Tobold!
You're baiting, big-time, with that last line!
:)
 

But how could RMT be supported by such a small player base as raiders Tobold :)

And RMT would be much worse if we opened raiding up to everyone, right? :)
 

Make everything no drop. Economies are so overrated.I'd love to see a mmorpg designed that way.
 

Or blizzard could buy into the whole RMT business and offer better prices than the farmers. Just a thought.

But then again, for those of us who aren't lazy about it daily quests are the way to go.
 

RMT=?
 

Actually. That’s not true, Blizzard does ban for buying gold. It simply takes a bit of time (months in some cases) for it to happen. The ban letter you receive is titled Economy Exploitation and it’s a ban that you can get for a) gold selling, b) gold buying, or c) AH manipulation. The banning can take some time because Blizzard needs to find the gold sellers then trace it back. Blizzard has done a great job in recent months of implementing server side detection methods to identify these types of issues. They also have detection in place to find players who have play excessively to the point that it is inhumanly possible to play that many hours of WoW over a period of time. Blizzard gets this wrap like they aren’t doing anything, while the communities that support these types of activities are getting hammered and KNOW that Blizzard is active. It’s ironic that the people who know best all that Blizzard are doing to fight this type of thing are the ones with the least credibility to the rest of the WoW community.

For example, people often rail on Blizzard for not insta-banning a bot they reported and get frustrated when they see that bot still in the same place and still farming away. What they don’t realize is that Blizzard will rarely insta-ban anyone. Instead, they usually ban in groups on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and its typically earlier in the week (but not always). What this method does is obfuscate the method of detection. Was it client side (ala Warden) or server side or player reported? When did the detection happen? What was the bot doing when it got detected? By banning in groups, the issue is confused greatly and it’s not as easy for that community to determine how or why the detection happened. Conversely, if it happened as an insta-ban, they could just look at the log of what was happening at the time and work around it. Moreover, since botters communicate and share information with each other, it is my belief that Blizzard purposely does not ban a certain % of accounts to further muddy the waters. Instead, they just save the ban for a future date now that they got the account flagged.
 

The best thing that could happen to dissolve the hardened rmt crust would be some pacing changes. first should be a pay/ hr scheme. players who take advantage of an unlmitd usage per month game scale the gameplay so fast that it leaves a void in social content for a less serielly addicted gamer. and on top of that this game has the loophole for high usage players to twink out alts which also diminishes the golden wow gameplay. this game was great pre bc before vanilla took over and dumbed and numbed over the players.
 

@syncaine. Because the raiders are the ones that will purchase gold multiple times a month. When I was in a hardcore raiding guild most of us were broke all the time. Because we were donating hard to find things to the bank, farming mats for potions and flasks and when we couldn't get enough or ran out of time we bought them. The only people in the guild that never had money problems were the guild master who was later caught selling mats from the bank. Our tank who had some sweet recipes and the 3 or 4 people that to this day I'm convinced were buying gold.

I don't think raiders are the only buyers but I'd bet they buy more than 50% of it. no real reason to buy gold if you pvp and if you play casually and have bit of patience on a high pop server you'll make plenty of cash.

And this problem started with BWL when the devs started tuning encounters around flasks and potions.

I think the only way blizzard could get rid of the bad side of RMT would be to set up in game vendors and let people sell thier gold for play time to the vendor and then let say 50% of that gold be bought online buy players that wanted to buy it.
 

RMT = Real-money trading

For example, buying WoW virtual gold with real U.S dollars.
 

Like you, I've got plenty of gold right now without too much effort. Running with our almost completely instance-only group, we've all managed to stay geared in blues from drops that are better than most anything we could buy and still sell enough mats on the AH to afford our epic mounts at 60 without much grind.

TBH, the grind for the first L40 mount in 2005 was much worse than the ordinary L60 epic today.

Of course, the point not to lose sight of is that while TBC has added a lot of gold to the economy, I suspect that all the gold that may be sold to high consumers (*cough*raiders*cough*) in RMT ultimately trickles down to benefit those of us plugging along, questing, doing 5 mans and otherwise selling our surplus mats. They don't have time to farm the raws, so they're willing to pay what I view as unreasonably high prices.

Somebody is buying all those mats off the AH and that gold has to come from somewhere...

If you're primarily a consumer of fixed price goods and services from the NPC economy, you win. Repairs, spells, reagents, mounts, etc. are all static.

All that gold flowing into the WoW economy from whatever source actually has a deflationary effect on those items while prices continue to spiral upwards in the player economy from the inflationary effect of increasing the money supply.
 

As someone that raids and keeps their equipment at a high level, it's still not that hard to make money, especially with the dailies. It's all a matter of time, and those who have the time to raid also have the time to do dailies (some have an alt 70 that is there just to do dailies.)
 

Actually I forgot about this, as a follow up to my last comment. Blizzard does ban gold buyers and people that contract with questionable services such as powerleveling. We had a guild member that was recently banned, and I have heard of others that have been banned for gold purchasing. So no, I think you're wrong on who Blizzard is banning.
 

The whole “economy” discussion and the effects that gold selling plays is an interesting one. First, let’s consider the source of the gold. If the gold is sourced from a “botter” who farmed items than the net effect of this individual to the economy is more deflationary than inflationary. The reason is that the increased number of items on the AH results in overall lower prices for people looking to buy these farmed goods. As these goods are exchanged on the AH, the fees taken from the AH actually REMOVE gold from the game. In fact, the only way that a botter adds gold to the game is through vendoring items since they normally don’t quest. Items that can’t be farmed easily (raid dungeon drops and such) typically are not impacted by the deflation. You could easily argue that any gold added to the economy by a bot vendoring is offset by the AH listing fees and repair bills that remove the gold from the game. I would also posit that the large majority of gold selling occurs not to support raids, but to enable people to buy epic flying mounts (another gold sink that removes the farmed gold from the economy). However, a lot of gold also comes from hacked accounts and many people who “buy gold” are simply buying gold from stolen accounts. In my mind, this is the true evil associated with gold selling. In most cases, the person simply ends up being inconvenienced for a short period of time until Blizzard can “create” your items and gold again. This DOES have an obvious inflationary impact since it is literally created out of nothing without the in-game mechanics that eat gold to counterbalance the problem. This “creation” of gold is an important one to consider if the developer decides to add in an authorized RMT system. The consequence is that you will see an inflationary impact (to the detriment of the less wealthy among us) that doesn’t exist when a bot has to follow the same rules that you do to farm the gold.
 

"All that gold flowing into the WoW economy from whatever source actually has a deflationary effect on those items while prices continue to spiral upwards in the player economy from the inflationary effect of increasing the money supply."

You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word 'inflation'. Inflation by itself has nothing to do with the value of a unit of currency. Inflation is an increase in average prices.

But yeah, if all you do is consume fixed-priced goods in the game, an increase in the money supply is a good thing. It's a lot easier to get 5000g on overpopulated Skullcrusher than it was on the barren server of Dentarg.
 

@blackhawk: Actually, I think I have a decent grasp of the concept of inflation and the role monetary policy has in devaluing the purchasing power of currency for goods in the "live" economy which is what I'm referring to. Role file footage of Germany's inter-war Weimer republic or any other incidence of hyperinflation and you'll see what I mean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

When you have inflow > outflow, other things equal, you have the makings of an inflationary spiral.

As Sid67 mentioned and bears repeating, purchasing gold to inject into the economy through dev sactioned RMT is just simply adding more currency to the money supply. Per se inflationary.

Whether the addition of gold via illicit farming is net inflationary does depend on what happens with the other drops that a farmer receives.

My main point was that in addition to providing high consumption players with gold, that gold gets spent in the economy and that redistribution significantly affects the rest of the player base.