Take Rhino meat for instance. Because my server is fairly heavy on progression, raid consumable’s or materials to create the consumables sell very well. So I’ll take my hunter out to either Stormpeaks for Mammoth meat or Borean Tundra for Rhino Meat. All the mobs are nice and packed together and respawn fast, so it’s easy to send Tupac (my gorilla) in thunderstomping to round them up… then I just throw down a exploding trap and volley to my hearts content. Loot, rinse, repeat.

If no one else is interrupting your pulls, you can easily clear 1K gold an hour between the meat that drops and the vendor junk. More if you’re a skinner. But now we have a problem, called economics. Right now you have a bag full of meat you can put up in the AH for 30-40g per stack of 4 (I’ll get into selling in smaller units and odd numbers later). The problem is, if you put all your meat up at once.. some of it will sell initially, but the rest will just sit because of two reasons:

1. You have 30 auctions up for Rhino meat. No one else has any posted. The “perceived” value and demand for that meat is now lower because of the apparent availability of it. So instead we have to post in batches of 6-7 at a time and wait until they sell out. Not exactly instant cash.
2. You have 30 auctions up for Rhino Meat. Some will sell initially, but unless your lucky, someone else is going to see the percieved demand and go farm themselves a couple stacks of meat real quick, then undercut all your auctions.

Either way theres a lot of work involved for a fairly minimal gain. It might take a week to get the gold together for that pair of Epic BOE Bracers sitting in the AH.

Now from a gold buyers perspective, say I make 12 Dollars an hour. Right now I can head over to my friendly neighborhood gold seller (mogs.com) and buy 1K gold for $5.85. The price may rise or fall depending on the gold market, but in general for my hour of work I can easily grab the 2k gold needed and not have to deal with the time it takes to farm and auction off mats.

Gold Buying -1, Farming-0.

Every site out there claims to be the best, cheapest, safest place to get your wow gold, but there are more scammers out there than not.  I’ve had enough bad experiences to learn from so I thought I would take a few minutes and share what I’ve picked up with you.

The first step is to do plenty of research on google.  Search the name of the company and see what kind of reviews come up on forums.  Make sure you check out third-party groups that do consumer reports on placed like this.  Bizrate is one, I know for sure they have ranked Mogs.com as one of the best placed to buy warcraft gold.

Another thing to check is their available payment methods.  Do they take paypal? Credit cards? If they insist on using untraceable payment methods, like Western Union, money orders, or Moneygram, it’s time to look somewhere else!  Places like that only stay open long enough to cash the checks, then they move on.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in the past (and seen other people make too) is to find what seems like a great deal, only to have the whole thing turn sour as soon as a payment has been made. Lots of sites make some pretty outrageous claims about their delivery times and methods. Most of the time they can’t even come close to living up to those claims. One time, I placed an order with a site that told me I’d have my gold within 5 minutes. 3 hours later, I still didn’t have my gold and after going around and around with their customer service, I just cancelled the whole thing. It’s an oldie but a goodie: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Keep your eyes open for places with money-back guarantees, like the one at Mogs.com. These are a great trump card because it means that the site is really careful about delivery. It doesn’t help anyone if you get banned, after all.
Finally, I recommend keeping things local. The people who got hit the worst when patches were dropped were the Chinese outfits. Those based in the US (again I have to mention Mogs) had far less trouble with it. Plus, the customer service tends to be more reliable and understandable if they’re in the states.

We hope the following information will answer your questions and give you the confidence to go ahead and make a purchase:

Credit/Debit Card or Your Paypal Balance?

Paypal allows you to choose the funding source for the payment you will send. The payment with either be sourced from your credit/debit card or Paypal balance (though you can also upload funds from a bank, but there is a delay of 3-5 days).

Sounds trivial? It’s far from it.

The first thing you should know is that using your debit card or Paypal balance does not provide you with any protection against fraudulent sellers. If you choose one of these payment options, you will need to go through a 4-6 week process to file a payment reversal if you do not receive your goods. But even in this situation, you are not guaranteed to get your money back.

Credit card payments, on the other hand, provide you (the buyer) with full protection against fraud or an unsatisfactory product. A quick call to your credit card company will ensure the payment is reversed immediately, without the need for the permission of Paypal or the seller.

The bottom line is simple – use your credit card!

What If I Don’t Have A Credit Card?

If you don’t have a credit card to make the purchase, you are at a disadvantage in terms of protecting yourself. However, there are some steps you can take and factors you can verify pre-purchase to ensure you’re buying WoW Gold safely:

1. Seller Location

The importance of location isn’t about time-zone, almost all companies are available 24/7 these days. What is important is accountability; if the company you buy from does meet your expectations, can you do something about it? There is much to say about legal accountability, international consumer law and various other factors, but our advice is simple – buy from a company based in the USA, Europe or your own country.

How can you be sure where the seller is from? Contact their Live Support, this will quickly tell you whether the company is a legitimate Western company or an outsourced Asian hub.

2. Verify Seller Credibility

Two independent comparison and review services that most sellers register to are MMOBux.com and BizRate.com. MMOBux provides excellent insider industry analysis, whereas BizRate is the most popular user review community for the WoW Gold market.

3. Is The Seller Paypal Verified?

This is a no-brainer whenever you use Paypal – make sure the person or company you’re sending money to is Paypal verified. This means the receiver has registered and verified their information, thus guaranteeing that they can be contacted and pursued by Paypal should things go wrong.
Our Conclusions

Whilst there are fraudulent WoW Gold sellers out there, the proportion is no higher than in any other online industry, and they are usually very easy to spot with a couple minutes of research. Use a credit card to fully protect yourself and rely on independent review and rating sources to find the best providers.

Good luck with your purchase!

As usual, if anything unexpected unfolds throughout the maintenance period tomorrow, we’ll be here to let you know what we know, which might not be much more than you know but you never know, you know?

The exchange of “real money” for its virtual gaming equivalent, whilst an insane concept to many, is nothing new. Real-Money Trading, or RMT companies as they are better known, have been around since the early days of Ultima Online but only became newsworthy with the release of World of Warcraft. The game’s population of almost 11 million subscribers makes it a lucrative marketplace for third-party companies, with no shortage of customers and suppliers (though the majority of the industry’s “product” is sourced through China). Industry analysts have predicted the RMT market to be worth around $2 billion in 2008, with a large proportion of that coming for World of Warcraft.

Though many gaming addicts will admit to purchasing virtual currencies and services, perhaps spending as much as a couple hundred dollars at a time, one wonders why someone would spend so much money on what is essentially pixels on a computer screen.

“My friends ask me, ‘You could have bought a car, a boat or put down a deposit on a house – why waste all that money on a game?’. I don’t like cars, I get sea-sick and I already own a couple of properties of my own.”, Jake contends. “I find less sense in blowing $40,000 on a BMW – at least WoW Gold retains its value.” You can almost understand his point – almost. After all, expendable income is all about enjoyment, whether it’s expensive holidays, a luxury sports car or the ability to own (literally) your friends at your favorite game. But still…

The lucky recipients of this record order were www.MOGS.com, an American provider of WoW Gold, based out of Lakewood, Ohio. “When we saw the order request come in, we just laughed; it’s not unusual to get joke requests”, said Joe, the Customer Service Leader managing the shift the order came in on. “But the guy persisted and provided us with a phone number that matched up with his registered address. When we realized that this might be a serious order, we took the steps to further verify Jake’s identity and the validity of his request with his bank.” Within a few days the deal was done and Jake was on his way to being what must certainly be the only World of Warcraft millionaire on the planet… though he’ll have to spread the wealth over atleast 5 characters as the currency limit for a single player (only ever acheived twice before in the game’s history) is just over 210,000 Gold.

Jake plans to gear up his characters with the best of everything the game has to offer, but he’s not forgotten his fellow guild members either. His girlfriend, also a World of Warcraft player, was pleasantly surprised when she found a 50,000 Gold 21st birthday gift from Jake in her in-game mailbox. It’s no diamond ring, but it’s pretty close in WoW!

However, there are numerous examples of where the real world breaks in to inform, capitalize on or entertain the virtual inhabitants. Musicians, charitable organizations and big business have all made their mark “in-game”, often making a big impression on the masses of orcs, elves and post-apocalyptic humanoids.

But now there is an opportunity to reverse the roles. Players of MMORPGs are being given the opportunity to make a difference to one of the biggest real world events in history – the 2008 US Presidential Election.

Massive Online Gaming Sales (MOGS), an American MMORPG services company, have started a new initiative to aid with voter registration in the USA. They are enabling players of seven major MMORPG titles to donate their virtual currency to make a difference to the democratic process. Players donate their currency to MOGS which is then converted into its US Dollar equivalent and donated to the prominent voter registration charity Rock the Vote. The company claims this is a way for MMORPG gamers to influence the democratic process in a way that is relevant to them and meaningful to the spirit of democracy.

The issue of voter registration is one that has sparked civil rights action and wide-scale government inquiries in the past, and remains an important issue today. By enabling a wider section of the electorate to have their say, the end result is more representative of the population and reflective of their views. This gives the future President and the government as a whole a stronger mandate from the people on which to act.

Whilst MOGS claims the programme is a fair and balanced way to encourage participation without them showing any leaning to one candidate or the other, it can be argued that great voter registration favours Barack Obama. The Illinois Senator has a commanding lead amongst young voters, those who are more likely to be disenfranchised without the help of organizations such as Rock the Vote. Encouraging voter registration therefore improves the chances of Obama more than it does McCain. However, the company stands firm on their claim; “We recognize that our customers, and MMORPG gamers as a whole, have a vested interest in the future Executive and are equally eager to support the democratic process. It is through this process that we are granted our freedoms and develop our ideals, two things which our company relies on and could not succeed without.”

Partisan politics aside, if you’re interested in increasing awareness of voter registration or have some spare MMORPG currency you’d like to donate then be sure to check out the Donate Your Virtual Currency page for further details.

And that’s just real life fishing. World of Warcraft fishing seems to follow the same basic concepts. As an avid roleplayer, I try to play my characters as close to type as possible and keep up their skills to match. I have a hunter in particular who is a classic backwoods rough and tumble hunter type, and it really seems like she should be a pretty good angler, so it’s sort of bothered me that I can’t get into WoW fishing.

Luckily, with the new fishing daily quests being introduced in 2.4, I think I’ve finally been prodded into action as far as levelling fishing goes. After all, who can resist some of these rewards? You can get an awesome hat, or a pretty cute baby crocolisk, or a recipe for booze. Oh yeah, and that one… er, two ring.

But the question becomes, how to get over the boredom and get to fishing? I’ll share some of my own methods after the break.

Flight of the Bumblebee's

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of nay-saying and negativity about engineering. It’s been coming at me from all angles. Members of our guild It Came From The Blog were even telling me a couple of weeks ago that I shouldn’t even bother because “you don’t get that many good items.” Let me throw some light on this from a different perspective and tell you why I like engineering.

If you’re going to look at engineering as a money making profession, then yes, absolutely, I agree with you. But just like there are more “stats that matter” than pure damage per second, there are other reasons to pursue a profession other than just money. For many classes, but I’m thinking of one in particular, engineering can fill gaps in your class that almost nothing else can fill. Take for example the Paladin class. They have no ranged attack ability, but with a little time spent in engineering they can make throwable explosives. Yes, the cooldown is evil, but… if you’re soloing with a paladin, you don’t have the boomerang, and you need to pull… don’t you think you’d find that handy?

Furthermore let’s remember that engineering is the profession of choice for PvP twinks! If you haven’t made a twink for Warsong Gulch in the Level 19 bracket, let me remind you that there aren’t a lot of head pieces in that level! The Green Tinted Goggles from engineering are widely regarded as the second best level 19 twink piece next to the Lucky Fishing Hat which requires a lot of fishing and a lot of luck in a level 30+ zone.

At later levels, the Field Repair Bots are very popular as well, even though they are somewhat expensive to make. Any engineer who can throw one down in an instance will surely make friends of the people who didn’t want to hearth home, repair, and come back.

Engineering is not for everyone, but it sure is for anyone who wants to have fun and laugh a little. And while you won’t be joining Azeroth’s Fortune 500 anytime soon as an engineer, you will get lots of unique stuff over the course of your engineering journey that will help you in the game or – at the very least – give you a good laugh.

The rules are still a little hazy, and the plans to get it seem to be somewhere between experiment and superstition: we know for sure that you need to have 390 First Aid already to get the book to drop (though you need 400 to actually use it), and we know that it can drop from almost anywhere in the world. But apparently there are a few places where it drops more often: in Zul’Drak, sometimes in Sholazar Basin, and sometimes in dungeons. Other than that, everything else is just rumors — I haven’t gotten the book yet, and I’ve been 400 since I had enough Frostweave to level up. I heard it was on the AH for around 20g, but of course that varies by realm, and when I checked today, it wasn’t on the AH at all. And we’ve also heard that once you learn it, it won’t drop for you again, so there may eventually be an AH market for these — until all potential sellers actually learn the recipe, that is. And then there’s this, which just makes my head spin. We may see another level of Frostweave bandages in a future patch.

Very strange, and strange choice by Blizzard to do it this way in the first place. It also appears that a stack of Heavy Frostweave Bandages sells to vendors for only 5g, so the days of nabbing lower-than-3g stacks of cloth on the AH and selling them to vendors for a profit may be over. Which is fine, because your guild’s tailor could probably use it anyway. But I am bummed I haven’t see the manual drop yet — the better my gear gets, the less the non-heavy bandages do for me.

Update: Yes of course they can’t be on the AH, because as you can see in the screenshot above, the manual is BoP. Never mind. Thanks, commenters.