to mine ore just to mine it other than trying to eventually profit from it, if we have the Thorium Bar market monopolized, we somewhat control the demand for ore (because we'll eventually be the number one buyers of ore) we indirectly control the price of ore. To explain it fully would probably require another post, but to sum up, an ore flood can be accounted for.
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once again I dont think you've grasped the end game content that drives this wow market. Your idea of cornering thorium is flawed because as long as the FARMERS farm thorium for ARCANE CRYSTALS there will be an endless supply of thorium on the market. The real end goal being arcane crystals since they sell for much more, depending on the server. It's not necessarily just the buyers that want crystals.. as farmers want them to sell to the buyers. If you look at the cost/reward benefit of farming rich thorium, you'll see that it's more beneficial for the farmer to farm rich thorium for arcane crystals than to farm mobs for the chance of a purple drop since the drop rate of a crystal is much higher with regularly spawning rich thorium veins. Also maybe you dont understand but there is no difference in ore or bar since to farm the ore, you will have the necessary skill level to make bars. If i had 3000 ore in my bags, I just simply walk up to a forge, open my skill window, click create, and boom 3000 ore are being turned into bars. Most of the farmers turn them into bars anyways since they stack higher (20 vs 10) than ore.

Also any of the 280+ skill level potions will never sell for less than the required mats. Especially at the 300 level, there is no need to make potions to skill up, and thus no one would be stupid (at least not many) enough to make potions for the purpose of selling at a loss.

my end point being.. thorium is still just a byproduct of farming for crystals which are far more rare and valuable. Even if you deflate the market to the point where it's easier to vendor the thorium bars, people will still mine for crystals.
 
Gongo said:
I'm pretty sure most Europeans cant find Kansas on a blank map either
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true but 1st of all... kansas is a state :) Europeans generally see it as ' USA ' not seperate states, i can say i know the position of the most important ones and if am not mistaken kansas is somewhat in the middle of the USA....maybe a little on the eastside. But beside the point. I just say that i noticed he's seeing us Europeans as a bunch of fools and bumb retards. And i know he's not the only one. I can point some arguments proving the oposide of it ( Eu's being dumd ) but i know i'll only start a flamewar.
 
Lone_Bullet.be said:
Lone_bullet.BE ( belgium of you're wondering...aye, thats europe...it's the lil country 80% of the american younlings cant point at a worldmap )
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That's because you are insignificant :eek:
 
dotK said:
Anyways, I bet those filthy Americans can't find Belgium on the map!
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Mainly because they can't see it on a map.

Oh, you see what I did there? :p
 
Lone_Bullet.be said:
true but 1st of all... kansas is a state :) Europeans generally see it as ' USA ' not seperate states, i can say i know the position of the most important ones and if am not mistaken kansas is somewhat in the middle of the USA....maybe a little on the eastside. But beside the point. I just say that i noticed he's seeing us Europeans as a bunch of fools and bumb retards. And i know he's not the only one. I can point some arguments proving the oposide of it ( Eu's being dumd ) but i know i'll only start a flamewar.
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Yes, precious, but bear in mind they've got to try to justify themselves for the most part. Let them have this one. It's not like anyone needs to prove themselves to this particular audience, eheh...?
 
Wally said:
Yes, precious, but bear in mind they've got to try to justify themselves for the most part. Let them have this one. It's not like anyone needs to prove themselves to this particular audience, eheh...?
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Aye ^^ but i just have to hear about how they see us Europeans as retards...and how many times do we have to hear about how they saved us in '40-'45 ? sick of it....but now i am generalising ( is that word exists ) so to all Americans who think otherwise, my excuses.

Capt. Insano said:
Sorry for the crappy quick MS Paint format. lol

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allthough you're pointing at luembourg, i think you mean the blue ( waterfilled) gab avove it...and so:you , sir deserve a biscuit....oh what the hell am i belgian or am i not? Give the man some Belgian fries ( there's NO such thing a frnsh fries;) ), chocolate, one of our beers and waffles ^^ )
 
Lone_Bullet.be said:
Aye ^^ but i just have to hear about how they see us Europeans as retards...
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Maybe if you didn't incorporate your country into your username and make random, off-topic posts about it in a thread that has nothing at all to do with it we wouldn't think you were a retard...

This is your first post in this thread and I can't even find anything it is relating to, I can only assume you posted in the wrong thread :confused:

Lone_Bullet.be said:
Europeans can't seem to grasp the logic and everyone else seems to be baffled.

ehhhh :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Some Americans....jezus.... such a high image of themselves...
notice the " .be " in my screenname and yes...i AM offended.

Lone_bullet.BE ( belgium of you're wondering...aye, thats europe...it's the lil country 80% of the american younlings cant point at a worldmap )
Click to expand...

Don't insult American's, we own the internet.
 
Yikes, this thread took a left turn. Let's get it back on track shall we?

My friend and I came up with a possible solution to discouraging farming using game mechanics that do exist in the game code, but isn't being used. I'm going to simply things a bit to make the concept a bit more clear. I'll make some generalizations that will apply in most cases, but I'm know it doesn't apply to everything.

When it comes to farming, essentially you get a bunch of stuff and then sell it on the market. After reading all these posts, I think we can agree that good farmer brings to market large number of items, stacks them and puts out a bunch of auctions. At any one time, this guy could have 400 fish constantly on the market. Let's say for the sake of argument this guy sells 50 fish a day. It would over a week for him to sell of them.

Let's get back to the real world. At a open fish market, would you buy a fish that's been outside for a week? Yeah, didn't think so. So in WoW, why isn't spoilage used more effectively? They use it for some quests and tournaments as far as I understand, so the code is already there.

So how does this effect an economy like WoW. Sticking with supposedly perishable items, a spoilage factor limits how much inventory you can have. If demand is less than your supply, eventually you'll lose your product. So with the above example, if cooked fish expire in 3 days, that farmer needs to sell all 400 fish in that time if he wants to make money.

This is actually good for the non-farmer. In order to move inventory, the farmer has to either have less inventory, lower his prices or do a combination of both. The average player might not make as much of a profit margin as he could if he wants to sell on the market, but he's got a better chance of getting his product out there at this point. Also, if he's a buyer, everything is cheaper.

You could apply the spoilage factor to other items if wanted. Potions would lose their effectiveness over time. Magical items could lose their enchantments. Armor and weapons could rust. Yeah, it could get a bit difficult to explain it for every type of item of how it slowly degrades (like ore) but Blizzard could pick and choose. Maybe for those really heavily farmed items that everyone bitches about they could make a "fungus" that eats it or something. It doesn't matter.

The point would be to decrease the amount of inventory a character could have of something which in turn forces you to not harvest as much, consume it faster and make the price come down so you can move that item.

I imagine that Blizzard hasn't really implemented this because for the end user, it's a bit hard to explain it to the casual player. "You mean that because I didn't log in for two weeks all my potions are worthless?" That would piss me off. Accompanying this change Blizzard would need to make some small adjustments to either turn spoilage on only in the auction house or institute some some kind of maintence that you need to perform for personal items to keep product integrity. A spell to maintain freshness if you will.

Some other MMOs have similar systems, but if you want to put a dent in farming, this would help. (Well, that and spoilage would actually help our economic model that we're trying. :p )

Oh, and Gongo, I see what you're saying about the Arcane Crystals. I have a response that I'm typing up, but I'm a bit busy at the moment and it'll take a while to write up. I haven't forgotten it. It actually is a fascinating twist to the idea.
 
Torgo said:
my friend was pulling in at least 25 gold a day just doing the auction house.
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This is the real funny part about this post.

I make a ton of money on the Auction House on my server, and a guildie of mine is up to over 6k gold, with our guild bank at around 18k gold or so.

If you're only making 25 gold a day, you need to rethink your strategies.
 
CatsGoMoo said:
This is the real funny part about this post.

I make a ton of money on the Auction House on my server, and a guildie of mine is up to over 6k gold, with our guild bank at around 18k gold or so.

If you're only making 25 gold a day, you need to rethink your strategies.
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I don't think his strategy was to make as much gold as possible, but to eliminate competition so that you can do to the market as you please.
 
RoffleCopter said:
I don't think his strategy was to make as much gold as possible, but to eliminate competition so that you can do to the market as you please.
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thats the thing, if you eliminate the competition and control the market as the OP has claimed, he should still rake in more than 25g a day.
 
The intent again is to have fun. I had a problem with my main... he gets terrible drops. I can do entire instances and NEVER see a green! When I go out with a party, I consistently get the lowest rolls on loot. My guild laughs about it, because the party prospers because overall for the party the drops are better when I come along. I don't know what mechanics are at work, but the flip side is I do crazy damage, seem to fish without effort and get insane xp out of quests.

But it was hard enjoy the character, because I had to buy or beg everything equipped on him. I wanted to make enough money to subsidize his short comings. This AH market strategy was born out of necessity. I target commodities and items that are consistent with my toon's level. As I have advanced I add more markets to my portfolio. I make it a point to never invest more than 30 to 40 mininutes to AH, because after that it becomes work. So I use some AH mods that help me do the analysis and auction posting; I setup my markets and let the AH do the rest. I just collect the gold through out my connect time and check on things whenever I pass by an AH. NO exploits, NO bots!

The only thing that I put extra time into is occassionally I will fish and cook up some deviate fish. Half, I take to auction, the rest I give away to noobs. After their first one they are hooked, and I have new customer for a while until they can make their own. We all know how long that takes ;)

I am not in it for big profit, just a way to make the game more fun for me. I am happy with what I make because that is all I need. I also watch the margins on my markets and the demand. If the margins are not high enough to turn a profit at near cost based on the demand, then I abandon that market.

There are a few criteria for identifying the goods to sell, but I will for now be satisfied with teasing you with the details. As my level has increased, so have my profits. Thus far, it has worked for me on every market, given the appropriate analysis. And I have tried on several servers.

My guild says it is kind of a geeky thing, but they know it works because I always have enough money to buy what I need and then some. I even purchased mounts for other guildies [because my toon is a warlock and did not need to buy one].

I am enjoying the dicussion, I will contribute when I can. Otherwise, I share a lot of the details with Torgo... Keep up the good work :cool: ,and enjoy the game...

Later,

MeatPuppet
 
In case it wasn't clear, Meatpuppet is my co-worker and partner in petty crime. (Which reminds me... I need to show you the actual game Meatpuppet that came out about 10 years back. Should finally run decently on today's hardware.)
 
/subscribed

A blog would be incredibly beneficial, because then a casual observer like me wouldn't have to sort through "WTF you don't know what you're talking about" and "Only 25 gold? I can make more than that in 0.0002 seconds" and "you sound like a 1st year MBA student that just throws around buzzwords."
 
Someone tried this with righteous orbs on our server. I just held onto all my orbs til the price went back up, didn't hurt my feelings any.
 
Been there, done that.

While I've played the market some on WoW, my experience with a similar process has been everquest and final fantasy XI. Prior to the gold dupe problems, I had a similar setup on the FV server of everquest. It's all basic economics - buy low, sell high, take advantage with changes in the server rules make a previous worthless item suddenly desired. I had over 3 million plat just running the bazaar before duping became a problem and inflation went through the roof.

Did a similar thing when the american FFXI servers opened. Found a easy to complete quest that required common, low priced items but yielded a end product that sold for 100x the intial investment and ran it non-stop for the 2 weeks the server was opened. By then a few others figured it out and the market bottom, but by then I had a huge cash flow to work with and by setting up characters at each of the 3 markets, could by low at one, transfer goods and sell high at another. I also tried controlling the market on several items, but found that I couldn't sustain it more than a couple of weeks, since after a few days others would realize the market change I was trying and would fill the void I was creating with removed the profit margin I was looking for. After a while I had more gil than I could possible spend given the limited item availability and actually played the game, at which point I realized true frustation and quit. My characters are probably still on the servers, so if anyone here still plays...

Now, if you're not looking to make more than just enough profit to keep going, the potential is there, but the problem is the resources you're working with aren't limited, and you're working a market thats being contributed to by 20,000+ players. Unless you can monitor it 24/7, constantly controlling every sale of the items your trying to corner, I don't see how you could completely control the economy short of the limited items your dealing with, let along collapse the economy for more than a day or two at most.
 
Actually, you don't have to monitor the market 24/7. You just have to figure out what the demand is for your commodity and make your product available at a price that attracts all the buyers in that market for a few days.

You soak up all the demand which forces your large inventory carriers to dump their product [often below market] to move their inventory because they become need their gold to play the game or to sell on Ebay. You now have a supply of goods at below your cost. What is even better is they do not get out of the market all at once, so you can sustain this behavior for a couple weeks which give you a psychological advantage to your competitors. They do not know how long you can last; they just see that day in and day out you monopolize the market they are selling in.

New entries have to come in below your price to compete which make them vulnerable to buy outs that can be repackaged and resold. Pretty soon you are dictating the price. You can control the supply and the demand by manipulating who is willing to participate in the market and what price they can sell for. You are determining what is available to the market and at what price.

Keep your price low and no one can compete because quality is not a factor. More player can afford your commodity because it is cheap, so your demand increases until everyone who would be interested at your price is buying and the market is saturated.

I only post auctions once per day on weekdays and twice on weekends. I check in on markets when I go through a city with an AH. I refrain from posting more frequently because you can actually screw up your pricing of your auction and end up competing with yourself.

There are other things you can do, but I will continue to tease you with those...

Later,

MeatPuppet
 
MeatPuppet said:
Actually, you don't have to monitor the market 24/7. You just have to figure out what the demand is for your commodity and make your product available at a price that attracts all the buyers in that market for a few days.

You soak up all the demand which forces your large inventory carriers to dump their product [often below market] to move their inventory because they become need their gold to play the game or to sell on Ebay. You now have a supply of goods at below your cost. What is even better is they do not get out of the market all at once, so you can sustain this behavior for a couple weeks which give you a psychological advantage to your competitors. They do not know how long you can last; they just see that day in and day out you monopolize the market they are selling in.

New entries have to come in below your price to compete which make them vulnerable to buy outs that can be repackaged and resold. Pretty soon you are dictating the price. You can control the supply and the demand by manipulating who is willing to participate in the market and what price they can sell for. You are determining what is available to the market and at what price.

Keep your price low and no one can compete because quality is not a factor. More player can afford your commodity because it is cheap, so your demand increases until everyone who would be interested at your price is buying and the market is saturated.

I only post auctions once per day on weekdays and twice on weekends. I check in on markets when I go through a city with an AH. I refrain from posting more frequently because you can actually screw up your pricing of your auction and end up competing with yourself.

There are other things you can do, but I will continue to tease you with those...

Later,

MeatPuppet
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I ask you also, what is your highest level char and how far have u progressed.
 
I have a question. if you attempt to control the market and people come in and undercut you, they're only undercutting by a minimal ammount. Say you have something up for 5g per item, and they come in and undercu for 4.90g per item. As a buyer I definatly will buy the 4.90g item instead of your 5g item. However, if you try to buyout the stock at 4.9g to relist, the AH tax will cause you to lose money. How do you get around the minimal undercutter and the AH tax?
 
After rereading your post, I see that you haven't hit 60 or played end game. This is the reason for so much of the holes in your theory. You have no idea which items are valuable and the ones that are you have no freaking idea why. Nexus shards/cured rugged hides/Elementium/Arcanite bars/Bloodvine/fiery cores etc..... are the most valuable things in the game. Everything else is just there to get you to a higher level. Most of these items are so valuable they wont even be found on an AH for any amount of gold. If I had one elementium bar I could buy out your entire supply of any low level good. These goods can not be cornered, they are in extreme limited supply.

Nexus shards are de'ed from epics
Elementium ore drops in bwl(1-3 per run usually thats the only ones you'll get per week and you have to have a bwl guild) and the bars are 1 ore 10x arcanite (which each is an arcane crystal plus a transmute from an alchemist which is on a timer)
Cured rugged hides are on a 2 day timer i think (maybe 4?)

etc...

So as you can see you will not be able to corner these markets. Great so your going to sell silk cheap on the auction house. You essentially jsut cornered an entirely useless market, its so insignifcant as to have zero effect on the server. ANYTHING useful you simply cant handle. Maybe if you actually played the game you would have a single clue as to what is important in the economy and why and then you could make some educated business plans as to how the hell to make money...

Btw last night i bought 15 Arcane crystals off the AH (everyone) for 20g each. I knew that a guild on my server had a naxx attunement deadline coming tomorrow ( you dont know what that is but it requires arcane crystals) i posted my arcane crystals for 50g each. I checked this morning and 13/15 sold. Yea there were people who undercut me but they based thier price on mine and only sold them for approx 45 gold. the demand was so high tho that eventually they bought mine also. I am sure the other 2 will sell which means I made 450 gold........ ya thats how you make money, not "trying to crash the economy using neat strategies I learned in my multi billion dollar company"
 
Boardin087 said:
...ya thats how you make money, not "trying to crash the economy using neat strategies I learned in my multi billion dollar company"
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LMAO!

dude, my dad owns this dealership... :p (ATHF reference)

I work for a multi-billion dollar company too, its called Target... lol
 
Oh no, I think you offended his sensiblities. :rolleyes:

Every kiddie whose economic knowledge is encompassed by the single sentence "Buy low and sell high" needs to refrain from posting in this thread. You can't comprehend what's going on.

Yes, so far the markets he is controlling are simple, mid level niche markets, but the principle is 100% sound. It's so effective that it is ILLEGAL in real-world America today.

The only parts I question are his ability to build up sufficient intial currency and stock reserves to take over the higher end markets, something that is certainly feasible over time as he gains ground from the markets already controlled (or if he cares enough to put in a real-world investment), and the effects that his method will have on professional farmers.

The only other real object I can see would be a "Bigger fish" with the ability to absorb the initial market dump by assimilating it into his own stock.
 
Boardin087 said:
Snip
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I'm going to have to go ahead and agree with this guy. This is basically the same type of stuff I do to make money, and imo seems to be a lot more efficient.


Edit: However I suppose this doesn't apply to what the op is saying. The op stated his goal isn't making tons of Gold, but instead to control part of the economy.
 
Talon Blackrazor said:
Oh no, I think you offended his sensiblities. :rolleyes:

Every kiddie whose economic knowledge is encompassed by the single sentence "Buy low and sell high" needs to refrain from posting in this thread. You can't comprehend what's going on.

Yes, so far the markets he is controlling are simple, mid level niche markets, but the principle is 100% sound. It's so effective that it is ILLEGAL in real-world America today.

The only parts I question are his ability to build up sufficient intial currency and stock reserves to take over the higher end markets, something that is certainly feasible over time as he gains ground from the markets already controlled (or if he cares enough to put in a real-world investment), and the effects that his method will have on professional farmers.

The only other real object I can see would be a "Bigger fish" with the ability to absorb the initial market dump by assimilating it into his own stock.
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Lol. Buy low sell high works based on the economy that Wow presents. No shit there is a hell of alot more to econ and SCIS however they simply dont apply. The items that matter you can not corner, however you can buy them out low and raise the average price causing a gain for you when you sell them. Its not a "genious economic strategy" but it follows more economic laws than the OP's stategy does. Considering the OP breaks two of the biggest rules in Econ in

1. Know your market
2. Know your consumer

you know neither because you dont understand the game fully. Not every system works for every economy and the wow economy is one that cannot be cornered in the way the OP wishes too.

btw im in school for an IST major/ finance minor but to me that means jackshit, the Wow economy is whole different animal
 
Tell that to my former guildmate who wrote his macro-economics thesis on how real-world economic principles can be applied to artificial virtual markets, such as the ones in MMORPGs.

He generated his data from two servers whose economies he controlled, one established, and one recently released. His approach was different, controlling the price on limited availability items rather than market flooding, but demostrated that there is nothing magicial about the WoW market that protects it from real-world economic practices.
 
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