WoW Token Pricing

I just saw something that makes me want to capture it in a post.

Over on WoW Token Info.

The buy price of a token in the U.S., today, is 41,699 gold.

In Europe, 83,842 gold.

Europeans tend to be a lot more hardcore, and into things.  (Consider how much more popular Alf and Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff are there.  Just saying.)

In China, 83,266 gold.

We all suspect we knew where gold farmers are from.  (I don’t believe prisoners have as much fun playing though.)

In Taiwan, 172,950 gold.  Say what?  (With a peak at 250,670 gold.  Looks like the goal of draining the bank accounts has been working.  But, still.  In America,  the peak was 55,754 gold.  A sign that we probably enjoy spending more than saving.)

In Korea, 181,163 gold.  (I saw peaks hitting 209,805 gold.  It takes me, with all my garrisons, and I probably have too many, months and months to earn that much gold.  Seriously, what game are they even playing that 1 month of playtime can possibly be worth 209,805 gold?)

When you hear a title is a “grind fest” what do you automatically think?  Me too.

WoW Token pricing actually follows patterns that you’d expect.  Interesting.

Legion, here we come.

I think I can call it good now.

My new 3-day mage will see all of Draenor’s dungeons.

And flight is in hand.  (With a Vial of Sands, the wife getting flight too just became a whole lot easier.)  (I did the grind with my Orc Warrior.  I won the race with the wife because I’d earned exalted on another character and got the reputation boost from one of my level 3 buildings.  (Not sure which it was though.))

Flying in Draenor is pretty spectacular feeling.

And everyone has it.

Get one flying…

Three days, and 30 levels a day.

That’s days played, so certainly longer than 3 calendar days.

This would be Virillustris, my Frost Mage.

He is mostly  a product of dungeon finder.  Fully outfitted in heirlooms he held his own on the damage charts.  I quested until I got flying in Outlands, then dungeons.  I knocked around Northrend with a few of the intro quests, but otherwise bypassed all content past the initial landfall.  I never even ventured into Mount Hyjal or Vashj’ir, or anywhere beyond.  Panderia, I fought my way off the attack ship and into the inn there.  I set it as my home, because I’m a mage and it doesn’t really matter, and that was it for questing outside of dungeons in Panderia.

Now I command a Garrison in Draenor.  And I have to quest to acquire the followers.

Dungeon Finder is a really great tool.  See content while you play your class, and otherwise, while waiting for the next dungeon to pop, be able to just chill, relaxing with music and reading the internet.

I’ve got some fairly high days played on my other characters.  The raiders.

But 3 days played to level 90?  It went by in a blink, comparatively.

I’d hope I can do the same for my Warlock.  The fact that their class hall is on another freaking planet come Legion is kind of cray cray.

Double jumping the shark?

The next expansion is announced and will feature the Demon Hunter as the new heroic class.  One of it’s heroic moves?  Double jumping.  Ala Wildstar.

It looks cool, but is it too much?

On the other hand, reaching 100+ levels, why aren’t we more like Illidian Stormrage, less like Marshal Dughan of Goldshire.

Bonus plus: Elves only.  (No gnome deathknights, thank you. Finally a class and race that honors lore, and does not cater to “I play what I want.”

The new Tauren have moose antlers.  We find the good vyrkul.

I think TAGN predicted more f’ing Orcs.  😉  We finally got an elf-centric expansion.  Nice.

On the gold front my Deathknight is nearly to 95,000 gold of his own.  (Or 244K total.  There isn’t really much to spend it on.)

Garrisons, gold, & gliding.

I’ve been playing WoW daily, still.  If anything, I run through the followers on each of my level 90+ characters.

I’m not gathering the resources anymore, and I’m not bothering to try and sell an i630 axe or staff anymore for the once astonishing 10,000 gold.

I’ve been making gold, and picking up i655 and i670 gear, just running the little money-making machine called my garrison.

Every time I got close to having 200,000 gold (!) I went and did a mega-purchase.

The first was the Vial of Sands so I can turn into a FLYING taxi for my wife.  (I actually picked it up for 22,000 gold, when it now sells for 44,000 gold or more.)  22,000 was actually cheaper than the base mats alone. And it meant my archealogist could at last stop looking for the required drop.

I then picked up a mechano-hog.  Rather, I had to spend the money on my Alliance character, who are poorer overall than my Horde characters, because the only two choppers were being sold as Alliance mounts, so not visibile to a Horde at the auction house.  However, upon learning it, it’s available then as a chopper to the Alliance, and as the hog to the Horde.  Now I’m a mechanical taxi for my wife.  And it meant my engineer didn’t have to worry about farming any more rep with the Valguard folks.  (And the parts for that aren’t cheap either.)

And while I was on a roll, I picked up the Ice Mammoth that can carry two passengers.  Something I’d never done because it cost several thousand gold.  Something I never had, not like this, until the Garrisons came around.

Now I’m on track to regain 200,000 gold, just doing Garrisons, next week.

My three main characters are decked out in low level epics.

My followers are all 25/25 i675 armor and weapons.

I didn’t originally care whether we flew in Draenor or not.  (I got the dragon so I could fly around Panderia, Outlands, etc., with my wife, who had not yet gotten flying in Panderia.  I got the chopper/hog because I’d always wanted one.  I got the mammoth because… Why not?)

But now I do care about flying around Draenor.  Why?  For something to work on again.

I paraphrase a baseball legend, garrizon been berra berra good to me.

WoW is amazing.

A couple of days ago my screen started blacking out.  The system was running, but the screen would just go black.  Then it started happening on boot up.  System running, no screen.  Even the bios splash screen wasn’t showing.

Obviously a bad graphics card.  So I pulled out the not that old GTX760 and plugged in a GTX750 I found at Best Buy.

The GTX760 has two connections to the power supply.  The 750 gets it’s power from the PCI slot.  The box says the 750 expects 400W power supply.  And I’ve got a 650W unit.

Then the 750 started doing the same thing.  I could boot, fire up WoW and Landmark, but it would soon go black on me.

So it wasn’t the graphics card.

Back to the store it went.  I joked with customer service.  “I can build a computer from the motherboard up, but I can’t open a cardboard box.”  (It didn’t make sense to me how they thought the box should open so I cleanly sliced it open on the long edge.  The side of the box just pulled out.)  They refunded it.

And now I’ve ordered a new PSU from Amazon.com.  In the reviews of my old model they said “It’s an acknowledged issue for these RM units below stock number X.”  Amazon won’t take the return, I’ve had it too long.  Oh, well.  That’s me.  So I ordered a different make, and 850W just to be sure.

But, in the mean time, I’m using the graphics chipset on the motherboard itself.  I always assumed those graphics were pretty basic.  Just enough to boot, show a screen, from which a graphics card can be installed.

But, wow, this on-the-motherboard graphics chip is actually good enough to run World of Warcraft, and it looks so good I forget my case is pretty much an empty shell without the honking twin fanned with cooler graphics card in it.  Playing graphically rich video games it should be like me functioning without a brain.

MSI Computer Corp. Motherboard ATX DDR3 1333 LGA 1150 Motherboards Z87-G45 GAMING – good motherboard!

Without a graphics card I can’t run Landmark.  I can, to an extent.  I can log in.  But the LAG makes it unplayable.  The graphics and scenery are all there.  But I can’t really move about.  But it was good enough to float up to my roof and paint a few tiles, then reverse it.  (The PSU will arrive before rent on my portal-side property is due.)

But World of Warcraft looks just as good without a graphics card AT ALL as with a pretty good one.

And we wonder why World of Warcraft is successful?  It gets so much more right than it might get wrong.  Ten expansions later, with imagery never better, and it runs on the default graphics chip.  I remain impressed.

Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!

WoW Insider, may she rest in peace, has returned as Blizzard Watch.

My daily fix, with clean, uncluttered articles, to see what’s going on will continue without a hitch.

I like the name too.

Wow, these are some changes afoot.

AOL is shutting down WoW Insider, Joystiq, and Massively.  A great pity.  I went to WoW Insider pretty much every day for years and years.  Even if I wasn’t subbed, like I was in a war zone or something, I could go visit and keep tabs on my favorite game.  (Things like WoW Insider was probably keeping AOL modern and relevant.)

I read WoW Insider for the guides, the upcoming things, the funnies, and tips to some pretty fun wow videos.  Like The Lament of Capt. Placeholder.

And over at my Landmark beta, Sony Entertainment Online has been sold to an investment company and has renamed itself Daybreak Gaming Company.  These are the guys that brought us Everquest.  Now they’re being sold off to who knows what kind of fate is in store for them.  (Overall opinion is It’s not a good thing.)

Like Todd Hoffman over at Gold Rush might say, “What the frick is going on???”

2014, for what it was.

Ah, 2014.  Coming back from a year overseas I was about to get my life back.  And that included a little gaming.

Landmark.  The wife had gotten interested in something called, back then, Everquest Next Landmark.  I got my own Founders Pack as soon as I had a machine again that could play it.  I was in on the final weeks of Alpha, and have been playing in the Closed Beta since then.  “Playing” is probably overly broad.  “Logging in and paying rent,” is a more apt phrase.  For building buildings, it’s great.  And the ones really devoted to building can do some incredible things.  It also seems a few “voxelmancers” are teaching Sony, and the engine developer too, what the engine is capable of.  They’ve now introduced, finally! for some, combat.  Bunny hopping, circle strafing, if your melee you’re doing it wrong, combat.  Some suggest that’s what EQN is going to be like.  Probably too late, and means I’ll likely take a pass on EQN.  EQ and EQII appear to be deep and rich.  It would seem they want EQN to be superficial.  Their business.

Archeage.  Was I interested in it?  Was I looking for something new?  Sure.  Was it?  No.  Reminded me a lot of Lineage (it would) and the cheesy character models (everyone is 16 and beautiful to a fault, except the hideously abhorrent models).  Their implementation of a pay-to-play cash shop convinced me it’d be a pass though.  Add to that the hackers and botters and, oh my, d.o.a..  Even paying a subscription wasn’t going to get me as far as cheating would.

Wildstar.  Loved the game.  Loved the style.  Loved the humor.  But I’m not playing it.  I’m already paying one sub.

World of Warcraft.  The comfortable pair of shoes I’ve had for ten years now.  I had to make a table in order to track progress on all my characters towards their Level 2 Garrisons.  I’ve got eight of them now.  One of those has graduated now to Level 3, and tonight, maybe, my 2nd character dings 100 and I get a 2nd Level 3 Garrison.  Then I worry about more mounts, more companions.  And after leveling Archaeology from 0 to 600+ just to work towards heirloom pants, I think I could work on my pet battles too.

2015?  Nothing new on my horizon.

Close enough! Ding, 2015!

Happy New Years folks.