Following up on the list I made last post these are the sources of top tier gear in WoW as from the completed roll-out of changes that are coming over the next few weeks.
Raids
Dazar'Alor
Mythic 415
Dungeons
Weekly Mythic+ cache, up to 410 after a couple of weeks for +10 Mythic.
Professions
Elite crafted: bop self-crafted: 415
Auction house
Possibly BoE world drops (if they even exist will probably be super rare and insanely expensive).
PvP
Rated pvp rewards are based on your pvp rank, rank 2400+ for the best rewards.
End of match rewards: occasional 370-405
Weekly cache rewards 385-415
Weekly chest rewards 385-415
World pvp quests (Alliance get a quest to kill 25 horde players awarding a 370 item)
Titan Residuum vendor:
vendor: up to 415 best in slot
Seals of Wartorn Fate
reroll a loot drop
Maximising these rewards for minimum effort gives us:
Raid - progress as far as your guild can go.
Dungeons. Clear one Mythic +10 per week.
Professions: if you're a tailor, leatherworker or blacksmith upgrade your item as far as it will go.
PvP: you want to work on your rating. ilvl this high only comes if you're in the top three tiers of pvp (Rival 1800, Duelist 2100 or Gladiator 2400). Rival looks pretty obtainable and will give a 405 item in the weekly cache.
TR: this is effectively grindable high end epics. You just do the content that offers other lower level epics and melt everything down, slowly inching your way towards the high price of the 415 gear or the even higher price of the specific slot 415 gear.
So there are three progression routes which are fixed. You can't make your guild raid more than it does, there's no point doing more than one +10 dungeon for this level gear (except for melting stuff down for TR) and you only make your profession 415 once.
PvP you can keep plugging away and inching your rating up and becoming better as a team.
TR you can grind by doing all the 370+ epics and melting them down allowing you to slowly inch towards your 415s by doing warfronts, emissaries etc. This is probably low priority filler activity.
In conclusion most ambitious raiders are going to be doing a lot of rated pvp if they want to gear quickly.
Thursday, 17 January 2019
Wednesday, 16 January 2019
Sources of end game reward in 8.1.5
Raids
Uldir:
LFR 340
Normal 355
Heroic 370
Mythic 385
Dazar'Alor
LFR 370
Normal 385
Heroic 400
Mythic 415
Dungeons
Normal Dungeons, LFG or guild, 340
Heroic Dungeons, LFG or guild, 355
Mythic + dungeons, guild or custom groups, 370-400
Weekly Mythic+ cache, up to 410 after a couple of weeks.
Weekly dungeon quest : (I had no idea this existed): 370
Timewalking: 320, also a weekly quest for a 370
Warfronts:
Darkshore world boss: 400
Darkshore main quest: 400
Darkshore base warfront reward: 355
Arathi world boss: 370
Arathi main quest: 370
Arathi base warfront reward: 340
Professions
Crafted armour: auctionhouse, self crafted: 340
Crafted weapons, rings 300-310
Darkmoon trinkets: 355
Elite crafted: bop self-crafted: 415
Auction house
BoE world drops
World quests:
Emissary: up to 385. Can reward 2000 gold.
Items from world quests: ?
World boss: pug, 355
Faction assault: ? (currently 370)
Faction assault token vendor sells a 395 ring
Island Expedition
weekly quest: 2500 AP and treasure map for 4 heroic or 3 mythic runs.
Each run can drop doubloons, pets, mounts or ilvl 325 weapons.
Mission table
Rep, gold, battle-scarred runes, in return for AP. (runes should be done on every 120 alt)
Followers can be equipped to give bonus resources.
Faction reps
free 45 ilvls on the amulet from Magni in Silithus for alts if your main is revered.
Vendors sell 320 cloak at Revered and 350-355 items at Exalted.
Contracts made by scribe give +10 per world quest to a single BFA faction.
Paragon bags reward 3500-5000 gold, AP, WR and some pets, toys or recipes varying by each faction.
PvP
Rated pvp rewards are based on your pvp rank, rank 2400+ for the best rewards.
End of match rewards: occasional 370-405
Weekly cache rewards 385-415
Weekly chest rewards 385-415
World pvp quests (Alliance get a quest to kill 25 horde players awarding a 370 item)
Titan Residuum vendor:
vendor: up to 415 best in slot
Seals of Wartorn Fate
reroll a loot drop
Pets
Note: all pet content is valid forever unlike ilvl bound equipment.
Dailies. Daily pet quests include BFA world quests, Legion world quests, garrison daily pet quests, wild pet trainer dailies, Celestial Tournament, Argent tournament.
Weekly dungeons: Wailing Caverns, Gnomeregan (Deadmines isn't worth repeating because the pets can't be caged).
Old world farming
Old content raids had pets added to their loot tables (generally 3 pets available per raid) and can drop mounts etc. These are on weekly timers.
Open world mounts pets and transmog can be farmed at any time (but my recent testing revealed it's kinda boring to kill 100s of world mobs for a 1 in 1000 chance of a pet).
Afterword:
Any additions or corrections are welcome, not all ilvls are fully implemented right away ( I haven't attempted to address the very complicated rollouts).
Sources:
Uldir:
LFR 340
Normal 355
Heroic 370
Mythic 385
Dazar'Alor
LFR 370
Normal 385
Heroic 400
Mythic 415
Dungeons
Normal Dungeons, LFG or guild, 340
Heroic Dungeons, LFG or guild, 355
Mythic + dungeons, guild or custom groups, 370-400
Weekly Mythic+ cache, up to 410 after a couple of weeks.
Weekly dungeon quest : (I had no idea this existed): 370
Timewalking: 320, also a weekly quest for a 370
Warfronts:
Darkshore world boss: 400
Darkshore main quest: 400
Darkshore base warfront reward: 355
Arathi world boss: 370
Arathi main quest: 370
Arathi base warfront reward: 340
Professions
Crafted armour: auctionhouse, self crafted: 340
Crafted weapons, rings 300-310
Darkmoon trinkets: 355
Elite crafted: bop self-crafted: 415
Auction house
BoE world drops
World quests:
Emissary: up to 385. Can reward 2000 gold.
Items from world quests: ?
World boss: pug, 355
Faction assault: ? (currently 370)
Faction assault token vendor sells a 395 ring
Island Expedition
weekly quest: 2500 AP and treasure map for 4 heroic or 3 mythic runs.
Each run can drop doubloons, pets, mounts or ilvl 325 weapons.
Mission table
Rep, gold, battle-scarred runes, in return for AP. (runes should be done on every 120 alt)
Followers can be equipped to give bonus resources.
Faction reps
free 45 ilvls on the amulet from Magni in Silithus for alts if your main is revered.
Vendors sell 320 cloak at Revered and 350-355 items at Exalted.
Contracts made by scribe give +10 per world quest to a single BFA faction.
Paragon bags reward 3500-5000 gold, AP, WR and some pets, toys or recipes varying by each faction.
PvP
Rated pvp rewards are based on your pvp rank, rank 2400+ for the best rewards.
End of match rewards: occasional 370-405
Weekly cache rewards 385-415
Weekly chest rewards 385-415
World pvp quests (Alliance get a quest to kill 25 horde players awarding a 370 item)
Titan Residuum vendor:
vendor: up to 415 best in slot
Seals of Wartorn Fate
reroll a loot drop
Pets
Note: all pet content is valid forever unlike ilvl bound equipment.
Dailies. Daily pet quests include BFA world quests, Legion world quests, garrison daily pet quests, wild pet trainer dailies, Celestial Tournament, Argent tournament.
Weekly dungeons: Wailing Caverns, Gnomeregan (Deadmines isn't worth repeating because the pets can't be caged).
Old world farming
Old content raids had pets added to their loot tables (generally 3 pets available per raid) and can drop mounts etc. These are on weekly timers.
Open world mounts pets and transmog can be farmed at any time (but my recent testing revealed it's kinda boring to kill 100s of world mobs for a 1 in 1000 chance of a pet).
Afterword:
Any additions or corrections are welcome, not all ilvls are fully implemented right away ( I haven't attempted to address the very complicated rollouts).
Sources:
(I used this page because it's simply this plus 30 for Season 2).
What’s Changing (and Not!) in Season 2
What’s Changing (and Not!) in Season 2
Thursday, 10 January 2019
Pet sales
Pet sales started to pick up yesterday and were really good today. These are mostly resales of 50s vendor pets although I'm starting to build out the selection with pets I've acquired from playing.
I did a little old content pet farming and it was very boring and I didn't get any pet drops. I won't be doing that in any systematic way.
It looks like investment is a really promising avenue and I'm preparing to launch into that. I need to do two things for that: liquidate my stockpiles and set up TSM, a Wow add-on. My stockpiles are of herbs, ore and leather and I'll sell them when the new raid comes out.
Monday, 7 January 2019
The pets are on farm
 |
| Wee Darkmoon Rabbit! |
I'm really enjoying myself setting up my cross-realm petshop. I sell 28 types of pets on each of 10 servers plus some rare pets such as this world boss drop that I just got.
This is a web page spreadsheet of the servers I sell on and a spreadsheet of rare beauty. I've spent considerable time browsing this page.
So let's see which server I should post this rabbit on. You have to use Cntrl-F rather than the Find box to get to the line listing its price on each server. Cheapest is 14,998g and dearest is 76,997g. But there's one server without any there so I might try there for a little over the most expensive. I log into my alt on Zenedar, cage it, search the AH and it's there already, the spreadsheet, glorious as it is, is not quite up to date. 46k? Too low, which server was 76k again? There we go, now listed there a copper cheaper.
So is money flooding in?
Not really. Most servers earn 0-200g a day with sometimes 1-2k on one or two of them. None of my premium pets have sold, world drops etc, just the ones from the vendors that I relist.
I think it will change when the new raid starts at the end of the month. New players will come back to the game and want to fill holes in their collection. Hopefully.
Another thing we goblins need is more positivity. The Wow raiding community is really bitter and negative at the moment. I'm pretty sure that depresses the economy.
So we'll see. The goal is to still keep building up the pet shop, branching into investing, a more risky process than farming and relisting pets from vendors.
In other news I completed the Deadmines Pet Dungeon then discovered you can't cage and therefore can't sell the pets from there. Disappointing. I'll stick to the other two.
Wednesday, 2 January 2019
Off to Feralas to test a pet farm!
And it's off to Feralas to grind the Sprite Darters. I wanted to burn off all the rest exp on my mid-40s Shaman alt. I gained 2 levels pretty quickly then ran out of rest exp.
There should be no need to move this girl until level 60 when she can go to Gundrak and farm a pet there for 10 levels.
No drop but it didn't feel like I killed that many Sprite Darters. Maybe about 50, the rest of the exp coming from random other herbs, mobs and quests that were in the area. It seemed a super fast way of getting 2 levels, the power of lots of heirloom gear plus rest exp plus the 8.1 patch adjustment.
WoW: pets from mob drops
Here are the top 20 priced pets that can be farmed from drops:
1. Spineclaw Crab, drops from Monstrous Spineclaw, Timeless Isle.
2. Rebuilt Mechanical Spider, part of Voldun invasions, Zandalar.
3. Rebuilt Gorilla Bot, part of Voldun invasions, Zandalar.
4. Coldlight Surfrunner, Island Expeditions, Zandalar.
5. Moon moon, drops from Moonfang, Darkmoon Faire.
6. Filthy Slime, drops from Gol'than, Tol Dagor mythic, Kul Tiras.
7. Knock-off Blingtron, Blingtron 6000 gift package, Engineering.
8. Spawn of Merektha, drops from Merektha, Temple of Sethraliss, Zuldazar.
9. Baby Stonehide, Island Expeditions
10. Tonguelasher, Island Expeditions.
11. Living Fluid, drop from Primordius, Throne of Thunder, Pandaria.
12. Rotting Ghoul, Island Expeditions.
13. Jadefire Spirit, drop from Spirit of Jadefire, Timeless Isle, Pandaria.
14. Sprite Darter Hatchling, world drop, Feralas. Best drop rate is from Sprite Darters.
15. Shadefeather Hatchling, Island Expeditions.
16. Black Tabby Cat, world drop, Hillsbrad Foothills. Best drop rate from Syndicate Spies.
17. Firefly, drop from Bogflare Needler, Zangarmarsh, Outlands.
18. Fox kit, drop from Baradin Fox, Tol Barad, Cataclysm PvP zone. A pet may also drop from Elementium mining nodes here.
19. Azure welpling, world drop, Winterspring, Wrath pvp zone.
20. Voru'kar leecher, Island Expeditions.
Let's break these into categories.
The first farm is Island Expeditions. Patch 8.1 introduced new expedition pets and a revamped loot system that makes all pets easier to get. However it's clear that demand is currently above the level of supply. Over time that will change as people run expeditions and find pets quite accidentally, with many of them going to the Auction House. It's still possibly the best pet farm in the game at the moment and has the side attractions of gaining your character Artifact Power and Seafarers' Doubloons. 100 Doubloons gets you a Crimson Octopode pet currently worth 77k. (there's also an albatross pet but that has a lower gold/dubloon rate).
It's best in my opinion to do this at the start of the week as even those few days allow prices to drop significantly. However there will probably be another surge in the prices when the 8.1 raid lands in late January and people come back to the game to do the raid (and buy pets!)
Next is the Voldun invasion that only seems to pop in the small hours of the morning. Very worthwhile doing if you happen to be up.
Next are Pandaria farms mostly based on the Timeless Isle. There's also a weekly pet tournament there which gives non-tradeable but very strong pets.
Darkmoon Faire starts on 6th January and offers a ton of pets. It seems better though to spend your tickets on transmog, sell the transmog then use the gold to buy things like Darkmoon Tonk if you want them.
There's a couple of nice ones from Mythic + BFA dungeons. If your group doesn't mind where they go then the chance of getting a 50K pet might be worth considering.
The Blingtron pet is super rare. It's possibly not worth levelling Engineering for but if you see a blue ! on your minimap while in town it's well worth a click.
The drops in low level Vanilla and TBC zones make farming those mobs a possible way to level an alt. Just burn through all your rest exp killing Sprite Darters to occasionally get a sweet gold injection.
I assume the pvp zones that give the pets are pretty much dead now. Could be another good alt leveling spot.
1. Spineclaw Crab, drops from Monstrous Spineclaw, Timeless Isle.
2. Rebuilt Mechanical Spider, part of Voldun invasions, Zandalar.
3. Rebuilt Gorilla Bot, part of Voldun invasions, Zandalar.
4. Coldlight Surfrunner, Island Expeditions, Zandalar.
5. Moon moon, drops from Moonfang, Darkmoon Faire.
6. Filthy Slime, drops from Gol'than, Tol Dagor mythic, Kul Tiras.
7. Knock-off Blingtron, Blingtron 6000 gift package, Engineering.
8. Spawn of Merektha, drops from Merektha, Temple of Sethraliss, Zuldazar.
9. Baby Stonehide, Island Expeditions
10. Tonguelasher, Island Expeditions.
11. Living Fluid, drop from Primordius, Throne of Thunder, Pandaria.
12. Rotting Ghoul, Island Expeditions.
13. Jadefire Spirit, drop from Spirit of Jadefire, Timeless Isle, Pandaria.
14. Sprite Darter Hatchling, world drop, Feralas. Best drop rate is from Sprite Darters.
15. Shadefeather Hatchling, Island Expeditions.
16. Black Tabby Cat, world drop, Hillsbrad Foothills. Best drop rate from Syndicate Spies.
17. Firefly, drop from Bogflare Needler, Zangarmarsh, Outlands.
18. Fox kit, drop from Baradin Fox, Tol Barad, Cataclysm PvP zone. A pet may also drop from Elementium mining nodes here.
19. Azure welpling, world drop, Winterspring, Wrath pvp zone.
20. Voru'kar leecher, Island Expeditions.
Let's break these into categories.
The first farm is Island Expeditions. Patch 8.1 introduced new expedition pets and a revamped loot system that makes all pets easier to get. However it's clear that demand is currently above the level of supply. Over time that will change as people run expeditions and find pets quite accidentally, with many of them going to the Auction House. It's still possibly the best pet farm in the game at the moment and has the side attractions of gaining your character Artifact Power and Seafarers' Doubloons. 100 Doubloons gets you a Crimson Octopode pet currently worth 77k. (there's also an albatross pet but that has a lower gold/dubloon rate).
It's best in my opinion to do this at the start of the week as even those few days allow prices to drop significantly. However there will probably be another surge in the prices when the 8.1 raid lands in late January and people come back to the game to do the raid (and buy pets!)
Next is the Voldun invasion that only seems to pop in the small hours of the morning. Very worthwhile doing if you happen to be up.
Next are Pandaria farms mostly based on the Timeless Isle. There's also a weekly pet tournament there which gives non-tradeable but very strong pets.
Darkmoon Faire starts on 6th January and offers a ton of pets. It seems better though to spend your tickets on transmog, sell the transmog then use the gold to buy things like Darkmoon Tonk if you want them.
There's a couple of nice ones from Mythic + BFA dungeons. If your group doesn't mind where they go then the chance of getting a 50K pet might be worth considering.
The Blingtron pet is super rare. It's possibly not worth levelling Engineering for but if you see a blue ! on your minimap while in town it's well worth a click.
The drops in low level Vanilla and TBC zones make farming those mobs a possible way to level an alt. Just burn through all your rest exp killing Sprite Darters to occasionally get a sweet gold injection.
I assume the pvp zones that give the pets are pretty much dead now. Could be another good alt leveling spot.
Pet selling: beginner results and first impressions of the market.
OK here's the results of my first round of marketing pets.
26th December: listed 13 pets across 8 servers for a total of 104 listings. 3 sales worth 1700g. The pets are 50 silver or less so that's 1699g profit.
29th December: listed 15 pets across 9 servers for a total of 135 listings. 13 sales worth 1480g.
31st December: listed 25 pets across 8 servers for a total of 200 listings. 18 sales worth 1633g.
- the first result was skewed by the person who bought a 50 silver pet for 1586g. Thanks, buddy!
- most sales are pretty sensible. I'd rather pay 50g to get a pet on my Horde character than try and travel all the way to Darnassus and die to the guards multiple times so I can buy it for 50s.
- I'm branching out into more expensive pets, eg the ones from the Dalaran pet shop that mostly sell at 50g from the vendor. Prices are usually well over 50g but I found some about 35-40g which I bought out. (My first pet trading investment). The risk is hugely lessened by being able to trade across the region. It's possible that someone got stuck with hundreds of these pets and is selling them off and will always put them there for 35g making it impossible to flip on that server. But that doesn't matter in this market.
- I went through my pet collection selling off unneeded pets, mostly drops from Island Expeditions. There's a huge range in price across servers and across pets. Cheapest Island Expedition pets are about 2k, most expensive over 100k.
Is it worth doing?
I've really enjoyed setting this up. I've spent a lot of hours though for 5k profit. By comparison I could have farmed leather on my skinner for about 25k an hour. So it's a huge opportunity cost.
For me that's fine, I've been learning tons, doing lots of research, experimenting and so on. I'd rather do that than grind while watching Netflix, using about 5% of my brain for the game.
It has the potential to be really lucrative. That's because it's multiplicative in several ways. More servers times a longer stock list times higher average pet price (which generally means more profit per transaction) should see this skyrocket over time. Unless I get bored - I always tend to be more Explorer than Achiever in the classic MMO player tropes.
Observations on the pet economy.
I would love to go back in time and be a fly on the wall when this feature was pitched to the WoW development team. Because it must have been the best pitch ever.
Every designer wants their featuire to be better than the other features in the game. Usually they get shut down by their bosses. Whoever pitched pet design got them to bust open the AH functionality making this market better than any other market, got them to make pets super attractive to gold makers, inserted them into guilds, dungeons, raids, random mobs, achievements and crafting - every part of the game except pvp. Making what is basically a Pokemon clone so ubiquitous it's almost impossible to avoid was a very high risk strategy for WoW. It makes the game more childish. I don't think Blizzard's ever got that a lot of their base take fantasy super seriously and come from the Tolkien, RE Howard, Lovecraft fantasy traditions and find all these "hey look! a pink bunny!" moments annoying and immersion breaking.
Remember WoW peaked around the time the players were pit against Arthas the Lich King and has been declining since they did the Kung Fu Panda expansion (which also introduced pet battles).
However, that doesn't matter, what matters is making gold. Here's my first impressions on the economy:
- the pet market is overwhelmingly driven by collectors not high end pet battlers.
- people buy pets by checking if there's pets they haven't got then buying them. This means that cheap pets sell and cute pets sell. A 5k slug is probably only going to be for the hardcore completionists.
- after 2 weeks of pet battling I have 215 pets which gives me a realm rank of 31st and a global rank of 46,489th. This means only 30 people have put more effort in than a pet newbie on my server. At least there are nearly 50,000 people more invested world-wide.
- analysing the market we can see the following categories of pet:
1. Defunct content pets, such as Blizzcon rewards and card game coupon pets. The most famous perhaps is the Spectral Tiger Cub. They're not completely defunct as a very small trickle of these items is added to the game through the Black Market Auction house (which is definitely part of the pet traders end game).
2. Fresh content pets. The recently added Gnomeregan pet dungeon allows people to farm a handful of pets including the 600k gold Alarm-o-dog. (Rare and cute). The paragon bags rarely drop a pet and those are very expensive. An Alchemy transmute can produce a pet of several types. The Voldun invasion can lead to 2 pets, one for each faction. Lots of these pets are over 100k gold because they have only just been introduced and they're quite hard to farm. These pets are worth a lot right now, even more at the first moment they could be sold and I expect them to decline over the course of the expansion and then perhaps slowly pick up once we have a new expansion and 99.9% of players never run an Island Expedition again. From an investment point of view the absolute worst pets are the ones that passively drop from content everyone does anyway like Islands and rep gain.
3. Discontined old content pets. Through some happenstance of the way people level now these pets aren't spawned by regular play. The supply depends on specific farmers and even there many would have to grind long quest chains or old reputation grinds.
4. Active old content pets. People love to run old raids for some pretty spectacular mounts, some achievements, even some guild achievements. The highest rated battle pet in the game, Anubisath Idol, is really cheap because of this as are most of the other raid drops, particularly those from Vanilla or cool dungeons like Karazhan.
5. Crafted pets. This seems like quite a good outlet for a crafter. Make a sword and you need to find someone on your server to buy it. Make a pet and you can list it on dozens of servers.
6. Vendor pets. This sub-market depends on how many goblins are doing what I'm currently doing. The 50 silver pets will always make a decent mark up but some of the more expensive pets like Crusher (1000g) are close to zero profit or even negative on many servers. Still because you can sell on any server you're likely to find a good place to list one. Some vendor pets can't be sold. Some are rep-gated but can still be sold.
7. World event pets. These are a pet trader's dream because supply comes once per year for a brief period then demand is constant. So you can currently buy the Winter's Veil pets for under 1g and they should be fairly expensive later on next year. I found some old Children's Week pets in my collection which I'd forgotten about so I've listed them as it's a long time since that event. This may be the best pet investment market as long as you don't mind waiting about 6 months to cash out.
26th December: listed 13 pets across 8 servers for a total of 104 listings. 3 sales worth 1700g. The pets are 50 silver or less so that's 1699g profit.
29th December: listed 15 pets across 9 servers for a total of 135 listings. 13 sales worth 1480g.
31st December: listed 25 pets across 8 servers for a total of 200 listings. 18 sales worth 1633g.
- the first result was skewed by the person who bought a 50 silver pet for 1586g. Thanks, buddy!
- most sales are pretty sensible. I'd rather pay 50g to get a pet on my Horde character than try and travel all the way to Darnassus and die to the guards multiple times so I can buy it for 50s.
- I'm branching out into more expensive pets, eg the ones from the Dalaran pet shop that mostly sell at 50g from the vendor. Prices are usually well over 50g but I found some about 35-40g which I bought out. (My first pet trading investment). The risk is hugely lessened by being able to trade across the region. It's possible that someone got stuck with hundreds of these pets and is selling them off and will always put them there for 35g making it impossible to flip on that server. But that doesn't matter in this market.
- I went through my pet collection selling off unneeded pets, mostly drops from Island Expeditions. There's a huge range in price across servers and across pets. Cheapest Island Expedition pets are about 2k, most expensive over 100k.
Is it worth doing?
I've really enjoyed setting this up. I've spent a lot of hours though for 5k profit. By comparison I could have farmed leather on my skinner for about 25k an hour. So it's a huge opportunity cost.
For me that's fine, I've been learning tons, doing lots of research, experimenting and so on. I'd rather do that than grind while watching Netflix, using about 5% of my brain for the game.
It has the potential to be really lucrative. That's because it's multiplicative in several ways. More servers times a longer stock list times higher average pet price (which generally means more profit per transaction) should see this skyrocket over time. Unless I get bored - I always tend to be more Explorer than Achiever in the classic MMO player tropes.
Observations on the pet economy.
I would love to go back in time and be a fly on the wall when this feature was pitched to the WoW development team. Because it must have been the best pitch ever.
Every designer wants their featuire to be better than the other features in the game. Usually they get shut down by their bosses. Whoever pitched pet design got them to bust open the AH functionality making this market better than any other market, got them to make pets super attractive to gold makers, inserted them into guilds, dungeons, raids, random mobs, achievements and crafting - every part of the game except pvp. Making what is basically a Pokemon clone so ubiquitous it's almost impossible to avoid was a very high risk strategy for WoW. It makes the game more childish. I don't think Blizzard's ever got that a lot of their base take fantasy super seriously and come from the Tolkien, RE Howard, Lovecraft fantasy traditions and find all these "hey look! a pink bunny!" moments annoying and immersion breaking.
Remember WoW peaked around the time the players were pit against Arthas the Lich King and has been declining since they did the Kung Fu Panda expansion (which also introduced pet battles).
However, that doesn't matter, what matters is making gold. Here's my first impressions on the economy:
- the pet market is overwhelmingly driven by collectors not high end pet battlers.
- people buy pets by checking if there's pets they haven't got then buying them. This means that cheap pets sell and cute pets sell. A 5k slug is probably only going to be for the hardcore completionists.
- after 2 weeks of pet battling I have 215 pets which gives me a realm rank of 31st and a global rank of 46,489th. This means only 30 people have put more effort in than a pet newbie on my server. At least there are nearly 50,000 people more invested world-wide.
- analysing the market we can see the following categories of pet:
1. Defunct content pets, such as Blizzcon rewards and card game coupon pets. The most famous perhaps is the Spectral Tiger Cub. They're not completely defunct as a very small trickle of these items is added to the game through the Black Market Auction house (which is definitely part of the pet traders end game).
2. Fresh content pets. The recently added Gnomeregan pet dungeon allows people to farm a handful of pets including the 600k gold Alarm-o-dog. (Rare and cute). The paragon bags rarely drop a pet and those are very expensive. An Alchemy transmute can produce a pet of several types. The Voldun invasion can lead to 2 pets, one for each faction. Lots of these pets are over 100k gold because they have only just been introduced and they're quite hard to farm. These pets are worth a lot right now, even more at the first moment they could be sold and I expect them to decline over the course of the expansion and then perhaps slowly pick up once we have a new expansion and 99.9% of players never run an Island Expedition again. From an investment point of view the absolute worst pets are the ones that passively drop from content everyone does anyway like Islands and rep gain.
3. Discontined old content pets. Through some happenstance of the way people level now these pets aren't spawned by regular play. The supply depends on specific farmers and even there many would have to grind long quest chains or old reputation grinds.
4. Active old content pets. People love to run old raids for some pretty spectacular mounts, some achievements, even some guild achievements. The highest rated battle pet in the game, Anubisath Idol, is really cheap because of this as are most of the other raid drops, particularly those from Vanilla or cool dungeons like Karazhan.
5. Crafted pets. This seems like quite a good outlet for a crafter. Make a sword and you need to find someone on your server to buy it. Make a pet and you can list it on dozens of servers.
6. Vendor pets. This sub-market depends on how many goblins are doing what I'm currently doing. The 50 silver pets will always make a decent mark up but some of the more expensive pets like Crusher (1000g) are close to zero profit or even negative on many servers. Still because you can sell on any server you're likely to find a good place to list one. Some vendor pets can't be sold. Some are rep-gated but can still be sold.
7. World event pets. These are a pet trader's dream because supply comes once per year for a brief period then demand is constant. So you can currently buy the Winter's Veil pets for under 1g and they should be fairly expensive later on next year. I found some old Children's Week pets in my collection which I'd forgotten about so I've listed them as it's a long time since that event. This may be the best pet investment market as long as you don't mind waiting about 6 months to cash out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)