Inactive account to BfA using 3 day trial

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1
Hey everyone,

About a week ago, I was getting nostalgic playing through the Warcraft 3 campaign and wanted to play WoW again. My account has been inactive since the end of the Emerald Nightmare raid (7/7 Normal, 1/7 Heroic [2/7 Heroic if you include a PUG I was in]) and I was scratching my head on how I could possibly get BfA, or at least a subscription. Money's really tight in the household right now, so straight out buying the expansion or the subscription is out of the question. For the time being, I had to put my aspirations aside and wait until there was some money in the bank.

This past Thursday evening, I noticed something peculiar in my Battle.net launcher. There was a gift box that was flashing in the interface. "Wouldn't it be funny if someone gifted me a sub to WoW?" I thought to myself. I clicked the box and much to my surprise, I had a 3 day "Battle For Azeroth Trial Subscription." I immediately opened it and activated the subscription. Of course, the actual "Battle For Azeroth Trial Subscription" is a little misleading. Here's what the promotion actually is:

  • A regular subscription for your account that lasts for 3 days
  • Class trials that last for 3 hours, or to a certain point in the storyline, whichever comes first
  • NOT a temporary upgrade to BfA for your existing characters


I found out very quickly that your existing characters cannot participate in the new expansion's content. After discovering this, I was a little disheartened and put the game down for the night, then worked the next day. One day of my 3 day sub was immediately thrown away... 48 hours remaining.

While at work the next day, the gears in my head started spinning: could I possibly grind enough gold in 2 days to buy enough WoW tokens to buy BfA? I can't participate in the new content, so a huge part of the gold farming market was eradicated from my potential. This was going to be difficult... I only can farm old-world content for gold and only have 2 days to do so. Therefore, I would need to farm things that sell quickly and sell for a decent price.
BoE/Transmog gear was basically out of the question for the reason that they take way too long to sell.
I would be forced to basically farm trade goods until I got the gold that I need. There was no way I'd be able to farm 4 tokens in 2 days by only farming trade goods. First, even though they're much faster moving than BoEs, they still won't sell that fast. Second, it would be very difficult to be able to farm that much material in that amount of time since I know NOTHING about this market. So I decided to make a gameplan centered around the limitations I have on my account:

  • Phase one: Farm gold to buy one WoW token & buy 30 day subscription with it
  • Phase two: Farm gold to buy 4 additional WoW tokens to buy BfA during the 30 day subscription.
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Phase one would absolutely be the hardest part. Farming ~110k gold in ~49 hours on a game I haven't played in a very long time, doing something I have very little experience doing (farming gold has never been a forte of mine in WoW), with extremely tough limitations on the account. I figured if I could complete phase one, I would be on easy street. Phase one would definitely be the test on whether I have the ability to do this or not; everything relied on my succeeding here.
My starting resources were limited too. I pooled all of my liquid gold from all of my characters, and I ended up having around 18k in liquid gold to start with and a bunch of battle pets that I could (maybe) sell.

The farming part of this story is actually pretty boring, here are some things I ended up farming:
  • Ghost Iron Ore
  • Volatile Air
  • Primal Fire
  • Savage Leather

I'm sure there were other things that I farmed testing out markets, but these were the main money makers for me. Of course, since I was selling and farming over the weekend, the prices on the goods I was farming crashed hard while I was selling which was VERY bad for me. With 13 hours left, I was still about 45k gold away from buying a token. I decided to put my Spineclaw Crab for sale for way under market value and see if someone would snatch the amazing deal while I slept. When I woke up, it was sold.

Phase one complete

Phase two is currently in progress. Since Friday night, I've made just under 200k gold, so I'm nearly at the first milestone: buying the first BfA token. I'm hoping that I'll have the full expac by the middle of next week, but we'll have to see how the markets behave this week.

I'm considering making a video about my progress, but I've been streaming my progress every night on twitch.tv/mysurvive starting at 9PM Eastern time. If you have any questions, have any tips, or just want to chat (it seriously makes the grind way easier), feel free to stop through.

I'll update this as we get closer to buying the expansion :)

By the way, shoutout to SamadanPlaysWoW for amazing guides on how to set up and use TSM, and to BregVids for giving me some inspiration and ideas on how to make gold.
3
I'm doing the same thing. broke dowm and paid for my second.month but first month was free and I am one sky golem away from BFA.

I'm hoping it will go up in price this weekend.
1 Like
4
brah,

get $65 dollars together
5
10/31/2018 09:12 PMPosted by Anrom
brah,

get $65 dollars together


I agree, it's not that much money. You could make it donating blood or taking surveys or plenty of other ways. You would probably save more time than making that much gold in WoW.

But people have different situations and it doesn't work out that easily. It's hard to justify spending 65$ real world cash on a game when money is a bit tight. Especially if it's on something like wow where you might stop playing in a few months if you get bored.

It's an interesting thing being able to use other people's money to pay for it. Nothing wrong with it.
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