How to Prevent the Gold Squish Drama 2020

I think it's really fair to say that there hasn't been a single year when the gold squish was welcomed with a standing ovation, accepted and cherished by everybody. In fact, 3/3 years, people were pissed, pissed and oh guess what, pissed. The gold squish took money from the people genuinely farming for their in-game necessities while the ones in the top 5% with 80% of all the gold cashed it in or items and made at least 70% of their value back by this point of time. Since the gold prices are about to peak up... Again, due to the next year's squish, which people are expecting as had been the case 3 years in a row so far, let me give my two cents on how I believe the gold squish can be avoided for the sake of warmane's pure profit.

The amount of gold in the server doesn't matter. Gold is useless on its own part for the low grinding players, but it's not them who are peaking the prices but the people actually selling their gold for coins. My suggestion is simple:

1) REMOVE GOLD TO COIN AND COIN TO GOLD SITE TRADES. Before I get publicly linched, read on. Instead, create an automated system where you (warmane) buys gold from people for coins and where you sell gold for coins back to players. Here's an example of how the system is going to benefit you.

You Buy Gold For ---> You sell Gold For (C) ---> Server Benefit (G) ---> Server Benefit Benefit (C)
1800 ---> 1200 ---> 600 ---> 1/3
3600 ---> 2400 ---> 1200 ---> 2/3
5400 ---> 3600 ---> 1800 ---> 1 Coin
.................................................. ...........................
41,400 ---> 27,600 ---> 13,800 ---> 7,66 coins

This would by far be the most effective gold / coin sink in the game and will give the players a sense of certainty that said gold they have will a) remain and b) sell for that exact amount of coins instantly.

Furthermore, you can manipulate the gold to coin prices to create things like events where it is discounted or, alternatively, adjust it higher if the gold in the server is getting out of hand, effectively preventing it from getting out of hand.

2) MAKE SCROLLS OF DECEPTION PURCHASABLE FOR GOLD
A price of 10,000 per scroll sounds reasonable. Also make the scrolls destroy the item they are taking the appearance of to prevent people making rapid decisions and having 20,000 sets they switch between. Make the items the grind, not the scrolls.

Okay. Let the "NOFUKU*****NOTGONNAHAPPEN" begin.

Fun Facts about squish:

It does not affect prices in long term, apart from "squish panic" when you can sell your **** for 300% price and make more gold in last month then whole previous year and let it squish. Prices will dramatically inflate this year, even if there is no squish or even if staff PMs everyone with caps "NO SKVISH SCURUB!".

What drives up prices in market is NOT those millions of gold who people have made over the years. What drives it up is amount of gold people can make by doing quests/rdf/stuff just by playing in 2-3 weeks(this is 99% of the "gold flow"). Also our new shiny(blizzlike) AH sorting system, which is designed for 3 pages of stuff instead of 50 - pure cancer, while on surface it looks like people will now undercut more as it's more competitive - that's not what will happen, quite the opposite actually, low bid - high buyout tactics, if you plant to sell stuff in stacks - tough luck, no one is going to dig trough 30 pages to find your stuff, which makes even more pages and problem just snowballs - coul'd this be reason why AH is getting slower and bottle-neck-y, same cases even unusable?

Reasons like "we do squish so new players can get foothold", "to fight bots", "to sink gold out", "reduce inflation", it just laughable, not a single of those things have anything to do with squish.
- After squish new players has to farm 3 times more stuff to get the same amount of gold by selling it on AH.
- Bots just laugh at that because they exploit insane inflation, make three times more and sell their gold after squish for double price or more.
- Do not put so much gold in or create worthwhile mechanism to sink the gold out. Make life more expensive as everyone have excess gold made in short time( real reason for inflation)
- As we have observed only correlation squish has with inflation is driving it up before squish and it stabilizes after 6 months for 3 months till there are 3 months left before next squish, and cycle repeats.I think only squish that worked was first one - and not because it halved gold. Because it had additional things(gold drop reduced to x3, profession rate reduced to x3).

As much as I like to make millions of gold thanks to squish, I hate to see so sad participation in economy as players just don't bother to trade up - it will be squished. And it defeats the purpose - less trading means less AH tax, less deposits. People doing quests instead of trading(creating, not sinking gold). Current prices are the same or even higher than last year at this date, explain that. I think I can - less competition, less people participating - means higher prices.

I think there are other motivation under squish, it doesn't add up otherwise.

P.S.
It's a bad idea to interrupt organic market. Make sandbox and let us make our own sand cakes.

Automated coversion gold to coins is absurd. You can sell only as much as someone is willing to buy now. With this it would actually have great effect, everyone would be interested to trade in some gold. Would be amazing few weeks before Warmane announces fact that they cant pay for services and is shutting down.

this topic has already been discussed, suggested, debated and ignored on several times. (i've done it myself, here: http://forum.warmane.com/showthread....ight=bakkhos16)

aparently warmane staff cares little for the ones who actually DO have to farm their gold and chose to rather tackle the problem on a server-wide scale, even if it means that the problem will persist.

gold-to-coins official system should be a great way for warmane to prevent this kind of gold chaos that the server has every year, but i have serious doubts that warmane will allow it. still, i look foward to it.

as a final note: it would be wise from warmane staff (forum staff, ingame GM's, administratives and others) to start considering a path to take about this issue and let the community know beforehand what you plan to do (or, if you're after a gold squish, dont let them know it at all in order to prevent economy chaos). having some clearance of what is to come often helps to calm down both people and economy

Okay since you asked for it, here is why "fck you, you are stupid, never gonna happen"

Server profits on people buying coins for REAL MONEY
Almost ALL coins are generated through people paying cash.
Server offers people many options how to spend coins and trade is one of the most useful ones because it is autobalancing
- when people stop buying coins, coins become more valuable in trade, more people buy coins coz they can buy more with them
Your idea wouldnt sink coins, IT WOULD GENERATE COINS from ingame gold = absurd cash loss for server.

The gold squish is because of huge gold getting injected into the economy due to exploits like resellable quest items and botting. So your ideas are pointless.

doing many raid icc rs toc , 25 10 and some hc but never drop scroll pls increase the drop rate

Increasing drop rate isn't good for business though.

If you wanna avoid gold squish drama while keeping gold squish mechanic - just squish it continually - it would require a bit more coding as the squish would need to happen live, but with server latency already high noone would mind a little lag.

Instead of squishing 50% once a year, squish 1% each week - year has 51 weeks :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by fatlinek

If you wanna avoid gold squish drama while keeping gold squish mechanic - just squish it continually - it would require a bit more coding as the squish would need to happen live, but with server latency already high noone would mind a little lag.

Instead of squishing 50% once a year, squish 1% each week - year has 51 weeks :D

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There's lottery now, it offered Shadowmourne quite a few times and one ticket costs 5k iirc, so people are dumping gold into that hopefully. Lottery might be a step forwards to a future without squish.

I doubt there are that many *****s to dump gold into tickets when you can get coins for gold and get SHM that way guaranteed and cheaper... and u can buy tickets for points :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by fatlinek

I doubt there are that many *****s to dump gold into tickets when you can get coins for gold and get SHM that way guaranteed and cheaper... and u can buy tickets for points :D

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People probably won't be spending large amount of gold on lottery but if the price was right, there would be people buying a few lottery tickets with gold for a small chance to win something. But currently that's not the case, at least on Icecrown. You can either buy a lottery ticket for 5k gold or sell the gold for coins using Trade system and then buy lottery tickets with coins, spending only around 2k gold per ticket. Current prices don't encourage spending gold on lottery directly and when gold is sold to another player instead, it does not get removed from the economy. If lottery was intended to be a gold sink, ticket prices in gold should have been much closer to to gold/coin ratio on Trade system. With current prices it makes no sense to buy lottery tickets with gold, unless the account is not premium and can't use Trade system.

Ho ho ho :D It's that time of the year again :D

Gold squish is pretty dumb, no other server does this... All I can say is if you squish outland this year, that will be the final nail in the coffin for that server rofl

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Originally Posted by Lanerei

Gold squish is pretty dumb, no other server does this... All I can say is if you squish outland this year, that will be the final nail in the coffin for that server rofl

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No other server has 12k online ever, let alone for hours every day. Prices get inaccessible for people starting out so they squish it so that new players have some chance of buying glyphs, gems and enchants when they don't have an alt with thousands of gold piled up.
And as for Outland, they can exclude some realms, Outland having low population could skip the squish this year. But then again, when I started out there a few months ago things were a bit expensive, but not insanely expensive, so squishing could also motivate new players in the same way as on Icecrown.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dolcokidol

Prices get inaccessible for people starting out so they squish it so that new players have some chance of buying glyphs, gems and enchants when they don't have an alt with thousands of gold piled up.

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Effect is quite the opposite,
After squish people will have to farm 2 times more to get gold, because they can sell their stuff only for cheap.
Also, prices were at record low, so low prices - never seen on realms. But then pre-squish panic started to set in, and right now prices are almost 2x compared to end of the summer. This is the best time for new players to make gold, they can sell their herb stacks and bars for double.