Death of a Salesman

Something you don't see so often on Aman'Thul is the gold seller. Don't get me wrong. They exist. They're in the trade channel stealing our moolah. They're just less prominent.

Aman'Thul is a high-population Oceanic PVE server. Nothing special about it. I've only been back here three months and don't know many people and the dungeon finder is more conducive to befriending people from your battlegroup rather than server. One thing really stands out. Where are all the friendly neighborhood gold spammers?


Background (skip if you want)

I first made a character here back in 2006 when the oceanic servers launched because my guild rolled here. I ended up quitting the game for a while, came back in TBC with friends and we chose a PvP server Jubei'Thos where I played, ganked and raided for some time. Eventually I quit the addiction (again) and relapsed (again). Because nothing was left for me on JT, everyone I loved had moved on, I decided I wanted to be Alliance this time and rolled on AT simply because I had alts floating here to buy starter bags and crap. And it was nice having a character with an original PvP title.

A tale of two servers

Yesterday, I posted this story about my druid who I haven't played in 2 years and it made me miss her a little. I decided to revisit her on Jubei'Thos. The saddest thing was logging on and seeing a full friends list, all offline. But what shocked me was the immediate flood of whispers, tells, yells, channel flood and even say emanating from the top of Org bank. What the... Aman'Thul is nothing like this and I don't even remember Jubei'Thos being this bad (see note below about filter).

Where have all the farmers gone?

So why have the sales farmers died on my current server? Is it a PvE vs PvP thing? Aman'Thul doesn't do GDKP runs either. People are friendly on the forums. You don't see many @ posts and there isn't a lot of trolling. JT was terrible for forum trolls. It's a completely different culture on the two servers.

I don't bemoan the lack of gold sales (compared to JT anyway) but there is something about Aman'Thul that doesn't sparkle for me. Maybe it's playing alliance after years of horde. Maybe the pve factor. I don't want to say niceness equates to blandness because there are still a lot of dumbasses on the server. Which is great. They provide future material to rant about on here. I think it's the lack of hardcore. There is no "best" guild on the server. Sure, some lead in progress relative to the rest of the server but overall progression is so casual. Every guild advertises in trade with the same message:

"Want to join a friendly, social guild with over 300 members? We help each other and have 6 bank tabs. When we get enough people we'll start raiding"

300 members and no raid team, GG.

There's not much gold seller spam because the market just doesn't exist. Everyone is obsessed with gear score and since no-one on AT trades raids for gold, gold cannot buy the items they need. There's not much loyalty. People leave their 300 member guilds to go join the one with over 500. Everyone gets along with everyone pretty much.  Most raids are pugged, even guild runs fill out with pugged members.

Culture clash

The culture on JT is different. No idea if they are very progressed now, they weren't when I was there, but the mentality is much more hardcore. Even the casual guilds are "casual hardcore". I'm willing to bet they do have GDKP runs. The massive gold seller spam occurs because there is a market for it.

I don't miss JT but I do miss being around people who know how to gem/enchant, what to itemize for before they apply for a guild, and that it makes a difference to being accepted. AT is all about mass recruitment on the trade channel and guild chat is full of arguments about why the guild keeps wiping on X encounter.

So does harcore equal gold sales? I had an addon when I was on Jubei'Thos that filtered spam. Don't need it on Aman'Thul. Right-click, ignore works just fine. Does not having a market for RMT make a server dull?

Physiotherapy

I don't miss my old server or its guilds, trolls and juvenile players but I really do miss people who take raiding seriously - and I only play casually this xpac. I just hate carrying people, bad back and all that.