Location Taken: Chestertown, NY
Time Taken: July 2012
I’m rich!
Rich, I say!
I should buy a bridge! Or an island! Or a volcano!
Or, you know, none of the above. I’m not that rich. And for that matter, I’m only rich in Guild Wars 2. And you can’t buy bridges, islands, or volcanoes there.
On the other hand, I did manage to earn a whopping 100 gold in just three days!
For comparison purposes, a single gold kinda feels somewhere between 10 and 20 American dollars in terms of how you spend it. You notice the loss, and have to think about it, (well, at least you do if you’re on a tight budget in the real world. Adjust number for personal wealth level.), but you’re still willing to spend it on somewhat frivolous things. Spending 10 gold is a major expense for most players, especially just starting out. Earning my first gold was a major accomplishment!
On that scale, 100 gold is between 1,000 and 2,000 dollars. The most expensive things sold by virtual merchants cost that much, and they’re a special book that gives you the Commander tag which makes you show up on the mini-map and become a leader in the eyes of many people (or at least someone they follow around and listen to the orders they give), and a component needed to create the most elaborate and expensive items, the legendaries. These things are so tough to make that one of the components is gotten from exploring every single corner of the rather large map, and that’s nowhere near the toughest one to get!
There’s also a trading post where you can sell and buy things with other players. Those legendaries are sellable (or at least put up for sale), and the most expensive one, Eternity, is currently being sold for 3,450 gold. Eternity is over a thousand gold more expensive than the next one down the list, but that’s because making it requires combining two other legendaries!
So with the scale I’m using, Eternity feels like it costs between 34,500 dollars and 69,000 dollars. I’m not sure if anyone actually buys these things when they’re listed…
Still, I’m now one tenth of the way to being able to afford that. Slightly more, actually, since I’ve got 354 gold. Yes, that means I’ve earned a third of my current wealth in the past week (not counting the rather expansive collection of expensive items I’ve accumulated). So, how did I do it?
By selling things worth six silver at most, of course! Quick currency note: 100 copper to a silver, 100 silver to a gold. That meant I had to have sold several thousand items during those three days, which is just what I did. Yay multiplication!
This game has a gathering system. You can wander around the maps finding spots to get materials. Some are worthless, others quite valuable. And you can sell these materials on that trading post. It can get quite boring just wandering from node to node over and over, but that’s just what I did. The primary ones I was gathering are in the highest-level areas, and are so valuable that you can only gather them once a day, rather than the once per hour of the lower-level nodes. These are materials needed to make the best gear in the game, so there’s quite the demand out there. I would wander around gathering every single piece of Orichalcum and Ancient Wood I could get my hands on, put them on sale on the trading post, and they’d be sold within minutes, if not seconds.
I earned just under five gold each run. Normally this would only net you about 15 gold in three days, which is actually a respectable income. Except. The nodes are only exhausted for the day by the character you gathered with. If you have multiple characters, you can gather multiple times a day. They have to be at the level cap and geared well enough to survive the run (which is quite difficult in some places). This requires a large amount of time and work and money to get these characters ready.
I’ve been playing this game regularly for a year. I have seven characters at max level.
So, thanks to the power of math, 7 characters x 3 days x ~5 gold equals about 100 gold in just three days. Most people can’t manage this particular route to wealth. Either they don’t have enough top-level characters, or their mind goes numb at the second or third run-through of the exact same gathering path, and they quit early. They take other paths to earn money, usually involving running dungeons with other people or buying speculation items and sitting on them for a while before selling at a profit or selling everything they get their hands on or what not.
In other words, this tactic works for me because it plays to my strong points. It requires patience, willingness to do repetitive tasks, love of traveling across the map, and an appreciation for the power of math. And it doesn’t hit my weak point of having to deal with other people to sell things (the trading post is an automatic interface, nothing more). I can take things at my own pace.
I’m still trying to figure out how to apply the insights about myself that I’m learning from this game to the real world. Although, based on that list of strong and weak points, maybe I should really focus on my photography and set up some way to sell my photos that requires minimal interaction with people…
Now if only real life had a one-click, always-available interface that handled both making my product known to people and all the technical aspects of market research and the actual selling aspect without any extra steps required on my part…
If that was the case, I could make hundreds of gold – I mean, dollars, in the real world too…
