Wednesday 1st April 2020

World of Warcraft has always been my self-care. When the world is stressful and scary, I find loosing myself in another world for a time can give my anxiety a rest and allow me to emerge the other side, calmer and a little more focused.

I dabble in the game, and as I realised the other day my major play times are at the start and towards the end of an expansion. I used to raid, but don’t do that currently (and as a tank I don’t want to LFR) preferring to solo old content.

I’ve not played a whole lot of the latest expansion (Battle for Azeroth or BFA). A lot of my gaming time has been eaten up with Pokemon Go and the occasional bit of Fortnite but with Pokemon Go pretty much on hiatus due to the pandemic and the last few seasons of Fortnite being a bit lacklustre, I’ve found myself jumping back into Warcraft.

A motivating factor is one of the BFA mounts. The brontosaur not only looks cool but it has an auction house on the back of it. That sounds awesome and it’s definitely one I want to add to my collection. There’s a problem though: firstly it cost 5 million in in-game gold, and secondly it’ll be effectively removed from purchase once the next expansion (Shadowlands) hits later this year.

I’ve dabbled in gold making in World of Warcraft. I watch a ton of gold making Twitch streams and Youtube videos, but my own results have been a bit mixed. However, with the ways to obtain this brontosaur mount going away, I’ve got a new incentive.

Like any MMOs, World of Warcraft is a grindfest. Sure, there are catch up mechanics, but in essence the gameplay of an MMO is repeating the same stuff, again and again. And I had a lot to grind!

Travel around the BFA islands is a lot quicker if you can fly, and I hadn’t unlocked that. Thankfully you only need to do it on one character for it to become account-wide. But it still involves a lot of grinding quests to raise the various reputations to such a level that it unlocks.

So I spent several weeks just doing that, gaining my pathfinder achievements that unlock the ability to fly.

The next task was to level up alts. Each of my characters have different skillsets and I want to at least have those with gathering professions get to such a level that I can send them flying into the world to gather materials without their ass being handed to them all the time.

Thankfully, about 2 weeks ago, Blizzard announced a 100% XP boost, which I’ve taken full advantage of. A combination of that boost and a dungeon event, allowed me to level up 2 new characters to max level with minimal effort. I’ve since then quested on another to get me to my current 4 max level characters.

At the same time, I’ve been doing some work to get them better gear and level up those gathering professions to max level. Some of this is gated behind quests, but most of it has been a bit of a grind. It’s not too bad as my approach now is to do a little on all of them each day, rather than get bored with doing one thing a lot.

I’m now at the stage where they’ve all got decent gear, have unlocked all the areas they need to visit and can gather materials. I’m now working on their crafting professions (another grind) using a portion of the items they’ve gathered to ‘fund’ this.

The rest of the gathered material is for sale on the auction house. I’ve been clever in ensuring that I’ve gathered the items that are supposedly in demand, and ensured that I have a spread of items so I’m not going to be reliant on any one market.

In theory I should be starting to rake in the gold… but I’m not.

I’ve got in-demand items on the auction house, but they’re not selling, or if they are, not in any great quantity. It’s a little disheartening as I can feel that clock ticking and I have so much gold I need to make.

World of Warcraft is a rabbit warren you can get lost in, and whilst part of me likes it as it takes my mind off everything else going on in the world right now (at least for a time), I’m a little frustrated at the lack of results after weeks grinding to get to this spot.

My plan for the week ahead is to continue to gather in-demand items, whilst doing some further configuration of the auctioning add-ons to see if that aids me. I also want to start levelling some additional characters. I’d like to level a new druid as a miner / herbalist who I’d use as a pure farmer but I’ve decided to wait until I unlock the Zandalari so I can use a new race. So part of this next week will be continuing rep grinds to unlock the last two allied races for my faction.

Hopefully I start to see sales pick up as I’ve already put a lot of time into this and whilst Warcraft has been good for my mental health during lockdown, it’s frustrating to put all this work in for no return. Perhaps I need to hit the various gold making forums again… and possibly plead for help.

I plan to update my progress each week, diving a bit deeper into what I’m doing in. As I said, this is a rabbit warren, and I’m already pretty far down.