Finally!

Economies Of (Dragon) Scale

My Hunter is a skinner and a leatherworker. Those are his two chosen professions. As such, there is actual use for these two things that benefit mail-wearing raiders who happen to be ready to own up Ragnaros: black dragonscale armor. This armor affords the wearer significant fire resistance, and as such, all the skinners and leatherworkers in the guild have been collecting black dragonscales and trying to acquire patterns that teach how to create the mail armor.

On my way to leveling my leatherworking skill to a high enough level that would allow me to craft this type of dragonscale armor, I acquired the pattern to create Dragonscale Breastplates, which are pretty useless for the Alliance. They seem to be made specifically for the Shaman class. But, hey, whatever. Anything to level up my skill, right? As such I had my guildmates send me every worn dragonscale they came across, as a significant amount of them are needed to craft this breastplate.

Once I created one I went to the auction house to see what kind of prices these pieces of armor were selling for. To my dismay I saw that the lowest buyout price on it was 9 gold. So, instead of being a good little capitalist and put my products out on the market at the price it had chosen, I decided to attempt to influence the market in order to raise the overall price of Dragonscale Breastplates.

I went to work. First I began by crafting another breastplate, which cost me considerable amount of gold for the mats. Then I put them both on the auction house at a ridiculous buyout price of around 18 and 20 gold.

The mentality of an AH seller is such that they will look to see what the highest buyout price on an item is and then place theirs for as high as they can without going above the current lowest cost. Thus, they have the cheapest product, compete better, and are bought out by some other player.

I was banking on the fact that the one guy who was selling his armor for 9 gold would have the auction expire, and try to put it back up only to see that, "Holy shit, I can put a buyout price of 17 gold, undercut my competition, and make 8 gold more than what I was willing to previously accept!"

Which, of course, happened. Once that happened, I allowed my auctions to expire and put them back up on the auction house, but I tacked 5 and 6 gold on more to the buyout prices. Soon enough other people who had crafted the same item were putting theirs up for slightly less than mine, even though the prices were still heading upwards. I'm sure I allowed a couple of fellas to make twice as much money on their item than they would have, but it was merely a path to a long-term goal.

Banking on the greed of other players who could make similar items and the ignorance of a buyer of the piece of armor's true worth (in addition to their impatience to buy armor of that quality), I crafted yet a third piece of armor and put it up on the auction house for a 30 gold buyout. My other two auctions expired and I placed them yet again for 32 and 35 gold buyouts. I was slowly leap-frogging the three pieces of armor over each other to higher and higher buyout prices.

Yesterday I sold my first armor for 36 gold.

When a week ago I would have had to sell my product for 8 gold, with patience I was able to quadruple the amount of gold the item went for by being the sole supplier of a majority of the items on the market and bringing the price up by leveraging the amount of items I had out there.

This armor is in no way worth 36 gold. At most 10 because of all the shitty stats. And even then that'd be pushing it because I really do not know what class on the Alliance side would benefit from this armor other than a Shaman, a class that has no access to the Ironforge auction house.

But the WoW economy is in no way similar to a real-world economy, either. First of all in WoW there are a bunch of retards who don't know the value of an item. I'm sure there's a moron Hunter out there running around with a useless piece of armor on his chest. GG noob, thanks for the gold.

However, the fact that I was able to artificially influence the the virtual economy means that I have played WoW for too damn long because I can understand the player base mentality and mechanics of the virtual economy enough to manipulate the market in such a manner.

It was, at the least, a fascinating experiment.

Hilarity Ensues

What happens when you're bored out of your fucking skull, sitting around The Burning Steppes, and a level 60 elite molten giant happens to cross your path? If you're a Hunter, you think to yourself, "Ima kite this son of a bitch to Stormwind!"

That's what I did last night and it was the most fucking fun I have had in the game in a long, long time.

For those unfamiliar with the tactic of kiting, it is simply keeping a mob at range while you peg away at it with arrows until it's dead. You pretty much run all over the place while it chases you, all the while doing damage to it with ranged attacks.

Usually if you run far enough away from a mob's patrol radius, it will say "fuck this," stop attacking you, and run back to its point of origin. However, as a Hunter it is possible to use Rank 1 Arcane Shot (the lowest level Arcane Shot in mana usage and damage) while running away with Aspect of the Cheetah, for the speed boost, to repeatedly tap it in order to keep it "interested" in you.

Thus given a monster with enough hit points, it is possible to kite these elites ridiculously long distances and drop them like a fuckin' nuclear bomb in an unsuspecting capital city where mayhem, madness, and hilarity ensues. This tactic has been used by many a skilled Hunter to kite dragons to large cities and watch them OMGWTFPWN little level 10 lowbies and pretty much bring the target city to a chaotic state of disarray.

So this was pretty much my train of thought when Volchan crossed my path. I pulled him through two medium- and low- level zones and turned many a player's head as I was hauling ass through small villages and towns with a monstrous molten giant in tow. This is the kind of shit that you do if you want to make an impact on several hundred people on a server and possibly get a thread created on the WoW forums in your honor.

Unfortunately, as I was mere meters from the gates of Stormwind, an Alliance capital city, I got sloppy and allowed Volchan to get much too close to me. He hit me once and I was automatically dazed from the effects melee attacks have on Aspect of the Cheetah, and then got pounded into the dirt road.

A few other players were there to witness my demise. When I resurrected they asked me where I had started kiting the giant.

"The Burning Steppes," I responded.

"Jesus," was one reply.

"That's one hell of a run," was another.

And then as I was riding back I notice the following message in the general chat channel: "Does anybody know what happened to the molten giant in the forest?"

I LOL-ed.

I WoW Too Much

A couple nights ago I had a dream where I finally got the quest to get the Hunter epic bow. Seriously. I play this shit way too much.