Prior to the first expansion it was a pain to grind gold for regular and epic land mounts. For that matter Verdin and Larus were my only characters to have epic land mount pre-Burning Crusades, and now all but Vulpes have epic flight ( I am holding out for if they make it cheaper >.>). Coming up with 1100 g was not easy (today its 680 g if your exalted ). The first expansion materials that were useless gained value with a few exceptions (level 50 – 60 elemental essences for example used to be a great way to make money, now your lucky to sell any). Materials that often never sold such as peace bloom and other lower level mats now had value for those wishing to power grind a profession on a Draenei or Blood Elf. Or perhaps you wanted to change professions as I did on Verdin, Plec, Rasbora, Larus, and Meriones. I easily spent over 8,000 gold on changing professions. This made it a lot easier for lower level new comers to put stuff on auction house and sell to make gold to buy your faster modes of travel. So by the time you get to 60 your going to want to start grinding gold for regular flight or better yet epic flight. By the time you reach level 77 and if you have not gotten flight training your going to need 2100 – 7300 gold. Icecrown and Storm Peaks are impossible to grind without flight, and in my opinion sluggish if you don’t have epic flight. Most of the flight paths depend upon you doing a series of chain quests in these two northern zones.

Granted if you sell stuff on ah from 1 – 60 you should have enough gold to buy regular and epic land transport. There is always going to be someone that wants to change professions based on its benefits . Much like my friend Inic who took up Alchemy for a trinket (granted Alchemy is the easiest level profession even to 450). I would like to think that I am set on my professions but something new may come out. But I did change out a lot of my professions so I could cover them all

What could have been done is they could have made patterns to lessen the grind from 350 – 375 that used outlands mats. Thus making it too where those that did have 375 in their professions would have less competition with those that did not bother to get their professions past 350. But instead they have taken a big nerf bat to outlands mats and have made them practically useless almost to the point of better off vendored. After all instead 75 points for professions you have 50. Blue quality gems are useless as you started getting points to level from 350 – 360 (skill was orange).

Its been my experience with Vulpes that you can make enough gold off ah 1 – 70 to make enough gold for regular land mount to regular flight. But that was before the cost of outlands mats dropped drastically. I can tell you now that I had a surplus after all my 375 – 450 training on Verdin and buying cold flying training. But there are some zones that have no flight paths til you do quests in the northern zones of Northrend. I don’t think I want to poke along to get from one part of a questing hub to another (though some people like Clouds/Wind don’t seem to mind).

I still want to know why wool never seems to lose value.

But my second gripe is that there is not enough cloth and mining nodes.  Amazlingly while grinding Pandion through two instances I went from 375 – 428 skinning and 375 – 391 leather working with no where near the effort that I have put in my other professions.

Today I was trying to find the website of a  guild site for one of the groups I run with, for a chance at Zul’Aman.  Apparently no search engine has found their forum, or they are lost some where in several thousand results.  Got to love paid search engine results, however that is a gripe for another time.  But at the top of my search results was something of an oddity:

http://money.howstuffworks.com/virtual-tax.htm

Normally I don’t click on strange websites (execept at work where I have to audit servers for bad content), but the search results caught my attention so I read on.  In a nut shell, it talks about taxing virtual goods on the basis of having real life value.  Honestly the only tax I think the government should have a right to is my 12.99 a month I pay (I pay every 6 months for what I consider I rather minuscule discount).  Not something I would like, though in all honesty it is perhaps the only thing I don’t pay tax on.  I could see being charged a tax if I was making some form of real chargeable income, for lets say selling a guide, gold, or even my characters.  After all that calculates into real world value as someone had to exchange money to get a virtual good.  But I am not going to sell my account as it has entertainment value that as of now is tax free (on my monthly fee).   Since I don’t plan to sell my world of Warcraft account it does not hold the tangible value of a house.  Though even if I did my house will be around even if the company that created it goes out of business or moves onto another project.  There is always that looming threat that perhaps the game was just the latest fad and something bigger and better comes along (and perhaps Verdin’s blog switches to another game).  In which case my account with have zero value even if I had plan to sell it.

But that leaves me to wonder how much real world value my account has, so far most of the account selling sites leave me feeling a bit weary of trying their system to get a value as they ask a few too many personal details or details that would take hours to accumulate.   I can’t seem to find anyway of calculating a value.

Though while looking for a site to try and get the value of my account I have come across several sites where parents talk about selling their kids accounts.

http://www.gamermom.com/2006/10/

Blizzard recently announce that you can change your character’s name for a $10.00 fee.  Which honestly seems a bit high to me, especially if I wanted to change more then one name.   I brought up changing Bankous’s name to some friends, but is seems that changing a bank alts name would be a lose of personality.    Some of the people for the name change service seem to think that someone that made a warrior with the name noobsauceftw should have the ability to change their name so when they raid they will have a more plausible name.  Though I tend to wonder why anyone would get a character with a name that sucks past level 10 to begin with.  Making it easier to just delete and start over.   I really have no objection to them doing this service, Blizzard is after all not in this just to make everyone happy.  There in it to make a buck, and I think it would be pointless not to have something of this size and not make money.

I personally would like to see something where you could change the physical look of your character.  That I would be willing to pay $10 to change, though admittedly I made many of my characters under low resolution system.  I quickly realized this after getting a machine purely for gaming and went to the max settings that I my choice of  looks were not exactly what I wanted.  But atleast in the next expansion I can get a different hair style and dance.

Ok I really consider this a bit of a sell out / over kill:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/visa/

Do we really need to encourage people to get into further debt just to get a credit card with a WoW theme?

I never got an answer back

Today I received more spam than ever before I have received, 6 in less then 10 minutes. Everyone of my alts had atleast 1 piece of spam in their mail box. I remember someone suggesting that the gold sellers were using free trial accounts to spam people. If that is the case you would think the best thing to do would be to disable whispers on free accounts. I am not sure if Blizzard takes credit cards for free trial accounts. But the company that I work for offers 90 day trial for web hosting, one way of keeping the rift raft out is manual screening as well as charging a $9.00 refundable deposit. Either way I can see several methods from prevent people from spamming people by whispers, one of which is a time limit between whispers. Perhaps even preventing multiple whispers on lower level characters. After all if they were forced to level to 10 or higher to have whisper multiple people would atleast make them a little less eager to spam.

The joy of it is Blizzard is now offering 10 day trial of Outlands.

The past few weeks I have been getting whispers from some odd ball made up name (perhaps a monkey pounding on a keyboard made them), on how I can buy gold or power level to 60 or 70 with x amount of gold and perhaps a epic mount. It used to be once every few weeks, but now its every hour or more. I am even seeing a increase of spam in my in-game mail. I think an instant fix for this would be to limit the amount of time between whispering of individuals. As its obvious that some automated system is doing this to as many people as it can find on the server. But for some reason Blizzard has done nothing to prevent these people from bugging the real game players. It seems no matter how much Blizzard parades how much it is against people buying gold, the game seems designed to encourage people to buy these services or spend insane amounts of time to generate it. Going to some of the sites that are linked on worldofwarcraft.com you can see adds for money or power leveling. After all the first mod I found was through WoW’s site, and not to mention the countless number of sites related to the game that are also linked to the game site.