One year ago in Legion I
made a post about Battle Pets I thought were worth investing in with the expectation of the typical inflation we've been used to. Unlike the last several expansions Blizzard handled gold much differently in BfA and reduced the flow of raw gold to players through things like missions and added more gold sinks through things like the AH mount and even just bonus rolls. This resulted in the relative buying power of gold increasing and the gold values of a lot of items decreasing, known as deflation.
I recorded the current US prices of all the pets in the list, the token, and a couple random pets to get some extra data. The average gold value dropped 22% over the last year, while the token price dropped by nearly 40% in the same time.
Here's the data on all the prices if you're interested. The last column is the change of prices last year to prices today:
Even though my investment suggestions turned out to generally be a loss at least we still got data out of it and a look at the impact of BfA's deflation even if just on a single market. I do wish I recorded the region quantities of each pet at the time as that would be useful in seeing how that changed over the year. If you're wondering why I recorded the prices manually it's because nobody records pet prices or data longer than a few weeks including both the TUJ and TSM websites.
If you lost some gold from my suggestions I'm sorry, it's a good lesson that investing is always a gamble even when it seems obvious! Remember, never invest gold you're not willing to lose and I'm sure I bought more of these pets than anyone else and still have tons of them in my guild banks.
BfA's deflation was a surprise for sure and maybe a little too far, but I'd argue it's better for the overall health of the game. It's good that they finally put some thought into the rampant inflation year after year. I just hope they turn it back on a little to encourage players to buy more pets and other 'luxury' items ;)
