O-M-G.  Did he just say….”gold farmer”?  The lowest of lows in the WoW community!  I can’t believe he would even address such a subject of wrongness and theft!  Seriously, Twizz……are you going to talk about this?

Yes.  Get ready.

So there I am.  I’m on my level 56 warrior tank surfing the auction house for the newest buff food to tank with since I am in another tier of cooked goods that I now qualify for.  MAN ALIVE!  Has anyone seen the price of Tough Jerky these days?  It’s GOT to be magical because I saw 4 stacks of 5 going for 4200 gold on the auction house!  Now, unless there’s a new Tough Jerky mount in the game that got introduced with 4.1, I’m thinking the seller is simply waiting for his real life order to pay out in game.  It’s funny really.  You hear ALL sorts of things from Blizzard about how you shouldn’t buy gold and such.  There’s even a huge post that they put out talking about how it upsets the economy and is the DIRECT CAUSE of all the orphans during childrens week.  You can go to just about any forum and read posts that pretty much say “Buying gold leads to account theft!”.  After seeing all these signs of the apocalypse you would think people would get the hint.  BUT, they don’t.  I challenge you right now to surf around on your server (or multiple servers if you have toons elsewhere) and look at the low level things going for astronomical amounts.  You’ll see it at some point and if you don’t see it right away, check again a little bit later.

SO, knowing that it’s happening and knowing that it’s going to continue to happen…..is there anything that can really be done?  Lets say that someone does get their account hacked because of a gold farmer.  I think it should be Blizzards right to say, “Well, we looked at your account activity and you received 15,000 gold shortly before you logged off.  After an hour or so, you logged back on and vendored your gear and  mailed that 15,000+ gold to a level 10 on the server.  That level 10 transferred off the server 20 minutes after he received the gold.  Yeah….you don’t have an authenticator that we’ve all but GIVEN to you and you want us to jump through hoops to get your account back?  Start a new account and don’t be a total moron.  Have a nice day.”.  Lets be honest, what’s going to take more time?  Finding out the gear that was lost, reprogramming it to get into your mailbox, reset your password and make sure that the password gets to the TRUE owner of the account.  OR, investigating some of the causes as to how the account was lost and making a judgment call?  My dad always told me “Twizz, if it looks like poop and it smells like poop….chances are….it’s poop.”  Blizzard is so accommodating to the people who break the rules that were set forth.  “We’ll give you gold and badges and stuff until your account gets back to normal!”.  Yeah, there ya go, give more rewards to the people who least deserve them.  Those rewards should go to people who have an authenticator on their account and someone found a work around.  In which case Blizz, your system failed.  I’d be willing to bet that the time spent on retrieving hacked accounts due to someone beating their authenticator would be more worth while and could lead to further security measures than the ones that had no authenticators and ignored the warning signs.

This is quite the twisted web though!  On the flip-side of the coin, a person who buys a large amount of gold really has nothing left to try to make money.  That person could win the roll on a random epic that falls off of raid trash.  He takes it to the AH and sees 3 other identical items at 8K gold.  Well, he’s richer than God at that point, so he’ll probably undercut them by 50% just to be a d-bag.  That just made a piece of gear that I was looking at VERY affordable now.  So did Mr. Gold farmer just become my friend?  You betcha!  So again, Mr. D-bag decides he wants to level his leatherworking.  He hasn’t TOUCHED it since Cata launched and now that he has the money, it’s time to get that to 525 and be even more of a pimp.  Guess what?  Because he has the money, he’s going to buy up EVERY single Leatherworking mat you’ve been trying to get rid of for weeks.  You want 350g for the latest blue quality leather piece?  No problem!  Because I spent $75 with Mr. Goldfarmer, I think I’ll take ALL 10 that are for sale.  Thank you!  At this point Mr. Gold farmer just made my Christmas card list.

SO, with these two scenarios in place, is it truly a bad idea to buy gold?  Lets be honest, surf around for a few minutes and you’ll see all sorts of wicked deals on gold.  $75 can get you 50,000 gold on one site.  $.50 can get you 1,000 gold on another one.  It’s almost too good to pass up!  Are you going to affect the economy of Blizzards auction house?  Yeah, but that’s not your problem to keep under control is it?  Shouldn’t that rest on the shoulders of Blizzard?  You know Blizzard right?  They charge 5,000 gold for epic flying.  They charge 16,000 gold for a mammoth with a repair dude on the back.  You know who I’m talking about right?

SO, I know everyone is out there saying “But gold is SO easy to come by now!”.  We’re human.  We’re greedy.  If we made 300 gold off the auction house, we’re not satisfied.  Especially when we see epic gear going for 14,000-16,000 gold.  What’s that 300 gold gonna do for me?  That’s barely repairs at the end of raid night.  Making money in WoW is easy, if you have the time to sit down and think everything out, come up with a strategy on your next move and then attack.  But as a casual player, we don’t want to do that.  We want to log in to WoW to play the game.  I want to raid or do heroics or something.  Sitting in front of an auctioneer with a calculator for an hour and a half is a waste of my night.  I won’t get that rep mount from crunching numbers all night.  As a very casual player, here’s what happens.  You log on.  Check the guild roster to see if your buddies are on.  You go out, do a couple daily’s to bump your skill points up and net a little bit of easy gold that way.  You could go to TB and do the dailies out there, but unless you want to spend twice as much time trying to fight past a 12 year old on a rogue who’s just massacring you, that’s not a good use of time.  You might be able to farm for just a little while.  Scoop up some ore or some herbs and sell them.  All in all, at that rate, you’ll make a few hundred gold in a week…..assuming you do that ALMOST every day.

So no matter how you slice it, there’s pro’s and con’s to all of this nonsense.  I’m sure there are MILLIONS of arguments in my theories and whatnot.  But….this is just WoW according to Twizz.  It’s not gospel.

Twizz out.

Follow me on Twitter! @TwizzleTank

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