According to a commonly held opinion, farmers contribute to in-game inflation, letting their insatiable appetite for gold drive prices up as they demand higher and higher payment for their merchandise. As far as I can tell, the opposite is true.Nobody really believes that increasing the supply of items for sell would increase the price of items in general, do they? Do THEY?!!? :-)
(BTW, I don't remember who was talking 'bout it (Jek?), but I've heard complaints that prices are going down. Now, we might be able to blame farmers for that!)
8 comments:
I've made about 18g so far on my alliance alt mostly by selling stacks of copper bars. People on the alliance side will usually buy out a single stack for 1g within 4 hours. At a 90s buyout, they usually sell within an hour.
Consider the intrinsic value of copper bars: a player needing them to advance a tradeskill is generally between levels 5-20. On my first character, when the server economy was brand new, I had saved up 1g by about level 16 (while maybe having spent 3g on skills and abilities).
I think this sort of inflation is a symptom of money flowing into the game economy faster than it flows out of it. A game economy like WoW, unlike a real economy, is not a zero-sum system. NPC merchants spawn new cash when you sell items to them instead of taking the cash out of a fixed purse. Items and coins transacted to NPCs are destroyed. Mobs spawn with items and cash regardless of quantities already in the world.
Ultimately I don't think that professional farmers generate enough volume of cash to make a significant difference in the economy either way. At least, not compared to the effects of the level cap. There aren't any significant built-in cash sinks for players after the epic mount (if they buy things from players, the cash stays in the system). High level players can pick up cash pretty easily if they know where to look -- many in The Fabled took up camping Tyr's Hand mobs at around 10g an hour to finance their epic mounts, and I can make more in 30 minutes fighting green mobs around the flight point in Silithus than I made in my first 20 levels.
I guess that's my real point - hardcore players, as a group, seem to do a much larger volume of farming than the professional farmers do. There's just a different mindset around it; look at the language they use: "I have to go grind cash for my mount," "I have to go grind in felwood for reagents," or even "WSG is better for farming honor points."
Here's a interesting rhetorical question: A pint of beer, in the United States, in 1918, cost around 5 cents (I'm guessing). In 2005, domestic beer production and distribution is many hundreds of times larger and vastly more efficient. So why does a pint of beer cost $3.50?
well, the other $3.45 goes into marketing.
"I think this sort of inflation is a symptom of money flowing into the game economy faster than it flows out of it. A game economy like WoW, unlike a real economy, is not a zero-sum system."
I agree that money is always increasing and in that sense its not zero-sum, but I disagree that we don't spontaneously make money in the real economy. What happens when a bank gives me a credit card and I go buy stuff on it? Did the Fed print more money? Nope, but there's more money in circulation (of course no new bills, but each bill is transacted more often).
Money in WoW is created when people go and "transact" with mobs.
There are interesting differences between the real world and WoW economies... You bring up one that I've complained about before. There's no real innovation/entrepreneurship. I can't invent a new epic item and start to sell it. Also, it seems that there are limits to productivity. Can you grind more than xg from a group of mobs in hour? x will be very dependent on Blizz set values like the repop rate. No matter how clever I am, I'm going to run into such limitations.
This is the heart of your question about lager. We pay more for beer because of inflation (which happens in the game, but interestingly not to vendors in-game) but also for the several generations of innovation that have transpired since 1910 or whenever. The beer we drink now is much better in terms of taste, variety, health (e.g. low-carb), packaging, etc... I think you can get catty about marketing (*looks at thumb*) but the fact is that when we buy stuff, we buy lifestyles. Which beer you buy/drink says something about who you are (and you pay to be a part of that).
BTW, you can get generic stuff for much less than a buck but that probably has better quality (i.e. it won't make you sick, it has consistent taste, etc) than the stuff from the "good 'ol days".
If you ask me, the biggest problem with the WoW economy as a model of the real one is that it lacks the dynamism of the real deal. I want to invent stuff; I wanna come up with clever methods to improve my mad grinding skilz!
And if you had that stuff, then you'd need (intellectual) property rights (the exclusive right to make an elite set item that I invented or a patent on a method to grind mobs in EPL better, etc)... but don't get me started.
Second Life
There
A few (probably less than 100, though) people actually make a living by designing and selling custom items/art in these worlds.
The beer question was easy enough to answer: I'm quite aware that a big chunk of the price goes to distribution and marketing. And all that fancy production equipment. And meeting government regulations. And maintaining a legal department. My point was that the absolute price went up even though the supply increased.
Back to in-game inflation, let's look at your X figure as the maximum estimated amount of cash that a player can grind from mobs in an hour. Let's pretend we collected an appropriately sized data sample, ran a good analysis on it, and came up with a figure for X that averages out cash and vendor item drops (items sold for players don't really count, because they just move money around inside the player economey). So we end up with a value, X, representing what an average hour of farming will "produce." Let's call X the estimated limit to your productivity; you might have better days, but they will be balanced out by worse days.
Let me now introduce a new value, Y. Y is the real, in-game limit to productivity. Y takes into account all of the dirty tricks and loopholes a player can use to make money. This is what the player will make if he grinds the rich mobs with the high respawn rate in the new zone that wasn't in game during the beta (Tyr's Hand). It's what he makes if he solos the same instance boss over and over using instance resets (SM Cathedral, now retuned). It might be what he gets if he runs a fishing macro 20 hours a day and sells the fish at a massive profit (Booty Bay, early retail, now fixed). I'd rather not include blatantly illegal techniques like duping inside of Y, but you can be sure that they factor in.
To be fair, the Blizzard devs are only human. Ultimately there are probably less than two dozen making the creative and design decisions, and they are up against several million players, most of whom are above average intelligence (think about it). A game this big is a highly complex system, and if the Blizzard team could predict every loophole and exploit, they should get out of the games business and make a killing practicing corporate law.
Side note, for some interesting reading, check out The Great Scam. It's the story of an investment pyramid scheme in another MMORPG called Eve Online.
Yeah, but I want creativity to be "in the game". As it is, "creativity" is for cheaters and exploiters. Too bad.
Re: beer inflation. There's a general devaluation of currency over time (aka inflation). A nickel 100 years ago is work a couple bucks today. This is a result of the gov't printing money. This has nothing to do with beer production or supply or anything.
So to help to think about these things clearly, economists have this thing called the real value or price. Its the price a beer minus inflation.
I wouldn't be surprised if the real price of beer has gone down in the last 100 years. Most foods and raw material-like things (e.g. iron) have seen sustained and drastic drops in real prices in last 200 years or so.
Mobs dropping cash might be considered directly equivalent to minting fresh currency, although in a relatively uncontrolled manner.
Maybe it's a mistake to think of the game economy as a unified system. Maybe it's more accurate to think of the player economy acting in parallel with the game economy - 1g still buys as much from a vendor as it did on day 1 of retail, but 1g gets you a lot less from another player.
A friend once told me about playing Diablo 2 on Battle.net. Cash was pretty easy to come by in that game; a player of sufficient level could pretty easily gather cash up to their carrying limit in a few hours. With every player potentially walking around with their pockets stuffed to capacity with money, the value of money quickly went straight to 0. An alternative medium of exchange arose, using the semi-rare Stone of Jordan rings; trades were negotiated using these as the new yardstick.
Re: Creativity - Potentially very fun in a big online game. It also makes it pretty much impossible to maintain a unifying narrative theme throughout the environment, because each GM has to become a censor.
That reminds me - I *have* to show you guys that half-life mod I was trying out.
ooh, I'm interested in halflife mods. What 'cha got? (Get nostalgic about beta testing counterstrike days) Also, I thought I was bad for making 6G by whoring bronze on the AH. the guy in that EVE story's nuts.
Garry's Mod
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