So Close!! And Horde Economics!

Well, I finished handing in a handful of quests in STV this morning and missed my Level 40 mark by 3 bubbles. :(

Ah well, I'll get it tonight and then I can upgrade to Mail Armor. :D

Speaking of......

The Economy of Gilneas, Horde side. Sucks!!

I know I've already made this comment already but the AH prices for green gear on Gilneas's Horde AH are really bad. To fully upgrade my leather gear to mail would cost me over 200g if I regear with items marked "of the Monkey, of the Falcon, or of Agility." This is beyond ridicoulous. Outland "of the Bandit" gear is cheaper than that. So what does this tell me? Well, two things really; One is that Horde players are assuming everyone playing lower levels is an alt to a level 70 Horde toon, and/or the Gold Farmers have driven the prices of things so high that they have the AH economy fully under control. Either way this spells bad times for anyone who does not have a level 70 horde toon on Gilneas in trying to acquire decent gear out of the AH. And unfortunately it shows that the players on the Horde side have little care for their bretheren there. This used to not be the case. These developements on Gilneas are rather recent. I've had horde toons on Gilneas almost since I started playing the game, but since I play the game with my friends and most of them play Alliance, I am usually on that side of things when I play, so I haven't devoted the time to fully level a horde toon until now. So seeing what's happened to the AH is a disappointment to say the least. Too bad we can't report people for "Price Gouging."

A clear example of this is show here, I recently acquired the River Pride Choker on a random drop. Now I happen to know that this is an item often sought after by twinks so I figured I would test the waters in the AH and see how much people would pay for this. Usually I see this selling for 50 or so gold on the Alliance AH. I posted it for 140g originally. It took me 4 postings in the AH for it to sell and it sold for 113g this morning. When I looked at other 'Blue' necklaces in the Ah over the last few days, none of them had prices that high on them, even the level 70 necklaces. Unfortunately people on Gilneas will pay these prices in the Horde AH because there simply are not enough items being posted up in the AH to drive the prices down. The players that are setting these insanely high prices know that they will have little or any competition for the item they post.

What I do know that happens a fair amount on Gilneas is that players often times will purchase stuff on the Alliance AH and then move the items through the 'neutral AH' to their horde alts and save a ton of money doing that. Sadly this further hurts the economy of the horde AH as it eliminates even more competition from the field. I've been seriously tempted to buy up a lot of green items cheap on the Alliance side and resell them on the Horde side for 2 to 3 times the price that I could pay for them. The logistics of doing such transactoins currently keep me from doing just that even though I could make a killing doing it. At this moment I'm really not going to worry about it that much, since I am leveling as fast as I can staying exceptionally well geared is not high on my priority list. Keeping my bow and arrows current is, but beyond that I'll stick with the cheap items I can find in the AH when I do find them and what I get from quest rewards and drops. But as long as people are willing to spend extreme amounts of gold on items on Gilneas I will take advantage of it with my bank toon who in just over a week has already earned me close to 300g just on level 30 to 40 items and the skins that I get from doing the quests.

I'm hoping that upon the release of Lich King that more people will go back to playing horde on Gilneas and that this will bring the prices down to a reasonable level again. I'm kind of curious to to hear about other people experiences on this matter as well.

Have fun, and Happy Hunting.