So here’s my obligatory 2 cents about the whole gold-buying fiasco that everybody’s been talking about lately. I’ve been swimming around the blogosphere adding comments to other people’s rants about it, I might as well sum up my feelings here.

I can’t stand people who buy gold. I usually consider myself to be a “good person” and I like to surround myself with other people who also similarly play by the “rules” set by society. I don’t consider there to be an argument that buying gold is bad. It’s against the rules! It leads to people getting hacked!

Once, years ago, I knew a guy in my guild who I trusted enough to make him an officer, who then proceeded to pay for a leveling service for his alt priest so that our guild would have a healer for the level 60 5-man instances. He wasn’t much help at the role he had paid for, because he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. And I never trusted him again, after I found out what he had done. Leveling services and gold buying might be different to some people, but they’re all shady. I don’t trust anyone who turns to quasi-legal means to ANY end.

But most of all, buying a thousand gold to buy dual-spec at level 40 is stupid. For the following reasons.

1. There’s a reason Blizzard made it cost 1000 gold, a sum of money that no person who is new to the game should have at that level. Because they didn’t want new players to have access to this advanced feature. Look at the people who usually play this game. A lot of them level to 80 without even knowing they have talent points at all. Do you want to make those people feel that managing TWO talent specs is a necessary and required part of the game, when they don’t even fully understand what their first talent tree does? That’s far too complex for a new player.

2. Look again at those people who level to 80 without spending any talent points. This obviously shows that you don’t NEED two specs, since you can level just fine without even having ONE.

3. If you’re not a brand new player, you don’t need two specs either. In my day, I healed through instances as boomkin spec until I started doing heroics in Northrend. Only THEN did I respec to resto. And I did fine that whole time. More than fine! I spent most of my time spamming Hurricane while my hots ticked away on my tank. I often prevented deaths while simultaneously beating most of the DPS on the damage meters. Who needs a dedicated spec to do a specific role in a non-endgame instance? These places can be done with three people! (I level my gnome warrior as prot because I like the playstyle of rounding up a bunch of mobs and AoEing them down with Thunderclap, not because I NEED to be prot to tank instances.)

4. If you’re not a brand new player and you still want dual spec at 40 for the hell of it (maybe for an “efficient grinding on weak things” spec and an “optimized for taking down single powerful mobs” spec?) it’s not difficult to make 1000 gold by the time you’re level 40. My little gnome dinged level 26 last night, and I’ve already bought all of my bank slots and have 300 gold sitting in my bags.

The rest of my gold is invested in various metal bars. You’d be surprised how easy it is to buy copper ore for ~20 silver apiece, smelt it and put it back up on the auction house for 50 — and watch it sell within 24 hours. Notice that there is not a single bronze bar up on the auction house, buy all the tin you can find and sell bronze bars for 40 gold a stack. It sells within the hour. If there’s one thing you can depend on to sell reliably well in large quantities, it’s low-level metal bars.

Another of my favorites is Netherweave bags. No matter how many you craft and sell, they’ll always be gone before the 24 hours is up. Your limiter in this situation is only Netherweave cloth. You could buy every scrap of netherweave on the auction house and put up 200 bags and they’ll all be gone by the next day.

However, I’m very glad that I took mining to go with my inscription instead of herbalism. Herbs are so expensive that I’d be better off selling them and buying the ink. When the herbs sell for ~1 gold each, and I can get the ink for ~2 gold each (and it takes an average of four herbs to make one ink) I’m glad I took mining instead so that I have access to the awesome money-making power of smelting instead. It might be a little counter-intuitive, but it actually works a lot better this way.

I just noticed this. This is a sign that I stare at tooltips too much.

Compare the wording on these:

Scroll of Enchant Chest – Minor Health vs Scroll of Enchant Chest – Greater Health

Permanently enchants a piece of chest armor…
so that it increases the health of the wearer by x?
to give +x health?

Scroll of Enchant Bracer – Lesser Stamina vs Scroll of Enchant Bracer – Stamina vs Scroll of Enchant Boots – Minor Stamina vs Scroll of Enchant Bracer – Minor Health vs Scroll of Enchant Bracer – Minor Agility

Permanently enchant…
a bracer so that it increases the wearer’s Stamina by x?
bracers to give +x Stamina?
boots to increase Stamina by x?
bracers to increase the health of the wearer by x?
bracers so they increase the wearer’s Agility by x?

My brain is having an argument. Part of it says “NOBODY CARES!” The other half is yelling “BUT IT’S INCONSISTENT!”

This is the first time I’ve had a character that actually rides a mechanostrider as her main form of transportation. Sure, my previous mains got exalted with everybody and got mechanostriders just for completion’s sake, but they always had better mounts (usually talbuks) to ride instead.

Did you know that mechanostriders have swimming animations? These things do not look or feel like they should be able to be completely submerged in water and still function properly. What with the giant exhaust pipes in the back.

Little Kaprika is actually level 23 now, thanks to trying to finish all of the green quests she can find in addition to doing each dungeon at least once. I just realized she was about to level past Wailing Caverns, so I went there today.

My dream realized — tiny gnome tank vs. giant plant monsters that could easily squish her but don’t for some reason!

I’ve decided that b2evo has simply become too annoying to bear, since whenever there’s ANYTHING I want to do with my blog, nobody knows how to do it in b2evo (or the answer is more confusing than the question, or the post explaining how is in Turkish or some ridiculous language like that), and I don’t know enough about programming PHP to write it myself. I’m attempting to switch my blog software over to Wordpress. We’ll see how this works out.

Edit: Okay! I seem to have successfully migrated all of my posts from b2evo 2.4.6 to Wordpress.

If you’d like to know how I did it (because I was having a ton of trouble finding information on how to do this that was written less than 5 years ago), read on.

1. The official Wordpress explanation.
The script they supply there was doing nothing but throwing me gibberish errors no matter what I tried to do.

2. Making a new skin that outputs the blog in something that can be imported via MoveableType.
Unfortunately, the newer version’s skins do not use the same code template. I could not replace the text in the specified files because those files did not exist, and any attempt of mine to shoehorn that code into the existing skin files only resulted in getting completely blank pages. The one time I actually got a page that looked somewhat like plain text (by using the premade skin here), I couldn’t get it to show all of my posts, and it didn’t include the comments either. Unacceptable.

3. A different script, that actually worked this time.
The first time I tried this script (rehosting it here in case it gets lost somewhere, right-click to save it if you need to use it), I already had Wordpress 2.9.2 installed from my previous attempts. It appeared to import all of the posts correctly, but then when I went to my blog, no posts were there. Something must have gone wrong somewhere. So when the instructions give a result you weren’t anticipating, try again except this time, follow them more precisely than you did before — namely, I uninstalled Wordpress 2.9.2, found a copy of the old Wordpress 2.0.4 that the instructions specified, and tried again with THAT version.

Hallelujah, this time it worked. Reinstalled 2.9.2 and ran the update script, and now everything’s beautiful. W00t.

Now, to mess with the theme so that it looks all pretty again….

But the nearest cooking fire is all the way upstairs!