Virtually a millionaire!

While I do spend a lot of time online playing World of Warcraft, most people by now realise that I play it mainly to socialise with other people. It gets a little lonely here at times and while I can't shimmy until I ache all over anymore (well no actually I can still do that, it just takes 5-10 seconds rather than 5-10 minutes!) I can in a virtual world fight monsters and cast spells. However these things quickly take their toll of my energy and while it is mostly mental exertion, it still leaves me exhausted. I've managed now to keep a balance of no more than a couple of hours doing questing and raiding with my friends. So what is it I do with all the rest of the time I have between resting breaks? Gold, my friend...gold.



I discovered many months ago that playing about with the in game Auction House doesn't drain my energy.  The actual mental input is minimal and as I'm not being forced to concentrate on flashing lights, audio alarms and little green bars - which is my usual focus when healing my little raid team - I find that I can happily keep myself entertained for ages.  Who knew how interesting it could be to watch the little piles of gold come rolling in?  At first I collected gold because there would often be weeks when I couldn't join in at all and in order to make sure I could keep up with my friends and not fall too far behind, I started to amass a "rainy day" fund to enable me to purchase equipment when I would lag behind.  This soon spread to being able to fund Mr Wench's occasional wishes in WoW too (as he does all the real life work that pays for our accounts) until my little nest egg had reached around 20,000 gold! A fortune!  Perhaps not...



Getting heavily into the swing of my new little addiction, I decided to try to get to the gold cap for a character in the game.  At that time it was around 250k gold, which seemed so far away.  The week before I managed it, Blizzard moved the goal posts and stretched the character gold cap to 1 million gold (well actually its one copper short, but I'm not fussy).  Not one to give up easily, especially now that I was so determined to reach that elusive gold cap, I continued planning, scheming and counting the coppers until finally last month...

I also seem to have developed a fascinatingly melodious and psychedelic sunflower pet.

You'd think that would be enough, wouldn't you? My menagerie of WoW vanity pets has grown to the point of no longer having pets that I can use gold to purchase.  I have caught up with all the equipment I wanted to buy for my main character, and while lacking the energy to play the other characters, there seems little point to buying things for them.



But no...the second million awaits...and it has cookies!