Why is Arctic Fur on the Vendor?

One of the newest changes on the Test Realm is the addition of Arctic Fur on the Leather Trader in Dalaran, available for the price of 10 Heavy Borean Leather. I find this change a bit odd because I didn't realize that Arctic Fur had become scarce. This is primarily because I'm not actually using my Leatherworking skill, which I guess is saying something. For a while I tried making leg armor, but I got disgusted with the lowballing and gave up. It probably doesn't help that I dropped skinning and now have to purchase leather.

I did a quick check on the auction house and verified that Arctic Fur is selling for close to 100G. That's pretty steep. So then I checked heavy borean leather and it looks to be selling for maybe 5g apiece? It's hard to say, since a few people posted for 5g and everyone else is trying to get 25g apiece. Which I guess gives me my answer, leather prices are all over the place. I can only assume this means no one is farming anymore and the prices are wonky. If you had to buy the borean leather to get the Arctic Fur, you'd still be spending 50g or more. This change to arctic fur will probably drive the leather prices up even more than the currently are. I have a feeling this won't work out to be a great solution, but we'll see.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this. As I said, I dropped Skinning to make room for Inscription so I'm not hip on the Skinning world. In order to correct pricing and availability irregularities for Arctic Fur, they are now being made available via the Trader. But from what I'm seeing, the prices for Heavy Borean Leather are also problematic. The situation for both item is due to no one gathering because they can easily get money from dailies. People no longer need to farm crafted materials and play Russian Roulette on the AH to make money. Most likely, players farm what they need for their own personal use and pay cash for anything else. But if everyone has this attitude, there's nothing left to buy. Somehow Alchemy seems largely unaffected by this - apparently this is where the Auction House whores are hiding.

I never thought I'd see the day when dailies would actually hurt the economy. There's just too much free money out there! Unfortunately there's not a great way to fix it at this point. You can't take dailies away, and you risk major player aggro if you nerf the cash component of dailies. In fact, in BC they were pushing dailies on us as a way to deal with gold farmers. And yet, strangely, gold farmers are still around. I can't get my head around that one - people too lazy to do anything besides raid and PVP all day. Unfortunately, I actually know a person who fits this profile and would rather buy gold instead of spending an hour a day earning it.

The nicest way I can think to deal with this is the phase dailies out as a cash cow and expand the token system to compensate. You still want players to do dailies for faction and such, you just want to reduce the cash benefit. On the other hand, you don't want to mess up your anti-gold-farmer strategy either. So you'd probably have to beef up the token usage. I'm not sure I like this solution either, eventually we wouldn't even have gold we'd just have tokens for everything.

What do you guys think? Are dailies hurting the economy or helping?
Posted by Kaliope at Monday, October 19, 2009
Labels: ,

15 comments:

  1. I think there is a better way to fix the problem. If the demand for leather were higher, then farming it would pay again and more people would do so. To increase the demand for leather, a few new recipes could be introduced that de into mats for profit rather well. This is effectively what drives the demand for cloth, eternals, herbs and gems. By carefully choosing the leather cost and de results for the new recipes, a more reliable relationship will appear between the price of leather and chanting mats (it is not profitable to do this for any leatherworking patterns last time I looked on my server).

    A while ago, Blizz increased the cost of a couple of the best de'ing leatherworking and tailoring patterns to make it less profitable to de those items. The reduced demand for leather has lead to the current unstable prices, scarcity of Arctic Fur and small market size (on my server anyway).

    I think that Blizz should just accept the fact that a few large volume merchants (players) will dominate the markets for materials on the AH. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Any player can freely choose to make playing the AH a part of the game that they enjoy, there are no barriers to entry. Other players will generally benefit from the availability of cheaper mats when they need them, as the large volumes generally smooth out availability and decrease the prices.

    More people farming for leather, will give more drops of Arctic Fur into the economy. Higher volumes of farmed leather also means that small tweaks in the Arctic Fur drop rate will have a more predictable outcome. Problem solved, everyone happy and those who don’t like the AH can still do their dailies ;-)
    ReplyDelete
  2. I must admit than on the server I play on (Aszune) I've mostly given up on the AH now. Or should I say, I've given up on having any clue what I'm likely to have to pay for ANYthing. Levelling low level alts and hoping to buy a green or two to keep me topped up is a joke (25g for a level 20-something piece? No thanks) and the price of mats is all over the place.
    ReplyDelete
  3. As a skinner LW myself l wish l could skin humanoids for like,...enchanted hide,.. or something,... as it is l skin everything and would skin a rat if l could. What l don't use myself l give to a fellow LW or ultimately post on AH. When l post l always check price first an undercut the lowest poster by enough that it doesn't encourage scalpers grabbin everything an posting higher,... least that way lower players who dont have "gold" to spare for mats can more easily obtain materials necessary to lvl up their own professions,... l've even gotten a thank you from an ingame player for a helm l made that they were able to afford :o)
    ReplyDelete
  4. At the moment on my server Borean Leather goes for 50s a piece, Heavy Borean Leather appears from time to time at around 4G a piece but doesn't sell, Arctic Furs are currently 80G each. I think part of the problem is there are few consumables from leather. Armor kits sell but slowly, the leg armours take Arctic Fur but it's scarce because no-one bothers farming leather any more because there's no money in it. Like you say using it for DE mats isn't viable. It's in poor shape compared to mining and herbalism. Both of those supply consumable - herbs for glyphs and flasks, ore for prosepecting. I hope that this change will perk up the leather market a bit but I'm not sure it's enough or even the right thing to do.
    ReplyDelete
  5. I like the change - mostly because it takes away the randomness that is obtaining Arctic Furs through skinning. I went through 5 heavy-skinnable dungeons with my skinner (Oculus, Violet Hold, AN, AK and Nexus, in order), and got a grand total of... ZERO Arctic Furs. Also, there's more bosses you can salvage than bosses you can skin, in current raid progression (Ulduar, ToC and Onyxia). At least, after the patch, I will have a much clearer idea of how much time it will take me to get an Arctic Fur (and maybe I'll be able to level LW to 450 - don't get me started on that).

    As for your actual question - although I'm not making money from professions, that suits me just fine. I do use the AH, but I really don't want to play my game that way: I normally only do dailies that move me towards a specific goal (be it rep grind, or tokens, or whatever), and money is simply a by-product.
    ReplyDelete
  6. Funny, I wasn't expecting this much consensus. It might be an option to increase the drop rate, but if no one is skinning that's unlikely to even be noticed. They would also have to mention it in the patch notes so players would be prodded into skinning again.

    I think they tried to create additional consumables by bringing drums back, unfortunately it hasn't actually worked. I know my guild isn't relying on drums even though I made some for the guild bank. This could possibly change when 3.3 goes live with the new raid. I'd hate to see skinning/LW stay this sad all the way to Cataclysm.
    ReplyDelete
  7. They should just remove these crappy items.

    Why do we need arctic fur if they have to link it to leather to couple the prices?

    Why do we need two kind of shards? And then allow us to convert one into dust? Make epics disenchant into 3-4 shards and drop the epic shard crap. Like in the good old days :-)
    ReplyDelete
  8. For 25man the drums/scrolls are pretty worthless, however for 10 man they are very usefull.
    ReplyDelete
  9. Kring: I think the original idea behind Arctic Fur was to give skinners a "rare" item equivalent to the Frost Lotus for Herbalists. Unfortunately that doesn't actually provide strong value to skinning itself, just the rare drop needed for raid craftables. Leatherworking in general still has no strong consumable items that will motivate skinner to continue collecting.

    On the other hand Alchemy is always needed to provide numerous flasks and potions, so Herbalists have a build in motivator for continuing their work outside of frost lotus farming. That's not even taking into account the demand for herbs from Scribes. Skinning is the only gathering profession that lacks strong production crafts to keep it viable - hence the arctic fur situation.

    As for enchanting, I don't really know the reasoning behind multiple shards except perhaps to increase the value of certain enchants and elevate them to "epic" status. Since we didn't really have a problem with certain enchants being considered BiS (aka expensive) in vanilla WoW, I'm not clear on why this was added.

    Hi Aurede =)
    ReplyDelete
  10. Maybe I just hate this fur stuff because I suffered through it while leveling letherworking back in vanilla. Where you could be sure to always be able to craft items that would have been useful 10 level ago... because of these special leathers.

    Having multiple materials to craft stuff from is great (if it doesn't get out of hand like with engineering). Jewelcrafting is a good example.

    But as soon as you have to provide some way to exchange on into each other, be it through NPCs (ink, fur) or through some kind of cooldown-free conversion (shatter) the whole idea just failed.

    If they would allow you to shatter abyss crystal into something else (flask for example, if alchemists start their make the big money with the jewel market, why not let enchanters make money with the flask market?) that would be cool and a different way to acquire something. But as soon as you can reduce the materials required to craft an item to one thing because of NPCs (ink of the sea, borean leather), it's bad.

    Why did the not introduce a conversion from borean leather to a fur with the help of the salt shaker? 1 day cooldown (or 4 days).

    Leatherworking was the first profession with a cooldown to make money, after all.
    ReplyDelete
  11. And they did it again. Cooldown on Saronite -> Titanium removed. Another two items are linked to fix their price.
    ReplyDelete
  12. "Why did the not introduce a conversion from borean leather to a fur with the help of the salt shaker? 1 day cooldown (or 4 days)."

    THIS. Absolutely. Arctic Furs are already beaten down to around 30g on my VERY small population server, and though I'm not a skinner... I feel bad that their "Woot!" moment is going to be stolen. ...I personally liked the ink conversion thing, if only because I was always just ONE ink short of some lower level glyph. I would, however, have been happy with a "distillation" style cooldown to change my own inks.
    ReplyDelete
  13. The issue with Arctic Fur (like many things)is the drop rate is inconsistent. In some areas it will NEVER drop, and other areas will consistently drop every 40-50 skinnings. This only works out though when the ratio of borean leather in a recipe is proportional to the amount of arctic fur required. Which using my droprate is about 40 to 1.
    ReplyDelete
  14. IOW if a recipe wants 15 borean leather and 8 arctic furs I should not have to farm more that 18 heavy borean leather to get 8 arctic furs
    ReplyDelete
  15. Heres my problem with all of that.I have 2 new 80s.;look at the prices for gear and trying to socket/enchant/n so on.then add in cold weather flying.5000 GOLD.I do skinning and minning on most of my characters.The higher your lev and skills...the higher your pay off SHOULD be.In outland for ezample fel ore sells for more then most ore in northern.I tryed farming artic fur and selling in the auction house.I had to kill on average over 100 spiders in northern for just 1 fur.after working so hard to just make it to 80 who in theyer right mind would want to spend all that time for such a low drop rate?The entire system in my opinion needs to be re thought by wow.The higher lev players and skills should make more in most cases then what we do.I am not a greedy person.But cmon..As a new 80 it takes alot of gold and time to try n gear.I dont have all day to farm for 1 artic fur in well over 100 kills.even if it sells for 80 g each.Or to mine wile im trying to farm artic fur because the ore isnt worth my time when fel ore goes for so much more.So..like i said ..wow needs to fix this.make it right,,make it fair.make it worth lev 68s to 80s time.After all.We put in our time.
    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)