Monday, April 19, 2010

Report 4-20



It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting blizz to get servers back up. As usual, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Income per banker
Epic gems, rare orange gems, vendor pets: 46,500

Rare gems, meta gems, LW, misc: 34,000

Smithing and enchanting: 61,000

Glyphs: 9,000

Total weekly sales: 150,000
Total gold: 837,000
Weekly Profit: 73,000

Slowly but surely creeping upon gold cap number 4. I decided that when I hit it, I'll reward myself by buying a battered hilt so I can check out the quest chain (I hear it's quite epic). Granted the sword will rarely be used, or seen for that matter, I'd still like to see what it's all about. Besides I'll probably collect the 12k I spent on it from my mail boxes by the time I finish up the quest chain anyways, hehe. I'll be getting the nifty 1h sword for my DK of frosty goodness, might help me break the 7k dps mark (at 6.5 atm) which isn't bad for a mix of i232 and i219 gear. I'll likely be hitting it tomorrow or the day after so I'll give you all my take on the quest chain.



Detailed Recap
--------------
Surprisingly glyphs have STILL been pulling in 1k per day every day even with my prices capped at 7g per sale. Also, I've slightly altered how I work this market. When I log on to make glyphs, any ones that I've sold out on I'll craft a set of 10 of that glyph instead of my normal stack size of 5. But if you remember my inscription redux post, I'm still making a select few glyphs in stacks of 10 no matter what. So far I haven't sold out of any of those aside from DK minor glyphs, perhaps I'll up their stack size to 15 sometime soon. I'm doing all of that for a few reasons.

One is to ward off any potential competition that is flipping the glyphs that I craft. While I don't mind this too much (since I'm still getting a profit) I'm more interested in the long term and being the main supplier of glyphs at a higher price than my current 7g. If somebody starts to resell my glyphs and then sees that I undercut them with another TEN glyphs instead of 5, they'll tend to lose interest rather fast. Once they leave the market (even partially) I can raise my prices and get just as many sales from others as I got from the person doing the flipping but with a much better profit.

The other reason is that there will always be a new flavor of the month class and/or spec, and they all need glyphs. Whenever a new patch comes it's obvious what's going to be it, but it still happens fairly randomly because of different people hitting 80 with different classes and the sort. So if I happen to sell out of a certain glyph, chances are I'll still be selling a bunch more of them for another day or two.

Crafting an extra handful ensures that I'll be the one that's doing the selling. Luckily though, it seems that towards the end of the week the campers have eased off (maybe they weren't playing this weekend at all, who knows) but I hope that means that they're backing off of me for a while now. That means that prices soon will be allowed to inflate once again but still won't be the 40g price tag people were used to before I showed up.

Leather has still been great fun just like last week. I sold out of all my leather in various forms and wound up spending another 2k on more (heh, that sound familiar?). Sad to say though, the supply dried up towards the weekend so as of this writing I'm on my last leg of this market. Still a solid stock of bags, armor kits, and assorted goodies to last another few days.

Epic gem supply has gone waaay down over this week! That's actually a good thing because when supply goes down, prices tend to go up and is proven by the many 200g+ gems I've sold over the weekend while snatching up any I can find for 130g and under. When you notice a supply shorting out take that as your cue to start stockpiling on whatever it is in anticipation of a price spike. Naturally I'm referring to your normal run of the mill supply shortage and not caused by a patch or otherwise significant change.

Rare gems have been flooded with people posting at dumping prices again so I just said screw it and bought them all out starting at 11g and below. Sure enough within a few days most of them have sold for a profit, some small as 2g, others as great as 30g. Not bad for a few moments of effort eh? Hopefully that combined with my continuous buying of cheap raw gems the prices will return to the normal 20g range.

As for enchanting... bleh. Just bleh! Materials have been in even shorter supply than last week! I am sold out of many weapon enchants and a handful of popular armor enchants with prices of mats still sky high (30g for cosmics and 50 for abyss). Hell a bit ago I even ran out of materials from TBC so I was sold out of mongoose scrolls and shield stam scrolls as well. Made me happy since goose was sold for over 500g each time and the shield ones went for at least 80g.

But even with huge profits, I don't like having to STOP making them. So at the end of the week I finally caved in and upped my buying price for crystals and cosmics just so I can continue to keep a stake in the market. Because if I'm having inventory issues then so is the competition which might give me a shot at a temporary monopoly. Who knows, we'll see what happens.


Lastly on a completely unrelated note, I was recently (sorta) interviewed on warcraftecon.com under the name of my main (Stokpile is just my fancy banker) for hitting the gold cap. Shortly there after I got a tell from another lvl 80 paladin on my server telling me how much they were inspired by my interview, that they enjoyed it very much, and that I should be very proud of my accomplishment. Well, I am very proud of myself. Like anybody who sets a long term goal and succeeds, you have every right to be glad about it and are entitled a small amount of bragging rights.

Just pointing this out because I always try to emphasize that if you want to learn to make gold in this game you can. And most importantly, as always, have fun while you're doing it. If this AH game wasn't fun for me right now, I'd be closing up shop tomorrow. Suffice to say, I hope you enjoy yourself and learn a thing or two by reading my blog because that's what I'm here for. To enlighten and to entertain.


Thanks for stopping by!

7 comments:

  1. I have enjoyed your blog. My main is Ench/JC and I'm leveling a DK to powerlevel a couple professions. I had my eye on Inscription and Alchemy, with Inscription sounding like a big challenge to master. Any opinions on prof for my DK?

    ReplyDelete
  2. So I love reading your updates and they have continued to help me, but now I have a question that you or one of your readers can help me with.

    On my server I have three glyph bots that run all the time. They are almost never offline and they are constantly scanning and undercutting auctions. How do you handle this situation? I've tried petitioning them a couple times but nothing seems to come of it. I have no problems with fair competition but what they are doing just drives me mad any suggestions as to how to handle people running bots?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tye.

    Inscription isn't hard as much as it is time consuming. I entered the market around 2 months ago and it generates money hand over fist. Im not pulling in 9k gold per week on it but i also dont have much play time to baby the market.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @ Tyberiuss
    If you willing to try and tame a monster, then inscription is the way to go. But unless you have most of the discovered glyphs, don't bother just yet. Being a scribe has an enormous start up cost, both in gold and time. BS/LW take the least effort to make gold, but takes a while to make up the profession leveling cost.

    Since you already have the best money makers I would recommend a more 'light weight' profession to increase your income. If you don't mind a potentially steep leveling cost do bs/lw. If there's usually a large supply of cloth and eternals definitely get a tailor (as silly as it may seem on a deathknight).

    If nothing else, alchemy xmute master makes me decent money for zero effort and I always sell a bunch of titansteel (since the CD is gone).

    ReplyDelete
  5. @ Anon
    If they are truly botting, just report them to blizz. If they find that they are indeed bots they'll get the axe almost immediately. But if they're not, do what I do. Drop your max selling price low! For the last few weeks I have not listed a glyph for more than 7g. Seven. Gold. As you can see I'm still doing well with it.

    Just make sure that you're getting good prices on your flowers and crafting a bunch of each type of glyph (I recommend 5). The idea here is that they'll either back off the camping, post less, or leave the market entirely. There's nothing you can do but accept lower profits for a while. Eventually one of you will give up.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I love your blog Stokpile, I am actually going to feature it in a post within the next two weeks :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. @ Marko
    Well thanks much for reading, and of course I hope you enjoyed what you read and got a few nifty ideas from my wall O' text.

    ReplyDelete