This will be my last post, I wanted to thank all my readers and everyone whoever commented on one of my posts. I got to the point where I had more gold coming in then I could spend, and the challenge became boring. I sent all my in game wealth to my sister and taught her how to make as much gold as she wants, but considering the amount of gold I sent over, I am not sure she will ever need to.
At the moment I have decided to focus more on my real life, and I am waiting to see if the bid I put on a house goes through. If so I will be spending my time making money in the real world to pay off my purchase. If not I think I will be looking at starting a business to try and apply all those college accounting and business investing classes to good use.
Goodbye, and farewell till we meet again.
Miy
Read more!
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
So your Rich. Now What?
What should you do with all that gold sitting in your bank account? Here are 10 suggestions.
Well you have bought sold and conquered and now sit on an overflowing pile of gold. What do you do with it?
To be honest, Blizzard has gone out of their way to make sure there wasnt much to spend your gold on. I really wish they had actually come out with the whole pimp your mount system. I would have dropped 30k gold to make my travelers mammoth a 310% flying mount. So what can you do?
1. Collect Mounts!
I am sitting just under 80 myself at the moment.
2. Buy BOE epic Ulduar Gear
I have three pieces and am planning on getting another three (an odd work schedule makes it hard to be on a raid team)
3. Make a twink
I have already dropped a little over 2k to gear my 49 mage. (a large chunk went to rep items for ZG)
4. Bypass the Hodir rep grind
It cost me about 2k to skip this. I hate repeating a quest more than once or twice.
5. Collect Vanity Pets.
Not my thing but hey some people like it.
6. Buy the Travelers Mammoth.
Hey those vendors are awesome. I didnt even wait to get my rep up to buy it myself.
7. Buy a Motorcycle
This isnt a steam punk game・why the ^#%$ would you want a motorcycle・whatever.
8. Buy a run through Ulduar
If you cant get in on a regular raid this might work for you.
9. Buy your twilight/black drake.
It is a 100% drop; you just need a group that knows what it is doing and the gold to pay them to let you have it.
10. Finance a guild/raid team
Gevlon seems to be doing this to great success, it costs him 5k a week, but the benefits are nice.
I wish there was more.
. Read more!
Well you have bought sold and conquered and now sit on an overflowing pile of gold. What do you do with it?
To be honest, Blizzard has gone out of their way to make sure there wasnt much to spend your gold on. I really wish they had actually come out with the whole pimp your mount system. I would have dropped 30k gold to make my travelers mammoth a 310% flying mount. So what can you do?
1. Collect Mounts!
I am sitting just under 80 myself at the moment.
2. Buy BOE epic Ulduar Gear
I have three pieces and am planning on getting another three (an odd work schedule makes it hard to be on a raid team)
3. Make a twink
I have already dropped a little over 2k to gear my 49 mage. (a large chunk went to rep items for ZG)
4. Bypass the Hodir rep grind
It cost me about 2k to skip this. I hate repeating a quest more than once or twice.
5. Collect Vanity Pets.
Not my thing but hey some people like it.
6. Buy the Travelers Mammoth.
Hey those vendors are awesome. I didnt even wait to get my rep up to buy it myself.
7. Buy a Motorcycle
This isnt a steam punk game・why the ^#%$ would you want a motorcycle・whatever.
8. Buy a run through Ulduar
If you cant get in on a regular raid this might work for you.
9. Buy your twilight/black drake.
It is a 100% drop; you just need a group that knows what it is doing and the gold to pay them to let you have it.
10. Finance a guild/raid team
Gevlon seems to be doing this to great success, it costs him 5k a week, but the benefits are nice.
I wish there was more.
. Read more!
Monday, June 15, 2009
AhTrader podcast #9
Notes on what i plan to podcast for my guild on the next segment.
Why you might not be making as much gold as you think.
Almost everyone here has been in economics 101, so you should remember the story about two men. Man A can produce 4 pizzas or 2 sodas in a day; man B can produce 1 pizza or 4 sodas a day. If each man spent half their time producing pizza and soda, man A would have 2 pizzas and 1 soda each day, and man B would have half a pizza and 2 sodas each day. But if they specialized and traded, each man could have 2 pizzas and 2 sodas each day.
The point is that specialization and trade is beneficial. In WOW there are players who have a gathering and an armor profession. These players are not specialized. In the burning crusade, armor professions were almost required, as the crafted epic set produced was equivalent to tier 4.5 gear. So having one armor profession and one gold making profession was expected. This however is no longer the case as armor professions are pretty ho hum at the moment.
Many players are thinking hmm, I should use both of my professions to make gold, so when they mine ore, they then create an epic piece of armor. Then than sell this armor on the auction house for 700g and think wow, I made a lot of gold my professions are great! Actually you only have half a pizza and one soda. Here is why, the time it took you to gather ore, use your skills (CDs), post on the AH, comes out to three hours or so of played time. This breaks down your gold per hour to 230. Since I know that questing dallies can produce 400g per hour, and gathering herbs and ore simultaneously can net 800-1000g per hour, I feel pretty confident in saying you are not using your time effectively.
The next thing to consider is the price of the materials themselves, if you had sold the raw materials, ore and titansteel etc, what was the market value? Often I see these pieces of armor selling for less than the price of the mats to create them.
So here is my advice, I recommend specialization for maximum profit, hence if you herb or mine, do so together. By dipping into multiple fields you are making it more complicated when it comes to accounting for your gold per hour time. Remember to keep it simple, and account for you time. Read more!
Why you might not be making as much gold as you think.
Almost everyone here has been in economics 101, so you should remember the story about two men. Man A can produce 4 pizzas or 2 sodas in a day; man B can produce 1 pizza or 4 sodas a day. If each man spent half their time producing pizza and soda, man A would have 2 pizzas and 1 soda each day, and man B would have half a pizza and 2 sodas each day. But if they specialized and traded, each man could have 2 pizzas and 2 sodas each day.
The point is that specialization and trade is beneficial. In WOW there are players who have a gathering and an armor profession. These players are not specialized. In the burning crusade, armor professions were almost required, as the crafted epic set produced was equivalent to tier 4.5 gear. So having one armor profession and one gold making profession was expected. This however is no longer the case as armor professions are pretty ho hum at the moment.
Many players are thinking hmm, I should use both of my professions to make gold, so when they mine ore, they then create an epic piece of armor. Then than sell this armor on the auction house for 700g and think wow, I made a lot of gold my professions are great! Actually you only have half a pizza and one soda. Here is why, the time it took you to gather ore, use your skills (CDs), post on the AH, comes out to three hours or so of played time. This breaks down your gold per hour to 230. Since I know that questing dallies can produce 400g per hour, and gathering herbs and ore simultaneously can net 800-1000g per hour, I feel pretty confident in saying you are not using your time effectively.
The next thing to consider is the price of the materials themselves, if you had sold the raw materials, ore and titansteel etc, what was the market value? Often I see these pieces of armor selling for less than the price of the mats to create them.
So here is my advice, I recommend specialization for maximum profit, hence if you herb or mine, do so together. By dipping into multiple fields you are making it more complicated when it comes to accounting for your gold per hour time. Remember to keep it simple, and account for you time. Read more!
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
The Phases of Knowledge, AH style
A Blog from Japan!
So I am writing this from Japan, but thought I would try to get to a web cafe to get this posted to my blog when I get a chance. So today lets talk about the phases of learning the Auction House.
While I am still refining my theories about the WOW economy, I think that all players can be placed into one of four categories. The following is me trying to quatify my thoughts and theories, and I would appreciate any feedback on my writing so I can further refine my explanations.
When learning something new, it is said that the first stage is being unconciously bad. This comes to mean that because we are unaware of something we don't even know that we are bad at it. The next three phases are conciously bad, conciously good, and finally unconciously good. These phases of learning transitioning learners from having no knowledge to the point where we barely need to think to do something well. The auction house is in essence like any knowledge, and as we learn to play and manipulate it we too move through these four stages. Today's post I want to try and quantify where each phase falls in terms of gold earning per hour and what defines each phase.
Preface: No one fits exactly into any definition. You may find that you have characteristics of multiple phases. Take everything you read following this with a grain of salt.
Phase 1: Unconciously Bad
Gold per hour potential: 0-1000g
So phase one represents the majority of players, this is where most people reside, and their knowledge of the auction house is limited to being minimalist buyers/sellers. They may or may not be sellers of items they have aquired in the normal course of their play, such as herbs, ore, and leather, eternals, and other similar items. We can describe their interaction minimal, only visit the auction house when they need items or want gold from items they would like to sell.
The major difference phase 1 and all other phases is intent, and the origin of where these players income comes from. As one progresses down the path of an AH Trader, our intent is to make gold strictly from the buying and selling of items on the auction house. While there are numerous ways to do this (arbitrage, investment, conversion, production) all share the common characteristic of starting and ending at the auction house. By moving to phase two we make a concious decision to create wealth .
(second half written offline, might be a little repetitive)
Phase 2: Consciously Bad
Income: -500 to 500 gold per hour played
This phase is exactly like it sounds, you have decided to go into business for yourself on the auction house. Like businesses in the real world, 90% fail in the first year. This stage is where many players lose money and return to being stage one players.
Let first discuss this entrance into the market and what differentiates it from stage one. In stage one; we are consumers, and sometimes producers (raw goods). Our gold comes from selling raw goods on the auction house, or quests and dalies. Stage two is different in that we are trying to make gold from supplying a service to other players, the process of which doesn稚 introduce gold or raw goods into the game.
This phase is a learning phase. Those that learn well may lose gold at first but eventually progress to the point where they supply services that will always turn a profit. Being successful in this phase pushes players into phase three. Think of it as the stage where you learn to ride a bicycle, some fall off and never try again, other eventually learn how to ride.
Phase 3: Consciously Good
Income: 500 to 1000 gold per hour played
You have been playing the auction house, and for the most part know the items you deal with, and how to guarantee a profit each time you sell. At phase three players understand that they need to sell items for more then the price of the raw materials to make a real profit. At this phase your trying out different markets, and probably have goods in a variety of sections of the auction house. All of these items should eventually turn a profit, the main question is how long it will take to sell.
For an analogy, you have learned to ride a bicycle very well
Phase 4: Unconsciously Good
Income: 1000 to 2500 gold per hour played
Phase four is different than phase 3 in time, quantity and volume. In phase four auction house traders have gotten to the point where you dont need to check whether items are profitable before listing, you list large amounts of items (in the hundreds) and make heavy use of mods like auctioneer to automate everything. Phase four takes less time to do then phase three, produces more gold per hour, and deals in larger quantities of goods. The actions of a phase four player are identical to the phase three player, they have just learned to do the same things more efficiently. You ride the bike without thinking about what you do, you just do it.
Phase 5?: The Professional (Consciously Excellent)
Income: 2500 to 5000 gold per hour played
If you can ride a bike doesnt mean you will become an Olympic bicyclist. Being unconsciously good at basketball doesnt make you Labron James. The difference with these professionals and normal people is that they take it one step further. Going beyond phase four requires becoming conscious again, It requires reanalyzing your every actions to find ways to improve and become excellent.
This phase goes beyond just selling on the auction house, it involves living there and literally taking over the auction house. It involves setting up monopolies and driving other players out of the market because they cant compete with your efficiency. It requires a massive amount of starting capital (20,000 to 40,000 gold) and a lot of knowledge. It is a phase I havent yet entered myself despite having a net worth of over 100k gold, because it requires a conscious decision to spend the time and gold to drive your competitors out of business. If I am successful, I will write a blog about it. If I am not, well I will write to tell you why I think I failed.
Read more!
So I am writing this from Japan, but thought I would try to get to a web cafe to get this posted to my blog when I get a chance. So today lets talk about the phases of learning the Auction House.
While I am still refining my theories about the WOW economy, I think that all players can be placed into one of four categories. The following is me trying to quatify my thoughts and theories, and I would appreciate any feedback on my writing so I can further refine my explanations.
When learning something new, it is said that the first stage is being unconciously bad. This comes to mean that because we are unaware of something we don't even know that we are bad at it. The next three phases are conciously bad, conciously good, and finally unconciously good. These phases of learning transitioning learners from having no knowledge to the point where we barely need to think to do something well. The auction house is in essence like any knowledge, and as we learn to play and manipulate it we too move through these four stages. Today's post I want to try and quantify where each phase falls in terms of gold earning per hour and what defines each phase.
Preface: No one fits exactly into any definition. You may find that you have characteristics of multiple phases. Take everything you read following this with a grain of salt.
Phase 1: Unconciously Bad
Gold per hour potential: 0-1000g
So phase one represents the majority of players, this is where most people reside, and their knowledge of the auction house is limited to being minimalist buyers/sellers. They may or may not be sellers of items they have aquired in the normal course of their play, such as herbs, ore, and leather, eternals, and other similar items. We can describe their interaction minimal, only visit the auction house when they need items or want gold from items they would like to sell.
The major difference phase 1 and all other phases is intent, and the origin of where these players income comes from. As one progresses down the path of an AH Trader, our intent is to make gold strictly from the buying and selling of items on the auction house. While there are numerous ways to do this (arbitrage, investment, conversion, production) all share the common characteristic of starting and ending at the auction house. By moving to phase two we make a concious decision to create wealth .
(second half written offline, might be a little repetitive)
Phase 2: Consciously Bad
Income: -500 to 500 gold per hour played
This phase is exactly like it sounds, you have decided to go into business for yourself on the auction house. Like businesses in the real world, 90% fail in the first year. This stage is where many players lose money and return to being stage one players.
Let first discuss this entrance into the market and what differentiates it from stage one. In stage one; we are consumers, and sometimes producers (raw goods). Our gold comes from selling raw goods on the auction house, or quests and dalies. Stage two is different in that we are trying to make gold from supplying a service to other players, the process of which doesn稚 introduce gold or raw goods into the game.
This phase is a learning phase. Those that learn well may lose gold at first but eventually progress to the point where they supply services that will always turn a profit. Being successful in this phase pushes players into phase three. Think of it as the stage where you learn to ride a bicycle, some fall off and never try again, other eventually learn how to ride.
Phase 3: Consciously Good
Income: 500 to 1000 gold per hour played
You have been playing the auction house, and for the most part know the items you deal with, and how to guarantee a profit each time you sell. At phase three players understand that they need to sell items for more then the price of the raw materials to make a real profit. At this phase your trying out different markets, and probably have goods in a variety of sections of the auction house. All of these items should eventually turn a profit, the main question is how long it will take to sell.
For an analogy, you have learned to ride a bicycle very well
Phase 4: Unconsciously Good
Income: 1000 to 2500 gold per hour played
Phase four is different than phase 3 in time, quantity and volume. In phase four auction house traders have gotten to the point where you dont need to check whether items are profitable before listing, you list large amounts of items (in the hundreds) and make heavy use of mods like auctioneer to automate everything. Phase four takes less time to do then phase three, produces more gold per hour, and deals in larger quantities of goods. The actions of a phase four player are identical to the phase three player, they have just learned to do the same things more efficiently. You ride the bike without thinking about what you do, you just do it.
Phase 5?: The Professional (Consciously Excellent)
Income: 2500 to 5000 gold per hour played
If you can ride a bike doesnt mean you will become an Olympic bicyclist. Being unconsciously good at basketball doesnt make you Labron James. The difference with these professionals and normal people is that they take it one step further. Going beyond phase four requires becoming conscious again, It requires reanalyzing your every actions to find ways to improve and become excellent.
This phase goes beyond just selling on the auction house, it involves living there and literally taking over the auction house. It involves setting up monopolies and driving other players out of the market because they cant compete with your efficiency. It requires a massive amount of starting capital (20,000 to 40,000 gold) and a lot of knowledge. It is a phase I havent yet entered myself despite having a net worth of over 100k gold, because it requires a conscious decision to spend the time and gold to drive your competitors out of business. If I am successful, I will write a blog about it. If I am not, well I will write to tell you why I think I failed.
Read more!
Friday, June 5, 2009
What no posts?
Out of the country, will resume blog upon my return. Sorry just didn't have the time in the hectic day to day to get around to putting togethr one of the 8 drafts i currently have hiding in back.
anyway I will return around the 12th, so expect something by the 15th. Read more!
anyway I will return around the 12th, so expect something by the 15th. Read more!
Saturday, May 30, 2009
The Not so Great Experiment
Perhaps it wasn't really such a great idea. About 3 months ago I lent 2000g to a guild member of mine. I wasn't sure if I would ever get the gold back, and I was upfront in saying that he could pay me back at his leisure in the next two months. A month since then has passed and I have yet to receive even a "hey I have almost made enough to pay you back". I guess I should explain my reasoning behind this experiment.
Back in the Burning Crusade I was broke, and didn't really have any need for gold, until one day when they introduced the netherdrake flying dragon mounts. I looked at that and it was instant love, and it would have been instant purchase, except for the 5000g training cost and the reputation grind which couldn't even be started until after epic flying training.
So I needed 5000g. As a warlock I could solo grind mobs relatively easily, and so I started the primal water grind for gold. Some 2500g and about 10 hours of grinding later I was bored and tired and honestly not sure if I wanted to continue. As I mentioned my plight within guild chat, a friendly guild mate whispered me that he would be willing to lend me the remaining 2500g if I would repay him as soon as I could.
I thought about it and then accepted his offer. This happened just about the time that the Isle of Quel released in patch 2.4, So with my now 280% flying mount I proceeded to grind the SSC dailies and the Netherwing dailies. For one week I did every daily I could and within 7 days I was able to repay the 2500g I borrowed. I was also able to hit exalted with the netherwing, and I believe close to revered with SSC. The main point being that I worked really hard to make sure I could repay my loan asap.
Interestingly enough this is the trigger for my start down the road of being an AH Trader. I really disliked the grinding, disliked doing the same quest over and over, and I thought to myself, there has to be a better way. I ended up dropping tailoring and I took up Jewelcrafting and by the time wrath had come out had accumulated over 30,000 gold on my character and bought just about every BOE jewelcrafting recipe available (they sold for 500-1000g each).
So as I lent this 2000g to a fellow guildy, I wondered would it have the same effect on him? Would this gold ever get repaid? Or would I have to ask over and over and then only get my gold back after months of effort on my part to hold him to an agreement that he promised to fulfill?
So it has been three months, currently I have contacted him one time, a month ago to ask how things were going. As of yet I have had no further contact with him, and no gold has been repaid. Currently my lending policy is one person at a time, so should I never get my 2000g back I shall never lend another gold to anyone else. It will be interesting to see where this goes as 2000g is relatively easy to repay. Heck just doing 6 AT dailies for 2 weeks would allow you to repay it, a total time investment of about 4-5 hours.
I was curious to see what my readers thought of my actions, do you think I was foolish to lend tho gold, or that it was the right thing to do? What are your thoughts?
Read more!
Back in the Burning Crusade I was broke, and didn't really have any need for gold, until one day when they introduced the netherdrake flying dragon mounts. I looked at that and it was instant love, and it would have been instant purchase, except for the 5000g training cost and the reputation grind which couldn't even be started until after epic flying training.
So I needed 5000g. As a warlock I could solo grind mobs relatively easily, and so I started the primal water grind for gold. Some 2500g and about 10 hours of grinding later I was bored and tired and honestly not sure if I wanted to continue. As I mentioned my plight within guild chat, a friendly guild mate whispered me that he would be willing to lend me the remaining 2500g if I would repay him as soon as I could.
I thought about it and then accepted his offer. This happened just about the time that the Isle of Quel released in patch 2.4, So with my now 280% flying mount I proceeded to grind the SSC dailies and the Netherwing dailies. For one week I did every daily I could and within 7 days I was able to repay the 2500g I borrowed. I was also able to hit exalted with the netherwing, and I believe close to revered with SSC. The main point being that I worked really hard to make sure I could repay my loan asap.
Interestingly enough this is the trigger for my start down the road of being an AH Trader. I really disliked the grinding, disliked doing the same quest over and over, and I thought to myself, there has to be a better way. I ended up dropping tailoring and I took up Jewelcrafting and by the time wrath had come out had accumulated over 30,000 gold on my character and bought just about every BOE jewelcrafting recipe available (they sold for 500-1000g each).
So as I lent this 2000g to a fellow guildy, I wondered would it have the same effect on him? Would this gold ever get repaid? Or would I have to ask over and over and then only get my gold back after months of effort on my part to hold him to an agreement that he promised to fulfill?
So it has been three months, currently I have contacted him one time, a month ago to ask how things were going. As of yet I have had no further contact with him, and no gold has been repaid. Currently my lending policy is one person at a time, so should I never get my 2000g back I shall never lend another gold to anyone else. It will be interesting to see where this goes as 2000g is relatively easy to repay. Heck just doing 6 AT dailies for 2 weeks would allow you to repay it, a total time investment of about 4-5 hours.
I was curious to see what my readers thought of my actions, do you think I was foolish to lend tho gold, or that it was the right thing to do? What are your thoughts?
Read more!
Monday, May 25, 2009
Professions
A big decision for your character is what profession to choose. All professions can be broken down into 3 categories. Gathering Professions, Armor Professions, and finally Accessory Professions. The exception to this in Engineering, which has elements of all three, but does none of them especially well.
Each category has it's positives and negatives, and I wanted to talk to you about how to choose based on your play style and which professions produce the most for your time from a gold standpoint.
Lets start off by breaking down each category.
Gathering professions are skinning, herbalism and mining. They offer a set bonus dependent on skill level and allow you to pick up (essentially) gold from the ground. While personally I find flying around to be painfully boring, if you out questing in the wilds often this might be the choice for you. Skinning requires dead mobs, so it is something you must consider if you choose it. Between mining and herbalism, both seem to be selling for about the same amount stack wise in the auction house. As herbs are more plentiful in the wild, between the two I would probably recommend herbalism. Profit potential, 300-600 gold per gathering profession per hour. (this guy claims 1000 gold an hour with both mining and herbalism: Link)
Armor professions are your Leatherworking, Tailoring, and Blacksmithing. These allow you to put extra stat adjusting items on your gear, and allow you to craft gear. However as no level 80 gear is BOP anymore, there is no real point to these professions. They dont give you any stat adjustments that another profession wouldn't give you, and they dont allow you to wear gear that another profession wouldn't. Any items you could craft with an armor profession, you can take the raw materials and find someone else in your guild to make for little to no extra cost. So from a money making standpoint, and for character developement, they are pretty much a waste of a profession choice. (should you decide to go this route I recommend looking at producing twink gear on a regular basis)
Finally there are the Accessories Professions Category. These include Inscription, Jewelcrafting, Alchemy, and Enchanting. Alchemy is interesting in that it can be profitable and the self buffs from potions and flasks are greater due to mixology. The downside is that the other accesory profession buffs dont expire. One you socket a gem or put those shoulder enchants on they dont dissappear in an hour, or if you die. The profitability of Alchemy is also highly dependent on the raiding community of your server, so your mileage may vary.
Jewelcrafting offers profit in prospecting, cutting gems, and probably the best profession for making stat allocations with it's in built buff to your character. The special Jewelcrafter only gems allow jewelcrafters to allocate hit, or any other stat they want far better then any other profession in the game. So as you progress in the game, jewelcrafting is wonderful for allowing you to equip that new piece of gear even if it doesn't have as much of X stat as the old piece did.
Currently Jewelcrafting is a bit low on the profit scale, on top of this cut gems dont stack, which is a real pain. The fact that the number of pieces of gear in northrend with gem slots is proportionetly less then back in outland, makes the future looks dim. There is one positive yet to come, should new content be hard like the dev's have promissed, people will need to do more min maxing, increasing the need for anything that can give them a better chance. Epic gems have yet to be introduced, because of this there may be lots of profit in the future.
Inscription is gold at the moment, and so far I haven't seen a sizable decrease in business despite the release of dual specs. There have been 58 new recipes introducd with the most recent patch and the shoulder enchants which allow you to skip having to get exalted with the Son's of Hodir are worth their weight in gold alone. So all in all, Iscription is good for making gold. The downside is what the future holds. While Jewelcrafting has epic gems to look forward to, I can't see them releasing yet more inscription glyphs before the next expansion. After the next expansion, I am still at a loss as to how the profession could be changed, its not ike they can continue to release more and more powerful glyphs, so who can tell where this is going.
Finally Enchanting. Enchanting is still one of the most annoying professions to make gold from. It is very possible, through disenchanting, to make gold, and there is the ability to place enchants on scrolls to sell on the auction house. But wow... it is a pain, each scroll must be individually made, and there is no way to look at the tooltip unless you have one in inventory. This prevents you from checking how many you have in inventory, and to see if they are currently profitable (sales prices seem to fluctuate wildly). The pluses are of course the ring enchants, and the ability to disenchant your soul bound gear, which is rather nice. Personally despite having a level 450 enchanter, I usually don't bother because of the very large investment in capital per scroll and pains of maintaining stock and getting my hands on enough gear to disenchant for enchanting mats. There is money here, there is also more work here, so take from this what you will.
I hope this give you a better idea on how the different profesions breakdown and perhaps gives you an idea as to what you may want to pursue. Personally if your not level 80 recommend the two gathering professions (herb and mining), which you should use to pay for your epic mount flying training, dual spec, etc, and then save enough gold to powerlevel 2 of the accessories professions. After that go kill the auction house and proceed to rob it blind. This is Miy saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies and for the horde. Read more!
Each category has it's positives and negatives, and I wanted to talk to you about how to choose based on your play style and which professions produce the most for your time from a gold standpoint.
Lets start off by breaking down each category.
Gathering professions are skinning, herbalism and mining. They offer a set bonus dependent on skill level and allow you to pick up (essentially) gold from the ground. While personally I find flying around to be painfully boring, if you out questing in the wilds often this might be the choice for you. Skinning requires dead mobs, so it is something you must consider if you choose it. Between mining and herbalism, both seem to be selling for about the same amount stack wise in the auction house. As herbs are more plentiful in the wild, between the two I would probably recommend herbalism. Profit potential, 300-600 gold per gathering profession per hour. (this guy claims 1000 gold an hour with both mining and herbalism: Link)
Armor professions are your Leatherworking, Tailoring, and Blacksmithing. These allow you to put extra stat adjusting items on your gear, and allow you to craft gear. However as no level 80 gear is BOP anymore, there is no real point to these professions. They dont give you any stat adjustments that another profession wouldn't give you, and they dont allow you to wear gear that another profession wouldn't. Any items you could craft with an armor profession, you can take the raw materials and find someone else in your guild to make for little to no extra cost. So from a money making standpoint, and for character developement, they are pretty much a waste of a profession choice. (should you decide to go this route I recommend looking at producing twink gear on a regular basis)
Finally there are the Accessories Professions Category. These include Inscription, Jewelcrafting, Alchemy, and Enchanting. Alchemy is interesting in that it can be profitable and the self buffs from potions and flasks are greater due to mixology. The downside is that the other accesory profession buffs dont expire. One you socket a gem or put those shoulder enchants on they dont dissappear in an hour, or if you die. The profitability of Alchemy is also highly dependent on the raiding community of your server, so your mileage may vary.
Jewelcrafting offers profit in prospecting, cutting gems, and probably the best profession for making stat allocations with it's in built buff to your character. The special Jewelcrafter only gems allow jewelcrafters to allocate hit, or any other stat they want far better then any other profession in the game. So as you progress in the game, jewelcrafting is wonderful for allowing you to equip that new piece of gear even if it doesn't have as much of X stat as the old piece did.
Currently Jewelcrafting is a bit low on the profit scale, on top of this cut gems dont stack, which is a real pain. The fact that the number of pieces of gear in northrend with gem slots is proportionetly less then back in outland, makes the future looks dim. There is one positive yet to come, should new content be hard like the dev's have promissed, people will need to do more min maxing, increasing the need for anything that can give them a better chance. Epic gems have yet to be introduced, because of this there may be lots of profit in the future.
Inscription is gold at the moment, and so far I haven't seen a sizable decrease in business despite the release of dual specs. There have been 58 new recipes introducd with the most recent patch and the shoulder enchants which allow you to skip having to get exalted with the Son's of Hodir are worth their weight in gold alone. So all in all, Iscription is good for making gold. The downside is what the future holds. While Jewelcrafting has epic gems to look forward to, I can't see them releasing yet more inscription glyphs before the next expansion. After the next expansion, I am still at a loss as to how the profession could be changed, its not ike they can continue to release more and more powerful glyphs, so who can tell where this is going.
Finally Enchanting. Enchanting is still one of the most annoying professions to make gold from. It is very possible, through disenchanting, to make gold, and there is the ability to place enchants on scrolls to sell on the auction house. But wow... it is a pain, each scroll must be individually made, and there is no way to look at the tooltip unless you have one in inventory. This prevents you from checking how many you have in inventory, and to see if they are currently profitable (sales prices seem to fluctuate wildly). The pluses are of course the ring enchants, and the ability to disenchant your soul bound gear, which is rather nice. Personally despite having a level 450 enchanter, I usually don't bother because of the very large investment in capital per scroll and pains of maintaining stock and getting my hands on enough gear to disenchant for enchanting mats. There is money here, there is also more work here, so take from this what you will.
I hope this give you a better idea on how the different profesions breakdown and perhaps gives you an idea as to what you may want to pursue. Personally if your not level 80 recommend the two gathering professions (herb and mining), which you should use to pay for your epic mount flying training, dual spec, etc, and then save enough gold to powerlevel 2 of the accessories professions. After that go kill the auction house and proceed to rob it blind. This is Miy saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies and for the horde. Read more!
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
AutoMagic, autoselling your junk.
So today I am going to discuss another section of the Auctioneer Suite, known as Automagic. The module is designed for selling items to vendors automatically, well sort of. Like anything in the game the developers want abilities to be triggered by keypresses, so you'll have to hit a confirm button. This is a very cool module, it save alot of time, and comes with some cool functions. We will start our discussion on how to turn Automagic on or off in Auctioneer's Config UI.
Breakdown:
1. Enabling/Disabling AutoMagic
2. Selling Junk (Greys)
3. Selling Junk to You (Whites)
4. Selling Items Bought from the AH (for Profit)
1. Enabling or Disabling AutoMagic:
This is pretty simple, we start by pressing the gold pile icon in the Auctioneer Slidebar (or push the config button when at the auction house). This will open up our Auctioneer Configuration menu, and by clicking on the AutoMagic option in the Util Modules we can turn it off or on and configure the different options available.
Once enabled AutoMagic will allow us to do a variety of things such as,
2. Selling Junk (Greys):
This is primarily what I use AutoMagic for. It works by opening up a confirm sell list once you click on a vendor. Click yes to sell, and whala, all you grey items have been sold. There are a few competing Mods on the market such as SellJunk which add a button to the Vendors UI to do something similar. However after having tried both I am firmly convinced on the usefulness of AutoMagic. AutoMagic is more flexible, is proactive vs passive, and sells everything in one go. SellJunk has a limit, and occasionally needs to be pushed multiple times to sell all the greys in your bag.
Add in the fact that Automagic is built into Auctioneer which if your an AH Trader your already using and you get a win win situation. AutoMagic also goes one step further. While SellJunk will sell everything grey named in your bag, AutoMagic has a feature that allows you to,
3. Sell Possible Junk (White level Items)
White named items in the game have some use or another, but most of them are now pretty pointless. There are a number of glyphs that eliminate the need for regents (which are white items). There are a variety of food items that drop from mobs, but we really want to carry around 1-2 full stacks of food, not a dozen stacks of one of each different food item. Add the things like stones, and rocks from mining, and there are quie a few items that can be used... but are probably better to sell and clear up that bag space.
AutoMagic meets this need by allowing us to add items to the Autosell list, so you do alot of mining, grinding, etc and get alot of the same white item which you always sell anyway? Well add it to the list and bother with it no more!
4. Auto AH Vendor Sales
Finally AutoMagic has one other funtion, there is the ability within Auctioneer to buy items on the auction house to sell to a vendor for a profit (the poster posted it for less then the Vendor will buy it for). But often if your buying a variety of items it is easy to forget which items were bought to be sold to the vendors. This is where AutoMagic come in again. AutoMagic will automatically remember the items you bought to be sold to the vendor and the next time you open a vendor window the confirmation box will pop up to sell those items! It is a big time saver, especially if your searching that auction house for vendor sales on a regular basis.
So get out there my loyal readers and start AutoMagicing away! Save your self an extra 2 minutes every time you visit a vendor!
Read more!
Breakdown:
1. Enabling/Disabling AutoMagic
2. Selling Junk (Greys)
3. Selling Junk to You (Whites)
4. Selling Items Bought from the AH (for Profit)
1. Enabling or Disabling AutoMagic:
This is pretty simple, we start by pressing the gold pile icon in the Auctioneer Slidebar (or push the config button when at the auction house). This will open up our Auctioneer Configuration menu, and by clicking on the AutoMagic option in the Util Modules we can turn it off or on and configure the different options available.
Once enabled AutoMagic will allow us to do a variety of things such as,
2. Selling Junk (Greys):
This is primarily what I use AutoMagic for. It works by opening up a confirm sell list once you click on a vendor. Click yes to sell, and whala, all you grey items have been sold. There are a few competing Mods on the market such as SellJunk which add a button to the Vendors UI to do something similar. However after having tried both I am firmly convinced on the usefulness of AutoMagic. AutoMagic is more flexible, is proactive vs passive, and sells everything in one go. SellJunk has a limit, and occasionally needs to be pushed multiple times to sell all the greys in your bag.
Add in the fact that Automagic is built into Auctioneer which if your an AH Trader your already using and you get a win win situation. AutoMagic also goes one step further. While SellJunk will sell everything grey named in your bag, AutoMagic has a feature that allows you to,
3. Sell Possible Junk (White level Items)
White named items in the game have some use or another, but most of them are now pretty pointless. There are a number of glyphs that eliminate the need for regents (which are white items). There are a variety of food items that drop from mobs, but we really want to carry around 1-2 full stacks of food, not a dozen stacks of one of each different food item. Add the things like stones, and rocks from mining, and there are quie a few items that can be used... but are probably better to sell and clear up that bag space.
AutoMagic meets this need by allowing us to add items to the Autosell list, so you do alot of mining, grinding, etc and get alot of the same white item which you always sell anyway? Well add it to the list and bother with it no more!
4. Auto AH Vendor Sales
Finally AutoMagic has one other funtion, there is the ability within Auctioneer to buy items on the auction house to sell to a vendor for a profit (the poster posted it for less then the Vendor will buy it for). But often if your buying a variety of items it is easy to forget which items were bought to be sold to the vendors. This is where AutoMagic come in again. AutoMagic will automatically remember the items you bought to be sold to the vendor and the next time you open a vendor window the confirmation box will pop up to sell those items! It is a big time saver, especially if your searching that auction house for vendor sales on a regular basis.
So get out there my loyal readers and start AutoMagicing away! Save your self an extra 2 minutes every time you visit a vendor!
Read more!
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Stocker I Choose You!
Stocker I choose you! Or I would if there was such a add-on. I think the biggest waste of my time each week in my glyph sales is in the restocking of sold glyphs. Each week I mill several dozen stacks of herbs, and then craft several hundred bottles of ink and finally create a queue in ATSW based of what needs to be restocked.
As I had mentioned in a previous blog post I was irritated by having to push mill four times for every stack of herbs I mill. I thought it would be awesome if in a future patch Blizzard changed WOW to allow one click milling of all of a single type of herb in your bag. I am always looking for ways to make my routine faster. Today I wanted to talk about an add-on, that actually doesn't exist, but maybe it should, because if it did, it would definetly make me faster.
I would call this add-on 'stocker'! Advanced Trade Skill Window is a wonderful add-on. It allows me to make my own categories (currently unprofitable, profitable, and highly profitable). It allows me to go down my skills and queue a list of items to be made. I wish it did one more thing.
You see once I have created this list it is just a matter of pressing the process queue button each time it is available to continue production of items I need to restock on my auctioh house alt. However the creation of this list each week takes time. This is where I see an opportunity to save time.
Bagnon my bag mod allows me to see how many of an item I have in stock. So When I create my production queue lists, I mouse over an item, see how many I have in stock, and queue items in lots of 5. If a add-on can tell me how many I have in stock, why not have another add-on intergrated to auto create a queue'd list to bring my stock up to a preset amount?
Here's the basic idea. Within ATSW for each item you could create, a slide bar is available and a check box. If you check the box, it becomes active for the auto queue process, then it is a matter of selecting a in stock amount with the slide bar. Say we want to always have 20 glyphs of blah in stock. We grab the slide bar and set it to 20. Once we have chosen which items we want to have auto queue'd, and the stock amounts, we push the auto queue, button. ATSW, or Stocker would then take our stock number, minus our in stock amount (which we know from our bag mod) and creates a list of production. A couple clicks of process queue and whala, we are ready to send our items to our auction house alt for restocking.
Anyway, at the moment such a add-on doesn't exist. I wish I had the skills to write one since it seems doable within the lua/scripting commands available within the wow interface. It I did create it I would have to say, time savings was a triumph, I am making a note here, huge success. Aperture Science FTW.
Read more!
As I had mentioned in a previous blog post I was irritated by having to push mill four times for every stack of herbs I mill. I thought it would be awesome if in a future patch Blizzard changed WOW to allow one click milling of all of a single type of herb in your bag. I am always looking for ways to make my routine faster. Today I wanted to talk about an add-on, that actually doesn't exist, but maybe it should, because if it did, it would definetly make me faster.
I would call this add-on 'stocker'! Advanced Trade Skill Window is a wonderful add-on. It allows me to make my own categories (currently unprofitable, profitable, and highly profitable). It allows me to go down my skills and queue a list of items to be made. I wish it did one more thing.
You see once I have created this list it is just a matter of pressing the process queue button each time it is available to continue production of items I need to restock on my auctioh house alt. However the creation of this list each week takes time. This is where I see an opportunity to save time.
Bagnon my bag mod allows me to see how many of an item I have in stock. So When I create my production queue lists, I mouse over an item, see how many I have in stock, and queue items in lots of 5. If a add-on can tell me how many I have in stock, why not have another add-on intergrated to auto create a queue'd list to bring my stock up to a preset amount?
Here's the basic idea. Within ATSW for each item you could create, a slide bar is available and a check box. If you check the box, it becomes active for the auto queue process, then it is a matter of selecting a in stock amount with the slide bar. Say we want to always have 20 glyphs of blah in stock. We grab the slide bar and set it to 20. Once we have chosen which items we want to have auto queue'd, and the stock amounts, we push the auto queue, button. ATSW, or Stocker would then take our stock number, minus our in stock amount (which we know from our bag mod) and creates a list of production. A couple clicks of process queue and whala, we are ready to send our items to our auction house alt for restocking.
Anyway, at the moment such a add-on doesn't exist. I wish I had the skills to write one since it seems doable within the lua/scripting commands available within the wow interface. It I did create it I would have to say, time savings was a triumph, I am making a note here, huge success. Aperture Science FTW.
Read more!
Friday, May 15, 2009
AH Trader Segment #8
Notes for the latest AIE Podcast Segment, AH Trader #8:
Talking about the Auction House Alt, and how it can save you time and gold.
Title: AHtrader 8
Opening: Hey and welcome to AHtrader 8, your segment of Goblinish gassy goldy goodness. This is Miy, spelled M. I. Y. and today we will be talking about the AH alt, aka the auction house alt.
Current News:
AhTrader.blogspot.com is my new blog where I am now posting all my notes from these segments and other wow gold related advice.
You may have noticed my absence for the last few podcasts as I took a break to try and figure out what direction I wanted to go with my podcast segments and blog posts. After a few weeks of random writing and thorough brain storming, I have decided to focus on simple beginner tips in the podcasts segments and slightly more advanced tips for saving time on my blog posts. So again my new blog is AHTrader.blogspot.com, please visit and check it out.
Main Topic:
So today’s main topic is the auction house alt, it is a very simple time saving technique that was developed many, many, MMO’s ago. The auction house alt is simply a level 1 character stationed at a major city near an auction house and a mailbox. The purpose of the auction house alt is three fold.
First, the auction house alt saves you time. Your alt will keep your main character from having to run into a major city every time you want to sell something on the auction house. This time savings really adds up, and allows you to use your hearthstone for more important things.
Second having an auction house alt can make it a little easier to manage your gold and items. By having all your investment gold and Items for sale on one character, you may find it easier to track where your gold is going, and how much you are actually making each week from your different activities.
Finally an auction house alt saves you bag space. Personally I post close to 400 glyphs on the auction house a day, if I kept these on one of my main characters; I wouldn’t be able to loot anything. My auction house alt have 4 of the large Inscription bags which allow me to store them all in one convenient place to make batch posting items simple and quick. I also use my auction house alt’s bank as a place to store stuff I have no use for presently but might be able to use in the future.
Final advice:
Choose a race/class you won’t be tempted to play, the purpose of this character is to stay in the major cities near an auction house, if you’re not there it defeats the purpose. On another note, if you having issues with computer performance due to memory, it can be useful to have auctioneer and other similar add-ons activated on your auction house alt only.
Closing: That concludes this segment, the notes on this can be found at ahtrader.blogspot.com, as well as other gold and auction house tips. This is Miy saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies and for the horde.
Read more!
Talking about the Auction House Alt, and how it can save you time and gold.
Title: AHtrader 8
Opening: Hey and welcome to AHtrader 8, your segment of Goblinish gassy goldy goodness. This is Miy, spelled M. I. Y. and today we will be talking about the AH alt, aka the auction house alt.
Current News:
AhTrader.blogspot.com is my new blog where I am now posting all my notes from these segments and other wow gold related advice.
You may have noticed my absence for the last few podcasts as I took a break to try and figure out what direction I wanted to go with my podcast segments and blog posts. After a few weeks of random writing and thorough brain storming, I have decided to focus on simple beginner tips in the podcasts segments and slightly more advanced tips for saving time on my blog posts. So again my new blog is AHTrader.blogspot.com, please visit and check it out.
Main Topic:
So today’s main topic is the auction house alt, it is a very simple time saving technique that was developed many, many, MMO’s ago. The auction house alt is simply a level 1 character stationed at a major city near an auction house and a mailbox. The purpose of the auction house alt is three fold.
First, the auction house alt saves you time. Your alt will keep your main character from having to run into a major city every time you want to sell something on the auction house. This time savings really adds up, and allows you to use your hearthstone for more important things.
Second having an auction house alt can make it a little easier to manage your gold and items. By having all your investment gold and Items for sale on one character, you may find it easier to track where your gold is going, and how much you are actually making each week from your different activities.
Finally an auction house alt saves you bag space. Personally I post close to 400 glyphs on the auction house a day, if I kept these on one of my main characters; I wouldn’t be able to loot anything. My auction house alt have 4 of the large Inscription bags which allow me to store them all in one convenient place to make batch posting items simple and quick. I also use my auction house alt’s bank as a place to store stuff I have no use for presently but might be able to use in the future.
Final advice:
Choose a race/class you won’t be tempted to play, the purpose of this character is to stay in the major cities near an auction house, if you’re not there it defeats the purpose. On another note, if you having issues with computer performance due to memory, it can be useful to have auctioneer and other similar add-ons activated on your auction house alt only.
Closing: That concludes this segment, the notes on this can be found at ahtrader.blogspot.com, as well as other gold and auction house tips. This is Miy saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies and for the horde.
Read more!
Monday, May 11, 2009
Batch Posting, Time Saver, Gold Maker.
I wanted to go into detail about batch posting, but first I wanted to discuss slightly the path I have taken to finally understand and use batch posting effectively.
I think there are phases in the life of an auction house trader. The first phase is being a buyer. You don’t sell, buying things you need when you have enough gold from questing or dailies. At some point perhaps due to lack of gold, or frustration with grinding you decide to try earn your gold through the AH.
This starts phase two, which is when you start to actively participate within the auction house economy. Generally you would start with one or two items, trying to sell them. Perhaps they are crafted items or something you gathered, regardless you are a seller of a couple items, and eventually you track and understand these items well.
This phase is somewhat of a turning point. It allows you to realize the potential for gold by participating in the auction house, or you get frustrated and go back to phase one. Some people will never leave this phase, content to be worker bees and gather herbs and such. All economies need workers, after all the gold in our wow economy comes from people doing quests and grinding mobs. The auction house merely redistributes this gold. The auction house of itself is actually a gold destroying function of our virtual game. It creates no wealth, just wealthy players.
As time passes for those that find some success selling, they evolve to carry more and more items, and usually end up specializing in one area or a couple of limited ones. The main difference between this and the second phase is primarily quantity and activity. At this phase AH Traders are posting on a pretty much daily basis and sell 30-100 items a day. I would say that the average income for these people would be 100-500 gold a day for spending 30 minutes putting up auctions each day, and perhaps another hour or two for restocking goods once a week.
The problem that arises is how to breach the time barrier. This is the primary problem for making it to the final phase. As always in this blog I believe time is the most important thing. Sure you could make more gold off the auction house, but it would require more and more time spent in front of the auction house click on the post auction button in auctioneer, and more and more time researching those items you are carrying to make sure you are making a profit off them. More math, more time, and more spreadsheets. Time becomes the limiting factor in the amount you can make on the auction house.
There are dozens of ways to make gold off the auction house, but each way requires a certain amount of time. So then we ask ourselves how are people like Gevlon making 10,000 gold a week? Is he spending 10 hours a day staring at his auction house screen? The answer is no, it comes down to a revolutionary way of selling, a change in your mentality. It is called batch posting.
The problem with batch posting is that it posts all your auctions, If you posting 1000 items a day like Gevlon, it would take forever to check each item to make sure it was going to sell for an appropriate price before clicking on the batch post button. At that point what’s the point, I may as well just click post auctions when I check each auction anyway, I mean Auctioneer will queue the auctions anyway so why bother with batch posting?
The answer is really simple, Gevlon, and myself as well, we don’t check the auctions we are going to list. I post 400 auctions a day. I do a scan of the auction house than I push batch post. It takes less than two minutes of my time. I window out of WOW and read some blogs, and check back in 15-20 minutes later and turn off WOW. I repeat, I have no idea what my auctions are selling for. I don’t check, by this phase you should be intimately familiar with Auctioneer. If you have set up the configuration correctly it will sell your items for approximately for what you want it to. Here is the kicker, at this point you may even be losing gold on some of your auctions. There will be errors when you first start this method. Items that you forgot to click on a match function, or that auctioneer didn’t have correct data on and they sold for ridiculously low prices. Sometimes you will be losing because you did the math wrong. Some items will be posting for too much, other for too little, adjustments will be made, but this one little function is the key to wealth, more than anything else.
After the first few weeks you can do an assessment with auctioneers bean counter and find out whether an items is making you gold or not. Batch posting is not for the new AH Trader, ideally it for those people who have gotten to the point that they are selling literally hundreds of items every day, and have the gold to back up mistakes while they convert to this new way of thinking. Batch posting allows an AH Trader to breach the time problem. Batch posting has allowed me to enter into fourth phase. It has allowed me to make an average of 1000g a day, every day. This is the final phase, or at least this is as far as I have made it. Perhaps there is more beyond this, but I am still searching for that next level myself so obviously I can’t tell you about it.
Ultimately, Batch Posting will save you time, and when it comes down to it, that’s all that really matters.
Read more!
I think there are phases in the life of an auction house trader. The first phase is being a buyer. You don’t sell, buying things you need when you have enough gold from questing or dailies. At some point perhaps due to lack of gold, or frustration with grinding you decide to try earn your gold through the AH.
This starts phase two, which is when you start to actively participate within the auction house economy. Generally you would start with one or two items, trying to sell them. Perhaps they are crafted items or something you gathered, regardless you are a seller of a couple items, and eventually you track and understand these items well.
This phase is somewhat of a turning point. It allows you to realize the potential for gold by participating in the auction house, or you get frustrated and go back to phase one. Some people will never leave this phase, content to be worker bees and gather herbs and such. All economies need workers, after all the gold in our wow economy comes from people doing quests and grinding mobs. The auction house merely redistributes this gold. The auction house of itself is actually a gold destroying function of our virtual game. It creates no wealth, just wealthy players.
As time passes for those that find some success selling, they evolve to carry more and more items, and usually end up specializing in one area or a couple of limited ones. The main difference between this and the second phase is primarily quantity and activity. At this phase AH Traders are posting on a pretty much daily basis and sell 30-100 items a day. I would say that the average income for these people would be 100-500 gold a day for spending 30 minutes putting up auctions each day, and perhaps another hour or two for restocking goods once a week.
The problem that arises is how to breach the time barrier. This is the primary problem for making it to the final phase. As always in this blog I believe time is the most important thing. Sure you could make more gold off the auction house, but it would require more and more time spent in front of the auction house click on the post auction button in auctioneer, and more and more time researching those items you are carrying to make sure you are making a profit off them. More math, more time, and more spreadsheets. Time becomes the limiting factor in the amount you can make on the auction house.
There are dozens of ways to make gold off the auction house, but each way requires a certain amount of time. So then we ask ourselves how are people like Gevlon making 10,000 gold a week? Is he spending 10 hours a day staring at his auction house screen? The answer is no, it comes down to a revolutionary way of selling, a change in your mentality. It is called batch posting.
The problem with batch posting is that it posts all your auctions, If you posting 1000 items a day like Gevlon, it would take forever to check each item to make sure it was going to sell for an appropriate price before clicking on the batch post button. At that point what’s the point, I may as well just click post auctions when I check each auction anyway, I mean Auctioneer will queue the auctions anyway so why bother with batch posting?
The answer is really simple, Gevlon, and myself as well, we don’t check the auctions we are going to list. I post 400 auctions a day. I do a scan of the auction house than I push batch post. It takes less than two minutes of my time. I window out of WOW and read some blogs, and check back in 15-20 minutes later and turn off WOW. I repeat, I have no idea what my auctions are selling for. I don’t check, by this phase you should be intimately familiar with Auctioneer. If you have set up the configuration correctly it will sell your items for approximately for what you want it to. Here is the kicker, at this point you may even be losing gold on some of your auctions. There will be errors when you first start this method. Items that you forgot to click on a match function, or that auctioneer didn’t have correct data on and they sold for ridiculously low prices. Sometimes you will be losing because you did the math wrong. Some items will be posting for too much, other for too little, adjustments will be made, but this one little function is the key to wealth, more than anything else.
After the first few weeks you can do an assessment with auctioneers bean counter and find out whether an items is making you gold or not. Batch posting is not for the new AH Trader, ideally it for those people who have gotten to the point that they are selling literally hundreds of items every day, and have the gold to back up mistakes while they convert to this new way of thinking. Batch posting allows an AH Trader to breach the time problem. Batch posting has allowed me to enter into fourth phase. It has allowed me to make an average of 1000g a day, every day. This is the final phase, or at least this is as far as I have made it. Perhaps there is more beyond this, but I am still searching for that next level myself so obviously I can’t tell you about it.
Ultimately, Batch Posting will save you time, and when it comes down to it, that’s all that really matters.
Read more!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The Evolution of the most Profitable Tradeskill
I think about WOW economics alot, and how the market affects the game. Today I wanted to hash out some of my thoughts about the past and the future of WOW professions. This is primarily related to what professions offer the most potential for profit.
Through the last 3 eras of the game, Vanilla, BC, and Wrath, each has had a dominant profession. By dominant I refer to profit potential. In the original vanilla WOW, I believe the most profitable profession was enchanting. In BC, it was Jewelcrafting and now in Wrath it is Inscription. Each profession is still very profitable, but with each new expansion a new king has come forth.
There are many factors that affect professions and their profit potential. These are the ones that come off the top of my head.
1. Application
2. Cost
3. Turnover
Application is how many uses does a profession have. Enchanting, JC, and Inscription have the most uses out of all other professions. To be a little more clear, lets take a look at the current king Inscription. Many of the low level glyphs are in demand for level 80s and level 15 characters as well.
This is not true with most other professions. Enchanting has minimal use for low level characters with the exception of twinks, and low level spells are useless to high level characters.Your not going to put +1 spirit on your level 80 shaman are you? No I didn't thinks so. Now take Jewelcrafting, you won't even see a gem slot till level 60 gear, and sadly enough the amount of gear with gem slots after level 70 has sharply declined. (evidence of this can be found by comparing the blue gear dropped in instances in Outland vs Northrend).
So how many applications a profession has, or how many items that can be produced for profit greatly affect the potential profit of a profession. Despite Enchanting and Jewelcrafting not having as many uses as Inscription, they still far outstrip everyother profession in application.
Cost is a factor in the ability to make items and sell them. I guess what I am saying is the percentage of the sales price. 'Glyph A' costs me 2 gold to make, and I sell it for 10 gold, my cost is 20%. Another reason that Inscription is King at the moment is that cost is almost non existant. Glyphs are subsidised by Snowfall Ink sales, make them for silver and sell tham for gold. Jewelcrafting would be next in this list with a very low cost of production, at least for common level gems. Enchanting however is actually rather pricy.
Finally Turnover, or how often are these items are being replaced. Repeat sales are the bread and butter of all normal businesses. If you cant sell it a second time, it makes it hard to make an effective living. One of the problem with Gear Professions, is that once someone has bought your epic crafted helm, they are never going to buy it again. Generally speaking, no one needs two helmets. But should they get a new drop, they will need new gems, and a new enchant, regardless of that fact that their old gear already had these. This is turnover.
So those are some of the factors that affect profession profit potential. It is interesting to note with each new expansion that the new profession instantly becomes the new most profitable profession. Makes me want to keep an alt ready for the next expansion so I can get a jump on whatever new profession is announced at Blizzcon. Anyone want to bet it will be based of leather or cloth?
One of these day's I return to this post and rewrite it with the correct economic terms, but I am lazy today.
Miy Read more!
Through the last 3 eras of the game, Vanilla, BC, and Wrath, each has had a dominant profession. By dominant I refer to profit potential. In the original vanilla WOW, I believe the most profitable profession was enchanting. In BC, it was Jewelcrafting and now in Wrath it is Inscription. Each profession is still very profitable, but with each new expansion a new king has come forth.
There are many factors that affect professions and their profit potential. These are the ones that come off the top of my head.
1. Application
2. Cost
3. Turnover
Application is how many uses does a profession have. Enchanting, JC, and Inscription have the most uses out of all other professions. To be a little more clear, lets take a look at the current king Inscription. Many of the low level glyphs are in demand for level 80s and level 15 characters as well.
This is not true with most other professions. Enchanting has minimal use for low level characters with the exception of twinks, and low level spells are useless to high level characters.Your not going to put +1 spirit on your level 80 shaman are you? No I didn't thinks so. Now take Jewelcrafting, you won't even see a gem slot till level 60 gear, and sadly enough the amount of gear with gem slots after level 70 has sharply declined. (evidence of this can be found by comparing the blue gear dropped in instances in Outland vs Northrend).
So how many applications a profession has, or how many items that can be produced for profit greatly affect the potential profit of a profession. Despite Enchanting and Jewelcrafting not having as many uses as Inscription, they still far outstrip everyother profession in application.
Cost is a factor in the ability to make items and sell them. I guess what I am saying is the percentage of the sales price. 'Glyph A' costs me 2 gold to make, and I sell it for 10 gold, my cost is 20%. Another reason that Inscription is King at the moment is that cost is almost non existant. Glyphs are subsidised by Snowfall Ink sales, make them for silver and sell tham for gold. Jewelcrafting would be next in this list with a very low cost of production, at least for common level gems. Enchanting however is actually rather pricy.
Finally Turnover, or how often are these items are being replaced. Repeat sales are the bread and butter of all normal businesses. If you cant sell it a second time, it makes it hard to make an effective living. One of the problem with Gear Professions, is that once someone has bought your epic crafted helm, they are never going to buy it again. Generally speaking, no one needs two helmets. But should they get a new drop, they will need new gems, and a new enchant, regardless of that fact that their old gear already had these. This is turnover.
So those are some of the factors that affect profession profit potential. It is interesting to note with each new expansion that the new profession instantly becomes the new most profitable profession. Makes me want to keep an alt ready for the next expansion so I can get a jump on whatever new profession is announced at Blizzcon. Anyone want to bet it will be based of leather or cloth?
One of these day's I return to this post and rewrite it with the correct economic terms, but I am lazy today.
Miy Read more!
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Dailies actually worth doing.
This post is going to be on somewhat of a tangent, it involves making gold and saving time doing it, but not with the Auction House or mods. Recently with the release of Patch 3.1 the Argent Tournament was released. Now I know most of you have taken a peak at it but perhaps some of you haven't realised the quick gold from dailies that are available there? (Updated with info from Nick!)
Once you have done enough dailies to reach the Champion status with your home city, and you have done the Black Knight questline you'll be able to do 6 AT dailies that combined reward 1000 argent crusade rep, plus 1500 rep with Sunreavers/Silver Covenant, 500 rep with your valiant faction, and 128 gold per day (or 88g + an additional 1000 rep with a home faction).
I have been able to do these 6 quests in about 15-20 mins so while not a huge amount of gold for your time, added to the reputation gains I think it is more then worth doing. So let's talk about how to do these quests faster to save ourselves some time.
Ok so once you have reached Champion status, you will have access to four quests. They are:
1. Among the Champions (4 jousting)
2. Threat From Above (kill chillmaw)
3. Battle Before The Citadel (fight at citadel)
4. Taking Battle To The Enemy (kill 15 scourge)
And these two specific Valiant's quests from the faction of your choice:
5. A Valient's Field Training
6. At The Enemy's Gate
You will need to accept becoming a Valiant for another faction, this can be done while you are a Champion. For the two Valiant quests you don't actually need to do anything, simply by doing the Champion quests you will complete the Valiant versions as well. (there are also two other valiant quests, but they require you to actually do things besides what the champions quests require.
So for optimal speed in completing these dailies we start immediately after accepting them by throwing a 'lfg for chillmaw' into general chat, then go and start working on doing the Among the Champions. For those of you having trouble with this quest, here is how you do it really easily. Start the match with three sheilds up, accept the dialogue to fight, and immediately throw a shield breaker and then close in with your opponent.
This allows you to start the battle with more defense then your opponent. Next your going to sit there spamming ability one, the sword one. When your opponent turns away to get distance immediately start spamming your charge ability. Once you charge turn and use sheild breaker and get back to your opponent to use ability one again. Rinse and repeat till defeated. Thats it. Make sure you refresh your shield as needed, and at least once a minute or it will dissipate. Once your done with each battle refill your mount to full health and start the next battle.
At some point through this you should have gotten an invite to a group to kill chillmaw, (you were throwing 'lfg for chillmaw' into channel 1 right?). As soon as you get invited to a group that has the required three people leave the Argent Tournament and head to Chillmaw, he spawns southwest of the tournament. Don't worry about completing Among the Champions, the group quest is more important. Should you be there before everyone in the group is there, a little to the southwest are some scourge that can count towards the Taking the Battle to the Enemy quest, use your time to its fullest.
Once your group is there, kill chillmaw, then head south to the Citadel, ask your group if anyone else is going to the citadel too. With luck at least one out of the other two people in your group is going as well, and two people make the Battle at the Citadel very easy and quick. The key to this quest is killing the Boneguard Commander, he's the only one in the kill count thats even remotely difficult. If you have a party member you each take turns charging him, he goes down real quick with 2 on 1.
Finally head back north and finish your 15 scourge kills, I usually go to sindragosa's fall and kill whelps as they go down real quick. Then finish up the Among the Champions quest. That it! Each quest turn in give the option of a writ for 250 rep or a purse with 10 gold. Six quests which reward 13.5 gold plus four 10 gold purses and after you sell the couple of gray loot items, your looking at 128g for 6 dailies and a couple thousand reputation. While I honestly hate dailies, I think these are actually worth doing, plus that undead white horse mount is awesome. Read more!
Once you have done enough dailies to reach the Champion status with your home city, and you have done the Black Knight questline you'll be able to do 6 AT dailies that combined reward 1000 argent crusade rep, plus 1500 rep with Sunreavers/Silver Covenant, 500 rep with your valiant faction, and 128 gold per day (or 88g + an additional 1000 rep with a home faction).
I have been able to do these 6 quests in about 15-20 mins so while not a huge amount of gold for your time, added to the reputation gains I think it is more then worth doing. So let's talk about how to do these quests faster to save ourselves some time.
Ok so once you have reached Champion status, you will have access to four quests. They are:
1. Among the Champions (4 jousting)
2. Threat From Above (kill chillmaw)
3. Battle Before The Citadel (fight at citadel)
4. Taking Battle To The Enemy (kill 15 scourge)
And these two specific Valiant's quests from the faction of your choice:
5. A Valient's Field Training
6. At The Enemy's Gate
You will need to accept becoming a Valiant for another faction, this can be done while you are a Champion. For the two Valiant quests you don't actually need to do anything, simply by doing the Champion quests you will complete the Valiant versions as well. (there are also two other valiant quests, but they require you to actually do things besides what the champions quests require.
So for optimal speed in completing these dailies we start immediately after accepting them by throwing a 'lfg for chillmaw' into general chat, then go and start working on doing the Among the Champions. For those of you having trouble with this quest, here is how you do it really easily. Start the match with three sheilds up, accept the dialogue to fight, and immediately throw a shield breaker and then close in with your opponent.
This allows you to start the battle with more defense then your opponent. Next your going to sit there spamming ability one, the sword one. When your opponent turns away to get distance immediately start spamming your charge ability. Once you charge turn and use sheild breaker and get back to your opponent to use ability one again. Rinse and repeat till defeated. Thats it. Make sure you refresh your shield as needed, and at least once a minute or it will dissipate. Once your done with each battle refill your mount to full health and start the next battle.
At some point through this you should have gotten an invite to a group to kill chillmaw, (you were throwing 'lfg for chillmaw' into channel 1 right?). As soon as you get invited to a group that has the required three people leave the Argent Tournament and head to Chillmaw, he spawns southwest of the tournament. Don't worry about completing Among the Champions, the group quest is more important. Should you be there before everyone in the group is there, a little to the southwest are some scourge that can count towards the Taking the Battle to the Enemy quest, use your time to its fullest.
Once your group is there, kill chillmaw, then head south to the Citadel, ask your group if anyone else is going to the citadel too. With luck at least one out of the other two people in your group is going as well, and two people make the Battle at the Citadel very easy and quick. The key to this quest is killing the Boneguard Commander, he's the only one in the kill count thats even remotely difficult. If you have a party member you each take turns charging him, he goes down real quick with 2 on 1.
Finally head back north and finish your 15 scourge kills, I usually go to sindragosa's fall and kill whelps as they go down real quick. Then finish up the Among the Champions quest. That it! Each quest turn in give the option of a writ for 250 rep or a purse with 10 gold. Six quests which reward 13.5 gold plus four 10 gold purses and after you sell the couple of gray loot items, your looking at 128g for 6 dailies and a couple thousand reputation. While I honestly hate dailies, I think these are actually worth doing, plus that undead white horse mount is awesome. Read more!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Grindy... Go Go Away
I have taken the glpyh market by storm over the last few weeks and made a bundle. There however is one thing that irks me. Milling. While I am also at it lets discuss Prospecting and Disenchanting. These are the skills within tradeskills that make these professions really grindy.
By grindy I mean, repetitive and boring. Which actually gives me some hope. Blizzard has made many attempts to change WOW to be less grindy and more interesting. If we look just to the recent past we can note the changes to mining nodes and even the amount of herbs that drop from a single node. The fact that all Wrath drop rates are progessive is also a good indication. Perhaps this is our light in the distance.
Lets be honest if you have taken up Jewelcrafting, Inscription or even Enchanting to some extent, you understand my pain. Well, those of you being active suppliers in the WOW economy do. I really dislike the sitting in Dalaran clicking Mill over and over again, and I already use Auctioneer to speed up the process by having it auto asking me to Mill/DE/Prospect. (If your not doing this yourself it is a component of Enchantrix, part of the Auctioneer suite and can be enabled throught the Enchantrix Configuration UI).
Generally, my daily AH business is very fast. I log in do a scan of the AH, tab out and read the current blogs for two mintues. Step two, I tab back in click 'Batch Post' Then leave for the 10 mins or it takes to post the 300+ auctions I have. I Tab back in one last time to run snatch and see if there is anything I want to buy. All in all it takes about 15 minutes and I do it once a day listing for 24 hours (although i am considering a change to 48, and having my auctions overlap each other). It is fast, which is my goal and I make anywhere from 600-1200g a day that I get off my lazy butt to list items.
This part I have no problems with, it is the once a week milling for dye and restocking that is so tedious. When you have 120+ stacks of herbs, milling takes forever..... Which is the whole point of today's blog post. As you know I am all about saving time and lets be honest sitting there clicking 'Mill' over and over again sucks. With Blizzards recent changes to make WOW less grindy, I think that brought to their attention they would be willing to change Prospecting and Milling into a skill within the standard Tradeskill UI. Once there it would be a simple click to 'Mill all' of a specific herb, a couple of tab outs and whala! complete.
As for Disenchanting, i think it would need to remain seperate, we wouldn't want to automatically DE our tier 8 by accident right? Anyway at this point your wondering why I brought this up, well I recently went into the WOW Suggestion Forums and added my two cents to someone else's post requesting the same thing.
Here is the Link: Add your opinion!
Go my loyal readers.. I know there is at least one of you. Thanks Marcko, you're my very first commmentor! And bug Blizzard to make this change! Read more!
By grindy I mean, repetitive and boring. Which actually gives me some hope. Blizzard has made many attempts to change WOW to be less grindy and more interesting. If we look just to the recent past we can note the changes to mining nodes and even the amount of herbs that drop from a single node. The fact that all Wrath drop rates are progessive is also a good indication. Perhaps this is our light in the distance.
Lets be honest if you have taken up Jewelcrafting, Inscription or even Enchanting to some extent, you understand my pain. Well, those of you being active suppliers in the WOW economy do. I really dislike the sitting in Dalaran clicking Mill over and over again, and I already use Auctioneer to speed up the process by having it auto asking me to Mill/DE/Prospect. (If your not doing this yourself it is a component of Enchantrix, part of the Auctioneer suite and can be enabled throught the Enchantrix Configuration UI).
Generally, my daily AH business is very fast. I log in do a scan of the AH, tab out and read the current blogs for two mintues. Step two, I tab back in click 'Batch Post' Then leave for the 10 mins or it takes to post the 300+ auctions I have. I Tab back in one last time to run snatch and see if there is anything I want to buy. All in all it takes about 15 minutes and I do it once a day listing for 24 hours (although i am considering a change to 48, and having my auctions overlap each other). It is fast, which is my goal and I make anywhere from 600-1200g a day that I get off my lazy butt to list items.
This part I have no problems with, it is the once a week milling for dye and restocking that is so tedious. When you have 120+ stacks of herbs, milling takes forever..... Which is the whole point of today's blog post. As you know I am all about saving time and lets be honest sitting there clicking 'Mill' over and over again sucks. With Blizzards recent changes to make WOW less grindy, I think that brought to their attention they would be willing to change Prospecting and Milling into a skill within the standard Tradeskill UI. Once there it would be a simple click to 'Mill all' of a specific herb, a couple of tab outs and whala! complete.
As for Disenchanting, i think it would need to remain seperate, we wouldn't want to automatically DE our tier 8 by accident right? Anyway at this point your wondering why I brought this up, well I recently went into the WOW Suggestion Forums and added my two cents to someone else's post requesting the same thing.
Here is the Link: Add your opinion!
Go my loyal readers.. I know there is at least one of you. Thanks Marcko, you're my very first commmentor! And bug Blizzard to make this change! Read more!
Monday, April 20, 2009
A New Direction?
So I started this blog at first to be a place where my podcast notes could be posted for those who wanted to review them. As time past I decided to add a little to that and eventually I came to a point at which I questioned where I was going with all of this. Was this for my podcast notes? Was it going to become a real blog? Before I went off into a hundred diferent direction I took a little break, started a variety of articles that i never published, read blog after blog on wow auction house gold advice and generally sat around wondering what to do.
I decided that another blog on wow gold advice seemed kinda pointless, there are a wealth of them out there, and most information is covered multiple times. I knew I wanted to be different. I knew I wanted to have a simple easy to understand blog, that helped wow players to save some time and earn more gold with less time spent.
With those thoughts in mind I decided I wanted to keep it simple and focus on one subject. Simply put, all articles will be focused on 'saving time'. There will be no deviation on this, every single article will focus on this subject. It wont happen instantly as I will need time to either rewrite or delete and redo the blogs already posted. To start off I will be focusing on addons for a bit, primarily a series of articles on the finer points of auctioneer (the last two articles were me feeling out this idea).
The secondary goal for each article will be simplicity and ease of understanding. I am a firm believer in K.I.S.S. and to this end, I will attempt to follow this principle while writing. Eventually I will return to doing my podcast segments, once I have established a decent amount of material on this site. The last thing is that I may depending on the amount of content I am putting out seek to find another blog to share space with, or to host what I write as a contributor.
Finally I hope to develope a simple format that each of my articles will follow, any input from readers would be helpful on this. Thanks for reading and as always your comments and critism are welcome. Read more!
I decided that another blog on wow gold advice seemed kinda pointless, there are a wealth of them out there, and most information is covered multiple times. I knew I wanted to be different. I knew I wanted to have a simple easy to understand blog, that helped wow players to save some time and earn more gold with less time spent.
With those thoughts in mind I decided I wanted to keep it simple and focus on one subject. Simply put, all articles will be focused on 'saving time'. There will be no deviation on this, every single article will focus on this subject. It wont happen instantly as I will need time to either rewrite or delete and redo the blogs already posted. To start off I will be focusing on addons for a bit, primarily a series of articles on the finer points of auctioneer (the last two articles were me feeling out this idea).
The secondary goal for each article will be simplicity and ease of understanding. I am a firm believer in K.I.S.S. and to this end, I will attempt to follow this principle while writing. Eventually I will return to doing my podcast segments, once I have established a decent amount of material on this site. The last thing is that I may depending on the amount of content I am putting out seek to find another blog to share space with, or to host what I write as a contributor.
Finally I hope to develope a simple format that each of my articles will follow, any input from readers would be helpful on this. Thanks for reading and as always your comments and critism are welcome. Read more!
Monday, April 13, 2009
How to use ATSW
Advanced Trade Skill Window is a wonderful mod for saving time. It allows for two really useful features that can shave time off of your auction house crafting sessions. The first is the ability to que up entire lists of items to make, and the second is the ability to create custom sorting lists.
Advanced Trade Skill Window will dominate two aspects of your productions. The first is in what you want to produce. Obviously we want to make products that will sell for more gold then it will cost us to make them. By the same token we know that most of our recipes produce items with a negative net value. In other words the materials would have sold for more.
In every profession there are items that are profitable which players are looking to buy in steady quantities. However I'll cover how to find profitable items in a later article. Today I want to talk about what to do with these recipes once we have found them. This is where ATSW can save your time. ATSW allows you to create custom lists, so what we do is create list with only the items we want to consistently produce and sell.
So this Is what ATSW looks like. It doubles the width of the Trade UI, moving production and mats to the left and leaving the right solely for recipes. The major sections are the ones with red squares around them.
Section #1: Is the most important in my opinion, the check box will allow you to sort recipes by your own custom categories, and the edit box brings up a UI to set those categories (seen in the third screenshot)
Section #2: Is the Filter where you can type in a variety of options to limit what you can see. The following is taken from the Readme file and explains how to use filters:
ATSW has a powerful search function built-in. You can either just type some text into the search box and have ATSW filter the recipe list according to your entry, or you can use one of the following parameters:
:reagent [reagent name] - filters the list to only include items that need the specified reagent
:minlevel [level] - filters the list to only include recipes for items with at least the given level requirement
:maxlevel [level] - the same as minlevel, just the other way round
:minrarity [grey/white/green/blue/purple] - filters the list to only include recipes for items with at least the given rarity
:maxrarity [grey/white/green/blue/purple] - should be self-explanatory
:minpossible [count] - filters the list to only include items that can be produced at least [count] times with the material in your inventory
:maxpossible [count] - do I really need to explain this?
:minpossibletotal [count] - like minpossible, but considers material in your bank your alt's banks and buyable materials (actually it depends on what you have activated in the options window!)
:maxpossibletotal [count] - doh!
You can even combine multiple parameters and a text for a name search, like this: "leather :minlevel 20 :minrarity green" - this will show you only recipes with the word "leather" in their name, a minimum level requirement of 20 and a minimum rarity of "green".
Section #3: Cover the production, it is pretty elf explanatory, however the bottom right button called regents is awesome.
By pushing the Regents button after you have qued a large list of items you would like to make, ATSW will generate a list of regents needed to produce everything. To take it a step further ATSW even allows you to auto buy regents from sellers when you have the trade window open with them. This is extremely useful for things like inscription as it allows me to instantly buy stacks and stacks of parchment.
So we have learned how ATSW allows us to produce lots of items relatively simply, but the true strength of ATSW is in the building of custom categories. As you can see below I prefer two. Profitable, and Not Profitable. Section 6 will allow you to type in any category that you would like to create, and then it is just a matter of clicking on the plus to open a category and then click on the recipe to the right to sort it.
I prefer the setting up Profitable and Not Profitable categories because once set up it allows me to bring up a list of the items I produce on a regular basis without having to see the other 90% of recipes which I don't. I hope this helps you to see how using ATSW can be useful, and please stay tuned for a future post about how to find these profitable recipes.
As always, your comments, questions and criticism are always welcome.
Miy
Read more!
Advanced Trade Skill Window will dominate two aspects of your productions. The first is in what you want to produce. Obviously we want to make products that will sell for more gold then it will cost us to make them. By the same token we know that most of our recipes produce items with a negative net value. In other words the materials would have sold for more.
In every profession there are items that are profitable which players are looking to buy in steady quantities. However I'll cover how to find profitable items in a later article. Today I want to talk about what to do with these recipes once we have found them. This is where ATSW can save your time. ATSW allows you to create custom lists, so what we do is create list with only the items we want to consistently produce and sell.
So this Is what ATSW looks like. It doubles the width of the Trade UI, moving production and mats to the left and leaving the right solely for recipes. The major sections are the ones with red squares around them.
Section #1: Is the most important in my opinion, the check box will allow you to sort recipes by your own custom categories, and the edit box brings up a UI to set those categories (seen in the third screenshot)
Section #2: Is the Filter where you can type in a variety of options to limit what you can see. The following is taken from the Readme file and explains how to use filters:
ATSW has a powerful search function built-in. You can either just type some text into the search box and have ATSW filter the recipe list according to your entry, or you can use one of the following parameters:
:reagent [reagent name] - filters the list to only include items that need the specified reagent
:minlevel [level] - filters the list to only include recipes for items with at least the given level requirement
:maxlevel [level] - the same as minlevel, just the other way round
:minrarity [grey/white/green/blue/purple] - filters the list to only include recipes for items with at least the given rarity
:maxrarity [grey/white/green/blue/purple] - should be self-explanatory
:minpossible [count] - filters the list to only include items that can be produced at least [count] times with the material in your inventory
:maxpossible [count] - do I really need to explain this?
:minpossibletotal [count] - like minpossible, but considers material in your bank your alt's banks and buyable materials (actually it depends on what you have activated in the options window!)
:maxpossibletotal [count] - doh!
You can even combine multiple parameters and a text for a name search, like this: "leather :minlevel 20 :minrarity green" - this will show you only recipes with the word "leather" in their name, a minimum level requirement of 20 and a minimum rarity of "green".
Section #3: Cover the production, it is pretty elf explanatory, however the bottom right button called regents is awesome.
By pushing the Regents button after you have qued a large list of items you would like to make, ATSW will generate a list of regents needed to produce everything. To take it a step further ATSW even allows you to auto buy regents from sellers when you have the trade window open with them. This is extremely useful for things like inscription as it allows me to instantly buy stacks and stacks of parchment.
So we have learned how ATSW allows us to produce lots of items relatively simply, but the true strength of ATSW is in the building of custom categories. As you can see below I prefer two. Profitable, and Not Profitable. Section 6 will allow you to type in any category that you would like to create, and then it is just a matter of clicking on the plus to open a category and then click on the recipe to the right to sort it.
I prefer the setting up Profitable and Not Profitable categories because once set up it allows me to bring up a list of the items I produce on a regular basis without having to see the other 90% of recipes which I don't. I hope this helps you to see how using ATSW can be useful, and please stay tuned for a future post about how to find these profitable recipes.
As always, your comments, questions and criticism are always welcome.
Miy
Read more!
Saturday, April 11, 2009
How to Snatch!
This article will talk about using the Snatch function of Auctioneer. Snatch is one of the many functions of the mod auctioneer. Snatch allows you to instantly bring up a list of items that you are interested in and then basically click and buy them almost instantly.
The first step is to of course do your scan for the day. Without a recent scan, Snatch will not work properly and be pretty much useless. With the release of the latest version of Auctioneer Advanced you will note a double arrow scan button like the one circled in the image below.
This button will allow you to scan the entire auction house in about 20% of the old scan time. I am personally able to scan my entire AH in about 2 minutes. So step one is to do your scan for the day. Next we need to go over to the Search tab which is circled above. Within the search tab you will find a rather large list of different modules all listed on the upper left corner. For now under the Searches heading choose Snatch (section #1). One you have chosen it you should see something similar to the image below.
The next step is to build a list of items you want, this would usually be items you buy a lot of. Personally as I am playing around in the glyph market at the moment, I buy a lot of herbs. The list is built through section #2 below and will appear in section #3 when you have added it correctly. Items can be added to section #2 by shift clicking them, dragging them from your bag or even shift clicking items links in trade chat. Once a picture appears in the box of section #2, add the price you would be willing to pay and then push the add button to add it to your growing list in section #3.
Our final step before we make use of Snatch is to save this list. This is done by typing a list name in the bar in section #4 and clicking the save button. If you do it correctly the name for your snatch list will turn green. From now on whenever you want to search for this particular list of items, simply select it from the the down arrow in section #4 and your ready to go. The main purpose behind Section #4 is to have the ability to make and manage multiple lists of items your interested in buying.
Finally your ready to click on the search button which you will find on the lower left side of the Search AH UI.
Once you have done a search your screen should look something like the one below this. If you have set every thing up properly, you can hold done shift, ctrl, and alt and click on the Purchase button (the one circled below) and que Auctioneer to buy every item on the list!
Pretty simple huh! That is pretty much it, there are a few more options such as the ability to only see items that meet your prices range and can be bought out immediately. You can see these options by scrolling down on the options pane (Picture #2) which you can always reopen by clicking on the plus sign (the one circled in the picture above).
I hope this was informative and useful for you, if you have any questions please leave a comment!
Here are a few links on other similar articles that also discuss Snatch.
Tales of a Priest: Auctioneer
Read more!
The first step is to of course do your scan for the day. Without a recent scan, Snatch will not work properly and be pretty much useless. With the release of the latest version of Auctioneer Advanced you will note a double arrow scan button like the one circled in the image below.
This button will allow you to scan the entire auction house in about 20% of the old scan time. I am personally able to scan my entire AH in about 2 minutes. So step one is to do your scan for the day. Next we need to go over to the Search tab which is circled above. Within the search tab you will find a rather large list of different modules all listed on the upper left corner. For now under the Searches heading choose Snatch (section #1). One you have chosen it you should see something similar to the image below.
The next step is to build a list of items you want, this would usually be items you buy a lot of. Personally as I am playing around in the glyph market at the moment, I buy a lot of herbs. The list is built through section #2 below and will appear in section #3 when you have added it correctly. Items can be added to section #2 by shift clicking them, dragging them from your bag or even shift clicking items links in trade chat. Once a picture appears in the box of section #2, add the price you would be willing to pay and then push the add button to add it to your growing list in section #3.
Our final step before we make use of Snatch is to save this list. This is done by typing a list name in the bar in section #4 and clicking the save button. If you do it correctly the name for your snatch list will turn green. From now on whenever you want to search for this particular list of items, simply select it from the the down arrow in section #4 and your ready to go. The main purpose behind Section #4 is to have the ability to make and manage multiple lists of items your interested in buying.
Finally your ready to click on the search button which you will find on the lower left side of the Search AH UI.
Once you have done a search your screen should look something like the one below this. If you have set every thing up properly, you can hold done shift, ctrl, and alt and click on the Purchase button (the one circled below) and que Auctioneer to buy every item on the list!
Pretty simple huh! That is pretty much it, there are a few more options such as the ability to only see items that meet your prices range and can be bought out immediately. You can see these options by scrolling down on the options pane (Picture #2) which you can always reopen by clicking on the plus sign (the one circled in the picture above).
I hope this was informative and useful for you, if you have any questions please leave a comment!
Here are a few links on other similar articles that also discuss Snatch.
Tales of a Priest: Auctioneer
Read more!
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Rant on DPS
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!
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 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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