It's also notable that even Eve Online suffers from this same problem. While mineral prices can now fluctuate and rewards from missions are auto-tuned, skills, NPC bounties and some other things still have fixed prices. But even with auto-tuning mission rewards that 4.5 million for an advanced learning skill is a large obstacle for a newbie. That's why many newbie guides recommend the Salvaging mini-profession, which scales with the economy. Even when you're playing alone, it multiplies the income by at least one order of magnitude. And if you tag along with an experienced player, your isk/hour will be a respectable percentage of his income. Of course, this only works because Eve's aggro system is primitive and there's practically no increasing level requirements to use Salvaging. If a newbie character were to accompany an experienced character to a high-level zone in WoW, he wouldn't be able to harvest anything due to level requirements and aggro everything within 50-yard radius.
 

The problem is the slicing WoW implemented. Every 10 levels most of the resources you find are worthless for the next higher 10 levels. It becomes more radical when you "jump" into an extension where they make all "older" resources worthless.

The trick would be to overlap the resources between the level slices. Why wouldnt a lvl 80 armor not need linen or silk to manufacture?
 

Just because you CAN make a relative fortune on the AH as a low-level doesn't mean that you HAVE to. And it very definitely doesn't mean that you need to.

You can make a new character in WoW and play quite comfortably and happily without ever visiting the auction house. The quests and grey drops supply you with more than enough money to progress.

I played that way with my first character earlier this year. I mined a lot of copper, but as I was doing Engineering I didn't sell any of it. I had plenty of cash for everything I needed.

It's interesting to compare a 5 year old MMO like WoW with a two-month old game like Fallen Earth. In FE, where I was struggling for chips at the start, and where I have a vault bursting with all kinds of scavenged crafting materials, I took a good look at the AH to see if I could make more money that way. Nope. No chance.

Two reasons for that; firstly, the game is bottom-heavy at this stage. Everyone is low-level. There's a superabundance of low-level mats and no high-level Alt market yet to take advantage of the supply. That happens in every new MMO.

The second reason, though, is that many, possibly most, Sector One crafting mats are available from vendors in infinite supply. They are priced to make them too expensive for it to be feasible for a new character to just buy his way to crafting success.

The presence of, say, Scrap Fasteners on vendors for 34 chips, however, means that later in the lifespan of the game, no-one will ever be able to sell fasteners on the AH for more than that base price.

Imagine if vendors in WoW sold copper ore for 5 silver a piece.
 

The solution would be for the low-level economy to be a huge amount of gold that is slowly reduced to silver and finally copper as the player reaches level cap.
 

I guess you could index link the NPC economy to the AH economy.

Alternatively there are the traditional ways to control mudflation but they've never been popular: item decay and loss.
 

A game can either give into inflation and index the NPC economy to the player economy (wow has tried this a bit by setting up some manufacturing to use vendor purchased bits) or add aggressive gold sinks. Current evidence from the various MMO's I've seen suggests it's still not possible to fix. I'm also not sure it needs to be fixed. What's damaged by the way it works now? Possibly a true new player, but it doesn't take long to either level or find the auction house. And when either of those two happen, problem solved.

The core problem is that gold gets pulled out of thin air when a mob is killed or a quest completed. At one point I was a proponent of a Fixed Gold model, were the game would spawn a fixed amount of gold into the "world" when a toon is created. The game would then never add more gold into the economy. As the gold pool gets exhausted quests and mob kills would be worth less and less. Money would have to move or none would exist. But, I don't think it would be very easy to design the money sinks needed to keep the massive amounts of gold that build up in old accounts from destroying everything.
 

I don't see a problem here. Low players don't need a whole lot from the larger economy. Instead they're in a position to sell into it, meaning they can benefit from the gold economy while still only needing the silver. It's like currency differences between states which encourage the weaker currency to export more. It sounds shameful to have a weak currency, but it can be very profitable.
 

I cant remember if it was on your blog or another, but several months ago there was a discussion about making a leveling server. If the player wanted to, they could chose to create a character with other people that are going back and leveling and then once they hit max level they would be forced to transfer to another server. While you will still have some close to max level characters participating in the ah economy and influencing the prices, their overall numbers would be much smaller than on a server where the majority of the gamers are playing at end game.
 

What exactly are you trying to fix? The disparity of wealth? Or the price of low level items? Or both?

The most obvious solution would be to increase supply of the low level items.

Imagine if low level nodes provided twice the yield and respawned twice as fast. That way, the amount of X that can be harvested in an hour significantly increases -- and the laws of supply and demand do the rest.

The unintended consequence is that the speed at which a player can gather the materials to level a profession or whatever greatly increases as well.

But is that an entirely bad game? Blizzard has already greatly increased the speed at which players level 1-70 in WoW, so why not do the same thing to low level crafting?
 

The problem is that the copper and twink gear you gather is desired by high level characters.

This could be fixed by two moves:
- when you drop your profession and you pick a new one, it starts at the bottom of the most recent expansion and not 1, if you already had a high level profession before. So if you'd pick blacksmithing now, you'd get blacksmithing lvl 350. This case no high lvl character would buy copper ore
- make BoA gear for all slots. This way alts could be fully geared up by mains without buying low lvl drops.

This way the low lvl char would have nothing to sell to the high lvl so he could only trade with his fellow low lvls.
 

I would side with Stabs here and say that item degradation coupled with a better realized crafting experience would help solve some of these problems. If low-level mobs and low-level crafters still provided relevant materials for higher level items, items that were in constant need of replacement, the line between the two economies would blur. Right now, even things like the various orbs used in upper level crafting dive in price as each new patch makes those crafting ingredients essentially obsolete. As Hirvox pointed out, salvaging and mining in EVE are as relevant and accessible for the newbie building his first frigate as they are for the PvPer after his next T2 cruiser.
 

Another solution would be different curriencies as you level, and move around geographically. Make Northrend have a totally different from of currency from BC and the original. If an 80 needs copper, go back to EK or Kalimdor to get it. For instance if copper is only traded in schnits, sure you can buy schnits using gold, but will pay a big conversion tax. Otherwise go kill mobs in kalimdor, which drop schnits, and buy it in its native currency.

Yeah this would be a pain in the ass, but with some tweaking it might work. Basically make the end game currency worthless in the earlier game.

I don't really see it as a problem now as it is though. There are almost no players leveling their first toon up, and if they are they usually have some help from a RL friend giving them some cash to help get along the way. I'm not rich, but I don't hoard either. If I have enough to pay for repairs or the occasional enchants and gems for a new item, i'm happy. As it sits now, gold is almost irrelevant to me, as I suspect it is to most players. It neither inhibits my ability to do what I want, nor drives me to do boring endless tasks in order to progress. You could basically remove the gold from the game and it would make little difference to me. If i need a gem, I buy a gem. Sure I don't ever get enough to get those vanity mounts or whatever, but who needs em. If I needed to grind, or farm just to be able to progress, I probably wouldnt play anymore. The game takes enough time already.
 

Indexing the economies would make far more sense for game consistency. It then makes sense for the mobs being killed to drop loot whose value has been indexed too. But then being consistent or making sense were never goals in WoW were they? Otherwise our tradeskills could make the mats we have to buy from vendors.

Gevlon's suggestion seems not unreasonable, but it got me thinking tangentially about another tradeskill level problem: why (oh why) does a DK who gets out of EPL at level 58 have to go back to the starting zone to level up a collection skill?

Is it just that balancing tradeskills and the economy is simply less important for Blizzard than offering more dungeon grinding and badge loot?
 

OK, some of you clearly do not get the point of the post.

The point is not that low level characters have too hard of a time leveling in the market-based economy.

The complaint made is that they in fact have it too easy, as they can casually gather their way to much gold and therefore trivialize the challenges presented by the low level money sinks (cost of spells, etc.).
 

The amount of gold that low level characters can make off the auction house, in addition to the significant drop in mount costs means that lower levels no longer have to manage their finances. Gone are the days of not having enough money to train or grinding 100g for the level 40 mount. In my view this improves the playing experience as no one enjoys the grinding. In any case, this is only an issue if you don't have a higher level alt. With paid server transfers, this issue would only really arise for brand new players.
 

Hey tobold, I wanted to comment on the post on the answers that some readers have posted.

It's been a while since I played wow so I will take a shot at 1 gold = 100 silver and 1 gold = 1000 copper? If I am right then you are looking at something called the pocket change principle. That principle is what our Realtime economy buys the morning paper and coffee with. Usually this stuff is usually gathered in jars and bowls and then brought to banks or shopping malls to convert into dollars.

When you were young you looked at a quarter like it was a lot of money. Nowadays it doesn't even fund a local pay phone call. This is what some call the throwaway currency that has often been the weakest point of our larger scale national economy. How do we know the value of a dollar if we don't respect the penny?

One way to capture that and possibly solve the low level economy is by looking to the local economy. Let's take the AH as the national economy or even the stock market. Where the stakes are a lot higher and it's more expensive to walk up to the table. This could be offering items via the chat channel and even local areas where characters of your level are known to play.

Working the local economy with groups of items worth silver sold in bundles for 1 gold. This method can help even the lowest level character break into the higher stakes. By consolidating some of the smaller change and converting it into the bigger more widely used type, gold.

Also, another method is by using plain old differed compensation. Very simply doing without certain things and saving for the more important ones. By understanding the opportunity cost of an item and "heavens forbid" working with a lower quality item in order to save the the larger one. Many higher level players don't do this. They want it now and will rely on the mentality of the higher level characters resources to fund the lower one. But if used correctly from the ground level even starting a new mmo is easier.

That is exactly what another reader was mentioning in FE. I look at it that I might have to wait or weigh the value of one item/skill versus another.

What's going to be better for me in the long run? The miner or the pewpew skill that will not come in handy until later on in the game. It will always be the one that is going to help me collect capital, or in this case, silver.

Thanks for reading my answer.
Frank
 

Hirvox, I would say that its a problem actually largely not present in EVE, for the simple reason there are no NPC vendors for most items. If you spend a couple of hours missioning, and build up a hangar of loot, and then sell it, you are selling to other players very nearly all of the time (partial exception: tags, randomly dropped trade goods). You are therefore participating in the player economy from the start, even when running L1 missions or belt-ratting the puniest rats in hisec.
 

I don't really see the problem.
You complain that the experience of low-level characters is weakended, because they can make too much money too easily?
I agree that this is the case, but IMO this is the intention of Blizzard.

That's why I (and a many other players) say: Remove the endgame or remove the leveling game. This is the same thing.

Add immersion. Don't let me have 10.000x as much life, dps, hps, or gold at level 80 compared to level 10.

But that's not Blizzards intention. Blizzard wants you to play the endgame, which is a Dalaran centered journey to (raid)dungeons. It's silly yes, but only if you look at it from an immersion/credibility/consistency PoV. As an artificial game it is as much fun as monopoly.

Don't mistake soccer for a war simulation and don't mistake WoW for a mmoRPg. WoW is a game; no more no less.

(And, yes - I'd definately love to play an mmoRPg that has been produced with the excellence of WoW. I just play WoW, because there is no reasonable competition.)
 

Inflation blew past the NPC's and it was never a consideration for adjustment unfortunately. Just based on what blizzard has done, and what they have planned, I don't think its really on the radar. But overall I would categorize it as a very minor issue in regards to balancing when in todays context it's no longer about that journey to 80, it's more about what you do at 80 that seems to be the focus point.

The WoW Economist
 

Scott suggested multiple currencies in WoW. As I already pointed out in Sarainy's excellent blog, Blizzard have already partially implemented this. The low-level economy functions gold, while the high level economy works in emblems and badges.
 

Hirvox, I would say that its a problem actually largely not present in EVE, for the simple reason there are no NPC vendors for most items.
How's that different from WoW, where 99% of the loot are drops?

If you spend a couple of hours missioning, and build up a hangar of loot, and then sell it, you are selling to other players very nearly all of the time (partial exception: tags, randomly dropped trade goods). You are therefore participating in the player economy from the start, even when running L1 missions or belt-ratting the puniest rats in hisec.
..and those L1 missions and highsec belt rats pay about as much as low-level quests or random grinding in WoW do. Random non-trash drops from mobs in both Eve and WoW are predominantly sold to players, even if those items are just fodder for Scrapmetal Processing or Disenchanting. Finding blue items/officer loot early can net you a relative fortune in both games. And just like in WoW, skill training in Eve is dependent on NPCs, with most of the abilities/recipes/skillbooks sold/trained by NPC vendors. This is the shadow economy Tobold was talking about. The only differences are that in Eve the minimum price for an item is de-facto set by the mineral value of the item, and in WoW it's the vendor price offered by NPCs. The other difference is that low-level minerals stay useful throughout the entire game in Eve, so the price is kept low by lots of experienced players doing quite a bit of high-efficiency mining. While it is good news for upstart crafters, it makes rookie mining a very thankless job.
 

The other difference is that low-level minerals stay useful throughout the entire game in Eve, so the price is kept low by lots of experienced players doing quite a bit of high-efficiency mining. While it is good news for upstart crafters, it makes rookie mining a very thankless job.

Very interesting!
I say so, because the question arises, why low level herbs in WoW ar often so expensive, even more expensive than high lvl herbs.

The answer is probably the different frame of mind the players are 'in'.

In EvE accumulating money is one of the goals of the game.

In WoW money is traditionally not very important and accumulating it is done by a small minority. This has become a bit better with very expensive vanity items and also the tradeable ressources that the highend dungeons offer which can be used to craft high-end items.

But still:
A WoW players thinks that farming low level herbs is even more boring than farming high lvl herbs and demands some extra gold.

In EvE people are happy that this is extra boring (=easy) and therefore happily farm the low lvl minerals.
 

Hirvox, you missed a step in Eve. After the scrap metal processing you then sell the result to the high level players. That's not true in WoW after the disenchant step. In Eve every time you get some bit of "loot" it is transferable into something high level players want thus brand new players get to engage in the player economy from day one. In Wow the trash drops are just trash that get sold to NPC merchants.

I'm not suggesting one is superior to the other. But there is an explicit difference.
 

So what is the broken part?

(1) new players that don't know about the AH sell their copper/herbs to venders that give them copper rather then silver/gold?

(2) new players that discover the AH will never have a shortage of cash while leveling?

(3) new players that discover the AH have a hard time making cash to buy greens from the AH?

If (1) is a problem, there are a lot of ways to fix it. One easy way is after the vender something that is going for 10x as much in the AH send them in-game mail from the AH urging them to make the trip to the big city to sell their stuff next time. A harder way would be add buy orders to the AH, and when you vender things the vender can fill the buy order and send you (most of) the extra money. Have it kick in after the hour timer expires you get mail with the extra money "my agent in iron forge found an eager buyer, here is the 37 silver that represents your share...if you find more copper I'll be happy to locate another buyer for my small 15 silver fee..."

The "harder way" is likely far simpler for players to deal with. "I just take stuff to a vender, give it to them, and I get some cash now...and in an hour or so maybe I get some extra cash...if I want a little extra I could go all the way to ironforge and get the cash a bit faster and a bit more cash...but it is a pretty long ride, why bother?"

The "easy way" is more of a pain for players, and will result in less change. Many people will ignore it until they run low on funds, then they will have to scrabble for it, and that isn't a lot of fun.

Of corse with the "hard way" you have buy orders in WoW which will have an effect on the economy (I think generally holding prices down a bit, but I'm not sure), and then you will have a larger supply of things into the AH (also downward price pressure). Those may be undesirable.

If (2) is a problem, maybe the right thing to do is (1) AND index the price of training and other things to the current going rate of a blend of gathered materials at the given level (level 10 training: costs what you would sell 2 copper ore plus 3 silver bloom has sold for in the AH over the last 4 days). However that is assuming that it IS a problem. I think it isn't a big deal. I think it is an improvement that it is pretty easy to keep enough cash to pay for training and basic mounts as you level. No stopping the "fun" to grind out some cash to pay for that next rank of fireball or whatnot.

(...more later...)
 

(...more now...)

(3) could be thought of as a problem. I think the solutions for (1) would help here, but not totally close the gap. More heirlooms wouldn't entirely fix this, since greens are bought to d/e as well as to twink, heirlooms would only take twinks out of the market.

Personally I don't think (3) impedes the ability of folks to level. However that isn't the measure of a game. Sure nobody needs to buy a "long spear of the boar" that can only be used starting at level 15, and will be obsolete by quest rewards at level 18 or sooner. However some people _like_ doing that sort of thing. You don't make them happy by saying "sure the spear you want costs like 75 gold, and would take 2 days of mining copper to get, and you would level out of it's useful range while gathering the copper anyway! Besides the guy in the white house over there will give you a better weapon when you find his lost cat."

You make them happy by getting them the frikin' spear they want. Or you avoid unhappiness by never letting them see the spear.

So if (1) can't get them enough money for the spear, maybe the right thing is to make all the low level weapons BOP. Or more aggressively go after the answers to (1) which makes more money for the lowbie to buy stuff from the AH. ("more aggressive" would be like the auto-fill buy orders system also looks at d/e'ing the items to fill different sets of orders, but that has an impact on enchanters incomes, so it might not be a universally acclaimed change).

Note for the most part (2) and (3) are at odds with each other, while (1) isn't at odds with any of the other issues. In fact solutions to (2) are likely to be strongly tied to (1) otherwise the gap between "those in the know" and "first time" will be huge, and it will be a painful game to level in.

-----

Personally I don't think any of these are huge issues that need to be tackled or the game will go down the tubes. If any were being addressed, I hope it would be (1).
 

This is a natural consequence of a large power band, mudflation and game age. It's not something you can "solve" without a drastically narrower power band in player power as well as gear and materials. (And as has been noted, item decay is likely necessary as well... though I'd tie it to usage rather than time.)
 

I say so, because the question arises, why low level herbs in WoW ar often so expensive, even more expensive than high lvl herbs.
Extremely low supply is probably the main reason. High-level players that level crafting professions need lots of materials, but there's only a very limited amount of newbie players acquiring said materials.

Partially, this is caused by the skill design. In Eve, almost all upgrades to mining (skills, modules or ships) increase the yield of all ores equally. But in WoW, a high-level gatherer is not orders of magnitude more efficient in harvesting low-level materials than a low-level one. Especially with herbs and ore, where the majority of time is spent in finding the next node. AoEing enemies for leather, cloth and disenchantable items is somewhat more efficient, though. But none of those come even close of the income a high-level gatherer can get in high-level zones, so they don't tend to compete with the low-level gatherers.

In Eve every time you get some bit of "loot" it is transferable into something high level players want thus brand new players get to engage in the player economy from day one. In Wow the trash drops are just trash that get sold to NPC merchants.
Correct, but Scrapmetal Processing is not something that a newbie necessarily has access to (training takes at least 38 days), so they sell their items on the market at low prices and someone else gets the extra profit. The regional markets mean that experienced players can set up regionwide buy orders at ridiculously low prices and profit on all newbies that don't take the time to travel to a market hub to get a higher price.

And even if the newbie has a "sugar daddy" available to turn trash drops into minerals, the relatively low price of minerals means that those minerals aren't going to net him a disproportionallly high payout like they do in WoW.
 

Two things to note if you were to try to fix this two economy split.

1) it's hard to find *everything* that high level players playing alts care about. Wool cloth goes for 50s-1g *ea* on my server because 80s swimming in gold buy it for cloth turn ins on their alts to get xp. If they are spending less gold on leveling profs and less gold on buying gear for alts, then they have more gold avaialble to bid up the prices of anything else that's useful to their alts. So wool and silk would go up. There are probably a few dozen other little items whose price would skyrocket if you put BoA items in all slots and gave profs plateaus so you didn't have to level from scratch when you switched.

2) even if you found a way to bring things more into balance, goblins would still find a way to make ridiculous money at low levels, it would just take longer. Now, I can skip straight to ah play on a new character with a few hours of leveling to 10, running some ore circuits, and then waiting overnight for my cloth, meat and ore/bars to sell. Voila! 100-200g starting capital and I'm ready to start trading mats for twink and level 80 profs.

If Gevlon's suggested changes happened (or something similar that kept low levels working primarily in a low level economy), I would still find ways to make money as a lvl 10, and eventually work my way into goblining the higher level economy. It would be harder to make the jump. require learning a bunch of intermediate markets, waiting patiently for good deals that my puny starting capital could take advantage of, but it would just be a matter of a few weeks intead of a few days to get to a few hundred gold.

The difference is that somebody who is not a serious econ player won't likely figure out how to make that kind of gold, so *most* low level players who don't have max alts would scrounge for money.
 

I tend to except to agree with Nils apart from the goal of EVE is to collect money.

Money is just a natural resource that enable the other economic natural resources to be harvested.

1) Land = soveriegncy and ulitmately "Dominion" and more power.

2) Labor = more dominion + more recruit to grow your posse = power.

3) Capital = Isk, Isk and more Isk to fund your POS's and ultimately expand sovereignty: Land + Labor = Power.

4) Entrepreneurial Ability: Is a collection of all of the above to create a local economy in low or null-sec areas. Which ultimately ends up in more power.

So in my experience, power is the ultimate goal of large mega-alliances like Goons, etc. Money is an integral part of it, but it is just a smaller piece of the larger picture.

Your career in EVE always starts of the same, that first mission, that first ship and piece of tritanium. It's how you run your "business" early on that will have an effect on the rest of that characters lifespan.

I don't think they have any problems with the first stages of development of new players. The problem is that everyone wants to leap frog into that Battleship quickly. And that, my friends, is not going to happen right away.
 

Hirvox, I think you miss part of the point. If I quest for a couple of hours in WoW, my inventory gets filled with grey items that I will only sell to an npc vendor. That is what I meant by EVE being different, and that is my impression of the shadow economy Tobold's original post was talking out. In EVE there are basically no 'grey items' that will only be sold to npc vendors (tags being a very partial exception in some cases, seeing as you can use them for other things as well). In ohter words, even from L1s you are participating fully in the player-market. Whereas in WoW from the quest itself, well, most of the time you are probably not. The odd item now and then to disenchant, and for ages that is pretty much it.
 

Hirvox, I think you miss part of the point. If I quest for a couple of hours in WoW, my inventory gets filled with grey items that I will only sell to an npc vendor.
And those vendor trash items net you about as much money as selling T1/meta1 loot to players with ridiciously low buy orders. While it's technically part of the player economy, the payoff difference is so large that it might as well be two different economies. It doesn't matter whether you're being fleeced by NPCs or players.
 

The last time my wife and I started characters from scratch on a new realm we quested for a couple hours, and our inventories were filled with grey items to sell to the vendor (many times over) for a pittance *and* a gradually increasing bunch of white items (meat, ore, leather, hides, herbs, feathers) that we sold on the ah to make something like 40-50g ea. overnight, without ever going out and doing circuits of herbing/mining or skinning, just gathering what we came across while questing before we got to lvl 8ish and hit a capital city.

So we were participating in the player economy from very close to the beginning. When we leveled our first characters 2 years+ ago, it didn't work that way. My wife was in her 30s and still struggling with money, got her first gold at lvl 20 or so, and had no freaking clue how she was going to raise 100g for her mount at 40. I started later, and about when I hit lvl 15 or so, I had the bright idea to look at what things I wanted to sell in the ah were being sold for before I listed them for 300% of vendor price or whatever blizz defeault was. OMG I made like 10g in the next few days just selling a few greens, cloth, etc. I didn't even realize my wife wasn't doing this, she looked at my screen and said something like "How the hell did you get 20g already?!" Well I told her and the rest is history. I also discovered the trick of buying things from people who didn't know better and selling them at the player economy price. and by the time she hit 40, I had enough gold to give/lend her the 100 and barely feel it, but she didn't need it either.

The point is, the player economy is available in wow from level 1, it's just a matter of knowing to access it (and how to do so).