Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Hitting the Gold Cap in WoW

This morning, 10/29/08, I hit the WoW gold limit: 214,748. That limit exists because Blizzard records money as a 32-bit signed integer. So the largest possible number of copper pieces is 2^31. Since there are 100 copper to a silver, and 100 silver to a gold, the gold cap is 2^31 / 10,000 = 214,748.

[screenshot]


Actually, I hit the gold cap with over 9k gold to spare on a different character. When I sent some extra gold back to my main character, and tried to open the mail, I got an "Internal Database Error." When I killed mobs, I would pick up money, but it would not be added to my gold total. Similarly, if I sold items to a vendor, the items would disappear, but my gold total would remain the same.

The past few weeks, ever since patch 3.0.2 where these statistics were recorded, I have been making about 10k gold per day. Apparently people are still buying the most expensive enchants and gems even though in two weeks, the expansion will make them obsolete. (The worst gems in the expansion are better than the best and most expensive gems now.) Why do people spend so much on things which don't last? [cue in Sunday School lesson here]

Some people -- including my spouse -- might wonder if I could sell my gold for real-world cash. A quick Google search will show that the going market price / exchange rate is about $20 per 1000g. I could sell my stash for $4,000. Even more importantly, I could sell my daily intake of 10,000g for $200. Which works out to $70k/year for income. Not bad! There are a few problems with this scheme:

1) It is against Blizzard's Terms-of-Use. If they catch me, they will delete my gold and my character, and ban me from the game.
2) It is not sustainable. I can only make that much money now because we are in a pre-expansion transitional phase. Who knows how the markets will behave in 2 weeks?
3) Once I turn the gold into real money, the IRS will tax it. Not reporting it = tax evasion.

So what do I do now? I still have plenty of gems and enchants in my inventory and queued up for sale in the Auction House. I guess in-game I will drop Skinning on an alt and pick up Blacksmithing instead. The gathering professions (Skinning, Herbalism, and Mining) are only useful for making money. And then I'll retire from money-making. Outside of the game, I'd like to spend some time thinking about the lessons I've learned from this experience, and how it could apply to the real world.

Lesson 1: Find a market of impatient wastrels. This is a difficult mindset because most of my friends are patient tightwads like me.

Lesson 2: Avoid personal interaction. The last thing you want to do is waste time haggling with impatient wastrels. Put your product up for sale, and let them buy it -- that's it. Think vending machines.

Lesson 3: Sell a product which is easy to manage in terms of production, storage, sales, and shipping. That is: minimize your logistics costs.

Lesson 4: Avoid intelligent competition. Smart people, upon seeing your product, should say, "Who in their right mind would buy this crap?"

Someday I would like to make a follow-up post titled, "Hitting the Money Cap in E*Trade".

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