– Reputation with old factions carries over and it’s something you just got by playing the game. Next expansion it might be hard to max out or even impossible. Try to max a raid faction reputation of an old expansion.
– Removed items carry over like the Naxx drake.
– Your collection of mounts and pets carry over. Try to get all pets available and you’ll see how much work collecting these old pets are. I still have my Winterspring tiger this expansion.
– Achievements carry over. Try to get raid achievements for a raid of the last expansion.
– Your class carries over. You still had a level 80 warrior at the beginning of Cataclysm. If a mage wanted to be able to tank this expansion he would have to level a new char. Yes, he could do that in advance but if gold doesn’t carry over why not let everyone select a new class for her char?
– Your social connections carry over, which is a valuable asset in an MMORPG. If you were a successful raider you have high changes that your raid still exists or you know enough people to get into another raid. For people who haven’t raided in WotLK it’ll be much more difficult to find a succesful raid.
– Your tradeskills carry over. It is incredible expensive to level the “profession of the month” from 1.

You might not care about these things but they exist and they carry over, too.

TBC and WotLK had an inflation of about 1000%. I don’t think we’ll see the same inflation this add-on especially since the daily quest gold reward wasn’t really increased.

But really what I hear from people (and what I’ve noticed too) is that the actual process of making the gold can be fun, but only up to a point. People talk about deleting all their gold and starting again, you could just as easily start an alt on a new server to have that experience if you want it. But there is no real economic endgame and during Wrath, even the interesting part of making gold (figuring out what people wanted, making sure you were providing it, second guessing the other traders) was pretty much reduced to a few macros and addons, and a lot of grind.

I play Wow mostly for the economic fun of it at this point. I am not alone. It’s hard for folks who don’t enjoy that aspect of life to understand it, but for us it’s loads of fun.

As far as a reset goes, sure. And we can also reset your Kingslayer or other titles. I’ve earned the gold I’ve made, just as you’ve earned other and more public achievements. It takes work, thought and planning to earn large sums of gold. Why take that from us?

Certainly the EVE market is more ‘difficult’ if we look at it in terms of what goes into the efficient production if items and getting said items TO the market, but if we were to look strictly at the set of tools the EVE Market and WoW’s Auctionhouse provide (even if we allow for mod’s like Auctioneer / APM) then I see EVE as being the much easier one to manage.

Sure, getting your head around buy orders / sale orders, as opposed to instantly buying/selling (from the aforementioned buy / sell orders) might be initially a little more complex than what the average WoW player is used to, and making use of the Market Data might be a little boggling at first glance, having the options and information available makes the actual decision making process on how to play the market that much easier.

Although even just writing that paragraph, I can see already, I think, why you might consider the EVE side of things to be more difficult.. Still though, after a bit of adjustment it really does make it a lot easier.

Further, I guess for those that just have NO interest in working it all out, they can still achieve the same satisfaction they do now of making some money and feeling they’re ‘beating’ it with the added bonus of now having instant gratification through both purchases AND sales via the orders others have put up.

There should simply NEVER be a way for some folks to impact others game time in a paid environment.

The “Economy” game is painful enough in the real world … I do not need it in my leisure world.

The AH game is just another mini-game that appeals to a sub-group of WoW players, and is easy enough such that most anyone interested in it can “win”. Not necessarily gold cap, mind you, but make enough profit to feel like you are beating it.

It’s genius, really.