A Server Transfer Cost Me $285

I've earned a million gold in World of Warcraft. Twice. That doesn't mean I got up to two million. It means I got to a million, had to walk away from half of it, and earn that 500k again. A couple of years ago Blizzard had a "sale" on character severs. Faction, race, and server changes were all 50% for one week. This was amazingly timed with the end of my long time guild disbanding, and many of us were already in conversations about moving to a bigger server. All of sudden we had a week to decide on a destination, organize our bags, and transfer for a more reasonable price. As a player of two characters, it was essentially a two for one deal. Not bad. So I spent a day or two liquidating assets I didn't want to transfer and getting all my various heirlooms to the characters I was going to move. There was probably another day or so spent researching destination realms and comparing notes with my comrades. So with decisions made and things in order I logged into battle net to move my characters to their new realm. And then I got this error message. The gold cap for transferring servers is 50k per character. I was stunned. 50k? But I have 900k that I worked damn hard to accrue! I'm sure 50k seemed reasonable when server transfers were first implemented. But we are now in an era with mounts between 40 and 100k. I spent 70k on a single Darkmoon trinket at the beginning of MoP. 50k?! Seriously? I was in disbelief. And running out of time.
So I frantically raided the auction house. I was looking for anything of higher value that would stack in my bags for the transfer. Primal Diamonds were good. I bought a few choppers (I know they don't stack, but still a decent way to convert some gold). It was working. I had fairly quickly turned more than 300k into things in my bags that I knew I could sell on the new server. Even if some of it sold at a loss, that was better than leaving gold on the table. But my old server was small. The same factors that let me corner the jewelcrafting market and earn a million gold were limiting my supply of available goods to "smuggle" across servers. I had to laugh when someone in trade asked why the price of Living Steel had quadrupled overnight. Because I bought literally all of it. And would have bought more if it had been there. I quickly realized that my little server's economy wasn't going to allow me to get all that gold converted. At least not while the sale on transfers was still happening. A friend and I looked into splitting a guild transfer, but details I can't remember now (guild level?) made that a non-option. And guild transfers weren't half-off anyway. I was starting to get pretty upset with the transfer gold cap. Having a degree in economics, I understood why one exists. I just couldn't/can't fathom why it is still so damn low. 50k was a lot in TBC. It really was. But today? Epic flying is 10% of that! I wasn't happy about it, but I couldn't see any solution. I kept telling myself Earth money is more valuable than Azeroth money. Over and over. Then I dropped 400k into my guild's bank and transferred immediately. My way of just ripping off the Band Aid. Eventually I got over it. I sold all that stuff in my bags, got my production system in TSM going again, and got back to making gold. I eventually peaked at 1.3 million before I started spending. While I was never ok with the transfer cap, I just kept telling myself it wasn't real money.

But now it IS real money. Now I could be using that gold to pay my subscription. And I'm kind of pissed about it. Beside the fact that I had to forfeit a major component of my personal character progression, the reason I had to do it is no longer valid, if it ever was. The only reason to have a cap at all is so somebody like me can't move to a server like my old one and disrupt the whole economy with their deep pockets. I understood that at the time even if I thought 50k was way low. But the WoW token is being sold region-wide. Large amounts of gold are now moving between server economies in 20-30k chunks. In a sense, there is only one economy for the entire region now. The AH is no longer faction specific, and we have been able to move battle pets across servers for years now. The old definition of a server economy has broken down. It's time for the transfer cap to disappear as well. Or at the VERY least be raised into the millions. Because of the 50k cap, I essentially paid $285 for a server change. And at the time I thought $25 was bad! My gold is gone, but maybe we can get the cap raised or removed now that gold is literally worth real money.

Update: The transfer cap is now 150k. That probably would have been enough before garrisons..

The Veteran's Bonus is Fine as it Is

There have been a lot of complaints about the Veteran's Bonus in the last week since character boosts went live. For those unaware, the Veteran's Bonus raises your professions to 600 (max level) if you use a boost on a character levels 60-89. When this feature was announced I was cautiously excited about it, from the perspective of someone who plays the auction house. I'm really happy with the current state of it, but quite a few are not.

The big question I had when we first heard about the Veteran's Bonus was in regard to recipes. What would these new crafters know how to make? Everything? Some things? Nothing? Turns out, nothing. You have 600 skill level, but no recipes. And that is where the complaints are coming from. People on Twitter and forums have been raging about this, and they are flat-out wrong. Just about every angry post I found, the person expected to get EVERY recipe up through 600. Many pointed out that the cost of EVERY recipe vastly exceeds the 150g your boosted character receives. Are you fucking kidding me? Do you even know what I had to do to learn all those patterns? While I'm as surprised as anyone that the VB doesn't give you any recipes at all, I am relieved that people aren't getting stuff that requires discovery or rep grinding. Stuff we just buy from a trainer? I'm ok with that. But I would be just as pissed as the guys that want it all for free if people had so easily gotten the patterns I had to work hard for. Some of my stuff required raiding. Some stuff (enchants) cost me hours of my life doing daily quests. Many of my good and profitable JC cuts were borne from an agonizing combination of random discovery and world drops. Meta cuts in particular took me a long time to get, and I'm frankly happy that my new competitors don't just have them because they are cool giving Blizzard $60. And why do these people want every recipe anyway?

If you're a completionist and you HAVE to have every purchasable pattern for your new professions, it's only going to cost you a few thousand gold. Really not much considering you're buying the potential to make hundreds of thousands back with a little discipline. The complainers posit that they are starting out on a new realm and only have the 150g the boost brings to work with. I suspect a lot of these complaints are false rationalizations for wanting patterns for nothing (you leveled to 60 and didn't make any gold?) but let's take them at their word. To start out, you only need to learn one or two current recipes for each of your professions to get going on your new realm. I'm going to give you a few examples from the professions I do.

Boosted an alchemist? Well, the stuff you want to learn is discovered. You can't buy it even if you have the gold. You can buy Master Healing Potion for only 20g, and each one you make gives you a chance to learn profitable transmutes. The mats for the potions are cheap. I think I discovered all the good stuff in about an hour. Let's talk leatherworking. You can get started for 5g. That will allow you to make Magnificent Hide, which sell consistently. You'll want to use them to make armor kits, but to do that you'll need to grind out some Golden Lotus rep like the rest of us had to. But you can start making profit for only 5g. Hard to complain about that. Jewelcrafters can get started even cheaper than that! The MoP cuts that sell are all discovered or dropped. You can learn the recipe to start discovering cuts for only 4.5g. It's going to take you a while to learn all the patterns that way, but the rest of us did it and we survived. You're on your own for the meta cuts. It took me months to get the ones that sell. But really guys, a 4.5g and reasonable time investment for a profession that makes quite a few WoW millionaires? Stop your bitching. Just to hammer my point home, you can get started in enchanting for 2.28g. Buy the pattern for Glorious Stats. They sell all day every day, and mats on quite a few servers are stupid cheap. I mean 80s for dust cheap. You can start cranking out enchants for the cost of a potion.

I don't know why people want a bunch of old recipes that don't really sell, but they do. OK fine, well you are going to have to go out and get them like the rest of us did. Farm some mobs and grind some rep. Solo super-old content for weeks while you wait for patterns to drop. Do totally repetitive daily quests. You're my competition now, so don't expect any sympathy. And I have clearly proven that you can get started making gold with your new professions for well under the 150g the boost gives you. So stop complaining. Asking for every recipe to be included with the Veteran's Bonus is lunacy.

Improving Professions

WoW Insider's blog topic this week asks how we would improve professions. Perhaps because I have been pretty successful on the AH lately (profiting 3k per day for the last month), or because I'm only in four professions, I'm not sure they need that much improvement. That said, there are some things I would like to see improved. Some of these are the tools used around professions as opposed to the skills themselves. Also, most of these ideas are not original. I get a lot of my ideas from gold podcasts such as Late Night with Stede and the now retired Call to Auction. On to how professions could be improved.

• Either get rid of all the combat bonuses or truly balance them. It's lame that raiders feel forced to take the same specific professions for the sake of an extra gem, etc. Professions should be totally optional regardless of what you do in the game, and players should feel free to chose whichever ones, if any, they want to do. I have to think if they could be balanced exactly, they would have been by now. They should probably just go away. Utility stuff like drums and rocket boots should stay.  Edit: Apparently getting rid of combat bonuses has already been announced for Warlords. I totally missed that, but glad to hear about the change.
• Every profession should be able to make a mount, and they should all require that trade skill. The current situation is inconsistent and convoluted. 
• New armor and weapons should have unique models. There should be exactly ONE way to get some awesome looking models, wether it's for transmog or not, and that is a craftsperson.
• Multiple recipes on a shared daily cooldown. Right now, my alchemist makes Living Steel every day regardless. That isn't exactly interesting.
• Maybe make those cooldowns weekly so we don't feel compelled to log in every day. Want to make 7 Living Steel on Tuesday and be done with it for the week? No problem.
• The ability to repair things you can craft at a nice discount. Maybe put it on a 2-5 hour cooldown.
• Extra storage if you have two professions at max. Perhaps an extra bank slot gets unlocked.
• Improve the AH. Make the default interface more like the mobile version or just like Auctionator. More importantly, implement buy orders. Buy orders would allow crafters to see real demand and margins for products before they have committed to making them. They would also make it easier to purchase hard to find materials. If I see that I can instantly sell Clefthoof leather at a great price, I might just go farm some up.

So that's what I have. How would YOU improve professions?

Don't freak out

Ever since Blizzard announced that gems will be random and there will be less gear that takes enchants, I have seen a lot of gloom and doom in the gold making community. On the surface, it does seem like they may be killing the golden geese of WoW. While it's way too early to tell for sure, after doing some thinking and even number-crunching, I'm happy to stay in both markets moving into Warlords. The only way I didn't drown in the combinations and permutations and get totally confused was to tell myself a story. A story about the luckiest hunter in the world...of Warcraft.

He's strictly a PvE raiding hunter. This hunter is lucky. He gets every drop. Literally every drop from a tier. He always puts the same haste enchant on his gloves. And he collects two sets, so that he has optimal secondary stats for both of his specs. So under our current gear system he gets:

• Raid Finder gloves
• Raid Finder off spec gloves
• Flex gloves
• Flex off spec gloves
• Normal gloves
• Normal off spec gloves
• Warforged gloves
• Warforged off spec gloves
• Heroic gloves
• Heroic off spec gloves
• Heroic Warforged gloves
• Heroic Warforged off spec gloves

I told you he was lucky. Anyway, under our current gear system we have a chance to sell him 12 enchants each tier for his glove slot. Not bad. Until you look at the lucky hunter's possibilities under the Warlords system. He's gonna get all the gloves listed above, but there will also be Warforged (whatever they end up calling it) Raid Finder and flex drops, so we're up to 14. Any time he gets gloves with either a random gem socket or his favorite tertiary stat he upgrades and enchants them (28). Then he starts collecting the drops with a gem socket AND his tertiary stat (42). There's more than one tertiary stat he likes, so he's building a second set of that (56). A gem slot for each of this set brings us to a whopping 70 opportunities to enchant this guy's gloves each tier. Almost six times as many as the current system. Even if there are half as many enchants in Warlords, we still have nearly triple the opportunity we do now. Imagine how many possibilities there would be if this guy decides he wants to collect all the tertiary stats! I tried to calculate that, but it got into scientific notation pretty quick. We haven't even considered PvP gear, two sets of non armor gear for hybrid classes, etc. I think it's safe to say we will still have plenty of opportunities to sell enchants in Warlords. Gems are going to be random, so it's a bit different, but in the example above we have at least 28 gems sold as opposed to 12 in the current system. More than twice as many chances per slot per tier. I'll take that all day!

Obviously this is an extreme, unrealistic example. Nobody gets this many pairs of gloves per tier. The point is I can't see any scenario where we don't get more sales opportunities to enhance gear under the new system. I certainly don't see the gem or enchant markets collapsing. If you disagree, feel free to drop out of those markets. Especially if you're on Aerie Peak.

The last year in gold

A lot of my WoW friends laugh when I tell them I keep an Excel sheet going of my gold totals. It is a little sill, but I do it for two reasons. First off, that's just how geeky I roll. I love a good data set. It also helps me see how the various professions I'm using (LW, Enchanting, JC, and Alchemy) are doing individually (I started this before I discovered the wonder that is TSM Accounting). Today I decided to look at a simple plot of total gold across my two main characters for about the last year.

From a gold making point of view, it doesn't tell us much we didn't already know. Patches that have a new raid are gold rushes. I knew my profits were good after 5.2, but I was a little surprised at that slope. It did coincide with my main jewelcrafting rival either quitting or transferring, but man, those weeks were sweet. I expect the same or more demand when 5.4 drops, which is why you can see the beginning of my stockpiling at the far right end of the graph. If you need some gold, get your mats for anything that upgrades gear NOW. There is a new raid. It has a shit load of bosses. Most importantly, there will be FOUR different versions of said raid. Gems, armor kits, belt buckles, spellthreads, and enchants will be flying out of the AH for a while. If you've never had the gold you've wanted, 5.4 will probably be your best chance for the next year or so.

For myself, this simple graph became more of a timeline of what I've been doing, which is why I dropped my awesome MacPaint skills on you all. Boy did I pay a lot for my Darkmoon trinket when MoP came out! I did use it all the way until ToT, however, and purchases like that are why I do the gold thing anyway. Same with the Jeweled Onyx Panther. Good thing I still like riding it. I was way into Voltron as a kid:) The huge plummet when I had to server transfer is still pissing me off, and there is post about transfers and my experience on the way. Short anser-50k per toon is not nearly enough for today's level of inflation. More on that subject in a future post.

Thanks for reading!
JC