“There’s no limit to money creation,” says Dr. Michael Morrison, an Edinboro University of Pennsylvania economics professor who wrote his dissertation on the World of Warcraft economy. “In the real world, money is created through a federal reserve. Historically, the limit was how much gold was in the ground. In World of Warcraft, currency continues to grow with play. The more people play, the more hours played, the more money is in the system and the more inflation you see.” More organized botters sell the in-game money or high-level characters they obtain to players in exchange for cash on third-party websites. On Loknar’s server, 100 gold goes for $4.79, while 1,000 gold goes for $47.73. (No bot-makers or gold sellers agreed to an on-the-record interview for this article.)
The influx of bots and bot mafias has had a complicated impact on the WoW Classic economy. Some items are worth less because bots are working 24/7 to achieve them; others are worth more because bot mafias have hogged goods. Tarek Beutler from NexusHub.co, a site that collects analytics from World of Warcraft, crunched the numbers across different WoW Classic servers’ auction houses. The price of a Black Lotus jumped 600 percent over six months, he says, until Blizzard added more Black Lotus spawns in an attempt to fix the problem. He estimates that inflation rates over the last six months have averaged 2.26 percent for US servers, and nearly 7 percent for EU servers.
“Black Lotus for example is a scarce resource and can only be up on a few spawnpoints in the world at the same time. It's pretty easy for botters to control these spawns and gauge the prices, so they go up,” Beutler says. Other resources that spawn in dungeons—which may be disconnected from the shared experience of other landscapes— ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
