What Is Server Maturity?

June 16th, 2008 · No Comments

World of Warcraft has been online now for over four years. After a couple of initial hiccups, it began running smoothly and has ever since. If you can remember that far back, you’ll recall that the previous level cap – pre Burning Crusade-was level 60. After the introduction of the Burning Crusade expansion set, the level cap was raised to 70.

You are allowed a maximum of 10 characters per server. As time goes by, the number of players that are entirely new to the game naturally diminishes, and those few that join are automatically directed towards the newer, emptier Realms.

What does it mean for established servers? Basically, and over the months, the number of low level players gradually diminishes, since a lot of players butt against the 10-toon limit. This has numerous, severe consequences on Realm economies. Let’s assume the following:

Most players have one or more level 70 characters.
They do one or more daily Quest each day.
They have one or more lower level alts that they feed with cash.

Understanding that most people dislike farming, all those rich low level alts will be buying the raw materials they need to level their skill on the auction house, concentrating the limited time they have in Azeroth to leveling their ‘toons’.

This leads to a supply and demand problem. It is well and good to buy your supplies on the AH, but someone HAS to be selling. Since a lot of players will be making their WOW living from daily Quests, the incentive to gather materials for the purpose of resell will be decreased because of the easy availability of gold. Prices will therefore rise until the prices become so high that it becomes worth it to deal with the drudgery of farming, because the rewards are so great.

Whichever way you look at it, the WoW economy is inflationary. The Central Bank - Blizzard - keeps pumping cash into the economy through quests, vendored items and mob drops. As time goes by, and especially on mature servers, it is inevitable that the prices for the most annoying items to gather will rise first, followed by everything else, as everyone has fatter and fatter bank balances, and just like in the real world, people are short on time.