What to do with this Blizzard money?

Diablo 3 offers players a revolutionary depth of real money trading. And no doubt many players are quite without planning it going to find themselves with a significant amount of real money. You will be able to cash it out in most countries via Paypal but I'd like to explore some of the other options. There are in fact quite a lot of ways to spend your Blizzbucks.


1) Games

Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm is due out this year.

Well Blizzard is a games company so it makes sense that they have rather a number of good games. While you can't pay for recurring sub fees directly with game money you will be able to buy games and you can buy WoW game time.

You could buy
- another copy of Diablo 3. More auction house slots, more character slots, more storage space, ability to cheese your other characters if you set it up on two computers.

- Diablo 2 (released 2000). Superb game that still has hundreds of thousands of players and ranks 18th in the all-time PC bestseller chart. It's one of the games that made Blizzard. My only quibble is that picking up gold is really annoying after you've played Diablo 3!

Starcraft I (released 1998) or II (Wings of Liberty campaign released 2010 and Heart of the Swarm campaign expected this year). Classic real time strategy games with a gritty sci fi style. So well balanced they've become one of the defining e-sports games supporting a community of professional gamers and commentators.

World of Warcraft. At the time of writing, if you've played WoW before the best way back in is with their scroll of resurrection deal. You can also get regular copies of the game as well as game time in the Blizzard store if you're not eligible for the scroll. If you've never played WoW it's a wonderful deep world full of little oddities and unexplored nooks. The main focus of players is raiding (killing big monsters in a large group) and group pvp in battlegrounds.

Warcraft 3 (released 2002). Another classic RTS, this is actually the base game that spawned the entire DOTA genre. Both DOTA and League of Legends emerged from Warcraft 3 mods. And Warcraft 3 is a very good real time strategy in its own right.


2) A Blizzard authenticator.

No, you can't have my stuff!

Phishing, keylogging, trojans - it's a brutal internet out there. And with Diablo 3 you'll be keeping REAL MONEY on the internet.

Lock your front door, folks, it's just common sense.


3) Cuddly toys

Like kids? I adore them although I don't have any myself. I do have friends with kids and the idea of playing Diablo 3 for a weekend then buying one of them a present from the proceeds seems like an excellent plan.

They even have a cuddly toy that looks like little Ashley:

Ashley. xx.

4) Books

Among my many other talents I'm a librarian and like most librarians I love a good read. Richard A Knaak is a talented writer who's done lots of fan fiction (and my, hasn't that come a long way since Gary Gygax's terrible novels). He's done 6 Diablo novels which I aim to collect by playing Diablo 3 and earning them in-game.

There's also the Book of Cain which is an encyclopaedia of the Diablo universe. I know one isn't supposed to judge a book by its cover but - damn:

Dare you smell the pages?

5) Mouse mat

Ah yes, the mouse mat. THAT mouse mat. The picture tells it all:

Bring it on, Inferno level!

Apparently there are other mouse mats in the store if you prefer something more wimpy. I couldn't really see them, my eyes were full of spikey mace.


6) T -shirts

There's both male and female T-shirts and they look pretty good.

7) Other stuff

There's a lot of other stuff in the Blizzard store too. There's an expensive but good mouse, an expensive but good headset, loads of WoW-related stuff and Starcraft stuff. So if you're someone who baulks at the idea of playing all night for $1 an hour maybe it's more palatable to think you play as you would anyway but sometimes treat yourself or your family to a present as a reward!