Thursday 30 October 2008

Gold statistics need to be made private

Finding it hard to post these days, as I have mid-term exams in a week, but I thought I'd make a quick one. I did my first full run of Kara last night (despite having been level 70 for the better part of this year) and it turned out pretty good even though I lost my internet connection for 15 minutes. I got a couple drops and had a fun time with the guild I recently joined. I did think the chess event was a bit of a mess, but turning into little red riding hood was the highlight of my night. I also finally got to Exalted with the Thorium Brotherhood, and I would recommend you all avoid this faction like the plague, it set me back thousands.

I mentioned before that I'm a big fan of the achievements system, and anytime I'm doing something mundane in a city, I'll right click the person nearest to me to compare our achievements. I was trying to fish in Ironforge when stumbled accross something in the Statistics section of achievements; there is a vast amount of information you can find out about another persons finances within the game. A quick browse showed the following details;
Total gold Acquired
Average gold earned per day
Gold looted
Gold from quest rewards
Gold earned from auctions
Most expensive bid on auction
Most expensive auction sold
Gold from vendors
Gold spent on travel
Gold spent on barber shops
Most gold ever owned
Gold spent on talent respecs
Auctions Posted & Purchased

Personally I have a number of problems with this information being shared. The most basic one is, once the beggers notice this, they'll certainly crawl around cities targeting people they feel have the money. A minor inconvenice sure, but still annoying.
Also I've come to think of the WoW Economy as something based on real life, and in real life the social norm is that your finances are you own private business. It's usually frowned upon to enquire about someone else's income, and usually a bit boastful to just mention how much you earn.
Also the paranoid side of me thinks in-game scammers or even hackers will make use of this information. It's a bit of a stretch to think someone could hack into your account once they see your gold totals, but I'd rather not share this data with every WoW player who walks past me.

On the other hand, for my own use these statistics are great. I'm sure it will help alot of users "balance" their books, and make sure their daily outgoings atleast match their income. Maybe you could challenge yourself to an average daily income level?
I did find it funny that my bank alt was out doing my main in a number of categories. I was also happy to see that I've sold 600g worth of items to the vendor already since the patch. Most of these items were bought at lower than vendor prices at the auction house (I'll share this little nugget if you email me).

Have you guys made any use of these statistics yet? I know I previously used add-ons for this, but the data was less reliable and varied. I'd also be interested if to know if you think I'm being overly sensitive on this data being made public.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hadn't realised they were public knowledge... I don't like that.

Sure give us the facility to link the info to people of our choice... but not random beggers and hackers

WoW Trader said...

Yeah I forgot to put that in my post, I'm hoping they change it that you can make certain things in your Stats private. Or simpler still make stats private, and achievements public.