"Same with raiding: asking me to join a 4 hour raid is literally asking me to spend $100. "

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

"$25 is the value of my time. With $25/hour, and 1000 gold costing $5 bucks, then unless I'm making 5000/hour it's more worth it to buy gold. Of couse, once you factor in the potential loss of losing my account, I instead play the AH. Why?"

By this logic, you owe yourself $400 per day for the 16 hours you spend sleeping, eating, commuting, playing WoW and otherwise not working. Assume you started working at 20, you'll have to work 90 years past the usual retirement age to pay yourself back.

An Econ 101 professor would be either embarrassed or worried to hear this level of economic thought in class. Everyone else, though, can simply enjoy the absurdity of it.

If there is one concept all the wannabe auctioneers throws up here without a clue as to what it is, it's opportunity cost. My thinking does not include eating or sleep because those are necessary activities that do represent the highest/best use of my time. If I sleep 16 hours a day when I need 8, or eat 12 meals a day when I could get by with 3, the excess could be categorized as costing me stuff.

When will the people who play this game realize that flipping gems in a virtual world, gives you no credibility when it comes to finance, especially when you're talking to someone with a Finance degree. I got an A in Micro and Macro economics...so apparently my professor managed to plow through his embarrassment/worry and give me the grade someone with a clue deserved.

I really wish I could say the same for the others. P.S. there is a longer response to this floating around the comments...I don't feel like reposting it so go find it.

I'm pretty sure this argument only holds water if you're playing WoW instead of working. It seems to me that it loses all merit once you're off the workday clock and in to your "me" time.

Aris; your me time is considered a cost. Once you decide you will not work vs. free time, any hobby you have starts costing you money.

Considering this is more time consuming than most hobbies, WoW can be pretty expensive.

Or think of it this way, most people start playing the game and it absorbs a ton of time and energy. How many people do you know started playing, lost a ton of weight, and went to school for a Masters degree? Not many...mostly because all those things stake time and there is only so much time in the day, and hours in a week.

Actually the biggest problem I have with your argument is that while I make less than you, I pay the same amount for my game time and I have about the same amount of free time not working (I only work 40-45 hours/week also). So essentially both our times online are worth the same.

What's worse is your logic that your time is worth $25/hour. Your job pays a set amount. The trouble is if you work more, you do not make more. So your time is actually not worth anything. It is your work (that you accomplish in the 40-45 hours/week) that is worth 50g at the end of the year.

As anecdotal evidence, during one project here, my department had to put in a lot of overtime to get the project done. Since I get paid time and a half for overtime and my boss is on salary, we figured it out that my time was apparently worth almost 18/hour for that month (normally 15 at the time) and that his time was ironically at just over minimum wage ($8/hr here in CA). Granted during normal weeks, I still made 15/hour and he made considerably more than 18/hour (more than your 50g/yr even), it was still funny at the time. Kinda.

And the real kicker is you tried to apply all this to buying gold or waiting for an afk raider. If your time is cut so fine that you don't have the patience for playing the game, then I question why you spend money on a game you don't have time to properly enjoy. If the threat of losing your account is your deterrence from buying gold or working out how valuable your gold/hour has to be to make it worth it to you, then I strongly encourage you to buy gold. Once you are goldcapped and quit the game because you could no longer earn gold, I'm sure your server will be very proud and happy.

You could make the argument that joining a raid is equivalent to spending how much gold you could have made in that time frame. I wouldn't, as I'd consider raiding to be a leisure activity. A leisure time within the leisure time, as it were. But if you're not giving up work to play WoW, it's not costing you real money.