Paying for WoW

As I said in yesterday’s post, starting this summer there will be four members of my family playing WoW together.

While this is fun, it also comes with the burden of paying for four subscriptions.  I am not excited about paying $60 per month for a game.

I haven’t paid a dime for WoW since they introduced the WoW Token.  Just with Garrisons and a little AH work I am able to bring in about 60k-70k gold per month, which easily pays for my monthly token.

My new question – can I increase my revenue in order to cover Tokens for two monthly subscriptions?  Three?  All four?

I think I’ll be going into Legion with the goal of being a full-time gold maker.  Without the Garrison income, this will be through professions and playing the Auction House.  Can I bring in about 200k gold per month?  Will there be any convenient gold-making strategies in the Legion economy?  Time will tell.

Going Back to My Roots

Just over ten years ago, I decided that I wanted to start playing World of Warcraft.  This was in March of 2006, shortly after the Ahn’Qiraj event and about a year before Burning Crusade.

My wife insisted that she had to play as well.  Soon afterward, my two brothers and my sister-in-law subscribed.  This gave us a full 5-man group with my wife as healer and my youngest brother as tank.  We went into the game intending on just questing and playing 5-man content together as a family.  There was no thought of raiding or pvp or anything else.

At the time, my three children were ages 9, 3, and 2.

A new expansion is coming.  My guild has pretty much fallen apart, and I don’t expect many of them to come back for Legion.  I still play, but only solo content and the occasional LFG dungeon.

This summer, my wife is going to resubscribe.  My two older children have accounts and will have max level characters by August.  Thus, we have the makings of a 5-man family group once again.  My youngest doesn’t play, so we’ll have to fill that 5th spot from outside the family.

And so things come full circle.  I am going into Legion with no anticipation of raiding or playing max level content.  I am looking to quest and play 5-man content with my family.  And I am content with that.

Beta Day 2

Finally got a chance to check back in on the beta.

I made it through the intro scenario.  Success!  It was interesting – mostly a zergfest of continuous combat.  As I was running at about 3 fps, and also hadn’t hotkeyed all of my abilities, I didn’t do a whole lot of damage and I died a lot.  Broke all my armor, in fact, before the end of the scenario.  I’m looking forward to seeing this scenario again when the game is live so I am on my own character and I have a better computer.

I made it as far as finding my way to my Class Hall.  I won’t spoil it, but it was neat.  I have the quest to get my artifact weapon.  Then… bugs. The NPC I have to kill to advance the questline is missing.  So I am at a standstill until it is fixed.

All in all, doing some fresh questing was a welcome change from standing in my garrison.

Beta Day One

Nothing to report

I was able to download and install it with no trouble.

However, my old computer system is really dragging right now.  Even on the live version I run at about 6 fps.  The new expansion has greater system requirements so my expectations were low.

I flew through Stormwind, running at about 4 fps.  Got to the first quest, which sends you into a 5-man scenario.

At this point I remembered that I had no add-ons, so none of my ability bars were configured.  Oops.

None of that mattered.  I made it through about 80% of the scenario, and then it crashed.  Reloaded, went in again, and got to 50% before it crashed.  Then the server crashed.

So, no joy in this first run through.  I’ll wait a few days and try again.  In the meantime, I’m researching new computers that are in my budget.

Beta

Got my beta invite.

Should I play it?

I played it heavily when I was in the beta back in Wrath.  I also did a lot in the Mists beta and some in Cataclysm.  I completely avoided the Warlords beta.

I think this time I’ll jump in.  I have nothing vital going on in the live game other than making gold to support my Tokens for playtime.