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Weekly WoW Economy Roundup - Multi-Boxing Further Restricted, Price of Burning Crusade Classic Services in Gold
Live
Pubblicato
09/05/2021 alle 13:00
da
perculia
WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-Up
Hello! Welcome to the 176th edition of the WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-up!
My name is
Samadan
and I am a content creator focusing on making gold using Professions and
TSM
. I have a number of guides over on
YouTube
and I also stream my adventures on
Twitch
.
Multi-Boxing Further Restricted
Multi-Boxing, always a contentious topic and one often mistaken for Botting
has seen further restrictions applied
, this time targeting the use of
Hardware and/or Software to streamline or automate multi-boxing
.
On November 3, 2020, we posted an update to our policy for input broadcasting software, and soon thereafter, we began taking action against accounts found to be using third party software to automatically mirror keystrokes to multiple game clients. We find that, like full automation of play, multiple-account mirroring disturbs the gameplay experience for the vast majority of players who control a single account at a time.We will now additionally prohibit the use of all software and hardware mechanisms to mirror commands to multiple World of Warcraft accounts at the same time, or to automate or streamline multi-boxing in any way. Players found to be in violation of this policy are subject to account actions. These actions can include warnings, account suspensions and, if necessary, permanent closure of the player’s World of Warcraft account(s), as activities which effectively replicate automated gameplay are contrary to the terms and conditions of the Blizzard End-User License Agreement (EULA).We urge all players to cease using any means of mirroring gameplay across multiple WoW accounts immediately, in order to maintain uninterrupted access to World of Warcraft.
The key message here seems to be that while having multiple accounts is fine, using software or hardware to
mirror gameplay across multiple accounts
is not fine.
For those confused, the additional change here is the addition of "Hardware". Previously they stated that input broardcasting SOFTWARE was not permited.
The loophole was that people continued multiboxing but used specific hardware instead of software (1 keyboard + mouse, into a splitter box, connected to multiple computers as a basic example)
Turns out Blizzards really wants to squish this problem completely.
To clarify further for many in this subreddit, having multiple accounts is still 100% ok. You can craft on one, sell on another, play on a third for example 100% without worry. But running all accounts around gathering is now considerably more risky. I would also consider this statment from blizzard to include ANY software for the purpose of multiboxing as an instant uninstall.
By having these restrictions to both hardware and software, I imagine the aim here is to take multi-boxing down to the basics where more than 4 or 6 accounts becomes highly inefficient if not impossible. This will take away the scale of efficiency that was previously possible and allowed for the running of 16+ accounts.
The wording on "Streamlining" is a little unclear where the boundary lies.
There's still some super vague language after that though:
to automate or streamline multi-boxing in any way.
Am I no longer allowed to have two monitors with a client on each to streamline my multi-boxing at the AH?
They might as well just say don't run more than one account, instead of "we're not banning multi-boxing, but don't do anything that would be classed as multi-boxing or we'll ban you".
I think at this point, so long as you're not mirroring gameplay across multiple accounts, you should be fine.
The Price of TBC Services in Gold
With the recent news about
TBC Classic Deluxe Edition prices
,
Boosts
&
Character Cloning Services
. I thought it would be fun to work out the cost of each in gold according to current prices..
Service
Cost in Dollars
Approximate Cost in Gold (NA)
Approximate Cost in Gold (EU)
Classic Deluxe Edition
$69.99
Character Boost
$39.99
Cloning Service
$35
Assuming the conversion from Dollars to EU/GB currency is roughly the same and token prices of 160,000g NA and 230,000g EU. That's quite a sizeable amount of gold for sure, but entirely doable should you have yourself setup and want to spend the gold.
The Boosting Economy
An interesting question around the boosting economy was asked by
u/Typh123
..
Thought about the title above. Realized that for the past few expacs I’ve just been casually making gold in order to buy game time and end game carries.
If a player doesn’t farm gold, and they want a carry, they buy WoW tokens and then buy a carry.
If a player sells carries, what do you do with the gold? I assume you use it for consumables, collectibles, and blizzard cash services (after converting to a WoW token).
The carry economy is strong, and it seems to incentivize people to regularly pay blizzard an extra $20 in addition to sub fees.
Anyone else think about this topic? Feel like carry culture has only grown and I wonder if Blizzard likes it this way, if they don’t outright promote it through design. Are any of you goblins out there finding yourselves farming gold just to buy carries? If so, what do you think about it? Personally after realizing my behavior I decided to take a break from the game.
I think Blizzard genuinely tried to combat boosting for years, they just realized it's impossible to get rid of and if it's just going to happen they might as well earn money with it, the same happened with real money transaction for golds. (hell I never bought a boost but technically in 2005 I bought golds from a website to pay for my lvl 60 mount, and most of my friends did too, it was so tedious to farm golds at the time)
I used to think it was wrong but it's so widespread nowadays I got used to it and honestly these days it doesn't really bother me.
People buy a boost for all kinds of reason, I've had guildies buying a "denatrius heroic boost" for their undergeared alt because "it's just 40k gold, I can make that in less than an hour boosting people on my main", I know some high rated pvp players that hates PvE and buy boosts when they need PvE gear and make the gold boosting PvP, the opposite also exist, mythic raiders buying PvP boost just to min max their ilvl/stats with the gold they earned from boosting.
I even know some advertisers from boosting communities that makes close to gold cap each week spaming /1 to find customers, and spend a decent amount on boosting their own toons.
At the end of the day everyone is happy with the deal, boosters making good moneys, boosted people saving precious time. It doesn't really affect others in PvE, in PvP it's more of an issue but blizzard is still trying to fight it, this change is clearly aimed at people geting carried to a pvp rating they cannot get themselves :
https://www.cuckhead.com/news/pvp-item-upgrade-changes-with-patch-9-1-ptr-weekly-win-required-for-upgrades-322100?page=2
Hopefully Blizzard find the right balance so the game stay healthy. In my opinion they're doing a decent job.
----
It's a different cut from community to community but for the one I am in a +15 is sold 200k and the cut is :
136k for the people boosting (34k each)
40k for the advertiser (the guy finding costumers/organizing the group/collecting the golds)
24k for the community (not sure where the money goes exactly but I supose it pays the people maintaining the discord, the admins, the people coding and updating discord bots etc)
Advertising is a lot more profitable if you're good at it, but it's also the most boring you don't even get to play the game. The boosters with the most earnings are making a few millions per week.
u/Wisconsen
also comes up with a very valid point about incentives ...
There is are very large differences between tolerating, promoting, and de-incentivizing.
Blizzard tolerates boosting at best, and actively tries to de-incentivize it when they can without harming the average player.
The evidence of this is in the history of changed they make and continue to make to the 3 major areas of Boosting, PvP, M+, and Raids.
PvP - The 9.1 PvP gearing changes (must win a match weekly to buy gear at your rank, ilvl changes for PvE vs PvP Content) have a very directed and target effect of making pvp boosting a massively less attractive and lucrative option than it is currently.
M+ - The Great Vault, while at first glance might seem a positive to boosting. The reality is that people buy less run than in BFA because the runs themselves are less rewarding and less efficient for gearing when combined with the other changes to M+ drops and gearing.
Raids - Personal loot was sold and generally thought of as a "defense against those tyrannical GMs who don't give loot fairly". The reality is that people do not and did not stay in those guilds. What it does do however is make selling raid loot much harder. Pre-Personal loot one of 2 things happened if a item was up for sale. Gold Auction, or Flat Price. Didn't matter how geared the boosters were. There was no question of "is it tradable" because Master Looter Existed.
Currently to get raid loot you need what are known as "Funnels" these are people who have a character with
both
the ability to have the item drop for them and the ability to trade the item if it drops. Which is much harder than just existing in the raid.
Next the item needs to actually drop for them. This leads to needing multiple of these funnels per boostee and even then it is very hit and miss because of how personal loot works.
I say and point these things out as someone who is staff in a 5,000 member boosting community. So i'm not exactly just talking out of my ass or without any experience to form the opinion upon.
As for your specific questions.
If a player doesn’t farm gold, and they want a carry, they buy WoW tokens and then buy a carry.
Some do, some don't. There is still a massive amount of gold in the game from WoD/Legion Passive sources. In addition Goblins are great customers. And other boosters are some of the best customers. I know a very large amount of people who boost M+ or Raid, then spend the gold earned on PvP boosts, or Mounts and Achievements. Where it essentially just gets redistributed to other boosters.
If a player sells carries, what do you do with the gold? I assume you use it for consumables, collectibles, and blizzard cash services (after converting to a WoW token).
Consumables, collectables, game time, boosts for themselves. Everyone tends to do different things with the gold they earn. We have one booster buying a little over 1 million gold worth of carries as giveaway prizes for their St. Jude's funraiser.
The carry economy is strong, and it seems to incentivize people to regularly pay blizzard an extra $20 in addition to sub fees.
I would argue the game incentivizes it, and boosting is a just a side effect. And ... there might not be anything wrong with that. Carries for Gold have existed since classic, but very recently (the past 5 years) exploded because of M+. How important it is to the game as a whole, and how few players (in relation to total player base) actually enjoy it.
Ultimately that is the crux of it is this. The wow token is a very easy way to exchange your time (via the dollar value earned with it) for Gold. The same could be done with a raw gold farm or a Crafting Vendor Flip. If the wow token didn't exist those people would simply buy gold from someone else. Which leads to a whole lot of other problems.
The game often "feels" like it requires a lot of time if you want to get anywhere. And a good portion of that time for a large majority of players is spent getting gold to fund the other things they want to do. WoW is a timesuck, and the best way to make gold is a minimum wage job. It's why i always tell people to only get into gold making if they enjoy gold making. Not just because they want gold. If they just want gold? buy a token.
A lot of the broad strokes talked about here all show how money moves through and around the game. The point at which you interject and join in as a player is all down to what you enjoy and the resources available to you, time, knowledge or money.
TSM Price Sources
Jack the Dipper
has put together a great
article going through all the different price sources in TradeSkillMaster
and what each of them mean and when to use them ...
Auctioning and Accounting Price Sources
Each material or item in-game has its own price depending on which source you are looking at.
Most straightforward price sources are fixed like , or that you can use for operations, but they aren’t dynamic as all the others are. Many of those dynamic price sources represent a price of a material or item based on the current posted on the auction house realms and TradeSkillMaster users data.
Take this
Mithril Bar
for an example that has three different kinds of price source categories;
Auction House
is the data that TradeSkillMaster receives from the World of Warcraft servers every few hours.
TradeSkillMaster Users
is the Accounting data from all TradeSkillMaster users.
Accounting (Personal Data)
is from all your purchases and sales on the auction house that TradeSkillMaster records.
All these price sources are different from each other but calculated in the same way. For example, when you see the word Region, it means every realm on the same continent, like EU or NA.
You can see these different price sources in the TradeSkillMaster tooltip that you can enable or disable in the tooltip settings.
He then goes on to talk about each of the individual price sources, what they mean and when to use them. I highly recommend checking out the
full article here.
Opportunity Cost and the Price of Materials
An interesting number of topics came up this week all around the topic of pricing your time vs. materials ..
u/Liekui
asked the question -
What is the point of selling Flask/Pots instead of Herbs.
Hello I would like to join the AH game and since I have Herbalism and Alchemy as professions I would like to potions accordingly. now it turns out that on my server (Blackhand EU) the individual herbs that are needed for the potions are more expensive than the potions themselves. Why do players put Flask and Pots in the AH when the prices for each plant are more expensive than the prices they receive for the potions?
This lead to further discussions around time and
farmed herbs are "free" by u/Manthieus
...
Variations of this statement are thrown around this subreddit DAILY! So I wanted to take a minute of your time to help explain some terminology that is frequently misused causing confusion and argument.
I will start with a simple example.
The herbs to make a potion are being sold on the AH for 10g.
The potion is listed for 12g.
If you farm your materials, or buy the herbs to craft the potion and sell it at 12g your profit is still only 2g.
WHY? - If you farmed the materials should your profit not be 12g?
To understand exactly why you first need to be clear on some of the terms that will be used in the explanation.
Profit - The resulting amount of gold remaining after ALL expenses have been considered.
Revenue - The total sales made
Cost - The total value of the material and expertise needed to craft the potion.
Explanation.
The COST of the potion does not change. If you farm for the materials or buy the materials the resources needed to make the potion have not changed. What is often not so obvious is that how you PAYED for the materials has changed.
If you buy the materials then the currency used is gold.
If you farm the materials then the currency used is time*.*
The PROFIT is calculated by taking the REVENUE made by selling the potion minus the COST spent on materials to make it.
It is often not obvious that time is a currency, and should be treated as one even if you do not value it personally.
Why does this matter?
For a lot of people it does not. With the result that if it doesn’t matter to YOU it can be hard to see why it matters to others. It matters most when you are trying to scale past what your own time will allow. Or when you want to achieve the same results in less time.
If you are content with only selling 100 potions a day, you might have enough time to achieve this yourself, but what happens when your 100 potions sell out and you want to sell 1000 potions?
You either now have to spend 10x as much time farming as you did before or spend 10x as much gold to buy materials. What happens if it took you 3 hours to farm for your 100 potions to begin with.
10*3h is 30 hours and there is only 24h in a day. PROBLEM.
Now you will have to PAY for someone else's time, maybe even multiple people's time. This is the transaction when you buy your materials. You are buying someone's time.
Summary
Understanding these principles are key to growing past a “minimum wage” wow lifestyle. This subreddit is for those that want to be more than just the minimum, it is based on the foundation that people want to learn and improve. If you are not willing to conceive that time is a resource, you are at the same time failing at the first hurdle. While it is true that Blizzard will let you buy other players time with your credit card, this does not change the basics.
Lets try to teach and learn from each other and not promote bad habits.
u/canibanoglu
created a great post
explaining Opportunity Cost
and also importantly, how there is no correct way to value someone's time..
"Time is money, friend!" This might very well be the most popular quote among goblins but the more I read content (posts/comments) from fellow goldmakers, the more I think there are some misconceptions about how you should value your time when it comes to goldmaking activities.
Opportunity Cost
Understanding what opportunity cost is and how it applies to any economic activity is very important when making decisions on how and where to invest your time and money. From Wikipedia:
In microeconomic theory, opportunity cost is the loss of the benefit that could have been enjoyed if the best alternative choice was chosen instead.
In goldmaking terms, if I have two avenues open to me, one earning me Xg and the other Yg (where X < Y), if I choose the first one, I'm effectively losing Y-Xg by going through with my choice.
It is an easy concept that we all intuitively have, in a way this is why we all want to work for a job that pays more. But when two very different activities are being compared opportunity costs can be easy to look over and end up costing you gold.
I started writing this after reading this
thread
and I will continue by expanding on it.
The main premise of that post is that farmed herbs are never free because time has an intrinsic value attached to it. This is not strictly true. And a very good counter argument is one that comes up pretty often:
If I'm collecting the raw materials as I'm playing the game normally (dailies, callings, dungeons etc), they cost me nothing. If I craft a flask/potion with those materials, any price that I can sell those at is pure profit.
This activity is completely different than actively farming for materials, it is in effect the same as materials magically appearing in your inventory at certain intervals.
Case Study: Asmonmats and his crazy community
In fact, let's take it a bit further and talk about a hypothetical streamer. Asmonmats is a streamer who accepts donations of raw materials every day for 10 minutes.
Today, during his daily 10 minute donation drive, he was given 9000 marrowroots. His cost for all of this is effectively zero. Even if you were to argue that his 10 minutes has an intrinsic time value associated to it, we could always increase the amount of donations and decrease the time duration in a way that even with the most unrealistic gold/hour values, his costs would be insignificant.
For simplicity, let's assume that you can only craft int pots with marrowroot.
He can either choose to sell 9000 marrowroots or he could create 1800 int pots and sell those.
Before, we go further and discuss different price points, I would like to ask you to please realize that intuitively, we check different options, we have a concept of oppportunity costs already. We will check which option results in more gold and do that.
Asmonmats gets on his longboi and checks the prices.
Universe A: Marrowroot sells for 10g, int pots sell for 70g a pop. It's clear what to do, craft 1800 pots and earn 36k more by selling those.
Universe B: Marrowroot sells for 10g, int pots sell for 30g a pop. This time, it's the other way around, he'd choose to sell the herbs as they are to make more money.
Note that it both cases, he will profit. Even if he sells everything for 1c, that's still pure profit.
This is the real reason nothing is really free. Even if you haven't paid anything to acquire what you're trying to sell, you still want to maximize the value you realize by your transactions.
Universe C: Marrowroot sells for 10g, int pots sell for 51g a pop. Now, this is where we will see another opportunity cost that we haven't considered yet. At first glance, we should again go for crafting the int pots and earn 1800g compared to the other option, right?
Not necessarily! So far we haven't considered another opportunity cost: the time it takes to craft 1800 int pots, which incidentally is 1 hour. If you can find an activity that will net you 1800g in an hour, you're better off selling the raw marrowroots and doint that other activity.
How it applies to real life
Since most of us are not blessed with thousands of people falling over each other donating mats (or gold for that matter) or magically appearing materials in our inventories, these examples might seem contrived but I assure you they're not.
Understanding what opportunity costs are and how they apply to you will allow you to make better decisions as your goldmaking operations evolve. What might make sense when you're at 100k might not make sense when you're managing an inventory of 10m.
One personal example I can give you is Heavy Desolate Armor Kits. I craft thousands of these at one go and I have to go through a LOT of Heavy Desolate Leathers. TSM will sometimes tell me to buy Desolate Leathers and craft the heavy version myself because it is more profitable to do so. The problem is that if I'm doing this for 10k items, I'm forfeiting other goldmaking operations that I might use that time for. As such, I'm more often than not willing to pay several thousand more for the heavy variant.
This also has implications on the generally accepted mantra of "AHing is better than farming". This is not necessarily true and you should weigh your situation carefully. If you buy 10k worth of mats and sold various crafted items for 15k in total, you have increased your net worth by only 5k gold.Let's say that crafting all these items took you an hour to complete. If you have a farming route that gives you more during that time, farming is definitely is what you should do between the two activities.
Alchemy is my preferred profession for making money but it's also one of the most time intensive ones, so much so that I would argue it's almost like farming. In some ways, it's easy money but as my operation is getting bigger and I'm moving thousands of pots and flasks every day, I'm getting more aware of the time I spend crafting the items. Sometimes it is actually just better to buy off the competition and make gold by flipping the items.
I hope this helps someone out there. I welcome discussion and tips/suggestions. Happy reset day!
I guess what really prompted me to write this was realizing how people blindly advocate some actions over others. Many people in the goldmaking community has a condescending approach to people who like to farm or who like to earn their gold in different ways. And the default argument they make is "time is money" and I guess the pretentiousness behind that is what bothered and prompted me to write this. There is no correct way to value someone's time, what might be extremely expensive to you might be worth absolutely nothing to another and this will lead you to make completely different economic choices at times. There is nothing inherently wrong about this.
I think this last part really hits home for me as a gold maker embracing that everyone's choices are different and what they find fun and how they value their time. These are all great examples as to how to look into being more efficient if that is your wish and how to look at the markets overall.
Either way, play your game, have fun and Happy Goldmaking!
Further Reading
Most of this information was discussed and originally posted on the
/r/woweconomy
subreddit or in the accompanying
Discord Server
. You can also catch me streaming live on
Twitch
on Sunday from around 7PM GMT UK Time (2pm Eastern Time) for the WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-up live on Wowhead.com, or you can tweet your feedback/thoughts via Twitter at
@SamadanPlaysWoW
I hope you found this useful and If you have any suggestions or feedback, please do say so in the comments below..
Until next time, Happy Goldmaking!
Samadan
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