Ah, gold. The main reason I hear from some of my guildmates that they haven’t picked up dual-specs? It costs 1000g. The main reason our my pally friend is tired of respecing between healing and tanking? Gold. Everyone needs it, not all of us have a good, solid way of getting it.

Have you ever wondered how people seem to play the auction house to make money? Have you ever wondered how you can take the economy on your server and turn it into a moneymaking machine without putting so much time into it that you’re distracted from actually playing the game? So have I! Which is why this post, Gold Making Tips from a WoW Millionaire over at WoW Economist piqued my interest.

In the first video, our tutor manages to make 1000g in 4 hours of /played time:

The post goes on into another video that outlines the narrator’s typical day of milking the auction house for all it’s worth – the best part is that this strategy doesn’t particularly rely on being brutal against other players and devastating the server economy in order to make a few extra copper – it’s just playing off the need for certain items and the willingness of many players to simply overpay for something because they want it. All of the videos are created by the writer of WoW Auction Mastery, where more videos and tutorials are promised soon.

Seems the Blizzard developers don’t want you to have too much gold. You can only amass wealth of 2^31 copper pieces or 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper.

Sorry guys.

Anyone close to the limit? Ever?

[Via BoingBoing]

Mounted and MOUNTED! Follow up to this can be found after the jump.
(more…)

I was going to write a story about this but I’m speechless.
5000 Gold for sex.
I wonder if this is a TOS violation.

“I play a level 70 night elf druid and would prefer someone who was into roleplaying (I have a costume!) boy honestly anyone will do, as long long as you have the gold. I would also be ok with a woman too, as long as you have the gold!”

The craiglist ad is after the jump.
(more…)

Because malicious hackers exploit a flaw in the way the Windows handles animated cursors to steal your login info and rape your account:

The flaw came to light in late March and lets attackers take over vulnerable PCs via booby-trapped websites. Warcraft players seem to be one of the targets because accounts for the game are potentially worth significant sums of money.

But the really interesting part is that the hack isn’t directly related to Warcraft. Instead, they’re using it gather WoW login info rather than credit card info because “the raw value of a WoW account is now higher than a credit card and its associated verification data.” How crazy is that?

So, we’ve all gotten those lame-ass spam mails in our in-game mailbox with a 100g COD for something like a plain letter. They suck. They really trick people now and again, and it’s really lame. So, this happens to someone on the WOW Community on LJ, and he got his sweet, sweet revenge, complete with GMs laughing at the farmer for getting rooked by his own scam. The rooking? Netted the guy enough to buy his epic flying mount riding skill.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Go read for all the laughs.

Well, we now have some job boards here on Metroblogging Azeroth. Since they are all of 10 minutes old they are totally empty so they won’t be of any use to people looking for a job, but if you have a WoW related (or any kind of gaming) position available you can post it there and folks can check it out. That way you can more more cash to cover your monthly WoW fees.

From Fanfan on Mal’Ganis the WoW forums:

Strapped for cash? need to buy epic flying mount? Want to make 1000g in 2 hours?

2 hours of farming yeilded 840g

The method relies upon crafters needing lots of the new primal essences for many decent high-level craftables, and is pretty ingenious. There is a very strong demand for these right now as everyone is rushing to skill up their professions. I can see the price dropping somewhat if everyone begins doing it, but the primal essences have a low deposit amount on the auction house, which makes them well-suited to waiting for a high buyout.

I may consider doing this once I run out of quests, if I’m still shy of the 5k I need for my epic flying mount.

So, the news is that 30,000 accounts being banned in May for gold-farming led to a loss of 30 million gold across all realms. That only comes to 1,000 gold per banned account on average. This number causes a bit of an eyebrow raise for being fairly low, in my opinion. Considering the amount of work needed to make 1,000 gold without breaking the rules, what are players doing that is so much more efficient than just levelling up and constantly running Dire Maul or Strat? I would probably only count myself as being a casual player when it comes to playing time, and I believe that with a realignment of priorities I could make 1,000 gold with relative ease. I’m interested in hearing from other high level players and what their own hourly gold rates are when they start taking the WoW economy seriously, without trying to cheat it.