Tachya how are you preparing, mat-wise, for the new raid next week?
Well I haven't actually been playing, much less the economic side of the game, if I can even get myself to login for the better part of a few months now. Also doesn't help that I'm pretty damn low on gold to be making any meaningful strategic investments without putting a bunch of time in either earning gold to build a even a modest stockpile or collecting resources by hand myself.
However I imagine the general strategy wouldn't be much different than any other time new content, particularly raid content, is released.
- You speculate on newly introduced recipes that might be valuable based on deep game knowledge.
- Invest in things you know will see an uptick in usage during certain times —e.g. for raid progression mostly consumables or gear needed to hit a hard ilvl cutoff early on for queuing
That's mostly it, but if you want to get more granular, further base decisions around idiosyncrasies of your own local server like expected competition, number of active players and type of content they would tend to prefer, etc. The big meta thing right now would be to take into account the much lower global population levels as a result of BfA being unsuccessful and temper expectations accordingly. There will still be a bump to the economy, but not as much as with a larger base load of players interested in still playing.
Also take note that because of rather severe deflation in BfA, the median player will have much less wealth than in the past in terms of the relative amount of gold owned unless they're supporting themselves with WoW tokens. It's why tokens are closer to 100k on NA than 200k at the end of Legion. Result of high raw gold sinks, significantly lowered standard income sources, and many people quitting locking a lot of previously earned wealth out of recirculating back into the economy.
Sorry for the long answer, but I think that's it. I don't have any specific items I could recommend investing in because I haven't been keeping up as much as a direct result of not playing. I got pretty apathetic towards the economy in BfA pretty quickly anyway after buying the long boi and also realizing that the dynamics of professions were so stripped down that it wasn't enjoyable to engage with past a few weeks. Combined with more raw gold income being rather low as well, any potential rewards weren't really worth my time with the extremely low barrier to entry of higher level competition.
The only thing that maintained value longer was dedicated group or multi-box grinds, but I typically find those intensely unfun, even if the returns are decent. I'd much rather work alone or not have to multi-box to be competitive in the economic arena. I find multi-boxing particularly distasteful in this domain and essentially an exploit — it's not enjoyable to me at that point. Which is one of the major issues I have with how EVE online has had its meta developed — multi-boxing there is even easier and more necessary/powerful than it is in WoW because it scales strongly in many activities for a few reasons. I don't have a particular issue with multiboxing as more of a novelty, but when it becomes required to compete that's just bad design and I tune out more. The sad thing is there's a couple actions developers could take to address this flaw, but when each account sub is paying the same amount of money each month, there's no incentive to discourage it unless it starts to negatively impact standard players on a large enough scale. Same deal with bots, but that's slightly more nuanced to address.
Bots are more explicit cheating outside the prescribed rules whereas multi-boxing is pushing the limits of what is allowed, but it tends to result in at least a soft pay-to-win. Both rely on some degree of automation.
Having extra accounts for more diversity purposes (like having a different class alt) isn't nearly as bad when the game artificially limits what you can do in a given amount of time on one account, but it still should be discouraged by gameplay design and/or business model because I don't think most people find meta-gaming as hard as that enjoyable if it wasn't expected to keep up at some level.
