I’ve noticed while shopping the AH that from time to time there will be a wide discrepancy in prices, with the higher price points absurdly high. For example, say I need This Reagent. A few sellers are offering it for 20 gold, a few for 25 gold, some for 30 gold, and one for 25,500 gold.
What is the guy who’s offering This Reagent for 25.5k trying to achieve? Is this just a case of running something up the flag pole to see if anyone salutes? Some bizarro manipulation of the Auction House pricing system that I’m failing to understand?
I’m not sure if WoW does, this, but some online games will kick a seller if it doesn’t have any inventory for sale. One way to prevent that is to ensure they always have at least one item in stock. One way to do that is to price a trivial item with an outrageous price that’s unlikely to be sold.
I’ve heard that sometimes people will buy gold on the web and this is how they get it. They pay real-world money to someone and then they put an item in the auction house with the price of whatever amount of gold they paid for. The person with the gold buys the item in the auction house after they got their $$$.
Quite possibly, something akin to the flag pole theory. Perhaps a variant, where there wasn’t any of that commodity on the AH at the time of that posting, and lacking guidance they priced aggressively based on the scarcity of the moment.
There is another phenomenon where players bulk-posting will set a moderate or high price on the hulk of their offering and defend their position by baiting other players posting the same item into grievously underpricing by posting a single instance at a stupid low price and then buying them out, preserving their preferred price point from undercutting pressure.
It’s been a long time since I paid WoW, but at some point you generally couldn’t send gold to a character of the other faction even if you owned that character. But there was a cross-faction auction house where the character wanting to receive cash would put trivial items in the auction house for large amounts of money, then login on their other-faction gold-having character to buy that item, resulting in the transfer of the gold.
The stupid-high price would dissuade other players from participating the deal, and if they do, hey, free money!
That’s how I would use the cross-faction auction house. But in my own faction’s auction house, it could be that whomever is posting a ridiculously high priced item is simply hoping someone blunders and accidentally buys it. Back in the old days, when Hunters required ammunition for their ranged weapons, you would often see someone with multiple auctions of single arrows or bullets. You’d have to wade through pages and pages of single arrows just to reach other auctions. Blizz put a stop to that nonsense after a while.
Of course, it’s also possible that the seller blundered, and typoed in an extra 0 or three. This is especially easy if the AH interface leaves that field filled in with the last value you typed, and you were selling one genuinely-expensive thing and one cheap thing.
There are people who will consistently put a number of a commonly needed item on the AH for a very high price, because sometimes you still need it, and given the low cost for most items to be placed, all it takes in a single sale for a massive product.
Second quote is true as well - lots of junk items up there are concealed transfers - a lot LESS than there used to be, now that WoW token sales are a thing, but it still happens, especially if the gold seller is drastically undercutting the token prices.
And quite a lot, though less than old days, of old fashioned market manipulation. There was a spike in Witchberry prices recently as it was needed for some of the Anniversary quests. In the last 48 hours or so, they spiked from 5-6g on average to several hundred. So market pressure.
There’s also some issues where a specific item may be trash to you, but it’s very valuable to someone else. Now that you can get transmog from gray items, some of the rarer ones may sell for a good bit for completionists, and some are required (dark iron booties) as turn ins for rare pets and the like.
For the record though, the whole cross faction cash isn’t a thing anymore. You can send items (and gold) to any of your own characters on a server, regardless of faction now.
Yep. WoW tokens for 3ish expansions now. It’s how I pay for the game.
Someone IRL “buys” a token from WoW for 20 USD. They then place it on the AH at a “market price” determined by Blizz (not by the purchaser). Someone buys the token from the AH for gold, and can then convert the token to $15 in “Blizzard cash” usable for most blizzard transactions (not just Wow) or a month of game time. Purchaser from the Blizz store gets the amount of gold it sells for. Nice cut there blizz!
Right now on my server, one token is running around 290,000 Gold.
It’ll go up towards the end of the expansion, and down near the beginning.
Ah, for the days when farming 300 gold for the mats for my paladin’s epic mount quest took over a month of buying/gathering thorium ore and making imperial plate armor to sell at the AH. Inflation makes fools of us all.
Well, trust me, it was still like that when I went to play Classic!
The thing is for several expansions now, there’s a ton of inflation - if you complete a quest (including daily world quests) at max level, you got substantially more gold in lieu of exp.
And in the last expansion, you could easily clear 2500G a day per character in about 30 minutes (per character) doing daily quests for 500G or more each. Not quite that bad right now, but plenty of quests and other ways to make a ton of cash.
Another inflation inducing measure comes from the LFG/LFR (Looking for group, looking for raid) scarcity incentive. If you que for a “needed class” (almost always tanks, frequently healers, rarely dps and there’s sufficient scarcity, the game rewards you with 900+G for completion, and 1-4 buff tokens that sell on the AH for 1.2-1.5k G each).
Lots of people flat out selling their services for paid runs throughout the difficulty gauntlets as well. The crap Elon Musk is accused of doing in Diablo 4 although a tiny bit less blatant. Pay someone to run your character through content to level fast (and you can buy level boosts!) and get all the gear / achievements / pets / mounts you want or need.
Wow, I heard about it when they introduced it, but I thought they were just doing it for the float. Well, and for getting rid of the gold farmers. Well, that, and ensuring a steady base of cash flow. I had no idea that they were taking a 25% cut in addition, on top of an already-profitable idea.
I also had the impression that the tokens were auctioned like any other item, and hence had a price set by the actual market of players, not artificially fixed by Blizzard themselves.
I could probably argue it both ways, and I do feel it’s excessive, but that’s from the perspective of someone buying tokens from the AH. It also prevents a secondary market, because the originally purchaser (from Wow) can only put it on the AH or use it themselves (at the immediate loss of value). Once purchased by another player, it cannot be re-auctioned or traded.
So… yeah. Very profitable and controlled for Blizz.
I found out back when they first launched the LFG matchmaker that DPS accounted for something like 90% of the playerbase. My tankadin NEVER had to wait long for a group.
That issue continues to grow, despite they (in my semi-expert opinion) have made tanking facerollingly easy, as well as letting tanks easily do the top dps and healing (self) in your average run.
I personally like healing a LOT, followed by DPS. I used to like tanking, but the groups these days are all about go fast, spam aoe, no skill required. But then again, I’ve played WoW since near the beginning.
I’m wondering if that will change now that you can automate normal level dungeons in the current content (NPC party, for a limited but large number of runs). But the people wanting the best gear need higher difficulties than the NPC mode allows.
Back to the OP then, that’s another exceedingly pricey option. Raids will rarely drop raid level bind on equip gear that especially early on will sell for insane prices.
That part sounds especially odd to me, because it sounds unprofitable for Blizzard. The longer a token goes unredeemed, the more profit they make from the float, and letting them be re-sold would cause them to go unredeemed for longer.
Blizz pretty carefully manages the prices of the tokens. They spiked hard when the released the AH equipped mount at 90 USD, going from low 200s to 250-70 within 48 hours - there was even a point where there were NO tokens on the AH until they rejiggered. Again, I don’t know all that’s going on behind the scenes, but they also want to prevent PCs from hoarding the things to create and otherwise manipulate scarcity.
Similarly, they cap the amount of blizz cash you can save up (345 with authenticated account) and the number of tokens you can keep in inventory (10). The only thing they’ll let you stack nearly indefinitely is game time, to the tune of at least several years worth.
So, using myself as an example, when the new expansion brought token prices down from the 330k range to 160-180k, I bought enough tokens to return my blizz cash to 340, and pushed my remaining subscription time up to 2.8 years. I spent… 9 million gold as I recall. And I have 10 tokens in reserve, and almost 10 million in gold.
But it’s silly, because the time spent grinding gold would be better spent doing some OT (if it was offerered) and making real cash. But I find grinding it relaxing. Small skinner box wins.
I haven’t played since Cataclysm*, but I didn’t find paladin tanking that hard even back then. I would bind shield throw, consecration, taunt, and hammer swing to 2, 4, 6, and 8, and as long as I kept hitting those four buttons in order I could MT 90% of dungeons without having to do much else aside from an occasional Flash Heal if the healer wasn’t keeping me sufficiently topped up. It was a vast improvement from Vanilla when paladins had no ranged pull and you had to rely on seal/judgement to generate aggro.
Now I’m feeling nostalgic and tempted to buy the latest expansion so I can give it another go.
(*I tried starting from scratch a few years back, but I picked Moon Guard as my server because I always felt RP servers had a more mature playerbase, not knowing that that was the S&M server these days, and it kinda turned me off wanting to play.)
Would that they had that option back in Vanilla. I used to work graveyards and would mostly play late at night or early morning, when finding a PUG was next to impossible. I didn’t get my first Deadmines run in until I was leveled up enough to solo it.
Agreed about RP servers normally being a better choice. If you decide to come back, let me know, I’m mostly on Wyrmrest Accord and I’ll spot you bags, gold, and help if need be.
About tanking again, Cata was probably the last expansion most would consider challenging in any way, between mechanics and having to use any sorts of tactics outside of raids. Just take your prior ease of play, and then increase the self heals and dps of the tanks by a few hundred percent.
Back to the OP though - the auction house is what you make of it. There will be people who have predatory pricing, there will be people who sell at a loss (lower than vendor price) due to incaution, and those who will manipulate the market by buying up and reselling. It’s very like real life in that manner.
Just to be clear - this mechanic, called “follower dungeons” are only available for the last two expansions of content, though there is hope that it’ll be rolled further back. And there is a cap on how many you can do in a week, but it’s great to get to see the game, even if it’s limited to “normal” difficulty and commensurate gear.
So it’s not a complete fix. But they’ve added (for the most recent expansion) a lot of ways to get heroic or better gear through non group based content, so this is a golden age for solo players, which is good because groups are just as toxic as always…
Which means leveling via dungeons (unless you’re a tank) isn’t easy, but the speed of leveling 1-70 is insanely fast these days. My casual group of adults normally only play on Friday nights for 2-3 hours, and we’ll still put on 2-3 levels each week anyway. And more like 4-8 below level 50.
Seriously let me know if you want to try, and I can help quite a bit.
Back when I was farming for my epic mount in Vanilla I would usually try to undercut the other people selling imperial plate by setting mine at the lowest price I could while still making a profit. If I couldn’t make a profit by undercutting the lowest-priced seller, I’d wait until the next morning and try again, and usually everything I put up would sell. I got angry letters in my mailbox once or twice from other sellers complaining that I was making things harder for them.
Capitalism is fun!
I’ll keep that in mind if I decide to go for it. I assume I only have to buy the latest expansion and it’ll unlock everything else, right?
