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Mists of Pandaria Beta: Transferring wealth between servers with battle pets?
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! Note: This article is about the Mists of Pandaria Beta. There is no guarantee that this functionality will exist in the live version of MoP. The new pet battle system in Mists of Pandaria is going to be one of the most exciting new features for a lot of people; however, a potentially unintended consequence of the way it's currently implemented is that by selling pets on one realm that you bought on another realm, you will be able to transfer wealth between servers or factions. Orkchop wrote me an email that got me investigating: All these pets are bound to your account, across all servers, across both factions, and can be sold. You can log on to your level 90 main, buy some pets, learn them, then log on to another server, create a level 1 and go sell those pets at auction. All without touching the neutral auction house and its fees.
Gold Capped: Ask an auctioneer
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. For half-arsed, last-minute mailbag posts, tune in every Thursday after Basil forgot his deadline because he was buying his wife stylish side tables at large Swedish furniture stores. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! I have a bunch of questions and comments piled up in my poor neglected inbox, so today we're going to jump right in and address some of the good ones. Bernake (awesome name, by the way) writes: Previously you have established that it is not profitable it to transfer gold frequently across faction. While this is generally true, I play on a server where the Horde population playing at peak hours is no more than 600 people, less than 2,000 active on the server. I was wondering (if that) warrants a change in this policy, as the Alliance have over 9,000 active players with at least 600 on throughout the day and over 2,000 playing at peak hours on any given day. I was considering moving into the Alliance glyph market, as the Horde glyph market is quite small. I was wondering if you would support this move as well as give some insight? I believe you're talking about this post on cross-faction arbitrage. In fact, it can be extremely profitable to move money and products across the neutral AH. I may have sounded a little negative because it is risky; however, unless you're losing a chunk of your stock to snipers or 20 percent of your gold to the neutral AH cut, it's not a bad thing to do. You can just buy to resell, or if you're having trouble finding mats on your home faction, you can use stock from the other side to keep your costs in line.
Gold Capped: Cross-faction arbitrage
Want to get Gold Capped? This column shows you how. Join author Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast and the Call to Auction podcast. Each server has two markets. Two economies, two sets of prices and two mostly isolated groups of players. The neutral auction house (conveniently located about as far from civilization as you can get in Gadgetzan, Booty Bay and Everlook) is the only place where Alliance and Horde characters can trade with each other, and this auction house has a much steeper cost of doing business. The deposit and AH cut are both three times the price as the normal faction AH. Needless to say, the central location and competitive fees of the neutral auction house lead to most business' being done on the faction AH. So what purpose does this place serve? An intelligent arbitrageur can use it to transfer goods and money between factions for personal profit.
The limits and possibilities of Bind to Account
Aeuis brings up an interesting point over on the forums: even though some of the items we get are called "Bind on Account" (or, more properly, Bind to Account, even though most people use BoA as shorthand) they're really not that, because you can't actually send them across factions or realms. Of course, that's pretty obvious to people who've been playing the game for a while -- Blizzard has never really encouraged cross-faction interaction at all (you can "send" items through the neutral AH, though even that is a bit of a hack, not really the intended purpose). So BoA items are actually bound to account, server, and faction.But Wyrxian is surprisingly open about "future possibility:" he does say that while Blizzard could allow us to send items between factions if they wanted us to, they also wanted to leave things open just in case the functionality came into view in the future. That doesn't mean we can expect a change in the next patch, but it does seem to mean that Blizzard is still open to the "possibility." You'd think it be tough technically (character inventories are all over the place, especially cross-server), but considering that we can now have cross-server battlegrounds, all it would probably take is a tweak to the in-game mail system. One character sends an item, another character receives it.And really, the only possibility that might come open is just ease-of-use -- that's why BoA and Heirloom items are in the game already, and if Blizzard determines that it would be easier to have you share items between your characters' factions and servers (perhaps if they upgrade the character re-customization feature to include a faction change?), then it will likely happen sooner or later.
