This forum post is dead wrong. For those who cannot click through, it is someone complaining about the auction house prices of consumable items and the components needed to craft them. Down-thread, he goes on to rant about price-gouging and arresting merchants who raise prices when items are in short supply. I left after he took the surreal turn of equating (not just comparing) the expansion to Hurricane Katrina and calling for tools to report and perma-ban sellers the same way that gold-spammers are banned.
We have covered this before, but let’s refresh for the economically illiterate. When supply is low, you want prices to go up. This is especially true in a MMO market for crafting materials, where the cost of entry is almost nil. If prices do not rise, supply will not rise, because people have better things to do with their time than farm materials for a few silver pieces (while getting mail and /tells about what horrible gougers they are). Higher prices induce more people to sell, which brings back lower prices with more supply.
Consider the original poster, who we will refer to as the whining, greedy destroyer (WGD). WGD sees the new expansion pack and wants to experience the new content. Does he want to log on an alt, grow tea leaves, make buff food, and transfer it over? Does he want to grab a different alt, run around the previous expansion’s zones to gather materials, craft consumables, and transfer them over? No, nor did he plan ahead on any of those. WGD wants to go do the new content now. He wants to raid and run skirmishes, which produce few to no consumable components. With a worldview that even Karl Marx condemned, he wants to consume without producing.
WGD instead wants someone else to do the farming and producing so he can consume. And he wants them to do it cheap, with a smile, instead of playing with the new content. And they should be banned if they will not. I mean, with all the extra gold being pumped into the economy by having higher level enemies, why should crafters get any of it? WGD has also missed the point that banning producers leads to even less supply. Because nothing helps the situation like actively making the problem worse.
If you think prices are too high, cash in. Leveling a gathering skill is quick, so you can even start from scratch. Farm, sell, and profit until prices are too low for it to be worth your time to farm and sell. If prices are too high for you to buy, but too low for it to be worth your time to farm and sell, why do you think it is worth anyone else’s time to farm and sell to you?
: Zubon
If you want to argue that there should be no crafted consumables, and everything should be available cheap on an NPC vendor, that’s a different design argument. This is just the stupidity of making a outraged claim to others’ time.
The nice thing about lotteries, however, is that sometimes you win. For those of you who do not know LotRO or the Hunter class there, the image is of a really nice bow, almost the best possible in the present game (before upgrading). Second Age weapons are hard to come by right now, and there are no level 65 First Age weapons yet; this will be my Hunter’s bow for the next three months, probably the next six to eight months, and possibly until the level cap rises.
