In Search of Fortune: Long Boi

Mighty Caravan Brutosaur

Welcome to ‘In Search of Fortune’, a new monthly series where I discuss my gold goals and in-game money making strategies.

Near the end of November, 2019, it was discovered (then confirmed) that the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur would no longer be purchasable in Shadowlands outside of a rare spawn on the black market auction house. Prior to this point, I had assumed I’d eventually get the mount, as gold inflation and whatnot tends to devalue old vendor items. I wasn’t, though, passionate about the mount. Sure, it would be nice, but… 5 million gold? Then, the news that it was going… extinct. Admittedly, I still didn’t care a lot. But there was this slight… annoyance. “I had plans for that”, I thought. Sure, not important plans, but, plans. Sometime after that, I wondered “could I even get it if I wanted?”. Well, sure I could, right? Suddenly my gold-making ego was self-challenged! Can I earn 5 million gold before Shadowlands (prepatch, even, I eventually learn)?

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What’s Incoming for this Blog

Future road pic

I guess it’s time I talk a little about where this blog is going. This is both for you and for me – for you to know what I intend and for me to, perhaps, get some feedback on that direction.

This one shouldn’t be incredibly long, but I’ll talk a little about what this blog has been doing, what I’m going to do with it, and how you can influence that if you have such a mind.

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Shadowlands: Why I’m Not a Fan of the ‘Great Vault’ (and Why You Might Be)

In Shadowlands, the weekly mythic+ cache is being replaced with the great vault. I shared my initial reaction of their first post about it (and got a correction by a commenter), wowhead has gotten more information, including an actual example of how it works. I’ll summarize a bit of what they said, along with providing a link to the original post after the break. Having seen clarification, there are parts of what bothered me that were my misunderstanding, however, most of my main issues still linger…

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Shadowlands Beta: Who Gets In?

While, this blog isn’t quite back up and running yet, I did want to talk a little about the Shadowlands beta and the access (or general lack of) to it.

The alpha test for this expansion was almost exclusively limited to streamers, youtubers and other such content creators. In addition to those type, the very top end of competitive content players also had a high rate of invitation (as is true historically as well). At first, this made sense to me. The very best get rewarded for their accomplishments. The content creators will create content with their access. Even further, WoW streamers and high end content runners tend to be very active and are very likely to spend a lot of time in an alpha test to either get an advantage for when the expansion goes live or, naturally, to have something in demand to stream. Win, win, win, right? Maybe… Some thoughts about this, and a tip about beta access, after the break.

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WoW: Is Ashran The Worst Thing to Happen to PVP?

oc8yhNcI started out wanting to write a nice little opinion piece on the new PVP zone. Right after launch (well, after the launch DDOS/lag fest/6 hour queues fiasco) and leveling to 100, the zone clearly had some issues – but what new feature doesn’t? So, I waited. Like the first 2 hours of the queue I am currently in to get into the zone I waited patiently for issues to be hammered out, balanced to be restored, etc. But a month after the release of Warlords the zone is more and more abhorrent. It’s past the point where I can feel the issues are bugs and more so that they’re working as intended. It’s not balanced, it’s “required” (I’ll get to that) and it’s just not fun. So, instead of writing a nice opinion piece about a feature I was once so excited about – there’s a rant incoming. (more…)