Re: Auction House change?

On Sep 27, 1:22 pm, Brian Trosko <btro...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
lcpltom <lcpl...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
it will take to go out and collect that item themselves. If you put
the price too high, very few people will purchase it. Gold may be in
infinite supply in WoW, but its not being just handed out. You
actually still have to go out and do some work to collect it.
Grinding gold isn't always fun.

Gringing medium leather isn't always fun. So if someone else out there
wants to grind medium leather and sell it to me for some tiny amount over
what it'd net him to vendor it, I don't see a problem with that.

So, what I am saying is, if I think netherweave cloth is worth 4g, and
you corner the market and try to sell it for 8g, I know I can go out
and in the time it takes me to farm 8g I can also farm the samea
mmount of netherweave cloth.

Yes, great, good for you. But netherweave cloth isn't worth 4g.
Netherweave cloth is worth what people are willing to pay for it. You're
welcome to *think* it's worth 4g, and you're more than welcome to pay the
opportunity cost of going out and farming it yourself. But it's actually
worth what people are willing to pay for it.

First, that's not the case. People can and do corner the market on
various goods at various times doing just what you describe. It would
take some dedication to corner the market on netherweave because there's
so much of it, but with enough of a starting bankroll (and 5000g would
likely be enough), it could be done, and you'd probably sell.
Ok, so someone will spend 5000g to corner the market and then what?
Put all those items he bought back up for a rediculously low price and
come out of it all with 4000g less? No, they're going to put the
price higher.

Yes, I believe that was the cover story in last month's issue of "No Shit"
magazine.

already there. They actually gather large quantities of the
materials, then put them up for cheap. It costs them very little to
gather and so most of what they sell it for is profit.

Still not seeing a problem.

rediculously over priced. You remove the gold farmers flooding the AH
with cheap mats and the price of mats goes up to a point that other
players aren't willing to pay.

You've just completely annihilated your own arguments, and have now
asserted that it's necessary for gold farmers to flood the AH with cheap
mats in order to keep prices down to the level that people are willing to
pay.
Not at all, its just what you read into it.

Did you, or did you not, just say "You remove the gold farmers flooding
the AH with cheap mats and the price of mats goes up to a point that
other players aren't willing to pay"?

Looks to me like you just said it.

To shorten it down to
what you can understand, there will be a ceiling at which point people
won't pay.

And from what you just said, gold farmers are necessary to keep the prices
below that ceiling, because players who don't have to compete with gold
farmers depressing prices will price things at a level nobody will pay.

That's cataclysmically wrong, and more to the point, it completely
undercuts what you're trying to argue here: that gold sellers hurt the
economy.

Competition between players will keep this price well
below the ceiling,

That is the exact and precise opposite of what you just said, which is
that if gold farmers stop flooding the AH with goods, the prices for goods
will climb until they reach the point that nobody's willing to pay.

unless someone with 5000g comes along and tries to
corner the market.

Happens all the time. People still buy thorium when I or someone else
buys it all up and puts it back up with a higher price, because while
they'd be happy to get it at a lower price, they're not willing to pay the
opportunity cost of mining it themselves.

Yes.

I never said there's no way to make money in WoW without adding value to
it. I stated that in a competitive economy, the price of a good will
always be driven towards the marginal cost of production.
Not exactly.

Yes, exactly. In a competitive economy, the price of a good will always
be driven towards the marginal cost of production.

The price of crafted mats rarely exceeds the price of
buying the mats on the AH.

Do you know why that is? It's because in a competetive economy, the price
of a good is always driven towards the marginal cost of production. In
WoW, it's even worse; many crafted items are put up on the AH for *less*
than the marginal cost of production, because crafters *need* to produce
certain items in order to skill up; they're not making those goods because
they value what they can get for them in sale, they're making those goods
because they value the skill-up.

It has to be something really rare,
something very few people have access to. And such rare high level
crafting recipes tend to be BoP items anyway, so theres no opportunity
to sell them.

Yes. These are all reasons why crafting in WoW sucks, and yet still more
reasons why your "Gold farmers hurt the economy" argument is nonsense. If
every non-gold-farmer dropped his gathering professions and picked up
crafting professions tomorrow, there'd be no harm to the game. There'd
still be cheap mats on the AH that can be bought for little money and
turned into crafted goods that nobody wants to buy.

into the effects that will propogate across the rest of the economy.
Drive down the cost of mats, you drive people away from gathering
professions and into crafting professions. Too many crafters means
too many products which leads to lower prices, adn there aren't too
many crafted items out there worth selling.

Stop right there.

What constitutes "too many crafters"? What constitutes "too many
products"? What constitutes prices that are too low.

There's no way to measure those things other than by looking at prices,
because prices are the way in which you measure the value of things. What
you are doing is engaging in special pleading. You are essentially saying
that the WoW economy has natural forces operating on it, and also has gold
farmers operating on it. That the gold farmers are an unnatural force,
and damage the economy. But gold farmers aren't any less natural than the
other factors influencing the economy, factors like "Most crafted items
are worthless," and "all gathered goods of a particular type are
identical."

If you want to improve the *game*, then stop worrying about the frigging
gold farmers, because they're *not* "hurting the economy." Start worrying
about how most crafted items are worthless, and how all gathered goods of
a particular type are indentical. Start worrying about how there are far
more gold sources than gold sinks.

I'm done responding to you because of your creative editing. Pulling
out parts of things I said and leaving other parts behind.

I don't need to prove it to you, and if you want to continue on in
ignorance of how gold farming negatively impacts the in game economy,
go on ahead. If you've found a way to benefit from the cheap mats
that gold farmers provide, then good for you. But because the cheap
mats don't effect you doesn't mean it doesn't harm the economy.

.

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