Friday, January 18, 2008

Rags To Riches in WoW - Horde Style: The Preamble

This series almost never saw the light of day. It was almost tossed. Thrown out. Scrapped. Eighty-sixed.

Why?

A couple of reasons.

You see, like with my first series on going from rags to riches in WoW, there's a lag from when the days happen to when they get posted. Primarily, it's because it takes a while to put it all together. Secondarily, it's because there are other things already on deck that need my attention. Thirdarily, I put a lot of research into these things (i.e. I have zero willpower and play when I should be writing).

With my first series this worked well (even the pathetic lack of willpower). However, with this series, there were some things I didn't do that made me question how good this series would be from a "how to" perspective. These included...


  • I didn't set concrete goals at the outset. Sure, sure, there's the 100+ gold and great gear, but I wanted to be clearer on the "great gear." Before I knew it I was chest deep in the series and setting goals then is like making bets on a NFL game in the final 5 minutes of the fourth quarter.
  • BeanCounter was going to help me be better at capturing the transaction details. Waaaaaaay better. So I didn't take any notes about buying/selling - BeanCounter rocks! One problem - it doesn't capture the size of a stack of goods you won at auction. That puts a crinkle into my ability to document my finds in the detail I want.
  • There were times when I fired up BottomScanner for finds. Problem is that I haven't written anything about BottomScanner yet. And I didn't want to interrupt the series to include that series (Og writes serially and slowly). Didn't stop me from snatching the deals though. A couple insanely good deals. Can't.....stop........myself...........from............clicking.................Buyout.


Those were the biggies. After wrestling with it I decided to publish the series because...


  • There's still a lot of great information in there that I think people will appreciate.
  • BeanCounter did capture some great information (it'll be better than last time in many respects).
  • It was a success. Even though I failed to clearly state my goals in the beginning, I think the only thing that would have done is moved the end of the post one or two days further at most (depending on what I would target...like Mystic Spellthread and other twink enchants...woot!).
  • It was a unique economy that posed some new twists and challenges and I wanted to share that experience.
  • If I didn't post this series based in the Horde faction of Blade's Edge, then Sellia might not see this series. His comment on the final post of my first series is the reason I picked this realm - it was my first and only request...behold the power of planting seeds.


So that's it in a Blackwood Nut shell.

Stay tuned for Day 1 of the series as I share my experience as being Horde for the very first time. Horde? Horde!

/snarl