I found myself with a few spare hours tonight and decided to spend 23K gold to reactivate my account for 30 days.

It wasn't an easy choice. I literally shut the game down twice before finally pulling the trigger. I'm going to put on a tech podcast, enjoy a few hours in the game (yes I still do actually day dream about playing WoW sometimes and I don't daydream ever) and try not to get sucked back in.

All I want is a few mindless hours visiting the world I love getting lost in.

(Sadly I've already wasted 1.5 hours just updating all the things my computer needed to update: Anti-Virus, Battle.net client and Steam. I'm sure iTunes and Flash will be bothering me soon.)

One other thing that only playing a few hours means is that I can dispense with things that take more than two hours including auctions, garrisons, etc. Perhaps a bit of laid back leveling on my Druid.

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Who would have thought all that time spent making gold would mean I would never have to pay real money to play World of Warcraft again.

At the current price I have enough gold to buy 10 years worth of WoW Tokens (or 5 years of time running 2 accounts simultaneously).

Do you want to know what the removal of a real money monthly fee has made me realize? That if I'm not playing WoW it isn't because I don't have the money and it certainly isn't because I don't like the game.

Blizzard announced today that the WoW Tokens were going to go on sale tomorrow, April 7, 2015. These tokens can be used to give you 30 days of game time.

The real money cost for the Tokens will be $20. The initial starting price to buy the tokens from the auction house (and potentially purchased without resubscribing) will at initially be set by Blizzard at 30,000 gold.

While the price for tokens will start to fluctuate based on market activity (if there are too many tokens for sale the price will drop and if there are too few the price will rise) I thought it would be fun to play with some Token math.

If you're like me you are a bit obsessive and completionistic about making sure you are doing your work orders on all of your alts. But what are you spending in material cost to stay on the "hamster wheel" of garrison work orders and should you even be spending that money?

I've been playing around with the spreadsheets I have been building using TSM data (See Build a WoW Item Pricing Spreadsheet Using TradeSkillMaster .CSVs + Google Drive Sheets) and one of the sheets I have calculates the cost of materials necessary for doing work orders on various professions buildings.

Head past the jump for an idea of what it costs to pump out work orders day after day on your characters.

Ever since I worked at an MMORPG company and I found out one of my co-workers who had worked on World of Warcraft had an NPC in WoW named after him I've always thought it would be awesome to have an NPC or item in the game named after me.

While I do have an NPC named after me in a previous MMORPG I worked on, having someone (or something) in World of Warcraft would be awesome.

Earlier tonight I found out about (and bought off trade chat) Erorus' Ledger of Trade which is a reference to Erorus, the creator of The Undermine Journal.

I even went into April and let her know that Erorus has an item in the game and how cool that was. I then also mentioned how it would be cool if I had an item in the game but I likely wasn't popular enough for that.

Later that night I decided to build a Trading Post (of course I would!) for my garrison building in The Spires of Arak.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I used my garrison ability (called "Smuggler's Run") which summons a Rare Goods Vendor and his name was "Honest Jim". I thought that was pretty neat but as I looked closer I started to notice some things.

• He's a human named Jim.
• He has facial hair. (Although, he also has hair on his head which doesn't fit my theory. lol)
• His flavor text reads "If you've got the gold, I've got the goods!".
• He is a Rare Goods Vendor (get it…Rare Goods, as in Blues).
• He sells you many rare items, some at pretty high prices (2,200g for a 28 slot bag!?!).

2,200g for a bag? That's some ignorant bull…gimme one!

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It's New Year's Eve and time to put some of my thoughts down about what's happened here at Power Word: Gold this year.

While there has been some fairly drastic changes in the area of gold-making itself due to the release of Warlords of Draenor this post will mainly focus on what's been going on with the blog specifically.

I normally try not to talk too much about the blog itself as I like to let the details be background to the content these end-of-the-year posts are when I allow myself to be a bit more introspective. Read on for more.

I was tipped off by Twitter user @OriShmori that there's a strong chance that Savage Blood is being duplicated ("duped") on several servers.

@PowerWordGold @CM_Lore Hopefully something will be done about the rampant Savage blood dupes. http://t.co/wbaEzSI298
— Ori (@OriShmori) December 26, 2014

If this is true this could be very bad for anyone hoping to make gold selling Savage Blood or selling items made with Savage Blood.

This isn't the first time I've written on the topic of item duplication and its effects on the economy (see Strong Evidence of Rampant Item Duplication in WoW and Proof Of Jeweled Onyx Panther Duping And Its Effects On Pricing). My guess is that (sadly) this won't be the last. Read on for our evidence and the ability to check the data for yourself.

Happy Holidays! In celebration of the successful launch of the Bid Fiddlers gold-making forums we're giving away a golden Soul of the Aspects pet.

(A huge thanks to @RhoWoW from the @RealmPodcast for providing the giveaway pet. Rho is a fantastic cheerleader for all WoW podcasts out there and a very generous person. Go listen to the Realm Maintenance podcast.

HOW TO ENTER:

To enter the contest do the following things:

• Sign up for a free account on the BidFiddlers.com forums 
• Reply to this contest post with your answer to the following question: "What are you looking forward to most in 2015?" 

Your answers don't have to relate specifically to WoW. I'm just a huge fan of the feeling of new beginnings that a new year brings.

CONTEST RULES:

• Answers to this contest post will be accepted up until midnight on December 31, 2014. 
• In the week following the closing of entries one comment will be chosen at random (via random.org where the comments are numbered from 1 being the first comment to what ever the last comment is).
• The winner will be contacted by me via the email address used to sign up for the forum and will be asked to reply to obtain the pet gift code.
•  If the winner doesn't accept the gift or reply to the email an new winner will be chosen at random and so on.

SPREAD THE LOVE

In addition, while it's not required, please feel free to share this contest on your blogs, social media and any other methods you see fit.

STICK AROUND 

I also hope that if you've signed up for the forums to enter the contest that you also stick around and chat with other forum members about gold-making. We have a great little community here and we're always looking for new members to help us learn about making gold in World of Warcraft.

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