Gold commeth, and gold goeth away..

Well, my dreams of amassing 4 million gold by the release of BfA have all but flown out the window, but I sort of knew they would. At the beginning of July I decided that I wanted to have my horde and alliance characters each on their own servers, and I wanted them to be different servers in terms of population. My horde characters are comfortably sitting on a high population server now, and that’s why there’s a dip in my money – I bought 6 WoW tokens to complete the various faction / server transfers while I got set up. My alliance characters are together on a low / medium population server (my main server as it were).

Why the two different servers? A lot of reasons, one of which being I wanted to be able to have one of every class for each faction. I have the alliance side taken care of, along with 8 of those characters sitting at level 110. The horde side isn’t nearly as fleshed out. I only have two characters (a third I’m still waiting to transfer) and only one of those is 110. Will I play them all? Probably not. Does it matter if I separate them? No. It’s just one of my weird OCD quirks. I like the idea of having 1 of everything, and then getting professions etc. all set up on them. Plus if there’s another garrison / order hall type mechanic in BfA I’d like to be able to take advantage of that. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

I did at least manage to stay above a million liquid, and that’s my smaller goal in the meantime. The AH mount or any other big expenses will just have to wait. It’s really not that big of a deal to me, but I hope sales pick up because they’ve been pretty slow. I still see lots of goblins making some really good coin, but I am not one of them. Plus, Nugette is due in a week, so I know my play time will be greatly reduced for the next few weeks while we get adjusted to another newbie in the family, and work on our schedule.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Memory Blanket

In keeping with my goals of learning new techniques and at least getting SOME knitting done in 2018 even if it wasn’t a lot of knitting, I picked up my mitered memory blanket from a few months back and added a few more squares to it. I’m not sure why I initially found the project difficult but my last two squares turned out much better and I’m finding it a simple relaxing knit (which is something I need right about now). As you can tell by the picture, my 2nd square (the blue and white one) is actually backwards. Long term that may bug me, it’s facing wrong side and it’s pointed the opposite way from the three other squares – but I decided to embrace this mistake. When the blanket is done, it will be a reminder of my learning, and getting better at something like this. It will be proof that I have improved.

Same can be said about the very first square, the black one. It’s not sized properly as I miss counted some rows and made some very simple mistakes. The two most recent squares (the gold/grey and the pink) are much nicer, show off the stitches, and are done ‘properly’ – but I think that even heirloom items need mistakes in them, it’s what makes us human.

Originally I had grand ideas of knitting one square a day and completing a year-long project (that resulted in a nice blanket) but I think I’ll continue to just work at it here and there when I have time between other projects, or the urge strikes me. It doesn’t take long to complete a square, and this is a fantastic way to stash bust those little ends of yarn that I’ve been collecting for absolutely zero reason (well, now they have a reason). Eventually once I find the blanket is as large as I want I’ll trim it with a black crochet boarder to complete the ‘look’ and to give it a cleaner appearance. I’ll also block it which should help make it look more uniform.

Remember, you shouldn’t be afraid to try new projects, even if they don’t turn out perfect the first time. There’s nothing wrong with growing from your mistakes, and there’s nothing wrong with showing your human side and even embracing those mistakes you’ve made. We all started from somewhere.

Why Knitting (and Learning) is Important to Me

My twitter timeline lately has been filled with knitting. I haven’t been doing a whole lot of it this year, but back in December I had set myself some goals that I wanted to accomplish, and they were goals that were really important to me. One of those goals was to learn the “fish lips kiss heel” – an alternative to doing gussets.

A bit of backstory – I’ve been knitting for almost 3 years (this September). I’m completely self taught. I found out I have a bit of a knack for it, and I find it really (really) enjoyable and relaxing. I purchased the FLKH pattern almost 2 years ago for $1 (that’s all the designer charges) and was COMPLETELY intimidated by the booklet that came along with the pattern. It was 18 pages of explanations and examples and instructions. I set it aside and went back to gussets.

I decided this year would be THE YEAR. I would FINALLY learn how to do these magical heels. Why are they magical? The designer claimed there was zero math involved, that there would be no gaps, and that they’d fit perfectly. If you’ve ever knit a gusset before, you know these are pretty big claims. I was still terrified.

I read the instructions. Watched the youtube videos. Re-read the instructions, and then just dove in, knitting my sock toe up for the first time ever and then following the pattern (which may be 18 pages long, but only one page is the actual instructions).

I should have done this 2 years ago. The heel is everything it claims to be and more. I am pretty sure I will never go back to a gusset type heel and that this is going to be my new favourite. I’m not 100% sold on the toe design I decided to use, but that’s the great thing about knitting, there are tons of options.

The best part is how proud of myself I am. I set a goal. I stuck with it. I accomplished it. I learned something new that works and it makes me feel good about myself and my skills.

Don’t let that little voice in your head hold you back. Go after your goals, no matter what that voice is telling you. It’s a huge cliche but the only regret I have is not trying sooner. Even if I failed (and trust me, I have failed in knitting many MANY a time before) I would have at least tried. I didn’t even give myself the opportunity to fail.

So here’s to my awesome looking socks – and now I can knit some for my very knit-worthy husband, because I don’t have to be so afraid.

My Road to 4 Million Gold

I started off tracking my gold May 16th and I had a total of 176,000. Not a very impressive number by any means. Now, June 26th, I’m at 2,174,000 and I’ve crossed over into the 2 million gold mark. I’m still quite far away from my desired goal of 4 million, but I have been keeping above where I need to be just slightly. Again this will probably take a nosedive in a few short weeks because I’m due with my second baby, but it has still been a fun adventure so far.

Where does the gold come from?

By far my biggest sellers have been flips that I picked up off of the auction house. I bought a Guardian Cub for 75,000 and I re-sold it for 400,000 gold. The person who bought it from me relisted it for 550,000 but I think I’m still the winner in that deal. I have had a few smaller deals like that but as you can see by my chart growth is not steady or rapid. There was a period of almost two weeks where I barely made anything and sales all but dried up.

I have only 1 character doing order hall missions and I tend to hoard my crafting supplies instead of selling them. I found an amazing deal where a player was selling 100 spirits of harmony for 35g each, so I picked them up and I’ve been making living steel on my alchemist that I hope to use towards a sky golem. Of course the other part of that is my engineer needs to create a daily for 30 days and there’s no way to bypass that. I do have two engineers, so I’m contemplating making two sky golems a month, but creating mounts is a market I’ve never really gotten into.

I have been doing a few monk farms, mostly for BC recipes and I’ve gotten a few lucky drops that way but nothing astounding. I am still playing on three servers total but I’m contemplating downgrading to just two, a horde and an alliance server. I don’t want to spread myself out just to try to obtain gold when I honestly have plenty for my needs. Gold is just a fun challenge for me, a new way to “play” the game when I don’t actually have a lot of time to game. It’s mostly passive (at least the way that I’m doing it) and doesn’t require a lot of hands on time. Sure I might be sitting in game, but IRL I’m typically tending to my little, doing chores, or just trying to beat the heat while I deal with this 9th month of pregnancy (it has been rough). It gives me a way to feel connected to the game when I would otherwise want to quit.

I’ve been doing the Midsummer Festival quests on some of my baby alts, farming blossoms so I can pick up pets and toys that I don’t currently have. I know fellow goblins are stockpiling them for when the festival is gone and people want the pets again, but I want them for myself and my collection, first. Spares can certainly go towards the market.

I’ve almost got one of every alliance created now on my main server, and I have been contemplating doing the same for horde on my backup server. There’s also rumors of server merges and I wonder how that will affect gold making, more competition and more goblins crammed into the same places. I don’t tend to run cancel scans because I find them a waste of time, I know sales would increase if I tried to undercut every time a player undercut me. To each their own, there’s no one “right” way to make gold.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

12 Years (and Counting)

12 years. That’s how long I’ve had this blog. Sure, it used to be MmoQuests and just recently I’ve changed it to NomadicGamersEh – but it’s the same site, the same posts. 3,251, in fact. I don’t write as often as I used to but I still call this little place ‘home’ for when I do have the time to write, and I don’t see myself giving it up any time soon.

A lot has changed over those years. Not just the games I was playing (mostly EQ2 at the time) but me as a person. I moved across the country. I got married. I have 1 (and a 2nd on the way) kid. I moved again, to a new province. My basic tastes have remained the same, especially in gaming (I still prefer to play RPG and MMO type games) but things have evolved and I’ve branched out. I don’t just use this blog to talk about gaming any more either. I use it to share my love of knitting, anime, food, and whatever else happens to cross into that territory.

I’m pretty proud. 12 years. That’s a long time. Here’s to 12 more!