Thread: Calculating Inflation

Inflation is a huge economic factor. It's something that has affected all of us, it's something that a lot of us probably understand, but as far as I can tell - no significant effort has been made to quantify it.

Based on prior discussion in this thread: http://consortium.stormspire.net/gen...sh-flow-2.html

Especially towards the end of it, I thought we could collectively take a stab at it. IMO, the 2 biggest factors to pin down (open for discussion, of course) would be rate of gold entering the economy via dailies, and rate of gold leaving the economy via repairs. If I'm missing any significant sources of gold in/gold out, let's discuss them, and their implications on a effective calculation.

In light of that, I will make the following assumption: (by all means, disagree with me - this is off the top of my head, and not necessarily based on anything concrete)

1)The average lvl 85 daily rewards 16g
2)The average player will complete 10 dailies every day

Based on that, the average person would be earning 160g every single day, PER character.

Repair calculations are based on information located here:

Durability - Wowpedia - Your wiki guide to the World of Warcraft

Repair assumptions:

1)The average person has a fairly even mixture of rare and epic items
2)The average person suffers approximately 20% durability loss per day
3)Average Item level of 350 per person

based on that, the average person would have approx. 800 durability across all their items, and would require 160 durability points to be repaired every day.

So, 160 * (350 - 32.5) * 0.0375 silver = 1905 silver, or 19g05s, per day, PER character.

That would give us a net increase of 140.95g PER character.

GLARING DISCLAIMER: I don't believe my numbers are accurate . However, hopefully they can serve as a launching point for some meaningful discussion/data gathering to arrive at a more accurate number.

Known omissions:

-Cash Flow guild perk
-AH fees (would like to hear some discussion about this one, and how big a factor it IS/should be)

Let's discuss...

I looked at this a few times and I don't think there's available data to really estimate accurately.
A lot of factors to consider here. Level 85 players is only one small segment. All the folks just starting and leveling.
Gold rewards from quests scale, but this late in WoW's life a decent population is leveling with BOAs. Meaning a percentage of the population will be either vendoring all their quest rewards or DE'ing them.
Looking at brackets of 10 for average gold reward and vendor value for quests.
And after that I'd still want somewhat of a accurate wow census, I haven't seen numbers I'd put any stock in. Without good denominator data it's all going to be way off.
Fun idea. But we'd need more information from Blizzard to really get a good answer.
PS I love Epidemiology. This was close.

Edit: server population would be a huge factor as well (obvious tip is obvious, unti someone forgets)

@bellavacca - a lot of the information you mentioned would be widely available in some form via the API. It's really a matter of determining what to look for...

I would add the 83g28s per dungeon run with dungeon finder.

All the gold looted by mobs and boss.
All the vendoring of items.

(soloing multen core generates around 250g in boss drop and vendoring of items).

for inflation but it has been nerfed :
-> BC and LK raid have seen their gold per boss heavily reduced at 4.1.
-> smelting saronite
-> obsidian shuffle

We are going to get Transmo / Void storage that will consume gold like repair.

While daily quests is probably responsible for a big part of the average player income, I think the 7 weeky Zandalari heroics, aswell as random junk picked up throughout heroics and questing will have a large inpact on the amount of gold earned each day or week.

One Zandalari heroic rewards 83g28s flat. Do all 7 every week and you get 582g.61s a week. I would hazard a guess between 40-100g a day collected in junk, green items to be sold/disenchanted and cloth picked up. That would put the weekly "junk" cash somewhere inbetween 280g-700g.

One of the hardest things to do though, is finding out who the average player is and what he does. If he raids, a problem would be to determine the use of consumables; food+potions+flasks. This would also mean gold leaving the economy.

While my numbers are probably not spot on, I believe it's within an accaptable errormargin, but I would like to do a "glaring disclaimer" aswell

@Dahmek - we were actually discussing that very point in IRC a little while ago. @Serejai pointed out that the bonus for Tanks (usually) is also in the realm of 90 - 100g per run. Not being involved in PvE/Heroics has certainly influenced my ability to make accurate estimates about these numbers.

However, regarding the use of consumables - since the gold spent on such items would be going directly to another player, I shouldn't think it would be worth worrying about, but perhaps I'm missing something.

@bellavacca - I've not been playing around with the Character/guild portion of the API at all, but I would assume that one would be able to determine the numbers of characters on each realm and their level without too much trouble. I would also assume that somebody already has, so it might be less effort to just try and track down their data...

Funny to see this posted. I asked a similar question in about February on JMTC as I rolled from 300k to 1.5M+ in 3 months there which really scared me - all while I was doing the same old same old routine pretty much - just the obsidium shuffle added more to it , although I personally didnt bother too much with it as it was too time consuming and insanely depressing work if you have only one account at your disposal - effectively completely blocking wow gameplay.

Correct me if Im wrong here I dont know the figures from my head exactly :

- WOTLK daily dungeon gave 25g - Cata gives 84g.
- WOTLK dailies gave 12g - Cata gives 16g.

The amount of dailies and dungeons shouldnt differ that much for the average player doing his average daily mumbo jumbo thing.
30g repair bill a day in wotlk vs 0 in any decent guild these days.
I dont know about other guilds, but most guilds I know let the money they accumulate via dungeon / raid / RBG rewards more or less rot in the bank. As its not in the economy its not hugely affecting inflation ( until the guild breaks apart and the GM takes it all and goes vanity item shopping )

This makes calculating inflation in the long run pretty damn easy.

10 x 12 + 25 = 145 - 30 = 115
10 x 16 + 84 = 244

Inflation nothing less than 244 / 144 = ~95%.

Inflation isnt only caused though by increased gain over the previous expansion.
If there is nothing to spend cash on then inflation naturally occurs and vanity item items are a pretty good measurement.
Compare prices of spectral tiger mounts from mid wotlk to now for example would give a pretty good example of how much the gold has devalued over time.

This is all subjective, but to me inflation feels about a factor 1 to 10 from wotlk to cataclysm.
The above mentioned spectral tigers are offered 1 Mil for left and right on EU forum now - try imagining this in wotlk with a goldcap of 214k per player.
Non existing repair costs and flask costs ( covered by guild ) just make the bankroll of players skyrocket to never seen heights.
Nothing new and fancy in cataclysm to really spend some bucks on ( TBC had epic flying skill, wotlk had chopper and mammoth mount which where really expensive for players back then, also dual spec ) - what major expense - relative to the completely filled wallet players had at the end of wotlk - did players had in cataclysm ? Reforging isnt a strong moneysink at all bar a few examples. ( Poor DK in my arena team who has to reforge everything when he changes spec )
Players actually just playing the game not doing any auctioneering sitting on 50k in my guild for example are no exception while this used to be a significant fortune for most players in mid wotlk that gave you a lot of respect - these days its just what the little more serious than average joe have - without having to do anything special for it.

There's also another point one should consider: fluctuation of players. Ppl who are quitting WoW and ppl who are continuing after a new patch / addon.

If ppl like us who have maybe stored expensive Vanity items and therefore pumped a lot of gold into the market cancel their account, then a lot of new gold is in the market. In addition, the available amount of those vanity items we purchased is decreased and therefore they are worth more than when we purchased them, since instead of like 100 of them per server there are only 90 available. This should get the price up and taking more gold (if bought) out of the market than we pumped into it before. Ofc. that works the other way around too.