Im sorry memoir but you are simply wrong again(or just misunderstanding me).
1. What i meant is that by crafting you dont turn free stuff into valuable stuff, you turn valuable stuff into valuable stuff of another kind. Besides fishing isnt crafting, its harvesting.
2. Sorry i just dont buy it(pun intended). If it where that easy id just buy 500 silver and make myself a quick 5k gold. Obviously that doesnt work that way. These items(crafttools) have a low demand, and supsequently sell rather slowly, which means most crafters dont bother with them, which means low amounts of them on the AH, which means they are a prime target for people playing the auction house. Also its a one time commodity, so people are more ready to pay premium for them since they figure its a one time investment. Lastly a high price listing on the AH doesnt mean the items actually get sold.
I once had to sell 30 craft tools from our guildbank(dont ask ...), even with undercutting all the others(i just wanted to get rid of the crap) it took 2+ weeks to sell them all because the market just saturated. Also i have been guilty of buying up all the items of a type, and relisting them at far higher prices with low volume commodities. Those silverrods sell just as well at 30 gold as they do 15 for example.
3. Is valid. And you cant cite hundreds of items, really you cant. The simple reason being, if there where items that ALWAYS sold above the price of their ingredients, all it takes is a single crafter producing hundreds of them and he would get reliably stinking rich. Its basic market logic. Also be aware that your arguing your own points here you cant have a healthy economy and sure moneyprinting at the same time. People will try to undercut you in a healthy market, which automatically makes the prices approach their manufactoring costs.
And about the servernumbers, what makes you think i wasnt talking about concurrent users? If you think about it, it doesnt matter how many people are on a server if they are all offline right? The concurrent user number is really the only thing you can use as we dont know stuff like average playtime or amount of players(we can count amount of chars, but not players). Also im playing in europe, and we have some unpopular rp-pvx servers where the economy has completly broken down, as in the AH becoming completely useless. So clearly population is very important.
The number of characters on a server is wholly unimportant, the only thing that matters is the time played per player, wether you play one char 5 hours or 5 chars one hour amounts to about the same. So my point that the servers are to small still stands, its not just theory btw. I listed examples of items getting sold out(which happens all the time in WoW), which is simply something that doesnt happen in a healthy selfsustained economy that has reached critical mass.
P.S.: Another reason why WoW does not have a real economy is that its limited to an Auctionhouse or direct trade for all transactions(meaning no history of sales and limited volume due to only being able to list things a short time on the AH). In eve you can auction or direct trade too, but what makes the economy in eve is the marketplace where you can list buy or sellorders. Imagine it like having your own trader npc, standing in ironforge and buying and selling stuff(that you set, anything tradeable) for you at prices you have set(obviously you have to actually posses the items you want to sell). And then imagine a new interface where you could access all those players trader npcs and sort the stuff they sell by type. Obviously thats a huge stabilizing factor for the market.
Basicly imagine if there werent a couple dozen 20 netherweave cloth stack on the AH, but thousands. Obviously it would be nearly impossible to manipulate prices, and even if you do, people might just decide to aquire their netherweave via buyorders, instead of buying it directly. Thats a healthy economy.
LOL: I gather the fish but I have to cook the fish feast. So it is very much a profession and I combine it with the daily fishing quest in gathering the 3 fishes to cook the fish feast. (do you even play WOW ?)...
Of course the concurrent users are NOT important to a server economy.
It is the total number of characters played that is important to an auction house. Since the selling is not to concurrent users but the total user group during the full 24 hour day.
20K characters played divided over 10K players of which 3-4K are concurrent on line on each server.
WOW has on my last count 597 world servers outside of China, that's 6 million players. 10 K players per server with a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of total:concurrent players and 20K characters per server.
This means the Auction House is adressing the exact same number YOUR previous post mentioned of having a "healthy" not manipulative kind of economy of 15K-20K characters being played.
That was a BIG error in your previous post and putting it under the door mat won't help.
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Secondly IF you had upped your professions on par with your leveling you would have seen the "opening" in commercial opportunities for crafted good at EACH level. You don't believe the money making in crafting at each level ? No worries that's your problem.
Your attitude is the typical attitude of someone who begins his professions at max level. I say "thank you" and "cash in" on your gold. You give me 1 gold for each copper bar of my level 16 miner. Excellent. The same with the much needed Rods for enchanters (typical hi end profession).
The end result is : that WOW has an economy where you can make huge profits if you know the market.
Just like in the stock exchange. The advantage is that people have to see the advantages, your loss is MY gain.
What's more player driven than an auction house where the smart guys gain the gold in all kinds of crafted goods.
I don't even know why you would discuss these things.
Every player needs the auction house and it is very much player driven.
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PS. for the first Rod as an example: on a typical server you sell around 3 to 4 each day...
Let's calculate: 1/8 are enchanters, that would mean around 2500 enchanters of which 10% is early leveling his profession (and a lot quit before being maxed out) that's 300 starting over for the next quarter. ... Mmm.
Combine it with a gathering profession and some wool and you have 300-400 of gold before even hitting 20..
LOL: I gather the fish but I have to cook the fish feast. So it is very much a profession and I combine it with the daily fishing quest in gathering the 3 fishes to cook the fish feast. (do you even play WOW ?)...
Of course the concurrent users are NOT important to a server economy.
It is the total number of characters played that is important to an auction house. Since the selling is not to concurrent users but the total user group during the full 24 hour day.
20K characters played divided over 10K players of which 3-4K are concurrent on line on each server.
WOW has on my last count 597 world servers outside of China, that's 6 million players. 10 K players per server with a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of total:concurrent players and 20K characters per server.
This means the Auction House is adressing the exact same number YOUR previous post mentioned of having a "healthy" not manipulative kind of economy of 15K-20K characters being played.
That was a BIG error in your previous post and putting it under the door mat won't help.
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Secondly IF you had upped your professions on par with your leveling you would have seen the "opening" in commercial opportunities for crafted good at EACH level. You don't believe the money making in crafting at each level ? No worries that's your problem.
Your attitude is the typical attitude of someone who begins his professions at max level. I say "thank you" and "cash in" on your gold. You give me 1 gold for each copper bar of my level 16 miner. Excellent. The same with the much needed Rods for enchanters (typical hi end profession).
The end result is : that WOW has an economy where you can make huge profits if you know the market.
Just like in the stock exchange. The advantage is that people have to see the advantages, your loss is MY gain.
What's more player driven than an auction house where the smart guys gain the gold in all kinds of crafted goods.
I don't even know why you would discuss these things.
Every player needs the auction house and it is very much player driven.
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PS. for the first Rod as an example: on a typical server you sell around 3 to 4 each day...
Let's calculate: 1/8 are enchanters, that would mean around 2500 enchanters of which 10% is early leveling his profession (and a lot quit before being maxed out) that's 300 starting over for the next quarter. ... Mmm.
Combine it with a gathering profession and some wool and you have 300-400 of gold before even hitting 20..
That's just a simple insight in the market.
Ok 1. how much are the fish worth in your fishfeast?
2. Your really obnoxious and insulting you know that? Who told you i didnt level my professions as i level, oh right you made that up because i have a different opinion than you. What a crime. And on how many servers did you play that you throw around things like "on most servers" when you said yourself there are more than 500?
Also your naive. Yes there are around 20k characters per server on average(WoW Census), but you dont know that each of them is played in a given 24hour period. I certainly dont play all my 10 alts every day. Also there are people with one char than contribute more to the AH that people with 10 chars, its not like you can play more than one char at a time. So since you can only play 1char at a time its the amount of concurrent users that determines how much resources get harvested per hour and how much items listed per hour on the AH.
Btw, on my server silver rod goes for around 2-3 gold.
Also lets keep arguing that the sky is green. I say WoW sees sellouts which dont happen in a market which reached critical mass, you say wow server have enough players so the market is fine. Besides i said EVE needed 15-20k players, to reach this critical mass, thats not 15-20k twinks or trial players, thats 15-20k real persons interacting on the market. And yes i made hundreds of gold before i reached lvl 20. You know why? Because i had two gathering professions. Not because i had two crafting proffession, no my enchanter/tailor was as poor as it gets while leveling since leveling professions like enchanting is damn expensive.
But you keep going on about how rich you get with crafting, just strange that none of the richest people i know in wow made their money crafting. Infact thouse that craft actively in our gild always bitch and moan about how expensive it is to get all the recipes for their crafts, and how they only get measily pocketchange since everyone brings their own materials.
About your math regarding enchanters, are you trolling? You really assume there is an even spread between the professions? You really assume EVERYONE of them would buy a silverrod on the AH(and not maybe have half a dozen of them lying in the guildbank or ask a fellow player/friend)? Also its not even as if you need the silver rod, a gold rod, runed truesilver rod, runed arcanite rod or Runed Fel iron rod does just as well, and you need to buy them later anyway. So yeah, your overcharging idiots with craftables. Grats. Not like that would ever work with anything besides craftables, like taking 2 gold per woolcloth a piece or somesuch ...
Also your last point, no player needs the AH. If your in a remotely healthy guild you have everything inhouse.
So since you like to assume stuff about me, here is some for you. Your a loner without a guild, or maybe a farce guild that doesnt really work together. You think making gold is about getting the highest % increase in goods(because selling 3 items a day with 12 gold profit is hot), you think if you have 500 gold your rich, and you disregard that it costs you thousands of gold to level a craft(opportunity cost, google it). You dont raid, oh you pug raid maybe, but your not in a organized raidgroup that has been going together for months. You think if you shout loud enough, and ignore everything you dont understand in a quote, people will still think your clever. Also you know not much about other mmos, market theories or what supply and demand really means in a virtual world where hardly any work is involved in crafting. You dont understand how prices develope and change either.
Prove me wrong on the above paragraph by making a sensible, polite, informed post where you explain your position in a ... less simplistic way then just saying "lol duh ima selling goods, so itsa marketeconomythingy". I dare you.
Rocket is absolutely correct.. WoW's economy is all about mats. Finished end product has virtually NO value, unless enchanters buy it to DE.. (again it's all about the mats)..
With the easy of puging a LFD, one can get geared in 219's and totally bypass all of the player made 200 epic. Are there epics from raid drops out there? Sure, but the choices are few, and hardly available on the AH.. In fact most raid epic crafted items are never on the AH because it's not economically worth it. Raid drop recipes are normally made on request AFTER said customer gathers all the expensive mats to make it..
The economy on WoW is basically a past time hobby.. You may argue siting a few examples to justify your opinion, but from an unbiased eye, 90% of the recipes out there are virtually worthless.. Is that a real economy? I think not
So since you like to assume stuff about me, here is some for you. Your a loner without a guild, or maybe a farce guild that doesnt really work together. You think making gold is about getting the highest % increase in goods(because selling 3 items a day with 12 gold profit is hot), you think if you have 500 gold your rich, and you disregard that it costs you thousands of gold to level a craft(opportunity cost, google it). You dont raid, oh you pug raid maybe, but your not in a organized raidgroup that has been going together for months. You think if you shout loud enough, and ignore everything you dont understand in a quote, people will still think your clever. Also you know not much about other mmos, market theories or what supply and demand really means in a virtual world where hardly any work is involved in crafting. You dont understand how prices develope and change either.
Prove me wrong on the above paragraph by making a sensible, polite, informed post where you explain your position in a ... less simplistic way then just saying "lol duh ima selling goods, so itsa marketeconomythingy". I dare you.
It depends how you look at it. My 2 mains are in a guild (even 200 characters in there - around 80 people). The guild is 2 bosses away from the Lich King on 10. Only downed rotface as 5th boss in 25. Our bank is full and has 25K Gold. A lot of RL friends in that guild btw. Half of the guilds - as usual - are indeed loners.
I have at the moment 8K gold on the main, but I play indeed a lot with alts to have fun. It depends on my mood setting. One day I want to play with a rogue, the other day I treasure my WL or Pala.
But ... my alts are self supporting. No gold send (except one) and no help at all from my mains. Not even heirlooms. I came to see how good the economy works when playing through the professions on an equal basis as your basic "level".
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The problems you all have is that you simply don't "play" the economical game. You level at warp speed IGNORING every other aspect of the game to arrive in the small corridor of the latest Raid. The end.
The fact is: WOW offers more than leveling through warp speed and ending it in that one way corridor of killing the Lich King.
That kind of play is one straight high way to boredom.
I play otherwise and have extreme fun with the mood I have for that day. Either way: everyone is free to play like he wants. But don't come here and tell me how I should play WOW.
Sorry you lost your way in the game with that warp speed.
I am having fun instead and make money out of my playing style and yes that includes very much playing the Auction House which is VERY much player driven.
Edit: as answering your question: currently I can buy for 4.75 Gold all 3 fishes that serve as the basis for the needed Fish feast in Raids. X2 and then for a stack of 5, that would make 9.5x5 = 47 Gold. The lowest stack of 5 prepared Fish feast at the moment is 52 Gold.
So the total of the units needed is not exceeding the sell price. it is in a rather perfect balance. A further proof it is - of course - based on offer and demand.
The advantage comes in when I do go to Wintergrasp and fish my daily quest (award at least 10-13 gold (sometimes more) and I add in the additional catched fishes I need for my fish feast. There are hundreds of different examples like that. The most profit comes of course when you discover some niche markets while leveling the professions (because of all that gold on maxed out characters who need to level a profession from scratch).
Apart from the fact that you assume im one of those racing through the game i consider the dare met. Im not a rusher, but i played WoW since release with some pauses. All my characterslots on the server i want to play on are already taken by me(and its the server all my friends play on, so i dont want to reroll on another). Im a RPer and playing on a medium sized RP server, and i admit it has been years since any of my chars really experienced the 10-40 levelrange.
Things change, but not to the better. Today the economy is controlled by 80s, goldfarmers and superrich twinks who dont really care if they pay 15-30 gold for a green lvl 15 item, which again, got farmed by a 80 running the DM(or other lowbie instances) 5 times per hour(which yields obscene amounts of cloth and BoE or disenchantable BoP items).
The reason i complain so much about wows economy these days is that it doesnt work anymore as it was intended. Inflation runs rampant, and so does the goldinflux per mobs, new dailies, or simple selling of items to vendors(all of which creates new gold) while most heavy golddrains are one time deals. Things like dualspec(which i enjoyed) and now a mount for RL money that applies to all your chars further eliminated golddrains, and as a result the inflation will get even worse.
What your talking about, selling craftable items to other players, it only shifts gold around. Yes you can earn money with low level chars, but it doesnt compare to the money printing ability 80s have. The problem with them is how it works:
1. Demand for a craftable item.
2. Crafter supplies the demand.
3. Demand for Gold to pay the crafter.
4. Gold is farmed and enters the market.
5. Item gets replaced with a better version and sold to vendor.
6. The farmed gold to pay the crafter is still in the market(the crafter has it), but now due to selling the item to a vendor, the ingredients the crafter used are essentially converted to gold aswell.
7. Rinse and repeat.
Now the above doesnt sound so bad, pff whats 10 gold for a weapon sold to a vendor or 100 gold farmed by dailies to pay the crafter. But if it suddenly happens thousands of times per day on a server it DOES become a problem.
There, thats my beef with crafting in wow. It should combat inflation, be a moneysink. Instead it encourages farming, and directly creates more gold when we already have a strong inflation. Is blizzard stupid that they dont see this? No ofc not, they know exactly what is going on. And thats the reason consumables are so powerful(as you said they are utterly required), compared to items like weapons or armor, or why the big novelty stuff like engi bike or warmammoth require loads of gold.
Consumables go poof upon use, the harvesting and crafting of them dont burden the economy beyond inciting people to farm money to be able to afford it. Same for enchanting and those rods you keep mentioning, sure you can sell them to a vendor when you dont need them, but to enchant them you require mats that you get by NOT vendoring other items first. Which is why enchanting is allowed to be powerful(and common), it removes large quantities of vendorable items from the game, while armor and weapon crafting only creates vendorable items.
So in summary, your ability to make money from crafting items, even hundreds of gold at levelranges designed for having a couple of gold, is a sign of a diseased economy, not a healthy one. Its a sign that so much gold is spilling down from the topend that people dont care about a inflation in the double or even triple digits.
The direct result of this inflation(that is inherent in the games design), is that we cant have good craftable armor/weapons without very limiting restrictions like requirering extremely rare components(raiddrops). If we had nice complete class sets(6-8 items, green or blue, nothign special) every 5 or 10 level requireing only ingredients from that levelrange everyone would have them and trivialize content even further, and creating a huge influx of new gold.
So yeah i consider WoWs market and crafting broken. Crafting nonconsumable items harms the economy, which is why blizzard keeps it down. Just think about it, weapon/armor crafting could be alot more viable, especially weapon crafting. Its intentionally kept down.
In WoW the NPCs will buy everything but gear obtained through honor and badges. This sets the rock bottom value an item has in game. If it were a player driven economy the NPCs would buy nothing ever and the players themselves would set the value of the item.
Seriously dude do some google searching for player driven economys in mmos and do some reading and you will quickly find that it's pretty common knowledge amongst the MMO community that WoW does not have a player driven economy while crafting centric games like PotBS, Eve, Wurm, Darkfall, Mortal and Earthrise all have player driven economys and this is amajor selling point for those games.
Every game has its economy system.
I showed you in all my constructive posts above - with examples - how players also drive an economy in WOW.
First you had to acknowledge WOW has an economy to better your gear stats (even needed in high end raiding).
Then I showed you your fellow above, the WOW economy per server includes around 20 K characters (he was confusing 3K-4K players CONCURRENTLY on line), while you have to include all characters played for the total economy.
Now you include some NPC's who buy back goods at the cheapest prices for BoP items etc...to prove exactly what ?
You know where your problem is ?
You try to state something that simply is not possible: everyone seriously playing the game uses stones, potions, enhancements, gear, every day in WOW that comes from the AH. Put simply:
You buy and trade in WOW. That's a simple fact.
Next time try - for once - advance your professions at the same levels as your avatar "progress". You know THAT is the core problem with WOW these days.
People level day and night ignoring their professions, hit 80 and then think ... hey I need to choose a profession...
That's why my level 20's have 300+ gold with selling some niche crafted goods.
That's pretty much a perfect example of HOW a player's economy works: Offer and demand.
I like those level 80's foolish enough to NOT level their professions. It makes a perfect working money machine for my low alts.
Some days I make more money with my lowbies than my main. Just passing by the AH and cashing in from those lazy 80's.
)) That's the economy I like !
You can type till you're fingers fall off, you will still be wrong. Wow has some player driven elements , but it is still not a player driven economy. Nothing you have said or will say is going to make any sense in this conversation. A player driven economy will force you to use other players for any items needed in game. It will not give you the option to totally avoid paying or using other players for items. Everything, right down to all the crafting mats used to make things would be gatherd by players, not just some. But I could go on and on about this all day, you really aren't listening and are only here to argue at this point.
A player in WoW can choose not to partake in any of the crafting or harvesting. A player can get everything he needs in WoW without ever spending a copper to another player. You get your gear off mobs, some enchants from faction rep, grab some gems from pvp If you need to ... and guess what 99.9% of ppl will cut it for free. You also get your enchant mats from dungeons and can have an enchanter do that for free too. This is not a player driven economy. I'd almost think you are a troll for your persistance but I think it's just plain arrogance and ignorance at this point.
No one is arguing the fact that it has some player driven elements or that you can even make money in it. It does and you can, but it is not a true player driven economy and I do not know why one would even argue the fact ... I'm done here though, I will only spend a couple posts on anyone that hard headed, but it is quite obvious you arent worth any more of my tiem than that.
Im also out, i just resubscribed to LoTRO again(NA this time) so im not really interested anymore in this discussion about a game i stopped playing. Besides we were getting dangerously offtopic i think, might want to creep out before a mod spots us and hits us with the nerfbat.
Comments
My last post and response to you.
"Economy" and "Player Driven Economy": Go learn the difference.
Im sorry memoir but you are simply wrong again(or just misunderstanding me).
1. What i meant is that by crafting you dont turn free stuff into valuable stuff, you turn valuable stuff into valuable stuff of another kind. Besides fishing isnt crafting, its harvesting.
2. Sorry i just dont buy it(pun intended). If it where that easy id just buy 500 silver and make myself a quick 5k gold. Obviously that doesnt work that way. These items(crafttools) have a low demand, and supsequently sell rather slowly, which means most crafters dont bother with them, which means low amounts of them on the AH, which means they are a prime target for people playing the auction house. Also its a one time commodity, so people are more ready to pay premium for them since they figure its a one time investment. Lastly a high price listing on the AH doesnt mean the items actually get sold.
I once had to sell 30 craft tools from our guildbank(dont ask ...), even with undercutting all the others(i just wanted to get rid of the crap) it took 2+ weeks to sell them all because the market just saturated. Also i have been guilty of buying up all the items of a type, and relisting them at far higher prices with low volume commodities. Those silverrods sell just as well at 30 gold as they do 15 for example.
3. Is valid. And you cant cite hundreds of items, really you cant. The simple reason being, if there where items that ALWAYS sold above the price of their ingredients, all it takes is a single crafter producing hundreds of them and he would get reliably stinking rich. Its basic market logic. Also be aware that your arguing your own points here you cant have a healthy economy and sure moneyprinting at the same time. People will try to undercut you in a healthy market, which automatically makes the prices approach their manufactoring costs.
And about the servernumbers, what makes you think i wasnt talking about concurrent users? If you think about it, it doesnt matter how many people are on a server if they are all offline right? The concurrent user number is really the only thing you can use as we dont know stuff like average playtime or amount of players(we can count amount of chars, but not players). Also im playing in europe, and we have some unpopular rp-pvx servers where the economy has completly broken down, as in the AH becoming completely useless. So clearly population is very important.
The number of characters on a server is wholly unimportant, the only thing that matters is the time played per player, wether you play one char 5 hours or 5 chars one hour amounts to about the same. So my point that the servers are to small still stands, its not just theory btw. I listed examples of items getting sold out(which happens all the time in WoW), which is simply something that doesnt happen in a healthy selfsustained economy that has reached critical mass.
P.S.: Another reason why WoW does not have a real economy is that its limited to an Auctionhouse or direct trade for all transactions(meaning no history of sales and limited volume due to only being able to list things a short time on the AH). In eve you can auction or direct trade too, but what makes the economy in eve is the marketplace where you can list buy or sellorders. Imagine it like having your own trader npc, standing in ironforge and buying and selling stuff(that you set, anything tradeable) for you at prices you have set(obviously you have to actually posses the items you want to sell). And then imagine a new interface where you could access all those players trader npcs and sort the stuff they sell by type. Obviously thats a huge stabilizing factor for the market.
Basicly imagine if there werent a couple dozen 20 netherweave cloth stack on the AH, but thousands. Obviously it would be nearly impossible to manipulate prices, and even if you do, people might just decide to aquire their netherweave via buyorders, instead of buying it directly. Thats a healthy economy.
Ok 1. how much are the fish worth in your fishfeast?
2. Your really obnoxious and insulting you know that? Who told you i didnt level my professions as i level, oh right you made that up because i have a different opinion than you. What a crime. And on how many servers did you play that you throw around things like "on most servers" when you said yourself there are more than 500?
Also your naive. Yes there are around 20k characters per server on average(WoW Census), but you dont know that each of them is played in a given 24hour period. I certainly dont play all my 10 alts every day. Also there are people with one char than contribute more to the AH that people with 10 chars, its not like you can play more than one char at a time. So since you can only play 1 char at a time its the amount of concurrent users that determines how much resources get harvested per hour and how much items listed per hour on the AH.
Btw, on my server silver rod goes for around 2-3 gold.
Also lets keep arguing that the sky is green. I say WoW sees sellouts which dont happen in a market which reached critical mass, you say wow server have enough players so the market is fine. Besides i said EVE needed 15-20k players, to reach this critical mass, thats not 15-20k twinks or trial players, thats 15-20k real persons interacting on the market. And yes i made hundreds of gold before i reached lvl 20. You know why? Because i had two gathering professions. Not because i had two crafting proffession, no my enchanter/tailor was as poor as it gets while leveling since leveling professions like enchanting is damn expensive.
But you keep going on about how rich you get with crafting, just strange that none of the richest people i know in wow made their money crafting. Infact thouse that craft actively in our gild always bitch and moan about how expensive it is to get all the recipes for their crafts, and how they only get measily pocketchange since everyone brings their own materials.
About your math regarding enchanters, are you trolling? You really assume there is an even spread between the professions? You really assume EVERYONE of them would buy a silverrod on the AH(and not maybe have half a dozen of them lying in the guildbank or ask a fellow player/friend)? Also its not even as if you need the silver rod, a gold rod, runed truesilver rod, runed arcanite rod or Runed Fel iron rod does just as well, and you need to buy them later anyway. So yeah, your overcharging idiots with craftables. Grats. Not like that would ever work with anything besides craftables, like taking 2 gold per woolcloth a piece or somesuch ...
Also your last point, no player needs the AH. If your in a remotely healthy guild you have everything inhouse.
So since you like to assume stuff about me, here is some for you. Your a loner without a guild, or maybe a farce guild that doesnt really work together. You think making gold is about getting the highest % increase in goods(because selling 3 items a day with 12 gold profit is hot), you think if you have 500 gold your rich, and you disregard that it costs you thousands of gold to level a craft(opportunity cost, google it). You dont raid, oh you pug raid maybe, but your not in a organized raidgroup that has been going together for months. You think if you shout loud enough, and ignore everything you dont understand in a quote, people will still think your clever. Also you know not much about other mmos, market theories or what supply and demand really means in a virtual world where hardly any work is involved in crafting. You dont understand how prices develope and change either.
Prove me wrong on the above paragraph by making a sensible, polite, informed post where you explain your position in a ... less simplistic way then just saying "lol duh ima selling goods, so itsa marketeconomythingy". I dare you.
Rocket is absolutely correct.. WoW's economy is all about mats. Finished end product has virtually NO value, unless enchanters buy it to DE.. (again it's all about the mats)..
With the easy of puging a LFD, one can get geared in 219's and totally bypass all of the player made 200 epic. Are there epics from raid drops out there? Sure, but the choices are few, and hardly available on the AH.. In fact most raid epic crafted items are never on the AH because it's not economically worth it. Raid drop recipes are normally made on request AFTER said customer gathers all the expensive mats to make it..
The economy on WoW is basically a past time hobby.. You may argue siting a few examples to justify your opinion, but from an unbiased eye, 90% of the recipes out there are virtually worthless.. Is that a real economy? I think not
Apart from the fact that you assume im one of those racing through the game i consider the dare met. Im not a rusher, but i played WoW since release with some pauses. All my characterslots on the server i want to play on are already taken by me(and its the server all my friends play on, so i dont want to reroll on another). Im a RPer and playing on a medium sized RP server, and i admit it has been years since any of my chars really experienced the 10-40 levelrange.
Things change, but not to the better. Today the economy is controlled by 80s, goldfarmers and superrich twinks who dont really care if they pay 15-30 gold for a green lvl 15 item, which again, got farmed by a 80 running the DM(or other lowbie instances) 5 times per hour(which yields obscene amounts of cloth and BoE or disenchantable BoP items).
The reason i complain so much about wows economy these days is that it doesnt work anymore as it was intended. Inflation runs rampant, and so does the goldinflux per mobs, new dailies, or simple selling of items to vendors(all of which creates new gold) while most heavy golddrains are one time deals. Things like dualspec(which i enjoyed) and now a mount for RL money that applies to all your chars further eliminated golddrains, and as a result the inflation will get even worse.
What your talking about, selling craftable items to other players, it only shifts gold around. Yes you can earn money with low level chars, but it doesnt compare to the money printing ability 80s have. The problem with them is how it works:
1. Demand for a craftable item.
2. Crafter supplies the demand.
3. Demand for Gold to pay the crafter.
4. Gold is farmed and enters the market.
5. Item gets replaced with a better version and sold to vendor.
6. The farmed gold to pay the crafter is still in the market(the crafter has it), but now due to selling the item to a vendor, the ingredients the crafter used are essentially converted to gold aswell.
7. Rinse and repeat.
Now the above doesnt sound so bad, pff whats 10 gold for a weapon sold to a vendor or 100 gold farmed by dailies to pay the crafter. But if it suddenly happens thousands of times per day on a server it DOES become a problem.
There, thats my beef with crafting in wow. It should combat inflation, be a moneysink. Instead it encourages farming, and directly creates more gold when we already have a strong inflation. Is blizzard stupid that they dont see this? No ofc not, they know exactly what is going on. And thats the reason consumables are so powerful(as you said they are utterly required), compared to items like weapons or armor, or why the big novelty stuff like engi bike or warmammoth require loads of gold.
Consumables go poof upon use, the harvesting and crafting of them dont burden the economy beyond inciting people to farm money to be able to afford it. Same for enchanting and those rods you keep mentioning, sure you can sell them to a vendor when you dont need them, but to enchant them you require mats that you get by NOT vendoring other items first. Which is why enchanting is allowed to be powerful(and common), it removes large quantities of vendorable items from the game, while armor and weapon crafting only creates vendorable items.
So in summary, your ability to make money from crafting items, even hundreds of gold at levelranges designed for having a couple of gold, is a sign of a diseased economy, not a healthy one. Its a sign that so much gold is spilling down from the topend that people dont care about a inflation in the double or even triple digits.
The direct result of this inflation(that is inherent in the games design), is that we cant have good craftable armor/weapons without very limiting restrictions like requirering extremely rare components(raiddrops). If we had nice complete class sets(6-8 items, green or blue, nothign special) every 5 or 10 level requireing only ingredients from that levelrange everyone would have them and trivialize content even further, and creating a huge influx of new gold.
So yeah i consider WoWs market and crafting broken. Crafting nonconsumable items harms the economy, which is why blizzard keeps it down. Just think about it, weapon/armor crafting could be alot more viable, especially weapon crafting. Its intentionally kept down.
You can type till you're fingers fall off, you will still be wrong. Wow has some player driven elements , but it is still not a player driven economy. Nothing you have said or will say is going to make any sense in this conversation. A player driven economy will force you to use other players for any items needed in game. It will not give you the option to totally avoid paying or using other players for items. Everything, right down to all the crafting mats used to make things would be gatherd by players, not just some. But I could go on and on about this all day, you really aren't listening and are only here to argue at this point.
A player in WoW can choose not to partake in any of the crafting or harvesting. A player can get everything he needs in WoW without ever spending a copper to another player. You get your gear off mobs, some enchants from faction rep, grab some gems from pvp If you need to ... and guess what 99.9% of ppl will cut it for free. You also get your enchant mats from dungeons and can have an enchanter do that for free too. This is not a player driven economy. I'd almost think you are a troll for your persistance but I think it's just plain arrogance and ignorance at this point.
No one is arguing the fact that it has some player driven elements or that you can even make money in it. It does and you can, but it is not a true player driven economy and I do not know why one would even argue the fact ... I'm done here though, I will only spend a couple posts on anyone that hard headed, but it is quite obvious you arent worth any more of my tiem than that.
Im also out, i just resubscribed to LoTRO again(NA this time) so im not really interested anymore in this discussion about a game i stopped playing. Besides we were getting dangerously offtopic i think, might want to creep out before a mod spots us and hits us with the nerfbat.