Over on Blog Azeroth, Nexdominus posed a question:

Do you help new players, if so in what way?

Well dear readers, I am about to let you in on a secret.  I am going to reveal one of my World of Warcraft guilty pleasures.  Brace yourselves.

I like to create characters on different servers, just to play the Auction House.  I know.  Crazy, right?

Yeah.  Crazy.

For me, the AH is like a game unto itself.  I start off on a new server with nothing, and I try to see how quickly I can make gold.  Then I see how quickly I can replicate my success across a few different servers.  It really doesn’t take much time to do, and once I’m set up the gold kinda just makes itself.

Even this guy thinks that’s pretty nerdy.

This will go on for some time until I get bored with the whole thing, it gets to be too time-consuming, or I find I have accumulated more money on other servers than I have on my own server (Editor’s Note:  It’s true.  He’s done this.)  When the Auction House game is finally over, I take the rich bank alt back from whence it came.  With a few hundred gold in his pocket, I start grouping up with any new players that I find.  Hopefully I find one that isn’t a complete smackwit, and is not decked out in heirloom items.  Someone that can use the help.

Sorry, I’ve just got gold.  I’m all out of coke and booze.

After the group wraps up and I’ve had a taste of what the player has to offer, I go to the nearest mailbox and send them gold. I thank them in the letter and offer the gold to help them gear up, buy their spells, or whatever they’re going to need on their way to 80.  A couple hundred gold always comes in handy, especially when someone’s just giving it to you and not asking you to dance naked on top of a mailbox first.

This is Herc the Merc, uncreepy Sugar Daddy to the Newbies.