I can't remember if I have done a blog post on the crazy cost of items on the Auction House in WoW, but my Gawd, its horrific. I understand the problem is more prevalent on older servers due to the excessive number of level 80's on that server with disposable income, but man, it's just crazy what a normal green item goes for these days in the AH.
I can understand a nominal price increase, but a 100 or 200 percent increase for items that aren't even blues is crazy. The concept of "Twinking" out a lower level character is not anything new, but the cost for a normal item has grown disproportional to the amount of income the average player makes playing the game. The problem is the creation of the Daily quest that net on average 10 gold per with the ability to do 25 of those quests a day. These are best done with a level 80 character and since most players don't have a level 80 character, it makes aquiring the such disposable income only available to a limited few players. So, who's at fault for this imbalance? Blizzard, of course.
They want to give end game players lots of money so they (Blizzard) can turn right around and drain it from them with crazy game items like epic flying mounts or dual specs. Then there is the cost of prepping and repairing epic gear from raiding, so they have to make it possible for those people that raid three or four times a week to do so, by giving them tons of disposable gold. In the mean time, it causes those that have little to no interest in raiding or doing a daily quest to spend their time finding items for lower level twinks and charging outrageous prices for them to try and drain the coffers of the 10% who have the ready cash.
It's a terrible cycle. Players who are low on the cash totem pole want to get a leg up so they feel compelled to drain money from the rich players on the server and therefore making it impossible for the average or new player to get any decent gear through the auction house. So the new players decide to take mining or herbalism as their trade skills so they can get their piece of the pie as well and it goes on and on. The trick would be for Blizzard to make dailys less profitable or to reduce the number of dailys players can do in a day. That way, the money would start to go down and prices would go back to some semblance of normal. But since Blizzard just increased the number of daily quests a character can do per day, I don't see this problem going away any time soon. But, it is a problem, when you can't outfit a level 40 character with decent gear because the cost is 200 times what it was 4 years ago when the server was new and fresh and without any high level rich players looking to throw away money.
Blizzard, please fix this problem so people can enjoy the game again.
