Spending the Gold Cap #6: Where have all the BMAH containers gone?

What else to do once you hit gold cap, other than spend your fortune? In the Spending the Gold Cap series, I account for the money I earned as I spend it on Unclaimed Black Market Containers, and the occasional pet or mount from the auction house. There will be tears.

A funny thing happened since the last StGC post and my return to chilly Wisco from sunny Anaheim, California: I casually went after a couple of Unclaimed Containers on the first two days back -- didn't win them. And then all of a sudden, Unclaimed Containers were no more. I can't say for sure when it started, as I only started paying close attention last Monday, but there haven't been any containers listed on the BMAH for at least five days.

I've checked the BMAH on-and-off since it's inclusion in Mists of Pandaria, and have amped that up to near-daily visits ever since Unclaimed Containers were added in patch 5.3 (in late May). Never before have I seen the BMAH void of containers for more than two days. I assume that what gets listed there is completely random; from what I've seen, Unclaimed Containers have a pretty good chance to be listed, as I'm used to seeing new listings at least every other day, if not every day.

So I'm a bit perplexed, but take comfort in the fact that this is probably just really bad luck. Anyway, not too much to report since the last one. At that point, I was left with:

697,389g

- 108g¹

Remaining Gold: 697,281g

                                                        

¹ Auction-house listing fees. Been unsuccessful dumping the sellable items I've won from unclaimed containers.

Unclaimed Container #1

Contained: Grievous Gladiator's Armplates of Proficiency

Purchase Price: 6,060g
Resale Value: N/A

If you mouse over the tooltip above, that's not an error: even if the toon I bought it on had been level 90, and had been a plate-wearer, he couldn't have used these. Why? Because these are the Alliance version of the armplates. I've won quite a few unusable PvP items in my quest to offload a hefty chunk of my gold, and I've held onto each of them with the hopes someday Blizzard will implement some sort of account-wide chest, ala Diablo III, that would allow you to pass soulbound items between toons on your account. Wishful thinking, I know, and if it does come, it'll probably happen too late. Oh well. There's always the 16g I can recoup should I decide to vendor this item.

Unclaimed Container #2

Contained: Pattern: Fists of Lightning
Purchase Price: 15,920g
Resale Value: ≈1,000

This'll allow a leatherworker to craft intellect mail gloves equivalent in power to what you can find just by stumbling around the Timeless Isle for a short period of time. So in other words, not very attractive at all. Given that these are quite easily obtainable by running this expansion's earlier raids, I'm a bit disappointed to even see these as options. That and it's not the first shite pattern I've landed. Anyway, I've had this one up to resell for more than a month and I've got no takers. I don't anticipate saying goodbye to this pattern any time soon.

With that, let's have a look where I'm at:

697,281g

- 6,060g

- 15,920g

Total Remaining Gold: 675,301g