Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Don't throw your gold away

I'm a person who hates wasteful behavior. I get twitches whenever two priests throw their aoe-buffs at the same time or someone places five fish feasts at once just to make it look like a smiley (Love does this from to time). Sure, we're not talking big money here, and Love if anyone can afford it. But still this annoys me somewhat and therefor I thought I'd make a short post on the most wasteful behavior of them all - disenchanting blues.

Although I am very happy with the new disenchant option given in the loot window, it truly amazes me how people can press that disenchant button without the slightest regard about what they're actually disenchanting. With all the money making blogs out there (and they might have written about this too, I don't know) and the general interest in not being a poor sod in WoW, I find it truly interesting that when it comes to disenchanting items, very few people seem to think about all the money they're loosing by pressing that disenchant button!

Everytime I do a random heroic the majority of my group simply presses that disenchant button for any and all blues that happen to drop (sometimes even boe blues). Considering that on all servers I play on, Dream Shards are priced at 2-5g each, there are in fact extremely few blues that are worth disenchanting anymore. Just the other day some blue worth 19g to vendor dropped and everyone pressed disenchant. I simply said "are you aware that by disenchanting that item you actually just lowered its worth by 15g?". People are practically throwing money into the sea, every day, every random heroic, by doing this.

One guy in that group responded "yeah but I need the shards for my enchanting". "sure" I told him, "but for the money you would've got from vendoring it you could have bought 7 shards instead of just getting 1". "True enough" he answered like this never even had crossed his mind. Fascinating, as Spock would have said.

If one wants to become really economically philosophical, one could always argue that by disenchanting blues we're keeping the general inflation of money down (since there will be less money in the world), which could be beneficial to the overall Wow-markets. I don't pretend to know much about economics, but I am quite sure this behavior wouldn't have a major impact on the big picture, but would probably do a difference mostly to the individual. Besides, inflation is not our concern, but issues that Blizzard have to work with, if they feel it's needed. The prices on Dream Shards would rise of course, and then disenchanting blues would be profitable again. And so on and so forth as with many other things on the market (like Large Brilliant Shards which can go from 2g each to 20g each from one day to the next completely based on supply and demand). Dream shards would just be another piece in the economic equation, but the individual could be tens of G richer after each instance. Tens of G might sound like nothing, but considering that everything that stands between you and those G's is the push of a button... "Don't click here to earn 15g". That's easy money people.

When it comes to greens, prices are also being so low that about half the time it's not worth disenchanting them. The "problem" with greens however is that they can turn into a varying amount of dust, or even Cosmic Essences, which means one green can disenchant into mats worth anything between 2-30g. Although certain gear types have higher chance of dropping a certain amount of mats or even of dropping Cosmic Essences over Dusts, having to calculate probabilities of making a few G here and there with every green drop is a little overkill even for me. But with blues there is a 100% chance it will drop a Dream Shard. You know perfectly well how much disenchanting that blue will be worth to you, and most likely, you'll make a loss from doing it.

So please, don't disenchant those blues.
Can you think of any other wasteful behaviors in WoW?

2 comments:

  1. I agree! I quit trying to explain it to people because they never listen in 5 mans. They always say "well, the shard is easier to move than the item".

    Well, some of those items are still desired by people leveling alts...such as cloaks, belts, pants, and other things that you cannot get through BoA gear...

    They just laugh at me and move on =(

    I also cry whenever someone vendors their pygmy oil, deviate fish, and meats. Those are all items that sell for at least 15g a stack on my server!

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  2. Yeah, and today when I did a random pug in Gnomeregan, the Supercharger Battle Axe dropped (blue boe two-handed axe). Everyone but me pressed disenchant, some other guy won it and it turned into a shard and I said "grats, you just lost 30g :P".

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