Economic impact

Since I've been playing world of warcraft a lot more lately, I've been noticing some interesting aspects to the game.

The game world on a server is a micro-economic system unto itself. people are buying and trading and creating new things all the time. in this economy there is definitely a few places where you can basically be a middleman and profit. Identifying and controlling certain aspects of the economy is key to your success. I think i now find this the most interesting aspect of the game.

I've found a few spots in the economy where I can make a huge profit margin, and a many more where i can make a slight margin. For instance, if i spend my days fishing and cooking deviant delight (turns you into a ninja or a pirate), then its ALL profit, at an average market price of about 1g per stack of 5, thats about 5-10g per hour. but then the market has a saturation point, you can't sell 10g worth of this on a typical day. weekends move things in the market faster because of increased population.

Another good example of how to make a tidy profit is enchanting, or disenchanting. my leatherworker can buy stacks of thick leather on the auctionhouse for about 50-70s per a 10 stack. i can turn 5 leather into a headband, that i can either sell to the NPC merchant for 44s, for a quick profit, or turn around and mail it to my enchanter, who disenchants each headband into about 1-2g worth of raw enchanting materials.

Another market I'm in is bag containers. my tailor can buy the materials needed at slightly less than he can sell the bags for, and make a minor profit. only problem here is that again the market gets saturated. people only ever want 4 of your bags, however people are making new characters each day, which creates new demand at a fairly steady rate.

Its also quite fun to control the market values if youve got spare capital. lets say you do a search on the same item your selling, and some fool is trying to undercut you, seriously below market value. sometimes people will even put things up for less than cost. buy them up, and now your price is the lowest price, and you can resell their things later on for a small profit.

So to keep track of average market prices would be a complete pain in the ass, but there is an addon called Auctioneer that does all the math and statistic tracking for you automatically. its quite nice, and saves endless hours. i doubt id be spending my time as an auctionhouse whore if it werent for this little gem.

PvP is starting to suck, since i hit 60. the horde had incredibly good teams in the 50-59 bracket, but in the 60 bracket, we hardly ever win. I'm not sure why this is yet. it could be many things. lvl 60 players often have access to voicechat, ventrilo, teamspeak, etc. and are therefore more organized in certain instances. one might also argue that because the alliance player population is about double that of the horde, they have larger guilds, and therefore more opportunity to get organized. and it also follows that the more organized they are, the better they do at raids, and therefore they get better equipment.