Economy Predictions

[iMaverick]

As I'm sure most of us have noticed, with the recent drop of Cataclysm the amount of gold a farmer can potentially make in an hour has significantly increased.

This has (among other things) deflated the price gold buyers are paying for gold down to about $1/k.

The question i'd like to put forth in this thread is: "What (if anything) will change in the months to come?"

It would be fantastic if some people who have been through this a couple times before could weigh in, but theorizing can certainly be helpful too.

On one hand, I'm not sure what would cause the amount of gold people can make in a day to decrease (or what would make the companies pay us more of them increase).

But it certainly seems like a possibility...

[jereminion]

its easy to predict

all 'illegal' gold famers get gold through mining, fishing, skinning, and herbalism. they depend on the AH. what i have noticed is that as time goes on, more people are getting these raw mats because theres more casual players at 85. the prices are going down and buyers of gold will pay even less. even worse is that you no longer need to 'gamble' or waste money on bots like honorbuddy or glider like in the past. sgather, mr fishit, and lazybot are all well performing bots that anyone can download and setup in 5 minutes, and its free.

i see about 5 people when ever i go into popular botting areas. they are always there and botting. that means you are constantly undercutting between 5 people--the prices go down 2% every time if you use auctioneer(most do) so the undercutting gets so extreme. when cata first came out, it was great to quickly hit 85. the elementium was selling for 150g per stack. today, it is modestly selling for 70g per stack. its not going to get better, just worse. to add to that, people no longer require the raw mats to level up quickly and get raid/pvp gear. once profession items become obselete, prices will go down even more since the mats will be useless

you need to look forward to the next raid content patch. generally blizzard releases hard mode raids with blacksmith, leatherworking and tailoring mats that drop from bosses. usually they have extreme mat requirements like 2 stacks of elementium bars and 10 truegold. im sure when these come out the prices will go up again. the top guilds that were buying in bulk are done now that the raid gear they are getting is better than the 'cata release profession gear'.

thats just on horde wildhammer server. the prices are great on this server. you require less work for more gold which means gold is worth a lot per each unit. on other servers botting is so bad and gold isnt worth that much, so having a lot of gold may not be as good if you are on a server like silverhand.

another thing to consider is that other mmo are coming out this year. if SWTOR or warhammer or rift are good enough to take a large majority of wow players, the economy will be worse even if there are less botters.