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Warlords of Draenor: Guild leveling and guild perk changes
Players on the Warlords of Draenor beta have noticed something a little different about guild perks in the new expansion -- a large portion of them have simply been removed entirely, including both the Fast Track and Cash Flow perks. While some assumed this was likely a bug, it turns out this is part of change that has been planned for guild leveling. Namely, guild leveling is being by and large removed from the game. Or, if you want to think of it in a slightly different fashion, all guilds will automatically be what level 25 once was. Why the changes? Watcher hit the forums to explain, and to point out that the perks people normally associate with guilds aren't really going away entirely. Some of them, like Ride Like the Wind or Honorable Mention will just be rolled into the game as default behavior, rather than offered as a perk of any kind. So yes, while the perk is getting removed, we won't really see a change -- flight paths will simply go 25% faster by default. The Cash Flow perk, however, is being flat out removed, and Watcher had some really good points as to why this is being changed.
Results are in for World of Wealthcraft survey
Last month, we reported that Xsinthis of The Golden Crusade was putting together his annual wealth report survey -- the third year he's put this particular survey together. The results are in, and while the pool of participants was smaller this year, there were still plenty of interesting facts to be found. The reported gold average has risen a little since the last survey, making the leap to 472,979 gold -- but nearly 81% of those surveyed were under that reported average. Other interesting facts -- wealthy players make use of addons and websites to boost their gold-earning prowess. While that shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone, it does mean that those looking to get a foot in the door may want to check out the various addons and websites listed if they'd like to be competitive with those already pulling in the gold. In addition, there's a section that inquires about ToS-breaking activities, and according to the survey, botting doesn't seem to be making a big impact. All in all, it's an interesting survey, and has some good food for thought for those seeking to make more gold, or just wondering where they stand in the grand scheme of wealth and WoW players. Xsinthis has the full results, including more information about demographics and in-game activities, available for reading on his website.
World of Wealthcraft survey returns
Everyone loves data. We've posted in previous years about the World of Warcraft Gold Survey, which is a data gathering attempt run by Xsinthis, a keen WoW economist. He's gathered the past two years of data, looking at how much average gold a player has, and now he's after a third. He uses that data to provide WoW wealth reports to the community. As Xsinthis says: As you may recall, the World of Warcraft Gold Survey (called the Wealth Survey in previous years) is an attempt to ascertain how much gold the average player has on them. In addition to this, the survey asks some background and demographic questions to gain insight on how the gold is spread out, if different aspects of the game correlate to having more gold, etc. Last year, 11,344 people participated and I got some fantastic results. This year's survey will give a third data point, and will be the first time that a second survey has been done in one expansion, so I'm really looking forward to the results this year. The survey is really quick, should only take one or two minutes for most people, and is completely anonymous. If you're interested in WoW wealth, take the survey! And if you want more information you can check out Xsinthis' website. The reports are really interesting reading, very in-depth, and Xsinthis does a great job of presenting the data in a readable way. For example, as he reports, last year's survey in late-Cataclysm found the wealth gap between the mega-rich and the just-getting-by in WoW had widened. Nearly 82% of those surveyed were under the reported gold average, leaving only 18% of players over it. That average? 302,593g. 58% of responders were under 100,000 gold. Interested yet? Get involved!
Is your guild bank going dry?
I raid with an extremely generous 25-man raiding guild that is chugging along quite nicely through the Siege of Orgrimmar. They are kind enough to provide not only guild repairs, but potions, flasks, and feasts -- now noodle carts -- as well. The guild is pretty good about keeping everything managed, and raiders do a pretty good job about keeping the guild bank filled with materials for all the stuff that the guild supplies on a typical guild run. But we've had a problem recently that picked up in patch 5.4. Someone mentioned that the guild bank wasn't making quite as much gold as it used to, and player repairs are bleeding the guild bank of gold almost faster than it can be put in. This seemed odd to me at the time, but I re-doubled my efforts to continue sticking herbs, gems, and whatever other useful items I came across into the guild bank, figuring it would all balance itself out. It turns out, however, that we aren't alone with our weird little problem.
Patch 5.4 will not bring epic gems to Mists
Patch 5.4 is bringing a ton of exciting content, as we've recently discussed in video and several articles. One thing it's not bringing, though, is epic gems, as Blizzard Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street recently confirmed. @B_Cogs Not happening for 5.4. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) August 2, 2013 Note how he doesn't say "not this expansion", rather just confirms that, as many expected given their total absence from the PTR, the epic gems are not coming right now. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It will certainly ensure that the value of the blue-quality gems stays high, for now at least. But could this be another indication that there is a patch 5.5 coming? Epic gems would certainly be one way to push players into additional content without devaluing the Siege of Orgrimmar final raid content, and many are growing concerned that, with the next expansion likely to be announced at Blizzcon in November with a beta to come shortly thereafter, we could be besieging Orgrimmar for a long old time.
Gold Capped: Sha Crystals are about to get a lot cheaper
WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! I hope you don't have too many Sha Crystals saved up for this upcoming patch. The 5.4 PTR has new epic craftable PvP gear on it which will likely disenchant into them, and some of these pieces will take very few materials. Six Bolts of Windwool Cloth, for example, will make you a nice disenchantable purple cape. The Sha Crystal from this can be turned into two Ethereal Shards, each of which can make three Mysterious Essences. Right now, the vast majority of enchanting materials are made through disenchanting gear crafted by tailoring or jewelcrafting. Jewelcrafters turn green quality gems into rings and amulets which DE into a lot of dust and a few essences. Tailors make blue PvP gear that disenchants into shards. Sha Crystals are only made on the daily cooldown that enchanters get, or through disenchanting epic gear obtained in other ways than crafting. Patch 5.4 will change everything. These methods will still work, but it'll get you more materials per bolt of cloth if you use the new recipes. Each purple Crystal will be able to be broken down into two blue Shards, which can be broken down into 6 green Essences. This new way will make more enchanting materials per cloth than the existing ways.
Congressional report says you 'may' owe taxes on your WoW income
If you're a World of Warcraft or Diablo 3 player, the federal government would like to have a word with you. Congress's U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), at the request of Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), just wrote and filed a 23-page report on the tax implications of earning gold in MMORPGs. Seriously. The report, titled "Virtual Economies and Currencies," focuses on buying, using, and selling virtual currencies like WoW gold. The key takeaway for World of Warcraft players is that the in-game economy is a "closed-flow system" -- because you can't exchange your gold for U.S. dollars, you don't need to worry about claiming those 26 gold pieces from completing a quest on your 2013 income taxes. If, however, you decide to sell your accumulated WoW items through a third-party exchange (Don't do it! It's against the Terms of Service and could get you hacked!), then you "may have earned taxable income from the sale of these virtual goods."
Gold Capped: How to handle undercutters
WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! I hear this all the time: "Every time I post anything, someone undercuts me within minutes." Luckily, there's a relatively simple solution to dealing with undercutters: ignore them. You don't ignore them hoping they go away, you ignore them because they aren't actually going to prevent you from selling your auctions. Think back to the last time you bought something from the Auction House; let's say an enchant. You search for the best enchant you can put onto the gear. If the lowest price is affordable, you buy it. If it feels too expensive (compared to what you've paid before or what you know the materials cost), you might buy the mats and ask friends or trade chat for someone to make it for you. You might instead look at the second best enchant for the gear if it's something you won't be wearing for long or you're not expected to always use best-in-slot enchants.
Gold Capped: Never scan the Auction House again
WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Have you ever scanned the Auction House with TradeSkillMaster (the best auction management addon, well worth the trouble of learning) and not gotten a complete scan? Maybe you see an error message and your crafting window starts displaying unknown materials prices, even though you can see the prices right front of you when you search? This is a bug that affects anyone on a realm with a lot of auctions (more than 42554, according to the TSM error message). In essence, the GetAll scan that's used to grab a dump of the AH in a few seconds can be incomplete if there are a lot of auctions. As far as I know, the traditional scans are immune to this, but they take a lot more time; like 20 minutes instead of 20 seconds. Even if the scans work perfectly on your realm, scanning is still an extra step that you have to do every time you want to update the prices before you queue up your crafting list. Luckily, there's a way you can get up to date price information without ever having to scan the AH again.
Gold Capped: How to make cheaper Enchanting materials
WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! One awesome side effect of the latest patch's new PvP gear is a way to make Enchanting materials much more cheaply. Since all the new gear is iLvl 458 blues, they disenchant into an Ethereal Shard. Sometimes two of them, although that is probably from the guild perk. By far, the most popular profession to use to craft this type of gear for disenchanting is Tailoring. Windwool Cloth is cheap and plentiful, and 20 of them make a single Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's piece that can be DEed. The best pieces to make are the ones that take 4 Bolts of Windwool Cloth: Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Cape of Cruelty or Prowess Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Cloak of Alacrity or Prowess Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Cuffs of Accuracy, Meditation, or Prowess Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Drape of Cruelty, Meditation, or Prowess After these, the materials start going up. That doesn't mean you can't use them, just that you'll have to live with a higher cost than all your competitors.
Call to Auction talks economy and professions with the devs
The Call to Auction podcast, which features our own Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, recently had the opportunity to send a big batch of questions about WoW's auction house, economy, and professions to developers Greg Street and He-Rim Woo. The devs gave out some great info, some highlights of which include: There are no plans for a sweeping auction house redesign Due to the popularity of the cooking and blacksmithing catch-up mechanisms, similar mechanisms for herbalism and mining might be on the way The Guardian Cub experiment was just that, and it's unlikely there'll be another item like it Splitting items off of a stack in the auction house is also unlikely going forward It's possible that buy orders will be implemented for high-cost items like Mechano-Hogs, unlikely for stuff like flasks and enchants The mailbox as the AH delivery system doesn't feel quite right and may eventually change You can read the full interview on the Consortium forums.
Patch 5.2's jewelcrafting changes and how to profit
There are going to be some new important recipes in 5.2 for Jewelcrafters: a "prism" style daily cooldown Serpent's Heart, and a no-cooldown recipe that allows you to craft the uncut meta gems, Primal Diamonds, out of gems and Spirits of Harmony. Kaliope reports that both recipes are world drops in Pandaria on the PTR, and shouldn't take long to farm. Serpent's Prism would have been a better name While the profession is better designed than ever (with much less waste for shufflers and far fewer items ending up at the vendor), the Serpent's Eyes that you get while prospecting Mists ore tend to pile up. They're used to make the 450 crafted jewelry, but the market for that isn't nearly as large as the supply of Serpent's Eyes. Many people end up making these into blues and disenchanting them so they're not wasted. Now that all JCs will have the option of turning three Serpent's Eyes into a prism every day, that will provide an outlet for the Eyes that may be more profitable than the 450 blues. So far, only a few Prisms have been opened, but they seem to award a random blue gem, just like prisms from expansions past. Since it's on a daily cooldown, it's unlikely to be able to push down the price of blue gems much. Is it worth using Spirits of Harmony? The new Primal Diamond recipe has no cooldown, but requires Spirits of Harmony which are their own sort of cooldown. One criticism of Jewelcrafting has been that JCs have nothing except research and extremely low-liquidity mini-pets to spend their Spirits of Harmony on. Jewelcrafters generate Spirits as quickly as any other character, and in theory, it'd be nice to have a JC option to use them on. Especially seeing as how anyone doing daily research will have almost certainly finished learning all their cuts by now.
What you should plant on your Tiller's farm
This hit my inbox the other day: What's the most profitable thing to plant in a farm? I'd assume in most cases people plant for their profession or whatever raw material sells for the most. I, however, am a chronic alt-oholic and have every profession maxed and available to me. I don't raid and can't stand dailies, so I only have patterns available that are vendor trained, bought with spirits of harmony, or learned off a cooldown. So what's the start and end of the equation? -Matt So what is the most profitable thing to plant on your farm? Matt assumes correctly that the majority of people simply plant what they can use to avoid having to buy off the Auction House. There is plenty of opportunity to improve this, though! Generally, the least profitable thing to farm is vegetables. This is only true because everyone else already farms them, and they're all you can farm until you get farther into the Tillers reputation grind. The reputation seeds for leather, ore, cloth, or enchanting mats are generally lower yield than simply getting Harmonies and trading those for what you need, and that's generally less than you'd get by planting Enigma Seeds, selling everything you get, and using that gold to buy leather, ore, cloth, or enchanting mats. In short, the most profitable thing to plant is usually Songbell Seeds or Enigma Seeds. Songbell Seeds Songbell Seeds provide you with Motes of Harmony, which provide Spirits of Harmony. If you have a profession that requires these to make items valuable to other players or allows you to use them to skip daily cooldowns, then you can figure out exactly how much one of them is worth and do the math.
Gold Capped: Train Nomi for free Ironpaw Tokens
"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! After writing my Ironpaw Shuffle guide, JessicaHealy posted a very insightful tip in the comments, which I had actually missed from all the way back in November on the Consortium professions forum: the Cooking School Bell is an investment that's well worth the price of 50 Ironpaw Tokens. If you have completed To Be a Master and finished leveling your cooking, you can buy the bell which will let you summon Nomi, your very own trainee! Nomi has his own reputation faction that you need to do daily quests to complete, and once that's done, he'll provide you with a one time gift of 5 of your choice of token-bought food, and then daily Tokens of Appreciation, which rewards a free Ironpaw Token. Luphian, in the Wowhead comments, calculated the time it takes to get exalted: Non-human, and no guild perk: 1000 reputation a day: 42 days, but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4000 reputation removes four days, so it will take 38 days to get exalted. Human OR Guild-Perk (10% extra reputation): 1100 reputation a day: 39 days - but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4400 reputation removes four days, so it will take 35 days to get exalted. Human AND Guild Perk (20% extra reputation): 1200 reputation a day: 35 days - but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4800 reputation removes four days, so it will take 31 days to get exalted. Once this is done, in 50 days you will have the 50 tokens you spent to get the bell. If you're using the tokens to buy Soy Sauce, Rice Flour, or Black Pepper, it'll only take 45 days if you consider the reward you get for getting exalted. Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.
Gold Capped: Inscription gold-making guide
"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Have a scribe? Need gold? Look no farther. Inscription is one of the best gold-making professions in the game. You can make glyphs, Darkmoon cards, and all kinds of other odds and ends. Each of these markets has a characteristic time investment requirement and potential profit. Each realm is going to be different, but in general: Darkmoon cards: Scalable time investment, massive profits Glyphs: Massive time investment, low profit Odds and ends: Minimal time investment, medium profit Darkmoon cards start off simply enough: if you do your daily research, you can make a card a day. Different cards have different values, but on average, you'll make back way more than the value of the inks. You can trade cards, and the more cards you make, the better efficiency you'll have making decks. Assuming you can make a full deck for every 12 cards you produce (which is the ratio you see if you trade really well and/or produce a lot of cards), it'll cost you 120 stacks of any herb but Fool's Cap, or 75 stacks of Fool's Cap. At 40g per stack of, for example, Green Tea Leaf, that's 4800g per deck. Some decks can sell for over 20,000g.
Gold Capped: How to make gold as an enchanter
"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Enchanting can be a very good way to make gold. Every time someone gets an upgrade, the first thing they do is see whether there's an enchant they could put on it, and if so, either have someone enchant it in a trade window, or buy a scroll from the AH. The first thing you'll need to know if you're going to get into the scroll market is that it's not a good idea to use the default interface. You will face challenges that it is simply not equipped to handle. Chiefly: Knowing whether a scroll is profitable Knowing whether you already have scrolls made and for sale
Gold Capped: Cheap Ironpaw Tokens
"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Feasts are expensive, but are still cheaper than everyone bringing their own food. The reason they're expensive is that they all require an ingredient that can only be bought with an Ironpaw Token, the 100 Year Soy Sauce. Ironpaw Tokens are a non-tradable currency obtained by doing quests (including dailies, or a weekly if you're a scribe), and their short supply can be a real limiting factor on leveling cooking. Leveling the "ways" of cooking requires a lot of tokens, and once they're leveled, using them requires a lot more. If you rely on dailies for these, you'll never have enough. A better way Luckily for us, you don't have to rely on dailies! The first thing I noticed when I was first exploring Halfhill was that Nam Ironpaw, the token vendor, had a repeatable quest called Replenishing the Pantry that asked for a Bundle of Groceries. Once I worked my way past the Preserving Freshness quest, he did, at least. Anyways, essentially, you can buy an empty container from Merchant Cheng (next to the seed vendor) which can be right clicked on to consume some quantity of cooking materials to make a Bundle of Groceries. This can be turned into an Ironpaw Token.
What should and shouldn't be on the Black Market Auction House?
Perculia of Wowhead recently posted an update about undocumented changes and vanity items, which included some new information on what was and wasn't on the Black Market Auction House, as far as mounts, pets and items. Perculia's update included the Sun-Lute of the Phoenix King, as used by Sig Nicious of the Elite Tauren Chieftains, but also the Reins of the Plagued Proto-Drake, which was a reward for completing Glory of the Raider back in Wrath of the Lich King. If you were wondering what else is sold on the Black Market Auction House, you can check out Wowhead's full list. While the "axe" is a fun item, the one likely to cause more of a stir is the Reins of the Plagued Proto-Drake. As Wowhead notes, this reward was removed from the game after the arrival of tier 8, and has therefore long been unavailable to players who didn't get the achievement before that time. So, since the arrival of Ulduar, that drake has been completely unavailable to new players until now. This raises a question which has been, and no doubt will continue to be, a hot topic of conversation surrounding the Black Market Auction House. Should old items such as these, which were a trophy for completing a fairly tricky achievement when it was relevant, now be available to players on the Black Market Auction House?
Does gold-making prowess merit achievements?
The recent discussion surrounding Blizzard's chosen method of proliferating Brawler's Guild invitations via the Black Market Auction House, as well as the controversy surrounding the recently removed realm first Brawler's Guild achievement has got me thinking. Some commenters on the various pieces we produced on this topic here at WoW Insider asked if it should not be the case that gold making aficionados have something to show for their skills. It seemed to me, and I doubt I was wholly alone in this opinion, that an achievement such as the now-defunct realm first win five brawls in a row was the wrong choice for an achievement linked with gold. A PvE combat achievement associated with gold only because of the necessity to buy entry into the guild was just not closely linked enough to gold-making to be valid. But gold-makers already have shiny things to show off in return for their skills! They have the Grand Expedition Yak, and perhaps the new Jewelcrafting mounts, though some of them appear to be dropping down in price.
Claim your place on the WoW Rich List
Last year, Xsinthis of Shadowmoon (US-A) carried out a survey of WoW wealth. The survey revealed some interesting results, quoting the previous write-up from Michael Gray: The top 1% wealthiest players control a mere 24.25% of the game's gold. Half the people who answered the survey had at least 35,000 gold. However, the bottom 75% of players controlled a mere 14% of the game's gold. This describes a huge disparity between the top gold earners and the bottom. This is perhaps less than surprising, given the chasm between the serious Auction House players and the more casual farmers, and those who sometimes need to lean on their guild for repairs! But it's really fascinating to get some hard numbers, instead of just idle speculation. If you're looking to increase your WoW wealth, Gold Capped is a great place to start. This year, Xsinthis is looking into how the average player's wealth has changed in the year since and with the recent expansion, as well as botting, gold buying and selling, and general exploits to help get a figure on these activities in game and how they relate to wealth levels. The survey is completely anonymous, and questions on the latter are 100% optional. If you're interested in helping Xsinthis out by answering 5 short questions, head to the survey. It only takes a moment. And if you're interested in finding out more, check out Xsinthis' blog.
