Blizzard announced a new feature, the auction house will be available from the armory, or some application. It does not seem to be a smart thing. I mean the players who focus on the AH are at first a minority, secondly are pretty much satisfied with the AH interface, or with the interface of various addons. Since the game has very little graphics demand, you can log in everywhere, even on an office machine with integrated video card (800x600, minimal graphics).
So it seems they are taking a huge job (imagine the database nightmare as it should be accessed immediately from different clients), that is not fulfilling any direct customer demand, nor it will increase the satisfaction of significant amount of customers. I'm one of the most active AH player in WoW, having a gold blog, running hundreds-to-thousands auctions a day in the value of 1-10K G, and would not use this feature (I don't dare to log in to WoW or the account management in my workplace as I find the security unreliable).
So who the hell is the audience of this feature? If your first guess is socials, you are wrong. They buy stuff when they need it. The idea of "I will raid tonight, so I buy consumables now" is foreign to them, otherwise they wouldn't be broke. They buy everything when they immediately need it, and if they are not logged in the game, they don't need anything.
I think the target audience of this armory-AH are the professional goldsellers. In the last years the goldsellers went through serious development. Once upon a time they were farming monsters for their loot, mostly for primals/eternals/essences and skins. Alternatively they farmed herbs and ore. However they realized that this is pretty stupid as it's low gold/hour and it is in direct competition with the socials who do the same, so they are hated, ganked, reported.
On the other hand running glyphs with QA3 with 24/7 camping gives more gold, and in the same time gives something useful to the players. The guy who buys his glyph for 5 G will definitely not report the seller. It's ultimately good for Blizzard, since the players access more items, cheaper.
The problem of the WoW economy is that the average player is way too dumb to recognize a business opportunity. For example he is a blacksmith and there is no belt buckle in the AH. The people need it and would pay 10-20G premium for it. It's a 10 secs work to trade the materials and craft it. So what will our blacksmith friend does? Goes to farm dailies or elementals.
This gap was filled by the AH goblins who did it for gold (game currency). I'm sure that Blizzard recognized that prices are lower and the amount of available goods are higher on servers that have 1-2 AH-goblin running for goldcap. But we are too few and rare. Several servers lack us, that's why the glyph-moron letters are so abundant. When the first goblin arrives, those who sold some glyphs for 50-60G are in outrage. How many servers can be out there with no AH-goblins? Also, after 100K why act more. Sooner or later every goblin retires and either stops playing or starts some different activity in the game.
The permanent filling of this gap is the professional goldfarmer, who camps the AH 24/7 (literally, using different employees), buying, crafting, selling. The armory application allows him to access the auctions with external programs. No longer he needs to run/write complicated addons. He can write automated programs in any language to create, buy or cancel auction.
Yes, this armory-AH is simply an interface for bots. It is designed to help goldsellers to run the economy of the servers with minimal server load (as he doesn't have to log in and run a client that queries the AH all the time). Also, now a single computer can trade on several servers, while AH addons needed the farmer to be logged on to the game. So if he wanted to trade on 10 servers, he needed 10 computers and 10 employees (or 5 good computers and 5 good employees who could multibox)
Besides running the economy, the AH trading increases the income of the goldsellers, so they will less likely to hack accounts for gold. Also they use raw materials, increasing the demand for farmed ores, herbs, eternals, skins, making the farming socials happy.
Almost forgot the best part: they will pay money to Blizzard to access this interface. Well done!
So it seems they are taking a huge job (imagine the database nightmare as it should be accessed immediately from different clients), that is not fulfilling any direct customer demand, nor it will increase the satisfaction of significant amount of customers. I'm one of the most active AH player in WoW, having a gold blog, running hundreds-to-thousands auctions a day in the value of 1-10K G, and would not use this feature (I don't dare to log in to WoW or the account management in my workplace as I find the security unreliable).
So who the hell is the audience of this feature? If your first guess is socials, you are wrong. They buy stuff when they need it. The idea of "I will raid tonight, so I buy consumables now" is foreign to them, otherwise they wouldn't be broke. They buy everything when they immediately need it, and if they are not logged in the game, they don't need anything.
I think the target audience of this armory-AH are the professional goldsellers. In the last years the goldsellers went through serious development. Once upon a time they were farming monsters for their loot, mostly for primals/eternals/essences and skins. Alternatively they farmed herbs and ore. However they realized that this is pretty stupid as it's low gold/hour and it is in direct competition with the socials who do the same, so they are hated, ganked, reported.
On the other hand running glyphs with QA3 with 24/7 camping gives more gold, and in the same time gives something useful to the players. The guy who buys his glyph for 5 G will definitely not report the seller. It's ultimately good for Blizzard, since the players access more items, cheaper.
The problem of the WoW economy is that the average player is way too dumb to recognize a business opportunity. For example he is a blacksmith and there is no belt buckle in the AH. The people need it and would pay 10-20G premium for it. It's a 10 secs work to trade the materials and craft it. So what will our blacksmith friend does? Goes to farm dailies or elementals.
This gap was filled by the AH goblins who did it for gold (game currency). I'm sure that Blizzard recognized that prices are lower and the amount of available goods are higher on servers that have 1-2 AH-goblin running for goldcap. But we are too few and rare. Several servers lack us, that's why the glyph-moron letters are so abundant. When the first goblin arrives, those who sold some glyphs for 50-60G are in outrage. How many servers can be out there with no AH-goblins? Also, after 100K why act more. Sooner or later every goblin retires and either stops playing or starts some different activity in the game.
The permanent filling of this gap is the professional goldfarmer, who camps the AH 24/7 (literally, using different employees), buying, crafting, selling. The armory application allows him to access the auctions with external programs. No longer he needs to run/write complicated addons. He can write automated programs in any language to create, buy or cancel auction.
Yes, this armory-AH is simply an interface for bots. It is designed to help goldsellers to run the economy of the servers with minimal server load (as he doesn't have to log in and run a client that queries the AH all the time). Also, now a single computer can trade on several servers, while AH addons needed the farmer to be logged on to the game. So if he wanted to trade on 10 servers, he needed 10 computers and 10 employees (or 5 good computers and 5 good employees who could multibox)
Besides running the economy, the AH trading increases the income of the goldsellers, so they will less likely to hack accounts for gold. Also they use raw materials, increasing the demand for farmed ores, herbs, eternals, skins, making the farming socials happy.
Almost forgot the best part: they will pay money to Blizzard to access this interface. Well done!
41 comments:
I am not quite sure whether it's a good idea.
Goldsellers do not 'hack' accounts. There is no targetted 'hacking'. The so-called WoW 'hacking' is only a glorified fire-and-forget system in which keyloggers are launched in the wild (often through embedded browser apps running themselves from the goldselling site itself), or phishing attempts through e-mail crawler gathering from fan-sites.
Basically, what goldsellers do, is sell you gold, install a keylogger on your machine during the transaction, and after you pay them, they doubleback and 'hack' your account, getting their gold back and everything else you had.
Rinse and repeat.
Considering the 'moron' proportion is so high, the tactic is most often sucessful.
Now the second part is that this feature will be open to browser abuse. Now, everything is regulated by what the WoW client allows you to do. But from a browser window? You could run an automated script, write your own auctioneer, and so forth. And best (worst) part is that Blizzard cannot do a damn thing, (Blizzard cannot control in which way people are using their browsers, nor can they check for 'illegitimate' third party programs running at the same time as the browser and indeed, interacting with the said browser.)
This thing is an extremely dangerous road, and will create uneven competition with the people that use ONLY the in-game AH. Quite concerned about this, TBH.
If Blizzard wanted to implement an official Gold-for-RL-Money program, they could have well pulled a CCP and did what Eve did.
Also, I do not think that I stressed this enough. Most of the 'professional goldselling' gold does not and did not come from farming, but from stolen accounts.
Gevlon, I believe your contempt for the masses that play World of Warcraft has blinded you on this point. Ultimately, I think your conclusions are hollow and represent only your biases.
First of all, it is not just gold farming employees who log in regularly to check on auctions. There are plenty of "socials" as you call them who log on throughout the day to check to see if any of their auctions have sold.
There are also people who are hoping for a particular item or a particular price and so will log on repeatedly to check for it.
In fact, a friend of mine will no longer hire World of Warcraft players to work at her office because of activity just like that.
There's also the huge success of addons like Auctioneer. If the only people trying to use the auction house regularly were goblins and gold farmers, these addons would not have the download and usage levels that they do. As it is, they're practically considered mandatory.
Now, only a small minority of those using the auction house may be gold capped goblins like yourself, but that's also because only a small minority either care enough or enjoy it enough to do these activities. For every player like you, there are an uncounted number like me who use the auction house to make some extra money to finance what we do in the game, not as the point of the game itself. For every player like me, there's an uncounted number more who dip their toe in and that's all they ever do.
You've also completely ignored the lure of the "update" to your so called "socials". Social sites with their tweets and status updates and whatever else are immensely popular. People check them repeatedly throughout the day. Blizzard has already dived into this with the armory feeds. Feeding the auction house into it is just one more way of catering to the masses who need updates on minutia throughout the day. And if Blizzard can charge them more and probably display advertisements on the web pages associated with these aps, then Blizzard can profit from this just like Facebook and Twitter do. (Which is a goblin style you should be able to respect.)
In the end, I think these audiences are where Blizzard is aiming, not some tiny segment of gold farmers who Blizzard is actively fighting.
Oh, and if Blizzard wanted to make money from gold farming, a more direct and profitable route than $15 per month from those farmers who aren't using stolen accounts would be to simply start selling gold for real world money. Why count on money from criminal hackers when they could just gain more money from millions of legitimate customers?
I really want to say you're wrong, but until we know what features and functions are allowed through the auction house, armory linkage we can't be certain.
If it's read-only then I think they're just wasting time developing a new bell to add to their bells and whistle collection. If it's full access then it'll be nice to automate my business even more. If it's read-only and full access with the 'premium service' I think you may be right. But why doesn't blue just put an end to the gold sellers by selling gold?
No no no...
I am an active raider who spends some time on the AH now and then when I have time, which is not alot because of my limited gametime and raiding schedule.
When this happens I have the ability to play the AH while at work (yes, I have the liberty to do that).
I know alot of the people I play with will use this oportunity, so your assumption that only goldsellers will use this is pretty far-fetched.
I think you're missing the mark abit here. After all, how many who goes to work where you have access to a computer can actually install a game on their computer? And even if you could bring your own laptop, chances are you are not going to risk losing your job running a game while at work. Visiting av website, however, is usually fine, as long as it's not porn-related.
The same basically goes for school, although higher education gives you a lot more freedom.
And people don't care about security. When at work, the sysadmins have gone to great length to assure that the network is secure so people feel safe.
At school, the children are instilled that school is safe, ergo is using the computers there safe.
The fact that their security often is an illusion eludes most people. It won't happen to me, right?
I think a lot more people than goldfarmers will actually use it, depending on how featurerich it really will be.
@SiderisAnon: if you are right and "legitimate" players would use this feature, than my only mistake is that my contempt for them is not big enough.
Camping the AH to make 10K/week is bad enough when you can make 5K/week with fire&forget auctions.
But camping the AH just to find a single underpriced item? I couldn't imagine that someone can be that loser. I mean if he spends a week camping until he grabs a battered hilt 2K below market price, than his profit is 2K and his gold/hour is easily below vendortrash farming.
I think it has its good points, and its bad points.
I wrote a similar article on my blog today sort of talking about the same thing.
I guess being an AH farmer back in the day I see where this could destroy the economy.
I also think it would help players who are looking for a certain item, and if they just received a text alert that it was posted on the AH on this faction/server it would be good.
The funny thing is that morons won't do that math. So yes, they camp a week on the AH for a battered hilt for 2k cheaper. Probably without addons because they are not 'no-lifers lolz'.
By the way Gevlon, is there any chance you're going to teach people how to make gold again? I'm trying to automate stuff, and I've made around 8k gold, but it requires way to much effort in my opinion(Actually a little ashamed for this, but it took me more then a month to reach that while I have a feeling it should be easier with inscription + leatherworking). I'd rather learn the shoot and forget method.
I know the second part of this comments makes me a moron according to the first part, but hey, I'd rather be known as the moron who tried to learn.
When Blizzard would provide access to the AH through the web, it will be a very short matter of time until someone puts a program on the internet that automates trading on the AH. Trading will be ruled by bots that run 24/7 and that take autonomous decisions about buying, selling and cancelling actions. It will be a heaven for 1c undercutters and monopolists, but then, anybody who downloads a bot from the internet will be able to be one with next to no effort, so competition will be brutal.
It's weird that Blizzard has gone to many lengths to prevent botting in the game and now they are to provide the ultimate bot interface themselves.
All the doomsayers claiming that it will result in bot programs using the interface 24/7 and ruining the economy are wrong. You just don't understand.
If you have any kind of programming background (like I do) you'd understand that Blizzard will have much MUCH more control over things than what is being said in these comments.
Making the AH available on the internet doesn't instantly leave it open to exploitation in this way. There will be limits and methods to discourage and prevent this kind of thing. We're not talking about some 16 year old's Websites 101 class project here. It's Blizzard. They have some of the best programmers in the world working for them and if they honestly could not stop people exploiting the feature to the extent the doomsayers are suggesting they wouldn't do it.
I seriously doubt that you will be able to do any kind of high-end AH business activites (glyphs, jewelcrafting, relisting etc) soely from the web interface. In fact I seriously doubt you'll be able to post *anything* from the web interface, simply purchase things.
@Mundy: you misunderstood me. I claim that Blizzard purposefully help goldsellers to do auctioning, as it lower prices, supply players, increase material prices (G/hour of farming).
If we continue the conspiracy, then probably most of gold-selling companies are anyway indirectly owned by Blizzard.
As for automation with bots, there are ways to make the interface so complex and self-mutating, that any bot that works today, will be already broken tomorrow. Same goes for even hourly spawning of random traps in the code that will catch the bot. Of course, one can make a bot that reads the info from screen pixel by pixel instead of parsing the html (or xml), and will send the input by simulating real user keystrokes/mouse clicks, but that is not very effective.
I really doubt they are gonna make a nice set of webservice APIs functions for anyone to easily write their own application (bot).
At this moment, we simply do not know exactly what functionality will be available.
For a full blown AH-gold farmer just raw selling and buying from AH is not enough, they will need to access their crafting professions as well through web. Next step is web access to vendors, etc.
Every speculation at the moment is simply very far fetched, since we don't have any exact details yet.
Would be quite hilarious tho, that it would turn out that they would just make a public RSS thread about all your purchases and sells in the AH and you'd have to pay premium to turn it off :)
Gevlon,
you mention "running glyphs with QA3 with 24/7 camping" - is it common on many servers now? Sadly my realm's AH is also being botted and it doesn't look like it's going to stop - after several months of people reporting them, Blizz actually banned one of the bots but it only took him/her a few days to make a new account and start again.
Do you have any advice how to deal with these cheaters? Personally I've been undercutting their QA thresholds (after finding them by trial and error) and it still gives me some profit, but not nearly as much as I'd make when faced with honest competitors.
Well, I have no idea whose shady operation would be benefited the most by this, but for me the immediate advantage is using the AH, if I want, from work.
Yes, work computers can run WoW... but most companies of some size and with a competent IT department will sack you if you fire off a game client during working hours.
In my particular case, I invest about 10-15 every day when I log into WoW to check my auctions, put new ones, etc. If I can fit that in my lunch break instead of at home, I have magically increased my leisure time by 15 min, by investing some time I could not use for that purpose before. Win/win.
Actually
It is more to do with Blizzard attempting to make their game more accessible more places. You have heard of handheld games and the market they have - well, it started with the armory and now the AH. With better handheld technology comes a bigger market, and infact I am fairly certain there will be many many players who own iPhones who will want to use it, simply because it's so accessible. Not all people who have to work during the day can have WoW on their office machines etc.
'There's an app for that' - there certainly is. What is next I wonder. The same thing could be used for Eve Online, setting skill training through your iPhone - its about making MMOGs more accessible in real life.
Of course the real thing that will happen is it will increase the number of people in the market place.
It will drive down prices and lower margins for crafted goods and increase the price of farmed goods.
You cannot stop the macro economic changes but you can prepare for them.
Prepare for World of War-bay
@Gevlon that wasn't so much pointed at you, more at some of the people who have commented so far.
I guess I'm just tired of every thing Blizzard does being turned into some kind of doomsday conspiracy. Blizzard aren't going to do something that hurts the game, that would be stupid.
Anon said: 'By the way Gevlon, is there any chance you're going to teach people how to make gold again?'
Gev said in his post: 'Sooner or later every goblin retires and either stops playing or starts some different activity in the game.'
@Anon. I doubt it, there rarely is 'My Business advice'. Gev seems to have moved onto 'running heroics in blues', 'trying to exploit the LFD tool' and having folks provide him content in the form and various screenshots of being mean to other players.
@Katerina,
How can you possibly know whether most gold comes from hacked accounts? Myself, I think it comes from profits derived in the game, whether it be farming or AH gaming. There is just way too much gold available for sale for all of it to come from hacked accounts.
@Gevlon,
There is no way that Blizzard is just thinking they will get more new goldsellers to subscribe. Even with the health number of them, they have to be a tiny minority of the playerbase. There is no way Blizzard is so shortsighted as to specifically gear an aspect of their game toward the goldsellers and against the majority of the playerbase. Your hypothesis sounds like an ill hatched conspiracy theory.
@Eaten by a Grue: NOT AGAINST THE PLAYERBASE. It will hurt the AH-goblins like me, but will benefit the average player. He will get his farmed saronite sold higher and buy his titanium cheaper.
Of course he could transmute it himself, but that's too complicated.
Gevlon said:
"But camping the AH just to find a single underpriced item? I couldn't imagine that someone can be that loser. I mean if he spends a week camping until he grabs a battered hilt 2K below market price, than his profit is 2K and his gold/hour is easily below vendortrash farming."
You seem to have forgotten your own blog post from last month. This is very much the same scenario as your sugestion to farm a vendor in Nagrand for items that disenchant into mats. You leave an alt there and check every so often to see if things have changed. That's like 2 min tops spent every time you check the AH.
If Blizzard provides a web based way to watch the AH, it would be trivial to refresh the search every few minutes and alert the user when something comes up that is a good deal. You just then have to switch to yoru AH character and buy it. Very little actual gameplay time used.
Gevlon claims that "Blizzard purposefully help(s) goldsellers to do auctioning, as it lower(s) prices, supply players, increase material prices (G/hour of farming)."
That might be a reasonable thing if you assumed Blizzard was more like a government and less like a God. Why in the world would Blizzard spend enormous amounts of resources developing this new feature just to lower prices, etc, when they could simply change the game directly? They have done this before to correct various market imbalances (such as allowing us to purchase Arctic Fur with Heavy Borean Leather). I can think of dozens of ways they can shift the surplus welfare from secondary producers to primary producers and consumers, all of which don't require adding (as you admit)a very complex and expensive feature.
To claim that Blizzard would use such an expensive method when they could just change a few variables in the game is very strange to me. Especially when there is an easier way to understand their direction with this (as suggested by other commenters).
I see what you are saying, Gevlon. The market will become more efficient overall, benefiting the average player. I think this is probably true.
But really, I think you have to look at what Blizzard has done in the past with the web interface to know its reasons. It wants to provide more functionally, more opportunity to use the product. Like the Armory, this can be accessed from anywhere, so people who need more WoW can do it from more places.
I think that Blizzard is thinking that the more usability they can provide, the more people will be into their game, the better they can keep subscriptions.
@Eaten by a Grue
Simple economics demonstrate this fact.
The CIA world Factbook estimates the GDP@PPP per capita of China at 6500 international dollars per year in 2009.
Assuming a standard 250 working days/year at 8 hour/day, (Which I doubt the Chinese observe, but I'll be lenient with the numbers just to illustrate a point. I'm quite sure the actual wage/hour is much lower.) a Chinese person averages 3.25 dollars/hour. Let's convert that to Euro and apply a 0.73 conversion rate for today's date. That means a 2.37 euro/hour.
Now, the going rate for gold that I've seen in goldselling spam was of 44 euro/10k gold, or 4.4 euro/1k.
This means that a single farmer gets 538 gold/hour just to break even.
538 gold /hour is a very bad rate for farming. I, speccing ret, and in ToC25 gear can barely make 500 gold/hour by pure farming.
Bots and multitasking can only get you so far considering other costs like subscription expenses, resubscriptions of banned accounts, losses caused by GM investigations, opportunity cost in time spent leveling up, and obviously, the need for profit.
Fair point, I can concede that they may bot the AH, but Gevlon earns 3k gold/hour. I can't fathom a bot doing more than that (indeed I suspect it's way way less, since Gevlon calculated that time by time at the keyboard, not time logged in, which is obviously way greater, and I suspect it would drop it to about 1k gold/hour).
The only other option is account 'hacking'. It stands to reason, really, have you seen the account recovery queues? Do you think Farmers would do it if it weren't profitable?
I admit, there's many assumptions in my post, but I do not think I am wrong. Unfortunately, since Blizzard doesn't release this information and I can't trust gold selling sites as far as I could throw them, we may never know the full truth.
@ Gevlon:
You mentioned that you dont log in at work because you dont find it secure enough, yet you log in at home? As im pretty sure you are not a network engineer, you realize of course that this is a 'feeling' and not based on any sort of facts.
In fact, its 99.99% more likely you are MUCH more secure at work than at home, unless you believe the threat lies with your network team. In fact, if you use addons (and update them) you are at a FAR greater risk of having your account compromised than you are logging in with a web client at work.
They might as well start selling gold for real money after this.
I don't like the idea. Even if I can think of ways I would use it, I think it's a bad idea.
It already takes Blizzard "several weeks" to handle botting reports in game. I make money CASUALLY through the AH. What happens when someone else can come in any time of the day and exert control over the AH (many people try, and are limited by not being able to be at the AH -at all hours-)?
Eh. Don't like it.
really, have you seen the account recovery queues
Really bad logic. How many people work in the account recovery ques.
If its say 50 people and 200 accounts are hacked a day and they have to investigate each account before it's restored a relatively small percentage of the playerbase could cause a really big backlog.
200 a day times 365 days is 0nly 73,000 accounts hacked a year or .73 percent. Even if it were 4 percent of the accounts per year thats only 400,000 accounts.
It's concievable that a small percentage of hacking is bogging down a work force of say a few hundred account recovery specialists.
Your math only works if blizzard has thousands and thousands of people restoring accounts.
Gevlon, you and some of your readers sound like old curmudgeons 15 years ago railing that the internet will never amount to anything and how could you possibly sell anything securely on a home computer?
This will, plain and simple, dramatically increase CUSTOMER access to our goods. Isn't that good for business?
And your first paragraph assuming that all AH users are happy with the interface? Come one. It sucks. Have they ever changed the graphics or menu or search abilities? Why can't I search for a raw gem like "shadow crystal" and not get every cut version of it? Why is there no damn AH in the most popular city, Dalaran?
I would gladly pay a few bucks a month just so I can access the AH from my iPhone while I'm sitting at my computer so I won't have to log over to my bank alt.
@Katerina
I think for sure hacking goes on and people's stuff gets sharded and gold gets stolen, and I am sure stolen accounts are used for other nefarious purposes.
But it's just that the gold selling engine seems to be too smooth of a machine to be relying on such constant criminal activity. Have you seen these websites? You can pick ANY server, any faction, name how much gold, and you get stuff within minutes.
To me, this speaks of a mass farming effort. Whether this farming is creature/nodes or AH/crafting, I cannot say. But if Gevlon can make a few thousand gold quickly, I think these guys can too. And Gevlon's method of afk would work great for them: Queue up 500 pigments to be milled and go to the next instance of WoW and do something else. Queue up 200 items to be auctioned, and so forth.
And finally, I have no reason to doubt your statistics, but I would say that the average gold farmer in China is probably working for much less than the national average wage. So the economics might work out after all, especially if you factor in multiple WoW instance efficiency and at least some automation.
Lastly, you will notice that almost all the gold selling sites offer leveling services. You cannot level a character through "hacking", and Blizzard has gotten so good at catching bots that it seems most likely that the leveling is done legit, through cheap labor. So that is evidence that there are actual people laboring over this stuff, and I suspect when they are not powerleveling, the employees are making gold.
Agreed with the comments above regarding "getting WoW in more places". Blizzard are putting WoW on the iPhone, on Facebook, as an AH minigame... This is about increasing awareness.
One thing you don't mention is the 'premium' which AHers will have to pay...
@Eaten
The wage cannot be too much under the national average wage, otherwise they'd lose workers. WoW 'botting' is not akin to digging a hole in the ground, it requires training. (at the very least, competency in using a computer, and I wouldn't be surprised if those goldfarmers would need some accounting skill)
Funny that you should mention powerleveling when in fact, powerleveled accounts have their access details saved and 'hacked' 2-3 months after.
Sam, are you kidding me? 200 hacked accounts per day?
Empiric Evidence: there are no less than 8 threads on hacked accounts today on the european forums. Europe has about 1 million accounts, so 10%. That means that according to your math, 40% of the people who got their accounts stolen find their way to the forums and post.
Nice number, right? Only it's not. I cannot find the source but I'm quite certain I saw an blue statement that said that only 5% of the playerbase ever reads/posts on the forums.
Can you explain to me where the other 35% comes from, assuming a statistically even distribution of posts?
It's way more likely that the above mentioned 5% are vocal on the forums about 'hacking' too. Meaning that for those 8 cases today, 160 accounts were hacked in Europe alone, today.
Multiply that by 10, and you have 1600 accounts hacked daily.
Now, I trust my estimates more than your estimates. I provided some evidence (albeit empiric) while you pulled numbers out of your butt.
Before we start making wild predictions about what Armory access to the Auction house will do, I think we need to find out the details of this new feature.
It seems to me people are assuming this will basically be like having auctioneer over the internet.
While that is possible it is also quite possible that an Armory AH will be very limited. In which case it does nothing for goblins or gold sellers.
For a lot of us, this wont even be a benfit at all, even at work. why? WEBSENSE! I can't even access the armory page, so this is useless to me and anyone else with a limited internet accessibility.
This may increase the number of sellers, if selling is an option from the webversion, but it will also increase the number of buyers. The real question is will this service increase more purchases or sales on the auction house?
Also, most servers have had the major markets crashed via golbins and add-on auto batch posting. What I have done is shyed away from these crashed markets (glyphs wich are down to 3-4g per on my server, when i used to be the first one with all glyphs week one selling for 60g per). Now I focus on markets that make big money and are far less prone to batch posting, like the gem market. With the big deposit costs for selling gems, people tend not to batch post more than a few and often times, even being higher up the price list, you will eventually sell.
As with any gold making strategy don't put all your eggs in one basket : DIVERSIFY.
Cold of Coldsgoldfactory.blogspot.com
I am reminded of the King Pin (an evil comic book villain). After once systematically destroying the life of a hero who fought him for so long, his first thought afterwards: hire the man. The King Pin was an evil *businessman*, and such a dedicated, hard-working individual is an ASSET.
If what Gevlon says is accurate, Blizzard is, in addition to fighting Goldsellers, HARNESSING and manipulating them to make life easier, cheaper, and more profitable for socials (the vast, VAST majority of WoW players) with the *only* downside being the tiny, tiny, TINY amount of AH-Goblins out there will find their lives a little bit more difficult; Goblins who's life revolves around finding clever ways to bypass or take advantage of game mechanics, and will in time learn to profit from this change anyway.
I am shocked. Shocked that Blizzard, a *business*, would do this. SHOCKED, I say.
Hey gevlon, where is it possible to mail you these days? I have been trying to send a mail to your mail adress in your profile but it does not work
I'm not a big fan of this announcement either. But let's wait and see exactly what form it will take.
LMAO so your estimate is based on the sampling of forum posters. Most likeley the Hard core more likely to have higher income in game and use addons and assume that the statistical sampling will be the same across all players?
Any mathmetician or analyst would fire you on the spot for such silly logic.
The simple fact is if they had 1/2 a million accounts being hacked every day they'd shut down the doors. Show me verifiable numbers instead of statistics that any moron can manipulate in thier own favorite direction.
If 1/2 a million accounts a year are being hacked then in 5 years 1/2 of the player base should have been hacked. I know exactly 3 players who have been hacked and all 3 were hacked by add-ons.
Just to show you how silly your numbers are lets take the statistical sampling of politicians that are caught taking bribes and use that as a statistical sampling of criminal activity across the general population. I'd bet It indicates that a really large number of people are on the take......LMAO...
At least I admitted my stats were pulled out my ass. you tried to cover yours with a little perfume but without input from blizzard we are both still only speaking our opinions.
two things,
Build it and they will come - I can see many casuals logging in from work - where they would normally never be seen running wow logged in at a computer. But where an internet browser is the norm.
Then there is also the fact that blizzard has no shortage of cash and if the developers want to waste time building a mostly useless app for the fun of it. Who cares? Maybe it was a leads birthday gift?
I understand this topic is a coupla months old, but I cant believe u guys r trashing the writer on wat he says!! Its all god damn true, it will ruin the AH and the gameplay.
For the so called goblins like me and others, sure we will lose out, but we are on par with the goldsellers in the markets we dominate on the AH. In saying that, i dont camp 24/7 neither do other players who just like to earn gold on my realm. This leaves room for the general public to actually make money off the AH buyng and selling orgathering adn crafting.
People hate gathering more and more and so Blizzard I believe are trying to make a way for the average user to make money off the AH and then they can devote more time to raiding and having fun. People that get a kick out of making 500g from a sale for the week dont realise there are others - ourselves AND the goldfarmers - making thousands and thousands for the week from the AH.
If the addon had the functionality to help goldfarmers camp 24/7, (it will come down to how cheap it will be to use and program automation as opposed to 5 chinese guys on a rotational basis in a little room in a little room in bangkok alternating shifts), and it works in their favour, then YES it will ruin the game in my opinion.
People will be back to farming and gathering more- BORING - and the AH will become little more than a vendor with static prices set by the AH bots. The gold sellers will sell to the public who will then have to buy the gold off them to spend on the AH again over and over.
SIMPLY PUT - The less ways to let the goldfarmers make money, the more enjoyable and more ways the average raider can make money too. In my opinion, Blizz shld force their hand the other way round and force them to stick to the crappy farming of shit and let us play the AH and have fun.
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