Project Lore

I recently had the opportunity to speak with one of my favorite WoW bloggers, Gevlon of Greedy Goblin. Gevlon is one of the few players in the game who has reached the elusive "gold cap" of 214,748.3646 gold. He is known for being extremely cynical and having radical and critical views of almost everything in WoW - from the game becoming too easy and the value of networking in game to more complex topics like objectivism, feminism, and welfare. I've been known to be cynical at times, and Gevlon's unique ideas often give me some great food for thought. Thanks for talking with us today. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you started blogging. I've been playing WoW for 2 years. I've never had problems with making gold, had around 5-10K gold all the time. I had my first 100G before lvl 20, and 5000G before going to Outland. I thought everyone was like this. Then someone asked for 1000G for their epic flyer and promised they would "farm a lot" to pay it back. I asked him what "farming" was, and he described the terrible routine of grinding elementals in Shadowmoon for hours. Others joined in guild chat and agreed that besides buying gold, your only choice was grinding. That's when I decided to make this blog. Larísa helped with the first steps; I figured out the rest. What is the appeal of collecting gold? You often criticize gold sinks like the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth or the motorcycle mounts, so what do you spend your gold on? The appeal is not grinding. Ever. Nor doing daily quests. I haven't done a SINGLE Argent Crusade daily; no wolvar pups for me either. For me, gold has one purpose: raiding. I pay five thousand gold per week to a guild to raid despite my 20-30% attendance. You have talked about how you "buy" a raid spot since it is easier and quicker for you to make money than it is for you to spend time with groups that are just learning the encounters. Can you talk about this briefly? I like the challenge of raiding, but I don't want to spend 3-4 evenings on it, especially since serious part of it is repetitive. Orbituary is great at first, fun the second time, and just boring third. By paying, I attend 1 raid per week. I skip farm-raids and go directly to the most interesting hard mode attempt. I was present on Orbituary and Steelbraker first, and currently I'm going to Vezax hard tries. I don't even have the normal Vezax kill. I've already written that I find gear upgrades overvalued, so I don't bother farming gear. My gear is a mixture of random ilvl226 with 213 and even 200 trinkets. I still got lot of gear, since everyone else already farmed everything out of Ulduar normal modes, so I have no competitor for ilvl226. You "roleplay" a "greedy goblin" a bit on your blog, or at least use it as a metaphor for the archetype of a player out to make gold wisely. How and why did this start? Goblins are a money-oriented faction in WoW, so it was an obvious identification. I've started the blog in a roleplaying fashion, but that faded away quickly. I like the word "goblinism" since it is without the non-business aspects of real world philosophies. Terms like "liberalism" not only mean free market, but also the support of gay rights. "Neo-conservatism" not only means deregulation, but also violent crusades against the "enemies of freedom". I don't want to say anything about these things; they are simply not my topic. By being "goblinist" I don't have to struggle with comments like "how can you still support neo-conservatives after Abu Ghraib?" You have recently started a "goblin apprentice" program where you help lucky players learn how to make gold and blog about it. Can you tell us about this? From time to time I post an "apply now" post. People send me mails. I pick one, create a banker toon on their realm and start giving them advices how to make gold. Post their progress on the blog for other readers. When I write this, the second applicant is not yet selected. The first one made 5K in a week. What WoW economy-related blogs do you read or suggest?

• Just My Two Copper
• Zekta's Stuff
• Warcraft Econ
• One Copper
• The WoW Street Journal
• WoWenomics

Do you think that the professions are "balanced" for money-making? People agree on one thing: the worst professions to make money are the two they currently have, no matter what they are. Inscription is definitely the most profitable, simply because it's the most complicated (you have to juggle 350 recipes), so not many people do it. The rest of the crafting skills have a similar gold per hour ratio, and all of the crafting professions are way above grinding or even gathering. You seem to have mixed feelings on Inscription. What do you think about the profession, and what would you do to change it? WoW is made "casual" friendly (I really hate this "politically correct" term). Still, Inscription needs lot of addons, seed money, and serious time to start (after that it's running quickly). So I'm not surprised that there are not many scribes who use it to make money. I would change the glyph system so that adding glyphs does not destroy old glyphs. When you apply a new one, you should get the old glyph returned to your backpack. That way, the huge demand for glyphs would decrease (and also the huge money the common players pay to goblins). What posts do you suggest new readers read to get an introduction to your blog? The "my business" tagged posts. They are the most directly about making money. What/who is M&S, and where did that terminology come from? Morons and slackers. I believe WoW is easy and everyone who fails in it is either as dumb as piece of rock or as lazy as a welfare leech. However, real casuals cannot fail as they don't raid or PvP. There is no "success" or "failure" in fishing coins. What add-ons do you recommend or use for your daily trading? Auctioneer. The rest is for crafting: Lil'sparky, whohas, possessions. What do you think about gold farmers? Should Blizzard being doing more to stop them, or are they inevitable and even essential to the current game economy? They will exist as long as there are M&S who can't make money. Blizzard won't do anything about them since the goldfarmers also pay them $15 a month and they don't harass other players. What simple tips can you offer to players looking to pad their wallets a bit? Have the Auctioneer addon so you won't sell stuff for half price. Also, don't be a packrat. There is deflation; the items that are worth 100G today will be worth 10G a year from now. Sell everything in your bank that you don't use or plan to use in a short time. You can buy it back later cheaper if you need it. Thanks for talking with us! Thanks for the opportunity!

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With patch 3.2 on the test realms and the Ulduar hype slowly fading, it seems like the live servers are more empty than usual. Not only are there less players overall, but there may be less gold farmers than usual. The game economy on each server is relatively small and sensitive to these temporary changes in player demographics, and right now the shifting player base on at least my server has had some serious effects on the economy. The first thing that I noticed are less raw materials at a higher price. Since there are less players on, there are less players running around doing dailies and quests that lead them to herbs, mining nodes, or dead animals to skin. On the flip side, there are less people spending hours and hours a week raiding than there were with the launch of Ulduar. Thus, the demand for things created by these materials - like elixirs, Ulduar recipes, etc, has also declined. The result is an overall smaller market that is overall easier to manipulate.  With less herbs (especially Frost Lotus) available on the auction house, I'm not able to make quite as many flasks, but they aren't all getting bought either. With less competitors in the market, I have made quite the pretty penny on flasks - though I am selling much less overall. Its a perfect opportunity to expand and explore into other areas. I recently picked up Engineering and I'm going to see how many of these Nesingwary 4000 the market is willing to buy. It makes me wonder how much of am impact gold farmers really have on the market and how many are really out there. Back in the vanilla WoW days, you could hardly walk into Tyr's Hand without seeing a dozen gold farmers gathering cloth and other baubles to sell in the auction house. It might be more subtle these days. Ever see those power-leveling services advertised in trade chat? If they are going through the hassle of advertising in-game, they are getting at least a few people to buy into it, and all those characters at their disposal gives them a great way to farm up cloth and materials while leveling those characters and dump it into the market. Where there's fire, there's smoke. Illegitimate services like power-leveling are likely a sign that gold farmers are still out and about on the realms in some fashion. With a steady supply of raw materials into the market from illegitimate players like gold farmers and hackers, many of the prices we are accustomed to are likely the work of a great supply. We are used to the land of bounty where we can go to the auction house and get almost whatever we want if we are willing to pay a reasonable price. If gold farmers leave the game completely, will this change? How negatively do these types of services actually impact the game? Looking forward, the release of patch 3.2 will bring an influx of players eager to jump back into heroics and all the old raids as well as the new Argent Tournament content. Start preparing now and stock up on potions, elixirs, eternal, and other materials. With epic gems and many new recipes, patch 3.2 will undoubtedly jump-start the WoW economy.

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