Selling Raid Loot
Expenses > Income = No Fun
This is going to be a short post. I’m curious about your opinion on something that isn’t really a new idea and has been around for a long time: selling raid slots/loot for gold.
My guild has posted an offer in our realm forum, where a raid slot and loot can be bought for gold, the raid instance where such a thing could be happening would be Naxxramas 25.
The prices for a raid slot and items that would drop might be a little bit too high. But then again, compared to crafted/BoE stuff in the AH, the deal isn’t so bad. Nonetheless, my guess is that no one or very few will pick up the offer, Naxxramas 25 is just not spectacular enough and our (initial?) prices for the loot might be a tad too high.
The motivation for this experiment isn’t hard to guess. The guild bank pays our repair bills on progress nights and provides flasks. So the guild bank needs money. This would seem a reasonable source of income. But then again, I wouldn’t mind shifting some expenses back to us raiders, covering raid expenses with some farming/dailies is pretty doable.
The reactions in the realm forum weren’t of course all friendly. After all we’re still the new guild on the server and the most progress oriented guild as well, that creates just naturally some envy. And not everyone thinks offering raid slots/loot for gold is cool.
I personally still hope that we might try to sell Sartharion 3D some time, because the title and the mount are be much more attractive than Naxxramas. People DO pay tons of gold for some strange mount. As it stands right now there are still a lot of people who want the drake in my guild, so this might not be realistic to ever happen.
So guys, two questions. If you are a casual player, would you ever consider paying gold for raid loot to a progress guild? If you’re a raider, what expenses do you have to cover yourself and where does the guild helps you out?
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The only thing our guild consistantly covers is food buffs. We sometimes offer flasks and we use mats gained from instances to do cheap enchants from the guild bank but, in general, nothing else is provided – though, raiding three nights a week for 4 hours, it’s really not hard to get the gold to cover costs…
Personally, I would not participate in any run which offered loot for gold – I don’t mind the idea, but I’m not wasting my evening boosting someone to get them some shinies – if I go to an instance on an ‘off’ night, it’ll be with an alt and some friends to have fun, bringing gold into the equation would make it ‘work’ not ‘play’.
/hug
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I understand your standpoint that such a raiding night might quickly turn into “work”, Naxxramas takes some hours and I can cover my expenses with farming some minutes per day only.
The reason why this idea came up was actually our guild alt runs. They are good fun, but not even our alts really need Naxx25 loot. But as soon as we get to Kel’Thuzad everyone suddenly wants to switch to the main char because nearly everyone still needs loot from KT, including me (*cough* voice of reason *cough*). So the background for this idea was farming KT while not letting the rest of the loot get to waste.
I personally come from guilds where none of the expenses would be covered, except maybe the costs for a necessary respec or helping warrior tanks with their repair builds. I don’t mind covering my costs on my own. But still, I’m a little bit curious if anyone is going to pick up on that offer or not.
I would sooo, buy loot, I got alts i’d luv to gear up a bit. I got a main missing a couple pieces and a dps set.
My server never got BT done though, and only one guild attempted sunwell.
GL selling thx.
I would never pay to raid, but I don’t really have anything against someone else doing it, as a concept. It would really depend on if the guild is already geared, and the purchaser isn’t taking loot from a member.
Since I’m a farming girl but I do raid some I would have no problem purchasing an item from a progression guild. If I can get a run to pick up a couple of things I need ..hell ya…I’m all over that.
What is the point in having gold if I can’t obtain the cool things I’d like to have; whether that be gear, mounts or any high end stuff. I’ll still be there in the raid doing my job so I’m working for it but nice to know there is no competition.
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It sounds good, but if I were paying for the service, I would be concerned about some guarantee that I would be getting my money’s worth. I could build a mountain with the number of Defender’s Codes I’ve seen, but other pieces that have refused to drop.
Hell, I’m nearly through with Naxx25 myself and I would pay for another guild (beyond the one I’m that is working on Uld10/25) for loot chances. I also would consider the doing the opposite, hiring myself out, to raise cash once I don’t need any gear.
Perhaps you go go a bit further and personalize the service a bit, perhaps generating EP values on their current gear setup based on the roles that they want to excel at and price based on a certain percentage of those EPs being upgraded. This might help assure players that they are both getting their monies’ worth and explain the value of the service.
Just a few quick thoughts.
First of all – our raid group is rich. I mean 100k gold rich. We provide both flasks and food/consumables for everyone in group but we never ever pay for repairs. Because let’s face it – if you want to raid you need to be prepared to pay some of the expenses. So right now we have bank full of both fish feasts and flasks, Wild Magic pots, Speed pots and other such stuff.
Now where do we get those things from? It started around SSC. We were getting those nice SSC BoE patterns and BoE epics (from Nether Vortexes when they were BoP) and we decided we don’t really want/need them all to be used. So we sold them. Then in BT we sold Hearts of Darkness and we also crafted some BoE items and sold those. From MH we were selling epic gems. And thanks to this in Sunwell on Brutallus we could just give every single one of us enough potions for all the tries we had there (ok, almost all, except for first learning wipes). That was a lot of help to the group.
So once WotLK come, we start selling Abyss Crystalls (100g per one? We could earn 2-3k per night sometimes), BoE epics (1-2k per one, depends when it was sold). This way we gathered during this last 6 months more then 50k gold in bank and at the same time we had 99 stacks of flasks (whole bank tab) in our raid bank (before patch). Now gold drops a bit, but I think we will start earning it back soon – less flask will go on farm nights and we will start selling both patterns and Runed Orbs (I bet around 750-1000g per one at the beginning). We also have good people in group who actually supply us with things like herbs or fish from time to time -> everyone knows they will have access to those when we go raiding.
Now regarding selling spots/BoP loot – I don’t think we would ever need it with such incomes. If we ever do it, it will not be for raid bank for sure – but maybe people who were doing all the hard work could share it and just earn some cash for themselves. But I don’t see it as “unethical” or “cheating”. Maybe getting achievements or titles this way would be -> after all it’s group that kills Sartharion 3D, not some guys with too much gold who payed to be able to die there and we do the job for him.
But I think raid groups have better ways to earn cash these days.