Posts with tag economy

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him, tweeting him at @foxvanallen, or by showing up in Los Angeles next weekend to give him some IRL love.

One of the most important points to remember when reading this or any other Gold Capped article is that advice that works well for one server's economy won't necessarily work for another. I can make money all day long selling Mysterious Fortune Cards on my server, but on your server, you might find that there's just no profit to be had in selling them -- if they even sell at all.

Certainly, there are a lot of factors responsible for this. Individual sellers have individual personalities and individual strategies. But beyond this, whether or not you're playing on a high-population server has a major effect on strategy as well. On one server, there may be 10 different people regularly trying to sell Flask of the Draconic Mind. On another, there may be no sellers -- because there aren't any buyers. Server choice matters. A lot.

We'll discuss the in and outs of both the low-population server and the high-population ones, because there are so many different strategies that work on one that don't work well on another. This week, though, we'll start with the most common scenario: The seller who find himself playing on a bustling server with what seems like an infinite amount of AH competition.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

edit: This is the TSM advanced guide, which assumes you've read at least the basic guide, if not the introductory description of the addon.

So last time we talked about TradeSkillMaster, it was just to go over the basics of the crafting queue. Let's finish the guide and talk about how to set up TSM so that it requires nothing more than a few minutes a day to get your work done.

First thing we'll want to do is update the addon. Since the last post, there's been a new version posted that's ironed out a few bugs. Don't forget to update the Crafting, Auctioning, and Shopping modules as well. The others haven't been changed.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail!

I walk a strange line. There are two distinct extremes in the readers of this column: those who feel I shouldn't be telling people their "secrets" about how to make gold, and those who believe that anyone who uses the auction house to make gold is somehow bad (in skill or character -- I get both). While the majority of readers are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between these extremes, let's look at the arguments.

Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Thursday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail!

Patch 4.0.1 has come and gone, and we can now use the benefit of hindsight to see how well our predictions did. I'm going to start off with the elephants in the room: alchemy transmutes and addons.

I reported that the cooldown for epic gems had been removed in the PTR and that this was likely so that people wouldn't be put into the poorhouse by having to regem. In reality, the datamining that determined this was incorrect, and the cooldowns are now resetting at midnight instead of the old way. There's huge demand for epic and rare cut and raw gems now, and people are tending to go toward rares because the epics are just too expensive.

Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail!

I got an email recently asking about something that's been on my mind lately: What ways of making gold are there when Cataclysm is just around the corner?

Graham writes:

I just recently had my first successful foray into the world of being an auctioneer. I am [now] sitting very happily with 28k gold earned [through selling crafted epics]. My goal is to purchase a Bane of the Fallen King title and ICC-10 full meta clear, which on Mal'ganis Horde sell for 50k and 75k respectively. At the time I am writing this, I have sold all of my inventory of epics and all of the materials that I was stockpiling to make more because my perception is the market has almost completely evaporated with the rumored release date of Nov. 2 for Cataclysm.

What other methods of accumulating a sizeable sum of gold over the next six weeks are available that should continue to be profitable clear up until the expansion hits?

I have access to max-level enchanting, blacksmithing, mining, alchemy and jewelcrafting. If the glyph market is your preferred answer, I could level a scribe. Unfortunately, my observation is that all crafted items (raid consumables, 264 epics, etc.) are selling at or below their material cost to create. I have looked into the Saronite shuffle and its various methods of earning income, and as near as I can determine, it's a zero-sum market as well (cost of ore = expected sale of any of the options).

Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail!

A couple of months ago, Blizzard released the mobile auction house, which is a feature of the armory that lets you buy and sell without having to log into the game. It's available on mobile devices like the iPod touch and Android handhelds; however, it's easiest to use in a browser with a full-sized screen.

This feature has sparked such innovative out-of-game tools like The Undermine Journal (see Gold Capped coverage), which crawls the armory auction house's listed auctions and provides some excellent aggregate data. Blizzard hasn't officially provided support for third-party applications yet, however they're close enough to in-game addons that I suspect it's only a matter of time.

The armory auction house isn't perfect, and since the beta ended, the product seems to have been left pretty much alone, bugs and all. That said, it accomplishes its purpose: You can buy and sell on your auction house instead of working or studying. Join me after the break to explore methods of work avoidance!

Patch 3.3.3 is going to the PTR soon, and there's a bunch of stuff that will affect those of us who play the auction house. I'm going to list them in the order I see them, and then we'll go into some analysis:

Professions

Runed Orbs: Recipes which require this item have had their material requirements significantly reduced.
Frozo the Renowned has moved into the Dalaran Magus Commerce Exchange and will be trading your Frozen Orbs for various other trade goods.

Update: Omega points out in the comments that Zarhym posted a list on the forums of what we'll be able to buy :

Crusader Orb (6)
Runed Orb (4)
Eternal Fire
Eternal Earth
Eternal Water
Eternal Air
Eternal Life
Eternal Shadow
Frost Lotus
Pattern: Frosty Flying Carpet [Tailors Only] (6)

Inscription

• Most recipes that required 2 inks now only require 1.

It's official -- Bornakk wrote on the official forums that Blizzard has increased the chance that a Northrend herb node will yield a Frost Lotus:

The drop rate of Frost Lotus, from herbs in Northrend, has been increased by 50%.

This will be a welcome change for many because with the increase in demand for raiding flasks that patch 3.3 brought, the supply of Frost Lotus on many servers has gotten quite low, which increased prices significantly. This change will go live on servers as they restart, so probably next Tuesday for most.

The new drop rate should have an fairly quick effect on the number of Frost Lotuses listed on your auction house, however it always takes a few days of lower sales volumes before the big farmers start to drop their prices and undercut each other.

My advice? Don't buy any Frost Lotus (or derivative flasks) unless you will use them the same day. Wait until the prices go down before stocking up! Also, if you are a herbalist, you can make a quick profit by spending some time farming now, and try to make some sales before the prices drop.

Wryxian has written a book on fishing over on the forums -- he originally responded to the thread with a quick link that affirmed in patch 3.3, you will never ever catch trash from fishing pools, regardless of your fishing level. If you put the bobber in a pool, you'll get what you're supposed to, no matter what (presumably to allow even low level players to do the fishing quests). But players have problems with that. First, there's the old issue of things always getting easier as the game changes -- people are complaining that they had to level with missed catches and trash, and those who level fishing after 3.3 won't. For that, I don't have a better answer than Wryxian does: that's just the way it works. The game is ever-changing, and most changes make things easier. That shouldn't devalue what you did before.

The other issue is that this may destroy the fishing economy -- if even low level characters always get the fish they want 100% of the time, that means more fish in the market, which means any money high-level fishermen would have made off of rare fish will probably go bye-bye. But Wryxian says that's OK -- people will still use fish for themselves, and he believes that the pain of losing that AH sale will be solved by the bonus of always getting the fish you want. We'll have to see -- it's true that between the updates to cooking lately (and the future fishy updates we're expecting), Blizzard is making sure the secondary professions are much less exclusive, which means there has to be the balance of also making them less lucrative.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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Former World of Warcraft distributor in China The9 recently reported on their third quarter revenues which showed a massive 94% drop Year Over Year. Their revenues were posted at $3.7 million, a significant drop from their second quarter revenue which was pegged at $42.2 million (while they still held the license). Last year, The9 reported revenues of $59.8 million.

Although The 9 downplays the loss, pointing to notable growth in their other licenses, such as FIFA Online 2 and Granado Espada, the impact of losing the publishing rights to Blizzard's phenomenal MMOG was more than apparent. World of Warcraft has a tumultuous history in China, with The9 losing the rights to rival Netease back in June, with rumors swirling about the change as early as April of this year.

World of Warcraft is currently in the middle of a power struggle between two Chinese government agencies, resulting in the suspension of the game. Players in mainland China have reportedly not had access to the game in months and there were numerous delays to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, putting the future of World of Warcraft in the country, as well as its potential millions of dollars in profits, in question.

[via Massively]

Elnia continues posting some interesting (and complicated) insight into the World of Warcraft over at the Pink Pigtail Inn. This time, it's about what she calls "rent seeking," which isn't about trying to find the money to pay for your apartment so much as it's about individuals petitioning authorities (the government, or in this case Blizzard) for their own income. The post dabbles with some complicated market theory, but in the end, the conclusion is this: while players have definitely petitioned Blizzard for changes to their own class, they have generally stayed away from asking for more money, or changes to the rules that would grant it to them. In general, players are fine with Blizzard staying hands-off of the various in-game economies running in Azeroth.

As the commenters over there say, there's a good reason for that, and it's because most of the economic play in WoW is completely optional. Aside from repair costs (which can be high for raiders, but for everyone else are fairly inconsequential), you don't really need money at all; given enough time, you can collect whatever you need from somewhere in the world, either by simply collecting ore or herbs, or by running instances and doing quests. But that doesn't mean that the "rent seeking" comparison isn't valid.

In a short (but not necessarily sweet) announcement, Zarhym announced on the official forums that the recently opened Blizzard pet store are now regional. This means that pets purchased from, say, the European store can only be redeemed on European World of Warcraft accounts. He doesn't go into detail other than to say that pets that have already been purchased from one region and redeemed in another region are not affected by this change.

While it's a curious move on the surface, it effectively restricts players from Europe purchasing their Pandaren Monk and Lil' K.T. from the US store where the pets are cheaper at $10 compared to €10 or £10 in the EU (roughly $15). Interestingly enough, the pets are priced at ₩12,000 in the Korean version of the store, which is about the same price as in the US ($10.3). It's unclear why the European version of the pets -- along with a few other Blizzard store items -- are more expensive, a fact that makes Turpster huff and puff and blow Azerothian houses down.

Obvious business reasons aside, it also creates a minor inconvenience for people who would like to give the pets as gifts to players in other regions. However, considering that many vanity pet codes have been regional in the past, such as those given away during Blizzard special events, it's not a surprising move. Then again, this whole foray into microtransactions was a bit of a surprise, so we've learned to never underestimate those folks from Irvine.

Researchers are apparently using economies in virtual worlds like Everquest, EVE Online, and of course our own World of Warcraft to determine how real-world economies work, according to this article by Reuters. Scientists have, of course, used WoW to model real-world behavior before, but that was specifically for something biological, and thus there were quite a few differences between the virtual model and the real application. In economies, however, it's all just money and numbers, so researchers can easily see real patterns and movements in the data.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't go too deeply into their results (and it only talks about their findings from Everquest), but there is one nugget of conclusion: the economists saw inflation spike in one server over 50% in just five months. They say that the population rose on the server, which apparently made some items hard to find, thus raising prices. Economists say they've seen that same thing in the real world before: in developing nations, and in war zones. We can probably see similar effects right around a patch, or even just on weekends. As more people run to the AH to buy certain items, inscriptions or enchants, the price on those is going to rise. Interesting stuff -- it would be cool to hear what other similarities these guys have found between the virtual world and the real.

I don't presume to know much about trade policy or international relations, so I'll just pass you this link to a story over on VentureBeat and let you decide for yourself. You probably have already heard that Blizzard has had plenty of trouble trying to bring World of Warcraft back online in China -- they've been waiting on approval from the Chinese government's General Administration of Press and Publication, which has already mandated a few changes to the game. Dean Takahashi at VB suggests that rather than being a technical issue, the delay may actually be political and/or economically motivated: the US and China have been bumping gently lately over exports and imports, and Takahashi suggests that Blizzard's game may have gotten caught in the middle. The GAPP, he says, may be holding the game back, concerned that such a popular foreign game might be released again on their soil.

Fortunately, even Takahashi says it's unsubstantiated -- WoW is likely to go back online in China in a matter of days, and the delays could just as easily have been administrative errors. But I do agree with Takahashi that it's worth watching -- China is cautious about allowing foreign manufacturers to sell to their citizens, and video games are no exception.

Our economy may still be pretty much in the gutter, but one industry is still going strong. If you glanced at what site you were reading this on and guessed "online gaming," congrats! You win a gold star. Here you go: ★.

Anyway, according to this industry report featured on GameSpot, online gaming overall (including MMOs, in turn including WoW) was up 22% year-over-year in May 2009. 87.1 million people were estimated to game online in the USA, an impressive 28% of our estimated total population.

Of course, a huge chunk of this is browser-based games (think Bejeweled or Yahoo! Games). WoW is apparently the 21st most popular "online locale," clocking in at 2.2 million US visitors. Still, I'd say 21st isn't bad for a game with a subscription fee; 2.2 million players at $15 a month is $33 million a month (assuming the each have exactly one account). The next-closest MMO, according to this report, is RuneScape, at 202,000 players. Really? Aren't there other MMOs with more than that?

Anyway, online gaming, like online everything else, is on the rise. Single-player, localized games are starting to feel positively quaint, although I still think Chrono Trigger is the best computer RPG of all time.