My Wow Goldmaking

I wouldn't call myself a "goblin" as far as gold making. I am not interested in making huge gold profits and storing more than 100k gold. But I am interested in having enough gold that I can invest in something if I want to, take some chances without worrying, and buy something nice once in awhile, also. In Wrath, I had gotten up to 23k gold, but late in the game, I spent about half of it trying to get a new character ready for raiding. However, my guild had a bunch of drama, and basically I showed up for a couple of raids, one that failed, one that got cancelled, and it turned out to be an unwise use of money. So I started Cataclysm with maybe 12k, can't remember exactly, it might have even been a little less than that.
My goal in Cataclysm was to slowly accumulate gold, not to make huge amounts quickly, but to be diligent in doing things to earn gold and to not waste gold. So first things first, I did all the quests with 3 characters, from Mt. Hyjal through Twilight Highlands. I only bought any weapons or armor on the auction house if they were "steals", and I made sure to sell any blues I got instead of keep them. I made sure to farm materials with my professions as I leveled and sell the excess in the auction house. The profession I have concentrated on, outside of that, for gold making is tailoring. I make the 26-slot bags every couple of weeks and sell for about 4k, I also use potions of treasure finding and farm the tiny treasure chests along with embersilk on the coast in TWilight Highlands. I probably average an embersilk bag sale a day at an average of 300g. Also I do dragonmaw and therazane dailies at least up to exalted with each character. My last level 85, a blood elf warrior, is an herbalist/alchemist, so when I do Twilight Highlands dailies, I make sure to farm a few stacks of twilight jasmine while I am there and sell a stack of mythical healing potions for about 350g. Other than that, I have invested in pyrite ore, hoping it will end up yielding purple gems to jewelcrafters and the price will go much higher. I have about 200 stacks of pyrite ore waiting in the bank, as well as 20 truegold, and transmuting another truegold each day. Hopefully the price on that will go up also after patch 4.2 comes out and all the blacksmiths need it for new recipes. Lastly I am making hardened elementium as there are blacksmithers buying it up ahead of said 4.2 recipes. I will continue to sell that after 4.2 comes out unless I run out of elementium and get tired of farming it. I was up to 40k gold cash plus my investments however I did buy my warrior the crafted epic shield and a soul blade. A bit of an indulgence however I felt I have earned it and am earning it by doing well at making gold and investing well. My goal is to get over 50k as a minimum and (maybe) get up to 100k before I am done playing Cataclysm.

Pay by the minute

Blizzard should stop charging by the month and start charging by the minute. Somebody who plays 4-5 hours a day, does their stuff, and logs out, will pay around 15 bucks a month. Somebody in China who runs the account 24/7 with farmers/bots will pay 5 times as much since they are online on that account 5 times as many hours. Somebody married with children who can only play 2 hours a day will pay less than $10/month. Also, the more time Wow is down for maintenance and patches, the less money they make. So they will hurry and get things up again. Players will think before going afk and making everybody else wait for them, which they won't, since they are paying by the minute, too.

New computer!

Eh. I'm building my own computer for the first time. Reason I say "Eh." is that right now I have an empty computer case, power supply, motherboard, 8GB memory, and a video card in a box sitting on my 2 sofas in my living room. I'm using the hard drives and DVDRW from this one(computer). And I'm just tired and irritated from working too much lately so I don't feel like dealing with it. I am super-excited, though, also, just got to get in the right mood to do the job and get it up and running. I think I have everything I need, and I made preliminary inspection of the parts, I do believe I ordered correctly and everything is going to snap into place and work just fine.
I'm only slightly annoyed that after buying the things, newegg made a "build your own computer sale" and the price of the memory and oem windows 7 went down, but I did get a good price on the AMD Phenom II quad-core ($120) and gtx460 video card($150). Other prices I paid was only $50 for the case, $78 for the memory, $65 for the power supply, $80 for the motherboard. Oh yeah and $100 for Windows 7. Everything was no tax and free shipping except the motherboard, paid 7 or 8 bucks to ship that.
I still owe a lot on my credit cards that I am trying to pay off, so that is the reason I am being cheap with how much I spend on it and building it myself. Also I worked a couple extra days the past few weeks, and I paid 2 years at a time last June for my car registration, and get 5 paydays this month, so this seemed to me like the month to do this. Hopefully in a few days I will post a reply to this saying that I love it so much, etc.....

Sometimes the internet is lonely

Sometimes the internet is a lonely place. After work, either playing World of Warcraft or reading and posting on other people's blogs, it fulfills whatever social needs are still left over after work. And sometimes, like today, it doesn't really fill that need and it just feels like a lonely place, which mostly it really is. If nobody I know is online, even though it's other people playing, it seems the same as a single-player game. Of course it's mostly because of my own choices to stay to myself most of the time. You can't have it both ways, if you are very popular, there are sometimes where it seems like everybody is bugging you and you can't get away. If you stay to yourself, there are some days like today. All of life seems to be that way; give and take. And of course there is the fact, at least I think it's a fact, that humans are hard-wired that way; I mean that nobody is wired to be happy all the time with the situation they are in. That's why I like to play orc instead of human, since orcs are wired for beer and cocaine. Just kidding ha-ha. I have been working very hard leveling up a warrior and now that I am at 83, it's like....I'm just about there, but instead of being excited, I feel like I'm about to fall flat on my face. Does that mean it's time to take some time off, or to fight through it? I think I'll fight through it.

Survival, freedom, and success

A human's, and any animal's first instinct is to survive. It takes precedence over all else. After that is the need to be free rather than be a slave. Especially important is freedom to come and go where you want. Only after a man or woman can survive and be free, do they then need to be successful. This is the problem where MMOs always fail. When they are new, the game is exciting and meaningful because you are trying to survive. Even the weakest creatures outside the inn or other safe area can kill you. Then you need to be free to travel, to go to other villages or cities, meet with other players, explore new lands. This also is very meaningful and acquiring some levels, basic equipment gains you that freedom. After that, some feel the need to be successful, to go into the dungeons and kill the most powerful monsters. But not everybody feels the need to do this very strongly.
For an MMO to always be highly entertaining, a player's survival and freedom must always be threatened. At the very least, there should always be somewhere that a player cannot travel to safely. There is a large percentage of players who will never feel a strong need to conquer monsters in dungeons to gain more power, that will allow them better chance of conquering even more monsters. A player's basic needs must also be challenged constantly. It is perfectly acceptable for this challenge to increase in difficulty. Just because it is "outdoors" should not necessarily mean trivial. Just like new dungeon content should get harder and harder, so should outdoor content. Perhaps a new quest hub should require players to pair up, or in threes, just to get to a new flight path/quest hub. Perhaps faction work also would be necessary. Don't just challenge the overachiever dungeoneers. Challenge questers and explorers. Challenge everybody, in many different ways.

Youtube site

I have a Youtube site with some World of Warcraft movies I made at http://www.youtube.com/user/yaggle52. I'm not saying they're great, or even they're good, I am just saying the Yaggle that does this blog is the same Yaggle that has that Youtube site. I figure everything else gets stolen online, I had better lay my claim to my own site before somebody else does.
Plus there is a link from there to here, so there probably should be a link from here to there.

Tanking is stupid

You need to kill something, you need to damage it. Well, if you are going up against something really nasty, you want to wear armor to protect yourself, right? The idea of "tanking" something in a role-playing game is pretty stupid. Anybody going up against a fire-breathing dragon is fair game and could get killed. Besides, dragons are smart, so they're going to go after the guy firing magic missiles at them, maybe. But the problem is, you can't protect the mage, can't keep him alive long enough. The dragon has to attack the "tank". Sure, okay. But the mage, as well as the priest, and the rogue, and the hunter,shaman,druid, etc. can't be getting hit because they will die. They will die because they can't use the best armor. Well, there's the problem. Who decided that? Just because Gary Gygax said that the magic-users can't wear plate mail, well screw him and the horse he rode in on. You think about it. You can cast a spell. You're going to fight a dragon. You're going to wear more than a bathrobe and a magic ring. You will find a way to make it happen. Wizards could wear armor in Michael Moorcock's books, and it made sense. My MMORPG should make sense, too. No more tanking. Everybody wears lots of armor. The warrior may have more stamina, but the wizard might have a ring of +5 protection and better saving throws. Who the hell knows, but stop with these weird and stupid rules where one player cons the boss mob into only attacking him(or her).