Recently Eyonix made a sticky in the General Forums titled “Don’t buy gold”
"Buying gold makes baby murlocs cry. If that isn’t enough to dissuade you all by itself, you might be interested in checking out the informational webpage that we put together to make sure players have the facts about the negative impact of purchasing gold and using power-leveling services. Our goal is to shed some light on how these companies operate, share some of the measures we’re constantly taking to combat them, raise awareness of the detrimental effects these services have on all players -- not just the buyers -- and help protect members of our community from being targeted by them. So give it a read -- it’ll only take a few minutes. And don’t buy gold. Because you wouldn’t want little Murky’s tears on your conscience, would you?"
This is the page page Blizzard put together to inform players about why buying gold is bad.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html
There’s one statement on that page that rubbed me the wrong way.
“...use bots that make it hard for players to find the resources they need, and raise the cost of items through inflation.”
The are a few problems with that statement.
Inflation:
Farmers do not cause inflation in the game. An AH or trade transaction does not increase the amount of gold available in the game. Let’s assume that the amount of gold available on the server is 1Billion. A botter farms 100 stacks of herbs and sells them on AH. I buy 100 stacks of herbs for my own use for 2000g. The botter takes the gold he made from 100 stacks and sells it to someone else for $20USD. The ammount of gold in the game didn’t increase, it was simply moved from me --> to the botter --> to the gold buyer. Actually the amount of gold decreased if you take AH fees and deposit costs into consideration. So no, botters/gold-farmers do not cause inflation.
Then when does inflation come from? It comes from a) vendoring b)loot and c) the major one: daily quests. Blizzard are themselves responsible for the inflation in the game because they increase gold rewards from questing and vendoring items. If Blizzard wanted to reduce inflation the solution would be obvious - remove gold from dailies, replace it with gear/gems/enchants/herbs/lotuses and so on.
Now to the second point, about how botters supposedly make it harder to find the resources players need. I value my account too much to ever compromise it with something like botting, but I can easily tell who’s a botter in the game and who isn’t without leaving Stormwind.
The demand for Nobles Decks on my server is very big. I’ve been crafting about 3 Nobles Decks a day for the past month. I won’t bore you with calculations and probability of getting cards (That’s for another post) but I’ll tell you that to craft 3 Nobles Decks takes roughly 600 stacks of high end herbs (Adder/Icethorn/Lichbloom) and 288 Eternal Life. When I buy herbs from the AH I pay attention who sells them since sometimes I can whisper and agree to get them to COD their herbs to me instead of putting them on the Auction House. I’ve noticed that the average player will only farm sell 10-12 stacks of herbs a day. That makes perfect sense: 10-12 stacks of herbs + a couple eternals and a few Frost Lotuses make about the same amount of gold as dailies. They run the heroic daily dungeon and maybe 1-2 more and they are set with the amount of gold they need to buy new gems/enchants for their gear and pay for repairs/consumables. So if the average player farms 10-12 stacks, where do the rest of the herbs come from? I often buy 60-70 stacks from the same name daily. I can only assume most of these accounts are botters. The thing is, if botters wouldn’t be there, the demand would simply be higher than the supply, and prices would rise higher and higher. Don’t believe me? I’ll give you an example. On September 4, 2009 farmers disappeared. Blizzard detective one of the biggest bots and banned everyone using it. Frost Lotus prices began to creep up to 40..50..60..80g. Very few put 2+2 together and soon enough someone started a rumor that there was a stealth nerf to lotus drop rates and that’s how they explained the rising market price. But with a 5% drop-rate and people only farming about 12 stacks a day lotus was actually just very hard to come by.
So let me ask you this. Blizzard knows way better than a casual observer like me how much the average player farms a day. Why the bloody hell do they create a 5% droprate for an item that’s used in 4 different flasks that almost every raider in the game uses on a weekly basis? Again, the answer is obvious. Blizzard knows that botters will always be there and designs the game not with the averages that legitimate players farm, but the averages that rule breaking farmers output every day. Here we finally arrive to the only possible conclusion, that gathering and crafting in this game is designed with farmers and botters in mind.
One final point is about Blizzards own attitude towards botters. They have some brilliant developers and impressive detection software, but they don’t take advantage if it as much as perhaps they should have. Blizzard is famous for their banwaves. They will not ban botters for month at a time, only to ban everyone one morning and make a nice press release. Tobold wrote a blog post about such a banwave a while ago.
Banning 1-2% of the botters/year makes for a better publicity stunt than banning 100-200 new botting accounts a day and keeping the game clean.
In conclusion I’d like to say that without a doubt the game would be more enjoyable for everyone if Blizzard redesigned the harvesting/crafting parts of the game and kept banning everyone who is detected using a bot on a daily basis. However in the current version of the game, botters are actually essential to the gameplay.
With respect, I would like to say that I think you are wrong about Gold sellers not causing inflation. What about this factor. A bunch of real life rich people buy wow gold. They need stacks of an item. They get on wow and pay any price because they have no limit of funds. The sellers realize that this item can bring in even more gold and raise the asking price. after a few cycles the price is too high.
ReplyDelete@m the transaction doesn't matter because when those rich RL people bought the gold, the gold was not created out of thin air. The gold farmer(I'm not talking about account hackers) does not create extra gold, he still has to work within the server economy to gain it. Meaning he farms ore/herbs which are then given to crafters, which then use his raw materials to make the items which are then sold to the person who likely bought that gold from the same gold farmer. It's a cycle where money gets transferred from one hand to another.
ReplyDeleteI am not an economist so please excuse me if this is naive, but doesn't people pulling large mounts of money from savings to dump on consumer spending lead to inflation? Hence if people buy gold to spend on items in the economy (consumables, gear from the AH) wont that raise prices and cause inflation?
ReplyDeleteThe gold has come from the farmers selling farmed items in game - i.e. it has come out of peoples savings. Given that there is no "investment" in wow in the economic sense (what infrastructure would we invest in - guild banks maybe?), we are not pulling from one type of spending in the economy to another, just from one persons gold idly sitting in the bank to another persons consumer spending.
@kotamundos,
ReplyDeleteinflation occurs when the TOTAL ammount of gold on the server increases.
Yes, if somebody has 1million gold saved and decides to go on a spending spree prices are going to spike, but only until he is done spending. After that, since gold was not created(some of it was actually destroyed due to AH fees), the total amount of gold on the server stays the same, so prices normalize. What happens in your scenario is simple wealth redistribution.
Just some thoughts. First, Blizzard can simultaneously design with botters in mind and still not want them in the game. Second, I think you're assuming Blizzard wanted raiders to be able to easily obtain their flasks. That's not a given. Finally, if the botters disappear, yes Frost Lotus gets more expensive, but in the long run there would simply be more people with herbalism.
ReplyDeleteAs an herbalist, I have no problem with 85G frost lotus.