Warcraft Diary 4: pimp my steed

I've been known to spend way too long playing videogames. I've also been known to spend waay too long on e-bay and the like buying rubbish.

Its pleasing (and also disturbing) to know I can satisy both urges at once.

Yeah: I've started using the Auction house in Warcraft. Money's fairly important in WOW, for the simple reason that as of level 40 , and again at level 60, you're able to buy a mount.Basically a large fast animal that carries you around on its back. Theres a certain amount of prestige in being able to summon your faithful four-legged friend and shoot off into the distance ,while you're poor friends are stuck slogging away on foot.They look pretty cool as well, it's about the equivalent of having a gold-plated beemer while you mates all get the bus.

The problem , however, is that an lvl40 mount costs 80-100 gold, a level 60 costs 900-1000g .Now to put that in perspective , as of level 32 the most money I've had at any one time was.....4 gold.

So the only real way to make the money (bar buying it from illegal chinese "gold farming" companies - yeah seriously - theres companies where a few guys in hong kong or wherever are paid a few pence a day to constantly kill creatures and sell the skins/goodies they get for gold , which inturn the company sells on the net for real money! crazy but true), the only real way is to sell everything in the auction house , with a low starting bid and a high(ish) buyout, keeping an eye on other sellers and trying to undercut them if you can ...it all makes the most vicious ,unbalanced player vs player fights look like a toddlers picnic by comparison.

And then there are the people who take it further, there are Del-boy trotters out there that made there money by just waiting and buying underpriced goods and selling them at a profit without the nasty buisness of killing things to get them, it's almost a game in itself...