Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

My Auction House Addiction

I had quit playing World of Warcraft for the most part around April of last year. I had been heavily raiding and my guild was working on 25man Yogg-Saron in Ulduar. We were probably the 2nd or 3rd guild for Horde on our server. Though that is not saying much because Bleeding Hollow, while populated, is still a back water server. The #1 guild on our server was only about #500 in the US and they had the top players so that the drop off between them and all other guilds was quite significant.

I just could not taking committing to raiding so much each week. Between 25mans and 10mans and working on getting the raiding achievements, I burned out. After four years of heavy raiding, I burned out hard. I am honestly surprised I lasted that long. I had taken a couple month long breaks in the past, but I always jumped head first back into raiding. I never closed my WoW subscription since I liked to occasionally pop on and talk to people and see if anything interesting was going on, but I never really played much. When patch 3.2 was released, I did the dailies for the coliseum so that I could get the Crusader title, but then I stopped playing again. In my time off, I explored many games. I went back to LotRO and I played Wizard 101, Aion, as well as spending a little time in some single player games.

World of Warcraft's patch 3.3 changed everything for me. It hooked me hard. I absolutely love the three new 5mans and have had a blast with the dungeon finder. I still have not formally returned to raiding. I have done the Coliseum once in 25man and once in 10man, the same goes for Onyxia. I still have not even stepped foot in the Icecrown Citadel raid. One thing that caught my eye like never before has been the Auction House.

I have never been good at making money in WoW. In vanilla WoW, I had my epic mount but I never really had more than a couple hundred gold at a time. I remember having 500g and staying at that for a while made me quite proud. In Burning Crusade, I bought epic flying for 5000g as well as paid 4000g for a Sunwell engineering goggles recipe. Other than that, I stayed around 1000g most the time. In WotLK, I have most of the time just hovered around 1500g. I did get addicted to dailies for one month and made the 13000g+ needed to make the motorcycle mount, but after that I burned out on dailies and never went above 1500g again. When I came back in patch 3.3, I had about 5g to my name. I have no idea what I ever did with all my gold, but it was gone.

When returning with patch 3.3, I decided to give the Auction House a shot. In my 5 years of playing WoW, I had never put a major focus on the auction house but now, I finally get it. I got up to about 500g from using the dungeon finder and used that as my base capital. Between ammo, enchanting mats, and enchanting scrolls, I was up to 4000g in about a week and a half. I then realized I had a level 70 warlock alt that I could be utilizing. The warlock was at 375 herbalism but nothing else. I spent 4500g (I had to borrow 500g from Rynala) and power leveled my warlock to 450 in Alchemy. I sold the potions, flasks, and gems that I had made while leveling alchemy as well as continuing in my other markets and was back to 5000g within a week.

In under one month of the patch, I had essentially made 10k gold (though the 4.5k was spent on alchemy) and it did not take nearly the work that the relentless daily farming did. By the time Christmas rolled around, I had 15k between both characters. Visiting family in early January stopped me from being able to log on to WoW and when I came back, I put a bit of time into Darksiders and Mass Effect 2. I spent a bit of time playing with the auction house, but it was not my focus.

As of this post, I have 25k gold between my two characters. I know it is not a lot since so many people are at the gold cap nowadays, but this amount makes me proud. It is more money than I have ever had at one time and though the economy in game has slowed down after the post patch rush died out, I still have a steady cash flow coming in every day.

My loftiest goal would be to reach the gold cap by Cataclysm, but I do not think that will happen. Even if I just reach 50k or even 100k gold, I will be happy. I am tempted to start buying things that I could never afford before like one of the Dalaran rings or one of the 3-person mammoths.

I know the real money is in Jewelcrafting and Inscription, but I do not have the patience for either of those. I have seen people like Gevlon or Tobold using inscription and listing thousands of glyphs a day. It gives me a headache just thinking about it. As for now, I am happy with the business I have and I am addicted to getting more gold.