Don’t wanna completely spam out your comments. I found the post interesting, however – it’s actually surprisingly rare to see players thinking outside their own type of gameplay to consider things Blizzard does.

Ghost iron ore has a value floor, as I’ve described a few times. I can take Ghost Iron Ore in quantity, prospect it, turn the results into rings, necklaces, and cut gems, and then sell them to the vendor, all for a value of 20-21g a stack. Thus, Ghost Iron Ore is never going to fall much below that point because if it does people like me will snap it up. Even at prices of around 25g-30g people will still jump because the value of the rare gems far exceeds the vendor price.

With ore being more rare, it won’t fall as quickly to that price, and it may stablize a fair distance above it. (Pre-patch, it seemed to be stable at around 30g a stack, but with some fire sales that I took advantage of). What it won’t do, however, is double, because the portion of a value of a stack of ore represented by its vendorables does not change. Right now ore seems to be stabilizing around the 40g a stack range, although it’s really hard to tell.

The gist of it is that ore sellers now have to work twice as long to get maybe 30% more gold. This is not a change that favors them, and Blizzard is being disingenuous to suggest that it is. The people who do nothing but mine ore will be okay (not that anyone needs to worry about them), but people who want to make some gold with an hour or so of gathering will find it much less appealing.

The change in itself is not something I’m terribly concerned with. Blizzard made a decision as of 5.0 to make ore and herbs plentiful and are now reversing course on that decision for whatever reason. What I am concerned about is how disingenuous they are in selling this. Claiming that this is for the benefit of people who are actually screwed over by the decision is double talk, and it’s not something to be accepted at face value.

The AH player really doesn’t care about the cost of an item per se, just that the player can profit off of it. It doesn’t matter to me that Ghost Iron is 20g a stack or 60g a stack, all it matters is that in both cases I will make back profit on the transaction. You see its the rare “Tycoon” that actually mines or herbs materials. We almost always buy it from the AH. OR we have deals with miners and herbers that do that for us. Most of your big players do that. In fact as a “Tycoon” the only upsetting thing was that this was a stealth nerf… HAd I known, I would have stockpiled more to make more of a killing. But make no mistake I can profit in the same time each play session regardless of what mat prices are. I may make different items or have to accept a smaller profit margin(could happen, hasn’t yet tho), but I will always come out ahead.

Now the self sufficient player, he/she is the one that’s hurt, because when they go out to herb and mine, they’ll have to spend more time getting the mats they need (or pay elevated AH prices) so if it took 30 mins to mine enough Ghost Iron for what you need, it will likely take at least 2X, but more likely 3-5X the time. The extra time will be required because of increased contention for nodes. So those extra hours you are now forced to mine, you could be spending playing and doing other fun things or spending time with your family.

Again, I find it odd that you’d be happy about this.

If they had not taken out all of the time saving quality of life features out of the game, some of the added difficulty would be acceptable.

But now it is a grind in rep, a grind in valor, a grind in justice points. Oh and instead of just grinding 1 to get a reward you have to grind rep to then spend your honor and valor something that was already capped and in valor case time gated on acquisition.

Rep items should only cost gold you already paid your dues
Justice, Valor, Honor and Conquest should not be further gated.

I also don’t want every activity I do in the game to take 100% attention to what I am doing. I like to play the game to relax.