What Blizzard's Warden is doing...

If you never read anything else on this blog, you should read this. I'm serious.

4.5 million copies of EULA-compliant spyware

WoW Statistics

If you haven't seen it already, take a look at the World of Warcraft Statistics Page

"This page provides you with up-to-date statistics about some of the most important aspects of World of Warcraft: most sought-after items in the Auction House, most common player-created items, the fiercest killers in the NPC kingdom, most gathered and found items, most looted items, and the most popular quests."

It was interesting to see that the 7th most gathered item was Shellfish which is gathered during the search for the big iron fishing pole. You get 55 silver for turning in 5 of them so it's not a bad way in itself for mid 30's players to make some gold. How long before it gets nerfed?

Making Warcraft Gold - Worth it?

If you have a high level character it's pretty easy to do an instance run or to use mining or herbalism to make a decent amount of gold.

The problem is if you only have characters below level 40. You can trade the AH for some decent gold and can probably make up to 20 gold for an hour of effort once you know what you are doing. If this is enough, that's great but what if you need 400 or 500 gold for some serious twinking? I was browsing some of the gold sellers recently and they are offering 500 WoW gold for about $70. This means you are effectively working for $2.80 an hour or less.

Would you take a job for $2.80 an hour?

If you would, then carry on. If not you may want to consider buying gold. This is against Blizzard's TOS and could, in theory, get your account banned. I've never heard of this happening but there's always a first time. The trouble is there are a lot of dodgy people out there that will take your money and never deliver the gold so you have to be careful. A friend of a friend :) told me that Guy4Game and BroGame both deliver the goods. Don't tell anybody I told you, ok?

Drool

Check out the specs on this PC Made specifically for WoW

Finally the WoW Online Gaming PC ™ has arrived! Because WidowPC is run by gamers, many of us are involved in the most popular game in history - World of Warcraft! We can't count the number of times that our friends have asked us to build computers for them that will run World of Warcraft with great performance, but cost them as little as possible.

This motherboard represents the best bang for the buck, World of Warcraft and MMO gaming platform from the industry leader in gaming motherboards. The A8N-E is supports AMD's famous socket 939 Athlon 64 dual core processors which are the perfect high performance, high value processor for online gaming.

An Apology from Blizzard

Recently banned users who were using the cadega emulator have received an apology from Blizzard and a 20 day credit.

In consideration of our error, we are applying a credit of two weeks play time onto your account, in addition to crediting back the time that your account was locked. This comes to a total of twenty (20) days credit, which should be visible on your account within the end of the week.

Credit to them for admitting and rectifying their mistake but maybe they should be a bit slower to ban first and check afterwards next time.

Trick Auctions

I'm describing this more as a warning than a way of making gold. I personally find it unethical but it's your call.

A number of people have started putting items in the AH – usually enchanting or tradeskill items - with a very low bid and a ridiculously high buyout price hoping that buyers will see a bargain and get so excited that they click on the buyout button by mistake

For example, as I write this there are Large Brilliant Shards, which normally sell for about 3 gold, on bid for 20 silver and on buyout for 99 gold. If somebody clicks on the buyout button without thinking they lose 99 gold and all sales are final. If you bid the 20 silver you will find that the auction gets canceled about 20 minutes before the scheduled end, so no bargains there.

Maybe the Chinese gold farmers are fed up with grinding :)

Be careful where you click.

Make Love, Not Warcraft

Fascinating article on the making of the Southpark episode featuring WoW.

South Park recently aired an episode involving World of Warcraft in which half of the show featured custom machinima footage. Machinima.com was given access to key members of the animation staff in order to find out more about the creative process behind the episode.

Blizzard banning Linux users?

Disturbing news at TransGaming that Blizzard may have started banning Linux users:

I think that perhaps one of the new "anti-cheat" mechanisms that Blizzard implemented can wrongly flag linux/cedega users as using banned software.

Shadowfang Keep

I recently started to twink a level 19 rogue for the battlegrounds and decided to equip him with two Assassin's Blade. Unfortunately several other people had the same idea and the only two available were priced at 400 gold a piece.

The dagger drops mostly off the boss mob in Shadowfang Keep, Archmage Arugal. This instance is intended for groups in their low or mid 20's with the mobs ranging from 19 to 26 elite.

In an attempt to save myself 800 gold, I sent in my level 50 hunter to investigate. Obviously he didn't get any experience but neither did he suffer an untimely death. In spite of pulling 6 mobs at a time, he never went below half-health thanks to his trusty companion which he calls simply “Dog”.

Did he get the dagger? No, in spite of running the instance four times it didn't drop. However he did come away with packs full of blue and green items on every run. It seems that the fashion is to twink level 19's on both sides and the gear for this level is commanding a premium price. Even for pretty average green items I was getting 2 gold a time. One blue item, Shadowfang, fetched 220 gold.

For the four runs, which took me just over 3 hours, I made slightly over 330 gold. Over 100 gold an hour.

If you can disenchant, you can also recover enchanting materials from the bind on pick up blues. It's also a great instance if you have skinning as almost every mob is skinnable.

The Lameness of WoW

An article on slate.com The Lameness of World of Warcraft makes some good arguments against the grind in WoW and for some customization and a changing storyline.

Burning Crusade Release Date

Blizzard have announced the release date of The Burning Crusade expansion:

Blizzard Entertainment® announced today that World of Warcraft®: The Burning Crusade™, the highly anticipated expansion to the world's leading subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, will be in stores on January 16 in North America and Europe.

More on cross-faction pets

I've mentioned selling cross-faction pets in the neutral AH to make some easy Warcraft gold previously. If you are Allianace, you can sell Kittens (Cat Carriers) purchased in Goldshire. If you are Horde, you can sell snakes purchased in Orgrimmar.

These both cost 50 silver and sell for about 4 gold in the neutral AH.

The only problem with this is that not everybody visists the neutral AH. On some servers this is almost unused.

But what if you had a friend who played the opposite faction on the same server? Or indeed, if you have 2 accounts. You can pass any item to each other through the neutral AH and sell in your normal AH. You just sell these pets to each other for cost and make a big profit in your own AH. I've seen kittens sell for 10 to 15 gold each in the Horde AH and snakes selling for 8 to 12 gold in the Alliance AH.

Don't have any friends playing the other faction? Or maybe you don't have any real-life friends at all? :)

No problem, Blizzard are offering a free 10 day trial to anybody. Just enter an email address and it's yours. Your "friend" can easily set up an account for 10 days and pass a few dozen pets over to you for 50 silver each during the free trial. You then sell these over the next few weeks for 10 gold profit a time.

Entire WoW Guild banned

Blizzard have banned an entire Horde guild after they were found using an exploit to remove walls.

Pantaloons, a member of the Overrated guild thinks they deserved the ban

"We are the only US Horde guild that clears Naxx, been like that for a few weeks. People found that the pre-C'thun trash was so painful, that they decided to install some stupid thing that deletes walls or something, and you can just run there after Skeram. "

Can I have their stuff?

Easy Warcraft Gold for Horde

I made over 24 WoW gold yesterday with my level 4 Horde warrior.

I'm sure you want to know how, so...

I bought these few items in the Orgrimmar AH and from vendors in Org:

Schematic: Red Firework from Sovik near the engineering trainer. Cost 18 silver each and I bought 2.

Crimson Snake from Xan'tish who wanders around the Valley of Spirits. Cost 50 silver.

Recipe: Savory Deviate Delight cost 1.5 and 1.0 gold in the AH. 2 purchased.

Savory Deviate Delight from the AH, I forgot to make a note of the price but I think it was close to 50 silver a stack of 20. I bought 2 stacks.

I took these to the neutral AH in Booty Bay. You can get there via the boat from Rachet. I had an entertaining journey through the Barrens at level 4 and died once or twice, but that's another story. I put these items up for sale in the Booty Bay AH:

Schematic: Red Firework - sold for 5 gold and 4 gold. Total 9 gold.

Crimson Snake - sold at 1.5 gold.

Recipe: Savory Deviate Delight both sold for 9.5 gold.

Savory Deviate Delight sold for 3.4 gold for both stacks.

Total sales were 32.9 less costs of 4.36 plus AH cut, which is steep in the neutral AH (15% I think). Total profit was almost 24 gold for one day at level 4.

Remember that you can do this day after day. Weekends are better but you can still sell plenty during the week.

Who needs a higher level for twinking?

World of Warcraft Encyclopedia

WoW Encyclopedia now online - races, factions, languages and a whole lot more. The official World of Warcraft Encyclopedia.

Trading Enchanting Materials

I covered how to use disenchanting to make Warcraft gold in an earlier post. Taking this one step further it’s possible, and easy, to make plenty of gold without ever leaving the AH. You can do this by trading the enchanting materials you would normally place straight in the AH.

I’ll illustrate this with an example using Greater Astral Essence. These normally sell for about a gold a piece on my server. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes there are twenty for sale, sometimes only two. When the supply goes down, the prices go up. If you study the market for a week you will easily see big price swings as supply fluctuates. I’ve seen them go from 50 silver to 3 gold over the course of a week then back down to 50 silver.

If you are willing to think ahead and hold the stock for a couple of days you can easily double your WoW gold each week.

Sometimes people will put them on the AH at a bid only without a buyout. Nobody want to wait to buy the mats to enchant their twink rogue, so the stuff with no buyout gets ignored. I’ve seen these go for as little as 10 silver for those willing to bid and wait.

The great thing about trading enchanting materials is that there is no AH deposit. Not a single copper. Since vendors won’t take them the AH won’t ask for a deposit. It’s a risk free trade, buy at 50 silver (or whatever the low end of the range is on your server) and put them straight back in at one gold. So what if it doesn’t sell. Nothing lost.

Remember that Greater Astral Essence is only an example, there are many others such as Greater Magic Essence, Lesser Astral Essence, Lesser Eternal Essence, Small Radiant Shard and many more. As you get more gold, trade the higher priced materials. Turn 5 gold into 10 with a few clicks of the mouse.

The Warcraft Diet

How Greg lost 41 pounds in 90 days playing WoW.