Some of a game’s worst logical fails are related to its in-game economy and no where is this more apparent than in World Of Warcraft. A close examination of how trade, banking, and production works in this game would make you instantly question how the whole thing hasn’t collapsed and left everyone in abject poverty.
Whether it’s rampant homelessness, merchants with unlimited funding, or the value of a gold bar, here are some things in World Of Warcraft’s economy that make absolutely no sense.
10 Vendor Prices Never Inflate
It doesn’t matter the supply, it doesn’t matter the demand, a merchant will never, ever raise their prices. A player could sit there and buy the same item over and over again for the rest of time and that merchant will never up their prices.
On the one hand it’s nice as a player to know exactly how much something you need is going to cost, but you’d think with the rampant gold inflation and the average player steadily becoming a millionaire they’d fee comfortable nudging up the price of bread just a few coppers.
9 Worth Of Gold Bars
There is an enemy in the game called Corporal Keeshan that will occasionally drop a gold bar. Most players would assume that because a single gold coin is worth 100 silver that the gold bar, which can make thousands of gold coins, would make you an instant millionaire in silver. Yet when you hawk it to the merchants, it’s worth a measly six silver.
The second you sell one to a merchant they probably close shop, melt the gold down, pour it into molds to make Gold Wedding Bands, and sells thousands of those babies on the market at 15 gold a piece.
8 Wealth Of Nations
When you see players buying Brutosaurs for five million gold and watch all the money that trades hands in the auction house it’s obvious that the average player is very wealthy and the industrious players are mind bogglingly rich.
At some point you have to wonder how it’s possible that the average player can accumulate enough gold to make themselves wealthier than the kings of the game, if not entire kingdoms, and still feel beholden to their laws? It’s also a surprise that a money grubbing monarch hasn’t sent his guards after any given player when they wander by his land.
7 Rampant Homelessness
Yet in spite of those millions of gold coins sitting in the bank like a Scrooge McDuck vault the wealthiest players in the game don’t have homes. Even lowly murlocs have huts to rest in, yet the player wandering around on his Brutosaur doesn’t even have a studio apartment in Stormwind City.
The housing crisis must be absurd if the leaders can’t afford to set aside some places to live for all the players in their kingdom for all that golden income. You’d think Sylvanas would be emptying out those mausoleums and renting them out as shared living space or something.
6 Everyone Has Cash
It’s hard to imagine anyone being poor in this economy when every living thing in the game has some kind of money on them. Even animals with rudimentary intelligence and a lack of thumbs will have a few coins stashed…somewhere.
Any lowly peasant, simpleton, or lazy bumpkin could surely muster up enough strength and ability to bring down at least one Small Crag Boar and start hoarding copper coins. Think about it, anyone who states they’re broke or have gone bankrupt are more impoverished than a boar living in the wilderness!
5 Sell Anything
The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer once said in his book, Canterbury Tales, “Earn what you can since everything’s for sale.” Yet even he would probably argue that some of the junk vendors buy in this game should never have been for sale.
Things like Hardened Springs, Old Rusty Keys, Barnacled Lockboxs, and other items are literal junk, even the game lists this stuff as junk items. Yet merchants will happily spend their hard earned copper on this stuff. After the hundredth Salt Shaker or the first Glorious Earwax Candle they buy it’s a wonder how they stay in business year after year.
4 WOW Gold Is Worth More Than Venezuelan Bolivar
You read that right, according a report by Fortune.com in 2017 World Of Warcraft’s digital, in-game currency was worth more than Venezuela’s real life currency the Bolivar when sold on the black market. WoW gives players the opportunity to buy WoW tokens for $20 which can be cashed in for about 129,631 gold coins which works out to be 6,482 gold per US Dollar.
Bolivar on the black market goes for 12,197 for each US Dollar. That means WoW gold is double the worth of Bolivar, and that was in 2017 it’s only gotten worse since then. There are digital characters in a virtual world who could theoretically have more cash on them than a person in Venezuela!
3 I Can Fix That
You’ve just completed the Burning Throne quest and Aggramar dropped the powerful Gorshalach’s Legacy into your possession. This weapon was forged by Eredar blacksmiths on an alien planet using unknown methods and materials.
Yet you can take that ridiculous weapon to any weapon vendor in the game and they’re happy to perform any repairs for you. That NPC who has never left their hometown, has a lifetime of experience working on standard weapons for the occasional soldier is somehow capable of repairing a sword the likes of which doesn’t exist in all of Azeroth.
2 Merchants Stay In Business
Speaking of which, it’s kind of a miracle at all that weapon merchants, or any merchant really, stays in business in this economy. The amount of players who buy weapons from merchants is very, very minimal and repairs aren’t all that expensive.
Yet these merchants seem to have a limitless supply of gold to buy any and all weapons you have in your possession.
1 No Tax
Probably the most laughable aspect of WoW’s economy is that there are is no tax on anything. Granted standard taxes you pay today weren’t really a thing until a little over a hundred years ago according to Investopedia, but war taxes have always been around.
The factions probably get a percentage of the repair fines, travel fees, and they’re likely stashing those cheaply bought gold bars somewhere, but the fact that they don’t tap into the wealth of their players/citizens with a mandatory war tax during war time, which is always, is completely absurd.