The Economy of WoW

[--Pete]

Hi,

Not necessarily. Exponential costs to better one's character strength quickly become ridiculous or impossible to obtain. Yet players still go for it.

In Lineage 1, it was not uncommon that players would spend a year on making enough money just to increase their average weapon damage from 30 to 31. 31-32 took 3-5x as long as that, and yet players still went for it. Why? They had nothing else to spend their money on that affected their character's strength. Not only that, people tended to believe the new weapon did more damage than it actually did.
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The question isn't whether *some* people will waste time and gold on marginal items. It is whether *enough* people will do so to balance an economy. I'm not familiar with Lineage, so I cannot address that. But I do have some questions. Was the economy at or near a state of ruin and did the offering of expensive yet useless buffs save the economy? What did the people who bought those buffs give up to buy them? What percentage of the people bought into the scam and what did the rest of the people do with their money?

Giving high-level players options to improve their high level gear with exponential costs, will only solve one part of the problem though. We still have the problem of high level players buying low level gear for their new characters and friends and inflating the price.

Whoa. If the problem of inflation making it impossible for low level characters to buy their own gear isn't solved by exponential cost goodies, then just *what* problem is solved? Effectively, you are just saying the same thing I've been saying -- expensive gee-gaws don't balance the economy, they just soak up the excess gold *after* the economy has gone to hell.

Due to the massive amount of gold available to the high level players, the only thing that will keep the low level items' price from inflating is statically linking gold to the items through vendors. The nice transferable stuff would have to become buyable from vendors at a set rate, reasonable for the new players with no help from high level players. Either this or get rid of trade completely and make it all bind-on-pickup, but I think that's the worse option.

Let's see. To keep the low level items from being inflated, have them available from vendors. But then the mid level items get inflated. Same solution? Then the high level items become inflated. Do it again? Then you've fixed the economy by abolishing it.

I don't think so. I think you need to go a few more steps in your "what if" analysis.

--Pete