World of Warcraft Economy

Welcome back readers. Here for your perusal I present the second article comparing the real world economy with the one in WoW. This week we look at how the two are dissimilar.

Taxes

The real world is full of them, Taxes, Levies, Stamp duty. Whatever they’re called you can’t escape them. In the World of Warcraft the only real tax is the either the initial listing fee or the final 5% deduction depending on whether your goods sell or not. The biggest difference however is why these exist. In the real world taxes are there either make people richer or create pools of money with which groups like the government can buy things for the collective public. In WoW these costs are there to prevent abuse of the AH. Imagine if posting was free. Everyone would start posting random products for 100x their price in the hope that some “mug” would buy it by not knowing its real price or misclick and buy the product accidentally. Even if 1 in 100 of these crazy priced items sold a lot of people would go ahead and post as they wouldn’t feel like they are losing anything on the unsold items. This would lead to the amount of items listed to rise massively and slow down the whole AH with annoying trades. The reason the neutral auction house auction fee is higher is to prevent abuse of cross-faction trading. However as a lot of blogs will tell you, even with this higher fee you can still make a lot of profit from it.

Quality of goods

In the real world if your competitors are beating you there is always the option of putting a bit more effort into your goods and going for the more quality focused markets. Or you could go the other way and create lots of cheap low quality products and sell at a low price. In World of Warcraft items do not have different levels of quality. This means that one of the only things competitors have to make themselves different is Buy wow gold  price.

Can change at any time

Most countries have a level of democracy which affects how economical decisions are made. There are votes and processes designed to make the system fair. Even if some of them are flawed they still make the processes drag out. In comparison WoW is a dictatorship. Blizzard have total control over how things work. If they wanted they could change any aspect of the game without consulting with players and they could do it without any warning. These changes work both for good and bad depending on who you are and how willing you are to adapt.

No Banks

Despite all their bad press banks help the economies of the world massively. They make cash flow much easier and can provide loans. If you come up with a good idea for a business then banks will fund it in return for interest on the loan. If you come up with a good investment opportunity in WoW you’re pretty much on your own. Unless you have some very trusting friends you will need to raise all the money yourself. This means the super rich in WoW have a lot more power than the poor. Personally I would like to see a feature in WoW where players or guilds could form banks with the option to give loans to other players and have some sort of inbuilt system to track the loans as well as some sort of enforceable payback schemes.