Life is like a bowl of petunias…

I’ve spent a lot of time today visiting Syncaine over at Hardcore Casual. That link will take you to a pretty interesting discussion about the impression WoW is leaving on the mindset of the MMO player. Syncaine seems to put a lot of stock in how WoW is imprinting players to behave a certain way in MMOs. I think it’s less about imprinting mindsets and more about WoW catering to the behavior of the masses. It may reinforce the behavior, but the behavior itself already existed and catering to that behavior is what makes WoW broadly appealing to the masses. I suggest reading that article to put the whole discussion in context.

It’s actually a bit funny -- I read both Syncaine’s blog and Tobold’s blog and the best comments are where they respond back to each other. They both have a friendly relationship and offer adversarial opinions. One would think that when they don’t agree, you would naturally choose a side. I may be unique in that I enjoy both the PvP and PvE game to the same degree. In fact, for me, it is as much about variety in a game as anything else. Anyway, it is certainly funny in that I often find myself agreeing with both of them. Perhaps part of it is that they both seem to take the position that PvP takes away from a PvE game and vice versa, PvE takes away from a PvP game. I would argue that the two are not mutually exclusive and it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too. And in that, I guess I disagree with both of them.

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Last week, I wrote an article titled “How to Roll a Merchant” and I spent a good deal of time talking about the 2.4 changes to Primal Nethers and Void Crystals. It took a week and a half for things to stabilize, but I’m making a mint selling off the my stockpile.

As I mentioned in my earlier article, I slowly started buying out Void Crystals around the 18-20g mark several weeks prior to the patch. I grabbed up around 86 of these for an average price of around 19g. My total investment was around 1635g. I’ve been selling them all off the last two days for 38g80s. Even with the 5% AH cut, I will make about 1500g profit.

I also bought up 26 Primal Nethers for an average price of about 32g on the AH the first few days after the patch. That was an 830g investment. I’ve sold out at 60g per Nether and made a tidy 600g profit.

I’ll admit to being nervous that first week, but I feel vindicated for having faith in my convictions and as I preached in my earlier post – the worst case scenario is that I re-sold them for the price of my original investment.

A new blog is out there that I have added to my RSS feeds - WoW Investor. It’s a site dedicated the WoW merchant in all of us. It’s one of those rare sites where the reader comments are as worthwhile a read as the actual poster. Hopefully, the author has staying power and keeps up the good writing.