Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit? - Kotaku Comments

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Krellie — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 04:06:53 MST

Look, this is how it works.
I played wow for a long time, and yes, I bought Gold.

I rather spend X hours working overtime at a real job, earning $Y/h (and then use some of that money to buy Wow-gold), than spending X hours in wow, farming gold, thus earning GOLD Y/h.

What it comes down to is that is MUCH more efficient to "grind" a real job, than it is grinding wow-gold. Maybe 10 times as efficient, cba to do the math now.

So, i the end, I dont buy virtual money, I buy time.
(Of course, this logic only works if you DO want to play the game, and enjoy doing so. Everything else would be stupid.)

note: Someone will say "How can you enjoy a game, but not wanting to put hours into it?" Well, I enjoy some parts of it, the high-end content, just not the money grind.

Sorry if this post is abit..off. Just woke up.

Krellie

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Ashton — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:18:40 MST

You guys do realize right that not every person successful in a mmo is a smelly fat loser with no life, right?

There's a very small middleground about it either. There are people with no life who play MMOs every single waking hour, there are people with a decent social life and still play mmos fairly well, and there are those who play football and bang 5000321 women/men per hour and don't play mmos or even do play them.

Stereotypes are for losers :(

Ashton

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

prmckinney — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:24:45 MST

Checking out the exchange rate on gameusd... it looks like this is worth ~21k USD... SELL SELL SELL

prmckinney

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Accelerata — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:01:33 MST

@Wraithfighter: You should get in the habit of explicitly declaring the size of your storage units. Lots of bugs creep into code because people forget what size their variable is and code becomes less portable because the size of "int" etc can vary from compiler to compiler. I use the uint_t declarations precisely for this reason. Fortunately in this case, they at least had an overflow check so you didn't suddenly have 0 or negative money.

Accelerata

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

finder39 — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:54:49 MST

that's sad that that was even figured out. lol

finder39

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

krunkjuice — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:45:28 MST

I bet this guy is one smelly assed WoW player.

krunkjuice

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Irenicus-the one and only — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:13:24 MST

I can't believe the guy doesn't sell it all or trade it. They guy got more then IGE themselves, like a personal sweatshop :P

With that amount he could have a fully epic tier 4 or better character of every class of both factions on several servers :D

I'm jealous :(

I bet Blizz GM's investigated this guy's account more then once, talk about setting off red flags to the GM crew lol!

Irenicus-the one and only

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Torgen got his apology faceplate but not his fixed GH3 disc — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:47:12 MST

@Zimans: That's not actually simpler than "if (4000 < 4200)"

Torgen got his apology faceplate but not his fixed GH3 disc

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Poffy — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 12:05:38 MST

@DefiantBurrito:
Who doesn't like negative money?

Poffy

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Xerxes 8933A — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:19:01 MST

The first one is by no means a bank toon, a raiding holy priest in full tier 6, with the Scarab Lord title, and the Ashes of Alar.
[armory.worldofwarcraft.com]
The second guy, well who knows, the pics been edited to remove all info. Though his bags make him look like a mage, I think.

Xerxes 8933A

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

unmarkedone — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:42:06 MST

I disagree with mass gold farming and online sales that have a big impact on a game's economy, but it is fun to legitimately sell an account for a small profit. In DAoC I split an eBay purchase of gold with some friends that really breathed some life back into the game, and then sold my account later for $450.

Not bad, considering I made back all the money I'd spent on subscription fees and then some.

unmarkedone

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Odin — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:53:35 MST

For that he could potentially pay a high end raiding guild to run him through Black Temple... REPEATEDLY. He could then get the best enchants and gems in his new gear and probably still have a metric fuckton leftover.

Odin

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Camann — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:25:36 MST

an addendum to the previous, I know it's not really million, I just used that to give an idea of the 0's I'd left off.

Camann

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Camann — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:24:04 MST

precisely 80 million in hex. (just used silver and copper as additional numbers since each additional is 100 of the previous)

Camann

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

RabidWombat — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:18:01 MST

@WhiteTree: My guess is that this is to make it so it could be used in conjunction with other signed ints. In addition, unsigned ints are actually troublesome for certain programming tasks, such as a loop which decrements the variable and checks if it's >= 0 (will always be true), even worse if you're not decrementing by 1. Also, if used in conjunction with signed ints, I believe the default C behavior is to cast the unsigned int to a signed int, which causes a horrible mess because it keeps the bits the same, which means for numbers with the most significant bit set, the result will be negative.
I actually had a professor tell us just yesterday that "just because a number doesn't need to be signed doesn't mean that it should be unsigned. In this case, it seems like the gold cap is high enough either way, so there's no real reason to use a signed int, but many not to.

RabidWombat

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Rubiximus — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:00:59 MST

I remember waiting in the Wii line in front of Best Buy. The guy that had the fire (I called him "fire guy Brian") was all into WoW and he was talking about how he'd play the auction house to make the monies. Blizzard emailed him making sure that his abundant sum was not bought from gold farmers.

I guess it means something when you have the dedication to make that much fake money in a game. Probably something to do with how little you go outside. (Course fire guy Brian had a girlfriend and I don't. Shows how much one can gain by staying away from MMOs...)

Rubiximus

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

tk. — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:34:40 MST

Well that's a sight better than the max 255 rupees in Zelda.

tk.

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

WhiteTree — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:32:59 MST

Why is this 2147483648 instead of 2147483647? Zero is one of the 2^31 'positive' values that a number can take on, and therefore the actual number 2^31 should not be included in the range of values ( [0,2^31-1] ). Did they use the representation 0x8000 as the limit and do away with hex representation after that, as there are no negative g/s/c values in this game?

Since there are no negative money values in this game, the programmers should have used a unsigned value instead, giving the game a hard limit of 2^32-1 instead, but I don't think they ever expected anyone to even reach 2^31.

WhiteTree

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

ach77 — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:28:57 MST

Man, I could definitely buy all the primal fire I need for my spellfire/spellstrike set if I had that much gold...I'd even give some to Whoneversleeps for his mongoose enchants.

ach77

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

ShawnC++ — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:16:48 MST

It's a pretty simple concept, the highest possible value for a 32 bit integer is 2147483647, it's also the problem with the Y2K38 problem when the epoch oversteps this bound.

ShawnC++

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

sloner — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:09:15 MST

@Yoshi3gg: Damn, beat me to it. To explain...in games, the limits are generally powers of two because of the way binary works.

sloner

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Project Thanatos — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:08:34 MST

Wow.. and I thought I had no life..

Project Thanatos

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

KirbyMorph — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:06:26 MST

He's also the guild leader of one of the top 10 WoW guilds in the world and they routinely sell runs for loot, making 1000's of gold week.

KirbyMorph

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Arttemis — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:30:13 MST

@pocketcowboy: He is horde: An Undead priest on the Illidan server.

Arttemis

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

pocketcowboy — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:44:40 MST

this toon should stop hoarding the gold, and start pwning the horde on bg...

pocketcowboy

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

LX — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:38:14 MST

@Bleentastic: Actually I'd liken it more to the DLC Need for Speed cars in the PSN store

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

bluesquareapple — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:37:12 MST

@galewind: If you have ever played WoW, you wouldn't put it passed them. They had reimplemented the same bug on a boss at least 7 times that I can recall through new patches. (Shade of Aran flame wreath triggering on pets.) Horrible oversights in coding is common place for WoW programmers.
Properly planning which variables to use was something I learned in my third semester of being a computer science major. I was an avid WoW player and have turned in to just a casual player. It's really pathetic and amazes me how much WoW players put up with..

bluesquareapple

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Zimans — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:22:44 MST

Galewind: c++ isn't old school. It's what just about every video game out there is currently being coded in. It is fast, it is stable, and just about every developer worth hiring knows it. And yes, WoW is written in C++, both server and client.

Zimans

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Zimans — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:20:11 MST

By keeping it as a signed int doing calculations becomes easier as you can deal with negative numbers. For example, if I had 4000 copper (really money is being stored as how much copper you have) and I want to buy something worth 4200 copper, you can test that as if (4000-4200 > 0) {} or if (4000-4200 < 0) {}, etc. If that was an unsigned than the result would be 4294967096 copper, as it would overflow. Yes you could use an unsigned int and have a max twice as large, but by using an int you are covered in all cases. No need to worry about overflow. Besides, 214748 gold is an exceedingly large amount of gold.

Zimans

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

mmr — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:16:26 MST

@pepote: Are you against rich people too? Just because I can buy a Ferrari doesn't mean I have the skill to operate one. Same goes for gaming. Just because you can buy something, doesn't mean it will have any real value to you if you don't know how to master it.

mmr

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

mmr — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:15:10 MST

@EvoAnubis: In a word, yes. It takes time to cultivate the gold and we all know that time is money. In this game gold can actually buy items that are incredibly hard to obtain in the game and because of this are worth more than just the powers or whatever that it gives you. If it took me 10 hours to get something and I make 8 dollars an hour that item could potentially have a real world value of around 80 dollars. Now, that isn't exactly how it works (and I should mention that I have never played WoW) but that is the idea.

I recommend reading "Play Money" which really delves into these things. Its a good read.

mmr

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

galewind — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:14:53 MST

I'm definitely curious as to why they made it a long as opposed to an unsigned long (if they did it in oldskool c++).

galewind

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

That Girl Hates You — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 05:59:41 MST

Geez and I would have thought that it would be closer to a mil....

But I some of highly doubt that this person grinded all that money.

That Girl Hates You

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Toprem — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 05:36:00 MST

Seriously, how are some of you people completely unaware that people use real money to buy in game money? It's been going on for years and sure as hell didn't start in WoW.

Toprem

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Iceman B. — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 05:24:03 MST

So I'm wondering, did this guy play WoW 24/7 to rake in such amounts or did he go about it in a much more efficient way?
I'm guessing the latter but does anyone have an idea?

Iceman B.

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

FP Bleentastic has cake — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 05:16:13 MST

@bluecell: erm spending money on fake stuff you can readly get by working for it in the game = EA new Pay for Cheat Code and pretend to be DLC plan

FP Bleentastic has cake

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

whoneversleeps — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:22:20 MST

I could finally get my mongoose enchants with cash like that... two even! Wouldn't have much left though...

whoneversleeps

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Tei — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:16:57 MST

If you give this dude 2 cents. his gold will result on -1 pennys.

2147483647 + 2 = -1

Tei

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

hamandcheeseUK — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:33:15 MST

@bluecell: It's their money, let them spend it how they like

hamandcheeseUK

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

pepote — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:22:17 MST

If you buy gold (real money for fake money) you are, in fact, buying time: the time you spend in daylies, or time in farming... it's a shortcut to get something (items, mounts, profession lvl...).

I'm against gold sellers/buyers, btw.

pepote

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

almypal — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:10:10 MST

Another good example of how one can be a loser and a winner at the same time.

almypal

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Trowble (XBL/PSN) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:53:01 MST

WoW! What a rich loser...

Trowble (XBL/PSN)

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Tei — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:41:32 MST

Can I have your gear?

Tei

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Infil — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:22:49 MST

Not to take away from this story, but the max amount of silver and copper you can have is actually 99 (obviously). It just so happens that richest you can ever be has 36 silver and 47 copper at the end (ie, the most silver/copper you can hold while simultaneously holding the most gold). Semantics, I suppose.

The limit is to be expected, since it's a typical programmer's choice. But what's ridiculous is that someone accomplished the maximum. Insane.

Infil

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Karmond — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:20:45 MST

This is old. The limit was reached by someone last year (I forget when abouts, but was at least 4 months ago), guess not alot of people noticed it.

Karmond

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

EnigmaNemesis — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:18:41 MST

@bluecell:

True!

EnigmaNemesis

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Bluecell — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:09:56 MST

@psycoking: Cool.

@EnigmaNemesis: The difference is that DLC is a provided extra. When buying things for WoW and other MMOs, you're purchasing things that are completely accessible to you already. You're not spending money on something to add to the game, you're spending money to save time and effort in attaining something that is already made available for free.
You're just lazy.
And presumably rich.

Bluecell

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Flawless101 — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:09:20 MST

they most likely store the data in a 32 bit signed integer, which has a maximum size of 2147483647. So the actual cap could potentially be 214748 gold, 36 silver and 47 copper, or they use that last byte for something else

Flawless101

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

psycoking — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:07:01 MST

@Wraithfighter: "using a signed int will make coding this a little bit simpler"

is typing "unsigned" really that hard?

psycoking

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Wraithfighter — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:02:30 MST

Uh, actually, the gold limit is 213748 gold, 36 sil and 47 copper.

The largest number that can be held in a x bit number is (2^x) - 1. The largest 4 bit number is 2^4 - 1 = 15, for example.

They use a signed integer number probably because they figured "Hey, no one's going to get 200k gold on one character, and using a signed int will make coding this a little bit simpler". I use signed ints in places where I probably should use unsigned ints or shorts. It's a stylistic choice when it doesn't affect anything.

Wraithfighter

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

xnamkcor — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:56:15 MST

@doing: Someone already mentioned it was probably a guild bank character, so it's more likely that the effort was split up between 8-64 people.

xnamkcor

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

psycoking — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:55:06 MST

@bluecell: There are guild banks nows. They just added them last month.

psycoking

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

EnigmaNemesis — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:53:24 MST

@EvoAnubis:

Is it any different that buying DLable content for console games now?

Other than the unethical and against games rules aside, but in general of buying virtual content.

EnigmaNemesis

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

doing — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:53:17 MST

Impressive number but I am saddened by the fact this was achieved from somebody destroying their life, well at least few years of it..

doing

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Bluecell — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:51:56 MST

Some guilds have bank characters (which is most likely what the two players who reached the limit are.) Basically, anything that couldn't be distributed to the guild would go to the bank character to store or sell. Then if a guild member needed materials, items or gold, they could just go to the bank character.

I haven't played WoW in over a yeaer, but I remember one of the top guilds had a bank player go awol and sell his character along with all the guild's savings. For real moneys that is. Around the time I quit they were talking about adding actual guild banks, dunno if they got around to it.

Bluecell

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Devittron — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:47:50 MST

It's not a random number.
They're storing the gold value as a 32-bit signed integer.

Devittron

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Torgen got his apology faceplate but not his fixed GH3 disc — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:47:48 MST

@Yoshi3gg: Odd that they would use a signed int when you can't actually have negative money... can you?

Torgen got his apology faceplate but not his fixed GH3 disc

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

xnamkcor — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:47:20 MST

1G=100S
1S=100C
214748*100
21474800
21474800+36
21474836
21474836*100
2147483600
2147483600+48
2147483648

2147483648=0x80000000

tl;dr=Max Gold in WoW is half of the max permited by 4-bytes of data.

xnamkcor

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

psycoking — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:46:16 MST

Did anyone else check out his armory page? Or am I the only one that bored?

psycoking

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Yoshi3gg — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:45:50 MST

@mishakoz:

It's not random!

214748g 36s 48c
2147483648 = 2^31

Yoshi3gg

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Muisee — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:44:59 MST

Must be the biggest shut-in ever. I have a friend that plays 24/7 it seems since it came out and he doesn't leave his house now.

Muisee

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

EvoAnubis — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:44:29 MST

@psycoking: That's . . . interesting. Um, really . . . wow. Using real money to buy fake money.

EvoAnubis

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

EvoAnubis — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:43:20 MST

@Spallywag: Pay real money for fake money to buy fake shit? Man . . . no wonder I heard about people laundering money in MMOs . . . I laughed when I read about that, but I guess they were actually serious.

EvoAnubis

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

q2on — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:42:18 MST

@mishakoz: That number is hardly random. It's 2^32 / 2, which is 2,147,483,648... the maximum value a signed integer can hold (actually, it's that minus 1). I'm just surprised they didn't use an unsigned integer... is it really possible to have negative gold?

q2on

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Spallywag — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:40:11 MST

@EvoAnubis: Yeah, some people pay REAL money for digital money to buy digital itmes with, if only the same worked with Monopoly money, I'd be rich, I've been hoarding that stuff for years.

Spallywag

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Deltakiral — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:40:01 MST

That guy/girl should sell it and partner.....since they obviously haven't been doing anything for quite some time...

Deltakiral

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

DefiantBurrito — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:39:57 MST

Makes sense - it's exactly 2^31 copper, which is the limit of a signed 32-bit integer.

Why they didn't make it unsigned, I have no idea...

DefiantBurrito

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

psycoking — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:39:54 MST

@EvoAnubis: You can buy wow gold, so I guess it can convert to real money.

psycoking

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

EnigmaNemesis — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:38:16 MST

@La Sepultura:

SELL DUDE SELL!

Nah, not in favor of gold farming ... but that is a lot of gold. WoW!!! Literally!

EnigmaNemesis

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

EvoAnubis — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:37:01 MST

Wait . . . WoW money can translate into real actual money?

I'm not being sarcastic here . . . I honestly have no idea.

EvoAnubis

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

Slayer — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:35:33 MST

That comes to about $9,660 according to IGE.

Slayer

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

mishakoz — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:34:52 MST

what a random ass number.

More like one metric failureton...

mishakoz

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

FP Furious_Liver, lacks independence — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:34:38 MST

This gives new meaning to the weight of one fuckton...

FP Furious_Liver, lacks independence

Did You Know WoW Has A Gold Limit?

NotSoCool — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:33:50 MST

I want his gold! :(

NotSoCool