China has unveiled the first official rule on the use of virtual currency in the trade of real goods and services to limit its possible impact on the real financial system. Would you like to know more?

Just wanted to pop a wee update on my lil' pally project.

He's now lvl 49. He's been that for a little bit, though. I've kept him in the battlegrounds for a few days. Not that I managed to play him much there yet. I respecced back to Ret for the pvp, and it's quite fun.

Casual observers of the massively-multiplayer world could be forgiven for thinking this is all rather silly. It's just a game, after all. For all the assets your red-suspendered day-trader elf accumulates, he's still just a fictional entity, and his wealth is just a set of ones and zeroes in some hulking database somewhere, subject to change at any time. - from here It is a soft read, but what I actually found interesting was the article that delved into ranking Everquest as a GDP! You see, on Saturday I went to a friends house to see the new ninja PC in action. And it is a beast, a Q9650 extreme, 8gb of DDR3-1600 ram, oodles of disk space and a couple of Radeon 3870 X2 (I hope I got all the numbers right) to power that lovely, widescreen monitor. I was in awe. Then flipped through Entropia and one of the player run shops. And that took my breath away!

In Guild Wars I learned a hard lesson. The last mob you kill, the one you honestly just want to ignore as you head back to the outpost, tired, footsore and with a full backpack. That last mob is the one carrying the [Black Dye]. It was in a similar mood that I slogged through Un'Goro, fighting off dinosaurs to get to Terror Run. And just before I hit the slopes and the Pterodactyls; a lone insect attacked me. And died. And dropped a Serpent Slicer. Which promptly sold for 30 gold. Which makes me even happier!

This beautiful, gorgeous, purple pattern just dropped for me off a level 67 Wyrmscale Poacher near Everglen, in Blade's Edge Mountains. A totally innocent, ignorant little mob that was almost not worth the effort. Now I love them. I don't think I'll kill one ever again. See, WowHead lists the average AH buyout of that pattern as 1000gp, and Allakazaham or whatever it's called lists it at 1175gp. My question to you - the smart people of WoW is - how much should I list it for, bid and buyout, and when? It's never been seen on our AH before. (Thanks Pipkin!) And to help those evil evil search engines in finding us for random gunk, this is Pattern: Thick Netherscale Breastplate. Of course, the temptation is there to keep it for my Shaman. For when I eventually level her. But no, likely better to just remember who dropped a load of money on it and then buy a breastplate off them later.

Blizzard designed World of Warcraft so you will earn enough money by playing the game normally. You can easily afford to train skills, buy the odd item off the Auction House by simply doing your quests. However, most of us like the feeling of money in our pocket and there are expenses that you cannot cover normally. Think of the first big milestone in your World of Warcraft career, the mount at level 40. You need to supplement your regular earnings a bit to cover this.

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