Auranea

You should read what I wrote above. I refuted almost all your arguments (including the accusation of being jealous or otherwise selfish) before you even made them. In response to the few unadressed points: - People having massive amounts of gold does NOT help the economy. It is at best neutral, if and only if they don't use that gold to buy whatever it is they want and drive up market prices. And even then, if this "rotting" gold gets into gold sellers' hands through account hacks, it goes right back into the economy. Even worse, it gets into the real money economy. - The blow to gold sellers will not be minimal. If you take away their assets, they will not have anything to sell, no matter the demand. Furthermore, it removes the incentive to hack accounts for gold, as people just won't have enough assets to be worth hacking. They will have to start over and farm everything they want to sell, which as you will agree is much harder than just selling what you already have. - I already stated it, but it is worth emphasizing: if you do a gold purge, you should also purge non-soulbound items for obvious reasons. There is only so much value players can transfer into the expansion by stacking soulbound garbage, and compared to the disaster of not limiting resource influx at all, it is a perfectly valid compromise in my opinion. I will level a char on Anathema just for the BC launch. Let's see if I get to 10k gold before Christmas, just in case the devs decide to break the BC server from day one.

What if you set the cap to 0 and ignore the "uproar" by the few lazy fat cats who are worried that they won't be able to rely on their privileged position to keep them ahead, and instead will have to re-establish their superiority through skill, game knowledge and dedication? not to mention the fact that you would also deal a huge blow to gold sellers and improve the overall experience for everyone who isn't too lazy to farm as much as the next guy?

You are projecting your selfishness on me i'm afraid. Just so you know how wrong you are about me, i'll have you know that even though I only started playing a few months ago, I already have my off-race epic mount, spent well over 1k on Quel'serrar and other BoE items and am nevertheless closing in on 1k gold (while also working full time and maintaining my social commitments). I know how to make money and I enjoy making money, so my argument is the very opposite of selfish. Well, that isn't quite true. I'm selfish in my desire for a really fresh start for everyone and a semi-level playing field, as well as a healthy, dynamic economy. Both factors are crucial for a stable population on the upcoming server. If you want the same things, you should see my point. If you are more concerned about leveraging your advantages to the detriment of the server's future, then I guess we agree to disagree.

1. What will please the players, so I claim, is a functioning TBC server with a functioning economy. You will NEVER get the same experience as on retail, unless you can un-write all the guides, addons and boss strats and make players forget all the information as well. The best we can realistically hope for is an approximation of the situation at the original BC launch. Which brings us to: 2. No one denies that there were a few exceptionally rich players back in retail vanilla. But that is what they were, exceptions. The average player back then would have barely 100g to his name, many didn't know how to farm properly and Blizz clamped down on bots and gold sellers much more than Elysium does. I have no hard data to back this up but I did play very actively between vanilla and WotLK. After levelling on Elysium, my gut feeling is that players are, on average, at least 3x or more rich already than they ever were in retail vanilla. One data point I still remember is that on my retail server, mongoose elixirs never went above 1.5g and flasks of the titans barely peaked at 40g (which at the time I thought was an outrageous price). 3. You demonstrated basic understanding of server economies by pointing out the various gold faucets and sinks. The fact is that on any server, the faucets generally outweigh the sinks, which causes inflation. This is aggravated on contemporary private servers because players are generally much better informed and better geared, not to mention the prevalence of farm bots and gold sellers (btw: hacking inactive accounts and selling the gold also contributes to inflation). Now here is the problem: most of the sinks you correctly named are large one-off investments like epic mounts. They are meant to negate the inflation *once* during the initial spike of activity. If a significant chunk of players are equipped to negate this initial hurdle, inflation kicks in full bore from day one. 4. If you're wondering why inflation is a bad thing in the first place, ask yourself this: once your money reserve runs out, would you rather farm one hour for your raid buffs or 10 hours? Would you rather pay 10g for an enchant or 100g? Would you rather be the first one by a month to get your epic mount or the first one by 30 minutes? Would you rather have 100 new players starting per month or 10? I'm exaggerating a little, but not by much. It's nice that there are hardcore players like the one in your screenshot, but they cannot carry a server by themselves. You need the steady influx of new players and the state of the economy is a significant factor in how many of them will be around farming the herbs for your potions and tanking heroics for your alts. (Also, just as an aside, if you really are hardcore and all that, starting with a less tilted playing field should be what you want, because that is the only way you can really show that you are better than the next guy.) TL;DR: you have the choice between a new challenge on a lively server with a healthy economy or a "blizzlike" abortion where the already rich established players leverage their advantage to stay ahead of the dwindling population, and in the process buy themselves out of the actual blizzlike experience of earning your mount, your BoP profession items etc.

How Blizzlike is it in your opinion if half the population starts with five digit gold amounts and dozens of bank chars full of potions, crafting mats etc? also, what effect would that have on players who start fresh and realize how far behind they are economically? As for pissing players off. How many do you think will quit over it? My careful guess would be 0.

Why would everyone farming megatons of gold be a good thing? Do you want to break the economy from day one? IMO if you want to keep the spirit of being "Blizzlike", taking away all the gold and non-soulbound items from all characters would get you closer to that goal than allowing three year old fat cats and gold buyers to get their epic mount the minute they hit 70. Add to that the huge kickstart to AH price inflation this would cause: "Selling motes of air 100g each, cheaper than AH PST".