WoW Economic Collapse

Just to say,

I played WoW but got sick of it. That out of the way....

What's funniest in this thread is how personally a lot of people take the experiment being made by Torgo and Meatpuppet. I mean, why attack them with the vigour of a teenager discovering his pee pee? They are just playing around, having some fun trying to see if their ideas work.

Jesus, just give them some valid critique, stop being so freakin childish

Oh and Torgo/Meatpuppet, sounds nice so far, keep us posted.
 
i've never played wow, but having a business school degree, this guy's theorems are sound.

FIFO and LIFO lol. thought i'd heard the last of that. inventory management and ops! UGH!

:)

zv
 
Kristo said:
Just to say,

I played WoW but got sick of it. That out of the way....

What's funniest in this thread is how personally a lot of people take the experiment being made by Torgo and Meatpuppet. I mean, why attack them with the vigour of a teenager discovering his pee pee? They are just playing around, having some fun trying to see if their ideas work.

Jesus, just give them some valid critique, stop being so freakin childish

Oh and Torgo/Meatpuppet, sounds nice so far, keep us posted.
zero_vertical said:
+1

then have your voracious sex.

w00t.
Exactly.
Torgo/Meat, test your theories.

Maybe they work, maybe they don't. In the end, it's an interesting investigation. No reason to spew baseless vitrol in their direction
 
Ah, lunchtime. Let's see what's on the menu today, shall we?
Boardin087 said:
Whether or not its a good analogy or not was not up for discussion.
This got a chuckle out of me. If you're going to offer an analogy (which is what you did) and then discuss it (which you did), then certainly it's worth debating if it's good or not. All I said is that your Olympic analogy doesn't compare to Auction House dynamics. No, looking back I did say it was a "horrible analogy". I stand by that statement. Despite your AOL style yelling of all captial letters and studdering like Rainman it doesn't make what you typed any more true for World of Warcraft. (See? Boldface. That's much more effective for making a point.) There is a limited amount of tickets to an event, like the Olympics. But in WoW Auction House, there isn't limited commodities. There might be a limited commodity on your neurons, but if I run out of something at the Auction House, I just go out and get more. You state yourself "Gold is unlimited you can kill things forever, Skinning is unlimitted." Making an item with a timer really doesn't matter. If an item has a 4 day timer, just go out and recruit a guildmember to help out. Use an alt. Go skim some low hanging fruit.

Just because there's a drawback doesn't mean the model doesn't work. It certainly might take you six months to acquire enough of an inventory and gold reserves to pull it off. Yeah, that's a drawback and it sucks. If you have the patience, it most certainly can be done. Considering the other guy is in the same position as you on creating items that require several days, if anything time is on your side. Take the time (which is limited only by your patience) to prepare for battle ahead of time.

Accept that the important items are limited or quit this fucking discussion. [...]
Again you admitted that for a limited commodity this wont work. The markets we are talking about are limited commodities and thats not up for argueing.
Okay, are you really Jayson Blair in disguise? I never said it wouldn't work for limited commodity. The only time I used the term "limited" in any of my posts was in conjunction with limited inventory. Well, unless you count the times I said unlimited. I think that you're trying to say that these important items are "limited" because they take a long time to make.

Limited. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. In a supply chain sense, limited means like #34 of 1000 which means there will be only 1000 ever made and never again. You know, like with limited prints, artwork and frilly stuff like that. Or like those Beanie Babies you collected as a little girl where the tag said 591/10,000.

What you're describing is availability, which is easily taken care of if you prepare your supply chain correctly. We've always maintained that those scarce items probably isn't the best to start out with, it's best left for one of the last things to take over in an Auction House. Use those items as a loss leader by using the smaller, more readily items as your profit center.
BTW...... the olympics happen once every 4 years not once. I thought youd at least know that :D
Sorry, I'm not as familiar with the Special Olympics as you are. My apologies. Okay, that's the appetizer. What's the next course?
arentol said:
1.) You said earlier that nobody could match your cost of production. However, without hacking, that is an impossibility in MMORPG's, and so your belief in that aspect of your economic model is baseless. Anyone can match your cost, and therefore your price if they so chose.
I'll clarify. We're pretty confident that no one currently can match our costs. Statistically speaking, someone with a thousand Chinese workers chained to a thousand keyboards will eventually come up with an exact clone of our character (and probably already have). Meatpuppet and I were actually discussing this scenario this morning before we started posting. What if there were two people following the exact same formula with the same cost? How would you combat that? Who would win? We're still going through the various scenarios, but more than likely you end up at a stalemate with items being sold for cost. The bigger question is who's going to blink first? The person seeking a high profit margin will always turn back before the guy who's just happy to make the scenario a game of it.
1.2) You can also be beaten based on timing.... If you aren't monitoring constantly then anyone can simply buy your entire stock, sell at a higher price while you are away, and then lower their price to match yours when you are active. As long as they are on more than you they will always make more money than you, and at your expense, not their own.
Not if you gauge daily demand of a product correctly. You only need to place out product once a day. If he buys out your inventory and sells at a higher price, he falls into the trap of increased inventory with a smaller profit margin due to LIFO as I outlined above. You do eventually bleed him out over time or force the price to go lower when he dumps his inventory.
2.) The reason why your process has worked so far is because nobody has bothered to try to beat you because they can move on to some other commodity at a moments notice, and only reenter the market for your cornered commodities when you raise prices or quit dealing on one of the commodities.
That's what most people do. However, we don't raise prices back up or quit the market. Leaving would only defeat the ultimate goal of having a monopoly. Having said that, we have as an experiment left the market and re-entered to see if it could be done, if we could rake those people speculating on high prices over the coals, and how the market would react. Didn't have a problem coming back in, nor taking it back over. We did notice that after doing this three times or so, people caught on that we could come back in whenever we wanted and quit that market segment completely. Very cool from the perspective we were starting to affect behavior.
2.1 [...]So this means that if you are going to screw with a commodity you have to do so 24/7, and you have to screw with ALL commodities in the market at once. Otherwise players just use the 0 cost of entry to get back into the market as soon as you leave, or they move on to another 0 cost of entry commodity.
You don't have to monitor the market 24/7, but just once a day as I mentioned above. Just exceed daily demand and you're covered. I don't think you quite covered why you need to cover all commodities at once. Since we're not leaving the market, they can leave to another market segment. That's fine. We'll just move in a bit later. Sorta like creeping kudzu. Time is on our side. To us, time is just about a zero cost. For others, time spent farming for razor thin margins does become a cost of entry. They don't want to spend the time and work involved to make it work.

To sum up your summations: A) Yeah, it's old because it's being used every day in the modern world since the publication of The Wealth of Nations. I just think it's novel because I or my friend haven't heard of anyone else doing it and sustaining for long periods of time. B) You can have all the money in the world, but the model works even if someone harrasses us. I've covered this many times in many posts. C) Hey, I'm about 90% in agreement with you on this conclusion. It does indeed hurt no one in a server economy when you first start out, but once you take over enough of the auction house to control most goods, you do start exerting some major influence on the economy.

Now in your second post, you do a really good job in your example. We do have a situation that is very similar to this at the moment. I'm going to assume in your example that you have both Mr. Bags and myself with the same cost of goods and employing pretty much the same strategy as me; razor-thin margins. The one thing your missing in your example is daily demand. People only demand so much of an item per day. I take this into account. If he constantly buys out my inventory, no big deal. All you need to do is wait until he dips below you and you start buying your own inventory back. Hey, it works both ways. If Mr. Bags is typical, he'll have a horde of items listed that exceeds daily demand. Like having 200 items and only 20 a day are being sold. The Auction House fees start eating into what little profit he has and he's losing money.

So if we take it to the extreme, if Mr. Bags is selling at cost and I'm just 1s above his buy now price and he keeps buying my inventory, I'm still making a little bit of money (again assuming we share the same costs) and Mr. Bags is constantly losing money relisting his auctions everyday. To top it off, his inventory is slowly increasing since I'm putting out more product than daily demand. Who is going to blink first?

Ah, that was actually a really good post. Y'all should learn from arentol. Thought out and well written. Time to have the sample platter:
CodeX said:
its just that no one cares enough about a GAME to put this much thought and effort into it
Well, I had a career in the video game industry and it was my job to think up crap like this. Plus, I do make some pocket change on the side writing and publishing still so I guess I still care. Silly that people would actually care about a $4 billion a year industry isn't it? Oh, and it wouldn't be the first time Blizzard has "borrowed" from a company I worked for before. (See my profile.)
Obi_Kwiet said:
Couldn't people just buy the stuff you have have, and sell it back to you at a higher price, until you become bankrupt? It'd be exponential, and you'd only need enough for one item.
Interesting idea, but that's assuming that I'd buy it back. No one is forcing me to buy my own items back. I'd let him keep it and sell it to someone else at a higher price. (See LIFO points above and in other messages.)
MenuBoy said:
there are bags larger than 16 slots and if you actually played WoW you would know that there is an "infinite" bag space
If you mean using the mail server as a psuedo bag, you're taking a risk. On MeatPuppet's server, they've had 2 mail server database corruptions where everyone lost their mail. For those people who complained to Blizzard about losing inventory they just replied, "You shouldn't be using mail for inventory." At least with a bag, it's safe. Using the mail as an inventory is just rolling the dice. Sure, you could do that, but Blizzard could always patch the mail server to prevent that. Blizzard developers are very hesitant to give out additional bag space because of the database requirements and performance hit it would cause. (Each new bag allowed hits every character in the database. It's the equivalent of adding another table to every character.) So, Boardin087 can use his alts mailbox all he wants. He's just a crash away from losing everything. (And we all know that WoW never crashes and never loses data....)
Kreator said:
with a few well placed and thoughtout lies you can make lots of money on an online game.
True. Works in real life too. As I have said numerous times, it's not about the money. It's about the control. And now for the dessert:
Qualm said:
Hyperinflation is caused by printing money. Torgo's scheme cannot increase the supply of money in the world, all it can do is temporarily influence people to spend more of their cash reserves on the items Torgo is trying to control.
Thanks for bringing us back full circle to the front page. Hyperinflation is a condition in which prices increase rapidly as a currency loses its value. It can be caused by printing too much money at once. Inflation is occurring on every WoW server because there is no true mechanism to remove currency from the economy. (I mentioned this earlier in the thread.) Once you utterly dominate an economy through deflation (driving the price of goods down) and control the markets, you're then free to price goods as you see fit. Since you control the flow of money (you acquired it from controlling the Auction House) and also the pricing structure of pretty much everything, you can artificially create hyperinflation by jacking up prices 3000% and not releasing money back outside of your guild. Prices have increased rapidly + money loses value because of hording = Hyperinflation. It would take a large guild to pull it off.

Quick hits: Bannage - Don't know if it would happen. We're staying away from any exploits and playing within the rules. We would only be in violation of some time of spirit of the game rule where doing this would make the situation too unfair or ruin the experience of other players. That's their call. Blizzard could ban, patch the game or just let it happen. For the time being, it's not a concern.

Get a clue OP! - Ah, the tried and true method of when not having anything coherent to say, just insult the poster with a one line message. Frankly, I'm amazed the thread hasn't been Godwined yet. There's still time. I personally don't mind the verbal jabs as long as it's accompanied by some thought and sticks to the topic at hand. Take your time (I spent 3 hours off and on writing this on my spare PC) and feel free to be as verbose as you want. I do read each one of the posts here and enjoy responding. There are some great questions and points, but there are a few that are starting to repeat the same things that borders on crossing the forum rules. Let's not ruin a good thread.
 
Boardin087 said:
I would love to stop posting in this thread If I could here the OP simply say this. I hate people who post on forums trying to act sophisticated and original when they are simply an amateur in the topic up for discussion.
Argh... I really hate to pull the Big Time card, but I waited until post 166 to do it. I'm sure Rich is probably wondering why I didn't do it sooner. (It's because I really don't like making a big deal out of it.)

Amateur. Me? I don't think so. Did your PC games sell 10 million copies worldwide? Didn't think so. Write any gaming books? I've got three under my belt. Let's put the bar a bit lower. Member of the Independent Game Developer Association? No?

Maybe you didn't know me from Adam when you first read my post. However, I do have the credentials to at least elevate myself from the rank of amateur. If I'm going to post something here in the gaming forum, I know that I've got a reputation to uphold and that my posts at least have some weight to them. That isn't to say that I'm always right (except in this thread so far) or that I'm perfect, but sheesh... at least a little respect this way please.

At least I'm not like some developers that ignore you or insult your ideas. I've tried to reply to every criticism with thought, reason and the best explanation I knew at the time. I plan to continue doing so. Tomorrow should be interesting. MP is going to take some screenshots of the latest attack on our monopoly and point out some mistakes that he's making. I'm looking forward to it.
 
]|[ Mar']['in ]|[ said:
What would I do at work if it wasn't for this thread? :)

keep it going.

Ha ha very true :D

From the information dribbled out by the OP it's one of the vaguest threads I've ever come across. Even though I would personally bet my car that a small group of people of no more than level 40 have anywhere near 1% of the clout needed to affect the economy of a WoW server (I have a sad number of days /played in terms of experience) I still find myself drawn here.

I'll just add that real world economics have only a small relevance to WoW economics, no matter how pleasing an argument to the contrary might sound.

EDIT - I'll also just add that the fear of Blizzard pouncing upon anyone trying the hypothetical theory is of only moderate importance. If a character is banned it takes only a couple of days /played to get back to level 40 plus the cost of a new box. Well worth it to prove a point that most think can't be proved. Perhaps with such a voracious appetite for sex the OP can't afford the risk :p
 
mail boxes arent the only place where u can find infinite bag space
wink.gif


also saying that using the mail box is a risk is like saying putting money in a real bank is a risk cuz sometimes they get robbed.

op, your vague theorycraft has yet to mention anything about the fact that there are 3 AH on a server. by saying you will control a market means you will control it on all 3 AH and lets not forget the trade channel. please give me your theorycraft on that.
 
mulpsmebeauty said:
I'll just add that real world economics have only a small relevance to WoW economics, no matter how pleasing an argument to the contrary might sound.
this is true.
some basic rules apply but WoW economy has things that is different from the real world.
 
Torgo said:
Argh... I really hate to pull the Big Time card, but I waited until post 166 to do it. I'm sure Rich is probably wondering why I didn't do it sooner. (It's because I really don't like making a big deal out of it.)

Amateur. Me? I don't think so. Did your PC games sell 10 million copies worldwide? Didn't think so. Write any gaming books? I've got three under my belt. Let's put the bar a bit lower. Member of the Independent Game Developer Association? No?


Hrmmm... damn, I fully enjoyed the dicussions all the back and forth going on here right up until this point here where you jumped at the bait hook,line and sinker. Well I guess you have to stick up for yourself when you feel like you're getting jumped on, but some people can't resist pushing at other people's buttons to get them to make it personal.

FWIW though I like the concept and Idea of the AH control/monopoly, I think it's something interesting to people who have no idea what these kind of things can do in a game. A good social experiment/proof of concept like that gets people talking about it whether it's criticism or praise for /against.
 
Get a clue OP! - Ah, the tried and true method of when not having anything coherent to say, just insult the poster with a one line message. Frankly, I'm amazed the thread hasn't been Godwined yet. There's still time. I personally don't mind the verbal jabs as long as it's accompanied by some thought and sticks to the topic at hand. Take your time (I spent 3 hours off and on writing this on my spare PC) and feel free to be as verbose as you want. I do read each one of the posts here and enjoy responding. There are some great questions and points, but there are a few that are starting to repeat the same things that borders on crossing the forum rules. Let's not ruin a good thread.

Im done, i understand thats you have a thorough knowledge of SCIS and some econ. However you really dont have an idea about the game whose economy you are discussing. Play it for a year and I'm sure that you would have spent many hours argueing against someone else froma different standpoint.

Go ahead and think that you are right. Your perspective on the game's economy is skewed and you can either accept that and try to fix it or ignore it. your choice but you know my view on tihs subject
 
matcauth said:
Hrmmm... damn, I fully enjoyed the dicussions all the back and forth going on here right up until this point here where you jumped at the bait hook,line and sinker.
I wouldn't say "jumped" per se. I've been nibbling for over 150 posts before I had to go big time. You've all discovered my hot button. I didn't bust my ass all those years for nothing. I'd say I've got a little more insight than 99% of the forum users when it comes to developing, testing and publishing games. Before I started this thread, we were playing around with this for months before we decided to make it public and share what we learned. I take this very seriously. Anyway...
mulpsmebeauty said:
I'll just add that real world economics have only a small relevance to WoW economics, no matter how pleasing an argument to the contrary might sound.
You're free to have that opinion. We think differently and think it's pretty fun to find comparisions to the real world. Some of it may be a stretch, but looking at what is and more importantly isn't in the game economically can help you. Are we taking this further than necessary? No doubt. If you want to make money at the AH, just follow this rule: Buy low, sell high. That's what just about everyone does. We just want to have fun in a different way.
MenuBoy said:
also saying that using the mail box is a risk is like saying putting money in a real bank is a risk cuz sometimes they get robbed.
Valid comparison, but my money in the bank is FICA insured. Blizzard says to the player, "Too bad. So sad." My bank has never been robbed. MeatPuppet's mail server has crashed twice in six months. If you're willing to accept the risk, go ahead and use the mail as an endless warehouse. Lastly, my current favorite poster...
Boardin087 said:
Then we can agree, to disagree.

Hey, in relevant on topic news, MeatPuppet took some screenshots last night and is going to write up a post illustrating some of our concepts in practice. Hopefully, seeing this in action will help understand the concept.

Oh, and we think we've finally found a flaw in our concept. I'll save it for another post, but it's actually a result of our plan working too well.
 
Torgo said:
Valid comparison, but my money in the bank is FICA insured.
that was my point.
i've played WoW for almost 2 years and i've had my share of crashes of all sorts.
i've never lost anything because if i did i always got it back. but i'll save that info on how to get lost goods back in a future post.
 
We promised some screenshots to illustrate what we have been doing. (Click on any individual slide to show a larger still shot.) However, I must set the scene for you and describe the environment this was done in.

This server is economically depressed. It has too little gold chasing too few goods. With that being said, it is very difficult to make money on the server to begin with.

I chose fish because it has the easiest point of entry of the markets on this server. It is not a complicated product to understand. Also, there is a social aspect to the use of savory deviates and how they are consumed. While it is fun to be a pirate or ninja; it is more fun as a group or part of a group. This fact affects the way that people buy those fish and makes it particularly popular with younger players. (Yarrrr!)

Over the last three days, I have been working the Neutral AH at Boot Bay. Another player, Hauobet, has been trying to out volume me on that market. Over the past week the average demand for SD fish has been about 125/day, selling @ 8g/20stack on a buyout. On Tuesday and Wednesday, there was a down turn in demand but I suspect this was due to the 1.12 patch and the problems people were having with interface changes and mods.

Day 1 Monday) Hauobet has about 27 stacks of 20 SD fish on the market. I put 125 SD fish on the market @ 2g25s buyout for a stack of 5. I sold all my fish.

Day 2 Tuesday) Hauobet reposted his fish at 7g/20stack. I went to the Horde AH and purchased and skimmed the lower end of the market of 130 SD fish for a total of 10g. I then posted those fish on Booty Bay @ 1g90s for 5stack. I sold only half my fish noted the significant change in demand.

Day 3 Wednesday) Hauobet reposted his fish this time at a buyout of 4g/20stack. Auction fees must hurt… I responded by filling my inventory and reposting 130 @ 1g25s/5stack.

I will see tonight if Hauobet has sold any of his fish.

Part of Hauobet’s error is he is trying to post too much of his inventory at one time. He is also selling his fish in stacks of 20. Because the server is economically depressed, the players most likely to purchase his product can not afford it or are inconvenienced by the quantity they must buy. Therefore, it is more difficult for Hauobet to sell his SD fish; even though, his price is the same or even slightly lower than mine.

If I lost a few sales on price, who cares? Remember, I am not in this for profit. He is encouraged by his small, but still unprofitable success. Thus, he is in the market longer making him an easy mark.

There is a screenshot of bag space to demonstrate the limitations of your “warehouse” and transportation space. Remember, I am not using any hacks or exploits to accomplish any of what I am doing so these limits are real. We are using the Auctioneer mod only to quickly gather AH statistics and to illustrate some of our methods more easily. It’s not required for the methodology to work.

I included some other screen shots at the end of the slideshow highlighting the analysis I do of the market. This is to address some of the remarks about what is worth selling. In the shots you will see the margins generated on items you may choose to sell in your market. While some rocket scientists would claim that thorium bars are the best thing to sell, I would like to point out that on this particular server, thorium bars only generate 2 percent margins, while gold bars are returning 13. Couple that with the fact there is a higher demand for gold bars and there is minimal risk in obtaining gold, the choice is not difficult. You will see on the first market analysis screen shot that medium armor kits have a margin of 98 percent and Greater Magic Essences are 99! However, the volume of kits varies and demand is not great. It has a great return, but will have other carrying costs. Magic essences are difficult to come by unless your toon is an enchanter or has some other source and they can be costly to obtain.

We will follow up with an update next week. It could be interesting if Hauobet catches wind of this thread.

Have Fun,

MeatPuppet :cool:
 
im sorry..... i cant resist. LOL

Your selling deviate delights? and your selling them more expensive and on a neutral AH. wow.

Deviate delights have only one actual use. And im pretty sure you dont know.
 
Boardin087 said:
Boardin087 said:
im sorry..... i cant resist. LOL
Ah, a man of his word. Oh, as for the Deviate Delights, I would tell you what they do, but I'd then have to keelhaul you followed by my Exploding Palm of Death maneuver. Yarrr! My style beats your nitpick style.

Coming later today: I'm writing up a post on the only flaw/problem that we can't figure out how to get past; what if there are more than one person employing our method in the same market? Or worse, what if there are multiple people or groups?
 
]|[ Mar']['in ]|[ said:
how come you bleeped out how much gold you have?
Take a look at the screenshot that shows his bank. You'll get a good idea of how much, or how little, he has by looking closely.
 
Eh, we expected that. MeatPuppet just went on a shopping spree to outfit his character right after he hit 48th level. This market attack happened right at a time when he didn't have hardly any cash reserves. He wasn't expecting this guy to pop in with so much inventory and competitive pricing. Very interesting indeed.

I made the call on blurring out the money because there would be three or four individuals who would scream, "d00d! h3 h4s n000 moneey! LOL!!!oneone!!11" I'd rather y'all pay attention to the method and the end goal. (Control of the market, not the money.) I see those people would rather complain about what is not shown rather than what is shown. What? No comments or insight on what is actually being done? Y'all can do better than that.

This isn't a get rich, quick scheme. It's a "WoW doesn't have real-world governing economic bodies so let's take over the market and slowly gleam guarenteed income" scheme. If anything, it proves that you don't have to be mega rich or have more money than the other guy to take over a market.

Sheesh, at least we're providing screenshots, explainations and detailed analysis. It's walking the walk while doing the talk.
 
Ok, first, why the Goblin AH? It costs more to post auctions there, and, at least on my server, there may be about 100 items total for sale there, with only a handful of people checking in at any one time.

If I were in the mood to buy 20 Savory Deviate Delights, I would go with Hauobet's auctions, since the price per Delight is lower than yours. Although, if I really wanted that stuff, I'd just make 'em myself (300 Fishing, 300 Cooking).

As for your market analysis pictures, what is it you're trying to show?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Qualm
Hyperinflation is caused by printing money. Torgo's scheme cannot increase the supply of money in the world, all it can do is temporarily influence people to spend more of their cash reserves on the items Torgo is trying to control.


Thanks for bringing us back full circle to the front page. Hyperinflation is a condition in which prices increase rapidly as a currency loses its value. It can be caused by printing too much money at once. Inflation is occurring on every WoW server because there is no true mechanism to remove currency from the economy. (I mentioned this earlier in the thread.) Once you utterly dominate an economy through deflation (driving the price of goods down) and control the markets, you're then free to price goods as you see fit. Since you control the flow of money (you acquired it from controlling the Auction House) and also the pricing structure of pretty much everything, you can artificially create hyperinflation by jacking up prices 3000% and not releasing money back outside of your guild. Prices have increased rapidly + money loses value because of hording = Hyperinflation. It would take a large guild to pull it off.

You mistate how Hyperinflation works by failing to understand (or ignoring) how money really loses value *hint: exponential increase in money supply*. Money doesn't enter the closed WoW economy nearly fast enough to achieve hyperinflation, AND IT NEVER WILL no matter what we players attempt to do in the economy. Blizzard was VERY well aware of the phenomenon of "mudflation" when they designed the game.

You also completely ignore the fact that the majority of WoW economics (supply of goods, demand for goods) takes place outside of the AH. The majority of WoW players can and do get everything they need to play the game without bothering with the AH. IF all goods were ONLY available through the AH, rather than through drops anyone can get at any time, your schemes might have a chance. But unfortunately for you, that's not the case. Which is what I pointed out in the rest of my first post.

Nice theorizing, but simply not viable. For a REAL mmorpg economic sandbox to toy with, I suggest EVE - http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=channel&channelID=3515
 
Qualm said:
You mistate how Hyperinflation works by failing to understand (or ignoring) how money really loses value *hint: exponential increase in money supply*.
Tap the breaks. If you are referring to Post WWI Germany or Post WWII Hungary where the government sustained hyperinflation by printing money, then I agree with you. Printing money during hyperinflation just starts a vicious cycle of sustained price increases. That's not how all hyperinflation starts however. You can start an occurance by controlling supply and then setting prices to whatever you want. That's the point of having a monopoly right?

Your best example is post-Soviet Russia. The government let loose it's state run monopolies without ensuring adequate competition first. The result was a case of hyperinflation without the money supply getting out of hand. That's pretty much what our scenario could create in WoW.

Since we would have the market monopoly and have more money coming in (and staying in) our Guild, a transfer of power is taking place through money ownership. We then have a "state" monopoly on most of the money (similar to Nationalist Mainlaind China in the 30s) and we can pretty much dictate what we please.

You also completely ignore the fact that the majority of WoW economics (supply of goods, demand for goods) takes place outside of the AH. The majority of WoW players can and do get everything they need to play the game without bothering with the AH.
For individuals, you can specialize in one or two areas, but eventually you can't do everything yourself. So you can go to a vendor, trade channel or the auction house. Sure you have choices, but we're like that crazy used car dealer on television late at night. "With prices this low, you'd be nuts not to shop here first!". Why spend hours doing something that you could just spend a tiny fraction over cost for? The consumer would be driven to the Auction House to our goods. The prices are too low to ignore. Those that are ignoring it are just trying to hone their skills or just like making stuff themselves. Maybe they just happen to be Amish Elves or something.
gamz247 said:
If I were in the mood to buy 20 Savory Deviate Delights, I would go with Hauobet's auctions, since the price per Delight is lower than yours.
You've already answered your own question. Why buy 20? It's the same reason why they don't package toilet paper 100 rolls to a package. I'll leave it at that.
 
I'm just triyng to get my head around why someone of your intelligence (I did my homework) is here preaching an economic theory that must be practiced for non-sustaining purposes to achieve its intended effect, but will fail due to the lack of any return on investment? Seems incredibly pointless to me.
 
Why? Because it can be done. It's been an issue for game testing for several decades now. Why do people cheat? Why do people do anything with games or software? As QA Lead, it was my job to anticipate ahead of time possible permutations of what could be done with our game. When you do bounds testing, all sorts of unexpected things happen. To see the outcome, you've got to test it out.

Oh, one other thing. MeatPuppet and I have been talking about the overall state of the thread. It's been going around in circles of late. We can only repeat ourselves so many times before the thread just gets boring. So rather than re-answer all the questions that have been posted, we're just going to ignore anything that has been asked before and just refer you to previous posts.

So, if you have a comment about "You don't understand economics" or "It's not going to work because you're selling fish/silk/gold bars" or "You don't understand farming or how WoW works" please save it. It's been said numerous times before in the thread. It's just a he said/she said back and forth.

For our part, we're going to stick with new material to post in this thread. We've got more screenshots and results from over the weekend. If you'd like to comment on anything new or have a legitimate question, please ask. If you have a question about a scenario that we're pointing out, please do so. Our plan is to continue our experiments and expand into different markets. If we encounter a problem, we'll be sure to share it so that perhaps you can help us either find a solution or make it a note of something to avoid. Next post: I've got a note from MeatPuppet about our efforts over the weekend and some screenshots of auction results.
 
Here's the post about our flaws that we've found so far that I promised. I have an update with I think 13 screenshots of our latest auction efforts.

No plan is perfect, and everything has a weak spot. There are two things that we've identified so far that could bring our monopoly efforts to a halt. One would be really hard to actually implement , but it's easy to do. The second is easier to pull to implement, put hard to understand the concept.

Flaw #1: The Boycott A monopoly is only as effective as long as people prefer to buy your goods over someone else. In WoW, 99% of the time the lowest price is good enough to entice the consumer. The other single percentage point is because someone for some reason choose someone else's item because it wasn't yours. Maybe you ganked him last week and he harbors a grudge. He was willing to pay extra to not buy from you.

Hence, our method is not invulnerable to a mass boycott. We can handle a few individuals who stubbornly don't buy from us. As one poster here said, he usually doesn't look at the name of the person selling the item. That's exactly what happens that 99% of the time. However, if enough individuals were able to buy from other people in the AH and stage a boycott of our goods, our methodology starts to fall apart.

It's just like any other real-life modern movement. Buy American. Buy California Raisins. South Carolina Peaches are better than Georgia Peaches. Nike is better than Reebok. If consumers band together, they can affect change in the marketplace. Just witness the consumer demand change from combustion driven cars to ones powered by alternative means. We're not so worried about this flaw. A boycott on WoW would be pretty hard to pull off on a big enough scale to actually hurt us. Then there's the question of how long it could last. Could it be done? Sure. Protests have happened before in WoW like the "Million Gnome March". A boycott isn't hard to imagine. The chaotic nature of MMORPGs seem to really make this a remote possibility.

Flaw #2: Multiple Wal-Marts The second flaw is what if there were more than one person applying our method on the same server, in the same market. Worse, what if there were three or four people? Doing some brainstorming, we determined it would be very difficult to maintain a monopoly in that particular market. You get into a vicious cycle where eventually the competitors could buy and sell from each other at cost and just rotate inventory amongst all of the vendors. If each vendor can make a Widget for 25s and sells it at cost for 25s, then the consumer could buy from any one of them.

The whole effort would degrade into micromanaging the situation. Relisting to make sure your auctions are listed first. Doing in-game "advertising" and social engineering in chat channels. Ugh, everything that we don't want to do. (We're lazy and don't want to spend too much time doing this. It's not fun if we do.) Since our method advocates never selling at a loss (or risk losing your inventory), these Wal-Mart clones will stick to their at cost pricing scheme until the end of time. A monopoly is never really achieved, so the method in our minds fails. This is much more feasible happening and is more likely.

Those are the two flaws so far documented for you to see. If you know a way around them, I'd sure like to know.
 
Here are some more screenshots and journal entries from MeatPuppet. I'm posting them because was busy and I'm stuck up at work doing an upgrade. From here out, this is all MP talking:

I was able to run Hauobet out of the Goblin (Neutral) AH. As it turns out Hauobet is botting her inventory. Thus, her time-to-effort is 0. However, the AH fees for posting her auctions are eating her up. She moved to the Horde AH. I could pursue her there because the bot is not responding well to the changes to the market. If I were to invest time (fishing), I could make both markets so unprofitable for her that she would not be able to afford AH fees to market all her goods. She would end up sitting on stacks of inventory with no place to sell. Because she is Horde I could completely lock her out of the market and force her to dump her inventory. I have a new player [in the Auction House] who is even less responsive to changes in prices. It will be interesting to crack that nut.

I also got some screen shots of 3 paydays, where I went to my mail box to collect my proceeds. I also financed (purchased) another mount this weekend for a friend.



SD Fish is being used to illustrate the simplicity of the concepts, being used and to demonstrate that it does not require a lot of money to do. [Any] profit is incidental. I am seeking to control a market and the behavior in that market. I believe to actually run someone out of a market is a reasonable proof of the premise.
[Torgo's note: Now that we know for a fact that we have a bot farmer, it really puts us to the test and is what many of you called for.]

Even if you are only impacting the horde side of the equation, you can manipulate the allied side in a limited way through the neutral AH.

ah9na1.jpg
ah14ot4.jpg

Note this last shot shows the income earned on fish using only 15 minutes worth of work. The extrapolation of nearly 106g per hour is not valid. Demand is not that high. Also, the intial gold doesn't take into account the purchase of a mount done earlier in the session. It's not about getting rich. It's about control.
 
Quick follow-up comments on the above. First, we know that H. is a bot because she's been observed fishing and only fishing. Hours and hours on end. We know the location of the fish and every conversation that MeatPuppet has tried resulted in canned responses. We're actually quite pleased at this discovery.

This presents some opportunities to screw with the bot programming. How will the bot behave when it doesn't sell? How low will it go? What kind of fail-safe logic does it have? We're still not sure if this is an Alt or a Main. Inventory is a question too. Is the bot storing all fish on hand, using a bank or using the mail system? How far does the inventory hole really go?

Either way, we're positive that the auction fees are slowing eating away in this situation. With us soaking up demand, the bot is forced to relist over and over and over. Again, what built in logic is in place to combat this?

Even if you disagree with the end results of our methodology, this is a good test for bot writers to examine. We're currently beating the bot and expect to continue doing so with ease. If you're writing the AI for such a bot, you need to account for player behavior such as what we're doing. How do you counter such a strategy? Using such a bot might be good for building skills, but not for generating money at this moment. More to come!
 
Torgo said:
Quick follow-up comments on the above. First, we know that H. is a bot because she's been observed fishing and only fishing. Hours and hours on end. We know the location of the fish and every conversation that MeatPuppet has tried resulted in canned responses. We're actually quite pleased at this discovery.

This presents some opportunities to screw with the bot programming. How will the bot behave when it doesn't sell? How low will it go? What kind of fail-safe logic does it have? We're still not sure if this is an Alt or a Main. Inventory is a question too. Is the bot storing all fish on hand, using a bank or using the mail system? How far does the inventory hole really go?

Either way, we're positive that the auction fees are slowing eating away in this situation. With us soaking up demand, the bot is forced to relist over and over and over. Again, what built in logic is in place to combat this?

Even if you disagree with the end results of our methodology, this is a good test for bot writers to examine. We're currently beating the bot and expect to continue doing so with ease. If you're writing the AI for such a bot, you need to account for player behavior such as what we're doing. How do you counter such a strategy? Using such a bot might be good for building skills, but not for generating money at this moment. More to come!

Btw, I believe the bot program doesn't automatically put stuff on the AH.. they usually just fish over and over again until the inventory is full, then log the char off. Then the actual player has to manually post the stuff on the AH..

...so I've heard..

*stopped playing wow about 5 months ago so might be wrong
 
that's true. the bot only farms the mats. a person has to log on and post the auctions probably using auctioneer as well. it could also be a farmer but i've suspected a fishing bot in the game at the moment. so the question is we know the person is botting which basically means an endless supply of fish since there isnt any finite supply of fish. what happens if the person selling wises up and undercuts you? you cant possibly buy out all of his product due to your finite gold/storage and his basically unilmited supply of goods. the thing about botting is, even if you drive the price so low, he can still vendor the fish for money (although it would be very little) but it's still 0 effort. you start the bot, go to work, 8 hours later you come back with full bags... so even if you drive them temporarily out of the AH market, they're still going to bot and as soon as the prices flux up, they'll re-enter the market.
 
Interesting thread here.

Ok, before I start; I don't own the game, I've never played it and I'm no pro on economics, but isn't there one glaring flaw here?

Since you're investing hardly any game time into this compared to others, what's stopping one of those hardcore players from just doing exactly what you're doing but out doing you with a greater farmed inventory?


I don't play the game but basically you get gold for free by farming which just takes time right? So you're gunna get done over by lack of invested farming time surely?


I think this system is going to require a large group of people working together, especially on a bigger server. How many people are there in a big server?
 
You cannot single-handedly supply the whole server's demand for any good that actually matters in the economy. At least not long enough to make any material difference. You will never crash or control the whole economy, the best you can hope for is to corner the market on a single trash commodity, which apparently you've done. Get over yourselves.
 
Gongo said:
so even if you drive them temporarily out of the AH market, they're still going to bot and as soon as the prices flux up, they'll re-enter the market.
Everything you've said is exactly true. If the prices do go up, they would re-enter the market. Which is why you don't raise prices back up. I know it's tempting and the allure of having a market all to yourself and making loads of money is tempting, but in this methodology, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You either have market monopoly and are happy with the small margins coming in, or you can ride the usual cycle of price fluxuations and striking it rich getting in and out at the right times. Do whatever you feel like will give you the most fun in the game world. We're currently having more fun doing experiments, being only adequately wealthy and acting like total jackasses.
spine said:
what's stopping one of those hardcore players from just doing exactly what you're doing but out doing you with a greater farmed inventory?
Nothing. See my earlier post about Flaw #2. However, inventory isn't the key. Demand is everything. You only need enough inventory to meet daily demand. Any more than that is really waste. A cost effective auctioneer, no matter what style he is playing, should never waste money on auction fees listing product that you know will not sell. That's a free tip for you. Even if you're going for high profit margins, if only 10 BoE items are sold a day, then don't waste money listing 100 BoE items because you're wasting money on auction fees.

Your other question about farming = gold in a general sense is true. You get a bunch of items and sell it to a vendor or player for currency. You could also just hunt creatures and monsters all day and get money. If prices were fixed across the board then it would end up being a case of "He who has the most money, wins". But in WoW, prices fluxuate with demand. In previous posts, we have examples of a rich player (Mr. Moneybags) and how to counter such efforts.

AceTKK said:
Growl!Sputter!droolmmfffaaarrtmgrrrowlarrrrghcrapppphhhhfffft
Uh... okay. Where's that /ignore feature? Just re-read all my reponses that have already addressed the concept.
 
Torgo said:
Nothing. See my earlier post about Flaw #2. However, inventory isn't the key. Demand is everything. You only need enough inventory to meet daily demand.
Ok, stop me if I've made a mistake about the gameplay ('cos as I've said I've never played) but...


The auctioning goes on all day right? People go in and out of the auction house whenever they want and it's always open?

So, say a person buys you out of all your stock of whatever (which you say it's not a problem for your strategy). And now say it's late at night, you goto sleep, whatever - you're not in the game anymore. This guy is then free to goto the auction house and just put the items on sale for whatever he chooses surely?

If that's true you'd have to constantly monitor the auction house to keep control. Even if you've bought all the stock of whatever, people can still farm their own and then sell it behind your back for whatever higher price. If you're not around at that time with your absurdly low prices then whoever else is rules.


Also, I think the reason you've had so much success so far is simply the lack of motivation there is for someone to try to compete with you. Anyone who likes to play with auctioning will just move to another server if someone like you shows up. In the whole scale of things, you weren't a problem for them.

If you became faced with people utterly and determined to fight with you, it'd be a different, albeit more interesting, story.
 
Torgo said:
Uh... okay. Where's that /ignore feature? Just re-read all my reponses that have already addressed the concept.

You HAVEN'T addressed the supply-side problems with your plan, that's the problem. As a single mid-level character you cannot farm / manufacture / otherwise get your hands on enough of a high-demand item to control the price. Period. Wal-Mart works because they control the factories in China. You can't operate on a high-volume / low-margin business model if you can't provide the high-volume.

Let's talk about your situation in the fish market posted above. You are excited about taking the market away from the botter, and we're all excited at that prospect. However, this is what's going to happen: Pretty soon Xingxou will realize what's going on and decide to take that market back from you. He'll set his auction bot to buy any fish below the price that he wants to get. So all of your fish are immediately bought up. While you are frantically trying to replenish your stock he marks your inventory up and sells it for a profit. You spend the next two days fishing non-stop because it's the only way to get more fish other than buying from Xingxou, which of course would be stupid. During those two days Xingxou has met the daily demand with his own supply at the price he decided to set.

Phew! You're exhausted; you've been fishing for 48 hours straight and now you're ready to take over that market again! You put your fish up at closeout pricing and cry out in dismay when Xingxou's auction bot immediately buys them all up and relists them with a healthy markup. Meanwhile, Xingxou's alt has been bot-fishing for the last two days and his warehouse is brimming while yours lies empty.

You can't control the market if you don't control the supply, and it's not possible in an MMO. I know that you'll say this is not accurate because auction / fish botting is against the rules and unfair. It doesn't matter though because Xingxou is not just one guy. He's an amalgam of all the other buyers / sellers in the market who, collectively, have unlimited time, unlimited capital, and perfect knowledge of the market conditions. You do not, and that is why you cannot control or crash the WoW economy.
 
Auction fees are part of my cost of goods sold. When he buys my stuff, I get paid. He has to relist. Who gets the gold? Do I care if he sell if he has 3000 widget on the market and I sold all of mine? Not likely.

BTW - I don't have extra inventory slots because I don't need them. If I wanted to be a warehouse I would buy more slots. I want to play, not be a transportation van from my bank to AH...

Later,

MeatPuppet :cool:
 
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