A blog a day through november?
I can do that... wish I'd heard bout it earlier, wouldn't have missed the first...
K, went MM. Lot more damage, pet can't tank fer crap, and pet goes down faster than a plastic chair at a weight watcher's meeting.
Still, the first MS crit for 2k...
I've been mostly just tradin round fer crap for Maj's spellfire set. Takes insane tons of primal fires and spellcloth. She should hit 70 in two weeks er so, and she'll have her epics when it happens.
Gold is a weird thing. I just finished reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged for the first time. She was apparently a gold bug like Ron Paul.
People... gold, like paper currency, has no intrinsic value. The only virtue of a gold based monetary system is that the government cannot arbitrarily increase it. So what does this mean to us, the WoW playing public?
High paying daily quests are the single biggest thing to hit the WoW economy since they started selling accounts in China. They do three things... first, they get high level chars the hell offa your tin nodes. A 70 would have to be nuts to gather resources to sell when he/she could just do a bit of dailies and score a ton of cash. Second, they hurt gold sellers. Gold sellers tend to have inferior gear, and by a damn sight don't have elite mounts. Their ability to compete for resources is crippled by the lack of capital they place in their characters... Lastest and bestest... the flow of money represented by dailies helps encourage in game spending... on pots, respecs, what have you.
Blizzard has a curious relationship with the WoW economy. First, they need for people to exchange goods and services... this build community, and community keeps people coming back to the game. OTOH... any gold you spend on the AH more or less cuts down time you have to spend making or questing for gear. What is ideal for blizzard is for there to be a linear relationship between power of character and time spent playing. Gold sellers circumvent this... why play a char to epic status when you can simply buy it? This leads to fustration, and people leaving...
Hence dailies... once you get a char to a certain point, you'll be able to super grind gold more efficiently than a farmer... as well, dailies are the gold equivalent to rest exp... they reward people who aren't on 24/7 with an hour or so of super lucrative play time a day... past that... well, less gold made... so the casual players who lack the time for serious farming have a steady income source, and are much less likely to buy gold, while the hard core players tend to be the ones who can't afford gold anyway...
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6 comments:
Gold definatly has an intrinsic value. It has several industrial application most notably in the electronics and chemical industrys. People also like gold jewelry still after 6000 years. Let me know when green paper clothing becomes popular.
Ron Paul and Ayn Rand may seem like gold bugs but this is because they are both advocates for free market money. For 6000 years, when people have been given a choice of money they have choosen gold. Gold has several properties that make it preferable to other specie ( immutability, homogeneity, divisibility, etc... ) but the real reason it was chosen as money is demand. There is a demand for gold.
"The only virtue of a gold based monetary system is that the government cannot arbitrarily increase it"
I would have to say this statement depends on what you mean by monetary system. The only way we will have a single monetary unit is by government force. Do you mean that other commodities and alternative monetary units are subject to sales taxes and capital gains taxes. Are there legal tender laws. Does the market set the exchange rates or does the government or a central bank. Are you forced to pay taxes in gold. Is it illegal to own alternative currencys ( private ownership of gold was only legalized in 1976 and the US has a long history of gold confiscations ). If the govenment puts restrictions on all currencies but gold then yes "The only virtue of a gold based monetary system is that the government cannot arbitrarily increase it".
But if it doesnt restrict alternative currencies then the advantage is choice. The problem isn't that the government is constantly devalueing your dollar the problem is the government is constantly devalueing your dollar and forcing you to use it at the same time. With choice you could tell the government to go fuck off and use shiny rocks as money. Maybe no one would take them but at least you have a choice.
Fellow WOW player and Free market money bug
Gold definatly has an intrinsic value. It has several industrial application most notably in the electronics and chemical industrys. People also like gold jewelry still after 6000 years. Let me know when green paper clothing becomes popular.
Ron Paul and Ayn Rand may seem like gold bugs but this is because they are both advocates for free market money. For 6000 years, when people have been given a choice of money they have choosen gold. Gold has several properties that make it preferable to other specie ( immutability, homogeneity, divisibility, etc... ) but the real reason it was chosen as money is demand. There is a demand for gold.
"The only virtue of a gold based monetary system is that the government cannot arbitrarily increase it"
I would have to say this statement depends on what you mean by monetary system. The only way we will have a single monetary unit is by government force. Do you mean that other commodities and alternative monetary units are subject to sales taxes and capital gains taxes. Are there legal tender laws. Does the market set the exchange rates or does the government or a central bank. Are you forced to pay taxes in gold. Is it illegal to own alternative currencys ( private ownership of gold was only legalized in 1976 and the US has a long history of gold confiscations ). If the govenment puts restrictions on all currencies but gold then yes "The only virtue of a gold based monetary system is that the government cannot arbitrarily increase it".
But if it doesnt restrict alternative currencies then the advantage is choice. The problem isn't that the government is constantly devalueing your dollar the problem is the government is constantly devalueing your dollar and forcing you to use it at the same time. With choice you could tell the government to go fuck off and use shiny rocks as money. Maybe no one would take them but at least you have a choice.
Fellow WOW player and Free market money bug
@anon...
I should edit my post to say that gold has extremely limited intrinsic value? The market price of gold is 95% subjective... if we'd give it up as a "shiny rock," we'd have a more efficient economy :)
A Monetary system is self explaintory... there are several in the states, but U.S. "Cash" is by far the most omnipresent... as far as the functionality of money, unit of price, medium of exchange, store of value, the most important for purposes of this discussion is store of value. As far as this is concerned... fiat currency IS a free market money... if you don't trust the dollar, you CAN tell it to go screw itself, and buy land, stock, foreign bonds, foreign capital assets... or even gold. The warning sign is when governments pass laws outlawing this... and when they do this, it doesn't matter what the money is, you screwed... lookit venezuela :)
It took about 50 years for civilized governments to discover this, but as far as things go, our current fiat currency system works far and away better than specie ever did...
BTW... when I say gold has no intrinsic value.. and you say the reason gold is valuable is because there is demand for it... you are actually agreeing with me. The whole point of jewelry is transportable cash... how did columbus get his ships? Q. Isabel pawned the state jewels...
I also have to correct something... I stated that gold currency keeps government arbitrarily increasing the monetary supply... this is actually wrong. (but a common enough misperception... that I fall into because I hate gove meddling with money as much as anyone..)
The sad sad history of specie currency is filled with examples of governments debasing the currency by adding more base metals and less gold to the coins, charging outragous "minting" fees, and demanding the use of only coins minted within the political locality...
Which is why, in the old days... certain coins, such as venetian ducats and spanish reals were universally excepted (the real is the basis for the american "two bit" term) while turkish and austrian currency was spit upon.
BTW, if you're really interested in some of the origins of monetary systems, a friend of mine is writing a book on the construction of the european economy after the fall of rome. It's pretty neat... he's beating on Henri Pirenne's Mohammed and Charlemagne theory...
http://ekeppich.livejournal.com/209107.html#cutid1
Whew! Economics is not your long suit. You've studied some but not grasped much.
Bringing it back to wow...Very interesting post. I like hearing about your view of the in-game economy and daily quests. My highest toon is at 63, so my experience has been making gold through herbalism and mining. Very lucrative as I travel around questing to level up. Now you've got me intrigued at the potential for a different way to earn gold. Intrigued, indeed. Perhaps you've given me some motivation to get past the levelling burnout hump I'm experiencing mid-way to 64 in Zangarmarsh.
Alternative possibility means freedom of choice: Crom Alternative Money
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