Trading Post Inflation

Table of Contents

• The Data
• The Graphs
• Proposition: Rusted Tender
• Conclusion
• Other Notes

To many, it probably isn’t surprising to feel that the Trading Post has consistently felt expensive. In this post, I want to explore why that may be, rising concerns about the future, and possible solutions that could help assuage worsening feelings.

The Data

In this post, I will be referring to this spreadsheet as my source of all Trading Post prices, Tender, and other sources. They are all linked within the spreadsheet, including the original Blizzard posts as well as the various tender values such as from Plunderstorm and store packs.

Looking at the data, it’s pretty obvious that the totals have gotten higher - in fact they’ve nearly doubled in some aspects. The total cost of all items (including returning ones) in this month of August 2024 is the highest it’s ever been by a rather large margin, just 60 tender short of 10,000. Having a few expensive months isn’t really out of the ordinary, perhaps even expected. However, what’s probably unexpected or even misunderstood is that, for both new and returning items, the average cost of an item has actually gone down by a fairly decent amount. Technically, you are capable of buying more items each month compared to the months of January 2024 and before. So what’s going on here?

The thing is, the amount of items themselves have gone up pretty drastically per month, going from the range below 20 items in the Trading Post per month before July 2023 to the 20-30 range by the end of 2023, and nearing 30-40 after April 2024. August 2024 sees a total amount of items at 42, almost 3 times as much as it was in February 2023. And this may be even worse if you’re a new player who has never had the chance to earn the past items, or took an extended break (which the term “new player” may even apply to here, as they’re just simply players who missed the content).

It should be no surprise that the thought of “FOMO” (fear of missing out) comes to mind with this - that you need to be subscribed to the game and do the content to get these items, even if it’s relatively easy to complete. We’ve even seen many store items cropping up with limited durations, only to return later on the Trading Post temporarily for even more Tender. While Trading Post items have become cheaper to buy, and even far more numerous, the actual income of Tender has remained relatively unchanged. And this is the key to all of this - income.

The Graphs

In order to really observe this, we have to take a look at what the graphs of the data show.

What we can observe from this data is that the total cost, both of all items (blue) and new items (red) have gone up drastically since its introduction in February 2023. Sometimes the cost went down a bit, but on a trend, it went up overall. Meanwhile, the income of Tender per month (green) stays relatively low. There were times when it fluctuated, usually with the introduction of expansion purchases or in-game shop packs, however it usually reverts back to a flat line of 1000 Tender. And that’s the key here. The income hasn’t changed, but the total costs have risen. To compensate, I believe Blizzard actually adjusted the prices on average.

The actual cost per item has gone down drastically since February 2024. On Average, items used to cost over 300 Trader’s Tender, but as of late are closer to around 220. With an income of approximately 1229 Tender per month, you should be able to buy on average 5 to 6 items, whereas during 2023 you could buy about 3 to 4. In that sense, our income of items themselves has gone up. This is actually a good thing, but there are other factors at play in all of this.

These are the total amounts of Tender anyone could ever possibly have obtained if they never spent any compared to the total amount needed to buy every single available item on the Trading Post. Undoubtedly it’s on purpose for a player to never obtain every single item, but what is clear is that ratio between these values greatly increased. The trend would suggest this discrepency will only increase. So while individual items are more affordable, the total amount of items and the total amount of tender needed for all items on average has deviated further away.

The total cost of new items divided by the average amount of Tender obtainable, via store packs, ingame, expansion purchases, etc. This shows that in February 2023, you could have bought approximately 50% of the items on the Trading Post. But by the next month, you could only get roughly a third of the items. This has slowly steadied out to the current day, where roughly 23% of the items can be attained from the Trading Post. If this trend continues as time goes on, you will on average be able to buy even less of a percent of the items, unless either the amount of items decrease, the prices per item decrease, or the income increases. Bear in mind, this assumes you’ve been able to obtain and afford every single Trader’s Tender pack and have been actively earning Tender since February 2023 - and that’s the other point I wanted to make here.

New players, returning players, and any other sort of player which just simply hasn’t/couldn’t take advantage of obtaining Trader’s Tender. If you started playing currently right now, you’d be behind by approximately 21350 Tender, and that value will only increase as time goes on. A veteran player will always be about 100 items ahead of you, with no form of catch-up. This isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself per se, but it can be demoralizing the more you think about it. This probably wouldn’t stop a player from interacting with the Trading Post, but it would make the player feel a bit worse. I believe this also fuels the feeling of “FOMO”, where you need to stay subscribed, pay money, and further pay as much money as you can on the most expensive expansion packs and buy all store items in case they go away and come back at a Tender cost. I can’t really speak as to whether or not this is all truly intentional - I think to some degree it is, but I’m not sure if I’d go as far as to describe it as “predatory”. However regardless of intent, the fact of the matter stands, many players increasingly feel that they have fewer tender to spend, despite objectively being able to buy more items per month. I think there is a way to assuage this, at least somewhat.

Proposition: Rusted Tender

I want to preface this by saying, I don’t really care about obtaining absolutely every item and having more Tenders than there are available to spend. This system can work, and works the way it does for a reason. It is something a WoW player can never fully finish 100%, and that’s okay, but I believe there is a balance to be struck. If you had a system where you’ll never obtain 90% of the items from it, that just simply doesn’t feel great, further exacerbated if you’re a player who’s fallen behind with no form of catch-up.

So I propose the idea of “Rusted Tender”. This would be another currency, separate from Trader’s Tender, that acts as a catch-up. The catch is of course, veteran players can’t earn this currency unless they took a break, missed a store pack, or are otherwise below the maximum amount of Tender possible. Additionally, this could only be used specifically on returning items, not new items. For example, if you didn’t buy Dragonflight, that’s okay, you can instead get 500 Rusted Tender. This currency would be obtained by doing additional activities on the Traveler’s Log, as a secondary “fill the bar”. In addition, perhaps a randomized “completion reward” could be assigned. At this current point in time, it’d still take a player approximately 19 months to catch up to a veteran, so it’s still something to work toward. You can’t just earn 20000 Rusted Tender over the course of the month, so it still incentivizes fundamentally playing at least sometimes.

The “Rusted Tender” as stated before can’t be used on any new items, but instead at a vendor set up with old returning items. These could be items purposefully set out of season, or completely, truly randomized, or simply a selection of the returning items for the current month.

It’s not exactly a new or revolutionary idea admittedly to “just grind more Traveler’s Log points”, but it would work, and it’d help at the very least close the gap between veteran and new players, as well as players that just simply can’t/don’t pay for store items. Considering for a while now the cost between the total amount of items and the total amount of new items has been greater than 1000, and a supposed cap of 1000 Rusted Tender, this can actually work with very little actual adjustment to the current selection of items.

Conclusion

Truly pleasing the playerbase is just utterly a sisyphean task, but I still think there are areas that can be improved about the system which has been extremely popular since its introduction. I still look forward to each month to find the new items available. I know there’s still a lot of them slated for their eventual addition later that I really want to obtain. But I can’t help with the nagging feeling that I run lower on Tender every month, despite being rather frugal with my spending, stockpiling for certain months I know will have items I want, and knowing that items on average are cheaper than before. I think perhaps having a bit of an increase of Tender each month for everyone will help just a bit with the immense gap between compounding tender cap and total compounding items. The fact of the matter is, even if the amount of Tender we could obtain doubled continuing on (a cap of 2k per month), we’d be still be drifting further away on the “Tender Values Compounding” trend, and that really isn’t ideal.

This solution also only really benefits long term players, however, and that’s why I also believe Rusted Tender is truly another aspect that needs to come into play regardless of helping close gaps. In a way, I guess I’m saying players should probably be allowed to take a break from the game without the fear of falling behind on Tender. Allowing players the feeling that they can at least take a break for even a month or two and catch up later goes a long way toward player satisfaction.

Other Notes

Much of this was pretty much calculated on my own. I’ve tried double and triple checking my work, my math, the correlations, and of course assembling lists of Trading Post historical data repeatedly. I even found some small incorrect numbers and bits of data that changed some of the numbers a bit. But to the best of my ability, as far as I’m aware, all data is correct.

For my graphs, I used this data below. It’s the same data as in the spreadsheet, but rearranged for it to be useable in graph form.

Thanks for reading, I hope this was at least informative. This isn’t meant to “insult the devs” or whatever, it’s simply to point out what I believe is a problem, point to the pain points of a system, and potential fixes to it. Putting blame on a person doesn’t really accomplish anything, and I legitimately just find this sort of stuff interesting to explore regardless of the issues (even if it is what initially caused me to investigate).

---

• ← Previous Post