CAN DO

It's been a couple of weeks, and you probably forgot about me, so let's fix that...

via GIPHY

I've been pretty busy, and there's a few things to report but not an overwhelming amount just hitting personal milestones...

MESEEKS AND DESTROY
Things have actually gone pretty well, I've managed to get enough gold to move most of my characters to Tichondrius. At this point in fact, there are only three remaining to move. However, I'm not sure I'm going to move my Monk as frankly I've managed to get some quick levels on a newbie Monk on Tichondrius already. Either way, with the XP flowing I should be looking at a screen full of 110s on my new home server soon.

Majesticer and Majecticer...

This has been a mixed bag of an expansion for me so far, I've started raiding again, but I've also done WAY more server hopping than ever before. And for me, that's a problem. I move somewhere, I'm bringing a ton of alts. Of course, I'm not out of pocket since I can just turn my gold into tokens/balance as I've been doing. But, that's when it gets nutty. Roughly this amounts to about 550k gold for three characters. And that's just a server transfer. So, for a full set of twelve that's a little over 2 million gold...

ZEROES AND ONES
Speaking of gold, I've obviously been making some if I've managed to move so many characters around. Well, I mentioned the Chimichanga Connection previously, and it's responsible really for my ability to move around so freely.

I paid five thousand gold total for everything in this screenshot and all of it has since sold...

The TLDR is cross realm pet trading, which has been a thing for years now. Historically speaking though, it's never been seriously considered by a lot of people because of the headache of moving that gold from some backwater server you only have a level 3 Blood Elf on to your main server where you can put it to some actual use. Basically it works like this...

First you get some seed money to the new server so you can start posting auctions, admittedly this is the easiest hurdle to overcome. But then, there's the more daunting task of finding servers with a favorable markup in the first place, and of course finding the right pets to sell there. And then the tedium of moving everything where it needs to go. That last part is something that only gets worse as you diversify.

Because you have to learn it on your buy server, switch to the sell server. Find the appropriate pet, cage it and any others you're looking to sell, then begin the process of listing them. Then you have the wait to look forward to, pets like transmog and other largely cosmetic items in the game don't sell instantly. You're usually waiting for days, weeks, or even months before something sells.

Then you have to figure out how to get it back to your main where it can actually do you some good, which means basically doing what you just did... backwards. Or at least, that WAS the case until very recently. See now that we can buy battle.net balance with wow tokens, there's a while lot more we can get out of cross realming pets. The main appeal here is of course that one can easily do things like buy months worth of game time with gold. Pay for game services, pets, mounts, etc. You can even buy packs in Hearthstone, Crates in Overwatch. Or hell, even buy games you never bothered to spend real money on. And the return can be substantial as long as you're patient and willing to put the time in.

The upkeep isn't too bad really, but the initial investment can definitely be daunting, so the real question is - is it worth it? That depends on how much your time is worth and how much you want to cut your wallet away from the game. For me, it's absolutely worth it. Not only is it an interesting challenge for my gold making skills, but it's nice to know I'm not stuck on a bad server, or with a character that I don't like the looks of. Knowing I can always pick up one of those other Blizzard games that I've been meaning to try out but just couldn't talk myself into spending money on. So, for me. Yeah, totally worth it.

CZR