WoW Gold Farming: Motes of Mana

Of course you have to make a lot of assumptions. And those assumptions probably won't turn out to be too accurate but its an entertaining if sobering thought experiment to conduct, nonetheless.

So, on average I'd say that in an hour I can get about 4x primal mana's. Remember that a primal mana consists of 10 motes of mana. On my server (magtheridon US) I can sell 4 primal's for about 68g.

You also have to remember that gray items drop and that you can vendor these for some gold as well. After a couple hours of testing, I got about 20g per hour worth of gray items to drop. I got misc. white items to drop as well but they're too many to list so I'll simply say that they totaled about 20g 18s. In total, including gray items and trade items (i.e. white items) plus the 4x primal mana's, so that's about 107g per hour.

Personally I found that number to be higher than my expectations. Now lets see--what kind of real US dollar value would that sort of number represent if we make some assumptions about time spent over the course of a year?

107g per hour x 8 hours a day= 856g per day

If you assume around $0.032 per 1g--which seems to be about the going rate these days on Sparter and other sites (at least for my server)--thats roughly $27.39 US dollars per day.

Now, 27.39 x 6 days=164.34 per week

That's lower than expected. I mean you figure gold farmers farm (for a nice overview about what "gold farmer" means, check out this wowvault article) something, and farming primal mana's is a pretty valuable thing to farm. I just didn't think you'd make so little per week doing that. I guess the research I've done about china farmers is correct: they make about 100 per week (check out this gameguidesonline.com article for a nice review of misconceptions about gold farmers). Anyway, the rest is equally sobering:

The Math: What could a wow gold farmer conceivably make?

So taking the above assumptions here's what we get for weekly, monthly, and yearly wow gold farmer incomes:

164.34 x 4 weeks= 657.36 per month

657.36x 11.5 months (didn't want to assume all 12 months of the year--even farmers have to take breaks, right?)= $7, 559.64

WOW Gold Famers: a measly income

Wow. What a measly income from some decent farming numbers. If someone posted a YouTube video showing exactly 107g per hour farming I'd be impressed, but maybe thats because I was naive myself about how much I could make.

You should probably note that the character I farm with is a combat-swords rogue. That said, he can down mobs pretty quickly, and probably faster than most other class-types can, you're assuming stellar gear.

Another thing that is obviously flawed about this is that if you were to do this for several weeks to months you'd no doubt come across some epic drops. In fact, just a few days ago I got an epic blacksmithing recipe to drop which wowhead.com tells me is worth an average of 1,000g. Of course, I haven't been able to sell it yet on my auction house--who knows why--even at the much-reduced-price of just 600g. The point I'm making though is that this thought experiment, in actuality, is somewhat conservative in its assumptions. The number of epic items, green items, and white items you'd get to drop is probably higher than a mere couple hours of testing can show for. I should try this again by posting numbers from a whole week of doing this.

I'd love to do that, but on second thought, not really. I also don't' have the time to pretend china farm. Its much more profitable to try my hand at the auction house reselling gray items that can be sold to vendors for higher prices than the buyout price, ha ha.

Anyway, pretty sobering information, despite the shortcomings. Those poor gold farmers.