TBC Account Transfer - Economy Issues

[Legendaria 0]

In an effort to help create a fresh server that is 'new', I have the naive idea that everyone would get transferred such that the fresh server will be just that, FRESH.  The economy of a server is a major concern.  If it becomes too one sided, it can ruin a server.  To elaborate more, what I mean by starting fresh is how to best go about transferring accounts where the new TBC realm economy will not go totally sideways when it launches.  I have played MMORPG's where the servers have been totally f#ck'd up by one sided economies.  I have been both at the top and bottom of this idea meaning I've been both the one with unlimited gold and almost no gold.  With unlimited gold you basically can buy your way to the top, i.e. a PTW atmosphere.  Not what I would like to see with WoW.  With almost no gold and someone with a monopoly on everything, you can't afford anything and everything takes that much longer.  Not a bad thing but also not intended to be this way for everything in game.  There are a few things which will inevitably make this happen.  Below is a list of what I see as potential issues and a potential solution to these issues.

The economy is a major issue which is affected by many sources.

1.  Gold - Issue:  If unlimited gold is allowed to be transferred, the economy will be very one sided to those who are gold farmers and already have thousands of gold at their disposal.  This can lead to things like a monopoly over the Auction House.  Potential Solution:  I suggest limiting gold to 100G.  This should be enough for anyone to be able to get a good jump on respec'ing skills, professions, etc. and is a very obtainable gold amount for anyone that raids weekly or does dungeons often on the Vanilla servers.  This will inevitably put everyone on a level playing field when it comes to starting currency.

2.  Materials - Issue:  If unlimited materials are allowed to be brought over, a couple things can happen.  I.  They can be sold on the Auction House for gold.  II.  They can be utilized to power level a good way into new professions, i.e. stocking up on ore and herbs for Jewel Crafting and Inscription, respectively, which will ultimately lead to gouging on the Auction House (though this may happen anyway with new materials).  Potential Solution:  I suggest not allowing ANY ore, herbs or skins (others?) allowed to be transferred.  This will inevitably put everyone on a level playing field when it comes to leveling professions.

3.  Item Transfer - Issue:  Those that so choose can always find those one off items that are worth a lot of gold but are not very useful and stock up on those items to vendor.  Potential Solution:  I suggest any tradeable items should NOT be allowed to be transferred.  Soulbound items should be allowed to be transferred pending the total soulbound item vendor amount does not exceed a predefined gold amount.  Ultimately if your bank and bank alts are fairly full, you will need to choose what gets brought over.  This will help steady the gold availability at the start of the fresh realm.

4.  Bank Alts - Issue:  As I was typing Item 4. above, this issue came to mind.  Alternate characters could potentially carry on them the same amount of items to maximize gold / item availability.  Potential Solution:  I suggest only one character being transferred be allowed to have items in its bank / bags.  All other characters will have their items removed.

5.  Mail Storage - Issue:  If you are not aware, the mailbox is a great source of extra bag space by simply mailing items to an alt character and leaving the items in the mail until needed.  For this reason, mail storage could be used in the same fashion to bring gold / items over to the new realm which could potentially ruin the fresh economy.  Potential Solution:  I suggest not allowing ANY mail to be brought over.

I am interested to hear what others think about this unprecedented transfer event and how this may affect the new realm.  If you have other ideas to help further bring everyone on an even playing field on the new realm, please share.

Please be kind in your responses.  Some may not like these ideas, which is fine, but your responses should be respectful at the very least.

[SweetRevenge 0]

I think rain or whoever else that managers this server should reduce the cost of repairing armor, and they should also get rid of the ridiculous deposit when you auction items(the amount of gold that players lose when they don't sell an item is absurd). I have an addon that records how much gold I lose to repairing armor/depositing money in auctions and its so high its embarrassing (the number is literally in the thousands).

[Flamekorn 1]

the server is not intended as "fresh" its intended as a continuation for the existing player base

[TheMEFFER 1]

Sorry for the huge wall of text - this got a lot bigger than I'd have thought it would.
I'd like to give my own and a few of my guildies general thoughts on a few of your ideas and what you see as issues. However, before that, I'd like to address your first statement.

As Flamekorn states, this server is not meant to be completely 'new'. You yourself pointed out that people will be transferred over, and as such it can't be regarded as a fresh or new TBC server, besides it being created with 0 people on it previously. However upon the transfer, it stops being "fresh", in the way realms/servers are regarded as fresh, which is completely clean slates. The community, peoples classes, races, learned abilities and skills will all carry over and can't be unlearned. There will be continuity - it's one of the selling points for the project, as stated by the staff themselves.
To quote a post made by Rain back when Felmyst closed:

Quote

Our TBC realm will be the first realm to allow players on a Vanilla server, to progress through the Dark Portal, and into Outland. This Progression Through Expansion program is the first of it's kind in the WoW Private Server community.

 

The economy more than likely will not go sideways. The reason simply being that people are intelligent enough to understand how to make money. If you can't make a lot of money off of farming greys, but you can make money off of farming primals, you switch up your game to farming that instead. If the most efficient way is farming enchanting materials, you gather a group of friends/guildies with an enchanter and run dungeons. People quickly figure out how to make the amount of money they need, and in TBC there are dailies to help you out. Play for 2-3 hours over the course of a week doing just 5 or so easy dailies for half an hour every day for those who can log daily, or put in a couple of hours in the weekend farming, and you're usually set on gold for your raids - that is, farming the correct stuff of course.

Let's say it does go "sideways" - how would that change the prices? Instead of being able to buy primals of life for 25g, you buy them at 50g instead. Now seeing how this will mean a lot more money from this, more people will see that money can be made, and start farming these. Supply will increase, while demand will stay the same. Prices will drop as a result, as per the usual 'supply and demand' "law" of economics. The economy for this specific item will stabilize, perhaps at 30-35g as an example. This is indeed a bit higher than the 25g, but it's something people can live with, and it's still worth it for people to farm.
- The above numbers are just examples and shouldn't be set as actual values of primals of life. These might as well instead be valued at 10g a piece - it depends what people are willing to sell them for, which is the reason why any speculations on the server economy are just that - speculations 😄

 

Now, for the points you presented. I'll try to keep 'em split, but some things go hand-in-hand such as gold gathering, and lack of gathering profession materials carrying over.

1: Limiting gold, especially at a measly 100g is an absolutely terrible idea. Of course, from someone having a lot of gold, this can be perceived as biased, however this amount would damage the community more than it would help them. A lot of healers who farm for their raids in vanilla, and tanks as well, reach the 50g respec cost cap. 100g would mean 2 respecs, and nothing for professions or training. Assuming no respecs done, a total of 100g can instead be used for leveling professions instead. Leveling a new profession as Jewelcrafting is extremely expensive - just getting the last few skills before 300 require a lot of high-end gems that easily cost 2g+ a piece. Enjoy spending 50g for the last 25 skills, however seeing as it requires more than 50g to get to 275 from 1, you're really stuck. This is assuming you can't farm it yourself, and you'd have to buy fresh off where demand is high, but supply is low and the items will be overvalued.
Now due to the limit of 100g, the economy will actually become very one-sided - first in favor of those who have gathering professions. There will be a lot of people leveling new professions: Some Jewelcrafting, some Enchanting, some Alchemy for transmutation and the like, and some Leatherworking for Drums. Of course, a few other professions will be rerolled for other reasons, and so will some of these, but this is just an example in regards to the gathering professions. Anyone who goes for old content and gathers materials, then lists them on the AH for ridiculous prices, will see pretty much instant sells because people will have no other way to get their professions sorted. Anyone with gathering professions could very easily earn anywhere between 2k and 10k within the first week or 2. Now if that isn't one-sided, I don't know what is.
Lastly, the reason why you find limiting gold would be a good idea is to avoid a monopoly. I see the idea, however that's not how it works for most people with gold. Sure, we can buy pretty much what we want to, but we don't have a reason to. Majority of my guild is set somewhere between 1-2k on average, some below and some of us above. Creating a monopoly will require quite a bit more than any of us have, and how long would it last? We can buy up anything, but at the same time that just means that anyone farming it would have their items bought immediately. They spread the info to their friends, and we end up stocking up several hundreds of an item, while the supply just keeps coming. A healthy chain of supply and demand, however when we wish to sell the items at a higher price, we'll be immediately undercut. A monopoly in World of Warcraft only works in its infancy stages, when supply is low. As soon as supply rises, you'll be looking at losing money, unless the population is so small that not enough will be farming - which with the current size of the playerbase is not an issue for Elysium.
I initially said it hurts the community more than helping them. The community will be so starved on money, their progress will be seriously halted. For some, this might be reason enough to quit - why would you continue on a server, even if it progresses from Vanilla to TBC, when your character is basically reset to 0 besides your equipped gear and your level.
- So, to sum up: 100g for respeccing is for some plenty, but for some very little. 100g for leveling new professions without having a corresponding gathering profession is ludicrous, and even leveling professions beyond 300 require a lot of money to just learn new 'skills'. Limiting gold hurts the general community more than those with a lot of gold. As you said, we're gold farmers, having spent a lot of time farming up our gold be it through AH or just a lot of farming. We can manage to do it again, but the community will feel unfairly treated.
 

2: Materials - this ties in some with the above, so I won't go into it all that much. Especially since I saw how long the post already got.. Limiting materials will be an extremely bad idea based on the above. It'll create a monopoly, and those who already farmed their crafting materials for various profession respecs will again feel (very) unfairly treated. True, materials can be sold on the auction house, however this will not be a problem, as they can also be sold right now. As such, people can stock up in preparation, and no issue will occur. The amount of money to be had from stuff being sold on the auction house will be limited mainly to those making on-the-fly profession decisions. Something I wouldn't worry too much about, as I think it would be fairly few.
If the case of not carrying over any profession items would be the case, I'm afraid a lot more issues would occur, as stated in [1]. For your second point, I can't seem to find the issue. What exactly would be the problem with people power leveling their professions?
 

3: BoE's and BoP's should not be limited. Depending on what Elysium staff decides regarding faction change; whether it will be available on day one, or a short time later, will affect how many people will be leveling new characters when the server launches. Any who decides to level new chars might've already acquired gear for their alts, so the gear would be lost. As for BoP's, limiting this just seems awful - So any characters with a mainspec and offspec set, several pieces for various jobs (tanking comes to mind with TPS-sets, avoidance, AoE-tanking etc.) and the like will be very limited in what they can do or bring. There's seemingly not a lot of thought behind it, besides just wanting to limit people with gold.
- @Ely staff as for the stuff about faction change, if you read this, please be considerate and keep to what you initially stated - that transfer will happen some time later. Otherwise it'll be a 'pay-to-win'-like feature in that very few would level new Shamans or Paladins on the TBC realm, since they'd be out of the raiding scene with their guild for about 2 weeks. More than likely guilds will recruit max-level Shamans/Paladins, and any who reroll at TBC because they don't want to pay will be pushed out of the roster, though of course that's my point of view. Though I guess that could be a reason behind a faction change - to have more people pay (donate, but let's call it pay, since that's what it is). Faction change by itself is not Blizzlike for the server, as it was introduced in Wrath of the Lich King anyhow. 😉 
 

4: In regards to bank alts, the above points have already answered what was given here, based on my own points of view of course. To my knowledge there might be some limit to the minimum level of characters that will be transferred, so this could/would possibly combat lower level bank alts, but I have only heard rumours of such.
 

5: I'm not entirely sure mail will carry over when we progress into TBC. Overall I agree with your point, but that's mainly because I don't see a reason for using the mail to carry over extra items based on my previous points where I try to argue for no cap on anything.

 

Well, me and a few guildies 2 cents. Again, apologies for the wall 😄 

[Zancon 117]

Just want to post here for everyone that we are reading this thread and nobody is being ignored.

As others have said, this is not a true "fresh" realm in the sense that everyone starts at level 1. This is a continuation of your characters from Nighthaven. This is no different than the the expansion dropped in retail.

[ipwxock 1]

I'd actually pay more attention to the potential horde overpopulation (like on many other TBC private) than to the economy.

As Specialist said: " This is no different than the the expansion dropped in retail.". Videogames economy is awesome, since there's unlimited money (questing, killing mobs), so you can afford anything eventually. Also, there will be more newcomers than existing players in TBC server, and I think it won't be a problem.

Overpopulation, however ... may need a fix.

[Paparia 4]

Like the glorius project boss mentioned this will try to be <retail like> . All the problems you mentioned are bad side effects of instant 60 <fresh> servers where there is 3000 new alchemists/tailors and enchanters camping the leveling recipy npcs, where an arcanite rod costs half a mount and your firstborn and 30% of ally is shamans or horde is paladins.

There is always going to be ppl who will try and will get some gold by geting important recipys first or will bleed their fingers grinding JC just to charge green gems 50g in ah but their big profits wont last long there is plenty of 300tradeskill ppl available for transfer in Nightheaven to compete with them and balance the economy.

 

Also transfering already gathered gold from vanila is no diferent than farming it in tbc the only diference is that in vanila it is slower to farm it so we are all busy doing it wile they work on the server so we have more free time for pvp when it launches

[asteldian 0]

Since the idea of the server is to continue chars (as if the current server had an expansion) i see no reason for any transfer limitations. Essentially the only reason Nighthaven does not simply progress is to keep a server for the vanilla server in tact, but this is basically an expansion and should be treated as such

[Mister K 3]

On 10/18/2018 at 1:41 AM, SweetRevenge said:

I think rain or whoever else that managers this server should reduce the cost of repairing armor, and they should also get rid of the ridiculous deposit when you auction items(the amount of gold that players lose when they don't sell an item is absurd). I have an addon that records how much gold I lose to repairing armor/depositing money in auctions and its so high its embarrassing (the number is literally in the thousands).

It should all remain Blizzlike.