Old raid gold nerfs in MoP

#1 - July 24, 2012, 11:40 p.m.

Forgive me in advance for my possibly bad english, as it's not my mother tongue. I'm French, but as French forums aren't really read by the team, I prefer to post this on English forum :)

Oh, and please, if you want Blizzard to go back with this change, try to keep this thread constructive. Keep your swears to you, don't write them in your posts, it will only get this thread locked and then ignored :)

As we EU players sadly can't post on US forums, let's discuss of it here.
Original thread here : http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6147286884
The situation :

In general, enemies in raids and dungeons drop significantly more gold than outdoor foes, specifically because we are assuming that the gold is going to be split 5, 10, or 25 ways. As player power rises over time, it obviously becomes possible to complete old content with significantly fewer players, such that the gold rewards become disproportionately high.

In the past, our only solution was to drastically reduce the gold dropped by legacy content across the board (e.g., Magtheridon, much of Karazhan, etc.). In Mists, we have a new system in place that normalizes gold yield based on the number of players involved in the kill. If a Black Temple enemy drops 100 gold today on live, and you kill it with a 25-player raid group in Mists, it'll also drop 100 gold and each player will get 4 gold. If you solo Black Temple, that enemy will also give you 4 gold. If you do it with 4 friends, it'll drop 20 gold and each of you will get 4.

In other words, the gold obtained from killing raid or dungeon creatures no longer depends upon how many people you bring, or do not bring, with you. This system does not apply to anything in the outdoor world.

Yep, you read right. Blizzard killed a fun way to make gold.
As someone so rightfully said on the topic : "I had more fun killing old bosses for an hour than I did running dailies for an hour. This is no longer a viable gold-making option"

Honestly, Blizzard. WHY ?
Players that solo old content do it for the gold of course, and for the fun of obtaining the gold. With this change, where is the fun ? You always bring up the fun to force us accept the changes, but with this, the fun is gone !

How do players make gold nowadays ?
AH => fun
Dailies : May be interesting the first days, but gets utterly boring after a week => not fun.
And soloing.

What possible good does this do for the game ? Nothing.
You could as well write this on a patch-note : "Bug: Players have been having fun. This was unintended and has been hotfixed."
Old raids will be even more deserted, players won't want to go there (don't bring transmog set, if you want a transmog set you already have one, and this change won't motivate you to get one).

You want to make people do tons of dailies every day in order to get gold ? Guess what, it won't work.

And how possibly the 180 gold I make from Sapphiron every week (for example) can disrupt the economy ? Please, explain.
I am, on my DK, currently trying to solo Arthas. This is really fun, however I have to level up engineering to use one particular item that will make me have Necrotic Plague to get rid of the adds (as I don't raid, I have to find something else). My only incomes in the game comes from soloing (as I've said before, dailies are extremely boring and way less funny that soloing). I've used much of the gold I made over this week (by soloing raids) to power-level my engineering skill (got from 50 to 400 in 2 days) by buying stuff from the AH.
I would be really pissed of to get 4 gold from Arthas (or whatever boss in the future) with this change.

Taepsilum

Community

#64 - Aug. 7, 2012, 2:40 p.m.

We know that a lot of players enjoy soloing old content and we certainly don't mean to discourage players from continuing to do so but the reality is that there were certain raids or parts of raids that were incredibly lucrative for solo players.

We could do a series of hotfixes to take care of those farming areas one by one, but that wouldn’t make much sense since we’re about to launch a new expansion and we have an opportunity to deal with the situation now in a much more effective way. So to stop the impact that soloing raids has over the economy, we think it makes much more sense to change the formula for the way the gold drops across the board.
Soloing will continue to be quite profitable if you take into consideration AoE looting and vendoring drops (the rates have not changed on item drops).

I do realize this isn’t probably what you all wanted to hear and that it’s hard when a nerf is made to something you enjoy doing, but the fact remains this really did impact the economy in ways we feel we shouldn’t have allowed in the first place.
We realize there are certainly a few other things that might also impact the economy that might still need to be taken care of, but that’s not a rational reason why we shouldn’t be fixing this one if we can.

We really don’t want to kill the fun out of running old raids, why would we undermine an experience (even if unintended) that players enjoy? It certainly doesn’t make sense, so keeping that in mind I really want to make sure you are confident about your feedback being heard and about it getting to the developers.
Also, remember we’re still in Beta, things can still change, numbers can be tuned, etc… so please do continue to voice your opinion and keep giving us feedback in a constructive and collaborative manner, we both share the same goal of improving our game and developers are always open to better ideas.
Is there a chance we are going to completely revert this? Probably not, can it be adjusted? Certainly, make a good case, with some backed up arguments and numbers and hey, devs are reasonable people, they will hear what you have to say.

Taepsilum

Community

#121 - Aug. 8, 2012, 1:02 p.m.

I can definitely understand how frustrating this must be to some of you and I really appreciate the way you continue to keep this thread constructive and bringing up very insightful observations.
Like I said, we still have plenty of time to do any kind of tuning or changes to the game before it goes live and your feedback might just be that extra factor that can turn the tides on certain decisions. I just would like to emphasize how persuasive careful and thought-out feedback can actually be, so please, if you have anything constructive and new to add to this topic, please let your voice be heard.

While I share some of your concerns on the amount of gold dropping from bosses possibly being a little bit on the low side, and I must say that I haven’t personally tested this myself on the beta, I was wondering if any of you with beta access has already tried to see just how much gold one can make by actually vendoring all the loot that you can get inside a raid, since AOE looting probably made it time efficient enough to kill all the trash packs instead of skipping them and going straight to bosses.

Also, I would like to shed some light on the constant comparison that is being made between playing the auction house and looting gold from bosses. I think this can be one of those fallacious arguments that can easily slip through as a valid argument and needs to be addressed.
There is a huge difference between these two, which is, playing the auction house doesn’t “create gold", looting does.
Just like in real life economics, adding gold to the system creates what is called inflation, prices rise because the amount of goods remains unaltered, while at the same time the amount of gold rises. So if players have more gold, they will be willing to spend more on the same quantity of items, and since prices are totally dependent on the laws of supply and demand, prices will consequently rise.
We can compare looting to doing dailies though, that argument works, since both generate gold, but we can't compare it with the auction house, that’s only a transaction of goods and not a generation of goods (actually this isn’t totally true, since there is an AH cut, so it can actually be considered a soft gold sink).