Filed under: Economy

The top 1% wealthiest players control a mere 24.25% of the game's gold. Half the people who answered the survey had at least 35,000 gold. However, the bottom 75% of players controlled a mere 14% of the game's gold. This describes a huge disparity between the top gold earners and the bottom.

This is perhaps less than surprising, given the chasm between the serious Auction House players and the more casual farmers, and those who sometimes need to lean on their guild for repairs! But it's really fascinating to get some hard numbers, instead of just idle speculation. If you're looking to increase your WoW wealth, Gold Capped is a great place to start.

This year, Xsinthis is looking into how the average player's wealth has changed in the year since and with the recent expansion, as well as botting, gold buying and selling, and general exploits to help get a figure on these activities in game and how they relate to wealth levels. The survey is completely anonymous, and questions on the latter are 100% optional.

If you're interested in helping Xsinthis out by answering 5 short questions, head to the survey. It only takes a moment. And if you're interested in finding out more, check out Xsinthis' blog.

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

This expansion is the first one where "perfect" cuts (which are about a 10% proc rate when you're cutting a green quality gem) are blue quality, and even though they have different names, they have identical stats as blue quality gems. People still don't generally know this, and will sometimes skip over the perfect cuts when they're gemming new gear, but over time it will become more commonly known that there's no difference between socketing, for example, a Perfect Delicate Pandarian Garnet or a Delicate Primordial Ruby.

If you're an enchanter, you may have noticed that the price for the common materials has gone way down, and if you're a jewelcrafter, you're probably wondering what to do with all the green quality gems you get from prospecting, as well as potentially looking wistfully at the profit margins on some of the really desirable research blue cuts.

If you're looking to get a Darkmoon Deck made before the end of the faire, you might be interested to know that despite a false start earlier this week, the Ink Traders and inscription vendors now accept trades of 10 Ink of Dreams for a Starlight Ink.

Ink Vendors finally updated. Very sorry for the delay.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) October 12, 2012

The Darkmoon Faire is only around once a month, and the one on now is ending this Sunday, October 14th. Unless the Faire is going on, you can't trade, for example, a Crane Deck in for a Relic of Chi Ji.

This expansion, unlike in others, Darkmoon Cards require an item that can only be made once a day by scribes, the Scroll of Wisdom. Scribes who have been hanging onto their Scrolls should probably look into making them into cards now that the inks can be gotten cheaply, since by the time the next Faire rolls around, there will be 3 more weeks worth of daily cooldowns waiting to be turned into cards. These trinkets range from pretty good to among the best in slot for most classes, so almost everyone can use one, and many people really want one.

Additionally, since the Starlight Inks have been so expensive lately, the epic quality shoulder enchants have been quite expensive. Now that you can trade the much less expensive Ink of Dreams in for them, you should see the prices lower on the Greater Ox Horn Inscription, the Greater Crane Wing Inscription, the Greater Tiger Claw Inscription, and the Greater Tiger Fang Inscription.

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Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.

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What's my favorite part of the expansion so far? The way that Blizzard has reworked the Jewelcrafting, Enchanting, and Alchemy professions to more efficiently support the "shuffle". That's a cute little name we auctioneers give to a fairly complicated business that takes ore and turns it into cut gems and enchanting scrolls. In every expansion where this has been possible, there's been a ton of waste. It's great to be able to make gold by combining profession synergy, but vendoring stacks of, for example, green quality gems feels like a waste.

How to do the MoP shuffle

While the business seems complicated to outsiders, it's actually a lot simpler than it looks. Let's break it down:

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Every new expansion brings with it two things: more ways to make gold, and more ways to spend it. Making gold can be a very rewarding and engaging way to play the game on its own, but it's not for everyone. Here are a few tips that can help anyone make gold in the first few weeks of an expansion.

Pay later

A huge part of how much gold you have is actually how much you spend. Most people neglect this part of the equation, allowing their subconscious to choose when to splurge. A very simple way to have more money to spend on even more cool stuff is to avoid buying something until you absolutely need it.

For example, if you decide to powerlevel that engineer or leatherworker, you have a choice: either pay now, or choose to wait a few weeks and level your profession when the mats go down in price. The only difference is the order you do things in, but waiting will save you thousands of gold in materials.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The ink traders you find near inscription trainers allow you to buy any lower-level common ink you might need for the price of one current ink. Glyphs take a variety of inks, and if you want to craft one, you're more likely to need ink from some earlier expansion than you are a current ink. In Wrath of the Lich King, we were trading in Ink of the Sea. In Cataclysm, we've been trading in Blackfallow Ink. In Mists of Pandaria, including patch 5.0.4, we'll be trading in Ink of Dreams -- or at least the tooltip at the ink trader would have you believe.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Note: This article is about the Mists of Pandaria Beta. There is no guarantee that this functionality will exist in the live version of MoP.

The new pet battle system in Mists of Pandaria is going to be one of the most exciting new features for a lot of people; however, a potentially unintended consequence of the way it's currently implemented is that by selling pets on one realm that you bought on another realm, you will be able to transfer wealth between servers or factions. Orkchop wrote me an email that got me investigating:

All these pets are bound to your account, across all servers, across both factions, and can be sold. You can log on to your level 90 main, buy some pets, learn them, then log on to another server, create a level 1 and go sell those pets at auction. All without touching the neutral auction house and its fees.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him, tweeting him at @foxvanallen, or sacrificing your first-born to him.

Tailoring has always been a solid profession choice, especially for casters. You can create some of the best, epic-quality gear for your character with your own two (digitized avatar's) hands. You can even create some serious bank notes by selling leg enchants and bags. It's never been the most profitable profession -- but in every expansion, it's been a solid money maker.

A number of tailoring patterns have finally started appearing on the Mists of Pandaria beta. But is the outlook for the upcoming expansion as golden as it's been in the past? The outlook is a bit cloudy (misty? haw haw haw), but we'll still see if we can make some sense of some of the major changes coming to the profession in just a few months' time.

Just how major are these changes, you might ask? Major enough that it's worth considering whether or not it's time to give tailoring up for good.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The Spirit of Harmony is going to be the limiting factor in a lot of craftable items in Mists of Pandaria. Just take a look at all the recipes it'll be a reagent for -- some 153 so far, and they haven't even finished designing the professions. The interesting part of this is that the Spirits (and the Motes you can turn into Spirits) are going to be bind on pickup, which means that you can't trade for them.

Does this means that you will not be able to level a profession up to the new maximum skill level without farming Spirits and Motes of Harmony yourself? Will it mean the end of readily available, entry-level crafted PvP and PvE blues?

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

I don't think we've had Auction House drama before. How delicious interesting.

Hello ladies

I have played WoW on and off since vanilla, but I always seem to return at the tail end of an expansion. I came back this time 3 months ago and decided to start fresh- new server, new faction, new toons. I have alot to prepare for the release of MoP like this but I thought I was doing pretty well.

I joined a really great guild who has an unwritten rule that we don't undercut others on the AH, and alot of the members go as far as waiting until others have sold their items before listing the same thing. As such we're all pretty open with our gold making 'secrets' with each other.

I have a friend who, like me, has two gathering professions on his main, which are also the same as mine. He was complaining that nothing was selling well anymore this late in Cata, so I shared with him a few of the things I gather and sell, my main money maker was something I specifically told him sells a little slow but does sell, so don't get carried away putting too much on the AH at once. Very quickly I found he was flooding the AH with what I suggested to him, undercutting me by 10-20g each time and soon enough things were selling for less than half of what they were before. I pointed out to him, again, he does not need to flood and undercut so much, but he did not listen.

Since the advent of gold sellers, players have discussed the ethics of buying gold with real currency, as well as what would if Blizzard started selling gold. Then came the Guardian Cub, and suddenly Blizzard was allowing gold buying and selling via a vanity pet.

Later, Blizzard hit us with the announcement that Diablo III would have an auction house that uses real money. Now that the Real-Money Auction House has been launched, the debates have heated up. This guide is to help you decide, debate, or deliberate about real money in Blizzard games.

Real-money transactions for WoW

• The implications of a real-dollar auction house
• What WoW can learn from other transaction models, part 1 and part 2
• Guardian Cub pros and cons
• WoW's immune system and the gold selling virus
• Blizzard responds to Guardian Cub controversy
• Guardian Cub pet available for purchase
• How much is a Guardian Cub worth?
• Guardian cub taking a bite out of third-party gold sales

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Elizabeth Wachowski will be your host today.

A point to ponder today: How come the quality of television has improved so dramatically in the past 10 to 15 years? Television in the 1970s and 1980s was widely considered trashy, and being a movie star was so much more sophisticated than being a TV star. Sure, there were a few groundbreaking comedies like All in the Family and M*A*S*H, but the concept of television as an art form didn't really take off until near the turn of the millennium, around the time of The Sopranos and HBO really putting effort into its original programming.

When was the last time you saw a movie more riveting than Breaking Bad or funnier than Arrested Development? Just something to think about next time you're complaining about Teen Mom.

sergel92 asked:

What could Blizzard do to make the other faction cities more appealing for players and force them to actually visit them?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him, tweeting him at @foxvanallen, or sacrificing your first-born to him.

I know there's some disagreement between myself and Basil over this, but inscription is hands down my favorite profession. That's not really because I like the process of finding or buying herbs, and I absolutely detest the whole milling procedure. It's because I like money. Inscription made me stupid rich.

So, it would only follow then that I have great interest in what scribes will be up to come Mists of Pandaria. After all, Cataclysm brought the advent of the ultra-profitable and high-demand Mysterious Fortune Cards, so Blizzard must have something cool up its sleeves for this next expansion, too, right?

Well ... sort of! I mean, let's face it, Mysterious Fortune Cards are a pretty big bar to set. That being said, there's some serious love coming scribes way in terms of new things to sell, new items to equip, and new, fun things to have fun with. But don't take my word for it. See for yourself.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him, tweeting him at @foxvanallen, or sacrificing your first-born to him.

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- if you're not having fun while playing World of Warcraft, you're doing it wrong. Sure, raiding is great, and so is having pockets full of gold. But if you don't find either of those fun, then why bother? Find something that is fun.

Fun, of course, is what the engineering profession is all about. It's certainly not about money, after all -- engineers make very few things that non-engineers can use. But while you're struggling to make money in MoP, you'll at least be getting a lot of new perks to enjoy while doing all that struggling. There are cool new pets, new conveniences, new gear, a new world-altering device, and even new mounts -- yes, mounts with an s!

Exciting times are most definitely ahead for engineers. So strap on your goggles and have a robot roll up your sleeves -- we're going to dive right in.