Brain-webs

It's been a while since I did a post of collected random thoughts so I figure it's high time I cleaned out the cobwebbies again. Granted "a while" is quite relative since any time I'm on wow it's likely for the AH game so it takes up a lot of the "warcraft info storage" of my brain brain. In any case each part of today's post will still closely relate to making the wow gold as per usual.

Heartseeker Scopes.
Another random goodie I discovered. I believe I saw it noted on Anaalius' blog first, but not positive. It was about a week ago. Any ways, these things are actually selling rather well for a respectable 30g+ profit. They take 10 saronite bars and 2 twilight opals to craft one from an engineer. Hell I managed to max out my engineering just by making this and nothing else from the level I was able to start making them at. Cool huh?


Things I buy the most no matter what.
I always buy saronite ore and bars until I have an entire bank tab of the stuff. Once I have a tab filled up, the rest will be xmuted into titanium bars to be used on many other things. The same goes with eternal earth, there is no possible way for me to have enough of it. Because when push comes to shove I can do light grinding and craft rings to get DE'd if dust is super scarce. Also buckles tend to run out rather quickly so having a massive supply of the raw materials and crafted buckles on hand is very important. I recently picked up a massive stock of 400 eternal fires and stopped buying a good amount of time before the prices started creeping back up. I did this once before and was scavenging for them by the time prices dropped in my favor again. I won't make that mistake again.


Check page two.
I notice this the most with enchanting mats. When I search for abyss crystals a lot of times I'll see the first of two pages filled with singles at too high a price. But when I go to the next page I'll see a handful at super cheap in stacks. This is because of the "order by %" feature that auctioneer has. The lowest market priced items appear first and are then ordered based on stack sizes. So when looking for stuff to buy you'll often see a page of singles and on the pages of the AH towards the last few are where the good deals are all at. The most obvious example is with infinite dust. There's a dozen pages of singles at 2g a piece but once you get to the full stacks of 20 you'll see that they're only a gold each. So from now on when you're looking for good deals on stuff don't just look at the first page and let that tell you the prices. Look deeper my friends.


TRY POWER STATS!
Every time I go to make a scroll of enchant Powerful stats I ALWAYS giggle. I can't help but think of it in the POWER THIRST voice. I'm completely serious, I think that video is pure genius made of concentrated awesome. If you have no idea wtf I'm going on about, go to this youtube link and thank me later.


Why a blog?
Ya know something, I never thought of myself as a "blogger." I always found the idea a bit on the silly side to be perfectly honest. But with so much to keep track of there was no way I could keep it all in my head and with so many sections, sub sections, costs, markets, etc. etc. it became an exercise in futility to mentally organize it all. So I started this blog to basically write it all out in a manner that would force thoughts to be organized. I wound up spending too much time and hassle figuring out the changes in my thresholds, keeping track of my profits from week to week, what I had bought and so on. Argh!

Hurts my brains. Accounting is a very important part of the AH game since you need to know how much profit you're making and if you're making any at all. Since it's easy to THINK you're doing great even when you're making only a tiny razor thin profit each week. If all you base your profits on is the amount you get in the mail you're doin' it wrong! So find a way to keep your thoughts organized and go with it. Blogging just so happened to be my way, find your own.

Random notes on my writing style. I write as I speak for the most part and generally don't write posts that far in advance. I write my business reports through out the whole week after I posted the previous ones. Then once Monday comes around I read through it and edit it accordingly which helps to keep things as "real time" as I can while covering a week of time. For all other posts I simply write whatever happens to come to mind and strikes me as "hey this could be useful to somebody somewhere."

Doing that also helps me identify specific AH tactics that I normally just go with. Once you identify a particular strategy consciously you can then modify it for more detailed and specialized purposes. Blogging also keeps me in the habit of properly spelling, capitalizing, and punctuating all of my sentences. My grammar is still made of fail and lulz though.


I hate that guy!
Got another goblin on your server giving you grief? Want to mess up their markets too, but you're not sure what else they sell? Well with the auctioneer addOn you can order AH search results by "owner" and can use this to do just that. What you do is when you open the AH window select a section like trade goods, armor, consumable, glyphs, or gems and just search without typing anything in. That will bring up every last item on auction in that category. Arrange the results by owner and cycle through the pages until you see your competitor. That will let you know exactly what they sell that you don't know about. From that info you can easily deduce what secondary markets have an impact on their primary markets and you can proceed to buy up all the raw materials to jack up the prices. Remember that this won't result in any profit if you don't have a use for the materials you're buying. In fact this might wind up being a loss, but it will definitely piss them off something fierce, especially when they find out it's you.


Prime time grind time.
If you work in markets that need mass amounts of eternals (especially fire) keep an eye out on when your faction controls WG during prime time. WG is the most common place that people will relentlessly grind eternals and then once the next battle begins 3 hours later, they'll fight, lose, and return to the AH to flood it with their now cheap as hell eternals. I've watched prices drop from 50g to 15 in the span of a single WG win/loss cycle. While the battle goes on after your faction wins is when I'll do the bulk of my scanning on the AH for mat purchases while crafting inks, leathers, or DE fodder. This also provides you with some great opportunities for flipping the eternals once prices go back up. Always be observant of behaviors, trends, and timings it can save you a lot of gold and make you even more.

Auctioneer of choice.
I'm always at the far left auctioneer in Org, Stampi in TB, and Epitwee in undercity since they're right next to a mailbox and parchment vendors. I never go to silvermoon because as beautiful as it looks, is very impractical for business.


Boring professions.
I have to say even with the AH PvP that has ensued since my start up, alchemy is an incredibly boring market. Don't ask me why. I consider my pair of daily xmutes a serious grind as having the bag space to ensure I never have to mail out more or make an extra trip to the bank is rather annoying. If it weren't for the fact that gem xmutes are such great profit I wouldn't even bother, hell I haven't even done the JC token daily in months.


Inscription nay sayers.
First, it's S-C-R-I-B-E! It is not INSCRIPTIONIST! That is a made up word and anybody who says it deserves to be beaten with heavy mining equipment! Rawr. Ok now that that's out of my system once again. Every time I see somebody complain about scribes making no money and that glyphs are a terrible market it always makes me facepalm something fierce. You don't have to like the inscription racket, you don't have to like selling glyphs, hell you don't even have to like the people doing it. But for god's sake don't be a retard and say it makes zero money.

You'll always here some failbot bitching about how glyphs used to sell for X gold but now they're down to only X-50 gold. Well now that you're out of it guess what? There's now only 2 people selling them and are raking in ridiculous amounts of profit. It is the hardest market to fully get into with the largest upfront time and gold investment. That's the reason that you'll see so many complaints about it. The other reason is that as I've mentioned before your average scribe player sells their wares for 15g maybe. So if you see a dozen different glyphs at 4g each and only a few for more than 10g your average WoW M&S will be thinking zomgz this blows.

It does for you, but not for me. Before I got some serious competition in the glyph biz I could make several thousand gold per day. Now that there's a few campers it's only 1k, but the potential to literally print money and pull it in hand over fist cannot be denied by anybody with more than a double digit IQ and has spent more than 5 minutes looking into how the glyph game works. It annoys me to no end when people will blatantly deny the obvious solely because they themselves cannot do it.

Sorry, glyphs take effort to get into and you have to PLAY the game and be competitive. But to these fools, "competitive" = "I win just by playing." Sorry bro it don't work like that!

/rant


Bag space.
Dammit it's always a problem I swear! I would give almost anything for another bag spot or blizz to just hotfix in a change to the basic back pack. The biggest problem is with my scribe and enchanter. My scribe has to keep tons of parchment and inks on them at all times so crafting a ton of glyphs I lose a bunch of time mailing things off while I'm in the middle of crafting. Also painful when I have to run to the vendor for parchment. My enchanter only has a real problem because for some strange reason enchant scrolls won't go into an enchanting bag, go figure. They have all the necessary stock of materials in a single enchanting bag and the rest of my portable holes are filled up with pre-crafted scrolls which is quite a bit, I might post a screen shot of it at some point.

Point being, don't skimp on the price of bag space, don't waste time with plain old netherweave bags unless the banker using them is in a tiny market. Just go right for the frostweave bags, possibly imbued or portable holes if you need it that much. Granted I hate the idea of spending 3k on a single bag just as much as you do. However I also despise the aggravation of always being out of bag space more than the price of an extra hole to stuff assorted goodies in. Heh. Also don't waste money by instantly maxing out your bag slots in your personal bank. Chances are good that you won't be needing them, personally I rarely have much of note in my bank and just use it as an extension of my bankers personal space. My scribe has extra IotS sitting in there along with unmilled herbs. But anything I use regularly I keep a solid supply on me at all times to save me time going to the bank as much as possible.


Stop buying!
Sometimes I get a real twitch to make more gold. I don't know I just get "in the mood" to do some business. Unfortunately the only way to actively make some extra cash after you've finished your round of crafting and posting is to farm. Screw that. So the only thing left to do is buy more crap to use. Unfortunately I've been at a point where I'm VERY well stocked up on everything. If you read my business report this week you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about. This is an easy mentality to get into, especially if you don't move massive amounts of inventory across every feasible market. You can think of this like the classic logical fallacy "You should be glad I bought X because it was on sale!" Spending money does not mean you saved money, good price or not. Period! Buying things that you do not have an immediate or nearly immediate use for is a waste.

You may think this goes against my constant yammering on about the need to stokpile mass amounts of stuff but it doesn't. I recommend you stokpile things that you use daily and in notably large amounts. Things like golden pearls that you DO use for 30sp enchants you have no reason to buy 500 of them even at 20g a piece. Or for that matter any old world or tbc materials have no need to be taking up 20 bag spots. Sure somethings that are very uncommon to find at a decent price you'll always want to take full advantage of because in that case you never know when you'll have another supply come in or when you'll be running out. It could be sooner or later so sometimes it's best to play it safe and stock up in advance.

If you get this sort of feeling come up from time to time like me, take your AH game into /2. See if you can fish up some people that will buy in bulk or happen to be in need of an i245 piece of purpley goodness at the right price. Just remember: never feed the trolls!


Thanks for stopping by!