Tuesday, January 12, 2016

How Has the Garrison Gold Influx Affected Your Numbers?

The expansion has not ended, not even close to doing so, but when talking about numbers with people the other day when someone complained "I can't make any gold" and we tried to explain how easy it is to make gold this expansion it made me wonder, where is everyone with gold.

This expansion more than ever before has proved to me that while we all play the same game, we are not all playing the same game.

What I mean by that is I see the wide range of people in my guild alone, one small sampling of the world we play in.  There are people that were always broke that are still always broke.  There are people that would have problems with gold that get by just fine now without really trying.  There are people that always made gold that now no longer even try because they do not need it.  And there are people that used to love making gold that now sleep in a castle built from gold with an ear to ear smile on a daily basis from how they are raking it in hand over fist.  And then there are various people in between those examples I gave.

We said to the person that while the garrisons no longer gives the massive gold influx they did at the start of the expansion they are still constant money making machines.  With the right set of buildings you can maximize your intake and even without all the perfect gold making buildings you can still do quite well for yourself.

Side note:  Salvage yard (level 3) for crates.  Jewel Crafting building (level 3 with worker) for daily. Bunker/Mill (level 3) do the daily for the weapon upgrade, sell all upgrades.  Inn/taven (level 3) for the treasure hunter missions and recruiting treasure hunters. Trading Post (any level really) to trade extra garrison resources for materials.  Mine and Garden (level 3 if you wish) to sell mats, not as lucrative any longer, but still something.  And then make sure to do any and all missions all the time.  Each time you do a mission it allows others to pop up.  Think of all gear missions, follower upgrade item missions, etc, as gold missions as all that stuff sells.  Remember, gold missions are not just from gold missions, it is from any mission that gives you something you can vendor.  And with that, even after it has been heavily nerfed, you could still make upwards of 10K a month even if you only log in a two or three times a week, per character.  Does not sound like a lot, but for such little effort, it really is money for nothing.

When it comes to the types I mentioned I fit into the one were I always made gold and no longer try.  Basically because I do not have to. Garrisons have made me lazy using the outline I mentioned above.  Not just partly lazy.  Completely and totally lazy.  I used to make gold the old fashioned way, I earned it, now I just sit around and collect it.  Yeap, 100% lazy now and I admit it.

When I talk about earning gold, for example, in cataclysm I would buy ore for 40 gold or less per stack from the auction house, or farm it if I were in the mood, I would then prospect it all, cut the good gems into whatever sold well and then turned all the others into rings and necks, passed them to my enchanter to disenchant, and then cut and vendor off any remaining gems. 

The enchanting materials sold for a very high number at the start and the crated lesser gems vendored for 9 gold a pop.  This basically meant that for each 40 gold I spent I would get, at least, 54 gold in the worst case, which never really happened, and at best around 600 gold.  If I spent an hour processing I could easily make upwards of 20K gold on a bad day. 

That is what I mean working for gold, but it could be anything, even something as simple as selling gear you craft or putting up glyphs for sale or potions and flask.  You were working for your gold.  I used to do things like that all the time when I needed some gold and I made good gold doing it, but now I basically just bounce from garrison to garrison and click on a few things like in a facebook game and collect gold for doing so.

Note: That no longer works.  The medium gems no longer have a market, the enchanting materials don't either. Not to mention they hard nerfed the cut gem vendor prices to near nothing, which was the key to making money with this scheme.

The thing is, even becoming flat out lazy, and admittedly so, I have more gold than I ever had before.  Sure, I could have quadruple the gold I do now if I actively tried to make gold this expansion, but in my mind once you have a couple of million, you really do not need more gold do you?

But all that is beside the point, as I said, while we all play the same game, we are not playing the same game.  Just as I changed, many others have as well.  There were people that never had gold that now do, people that used to make decent gold that somehow can't (as mainstays like crafting materials are now worthless over all) and then people that somehow still can not make gold even with the cash machine as their home base in warlords.  Why is that so I might ask, and answer at the end, if you will indulge me.

So I tried to remember what it looked like for me at the end of every expansion I played in gold wise.  It is entirely possible I could be remembering some things slightly off but I will try to be as accurate as I can.  There are some things I do recall, which help me remember where I was at when the time came.

At the end of BC.  I did not even have a mount, because I did not having riding.  I could not afford it.  Yeah, don't judge, lol.  I was not much of a player back then.  Noob would be an understatement.  I quit before the end of BC and did not return until wrath was out of a couple of months.

At the end of wrath.  My main was around 40K gold and my bank alt was more than that, my alts had some gold, but not much at all.  If my alts had at much as 4K I think that would be over estimating.

At the end of cataclysm.  I think my main was sitting at the 200K range and I had at least 2 alts over 100K.  Most of my characters were sitting around roughly 20K-25K with the exception of my least played characters.  One I recall spot on, because it spent 10K gold near the end, was my rogue who started the legendary quest line then never really did much after he started it.  When he started he had 11K on him, so I spent nearly every cent I had starting it and he was my lowest max level, gold wise.  A few  max level alts on other servers were sitting at 20K and one was in the 60K range.  So over all I would say my average character had at least 20K, if I had to judge looking back.  Of course my main and bank alt being the only major outsiders to that average.

At the end of mists.  I had many characters over 100K, multiple hunters, my Dk, my priest, my shaman, my mage, and more.  My lesser played characters were not as lucky, my rogue never quite made it back up to far, I am sure he ended mists at 24K because I joked thinking he was the only max level I had who I would not be able to instantly upgrade the entire garrison with, as doing all upgrades would cost 36K.  Over all I passed 1M for a single server in mists for the first time.  I believe when warlords started, because I spent some cash, I was just shy of 1M on that server, something like 988K.  I'd say my average characters had roughly 50K if I played it even once in a while and all my more played characters had at least 80K while the newest max level ones had considerably less.  This was also the expansion of the alt for me as I had more max level characters in it than any other.

Now warlords is not over, but where I stand now, and what started this conversation, was when I said, I noticed that most of my characters, except the newest ones to hit 100, are all sitting at, at least, 160K.  I have multiple characters with over 400K sitting on them too.  Even my rogue, who never had money and was always behind since he started the dagger quest that almost made him broke, is sitting at 180K just from being one of the earlier characters I got to 100 so he really had a lot of the early garrison income.  Even some alts on other servers are over that average 160K mark.  Most characters I log into, at most, once per week.  So I am not making any effort to make gold and I have been freely spending it too, and I still have more than doubled what I came into the expansion with and we still have 6-8 months to go.  I don't know where I will end but I would say it is safe to guess my average max level character will be over 200K by then if I keep up at this rate.

So lets break this down to average numbers, removing the top (mostly my main and banker) and bottom numbers for the expansion averages.  And not even counting BC when I could not even ride around on a mount.

Wrath: 4K
Cata: 20K
Mists: 50K
Warlords: 200K

Now I am just one player, so you can not judge from me.  But it actually looks somewhat reasonable in terms of increase per expansion.  Cata I had 5 times the amount I did in wrath.  Mists I had 2 1/2 over cata, but i also had more characters than I ever had before, more than double, so that really works out to 5 times too when you consider I did double the max level characters.  And mists to warlords it is 4 times as much.  But remember, I am only estimating, I could easily be somewhere around 250K which once again would be 5 times the amount I had in mists.

So looking at it that way, percentage wise, inflation is not really worse than it has ever been.  It is actually pretty steady, for me at least.  Albeit I could have made a lot more money if I made an effort to this expansion, but the fact remains, with what I did decide to do, the game steadily advanced at the same pace it always does.

So looking at it that way, how has the garrison gold influx affected your numbers?

Are you in a better position, worse position, how has it treated you, and you can't just look at the numbers.  Until I thought of it like this I thought I was making bank this expansion but now I see I am just moving at the standard pace I always have been.  I am not getting rich, I am just increasing at the same steady rate I always have been.

I will have to look at it again when the expansion ends and see where I really end at, but inflation doesn't seem as bad now, to me, looking at it this way.  It is just steadily increasing at the same rate it always has.  So maybe the people who have changed how much they have in terms of gold have changed the way they played and that is why the broke people are still broke even if there is a lot of gold to be made, they did not change.  They were never the type that made gold to begin with.  So maybe they do have 5 times as much as they used to, but that 5 times as much still does not buy what they wanted just like it did not buy what they wanted before.

38 comments:

  1. I haven't really kept much track of gold, but I do feel like I'm low this xpac, especially compared to pandaland.

    I don't really max my garrison, so all my gold just comes from missions/shipyard. Really that gives me plenty of gold, because the thing is, while I'm not making as much gold as I used to, I'm making a lot of gold without really playing the game. Log in for a few seconds a day for missions, and log in for raid. That's it right now (on a pvp break).

    In pandaland, I was one of the only really reliable LWs on our server (this was before the merge) to quickly farm mats and have all the raid recipes. Before MsV opened, and on opening week when only normal was open, I probably sold a dozen total 476 chest and gloves (maybe it was chest and boots?) of earthen harmony, 15k for the gloves and 17.5k for the chest. I think I even sold the first couple pairs for 20/17.5. So I started off the xpac, before even getting the 496 raid recipes, with about 200k, not even including the gold made from all that 450 ilvl PvP gear that fresh 90s wanted. But the more important part, I was logging in to farm those harmony spirit things. Even if I was doing a fairly mindless task while watching netflix/youtube in my other monitor, at least I had a reason to log in and play my hunter. I actually recall having fun trying to see how many goats (up on the hozen cliffs by the farm) I could handle at once when I was still in mostly dungeon blues.

    By the time I got to selling actual raid-equivalent ilvl gear, I was really raking in the gold.

    Anyhow, there's nothing like that in WoD. So yeah, gold is much, much easier to come by. Anyone with 3 minutes a day can bring in at least several thousand gold each week. I think that's a lot of the problem. So, maybe I could farm those crafting reagents in tanaan, and sell fully upgraded gear for some good gold. But it's not going to get me that much more than just playing the garrison game for a couple minutes.

    They set our expectations for gold/effort super high with the garrisons, the gold return from crafting relative to the effort just isn't worth it. In MoP, there was no free, crazy easy gold to be had, so the long grind of harmonies or whatever else seemed worthwhile.

    I did grind all 270 or so of the fel blights so I could fully upgrade before HFC mythics, which felt worthwhile, grinding them for sales/gold, doesn't...

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    1. Even if all you do is the missions table and do not maximize it with salvage crates and other stuff, you can still do quite well for yourself. Even post nerf.

      On my server those 476 pieces still sold nicely even up to ToT. So if you were one of the first to get it I could easily see it as something that could have brought you in a windfall.

      I so love watching people go off the edges from those goats. Call me mean if you will, but I got a kick out of it every time I saw someone flying off.

      I agree that they did a large disservice to themselves. Why craft, even if you can get good gold from it, when you can get just as much if not more doing basically nothing.

      Same here. I went out of my way to upgrade my own gear at first but I never even considered doing it to make things to sell. If I get blight now, I save it to make an alt an upgrade. I don't even consider selling stuff any more.

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  2. I've always been interested in the gold game, between crafting and flipping.

    I don't really remember how much gold I had at the end of Wrath (my first xpac), but I played for about the first 6 months of Cata and had about 4-500k gold total across my characters when I took a break.

    I came back in MoP during the Great SoO Content Drought, and from January -> November 2014 I built up to 1.5MM

    Since the release of Warlords, I built that up to briefly touch 5 MM before blowing 500k on a spectral tiger mount, so now I'm at about 4.7k and growing. This is with having spent probably another 300k on various mounts on the AH and 50k on a H Archie carry for the moose. Also haven't paid a sub since they started the tokens last spring, so that's probably another 250k I've spent.

    So all in all I'd say that gold is pretty easy to come by this expansion...

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    1. Seems like you have really taken advantage of this gold flow about as much as one could. Congrats. Nice work. If I were not playing it lazy I'd like to think I could have done much of the same. My desire to do so however just isn't there.

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  3. Don't remember prior expansions.

    I think I have you beat in levels of laziness.

    I make around 20-40k gold per month with 2 max level characters using garrisons with a full slate of epic gold/garrison-resources followers.

    I hate the tedium of selling stuff to vendors, so I never do missions with crap that goes into my bags unless that crap will sell for over 200g on the auction house. I have no salvage yard. I don't gather anything (mine nodes and herb nodes are just sitting there lonely).

    I've bought wow tokens with gold and I've upgraded trinkets and stuff.

    Oh, and the other big moneymaker for me is I do Supreme Lord Kazzak on 2 max level character and sell the Felblight on the auction house.
    kazzak

    Oh, and I constantly buy raid materials for 2 specs (potions, flasks, food, goblin glider kit, augment stone, drums for fake heroism, savage feast for slackers).

    The one thing I refuse to buy are epic gems. They are like 5,000g and only provide like 10 more stat over the medium level 300g ones.
    --
    Regards,

    regardsanon

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    1. Even stuff that sells for 15 gold adds up. Say each character gets one to sell and you have 10, that is 150 gold. In a week, that one thing mean 1050 gold. So sure it is not 200g per, but it does add up and if you are sitting at your garrison table anyway, might as well collect the freebie gold I'd say.

      I rarely do Kaz on even one, I always forget about it or when I look there are no groups and I move on. If I did it every week with all my hundreds I could easily have another 1M just in felblights. lol

      I make all my own raid stuff. I have every profession and more than enough materials to last forever and a day. So for me there is no need to spend anything there. Yes, even epic gems, but I only make them for my main(s). The rest use the lesser ones.

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  4. I made modest money in MoP, mainly from selling crafted 502 weapons, I had enough to buy the odd mount but now much else.

    I hated Garrisonville so much in 6.0 and 6.1 that I was blinded to the possibilities of making money so I missed out on the really Monty Haul period. A couple of guildies told me how easy it was, but I just didn't care enough to try.

    However once 6.2 came out and I started to enjoy playing again, I got 5 characters up to level 100 and gave them level 3 Garrisons (3 have the level 3 shipyard too, I'm just finishing off the last two now).

    I easily make enough in 2 - 3 weeks to buy a WoW token (highest I've paid was 65k, they're now nearer 60k gold in EU). Minimal effort for decent income now they're set up.

    The cynical part of me suspects that Blizz have allowed the gold to keep flowing to keep players like myself in the game and buying tokens, as they make more money that way. They could easily have further cut gold income if they wanted to.

    When the inevitable nerf hammer swings in 7.0 and the gold flow dries up I will miss it that's for sure. I'm paid up to June game time, I'm wondering when to stop spending and start saving my gold.....

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    1. Early on one character could rake in 20K a week, at lowest. So if you had a lot of 100s early on, you could really be rolling in the gold.

      The nerf will come in 7.0 because they will not want us hanging out in our garrisons next expansion, that is for sure, but there is still a lot of gold to be made before that time comes. Your idea might not be far off, letting people make gold so they can buy game time keeps them playing and actually makes more money for them. I think over all inflation is not as bad as some people think. Surprisingly enough, I think blizzard does have control over it and they are doing a somewhat fair job. Only problem is, for me, if they keep that x 5 rate up, gold will seem worthless real soon, another expansion or two at most.

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  5. I always considered I had a responsibility to each character to keep "enough" gold on them for their needs. "Enough" began for me at 10K in Cata, moved to 30K in Mists, and now the numbers are so high that it doesn't matter. There was a satisfaction in making sure I was provided for. I was proud of myself for making steady gold from Molten Front dailies, picking Whiptail in Uldum, and farming Ghost Iron in Skyreach. Flasks and Gems were a cherry on top.
    I was never interested in goldmaking in itself. I don't get a happy "woot!" when I make a big sale or look at my numbers, and I HATE spending time at the AH, but I always enjoyed gathering, so that was always a steady income.
    I had 4 max-level characters at the end of Mists. I've just added a fifth, but it would be fairer to say I've had 4 characters all along.
    I had 400K at the end of Mists, and am just bumping 2M now. That number is actually a bit deceptive. My addons tell me I've sold almost 3M on the AH in WoD, but when my banker gets over 900K, I dump some on Tokens and expensive pets.
    I did nothing at all to get gold until 6.1. There was no point in gathering, and no fun without flying, and while crafting with Savage Blood was lucrative, I didn't do any - the boring crafting of upgrade items and RNG rerollers was repulsive to me.
    When the disappointment of 6.1 hit, and it became clear nothing more was coming, I set up a few barns and did some of the Savage Blood crafting anyway. I'm sorry I didn't start it sooner - it may be rather degrading, but it did at least get me out of the garrison occasionally, and trapping was as much fun as I've had this expansion. That "Barn phase" accounted for about a million in income. I've since converted all but one of my barns to inns, and I'm really not thinking about gold at all, except when my banker approaches cap again and it's time to find somewhere to dump it.
    So, like you, I have about a fivefold increase on the expansion, though I think the increase could be said to be a million or so higher, if you take Tokens and pets (which can be resellable assets) into consideration. That might make it an eightfold increase, and Warlords isn't over yet.
    With this inflation, while I regularly see Mythic BoEs regularly going for 6 figures, the basic "cost of living" in the game hasn't increased at all. A Traveller's Tundra Mammoth isn't 5 times as expensive as a year ago. Big Keech hasn't raised the prices on an Orb of Mystery. Consumables are still dirt cheap (bitter Herbalist/Alchemist speaking here!) because mats are free to everyone. Repairs are more expensive because the new armour is more expensive, but the numbers are so small as to be irrelevant. So I'm comparatively swimming in pointless gold, and I don't feel I've earned it.

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    1. I like to do that as well. Make all my character support themselves. Like my rogue did not have enough to max his garrison, but he did, on his own. Just a little slower. The only time I give a character gold is when they are starting out. Once they venture out in the world on their own, they are on their own. Gold wise, I still share things like enchants, gems, etc between all characters.

      I think what you say is key. Swimming in gold but do not feel I've earned it.

      I've moved up in gold each expansion and I felt I earned it. Now I feel like I just log in and collect it. Not like I am working for it. Does not feel as satisfying.

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  6. I ended MoP with 80K gold on alliance side and barely any on horde side, now I have about 500K on alliance side and 50K on horde side.

    I had only one character with a garrison before the nerf and only a few followers with the gold trait. After the nerf I managed to level another 4 characters on alliance side and my horde char. Between them I think I have only 3 followers with the gold trait, since I never bothered to get any from the inn just for the gold trait. The only thing I really did was starting all available missions on all my characters everytime I logged on. I also did spend a bit on buying mounts, so it probably was 600K at some point.

    Everything considered, for the limited effort I put into it, I think that's a nice bit of gold. I also haven't played much since August, because I lost interest in the game.

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    1. Even without the gold trait, if you are active, you can still make a ton of gold. My rogue only has 1 with the gold trait and he is over 180K now. So it still is good.

      I agree for the amount of effort put in, it is a fair bit of gold. It made me lazy and I think come next expansion I might end up seeing the impact of that when I have to go back to working for my gold.

      Sadly, all the "good" from this is part of the reason you and many others lost interest. It is nice to make the gold from it, but from a game play standpoint, it is rather boring.

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  7. I think my estimate would be that I've made about 1.5 million gold total during WoD. Most of that is the lazy way that you mention with first three, now four maximized garrisons. I've also sold a ton of battle pets this expansion and probably made about 200K that way as well. Medallions and other tokens have probably made me another 250-350K. (I sell everything this expansion. Upgraded gems and crafted gear mean nothing to me.) While I've made that much -- and started WoD with about 350K total -- I pretty much keep 500K on my alliance toons and 100K on my single horde hunter. The rest I've spent on mounts. I'm getting closer to 300, so I'm buying trading card mounts, plus the odd mount on the BMAH. I want to keep that level of gold for Legion as a cushion. If the expansion come out in September and they don't nerf garrisons until August, I figure I can more than double my gold in the mean time, which actually means at least a half-dozen-ish more mounts.

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    1. My biggest gold-related regret of the expansion was not selling my first Left Shark the week that naval missions released. As a mount collector, I hung on to it. I could have sold it over trade chat for 100K in less than a minute. On the AH, I could have listed it for 150K and had it sold in 24 hours. Now, I sell these sharks leveled for 2K or less and constantly have the missions available. Same with the coal gronnling. Kept my first when when they were selling for over 100K. Now, I've sold about five more all for less than 4K each. Sad and a lesson there.

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    2. Sorry, meant pet collector above. Obviously.

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    3. Funny part is I keep all those things. Kept my pets mostly, kept the medallions of the legion, the oil things, garrison resource things, frozen arms things. Those for the next alt to get a leg up of course. And I still made gold. I can only imagine if I was not such a huge hoarder with that stuff. Wow.

      I have over 30 left sharks now. I know how you feel. I did not sell it when it was going for 25K on my server. I sure wish I did now. They sell for 2-5G on my server now. I wish I could get 2K a piece for them. I would sell them just to free up bag space.

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  8. What I know is that I'm spending tremendous amounts of gold on most expensive mounts now which I could never afford. And I'm not getting gold from any where except Garrison and Shipyard missions, although I have many alts which helps.

    My concerns would be:
    1. Will professions matter again? Because as I've earned some solid cash through Jewellery in Pandaria, in Draenor I don't think craft is even worth it.
    2. What will happen to mission tables in Legion? Because if we still have this income, you will be bound to Garrison. You won't miss an opportunity to get free 200 to 5000 gold a day per alt. And that will be frustrating, having to do the old content while you must be completely deep into Broken Isles. It's like we had to go to Halfhill in Draenor to get some cash - daily. It seems that Blizzard can't get away from this situation without pain. I've thought of deleting or reducing garrison missions when you are above lv 100 by game mechanics, but it's not a cool option too.

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    1. 1) I was actually planning a follow up post today concerning professions. Like you I am concerned with what will become of them next expansion.

      2) I will tell you (even if I do not know for sure.) They will either remove, or nerf gold missions to be something like 4 or 5 gold max so people can still go back and get the achievements but it would not be worth it to go back to make gold. They will remove, or greatly reduce, the vendor price for things you can get a lot of with missions, like follower upgrades. Those things alone will make going back nearly worthless for terms of making gold.

      So do not worry, we will not be going back to our garrisons, they will make it so worthless we just would not want to. We will make more gold doing 1 daily in legion than an entire days worth of gold missions in our garrison.

      Remember, they need to leave gold missions and missions in general, so new people can go back for achievements, but they will make it so it is not worthwhile to do so for gold.

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  9. Has the gold cap changed? I thought it was still 999,999?

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    1. Still the same, but that is a per character limit, not an account wide limit. Not to mention there is no cap on a guild bank, so if you are like me and have your own guild you use for storage, that also means you have access to a place to put unlimited amounts of gold.

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    2. Thanks! I was thinking it was per account. And I do have a storage guild, if that happy day of being over on all ever happens.

      There will have to be a hell of a gold sink,next xpac. Given what BMAH mounts top out at, there must be many Wow gold millionaires

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    3. I don't so much think they need a gold sink, so to speak, they just need to stop adding new ways to make gold for doing nothing and let the community settle down into what prices should be. As long as they keep adding gold they have to worry, they need to stop adding easy gold. That is the solution. As odd as it sounds, just repair costs alone would slowly drain the gold from the community.

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    4. Actually guild banks have a 1 MM gold limit.

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    5. That is good to know. Not like I would ever reach it, but still good to know. For the vast majority of players that might as well be unlimited. lol

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  10. I had 1.5 million at the end of MoP. Bought a TCG mount for 250k and spent a bunch on gear when WoD launched. I've been right around 1 million since the token came out because I have been using them for my subscription. EVen without logging in every day I'm profiting about 1k per day from my two garrisons combined.
    I honestly expected a lot more inflation. It seems garrison gold isn't any easier than AH gold for the majority of WoW players.

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    1. I think garrison gold just opens the doors for the active players that were never good at making gold to make gold. Now just being active is enough to make gold, before it was being active and doing something. Now it is being active and doing nothing, really.

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    2. For some. I know plenty of active players that are still "broke." People either make gold a priority or they don't.

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    3. As part of "active" I mean doing things in game. Not just logging in. My girlfriend is "active" in game but all she does is log on and chat for a few hours and then log off. She doesn't actually "do" anything.

      But I know what you mean.

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  11. Anon, Grumpy's former Guild Leader:

    Making gold has never been a real high priority of and on its own self for me. I always made enough to have everything I needed, and being as how I have the habit of having all the professions covered that didn't leave a need for a great deal of gold. Even so, I learned the trick early on of identifying a market and dominating it. After all, mounts were not as cheap then as they are now nor was the training costs (all added together for then versus now).

    Raising 500 gold in vanilla wow took a great deal of effort, more so than raising 5000 gold would now...far more so. Even so, both my 60s had such a mount long before TBC. For flying the first time, I saw a need for a certain food for spellcasters that was the best available but a boring task to collect, so I went and collected that meat until I had enough to gain my first flying mount.

    Up until this expansion, that is the way I have always played, gain enough gold for what I need but otherwise not worry over it to much. Early on, my paladin noticed the increased gold amounts that came in from having a garrison, so for the first time I set out to deliberately try to make a 100,000 gold for one toon. Modest by your standards yes, but recall I play far far less now than I did. As it turned out, it was a good thing I did or else wise my pathfinder achievement would have been even more delayed. Yep, spent about 80,000 gold on getting to revered rather than play out things I was not interested in doing.

    I suspect that gold from revisiting the garrison is going to continue to play a role in a smart person's overall scheme of things. It may take a hit but Blizzard set this up to be a player's housing and they won't ruin that totally by making it the source of a players' base income and then taking it away. At least not in total. If income now is 4000 gold, then maybe it drops to 1500 or 2000 gold. That type of cut may be all we see.

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    1. I am 100% certain that the gold from garrisons will be reduced to near nothing. They do not want us coming back to the garrison.

      At least people like yourself will remember how to actually earn your money and be capable of doing so again. I feel bad for all the people that just sit back and collect and do not know how to make gold on their own. It will be a real change of things for them. A shock to the system.

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  12. I'm making gold faster than I can spend it even just doing missions these days on ~15 toons, takes about an hour a day when I feel like doing them. I've purchased roughly 3M worth of BMAH mounts this expansion, plus buying play tokens for 4 different accounts (2 mine, 2 other people), plus single-handedly providing consumables and repairs for my raid.

    I'm up roughly 1M gold in the past 2 months. I'm at almost 5M across servers (might be over that now, haven't checked in a while). Assuming the expansion hits in 6 months I'll be in the 6-7M range, most likely.

    I have the mats to make hundreds of Hexweave bags. I have tens of thousands of crafting mats (BoP ones) that I can't find anything worthwhile to do with. I have thousands of elemental thingies, more than I'll ever be able to use for bag making later.

    I have a decent stockpile of Grumpus mounts with the expectation that they'll sell higher 6 months from now. I actually took some risk, bought them at 50K each, but have to do SOMETHING with my gold. I figure I'll at least break even but I'm expecting they'll sell for 100K+ each at some point.

    Aside from Grumpus mounts I don't play the AH anymore... I sell things worth selling, sure, but I don't scan/flip. I might do a full scan once a month... prices just don't matter any more even when selling.

    I've been pretty good at making gold with relatively little effort since Cat... making gold right now is 16x easier than it has ever been. 4x the gold for 25% of the effort.

    On one of my less played servers I have one max-level toon who I just do garrison stuff with... this toon hasn't had a chance to be optimized for gold making yet (haven't targeted gold bonus for followers, etc, and most followers are still in the 615-630 gear range), it only hit 100 a few weeks ago, but I'm already up about 40K on that server, mostly from from missions. I expect once that toon is fully developed in a few weeks it'll be pulling in 10-20K/week with 5 minutes of play per day. Honestly, when has anything close to that been possible?

    Hell, I've made over 100K on another server that doesn't have any garrisons yet at all... one Sky Golem per month (roughly 50% profit on that at this point, so 8K profit per month) and the high-end MoP bags that still sell for 1K/ea on every one of my servers and are mostly profit, that's another 2K/month. 10K/month with 2 minutes a day, just doing two crafting dailies on that server from last expansion.

    TLDR: Anyone who says it's hard to make gold is intentionally trying not to.

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    1. Your experience seems to be in line with most others. I've had the same with many alts on alt servers where they are up to 40K or more without doing a single thing in game that requires them to step out of their garrison. It is amazing how easy it is to make gold just logging in and doing mission. You are right, if you can not make gold, you have to not be trying.

      Side note:

      Depending on how things go the Grumpus mount thing might backfire. While it is an excellent idea and one I considered myself, I did not want to take the chance.

      Duping is so wide spread on my server and many others. Vial of the sands selling for less than the mats to make it. Same for engineering mounts, the jewel crafting panthers. All can be purchased day or night for less than half of the cost to make them. Dupers are going insane.

      Now, can grumpus be duped? That is the question at hand. The other stuff is all crafted and the crafting duping glitch is very well know, has been since cata, and they never fixed it.

      But fear that they can dupe those made me not invest. I mean they are duping pets like crazy too, and they are not crafted, so maybe they can do it with mounts as well.

      Either way, good luck, hope it works out. You are a much braver elf than I as I did not want to take the chance, that is for sure.

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    2. Well, it would have been gutsy if I'd put most of my gold into them but I generally didn't, I think I bought 10 total on 3 of my servers... I did put about half my gold on my #4 server into one (had about 80K, bought for 50K) but even then, it's my #4 server... even if it drops to zero value I'll make it back eventually, I don't really need the gold for anything.

      I bought 3 on my main server and I'll make the gold back in about a week. Not much risk, really. :)

      I'm more concerned that either the market for 100K+ mounts is too limited &/or they make the mount available some other way. At this point I still haven't seen one listed for under 50K on any of my servers but they're still hanging in the 50-60K range for the most part. It's still early, though, people might be waiting for the prices to drop before they jump in.

      Honestly, though, I really am at the point of not having things to buy with gold. I have all of the TCG mounts... I have almost every other mount that can be purchased for gold, even off the BMAH, I think the only one I'm missing is Mimiron's Head and I took a pass on that one in MoP because I'd never use it (at this point I'd buy it just for the +1 mount, though). I don't buy gear, I like to earn it in the content I run. I haven't even trained pet battles so no real way to dump gold for leveled pets or anything. I'm only allowed to carry 5 monthly tokens per account... I suppose I could just buy and use 10 years worth of tokens on each account but for some reason I'm still using them monthly, guess doing them all at once feels too much like a commitment to a game that's been annoying me at times.

      I dunno. I'm mostly just accumulating gold to accumulate gold, I guess.

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    3. For me there are a lot of things I "can' buy but even with the gold I have and as easy as it is to make, I do not think it is worth it. Spectral tiger mount still goes around 450K on my server. I would not pay more than 50K for it. Reason being is I know it is duped. How else would a small server have dozens for sale when it was an extremely rare thing before they stopped making them. Now that they stopped making them they seem to be all over? Hell no, I am not paying 450K for something like that. Heck, they should sell for 20K max being they are duped.

      As for accumulating for the sake of accumulating, it is not a bad thing. At least you know when the time comes that you do want something you can buy it easily.

      One thing I wonder is this. Why did mount and pet prices go up when everyone and their mother has gold while carry groups went down. I remember garrosh runs, even after it it was super easy, would be 25K for just garrosh. But now archie runs, full runs with gear, are only 25K. Why did carries go down in price when everything else went up. There has to be some reason behind that.

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    4. I've wondered the same, although part of it may be that there are at least two initiatives in place to get people free H Archie kills. I don't recall the names off-hand but they shouldn't be hard to find for anyone who's interested and there may be more I'm not aware of. My raid technically got to H Archie last week so I'm avoiding outside runs, I've killed him in the past with other groups but at this point I'd like to get the mount with my own scrappy little run.

      Plus, it's still (sadly) relatively early in the expansion and they haven't announced when the mount will stop being available. There's still lots of time. The Garrosh runs always felt somewhat time limited in comparison. Plus, heirloom leveling weapons for the next expansion... I bought about 10 runs myself even though I knew the raids who were selling the runs and even ran with them occasionally, just felt like contributing. I think the runs on my server were 10K, too, and the Archie runs are 20-25K so at least on my server there is some inflation at play. Maybe the lack of repetition is also a factor... in one regard that should make the price higher but by the same token it makes it less of a must-do-constantly so the runs have to actually convince people to run now rather than later.

      I really do hope that there's a good gold sink in Legion, there really wasn't in WoD. I've taken advantage of the weekly bonus roll token for 500g a few times but even then I normally use resources. Beyond that, almost everything I might want requires something other than gold to get. I liked the idea of making the Apexis items available for gold in 6.3 or whenever that happened but the prices were stupid, 5x what equivalent iLvl items sell for on the AH, and they weren't even close to being worth buying (i675? Meh).

      I'm surprised the monthly game tokens haven't gone higher, I think I predicted on this site when they first started talking about them that I wanted them to be in the 100K range but expected 50K at the start... they started at 20K and last I checked they were 35K. That's still really cheap.

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    5. I guess that does make sense. You only need to do archie once and the reward is guaranteed and account wide. Whereas with garrosh the reward was RNG based and there were a lot of rewards so there was a reason to do it as often as possible. I got everything except the 2 shields myself. Multiples of most weapons. About 8 hunter ones. lol

      I use honor or apexis for coin rolls. I need neither of them and always have an abundance of them.

      The apexis for gold thing was crazy. As you said they were more expensive than the AH. Plus their stats sucked, for everyone. So why would anyone pay more for less. I'd have to guess that everyone involved in the pricing decision was either drunk or stoned, because there is no other reason for the pricing the way it was.

      I too would have thought the tokens would go higher. Basically because gold was so easy to make so why would someone pay cash for such a small amount of gold when for a very limited amount of effort they could make the same amount or more.

      I honestly believe buy a level 100 boost, of a hunter (not being bias here) would be a better use of your cash than buying tokens to sell. You get a one time fix for a small amount buying a token, you get a constant gold maker, a garrison, and an easy to solo with class that can make you 10 fold what you would get for the price of 3 tokens in the matter of one month.

      So if people need gold, buying a level 100 boost of a hunter is a better way to "buy gold" than buying a token to sell.

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    6. Just to fill in a bit more detail here, tokens are creeping up now, I think the last one I bought was 45K or so... next time they drop at all I'll stock back up.

      Also, I've been tracking my gold income lately just from garrisons... on my main server (11 maxed toons) I'm picking up about 7K/day gold on average. That's straight up gold from missions (I assume it includes ship missions but not much gold to be had there most of the time). That doesn't include items I sell on the AH from missions, those are probably another 5K/day on average if not more, haven't tracked specifically how often those items come up in missions.

      The one place I'm noticing the extra gold is in BMAH prices... almost any mount these days is going for gold cap / bid max (ie. 953K gold or whatever that can be outbid) if it has ANY rarity at all. Glad I have almost all of them by now, even with my stockpile a million gold hurts a bit to part with. :)

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    7. Oh, and stocking up on those mounts has been a complete disaster. I thankfully only bought 5 (not the 10 I'd estimated earlier), one sold for a 6K profit, the rest are still sitting around on 3 of the 4 are on a server that's selling them for 10K below what I paid. I think I'll let them sit in the bank for a few expansions in hope that they don't add them back into the game somehow (or BMAH only) and increase dramatically in value at that point. But I'm not hopeful and that sucks, I'm not usually wrong at reading this type of stuff.

      Speaking of being wrong, I've been stockpiling Hexweave bags all expansion, both the bags themselves (bought off the AH when people sold low) and stockpiling the mats to make them. I'll have hundreds if not thousands of bags by the next expansion.

      The bags are now selling for about 200g below what I was buying them up for earlier. I've stopped buying... I'm out of bag space on all my toons, including guild bank, to store them in and I don't want to lose another whack of bags/mats as happened last expansion due to mail management issues.

      I have zero clue what to do about those... who's going to NEED bags in Legion? Who doesn't already have a full set of 11 or whatever per toon? Ugh.

      I have even less of a clue of what to do with the BoP crafting mats for the other professions, the non-bound ones sell well enough but the bound ones? I have tens of thousands that I have no idea what to do with. Zero clue.

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