BaSH PR0MPT

Warcrack economics

So within a few minutes of posting about Warcrack a friend SMS’d me asking me to post more on WoW economics. I’ve always had this habit in MMO’s and RPG’s of starting with nothing and ending up filthy rich. What it boils down to is free trade elements within the games, in the case of WoW it’s the auction house. There are two ways to make serious cash, one is supplying goods in demand, the other is market domination of niche products.

Supplying goods is pretty simple, find what people want, make sure it’s a non-reusable resource, and farm it up. That’s how you get your gravy train started. It’ll be effective if it’s something that not many people farm and it has a reasonable demand level, but before long you’ll find other players have noticed this market gap and have stepped in and are out supplying you. There’s two ways around this, one is to organise a player agreement, hire lowbies to farm up what you want and pay them a percentage of the cost. To most newbs 100 gold per week is a wage they’ll happily jump at, even though you can grind that in an hour they can’t. But what if the prices are dropping due to over supply and it’s no longer financially viable?

Market domination is an easy solution, once you have enough gold as a float, simply buy out the people undercutting you and relist their items at a higher value. Keep the market price fixed. This requires a fair bit of micromanagement, however even the most remedial player can login a half dozen times a day to check their auctions and eliminate the competition. Price fixing is the simplest way to gain a monopoly on the element of the game you are supplying, and it’s one of the primary keys to grinding a few grand per day. As I mentioned in my last post I had 800g left over after two days, I didn’t leave the auction house or battlegrounds, and blew a few grand on gems. So to those wondering how I ended up with such a surplus still, that’s how. Market dominance.