50 gold at level 20, and the mail bug that can swallow it before your alt sees it

While the forums argue about who has too much gold, a quieter question keeps coming up: how much can you actually make on the beta at level 20? One answer arrived this week, along with a warning about how to lose it.

About 50 gold in an evening

Frostadamus published How I Made 50 Gold at Lvl 20 on September 29. By his account, he made roughly 50 gold in a single evening on a level 20 character, using Enchanting and Blacksmithing together: craft items, disenchant them, sell what comes out. He describes the loop as mostly semi-AFK, and says it needs neither a high-level character nor a large amount of starting gold.

That figure is worth holding on to. In this week’s argument about streamers who suddenly had hundreds of gold, which we covered here, players on both sides were guessing at what is normal on a level-capped beta. An evening of crafting for 50 gold is a useful reference point, from someone showing the work.

The bug in the middle of the video

The video’s own chapter list includes something else: a known bug that loses your gold in the mail. Beta testers have been reporting it for over a week.

In In-game mail to characters with same first name, a tester explains that he levelled a Hunter to 20, made a Warlock alt with the same first name and a different surname, and could not mail anything to it: the game answered “can’t send mail to yourself”, even when he typed the full first and last name. A second poster went further, made a third character to relay the mail, and found it always landed in the first mailbox belonging to that first name. A third says guild members have had mail “vanish into the ether”, and that some testers believe it goes to whoever created the name first.

It is not only about duplicate names. In The mail problem persists, a player reports losing over 10 gold worth of materials twice while sending stacks to an alt, and notes that small items and plain gold went through fine and that his characters’ names were entirely different. His plea is the same one in every thread: this cannot ship on November 4.

Blizzard has not replied to either thread.

What to do until it is fixed

• Do not mail valuable stacks to an alt on the beta, especially if the two characters share a first name. Our explainer on how the two-name system works covers why so many characters end up sharing one.
• Trade face to face where you can, or park materials in the bank on the character that gathered them.
• Report it in game. Bug reports are what gets this prioritised before launch.

If you want the legitimate ways to build gold for launch, our gold guide collects them, and the beta changes list tracks what is being fixed.