This week’s episode is very long to make up for the crappiness of last week’s episode, and the crew have fun with the trolling of Target critics this past week.
The news this week includes:
This and Listener Feedback.
“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.
This week is packed full of gaming goodness, as the winner of the Civilization V contest is revealed. If that weren’t enough, the news items for the week invoked a lot of conversation:
The podcast also features some great, heartwarming Reader Feedback as well as a new contest to win a code for Magicka. The question of the week, “What books featuring magic do you like the best?”
This week’s episode is abbreviated due to Paul’s move to California, and various Halloween delays. That’s not to say there’s no great stuff in the show, as there are some big debates about privacy and bugs.
The news this week includes:
All that, and Paul feels older thanks to the Reader Feedback.
Question of the Week this time is non-videogame related: What’s your favorite vacation spot?
Hi Guys, Good Episode. I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while as I have been busy with my newborn son William. I like that you have now expanded to include other game types other thank video games. To Paul’s infamous comment Story is Game Play’s Bitch… I HATE THIS… I really only like games that have stories or enable me to make a story… I hate games that are pointless grinding. I need progression otherwise I stop paying attention and generally stop playing. I still play game from the 90s because back then they had good stories. As for the Steam Machine’s suspend feature, I like the fact they recognize the risk and disable the feature, nothing would piss me off more than suspending the game and expecting it to start back up and finding that the session had expired/become corrupt. It would be great if they can fix it but I don’t think that would change my buying decision. As for the steam machine, I don’t mind the idea if the boxes are cheaper and outperform my gaming PC… otherwise they don’t really make much sense. If I want to play my PC games on my TV I would connect my PC to the TV. Otherwise… keep recording and I’ll keep listening.