…Well, on World of Warcraft, anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, the co-workers of one of my gaming buddies convinced him to pick up WoW again. He, in turn, came to his fellow recovering WoW addicts (me and his brother) and asked us to join in. We did.

I’m playing a troll mage by the name of Xenophanes, with alchemy/herbalism as my profession. I’m not ordinarily a fisherman, but when I saw that prices for Blackmouth & Firefin were much higher than I remembered, I took up fishing. Then, I found out why prices were up. Instead of random catches among the other fish, Blackmouth, Deviants, Firefin, and perhaps others, are now caught by seeking out schools and fishing in them. They’re not hard to find, but it’s inconvenient (and probably discourages the development of fishing bots, but I don’t know that), and somewhat time consuming.

I spent about an hour last night fishing, got enough Blackmouth Oil to do me for now, and headed to the Auction House. Joking with my friends about starting my own commerce guild (Xen*Mart), I put my fish on the market at a high enough price to make it worth my while, but low enough to seriously undercut the competition. When I woke this morning, I’d earned nearly seven gold — at level 17, IN AN HOUR. Granted, that may not seem like much to others who play the game, I suck at making money on these games. I saved for two weeks with my last high level guy when he hit 40, and ended up borrowing almost 50 gold to get my mount.

Of course. now that I’m not playing “fair” with the price gougers, the bottom’ll fall out of the market. Hopefully, they’ll move on to more profitable ventures, allowing me to raise prices and make myself rich through my monopoly, but that seems an unlikely outcome. At any rate, I’ve made more (virtual) money than I expected in the last 24 hours, so I call it a win.