The other day I asked a friend if he could craft the Felsteel Whisper knives (throwing weapons) as my rogue Warspike soon hits 70. He was very happy to make them for me but I had to supply the ingredients (and I would expect nothing else). A lot of materials are required for the knives - they are blue level 70 knives after all. When I browsed the AH for the materials I realized that the price for me to get all this stuff would be far more than the price of actually buying the knives themselves on AH. Just a week earlier I had seen them on AH for as little as 30-40 gold. The sum of the mats I would have to buy would on my server be 150-200 gold.
Which led us to a lengthy discussion that the economy in World of Warcraft is seriously wrong. The materials are more expensive than a finished product. Why is it that the common commodities are so expensive? One reason could be that everyone needs the same materials in this case a bit of felsteel (engineers, jewelcrafters and all the blacksmiths) but how many actually needs the throwing knives? And as a guild mate of mine pointed out... everyone and their mother are power-levelling up their crafting professions which makes a huge material demand. And it doesn't end there but many end-game players choose to have two crafting proffessions for those imba BoP's. Every rogue should have blacksmithing for the Drakefist Hammer and jewelcrafting for the Nightseye Panther ... or enchanting to play the AH market for even more gold to afford those pricey materials.
So what possible solutions are there? I see none within the current game mechanics of WOW. So I'll throw out a few ideas...
#1 Restrict the crafting skills to one craft per player
#2 Allow everyone to gather material - this will probably flood the market with mats and thus make sure that a finished product is worth more.
#3 Have mats gathered be BoP and redesign a new interface for the crafting where the crafting can be made into a group action. It can be as simple as a Warlock's summoning. Click on the forge .. add a few mats and BOOM a new item.
#4 Stop the gold buying... we all know that has one of the biggest impacts on the economy.
What are your suggestions?
3 years ago
2 comments:
I don't think there is any simple across-the-board fix for the economic woes in WoW, simply because in my experience, economies develop differently on different servers. My guess (though I am not an economist or a game designer) is that there are a combination of problems that would require rebuilding the whole economic model in WoW.
I say this because of my experiences on various servers. I have played on several different servers. One of them(Kirin Tor - US) has a very inflated market, both Alliance- and Horde-side, for mats. The other servers I have played on, even as they mature, have not witnessed the same degree of inflation. In fact, on one server (Steamwheedle Cartel - US) mats prices have remained remarkably steady, and fairly low, for over a year. Sure there are times that someone tries to corner the market, and occasional runs on specific items, but equilibrium generally returns fairly quickly.
make drops rate more for mats (i.e like 3+ knothide leather perskin, or more motes)
petition??
Post a Comment