Blizzard's Economy Actions Backfire?

Unless you’ve been hidden under a rock in the farthest corner of Azeroth, you’ll have noticed that the price of many vendor items have dropped over the past few months. This is seen as an attempt by Blizzard to curb what they see as a Gold farming/selling/buying epidemic. The principle was simple; reducing the price of core items requires players to have less Gold, thus lowering the temptation to purchase Gold from third parties.

The problem lies in the heart of the Azeroth economy; the Auction House. WoW players are finding themselves with a larger expendable income when they approach the AH, and are thus more able to pay higher prices for the items they want. This is reacted upon by sellers who no longer need to cut their prices to sell items, and infact opt to increase their prices across the board. Whilst Blizzard’s economic plan may have had good intent, it seems they didn’t pay too close attention to economics in school.

The result is two-fold; players need more Gold (to afford the higher priced items) and farmers are able to sell their farmed items for more, thus producing more Gold and becoming more cost-effective. This seems like another situation that will lead to Gold saturation on the main servers, and see another dramatic drop in Gold prices in the near future, regardless of the recent price hike.

The only thing that can seemingly save Blizzard from this situation is repeating the mass bannings seen recently, removing Gold from the economy and sending Gold prices shooting up once again. This is a proverbial game of cat-and-mouse, bust-and-benefit for both the game developer and RMT companies, but one must ask what the effect is on the average gamer.

Will we see constant fluctuations in the AH, where tools such as Auctioneer are rendered useless? Or have Blizzard simply preparing the landscape for another big change? Only time will tell, and we’ll certainly be watching closely!