Gold squishes are bad. Here is an alternative to reduce the gold in the market.

[Xaring]

TL:DR; Introduce a Black Market Auction House-like system to reduce the amount of gold running in the system.

It's been my first gold squish - which didnt really affect me, I had 10k gold, I had 5k after, its a minimal loss, nevertheless I have seen no "positive" outcome from it.
"There is too much gold and everything is too expensive for new players" - I believe this is the only valid point to be done about the Squish. It is true that AH prices have come down by about 40% compared to before the squish - but still, once you have enough money, you didn't really care about it - you still make the same margin (if any).

The real issue is the terrible AH pricing and balance, general consume goods, such as flasks cost more to self-produce than to buy in the AH - leaving no profit to anyone that actually took time to level up alchemy. Most of the time, you are better off selling the plants and reagents than taking the time to make flasks, if you are looking for profit. Same principle applies to enchanting, mining, prospecting and most of the professions.

The botters are an issue. We know that, but we can all appreciate the effort put into banning them. The next issue is that WoW has, like most games, is that the currency is made out of thin air - you kill a MOB and it drops loot. This means that you need to remove gold from the economy to reduce the purchasing power of the player base. The current method are gold squishes.

My proposition is the next: Take the approach that blizzard took and make a black market auction house.

The concept is pretty simple: Remove gold from the game by selling players overpriced cosmetic or minor QoL items for gold. Thus, removing the gold from the economy. It's a pretty simple feat to accomplish, have a GM list a rare item in the AH with the option to bid only, starting at a reasonable gold price (2000g?), and let it rise up to whatever the population is willing to pay for it.

This item can be anything; 36-slot bags http://www.wowhead.com/item=51809, rare mounts http://www.wowhead.com/item=32458/ashes-of-alar or transmorg gear and scrolls, to name a few.

Ps- You can also trace the gold used to buy that stuff back - where did the auction winner of said item earn the gold from? Is he an AH broker? Did he buy with coins? Did he receive it from his guildmates? Or did he receive it from a third-party gold seller?

I believe this to be a much better way of stabilizing the economy than doing the gold squish, as those pretty much only annoy the population and make a terrible job of balancing the economy.

[crafter1992]

Or they can wipe ALL gold every 2-3 years. That would make people vendor a lot of items in order to have enough for repairs and what not. This would also remove 100% of gold from bots/gold sellers. I think once every 2 years at random they should also wipe all guild banks and AH since theres an overflow of items on the servers atm.

[Xaring]

The point of this post is exactly the opposite XD

You are NOT gonna solve the botting and gold selling problem - its imposible. As long as there's possible buyers, there will be people trying to exploit the system. What you need is a HEALTHY and STABLE economy - removing stuff for which players have worked for over time is arguably unfair. Removing gold from the economy allows there to be no inflation, therefore stabilizing it - that should be the admin's objective. Making everyone start from scratch will make people quit the game or be frustrated and it does not solve the intrinsic issues in the current system.

[Deathtear]

Or they can wipe ALL gold every 2-3 years. That would make people vendor a lot of items in order to have enough for repairs and what not. This would also remove 100% of gold from bots/gold sellers. I think once every 2 years at random they should also wipe all guild banks and AH since theres an overflow of items on the servers atm.

I'm assuming you are a casual player but for players who farm for hours and sell stuff on AH to hoard gold, this is a bad idea, because to disrupt the gold farmers and sellers you are affecting 90% of the remaining server's players too. It's just like malaria is spreading? let's just kill everyone to make it stop. Xaring's idea of a black market seems reasonable. Put up toys and stuff for auctions with no bid limit on the AH, let the population use their cash for it.

[Russiantommy]

Doing a gold squish every year will make the prices very unstable, especially 3 months before and after a gold squish. I would recommend doing a gold squish every day or every week to keep it from happening. Since you have done 2 squishes already and the gold supply is pretty low I would recommend a much lower gold squish of maybe 25%. So 0.75^(1/52) = 0.9944829277 which means you squish ~0.56% every week.

I really dont recommend to do a larger squish than 10% annually as it decreases the gold supply too much. Levelers wont make as much with their proffesions on the AH and the spells/mounts will become more expensive.

[Deathtear]

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/...9301423?page=1
Here are blizzard players discussing it.
A gold sink like Costly Transmog NPC (Say 5k for weapon 3k for gears), a Black Market with high prices like 50k+ having pets, mounts, vanity items, toys etc. Hell, even keep old content legendaries for 999k(no smourne though, only previous expansion's legendaries). I'd like a moderator to send these suggestions to the staff and plz keep us in the loop of what the decision and opinions are on this.

[Xaring]

That's a neat thread! Thanks for sharing.

[crafter1992]

I'm assuming you are a casual player but for players who farm for hours and sell stuff on AH to hoard gold, this is a bad idea, because to disrupt the gold farmers and sellers you are affecting 90% of the remaining server's players too. It's just like malaria is spreading? let's just kill everyone to make it stop. Xaring's idea of a black market seems reasonable. Put up toys and stuff for auctions with no bid limit on the AH, let the population use their cash for it.

Not a casual. I'm sitting at around 1 mil gold on Icecrown atm. It's so easy to make ill just make more if they wipe it.

[angrylol]

"Black Market Auctions" is neat idea, but you forget one thing - why would I bother if I can sell my gold and buy item for coins from Store?

90% of all gold that goes trough AH is "new" gold. Gold that people got from questing, etc in last few weeks. People still buy my stuff, it's even rare that auctions expire. That means prices are ok. And about professions, you are totally wrong. I don't have a single gathering profession, yet I have gold in millions. There is no such a thing as "too high" price. I'm interested to sell and if no one buys - I lower the price. At the end of the day I don't care if I sold 50 or 100 stacks in the same time and it made same profit.

Yes, server needs to remove gold from game, and the problem is exactly there. Those 90% of people, they spend some 10k on skills, riding, dual-talents and such.. after that it just keeps piling up. Draining mechanisms like repair, AH tax and vendor necessities just can't keep up with x3 rates. So they squish everyone with squishhammer, even those who don't have riding yet. I don't know how it's supposed to fight goldsellers... it actually helps them, but nvm about that.

Blizz made realm economy viable for a year at max, that is with x1 rates, it's a game after all. So, solution would be x1 rates and additional drains, like that Black Market. However that means something has to be done about trading gold on website. Also it would make life harder for "90%-ers", Icecrown would lose its appeal and would become something that players who play "didn't sign up for".

Doing a gold squish every year will make the prices very unstable, especially 3 months before and after a gold squish. I would recommend doing a gold squish every day or every week to keep it from happening. Since you have done 2 squishes already and the gold supply is pretty low I would recommend a much lower gold squish of maybe 25%. So 0.75^(1/52) = 0.9944829277 which means you squish ~0.56% every week.

I really dont recommend to do a larger squish than 10% annually as it decreases the gold supply too much. Levelers wont make as much with their proffesions on the AH and the spells/mounts will become more expensive.

This is exactly the point. Just have to think about those 0.56% every week. How to collect this tax in manner that players get something fair for it?

[Paperlolz]

Add a vendor that sells "Scroll of Deception" for 100k+ gold. Problem solved.

[Pickel]

the botts are a big problem... other games I have played that were over run with botts, all they did was Disable all macros in game.. that stopped the botters... they did eventually restarted the macros in those games and the botters came back
.

[MaXiMuS54]

Or they can wipe ALL gold every 2-3 years. That would make people vendor a lot of items in order to have enough for repairs and what not. This would also remove 100% of gold from bots/gold sellers. I think once every 2 years at random they should also wipe all guild banks and AH since theres an overflow of items on the servers atm.