Sunday, December 26, 2010

About the AH pile: My story


This entry here is going to serve as an extended "About" page which I'll have linked over yonder. --->

The idea here is to give my background in warcraft and the auction house, mostly the AH. This should let you know just who I am, what I do, and what I've done.


WoW History.
I started playing just after patch 2.4 was released as a paladin who I had specced as protection from level 10 and on. I picked a pally because hey why not? The same thing goes for tanking, just felt like it. Nothing special. But I came to find out that I really enjoyed tanking and was quite good at it. After hitting the then level cap of 70 I started gearing up through regular dungeons, crafted gear and reputations.

My first raid experience was in Serpent Shrine Cavern as add tank for all the trash and bosses. Mind you my gear was barely acceptable for the entry level 10 man raid Karazan, let alone tier 5 content. But there I was. I did alright for my first time tanking anything serious, made a few mistakes but corrected them right away. Things went on like this for most of TBC with all my my income from daily quests and farming primal air in nagrand with engineering. Sure it was good money, but too much of my time was spent wanting to play rather than actually playing.

Enter wrath of the lich king.

Casually leveling to the new cap of 80 and making good money selling every little thing I picked off the ground from meat to cloth be it to a vendor or on the AH. This is where the gold making story really begins.


The AH baron begins.
I was curious about what this whole "inscription doo-boppy" was all about. So I made a post on Maintankadin asking how scribes can make money at all with such low prices and page after page of cheap glyphs. Obviously I had no idea what I was talking about or about to get into. I was then refered to the Greedy Goblin blog and read all about how Gevlon got gold capped with very little work using only inscription as a source of income. I read all of his posts and realized that I was doin' it wrong(tm).

So I decided to give it a shot and maxed the profession, stockpiled inks etc and started selling them. The cash started to flood my mailbox daily! I was truly amazed and the sheer profit I was making with such little time investment. I then started reading other gold blogs and explored other markets. My first was JC which was an immediate success. With the style of posting, timing, and undercut methods it was literally as easy as buying materials - cut gems - profit.

After about a month and a half of serious AH playing is when I decided to start up this blog and aim for the gold cap of 214k gold at the time. And of course at this time, people having max gold were almost entirely unheard of. In fact I'm sure most people weren't even aware that there WAS a cap.

I now had every profession minus alchemy maxed with oodles of rare recipes and high end patterns. I was pulling in around 50k a week at this point as I had entirely taken over the epic gem, enchanting, glyph, and BS markets. I decided to get into alchemy and selling flasks mostly for the purpose of curiosity and giving the readers a step by step guide of what to do when entering a new market that they have no experience with. It went alright, I made some profit but nothing staggering. Simply put I decided not to keep up with it due to the extra effort needed and tiny profit margins and stuck with xmute mastery.


From the ground up.
To hold my interest in the game when not up to my usual AH antics I started a side project. I started a level 1 alliance priest on my server where all of my empire was horde, and decided to see how much I could make from absolutely nothing with the only source of income being questing and the AH. The only support I gave myself from my mains was a set of heirloom gear and a wish for luck.

At the beginning things were, in a word, terrible. I couldn't afford skill training, shit I couldn't even afford water and that's not a joke at all! Thank god I had free self heals or I'd have been in real trouble. But being the observant person that I am, I know what sells so I took some clam meat that is used to level early cooking and sold 2 stacks on the AH that I got from questing. That's how my ass broke space goat made their start up capital. A while 20 gold coins. This stocked me up with water, maxed out my skills, and allowed me to buy parchment to level inscription.

I did my daily glyph research while leveling and just before outlands, I dropped herbalism and now had enchanting and inscription as my only professions. That means ONLY, as in no first aid or fishing even. I leveled enchanting slowly with cheap mats and went back and farmed a few rep recipes and started to sell agility and crusader enchants.

At level 40 I had dual spec, at 68 I had CWF and at 80 I had full epic gear that I purchased along with epic gems in every spot. 2 weeks after hitting 80 I had epic flying as well. After 2 whole months of this project I had 50k in hard cash along with a solid market share of enchanting and owned the glyph market.


A millionaire born.
Not long before TGU project was a success, I had reached the milestone of 1 million gold in cash. I spent this on the biggest gold sink I could find: a run through ICC 25. Since I had stopped bothering to guild hop with so many shit guilds out there I hadn't gotten to see all of the last raid and decided that I can buy anything. And I did. It was after this that I took a break from the game. I left with 500k in cash and a ton of spare materials to boot.

I am now back in the game and starting up my business empire on the AH. I am once again invading every single market under the sun and aiming to double my last achievement of a million gold.


Thanks for stopping by!

1 comment:

  1. Good luck with your new goal! I am sitting at 150k and am having trouble with ridiculous competition on my server, I hope of making gold by stockpiling all gem tokens and waiting for cata epic gems, currently have 63 on my main horde char, buying all blue cuts on a 2nd horde jc,

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