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Friday, March 19, 2010

What would you do with a million gold?

For many WoW players, 1 million gold is a fabulous amount, something that they will never hope to attain even if they were to play for a lifetime. For others, it has long become a reality. Personally I'm sitting on a quarter of that amount, so it's perfectly reasonable to assume that, if I really set my mind to reaching 1 million gold, I could do it.

Beyond the novelty of having such a huge amount of gold, one has to wonder what can be done with so much virtual money. I mean what's the point? I can't even use a quarter million.

Besides the obvious (buying all the vanity pets, mounts, equipment, etc. for all your characters), here's my idea. I would try to control the market for certain goods for a period of time. Would I need 1 million gold for that? Probably not, but it's certainly a nice fallback amount in case things go wrong.

I wouldn't be able to do it for extended periods of time and I would probably need to take a week off from work to accomplish this. By "controlling" the market I mean "form a total monopoly on certain goods". I would probably scope out some scarce crafting mats and I would buy them all below a certain threshold. Then I would set my own price and sell them at that price. I would buy all undercutters and re-post.

What would I accomplish? In the end probably not much. It would be more of an experiment but in the best case I would turn even more profits. Unfortunately I don't know what success such a scheme would have due to people constantly undercutting, at all hours, even in the middle of the night when I can't do anything about it. That's why I'd have to take time off from work. So in the end it might not be such a great idea after all.

I just wish I had $1 million instead. I'd certainly find a use for those!

What about you? What would you do with a million gold?

12 comments:

Jackfinished said...

Gold buying is pretty stupid, but if I honestly had a million gold I would sell it either on my own or to a gold selling company. Seriously you can't spend all that in game reasonably. So might was well make some real cash and save some gold for yourself.

Darth Solo said...

True dat. I was gonna write a post about the very topic of gold selling.

Tyrsalt said...

Since it would be more than enough to satisfy the needs of all my toons, I would have a blast with it. Gifts for guildies, buy some bags and give them out to new players at the starting area, and stuff like that.

Gyldenfeax said...

I used to need gold for buying gear that I otherwise couldn't get from pvping, but since heroics buying gear isn't really necessary, apart from Quel'Dalar a few months ago. I make less gold now from the AH (my old tricks don't make the money they used to) than I do from dailies.

A 100,000 gold is way more than I need to buy every mount and pet in the game that I don't already have, but it's a good amount to have for Cataclysm.

If I had a million gold maybe I'd organize some sort of server event. See how many flares can be placed in 10 minutes or cover the area between IF bank and AH with fish feasts.

Anonymous said...

Theres just nothing kmuch to do with it really is there? I have 90k ish at the moment, 4 80s, all with epic flying, a couple of choppers, a mammoth... there's barely any epics worth buying anymore.

Elkagorasa said...

After getting all the gold-based achievements (kirin tor rings, the 22-slot bag, and the various mounts) and decking my main out with the various vanity pets, not much else one can do. I like the idea of controlling a market, but who knows Blizz might not take kindly to one toon controlling a monopoly on say epic gems.

Darth Solo said...

Blizzard doesn't mind people trying to control a market, as long as they are not using bots or other automated means to do it. They've stated this repeatedly. For example they won't mind if, say, someone tries to monopolize a certain market by keeping prices artificially low for weeks on end. It's pretty much a free market (again, provided no cheats are used). So monopolize away!

Tomas said...

I would disagree with your fundamental gold making mantras...

Here's my strategy: -

Level to 80 FAST. Fuck gathering and trades and the AH and all that stuff, you'll get all the gold and gear you need from quests and running dungeons.. reason for this is it's much easier to make gold when u get to 80.

Once you get to 80, hammer the argent/ebonweave blah blah dailies. at the same time get into the dungeon group finder. Use the triumph emblems to buy crusader orbs from vendor and punt them on AH. Level jewelcrafting then use the dalaran jewlers tokens from daily quest to buy dragon's eyes that you can sell on AH.. Level enchanting and DE all the purples u can get. Use your champion's seals from argent to get weps and DE them and sell the crystals.... also vendor trash all the other drops you get in heroic dungeons and your away.

Another tip, once you complete a dungeon on dungeon finder, don't put in your need/greed rolls on the drops straight away, most people only care about emblems and will beam out straight away and u can win the loot easy (and DE or trash). If any fucker is wise to this (there's always one), fuck em, roll a need for everything. You'll never see him again anyway. Rinse and repeat. Daily quests while you're dungeon queueing. I should charge money for this shit. Peace out.

Tomas said...

Oh, and you'll get stone keeper's shards, use them to buy whatever gems are selling for decent on your server and u can make a fortune.

This is also a simpler strat than splitting up saronite bars etc. as you don't need to fuck around with the AH too much and also you can get geared at the same time :-)

Darth Solo said...

That is also a way to do it, of course. At any rate, I don't see a reason not to learn skinning at the very least while leveling. Skinning is one skill that practically levels itself and gives you extra crit to boot.

Oxymustard said...

Sell it, that's what I used to do back in vanilla. Find a few buyers in your region, login at their place over the course of a few weeks and when a GM contacts you simply say that he's a friend from college/work and that you gave the gold as a gift and because your IP is registered there a few times and you're not from Asia they won't make it a big deal.

I'm sitting on 780k right now and feeling pretty burned out from raiding. I usually monopolize the pristine black diamond,librams and rare patterns/designs/schematics market. The first two will make you alot of gold because many folks start and quit The Insane achievement.

Darth Solo said...

@Oxymustard yeah I would sell it but I'm not gonna risk it. Besides, there are bigger security issues with these gold sites and I wouldn't wanna get involved. At any rate, it's always good to have a big gold buffer.