Added
Release notes for a week with no release. Entries below are things that turned up in guild chat and on my own screen while playing Retail in the Midnight expansion at level 90.
- A fresh habit of opening the Auction House before logging out, just to see what moved.
- One new spreadsheet tab for crafted goods, kept deliberately ugly so I actually use it.
- A second route through the hills for herbs, picked because it ends near a flight master.
- Three guildies asking, in the same evening, what a decent amount of gold looks like at max level. Nobody agreed.
- A small rule: no buying anything from a vendor until the bags are sorted.
- A cheap habit of scanning the first page of search results for an item I know well, to remember what normal looks like on my realm.
- A sticky note on the monitor that says “sell the surplus, keep the useful”. It has already saved me one afternoon.
- A weekly walk through the capital city market, no goal, just watching what other players carry and craft.
None of this is glamorous, and that is the point of keeping a log at all. Most of the added items cost nothing but attention, and attention turns out to be the scarce resource once a character reaches level 90.
Changed
- Farming order. Mining first, then herbs, then the dull stuff. Mornings are quieter and nodes feel less contested.
- Posting habit. Fewer, larger stacks instead of many small ones. Easier to read, easier to undercut yourself by accident less often.
- Repair stops. Moved from “whenever I notice” to “after every dungeon”. Dull, tidy, works.
- Opinion on crafting. I used to treat it as a side hobby. It now sits closer to the centre of my gold plan.
- Bank tabs. Renamed to something a tired person can parse at midnight.
- Dungeon loot. Anything I cannot use goes straight into a sell pile instead of lingering in the bags for a fortnight.
- Chat channel. I muted the trade channel for evenings and read it deliberately, once, in the morning.
- Weekend plans. Gold gets one block of time, not the whole day. The rest belongs to raids and silly alts.
Changed, but only slightly
- I stopped comparing my gold total with other people’s screenshots. It never helped.
- Mount farming now happens in short bursts between other things, not in marathon sessions.
- I check the Auction House on two evenings, not every evening, and my mood has improved.
- Old stacks of cloth stay in the bank until there is a reason to move them, rather than being shuffled around for comfort.
Noted
Not everything in a gold week is farming, and not everything needs a spreadsheet either. A few players in my circle mention that they sometimes skip the grind for a stretch and look at options like World of Warcraft Gold for Sale, usually when a new character needs a quick start or time is short that week. Others never touch the idea and are perfectly happy with their routes. Both camps keep raiding on the same nights, which says plenty.
- Noted: the Auction House rewards patience more than speed.
- Noted: a full bag is a small tax on every farming trip.
- Noted: alts with a profession each can quietly feed the main.
- Noted: guild banks fill up with odds and ends; somebody should sort them.
- Noted: a quiet realm and a crowded one price the same item very differently, and that is fine.
- Noted: everyone’s favourite gold tip contradicts someone else’s, so keep a notebook of your own results.
Not yet shipped
- A proper look at which crafted items hold up after a few weeks.
- A written route for the next zone I intend to farm.
- A tidy-up of the old Classic characters I keep meaning to visit.
- A short list of professions worth pairing together on a fresh alt, so the second character starts with a plan and not a shrug.
That is the digest. Next week: whatever the market decides to do, which it does without asking.
