Podcasts and Gold

Apologies for the lack of posts recently, a mix of being crazy - busy at work and the World Cup has seriously curtailed my time to blog. So, what’s been happening? First of all, I would like to thank everyone who contributed kind comments and constructive points about my little story ‘Rogue Reports’; especially Adam at ‘The Noisy Rogue’, Rilandune at ‘Heroically Random’ (formally ‘A Rogue’s Tale’), Daraia at ‘Daughter of Ravenholdt Manor’, Amelia at ‘In Shadows of Dawn’ and of course all my fantastic guildies over at ‘Knights of Columbus’. I probably won’t be posting any more parts of the story for a while as I am going to see if I can find the time to write a few more chapters offline to maintain continuity, and get ahead of the game a little, then start publishing them again.

Whilst at work I have recently discovered the joys of listening to Warcraft gold making Podcasts. As far as I know (I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong) there are only two, the more established (currently 10 episodes) ‘Call to Auction’ and the relative newcomer with only two episodes so far (not including the test one), ‘One Copper Podcast’.

The ‘Call to Auction’ podcast is hosted by Markco, Euripides, and sometimes Faeghleis. Most people who are in anyway interested in making gold in Warcraft know Markco from the ubiquitous ‘Just My Two Copper’ blog. Euripides is from ‘outdps.com’ and writes an article called ‘Gold Capped’ for ‘wow.com’ and Faeghleis pops in now and then to do the sound, explain add-ons and basically keep the guys on track. This is an excellent, funny, well put together podcast which over the course of the episodes goes a long way to explaining the basics of gold making, more advanced strategies and looks at the gold making aspects of professions and the value of different add-ons.

The ‘One Copper’ podcast is hosted by Seth from 'One Copper' (one of my favourite gold blogs) and Coffelord (I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about him, apart from him being the leader of a large guild on the US server Mal’ganis and he writes a blog called ‘hilariouslyrandom’. This podcast is really growing on me. The first episode was a little rough around the edges with some dead-air moments and miscommunications, however the content is great and, in my opinion, that’s what’s important. The second episode came on leaps and bounds, much smoother and more professional. I am sure that as soon as Seth gets a new microphone this will greatly enhance the listening experience and make this a ‘must not miss’ podcast.

One of the questions that Coffelord posed on the last podcast was ‘Why do you make gold?’ This has been picked up by a couple of bloggers and I just thought that I’d put in my two coppers. I started my gold grind just before Christmas ’09 with about 3.5k in the bank, by the beginning of February ’10 I had raised that to 50k and at the start of March I had doubled this to 100,000 gold. I then went on a bit of a spending spree and geared my rogue up to a decent ICC raiding level (even though I have still not seen the inside of it) This cost me in the region of 40k. This, as well as shelling out for epic and cold weather flying for my alts, made a serious dent in my fortune. So I started again, albeit a little slower this time, as I was levelling my pally to 80 at the same time. I currently have around 143,000 gold and would probably be close to gold cap if I hadn’t splashed out so much, but hey, what’s the point in having it if you’re not going to spend it.

I don’t really have any plans to spend much more pre-Cataclysm, so I think I’ll use whatever I happen to have when I get there, to take full advantage of some of the lovely gold-sinks that Blizzard will no doubt tempt us with. I will probably also use a fair bit to level my crafting professions, though hopefully my gathering professions will go a long way to offset this. At the end of the day, as long as I’m still having fun, then I won’t worry about it, though I still hope to hit gold-cap eventually, just to know that I did!

~McRaffles