Income/Outcome

I'll update my wallet tomorrow, that will be a full seven days to show progress. Today, lets focus on money making mentality. We know where money comes from, we've outlined the flow of money in and out of the server. So let's consider how we get it in between it's creation and destruction.

We know people who think Daily Questing or killing monsters are not rich. Yet they are bringing gold into the server. This is good. Now, what would they need money for? We could make a long list, but specifically lets look at a conceptual breakdown of percentages. I asked several level 80's on my server to break down their wealth page for me:

People have acquired hundreds of thousands of gold in their lifetime of playing their 1 character.
The average is 30,000 to 150,000 gold depending on character age.
The average player posts 1 auction per every 4 they purchase.
The most gold a player ever had at one point consistently hovers around 5-6k. Only one exception was significantly more.
The average gold earned per day fluctuated with time spent playing, which made sense. This was 50 G to 300 G.

To make a list of the silly things they buy, that we cannot profit directly from:
Dual Specialization
Extra Mounts
NPC reputation items / enhancements
Travel
Talent Tree re-specializations

Everything else is fair game!

This is illuminating (even though my sample base was too small to make concrete assumptions). We see people making thousands of gold, yet never keeping any of it. So they are spending it! They make a median value of 175 gold per day, and it's being spent somewhere! It's not all just repair bills either, we can usually write off repairs as costs eaten by raiding income. We also learned that most people aren't very savvy with the AH, at least not to the point where they are making as much money from it as they spend. 1 auction posted versus 4 auctions purchased means they are putting gold back into the AH instead of destroying it or drinking it or smelting it into their armor.

They also never saved enough gold for anything more than their flying mount!

So we have encouragement to post auctions up now, because people buy them! we have learned in order to make money, we need to buy less auctions than we sell. Of course, costs of sold vs purchased are a factor. Did you know I never buy a single thing from the AH ever? That makes me a horrible person for the profit of others, but does great things for my own wallet. Thinking thrifty, instead of 'yay I have 600 gold i can buy something' is key to making money. It's not just the production of income that matters, but keeping it!