I've been thinking lately about Cataclysm and how guild talent trees are going to play out. For one, I see these trees being very customizable but also restricting like a normal talent tree in that you have to choose specific talents for specific goals. There will most likely be a 'best' pve spec, pvp spec, but then there will be the hybrids as well.
There will be one hybrid that is going to be focused on making gold, lots of gold actually. Everything from increasing the amount of gold your guild farms from mobs to the amount of gold bosses drop are already talents on the trees, and I'm sure more will be developed.
A long time ago I made a joke talent tree for the auction house, this was before the Cataclysm was announced so the idea was pretty revolutionary. With the onslaught of guild talent points this 'farming spec' or even 'auction house spec' could become a reality.
Imagine guilds for your alts based solely on farming cash... will this destroy the individual aucitoneer? Everything about the cataclysm seems to suggest that blizzard wants to focus on group play... bgs and instances are going to require a guild to be effective and earn top gear. With talent points that boost your income while farming, how could you pass this up as an auctioneer?
Now obviously I haven't forgotten the fact that most of you savy auctioneers use your own single player owned guild banks and guilds, but this will not work in cataclysm. In order to get guild talent points you will need to build up some form of guild points (not yet announced) which will allow you to purchase those precious talent points. Ideas for accruing the points include daily heroics, bgs, arenas, and dungeon clears... how are you going to get all those points solo?
There is one final work around for those of you who do not want to lose your individual selling style and that's the purchasing of guilds already built with talent points and guild points for retalenting their trees (since you'll want to change their pvp/pve spec'd guild to a money making one). How hard will this be? Who knows, all I know is that guild cartels are going to start showing up, and it will be interesting to see what this does to the auction house. These cartels will be able to spend their guild points on raiding consumables and sell those to the various raiding guilds on the same server who might be saving points to buy more talents. The possibilities are endless and the speculation bottomless until more concrete information comes out. Just be ready to start making more friends on the auction house!
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8 comments: on "Cataclysm - The End of the Individual Auctioneer"
Anonymous said... November 5, 2009 at 8:39 AM
I doubt that there'll be any trading of raiding consumables, given that Blizzard have said that any such rewards will be 'guild bound'.
Goth said... November 5, 2009 at 8:46 AM
I have to agree with you philosophy the game seems to be evolving into an Eve type economy that promotes group wealth. The player base still has to accept this transition and if so I will be looking to sell my guild banks - thankfully, I didn't name my guilds LolBankerloL.
Anonymous said... November 5, 2009 at 8:59 AM
I hope you're overestimating the impact Guild Talents will make... I'd hate for the economy to become a planned economy. =P
ZachPruckowski said... November 5, 2009 at 12:55 PM
Even if this is allowed, it'll be hard to pull off. Getting your main guild's glevel up first has to be primary for everybody. Sure, only the top 20 people per week can do that, but that means that in order to do two guilds (a main guild and an alt-banker guild), you need to have 20 characters in each guild working hard, and you need to balance it properly. That's not going to be easy.
I think it depends on what the talents are and how hard to earn the points are. If the talents can be optimized to make gold-earning much easier and hitting the weekly point-cap is easy (everyone spends 2 hours on an alt), then everyone will do it. If it's a tiny bump to gold-making and hitting point cap is a major weekly grind, then it'll be a rare situation. We'll know more when Cataclysm beta launches (February-March is my guess).
"I doubt that there'll be any trading of raiding consumables, given that Blizzard have said that any such rewards will be 'guild bound'."
Well, I could always get the guy to swap into my bank-guild for the run, set him at "customer" rank and manually trade him the goods. Then whenever he's done with the raid, he switches back to his main guild. His guild run may lose out on some points as only 24 official "guild members" are in the run, but that should be a small factor, and not a factor at all for PUGgies.
Anonymous said... November 5, 2009 at 1:19 PM
As a Blizzard project manager (lie) I can fully appreciate your wishes from the new expansion (I have no idea what you're suggesting). I can exclusively tell you that the guild changes will be both bigger than you expect and small enough that it will not impact the way you play (we have no clue what the changes are supposed to do, but Vanessa in product management says they are cool and I really fancy her).
The new expansion promises to give whole new dimentions to trading and profit in the economy, while also ensuring casual players a immersive experience (by which I mean my project brief makes no sense, so I'm just planning to change some buttons and make a new acheivement or two).
The next expansion will bring a whole new lease of life to the game for all players (I'm leaving two weeks before it goes live, and blaming the testers when it crashes).
The economy is crucial to our development and is a key focus (I need a pay increase to impress vanessa, god she's well hot!).
Iiene of Kul Tiras said... November 5, 2009 at 2:42 PM
I don't see how this will make a bit of difference. Except, perhaps put a few extra gold in people's pockets to give to us.
I haven't farmed anything of any consequence in ages. I couldn't care less if mobs or bosses drop more gold.
I expect that the only guilds that will use the system to provide consumables are the guilds that already do that now.
idemise leveling said... November 5, 2009 at 3:14 PM
nice blog! really enjoyed the post!
Anonymous said... November 5, 2009 at 3:48 PM
So far there is no evidence that anything about the guild talent system will have an impact on how we use the auction house. I'm sure that most of us have "main guilds" and "bank guilds" at this point already. Our main guild is where our max level toon(s) is/are and the talents previewed so far will really only have an impact on raiding.
Increased gold drop by mobs? So what? A small percent increase on a tiny number is an even tinier number. I doubt that anyone actually farms mobs for the silver that they drop. I always see mobs that drop silver as kind of a "gravy" perk on top of what I'm really farming. When you add a percentage to a raid boss gold drop, that's the only time you'll notice the increase.
Just my opinion.
-Kiseki
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