3 Things To Do IRL With Your WoW Gold

Posted by Warcraftecon | September 10, 2009 .

Lately it seems like some of us that have so much gold that we have nothing to spend it on. Although the majority of readers would love to have this problem, some still don’t make enough for various reasons. A frequent commenter, Zerohour, breaks it down for us:

It boils down to one of either three things: Laziness, Ignorance, or Not Enough Time

Not Enough Time – people that play casually and log in only to raid or arena. They have a limited schedule with not much open time in between because of jobs, home situation, etc. Dailies could be out of the cards because they really do have IRL responsibilities.

Ignorance – Defined as “Not knowing of something”, it does NOT mean stupid. These are the people that don’t understand the various methods of making gold, yet. Once they learn how though, they apply the techniques and make a profit. These are the “teach a man to fish” crowd.

Laziness – Just flat out not doing what’s required to make gold and believe that it takes monumental effort to make money in a video game. These are people that know the AH makes money, or know dailies exist, but aren’t putting forth the effort. I know people with 5×80s and always broke. They lack priorities, generally can be found working on that level 24 hunter or even worse – standing around in Ironforge doing absolutely nothing. Cooking and Fishing are just too boring to level, so scratch those dailies in Dalaran (besides, feasts are brought to raids). Conversely, “AH is for nubs” they’ll tell you, or it’s a complete mystery to them. They may have leveled a raid profession, but only to 400 and they’ll complain about it anytime they are asked about their experience, and it just doesn’t make any money!

My favorite example is the rogue I know who couldn’t put 100g together to save his life – probably 100 days played in Ironforge, was on usually about 6-7 hours a day, and all he would do when on is sit in capital cities when not in raid or pvping. He had a valid excuse though, he has a social life that prevents him from grinding gold the way he would need to. I even shared 3 of the best gold making tips in the game with him about 2 months ago, he has yet to implement one of them and is still broke.

This weekend brought me almost 10k, and I spent 95% of my time online raiding, PvPing and doing dungeons. Now where’s the blue post about 100k mounts being implemented!?

Now what happens when you have so much gold that there is not much to spend it on? There are a few different unorthodox ideas such as paying a guild 5000g/week for a raid spot. But what if you have exhausted all your in-game possibilities? There are a few ways to spend it outside of WoW, but there aren’t many. So here are 3 things to do in real life with your WoW gold:

Bet it -This method can be fun among some friends. Using WoW gold instead of real money to bet on random things can make things interesting. You have heard of dueling for gold, so why not bet on real life things with it. You can even have a Texas Hold Em poker tournament with some friends and use the gold as the prize money and the currency to bet.
Trade it- You can also trade this currency for goods and services in real life. Want a Chipotle burrito or a Starbucks coffee? Offer some WoW gold to your friends and have them purchase it for you. You have just essentially traded an online currency for a real life item. However you did spend time to accumulate this virtual currency and if the saying “time is money” than there isn’t much of a difference between real and virtual currency anyways.
Sell it - We must warn you that this is against Blizzard’s terms of service, and you should use this as information purposes only. If you have large amounts of gold, you can consider selling it either to a gold farming company for a very low exchange rate or your friends. Going to a gold farming website or company has it’s usual risks and plenty of things can go wrong. The exchange rate from gold to US dollars is very low also, something along the lines of .002 – .003 cents per gold. Which equals to about $20-$30 per 10,000g. They then turn around and sell it to other players for their normal rates of around $70-90 per 10,000g. The other way to sell gold is just to your friends for various rates of your choosing.

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8 Comments so far

Wes September 10, 2009 8:16 PM

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IB4 The shitstorm over telling people to sell gold
Zerohour September 11, 2009 7:16 AM

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@ Wes: He’s not suggesting you go sell gold, that’s severe misinterpretation. Read the first line “We must warn you that this is against Blizzard’s terms of service, and you should use this as information purposes only.”

It’s merely a friendly post about what people do with their gold and suggestions for when a person has so much of it they don’t know what the do with it because there simply are not enough sinks in the game that make it fun.

I liked Gevlon’s example there, I liked it when he originally posted it. There was a guy on my server last Arena season that was carrying people to 2350 rating for their weapons. The funny thing was he was seriously undercharging – only 5-6k for the service. Too bad he just faction transferred. Our guilds on my server aren’t providing the PvE service like Gevlon received, they tend to be too busy doing their own thing and would much rather help only guildmates, so buying a spot isn’t going to work very well on my server. It used to, however, back in Vanilla. And that’s an interesting phenomena.

Back in Vanilla, a typical high end guild that was working through AQ40 or Naxx40 didn’t have a ton of time to go off and farm up the necessary Black Lotus (which spawned in like 5 zones in the game, and one at a time) for their flasks, nor did they have time to collect the amount of gold it took to repair 40 people consistently. So they would sell certain drops from farm content that noone needed. Since you realistically only needed 25 people that knew what they were doing, you could carry 15 others through the place.

You see, back in Vanilla, raiding was 6-7 days a week, 5-6 hours at a crack, and that’s if you wanted to kill all the content and get some upgrades because back then if you had an epic, you were in a decent guild! That changed with BC where the game offered easier purples and even moreso in Wrath where today Frost Lotus are everywhere, gold for repairs and other minor things became a 30 minute grind, and people lost interest in selling raid spots because now they are busy gearing an alt in the latest content so their guild has access to several other options since the bulk of people playing are running PUGs that fail. So the spot selling isn’t there anymore.
Twan September 11, 2009 7:17 AM

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Even if you filter it through another account its traceable back isnt it?
Zerohour September 11, 2009 10:20 AM

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Alright, Real Money Trades (RMT) exist. The site is merely pointing it out that they exist, and that there is an exchange rate. There are also creative ways to spend the gold IRL. Great. But. If you trade WoW gold for money in game or ANY OTHER currency, good or service, you risk being banned. They can trace several things at Blizzard.

If you mail large amounts to friends for no reason, perform person-to-person trades with no item exchange, or try to launder the gold through several accounts, you are looking at getting slapped with a permanent ban for Economic Manipulation.

I know someone that lost their second account because someone (either at Blizzard or another player) noticed the account was all low level characters with about 100,000 gold on them. This resulted in account closure for suspicion of being a gold-seller. So the lesson is “Don’t keep large amounts of gold on an account with low level characters”. I still suspect he got nailed because he was sending gold to his main, which was on the main account. Anyhow….

The information is for information purposes only, not advising you to go try and get your account banned or what to do when you quit the game and have no use for all the gold.
Warcraftecon September 11, 2009 7:32 PM

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@ Zerohour – Well put, this was more for entertainment and info than to risk our readers accounts. You can do whatever you choose, we are not trying to encourage it or even discourage it. Just be aware that there can be consequences by doing things even remotely against the terms of service.
Ewber September 11, 2009 10:50 PM

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Oh and you can sell for about 4$ per 1k, in case anyone was wondering.
Kermonk September 12, 2009 7:50 AM

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Don’t be an idiot Zerohour – of course he was. That’s childrens way of saying “we weren’t saying that” but adults (or courts) don’t buy that.
Suna September 16, 2009 10:31 AM

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A friend of mine was trading WoW gold for account subscription cards, Blizzard found out about it, and banned his account permanently. Be careful of discussing “trades” in game chat since blizzard can monitor everything you say. If you think you’re doing something that could piss off Blizzard, it’s best to discuss it in vent or some other chat window. I’m not saying everyone should go out and trade or condoning this type of behavior but harmless trades between friends can still get you in trouble. Just a FYI.