Someone on my YouTube channel left a comment yesterday claiming that transmog is worthless. While some people just rage that "lol greenz can't sell for 500g!" his basic point was more thought out; while transmog will sell on any server, it's only really a viable market on a Role Playing server where there are enough people transmogging to drive sales. As goldmakers this is an important thing to consider and I think we would all agree with that on the surface, or at least we would agree with the general rule of thumb that "Transmog sells better on RP servers." However I don't know of anyone who has delved into the topic analytically to find out if it's actually true or if it's just hearsay. So let's do that now!
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Before we see how many individual pieces people buy, let's look at actual mogs they wear at any given time, which is the driving force of the issue. We'll study how many people actually take each slot of their gear and transmog it and then see if there a significant difference on Role Playing Realms. While there are 11 moggable slots if you include the duel wielders, some classes only single wield, so I lumped together "Weapon" into one to simplify for a total of 10 moggable slots. i.e.Fury Warriors who only mogged one of their two maces got counted as having a total weapon mog.
I looked at a large sample of toons on each of four different servers: my home realm Tanaris (PVE- Ally pop 54,000), a large pvp server Darkspear (PVP - population 171,000), and then two popular Role playing servers Earthen Ring (RP - population 48,000), and Moon Guard (RP - Ally pop: 89,000). Before we get into the important analysis, there are a couple unimportant things that I learned inspecting a couple hundred toons, like:
- You'd be surprised how many mog just the hands
- You'd be surprised how many mog just the belt
- Heroic raiders go all the way or nothing at all
- PVPers never bother mogging their equipment (except of course for their weapons)
- The majority of moggers actually have a pretty decent sense of style, or I have none.
Results
Ok, on to the good stuff. after looking at all these toons, the total mog rate is higher on average for RP realms (some rates were the same or lower on Earthen Ring). Combining everything, 43% of the population on PVE/PVP didn't mog anything at all, while RP servers had only 23% completely unmogged. Interestingly though, when you take those people out of the sample, both RP and PVE/PVP players both mog exactly 54% of their available slots. and those that mog do so in the following priority system:
1. Weapon 80%
2-4. Head/Shoulder/Chest 70% (RPs order is Shoulder/Chest/Head with head devalued but let's call it a tie)
5. Hands 62%
6. Legs 58%
7. Waist 53%
8. Boots 52%
Something missing from the list? Oh right! Well the Legendary cape quest chain absolutely KILLED the cape transmog market; only 6% of people have a cape mog right now. Come to think of it though, cool cape transmogs might be something to stock up on for Warlords of Draenor that a lot of sellers might not have once everyone starts hitting 100 and the 608s become obsolete. #SadDay
Conclusion
Moggers mog the same no matter where they are, however there may be more of them on RP servers, although not as overwhelmingly so as the grapevine may lead us to believe. If you're looking to enter the transmog market, focus on things near the top of the list and ignore capes and bracers, and be wary of boots and belts. Don't server transfer to take advantage of the phat mog markets on another server though, because that is mostly a myth. Although, we may need to do another test looking at sales data...
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