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.

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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?


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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.

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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!