This is just me complaining. I play a warlock and have since the burning crusade expansion. I love the warlock, I love the idea and the play style. I have many things I wish for such as the ability to get new pet demons like hunters can, but for the most part I am happy.
Except for one thing. Where is the warlock love? We are the least dominant class in pvp, and although I do decent damage in pve I question my purpose when pretty much every other class can keep up with me. Now that everyone can be dps why am I not playing a class that can do other roles as well?
I ran VOA today in both 25 and 10 man, and had issues with both. While my dps is where I expected it to be, at 3k, I had problems with two other issues. The first was the 10 man VOA. I am doing a solid 3k dps, my job as we have a 5 min enrage timer when I draw aggro away from the tank. Granted our main tank knew what he was doing the problem was our off tank who I found out was new when he got the achievement for VOA when we completed. Since the tanks need to switch when one gets eaten, it is essential that both tanks remain at the top of the meters.
I survive by luck and some quick healing. So i move off to the side, regain all my health and mana, fill my imp back to full health, and blow my one threat reducing talent which is usable every 5 mins and costs a soul shard. Then I start up again with my dps which has in the mean time dropped from 3k to 2.3k. Fifteen seconds later I pulled aggro again and the healers weren't able to keep me alive this time. Although I died we still completed I still ranked third for overall damage and first for dps.
I guess I am irritated that unless I have a good tank I am going to die. I can slow down my dps, but the problem lies more with my crit chance which is static at 35% and can go higher depending on party make up. All it takes is a string of crits and I easily blow past bad tanks on the threat meter. Perhaps it is more my fault as I have gotten used to running with some excellent tanks that can out threat me no matter what I do, but part of me wants a more reasonable threat reduction like the hunters feign death or the priest fade.
My second gripe has to do with the VOA 25 man, I had no issues with threat and ran with an excellent group in terms of dps, tanking and heals. At the end of the fight I ranked 6th in dps and overall damage with my dps in the 3k range. My issue was that our main tank ranked right behind me. Yeah he was a death knight.
Our frost spec'd tank hit 3k dps. In fact the top 5 dps were 3 hunters and two death knights, followed by me and then our main tank another death knight. I am slightly saddened that I can't keep up with hunters, but I keep telling myself that they must be better geared then me. My gear averages out to only item level 200, its mostly epic but could be better. I tell myself that if I was wearing ilvl 213 or 226 gear I would be able to hit the 4k dps that hunters seem to hit so easily.
I think I am lying to myself. I have yet to see a warlock in my party out dps me. My problem has less to do with the hunters which are also a pure class like myself then with the death knights, which are able to be both tanks and dps. What really gets me is that they can out dps me as a tank (almost). What is my role really? Why not take four death knight tanks and a healer? They dps as well as me and take a lot less damage if they take aggro.
While I am at it, they kick my but in pvp too. Maybe I should just reroll a death knight.
Read more!
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Perceived Wealth
I had a discussion today with a guild member who was eager to get to max level in his profession so that he could produce epics to sell on the auction house. While I have had less then spectacular results with it myself I have made a profit selling epics and considering that I always see them being sold on the auction house we would assume that others are as well.
As I discussed this with him, I wanted to go into depth on why I thought that the epic market was less then worthwhile I realized it would take a lot of time and typing in the whispers to explain it all. So I decided to Blog it.
I believe the market in wow often revolves around perceived wealth. obviously perceived wealth is how a player perceives their wealth in the game, are they rich, poor, etc... More then that perceived wealth affect buying patterns as players decide what is affordable and what isn't. The root of this is what level is the average player perceive their wealth to be at.
I believe the average wow player bases their wealth on gold/time earning, in a subconscious way at least. Those items that can be purchased for 10-15 minutes work are low priced, 30 minutes equals a middle level price, an hour work makes an item upper priced, and at 2-3 hours work it is expensive. Translated through the average player who probably earns gold off dailies or questing and we can input cheap at sub 25g, medium at 25-50g, high priced at 50-100g, expensive running in the multiple hundreds of gold.
While I doubt players actually consciously think in these terms, I believe they base their opinions on what is expensive by how quickly gold seems to appear in their bags. It is interesting to note how this effects purchasing habits and how sellers can adjust the market to capitalize on these changes in trends. When 2.4 released with its influx of easily accesible dailies the gold liquidity within WOW jumped and the average players pocket wealth also saw an increase. I was able to make a nice mint on selling my common level gems for a 500% mark up (5 to 15g) because the average daily brought in 10g and took 3-5 mins. Which made them, despite being five times the normal price, cheap.
Anyway I am jumping slightly off topic here. As players scan the auction house they will subconsciously label items as cheap or expensive, affordable or not. They make these distinctions regardless of the profit margin in an item. I am able to sell glyphs for three times the price of production because they still come under the category of cheap (15g). No one thinks 'hmm I could buy the mats and ask my friend to make them' because after time and/or tip cheap is still cheap. However at a certain price items move from the affordable to the expensive column and a different mindset is applied to purchasing them.
Buyers will either not buy the items because it is too expensive, or look for ways to make it cheaper such as having a friend craft it from the raw materials. After this point is passed as a seller/producer I found it harder to sell regardless of profit margin. Even when I was only making 100g of a 1000g epic item (10% profit), that 100g is labeled under the expensive column for a buyer, so they will apply that second mindset and look for a way to save that gold.
As a seller/producer I personally look for items that have a large profit, and yet still fall below the expensive mindset. I personally want to sell items as close to that maximum point without going over it. This allows me to sell less items, with more gold per transaction. As a side benefit I spend less time at the auction house listing auctions. Glyphs are a gold mine, but listing 100 to 200 auctions still takes a lot of time (despite batch listing).
I hope this can give you some ideas on how I personally decide what markets to try produce for. Next time I will talk about the factors that affect how much you can sell of the different level price items and how that effects a sellers daily profits.
Miy
Read more!Saturday, March 14, 2009
Does your level affect your professions?
This is somewhat a response to my comment in wow trader six where I said based on your level you should have certain professions.
It is my belief that while questing and leveling you should have two gathering professions, so levels 1-79 you gather level 80 you can choose to do something else. The reasons for this are as follows.
1. your already out in the world, gathering allows you to increase gold/hour earnings.
2. Non gathering professions are rarely profitable until you have almost maxed them out. on top of this they requires an investment of materials to level. Gathering professions are profitable instantly. (a stack of lvl 1 herbs can sell for 10-15g easily)
3. Non Gathering professions require that you be at a AH often to buy materials and supplies to craft items. While running around if you have to constantly stop in to visit the AH your going to slow your leveling down dramatically.
Now I know a lot of people take up one gathering and one crafting profession, usually ones that complement each other such as leather working and skinning. The argument is that by doing this you saves gold by not having to buy materials to level your leather working. This is False, the cake is a lie.
Whether you sell or use the leather the value of that leather doesn't change. So either you sell it for gold, or use X gold worth of leather for leveling your leather working. As far as leather working is concerned you have saved nothing. You however, have lost the opportunity to gather something else by using one of your slots for leather working. The result is a loss in current income for no immediate gain.
I would also recommend that you choose mining and herbalism. while leather working is a nice skill it doesn't have as many professions that draw from it, herbalism has two and mining has two leather working has only one.
The issue with two gathering professions is the inability to see both types of nodes on the mini map at the same time. This however can be solved by using the gatherer mod and downloading the node locations.
Once you hit 80, you then have the option to simply continue gathering, at which time you will need to do the research to find out which gathering routes produce the most ore/herb per circuit or to reroll a new profession and learn how to make a profit off the auction house with that profession.
Read more!WOW Trader Segment #6
Hey and welcome to wowtrader 6, your segment of goldy goodness in the alea iacta est podcast number 22. This is Miy, spelled M. I. Y. and today we will be talking about how to get started selling on the AH.
So you have reached 80, leveled a non gathering profession to the 400’s and now want to know how do I make gold of the auction house with my profession. Well the original way was to take your 400 recipes, and figure whether the materials or the final product was worth more. Then take the 30 items or so that the final product was profitable and keep producing and selling them.
Needless to say this could take some time. Well that why Miy is here, I Miy, Miy I uh well anyway lets save some of your time shall we. Recently I power leveled inscription on my new shaman. Earlier today I thought hmm, I really don’t want to spend 4-5 hours figuring out what items sell for the most so are there some mods out there that can help save me time? Lo and behold I found two, the first was advanced trade skill window, and the second was lilsparky’s workshop.
Advanced tradeskill window does two things I like very much, one it allows me to set up a que for items I wish to produce, which is very usefull when I am producing 200+ glyphs and it at the same time it allows me to see if I have enough regents to produce all the items I have qued.
The second thing it does is it allows me to do is create custome filters for the items I can produce, so I made two categories, profitable and unprofitable. go figure.
Little sparkys workshop is awesome in that it gives me the cost of production and the potential profit in two columns as part of the tradeskill window, this allows me to see my entire production list pretty much at a glance and see which items are profitable and which are not. What once took me 4-5 hours in set up time took me about 1 hour tonight, and most of that was figuring out how to use the mods.
So what have we learned to day? When entering the wow trader market step one is to figure out where you can make a profit. So go out there down load these mods, or do it the old fashioned way an put some gold in your pocket.
This is Miy, Miy, saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies and for the horde. Read more!
Auction house trading is about buying items off the auction house, converting them into items people need and then selling them for a profit. this is not as simple as just running around and clicking on plants or ores, so it pays more for your time, but requires more thinking and probably some math on your part. To be most effective at this one needs characters with maxed out professions, or professions leveled high enough to produce profitable conversions.
You characters level affects what you should be doing. those of you actively questing I recommend that you should have gathering professions, while you’re out there in the world running around it makes sense to pick up everything you can find that will sell. But those of you who are at 80 then can alternatively choose the life of an auction house trader since for the most part you will be hanging out in major cities anyway.
So you have reached 80, leveled a non gathering profession to the 400’s and now want to know how do I make gold of the auction house with my profession. Well the original way was to take your 400 recipes, and figure whether the materials or the final product was worth more. Then take the 30 items or so that the final product was profitable and keep producing and selling them.
Needless to say this could take some time. Well that why Miy is here, I Miy, Miy I uh well anyway lets save some of your time shall we. Recently I power leveled inscription on my new shaman. Earlier today I thought hmm, I really don’t want to spend 4-5 hours figuring out what items sell for the most so are there some mods out there that can help save me time? Lo and behold I found two, the first was advanced trade skill window, and the second was lilsparky’s workshop.
Advanced tradeskill window does two things I like very much, one it allows me to set up a que for items I wish to produce, which is very usefull when I am producing 200+ glyphs and it at the same time it allows me to see if I have enough regents to produce all the items I have qued.
The second thing it does is it allows me to do is create custome filters for the items I can produce, so I made two categories, profitable and unprofitable. go figure.
Little sparkys workshop is awesome in that it gives me the cost of production and the potential profit in two columns as part of the tradeskill window, this allows me to see my entire production list pretty much at a glance and see which items are profitable and which are not. What once took me 4-5 hours in set up time took me about 1 hour tonight, and most of that was figuring out how to use the mods.
So what have we learned to day? When entering the wow trader market step one is to figure out where you can make a profit. So go out there down load these mods, or do it the old fashioned way an put some gold in your pocket.
This is Miy, Miy, saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies and for the horde. Read more!
WOW Trader Segment #5
Welcome to wow trader your source of wow auction house epic knowledge. This is Miy, spelled M I Y, your host and this is your wow trader segment for AIE podcast number 21.
Announcements:
3.1 is coming
AA version is out.
Today we will be discussing two things,
1. Patch equals profit
2. Postponed consumption and opportunity cost
Last week we discussed the cycles and shift in demand, today we will talk about how to profit ofof them. The biggest shift comes with patches, imagine that Patches are like high tide, the prices rise and the economy picks up, in between patches the economy goes reaches low tide, until the next patch comes and tide goes back up.
So first off, a Patch equals profit:
Patches bring new things into the game, patch notes are a source of information on what will be profitable in the future and what purchased today will be worth more later. A good example would have been the 2.4 patch. When 2.4 hit it introduced a variety of things into the game, a easily accessable source of gold from dailies, new gear from the new instance and raid, and a new season of pvp gear. This meant the people had more gold then ever and lots of new gear in need of enchantments and gems.
To capitalize off of this I took over the uncommon level gem market for two weeks on my old server, I raised the price of all uncommon gems by 500%, I bought all gems that sold for less than mine and undercut anyone close to the 500% margin I had set. At the end of two weeks this had brought in over 10,000 gold.
Patches bring a variety of new ways to make a lot of gold, the main thing to think about is, whats new in the patch, and what will people need because of these new things.
Second topic is postponed consumption and opportunity cost
This topic ties in with patches but in the opposite way, when new things enter the market they are always expensive, in the case of my gems, if you didn’t have them before I started selling them, you would have had to pay my price to get them. After a patch you want to be a seller, not a buyer, everything is going to be expensive after a new patch hits, one of the best examples from recently would be the tailor made cloth and dragon eyes.
Both of these items sold for 400-500 gold at the release of wrath of the litch king, but currently only sell for about 100g. by postponing our consumption we could have sold our cloth and dragon eyes for lots of gold then and now purchased what we need if any for 20% of what they originally sold for. As a jewelcrafter the dragon eyes were purchased with the token for a 5 min quest that is a daily. By analyzing my options I had two choices, one was to use these token to buy jewelcrafting recipes, the other was to use the token to buy a dragons eye each day and sell it.
Remember that opportunity cost it what you give up to get something, so by buying a gem recipe for three tokens I gave up selling three dragons eye, or 1500g. 5 token recipes cost 2500g, and the epic patterns cost 3000g. I then asked myself would it be more profitable to cut gems, or sell dragons eyes, since the profit on most of these recipes was around 25g for each cut, it meant I would have needed to sell 60 gems of each cut I bought in order to break even with just selling dragons eyes, on top of this I would need to sell 60 gems before the price of dragons eyes had dropped. Right now those same recipes run me 300g to aquire versus 1500, and the profit margin is less but still decent.
So by delaying our consumption and asking what our opportunity cost is we can make a lot of gold.
Thanks for listening to Wow trader your source for gold
Thanks for listening to Wowtrader your source for papa hummels biscuits for your wow wealth. This is Miy saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies, for the horde! Read more!
Announcements:
3.1 is coming
AA version is out.
Today we will be discussing two things,
1. Patch equals profit
2. Postponed consumption and opportunity cost
Last week we discussed the cycles and shift in demand, today we will talk about how to profit ofof them. The biggest shift comes with patches, imagine that Patches are like high tide, the prices rise and the economy picks up, in between patches the economy goes reaches low tide, until the next patch comes and tide goes back up.
So first off, a Patch equals profit:
Patches bring new things into the game, patch notes are a source of information on what will be profitable in the future and what purchased today will be worth more later. A good example would have been the 2.4 patch. When 2.4 hit it introduced a variety of things into the game, a easily accessable source of gold from dailies, new gear from the new instance and raid, and a new season of pvp gear. This meant the people had more gold then ever and lots of new gear in need of enchantments and gems.
To capitalize off of this I took over the uncommon level gem market for two weeks on my old server, I raised the price of all uncommon gems by 500%, I bought all gems that sold for less than mine and undercut anyone close to the 500% margin I had set. At the end of two weeks this had brought in over 10,000 gold.
Patches bring a variety of new ways to make a lot of gold, the main thing to think about is, whats new in the patch, and what will people need because of these new things.
Second topic is postponed consumption and opportunity cost
This topic ties in with patches but in the opposite way, when new things enter the market they are always expensive, in the case of my gems, if you didn’t have them before I started selling them, you would have had to pay my price to get them. After a patch you want to be a seller, not a buyer, everything is going to be expensive after a new patch hits, one of the best examples from recently would be the tailor made cloth and dragon eyes.
Both of these items sold for 400-500 gold at the release of wrath of the litch king, but currently only sell for about 100g. by postponing our consumption we could have sold our cloth and dragon eyes for lots of gold then and now purchased what we need if any for 20% of what they originally sold for. As a jewelcrafter the dragon eyes were purchased with the token for a 5 min quest that is a daily. By analyzing my options I had two choices, one was to use these token to buy jewelcrafting recipes, the other was to use the token to buy a dragons eye each day and sell it.
Remember that opportunity cost it what you give up to get something, so by buying a gem recipe for three tokens I gave up selling three dragons eye, or 1500g. 5 token recipes cost 2500g, and the epic patterns cost 3000g. I then asked myself would it be more profitable to cut gems, or sell dragons eyes, since the profit on most of these recipes was around 25g for each cut, it meant I would have needed to sell 60 gems of each cut I bought in order to break even with just selling dragons eyes, on top of this I would need to sell 60 gems before the price of dragons eyes had dropped. Right now those same recipes run me 300g to aquire versus 1500, and the profit margin is less but still decent.
So by delaying our consumption and asking what our opportunity cost is we can make a lot of gold.
Thanks for listening to Wow trader your source for gold
Thanks for listening to Wowtrader your source for papa hummels biscuits for your wow wealth. This is Miy saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies, for the horde! Read more!
WOW Trader Segment #4
Welcome to wow trader your source of wow auction house epic knowledge. Miy here and recently I received an email with an auction house question, allow me to read a section from it.
Dear Miy,
One aspect of WoW commerce that I'd like to hear your views on is how to deal with demand shifts and how to handle them when the demand price is relatively inelastic. For instance, I always found Cobra Scales to be frustrating. They sold for 45-50g each pre-WotLK and I found them very easy to farm as a BM hunter. I could produce a full stack of 20 in 2-3 hours when I was on a roll.
The problem was that demand would shift frequently. Some weeks I'd have to repost them 10 times, other weeks they'd sell before I closed the AH window. However, the price didn't vary significantly from week to week. How do you handle these changes in demand which are not apparent from Auctioneer data alone?
From Miy admirer.
Well Miy Admirer, I am glad you asked because this is a wonderful topic to base today’s discussion on. So for today’s wow trader we will discuss the shifts within the auction house.
Well first lets talk about the different types of shifts. There are two types of shifts and they are shifts in demand and shifts in supply
Generally speaking the shifts in demand and supply affect the price, however there is often a delay between action and result, so that a singles days shortage in supply is not enough to affect the long term price of an item. This explains why those cobra scales did not change in price even with shortages or an excess of product. Sellers were used to selling them at that price and buyers were used to buying them at that price so the market stayed relatively stable.
As for the shifts in demand, to some extent this is predictable, days when more people log on, there will be more activity on the auction house. Weekdays will generally see less activity. However there is also a random element to all of this, some days will just have more activity then others as a result of the random choices of players. This occurs often because players spend a week or two farming, and then when they start running low on gold they try to unload all their items at once to get the gold they need.
So how do we deal with these shifts, and how can we be profitable with them?
Well first off shifts in supply and demand are somewhat predictable. They often revolve around gear. Whether it is the purchase of gear, the purchase of items to make gear, the purchase of items to improve gear, or the purchase of items to help go and get gear, it really all comes down to gear.
Gear is the one thing that drives the economy so by tracking gear we can track the shifts in the auction house economy. Some of the following effects will cause shifts.
New patch = new gear, demand shifts to the right
Raiding is hard = people min maxing, demand shifts to the right.
It is a raiding night = people get new gear, demand shifts to the right.
The lack of these conditions shifts demand to the left, which is actually the current state of our economy.
Supply is a little more fickle, generally we have two types of providers, the career auction house players who are always posting items on the auction house, and those who sell stuff they have accumulated from farming or from leveling their trade skills whenever they need gold, or want to create space in their bank.
So now we understand why they’re shifts on the auction house, we have to ask how can we make a profit off of this?
For this week I will just say sell when the supply low and demand is high, and buy items when the opposite is true. You also want to become a regular seller, each day, place a few of each item you want to sell on the auction house, this allows you to avoid losses from auction house fees if items don’t sell, and by regularly placing items on the auction house you help to maintain a steady level of supply and demand, and steady profits.
Next week we will go into how to predict shifts in supply and demand and how to use this information to maximize profit.
Thanks for listening to Wowtrader your source for papa hummels biscuits for your wow wealth. This is Miy saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies, for the horde! Read more!
WOW Trader Segment #3
Welcome to wow trader 3 where we help you ninja that auction house gold
Today I want to discuss the most valuable resource in wow. This resource is worth more than Eternal fire, worth more than brilliant spell thread, or that Nestingwary 4000. And I know you’re thinking that this is easy, the most valuable resource in the game is gold!
The most valuable resource in wow is not gold. It is time. Gold we can always farm more of, we can buy and sell it. We can trade for it. But our time is set. Once spent it is not recoverable, and once wasted it is gone forever.
The goal of wow trader is to help you acquire gold, but even more basic then that wow trader is here to try and save you time. I am here to try and give you the tools to save your time to do the things in game that you enjoy.
Last segment we talked about selling this segment we are going to discuss buying. Whenever we buy something from the auction house we make a decision, we decide to spend gold, but in reality we are sending our time. Our gold spent on the auction house is equal to the time it took us to farm that gold. The other option is to go out and get the item ourselves.
Let’s start off with an example. On the AH is a stack of Iron, it is selling for 20g. Here is the question which is faster for you, doing two dailies and using the gold from those dailies to buy the iron? Or flying to the old world and running around searching for iron nodes until your find a stack worth?
Whenever we buy something, we have to ask ourselves, which is the best use of my time.
However it is hard to calculate the time… have any of you spent an hour gathering iron ore, then dividing the amount you collected to figure out your stack per hour? Not many of us have. So how can we know which is faster?
And this is why we have gold wage; think of it as your hourly wage but in wow gold. How much gold are you worth an hour. Since we don’t have a job in wow, we have to figure out our gold wage by the activities we do in wow to make gold. Currently my gold wage is 1200g an hour; yours should be between 500g to 2000g an hour as well.
So how do you figure out your gold wage? Well let’s say you can farm 500g worth of primal fire in an hour and 400g worth of herbs, your value is 500g, because it is your highest gold making activity.
Pro tip: if you can farm 500 gold in eternals or 400g in herbs in an hour, you should never be farming those herbs. Farm the primal for an hour, sell them and then buy 400g in herbs and keep the 100g in your pocket. Always do your highest earning potential, to save yourself the most important thing, time.
So step one is to figure out your gold wage, how much gold are you worth each hour. your gold value could be from dailies, farming herbs or ores, running old instances, killing mobs for rep items or anything you can think off. Do it, time yourself and figure out how much gold you make per hour.
Once you know your gold wage, we can apply it to things on the auction house
Let’s go back to that stack of iron. So the stack of iron sells for 20g. My gold wage is 1200g an hour, so 20g is worth 1 minute of my time. I ask myself can I farm a stack of iron in 1 minute. If the answer is no, than I will be buying my Iron off of the auction house.
This applies to everything in the game. Say there is a Nestingwary 4000 on the auction house for 2000g. There is another one that drops in Naxx off of Kel’thuzad. So again we measure in time. I make 1200g an hour, so to buy the gun off the auction house for 2000g so it will take me 1 hour and 40 minutes to get this gun.
Now let’s say I have an excellent group that can clear Naxx in 1 hour. The Neurubian Conqueror has a 19% drop rate so let’s say 1 in 5. That means on average I will need to spend 5 hours to get it from Naxx. So its 1 hour and 40 minutes and 5 hours, hmm this is a difficult choice.
Now I understand most of you are going to go to Naxx for fun, and so this is something you need to consider, but also you have to consider that
1. naxx takes longer than 1 hour.
2. You can only kill kel’thuzad once a week
3. Depending on your group, you may not be able to clear naxx in the first couple of weeks and it may take you several months to get it.
So to recap this podcast segment, remember:
1. The most valuable resource in wow is time.
2. Know your wow gold wage.
3. When you buy your spending time, not gold.
Protip: if you’re one of those people who buys large quantities of the same item over and over from the auction house, I recommend one of two methods to save time. One is AHsearch, which is a mod to allow you to preset searches for faster viewing later on, and the other is snatch which is a module of auctioneer which can store values for items on the ah, whenever it sees those items on the ah for less than the value you set it will let you know so you can purchase them right away.
Thank you for listening to wow trader where we Buff you with arcane intellect on auction house knowledge. Read more!
Today I want to discuss the most valuable resource in wow. This resource is worth more than Eternal fire, worth more than brilliant spell thread, or that Nestingwary 4000. And I know you’re thinking that this is easy, the most valuable resource in the game is gold!
The most valuable resource in wow is not gold. It is time. Gold we can always farm more of, we can buy and sell it. We can trade for it. But our time is set. Once spent it is not recoverable, and once wasted it is gone forever.
The goal of wow trader is to help you acquire gold, but even more basic then that wow trader is here to try and save you time. I am here to try and give you the tools to save your time to do the things in game that you enjoy.
Last segment we talked about selling this segment we are going to discuss buying. Whenever we buy something from the auction house we make a decision, we decide to spend gold, but in reality we are sending our time. Our gold spent on the auction house is equal to the time it took us to farm that gold. The other option is to go out and get the item ourselves.
Let’s start off with an example. On the AH is a stack of Iron, it is selling for 20g. Here is the question which is faster for you, doing two dailies and using the gold from those dailies to buy the iron? Or flying to the old world and running around searching for iron nodes until your find a stack worth?
Whenever we buy something, we have to ask ourselves, which is the best use of my time.
However it is hard to calculate the time… have any of you spent an hour gathering iron ore, then dividing the amount you collected to figure out your stack per hour? Not many of us have. So how can we know which is faster?
And this is why we have gold wage; think of it as your hourly wage but in wow gold. How much gold are you worth an hour. Since we don’t have a job in wow, we have to figure out our gold wage by the activities we do in wow to make gold. Currently my gold wage is 1200g an hour; yours should be between 500g to 2000g an hour as well.
So how do you figure out your gold wage? Well let’s say you can farm 500g worth of primal fire in an hour and 400g worth of herbs, your value is 500g, because it is your highest gold making activity.
Pro tip: if you can farm 500 gold in eternals or 400g in herbs in an hour, you should never be farming those herbs. Farm the primal for an hour, sell them and then buy 400g in herbs and keep the 100g in your pocket. Always do your highest earning potential, to save yourself the most important thing, time.
So step one is to figure out your gold wage, how much gold are you worth each hour. your gold value could be from dailies, farming herbs or ores, running old instances, killing mobs for rep items or anything you can think off. Do it, time yourself and figure out how much gold you make per hour.
Once you know your gold wage, we can apply it to things on the auction house
Let’s go back to that stack of iron. So the stack of iron sells for 20g. My gold wage is 1200g an hour, so 20g is worth 1 minute of my time. I ask myself can I farm a stack of iron in 1 minute. If the answer is no, than I will be buying my Iron off of the auction house.
This applies to everything in the game. Say there is a Nestingwary 4000 on the auction house for 2000g. There is another one that drops in Naxx off of Kel’thuzad. So again we measure in time. I make 1200g an hour, so to buy the gun off the auction house for 2000g so it will take me 1 hour and 40 minutes to get this gun.
Now let’s say I have an excellent group that can clear Naxx in 1 hour. The Neurubian Conqueror has a 19% drop rate so let’s say 1 in 5. That means on average I will need to spend 5 hours to get it from Naxx. So its 1 hour and 40 minutes and 5 hours, hmm this is a difficult choice.
Now I understand most of you are going to go to Naxx for fun, and so this is something you need to consider, but also you have to consider that
1. naxx takes longer than 1 hour.
2. You can only kill kel’thuzad once a week
3. Depending on your group, you may not be able to clear naxx in the first couple of weeks and it may take you several months to get it.
So to recap this podcast segment, remember:
1. The most valuable resource in wow is time.
2. Know your wow gold wage.
3. When you buy your spending time, not gold.
Protip: if you’re one of those people who buys large quantities of the same item over and over from the auction house, I recommend one of two methods to save time. One is AHsearch, which is a mod to allow you to preset searches for faster viewing later on, and the other is snatch which is a module of auctioneer which can store values for items on the ah, whenever it sees those items on the ah for less than the value you set it will let you know so you can purchase them right away.
Thank you for listening to wow trader where we Buff you with arcane intellect on auction house knowledge. Read more!
WOW Trader Segment #2
Welcome to wow trader where we put the arcane brilliance on your wow wallet.
Last segment I went over some general topics, this week I would like to go more into detail about how to post auctions successfully and how to use auctioneer to simplify posting auctions.
Lets start with selling items successfully on the AH. Here are a three rules for listing auctions based on what I call the walmart strategy.
1. Have up to date data.
2. Be the cheapest.
3. Less time is better then more.
These rules cater to the AH trader. It focuses on the idea of being the walmart seller versus the nordstroms. The goal is to get your items to sell every time we list them for slightly less profit, then having to list multiple times for a sale that yield a larger profit. In other words we sell 5 items for 50 gold profit rather then one of the same item for 100 gold profit.
Again those three rules are:
1. Have up to date data.
2. Be the cheapest.
3. Less time is better then more.
Now lets dive into these very vague rules and explain in more detail what each means and doesn’t mean.
Rule one have up to date data, this means doing a scan before listing any auctions.
*Pro-tip: Auctioneer’s wrath version will feature a button to grab data from blizzards server faster, but the current release of Auctioneer doesn’t yet have this button. You can however use /aadv getall to get all the auction house data in a quarter of the normal scanning time.
/aadv getall
The reason we need up to date data, is that we want to list our auctions cheaper than anyone else’s however, if we don’t have up to date data we may be listing our items for more than a competitor’s price and not even know it.
* Pro-tip two: Auctioneer’s Appraiser module has a refresh button to update data of a specific item should you not want to scan the entire auction house to sell one item.
Onward to rule two, be the cheapest. When I say be cheapest I mean be exactly 1 copper less than the cheapest current lister. We want to be first on the list of items that show up on the auction house when someone does a search. To be first you have to be the cheapest. To be first on the list, and first to sell, your bid and buyout must be 1 copper cheaper than anyone else.
Do not list your product more than 1 copper cheaper. Many people think that they should mark down by a couple of gold to give buyers a reason to purchase their product. This is a false assumption. Walmart does not sell products a couple dollars cheaper, they sell everything a couple of copper cheaper.
We are also marking down by one copper to avoid a market collapsing. By market collapse I am referring to when 10 people each post an item for 5g cheaper than the last lister. This creates a situation where the profit on selling this item quickly disappears and the market bottoms out.
By listing 1 copper cheaper we maintain the market price, and profit, and still sell more than our competitors. This is the AH traders way, this is the Wal-Mart way. It may not appeal to your business ethical beliefs, but it works, look at Wal-Mart.
*This brings us to Pro-tip three: Auctioneer can be set up to automatically list your items 1 copper cheaper, there is a check box on the right side of the appraiser tab for each item that is called price matching. It can be adjusted to be 1 copper or even a percentage in the configuration user interface of auctioneer.
Finally rule three, Less time is better then more.
In a Wal-Mart auction House trader strategy we want to minimize our risk and costs of doing business.
Ideally we sell an item the first time we list it. However if we don’t sell it, we lose the deposit fee. An items deposit fee is determined by a percentage of an items vendor sell price times the listing period coefficient. This means a 48 hour deposit cost 4 times the deposit of a 12 hour deposit.
We choose a shorter listing period to take less of hit when items don’t sell and to focus our sales to times of peak users being online. To achieve this I generally list for 12 hours in the morning. My items are listed during the peak user times and shortly afterward are returned to me to be relisted the following morning.
Generally speaking if your items don’t sell in the first 12 hours, they are out of sync with the new marketprice and are not going to sell over the following 36 hours. By selling in 12 hour increments, we lose less gold when they don’t sell and are able to adjust the price to the new market price on the following day.
The exception to this rule are items which you are providing to the market in large amounts at a set price that have a zero or minimal listing fee, such as enchanting mats. However this is a more advanced topic we will discuss on a future segment.
So once more the three rules for being a wow trader are:
1. Have up to date data.
2. Be the cheapest.
3. Less time is better then more.
Auctioneer settings: What should and shouldn’t be sold on the AH.
Items that cost more in materials should not be sold on the AH. What do I mean by this, lets take a epic level crafted gun for example. Recently a friend in the game crafted an epic level gun to sell on the AH, he was going to use the gold brought in by the sale to pay for his epic flight training.
So the question is, should he be selling it on the AH or not? The answer of course is yes, he has already crafted it, so he now has to sell it on the AH. But what about before he crafted it? We ask because when we craft something we destroy X amount of gold worth of material to produce a new item worth Y amount of gold. If Y is greater then X then we should craft and sell, if X is greater the y we should not.
In other words if you can sell the materials used to craft that epic gun on the AH for the same or more then the gun, then why are you going to make the gun? The point of trade skills is to take materials worth 50g and turn them into a new item worth 100g.
90% of your recipes will turn more valuable items into less valuable items. These should if at all possible never be made Read more!
Last segment I went over some general topics, this week I would like to go more into detail about how to post auctions successfully and how to use auctioneer to simplify posting auctions.
Lets start with selling items successfully on the AH. Here are a three rules for listing auctions based on what I call the walmart strategy.
1. Have up to date data.
2. Be the cheapest.
3. Less time is better then more.
These rules cater to the AH trader. It focuses on the idea of being the walmart seller versus the nordstroms. The goal is to get your items to sell every time we list them for slightly less profit, then having to list multiple times for a sale that yield a larger profit. In other words we sell 5 items for 50 gold profit rather then one of the same item for 100 gold profit.
Again those three rules are:
1. Have up to date data.
2. Be the cheapest.
3. Less time is better then more.
Now lets dive into these very vague rules and explain in more detail what each means and doesn’t mean.
Rule one have up to date data, this means doing a scan before listing any auctions.
*Pro-tip: Auctioneer’s wrath version will feature a button to grab data from blizzards server faster, but the current release of Auctioneer doesn’t yet have this button. You can however use /aadv getall to get all the auction house data in a quarter of the normal scanning time.
/aadv getall
The reason we need up to date data, is that we want to list our auctions cheaper than anyone else’s however, if we don’t have up to date data we may be listing our items for more than a competitor’s price and not even know it.
* Pro-tip two: Auctioneer’s Appraiser module has a refresh button to update data of a specific item should you not want to scan the entire auction house to sell one item.
Onward to rule two, be the cheapest. When I say be cheapest I mean be exactly 1 copper less than the cheapest current lister. We want to be first on the list of items that show up on the auction house when someone does a search. To be first you have to be the cheapest. To be first on the list, and first to sell, your bid and buyout must be 1 copper cheaper than anyone else.
Do not list your product more than 1 copper cheaper. Many people think that they should mark down by a couple of gold to give buyers a reason to purchase their product. This is a false assumption. Walmart does not sell products a couple dollars cheaper, they sell everything a couple of copper cheaper.
We are also marking down by one copper to avoid a market collapsing. By market collapse I am referring to when 10 people each post an item for 5g cheaper than the last lister. This creates a situation where the profit on selling this item quickly disappears and the market bottoms out.
By listing 1 copper cheaper we maintain the market price, and profit, and still sell more than our competitors. This is the AH traders way, this is the Wal-Mart way. It may not appeal to your business ethical beliefs, but it works, look at Wal-Mart.
*This brings us to Pro-tip three: Auctioneer can be set up to automatically list your items 1 copper cheaper, there is a check box on the right side of the appraiser tab for each item that is called price matching. It can be adjusted to be 1 copper or even a percentage in the configuration user interface of auctioneer.
Finally rule three, Less time is better then more.
In a Wal-Mart auction House trader strategy we want to minimize our risk and costs of doing business.
Ideally we sell an item the first time we list it. However if we don’t sell it, we lose the deposit fee. An items deposit fee is determined by a percentage of an items vendor sell price times the listing period coefficient. This means a 48 hour deposit cost 4 times the deposit of a 12 hour deposit.
We choose a shorter listing period to take less of hit when items don’t sell and to focus our sales to times of peak users being online. To achieve this I generally list for 12 hours in the morning. My items are listed during the peak user times and shortly afterward are returned to me to be relisted the following morning.
Generally speaking if your items don’t sell in the first 12 hours, they are out of sync with the new marketprice and are not going to sell over the following 36 hours. By selling in 12 hour increments, we lose less gold when they don’t sell and are able to adjust the price to the new market price on the following day.
The exception to this rule are items which you are providing to the market in large amounts at a set price that have a zero or minimal listing fee, such as enchanting mats. However this is a more advanced topic we will discuss on a future segment.
So once more the three rules for being a wow trader are:
1. Have up to date data.
2. Be the cheapest.
3. Less time is better then more.
Auctioneer settings: What should and shouldn’t be sold on the AH.
Items that cost more in materials should not be sold on the AH. What do I mean by this, lets take a epic level crafted gun for example. Recently a friend in the game crafted an epic level gun to sell on the AH, he was going to use the gold brought in by the sale to pay for his epic flight training.
So the question is, should he be selling it on the AH or not? The answer of course is yes, he has already crafted it, so he now has to sell it on the AH. But what about before he crafted it? We ask because when we craft something we destroy X amount of gold worth of material to produce a new item worth Y amount of gold. If Y is greater then X then we should craft and sell, if X is greater the y we should not.
In other words if you can sell the materials used to craft that epic gun on the AH for the same or more then the gun, then why are you going to make the gun? The point of trade skills is to take materials worth 50g and turn them into a new item worth 100g.
90% of your recipes will turn more valuable items into less valuable items. These should if at all possible never be made Read more!
WOW Trader segment #1
welcome to wow trader, where we put the arcane brilliance on your wow bling. This is Miy, level 80 warlock and your host for this segment.
The goal of this segment is to help you put a little gold if your pocket, but here is a disclaimer, this podcast is not a short cut to gold and wealth. I am here to try and point you in the correct direction; the effort will have to come from you. Any advice I give applied improperly can lose the gold you invest. If you want to succeed you will need to put in the time and effort. In this case it means doing the research before investing your hard earned gold.
It is my hope this podcast segment will allow you to avoid most of the many hours of research I had to do to get to where I am now. This is Miy, and welcome to WOW Trader.
Where’s the beef?
Today we will discuss tools and resources. When humans do anything, tools allow us to accomplish more. Today I want to share with you a few of my tools and resources.
I use a few add-ons which I load only on my AH character, but the most important one is Auctioneer. Auctioneer can be downloaded at curse.com or with wow matrix.
Auctioneer allows you to scan the auction house for sales prices, over time this can give you a basic idea of what things are worth. A week’s worth of scanning is enough to get good reliable data, after which I usually only scan once a week or so.
Tip tip tip tip
If I could impart only one piece of advice to you to this is it. Set up a level one character in Orgrimmar, download auctioneer, scan for a week, and then mail and sell all items you are going to on this character. If you learn nothing else from this podcast segment, remember this advice.
Now on to my resources, I used to do all the research myself, but recently there have been a few blogs that have popped up that offer really good information. My two favorite at the moment are ‘thewoweconomist.com’ and ‘greedygoblin.blogspot.com’
The wow economist tracks trends to an amazing degree, and gives great introductory articles for those new to WOW, or those new to playing the auction house.
The greedy goblin is designed for those a little more advanced. It takes some hard hitting stances on different AH activities. Mind you I don’t agree with everything the author writes, but he has many good points.
Both have a wealth of resources that you should be reading about. And that is where the beef is.
MOOOOO
The Street:
Here the word on the street, while checking out my new pvp leggings from the vault I noticed there were no epic level thread enchants for cloth gear on the ah. So I did a little research.
Tip tip tip tip
Brilliant spell thread takes 8 eternal life, 3 eternium thread, 1 frozen orb and 1 iceweb spider silk the cost of all these materials is 230g if you buy them from the AH, now I figure when I was level 70 these enchants ran 300g, 400g should be a reasonable amount to ask for level 80 enchants, which means a profit of 170 per brilliant spellthread sold. That’s a pretty decent profit margin if you ask me.
Tip tip tip tip
If you check out our forms under the professions section I posted a picture of a farming route for engineers for eternal fire, I understand that this route generates about 480g worth of eternals in an hour. So if you’re the gathering type and you have engineering as a profession you might want to take a look at it.
The Rant:
Every, I repeat every, profession has a way to make gold. Some are better than others. Jewelcrafting makes me about 1800 gold an hour invested at the moment. It however is the exception to the normal.
When someone say’s I can’t make gold off my profession, what they are saying is I don’t want to do the research to see which products sell for more than the materials to make it. This is a good thing, for you. Because most people are not going to do the research which means it will remain profitable. If everyone did the research we would all sell the items, flood the market and eventually there would be no profit.
Let’s be honest, most patterns do not produce an item more valuable than its component pieces, but some do. And if you are willing to do the research to find these recipes, then you can make a profit with your profession, regardless of what that profession is.
But to take this rant a step further, you even don’t need to have a profession to make gold off it. I have made 1000’s of gold off leatherworking and tailoring neither of which I personally have. To make gold off profession you don’t have means a lot of research
Tip tip tip tip
Although there are hundreds of recipes, focus on wrath content the higher the level of recipe the higher level of player using whatever it produces which means more profit, or more loss, make sure you do your research.
This is Miy, putting the wed fed buff on your wow wallet. Read more!
The goal of this segment is to help you put a little gold if your pocket, but here is a disclaimer, this podcast is not a short cut to gold and wealth. I am here to try and point you in the correct direction; the effort will have to come from you. Any advice I give applied improperly can lose the gold you invest. If you want to succeed you will need to put in the time and effort. In this case it means doing the research before investing your hard earned gold.
It is my hope this podcast segment will allow you to avoid most of the many hours of research I had to do to get to where I am now. This is Miy, and welcome to WOW Trader.
Where’s the beef?
Today we will discuss tools and resources. When humans do anything, tools allow us to accomplish more. Today I want to share with you a few of my tools and resources.
I use a few add-ons which I load only on my AH character, but the most important one is Auctioneer. Auctioneer can be downloaded at curse.com or with wow matrix.
Auctioneer allows you to scan the auction house for sales prices, over time this can give you a basic idea of what things are worth. A week’s worth of scanning is enough to get good reliable data, after which I usually only scan once a week or so.
Tip tip tip tip
If I could impart only one piece of advice to you to this is it. Set up a level one character in Orgrimmar, download auctioneer, scan for a week, and then mail and sell all items you are going to on this character. If you learn nothing else from this podcast segment, remember this advice.
Now on to my resources, I used to do all the research myself, but recently there have been a few blogs that have popped up that offer really good information. My two favorite at the moment are ‘thewoweconomist.com’ and ‘greedygoblin.blogspot.com’
The wow economist tracks trends to an amazing degree, and gives great introductory articles for those new to WOW, or those new to playing the auction house.
The greedy goblin is designed for those a little more advanced. It takes some hard hitting stances on different AH activities. Mind you I don’t agree with everything the author writes, but he has many good points.
Both have a wealth of resources that you should be reading about. And that is where the beef is.
MOOOOO
The Street:
Here the word on the street, while checking out my new pvp leggings from the vault I noticed there were no epic level thread enchants for cloth gear on the ah. So I did a little research.
Tip tip tip tip
Brilliant spell thread takes 8 eternal life, 3 eternium thread, 1 frozen orb and 1 iceweb spider silk the cost of all these materials is 230g if you buy them from the AH, now I figure when I was level 70 these enchants ran 300g, 400g should be a reasonable amount to ask for level 80 enchants, which means a profit of 170 per brilliant spellthread sold. That’s a pretty decent profit margin if you ask me.
Tip tip tip tip
If you check out our forms under the professions section I posted a picture of a farming route for engineers for eternal fire, I understand that this route generates about 480g worth of eternals in an hour. So if you’re the gathering type and you have engineering as a profession you might want to take a look at it.
The Rant:
Every, I repeat every, profession has a way to make gold. Some are better than others. Jewelcrafting makes me about 1800 gold an hour invested at the moment. It however is the exception to the normal.
When someone say’s I can’t make gold off my profession, what they are saying is I don’t want to do the research to see which products sell for more than the materials to make it. This is a good thing, for you. Because most people are not going to do the research which means it will remain profitable. If everyone did the research we would all sell the items, flood the market and eventually there would be no profit.
Let’s be honest, most patterns do not produce an item more valuable than its component pieces, but some do. And if you are willing to do the research to find these recipes, then you can make a profit with your profession, regardless of what that profession is.
But to take this rant a step further, you even don’t need to have a profession to make gold off it. I have made 1000’s of gold off leatherworking and tailoring neither of which I personally have. To make gold off profession you don’t have means a lot of research
Tip tip tip tip
Although there are hundreds of recipes, focus on wrath content the higher the level of recipe the higher level of player using whatever it produces which means more profit, or more loss, make sure you do your research.
This is Miy, putting the wed fed buff on your wow wallet. Read more!
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