Buying Back BoE Emblems

How much emblem gear have you bought, upgraded, and then destroyed? It's an endless cycle of destruction, which I'm sure the NPCs do not appreciate. Their hard work is destroyed over and over. Though I wonder why they hold such a monopoly, that players cannot craft the same. But that's tomorrow's subject.

My alts are mostly 80 and not very geared. Worse yet, they're DPS. This means that gearing up is a slow process of random heroics and PUG raids, neither of which are much fun. I'm a fan of pyramid schemes, which is why I'm a big supporter of social security and the stock market. So I figured, how can I apply this perfectly sound concept to WoW, specifically to my alts?

For gear which has passed the two hour mark of a full refund or been socketed, enchanted, poisoned, or otherwise made unrefundable, instead allow it to be turned back in for 50%, rounded down in the case of odd costs. This makes a reverse pyramid scheme in which each alt passes down fewer and fewer emblems, demanding more badge farming, but thanks to the marvels of accounting, actually calls for less overall farming. It's as if currency was being created from nothing, except without technically being fraud.

For the BoE part, this means that I can effectively sell half my badges. For tanks, this could be a good source of income, possibly enough to bring in more tanks. For DPS, it means they can spend their queue times doing dailies or farming and use that to bump up their badge count.

What would they cost? If we were all perfectly rational, they would cost at least double the equivalent number of gems. In other words, there is currently a 'market price' for badges based on buying gems with them. If we could instead get half that number of badges and sell them directly, they'd have to at least match what we'd get from gems. However there will inevitably be some fraction of the population which regards its badges as free, somehow failing to recognize that the gems would be just as 'free', so they might actually drive the cost below the double-gem threshold. Rubies are around 100g on my server, or about 5g per badge, suggesting a market price of at least 10g for resale badges.

10g per badges puts a wide variety of 232 and 245 level gear at 250g to 750g. For the quality, that's cheap, so we might expect prices to go up. But from months of people running randoms for 2 frost, and a half-dozen unwanted triumph, there are a lot of triumph out there to sell, meaning that early on, people are unlikely to be charging their potential value, and by the time supplies run down and prices go up, the upcoming cataclysm may destroy interest in the gear anyway, perhaps leaving only the heirloom market. 750g for a 232 level item is cheap compared to crafted gear, possibly enough enough that GDKP runs become less appealing, and crafting below the 264 level would likely be ruined.

On the plus side, I could gear up my rogue so much faster.