Website The end of the Gold Squish era?

[bakkhos16]

allright so, before i start. i will be doing a recap on past gold squishes, their impact and some opinions on the matter, with sugestions at the end. if you want to jump straight to the sugestions, just ignore the spoilers.

Our gold-squished road until today:

Spoiler: Show

allright, so. first things first: why did we even start with gold squishes?
the answer warmane staff gave us when they first introduced the gold squish, and the one they maintain until this day is "to maintain a healty economy" and to "reduce server-wide gold ammounts". this statements have been, and continue to be TRUE. however, the way on how the squishes have happened have changed.

The 1st gold squish
the first gold squish happened back in 2016 (even tough staff members announced there could be one as back as 2015 on this post: http://forum.warmane.com/showthread....ht=gold+squish) and did 2 major things right:

first: being the 1st gold squish on the server, it caught everyone by surprise

second: it was accompanied by a proffesion rate decrease (from x7 to x3)

however, it did not come without its major drawbacks. to begin with, the community was most unpleased with this squish. since they fought tooth and nail for their "hard earned gold" and looked for ways to bypass the squish, from keeping it in guild banks, mailing it, bidding on ah items, etc etc etc. none of it worked however.
in the end these 2 things done right made a huge impact on reducing gold and helped to keep prices stable for the following year, being the most succesfull squish at completing its goals, since it was the one that sunk gold the hardest, as well as preventing prices to skyrocket back to its original prices during that same year.

2nd, 3rd and 4th gold squishes and their impact

Spoiler: Show

following the 1st gold squish back in 2016 warmane has experienced a yearly gold squish ever since. all under the premise of "maintaining a healty economy" and "reducing gold ammounts". however, none of the following squishes were as succesfull as the first, because of 3 reasons:

1st: they became predictable (everyone knew that around the end of the year a squish was going to happen)

2nd: none of these squishes was accompanied by a reduction on proffesion rates or any other gold generation methods.

3rd: the warmane community developed strategies to minimize the gold squish impact (most notoriously the: "stack goods beforehand, sell them at peak prices and make a profit that way" strategy which led to rich players becoming even richer, while newer players got hit by the full force of the squishes)

even worse, the last 2 squishes in particular have managed to cut gold and reduce prices, but only temporarily, since the "gold squish panic" has made the community to raise goods prices in anticipation for the upcoming gold squish (2019 year being the absolute worse so far, since prices started to scale back in september, with the proper squish happening 5 months later)

whats coming next...

Spoiler: Show

despite the up's and down's of the gold squishes, this year's squish has brought a new info and new chances to warmane staff. in contrast on what has happened on 2018's squish, this year's prices did NOT skyrocket overnight after the announcement, but rather had a slow, steady increase in prices up to yesterday (today we had the squish). the fact that we had a month between new year's event and the squish, and the fact that we are currently on "love is in the air" event also helps.all this gives us information about 2 things:

1st: prices were already on "gold squish panic" even before the announcement was made, so prices did not move that much after that
and 2nd: everyone knew the gold squish announcement date in advance (even i knew that gold squish announcement was between 20 and 25 jan, so i had time to prepare, and so did the rest of the community).

only time will tell if this quish was succesfull, but with prices back on september's prices the very first day after the squish, it does not look very promising...

allright so, how do we end or deal with future gold problems? here i give a few sugestions:

1st: as i explained above, gold squishes that only cut gold in half are becoming less and less effective over time, so its time for a change. If warmane staff wishes to continue with this way of gold squish, why not tweaking spawn /drop ratios for herbs, mining nodes, quest items and BoE's as well?

2nd: make an alternative gold spending method. making a website market with ingame gold as currency might help in both sinking gold, as well as maintaining prices constant during the year. and before you ask: no, Lottery is not a viable option, since no one with enough gray matter will spend 5k gold into a lottery ticket when they can just buy it for 5 points (which also needs to be tweaked, but will leave that for another post)

3rd: allow certain items or services that are bought with points to be bought with gold instead (for instance: race change, faction change, etc). also, you might want to allow certain "coin-only" items to be obtained with gold as well (lets say, for example, a transmog scroll to be bought for 50k gold (not the legendary one) or certain rare, no longuer obtainable mounts (past arena season mounts, cosmetic mounts, etc))

4th: you (warmane staff) need to consider start tackling the economy problems head on. IP banning accounts with bots to ensure they cant create new ones (or tracking the VPN if they use one and if possible) as well as adressing the monopoly problems ingame (bots or players camping NPC's, using addons and gold to buy every item and then sell at whatever price they want, etc)

i know all this is hard, i know warmane staff has other corncerns, but as i said at the start of this post, its my opinion, and some sugestions that i believe can help to improve the server

all in all, i believe with all said and done, we might have seen the last gold squish with this format, and i believe more, better changes are coming...

[Thydus]

I mean overall the server experience i'd say is diminished, back on molten and early warmane, i'd throw anyone gold who asked for it, sure some people are just begging others are genuinely new and don't know how easy it is to get some starter gold from AH with mining/tailoring.
The gold squish only hurts the new players, why punish people for no gain, they won't buy 80 boosts or gold from trade, they quit.

[angrylol]

Wasnt the first squish just a squish and second one with gold drop and profession changes from x7 to x3? Seems first one didn't do anything so they decided to change rates - which worked (I sold 1.5milj to get SM and after second I sold 350k). Now the important part - after 3rd squish I had to sell around 350k.
Despite having less gold on realm prices remained and remains the same since the squish with rate changes.
People don't believe in gold anymore and it ends in 2 types - people who get as much as they need and that's it or people who scoop up everything and have vaults full of primos and chokers(and they don't keep much gold either, just enough to keep milking machine going). I don't know what kind of big gold reserves they are talking about that needs to be nuked. Most people I know don't keep some big reserves, mostly what players get passively from raids/emblems and some fishing/cooking daily. Enough for flasks, repairs and some occasional enchant/gem.

RESTORE FAITH IN GOLD!

[deadduck]

4th: you (warmane staff) need to consider start tackling the economy problems head on. IP banning accounts with bots to ensure they cant create new ones (or tracking the VPN if they use one and if possible) as well as adressing the monopoly problems ingame (bots or players camping NPC's, using addons and gold to buy every item and then sell at whatever price they want, etc).

About the bots, I'm sure they're doing everything they can to prevent them. You're not mentioning anything new to them that they haven't thought of before. If IP banning was feasible, they would be doing it right now. In fact, maybe they are.

And about the other points, I have to disagree completely. It's a free market, and if people want to play the system (just like in real life) all the power to them. Either way, this does NOT affect the overall economy one iota. And making professions x3 instead of x7 also has negligible impact on overall economy. It just means that it takes longer to level up your profession, nothing more, nothing less. But the same overall amount of gold is still there, just spread out differently.

It boils down to basic supply and demand. The ONLY way to tackle the economy problem is to limit the amount of new gold being created. So a simple fix would make gold drop from x7 to something less. You reduce the gold supply and suddenly the value of gold goes up, and all prices go down.

[angrylol]

It wasnt just profession rates, it was gold drop and gold rewards decreased to x3 too

And creating hardcore economy would scare lot of people away, and I think they already are pushing it with x3 gold rates. So reducing gold supply is out of the question. Problem is that in a long run people will accumulate loads of gold - we all know that when you have gold, all the enchants and gems, all the mounts and only thing you need from gold is flask and a repair - all those players are dreaming about is going and buying gems for 5k, that's what we are supposed to believe. So only logical solution is squish - force those players to actually buy gems for "5k", push all that unused gold back into market and cut it in half.

[deadduck]

The only two factors are supply and demand. If you reduce supply of gold (by doing a gold squish, or by limiting the gold being pumped in), or if you reduce the demand for items, prices will go down. People sitting on their money do not affect either.

[Thydus]

People play warmane for the easy accessible gameplay, you take away the gold they can't buy spells, thus frustrating newplayers and if old players dont have as much to just throw their way as we did in the past then people simply quit.

[Obnoxious]

It's a free market, and if people want to play the system (just like in real life)

Except it isn't "just like in real life," at all. Unless you can show me yourself walking for 5 mins, finding a pile of rocks you hit for a couple seconds, getting materials out of that, and having it materialize again a few minutes later, which you can then carry on your back effortlessly and smelt into bars within seconds, using tools that never need any sort of maintenance, selling it to people who can just make gold appear by farming spawns. Same goes for any other profession or even to murdering to steal from corpses. Don't forget "in real life" we also have hundreds of laws and regulations to avoid monopolies and control the distribution of economic power with antitrust mechanisms. "In real life" people trying to "play the system" like that would be paying fines or risking jail time, because people wouldn't be just silently complaining about inflated prices, it would be in the news and so on.

This whole "free market like in real life" is just a Swiss cheese of a cop-out.

[Islingr]

personally, I've barely noticed this year's gold squish since I don't auction hustle (playing on Lordaeron), but it did turn to where any items I needed in the last few weeks leading up to the squish being done, weren't made in not in gold (which I spent on permanent gold-bought items in late december) but with raw item trade - I have a nightmare ender, you have some gems, let's trade.

for a gold squish to be effective, it would need to be done with an inverse scale - the more gold you have, the more you lose, and it's horribly impractical to send 100g to each of your 100s of alts so you only lose 20g per character, instead of 70% of your 30k gold - but if even that could be countered somehow, then that would be a more effective gold squish. But only then only for one year, after that the economy would likely just turn to using primordial saronites as currency for the vast majority of things (want a cardinal ruby? I'll trade 4-5 of them for a primo!) or something similar, and then you have to think of squishing that as well?

[bakkhos16]

for those saying "its all supply and demand" thing. when you have 10 people supplying a market, and suddenly someone buys it all and resells it at x3 its price. thats called monopoly, and crushes any and all "supply and demand" mechanism. same happens when instead of 10 people supplying the market you have campers or botting doing that. you want some stuff? you will have to buy from them ONLY. again: monopoly.

the only 2 ways to deal with that without making a gold squish is to either ban all botters / AH abusers / NPC/nodes campers, or to increase spawn rates so that its less abusable, and none of those options is easy to do. HOWEVER, i believe working towards those is the right path to follow.

[angrylol]

for those saying "its all supply and demand" thing. when you have 10 people supplying a market, and suddenly someone buys it all and resells it at x3 its price. thats called monopoly, and crushes any and all "supply and demand" mechanism. same happens when instead of 10 people supplying the market you have campers or botting doing that. you want some stuff? you will have to buy from them ONLY. again: monopoly.

How about players sees the prices are insane. He then goes and gets whatever he wants himself. Farms few dungeons or BGs and buys gem. Kill some mobs and disenchants those greens for enchants. Would you kindly name those items that are impossible to get by anyone except "AH abusers"? And they are not limited, there is infinite supply.

If player chooses to buy it for whatever price that means he rather spend that gold instead of going out and farming things. And that is the real price of items.

[geirigold]

for those saying "its all supply and demand" thing. when you have 10 people supplying a market, and suddenly someone buys it all and resells it at x3 its price. thats called monopoly, and crushes any and all "supply and demand" mechanism. same happens when instead of 10 people supplying the market you have campers or botting doing that. you want some stuff? you will have to buy from them ONLY. again: monopoly.

the only 2 ways to deal with that without making a gold squish is to either ban all botters / AH abusers / NPC/nodes campers, or to increase spawn rates so that its less abusable, and none of those options is easy to do. HOWEVER, i believe working towards those is the right path to follow.

After reading this comment I can confirm that some of my brain cells are missing.

[dolcokidol]

How about players sees the prices are insane. He then goes and gets whatever he wants himself. Farms few dungeons or BGs and buys gem. Kill some mobs and disenchants those greens for enchants. Would you kindly name those items that are impossible to get by anyone except "AH abusers"? And they are not limited, there is infinite supply.

If player chooses to buy it for whatever price that means he rather spend that gold instead of going out and farming things. And that is the real price of items.

Exactly. If we're gonna go ****ting out real life sayings for ingame stuff let's also shove "time is money" in there. If you don't want to spend time looking for that god damn TBC ore you can buy it from me. It'll cost what I deem my time worth.
Also, AH abusers are just adding what's called "finder's fee." Same thing all sorts of "agents" apply for when you're buying/renting stuff not directly from the source, but through someone else.

Good thing this is a ****ing game where I can run my monopoly business without an issue. Go and farm your ores if mine are expensive.

[bakkhos16]

How about players sees the prices are insane. He then goes and gets whatever he wants himself. Farms few dungeons or BGs and buys gem. Kill some mobs and disenchants those greens for enchants. Would you kindly name those items that are impossible to get by anyone except "AH abusers"? And they are not limited, there is infinite supply.

If player chooses to buy it for whatever price that means he rather spend that gold instead of going out and farming things. And that is the real price of items.

i mean items like Elementium-Plated Exhaust pipe or certain recipes for proffesions, as well as people who use bots to set a monopoly on the ah by buying every item in store and resell it at a much higher price.

[angrylol]

I don't know man, I got one pipe today. To be honest I rather pay triple for it than sit there and spam the vendor. And sell 5 hogs for same profit compared to one "camped" hog.

But overall I completely agree about needing ideas about squish. Not that I mind making a haul from squish, I'm concerned that average player do not want to participate in economy, instead they just farm quests for gold. And people no longer recognizing gold as currency, alternate currencies are in every game where main currency is destroyed for whatever reason.