Minimum Wage

I have been raiding a lot as of late, and so have started to pay more attention to repair costs and money in general, as repairs tend to add up and become expensive quickly. It occurs to me there is probably an average 'wage' in Azeroth, so today I thought I would examine money making. I have had an active interest in making gold for some time, ever since Burning Crusade hit. I have also never been a goblin, I might use the auction house on occasion, but I am more of a blue-collar type when it comes to gold making. I have generally relied on farming, questing and grinding.

One of the more proletarian ways to go about making gold, is to run a daily routine on the Timeless Isle. The other day I decided to estimate what exactly I generally make for every hour I spend on the isle. I time myself and actually found I was out farming mobs for longer than I would ordinarily. The three daily quests I do take less than thirty minutes.

Between quest rewards and vendor trash I made 184 gold. Not factored into this, was a stack of 20 wildfowl breasts I accumulated from killing those obnoxious pink flamingo looking mobs over and over. Also not factored into my profits were the 11 motes of harmony I got. I could have certainly used the resulting spirit of harmony to buy and then auction any number of things such as golden lotus or trillium ore. I am just going to wing it and estimate that if I auctioned the wildfowl breasts and used the spirit to buy some commodity and auction it, my earnings for one hour of time on the isle would be 225 gold.

This is about as proletarian as things get. So based on this very limited experiment, I would say the Azerothian minimum wage is 200 gold, give or take. If your intake is less than this per hour then you are either A. raiding or B. Sitting in a city and trolling chat.

A minimum wage player, who plays a mere 10 hours a week, makes 2k a week. This means the same player makes 8K a month. Obviously repair costs have not been factored in.

Based on all of this, it is not the least bit hard to make gold. I proved this by spending an hour doing three easy quests and farming mobs. I wasn't even trying. You might think I intentionally made huge pulls or pulled non-stop to inflate my earnings during my test run. You'd be wrong. I did things at my normal, rather slow pace. You might not become a goblineering millionaire, but you can certainly live well enough on minimum wages, at least in Azeroth.

Peace.