World of Warcraft Alt value

World of Warcraft, a multi-player, on-line role playing game. More than one player, on line and connected to the same environment while playing a game. Each player has a unique play style, in one way or another. I have several characters, with one or two being my primary. These two I have ramped up their skills and abilities and they are the characters that get the most play-time. As it is a social environment as well, being on line in my own name enables friends and followers to find me, talk or interact with me.

Sometime we all need a little 'quiet' time while we concentrate and do things we want to do. Alternative characters enable a player to be online and yet be separate from the established social circle, so to that end, I have an alt who's name for the most part is not connected to my main. My banking alt is obviously a banking  alt, a character used primarily for interacting with the bank and the auction house, yet though if a player knew who I was, there would be no obvious link to my main account. Ah, such is the wonderful anonymity a banking alt garners.

I have other alts, born from the frustration of paying high prices for goods and services my mains need while levelling their games. Each player is limited to two primary skills, such as Mining and Blacksmithing. Skilling alts up to be able to process the materials needed for top level objects is relatively simple. Levelling them with no trade whatsoever means a much faster levelling process, then, when you reach 85 or 90, teach your alt the trade and within a few days you have a workable proficiency.

With Mists of  Pandaria, the latest expansion by Blizzard for the game World of Warcraft, crafting alts need materials only found when killing Non Player Characters, NPC's. A player needs to play the alt characters if they want to use the crafting skills. Previously, the rare crafting materials were available by farming ores or herbs or even in the auction house. As I have enough alternative characters to cover all the trades I need, I find my daily workload ballooning.

Maybe those players using robots to automatically farm, are turning to 'bots' capable of harvesting NPC's in order to gain the needed crafting materials, or do they reduce the number of alts they use and farm the auction house to generate gold and thereby purchase the needed items from other players. An interesting conundrum,

I predict several 'bots' will greatly improve their 'AI' as they  tackle this problem. Gold Sellers seem to be dropping off the daily chat logs, possibly because the  rare materials cannot be easily harvested from simple 'bots' endlessly farming the ores and herbs from dawn until dawn the next day. Goes to show, if you solve a problem, you create a new challenge for someone else. Good job Blizzard making players work for the rare items, but it will be interesting to see how things turn out once the undetectable payer bots are introduced into the mix.

World of Warcraft needs a Dragon

It is good that some entities, like Blizzard, the Company that owns World of Warcraft, considers it important to raise money for relief aid to Japan. For any reason you care to choose, helping others is always good. Though sometimes, a little incentive is needed to get their customers to part with their hard earned cash so that it can be forwarded to the Japan Relief Fund.

Sadly, if a scheme is only half baked, then a full loaf is never returned, and by that I mean, Blizzard, for example, could have gained terrific leverage on the inherent need for many of their gamers to own something worthwhile.

Blizzard are giving a small pet away as a way of saying 'thank you' for making a donation. Sadly, most players have more pets than they can use in any given session, with so many pets given away as incentives, a pet shortage in World of Warcraft is something there is not.
I applaud their desire to help Japan, but I feel they could have raised tons of cash instead of the great dollop they have. And they had the mechanism at their disposal, in plain sight and not being used effectively.

Now the players can fly just about anywhere on almost any mount, the race is on to get bigger, harder to get, more colourful mounts, so gigantic dragons, breathing blue flames, and whose frame is all bones is the most wanted flying mount.

If Blizzard had released a huge colourful very fast flying mount, something unique, and made it account bound, and charged the player something easy to obtain, like twenty Euros or twenty Dollars, then I bet I would have purchased it for my characters. I bet a lot of people would have bought it. Once one player has it, others demand to know how they can get one and do not want to be left out.

Imagine a couple million players each pumping twenty dollars into the system, Blizzard could have made a significant donation to the Japan Relief Fund.