Thursday, August 23, 2012

High Pop vs. Low Pop

Hi Guys,

Today I wanted to talk about High Pop vs. Low Pop servers, specifically my experiences with them.  For those of you who don't know or don't remember from previous posts, my main server is Low Pop (until MoP when it'll probably hit medium).  Recently I participated in a gold making competition where we competed on a high pop server.  Since then I have been playing with their AH on and off for fun, and I've learned quite a bit about how size effects sales among different markets, and I just wanted to share some general observations.

Transmog
Being on my Low Pop server and having a large (~800 item) transmog inventory, I get less sales per 48 hour posting  than my character on a high pop server with ~150 item inventory.  This could be due to a few factors I suppose.  There are probably more characters with disposable income on a large server, and more characters interested in transmog as well.  One thing I'm interested in seeing the results of once MoP comes around is doubling all my xmog prices (except my highest tier which is really expensive as is :-P), and seeing how the two markets react.

Jewelcrafting/Enhancement Professions
Since my experiment is mostly for fun, I decided to use a gem strategy similar to what I use on my Low Pop server and see how it worked on a high pop server.  As I don't have a JC on the larger server, I bought up gems I would craft and resold.  As you could (probably) imagine, I actually sold less gems per 12 hour posting on the High Pop as compared to the Low.  This is due to more/faster undercutting on a higher population server, which just makes sense.  Although, when I did dungeons on the high pop, I got A LOT more sales posting in between queues.  iSold was going crazy!  For a regular player who posts from their main, a High Pop server will give you a distinct advantage for repost sales, but I can't say it makes a huge difference from a small with "set it and forget it" auctions.

Inscription
In this one I have a clear favorite.  Small servers.  If you are the type of gold maker like me, you aren't logging and reposting all the time, you either want to enjoy the game time you have, or other aspects of your life, and want to get your routine done and over with.  This is where glyphs on a small server blows large servers out of the water.  Even if you have a competitor or two, it's nothing compared to what you have to face on a large server.  You can make lots of gold not having to repost so often, and that's great for me.

Advantages of my Second Server
If you're someone like me who enjoys making gold just for the "how much can I make" aspect of it, you don't like spending gold on your main server.  If you're a hardcore gold maker you'll find it easy to get on a high pop server and start making gold relatively fast.  Although I had an extra kickstart of motivation to make my characters, I look forward to using this character to purchase high-end TCG mounts, rare pets, etc. that will be account wide in MoP.  Why spend all that gold on your main server when you can get it on another server you are not interested in?  Also even though I have the utility to make gold on that server, I don't have anywhere near as much utility as I do on my main server.  That being said when Black Market AH comes out in MoP I'm not going to be depending on my secondary server to buy things (nor would I want to, especially in the case of something like gear).  So having a large gold stockpile will be functional (maybe).  What is your favorite (or least favorite) difference between low and high pop servers?

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you like my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!!

4 comments:

  1. I enjoy low/medium population realms. I find monopolization to be a lot better source for gold than the others, and it doesn't work well on a large realm. Requires a lot less time too than converting cheap mats to expensive goods with a hundred different professions.

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  2. I only have one real competitor for glyphs on my low-medium pop realm and no real competition for the transmog market (both Alliance and Horde side). I recently added a toon to a high-pop Role Playing realm to test the transmog market there and found that I made less on that realm. This is mostly due to the high volume of people posting auctions so I quickly get undercut for half of my auctions. The prices tend to either be much lower or much higher then my low pop realm, but the variety of items available is so much greater. I see rare items every day that I have only heard existed and may never have actually been seen on the low pop AH. The other main difference is I get a lot less hate mail (mostly from twinks I think) on the high pop realm since I am just part of the mass of people posting and not the lone monopolizer of the AH.

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  3. I think in terms of purely making gold a super high pop realm is proabably best because of the amount of gold coming into the realm every day, quests, daillies etc.

    If you take a look at wowuction it will show you top 10/15 Auction House values for your region, the biggest realms always have the most amount of gold flowing around in them. Prices tend to be lower on high pop realms because mats are cheaper.

    I sometimes get emails from people on really tiny realms and my advice is reroll on a bigger realm because if your realm has like 20-25k players on realmpop then you are going to find it extremely tough to make gold there.

    However if you are an altholic like me then you are probably stuck on whatever realm you are on, unless you want to invest time/money into RAF'ing or just money in server transferring all your alts.

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