“Gold Rush”
It’s amazing how economies thrive on virtual worlds like Azeroth. One can buy and sell wares at an auction house to bring in money and spend money. Unfortunately, on my return back to Azeroth after a large siesta from the virtual world, many things seem to have changed… it costs an arm and a leg for almost everything. Perhaps the Burning Crusade expansion has set a new level of cost?
Here’s the deal. If you’re a brand new World of Warcraft player, you’re going to find yourself having to harvest the materials of the world (known as “mats”) for yourself because the auction house is way too expensive for everyday items. Inflation is out of control, imagine going to the store to purchase a leather jacket for the price of a car. You’d go cold wouldn’t you?
Once upon a time things were different, “low-bee” items (items between 1 and 15 let’s say) were a reasonable price, usually in the silver range of money. Today, they’re weighted in gold. The concept of supply and demand is at work but how is it we can purchase the supply at such a high cost? Because we’ve got friends or other characters with a lot of unused cash!
With Burning Crusade we saw basic quests tossing around gold as if it were common place. A character would save up thousands of gold for mounts and then horde the gold as if it were precious until they realized it was nearly infinite in supply and would start passing it around their guild or to other low level characters in their account. The end result, a low level character can go into the auction house with 100 gold in hand and buy whatever they need for basic materials no matter the price.
The laws of supply and demand take on a whole new meaning when people buying have nearly infinate supplies of cash. For me, I’ve decided to purchase some materials while “grinding” for others because they’re just too costly to purchase. However, I’ll do what needs to be done to also exploit the high prices when selling items back to the auction house and contribute to the over-inflated economies.
Perhaps, over time, Blizzard will create a platinum piece to replace the common nature of the gold as it depreciates in value. Although that’s said more in jest, it’s unfortunate that brand new gamers to this MMORPG won’t be able to take full advantage of the auction house as they could years ago with the influx in gold deposits.
A lot of people have purchased the Xbox 360 and a growing number have had new interests in the PlayStation 3. The summer time is winding to an end and fall will bring us a new host of video games and reasons to keep playing our current generation consoles. Many analysts and industry leaders believe the 360 and PlayStation 3 will
No New Game Consoles
@No PSN unless you waive lawsuit
On the behalf of the PC community, we welcome all PS3 players to join us :P. Or play SP games only, assuming that the SP games don’t require a PSN connection.
My guess is: the network is not safe, and they [Sony] don’t plan to fix it any time soon, so they don’t plan to play nice. Something evil this way comes, at least for PSN customers.
Jonah, pipe down 🙂 …
@DC Universe Online goes free-to-play
Peer-to-peer MMOs + free-to-play may be the only way for small devs to start off an MMO.
As for free-to-play as the single business model in the futire, dunno. If the game is stunning, people will pay.
@Microsoft: Xbox TV this Fall
So basically competition to Netflix and Hulu. The more the merrier, if you ask me.
@Rogers Cable ordered to stop throttling gamers
Throttling is cheaper than replacing lines with ones of a higher capacity. I find it weird though that a third party entity orders a cable company how to do their business. It should be the customers, voting with their wallets that do that.
@Nintendo and Valve say no to smartphone games
Dunno about your explanation Jonah. Valve didn’t mind doing games for PS3, Mac and it is now pushing Steam for XBox 360.
One thing that I keep ‘feeling’ about Valve is that they’re understaffed: between making games and improving Steam, they might actually lack the resources to move to that market.
Oh Paul … everybody dies at one point or another, and we have little control over it.
@QOTW:
Well, the very first one I played is WWF: Royal Rumble, on the Sega Genesis.
Hi, fairly new listener here. I came across you while searching for a decent podcast about games, but couldn’t find one that I actually liked. I finally found your podcast, which is very enjoyable, especially because of the chemistry going on, you work well together.
@DC Universe going free-to-play: I think that all these MMOs going f2p is a good sign because it shows companies that they could make more profit if they stop trying to get loads of money upfront and instead gain the loyalty of their customers.
@Nintendo and Valve saying no to smartphone games: For both their businesses, I think it’s best that they want to focus on products for their platforms only. I remember Nintendo once saying that they don’t consider smartphone games to be “true” games, and I don’t think they will contradict themselves too soon.
Oh and to Paul: I know where you’re coming from with all this want of hate-mail. I have this “problem” myself too. It’s just a need you have after being so nice to people and receiving only praise. I haven’t yet received any hate, even after having asked for it, and so I won’t give you that satisfaction either.
No PSN for you! – Congrats on breaking the story guys, too bad you didn’t get the recognition you deserve, but us listeners know the truth, if that means anything at all. I am glad that this was actually pointed out, and its so hard to believe that a big company like Sony cares more for their wallets than their customers. GASP
Qwikster – It seems like a reasonable decision, people wanted games, and that’s what they are giving. The only thing that I could see being a problem is the price. I know GameFly charges 23 dollars a month which is too much for me, but if Qwikster can do the same thing GameFly does but cheaper, I will definitely be utilizing this feature.
Xbox TV – It seems that the Xbox is going to be an all around entertainment system rather than a gaming platform. They just keep on adding features to it, and if they had one the HDDVD vs. Blu-Ray wars, they PS3 would be dead. For only 200 dollars you can get one, and then you can pick and choose what features you want to pay for. Microsoft has handled this console well, even when your console fails, they fix it and send it back with a 1 Month Gold Subscription, they are doing everything right in my eyes.
No Smartphone Games from Nintendo – I think that the main reason that they aren’t doing this is that they don’t want to be giving anything to their competitors. It has been said many times that the DS’s main competitor is the iPhone, and if Nintendo were to give content to them, they would be taking money out of their own pockets. In my opinion, it was a good decision to stay away from smartphones, in Nintendo’s case.
QOTW – The first game I can remember playing would be Doom. Their is also the N64 games, but Doom seems to be pretty prevalent in my mind when it comes to the first. I can still map out the first chapter’s levels in my mind.
Super question, but I don`t think that I remember…
QOTW – My vanilla answer to this question is Super Mario Brothers for the NES on my 4th Birthday. I kept running full speed ahead on level 1-2 hoping to beat the koopa troopa to the low hanging formation of blocks only to run right into him every time. It took the older neighbor to teach me how to actually play video games before I learned my lesson. Alas, I’ve retained this bullhead, brute-force strategy to gaming to this day. I suck at video games unfortunately.