Playing wow for gold? Nope

There is a spot-on post by Tobold which questions those players who play to acquire in-game currency (Optional Economies). It’s not that playing to get large amounts of gold is not a valid goal – it is; but some players do not care at all for the economies. It resounds for me as I am one of those players. Gold is just another token to get to the other end-goal.

With so much concentration on efficient gold farming and selling around, its good to see a blogger outlining that non-gold approaches are not silly. Playing for gold to me seems silly; I’d be better off working another job if I wanted to acquire extra money in my spare time. I don’t – I want to relax.

How wealthy are your characters?

The findings of a wow wealth survey were published by Golden Crusade recently, and it indicates some interesting things about how much gold players in wow have. It also has some stats on how many of the respondents did some of the nefarious activities like botting, buying gold, item duplication, and some other deeds not well likes by the terms of service.

Essentially there are some very rich players in game, but the typical player is not even close to as wealthy as the raw average might indicate (i.e. median value is far lower than the average gold amount).

In summary:

The World of Warcraft Wealth Survey 2012 ran Sunday, October 28th, 2012 through Saturday, November 10th, 2012 and collected 11,344 usable results. Given these results the study found:

The average player gold is 302,593

Median player gold was 80,000 gold

81.63% of players are below average

If you’re feeling the pinch of being constantly using all the gold that you generate then I’d say you’re not alone. Most players are in a similar situation, where they are gradually building wealth, rather than hyper-building wealth quickly.

81% of players (not characters) are under the average of 300k total, and that 39% of players were under 50k. I know many players who are happy with 15k.

I sit typically in the middle of that range, where I think 30-40k total is not enough to have flexibility should I need it, but over 100K is far more gold than I think is needed for my typical game-play.

Funny that the numbers line up a little isn’t it. Would I like more gold? Sure, but I know I’d spend it right back down to the level I have now, as amassing a huge amount of gold does not offer a radically different play experience from what I am enjoying now. I have a repair mount, two legendary items, 4x character with epic flying, and all sorts of minor toys and purchased and craftable gear.

A large bank-roll is a good and worthy challenge for players, but essentially I do not know of anything which requires 500,000g to complete.

The survey findings are worth reviewing. Happy Killing.

The Cub is almost irrelevant

There is banter abroad about the USD $10 in game pet that can be traded between players, and yes, its a variation on what was happening before. The card game prizes and all sorts of other items could be traded between characters before, and this adds another way, which is admittedly far more obvious and direct. Tabards, mounts, special toys, flags, and a huge array of other junk are already available for purchase via ebay. It has not wrecked anything. This is another item with no actual impact on gameplay being sold.

Overall though the people this will impact the most is the people who are buying and selling gold – and if you’re doing that you really need to be quiet and sit down.

Take these scenarios:

1. Player who wants the pet, and buys it from Blizzard. Cost $10, with no impact to game.
2. Player who want the pet, and buys it from the AH using gold. Cost: a sack of gold depending on the market. and still no real impact to the rest of the community.
3. Player who buys the pet to sell on the AH for gold. They give their money to Blizzard instead of a illegitimate company, and get the sack of gold. they’ll be looking to sell it on servers where the cub is rare, and hoping to clean-up. Tools like the Undermine Journal will be great resources to see where it is best to sell this little kitten.
4. The gold buying player who previously used an illegal service, will now consider what the likely value of the Cub will be, and decide to either buy gold, or buy the cub. I’d like to think that this will mean less gold purchases overall, but I am not sure. It will certainly change the price that gold sellers will charge.

It could be argued that the impact to other players is the value of that sack of gold. As if their is a flood of buying and selling, the overall value of gold will change. Yup, dead right – it will. It’s been changing since day one, and will continue to change. An end game BoE used to be a few hundred gold, which was a huge amount of gold. A player with 1000g was amazingly rich in the old game. Now players have huge amounts (probably between 20k-200k gold) and we have entire sub-sets of the community focusing on gold generation as their core gameplay.

I’d stagger a guess though that the value of the sack will still not be a game changer. A game changer would be just letting a player buy a sack for money direct from the vendor.

This is not real money transactions, and I can’t see how it will affect my game-play at all..

You’re an idiot if you think that BoEs were not being traded for real money before (I know that calling potential readers idiots is a bad thing, but really c’mon) via indirect methods, and this change makes it more likely for the buyer and seller to use the Cub as a form of conversion.I know for a fact that it used to happen because an ex-guildie offered me real money for a nice blue helm once, and I was very tempted.

This is not breaking the bank, and is only going to hurt those who were dodgy to begin with.To my mind this only makes the gold sellers job more difficult, as the players can now circumvent a large part of their offering.

Bad for the bad sellers, good for the developer, and good for the player who was previously buying gold as they get gold from a legitimate source.

Tanking for Money

This is a simple one – When you tank in LFD you get around 80g extra, some points that you may not need (so convert to BoE gear) and the chance at a pet. I’ve been selling the pets for a reasonable amount of cash, and making some ok gold.Thus far a few more common Alliance pets (30-50g), a few rares (1000+g), and two Horde pets that hopefully sell for a reasonable amount (3-5k each?).

So the daily grind is not so bad in tank land. It is not a 1000-2000g per hour strategy, but being paid a little extra to suffer through the LFD is good. Pity the lowbie tanks don’t also get the reward – my mid 70s Warrior could use some extra cash too.

Happy Killing.

Farming the AH for raid gear, p2

Well it has been three weeks since I thought to start gearing up, and my effort to gear up via making a huge pile of cash from the AH is not going well. I’ve increased my gold total by about 3k. Given that the gear I want to buy costs ~60k, I’m a long way short. Only 60 weeks to go at this rate (shudder). I have had some very expensive expenses as I spend gold on mounts, gear changes, glyphs, and all sort of other strange items. In terms of income the figure is more like 5-6k, and I’ve been spendthrift.

You see I’ve not really changed my (poor) analysis methods, or started converting materials into items to re-sell. Part of my hesitation is that I may need some of those materials later, but really it is because I love to horde mats.

I’m a womble at heart.

I’ve looked at the current craftables that are performing well for which I have patterns, and there is money to be made. There is also however a slowly closing window for this opportunity as more players enter the manufacturing market, and the demand drops off as players buy what they need. The real burst time for profit is probably past, and now it is about considering the goal vs the cost.

When I thought that the mats could be redeveloped into around 40k of gold, that meant that I could get a fair way along my goal – which is better gear. But then the gearing through the dailies is reasonable, and the rep rewards are very solid. I think a better approach might be to do the same effort of slowing building a gold base, but spending that gold on rewards that are ever decreasing in cost is not something I want to rush.

e.g. A really smick one handed axe was selling for upward of 35k, and it now sits around 22-28k depending on the day. That is a very large drop in price in a short period.The axe is BoE drop, so there will be more at a steady rate, and the demand will decrease.

So I continue to ponder options and review what items to craft. My mats are steadily increasing and via the odd bargain, some clever use of mats, and some questing I think I can maintain a steady growth of my gold base at around 1k per week – after all the repairs and upgrade costs are included. That is an OK way to play for somebody who only really gets online 2 nights a week.

Happy farming.

A Gold Beggar Made Me Laugh

A few days ago a gold beggar made me laugh, but not because of what they did, but because of the circumstances around their efforts to spam folks.

We were happily wasting our time in game, when a guildie named Genowen piped up on vent that she was getting personal messages from a gold beggar; but what made these different is that they were in full sob story style. Almost propper RP style.

I chuckled and we kept playing. About 10 minutes later I get this:

I actually laughed out loud, Genowen would certainly ignore a beggar and it made the experience a little less like spam and more like a real story.

Quick Tip: Gold for beginners

Because I am an alt-a-holic with a short attention span….I started a toon on a server where I have no others, and was worried about the cash flow. Initially it sucked not having any cash for the 35-50 silver items that would make questing a little easier.

Now that I’ve spend a little while leveling Herbalism to around 170 and Inscription to 150, gold is not an issue. Some very cheap Glyphs sell well. 20 minutes of farming can make you 8-10g. For a low level toon that is a frigging fortune. There is no excuse for gold begging.

I bet Ulduar repair is the new gold sink

Quick thought, the new gold sink that I’ve discovered is repair bills. I wonder who is the biggest contributor to the pain?

Well the wow stats site would normally tell us, but it appears to be missing some name data. My hunch is that new 3.1 bosses and items are the things missing.

Gold beggars are not very bright?

It would be interesting to know what the hit rate is for begging in Warcraft. Given that people still do it, somebody must be feeding these guys with money? Maybe its part of  a mini-game for them.

Imagine a guild or forum based around screen-caps of people giving them money. Like a strange form of social engineering testing, where he who gets the most gold by begging is the “Master Beggar”.

But I doubt its that cool, organised, or intelligent.

Another idiot named Hartlessq on Nagrand begs for gold. What did he think would happen?

I’d normally blur out the names, but in this case I’m angry. Hartlessq the Death Knight is only the most recent ass-hat to beg money from one of my characters. At 58 he has more than enough levels to make money easily. I guess he doesn’t really know what tough love is.

Am I broke yet?

Power-grinding my Mining and Blacksmithing is a huge and expensive undertaking, especially as a lot of players are doing it. Price change over the last week has been huge. I’ve decided to pause this process until the market bloat slows down, which I hope starts shortly. Basically I’m blowing huge amounts of gold on trying to do this the quick and dirty way, without actually mining anything. Copper Ore are expensive and Silver Ore is just insane.

Here is the other solution: everyone just stop! Go play chess, go outside, whatever. I don’t care. Leave the AH alone, stop leveling your DKs. Leave the server and all the mobs to me.

Its all mine; mine! My precious…

Observations and Intollerance of Players

Warning: This is a rant. Skip if you dislike strong language and intolerance.

There are a few types of people who grind on my personality. Not just the folks who mildly  perturb you; these are people who you’d cross the street to slap if it wouldn’t mean jail time.

In “game” the odd/irritating players are pretty easy to stumble upon, and the really painful ones are easy to stumble upon but can’t be silenced by a palm to the head. You’ll see them bouncing around begging for gold, or making asshats out of themselves in trade/general/lfg as you move around them to quest.

Dancing on a mailbox is so last week

For those guys seeking a good source of money in early levels, try parking a few alts in front of the Stormwind Bank. Then join General and Trade, and watch the human wall of noise. Every now and then somebody will yell for signatures for a guild, which on my server can go for 1-5 gold each. Its nuts, but my three bank alts have made me about 15g in the past week without trying.

When I think back to having 5g on a level 6 toon, that was a huge amount of money.