World of Warcraft Gold Limit Reached, It's 2^31

Mitch writes "Blizzard apparently used signed integers for their World of Warcraft gold values as some people have recently hit the limit of 2^31. "Apparently that amount is 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper. After you reach that lofty sum, you'll no longer be able to receive money from any source in the game. While some responses to the original posts claim that this exact limit had previously been theorized to exist, there have been no reports of anyone in the game actually achieving this amount via legal means." I guess Blizzard didn't expect anyone to ever get close to that much gold in game."

Not really correct

[pipatron]

A signed 32-bit integer can not store 2^31, but 2^31-1, which would be 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 47 copper.

Re:Fiat money causes inflation in WoW?

[Merkuri22]

There's not a real economy in WoW, per say. You get most of your money from quests and kills, which is pretty well-regulated (in the sense that lower level mobs and quests give lower amounts of money, and there's a limit to what you can kill and loot), and you spend most of it in NPC shops. The only semblance of an economy is the auction house and trade channels.

The fact that most of your money disappears into NPC shops with set prices keeps inflation from happening.

Re:So, how does one accumulate that much gold?

[calibanDNS]

Do you have any gathering professions? I can make 100+ just buy selling a few stacks of adamantite ore (plus the eternium and gems) that I get from mining in a short amount of time. When my first (and only) toon hit 70, he already had about 3000g mostly from the quests going from 60 to 70. On top of that, factor in daily quests which give you ~12g per quest, which you can do up to 10 of per day; 12g * 10 = another 120g per day per character.

2^31 ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not great with signed integers, but wouldn't it make sense for blizzard to use a 32 bit integer, thus

2 ^ 32 = 4,294,967,296 / 2 = 2,147,483,648 - 1 = 2,147,483,647

It seems like the story and summary are wrong

Re:Fiat money causes inflation in WoW?

[Tango42]

I also don't play WoW, so I'm not sure how (or even if) they combat inflation, but I know other games get round it by removing wealth from the game in the form of wear and tear on equipment. Anything consumable would also allow wealth to be removed from the game, although if it's easily created (food growing on trees, say) it won't make much difference.

There are all kinds of other ways you could remove wealth - NPC's charging tolls to cross bridges, say. Anything where something of value disappears from the came will compensate for the increase in money supply caused and equipment caused by new players and monsters.

Re:2^31 ???

[Cillian]

An unsigned integer would indeed be 32 bits, i.e. gold limit of 2^32-1, but they are using a signed one - one of the bits is a sign bit. Therefore half of the range of values is "lost" to negative values. I think.

Re:So, how does one accumulate that much gold?

[hitmanWilly1337]

How do you defeat he who has no life? And I can see it happening with the new guild banks.

Re:News for nerds, stuff that matters

[QuantumLeaper]

Very true, and here is a link to the most likely gold farmer, I mean character, based on names in the screen shot.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Illidan&n=Zxtreme [wowarmory.com]

Re:Thats worth around 6500$

[Dr. Evil]

Selling WoW gold is against game policy. Blizzard can take it all away from you if they want to.

It'd make a risky day job.

Re:Fiat money causes inflation in WoW?

[Talla]

Since the money is fiat, i.e. not backed by a fixed standard in the game, have people seen monetary inflation causing price increases in the game, or has the population of players offset any growth in money?

My experience from the horde side of the server Aerie Peak is deflation on grinding items (particularly from mining and herbalism), and inflation on very rare (epic) items. Too many people have learned the auction house trick of buying to keep prices up. That kept the prices artificially high, and too many people took up herbalism and mining. Suddenly everyone was flooding the market, and prices more than halved in a month. Relatively little gold is taken out of the market by Blizzard, though, so when an item a lot of people really want becomes available, the prices can get very high.

Re:Duh

[ZeroFactorial]

The range for a signed integer is 2,147,483,648 to +2,147,483,64_7_ (not 8).

The negative range always extends one higher, since zero uses the first "positive" value.

I call fabrication. And I call O.o for slashdotters not realizing this sooner.

Re:Duh

[mysidia]

Signed integers are used all the time for strictly positive values. For most purposes it is more convenient to just utilize the standard signed integer, and perform range checking to ensure it's positive.

(You need to range check unsigned integers too, it's not as if switching to an unsigned integer relieves you of any problems, other than that it increases the 2^31-1 limit to a 2^32-1 limit.)

The player should be thankful that the only consequence is they can't receive more gold from other players, rather than finding they have a _VERY_ negative amount of gold (less than zero).

In many C based programs, your gold would overflow and drop to (-2^31+1), -2147483647, since the C programming language doesn't offer the programmer any exception handling mechanism for overflow detection (overflows are silently allowed to happen), and game developers don't necessarily anticipate such extremes.

Re:Thats worth around 6500$

[baynham]

You can grind gold (repeatably kill certain mobs) and sell their drops on the AH. You can make anywhere between 100-200G an hour depending on how good you are and how many mobs there are to kill.

I believe these guys were raiding SSC and TK (high level instances) for drops which can be sold on the AH for around 1000G. Also once you reach such a high level you don't have much to spend your gold on.

Normally people that farm gold live in countries where the national wage is low - And so the term "Chinese gold farmer" is used. I would suspect they make around $4-6 an hour.

Re:Thats worth around 6500$

[Anonymous Coward]

With the optimal gold-grinding tactic you're still earning little more than a slave's salary, that's why all gold-farming businesses have their workers in china.

Re:Hmm

[Jack9]

A. This is not the "first time" the limit has been reached. The article is inaccurate.
B. The reason it's a signed int is so that GMs/Developers can alter Gold amounts and either, not have to worry about setting or INTENTIONALLY set a player's Gold to a negative. If you have negative gold, you cannot gain any (gold effectively disappears, barring log analyzation). Simple logic there.

Re:GuildWars Limit: 1000p + 100p per Character

[Anonymous Coward]

Since GW has been out for nearly 3 years, that's just over 2 hours a day.

Re:Fiat money causes inflation in WoW?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not usually a grammar nazi, but this is going to get you in trouble in the real world. It's per se. It's Latin, and its native English equivalent is "in and of itself".

Re:Duh

[Detritus]

You are assuming binary two's complement arithmetic. That isn't always the case. Also, the programming language, or it's implementation, may opt for a symmetric range of values.

Re:Get a life

[Gewalt]

You could also invent a new technology out of pure evil greed for money and still be extremely contributing to society, though.

That is PRECISELY how Bill Gates got knighted.

Re:Fiat money causes inflation in WoW?

[xouumalperxe]

Also, there are a fair few mechanisms that remove gold from the economy: repairs, reagents, auction house fees...

Re:Duh

[BinaryOpty]

No modern programming language or CPU uses anything but 2's complement integers, so I don't get the idea behind your post.

Re:Duh

[Detritus]

Better not tell IBM.

How about COBOL, PL/I, BASIC, REXX, Common LISP, Visual Basic, Java, Ada 95, Perl, and C#?