Sunday, March 20, 2011

My Specifics


NOTE: I have officially been (re) inducted into the warcraft econ hall of fame. You can check out their interview with me here.

I get a lot of people asking me either in email (address is over yonder -->) or by rolling a lvl 1 on my server to chat. So today I'll answer, at least in part, these questions with a bit more detail than I typically give. After all it's hard to give the same 3 paragraph answer to the same question multiple times. That and wow needs a spell checker because my typing is fail.


Q: How much do you actually stokpile, Stokpile? (In reference to obscure materials)

A: Absolutely all of them. And unless I'm flooding the bags of the associated crafter I don't stop buying anything that's in my price range. If I won't pay more than 10g for something and I see a stack up for 9g 99s 99c I'm going to buy it. If you want a really good explanation of how much I stokpile, read the entry with the obvious title How much to stokpile.


Q: How often and/or when do you post auctions?

A: First my preferred times to do a cancel/post on all of my bankers is at 11am and 11pm server time. I catch most of the afternoon and post raid crowds at these times so I try to hit them when I can, but I'm not always able to due to work and sleep and binge drinking. That being said, I like to change them up to something completely random as much as I'm able to while still being in the general time frame. Hell sometimes I only list once a day, life can be funny that way sometimes.

Also if I happen to have 5 minutes to kill, I'll hop onto a totally random banker and do a cancel/post on them. Sometimes I'll just post the spares that I have in the bag and not cancel anything. If I'm doing heroics as DPS I'll cancel and post while I wait for the que to come up as well. Basically if there's a time frame where I have nothing pressing to do and have no work that I can accomplish in those few minutes I'll post some auctions.

Like an old store manager once told me while I was working at a deli when I was 19, "If you've got time to lean you've got time to clean." In other words if you have the time to pretend to look awesome and idle in front of the bank, you've got time to do some auctions. Wasted time is wasted money.


Q: ...comparing my AH methods to my RL personality.

A: Ok not really a question I get asked often, but worth while to include. I've spoken briefly before about personality types and how they effect your AH game. When you're able to identify these things on a conscious level you can work to strengthen them if they're helpful or lessen/remove them if they are not.

And by "on a conscious level" I mean that you can actually say it out loud and not feel silly because you are fully aware that it is fact. IRL I spend my dollars mostly the same as I spend my gold, wisely. If I don't need something then I don't get it unless I'm quite well off at the time. If a good amount of money happens to come in I'll treat myself to going out to a fancy sushi restaurant. The same goes for mechano hogs and vial of the sands for two toons. For the AH I try to price things at a reasonable level while still trying to get as much profit as I can both in game and irl.


Q: How much you make on an average day from (market name)?

A: I can't really give any exact figures because I only tally things up once a week. But I can give a rough estimate for a few markets. For gems I make about 10-16k per day. It depends on the competition campers and the day of the week. Enchanting makes 8-12 a day when combined with smithing which might be 1-3k per day extra. Smithing mostly depends on if I sell any pvp gear that day. Engineering gets me a bit under 1k per day with the occasional 4k day when a lot of mini pets happen to sell.


Q: What were things like when you first started playing the AH game?

A: I started working the AH with about 5k in gold and a handful of raw gems in my bank. At the beginning it was mostly selling cut rare gems in wrath as my first serious market. I had a lot of the cuts already from the dailys so I'd just buy some ore to prospect or cheap gems and cut them. I was a casual seller for a long time until I had all of the expensive boe tank gear I was saving for. Then I got into glyphs after reading gevlon's blog on the inscription business and it was all downhill from there. I got into enchanting and BS and next and then that led to branching out into everything I am into today one after another.


That should cover most of the common questions that I get asked. If there's any other random factoids you're curious about just post a comment and I'll do my best to answer them.

Thanks for stopping by!

7 comments:

  1. When you mention "For gems I make about 10-16k per day." is that 10-16k in pure profit or are you taking into account the price of the uncut gems / transmuted gems? This is often something that's interested me when people mention how much they make per day on certain items.
    Great post btw and I really enjoyed your interview with warcraftecon! x

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  2. 10-16k a day for the gem market? I guess the average price of gems is around 50g? then you have to sell over 300 gems. That's a good amount of sells:p I sell maybe 50 gems a day and the prices is around 25g per gem. Alot of prospecting for you then.

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  3. Do you have any tips for an enchanter? The problem on my server is that nearly every scroll is under mats price.

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  4. Enchanting is both different and not. You have to make sure you aren't just missing out on the low prices first. Use Undermine Journal for that. If the mats prices are truly always more expensive then the end product then your only remaining option is investigating the mat sources. For example if you were doing jewel crafting you wouldn't only look at the prices of uncut gems. You would also look at the prices of ore. In the case of enchanting its a little bit more complex. On top of enchanting mats you want to look for cheap items that will disenchant into what you want. Auctioneer (yuck) has a great searcher for this called "Enchant mats".

    Following that same trend you will want to investigate if any of your other crafting professions can make something that will disenchant into more valuable enchant mats. Enchanting Thorium Blades is a popular one for the Bind on Account enchants and Carnelian Spikes is still pretty good for Greater Celestial Essence in most cases. You can use wowhead to search for the enchanting mat you need then find what disenchants into that and filter by "Crafted by a profession." From there you'll have to figure out if its worth it to craft then de.

    If those investigations yield that its still unprofitable to craft enchants then I'm afraid you'll just have to wait it out and watch the mat prices like a hawk. That means someone has a huge stockpile of leftover mats that they got cheaper than current market and you are unable to compete. (HINT: If you are reading this blog then you already know one of the kings of this). The person created those market conditions intentionally to keep you out and as one of Stok's recent blogs point out the rich can make market entry a nightmare for newcomers.

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  5. The highest return gem for me if buying uncut to sell is Inferno ruby's at 85g typically bold, brilliant and delicate each sell for 110g give or take 5 gold each way. Green, orange, purple gems all sell around 60g uncut, 75 cut. Red is the only profitable transmute. Yellow/Blue cut and uncut are around 11g I can sell the odd 40 stam gem for around 15g which just doesn't even seen worth it. I stick to Inferno rubies but as you'd imagine with the highest profit they're pretty cut throat!

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  6. @ Anon 1
    That's income sorry. I always interchange the two when writing. I'll edit that.

    @ Yarge
    Meta gems sell on average from 100-250. That and I always list my gems (as much as I can) when prices are typically higher than normal-ish.

    @ Anon 2
    Check out my post on enchanting at

    http://theahpile.blogspot.com/2011/02/profession-overview-enchanting.html

    If you have more questions, send me an email to theahpile@gmail.com with some specific questions and I'll see what I can do to help.

    @ Dale
    <3

    @ Anon 3
    Red xmutes are also the only ones that are consistantly profitable for me as well. Though on some days, especially lately, I'll get very low on purple or oranges and the prices happen to be high. This is where watchign a market closely is important because you can react to thigns like this that are "here today, gone tomorrow" situations.

    Think of them the same way that you would of a temporary monopoly. It isn't something you stokpile for what so ever, but it is DEFINITELY something you want to get in on while the getting is good.

    And while red gems are very cut throat, don't forget that according to EJ almost every class and spec should gem plain red stat gems everywhere or they're doin' it wrong. Because of that intense demand that isn't going to change too much it's not a hard of a market to work in as you might think at first glance.

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  7. @ Anon 1
    I also forgot to mention a bit about prospecting. Yes I do a lot of it and I'm finally able to get the stupid cheap ore prices that everyone else seems to have. So it's rather hard to say what % of that income is actually profit because as you know the shuffle gets spread thin across so many different markets you can't really keep track of it.

    But the common gems all turn a profit from the vendor cost which covers all of the ore (and therefore rare gems) it most likely is pure profit. But again, I can't really say with 100% certainty how much is profit.

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