Friday, June 4, 2010

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...
-------------
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!

15 comments:

  1. Awesome way to take it to MB. I love to see how the strategy works out from Horde to Alliance sides. Just a bit over two months and already got such a hold on the market is amazing. Im wondering if your competition is awake to your changes or are they the same as a poker player on tilt. No matter which way it is, they seemed to be going for a loss against you.

    Thanks for the heads up on the stream on PVP tourney. Sounds like a great watch.

    Ticallion

    ReplyDelete
  2. @ Ticallion
    Oh I'm sure they're a bit wise to it as they're posting and buying under several different names now. Where as since I was level 20 posting a bunch of glphs they always used the same one up until only recently. But they're still buying a ton of my glyphs and I'm still making more of them. Either way I'm making a good profit off them and the general sales so they're just getting me closer to my goal each day. It's only a matter of time before they either turn into a camper or stop bothering.

    ReplyDelete
  3. First of all, I love reading your posts and I hope you'll keep this going for a very long time. You've actually inspired me to start on the Glyph business so I recently got into the Glyph industry and I'm currently doing approximately 600g-1000g in sales per day, averaging about 250-600g in profit per day, all thanks to you. I list only about 250 glyphs per day but that will grow as I continue my daily researches and as Glyph of Mastery book become available on the AH. The problem I'm running into right now is not w/ Glyphs but Enchanting scroll campers. There are 2 and they log on around 8pm and are usually gone by 7am in the morning. Each time I post anything, I'm usually undercut within 5-15min. I'm willing to get really aggressive and drop the scroll prices down dramatically w/ minimal profit margins (effectively killing the market) and fight it out. However, with the rising cost of enchanting mats and the decrease in the availability of mats, I'm concerned how much staying power I'll have to fight this for the long haul. Since the quantity of mats will drive how long I can fight this out, how do you go about stokpiling your mats to fight it out for the long haul? I think they're Chinese campers given that they usually log between 8pm - 7am (which is 11am - 7pm China time), have lvl 1 characters w/ wierd names and they literally sit and camp the AH for the entire duration, effectively not allowing anybody to sell. Also by camping, they can snatch up all the cheap mats during their shift. How have you dealt with such campers in the past and any advice on stokpiling mats/ supplies?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Silly MB team. What are they thinking? You'll just go away and stop posting glyphs endlessly?

    BTW a tip: make the text area in your blog wider, it's hard to read.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @ Johndoh
    I wouldn't be surprised if everybody in the scroll business is having the problem with a supply shortage aside from the few spurts here and there. What that means is that they're running low too. Even with all the talk I do of stokpiling it's hard for even me to maintain one, so what you can do it take the prices down to material cost, or close, and buy them out if you have the gold to do so. Normally that won't work due to the mass amount of raw materials around, but it seems enchanting is the exception as the mats cannot be "farmed" in the traditional sense.

    I've delt with every type of camper in every market so far and the best thing I have found is to buy all the materials at a certain price no matter how many you have. If it takes up 4 bank tabs then so be it. Then let your deep undercutting do it's thing. The drive prices down and buy them out strat only really works when there's a very limited supply because you can me very certain that they're being effected by it as well, especially if it's been going on for a while and they're big into the business.


    @ Gevlon
    I sure hope that's what they're thinking, it makes me rich after all. Last night when I was crafting I made a few hundred glyphs as per usual, and as I'm writing this I've already sold twice as many to them along with all the snowfall inks I've gotten. The best part is I almost never have to mill herbs as there's two people that sell IotS regularly for about 2.2g each and a random UF with cheap ice thorn when I need a bunch. It's a goblin's paradise hehehe.

    As for the text area I'll look into it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Stok,
    Your gold making strats are awsome! Noob question...Do you just stock up IOTS and use those to trade in for other inks you need?

    ReplyDelete
  7. @ Anon
    When I was first getting into the glyph game that's what I did yes. I'd just have a pile of IotS and only exchange them for the other s as the need arose. But as I got deeper and deeper into it, I'd just stokpile a few hundred of every color in addition to another thousand plus IotS so that I can save myself the effort and lag of going to dalaran later on picking up different inks. Mostly because I was crafting such a huge amount of glyphs that I needed a constant amount of diverse inks and CBA constantly exchanging in the middle of a crafting session.

    ReplyDelete
  8. hey man this is the blue crew/// thanks for all the cool stuff you write///bring it on/// I make 5k a day...but now I will be happy with 200g a day for lets say...hmm...the next 90 days..sure I buy 10 of your glyphs for 80g..usually within the next hour I make 120g( or more)..have 7 extra glyphs to boot...be on the look out..each of my blues has 11 glyph bags..all glyph bags are kept full...there r 4 guild banks with 4 tabs full of iots..because of you I haven't had to make a glyph in a while but I can if I have to(LOL). My strat is to drive the price down...I am no longer upset with myself for buying 50kg worth of iots for 1 gold apiece..now the question is who will quit 1 st///// sure it wont be me

    Regards

    THE BLUE CREW

    ReplyDelete
  9. @ Blue
    Thanks for all the easy money. Your strat of driving the prices down seems to be working very well considering the average glyph price got up to 50g+ until I showed up. I highly doubt you're making 5k per day on glyphs with me listing 90% of them at 8g and below.

    Also if you wanted me to leave, well, you're definitely going about it a strange way. Regardless, thanks for proving that my methods work regardless of the situation. After all that is the whole point of this project.

    Glad you like the blog though, I always enjoy it when my competition reads. Makes things far more fun and adds a nice personal touch to it all for the other readers out there when they comment.

    ReplyDelete
  10. @ "blue crew"

    So your idea is to drive prices down and continue to buy his stock? By all means if you like stockpiling glyphs that you will never get to sale then by all means go for it.

    @stokpile

    What do you do while crafting all these glyphs? I'm currently in a war on my server right now, and starting to get where one of the glyph campers is consistently buying my glyphs out at 3.5g each since they can't undercut me. Due to that, I still need to craft a ton of inks and glyphs and between all the gold making blogs, I am still crafting.

    Anyway keep up the great work.

    ReplyDelete
  11. @ Leggo
    Over the last few days I've been watching the MLG 3v3 arena tournament actually. It's good stuff. But usually, I do it in between working on something of my own IRL since there's a lot of times where I have to wait 10 seconds here, or 20 seconds there for something to load.

    But since I have my stack sizes in large numbers I generally do some reading of one sort or another. Books, trade magazines (I'm a total dork when it comes to my work), or other blogs.

    I've also taken to crafting glyphs while I'm in a raid or doing my daily heroic hehe. When tanks take negative zero damage in a 5m and I'm healing there's not much else I can do short of auto follow. And raids -never- start on time so in between pulls, forming up, or during loot distribution you get a ton of time that you're otherwise sitting and staring.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hey Stokpile long time reader and newfound adopter of your stokpiling technique. Recently I have pretty much taken over the enchant scroll market by simply buying up all the mats. The only problem I have is keeping Cosmic Essence in stock. Do you have a method outside of buying off the AH to keep them in stock? I cant keep some of the scrolls in stock that require Cosmics because I usually cant keep more then 20 in stock. Atleast i know everyone else is having a tougher problem because they cant keep any dust or shards in stock below market value because I own them all :)

    Thanks
    Aso

    ReplyDelete
  13. @ Anon
    While you're doing your buying and posting on the AH you should make a macro or something to copy paste a post into trade chat like "wtb cosmics Xg pst or cod" then just post that every so often until you log off or move onto something else. What I've been doing when supply goes far down is I'll start browsing for cheap green weapons to DE for cosmics. Just make sure you don't spend 20g to buy a weapon that'll DE into 2 lessers.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Hey there. I appreciate any advice you can give me based on my current situation.

    I recently entered the Glyph business on my server, which is a medium population realm with more players playing horde side. My main is on the horde and has maxed inscription with almost every glyph learned. I also have a DK alt on the alliance who typically is used to buy herbs (because theyre about 30-40% cheaper on that side). The alliance DK also has inscription, but only knows all of the book and vendor taught glyphs along with a few days worth of researched ones.

    When I first entered the glyph market on the horde side, I would make around 500-700 gold profit per night listing glyphs on the horde side with 2 main competitors. Most of the profit was because I stay up late and would just post before sleeping to catch the late night/early morning sales. Recently, there seem to be at least 3, possibly 4 new competitors who are undercutting quite often (they aren't just one persons alts, as each of these new competitors has several alts themselves). They also seem to be occasionally undercutting rather late at night, putting a cramp on my niche of the glyph market. On both factions, glyph prices are typically between 2 gold and 50 gold depending on the day. Most floating between 8g and 15g.

    Somedays now I'll log in to find a mere 30 gold in profit and other days its still close to 500 gold profit. Regardless, it is much less than I was used to making in my first month or so. As a result, I've been considering using your method to drive some competitors out of the market. I have around 30k gold, 1k IotS and a couple guild bank tabs full of icethorn and adder's tongue at my disposal. Would your method be beneficial in my circumstance?

    I can't decide if it would be best to crash the market on both the horde side and the alliance, or to only crash it on one side to continue making a reasonable amount of gold. Crashing it on the alliance would be difficult because I don't know many of the researched recipes yet. However, the plus side to crashing the alliance side would be that my alliance characters are on a second account, meaning I can constantly undercut and craft while playing on my main horde side.

    Another concern for me is that most of the herb farmers on my server have been banned lately and herbs are occasionally very scarce. I would hate to burn through my ink and herbs only to find that I can't continue crafting due to the scarcity of raw materials currently.

    Sorry for the novel. Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer.


    - Snuggiz

    ReplyDelete
  15. I dunno if you've found this yet or not but you mentioned Postal not filling your bags completely when you have one open bag space... If you click on the down arrow at the top of your mail screen it will show you Postal's options. Go to Open All>Other Options>Keep Free Bag Space>0. That allows you to never keep any free bag space when using Open All. :)

    ReplyDelete