From the ground up: Week 6

Happy Saturday to you all and here's the latest journal entry of the "From the ground up" project where I started a level 1 priest with not a single copper and intend to level them to 80 and amass a large amount of gold without the help of a single person. The only supplies they were given was a set of BoA gear and nothing else. They are starting out with only inscription, herbalism, and their wits with which they must turn a profit.

Here's the run down of my progress thus far.

Level: 80

Current Gold: 7,800 of 50,000

Total gold earned: 72,000
(according to my banker's statistics page)

Inscription skill: 450

Enchanting skill: 450

Required purchases to make: enchanting recipe +4 stats



It begins...
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I came into a huge tupply of inks with icethorn purchases and plain inks. When all was milled and crafted, I was over 1k IotS so that means it can start. Glyph stack size is now 5, max sale price is now 8g. I also have a few thousand in my pockets to continue to buy up cheap herbs/inks any time that I see them to force my competitors to deal with my price by either buying me out (which I expect) or leaving the market (which would make me giggle).

I expect that Mister Blue (MB) will be continuing on their standard MO of buying up everything I post at a cheap price. Now with around a thousand glyphs up for their general buying price I'm expecting that they'll buy up almost all of them giving me a shit load of profit immediately. If they don't I'll still be ruining theirs and still getting the same general profit. Either way it's a win/win situation for me. All the while I'll be keeping up with my scrolls, off hands, and armor vellum sales to keep me afloat. If they turn into another camper life will be purely suck-tastic for them and I'll have the inscription secondary markets along with enchanting to keep the gold coming in.

Even though I might not have the massive financial muscle on my priest that I do horde side, I will still make your AH game hell if you decide to camp a market I'm paying attention to.

Hmm I've identified two other major glyph sellers. Neither are as large as the Blue crew, but they still list a ton none the less. It's going to be interesting to see just who sends me some "fan mail" first teehee!

I'm not sure if this is a sign of higher server progression, but abyss crystals are retardedly cheap alliance side here! By cheap I mean I'm regularly buying them up for 15g a piece while horde side I'm lucky to get them for 25. That being the case I lowered my thresholds accordingly and am getting a ton of sales on NR weapon enchants. Selling mighty SP for over 100g profit and berserking for 200 profit. It's a good thing. Dust unfortunately has been in a very short supply on both sides. Making me very tempted to move my supplies over from hrode side, but that would defeat the purpose of this whole project. So no worries there.

I just dropped a few thousand on herbs that were retarded cheap. By cheap I mean a vendor wouldn't give you much less. I'm now stocked for inks (over 1600 IotS with a full roll of glyphs) as if I had the entire market to myself. So far, so good.

And I sold my first healing power scroll for over 250g profit! Aaand just 20 minutes later, my second one sold for the same price. Man, if I could get my hands on the spellpower recipe damn I'll be in business.

Hehe speaking of the spell power recipe... I just picked one up for an even 4k gold. Now the last required purchase I have to make is the +4 stats recipe. Really looking forward to that one as they sell extremely often horde side. Then there's the stokpile, but with material supplies being what it is, I don't think I'll even be able to regardless of my funding due to the lack of supply. Sadly I only have 1 golden pearl so I'm heading back to the naga cave in feralas to farm up one more to craft a scroll. I also raised my selling price on BoA enchants by another 50g just to see what happens. I know some people sell the rare weapon scrolls for up to 1k, but I don't know if I'll be that lucky with people's desperation. But if they start selling for 550g regularly then I'll keep increasing the price 20g at a time until I find people's spending limits.

I just finished my next mass glyph crafting session and along with 60 of every color ink I have over 1,200 IotS left over along with an ass ton of snowfalls left to move. Good thing that scrolls sell well over here. Also the dark moon faire begins next week so hopefully the demand for the inks will spike up as usual. With over 200 snowfalls in my bags that's potential to make back almost every bit I spent on the flowers and then some. If I can get at least 6g per snowfall I'll be about breaking even once all is said and done, but if I can get more than that like last month horde side, damn. I'll be in the money!

The pearl farming was an epic waste of 30 minutes. I didn't get a single golden pearl, just an aqua marine, a boe green and a black pearl. Definitely NOT worth the time at all. Bleh. At least by the time I got back and check the AH again there was a pair up for 50g/ea so I snagged them and made my first SP scroll with me being the only seller. Maybe I'll get lucky again and find greater stats soon. /crosses fingers

And my master plan is now coming to fruition mwahahaha! I noticed that MB was buying up all of my cheap glyphs and that there wasn't much other competition besides them. Oh sure there's a few others that list glyphs regularly, but as far as pure market share is concerned they're the man (or woman). A few times I was even able to trick them into buying up my 20g glyphs by posting them right as they were busy buying them up. They can be doing this either by automatic snatching of glyphs at X gold or below or manually. I believe that they're doing it all by hand as it takes them a good 20-30 minutes.

However if they're using an addon it must refresh after purchasing a glyph because there's been many times where I'll list a few glyphs at 20g (my max price previously) and they'd buy them along with the others of the same glyph at 3.5g each. Either way I picked the perfect max price for my glyph price cap of 8g. They're busy at work buying up damned near every single glyph I own. Add on top of that the fact that almost all of my snowfall inks have been sold to a card maker that means evry damned copper that comes in is like 99% profit. Hellooo 1k extra gold and back up to 1400 IotS.

Out played.

I think that they're doing one of two things. One is using an addon with a spending limit or they are doing all of their buying on a toon with a very specific amount of gold to buy glyphs to flip with. I think this because almost every time they go to buy my glyphs, a good amount of 3.5g glyphs of mine go unsold to them. Not sure of any other explanation for that one. Definitely not complaining though. I'm doing my normal crafting of glyphs while waiting for a raid to fill up knowing that half of my glyphs are going to sell regardless of price. And it's all cash in the bank.

I'm not sure what to do about my issues with bag space though. Since enchanted scrolls don't have their own profession bag and I carry glyph bags in the other spots there's no space for mass buying herbs. I have on average 8 open normal bag spots and the rest are either glyphs or scrolls. So when I go to buy a ton of one thing or another I have to open and send mail several times. It's also annoying because the open all function of postal won't open mail if you only have 1 bag spot open even if you are taking out glyphs into a scribe bag. Bleh.

Random thought though, MB might not have a set limit of total glyphs to buy OR gold to spend. They might be buying up cheap glyphs at X and under ONLY IF there's less than 5 up at a time. Ever since I started posting them at 5 a crack and making 10 each time I sell out they've stopped buying all of them. I'm going to pay close attention tomorrow afternoon when they do their daily buying spree. If that's the case I'm going to just list 4 at a time and keep the rest in the bank. If that isn't it I'll go back down to 3. If neither is the case then they definitely have something limiting the amount that they're buying be it gold or total items.

Fascinating!

However! If posting glyphs in sets of 10 keeps them from listing any more, well, that means that I've got my pseudo glyph monopoly going on again. At which point this project is already 50% finished, holy crap. Thanks to the massive purchases my MB I've gotten fully stocked up on enchanting mats. Something to the tune of 100 cosmics, crystals, and a ton of dust with still over 2k gold left over. I love it.

Heh I think I figured out why MB hasn't been buying 100% of my glyphs. They're using several different toons that don't have the same naming convention now. And they're buying them through out the entire day. Through all of yesterday I saw constantly a set of 50+ glyphs get sold to a different toon of varying class glyphs. I don't mind people buying my stuff and trying to flip it, I'm still getting a profit. The best part is, they're having to put in still extra effort into the glyph market that I'm not. Unless of course they're not crafting at all and ONLY flipping glyphs in which case they're literally a 24 hour camper. In that case I'll be having oodles of fun ensuring that they make zero mentionable profit. Taking over a market that's run by a fool is an easy thing to do. In fact, it's as easy as stealing candy from a moron because to camp the AH all day in order to make money you HAVE to be an idiot.

Even if I wind up running the glyph racket a heck of a lot sooner than expected, at least I'll get to still have my fun by making the local alliance basement dwelling camper nerd rage until their head explodes. Yup, I'm a dick like that sometimes. Ok maybe not sometimes, but often. It's still funny as hell.

Fresh enchants and glyph stock puts me down to 5k gold, enough for another epic flyer. Considering that I had about 3,500 yesterday I think I'm doing damned well. 1,500 in a day is nothing to thumb your nose at.

Woohoo! First scroll of 30s just sold for an awesome 550g, even sold another pair of healing power scrolls. Sadly that's only 522ish after the AH cut but still! It cost be barely 100g to make it (if that) so I'm officially on my way to making up the investment that I made on the recipe. So at an average of 400g profit, which is about average, I only need to sell 9 more before I've officially turned a profit after the cost of the recipe. Now I'm just under 7k and invested another 1k into more raw mats and at 6k by the end of the night.

I just cashed in all my excess badges and honor to make the transition over to full epic gems. My belt and legs don't have any just yet because I plan on replacing them relatively soon assuming that rng is in my favor. I also upgraded to max level enchants on all of my gear so no more blue spell threads. I made sure to wait for materials to be extra cheap so I put the threads together for a low price of 75g. Hell if I had a pocket tailor I'd start selling these regularly. I'm now over 2500 sp and still over 30k mana buffed, not bad considering I have zero talents that increase my SP like holy spec does. That's also why I'm shying away from spirit items as I'm never oo5sr so it gives me almost zero benefit as opposed to mp5 gear.

I have to admit though, it's hysterical seeing my competition undercutting each other by 5 copper from the 55g range on glyphs then I show up and list a set of glyphs at 8g each.

Friday night pre raid time and I've sold a ton of glyphs, some to MB but mostly to just random players. Good sign that I'm starting to take over my more than fair share of the market. All that plus a few twink enchants puts me just over the 7k marker. Very interested to see what my Friday night sales will bring me up to. Closing in on my goal pretty fast since less than 2 months ago this toon was level 1.

Random thought, I love watching PvP tournaments. The MLG Columbus is going on right now and damn is this exciting. I especially love the videos put out by woundman from the Tournament Realm lately. Hearing and watching top class players and getting to see first hand, and especially hear them, as they go through their strat on the fly is amazing. Even if you're not into pvp much you should check some of them out. You can find the stream (which is great quality actually) on gotfrag.com and I believe mmo-champion is hosting one as well.

Bleh due to my single banker and lack of bag space I just noticed that I'm missing a few enchanting scrolls. And I probably have been for some time now. That's a lot of potential profits lost >_< Especially so since two of them were berserking and sup spellpower to staff. Doh!

Closing the week at 7k, that makes 2,500 more than a couple days ago. Moving right along.


Thanks for stopping by!