In which we go "all in" on Fireflys

One of my World of Warcraft goals is to garner enough money for a $20,000 Gold mount that travels with its own set of vendors and repair people. It is just the sort of ridiculous luxury purchase with no real value that I enjoy so much. Of course, $20,000 Gold is a lot of wow money. To give the non-wow players an idea of the scope of this thing, each quest completed in the game will net you from 3-20 gold. Thus...this is a lot of money.

Of course, there are other, more efficient, ways to rack up the gold. The most popular is the "auction house", where one can craft or find rare goods and then charge other players whatever the heck they want for them.

One such item is the ultra-rare "captured firefly." It is a stupid pet (seen above) that follows your character around and looks neat. It is about a 1/1500 drop chance off of a specific set of bad guys in a very specific place. We'll ignore how statistics actually work for a second and just say that you have to kill a TON of these things to get a firefly. Like you'd have to spend days and weeks killing the same thing over and over just to see one. As such, they tend to sell on the auction house for around $5,000 gold.

So...as I was searching the AH I noticed a character named "szbb" selling TWO of them for $1,500 gold. TWO. I bought them both. I then managed to sell one of them for $4000 gold...quite a tidy profit.

Then, today, our dear friend "szbb" had SIX more of these guys up. SIX. So...based on the name, this guy is clearly some sort of a farmer. Either he has a bot setup to find these things or he has some sort of a duplicate item hack. Thus...I now have a conundrum. Keep buying the things and go "all in" or quietly walk away.

I went "all in." That means I now own a total of seven fireflys, and I have very little cash reserves left. Honestly, to unload these bad boys I may have to transfer servers...each server only has so many fools like me willing to sell out big gold for stupid items.

On the other hand, I also reported this guy so that Blizzard can investigate. The fact is, if I can't get "rid of him", he'll win in the end by deflating the price on these things so much that I can't get my money out.