Monday, December 16, 2013

Ph.A.Q.: How does someone know how much gold I have?

Today marks the first of the Ph.A.Q.'s a series dedicated to answering users questions.  If you'd like to learn more about how your question can be featured, check out my page about it here, and get your question in ASAP!  

So here's this week's scenario, sent in by Curtis:

"I had something wired happen to me the other day, wondering if you have ever heard of it or know how they did it? I was on my alt bank/guild toon the other day when this guy started asking me for money cause he was from a different realm and didnt have any. I was friendly and all but refused to give him any. After a few minutes he asked again and I said I didn't have gold but lots of silver and copper. Seconds later he said no that I have 65,765 amount of gold, and that I was doing pretty good. The weird part is that he was off by like 5 golds and a few silvers of what I actually had ! I don't share account info with anyone but my son who was there beside me when it happened and I use a authenticator. Was this just a extremely lucky guess or is there a way he could have looked up how much I had?"'


My Idea
Well this is a strange scenario, and I've not personally had it happen previously.  My guess is they used the following method to "guess" how much gold you had by assuming the max you've held at 1 time is your current total.

Click any (other) player, and right click their portrait, and go to "Compare Achievements".  Go to the bottom Statistics tab on the bottom, then Character -> Wealth on the left hand side, you'll see something like this (click the image to enlarge):


Now, if you look at the "Most gold ever owned" stat on my stats on the left side, not much is told by this.  I've had almost cap on this character, but that doesn't paint a picture of what I might have on hand right now, because odds are I've traded it to my other toons and it's irrelevant.

On the other hand, if I look at this random toon who I've inspected, the most he's ever held is 15,686g 0s 38c, this could very well be what he has on hand at this very moment, especially considering he's made ~16k from auctions.  Is this a fool proof method that will work for every toon? No.  But it's a good gauge to guess how much gold someone has if they're working their way up.

There may be other ways to do this, but this is the most simple and only way I know of in game that will let you guess semi-accurately how much gold someone has.


Cheers,

Phat Lewts

2 comments:

  1. There used to be an addon on Curse called TooltipWealth that would provide a mouseover tooltip with information about a player's wealth. I think it based its stats on the data you mentioned above. Not sure if it still works.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have had this happen a few times and assumed there was an addon that gave you information on others as was celebrating when I reached gold cap only for a guildee to tell me I only had 545k on my toon which was almost exactly right. I have no idea of which addon it is as never asked but he was so correct that this was my assumption at the time.

    ReplyDelete

Don't Call it a Comeback

Okay. You can probably call it a comeback in this case. I've been gone a long time. So if you follow my Twitter you'll know I recent...