We'll agree to disagree on that one, I guess. The sample size is actually huge as Gurg pointed out, if we consider it as raiders only. It still is not convincing though or I guess it could be just me refusing to believe gold buying is that popular (1 out of 4 raiders?)

I view gold-buying as cheating, so I would hope that the majority of the playerbase considers it the same; I do however understand that there might avid raiders who simply don't have the playtime to raid and also farm for consumables / repairs. In their shoes, I would probably do the same, which shows the underlying problem with consumables mainly. Let's hope 2.1 improves the situation.

On another note, regarding current inflation levels, could the gold from questing be the source? I've tried grinding mobs for silver and vendor trash (not with the most efficient grinding spec, mind you) and there's no way I can reach the 120g+ per hour I can get by farming primals. So my question is, how is that gold generated in the game world?

Could it be that the gold sinks (at the moment it's mounts, vendor goods and repairs, anything else?) are too low compared to the gold generated? Or is the gold from questing affecting prices at the moment because of the mass leveling which happened the last 2 months, but since it's a one off, prices will start to slowly drop? I'm not an economical analysis expert so my theories could be(and probably are) way off, I'm really curious about what is causing the inflation though, so apologies for this derail.

1000 people is a huge sample size, it is bigger than most used for most election polls.

The problem is that the sample is hugely biased in terms of hardcore raiders, but it probably mirrors the amount of hardcore raiders who buy gold just to stay afloat and keep raiding.

It also doesn't account for frequency of gold buying. Someone who has played for 2+ years, and bought gold once when they were working long hours during a busy time at work so that they could be prepared for their raids, is lumped in and treated the same as someone who buys gold every other week whenever he wants something new off the AH.

I agree, but I cannot imagine that many people who post here are the type who splurge gold to buy BoE items, given that the number of BoE items that a raider could desire are incredibly low. This might be an assumption on my part though.

Well, I'm not necessarily saying BoE items.

There are some people who probably bought gold just once, because they needed a mount, or because they had no time to farm for a short period of time due to RL obligations and felt the need to do so in order to not let their guild down.

Then there are other people for whom buying gold, for whatever reason, is a routine action.

For the purposes of this poll/discussion, perhaps there isn't any difference between the two groups.

But so is doing someone who enjoyes farming for silver drops. I used to be such a person. I'm sure that I brought no less gold into the economy than a run of the mill gold farmer/bot.
The only distinctive difference beng that i spent my gold on consumables/gear that I needed for myself, whereas the gold farmer lets another player spend the same resources.
Still ... I'm not saying that gold buying does not result in inflating economies (IMHO it does) ... just pointing out that a gold farmer per se is not worse in that aspect than a hardcore farming "real" player.

EDIT One last point: The recent seen inflation imho is due to "quest=Gold" conversion after hitting Lvl 70 more than anything else. A lot of my guildmates make ingame money by just leveling their alt toons. This gold surplus will come to an end in the foreseeable future.

BTW: As for your math example, the falling crux of this well know proof that "2=1" is not the assumption but the semilast step which is in direct violation of this same assumption. You are in fact dividing by zero. Up to this point everything is correct. "2*0 = 1*0" /OT

The problem there is that if you complete pretty much all quest content currently extant at 70, your quest->gold (barring your having done something like running BF til 66) is going to cover your epic flying mount and that's about it. That gold surplus is only there because people are spending gold on things other than epic mounts (tailoring epics and a Blade of Wizardry, for example) - I'm now at the point of having to fund an epic mount via grinding, since quest gold is simply unavailable to me now. And believe me, when contemplating grinding out 5k gold, gold buying starts to seem a bit more tempting.

Not tempting enough to be able to justify it, though.

Aye. It's possible that the epic flyer is failing at being a gold sink - i.e. it's *so* expensive that people are refusing to buy it. There's a subject for another poll - have you bought your epic flying mount?

It may be (paradoxically) that they need to make it cheaper so it can act as a functioning gold sink. Or maybe the new flying mounts will push people over the edge into getting the training.

Well, that's obviously a major intent of the 2.1 content, yeah.

Yeah, but given that more people will try to grind the cash, this will remove money from the economy, so gold will become more precious and have higher buying power.

Basically, if you want to buy gold, do it now, if you want to sell items, do it now, if you want to buy stuff, wait for the patch.

I'd love to construct our poll to be somewhat more rigidly stated, but I can't think how to do it without making it into 2 questions:

1. A question regarding your raiding status, perhaps with nights per week as the determining factor, or perhaps the most difficult boss you've downed (I prefer the first option).

2. The gold-buying question already present in this topic - with corrections as noted by the OP and others that would have made it better.

To be clear, <I> don't necessarily want to do this (and I doubt it's even possible with the current forum format), but I would <support> it being done by someone.

And I've never bought gold. But I must say that it seems more viable after having read this topic. However, I'm a Mage with plenty of money and a RL Engineering job, so on both fronts I don't think I'll ever see the need personally.

P.S. On second thought, it might be a good thing to include a THIRD question on the poll about the person's RL income. And I can even see a 4th question that naturally follows too about playtime....we could be very scientifically complete about this if we wanted to be.

I have never seen evidence of anyone getting banned for buying gold, ever. Have you / anyone else here?

I understood it was simply not ever done.

They don't usually ban the buyers, they go after the sellers. It does happen from time to time though.

There was already examples given as to why you can't really ban the buyers. Too easy to grief someone that way.

I can’t say I get the whole “gold farmers cause inflation” argument. While it seems logical that someone who buys gold is much more free with the way they spend, and much more likely to pay exorbitant prices, the greater effect on the economy is the action of the seller not the buyer. I do know (not personally) gold buyers who treat gold like it was copper and give it away to all their guild mates, buy things for any price etc.
But what of the gold farmer? They seem to suppress prices rather than inflate them, and theirs is the more dominant effect on the economy imo.

I do consider myself having a unique perspective on the effect of farmers at both extremes. I’m not sure how many servers this happened to but when Duskwood launched in early 2006 it was literally FLOODED with farmers. I don’t know how I can describe how flooded we were. It was ridiculous. Black Lotus for 2g. I used to make any person I grouped with speak coherent English to be sure they weren’t some farmer. The day I saw a gold farmer literally farming WPL spiders because there was nothing else available to kill I knew this was big. This flooding basically killed every commodity price on the server. It was horrible for the economy. But not because everything was expensive. Because everything was CHEAP. No one could make a dime on the AH because prices simply didn’t match up to the effort of obtaining the items. Eventually we moved to more manageable levels as mass banning happened.

Then the apparent farmer purge on TBC happened. And now you see the opposite. Our server is medium population and the lesser population is showing itself in low supply of certain commodities resulting in price gorging by actual players. To the extent that it now actually makes more sense to farm a lot of this stuff yourself. But now you have to pay in time for them. Unfairly balanced pricing on different commodities had made “trade” not such a good prospect.

I think a decent balance of gold farmers is a good thing. Especially on highly used commodities. I can’t count the number of times I’m cursing because the AH has less than a page of netherweave cloth up, all for ridiculous prices. And this when I’m leveling tailoring. If this was the old days and this was runecloth, the Azshara farmers would have the AH overflowing with cloth. Tailors, people wanting bandages etc were easily supplied in a price competitive market.

I don’t buy gold and I never will, but it seems to me that these farmers can serve a useful purpose if their numbers don’t grow too large. God knows I’d like some Chinese farmers in Outland farming for some cloth /sigh
Reading over my post I guess this is just mostly me QQing because I can’t get enough cloth but I think my point still stands.

Having forsaken my tailoring epics and even my group spells (man, buffing single arcane brilliance sucks..) in the pursuit of my epic mount through questing gold- I made more gold in raw gathered materials last night than I made in 2-3 days of quest farming... and it's repeatable. Admittedly I'm dual gathering, but the epic mount seems to be one of those "have money to make money" items that I always find myself recommending. The gathering rate on an epic mount is simply so much faster.

That said, if I had been required to attend raids for the last 3 weeks instead of been in a friends'n'family position in the guild- the cost of consumables and the virtual requirement of pursuing better crafted gear as my guild goes into SSC would have driven me even further away from my epic mount....

The price of progression is incredibly steep.