WoW Rest Stop

I haven't really posted much on the subject but about half my gametime these days involves playing the auction house game.  The fact that I have 6 80s helps me quite a bit in this area.  For instance my druid is an alchemist/herber, my pally a blacksmith/miner, my hunter a leatherworker/skinner, my mage a tailor/enchanter, my rogue a scribe/engineer, and my deathknight a jewelcrafter/miner.  Since all these toon's professions are at max level I have everything covered.

Currently my bank account is sitting at 190k gold which is probably higher than 99% of the people that play the game.  I got into the AH game last summer a bit by accident as I was trying to gear out all my toons but was continually frustrated because I was running out of money.  The only solution was to get smart at making money.  I originally focused on inscription as I had heard that it was a great way to make money but soon realized that the easy days there were over and it was going to take a long time for my toon to learn all the recipes to put the theory to practice.  So while I worked on that I maxed out everyone else.  My toons focused on the following:

Kelyn	Enchanter	Various enchanting scrolls based on market price
Kelyn	Enchanter	DE'ing random greens
Kelyn	Tailor	400g every 4 days for Spellthread, Ebonweath, Moonshroud
Shribryn	Alchemy	100g for an epic gem 1 Epic gem
Malla	Jewelcrafting	50g for turning epic gem to crafted gem
Rinda	Inscription	Took lots of time / little profit
Henna	Blacksmithing	Create various blacksmiting items for DE if mat price low
Henna	Blacksmithing	Create Eternal Beltbuckle
Delan	Leatherworking	Create Drums and Leg Enhancements

I started to slowly accumulate gold with this strategy but as I watched and learned the auction house I realized that there were 100s of opportunities that I was missing.  I got heavy in to speculation in November before the 3.3 patch at the same time I learned the final few inscription recipes.  Suddenly my moneymaking went to the next level with inscription taking the lead and I was making about 3-4k g per day after expenses.  The bad thing I realized was I was that while I had geared out all my toons with epics I didn't have time to play them because I was spending about 2 hours playing the AH instead of the game.  Now that inscription had taken off I picked my 80 best recipes and focused on them and cherry picked / speculated for the rest which got my time down to about a half hour per day while still making about 2k gold per day.  This has worked well with one problem ... it is virtually impossible for an scribe to get rid of all their Snowfall Ink.  Scribes make their ink by milling herbs and for WotLK that means milling mainly Icebloom or Adders Tongue.  For every 6 glyphs I make I end up with 1 Snowfall ink.  Since I sell about 600 glyphs a week that means I have 100 Snowfall Ink need to get rid of every week.  The problem is demand.  There are only 4 ways to get rid of Snowfall Ink: sell them, make offhand weapons, make scrolls of fortitude or make darkmoon fair cards.  Offhand weapons can usually get rid of a maximum of only 5 per week and Scrolls a max of another 20.  That means I need to sell at least 75 snowfall per week to break even.  The problem with selling them is since there is only 3 things the people can do with them so 1) I am either selling them to my direct competition making cards/scrolls/offhand or 2) selling them to people leveling inscription and increasing my future competition.  The bottom line is I've slowly accumulated 1,100 Snowfall Ink and it is growing.  It's really a no win situation and ultimately it is almost better to think of Snowfall Ink as worthless and figure out the easiest way to get rid of them.

A year ago the best way to get rid of Snowfall ink was easy and very profitable - Darkmoon cards.  The reason is that every time you create a darkmoon card you have a 1 in 4 chance of creating a Nobles card which make a trinket called Greatness.  The Greatness card is by far the best purchasable trinket in the game and at one point it sold for around 10k gold.  This decreased as better content was released to today's price of 4-5k gold.  The problem with this trinket is with the release of Icecrown Citadel there are trinkets out there that are actually better.  These trinkets aren't attainable to people other than raiders but that leads to the other issue.  Greatness is level i200 and there are many other trinkets that are easily attainable that are i219-i232 so the perception is that it is inferior.  So sadly, the only people that really understand how good the card is are the ones that have other options. 

Last month I created a Greatness card and it took me almost a month to sell it for 4k so the demand is very small.  Still I need to get rid of these because the Snowfall ink I have are currently taking up 55 slots in my inventory and it is growing so I have to do something.  That brings me to the title of this article .... The Darkmoon Gambit.

Since Snowfall Ink are essentially worthless I'm thinking of doing something crazy but first I need to figure out the bottom price I can do this and still make money.

	Qty	Each	Cost
Snowfall Ink	6	0	0
Ink of the Sea	3	2	6
3 Eternal Life	3	20	60
Resilent Parchment	1	0.4	0.4
Min Cost of Card			66.4
Cards for Greatness			x 32
Cost of Greatness			2125

What this is say is if I make 32 cards I need to sell my Greatness Deck for 2125 gold to pay for the non-Snowfall mats and this assumes that all of the other cards are worthless.  The truth is I should be able to sell the other 3 cards for about 100g each and I'm pretty confident if I deep undercut the current market to 3k that I would get almost immediate buyer/resellers.  If that were to happen I would have a profit from my Snowfall of 1175g or 6.1g per ink (1175 / (6*32)).  If I listed my Snowfall in the Auction House today at 6g all that would happen is my competition would match the price and none of use would sell many.  Of course there is risk with this plan as there is no guarantee that I will get the number of Greatness cards I expect or that i will be able to turn them into full decks.  But if the math works I am looking at turning my 1100 Snowfall ink that is just taking up space into a minimum of 7k in gold.  I have a feeling I will do a lot better than that.  Time will tell.

What do you do when you aren't having fun? I've been playing this game for over 5 years now and I've noticed it is starting to be a bit stale. When I first started the game everything was new and it was fun even though I didn't know what I was doing. One of the best things about the game at that time is I banded together with a bunch of other people to form one of the biggest guilds on the Khadgar server. We were all learning the game, exploring and just enjoying playing the game. The problems arose when we hit max level (60 at the time). My first toon was my paladin Henna and I distinctly remember hitting 10 man Scholo with the guild and getting owned. The issue was we were a bunch of noobs but didn't realize it so our guild slowly fell apart as we figured out that we all wanted different things. It was at that time that I started leveling Shribryn again who I left at level 37 when I started leveling Henna and decided because our guild was lacking in dps to create both Kelyn (mage) and Lemhi (warlock that I've never been able to get to max level - now at level 54). This happened to many of us in the guild and we soon found that we were spending more time with people outside the guild so we slowly disbanded. After I gquit I focused mainly on getting Shrib to 60 then realized that now that every guild was concentrating on Molten Core so I started working on getting my Wildheart set. I tried to do the same thing with Henna but soon realized that 1) paladin dps was terrible 2) paladin tanks didn't exist 3) Paladin healers weren't accepted 4) buffing 15 people every 5 minutes sucked and 5) the competition for plate armor was tough. On the flip side no one was playing druids at the time so it only took me a month or so to get my tier 0 armor (Henna never got a single piece). Now I was ready for the big time and i bounced from guild to guild never really finding a good fit or any fun. When the option to change servers happened in January 06 I decided to take the opportunity to jump ship and move to Eitrigg. Moving to a new server is always difficult but it was a bit exciting because it was a new beginning. My first guild didn't work out because I found out pretty quickly that they left their previous server because everyone hated them. They were working on a similar rep on Eitrigg so I joined some friends from Khadgar in a guild they had just joined called Requiem at the beginning of March 2006. I had finally found a home of likeminded people.

I have been in Requiem for 4 years and in that time I was a main raider in Molten Core to an officer in Blackwing Lair/AQ. I went back to raider for a short time until we started Gruul Lair then was a recruiting officer from that point through Sunwell. After 3 years raiding I decided to take a break when WotLK was released and have spent the last year PuGing and focusing on increasing my money. At this point I'm sick of PuGs and I'm well on my way to hitting the money cap but no desire to spend any of the money.

I've been waiting for my desire to raid to come back but I think it is gone and may never return. I do know that I'm not having fun and it makes me wonder why I continue to play. I think it has something to do with the fact that this is one of the first persistent world games I've ever played. It's not like when I finished Baldur's Gate that I had anything to do. The bad guys were beaten and I moved on to the next game. With WoW that will never happen and the treadmill gets to you after a while. There is no doubt in my mind that helping put a team together that did a server first kill of Vashj and Kael then being the only guild in Black Temple for a few months was the most satisfied I've ever felt in a game. The thing is the game moves on and raiding is stressful.

So what to do? I'm really not sure. If I'm not having fun I really shouldn't play but I worked pretty hard to get where I am and I'd hate for the time investment to feel like it was all for nothing. The thing is I know that is irrational as I've spent a lot of time in other games and had no problem walking away. I am thinking of moving a few toons to another server/guild to see if that helps but if things keep on the way they have lately my days in WoW are numbered.