Probably farming/AH.
Unless he botted to farm then probably.
If people can do 10-14 hr back to back to back to back binge PvP sessions to grind out R13 and R14 because someone broke brackets, sit in a normal raid for 2-4 hours, or even just make it to lvl60, a simple but efficient gold farming strategy done a few hours a day, most days of the week, would accumulate a tremendous amount of gold.
ZF GY gold farming nets around 40-50g/hour, meaning if you only did that and nothing else and started at zero gold you’d need 4000-5000 hours of farming. If this was the pinnacle of gold/hour, I’d be incredulous of the 166-209 days worth of farming needed to drop 200k, since that’s insanely high.
But I also know that ZF GY farming is incredibly small beans compared to hosts of other solo farming methods, not counting boosts of any kind, and obviously not counting other sources of gold. Jump runs were netting people over 150g/hour when Arcane Crystals were in super high demand for Thunder Fury in Phase 3. You could score several hundred gold per hour if you could do the Landslide farming before they hotfixed it. Early ZG soloing net people all kinds of money, and while it was volatile to be sure, if you were among the first folks to do it, you were rewarded handsomely.
Then there’s just the massive gold to be made playing the AH once you have enough raw income, which people can almost entirely automate now with a lot of preliminary setup and prep with addons, especially if you have an Enchanter and a few crafting toons. Cloth and Leather can be converted into cheap items that can be converted into less cheap enchanting materials that can be listed endlessly until someone buys them at zero cost. Greens and even blues often get listed for all kinds of terribly low prices that allow you to buy, DE, and relist the materials. This is less useful now since so many people use addons for AH related flipping, but early on this was worth tens of thousands of gold without even leaving a capitol city. You can still make easy profits with buying raw materials and selling created items like sappers (these yield big returns), all manner of alchemy consumables, or even something as simple as Thorium Bullets.
And again… none of this really compares to what a Mage can make boosting, and best of all with boosting you’re not even having to worry about the AH, looting anything, none of that. You just get paid a ton per run by four people who individually don’t mind paying that amount. Boosting far outstrips most solo farming methods unless you suck at it or your server economy is just in the toilet.
The list goes on and on.
My three 60’s have about 55 days played at lvl60 between them, and I do not farm all day, or grind things all day, or anything of the sort. P2 was basically 100% raid logging for me. There are folks who easily exceed 60 days played at 60 on each of their various characters. There aren’t many, but holy crap do they have tons of everything all the time, and they aren’t botting.
Which to “strain credulity” you’d have to take the claim 100% literally, which is entirely on WillE.
Again, he’s testing it by taking it 100% literally. That’s silly.
No, just that honesty isn’t guaranteed, nothing more. The claim of “He has no reason to lie” is as reasonable as “He has no reason not to” since nothing we’re talking about actually constrains or checks his honesty.