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."

Re:Get a life

[Aladrin]

To everyone saying "Get a Life": What have you done lately that's worth a shit? This doesn't apply to anyone who didn't say it, by the way. Only those who think they are so special that they can tell others to 'get a life'.

I'll give you a hint of things that aren't worth a shit: Playing video games, playing real life sports, drinking, partying, watching tv, watching sports, upgrading your car, buying new toys, buying a new car, hiking, camping, getting married, having a baby, buying a house, and much more..

In fact, anything that doesn't improve the life of the world in general, you can pretty much put in the 'not worth a shit' category.

That seems harsh at first, but playing WoW is how these people have fun, and everything listed above is how other people have fun. Unless you've donated significant money to charity, donated your time to charity, cured a disease, or otherwise improved the world in general, you have no business acting all high and mighty.

Do I claim to fit in the 'worth a shit' category? Not at all. But I don't go telling others how to have fun, either.

Re:Thats worth around 6500$

[teslar]

So I wonder... how long does it take to get 6500$'s equivalent in WoW gold? I.e. how many hours do you have to work for that money and how does that compare to a normal job? Are you earning like an executive or are you on minimum wage or less?

Re:Thats worth around 6500$

[karl marx is my hero]

That's the current market rate for it. If he floods the market all at once with that much gold, he's likely to get much less than the current market rate.

Re:Signed?

[Ciggy]

Probably a programmer not really thinking about it, or didn't really expect the limit to be reached, used "int money;" as opposed to "unsigned int money;".

Thinking back over the code I've written, I've often used "int " (where int is 4 bytes, signed) when I should have really used an "unsigned int " - of the code which is still in use and for which that will be an issue, it'll be about 2037 before the problem really crops up and I'll be retired; as will, I suspect, the code (though the source is available to anyone who is running the code to fix it if they require).

Re:Fiat money causes inflation in WoW?

[Tango42]

The stock market is far from a zero-sum game... otherwise the indexes wouldn't change.

Re:Get a life

[Aladrin]

It used to just annoy me until someone suggested I should actually go take a hike instead of playing games. Not like 'get lost, loser' but actually take a hike. Like that's somehow better for -anyone- if I do. That's when I realized that entertainment is entertainment, no matter what the form. (Assuming it doesn't actively hurt others, of course.) Why should some hiker feel special because he hikes instead of playing video games?

FWIW: I played D&D twice and found both groups to be complete morons. (I know there are non-moron D&D players out there, but I have yet to actually see them play.) I played WoW for about 2 months before I got bored of it. I'm a gamer, but I can't stand to sit in front of the same game for months at a time grinding. The game has to be interesting, not just a time-sink.

I'm just bloody sick of people getting all high and mighty because they don't play games, and then going and sitting in front of the TV and watching Friends or football.

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

[Imsdal]

It took me > 2400 hours of casual gaming to (...)

I'm not sure spending 2400 hours on any one activity can be referred to as "casual"...

A conscious design decision

[digitalderbs]

Presumably they didn't use a 64-bit integer to save on bandwidth costs.

Re:Get a life

[phoenix321]

To sum your post up: "Life is only worth more than human excrement if you rather selflessly helped poor and needy people."

Come out of your ivory tower and then do something that is "not bad for most people". That's ususally enough to do your part on making the world a better place. You could also invent a new technology out of pure evil greed for money and still be extremely contributing to society, though.

"Private vices, public benefits" is the keyword here. It doesn't matter if you get filthy rich while really actually improving life for everyone. Filthy rich, greedy, grumpy old bastards can be better to society than the most philantrophic people, because we don't just need people to help people, but also money, knowledge and technology.

I'd rather fear those people that claim to do good for all. They usually end up *forcing* all others to do the same.

Re:Fiat money causes inflation in WoW?

[dscowboy]

A "Gold Standard" version of Wow would simply mean there is a fixed amount of gold in the world. Since none of the NPCs actually exchange gold with each other or function as anything other than animated figurines, any gold-giving NPC would permanently run out of gold at some point and any gold-receiving NPC would constantly increase their inaccessible stash.

The reason there's no massive inflation in Wow is two-fold:
1) Since player actions are what generates gold, the amount of gold in the world is roughly equal to (the number of players in the world) * (the amount of gold-generating work they are doing). Gold-supply scales perfectly with player-supply.

2) NPC item prices are fixed and don't respond to the 'market'

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

[Rogerborg]

Why would a commercial farmer would be hanging on to gold rather than selling it for $$$? If it's not worth selling at its current price, why keep farming at all, as it's unlikely to rise in future.

Re:Get a life

[patrik]

But...
Playing sports improves your physical endurance.
Working on a car improves your knowledge of mechanics, electronics, etc.
Hiking a new trail every week lets you see new things in the world.
Getting married and having a baby is procreation (do I need to explain how that is useful?).
Going to school and getting a degree means being smarter, richer, better of in all ways. (I know you didn't mention this one, but this is the #1 thing I see people screw over for MMORPGs)

Self-improvement is not worthless to one's self. Sure it's worthless to the world, but you have to balance civic "worth" vs. personal worth. WoW offers almost no chance for self-improvement. While you can argue the social aspect of the game gives you a way of meeting new people or interacting with old friends, it turns out that most people when offered an anonymous mask act like drama queens and morons, so even that aspect is quite limited.

But I'll agree with you that WoW has about the usefulness of watching TV.

Re:Umm

[spikedvodka]

Ob: None of you guys are parents, are you? I have a 2-year old son, and yeah, kids are expensive, and you lose sleep. but I wouldn't trade him for anything in the world

Re:Get a life

[Major League Gamer]

Will WoW take care of you when you are old?

Will our kids?

Re:Get a life

[Subtle Matter]

Bwahahaha! And you're that former high school football player driving a forklift at the WalMart distribution warehouse for $12/hr at age 40, while I'm working for Google! Who's laughing NOW?

The former high school football players working at Google. You can be smart, physically fit and well socialized. It just requires more work than the average "lazy jock" or "lazy geek" is willing to put in.

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

[Affix]

By far the fastest way of getting gold in WoW is to sell arena points to other players. The process isn't very complicated and just involves bringing two arena teams to a very high rating, inviting a large amount of point buyers to both team, and have them win-trade back and forth. Using this method you can easily have 9 point buyers per team, per week. The initial time investment is rather large as getting two teams to a competitive rating can take 5 or 6 hours. But once you're done with that part, you never have to do it for the rest of the arena season. At the moment, we are doing this with 4 teams. Buyers typically pay anywhere between 600 and 800 gold every week. With 4 teams, that is as much as 28,800 gold per week. This number is typically split between the players that leveled up the teams, but that's still over 5,500 gold per week, per person. Note that the time investment for doing more than 4 teams does not go up by very much. I spend about 2 hours a week arranging games. If I were to expand this service to 20 teams, I would spend about 15 hours a week finding buyers, and I'd personally rake in 41,000 gold per week, reaching the gold cap in 5 weeks. The market for point selling is a strange one, as it is one of the few skill-based ways of farming gold in this game. A very small population of WoW have the ability to get teams to these ratings (we're talking somewhere above the 98th percentile of ratings), and then have the willingness to spend the time selling points week after week.

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

[Kalroth]

One does not get that much gold. But that's the good thing about MMO's, you're rarely ever alone.

The first screenshot in the article is of Zxtreme, a guild master of the Blood Legion guild. http://bloodlegion.com/wow/ [bloodlegion.com]
I believe this is the first guild to reach the gold limit and it was done simply through trade of rare items in the game. It is the money from the guild bank he is showing off.

A regular WoW guild got anywhere between 40 to 60 active players. If you take the gold limit of ~217k and divide it by 40 people, then it's only about ~5500 gold per player. I currently got around 8500 gold on my account and we got members in the guild with 20-30k gold on their accounts.

This article is a lot of fuss about nothing, gold in WoW has devaluated by a lot since the expansion pack.

Re:Get a life

[Lord Ender]

Will WoW take care of you when you are old?

Will our kids?

Have you been in a nursing home lately? They just lie around and watch TV, or have the same boring conversations with each other over and over. By the time I'm in a nursing home, I expect to have a PC with a large selection of multiplayer online games. I expect games like WoW to take care of a lot of my social and entertainment needs when I'm old.

Re:Duh

[shutdown -p now]

The reason why int is often used instead of unsigned int in C/C++ is also because of its weird mixed arithmetic rules which require that result of any unary and binary operator is unsigned if at least one of the operands is unsigned, which makes very little sense for common (small) int values - e.g. on a typical 32-bit platform, (4u / -2) == (4u / (unsigned)-2) == (4u / 0xFFFFFFFEu) == 0. These sort of mistakes can be hard to spot and catch, so it's often safer to just do everything in signed. See here [google.com] for more examples.

Re:Fiat money causes inflation in WoW?

[Tango42]

I buy a piece of wood for £1, carve a statue out of it and sell it for £10. Before I carved it, I owned a piece of wood worth £1 and the purchaser owned money worth £10, that's a total of £11. After selling it, I own money worth £10 and the purchaser owns a statue worth £10, that's a total of £20. That extra £9 is new wealth. It didn't previously exist.

Prime.

[Tatarize]

True, but 2^31-1 is so much cooler. It's prime after all.

Re:Fiat money causes inflation in WoW?

[gronofer]

In those cases, someone gives you currency, and they become poorer, wealth is then exchanged into your hands. Poverty is a direct result of wealth.

If they give you currency and get nothing in return they would become poorer. But since you are selling them something, which they value more highly than the currency, they become richer.