Category Archives: World of Warcraft
Alliance Speed Leveling 90-100
This has been a busy couple of weeks for me. I’ve recently started a temporary training position for a new job, which means working a new schedule. It’s shift work too, which brings more time off but less things like sleeping and forming coherent sentences without a metric ton of coffee in my system at any one time.
I also started leveling up two Alliance characters on a new server.
My DK was already 90, so he got to dip his toes into the Draenor pond. I’ll just say this – for a guy who hates the snow and cold like I do, leveling through the Alliance’s Shadowmoon Valley was a breath of fresh air. At least, it was for the ten minutes I was there. I actually had to go back because I missed a quest that rewarded me with a follower. It was in the first town in the quest chain once you leave your garrison. I’d left my garrison and went to the next zone, not town. So I had to backtrack.
How did I get going so quickly? First, I beefed up my plate heirlooms to cap at 100 and geared the DK accordingly. Next, I knew I wanted to use the Potion of Accelerated Learning. The trick was getting one hundred garrison resources. My DK took a stroll around the scenic countryside and murdered several rare mobs, scrounged up a few treasures, and got enough resources to buy the potion. Twenty percent XP buff from the potion, about 45% from heirloom gear, 200% from rested XP, and I knew I’d put on levels.
Ready to rock, I had two choices – clip through quest chains, or engage in some bullet leveling.
My selection: Click-click-boom, baby. And Bellular gave me the ammunition.
Naturally Elvine gets credit too.
The good news is that I went from 93 to 100 in a few hours. The bad news is that I don’t have the garrison resources, or gold, to get my garrison to Level Three. Also, I’m looking to apply to a new guild and now that my Alliance DK is 100 I’m going to have to quest anyway to get his rep up.
Speed may not kill, but it can hurt your rep. And your wallet.
And your garrison.
Blizzard Sells Gold In Patch 6.1.2
Mama’s got a lifestyle to maintain.
I’d like to read a question that I may or may not have actually received via email.
Dear Rokk,
Have you ever purchased gold with RL currency?
Sincerely,
Some Dude.P.S. You’re awesome.
Now regardless of whether I actually received this email (ahem), I will answer the question.
Yes, I have bought gold online, through a third party site, for real cash money.
But not in WoW. It was in Everquest.
Why would I do such a thing? Well, I had the disposable cash and no real skills that I could use to make gold (or platinum, in this case). I had nothing to sell, nothing to offer. I decided that I would rather give someone ten bucks for a bunch of platinum so I could play the game and buy gear, rather than sit by the second torch in the East Commonland tunnel repeatedly shouting (but not spamming) “WTS (some arbitrary item).” Oh, and bonus points for you if you get the very old-school reference.
It wasn’t easy to make platinum in EQ.
World of Warcraft is another story entirely.
I’ve probably got about 90k gold spread across all of my characters. Most of that gold was made through selling tradeskill items, the occasional transmog doodad, and by farming and/ or questing. While I’ve been working on making gold, a few things had popped up on the AH that I wanted to buy but couldn’t afford. I just learned to live without it. I never considered buying gold because a) the gold came from hacked accounts (blood money) and b) I’d rather not have my account banned. So I stayed frugal and decided I wouldn’t buy gold.
Until now. Sorta. Indirectly.
In Patch 6.1.2, Blizzard is going to be getting into the gold-selling business. Kinda. They will have a WoW token in their store, which can be used to buy a month of game time. You’ll buy the token from the Blizzard store using real greenback-style money, and it will show up in a special slot on the Auction House. It can then be bought for a predetermined amount of gold (a pricetag that will be set by Blizzard).
Everybody wins in this deal. You’ve got the WoW Millionaires with more gold than they know what to do with, who can now use their fortune to pay for their WoW time. You’ve got players with a little disposable cash who might be looking to pad their character’s pockets, that can buy these tokens and sell them for gold. And Blizzard, well they get to makes more money, because they don’t have enough gold-plated toilets in their big WoW mansions.
It has yet to be determined just how much the tokens will sell for (either in gold or dollars). The speculation is that the prices will be determined by whatever gold is being sold for on third party websites. I poked around and what I came up with was roughly 1000g for one dollar. If a token is sold for $15, which is roughly the cost of a month of WoW time, then the token will sell for 15000g. Math stuff.
So going back to the question of buying gold (re: buying tokens and selling them for a fixed price on the AH)?
I’ll most likely buy a few tokens. Probably for some seed money so I can create and flip some more expensive tradeskill stuff. Or maybe I’ll just blow the gold on hats or something.
Are you going to be taking part in the token market, as a buyer or seller? Tell me in the comments below, if you would be so kind.
Rokk Talk 