Would You Pay 7k Gold for a T10 Piece?
Heartbourne on Sunday, February 14, 2010 - 30 Comments Tags: goblinism, gold, rant, tier 10 
I often can't understand the average player. Many players acquire gold primarily by doing dailies, farming, or running random dungeons. All three are relatively comparable in profitability. Then again, most players don't have much gold and make just enough to get by. Sometimes they get a windfall, like a Battered Hilt or rare pet drop, then put it on the Auction House, convert their fortune to cash, and stop working to acquire gold. Most players will buy their tier 10 pieces or other Frost Emblem purchases as soon as they have enough emblems instead of buying Primordial Saronite and selling it for an easy ~2,000 gold. Its almost like having the ability to control when you get fortunate enough to cash in on a high-tag item, but hardly anyone does it. Why?
There are three cognitive biases that can help explain this phenomenon - the endowment effect, also known as loss aversion, system justification, and hyperbolic discounting.
The endowment effect is the tendency of people to feel like they deserve something that they earned and overvalue it. That is, a person who acquires something is likely to be unwilling to sell it at a price comparable to the price at which they would have bought it. For example, players who do their random dungeon, run ICC, and do the weekly raid quest acquire Emblems of Frost. The decision they must make is this: "should I buy gear with this, or buy a very popular commodity, Primordial Saronite, and sell it?" Assuming that Primordial Saronite currently sells for 2,000 gold (check your server's AH), and knowing that Primordial Saronite costs 23 Emblems of Frost, we can see that we can easily change each Frost Emblem into about 86 gold each. A player spending 60 Frost Emblems for their tier 10 pants or legs therefore forgoes 5,160 gold, and a player buying the other tier 10 items at 90 Emblems is forgoing 7,740 gold. However, these same players would probably not be willing to work for and spend 7.7k gold on the same gear, or spend a few thousand on an often times better BoE piece.
Since Frost Emblems have been in the game for about 2 months, most players have had time to acquire enough Frost Emblems to make a purchase or two. To most players, the thought of exchanging Emblems for gold doesn't even cross their minds. While tier 10 gear is very good, I seriously doubt the majority of players currently wearing a tier 10 piece or two would have spent 7.7 thousand gold on one piece of gear, yet they are quick to lose the opportunity to have 7.7k gold (which is worth just as much). Consider this - there are boots craftable with 5 Primordial Saronite, plus a few other expensive items, totaling perhaps 12,000 gold to purchase. Hardly anyone has these boots, yet just about every chump has at least one tier 10 piece. Its really silly, especially when two of the tier 10 pieces drop from Vault of Archavon (even in the upgraded version) and Primordial Saronite, like almost everything in WoW, loses value over time. Everyone is buying gear right now, but in a few months, when more guilds will have ICC on farm and Frost Emblems out the wazzoo, everyone and their dog will be trying to sell you some Primordial Saronite.
Instead of being left at a complete loss on why people are susceptible to the endowment effect, lets also look at system justification. The theory of system justification states that people are likely to support the status quo simply because it is the status quo. Everyone is buying tier 10 gear, and having tier 10 gear is held by many to show dedication and skill. As such, since everyone is buying tier 10 gear, the average player will also buy tier 10 gear before making a rational decision. People want to appear good players, even is that means making poor decisions. Most guilds that can't progress past Saurfang would rather have every member purchase and wear a piece of tier 10 before having 130,000 gold in their bank (25 people times 60 emblems times 87 gold). If you can't get people to use consumables regularly and don't have the guild funds to buy everyone consumables, I can't help but find the paradigm hypocritical. People will value how well their character or guild fits into the status quo over rational decisions.
The third effect I listed, hyperbolic discounting, means that people overvalue having something now rather than having something later. That tier 10 piece will help you and your guild progress, but how much do you value progression? Primordial Saronite will be much cheaper in the future when you have a full set of tier 10. If you can get a full set of tier 10 in 2 months, would you rather have 34,000 gold (the value of 395 emblems, the cost of a set of tier 10) after two months and no tier 10, or a full set? After 4 months, you've lost the opportunity to sell while Primordial Saronite prices are high, so you only get perhaps 300g per Saronite. After four months, the guy who sold his Frost Emblems walks away with 34,000 gold and a set of tier 10, while the guy who bought tier 10 first only walks away with 5,000 more gold. Do you value having tier 10 now instead of later at the difference, 29,000g? Probably not, but most players will buy tier 10 now anyway.
This isn't to say that purchasing tier 10 isn't acceptable in some situations. For guilds where every member puts in 100% to maximize their performance, acquiring tier 10 may be appropriate. They are likely to have access to Marks of Sanctification to upgrade their tier 10 pieces and want to squeeze out every DPS possible. To the group, the value of downing a new boss or hard mode is more than the total gold spent and forgone by acquiring best in slot gear. To the average player, the marginal DPS that these upgrades provide won't make or break your group's success and you are better off waiting on drops from whatever dungeons and raid you are running.
So, jump on your alts and do some random dungeons or find an ICC group. Its great money and it won't last forever.
Reader Comments (30)
I must say, I was freakishly fascinated by this and read it twice.
It is weird that i havent seen this mentioned anywhere before now.
I can mention a reason for buying t10 first though. Having it makes you feel good and important, plus it makes it easier to get into groups nowadays when criterias for joining are set by noobs that say "I DID HEROICS AND HAVE T10 LINK ACHI AND UR T10GEAR AND 5500+GEARSCORE LAL OR U CANT JOIN UR BAD" Many of those people are new to WoW and think theyre all that because they have t10, but when you join their groups they fail at moving from fire and deal 2k dps while people with half their gear deal 5k. These dumbs down the game and a big amount of its players.
Huh, never considered that.
Well, right now the Alliance PL Fan Guild is stucked with Rotface, so we need every upgrade we can to be able to burn him.
Plus, I don't consider gold that important. I already have Artisan Riding and Dual Spec. That's pretty much all I need. Having lots of gold is not a bad thing, but ehh... no biggie if I don't have that much.
I can understand what your saying, especially if the Tier 10 BoE items cost 7-8k, but on my server they are selling for around 20k, so personally i dont see the benefit in not getting tier 10 pieces so i can get one of those items, but thats just my opinion.
honestly to me gold has never been a problem so for me i really could care less about selling primordial saronite when they are the current price...ever since BC i have had always at least 5000 gold. i farmed for a while to get my epic flyer on my druid. spent the first 5000 and then got back up to it....i am currently sitting on 34000g and it steadily rises. it would be much more than that if i hadnt bought my chopper and a battered hilt as well as epic flying for my warrior.(thats 14000, 10000 and 5000 respectively). i would much rather have the gear to progress than have a ton of gold that i really dont need that much of. sure i do have 34000g right now but thats mainly because i was doing dailies everyday for months on end with little to buy with my gold save for flasks and repair bills. my gold is really only there for a rainy day or when something that really wows me comes along. thats just me though, i know people despise dailies and would rather get a quick amount of gold....what you can take away from this is, i could care less how you get your gold/gear....play the game how you want
Gold in itself is worthless. It is used only to improve your character in performance or in personal desires. Why one who is involved in raiding would actively choose the gold over the gear that improves their raid performance, is beyond me. By the time saronite is selling cheap, T10 will not be the golden chalice it is now.
True i've seen saronite going for 5k where i'm at though....
Personally, i'm going to side with selling the saronite on this one. I want to start raiding, but fail to have the gold to regem and enchant gear to climb up from the bottom of the "n00b" pile. With 2,000 gold coming in roughly once every 12 days (daily random heroics only, getting 2 badges a day) I could quickly grab all the auction house BoE crafted armor I want (Saronite Swordbreakers and Breastplate of the White Knight for example.)
Good post Boss. Thanks.
My only qualm is that why would someone, who is progression minded, rather have 34,000 gold than the best possible gear in the shortest time slot available. For me I rushed to get my 4 piece T10 and to get the crafted legs asap by running two different alts through as many heroic dailies as possible plus pugging icc 10/25 on each, every week. This was to get my main to be as competitive as possible within the guild ranks. I would feel that if there were people in a competitive guild that were using their saronites for gold instead of min/maxing then they should not be included in this progressive guild over someone who is putting the guild first and getting the best gear. I guess i just don't see the point of hording mass amounts of gold instead of getting good gear.
I'm rich as all hell. Gold ceases to have meaning around the point you pass 25 grand. After that it sort of becomes a blur.
So yes, I would, and do pay 7.5 grand for T10
My problem would be that any upgrades to my current gear, would require rare bop drops from raids or emblem purchases. There's actually very little, in terms of complete sets, that can be found on the AH that I can personally use. Maybe it's just my class/spec and newbness, but trinkets and mounts are the only upgrades gold could buy for me. But if that wasn't the case, I'd certainly go for the gold.
I usually save up my gold for things like mounts and stuff like that, I don't really buy stuff on the AH (as a matter of fact, I don't even bother with it!)
I am not in a high progression guild. I'm in a very very old, very large socialish guild that at this point has a few "raid groups" that aren't really set in stone core groups and we're raiding as low as uld 10 and as high as the first bits of ICC. I don't raid much, I usually get a character to 80, run the hell out of him, gear him up halfway then get bored and start leveling a new toon. I've been playing on my retadin mostly for the past couple of weeks, I've gathered almost enough frosts for a piece of T10 and I was going to buy one... until I read this article.
I had seriously never thought about this before, but I was just following what was fashionable. Every time some hunter in 3/5 T10 destroyed the charts in a group, I would say to myself, "boy the moment I get my T10 set, I'm gonna destroy those meters and everyone will be impressed". Now I realize that in a few weeks I'll probably be back to leveling my druid (62 atm), and by the time he hits 80, T10 or equivalent items could be the fr33 ep1x.
Now I will for sure be using all of my frosts on primordial saronite while it's still expensive. Thanks Heart, you may have just made me a lot of money.
This is an excellent post, one of the best and most informative that I've seen on ANY wow site in a long time.
i want the gold first i just got my t9 all gemed and i want that damm hilt
Like many others before me, I don't understand the argument for selling saronite instead of getting t10. Gold was only ever a problem for me in vanilla, after that some studious dailys and questing has kept me in more than enough gold to buy what I need and what I want. If more gear was BoE I could understand this thought process, but honestly gold can buy very little unless you are bribing someone in a raid.
The Gold isnt real. True, neither is the armour, but gold doesnt get you to raid in icc.
I have epic mounts for my 10 toons, they are all dual specced, and I can buy anything I want in the game. Why would I want more useless Gold? I have no idea what to do with it anymore, since most gold sinks, ie, fancy mounts, don't interest me all that much.
I really don't agree with this at all, much of what is said here is total fallacy.
T10 isn't only worth the amount of the saronite you could have bought instead - it's worth far more than that. It represents a totally unique commodity that can ONLY be aquired through the use of Frost badges. There are very limited ways of aqquiring frost badges and T10 (or, for many classes, the 264 off-tier peices which may be BiS or close to it) is the most valuable thing you can buy. Assuming you are in a raiding guild, T10 or other Frost gear gives you a benefit which no amount of gold can purchase (especially in the case of set-bonuses) in improving your raid performance and whose only alternatives mostly are only available through the random chance of a boss dropping the right drop and that you are lucky enough to be the one to win the roll / DKP bid / be deemed the most worthy by your loot council or whatever. Frost gear is essentially the ONLY way of being absolutely 100% guarenteed to improve your gear that doesn't rely on others.
Using those frost badges to aqquire something you could be spending gold to buy instead is, in my opinion, completely wasting those badges. As you mention yourself in the article there are multiple sources of gold - and it's really not that hard to come by. You can make hundreds of gold quickly doing dailies in Icecrown, much more by farming and vast quantities of it by playing the AH. Ultimately, apart from one or two BOE pieces that may show up on the AH at vastly inflated prices there is nothing you can buy with that gold beisdes consumables (which, quite frankly, don't require a whole lot of gold in the first place and are becoming less important since, unlike gear, the benefits they give haven't scaled over the expansion) and vanity items or items for alts. Your guild may have 130,000 gold in the bank and be able to put down a fish feat each at the beginning of each pull, but if everyone is too undergeared to take down Putricide then it really doesn't matter. A guild relying soley on boss drops to gear up their members will soon find that they run out of all that gold on paying repair bills for all the wiping they do.
If this was the real world and you had to think about retirement plans, paying your mortgage or saving up for your kid's college fund - they yeah, you'd take the gold. But it's not - and gold s fairly meaningless - those people who spend time getting just enough gold to keep them going are doing it far better than the author of this post.
Some comments on Literaltruth and other's posts:
Most things in this game are valued in gold. You can get pretty much anything in gold. The exception is top of the line raid gear. I make the point at the end of the article that yes, if you are working on cutting edge content where everyone is throwing everything they have at a boss, you are probably willing to knowingly forgo a lot of gold in not buying Saronite, constantly regemming, etc. The majority of players are not hardcore raiders and a lot of them really want gold for various things (including non-top-of-the-line gear). The guy who just does random dungeons and sometimes an ICC or ToC pug might want to weigh his choices carefully, as 7k gold can go a long way. It comes down to priorities and conscious decisions; the majority of players would love to have a lot more gold unless other things, llke needing to squeeze out an extra 100 DPS, are worth the gold they are forgoing.
Well, since the release of 3.3 ive spent my frosts on Primordial Saronite bcause my main doesn´t have that much money, im an altaholic and it doesn´t help when in the AH Flask of the frost wyrm is 50g per flask... or 130g per epic gem :P
There is no phenomenon at all here. If you want to talk about phenomenons talk about non-combat pets selling for thousands of gold.
So a player can have 34,000 gold rather than a full set of T10. Great, now what. What will that 34,000 gold do for them? By your logic, nothing. By your logic someone should just keep making their gold and never spend any because EVERYTHING loses it's value at some point.
Advancement is the entire point of the game. Every aspect of the game revolves around some sort of advancement. Gold is simply the means to an end. With tools like gearscore or wow-heroes there is a sense of urgency now more then ever to compete and "keep up" with the pack. People like to feel as though they are "better" than others in some way and having more gold does nothing for one's "endowment".
Maybe if our in-game bank account balances were displayed next to our names above our heads, your article may have some sort of weight but unless someone else actually logs onto your account there is no way for them to know how much gold you have.
I suppose the non-combat pets give people a feeling that they have something rare so that they could show off to others. They would not be a phenomenon either.
"phenomenon |fəˈnäməˌnän; -nən|
noun ( pl. -na |-nə|)
1 a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, esp. one whose cause or explanation is in question : glaciers are unique and interesting natural phenomena."
How can you argue that something isn't a phenomenon?
I'm not reading or responding to any more comments on this thread. If you are saying that buying tier 10 is bought "to keep up with the pack", you are stating exactly what I said. "By my logic", lots of people want gold and might have not thought through their options or made the choice that is best for them. That is all this article is saying; it is posing the question that should run through your mind before making a purchase.
Frankly I'm having trouble trying to figure out those people who barely have enough gold to cover their repair costs, yet somehow had enough to buy gems, enchants, and gear.
I am sitting currently at 22K gold from analyzing how the supply and demand is on my server. It's not that hard, just go to a city and look at the trade chat. When you see anywhere upwards of 10 different people spamming WTB the same item, get it and sell it. Instant profit.
As for badges for gear vs badges for sellables... I'm on the fence. Yes, I want great gear that'll ensure I get into a raid, but at the same time I want the gold to be able to repair, buy supplies, and maybe get a mount or two. I agree though that the gear does not make the raider. A person may have full T10 gear, but unless it's gemmed and enchanted properly, it may not do anything for their raid desireability. A full T10 tank with nothing in the slots of put on the items will lose agro faster than a hunter can FD or MD.
Buy primal saronite to resell for max profit... well, I do have all those Emblems of Frost just gathering dust right now...
cool new la y out