Friday, January 11, 2008

The WoW-Jones Industrial Average

I'll start off by saying, for the umpteenth time, that while herbalism has led me to giant financial joys in WoW, lately its like school in summer time, it sux. Positive thinking, my @$$

Ok, on to the post...

Raise your hand if you use an alt as your AH mule?

Now, raise your other hand if you also created a guild for that AH mule, purely to gain access to the new guild vault features (and the side benefit of no longer being un-guilded and thus the target of "sign my charter" spam)?

I know that before the guild vault was available, my AH mule's personal bank slots were jam packed with all sorts of stuff that I was either saving up for optimal stack sizes before selling, or just wouldn't sell so I was holding on for better market conditions.

Ok, you can put your hand(s) down now.

The guild vault helped reduce the problem, for a while. Now I've got two tabs that're nearly full. Granted, one whole tab full with green items to DE, and his Enchanting just hit 275 on wednesday, so those puppies will get one final run through the AH, afterwhich any that don't sell will be sizzled, and I'll have an empty slot to play with. When's somebody going to write an addon that calculates the total value of all items on a Guild Vault tab? Don't look at me ;-) I'd like to see the total value of the giant pile of greenies, then sizzle them all and replace the spots with the DE'd mats and compare the values, without a lot of manual arithmetic fuss.

Led me to ponder, as I'm apt to do.....how about a new profession called Banker.

Only a half baked idea at this point, but it would be a profession for exactly this purpose, an alt who's main purpose in life is to read email, sell stuff, and reap gold.

Possible features of the Banking profession:
1) Firstly, you can only play him during normal business hours, as he is a Banker afterall :-)

2) Maybe this type of player comes with all the bank slots pre-filled with large bags

3) Bankers get access to a "savings account" where they can earn some sort of realm-specific adjustable interest rate. Not sure how they'd calculate this interest rate, but I'm sure they have economists on staff at Blizzard who could figure out a formula based upon the market conditions and fluctuations of prices and volumes of certain staple products. Maybe a WoW-Jones Industrial Average?

4) If the savings account proves to be an economically viable concept by Blizz, then as you skill up your banker, you could invest in CD's, Mutual Funds, and other more advanced financial instruments.

5) New recipes in the Tailoring profession for formal business attire. My dwarf would look awesome in a 3-piece suit. And maybe my engineer can craft a Comb so he could brush his hair into a nice little do, kinda like when Bart Simpson combs his hair for church.

6) You could set it up such that the gold resides on the Banker alt, but your main can withdraw the money without having to log out and then log back in. Not sure if it should work that way for item slots as well, but maybe.

Sure, this profession wouldn't be as feature-rich as some of the others, but it would solve some of the things that are painful about storing items, and I'm not 100% clear on Blizzards reasons for making those activities difficult on us.

1 comment:

Mosshoof said...

My banker wears a tuxedo in lieu of actual formal business attire.

And while I haven't created myself a solo guild, I've certainly considered it.