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Gold Capped: How to reach the gold cap
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Don't mind the intrusion, folks. It's me, Fox Van Allen. I'm filling in for Basil this week while he deals with the parasite that recently burst from his wife's stomach. (That's what those baby things are, right? Am I recalling seventh grade health class correctly?) If any of you have been following me on Twitter (and if you haven't, for shame), you may already know that back in March, Heartbourne of Lore Hound challenged me to a race to the 999,999g 99s 99c gold cap. I immediately accepted. After coming up with some basic rules (no gold buying, no server transfers, no "borrowing," no interfering with each other's auctions), the race to a million was on. During the contest, I was quiet about my gold-making activities -- I didn't want to tip off the competition. But now that the contest officially ended this past week, I'm free to talk about what happened. And so, my friends, what follows is the tale of how someone with virtually no gold-making knowledge went from next to nothing at the start of Cataclysm to, as of June 10, over one million gold.
Making the dungeon finder suck less
Anyone who's read the official forums lately has probably seen a raft of complaints directed at players abusing the dungeon finder and vote to kick features. It's a reminder that people will always figure out a way to twist a system to their own benefit. The most upsetting technique I've read about is two hybrid DPS in cahoots with a third DPS queuing as a tank/healer duo, getting an instant invite to dungeons, and then pressuring the two other members of the party to shoulder the tank or healer job. If they don't or can't fill these roles -- kick 'em after the 15 min grace period and requeue themselves as straight DPS. Voilà -- they are now at the head of the dungeon queue for the next tank or healer! Is it any wonder that players find this enraging? Heartbourne of Lore Hound offers an analysis of some potential solutions to dungeon finder abuse. As he observes, a proposed rating system for players could be easily abused on its own, so maybe that's not the best way to go. However, I find his suggestion of a social networking angle to be pretty interesting. What if there were a priority system to be grouped with players you met and "liked" before? What if guilds across servers could "friend" each other and form pools of players from which to draw 5-man groups?
WoW Insider Show Episode 125 with Project Lore
Despite the fairly slow news week, we had a good WoW Insider Show podcast this Saturday, with Project Lore writers Tim "Heartbourne" Tusing and Jimmy "DJTyrant" Blocksom stopping by to offer their unique perspective on reader emails, the week's top stories, and having too little to talk about, for once. We discussed Sam Raimi's newfound freedom to work on the Warcraft movie, the Blizzard dev chat on Twitter, why tauren paladins really aren't that broken, and a myriad of other topics. As always, you can email theshow@wow.com to have your email answered on the air, and if you have any guests you'd like to see on the show (or you'd like to be a guest yourself!) you can get a hold of us the same way. Get the podcast: [iTunes] Subscribe to the WoW Insider Show directly in iTunes. [RSS] Add the WoW Insider Show to your RSS aggregator. [MP3] Download the MP3 directly. Listen here on the page:
WoW Insider Show live today at 3:30 PM Eastern
The WoW Insider Show returns to the airwaves today at 3:30 PM Eastern time, bringing with it familiar faces Michael Sacco and Matthew Rossi (your host and co-host, respectively), with special guests Tim "Heartbourne" Tusing and Jimmy "DJTyrant" Blocksom of Project Lore bringing their unique perspectives to this week's top stories, both here and around the internet. And, of course, they'll answer your emails and talk live with the folks in the chat channel. You can email the podcast any time of night or day at theshow@wow.com, and you'll be able to listen in to the show on the feed on our Ustream site, or after the jump.
