Aldonza needs a new goal

You can lose the habit of writing on your blog. As time grows, it can become increasingly difficult to write that next post. There's too many things to mention and they get all tangled. To break the jumble, where do you start? Even if you want to focus on one small piece, it can be hard to pull it apart from other things you want to mention.

Where to start?

I also lost the habit of questing and running dungeons. All I've really been doing for the past few months has been playing with Aldonza The Coward. All she has been doing has been crafting and selling on the Auction House and a few dailies. While this is all she's ever really done, there has been a big difference because of recent progress.

Somewhere along the way, Aldonza leveled high enough to start the Dalaran fishing and cooking dailies. There were a few fishing dailies that scared the coward off, especially fishing in Wintergrasp! Still, having a third and sometimes fourth daily quest meant her progress was accelerating.

A side effect of her leveling progress was access to higher level, and more profitable, crafts. Although my total time spent in Azeroth has decreased, the new items brought in greater profits. Aldonza was thrilled.

And then last week, she reached her goal. She dinged level 80!

 There may have been two expansions since this was the top level, but it was key to unlocking the final tier in her professions. It only took another day or so to hit 600 in Inscription! This has always been the end goal for my experiment. There isn't much else she can do that will improve her profit-making. Her next opportunity comes from earning motes of harmony via farming in Half-Hill or fishing in Pandarian pools, neither of which will happen with Aldonza until she hits level 90. Actually, if you have suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Allow me to back up and provide some history. Years ago, and also a different server ago, I learned about Bank Mules. I created Rocinante to receive various goods for listing on the Auction House. I thought I was being original in my naming my mule after Don Quijote's horse, but I merely got lucky as there are 152 other servers with a character named "Rocinante"! When I moved to my current server, another RP server, I wanted a name less animal and more personal, thus choosing a different character from that inspiring novel. With my interest in role-play, Aldonza was never just a simple bank mule, but started to acquire a personality. Don Quijote saw her as Dulcinea and imagines her to be beautiful and noble while Sancho Panza explains that the real woman, Aldonza, is far more mundane. Unlike the novel, this character actually appears in the musical Man of La Mancha and Quijote inspires her to change.

My character reflects on her possible greediness. Her whole purpose is to make money, but she wants to be something more noble and heroic than just a copper-pinching merchant. I was used to Mages so I could level her up a few levels quickly, but anything more was tedious, so she was supposed to be stuck around level 10. Yet that limit also meant there was a limit to her crafting. She could earn money disenchanting and supplying the Auction House with low level dusts, but most other crafting professions wouldn't earn gold at the lower levels. Except, as she discovered, for Inscription!

What happened was that Cataclysm came out with a daily fishing and cooking quest in the capital cities. I was logging onto Aldonza frequently at the start and close of playing on my main for the purpose of posting, cancelling undercut items and reposting. It was a simple matter to also run the two dailies. It earned enough gold and XP to be worth the experiment. Thus I conceived the goal of seeing how fast and high she might level with only this method. Her In-Character justification for this activity was fear, thus "The Coward" was born.

The experiment didn't have rules as strict as Iron Man, rather it was character driven. Aldonza wasn't about to risk her neck when there were perfectly good profits to be made. As a Mage, Aldonza had the advantage of teleporting herself to any city, including Shattrath and Dalaran when she reached certain levelling milestones. She discovered true advantage of this arrangement are Pilgrim's Bounty. These holiday quests weren't dangerous and were still quick to perform, allowing me to spend maximum time with my main yet seeing progress on the coward.

I think I've managed to write enough to break whatever mental barrier was preventing me from posting. I have more to say, but maybe it's best if I keep that as incentive for writing more!