If Blizzard makes a "Super Primal Nethermooncloth" 22 slot craftable bag, it would just cause more inflation, because it will add additional demand for whatever items get used to craft it. Blizzard doesn't want or care about a gold sink. They do however care about bored players with tons of gold that feel like they have nothing to spend it on, so they put in a useful, but completely unnecessary item, which can be purchased for a somewhat high but not overly unreasonable price. It can't be shown off, it is just there for people with gold to go "well sure, that's useful and the gold is just sitting anyway" and buy it.
This item will essentially have no effect on the market at all. The people that will buy it, the gold is just sitting anyway. Making it artificially a "trade skill item" just to imply that tailoring is important is completely unnecessary. It can't do anything but make the process more complex, the market more easily manipulated, and cause inflation of whatever materials are used. Besides, no one has tailoring because of a deep love of bag crafting.
It's almost certain there will be a crafted Primal Frostweave 22 slot bag, along with a cheaper 18 and 20 slot bags in WotLK, just as there were new cheap 16/18/20s in BC. So this is just a short term addition to give people something to spend gold on.
With decreasing demand, though, prices must fall, thus correcting the economy a bit, though likely not to the level it was before the daily inflation. A better solution by far though would've involved the players directly, as this only leads to disgruntled tailors. A bag requiring similar mats to 20 slotters but including a "Primal Bagspace", sold by a vendor for 1000g, would've been a much more elegant solution. Money is dumped, tailors don't feel their profession has just been hijacked, and prices go down.
I'm not following how this works. Say we're talking a 22slot takes a primal bagspace (1000g vendor item) and 5 bolts of imbued netherweave.
Now I just need to find a (say) 375 tailor who knows this. Either:
1, the pattern for the 22 slotter is rep-based or
2, it's not.
In Case 2, I find any tailor -- like, say, a guildmate. Bang, I get it for free or perhaps a 10g tip.
In Case 1, either the rep required is trivial ("SSO Honored? Lol") or annoying -- but Blizzard is pretty good about not requiring annoying rep grinds anymore. Heck, the new herb bag is only Sporeggar Revered. My 375 tailor was only a bit into Honored, and 46g later on the AH, she's one quest turn-in away from Revered. So I assert that Case 1 devolves into Case 2.
How are tailors supposed to make money off of this proposed scheme?
Don't be so quick to judge things "stupid". What's to say the expensive reagent couldn't be "Primal Bagspace" from an NPC? As it stands on Silver Hand at least, the point about this hurting Tailors is spot on. It will likely help the economy, but shows again Blizz doesn't take tradeskills seriously.
I think you're wrong here.
Everything tradeskills make (aside from item enchants/improvements) is gradually phased out over the course of an expansion. Take Blacksmithing for example. I used to make [Black Felsteel Bracers] and sell them for a good 300g profit or so when people were just starting to hit 70. Nowadays I couldn't possibly sell them at mat price. It is that way with every single profession, Tailoring just had one thing that made them "the best in slot" for a while longer than the other crafting. I'm not saying it's good design, but it follows exactly how the game has been going and if you didn't see it coming you're pretty dense.
And I honestly doubt you'll lose much business from this. Very few people (other than the extremely rich) will bother spending that much money to upgrade bags when there are perfectly usable ones for cheaper (PMC bags on Draka run at around 350g right now so we would be paying 4 times more for 2 extra slots).
I would think they would have a real money sink if they sold the 22 slot bags at 600 gold. It may not go well with many players that a bag cost more than a mount. Plus the idea is to encourage people to spend the money and I think they would get more gold out of the system by selling at a lower price.
Last edited by ZeroWashu : 06/19/08 at 6:26 PM.
Reason: followup in thread invalidated my response
The point of these bags isn't to get the maximum amount of gold out of the economy. It's to give individual characters with lots of extra gold, without something to spend it on. The two are related, but not entirely the same.
Players can earn a lot of money with daily quests now. Don't you think that there is a big difference between the rich players and the poor players?
Yes definitely, there is a big gap between players that are doing a lot of daily quests and players that don't, and we do have plans to introduce some additional things to the game that players might want to spend their money on, spend excess gold on. The daily quests are very cool, they give players a relatively casual way to get money so that they can get things like the epic mount etc, but even before Lich King comes out we are hoping to introduce some things that have potential to sink some money out of the economy, and they're targeted towards players who have a whole load of gold and don't know what to do with it.
If someone would buy a 22 slot bag at 600g but not 1200g, they're probably not the intended consumer.
Everything tradeskills make (aside from item enchants/improvements) is gradually phased out over the course of an expansion. Take Blacksmithing for example. I used to make [Black Felsteel Bracers] and sell them for a good 300g profit or so when people were just starting to hit 70. Nowadays I couldn't possibly sell them at mat price. It is that way with every single profession, Tailoring just had one thing that made them "the best in slot" for a while longer than the other crafting. I'm not saying it's good design, but it follows exactly how the game has been going and if you didn't see it coming you're pretty dense.
And I honestly doubt you'll lose much business from this. Very few people (other than the extremely rich) will bother spending that much money to upgrade bags when there are perfectly usable ones for cheaper (PMC bags on Draka run at around 350g right now so we would be paying 4 times more for 2 extra slots).
Bags aren't phased out the same way as gear. There's still a market for all bag sizes here (this may be a quirk of this server), especially 18 and 20. I merely contend that it's rather poor design and bad PR, as Tailors WILL feel like they've been hit by this, regardless of how the market plays out. If I can come up with "Primal Bagspaces" as a cash dump off the top of my head, I fail to see why their design team couldn't.
As for the business, products are done two ways on this server:
1) You buy the completed product, usually sold for 110-120% of cost.
2) You provide all materials, and optionally give the crafter a tip.
In both cases, a Primal Bagspace still fits the existing business model, provides the gold dump they want, and makes players feel more involved, which should be the ultimate goal of WoW, shouldn't it?
Also, I did see bags as a possible cash dump, so you're invited to be less condescending.
As for the business, products are done two ways on this server:
1) You buy the completed product, usually sold for 110-120% of cost.
2) You provide all materials, and optionally give the crafter a tip.
In both cases, a Primal Bagspace still fits the existing business model, provides the gold dump they want, and makes players feel more involved, which should be the ultimate goal of WoW, shouldn't it?
That is not a gold dump.
In WoW natural resources and money are in a limitless supply. Every time you kill a humanoid mob 1-3 pieces of Netherweave cloth are created out of nothing. Every time you run a daily quest 11.99 gold is added to the server economy from nowhere.
Passing money from one player to another does not remove anything from the economy. Removing means exactly what is says: that gold no longer exists in any form in anyone's pocket on the server. If you buy a bag from your friend Sally Tailoralot the server economy is still at the exact same amount as before, it is just divided among people slightly differently. Professions are just a personal money sink, not an economy-wide money sink. Personal money sinks matter almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, inflation will continue to rise regardless of the amount of these which is why there need to be "hard" economy-wide money sinks.
There are very few things that continually remove money from the economy.
- Repair Bills
- AH fees (small)
- Respec Costs
- Mount training
- Buying items from a vendor
The only possible way for them to put in a true money sink is to make that money disappear, which means it can not be a player to player interaction.
EDIT: To clarify I'll define both of the types of sinks. Personal Money Sink: Removes money from one character and transfers it to another (total money in circulation remains equal). "Hard" Economy Money Sink: Removes money from one character permanently (total money in circulation decreases).
Flying Toaster: No shit. The idea under consideration is that the bag recipe requires a 1200g vendor material, for exactly the reason you describe. It has the same effect on the overall economy, and the effect on the personal economy is that tailors don't feel like they're getting shafted. Now, whether that feeling is either deserved or real is a separate discussion.
All true, but the case he's making is to have "Primal Bagspace" be something purchasable from a vendor, which solves both the issue of having a permanent money sink and increasing demand for tailors. You still pull the money out of the economy by way of a vendor, but you have to go to a tailor to turn that money into a useful item.
You missed mail postage, which is also very small.
If I were concerned about inflation in-game, the first thing I would do is to audit vendor prices on all non-BOP items so they can't be traded on the auction house indefinitely. All enchanting shards/dusts/etc would be priced at 10% less than the lowest item that could generate them. Primal elements, nethers, nether vortexes, hearts of darkness, sunmotes, etc, would also have their vendor prices increased by at least ten-fold. I would also flag badges of justice tradeable and put them on an actual vendor for 100g apeice.
Lastly, I would give the engineer-created repairbot a whopping 110 charges and allow it to be used by non-engineers but remove the scrolls/pots from its inventory and charge twice as much as normal neutral prices for repairs.
What part of "Primal Bagspace bought from a vendor for 1000g" is difficult for you? It doesn't matter if I buy it to have my bag crafted, or the tailor buys it to sell a bag, 1000g has been paid to the NPC, thus that money is GONE. Oh, but the tailor charges 1000+ g to cover the cost of the bag? It doesn't matter.
The total cash reserves of that server were reduced by 1000g when the Primal Bagspace was bought.
Purchasable Badges of Justice would be a bad thing, and it isn't going to happen until well after the gear gets deprecated. The point of bind-on-pickup loot, and by extension badge loot, is twofold: first that you run dungeons, second that you can't buy all the good loot from China. Both of these design decisions are still very much in force.
Who really cares about the easy availability of badge gear at this point? With ~75 badges per week available from 10mans and heroics alone, it just means more people that can get into T6 content before the expansion hits.
I suppose you have a point about encouraging gold farming, though. At the very least, I'd set them tradeable and increase the vendor value to 100g so they could be sold on the AH.
Am I the only one who doesn't give a fig whether my bag is tailored or bought directly from a vendor? If it was tailored I would just grab the mats and bring them to one of my guild tailors. It would be very very minorly more irritating. Instead I shall simply buy the bags from Ms. Pilton (incidentally it makes more sense for her to be selling handbags than handbag mats, although of course they could put the mats on some other vendor).
Tailors will get over it, just like the alchemists survived the 2.1 consumable changes, the blacksmiths have survived the obsolescence of their big ticket items (the weapons), and so on. These new bags won't stop anyone from buying the primal mooncloth variety, given the enormous price tag differential. (And if tailors simply feel they're entitled to make every bag due to being tailors, well... tough.)
My point is, game designers should do everything in their power to avoid situations where players have to "get over it". Since their business model depends somewhat on keeping customers happy, it's in their best interests to take the extra five minutes of design time for things like "Primal Bagspaces".
Flying Toaster: No shit. The idea under consideration is that the bag recipe requires a 1200g vendor material, for exactly the reason you describe. It has the same effect on the overall economy, and the effect on the personal economy is that tailors don't feel like they're getting shafted. Now, whether that feeling is either deserved or real is a separate discussion.
I don't understand why tailors would feel so butthurt about this. Every single other profession has dealt with the complete depreciation of their goods' values since TBC came out. Why do tailors get to be special? Why do they get to make extra profit from the new gold sink when Blacksmiths, Leatherworkers and Engineers get to watch their wares rot?
It's pretty much a given that PMC will still be a damn good bang-for-the-buck compared to these new bags. WoWhead has the average price of PMC bags at 400g. These new bags cost 3 times that amount for 2 extra slots, nearly a 3 times better ratio of space:gold. Your alt's bags will still sell fine, these are just to give those people at the gold cap something to blow extra cash on.
Again, is it the best design? No. But it has been this way since TBC came out, you should have seen it coming, stop whining.
It obviously would be a very, very large buff to mages and warlocks, the former of which have hugely increasing survivability via frostbite procs vs melee, and the latter hugely increased team longevity due to Fel Armor's 20% healing received.
So past sloppy design excuses a continuation of the trend, eh? Most people here expect improvements.
The thing is, certain things do not depreciate in value. Blacksmiths still make sharpening/weight stones, engineers make injectors, LWers like me make drums/leg kits, tailors make bags. No one's talking about the level 70 "here's your epic set" items.
So past sloppy design excuses a continuation of the trend, eh? Most people here expect improvements.
The thing is, certain things do not depreciate in value. Blacksmiths still make sharpening/weight stones, engineers make injectors, LWers like me make drums/leg kits, tailors make bags. No one's talking about the level 70 "here's your epic set" items.
No, Tailors make leg thread if you want to try that argument. Bags are extra icing on the side.
Regardless, this is mainly supposed to be a small bug-fix patch. I sincerely hope Blizzard learned from the debacle that was patch 2.1 and is going to save the huge profession altering changes for expansions/really well tested and documented patches. Patch 2.4.3 shouldn't be the big "lets start fucking with professions" patch.
So past sloppy design excuses a continuation of the trend, eh? Most people here expect improvements.
The thing is, certain things do not depreciate in value. Blacksmiths still make sharpening/weight stones, engineers make injectors, LWers like me make drums/leg kits, tailors make bags. No one's talking about the level 70 "here's your epic set" items.
Really? We all know how useful Sharpening Stones are with Poisons/WF available. Oh and lets conveniently forget about the Righteous Weapon oils added in the daily quests, eh? As for the Injectors, nothing more than bag space savers. Oh and quite how are LWers going to make much money on leg kits anymore? Most people will have access to a friendly LW in the guild, and ever since the Nether's where available for badges, random people can provide that part of the craft themselves. Now the LW gets the odd occassional crafting tip (as opposed to the fee from the Nether they used to get) and quite often no tip at all if done for a guild member, much like an Enchanter would.
I'm not proposing a massive change to professions, I'm proposing a very simple idea, no different from buying Nethers/Vortexes. Since this is still apparently not grasped, I'm abandoning further attempts to clarify.
For those who did grasp it, I think we can all agree fixes can be incremental and very minor in actual effort, yet go a long way towards what should be done.
No, you're really not seeing the problem at all. The value of almost everything that crafting professions produce does eventually fall. We see it in items first, item enhancements second, and various sundries afterwards. The expansion is on the horizon, so now we see it in tailoring. You missed the point with LW leg crafts because they used to rely upon a BoP, highly sought after item from a Heroic. Back when Heroics were actually difficult for a large part of the WoW population. Premium prices could be charged, and I'm sure a lot of people made a nice amount of money.
Then they became tradeable, and buyable for Badges of Justice. The bottom drops out of the LW leg enchant market, because the difficult to obtain item just became easy to obtain. This has never happened with tailoring yet because the item in demand is the Primal Mooncloth, something which creation relies upon the tailor.
Your proposal is simple, as are you in assuming that it's somehow not "grasped". But I honestly don't see the point in adding an extra layer of complexity and potential inflation to something so simple as buying bags. It's not like you've never been able to buy bags before, and it's not as if the best bags available have always been a tailor exclusive thing either. Blizzard has added this system as a gold sink. They want to get gold out of the economy in order to rebalance the fact that it's flowing in at a much greater rate than it's going out. So if they want to make a gold sink, isn't it counter-intuitive for them to add it in such a way that allows people to earn money from it?
I'm not proposing a massive change to professions, I'm proposing a very simple idea, no different from buying Nethers/Vortexes. Since this is still apparently not grasped, I'm abandoning further attempts to clarify.
For those who did grasp it, I think we can all agree fixes can be incremental and very minor in actual effort, yet go a long way towards what should be done.
This change on its own is small, yes.
The paradigm shift that would come as a result of this change is absolutely massive.
Since day 1 the prevailing idea behind crafting professions is that eventually their sellable wares (apart from a few item enhancements) will eventually be supplanted by better items from raiding/PvPing/whatever. You are proposing a change to this idea, that professions continue to be the only source of the "best" items through the end of content.
I would love for my blacksmithing to be useful for something other than [Hard Khorium Battleplate]. But now is not the time for it. This is a massive change to how loot would work, it deserves development time and testing that can only be done in an expansion scenario, not a random double-decimaled bug-fix patch.
In some cases, that paradigm shift has happened. LW kits, tailoring threads aren't replaced by raid/pvp gear. (I'll refrain from my previous Smithing example, as I don't have the profession.) Why not continue building on that success, albeit gradually? One of BC's major themes was more accessibility to answer the accusations of "raid or die". Perhaps they took it too far, but that's another topic.
Tradeskills having at least one thing outside raids that anyone can make and use or sell is already a proven good idea, as shown by the aforementioned leg enchants. Expanding on this would allow for more of the desired accessibility at no real detriment to raiding or pvp. While it IS a major change, the groundwork is already in place.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don't mean crafting gear superior to raid loot. I mean things that aren't covered in raids or pvp. Leg enchants, bags, drums, and similar products that are valuable to everyone, whatever they prefer to do in the game.
06/19/08, 4:41 PM
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