World Bank: gold farming could prove to be very beneficial to local and developing economies

[Odesio]

@Palooka

Gold in WoW is pretty useless. You don’t need it for gear. You don’t need it for PvP. It doesn’t take much for afford your skills. Flying is a major sink, but you don’t really need to leave town ever either. I guess you need it for enchants, but then the question is, why do enchanters want gold?

Right not on my server a stack of embercloth goes for about 100g. One stack of ebmbercloth only makes four bolts of embercloth. Add that to the cost of purchasing volatile elements and it gets pretty expensive leveling up skills. I think a stack of savage leather costs 110g or so.

[Palooka]

I meant more like class skills – Frost Nova, Death Coil, Storm Bolt – than professions. I’d sau professions are only slightly more useful than gold. They give a buff, but unless you’re doing seriously close to your theoretical max damage, you’re probably better off just practicing than sinking all that time to gain 80 more agility. No real use at all in PvP.

[Nava]

@markdash

I don’t play WoW, but as I see it, they could effectively kill the gold farming market if they made a couple changes:

-Eliminate the auction
-Change the more expensive purchases (like flying mounts or whatever) to an experience-based purchase, rather than gold-based. That is, if you did a certain number of quests, then you would just get one, instead of grinding for the cash and then buying it.

Nope, people don’t just buy “gold” off farmers. Often what they pay for is playing for them: speed leveling and obtaining already-existing “experience-based rewards” (in WoW this is a matter of doing certain tasks for several days, where “several” can range from five to over a year).