Tracking deflation

I mentioned before that Lord of the Rings Online is similar to World of Warcraft. That of course also means it will suffer from some of the same problems, like gold farmers. So I surfed to the site of a recently mentioned company I won't link to, and no surprise, LotRO gold was already on offer, 3 days before release. Now cheating with bought gold is obviously the most useful very early in the game. And at the same time there is still very little gold in the system. Which means that if you buy gold for dollars, the price now will be the highest ever. Over the coming months the gold price will fall, but that price development can give us interesting information; for example if Turbine actively banned gold farmer accounts in a timely manner, gold prices would remain high.

So just for the record, as a starting point of comparison, currently 100 gold in LotRO cost $500. By the way, you can't compare that to World of Warcraft, because the purchase power of a gold piece in LotRO is higher. Actually I'm surprised 100 gold is even on offer. With 1 gold being 1000 silver in LotRO, and the "evil farming exploit" earning you 100 silver or 0.1 gold per hour, you'd need to farm 1000 hours to earn those 100 gold. At 50 cents per hour, you wouldn't even get a Chinese to work for you. And the servers aren't even live for 1000 hours yet, you'd need several people farm that much. Plus there is a level cap of 15. Somewhere people must have ways to earn much more than the farming income of 100 silver per hour.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:50 AM Permanent Link