Twenty Days of Gold Making - Day 4. The bank alt.

Do you use a banker alt/guild? When did you start doing that & why?

Funny you should ask that, I use both.

I had a low level employee that got into PvP and started playing battlegrounds. Fuill is her name, and she's a mage. Her professions were skinning and herbalism, but once she got into level 19 battlegrounds, she had to drop these. Why? Well, in those days, you couldn't switch off XP gain. If you wanted to stay at level 19 for Warsong Gulch (in those days, you got no XP from battlegrounds), you couldn't go out into the world and kill things, or even explore. I had my own horrible experience of this once at level 49, when I, too, had decided to spend a little time in random battlegrounds. I stayed at level 49 for about two months. One particular day, I was queued for a random battleground as usual, and while waiting, I took a gryphon taxi from Stormwind to Loch Modan, where I had some business with Innkeeper Hearthstove. As I was flying over the Searing Gorge, I was called to the battleground. As I answered the call, I was unseated from my taxi mount to be put into the battleground, and as soon as that happened, the unexplored part of the Searing Gorge that I was over became explored. I picked up a few XP for it, which was enough to tip me over to level 50, and that battleground was my last for a long time!

Anyway, Fuill was well kitted out with level 19 gear (she had the spidersilk boots and cape I mentioned in my last article, as well as a Tree Bark Jacket¹, Keller's Girdle, and a host of other goodies). She couldn't work as a herbalist or a skinner for fear of picking up XP, so she decided to try her hand at crafting. First choice was to be an engineer, as it was her best source of head armour (Green Tinted Goggles). After reading Gevlon's blog in which he extolled the virtues of glyph production, she also decided to try inscription.

Inscription was a great profession for a gladiator. Once you join the queue for Warsong Gulch, you have to be ready to be teleported at any moment straight to the battleground, with only enough time to pick up a battle-bag if you're near a bank. So level 19 twinks had to spend a lot of time near the bank in Stormwind or Ironforge.  The proximity of these banks to the auction house was the reason that no other bank would do. In fact Auctioneer Jaxon in Stormwind was at that time positioned so that you didn't actually have to enter the auction house to target her! So Fuill spent a lot of time standing on a packing crate beside the mailbox outside, shouting orders to Jaxon through the wall, and picking up purchases without the need to move.

Time spent queueing could be whiled away in the AH, buying herbs, milling them, making inks, inscribing glyphs, and listing them for sale, all activities that could be put on hold for the call to Warsong Gulch.

As Fuill toiled away, she gradually learned more and more minor glyphs (which, it turned out, were the most profitable glyphs that a level 19 could learn), and started to run out of space in bags and bank. Inscription is like that: you need to stock hundreds of different glyphs and be prepared to see most of them in your mailbox again. That's what prompted Fuill to think of getting a guild. Somewhere to store gluts of herbs/inks/glyphs, in preparation for famines. Room to branch out into other markets. And so it was that she bought a moribund guild with a couple of tabs already paid for.

For a long time, Fuill was the only member of that guild. She named it BoI, which was short for Bank of Ireland (or Bank of Ironforge). Later she employed a minion in Booty Bay, for the Blackwater Auction house; but that eventually proved not worth the effort. Eventually when the Cataclysm arrived, she decided to try to build up the guild level to avail of guild perks. But how? By now she was XP-capped and fighting in twinks-only Warsong Gulch (though that was drying up). The only solution was inviting others to join the guild. And slowly, to her surprise, the guild became a real living guild, filled with interesting new people. I eventually joined her guild as well, and we started doing fun things together, looking forward to each other's company. May it go from strength to strength.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

¹You can imagine how annoyed she was one patch day when she woke up and found that her jacket no longer fitted her, and wouldn't fit again until she was level 20.