Stokpile

Why I disappeared

2011-12-31T18:37:00.000-08:00

Aloha all. I wanted to write to you all today and apologize for my sudden disappearance. I’m sure this may come as too little to late, but I feel that I should regardless. The short and simple answer is that shit happens and I didn’t have the time. Ok that’s a horrible reason I’ll admit, so let me give you a bit more details as to how that came about.

For quite some time I have been looking for a regular job in web design, which is what I spent X thousand dollars on an education for. After a while I still hadn’t found one so when my best friend says “Hey I’m moving out to Illinois while my girl finishes college, want to come with and start up a web business?” I immediately said hell yes. No questions asked.

That’s pretty much the story of my life right there, barely any planning or reason for whatever I do other than “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” After packing up we made the 15ish hour long drive out there and got set up. Unfortunately working freelance in the mid-west isn’t so easy. Granted it isn’t easy anywhere, but that’s another debate.

The simple fact is that I was desperate to leave my current situation and was borderline on taking a job in the all American fast food industry if that would get me out. So I took the first opportunity to get out and it worked out, at least a little. We get our first job in the business shortly after getting there from a friend of a friend.

It was a nightmare.

I can go on for hours ranting on about how brain damaged this person was (and I have) but I’ll spare you. The short version is they could barely use a computer and were telling me how to do my job at every turn. *stabby stabby stabby!* But we managed to get it done and find more contracts here and there. Meanwhile almost all of my time is dedicated to either drinking heavily or trying to find new clients. Or both, ya know whichever.

I stopped writing because first I stopped gaming for the most part. I was rich in Rift and was getting bored of the game. Although it’s more accurate to say that my mind was focused on work, creating new designs, learning new tricks etc.

Once things finally calmed down and I was financially stable about a year had already passed. At that point I just said fuck it and ignored the AH game and the blog (therefore you) all together. I was just thinking (very little at all) that at this point why bother? In the end, all of my writing and serious gaming had completely fallen by the wayside until just recently.

For all of you who only read for the tips on making the MMO moneys don’t worry that you’ve missed out on many great secrets, you haven’t. I’ve told you everything you need to know, the rest is up to you. And for those who actually read my blog for entertainment or because you just enjoyed my writing, I apologize. Yes I actually feel bad about not writing and falling out of the bloging thing.

However I do intend to get back to writing, and very soon at that, but it will take on a slightly different form. Mostly, I’m waiting for Guild Wars 2 to be released which will likely be the last MMO I intend to play for quite some time. With the planning of a reverse auction house, I am extremely interested in how well I will fare. For those of you that don’t know, what that means is that you can list what you have for sale AND what you want to buy. Very cool stuff. But I digress.

I don’t mean to turn this entry into something that belongs on a live journal post, but I owe an explanation if nothing else. Even if it is two years too late. Sorry about that. But fear not, Guild Wars 2 is currently in closed beta and, if all goes well, it will be in an open beta before spring time. Until then I’ll be working on my writing ability and hopefully get a job as a writer for one of the many fine sites out there on the interwebs.

Thanks for stopping by.

Taking a loss

2011-08-19T08:20:00.001-07:00

As to be expected, I've taken a significant loss in a number of things that I've tried to sell. Not because of forgetting to do my homework, I've learned the hard way not to forget that part. I took a loss because I have very little to base my guess work on. And it wasn't until much later on that I discovered a few clues that would suggest avoiding a certain item. That being said, let me give you the full list of things that I have not sold or sold very few of so far. Anything that has sold came with a monetary cost that was not made back from sales to date.

Ornate steel choker
Gold gorget
Gold chain
Night iron gauntlets
Fine leather leggings
Plaited cinerium ring
Shining sapphire ring
Heartless ring
Reinforced leather helm
Reinforced leather belt

Each of the above items cost me two things. First is the obvious monetary investment it took to craft them. Sure I can RB them to try and recoup it, but that would be such a small fraction of the final cost that it's not even worth taking into account. I also don't have a toon that can use them so that is also not relevant. The second thing that I took a loss on was the tokens it cost to learn the recipe itself. That means time which is infinitely more valuable than the gold.

Each recipe took at least two daily of full dailys to get enough tokens for which could have been spent more wisely on something else that might (or might not) have sold. Like I always say, time is the most important thing you can invest because you cannot get more and cannot regain what you have lost.

Bear in mind though I am in no way saying that the professions that make these things are worthless themselves, far from it. I am only pointing out a few things that you should be avoiding unless you have nothing else better to spend your tokens on and have some decent cash that you can afford to throw in the gutter. While it is true that this can happen with anything on your shard, these are a few items that I know for a fact are not working out on mine and are very likely the same on yours.

As time goes on and I continue to experiment with different things to craft and sell I'll be writing more and more entries like this I'm sure. Once again there is little to no way to base your markets on. That is yet another reason that reading fine blogs such as mine is important even if you're already well off, you never know when a big loss is waiting around the corner. And the flip side of course is true, you never know if there's a fortune waiting right under your nose until somebody points it out to you. That's what I'm here for after all, to enlighten and to entertain.

I'm still looking for the markets that have a high rate of consistent sales because that's where you need to be if you want to get rich anytime this century. So far the closest I've found is bags, but their profit margins are so low it's still going to take a while with them. Then there is the "death and taxes" profession of rune crafting. I refer to it as such because the only two thing you can't avoid in life are death and taxes. Any time you get a new piece of gear you can't avoid heading to a RC to add some shine to it. But with the campers that farm for free that isn't an option either. So here's to searching!

Thanks for stopping by!

For those who farm

2011-08-17T23:36:00.001-07:00

Although I'm against farming I still feel it's wise to mention it from time to time. Today I'm going to give a few pointers on farming spots, how to do them, what to expect, and when it's a good idea. That's right, a good idea to farm. However seeing as how I'm not the most adept or experienced farmer out there there could easily be better spots than the ones I've mentioned.

The farming locations that I'll cover are the ones that I've found merely by questing and wound up spending more time gathering than killing. In other words all of the farm spots tend to have a lot of nodes in a tight area. Here's my recommendations based on material type along with any note worthy points on it.

Titanium.
Most people will tell you to go to the level 50 zones if you want to farm this and of course that's not a good idea. When it comes to farming you never EVER go to where "everybody" says to go unless that's your only option. That's because obviously there's a lot of competition for spawn points. The best place that I've found is the south east portion of the drought lands. Not many people quest in there and the dominate node for the zone is cobalt. However in this higher level section you'll find oodles and oodles of titanium spawn points. Bear in mind though that there are a handful that spawn underground and aren't worth going for usually.

Fun note on this though. If you port to phoenix rise there can be a node spawn directly behind you and if you go to fortune's shore there can be one next to the neutral gang mobs in town as well just a short run to the west.

Carmintium.
The easiest route to farm this that I've found is along side the road between exile's den and white fall tavern. Just run your circle starting at exile's on the left side of the road until you get to white fall and then go back on the other side. There is also a cave that has 3-5 spawn points but is also loaded up with mobs.

If you don't see a node right outside that usually means that there won't be any inside either. But if you have great aoe and won't get killed it might be worth your while to look. There is a large number of spawns in stillmoor in the fields around the citadel, but you'll have to dodge countless mobs with a few elites mixed in so this is definitely not a good place to farm effectively.

Spellspun silk.
This is something that you'll only want to really farm if you can solo aoe it all. It seems that the only really viable option for this is the undead town at the very southern end of stillmoor. Be mindful of the few elites that sit by the walls though or you could be in trouble.

Cobalt.
Right in the middle of the northern portion of drought lands is the prime spot for this. Everywhere that has a little centaur camp is likely to have either this or gold hidden away. Anywhere that you see a few stone mountain pillar things is where you're going to find a node. Basically just look for big rocks sticking up and you'll get what you're after.

Chromite.
This route is almost the same as the one for carmintium, just in a different zone. You start out in perspice and follow the left side of the road north. Follow it all the way up to the last Guardian camp and then turn around. In each of the little pits with the scaffolding or tree stumps is where you're going to find the nodes you want.

Exotic hide.
There are two different spots that I've found for this. One is right outside of exile's den to the east. You'll find a bunch of tigers that hang around the sides of the road that you usually pass by entirely. They're spread out enough that it's easy to go one at a time and close enough together that you can aoe them if you can. The other spot is a little east of whitefall with the same situation, lots of tigers packed together nicely.

Orichilum.
There is actually only one route that I know of that won't take an hour to get 10 ore together. The only down side to it is that if you aren't a defiant it's not practical for you at all. You leave right out the front gates of meridian and make a right. Follow the mountains along the coast until you're think you're going to enter the desert. Right in the corner are a few elites and some wrecked boats which is where three nodes can spawn.

The elites can be solo'd by any pet class or tank and for everyone else they are very easy to avoid. After you check those spots head out into the lake and you'll find a buried treasure chest if you haven't already along with several other spawn points and elites to avoid. Aside from this spot your only other options are dungeons and the citadel in stillmoor with a ton of mobs and elites that cannot be avoided.

Thanks for stopping by!

Random rift thoughts 2

2011-08-17T07:01:00.001-07:00

Aloha all! I'm here with another collection of random thoughts to help you make money in rift. As always just a few quick tips that only need a little explanation on what I'm talking about. I try to do more than just provide you with original content each day after all. I do my best to make sure that it is not only quality content, but also that there is a lot of it.

Enjoy!

1. Soulbind/Exotic leather belts.
This is a vendor bought recipe that takes 40ish tokens to get. To craft them it only takes 1 soulbind leather (2-5g on my shard) and an item sold form the OF vendor. This is noteworthy because if you're like me and RB tons of gear to get materials for insanely cheap this is the route to take. Before I discovered this I was crafting the boot which takes two pieces of leather to craft and this just increased my profit margins by 50% on it's own.

However for those of you who don't have OF on your rune crafter this is going to be a problem. I'd recommend making an alt just to be your RB workhorse in all honesty. Get their RC skill up to the 250s range and their OF up to the same just so that you can craft tons of greens and RB them on the spot. With only 6 items fitting in a mail to yourself this will save a ton on postage and loads of time shuffling junk around.

2. Tell the other faction you're doing crafting rifts.
Now I haven't tried this personally, but I have a feeling it will pay off well. Roll an alt on the opposite faction's side and walk them to their main town. When you or another group are starting to do crafting rifts log onto them and spam that they're going on for a few minutes to get more people to join in from there. You just might get a few extra lures popped out of it. The other reason that I'm thinking this is a good idea is that you just might get the same treatment in turn.

An MMO is a social game filled with oodles of social and/or casual people and this is the sort of thing that they get into. Friendly people helping other friendly people. So by doing this you can get your own returned favor of announcements when there's about to be 30+ crafting rifts going off which can be nice if you don't have the time or don't want to bother leaving an alt in the middle of nowhere to check.

3. Stokpile catalysts and eternal dust on Wednesday
As you know, all weekly resets happen on Wednesday and this includes crafting weekly quests. These are the quests that reward you with the crafting rift lures and it's very common to see several full raids doing these several times on your average Wednesday. This means that all of a sudden tons of minor catalysts, eternal planar dust, and assorted max level crafting materials have been introduced into the system. And there will be a ton of them.

When any large floods of supply come in the prices of them will always drop down by a noticeable amount. Because of that each week when the crafting lures are reset the prices of all of those will drop down and makes for a great opportunity for you to stokpile them all. The same is also true of other materials like carmintium and soul leather. When people get a small hand full of random materials that they're not going to use they tend to put it up on AH for a serious undercut. So in addition to getting a shot at great deals on rare mats you can do the same with the more common ones as well.

Thanks for stopping by!

The 40 plat price cap

2011-08-16T02:16:00.000-07:00

It seems that I'm always going on about how you need to find the perfect price point for your markets on your server. It's of utmost importance to maximizing your profits to balance rate of sales with profit and I think I've found mine for rift. And that number is 40 platinum for everything, it's a sweeping generalization of prices sure but it seems to fit the bill, no pun intended. Naturally there isn't anything in game that you can auction for 40 platinum that isn't purple so that's what I'm going to be focusing on today. Of course should anybody be aware of a blue item that they can sell for that much I'd be thrilled to know!

The first epic that I crafted was a black iron hatchet, an epic 1h axe for warriors. It began to sell steadily once prices were at an acceptable point for me to list them, it began to sell consistently. I started listing them at 26 platinum which is about a 6p profit and over time slowly raised the price bit by bit as each one sold. However once I reached a 40 platinum price tag they just stopped selling. When something stops selling entirely, you'd think that something has changed.

It might be a patch, a hotfix, or just the community's view on the targeted class in general, but in this case the only thing that had changed was my price tag. I dropped the price back down to 38 and voila, they start selling regularly again. So 195% ish of the material cost is the ideal pricing point for this item.

Strange sure, but one case doesn't make a pattern.

The next epic I started to sell was the flesh reaper, this one is a bit more expensive to craft at about 28 platinum in materials. So I started to list these at 50 platinum with a fancy augment. Not a single sale. Ok so maybe 50 is a bit too much for an entry level epic and I drop the price to 45 platinum. A week later and I finally get a sale. Woohoo! So I craft another and list it back at 45 and sell another but at the same slow pace.

I get undercut by a few gold and I drop the price down to 39.55 platinum. Two days later it sold and I crafted another one to list for the same price. I sold yet another that week. The other one either sold or expired by the time I went to list another and I put it back up for 45 to see what happens. What happened was the exact same thing!

Ok so I'm two for two on selling things under 40 platinum better than higher prices, that is until I mention Martyr's fist and faith forged spaulders. Both sexy cleric purple gear, both cost roughly 25ish platinum to craft. And yes, both take forever and a day to sell with a 41+ platinum price tag.

So what's the deal here? Obviously people are willing to pay top dollar for crafted epics, but not many are. That part is easy to explain and I've covered it a few times so far, there just isn't a lot of money in the world period. There's a lot of quests and vendor bait but there's a lot of gold sinks as well so not many people can afford that.

The real question here is why 40? What makes this the magic number? Yes 39.99 is not particularly different than 40, but that bit of pricing psychology has been proven to be very effective for ages now. So I will ask again: what makes 40 platinum so special and not 45? Why not 100 platinum? We shall see.

Thanks for stopping by!

Don't compete with yourself

2011-08-12T02:09:00.001-07:00

Another entry listed over at wowecon today. This one is on the subject of pricing once again and why you should leave a large and noticeable gap in price between the top end items and those that are second best. Here's the first part.

"Today's entry is on the general subject of pricing and the specific topic of being your own worst enemy on the AH. Let's say you have three different things to sell, A, B, and C. A is for max level players with a lot to spend, B is for people that are almost at the level cap and C is for those that have just hit the level cap. As expected, you'll want to price item A rather high as it's for people that have money to spend and it will probably last them long enough. However Items A and B are very close in level range, stats, and estimated length of use.

We all know that there is a solid market for leveling gear even when you're close to finished. That's because sometimes people level fast or skip areas or otherwise do things that don't upgrade their gear at the same rate as their level. So they might actually need to buy some gear so the last few levels aren't a nightmare. But there is also the other side that figures that it's not worth the money since it'll be replaced soon anyways. But with these two different items, one for near cap and one entry level gear, they're both going to be sold to the same person.

This is where the pricing gets tricky."

Click here to read the whole entry.

Thanks for stopping by!

The AH never changes

2011-08-11T01:33:00.000-07:00

Entry is posted in it's entirety over at warcraftecon.net today. It's on the subject of why all of you wow players will still find valuable insight in the AH from reading my blog and why all of you rift players would do well to read a few of the wow gold blogs that are out there. Here's the first part

"And why does it not change? How does it stay the same no matter what game your playing? Because at it's core what drive the AH to function are people and we never change. The lazy people on wow are going to be lazy on Rift, the morons will stay morons, and the goblins will stay goblins. This means that everything I have learned from the AH game on wow will apply to rift and vice versa. The only changes are how you shuffle around names and numbers. Every situation I found myself in wow I'll find once again in rift and the same methods will need to be applied to work with it.

Hell I've even ran off my first camper."

Click here to read the whole thing.

Thanks for stopping by!

Making a few predictions

2011-08-09T21:44:00.001-07:00

I've been following the development of the Rift economy very closely as you may imagine since I started playing. And as such I've noticed a few subtleties of trion that lead me to expect a few things in the not so distant future. I wanted to take today to share a few of my thoughts on this matter and have it officially in writing what I expect to see how close I am. Mind you that NONE OF THIS is official or hinted at by the developers, it is only my thoughts and expectations. So don't take any of this as gospel, just something to keep in the back of your mind.

Crafting plaques will be obtained easier.
With the dozens of new recipes that have been added in requiring 5 plaques a piece to learn these won't become common for a long, long time. They were added in to help people fill in gaps in their raid gear to help them progress faster through the raid content without nerfing the hell out of the raids. Because of this I expect there to be another way to gain plaques or a better chance of getting them. This may be done by increasing the drop rate from dailys and crafting rifts, or merely allow you to buy them with artisan's marks, or increase the weekly quest award up to 2-3 plaques instead of only one.

Crafting rifts.
I expect that these will soon include the new CD based materials as potential drops. For one to make these a bit more profitable for those that do them because right now no matter how lucky you are, you lose money compared to the lure cost. Lets face it, the minor cats are the only thing that's worth actual money from them as the common mats don't even make up 1/8 of the lure's cost to craft.

More vanity items.
This one is a given, the mathosian guard's armor is very popular and is the only costume set you can craft. People love this sort of thing and that was proven by how many people dove on it when it was made live. I expect outfitters to get the next full set and eventually artificers or RC's will get something that will add a little "woo-shiny!" to what you already have. By that I mean something like the random things you get from the event seals that add a little storm cloud over your head and the such or the apoth potions that let you turn somebody into a critter.

More augments.
With the release of patch 1.4 apothecaries can craft primary stat augments. While this is a great addition and much needed boost to a poor (see what I did there?) profession it is not nearly enough. Add to that the fact that the best and highest demand augments are mixed stat ones, I expect these to be eventually added in. More specifically I expect at least stat/power and endurance/block to be added if nothing else. While I would love to see some stat/crit ones put in I am not expecting this and I certainly hope that they don't add in the terrible stat/endurance ones. But regardless of which ones they do add, I am positive that there will be new ones put in.

Thanks for stopping by!

Rift 1.4 crafted gear

2011-08-08T21:19:00.001-07:00

It's been almost a week since the patch hit so I've had enough time to go over it all on live and see what is what. Today I'm going to give you the important info that you'll need to know about all of these new goodies that have been added in. I'll go on a profession by profession basis and list off anything unique about them outside of what applies to every one of them.

Foraging, mining, butchering.
All gathering professions can craft a new type of material which is on a 20 hour cool down. Each one requires two of the top end materials related to that profession such as steeled leather, shadethorn lumber along with two items sold by the associated vendor with cost 4.2 platinum each. This puts their base cost at approximately 9 platinum + fee for the cool down. If you have a toon with all three gathering profs on them they can do each of them when the CD is up so they do not have a "shared" cool down.

Outfitter.
As with each of the gear crafting professions, there are a whole slew of new recipes. Each recipe for armor/weapons cost 5 plaques each to learn and require (on average) 8 items that are crafted by other professions with a 20 hour CD. Outfitter is unique in that it has a CD to use in addition to the new materials.

Rune crafting.
This profession does not have any new crafted recipes, but does have a CD to use for new materials.

Weapon/armor smith.
These professions do not have a CD but have the most sought after pieces of gear from the new recipes.

Artificer.
The big one here is the burning powerstone. It adds 200sp to your main hand or 2h weapon which includes both hammers and staffs. This is obviously the best weapon consumable in game for any caster, healer, or dps/support cleric so they are in very high demand. And you know what the best part is? They're cheap to make! To craft them it takes two refined gems and to get those they require your artificer to make any piece of gear that uses a brilliant or lights bane diamond and salvage it. Each salvage will produce on average 3 gem fragments and it takes 5 fragments to craft one refined gem.

The best items to craft are brilliant diamond bands (platinum bar and one gem) and lights bane diamond band which takes a lights bane diamond and a platinum bar. In total that costs maybe one platinum and I've been selling these things for as high as 15 a piece.

This profession does not have a CD to use.

There are also the new recipes that they can make which are rings and a staff. So far out of all the recipes added in, the most popular request that I've seen is the staff. And that's out of all the professions and not just this one.

Apothecary.
Out of all the professions, this one got the most love. First is the new ability to salvage essences. Note that there is a bug and any lesser essences that are BoE cannot be salvaged. Trion has stated that they're looking into this. All of the materials gotten from this salvage are all used for crafting augments of different levels. Here's the low down on what you get from this.

Green essences turn into basic "powder" and it takes 5 of them to make one inert thingy. The inerts are what are used in crafting augments and the type inert is tied to the item level that you salvaged. This is true of both blue and green essences. In addition to this powder, you will also get anywhere from 1-3 planar dust of the associated level which is enduring, endless, or eternal.

Now we come to the epic essences. Any epics that you buy from a vendor (that I've seen at least) cannot be salvaged, it's the BoE ones that you're after. The epic lessers can be any level from 10 to 50 and produce the same results. They will give you Prism fragments which turn into the mats needed for epic augments and 1-3 eternal dust. So depending on how you value eternal dust this can be some easy money for very little effort. Also of note is that the inert prisms sell for as high as 30 platinum each and the lowbie lessers sell as low as 5, heh you do the math.

Then are the epic augment recipes, each one takes 3 plaques to learn and requires one of the CD materials, two eternal dust, and an inert prism. After those are the pure augments which need a mighty vial of a related stat and inert crystals which come only from salvaging high level blue essences. To learn these recipes they take 212 artisan's marks each. The lower quality augments take much fewer marks and require level appropriate inert salvages.

To make these you'll need to salvage green essences that are BoP (until this is fixed) and rare greater essences. But since you can still get augments from planarite this isn't too much of a concern as they'll remain in the throw away category.

Leaving off on a potentially huge money making tip right now. You know all of those rune king seals that you probably have a million of? Trade in 75 of them for an epic lesser essence and salvage it for a few eternal dust and prism shards. They're suddenly not totally worthless! And the same thing goes for the new epic lessers gotten with dragon tears with the current world event so get going on those daily quests! And the best part is that both the tokens and the essences themselves are all boa so that means that you can do the quests on every toon and mail them all off to your apothecary. Pretty neat-o huh?

Thanks for stopping by!

The freedom money brings

2011-08-07T19:39:00.000-07:00

Another entry is posted today over at wowecon and it's on the subject of why I bother to even do any of this. The money, the blog, the AH, etc, it all has a reason. Many reasons in fact. Here's the first part.

"One of the obvious questions that AH players get asked is "why?" Why bother making thousands and thousands of gold or platinum in wow or rift? The answer is the freedom that it allows us. They say money can't buy you happiness, which is certainly true. I mean after all, I have not once seen it on the shelves at the local Wal-Mart. Happiness is supposed to be in isle 4 isn't it? But money can definitely buy you things that will make you happy. In an MMO that means independence and convenience. Two words which I'll never spell right without a spell checker.

To me, happiness in the world of an MMO is being able to take care of any alt that I make without scrambling for funding. As soon as they hit the level cap I want to be able to kit them out in high end blue gear at the least so they can hop into the harder dungeons right away and not get carried. Having even more money means they can get suited up with shiny as hell purples and jump right into raiding if so desired."

Click here to read the whole thing.

Thanks for stopping by!

Take the E-peen out of the AH

2011-08-04T20:02:00.001-07:00

Today I have another article posted over at warcraft econ. Today it's on the subject of how your ego is the most likely thing to hold you back. Here's the first part:

"A great writer once said a very blunt, but very pertinent one liner about how to write a great story and that is "stop getting your balls in the way of your writing! You keep trying to put your nuts in the middle of everything just tell the story!" Pretty in your face sort of visual isn't it? But it's a very important point and applies to virtually everything you will ever do, including the AH game.

First let me explain where they're coming from and the point they're trying to make with such a quote. The idea is that when you're trying to do something well, your ego is going to hold you back. It's as simple as that. Like I've said many times when it comes to the AH or writing a blog in general, do it for the sake of doing it. If you write for the sole reason of popularity you're probably going to fail. If you make money on an MMO just to show off you are going to have the opposite of fun. Sure it's nice to brag and to have 2,345,567 readers but if that's your goal you're obviously going to fall short."

Click here to check out the whole entry.

Thanks for stopping by!

Fill in the gaps

2011-08-04T03:26:00.000-07:00

Aloha all, today I have another entry posted at warcraft econ. The subject today is things you should pay attention to while leveling that will make you a profit. More specifically, it's about what you should look for to identify what leveling items you should focus on selling first. Here's the first part.

"When you’re busy leveling your toon, there’s a lot more to pay attention to than just questing. I’ve already written at length about how everything sells and to try and AH everything that isn’t grey so I won’t be covering that today. Instead I wanted to cover something that’s mentioned every now and then but never in depth. I refer to the concept of niche markets which we’re all aware of to some degree.

A niche market is just what you would expect, a small specialized market. More often than not it is used in reference to a certain type of customer base, primarily collectors and vanity items. However there is another niche market that I have only seen talked about in great detail by the epic penny pouch, great wow blog found over yonder, and that is specific level ranges. In every mmo there are different items that are more easily acquired at certain level ranges such as rings or necklaces."

Click here to read the whole thing.

Thanks for stopping by!

PSA: How to properly AoE

2011-08-03T04:25:00.001-07:00

Aloha all it's time for another public service announce from yours truly. Today's lesson in how not to fail is on the subject of AoE dps and how to do more than hit your channeled spell and scratch your balls. What's that? Why yes there is far more to aoe than just that. And before it gets brought up, I am fully aware that some classes are rather limited in their choice of aoe. For some of them, such as some rogues in wow, your only aoe is an on/off switch. By that I mean that either you're spamming aoe non stop or you are doing zero aoe with nothing in between. Bear this in mind with your class if you have the capability to do more than mash one button.

In fact, there are several different types of aoe "styles" to pick from. Choosing the right one for the situation is what will separate you, the super cool johnny awesome player, from the power drooling inbred mongoloids you'll come across in randoms. I'll start by listing a different style of aoe and then explain exactly what it is.

After that I'll go over when to use it and why it's important that you use that style instead of smashing your single "enemies explode" spell. The goal essentially is to get the best of both worlds. Aoe does more total damage, but won't kill a single mob as fast as focused fire will. Adopting these different aoe styles will do the most to have great spread damage while still focusing on the primary objective for the given situation.

You might ask why this is important or wonder why it is at all. Yes, yes I know, aoe dps are srs bsns! But when a fight requires good aoe, guess what? It is very serious business. Any time that I've seen aoe as even a slightly of an important factor it was always VERY important and was literally a pass or fail. If you couldn't do enough aoe in the right place the right way then it was a guaranteed wipe without question. Hence the PSA on aoe.

Full on AoE.
Obvious one comes first. This is where you're supposed to hit you're single enemies explode spell/attack, lean on back and scratch your nuts. The only time to do this is when there is a shit load of mobs all in the same spot. The amount that is needed to make this worthwhile varies greatly from player to player. This is because different classes have different aoe abilities and different groups of mobs might really need one focused down like a healer before aoe even matters. However I think that a good rule of thumb to follow is anytime there's 5+ mobs that do not have a high priority target (such as a healer) is when you should spam your big bombs non stop.

Cleave based AoE.
If you're not familiar with the term it means to replace your primary spam attack with one that hits multiple targets. Now you don't spam this attack and only this attack, it just replaces your standard filler ability. Meanwhile you continue your usual single target dps rotation on the marked target. One example of where this style should be used is when you have a pull that has 1 elite mob and 5 non elite buddies. Your single target priorities will bring down the elite almost as fast as normal, but all of the little buggers will drop rather fast which will greatly reduce tank damage.

Emphasized AoE.
By this I mean that you still want to focus on your single target, but throw in as much aoe as possible at the same time. Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. Lets say your mega aoe spell is a big fire nuke you cast a ton and also have a talent that makes your 4 second cast meteor spell instant. For prioritized aoeyou'll spam your aoe until you get that instant cast proc and use it on the primary target. Or if you build up a buff on yourself with aoe skills and have a big nuke that consumes that buff this is another example of where this comes into play. Now the time to use this is once again when there are a lot of mobs around. There's no point to spamming aoe on only 2-3 dudes, that's a waste.

The proper time to use this depends entirely on your ability to do it and the group of mobs that you're facing. One easy example is another pull with a single elite and 50 little ones that die fast. Another good one is if you're facing a boss that summons swarms of mobs that get killed in 2-3 hits from aoe. Those types of fights are fairly common and it's always important to keep at least some focused dps on the boss at all times. If there's any sort of time limit on the fight with swarms of aoe adds this is imperative to downing the boss before you get eaten.

Thanks for stopping by!

Duplicate professions

2011-08-02T00:04:00.000-07:00

Today I want to talk about a nifty investment that you can make in rift. With the profitable recipes coming from tokens that you can start to acquire immediately after learning a profession it takes a long, long time to learn them all. This is especially true for weapon and armor smiths because so much of it is useful for so many different people. And since there is no other way to acquire these tokens outside of dailys we need to look for a way to get around that. And I've found one.

This investment won't be on the massive 5k plat scale, but can be a lot if you're just starting out. It's as simple as power leveling a profession for a second time on an alt. You'll still get all of the daily quests and tokens for it regardless. Obvious I know, but the obvious isn't noticed sometimes unless it's pointed out. You leave your main crafter to do the dungeon runs and the like for rep and rare drops while still doing their dailys for tokens also.

Make a note of what recipes you're missing and just be sure not to double up on them. I'm not aware of any minimum level req to train max level professions, but my level 23 alt had 300 artificer so you can probably assume you can do it at level 15 at the worst or possibly level 1.

I'd suggest making a cleric so that you can easily solo earth and fire invasions or rifts. You'll still want to do these for a quick five egg shells to put with the 10 from dailys to get the profession bag. I was crazy lucky on my cleric and got a plaque on their second day being alive at maybe level 8 if that. So yes it is possible to get them that early.

Instead of taking duplicate professions, you can also take three crafting professions on the same toon to really maximize the tokens that you get. In addition if you have multiple toons with OF they each can do the weekly quest to get a plaque so that you can craft all of the epic recipes even faster. Once you have all of them available to you, keep doing the weekly and such on your "primary" crafter that you have all of the rare drop recipes on and keep trying to acquire the epic ones that you need alts to make. Once you have all of those on your primary crafter you can feel free to delete your alts that have duplicates of all the recipes you have on a single toon and start over with another profession.

This might seem time consuming, but power leveling a profession only take a long time if you farm everything you need. Please don't. If you buy everything it might total up around 150 plat using current average material prices which isn't too terribly high. Doing this will essentially cut down the total time frame by half to get all of the recipes from tokens and plaques. Is this viable? Well that depends entirely on you. It depends on how much you have, are willing to spend, and how cheap you can get materials for. That and how much you can sell the crafted goods for of course.

If there are only 3 epic recipes for OF that get a profit then this is totally not worth it. But if you're in the situation as I am where half of the weapon and armor smith recipes are profitable then this is something that you should seriously consider. As of this writing, I need almost three THOUSAND tokens to get all of the recipes that get a profit. At an average of 70 per day on 3 different toons that makes it 15 days or so to get them all. That doesn't sound too bad does it? Well unfortunately it's not that simple because all of the tokens don't go into the same pocket.

For OF I need 400 to finish that up which is 6 days on that toon and only that one. Armor smith needs 700 so 10 days for that toon and then another 700 for weapon smith which is another 10 days on the same toon. Keep in mind also that I've been doing these dailys for a month already, so starting up an entirely new profession that you don't have already will make this time frame much longer. This is why power leveling another profession just to do the dailys is a good option for anybody that wants to jump into a new market. Think about it.

Thanks for stopping by!

Casual George = AH guru

2011-08-01T02:28:00.000-07:00

Today I have yet another entry written up that it posted at wowecon.net. Today I talk about the best and most informed person in game in regards to acceptable prices: the casual player. One question that everyone asks themselves when they go to sell an item they have never listed before is how much they should sell it for. What is XYZ worth? Check out the article and find out why Casual George is the best one to ask. Here's the first part of it all.

"I will admit first that it is true that a casual gamer doesn’t typically play the AH in the sense that a goblin or an otherwise AH focused player does. They do however play the game in many more ways that your typical raider or AH baron does. That means that they fit perfectly into the category of who you sell everything to. Does the expression “know your customers” ring a bell? It should because that’s exactly where I’m going with this.

This is not because they’re stupid or lazy, they are just the same as I was before I started to build my empire: uninformed. They just don’t know and if they do, then they either don’t have the time for it or would rather be just plain getting by. That’s the definition of a casual pretty much, limited play time, enjoys everything they do on game and are somewhat competent players at the very least. Suffice to say, casuals are my kind of people, probably because I’m a casual player as well."

Click here to check out the full article.

Thanks for stopping by!

Empty markets at a glance

2011-07-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

NOTE: Quick tip on what to stokpile with the coming recipes and what to look out for now that Hammerknell is out. Any runes with hit/focus are going to be a big seller for a while as people try to hit the minimum stats. Also twilight bloom roots will be popular as they're needed in all of the augments and many consumables. The same is true with eternal dust because it goes into everything, expect a price increase in those.

Today I have yet another entry written up that it posted at wowecon.net. Today I talk about what you should consider when you search for an item on the AH and find nothing. Do they sell out that fast? Is there no market for it? Does nobody try to sell it? I discuss all of this and much more. This is very important info to have because when the new rift items come in patch 1.4 there will be a lot of empty AH windows. Here's the first part of it all.

"When you find something new to sell and are in a situation where there are none up on the auction house there is a good deal that can be interpreted from that. Sometimes it’s a recipe that you have just gotten and thus new to you or it could be a recipe/item that is new to the game entirely. But whichever the case is, the potential scenarios are always the same.

When you find yourself in a situation such as this you need to ask yourself a few questions before moving forward. First is the obvious question, can you afford to take a complete loss in this investment? If so then you can move on with the fun parts. Is there a market for this new epic item? Are there alternatives that are close to the same level for half the price? How many people tend to spend the extra coin to upgrade this specific item?"

Click here to check out the full article.

Thanks for stopping by!

Ooh, is that new?

2011-07-28T01:34:00.000-07:00

Aloha all! As of today my first article is officially going up on wowecon.net and is useful to anybody that wants to make a little (ok, a lot) extra money on the AH. I discuss what to do when any new items are added into the game and how even a single new recipe can have far reaching effects. If you're interested in a more in depth look at how to profit from the Patch 1.4 crafted gear and the different ways there are to profit from it, I highly suggest you read it. Here's the first part.

"The first option is to sell the new gear itself. This one is pretty straightforward as you imagine, but there is still slightly more to it than craft and list. The most important part of selling either the crafted gear or BoE drops is when they’re not being actively farmed. This means prime time is a no go for listing these on the auction house. This is because the people that are interested in getting easy top end epics are either actively farming them or are about to be.

After all, why would you buy a raid drop when you’re going into that raid in 15 minutes? You buy them after you raid and don’t get the drop you’re after. Listing before the raid typically won’t do anything more than lower the current price of them. And that’s when you want to sell them. You have to know your server and know your customers."

Click here to check out the full article.

Thanks for stopping by!

New Rift Patch 1.4 recipes

2011-07-27T05:27:00.000-07:00

As the title says there are a lot of new recipes being added in the upcoming patch along with a few current ones being changed drastically. First here's a quick copy/paste from the patch notes that are in progress.

"* New Artificer recipe: Blazing Powerstone, purchasable from trainers at 285 Artificer skill. Usable on main-hand weapons and adds 200 Spell Power for 4 hours.

* New recipes are available on the Armorsmith, Outfitter, Weaponsmith, and Artificer artisan store merchants. These are new Epic crafted items with set bonuses. Each set includes 2 pieces of armor, 1 weapon, and 1 ring to complete the set. Recipes can be purchased for Plaques.

* Recipes for new materials are available from the various profession trainers for 20 platinum - Enchanted Shadethorn Lumber, Tempered Orichalcum Bar, Steel-Stitched Leather, Bolt of Radiant Witchweave, and Infinite Essence. Each recipe has a 24 hour cooldown and are used in new production recipes.

* Crafting trainers now sell new reagents needed for the new recipes: Ethereal Flux, Magical Oil, Enchanted Lacquer, and Endless Dust. Foraging trainers now sell reagents.

* New Weaponsmith recipe: Exquisite Oilstone, purchasable from trainers at 285 Weaponsmith skill. Usable on 2-handed weapons and adds 10 melee weapon DPS for 4 hours."

That's not that many notes, but if you have a keen eye for profit then that is a whole lot to take in all at once. So before I get into the details, here's the short version of it all.

- Stokpile brilliant diamonds
- Apothecary might suddenly become extremely profitable
- Stop spending your plaques right now
- Pick up the apothecary recipes for the heroic vials (needed as materials for new augments)
- Eternal dust will go up in price
- Minor catalysts will go up in price

So that's the short version of it all, but there is so much more to it. The new recipes will be raid quality gear and when combined with an epic augment (which have all gotten a big boost) will be around t2 raid level gear. The down side? They cost a few hundred platinum in vendor sold materials alone. So there won't be a huge market for them, but that also means very low competition. As you will read in my upcoming article on www.wowecon.net, any time new things are added in there is potential for massive profits to come. The what and how you sell them is a huge factor as much as the demand is.

For those of you that can't afford this large of an investment, which even I'm not comfortable doing, there are still a bunch of things you can do to make a killing. First is to stokpile eternal dust and catalysts. They will all go up in price and the cats can be broken down my apoth's into essences which are needed for a number of recipes as well. There is also a new temporary weapon buff for +200 SP which requires refined bones to make.

To get those you need hollow bones and bloody fangs to craft a sacred fetish with artificer. The recipe for the fetish only costs about 50 normal tokens which is a single day of dailys. You craft a ton of them and salvage them to get bone pieces and so forth. This will not only be the best option for those that use 1h/totem but also for cleric tanks as well. These items will become in extremely high demand and the mats to make them are super cheap so start to stokpile 'dem bones yesterday.

And lastly are the recipes that will be added in with a 24 hour cool down. Since these are in a very limited supply and will likely be moderately pricey to make you can expect these to fetch a hefty profit as well. All of these CD mats are needed in all of the new crafted gear so if you don't want to go the route of selling the gear itself, just sell the mats to make it. But if you really want to capitalize on it all, do both!

So what is it that the great Stokpile, the well dressed and lover of all things shiny, is going to do? I'm banking on the mass wave of sales for the flawless +stats augments being the big money maker. For one, these already have a great rate of sales on live. The only problem is that they're rare as all get out. And with the newness of these recipes a lot of people won't even know that they can be crafted now and if they do the complexity of the mats will certainly put them off for a while.

I say complexity because you have to buy stuff fro ma vendor, learn a new recipe (two if you can't break down cats yet), use new vendor mats and crafted mats to craft. That and they're rather expensive to start crafting for almost anybody at 10ish platinum a piece. However they sell all of the time for 15 and up. I'm hoping to capitalize on this asap. Aside form that I'll definitely be selling the mats that are on a day long CD as there will be a solid demand for anybody that wants the gear made.

I'll pick up a recipe for each gear type to work for a large fee and only craft one or two pieces. And the gear that I will make I'll only make what I can use, so cleric gear it is. The last thing that I'll be doing is selling the 17 platinum vendor mats on the AH for a nice mark up on the AH to the people that are too lazy/stupid to bother reading patch notes. You'd be surprised how often people buy stuff that's sold from a vendor 20 steps away...

Thanks for stopping by!

What I've been up to

2011-07-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

NOTE: I've recently updated the list and added a bunch of new items to it. There is quite a bit in this game that does sell regularly, you just need to find them so check it out!

Lately I've been getting my fingers into a whole bunch of different things and haven't said much here about it all. So I wanted to take today to get you all up to speed on what's been going on in my Rift world. You can consider this another semi-formal status report, but less focused on the cash and more focused on my current goals. I'll be covering what markets I've been having a degree of success with, what I've been experimenting with and what's next for me.

So farm armor smith has been my top earner as far as money goes with runes being a very close second. This is most likely because I'm still missing a ton of high demand rune recipes that are all BoP zone drops. The rune recipes I'm missing are scattered throughout trash mobs in every instance except for two. I got very lucky the other day and won my first roll ever over somebody else and got a tank rune recipe. I picked up the last BoE one later that day and now I have to suffer through countless dungeon runs to get the rest. I doubt that I'll be actively farming them and once my RC has their gear finished I doubt I'll be going back that much. It simply isn't worth all the time it takes for a chance at a chance.

Meanwhile my armor smith has almost every recipe in game. They need one more from plaques and one boe epic recipe while all of the reputation, rare and epic BoE, and token bought ones are taken care of. The same thing goes for all of the professions actually. All of the gathering professions have finished the quests to learn all of the refined material recipes. Weapon smith is also missing a few plaque recipes and has all of the boe ones that I know of which is very nice. Outfitter is almost there as well with all tokens, rep, missing a plaque here and there etc.

Also artificer is also totally finished as far as I know. I add on that last little bit there because I've found a few boe recipes online for it but there is exactly zero data on them, I don't even know if they're in game so I just consider that one finished. And lastly apothecary is totally finished since all the token recipes are completely worthless. I have every color of dye learned and really expected a bit more to come out of this as they're consumables and people like to experiment with their look a lot. Maybe I just need to actually market it? Who knows but who cares really, the profits are about 30g at the absolute most on the token ones and black/white are 2 platinum when you're crazy lucky.

This profession really needs some help.

On the financial side of things I am over 6,000 platinum now with no more effort than I put forth making my fortune in WoW. I don't expect to be totally filthy rich for a while as there just isn't enough money in game to be made. People typically aren't able to drop 500 platinum to gear out their 9th alt and aren't at the point where they're making a ton of alts either. But regardless of that I'm still comparatively wealthy considering the average rift player. It seems that I've been at a steady 100 platinum profit per day after all expenses. That includes my constant talent resets, travel, soul healing, and of course my massive material stokpiles.

But now that I'm almost finished with profession dailys for plaques that cost is going to be removed entirely and will drastically increase my day to day profit. On top of that I've been slowly increasing my daily profits simply by having more and more things to sell which is a bit of a given. However when I don't come across a massive amount of dust and catalysts for super cheap I've managed to make as much as 500 platinum profit in a single day. Not bad I think. Now all I have to do is cut my costs down by a little bit more and keep up with my patent pending Stokpile AH method and I'll be hitting the big time in no time.

Thanks for stopping by!

Salvaging for a profit

2011-07-24T23:11:00.001-07:00

It seems like hundreds of people are picking up rift every day. This is evident in the fact that every other day a different level of items from trade skills are being dumped on the AH. And by dumped I mean barely over vendor value to the point that some are even losing money when the AH takes their 5% cut. Honestly that part makes me laugh.

But when you notice a page or two of gear being sold for 20g and under you should take a moment to think twice about passing it off as just another flood. The most common thing you find is gear and low level runes. Runes you can't really do much with so I just ignore them. At that low of a level you replace gear every 15 minutes so it's a total waste to spend money to slightly help you kill 30 mobs 9 seconds faster before it gets trashed. The gear however is where the money is.

For anybody with a salvaging ability you should make it a point to check the AH during prime time for crafted gear to break down that's like 20g or so and under. For this you'll want to focus on the level 40 and up range. Since every gear prof can craft item enhancements that are very useful (and last for a long time) these are actually in demand. A couple plat for an extra 15% to crit damage? Yes please! As useful and cheap as these typically are, there never seems to be any on the AH outside of the first ones you get from the trainer.

This is a market that is almost entirely untouched.

So far the most successful ones I've been selling have been exquisite whetstones and shield spikes. I'm still experimenting with the price ranges for everything right now so take this part with a grain of salt. Up until now I've been slowly increasing the sale price of these things, starting at only 1 plat and adding another 40g to the price tag each time I sell out. I'm only adding 40 because of the same reason that you always see things priced at $399.99 and such. You don't want to break that threshold even if you're only under by a single coin.

Right now the price it up to 2.6 plat and they're still selling. Right now I'm wondering a couple things for maximizing this little niche market. For one I have no idea what they exact % chance of getting metal widgets is. It seems to be 50/50 to get any of them in general and being able to get as many as 3 at once. What I really want to know is the chances of getting more than 1 and a way to move the processed metal that you get. The mid range enhancements sell pretty slowly so that's not a viable option, they may just end up being vendor food.

It's fairly often that I see a full page or two of carmintium gear up for 15g each when it costs more than double that to make. When it's that cheap the only decision I have to make is if I'm going to use RC or armor smith to break it apart for a profit.

Thanks for stopping by!

Assumed value

2011-07-21T23:26:00.001-07:00

One expression that I tend to use now and again is "assumed value" or "assumed price." I wanted to take the time today to talk about what I actually mean by that and how to apply this theory to your own AH playing. The easiest way to explain this is to think of the assumed price as a buying/selling threshold. The primary difference here is that a threshold is based off of average market prices while the assumed value is based off of essentially nothing. That's right, nothing at all.

This is a value that you place on something personally and base that value on whatever you please. You take this number and base all of your other, more concrete, prices around it. Here's an easy example. To craft certain runes and pieces of gear you need vendor sold materials, simple and straight forward mats. These mats cost anywhere from a few silver to a few gold each and the recipes that require them are just as varied.

So I am giving them an assumed value of 3g no matter what the actual value is. This is the first reason I'm going to cover for using an assumed value, simplicity. If you were to just total them up into your thresholds individually things would get a lot more complicated with many remainders at the end. Doing this keeps it simple, fast, and efficient.

The next reason that having an assumed value is important is to calculate your selling thresholds easier when using materials that aren't typically bought. Things like eternal planar dust, shimmering shards, or minor catalysts are a good example. I'll tell you how this works first and then explain it a bit more thoroughly after words. Using a shard as an example lets say that they're 10 plat on auction, when selling one of mine I'll undercut by 50g. So anytime that I craft something that uses a minor catalyst my assumed price on them is 9.5 plat which is what I calculate in my threshold for it.

Now let me explain why. Things like catalysts I don't usually buy and hold onto so I only sell them. I don't however sell them plain and instead use them to craft epics so I need to have a threshold for them still. Basically I set my assumed price to whatever my selling price "would be" if I were to sell the materials plain. It's like how I say market price doesn't matter because what you paid for something matters more. This is the same idea except the opposite.

Here's a longer explanation. It doesn't matter what they're selling for on the AH, what matters is what you are ABLE to sell them for. If a catalyst is up for 100 plat that doesn't mean you should value them at that price, because they aren't ever going to sell. Now lets use a more realistic example. Lets say that they're on AH for 8 plat.

Obviously you have to undercut them if you want yours to sell any time soon so what you are able to sell them for is 7 plat. Since you're only able to get 7 plat out of selling it, then you shouldn't value them any higher. This assumed value I suppose could also be called their actual value because it is what you are actually going to get from selling it. Keep this in mind next time you go to sell something using rare materials.

And closing with one final example of when to use an assumed value. Whenever I RB a ton of greens I get loaded up with flickering shards, far more than I'll ever use. I can't sell them aside from a vendor because there are just that many around and you don't use a lot of them at all. Because of that I put their assumed price right at what a vendor will pay me.

I'll never ever sell them on AH but I did spend money to get them by buying mats to craft gear and RB. So I set their assumed price at 6g which is slightly under what I'm paying to craft RB gear. Even though they'll only ever sell to a vendor, I still paid money to acquire them which gives them a value just as much as it gives a value to all of the useful materials I get.

Everything has a price. Nothing is free.

Door charge

2011-07-20T21:58:00.000-07:00

When it comes to entering any market there's going to be a door charge, an entrance fee of sorts. This is what you're going to have to pay and invest up front before you can even think about selling anything. Today I'm going to talk about what price you'll have to pay with any new market in rift and the potential consequences of such.

As per usual, I'll get the obvious out of the way first; money. In the business world we all know that it takes money to make money, and life on the AH in an MMO is no exception. You'll have to first skill up your trade skills, throwing away 90% of the cash you could be making off selling the mats as is. Luckily though, each profession has some form of a salvage option to get back some of the materials. Salvaging also gives you unique mats that can only be gotten FROM salvaging, these are used to make temporary item enhancements.

One example is whetstones which increase melee crit damage. These items help recoup your losses at higher levels and salvaging lets you sneak in a few dozen extra skill ups in the mean time. Bear in mind that it's not worth buying things just to salvage unless you're after the "salvaged only" type of materials as you're not promised the raw mats that went into it. The key thing here is learning how to cut costs and corners in every way possible. This is step number one in reducing your entrance fee which is essential to maximizing your profits.

The next and most important price you have to pay is time. Time is not free and is the most valuable commodity a human being will ever have access to. I say this because time is the only thing which you cannot change, reform, make more or less of. The time you have now is the only time you get. Each day has only 24 hours, no more no less. So learning how to "spend" your time wisely is imperative to being cost effective and reducing the price you have to pay with a new market.

The time investment in rift is much akin to the investment needed for the JC market in wow. You get dailys to do for crafting tokens which let you buy special recipes. Now you might be thinking "How can you be more time efficient when you have a hard limit on quests" but there are still ways to get around this as it were. But first we have to divide by zero and split up the definition of time.

In terms of breaking into a market that needs you to do daily quests you have to think of it in time frames, and not just a total number of hours. Meaning it will take X days to get this recipe and Y for that. This is different than total times because you can only do these quests once per day so your "total time" won't be more than an hour or two, even though ti's spread out over the course of a month.

Important distinction.

Since the higher you get in skill the more tokens you get form these quests you can sort of fake your way through it to a point. You can choose what form of currency (total time or money) you are capable of investing more of. You can power level your professions at the expense of a huge sum of cash so that you can get the most amount of tokens immediately as opposed to three weeks from now. This will cut the time frame of (fake numbers) 3 months down to 2 months.

This is obviously a significant decrease, albeit fictitious, but you can see the point I'm trying to make. By going this route you will be able to start working that market and selling those rare items immensely faster than only taking skill ups as you level.

The other "currency" that you can invest in is total time spent. By this I mean that you can just farm everything. You will drastically lower the plat cost but at the expense of not having much fun on game. This will also reduce the time frame, but depending on what you have more of (and value least) decides your course of action.

Whichever route you choose the goal should always be the same, get as many tokens as possible as fast as possible. The sooner you get into a market the faster you're going to turn a profit. Or lose everything. Ya know, whichever comes first.

Thanks for stopping by!

Rift leveling tips

2011-07-19T21:34:00.001-07:00

In hopes of inspiring a person or three to play Rift I've decided to take today to give a fist full of tips on leveling up as the title suggests. The good news is that it will be far more then the painfully obvious "go here at level 10 do every quest, then go here" that you'll get in essentially every paid guide out there. Now you are going to get proper leveling tips for free ad free, imagine that! The bad news is that the only way it relates to making the rift plat is that you can't level your crafting unless you level your crafter. Enjoy!

Get a pet to tank.
Every calling has a soul that can summon a pet and only clerics don't have a tanking pet to start off with. Clerics don't necessarily need one, but more on that later. Warriors get beast master, mages get elementalist or necromancer, and rogues get hunter. Either way having a pet to tank is such a massive boon I cannot imagine leveling without one or a pocket healer.

The big thing that you'll have to get used to is that tank pets can actually, ya know, tank! It was amazing being able to not worry about pulling threat single target. Some pets are even able to aoe tank, but won't hold threat if YOU aoe. In other words, they can keep a few mobs occupied while you pick them off one at a time. Clerics don't need a pet because they are able to spec into cheap instant heals which will negate that necessity for the most part.

Level your crafting professions now!
Each crafting prof gets two daily quests to donate crafted items to the war effort. You should do these every day fro two reasons. First being that you get artisan's tokens which let you buy the "valuable" recipes and the sooner you start the more you'll have when you are able to invest in making some of them. The second is they don't give a pithy 200 exp at level 1, no they give a full quest reward of several thousand experience. Doing that every day twice a day is going to be a huge boost to hitting 50.

Leveling gear.
Simply put, ignore it entirely until your mid 30s. Don't ever bother with buying greens as you'll get all you need to be comfortably well off from quests. Blues however can last as long as 15 levels, this is especially true for the 33+ range and you can even be wearing a few pieces to 50. So save yourself some time and a bit of coin and don't bother buying anything until then. As for low level purples, as you may expect they're generally too expensive to be worth while and aren't going to last much longer than an equal level blue item.

Become a pack rat.
There are more profession overlaps than you can imagine in this game. That's probably why you can have 3 professions at once instead of only 1 or 2. If you're not using your cloth, stash it away for a toon that will use it. The same goes with any leather and boe greens. If you're reading this blog then you're probably going to level them eventually to make some money off of them so save yourself the hassle and save it all up for when you need it. When bag space becomes an issue keep an eye on the cloth and bag market. It's fairly often to see them being dumped from leveling up OF. The extra bank space if pretty cheap for the first 2-3 slots so it won't be a major investment.

Get the portals open early.
This is going to be a lot more handy then one might imagine and I recommend doing it as soon as you get your mount and have some spare time. Yes you'll be going through a ton of high level zones with mobs that will om nom nom your face, but stick to the roads and you'll mostly be fine. If you level up your professions higher than the zone you're questing or farming in then you won't be able to turn in your prof dailys, this will make that possible at early levels. You'd think that this is hard to do at first or require an hour or three of doing corpse runs, but that's not the case.

When I ran my baby level 24 cleric all over the world I died three times total. One time I died because I was busy writing up a wonderful entry for you all to read while auto running into a group of 5 mobs 20 levels above me. The second time was intentional because there were 10 mobs between me and the portal and I didn't want to spend 5 minutes walking around them. So I died on purpose and soul walked right on past them. All in all it may take 30 minutes depending on what portals you have open already and won't be filled with corpse runs.

Get all of your souls early.
You get new souls (talent trees) from quests that are opened up at level 13ish. To do them you have to close a rift to get a quest item which you have to use at a death rift. You'll most likely want to experiment with different soul combo's so get them done early. This is important because the quests give good experience and it's something that you'll be doing eventually anyway so you might as well get half a level out of it.

If you're doing it all solo.
Enjoy the rifts in rift. These are going to give you a lot of experience and items that you'll be wanting at 50 so take advantage of them any time you can. Again focus on the fire and earth ones for the egg shells, I cannot emphasize this one enough. Also be sure to do every quest that you can dig up and try to find groups when you have to kill elites, trust me you won't be able to solo them unless you're OP and leveling in style. Luckily enough you can use the LFG tool for the quests as well.

Deciding on what zone to go to next is fairly straight forward due to the bread crumbs that you're given, but if you see a quest is orange don't bother. To avoid the back and forth between zones and questing hubs just stick with a single zone until most of the map is uncovered. Also try and take part in the zone wide invasions as well. You're almost guaranteed to get at least one of the epic versions and several of the normal wide scale ones. With these you'll get killer exp, more planar mats, and special currency to buy some very long lasting gear. Oh yeah and they're fun as hell too. Nice little perk there eh?

Thanks for stopping by!

Random rift thoughts 1

2011-07-19T03:30:00.001-07:00

Today's entry is going to be a large collection of short tips that have been in my mind lately. As my old readers may remember, my "random thoughts" entries contain just a handful of short quick tips to help you make some extra coin here and there. While they are important and do make/save money, they're far too short to dedicate an entire day's entry to. So instead I just write them down as they come and when there is what seems like enough, I'll post them all at once. There is no particular order of importance or any real semblance of transition. Read on and enjoy!

1. I got my first piece of fan mail!
For those of you that don't know, I refer to any in game mail I get yelling at me to stop undercutting by more than one coin as fan mail. Any time you get this, it means you're doing something very right and are about to lose another competitor. Today marks the first official piece of fan mail that I've gotten and it was in the rune crafting racket. There's been a few here and there trying to "bargain" with me, but now I got the real thing.

Happy goblin is happy. Ok that's not exactly very money making related, but it's an important milestone for every AH player out there. There is also a much more practical reason why it's better to undercut by larger amounts in rift. That's because there is no addons to automate the amount and it's a lot easier to hit "1, tab, 44" as opposed to "1, tab, 99, tab, 99." Doing this over the course of a few hundred auctions saves an absolutely huge amount of time.

2. Sell epics during the week.
As we all know, timing can be very important and can make or break certain markets. Pre-raid items such as potions and what not will never see great sales as they would before most raids start while post-raid ones only have great sales afterwards and are "meh" at all other times. A specific market in rift has the exact same issue and that is BoE epic gear.

It doesn't matter what armor type or role they're made for, if they're purple only sell them during the week. This is when people will grind out dungeons for a new shiny, spend 3 hours not getting one and figure screw it, I'll just buy one. This isn't true for the weekends because people typically have much more time to run dungeons or are out farming the mats "for free."

3. Epic recipes are priceless.
Your average expert dungeon can take about 30-45 minutes with a good group. With an average or bad group it can take well over double that. Epic recipes are all boe and (generally) only drop from the last boss of an expert dungeon with a wonderful 0.4% drop rate. That means that if you want to try and "farm" a certain recipe you are going to be beating out death and taxes in longevity before you see it. Because of that if there's one you want and don't see anybody selling it, no price is too high.

It's no different than materials you can't farm and aren't for sale on AH. You have to pay the going rate and whoever has them to sell has a temporary monopoly. When I see an epic recipe pop up on the AH I'll go as high as 120 platinum for it if it's valuable to me on my server. Of course if there's a low bid I'll try and snag it for cheap that way, but if people are camping it I'll just flat out buy it. The time it would take to get one by running an hour long dungeon plus another 15-30 minutes of que times plus a potential 40 minutes of wipes and corpse runs is...yeah you get the point.

Just buy the damned thing.

4. Check the Dunes of Akala for rifts
The Dunes of Akala is the area of shimmer sand in the NW where there's usually a hand full of major and minor level 50 rifts. It's worth it to port over now and then to see if there are any up or not. That's because this area is the prime spot for doing a bunch of crafting rifts. So if you hop over and only one or two rifts if any up there's a good chance that you'll find a group or even a raid doing a ton of them.

As I mentioned in my entry about crafting rifts you don't have to be in the group doing them in order to get the rewards, you only need to participate. This makes for a good opportunity to get a bunch of extra mats and if luck favors you a few extra plaques as well.

5. Promote higher prices: Success!
A while ago I wrote of an experiment that I was doing on the AH. Prices on many things were in the gutter and constantly below material costs even when people were willing to pay much, much more. What I did was instead of undercutting further I would list at the second cheapest or if everything was under the material costs, I'd list my wares at my normal price if nobody was selling them on the AH minus a few platinum.

A few weeks later and I'm starting to see a few things that I haven't sold before due to prices. Namely a few common runes used for leveling up but still very useful options. After that was a few low level crafted items like damascus weapons and the shields from the starting zone faction rep vendors. That and I got a few "oops" sales where people would buy my expensive stuff even though there are many more up for far less. That happened because not everyone sorts the AH by unit price and just assume that the one op top is the cheapest or merely buy what they see first.

Thanks for stopping by!

Where to start: Rift AH survival tips

2011-07-18T01:42:00.000-07:00

Just as Rome wasn't built in a day neither is an auction house empire. Like you've heard hundreds of times "it takes money to make money" is forever true no matter where you go so you need to do something to get your start up capital. Today I wanted to give a few extra pointers and stepping stones for the lowbies that need to save for their epic mount at 50 or those without maxed professions. Believe it or not there are still ways to make money without tirelessly grinding away for hours on end.

Granted you won't be making a ton of cash, but it's more than you will spending an hour to farm up 10 platinum worth of ore. As per the theme of this blog, farming as your primary source of income is an absolute no-no which is why I write entries for both the big AH goblins and those that need money just to train their skills and everyone in between. Take what you read today and try and work it into your daily play time as I can promise it won't take up much time, even for those that only play two hours in a given day.

Know your dailys.
The daily quest for every profession is 90% predictable. You don't know what ones you'll have to do tomorrow but you will know what ones you can get which is any pair of 4 different quests (based on profession). As such you will know what daily quests that everyone else might be doing as well. For example, right now my outfitter daily can be to make silk shoes, composite shoes, exotic leather boots, or thick leather boots.

Each of those nifty pieces of footwear takes 2 of the associated material to craft and needs 6 total to be crafted for the lower ones and 7 for the higher. Where am I going with all of these random numbers? To more numbers obviously, but the ones you're looking for this time.

If it takes 14 exotic leather to do a profession daily, what stack sizes should you be AH'ing them at? that's right, 14. I've seen several stacks of leather up for 3g/each while I watch my stacks of 14 leather sell out for 20g/each. The same goes for every crafting profession out there so look into what kind of boots they need to craft and what not for the daily and start selling and/or flipping those mats in the desired stack sizes.Cloth however is the exception to this because anybody can pick it up and that lowers the price on it dramatically.

Again with the material conversions!
I know I'm sorta beating a dead horse here, but trading down RC mats is just too good to not mention all the time. The same thing goes for leather and cloth actually. The leather I can understand because you need butchery in order to turn hides into leather with can be used by an outfitter. The cloth however needs an outfitter to create and only they need it in any large amount.

The only guess I can make is somebody leveled their profession up so high that they can't get the materials they need for the daily where they're questing at. And while that's a good reason to buy something that you can craft by default, it's also the only reason. I've been making a nice profit by AFK crafting bolts of silk and thick leather lately and has helped fund my first alt's training and mounts. Definitely look into it.

Well it looks like it's good...
The average player is not sure of what's good or not stat wise so its all guess work to them. In fact the only real clue that's given to you in game is the stats on your armor class. If you're a warrior you'll see strength and dext on plate everywhere so you'll figure out (hopefully) that you get a use out of both while not knowing exactly how much of one is worth in the other. Because of this split stat items are the best to sell. People will naturally want to match their runes to their gear which has both on them and some AP at higher levels.

The Pokémon Imperative.
Artifacts, people just love to collect them all! Aside from an epic mount at 100 finished full sets, there is no reason ever to buy these. And yet people sell up fist fulls of plat for the blue level ones and even pay as much as 2 plat for common ones. I'm sure that if you do a little google work, you can find out where they all spawn at and can check those locations from time to time.

In case you're unaware, artifacts come from picking up the teeny tiny glowy objects that you see scattered all over the place in every zone. In addition to that, there is another out in scarwood that you can do 3 times in a day for one of 16ish different ones. To complete that set you need to have every last one so these can fetch a pretty penny.

Everybody has a use for something.
Outside of the first two zones anything that is at least common quality has a price tag on it for a player. It could be animal parts from butchery or common artifacts you've seen a dozen times. Some may only sell for a few gold each, but that's a few more than you had before. That pays for your skill training if you sell all of it when you can instead of vendoring it all without trying. Once you get to the mid 40s range you can spend as much as 1.5 plat just on skills which totals up very fast.

Now mind you the price of mats in the first two zones will go up eventually, but right now it's best to either use them or vendor them. The main reason being that the deposit cost of a stack of burlap for example isn't too far off from the vendor price and the average prices are maybe 50g over the vendor. When you have to count your copper watch what you decide to auction carefully.

Thanks for stopping by!

Platinum to the core

2011-07-15T02:25:00.001-07:00

In case you don't know, "cores" are a crafting reagent that seem to drastically shift in price. They were added in an early patch as a zone wide rare drop and are required for most recipes from a zone specific quartermaster. Each zone has their own unique core which go into crafting level appropriate blue gear.

Several content patches later many people that have been 50 for a while still don't know what they're good for. This is why you'll see them for 20g today and then up to 5 plat tomorrow. Can you sense an opportunity for flipping here? I sure can.

Here's a list of all the cores and the respective zones that they drop in. Taken from the Zam wiki page found here.

Evergreen Core - Freemarch and Silverwood
Enchanted Core - Silverwood and Freemarch
Stone Core - Stonefield and Gloamwood
Shadow Core - Gloamwood and Stonefield
Rusty Core - Scarlet Gorge
Gnarled Core - Scarwood Reach
Cracked Core - Droughtlands
Glowing Core - Moonshade Highlands.
Frozen Core - Iron Pine Peak
Shimmering Core - Shimmersand
Dead Core - Stillmoor

Like I mentioned earlier, these fluctuate in price daily, sometimes hourly. This gives you a handful of options to make a profit with. The obvious I stated already, as usual, flipping them every other day. Buy them all up today for 30g each and resell them in a few days for a few plat each. The next is crafting some gear to sell "under" material costs. This is where it's important to stokpile...again. Buy up a metric ass ton of them when they're uber cheap and let them chill out in your bank.

They stack to 50 like most everything else so this won't be a problem as far as bag space goes. And then you just craft the associated gear with any cheap old augment. The primary level range you'll want to be focusing on is everything in the 30s area. This is because these blues will easily last you through the mid 40s range where you end up having to kill tons of mobs that are 1-2 levels over you. As such this small boost in theory is actually quite large in practice.

As a nice little bonus or added incentive here, most of the recipes can be bought at only friendly notoriety. Just by leveling up through the zone questing and doing a ton of rifts I hit friendly with everyone. There are a couple that require honored so I can't comment on them just yet, but I assume that they'll fetch an even higher profit. Speaking of profit the general price range that I sell at is anywhere from 3-7 plat per item. It might not be much but the sales are consistent and that is almost entirely profit. Especially when you're patient and buy the cores when they're down to only pocket change.

Thanks for stopping by!

Rift best selling items

2011-07-13T23:53:00.001-07:00

Today is going to be a short list style entry on what my best selling items are in rift. No real explanations as always, just a large listing of what the most profitable items are that I have found. I'll go profession by profession and in addition to listing everything that sells, I'll also give recommended prices for what I typically sell each item for.

Enjoy!

Outfitter
Spellspun bag - 1.5 platinum
Shaleweave robe - 6 platinum
Steeled leather brigandine - 8 platinum
Witchweave bag - 9 platinum
Darkcloth leggings - 38 platinum

Rune crafter
Blazing dexterity rune shard - 4 platinum
Blazing indomitable rune - 4 platinum
Blazing intelligence runeshard - 2 platinum
Brilliant tough rune - 5 platinum
Blazing tough rune - 9 platinum
Incandescent indomitable rune - 10 platinum

Armor smith
Darkmetal tassets - 6 platinum
Orichilum gauntlets - 9 platinum
Faith-forged spaulders - 45 platinum

Weapon smith
Black iron hatchet - 30 platinum
Ebony hatchet - 6 platinum
Damascus saber - 4 platinum
Exquisite whetstone - 3 platinum
Steeltouched longsword - 4 platinum
Warden's dagger - 3 platinum

Apothecary
Nothing, sorry folks.

Artificer
Fine platinum chain - 9 platinum
Band of crystallized mana - 30 platinum

Thanks for stopping by!

You're hired!

2011-07-12T20:05:00.002-07:00

Note: This isn't the official post for today. Click Here to read it.

Aloha all! Very cool news on my end I wanted to share with you all. I am now officially a professional-ish writer on the subject of the auction house! I have been hired on staff for the website www.warcraftecon.net where I'll be writing four articles a week over there on the exact same subject that I talk about here: making tons of money in your MMO of choice.

Warcraftecon if the go to site for a lot of wow based economy information. While I am not actually playing wow, I do write about the auction house and general economic theory in an MMO which applies to every game that has one. For everything that I write that it wow-centric you won't be finding it here, I'll leave a link and a short description of what I wrote about up top and that's all. For my normal blog posts however, I'll have a direct link to the site where my article is published.

So what does this mean for the blog? It means that sometimes you'll have an extra link to click to get your daily fix of into on making money on the AH and that's it. I am certainly not abandoning this blog, not by a long shot. I'll be keeping all of my rift centric writing here while my general purpose theory and wow specific writing will be over there.

Lastly, there is no need to worry about me sending all of my "best" content over there and leaving only the left overs on my blog. At the worst, I'll be splitting up the location of my writing. At best you will have even more awesome stuff to read while you pretend to be busy at work! Suffice to say, I am very excited about this opportunity and I look forward to sharing even more of my thoughts on the AH with all of you.

Thanks for stopping by!

Heavy Metal Platinum

2011-07-12T20:05:00.001-07:00

I've been playing rift for just over 2 months now and I'm still having loads of fun with it. I've already changed mains and have every profession at max skill level. In addition to that I have every token recipe purchased and basically every recipe from plaques learned as well. That being said I think I'm well on my way to having my "crafting empire" in full swing. That and playing wow isn't even a consideration at this point. I say all of this because today I want to go over my favored market in rift and the one that is making the most platinum out of all of the ones I have open to me.

To date armor and weapon smithing has gotten me more profit than any of my other markets by a large margin. My best selling gear is plate dps oriented and my biggest profit margins are from anything that's purple. The epics sell for a high profit margin because people expect them to be expensive and they actually are pretty expensive to make. By knowing how my customer base is thinking allows me to get away with much higher prices in this market as opposed to any others. Just as it was in wow, the most popular items are all melee oriented which is still the most popular class.

It seems that the generic melee and generic caster "names" of classes attract the most attention. This could be because people are lazy and don't want to find out wtf a cleric is so they go with warrior (rawr smash!) or a mage (rawr 'splosions!). Or it could be because that's their preferred style of play, who knows. Regardless they all come to me for their shiny gear. For epic weapons, the best selling items by far are the black iron hatchet and the fleshreaper which are 1h and 2h items respectively. When I don't have an augment on them they tend to sell extremely slow, but any time they do their rate of sales is fairly consistent.

As for the blue weapons, the best ones are typically tank or caster focused. 2h maces sell to clerics and 1h maces and swords sell to clerics, mages, and warrior tanks which are all in the same level rage of late 40's. This is likely because the ones you get from questing and normal mode dungeons don't typically have the most important stats for these classes: hit, focus, and avoidance.

A weapon that you get at level 38 is going to be better than one you get at 50 if the low level ones has the primary stats you need. And without a certain amount of these stats you won't get into the expert mode dungeons so these are both extremely popular and necessary. Without buying them you could spend 12 hours doing random dungeons just to get two specific items so that you can do what you're really wanting to.

After that we have armor smith that makes lots of gear for every role for clerics and warriors. Clerics are the generic healing class, but can fulfill every role from tank to support and wear chain mail armor. If you're a melee cleric you will by default have a caster stat to melee stat conversion so anything that's chain with non caster stats is going to be a slow sale. That's because while a cleric tank does like parry, they have a talent that increases your parry by X% of your spell power so 1 sp = 3 parry. That's a lengthy explanation I know, but it is needed to understand why I don't focus on certain items.

The most popular epic armor I craft are the faith forged spaulders which is a cleric piece with generic caster stats. Every cleric in game should want these when they hit 50 as they are loaded with everything you need even if they are a tad expensive. Though oddly enough the epic armor for warrior dps is severely lacking in the sales department. The best selling rare items from this profession are the darkmetal sets for both warriors and clerics. This is again due to the fact that they have hit and focus on them or are just loaded up with crit. Out of all the stats in game crit seems to be the most important one after reaching the cap on focus or hit so anything that has that over ap/sp is going to be a hot item.

Out of all the things I can craft in both professions, I was let down the most by the ranged weapons. I barely sell any guns or bows ever for any level range outside of a sub level 20 bow. Why this is I cannot begin to guess other than the fact that there are only a few classes that use them. But even still there is little to no competition in these markets so why they still sell so slowly is beyond my understanding at this time.

All in all these professions are pretty fun even though they take a lot of inventory management with all of the different materials they both need. And they need everything but flowers. I only hope that rune crafting starts to pick up a bit more later on, but unless pugs start forming and doing better in raids and the harder rifts I don't think this will happen. In a solid raiding guild you'll have every profession covered for consumables and that includes RC so they typically won't need to go to the AH that often. But we shall see.

Thanks for stopping by!

The lonely goblin

2011-07-11T23:25:00.000-07:00

When patch 1.3 landed the other week I had a bit of time to kill due to extended maintenance. While waiting for shards to come back up I was browsing assorted rift forums, looking for some random info here and there on crafting and searching for a few recipe locations. During my browsing I would of course look for any "how does i make the plt lol" types of threads and went through them. After reading a few here and there and thinking of what I see in general and chat typically I noticed something.

I am all alone.

Out of dozens of pages and countless comments on game I have only seen a single person talk about working the AH to make money in rift. Literally, only one person. Yes I have competitors and yes people sell stuff on the AH and make money from it and yes there are a few people that claim to have hundreds of thousands of platinum. But there is not a single goblin on the entire shard. And considering what I've read so far, I wouldn't be shocked if there's maybe 6 goblins in the entire game for all of North America. That's a pretty crazy thought isn't it?

For all of the people hat claim to be rich let me tell you a few things that every single one of them has in common.

- No screen shots or other form of proof
- Gives away thousands every day to guildies and friends
- Is convinced that making money is easy as hell
- Doesn't understand why everyone doesn't have 500k platinum
- Has the exact same "method" as everyone else: get a monopoly on a recipe, profit.
- Farms all of their materials for free

Ok so they're obviously not too bright. At all. The farming for free failure is so widespread in this game it's staggering to me so that makes taking the goblin route a little bit more interesting. But when people are selling crafted gear for 10 platinum under the cost of the all time record lowest prices you KNOW they believe it. And the saddest part of that is that anytime somebody asks for advice on making some money or what items tend to sell well or profs that can make money they're met with 12 different versions of "go farm noob." Every answer to what sells for a profit is precluded by 12 different versions of "first farm the mats."

To me this is unheard of but it's the truth. Outside of two other people, I have not seen anybody working any market consistently. And of those two people, one spends hours a day farming for free and the other only works a single market and not much of it at that. What does that mean for yours truly? It means that there are countless areas of the AH where I have zero competition that's what! While that may seem like taking easy street to fame and fortune it's not. That's because there just isn't a lot of money in the world to be spent.

In addition to that there isn't much way for it to be artificially generated either such as through daily quests or dungeons. 95% of every coin comes from another player so while one person spends all of his money it doesn't evaporate, it goes to somebody else. But when they do go broke there isn't any real way for them to get more cash other than selling something to another player. This is going to make getting rich rather interesting without a massive demand monopoly. It also means that it is technically possible to have every penny that every player has. I think that's a fair goal to aim for.

Thanks for stopping by!

Lets talk competition

2011-07-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

My competition to be exact. Almost immediately I noticed the main competitor in the rune market and have since noticed another. The second one only works the high end stuff while the first sells almost everything in game. And just about all of it is selling under materials. They're obviously in the "farmed it for free" group of idiots. This is apparent in the fact that they're continuously selling things and continuously online. Far far more than me and this is truly frightening.

How do you kill that which has no life?

Well I already know how. Today I ask a better question: how do you kill somebody that has a lot of cash and places absolutely zero value on their time? That's an important question indeed and unfortunately is one that I have no answer to. The second one is obviously a businessman, a goblin. I can understand them and therefore am able to handle them eventually. A legitimate, honest to god no-lifer is something you don't come across every day and is a little depressing if you ask me.

Suffice to say this is a serious problem, one that I don't expect to solve any time soon. In the mean time though I have to learn to deal with it. The first thing I'm doing is trying to find out when it is that they post what on the AH. As far as I know there is no macro or script that you can use to make the cancel/post cycle any faster or easier. Trust me I've looked, oh dear how I have looked.

This means that they're doing all of this by hand for hours at a time. That leads me to believe that they only do a single cycle when they go to do one, they would have to truely be inhuman to camp the AH with as much crap as they're listing. If that's the case I'm going to have to REALLY work hard to take them apart.

The name of the game here is adaptation.

I'm going to have to adapt to how they play and change my methods around to suit this unique situation. Obviously I've had to deal with campers and the like before, but NEVER one this insane. And it figures that they're the first one that I come across on a brand new game where I barely have a leg to stand on financially. It seems to me that they flush the AH at least 3 times a day and as many as 5. I haven't managed to pin down any sort of schedule that they have, but I do know that they're not camping me specifically. So I've added them to my friends list and am doing the tried and true "list when they're done" method. It seems to be working so far.

In addition to that I'm doing exactly what anybody should do with a camper; make their AH life miserable. I've decided that 70g is as low as I will sell any rune which is a 100% profit. While that might seem good, that's only a 50g profit margin off the mats. 50g is almost nothing.

The main thing I have to do is find a pattern. If they have a pattern it will tell a lot about how often they camp and what they sell when. If I can figure this out then I can easily work myself around them and make a nice profit. But until then I'll let them buy up my cheap runes when they reset the price only to be undercut. They're starting to sound a little blue..

Thanks for stopping by!

Augments: What, When, and Why

2011-07-07T23:35:00.000-07:00

Something that makes crafting gear for profit a little tricky in rift are the augments that you can add. These are all small bonuses to an assortment of different that's like a rune or enchantment, but the catch is that you can only add them to a crafted items as it is crafted. So once an item is made it can no longer be augmented and using one of the higher level ones has a chance to fail to boot. So this chance of failure means you don't want to buy something expensive for it to just blow up when you're only going to sell it.

This is also a big reason for people to buy the mats instead of a cheaper pre-crafted item so that they can be sure it has the right augment for them. You can tell what augment was used based on the prefix attached to the name, but you can only tell how good it is by manually comparing the stats to a plain version of the item. Because of that, most people won't bother to look at what augment was used, only that it has one and matches up correctly. By that I mean that there isn't any wisdom or int on a melee dps weapon for example.

But when somebody goes to buy something from the AH the first question is the most important as it is an automatic yes or no on the spot: can I afford it? If your wares are too expensive then you're not getting a sale and that's the end of it. If it does happen to be in their price range that is when you get the continue with the rest of the silent AH interview. Anything with an stats appropriate augment is going to be better than without just like an item without a rune or enchant is not an upgrade without it. So better is better obviously enough. But augments aren't free.

The real question you need to ask before wondering if you should add an augment to an item or not is how long are they going to be using it. If it's only a leveling piece then the primary concern is going to be price. The average player will look for any gear that's blue and available and grab the cheapest one regardless of bonuses like that. Why? Because they don't care that's why. Sure it's nice, but it's not important enough to wait for a good deal because by the time you find one that item is going to be replaced.

However if it is an item that's going to last them for a while then things get a little tricky. This is one of two situations where having an augmented item is more important than not and it varies from buyer to buyer. For example if you are trying to just get geared enough to do t2's you'll want every tiny bit of extra stats that you can grab so that you can que for them. But if they know that they'll be getting boosted through dungeons and go straight into raids these extra stats are meaningless as they only need just enough so that they don't feel entirely worthless.

Then we come to the social player who just wants to look like they're good without actually being good. For these people you can just throw on any PoS augment so long as it has the right name. It could be a +1 bonus to strength and they won't care because they won't ever look or even care to. This, like most everything, comes down to knowing your market and who your customers are. One final random note about when to use an augment is for any high priced items. This way the little bit of extra stats may be that little extra push that convinces them to buy it.

Now let me give you a few specific in game examples. The Fleshreaper is a great 2h weapon that rivals some t2 gear. If nothing else the big reason to buy one will always stand: it's epic and you can have it NOW. But it is pretty expensive to craft and takes a whopping 4 plaques to learn the recipe which means not many can craft it outside of the people who "collect" every recipe then ignore them forever.

Since this item is rather expensive to make and sells somewhat slow you'll want to give a prospective customer every reason to buy it that you can, this means augment it. It doesn't have to be an epic level 20 platinum valued augment, but you don't want to throw on some PoS either. I try to add in either a max level green or a rare quality one any chance that I get for these types of items. Anything that is expensive and sells slow is when you want to throw on a good augment.

The other important example to consider is leveling gear. This is gear that's going to be replaced in a few days or a week at most depending on the range. Anything that is under level 40 will be replaced quickly while anything above may last until 50 and into t1 runs depending on the luck of the drops. When somebody is buying a good piece of gear to level and quest with, what are they looking for exactly?

They want something that's right for their spec and is going to last a long time without being too expensive for what is essentially a throw away item. Leveling gear counts as throw away pieces because that's exactly what you're going to do with them. Use them for a while then toss it. This means that price is the more important factor here.

Using one of my best selling weapons as an example, the bony hatchet, you don't want to augment these things. The reason is because it is going to be a total waste to do so more often than not. The only time I use one is if I find myself with a bunch of augs that I'm not going to use any time soon so I'll just throw them on because they're too much of a hassle to auction off. In short, use good augments on expensive high-end items and don't go out of your way to use them on leveling gear.

Thanks for stopping by!

Random drops price guide

2011-07-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

When you're out and about questing, doing invasions, or closing rifts you'll come across tons of random goodies. Some of these goodies are "throw aways" or should go to a vendor, but most of them have a value on the AH. Since these drop only from things that 70% of everybody is doing many times every single day a lot of them aren't worth much. They are however still in high demand. Today I'm going to do my best to list off as many as I can think of and then I'll give you a good idea of what price range you should be selling them in.

This is all of course based on your server so YMMV as per usual. The bulk of these items are going to be coming from rifts and zone invasions, but I'll list other things as well and make a note of where they come from if you want to specifically go looking around for them. And lastly, as with any list type entry that I do there will be a link over yonder to this entry and I'll update it frequently. This way you'll have easy access and the prices and item will always be current.

Enjoy!

Planar essences.
The common ones you'll want to just vendor or RB for the most part. The only exception to this is the ones with 3 active stats such as strength, dext, and crit. If it has resists or endurance it's a throw away. As for the greater ones, those are always useful at any level above 30. I say above 30 because you're not very likely to be able to have a focus to put them into until that point. These are all random drops from invasions (zone and normal), rifts, and foot holds.

Common lesser: 1 platinum
Rare lesser: 2-4 platinum
Greater essences: 1-5 platinum

Planar consumables.
By thins I mean things like earth runes from earth rifts and soul shards from death rifts. Each of these are useful in some way but are worth nothing more than what a vendor will pay you. I like to keep a handful of each kind around for when I go rifting by myself as they can add a lot of damage or self healing in addition to potions.

The only possible exception to this are the level 50 versions because they are needed to craft resistance consumables. The emphasis here is on "possible" because I have not crafted any resistance items (runes, potions, etc.) because they need a bunch of eternal dust which is a tad expensive for me right now. That and the fact that I haven't seen any on the AH either makes me wonder. Long story short, these are almost all throw-aways. Use them or vendor them.

The only exception to this are the ancient/elder tablets from water rifts and that whole world event thing that's going on. A lot of dps warriors use these for the energy regen and is crucial to a few builds. They go away when you die and only last 15 minutes-ish so they'll go through a lot of them on your average day. In this case they're definitely worth hanging onto for either use or for sale if prices seem worth it.

Artifacts.
These are the little glowy tiny orbs of light you see scattered all around the world. You complete "sets" of a certain type and that gets you a lucky coin. You use these coins to buy vanity gear or an epic mount. Don't get excited because you need to finish 100 sets to get the mount which is NOT easy and if you buy them all is far more expensive than the mount itself. You can also get ones that are unique to elemental zone invasions as well which are very sought after. For any green artifacts from invasions, add 3 platinum. For rare invasion artifacts, they can be as low as 3 platinum.

Common artifacts: 1 platinum or less
Green artifacts: 3-5 platinum
Blue artifacts: 10-15 platinum

Do note that this does not include the new artifacts that can only be seen with the "quantum sight doo-boppy" that was introduced with the patch. As for those I can only assume that the price is much much higher than the normal ones you'll find in your daily routine.

Augments.
These are all over the place in price. My guess is that a lot of people aren't too sure what they should be worth or sold for. Also if you're not going to craft any gear these are totally worthless to you so they can easily be thrown onto the AH for next to nothing. For the rare ones you can make some good money flipping them. There's also not a good way to list them off below the rare levels, but I'll try.

Rough, fractured and "not good" sounding: Throw away
Plain names: 50g to 1 platinum
Green mixed stats: 1-3 platinum
Rare single stats: 2-3 platinum
rare mixed stats: 1-2 platinum
Epic single stats: 8-20 platinum

However with that being said, there are a few specific types of augments that are worth a little bit more than the rest in the same level. The ones that come the mind as the most important are spell power, melee crit, spell crit, block/endurance combo, int/spell crit combo, and attack power. This is because AP/SP are the msot obvious choice for somebody that doesn't know anything about what stats are the best. If you're a caster you'll probably want more spell power right? After that is crit which is more valuable because it is the best stat for almsot every soul combo in game. And lastly is block/endurance combo because block is just the best stat hands down for any tank.

Recipes: rare and epic.
This one is a little tricky to pin down due to the people you'll be selling these to. There are three different types of people that would be interested in these ranging from the average, the savvy, and the idiots. One type of person is the AH player which knows full well that if they wait they can get them for extra cheap. Another is the collector who believes that they are priceless and the last is the moron that will buy the recipe then buy the mats so that they can craft the item once and then forget they even have the recipe next week.

A random note on this is that for some reason rare artificer recipes seem to always be flooding the AH and even when there's only one up they tend to be at about 5-15 platinum each. Perhaps there are just that many more out there or their drop rate is just much higher. Because of this, it's very hard to come up with a good rule of thumb for what to price these at, but here's the averages that I've been seeing on my shard.

Rares: 15-30 platinum
Epics: 60-150 platinum

Rune crafting recipes are an entirely different beast just like arti recipes are. I have only ever seen epic BoU recipes on the auction house and they're almost always in the range of 40-70 platinum each. This is probably because their sale price is 1/3 of what you'll see on the price tag for an epic piece of gear. This may be what scares people off from buying them for the same price as other epic recipes.

That's all that I can come up with for now so I hope that gives a few of you out there a hand when you get a lucky drop. I'll be leaving a link to this entry off to the side under the index for easy access. I'll update it from time to time as the economy changes or when I find something new that fits in with the rest.

Thanks for stopping by!

So what's "free" anyway?

2011-07-05T22:04:00.001-07:00

The more I play the more annoyed I get that things are being crafted under material costs. But on the flip side I'm beginning to understand WHY this is and it's not as bothersome as it was at first. "Free" is typically defined as something without cost weather or not it has a value. But as any businessman will tell you value is the same as cost when it comes to deciding what to do with it. If I gave you the keys and pink slip to a brand new Porsche I don't think you'd believe it was without value.

You could either drive it and look all "mid life crisis-ey" or you could sell it off for half the price and probably finish paying off your home. Or you could launch it in a catapult for the lulz. Either way that car has a cost and a value. The cost is what it takes to use it and the value is what you can get out of it. You can either get 20 seconds of entertainment, a warm fuzzy feeling when you give it away, or a few years of security when you use the money from selling it to pay off all of your bills and debts.

The wise man will bear this all in mind before making a decision.

So what to do? Since we're talking hypothetically with a sports car let's keep rolling with that and move onto why I think so many crafted pieces are selling under material costs. Lets say you decide not to give away the sports car and don't have access to a car-a-pult (such a travesty, I know) and you decide to sell it off for the almighty dollar. So how are you going to do that? Maybe you're in the know and I'm just a fool, but I have no clue where I'd go to sell a brand new sports car for a halfway realistic price without a trade in arrangement. Just like I don't know who to sell these hard to find materials to in rift.

Starting to tie it all together now?

The fact is that these materials and recipes can be a pain in the ass to come by. This is partially because of their rarity and partially because of the fact that not many people are even capable of getting them on their own. Be it gear or level requirements for the zones that they drop in and what not. You can't have a value or a price tag without a prospective buyer. With the great rarity of the mats the price is naturally high, but they're not selling because not many people can afford them while the rarity keeps it high even with lack of a significant demand. What is the price or "value" of these rare mats if nobody is buying them then? I'll tell you, it's value is precisely what the vendor will pay you for it.

That's right, just like with everything else if you can't AH it then vendor it. Crap sitting in your bank makes you exactly ZERO profit. Even if you can put something on AH for 500 plat that doesn't mean shit if it'll never sell, which seems to be the case with a lot of mats. So if we go under the assumption that the materials X, Y, and Z are never going to sell for more than a smidgeon over the vendor price we can effectively remove them from the sale price equation.

Do that and then all of a sudden that 5 plat loss becomes a 15 plat profit. Isn't economics fun kids!? Imagine if the demand for gold IRL entirely vanished. It would still be just as useful as before for both practical purposes and vanity, but the value it once had would be meaningless.

Not to mention economic collapse.

But people would then be trying to sell it for whatever the hell they can get or would just use it to make things that DO sell. Things like wedding rings and computer parts. That's exactly what is happening in rift. People won't buy the mats but they will buy what they go into, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is going to be very difficult to wrap my mind around if this winds up being true across the board. I know of a few rare mats that do sell consistently for a regular price and base my values off of that. But for anything with purple text that's an entirely different story.

Thanks for stopping by!

The Rift List

2011-07-04T22:21:00.000-07:00

Well it was only a matter of time before I put one of these together. My old readers already know what's coming, but for anybody new here's the gist of it. This entire entry is nothing more than everything I sell. No explanations no theory, no nothing. This is just a comprehensive list of everything that I sell. Want to know how to make money in Rift? Craft a few of these and keep reading my blog and you'll find out.

Everything is sorted by profession and I'm even including the raw materials that I sell frequently. Once there is a decent way to do so I'll include item links to them as well. This page will be updated frequently and linked on the side for easy access. Also I'll mark anything that I recommend using an augment on with (a) so you'll have a rough idea for that as well. Want to know what to sell in Rift to make some platinum? Look no further.

Enjoy!

Outfitter.
Shaleweave robe
Shaleweave handwraps
Spellspun bag
Witchweave bag

Silken bag
Red scar headwrap
Steeled leather brigandine (a)
Steeled leather leggings

Steeled leather boots
Robes of flowing dark (a)
Wayward brigandine
Lockweave shoulders

Conditioned leather boots
Nightshade belt
Leggings of the hunter (a)
Darkcloth leggings (a)

Darkcloth slippers (a)
Darkcloth cap (a)
Nightshade belt
Conditioned leather shoulder guard (a)

Hood of the flowing dark (a)
Darkcloth belt (a)
Darkcloth shroud (a)
Ceremonial visage

Ceremonial breeches

Armor smith.
Darkmetal tassets
Darkmetal helm
Darkmetal shoulders
Red scar boots

Noble girdle
Steel spaulders
Orichilum gauntlets
Worshiper's chainmail

Orichilum buckler (a)
Faith-forged spaulders (a)
Steel buckled
Buckler of the scholar

Stoneshatter spellshield
Dark iron gauntlets (a)
Night iron gauntlets (a)
Implacable steel gauntlets (a)

Carmintium fauld
Dark iron helmet (a)
Faith forged helm (a)
Soul warden's helm

Sabatons of the devout (a)
Night iron sabatons (a)
Implacable steel Helm (a)
Implacable steel greaves (a)

Refurbished mathosian tabard
Refurbished mathosian barbute
Refurbished mathosian leggings
Refurbished mathosian gauntlets

Refurbished mathosian pauldrons
Refurbished mathosian greaves
Implacable steel helm (a)
Weight of the world (a)

Hauberk of the devout (a)
Orichilum chausses
Orichilum cuisses
Glossy steel helm (a)

Greathelm of grandeur (a)
Weight of the world (a)

Weapon smith.
Martyr's fist (a)
Ebony hatchet (a)
Darkmetal battleaxe (a)
Darkmetal scepter

Spellhunter's cudgel
Darkmetal sword
Fleshreaper (a)
Orichilum claymore (a)

Runeguard blunderbuss
Damascus shiv
Damascus war hammer
Damascus saber

Logger's axe
Exquisite whetstone
Fine whetstone
Spark smiter (a)

Steeltouched longsword
Spined compound bow
Ebony maul
Spellsmasher

Orichilum mace
Lightsmasher (a)
Merciless blade
Black iron hatchet (a)

Malevolent great axe (a)
Shadethorn bow (a)
Carmintium spell cutter
Callous blade (a)

Stone cleaver

Rune crafting.
Everything blazing, radiant, and incandescent.
Icewall rune
Feral rune

Raw materials.
Perpetual glow
Perpetual flare
Kinetic charge
Kinetic burst

Sentient surge
Sentient blast
Witchweave cloth
Flickering Crystal

Exotic leather
Bolt of composite cloth
Pristine distillate
Potent distillate

Spiritweave cloth
Minor catalyst
Catalytic essence
Refined gem

Inert prism
Inert crystal

Apothacary.
Nothing. Nothing at all.

Artificer.
Gold chain
Platinum choker
Platinum necklace (a)
Bound-flame ring (a)

Fine platinum chain (a)
Ill-fated relic
Stonefallen band
Red scar tracking manual

Platinum gorget
Shadethorn spellstaff (a)
Stoic pendant
Polished mahogany rod

Polished runebirch rod
Talisman of emphatic defense (a)
Tysumi's treatise on arcane travel (a)
Titan's signet (a)

Band of spells (a)
Dragon hunter's iron ring (a)
Dragon ruby ring (a)
Triple-knotted band

Orichilum wand (a)
Orichlum amulet (a)
Spell staff of raging lightning (a)
Luminous crook

Puglist's signet (a)
Brilliant diamond band
Blood berylite signet
Lightsbane diamond band

Burning powerstone

Thanks for stopping by!

About this blog

2011-07-03T22:47:00.001-07:00

I'm writing this entry as a formal introduction to what I write about, making platinum in Rift. Throughout the rest of the week I'll be posting my "list" entries which will contain everything that I sell and what sells the best. With that being said, lets get started.

What do I do?
To put it simply I sell stuff, and a lot of it. I do as much as I can in as little time as possible to make tons of platinum in Rift every day. I do it because it's myown little "mini game" in an mmo. I did the same thing in wow where I was one of the first (if not THE first) player to hit two million gold. For those of you that ask "how to make money in Rift" you've come to the right place.

I use the auction house and every profession in game to craft and sell things while using basic methods and auction house theory to make huge profits. All of these methods and theories have been proven to work and will continue to work because they're not based on the game, but instead on the people that play the game.

What don't I do?
This is the important part that sets me and my blog apart from 90% of the players. First and foremost I do not farm a single thing nor do I recommend it. Out of all my time on game not a single minute is spent farming materials or recipes or anything of the sort. Farming is boring, repetitive, and a terrible way to make money. I personally do not find farming to be interesting or entertaining and as such I don't want to spend $15 a month to do something that I am not enjoying.

Lastly I do not farm because that does not make anything free. The flowers or ore that you just picked up have a value and a price, even if you didn't spend money to acquire them you spent your time. Time which could have been spent on having fun doing what you really want to be doing. And no I do not sell platinum like the 400 spammers you have on ignore.

No exploits. No hacks. No cheats. No ads.
While playing wow I used addOns as did everyone who played the game. In Rift there are no addOns but (from what I hear) botting and the like are very common on some shards. I do not do any of this. How I make money is doing exactly what anybody can do the moment they train a profession and is 100% legitimate. Like many people, I believe cheating lessens the value of a game and detracts from the enjoyment.

I believe that something given isn't nearly as important as something you have earned on your own accord and that is exactly what cheating is. Every method and theory I write about is entirely legal and doesn't even fall into some kind of "grey area" in the rift terms of service. And you'll never see 400 ads on this blog unlike many others.

How to use this blog.
Over the next few days I will post several entries on what I sell, what the best selling items are, and a few small price guides. I write every weekday from Monday to Friday and occasionally write an entry for the weekend. Once a week I write a status report on the markets that I'm working in, different observations, and general minute to minute updates on the rift economy. Almost every entry that I write is about how to make money or cut costs and the reasoning behind it.

My last note here is for those who have just started to read. I highly suggest you glance over a few of the links in my wow AH index entry. Most of what is written there isn't wow related and is general AH theory. Everything from figuring out how to price your items and why I say to stokpile materials and undercut by large amounts is covered there.

Thanks for stopping by!

Weekend status update

2011-07-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

Aloha all! I'm writing one of a few odd entries on the weekends for a status update on what I'm still hunting down in rift. There isn't much in the way of AH platinum tips as it's mostly for my personal benefit. This is one of many ways that I keep track of what I'm missing and need more of etc. So today is what I'm still looking for recipe wise.

Reputation recipes:
Charmer's caldera runs on everyone. There's a few daily quests that give a little rep, but not much at all. The quest item turn in is fast and easy, but it'll cost like 200 plat to get the rep needed and across 3 toons that's a ton of cash. So rep runs it is!

The mage still needs granite falls, but that instance is an abomination! Seriously, it takes forever to do even with a pro group so that's on the back burner. But aside from those two, the rest are taken care of for all that I need. While the CC rep is important, there's 5 recipes after all, it will take far too long to do on 3 different toons and is far too pricey to buy right now.

Token recipes:
These are almost entirely done minus the BS ones that I'm not going to bother with. I have every recipe from normal daily tokens for everything minus 2 weapons (424 tokens) and one piece of armor (255 tokens). There are still a handful of different colored dyes that I can get, but those haven't been profitable since ever so I'm not going to bother with them.

The plaques are the real issue as one would expect. My armor/weapon smith needs 14, artificer needs only 8, RC needs 16 more, 8 for outfitter, and 2 for apothecary. Again, I'm not worried about apoth at all.

Random drops.
These simply cannot be farmed in the traditional sense. They're all very rare zone drops from expert dungeons that are BoP. As such they are in very high demand and catch a huge profit if you're lucky enough to get one. For those that do have them you might have a complete monopoly that will last a long, long time. The only instance I'm farming is lantern hook because in addition to there being a few bop recipes that I want there are 5 boe ones as well in addition to an epic recipe. With that much potential it makes it worth running once a day, that and it's a fairly easy one since it's a T1. The only problem there is just getting a group for it, heh.

So all in all that makes maybe a month or two to have all of the recipes that I can get for sure. With a dose of luck I'll pick up a few more from dungeon drops or off of the AH. And as of this writing I have officially broken 2,000 platinum. That's enough to gear up every alt I have in epics...or to expand my business of makin' the business!

Thanks for stopping by!

Price drops and stokpiling

2011-06-30T22:07:00.001-07:00

Since the creation of this blog I've yammered on at great length of the benefits and necessities of stokpiling. A few times even I've given very specific notes and advice on what, when, and how much to stokpile. Today I'm going to do the opposite and cite an example where you shouldn't stokpile by referencing the current state of a few markets in rift.

The primary reason you would want to avoid building up a stokpile is when prices are likely to go down. If you get a hint that they're about to drop (which can take many forms) you may want to consider selling off what you have piled up and save only what you'll be needing soon. This is when you make the shift from long term profits to making money on what you can sell today or tomorrow only.

The big problem here is that the signs of a price drop are usually extremely subtle and sometimes are entirely unnoticeable unless there's some patch notes that specifically state something about drop rates or material changes. It's very easy to get jumpy here and you have to resist bailing 99% of the time, but always keep your eyes open just in case.

Right now in rift, the price on raw materials are very slowly dropping lower and lower. It's only to the tune of a few gold here and there, but it is steady much like the way that gas prices raise IRL. Very slow and you won't notice it hurting your pocket until they're way up there. Same thing just in a different direction. With the materials slowing degrading in value you'd think that the price of the crafted goods are going down in stride right?

Wrong.

The prices of the crafted gear form blues to purples are staying the same. In fact a fist full of them have actually gone up since people aren't trying to sell them at all. That means it's time to really profit. My biggest gripe to date in the rift AH has been things selling under material costs and it looks like this might be about to change. If materials go down just a little bit more there will be room for some serious profit. But anyway, back on topic. Over the last week or so the price on a few high demand materials have gone down in price and have been in this new low range fairly consistently. Namely metal bars and lumber.

The main ones that I've notice go down are carmintium bars and shadethorn and runebirch lumber. The reasons for this are fairly basic. The large demand for all of these materials stems from the daily quests that use them and each needs a large amount of them. That high demand attracts the farmers to supply it while lowering the price due to a drastically increased supply. To give you an idea of how much they have dropped when I first got to the level that I needed them they were all around 50g each. As of this writing they're hovering between 10 and 15g each. That's quite a significant drop off.

The reason that a lot of the crafted goods haven't gone down in price is because at least 80% of these materials vanish when people craft items to turn in for their daily quests. So the amount that's left floating around at the end of the day winds up being rather low. Once the prices stabilize once again at their new price ranges is when it will be time to stokpile.

In addition to being able to grab mats super cheap mid day and on the weekends (just like saronite Saturdays in wow) that allows for more opportunities to flip the raw materials during the week when the farmers are off duty and prices rise. Meanwhile I'll be stashing a bunch away to craft all the stuff that needs them and supply my own daily quests.

One other reason for crafted items not falling in price that I can think of while I'm on this subject is that these materials aren't used directly in a lot of things. They're primarily used to craft other raw-ish materials which in turn go into all of the high end and high demand goodies. These "refined" materials can sell for almost double the plain material costs and the crafted items are now selling for a good profit because of this.

You'll almost never see the refined mats on AH because people only buy a few here and there to get what they need crafted and then ignore them. But as the CEO of Wal-Mart can tell you, these occasional sales are all that you need to become incredibly wealthy. That's my plan.

Thanks for stopping by!

A beautiful mess

2011-06-29T21:32:00.001-07:00

Remember when I was writing about enchanting on wow? Remember me bitching about bag space all the time? Well I'm at it again, I've done run out of out of room on my main. I'm holding onto just about everything for every profession I come across. I'm doing this because there's still 2 more professions for me to level up and there is a ton of material overlaps.

The more I play the more that I'm noticing there are positively oodles of small markets to play around with. I've been experimenting with just about everything that I can and have found a number that are profitable, but not many that are worthwhile. So far my experimenting has been limited to low level gear from OF and AS and some assorted baggies.

It seems that bags are now in demand. I tried crafting a few silk bags a while ago but none of them sold, even for a pithy 60g. The materials are about 50g to craft and that's roughly the same price for vendor sold bags with fewer slots. Lately however I've been getting as much as 1.5 plat for them and sold over 20 in a single day.

I've gotten my OF up high enough to make the next level bags which have a material price of a bit over 1 plat so we'll see how that goes. Considering how well silk bags are doing and based off what I know about people in this market from wow I'd expect the higher bags to fetch a great profit but at a slightly lower sales rate.

The other thing I've been fooling around with is burlap and copper gear. Granted copper typically sells for 10-20g each I've managed to sell several sets of it for 20g each which is a 20g or so loss. But all professions come with an investment and start at a huge loss I'm not too worried. Also it's not viable to RB or salvage them at that low of a level because the mats you get out of it are essentially worthless. Burlap gear though costs a few silver at most to craft and I' sold two sets of it for 30g each. A pittance for profit sure but it sells.

At any point where there is a demand for something (especially gear) it proves that the market is viable in that range. Though the cloth sells so low it's not worthwhile now, it will go up over time as less people are trying to sell it. This also proves that since there is a solid demand for low level gear that there is going to be an equal demand for mid range gar as well which I'm going to look into soon. I'm thinking somewhere in the 30s range with chromite plate, thick leather gear, and silk cloth areas.

The main thing that I need to figure out is how much profit am I willing to settle for. Normally it's material cost plus 15%. But when I'm working with things that can be razor thin profits at times it's not really worth the hassle. Right now I'm willing to sell runes for a mere 10% over the mats, but that's just to mess with my main competitor in that market.

The rest, well, I'll have to feel thing out and wait a bit before I make any final decisions. The great double gold capped stokpile AH extraordinaire is debating on weather or not a tiny sum is worth the effort I know, it's a shame. But when you're working with such a small amount of start up capital every penny matters. It matters a lot.

Thanks for stopping by!

Market experiments

2011-06-28T21:05:00.001-07:00

I now have 4 different crafting professions at max skill level and as such have been looking into lots of different things. Today I'm going to cover a few random things that I've been crafting, what's been sold and what's been turned into RB fodder. I'll go profession by profession listing each item that I've been experimenting with along with a quick once over on it.

Outfitter.
I bought the recipe for shaleweave gloves and robes a bit ago as there were none on AH for a few days that I saw. So far the gloves have not sold, but I've sold three sets of robes in the price range of 3-6 plat. Aside form that, the big deal here is crafted bags. Just like the nether bags in wow, silken bags are selling faster than I can buy the mats and craft them. And I even mean that literally. I sell typically 10 per day at anywhere from 30g profit to as high as 1 plat profit over the materials on each sale.

Right above silken bags are the ones that use spellspun silk which is typically not easy to find a good deal on. Time to start up the stokpile method. These cost about 1 plat to make and sell for as much as 4. I also saved up three days worth of tokens to buy the next level of bags that uses witch weave cloth. Significantly more expensive than plain silk of course, but it has more slots! These cost around 3-4 plat to craft and can sell as high as 10. All of these bags have the same profit margins and rate of sales: high.

Crafting the bolts and the bags takes only a few moments so it's not a big deal to have a guildie craft a fist full for you.

Other than that I bought the recipe for marauder's breeches which still to this day have not sold as people are selling them for 1 plat which is significantly under material costs. Hell I've even seen some for 50g and below. What in gods name are these people thinking? Sigh.

Armorsmith.
This was my first experiment and I bought a recipe for a plate dps belt, darkmetal tassets which is a high 30's range. I've sold several so far for a 2 plat profit and they seem to go at a rate of one per day. So far so good. I also crafted a set of plate tanking gloves which I'm hopeful for as they are not easy to craft and have not seen any on the AH yet.

In addition to that, I also got the recipe for worshipper's chainmail which is selling at almost the exact same rate and profit margins. Doing rather well with this prof so far.

Rune crafting.
I've bought a few of the recipes that needed a plaque to craft so far and am rather disappointing. I bought the ones for strength and int to weapon and have seen only a few sales for very low profits. So far this entire profession makes next to zero profit without selling the mats. I've been abusing the hell out of my RB button with exotic leather and composite shoes. Other than that this prof is a waste thus far.

Weapon smith.
For this prof I'm mostly working with 2h weapons. I've crafted a darkmetal axe and an orich sword. So far neither have sold, but I'm certain that they will soon. I'm sure because they are leaps and bounds better than any alternative and are max level blues, so you'll have to run T1's to get an equivalent or better easily. That and they have hit on them which is extremely valuable when gearing up.

After that I got the rep recipe for a darkmetal gun which has been selling the same as the other dark metal gear. I think this level and price range is where the magic is at so I'm going to try and acquire a few more pieces around this area.

Thanks for stopping by!

Promote higher prices

2011-06-28T11:17:00.001-07:00

I've said many times that almost everything in rift is being sold under materials, so today I'm going to give a short look on my thoughts on how to "fix" this situation. Granted one person isn't going to change the world over night, but you can at least get things rolling. This is actually something that I haven't done before and am pretty excited to see how it works out.

I'm going to lose a few plat on deposit fees over the course of a couple weeks but it might be well worth it in the long run. And you know me, I always plan for next month instead of next week. Since this is just a theory this is going to be a shorter entry than my typical wall o' text that I love oh so much.

First is the plan. Any time I see a bunch of runes up for 10g when it costs something like 90g to craft I'll list mine at 1.5 plat. In other words, I'll base the price I list at on the current low under mat cost and my default fall back prices and guess at what their average market value would be if it was placed in a healthy economy. I'm not undercutting holy crap I know! I'm going to be doing the exact opposite and doing it during prime time mid afternoon.

Now here's why I'm doing this. People that are selling for chump change compared to the material prices KNOW that they're selling at a huge loss and are willing to accept that fact. Anytime I power leveled a profession in wow I knew I was selling at a loss and losing a ton of gold up front and so did the people that had no idea about in game economics.

It is just that obvious. So the idea here is that by always having something up for a high but still reasonable price people might wise up. They could easily get to thinking "ya know I want to sell this crap to make some cash back, but why not go a tad higher and get more?" All of these overhead auctions will be listed for 48 hours so that when the 10g auctions expire they'll relist and see me up for 1-3 plat and think twice about auctioning them for a few coins over the vendor price.

Because runes DO sell and sell often, but people aren't listing them for a profit. So this is my attempt to clue people into the fact that they can get sales and they can turn a profit. My hope is that this will help raise prices up to a profitable level a bit sooner rather than later. I am really excited to see how this pans out, I'll be keeping track of dates, times and prices for a few weeks. During which time I'll update you all on when something of note happens which includes a string of nothing happening at all.

And to cap it all off, there's one last potential benefit of doing this. By default the AH listings show the highest price up top. So with a bit of luck I can catch a few "oops" sales by accident. People may just expect that the cheapest is shown first (which I really hope they make default soon btw) and buy whatever is up top. In this case it'll be me with my nominally priced rune at 2 plat and not 10g.

Thanks for stopping by!

Free server transfers

2011-06-25T15:21:00.000-07:00

NOTE: In addition to free xfers, many shards were turned into trial only ones which has caused an exceptional amount of people shifting around. So while this was intended to be Monday's entry I felt it was too important to wait because it's happening right now.

Trion just recently put in character transfers which are free and only to select realms. This is one of those big things that will have a massive impact on your local auction house. Since it's free and only have a one week "cool down" on it, this means that people are going to be shuffling around quite a bit. For example, my server WAS a low pop server and is now high and to my knowledge is also locked from other players transferring to it. That was all over the span of a single weekend, which isn't over yet as I'm writing this on Saturday.

What does this mean to you?

Well a lot actually. This means that of all of the possibilities, at least 20 of them are going to happen with you over the next week. Competitors will be leaving, new ones will be joining. A lot of prospective buyers will be coming and going as well. Low pop servers will become medium or high ones so be prepared. I'm going to cover a few important things that you have to look for immediately because you stand to either lose a ton of money or have a chance to triple what you already have.

Check your stokpiles.
With potentially hundreds of people joining your server in a 48 hour period that means there's potentially hundreds of raw materials flying up onto the AH. For me the main thing to be hit were minor catalysts. Before they would rarely go down to 8 platinum and now that is the standard price of them.

On the flip side (mild pun) eternal planar dust has gone up by a platinum and spikes at 8 when it was steady at 4-5 each. So depending on how thing go you may be out a little on your investments or have a chance to make a killing by flipping what you already bought for super cheap compared to the new prices.

Markets: New and old
The main reference to this is my situation with rune crafting. Before xfers came around it was essentially a dead market. Not many sales for not much of a profit. That's entirely different now to the point that I've have to literally triple the amount of mats that I keep stokpiled just to keep up with the new demand. Meanwhile the bag market has been so flooded everything is under material costs again and the prices have even gone up on the mats.

So anything that requires a consistent amount of small sales to be worth it is either going to be amazing now or totally destroyed. In this respect you can think of the flood of xfers going in and out as cleaning the pipes for a breath of fresh air into the auction house. Look over all of your professions and see if anything has opened up.

Price changes.
Yes this one is obvious, but not in the way that I'm thinking. Most people that are trying to work the AH in any degree have likely been playing the game for a while now. And as such they have a good idea of what the normal accepted value or things are, on their old server. Now they're coming over to yours and are trying to sell stuff that will be either much above or below what you may normally expect.

In either case you stand to profit by playing your cards right and taking advantage of people selling at their prices and flipping their stuff. For those who want to sell way above the prices you can undercut them by a lot and seem like a very good deal on your wares while still far above your normal price. Either way, your local prices on just about everything is going to change significantly.

Thanks for stopping by!

1,000 platinum and market approaches

2011-06-23T21:56:00.001-07:00

As of today I have reached my next goal of 1,000 platinum. Since this is a rather important milestone I wanted to take the time today to talk about the different approaches I've been taking in addition to giving you all a list of the hottest items that I've been selling. The biggest difference in moving from wow to rift is that every profession has so much that they can sell.

The only exception to that is an apothecary because their most popular items to sell (dyes) are used frequently for cheap skill ups. They do however have full dominion over a certain niche market which I'll be covering at a later date once I look into it more. When you have such a wide variety of items to craft, flip, and refine there is only two approaches that you can take that are viable. This is what I want to cover today along with the pros and cons of each one. First I'll go over the approach that I'm currently using: the blanket approach.

The blanket approach is the easiest one to understand of the two. When you have a large amount of options of things to sell, you simply sell all of them. That's it. While this is incredibly easy to understand, it is actually a little harder to pull off properly and be effective at it. The blanket approach is only for those who are capable of being highly organized. Here's a few reasons why you will not succeed at this approach if you are not very organized. When taking the full on blanket approach you have to constantly keep track of all of the following:

~ 20+ different items
~ Thresholds of each item
~ Fall back prices of each item
~ No less than 3 different materials needed to craft
~ Stokpiles of all the necessary mats
~ Material overlaps for over half of the items
~ Which banker is supposed to be selling what
~ Which toon has what 2 or 3 professions
~ Where to farm the mats if there are none to buy
~ Every competitor in every market for every item you sell

That's quite a lot isn't it? Granted some of that you don't have to memorize, but if you don't that adds a good amount of extra time looking things up. For example when you have to craft another ebony hatchet you'll have to cycle through your trade skill book, identify what mats you need, filter through your inventory and bank for all of them, and then double check what vendor mats you need to buy and how many. That can take upwards of a minute to do and if you multiply that by 20 items you can tell that it is no small length of time. But if I just said "ebony hatchet materials" and you immediately think "2 dark metal, ruby, minor flux, 2 enduring dust" you're good to go.

That's the biggest draw back to the blanket approach right there. You will have an absolutely massive inventory to keep track of which translates into needing an equally massive stokpile of raw materials (plain, vendor purchased, and refined) along with a serious need for bag space. While it takes a bit to explain the draw backs of it, the benefits that this approach gives you are very straightforward. You have tons of options of things to sell and never miss a chance to make some cash.

The other viable approach that you can take for making money in rift is the specialized approach. This is somewhat akin to the blanket approach in that you make a lot of everything, but as the name might imply you specialize in what you sell. How you specialize is entirely dependent on personal preference and shard economy. How you specialize is entirely at your own discretion and each section of the market that you focus on will have exactly the same pros and cons as the others. So first I'll give you the good and bad of the specialized approach and then I'll list off what I've found to be the best things to focus on.

The biggest benefit of specializing is the simplicity and ease of use that it offers. You are working in a small to moderate sized market in only one or two professions which means that the material overlap will be very limited. That makes keeping track of what you need to stokpile, farm, or buy more of very fast and easy. The other benefit is that it is very easy to keep track of who has what and what you need to craft more of.

A specialized approach typically doesn't deal with more than a dozen different items or so and only from a single profession. With low material overlap and compact enough to fit in a single toon's bank and bags makes this approach ideal for those with only one character or lack of organization skills. And now to wrap this all up with a simple list of the areas that I recommend to specialize in.

~ Epic gear
~ Refined materials
~ Gear for specific level ranges
~ PvP oriented goods
~ Level 50 blues (high end or entry level)

Thanks for stopping by!

How I'm doin' it wrong

2011-06-23T13:27:00.001-07:00

Today I'm going to describe my step by step method of how I work the rift AH. But before that I'm going to start out with a disclaimer because I'm positive that I'm doin' it wrong, hence the title. Simply put, I'm almost certain that there is a better way of doing things that I just haven't discovered yet. Either there's some form of a macro, script, or esoteric addOn plug-in thing that I'm entirely unaware of. There just has to be something I'm missing. That being said, here's the process in it's entirety.

First I log into my banker: the man, the myth, the legend, the lover of all things shiny Stokpile. Ah it's been far too long since I got to do that. I collect any expired and sold auctions while making a note of what has been sold so far, just like I did with enchanting in wow. then I mosey over 5 steps to the auctioneer and open my bags. I'll right click on a rune to search for it and sort everything by lowest unit price. If I'm not the lowest on that one, I'll open the auctions tab, sort by name, and then cancel all of them that I have up.

Since canceling an auction causes the scroll bar to automatically tick back to the top I make sure to keep an eye on how far up or down it was so I don't have to spend so much time looking. I do this for each of the runes that I have in my bags and once I've gone through them all I collect whatever are in the mail. There's a bit of a long delay when canceling auctions so once I have what was there I'll log off and onto my RC. Since my RC is also my OF I'll do the same cycle here in a way. I'll collect the mail and make a note of what's sold. I'll go to the work bench and craft any runes that I need and then a few steps over to the loom and craft any extra bags.

Then I hop over to the AH and start searching fro RC mats, bags, and other things that I stokpile. I'll look for cloth, catalysts, and assorted planar dust and recipes. After that I'll list my wares and hop onto my smith. Same deal, collect mail, note what's sold, craft replacements. The difference here is that all of their items are augmented so I can't just right click to see what's currently being sold. So I'll type in the first 4 letters into the weapon or armor sections. That way I'll cut out just about everything that's up with those same letters in the name though for a few things I don't even need to specify which section. That's a very nice thing to remember as it can save a bunch of time and hassle.

Once that toon's auctions are handled I'll log back onto Stokpile and collect the rest of the canceled auctions along with anything I mailed over. Then I double check each of the runes that I have for sale by right clicking them in an extra step. Granted this isn't entirely necessary as no more than 10-15 minutes have passed, but it's a good precaution to take since I am human and tend to make mistakes from time to time. Once I finish canceling I'll list all of his wares and then call it done until later that evening.

I still haven't figured out a good time frame to aim for when posting auctions. It seems that around 8pm-ish is when people finish up with their chain dungeon runs and runes start to sell more than usual. At 3 or so is when it seems that gear typically sells the best, but these are all very light observations since I sell things on several different toons I don't really know EXACTLY when something sells, only that it has sold. So I try and poke my head in to check their mail throughout the day when I have a spare minute just to see what is selling and when. So far this is as much as I've been able to pin down.

Thanks for stopping by!

Searching for a method

2011-06-22T04:53:00.000-07:00

Time is money friend! And the one thing that addOns gave us goblins more than anything was more time. I don't have that luxury in rift and even said a while ago that I'd be out of the AH game if I didn't have any addOns. Unfortunately I don't have that option here in rift. There are very few ways to save time that are already built in, in fact the only good one that I know of is that if you right click on an item at the AH window it's search for that item for you.

So you don't have to type anything in when you want to see what the current price is. No matter what, working the AH in rift is going to take significantly more time than in wow. This is especially true with RC which requires a blanket approach and a dedicated banker like glyphs and enchants did in wow.

So how can I work the AH as well as I know I can without spending all day doing so? The name of the game is specialize. Pick a specific profession and/or market and put your effort into that and ignore the rest. Time to compromise.

I won't be working in every single facet of every profession I can find a viable market for at all like I was in wow. And even when I have an alt covering every profession I still wont. There just isn't enough hours in the day to do that without some form of automation. That and it'll get incredibly boring very fast and I don't want that to happen. So instead I'll be focusing on what sells consistently in any given profession for an acceptable price range. This is also going to take a lot of time to get down because I'll have to commit to memory a lot of things that AH
addOns used to do for me.

I know the general price ranges for the runes I sell, radiants are 50g, token bought ones are 2p, and anything else is around 20g. There's a lot that are different so those I have to double check on a case by case basis, but I get reminded easily. What I do after collecting the mail is write down in notepad what I've sold (just like I used to do with enchanting) and craft more of them. Then I go through my bags and right click on each rune to see what the current price is.

Anything that's priced at 1p or higher I double check my price guide for. Everything else fits in neatly for what I stated earlier. When I find something I have to undercut I'll sort my current auctions by name and cancel them and relist what's in my bags. I always make sure to have 1 rune more than the 2 I normally list so that I can easily search. Then I log onto my main and craft whatever needs crafting, mail it off and list.

With so few regular sellers there's no need for a second cancel/post cycle but I'm sure that's not far off once things settle down and aren't all under material costs. Hopefully this will be soon because just selling raw materials seems a little silly considering the massive crafting empire I left behind in wow.

I'm still trying to iron out how to go about my AH playing with so little to go on in the way of time saving. I'm sure in a month or two either I'll have things down to a point that it's as fast as possible or things will be added/fixed with the game so that I won't have to think so hard about quickening the process.

Thanks for stopping by!

Rift status report

2011-06-21T00:42:00.001-07:00

Since I haven't made many official "reports" on my business in rift I figured I should write one about where I stand now. First, my platinum total is 720. I've spent a good number on stokpiling mats that I use regularly and a few epic RC recipes. Next are the professions and right now I have all of them maxed out, but still a number of recipes to get. Here's the score on that front.

Rune crafter: Down to "only" 10 plaques needed, going to take a while if I don't get lucky. You're guaranteed at least one plaque per week from a quest for a crafting lure. But the 15 shell daily, the crafting rift itself and the master level prof daily all have a chance at a plaque. It is probably something like a 5% chance because I've gotten maybe 4 plaques so far for assorted toons by doing all of these dailys. So it could take me 10 weeks or it could take a few days.

Outfitter: Two more plaques and then it is complete. The only recipes that are missing aside form the one are currently below material costs which includes both blues and purples.

Armor smith: Four more recipes and four plaques to go and this one is done for now. So far dark metal plate is pretty popular along with dark metal weapons for assorted classes.

Apothacary: Maxed skill. Buying different token recipes will be the VERY LAST thing that I do, and there's only 3 that might be profitable. Even the high demand ones such as black or white dyes are very questionable on their profit margins. For this profession I'll wait to get them all last unless something major changes.

Artificer: Three more epics to go which takes another 6 plaques. After that I'll have 3 more blue recipes left, each of which will take several days to buy.

Weapon smith: I'm missing two blue recipes which take 212 tokens each to buy and have no competition with. I may end up buying another two for bows after I get the armor recipes. Other than that the only recipes that I'm missing are currently below material costs.

Reputation recipes: This part is going to take a long, long, long time. The obvious reason of needing so much of it isn't the biggest issue. More than the rep needed (honored and above for everything) is the fact that every toon needs it that high. All of the recipes are scattered and diverse as one might expect so I don't actually need every single rep nearly maxed for every toon. But the fact remains that I need at least half of them for access to the goodies that they each offer.

To top that off, the real kick in the nuts is the super long que times for dps (which are all of my toons) so I'm going to have to give support a try and possibly tank. Shudder. Other than that the only real downsides is that there are no RC recipes to be had from rep and none of my toons has a pair of crafting profs that have recipes from the same rep. Ah well, Rome wasn't built in a day after all.

Naturally I intend to keep doing the prof dailys even after I have all of the profitable recipes. Simply put you never know when a large shift will come around so it's good to be prepared. It costs me maybe 20 or so platinum each day to do all the quests but half that for only the max level quests which is pretty damned significant of an investment. But once I have all of the essential recipes for each profession I can cut back to only doing the master level ones because they have a chance at a plaque each time so I'll keep up with that until I have all of those.

After another week or two I'll have all of the normal recipes taken care of completely it seems and, depending on luck, I'll have the epic ones done soon after. It seems that the influx of certain materials is becoming much more steady which allows me to buy them as I need them. I can't afford to stokpile anything that costs 10 plat but everything else I can start to stash away. But I'm still going to wait on the big stokpile craze as I'm getting the notion that prices are going to start to steadily fall. I'm not usually wrong about these things.

Thanks for stopping by!

Building an army

2011-06-19T23:32:00.001-07:00

I made my first alt last week or so and they're in their 40s already. After seeing the quests once and having it all fresh in my mind, leveling up is insanely fast and easy. And you know what's better than that? It's fun! I've been leveling an alt mage as stormcaller spec and I bought them 2 more roles for ele (so I can pseudo tank rifts) and pyro just for a change of pace.

Fire spec is insanely fun to play and is highly mobile but not so good for leveling up. Ele is just insanely boring all around to be honest, leveling as a tanking warrior is more interesting. While stormcaller is huge fun, big burst damage and loads of utility. Now when I was creating this toon and got out of the starter zone I had to decide on professions, the fun part.

Always take a gathering prof so I took mining as everyone needs ore and gems. Then I took a pair of crafting profs with armor and weapon smiths because once the game matures a little bit more the token recipes will sell very well. Being able to have 3 different profs on a single toon is going to be amazing and will drastically cut down on my AH time once the business is in full swing later on down the line.

Though admittedly this isn't going to be much of an army since the 3 professions per toon limit bring the number needed down to only crafters total. The rest of the gathering profs can be scattered across 4 different toons which is enough to have one of every calling and is all you should ever need with being able to have 5 different soul set ups. A total relief from wow where I needed every single character slot used up by crafting alts and bankers.

I chose these because I've heard of a lot of people that are selling certain blue gear from reputation recipes with some success. That and my main wears plate so this would help out a little. In addition to that, I can save up all of the gems for when I eventually take artificer on another alt and I won't have to worry about needing them at all. After the mage is taken care of I think I'll make a rogue and aim for artificer, apoth, and foraging. After that I believe I'll have everything covered and for alt number 4 they'll only need gathering profs which leaves me a lot of room to play around with if/when a new profession is added in.

Stating the obvious, the goal here is to diversify early on and be ready for when I can really move ahead in the AH game. Since most of the rep gear needs dust from mid range rifts I've gotten a shit ton of that just from leveling and taking the RC pouch from the meridian daily quest. Also there is the added benefit of being able to do the weekly quest and make a crafter's lure every week for every prof which will make me quite popular in any guild I run with. I read that anybody that participates will get the bonus mats and they are not divided up.

The plus side there is you get some brownie points with your guild, more mats for you and maybe more if they donate some of their share, and extra mats since with a group you can clear every stage including the bonus boss. It will definitely be fun to drop like 10 of these in a row teehee. Just make sure that you don't use them until you're max level and only use them in max level zones of you're going to screw yourself on the mats you can get.

Thanks for stopping by!

Crafting rifts 411

2011-06-17T04:26:00.001-07:00

Today is a rather short, but extremely useful and important entry none the less. It's on the topic of crafting profession rifts and all of the unknowns surrounding them to the uninformed. It will be just a collection of all the random facts and tidbits of information that I've found out from experience. I've done a handful of these so far and am experienced enough that I can give a ton of random info on them. Unfortunately all that you get told in game is that you can make them and you can get plaques out of the deal along with profession specific mats. That's it.

Being the good goblin that I am (yes I am still a goblin, even in rift) I didn't use a single one before I had all of the essential questions answered. So today I'll be sharing with you all of the info that I've gathered on them. This is all accurate and comes directly from personal experience. I've learned not to trust google or any fan sites as there is so much out of date info that you can't really rely on it without confirming it first hand. Without any further ado, here's what I know on the subject.

- For those with more than one crafting profession on the same toon, you will have the option to start the weekly quest for any of them to get a lure. HOWEVER they all share the same weekly cool down. In other words if you turn in the quest for a rune crafting lure, you will not be able to do one for armor smith that week. So don't craft the quest items unless you want to get that specific lure that specific week. I found this one out the hard way.

- The crafting lure can only be used on a tear

- The level of the tear DOES have an effect. For best results, use the ones in the NW area of shimmer sands. If there aren't any up you'll have to seal all of the other rifts that are up. If you can't solo the last elite just let the timer expire as soon as you get one.

- The level of the zone obviously matters as well. Only use these in stillmoor or shimmer sands to get the most out of it.

- Minor and major tears have no effect, they will always end up being minor in that the mobs are all non-elites minus the bonus boss.

- Each one can be done with a group of 3. They're identical to your average run of the mill minor rifts but with bonus materials and such. Anybody with plate armor and a support healer should do the trick. In fact I did several on my mage with a tank and a dps and we did just fine. We hit all of the timers with plenty left over and downed the bonus stage boss without any problems at all.

- The drop rate of plaques is quite low as one would expect.

- The materials that you can get range all the way from top level stuff that you can gather normally or the hard to come by good stuff such as minor catalysts and eternal dust.

- You can get a plaque from a crafter's rift even if you weren't the one to open it. So long as you have the associated profession you have a shot at it once it's sealed.

- If you come across a group doing a crafting rift and don't get an invite or join publicly, you can still get mats and plaques by helping out. VERY cool.

- Just a personal observation, but it seems that the most common types of lures used in "crafting raids" are for armor and weapon smiths. So should you find yourself able to hop into a group take the toons with one of those professions to increase your chances of getting extra plaques.

Thanks for stopping by!

Fun farming!?

2011-06-14T20:12:00.001-07:00

I know I know. Don't farm fools, donate your bodies to science! ...and all that stuff. But one thing that I just love doing in rift is, well, rifts. Every one you close you get non gold currency to buy stuff from vendors. All of it is useful and all of it sells to somebody. In addition to that you get rare materials which are needed to craft some pretty sweet epic lewts.

This includes things that you need for a daily quest which gives a chance at a rare prof token and a rare artifact (random collectible that sells). While still leveling up, me and my gf would clear any rift that we came across and managed to skip a full zone and a half by the time we hit 50. In other words not only are they highly profitable, they give great exp.

The main thing to look for from closing a rift is eternal and endless planar dust. This goes into either epics, high end blues (t1 equivalents) or sells often and for a good price. Also to top that off, you need several eternals for a weekly quest which gives you a plaque for a given profession which gets you the really profitable recipes. In other words you get so much form them that is so versatile in it's use there is no reason not to clear them.

Yes it's farming, but since when do you not have to grind for gear? In wow you run normal and so called "heroic" dungeons that you need fuck all from just to get rep for upgrades to get ready for raids. You farm or save up cash to buy rare boe gear or the mats to craft them. Even when you have a fortune at your disposal, you still have to do SOME form of grinding to have as many upgrades as you can outside of raids.

In total there are 6 different types of rifts that can spawn, each with 4 (I think) different versions and goals. Each one has the same general loot table as the others, just replace fire themed items with water themed ones and the like. And for some bizarre reason, I cannot stop doing these things. I can't help but find it incredibly fun, especially the ones that are more than killing mobs. The major rifts contain only elite mobs (mostly) so you can't clear them and get the bonus boss with only a plate dps and a support healer. If you go solo you can clear a normal rift minus the bonus stage usually, but if you have some kind of self healing you can clear every section in the time limit of a max level rift.

But for max level major rifts a full group of 5 or 2 dps, support healer, and tank-like-person could do it just fine I imagine. The expert level rifts will require a full standard group of tank, healer, support, 2dps though. But the higher the difficulty, you guessed it, the better the rewards.

Once we hit 50 we went on a rifting spree and cleared every max level zone of rifts until something more interesting comes along, which would be something like a full guild dungeon run. I mean come on, great money, great fun, guild exp. quests, great gear, silly acheesements? What's not to like?

Thanks for stopping by!

Rift market watch

2011-06-13T20:14:00.001-07:00

I've been playing rift for a while now and have been watching the AH since the second week I started. So I think I have a firm enough grasp of what's going on right now to a point that I can safely comment on it. First I'll just write up a short list of what sells then go in depth afterwords. But before I get into that I have to give my "massive" gold total first. 400 platinum. Far better than I was expecting in all honesty with the economy being in the state that it is. Here's what I'm seeing sell with a degree of consistent profit.

- Rare level 50 epics
- Mid 40s range blues
- Level 50 blues
- Artifacts
- Top end mats for weekly quests
- Top end runes
- Mid range crafting materials
- Top end rift mats

One unfortunate note is that every one of the crafted pieces of gear that's sold for a profit is from a rare drop recipe. All of them. Any recipe you can get with tokens or a trainer is basically a throw away, max level epic or not it doesn't matter. They're all still selling at a loss. Meanwhile runes learned form tokens and plaques are selling for a small but steady 50g-1p profit a piece. This is good news for me as I have that profession maxed out. That means that once I get a fist full more recipes learned from dailys I'll be able to pull in a steady 10-30 platinum per week. That's assuming that their rate of sales and profit margins don't change.

The RB shuffle is still coming along nicely with a steady 3 plat per day and as high as 8 depending on the current demand. I've taken to no longer bidding on items, but AFK crafting them myself. 2 exotic leather is enough to craft a pair of level 40 range boots which will always RB for a profit with current prices. They cost 5-8g to craft and I sell the mats for on average 50g a piece, now that's a profit margin. As per usual, I'm stashing away 10 of each type for the daily quests and selling the rest. Any runes that sell when I don't have enough mats I can either xmute them if I'm in a bind or just craft more RB fodder.

The rare recipes are definitely where the money is at as people are willing to shell out top coin to be ready for expert dungeons and raids. These only come from top end dungeons and a select few expert level ones as well. In other words the recipe is on the same item level as the gear it creates and thus needs the same level mob to drop it. So until I get some gear together I may not see one for a while without luck form dailys giving me a plaque.

Since the end game is still very new to people one might think that there's no way for me to pick and choose the best rune recipe to sell because nobody knows. But there is a way. The top end runes sell for 3-5 plat each which means only accomplished players that don't spend all of their money on "fun" stuff can afford them.

And if you're good enough to be needing them and smart enough to afford them, then you're smart enough to know that 1 attack power is always going to be better than 1 crit rating. You'll also know that 1 ap is better than 1 strength or dext as well. I may be off on the stats (haven't checked since 3 patches ago), but the idea is that they're good because they know these things. These are the people I'm selling to, these are the people that I need to learn more about. Know your markets, eh folks?

Thanks for stopping by!

Check point reached

2011-06-12T19:07:00.000-07:00

Just the other day I reached my first gold making milestone in rift of 100 platinum. I did it through the methods that I have outlined already of day by day profitable runes, material conversions and flipping. Now as important as that may be, that's not exactly something I would dedicate an entire blog entry to. That's what, 2-3 sentences written and then call it a day? That's perfect if you're a gold fish maybe, but I have a bit more to say.

I've written before about how a milestone is an important thing to make note of as it sets a clear goal for yourself. However doing this entirely from nothing gave me a much different perspective on the matter. This is unlike my wow project where I made 50k with no help from level 1 in that I have zero knowledge of the game or it's markets. And neither does 70% of the people playing it for that matter.

Why is having 100 plat so important to me? Because it affords me many luxuries that I turn into business opportunities. I no longer have to count my pennies every day so I can train everything the prof trainers have to offer to make crafting and looking for something easier. I can train every skill for my class in case I want to try out a new spec later on.

I can comfortable invest in my weekly quest (finally!) for a RC plaque or general bidding. Most of these things though are just time savers and are more of a "quality of life" improvement than they are for making the rift money. The biggest improvement that this milestone means for me is that I no longer have to recycle my money.

By that I mean I don't have to go all in as it were every time something sells. Let me give you an example. When I had only 1 plat to my name, buying up junk just to RB was a serious gamble. If I only got crystals from it, I was completely SoL without a back up plan aside from questing more for rewards and vendor trash. So each time I'd sell a few kinetics I'd have to take all of my gold and all of the profit that I had just made and invest every silver coin of it to try and make more.

Now that I have a decent amount considering the level that I'm focusing on right now, I can easily buy 10 stacks of cloth or leather to RB and not worry. I spent the extra 2 plat to get my first alt their mount and another 4 to get a third role purchased just to muck about with and still be able to keep working my markets. By being consciously aware of this, it is allowing me to do exactly what I do best: Stokpile.

Now that I have the essentials out of the way (mounts, alt, extra specs, training, professions) I can focus on building a massive stokpile of RC mats so that once I'm able to do expert dungeons and get a few recipes for high demand runes I can fill that market nicely. I think I'm doing well, my initial goal was to be comfortable financially once I hit 50 and was a few levels ahead of schedule.

Thanks for stopping by!

How different is different?

2011-06-09T23:02:00.000-07:00

A lot of people are saying that Rift is nothing more than a wow clone. Well that's a valid opinion, but if it's a clone where are my orcs? Why can't I play a wolf? And why isn't my mage able to spec arcane? I know you're probably thinking "well that's still the same thing, just with different names." If that's your reasoning for believing that Rift isn't an entirely different game than wow, allow me to counter that logic with your own logic.

First lets play a little guessing game. The rules are simple: I show you two images of two different things and you tell me their name in one word. After you check them all out I'll let you know what they are. There's a total of only 4 pairs so I'm sure you'll do just fine!

Set 1

Set 2

Set 3

Set 4

Ok got it figured all out now? Good now here's the answers.

Set 1: first is a branch, second is a twig.
Set 2: first is a boulder, second is a rock.
Set 3: both are chairs
Set 4: I don't know about you, but I see a stool and a table

Sooooo how many did you get right? Get one or two wrong? Well that "stick" up there, at what point does it become a branch? If you say when it's attached to a tree, what of when it breaks? It's still there in the tree, it's still a part of the tree. And what of that boulder, just how big does a rock have to be so that it is considered a boulder? What about a rock being called a pebble and so forth?

A chair is a chair is a chair. Some might call ti a recliner or a sofa. The short hand version of all of this is the exact same logic saying that rift is identical to wow: "they're all the same, just with different names."

Clearly they're not.

Meanwhile I can (and obviously will) argue that TBC, wrath, and cata are the exact same game. Yes I'm saying that three entire expansions are the same game...just with different names. Here let me quote a few items for you along with noting what "expansion" they were introduced with.

TBC.
Arcane dust
Lesser planar essence
Greater planar essence
Small prismatic shard
Large prismatic shard

WotLK.
Infinite dust
Lesser cosmic essence
Greater cosmic essence
Small dream shard
Dream shard

Cata.
Hypnotic dust
Lesser celestial essence
Greater celestial essence
Small heavenly shard
Heavenly shard

Ok so those are just items, big deal. I mean they don't REALLY count right? What about the REAL game huh? The dungeons! The raids! Wow certainly has a few gems of boss encounters. Ones like lady vashj or sinestra or yogg saron. Very cool indeed, but let me sum up the boss fights that 80% of the raiding population saw.

Kill adds
Pew pew boss
Interrupt shit
Don't be in fire

Get the idea here? You can break it down even more, a fury warrior is just a rogue in plate with a red energy bar that goes up instead of down. Baseball is just some dudes hitting a ball with a stick. But I used to do that all of the time, why am I not being paid millions for it? I think you get the point.

Even though rift is very similar to wow in the same way that a rogue is close to a fury warrior they're in all reality entirely different. They just have different flavors. This is all going back to what I've said a dozen plus times so far: at what point is something no longer worth it? If 60 minutes per day is far too long to make 5k in glyphs, would 30 minutes be fast enough? What about 40? 50?

Just where do you draw that line is what you really need to figure out. What it all boils down to is where you and you alone make the distinction that something is different in enough ways to noticeably be it's own entity. So naturally I believe that rift is different enough from wow to capture and maintain my interest for a long enough time that I picked it up.

Why did I decide to raid as a DK instead of my pally with 3567847 acheesements? I like the DK flavor. Why? Absolutely no other reason that "zomg it looks so kewl!" Why do I like Rift more than wow? Same reason. Why do I like the enchanting market more than gems even though they're "the same thing with different names?" I just do.

What's your reason?

Easy mistakes to avoid

2011-06-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

NOTE: For those of you who may be wondering, I'll be writing up my weekly business reports next month. They'll come every Wednesday (reset day) and will contain all of the goodies and real time market info like I have always given.

Short-ish entry today on a few things I've noticed on the AH that can lose you a lot of money. They aren't bugs at all in the traditional sense, they're more along the lines of things being different than you naturally expect. They all have to do with the auction house UI and not the standard game settings or simple human error per sé.

I'll list them each off one by one and give a few notes on it. The idea here is making an easy way to keep tabs on things to watch out for so I'll leave a link to this entry on the side over yonder just to keep it handy. This will be updated regularly as trion changes the game and with anything new that I notice. If you picked up on anything that can cause problems or annoyances that are more than just a "aww that sucks but whatever" sort of thing please leave a comment and I'll edit it in.

Default vendor price bids.
When you first right click an item to put it in the AH window it sets the bid to the vendor price by default. I think the danger here is obvious since you can't cancel an auction that has a bid on it already. Personally I've made this mistake a ton and have profited from it just as much. I've gotten hundreds of pieces of cloth this way and managed to fuel my crafting with insanely cheap planar dust by this. So make sure you take the extra moment to double check you have the bid set right.

Changed settings not saving.
To easily avoid the vendor bid part you can click the box to set the bid to the buyout price. However if you close the AH window this might not save. In other words you have to do this each time you close and re-open the AH window. It might be a hassle I know so hopefully it'll be changed soon.

Searching for augmented items.
When you right click an item to search for it on the AH it will search for that exact name. This is important because when you add an augment to an item, which you should anyways as they're insanely cheap, it gets something else added to the name. So you may think that there are none on the AH when there's actually several and you list it for triple everything else. To avoid this I just type in the first 4 letters of the plain item to look.

Default item sorting.
By default the items on the AH are sorted with the most expensive ones first. This can be a boon and you can get a few "whoops" sales out of it, but you can also do the same thing and lose a lot of plat. Make sure to sort by unit price each time you close and open the AH window.

Incorrect mail auto complete
This is something I just hate about the mail box. It will try to auto complete a name for people on your friends list, in guild, and I've even seen a few random names pop up. Once again take the extra time to make sure you're mailing stuff to the right name or you can lose a lot.

Runes and rune Shards.
This one is specific to rune crafters. The profession dailys can easily cause you to waste a bunch of mats if you don't pay close attention to the name of what you have to craft. As the theme of this entry seems to be, double check every time. This also goes for when you're buying runes. You could easily buy two runes that won't go onto that shiny 2 hand weapon of yours so be careful.

Thanks for stopping by!

The plan

2011-06-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to detail out my long term plan for making some extra bank in rift as the title would suggest. Mind you I am still poor and most everything I can sell is listed under material costs. The name of the game right now is exclusivity. The more rare something is the more likely it will fetch a profit as everything taught by trainers is being sold at dumping prices. By dumping prices, I mean 10g for something that costs 2 plat to craft. If I wasn't trying to save up I'd get into flipping this crap, no joke.

Step one is to slowly build up a stokpile of RC mats. I'll be using most of these for the profession dailys and the rest will be sold as is. On the rare occasion I sell a rune for a profit I'll replenish my supply of them and list a few more, but they sell so slowly right now that it's not a real consideration unless I get a new recipe. Since every prof daily gives you generic tokens, all of the ones I get from outfitter quests will go into new rune recipes since I can get mats for runes far easier than I can get leather or cloth. Plus they're still semi profitable and once prices go up I'll already have the worthwhile runes to sell. Again, this is long term based on the fact that prices WILL go up at some point.

After hitting 50, I'll be able to do max level rifts which will give me a fairly good chance at getting the mats needed for the prof weekly quest that gives a plaque. I'll turn that in for the most profitable rune I can find and craft 3 of those. 2 get put on the AH and the third sits in my bags for ease of searching. This will take about a week to complete with any degree of success as closing a max level rift is NOT easy solo and doesn't guarantee any eternal planar dust. Essentially, the main goal I have is to do whatever I can to get more rare recipes.

But when me and my gf can get together and go on a rift hunt it won't be a big deal as we can aoe most of the stages just fine. As a paragon, extreme aoe is my specialty. It has huge range, hits a ton of targets, and I can spam it with massive +damage bonuses to the ones on a 6 second CD. So as long as the healer can keep me up, the mobs will be totally melted in no time. If we can put together a guild group once a week, then we'll be able to do the harder ones for both gear and mats. Like I mentioned before, the rewards are so varied that any chance you get to clear a major rift plus bonus you should jump on.

Once I've gotten a dozen or so rare recipes, prices for a lot of things will have evened out and selling raw RC mats won't be as profitable as it was when I started. But even at this point, I'll still be hunting for cheap greens to break down to keep myself supplied for quests and runes.

After I've gotten the key rune recipes for normal tokens, I'll then start working on leather gear. There aren't 3x more cloth wearing classes than leather ones like in wow, so choosing one or the other is based on competition and supply of materials. Since I'll be getting a good amount of leather in my normal day to day play time this seems to be the right way to go. Sure I can sell the leather just like I can sell the cloth, but when I pick it up by default more often that means the supply is far more steady.

I'll be focusing primarily on the mid 30s and early 40s level ranges. This is when spending a bit extra on gear begins to become a legitimate consideration. The blues you get then will ,last you through level 50 and serve you well still in entry level dungeons until the dice start to favor you. But if I can snag a profitable level 50 blue piece I'm definitely not going to pass it up.

So the short version is as follows:

1. Build up a stokpile of RC mats.
2. Continue to RB cheap greens for prof dailys and profit on selling mats.
3. Focus on rare rune recipes.
4. Clear a ton of max level rifts for planar dust.
5. Save up enough plat so that I can safely invest in flipping runes.
6. Patiently wait for normal trainer runes to be profitable then revisit them.
7. Start spending tokens on leather gear after important runes.
8. Try and acquire at least 1 high end leather recipe to craft.
9. Stop selling mats and work runes just like I worked enchanting in wow.
10. Drop butchering in favor of another crafting profession, most likely armor smith.

Thanks for stopping by!

How I make money

2011-06-07T00:41:00.001-07:00

Ah my first official entry on making the rift money. Today I'll be giving a fairly detailed once over on what I'm actively doing to turn a profit in rift. Not what I'm planning to do or what I expect to do, but what I'm doing right now that is supporting my normal playing costs and profession leveling. To any wow player this is an oldie but a goodie that still makes great profit even today: DE'ing cheap greens.

This is something that I haven't done in wow for ages, but is necessary to fund RC in rift. I scan the AH in sections by armor type and then weapons. I sort them out by price and start scrolling down the pages. Since almost no green gear gets sold under the level cap I can safely bid on anything to same some cash by waiting a day. Before I go on I have to explain a few things about RC. This is good info for both rift players that don't have an RC and for wow players to understand wtf I'm talking about.

First there are only a few types of mats for RC in game and you can get any of them from any level green. In wow you have a different tier of materials for each level range and anything more than 10 levels below the current cap are worthless. Not in rift, every tier of materials is made by combining X of the lower tier ones just like lesser and greater essences in wow. Here's the different materials and their tiers.

Kinetic arc x5 > Kinetic charge x3 > Kinetic burst
Perpetual blur x5 > Perpetual glow x3 > Perpetual flare
Sentient spark x5 > Sentient surge x3 > Sentient blast

Flickering dust x3> Flickering shard x3 > Flickering crystal
Sparkling dust x3> Sparkling shard x3 > Sparkling crystal
Shimmering dust x3> Shimmering shard x3 > Shimmering crystal

Keep in mind that you cannot downgrade any materials unless they are at the max tier. So when you turn 5 kinetic arc into a kinetic charge, you cannot do the reverse. You can however turn a perpetual flare into 15 perpetual blur so you won't lose anything in the technical sense, but it is extremely annoying when you actively use a mix of all tiers when skilling up.

When you RB a green what you get is going to be one of those materials aside from the last two. What level the green is effects your chances of getting higher tier materials as opposed to what materials you get. This was an important bit of info for me to figure out early on or I'd have spent tons of plat and gotten crap from it all. Next of note is the level range vs. chance of high tier mats. None of this is for sure and is only my personal observations so I won't be giving any %'s just the general ballpark likeliness.

From level 1-29 it seems that you will only get bottom tier mats and maybe t2 shards. From level 30-39 you're very likely to get at least a t2 material from a single RB or t3 shard. From level 40-50 you're promised either a t3 mat or several max tier crystals. With all of that out of the way lets move on.

The next thing I have to look at is the assumed prices. With materials changing drastically each day I have to assign each of them MY price and what I value them at, not the AH. My assumed price for crystals is 10g and the other mats at 25g. This means that any high level green priced at 20g and below is going to get me a profit on average. So with that in mind it's just some simple division to decide what I should spend on anything level 39 or below.

But before I get to selling and buying and all that jazz, I check what the going rate of the t3 materials are selling for that day. If I can get at least a 20g profit I'll buy and RB them all. I'll list all but 10 of each so that I have enough left to do my prof dailys the next morning.

Fairly simple but still fairly effective none the less. As for the crafted runes themselves I only craft what's profitable for that specific day and nothing more. Prices just shift too much too often for if to be worth the time and effort of managing the inventory it needs.

Thanks for stopping by!

Everyone is a newbie

2011-06-06T00:20:00.001-07:00

Right now Rift has been out of beta and officially released for...3 months. If that. In other words 90% of the players are still trying to figure shit out, including yours truly. This also means that the prices on everything are all over the place. Absolutely everything taught by a trainer is selling SIGNIFICANTLY under material costs. This is because of the obvious, everybody and their brother are crafting these with stuff they farmed or got from leveling and are trying to make their money back on it all. So any item enhancements are not going to sell for much if ever and gear is going to be very low as well.

A good goblin would notice this and invest in materials and any rare profession recipes. Just like me. Right now my professions are skinning, tailoring and enchanting in wow terms which are Outfitter, Butchering, and Runecrafting. RC lets you rune break (DE) almost anything that's green. So I buy any gear that's at a certain price range, break it, and sell the mats now that my prof is maxed. I use the mats for the daily quests and try hard to have a little extra for tomorrow.

Going from 2 million gold, rich enough to buy a max level guild and STILL be swimming in cash all the way down to not being able to afford training skills because I bought a mount is a bit of a shock. But I remember doing my From the Ground Up project and I don't feel so bad.

The big issue is that there are a ton of markets that will exist in the future that aren't viable right now. That's because there isn't enough money in game period. Things like vanity items, small items that help you clear rifts easier and the like. They are all good things and in demand, but people just can't afford it when they still don't have a max level mount yet.

The only perk to this situation is that you can take advantage of this game wide ignorance sometimes. For example if I asked you what a "Radiant rage runeshard" was worth what would your answer be? Exactly. And that's my answer as well, "fuck I don't know!" And that's the same thing you'll get from anybody short of being quoted the AH price for that exact minute. So when there isn't any X Widget's on the AH you can set not only their price, but their "assumed value" as well. So for the next 20 minutes that is what your widget is worth to anybody and everybody because they have no idea that it will eventually be worth pocket change.

The flip side to that is the prices on materials. Once you get higher level than the starter zone is when things take a turn. Leather that you get at level 40 might be worth the same as what you get at level 1 on that day. If you aren't rich enough to stokpile, these fluctuations in supply can really ruin your day. Although it does present a very high risk flipping change. The problem is, again, you have no idea what their average market value is and no way TO know short of watching them very closely every single day.

Since I spent all of my money at level 40 for a mount I cannot take such risks by any means since I literally can't afford to try. So What am I doing to make money in Rift? Check in tomorrow.

Thanks for stopping by!

Starting Monday

2011-06-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

Aloha all, checking in to let you know that I'll be back to consistent posting after the weekend. Even though I have a lot written I am still putting it off for a bit. Sorry about that. The main reason is because I'm still fairly new to the game and am going over all that I've written to make sure it's still accurate. That and I'm still figuring out all of the "what's" there are to be had and sold in the AH game over here.

But fear not there is still a ton of theory coming your way and a good number of specifics on what to sell for the rift players that may be reading. With the game being only a few months old it is very exciting. I'm getting to watch a game and community grow and see how every single inch of that effects the economy. Fun times.

Thanks for stopping by!

Rift Beginner's guide Part 2

2011-05-31T21:58:00.001-07:00

Continuing from yesterday with a crash course in how to play Rift we'll look at a few more points in the game that everybody should know when you first open it up. After I spend a little more time at the level cap I'll give you a once over of what dungeons and the like are all about.

Callings and souls.
A calling is your base class which pretty much just defines your armor type and how you want to play them. You have warrior, rogue, mage, and cleric to choose from. With each of these callings are several different souls to pick from of which you can have 3 at once. Each soul has it's own talent tree which decides if you're a wow hunter, a ranged rogue, a healing priest, dps priest, tank, or support class.

Support is a new role added into the typical mmo trinity. The support role is exactly what you think it would be, support. The entire soul tree is centered entirely around utility with things such as super awesome CC, aoe silences, snares, focused and raid healing counterparts to dps (1 damage also turns into 1 healing, not replaced) etc. Depending on how you spec and souls taken, you can be a very solid dps loaded up with utility. Fun stuff.

In other words there are dozens of different talent trees for you to look at and each one has a tool tip telling you what a recommended pairing is for it. Choosing talents is totally simple, take whatever adds to DPS, healing, or survival and grab utility with anything left over.

What's built in.
Since there are no addOns in the game currently, they made sure that almost everything you'd want comes already running by default. Unfortunately it is lacking in anything relating to the AH aside from the basic functions. Here's a few wow-esque addOns that come stock with the game.

Carbonite / quest helper: The awesome mini map and questing database from these two addOns is a much have for any game if you ask me. You get a note in an enemy's tooltip if they're for a quest, you can track them on your map and mini map and get yellow circles around the area the quest is at. Oh and the mini map is actually useful! In wow the mini map or compass were absolute garbage and had zero use what so ever, but the one in Rift has everything you'd expect it to have.

Map coordinates: Mouse over any pixel on the map and you see what coords you're pointing at. Winning. In addition to that you can right click and set a "way point" which is exactly what you think it is. It sets a marker on the map and you get a small arrow pointing you what direction to go in order to get to that point. You can only have one up at a time, but everybody in the group can set one.

Dynamic events.
The first are rifts which are entail a spawn point of baddies, mini quest, and unique loot. If you clear the stage that it's in within the time limit (if there is one) you'll get a bonus stage which is where all of the real goodies come from. Next are invasions and foot holds which are just a smaller version of a rift and only entail clearing a small pack of mobs to get some drops.

Lastly are epic invasions which are when dozens of rifts, footholds and invasions happen all over an entire zone at once. These are zone wide and totally massive. They require basically everyone in the zone to take part in a quest that gets added to your log by default to complete and get high end rewards and level appropriate epics.

If you're worried about there not being enough people doing them I took part in one the other day at like 2am and we cleared everything including the final boss with about 20 people total.

In addition to that, there is still good reason to do an epic invasion quest in a lowbie zone even if you're at 50. The rewards you get can be traded up for things you can sell to lower level players or special currencies you can use at any time at any level. Doing lower ones will give you lesser amounts than higher level ones of course, but you will still get a useful amount at any level.

Dynamic groups.
The big thing in Rift are world events that happen on the fly, some only need a small group of 2-3 people to do while others need an entire raid. To make this easier if you're group is trying to close a rift (spawn point of baddies, mini quest, unique loot) at the same time as another one is, both groups will be merged together automatically.

This is called being in a public group which the group leader can change any time they want by right clicking their picture and changing it from public to private. If your group goes above 5 people it'll be turned into a raid group which you can still invite more to and so forth. And as far as I know, you can still do regular quests while in a raid group and are not penalized for being in one.

PvP.
The same as wow. You can do world pvp if you're on the right server or flag yourself if you're on a carebear server. There are plenty of questing hubs and outposts for you to go explode if you feel so inclined. Be advised though that even at max level with decent gear, you won't be one shotting everything you come across and can easily lose a 1 on 3 battle if the 3 lowbies actually try to kill you.

The big difference here is that you have to select a certain pvp soul in order to compete instead of getting a ton of pvp gear just to not be exploded.

What am I playing?
I'm a dps warrior using the Paragon soul. Think fury warrior from TBC, dual wielding great aoe, and high sustained damage. My gf is playing a chloromancer mage which is a dps/healing support role. All of their damage heals either the group or an assigned target with certain buffs being handed out. So far every soul seems to have a solid niche that they can fit and do well in with their flavor of damage and such. Also of note is that you can have up to 5 different specs at once so there are plenty of options with a single calling.

Crafting and selling.
Ah what you've all been waiting for! Unfortunately there won't be anything here that you don't already know from wow. The only real difference here is the names of everything. The big thing to point out though is that every crafting profession has a set of daily quests you can do that you can start doing at level 1. Each quest is chosen randomly each day and at a max of 2 daily's per crafting profession. The reward is a fist full of assorted mats for that profession and tokens that are used to learn more recipes, think JC gem cuts but for every profession.

Each one of these quests requires you to turn in a number of crafted items to an NPC. The things you turn in don't have to be crafted though, so you can just buy them from the AH if they're cheaper than the mats and hand those over.

The prof daily quests (which reset at 4am server) scale with your current profession skill level and not your character level so you may get a quest at level 20 that needs you to deliver something to an NPC in a level 40 zone. I know, it happened to me many times. Also you can predict what you'll need to craft to a certain extent. The two crafting quests will want the highest tier material and the second highest material to craft something that you can make.

To put this into wow terms, Enchanting at 525 skill level would get one quest that needs maelstrom crystals and another quest needing heavenly shards. Below that you would have to craft something with GCE's and below that would be something needing hypnotic dust. I'm sure that's a tad confusing, but it's a lot harder to explain that it actually is. Once you check it out you'll understand completely.

Thanks for stopping by!

Rift Beginner's guide: Part 1

2011-05-29T22:03:00.001-07:00

I've been playing rift for a month or so now and I've got a pretty strong grasp of the mechanics and game play. So for today and tomorrow you'll get to read a write up on the main differences between Rift and wow and a general overview of "how to play." Basically all of the questions that you'll have after your first 2 hours of the game will be answered here.

Money.
Gold, silver, copper has been turned into platinum, gold, silver. Same value and rarity as in wow but with different names. So anytime I say "plat" you can just translate that in your mind as gold in wow.

Mail.
It's instant between all players, but from the AH it's a little delayed. When you buy or cancel an auction it's delayed by around 45 seconds, but when you sell something it's instant. When you mail something add the item before typing in the name or it gets a tad temperamental.

Leveling.
If you wear plate, take 1 defensive talent and the rest dps and you're fine. If you go with a tank spec you can pull as much as you like usually, but things die VERY slowly. If you level as a healer it's the same as with wow, kill yourself. Your first purchase of a second spec is dirt cheap so being able to dps and heal or tank is no problem. It's all straight forward and easy to figure out. In fact, if you level a toon in wow to 60 without heirloom gear that's 20 times more of a nightmare than in rift.

Fun fact: I never enjoyed questing in wow. Ever. Not even on my first toon, I hated every single quest. None of them were slightly interesting minus like, 8 total. Meanwhile in rift, I'm having fun on at least half of the quests as they're interesting and have their own story in their own place. Not like blizz did in wrath and cata where every damned quests was either "zomg unded" or "zomg something's burning."

Best game mechanics.
Two things come to mind. One is automatic AoE looting. If you kill 10 mobs in the same spot once you loot one of them you auto loot them all. FUCKING WINNING! Like seriously, who ever made that call has got to have tiger's blood or something. After that is that you don't have to dismount to loot anything, don't have to wait 10 seconds before skinning a dead mob etc. Other cool things include when you need to kill a named mob but it's tagged, as long as you help kill it you still get credit. An when you're on a collect drops quest, everyone in the group can loot the quest item from the mob so you don't have to kill 10 bears for each person.

Talents.
Identical to wow for the most part. The main difference is that the more points you spend in a certain tree you'll get more abilities opened up. I don't mean that if you spend a talent point into X you'll get X skill. No it's more of a passive thing where 30 points into a tree will get you Y ability. That and you have talents that are like built in mastery where the more you spend there, the better you are at that role.

Mounts.
You can get your first one as soon as you can afford to buy it (2.5 plat), next at 40, and the last is at 50. With gold given from only quests I was able to afford my first one at around level 10.

Professions.
Identical to wow. Skill ups are green, yellow, and orange difficulties. The big difference here is that you can learn 3 at once and a lot of them are either splits of wow profs or combines. For example "Outfitter" crafts both cloth and leather gear, so it needs a leather gathering prof to supplement it. Meanwhile "Weaponsmith" is just what it sounds, a black smith that makes mostly weapons. Choose wisely. I went with outfitter, rune crafting (enchanting), and butchery (skinning).

Biggest thing missing from wow?
No addons, none, zero. They have stated that it's something they're considering for the future, but want to see how the game plays and the people go through it before they make a decision. In other words, the game is 2 months old fool! I think this is a good decision honestly, because unless you run the game right out of the box there's no way to really gauge the difficulty of learning and playing it. This is mostly from a developer's standpoint though. I'm sure that your average wow player has no problem working with addOns but if you're fairly new to the genre you'll be like a deer in headlights.

Bugs.
There aren't many bugs in the traditional sense, but there is a lot of things that I've noticed that make you wonder "why can't I do this?" By that I mean when a confirmation window pops up, you can't hit enter to say OK. Also the auto complete in the mail box is a bit temperamental. I'm positive that things like this will be fixed or added in later on as they've already handled a ton of this in the last patch or two. So in the mean time, be aware that there are still a few minor annoyances that you'll have to deal with.

Travel.
This is the most awesome change from wow right here. No more 10 minute flights from A to B! In every zone there is a portal that gives you instant travel to any other portal that you've come across thus far for a minor fee. And I do mean instant in the literal sense, you hit OK and you go to the loading screen and blam you're there. One per zone might not seem like a lot, but traveling on a mount is VERY simple when you stick to a road. In some zones that are much larger you'll find two of them there so the only hard part is finding them. And that's only hard if you have nobody at all to tell you where they are.

Thanks for stopping by!

Friendly reminder

2011-05-27T08:03:00.001-07:00

Aloha all, I just wanted to check in and remind you that I'm going to be back to writing fairly soon. Bear in mind that I have a lot of stuff already written (over two weeks worth!) so it may seem a tad out of order as I was writing it as I leveled up and have since hit 50. Now that you've read my two entries on rift starter guides (you have read them haven't you?) you should be up to speed on everything you need to know so that you can understand what I'm saying when I talk specifics.

I'll be writing about making gold yes, but in Rift this time. All of the theory I mention then you can easily apply to any game with an AH and an established crafting system in place. The what and where is always important, but is trumped by the WHY every single time if you want to go far.

I'll be starting up again officially this coming Monday so be sure to check it out!

Thanks for stopping by!

Wow AH index

2011-05-24T04:33:00.001-07:00

Today is my final entry on wow and it's going to be a simple index of my most important entries that I've written to date. I'll leave a link to this entry on the side so you will have easy access once I move onto writing about rift full time. I am beyond thrilled that all of you enjoyed my blog as I did writing it, but it's time for me to move onto something that I find more interesting.

Should you have any wow related questions, feel free to send an email to theahpile@gmail.com as I don't think I'll forget everything I've learned in 2 years over night. That and the fact that once new content and gems come out the methods and ideas will always apply.

Here are the most pertinent blog posts you will find here and possibly anywhere else. Each one deals with everything from pricing theory to campers to my massive list of what sells for a profit. Enjoy!

My credentials on the wow AH.
First gold cap: 1/18/10
1 Million gold: 5/7/2010
A fortune in 2 months
2 million gold: 5/1/11

Dealing with campers.
What every scribe asks 1
What every scribe asks 2
What every scribe asks 3
Vicious
Campers and greed
How do you kill that which has no life?

General AH theory.
Old markets are thriving markets
So sayeth the Stokpile
Dual monitors
Key ingredients
My specifics
The Method

Pricing theory.
Auction House Nirvana: Part 1
Auction House Nirvana: Part 2
Auction House Nirvana: Part 3

Buy, sell, and trade lists.
Comprehensive list of everything that sells.
Buying list
Best sellers
What DON'T I sell?

Profession specific guides.
Profession Overview: Inscription
Profession overview: Jewel crafting
Profession overview: Smithing & Leatherworking
Profession overview: Tailoring & Engineering
Profession overview: Enchanting
Low profit professions: Part 1
Low profit professions: Part 2
BoA enchanting guide

Off topic rants.
For the potential blogger
On raiding: PSA
A few gems from "Ask the devs"
Dungeon finder Call to arms (failure)
I bought the ultimate gold sink
Must nerd rage!

For those just starting up.
Where to start?
Profession Priorities
First place finishes last
Convert to goblinism and profit
Investments & Bracer enchants
Start up
Patience

Assorted tips.
Entry detailing the addOns I use
zeroAuctions set up guide
MS Excel enchanting price guide spread sheet
How much to Stokpile
Pro Tips

Thanks for stopping by!

A brave new world

2011-05-22T22:09:00.001-07:00

And thus ends the great WoW empire of Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny. I have said just about everything that I have to say on the world of warcraft auction house and using it to make tons of gold quickly and easily so it's time to move on. As I mentioned last week I am moving over to Rift and am trying my hand at that game. Today's entry is to give all you a heads up for things to come with the blog.

First, the blog is going to be inactive for about a week or two while I figure some things out with the game. I'm level 50 right now which is the level cap, totally broke, and am getting my feet wet with some of the max level content in the game. I won't be raiding for a while as that needs some significant gear upgrades from the greens I'm in. Tomorrow I'll be posting an index of what I feel are the most important entries that I've made over the lifespan of my wow AH career as it were.

Soon I'll be writing up a beginner's guide to Rift so that anybody that is considering trying it out won't walk into it as a total newbie and can help others decide if it's even worth trying out. In addition to that, it will give any continuing readers a much better grasp of things that I'm talking about in my future writing on the game. I built an empire in wow and plan to do the same in this game eventually. But of course, such things take time and that means you'll get day to day updates on the things that I'm seeing and a bit of an intellectual head start should you move over to Rift as well.

I'll be writing about making the Rift moneys as well as anything that I find interesting about the end game content once I get up to it. I never really wrote much about wow end game because just about everyone who was reading already was having fun with it so there wasn't much of a point. But now with a brand new game, there's basically nothing at all out there.

As for me returning to wow again, I don't think it's very likely. I mean come on, I have 2 million gold and was the top DK dps on my server. I know my class inside and out and have no reason to log on when it isn't raid night. That doesn't really warrant a subscription fee if you ask me. Go do quests? No thanks, they're all the same with little to no story in them. Each one is a different rendition of "the shit is on fire" show. Pvp? I stopped playing during wrath because I was sick of guild hopping and am NOT going to do the same thing with arena teams. Achievements? I'm a goblin. I'm a very pragmatic person. Take that and guess how interested I am in killing 500,000 digital squirrels.

At the end of he day I'll still be writing regularly on the same topic as always, but with a different flavor topping. Once I get a bit more figured out and shed my newbie skin I'll give a full write up on the game, a few classes that I'm familiar with, the whole crafting and auctioning thing, and the obligatory how to make mega muneh! The idea behind writing about the game in depth before I get into the AH part of it all is two fold.

One is so that you, my dear readers, will be able to understand wtf I'm going on about and get a grasp of some new in game lingo. And the second is so that I have some time to actually figure things out for myself. The Stokpile Method doesn't work well if you have to count your pennies and go for broke when you buy a mount. So stay tuned, more quality and original content is coming soon! I'll be posting regularly again in two weeks time with a crash course in Rift game play being posted next week.

See ya then.

Like I always say...

2011-05-19T22:05:00.001-07:00

Have you noticed how often I use the phrase "like I always say" in my blog? Well I have and it seems that it's almost every week that I say it. Throughout the lifespan of this blog I've repeated certain phrases and catch phrases of sorts fairly often. I do this for a couple of reasons. One is to drill it into your head because it's that important. And the other is because it's a very easy way to get people to learn, simple expressions can be remembered easily and morphed into your own version of it to fit your situation. So I took some time looking over older entries and came up with a handful of my most common expressions for you to put to use. Immediately!

A winner always knows where they're going. A champion never forgets where they're from.
This one is all about fun and respect. Be respectful to other people, both the morons and the competing AH barons. There is simply never a reason to be rude until you're insulted. Always have fun while you play the AH, even if you are driven to hit 1 million stop the moment it's no longer fun.

The most valuable thing you can have is time.
Going against the goblin adage of "time is money" a bit here. Yes you can make easy money prospecting, but how long does it take? When people call something easy, they always forget the whole "time consuming" part of it all. If you're spending a few hours a day working glyphs from the milling all the way up to posting and only making 5k a day... just stop. Please, please, PLEASE value your time a tad more than that. And I don't just mean your in game time, because your game time cuts into your living time. Do you really want to be 60 and look back remembering the week you spent 4 hours every night hitting a "mill herbs" macro? I should hope not.

Music is awesome.
Check out Korpiklanni, great folk metal. Here's a drinking song they wrote that is perfect for everybody. Ok I don't really say that a lot, but they're awesome regardless. Go watch and come back when it's done!

Have a reason that's more than just gold.
Obvious reason is obvious. If you're only playing the AH for cash, you won't get very far. The asshole (me) that undercuts your 300g gem down to 180g is going to really piss you off because you're losing a lot of gold by undercutting them and not selling at 299.99.99 like you want to. If money is your only motivator you're likely going to be very lonely on the AH (and usually IRL if you watch the greediest of the greedy play house) and will be driven out of markets very easily.

Now before you piss and moan "you're wrong Stokpile, I'll just come back when prices are high again" remember that the asshole 100g undercutter that pushed you out (me again) just made 50k profit from the market you left because you left it. If you would have stayed in you'd have 20k from that market and not a fat ZERO. Granted I have a zero as well each week. In fact I have 6 of them all in a row...

Don't forget the small fish.
Always sell everything, even if it's only for a few gold and goes slowly. If it goes slow then there's going to be maybe 1 other person that sells it. In other words you can dictate the price of it, set it, and forget about it. These types of niche markets I just love. Zero thought required and barely any effort involved. If you look at my enchanting numbers and all of the scrolls I sell on the list, you'll that there's a reason I keep to this.

Persistence
When you find a method that works great for you, don't worry about what I say. Do it and keep doing it, it's usually not a good idea to fix something that isn't broken. But that is entirely relative of course. If your method makes you 20k profit a week working a dozen markets while mine made me 240k profit in a single week, well, you've got some thinking to do.

Consistence
Now that you're sticking with the same method, you just have to make sure that you take care of your business every single day at least once. Do your cancel/craft/cancel/post cycle in it's entirety at least once a day and keep at it. If you do, you'll be at the 1 million gold cap 10 times faster than if you didn't. In the time that you're not selling, others are and are getting a stronger hold on the market while you're losing yours. The short hand version of this is to once again weigh your effort against your profits and determine if they're worth it. Time is valuable, remember?

Thanks for stopping by!

The G/Hour Misconception

2011-05-19T00:23:00.001-07:00

One thing that really bothers me is when people talk about gold per hour. That is, the amount of gold you get in a given time frame doing a specific set of tasks. You can also relate this theory, and it is only just a theory, to the 80/20 rule where 80% of your gold must come from only 20% of your effort. Unfortunately both of these theories are almost impossible to quantify with any degree of accuracy.

Mind you I am not in any way saying that guessing your G/hour is pointless or always going to be wrong or a piece of information that has no meaning. No, I'm only going to try today to clear up an extremely popular misconception about the whole idea. One which just about everybody in the AH game likes to either ignore it or simply take g/hour as the word of god.

The only exception to g/h being immeasurable is farming a very specific group of mobs and skinning while alone or something along the lines of the shuffle when you vendor absolutely everything. You spend X time prospecting, Y time cutting gems, and Z time vendoring. Each one of those steps has an exact value attached to it which you can easily multiply and add accordingly. Hmmm, but what if you AH the rare gems? What if you like to DE carnelian spikes and turn them into scrolls to sell? Now it's suddenly impossible to calculate with any degree of certainty what so ever. This is where the problem comes in.

Let me give you the typical fallacy of the g/h myth. Actually it's more of a misuse of the theory than it is a misconception is certain cases. But that's just semantics, moving on. Here's the example: buy a widget from a vendor for 1g (copper rod, local cooking recipe, etc.) and place it on auction for 10g. That has taken you about 30 seconds to do so far. The items then sells for 11g, which gives you a 10g profit. What the typical person does here is instantly jumps forward in time to "omg I just made 10g in only 30 seconds! That means my gold per hours is 1200! Go me I'm gonna be rich tomorrow!"

Ok here's the first problem in why this is entirely wrong. You're completely skipping the 38 hours it took for that copper rod to sell. so rounding up here, that means that your g/hour from selling copper rods is somewhere in the range of... less that a friggin copper. Should you still sell copper rods? Of course. Is it great gold per hour? Obviously not.

The second problem here is another that is so staggeringly obvious that I'm shocked nobody has mentioned it before. These copper rods, these vendor recipes, these pets, you don't buy them from one vendor for 5g and sell them to another vendor for 20. You sell them to a person. A person who is either a moron, lazy, uninformed, or plain doesn't care what they spend on what. That person is not always there, the vendor that buys your common gems for 5g is always there.

So not only do these pro tips of slow selling items not make even a fraction of the gold per hour as they claim, they don't always have a person to sell to. Once you take these two things into account you'll have a much better chance of improving your actual gold per hours. Look a little bit deeper and you'll see that this whole time I've been repeating another one of my many AH motto's. Know your market. Know your customer.

To really make the g/hour theory applicable to anything is to add in one other part to the equation: repetition. If you get a world boe from an instance that you sell for 20k, your g/h is NOT 20k per dungeon run. So maybe make it like (gold / hour) / T where T is how much time you'd have to spend so that it can be repeated.

In the end, what you should be doing is what I keep telling you to do every Tuesday, look at the bottom lines first. Take the amount of time total that you spend working the AH, crafting, posting, collecting and everything else that goes into it. Tally that all up and then total up all of the gold you made for that day or week and put them together. That is what your real gold per hour is. Is that easy to do? No not really actually, I know because I've done it. But is it accurate? It is as honest about your g/h as you are. So when somebody claims an amazingly simple method of 600g/hour be wary as it is practically guaranteed that it isn't consistent.

Thanks for stopping by!

On raiding: PSA

2011-05-17T21:20:00.001-07:00

No gold making entry today, sorry about that. Today I'm going to talk about raiding and the crap that for some reason people are still doing that causes fail after fail attempt. Today is one of the few times where if you disagree I will flat out say you are entirely 100% incorrect and need to stop playing. Yes they are are very simple things and yes they DO matter. They matter a lot.

And to answer the question that is begged by an entry such as this let me explain why these things piss me off. Getting killed because 5 people don't know that fire hurts is not fun for me, nor is it fun for the other 19 people that you just stole time from. Also it's not annoying that you're bad at a game, it's aggravating because if you cannot comprehend "dps switch to skull" then you are not just a dumb player, you are a dumb person. Fact. If you can't do that, then I'm terrified to be in the same state as you because you might not stop when you see a red light show up. And nothing pisses me off more than blatant stupidity.

If you click, you are wrong.
At the risk of sounding rude, if you click most of the abilities in your primary rotation/priority then you have got to have a brain the size of a golf ball. The amount of physical coordination is zero, if you can type a single sentence without a spelling error then you can use keybinds. The only exceptions here are certain CD's that are used maybe once or twice a fight.

Some examples are bloodlust, army of the dead, and maybe even vanish. These spells are typically cast only once per fight so there's no reason to keybind them when if you wait the 1-2 seconds to hit them it most likely won't change the outcome. It can and does happen, but rarely. If you're a mage clicking fire ball or arcane blast, then you are wrong.

And before you even THINK about moaning that "oh well keybinds may work for you, but clicking is still better for me and works better" shut up. Don't talk because everyone that might read that by accident will become dumber. There is zero excuse outside of a crippled hand not to keybind your skills. If you think that clicking is better for you, get better because you're terrible right now compared to ANYBODY in equal gear and half of your "skill."

EDIT: Thomas made a good comment that requires me to clarify this a little. They mentioned that as a healer they use a click addOn which most healers use in some form or another. This is entirely different than what I was getting at above so let me expand on this a bit. By "clicking" I refer to (as a tank) click on the boss, move mouse, click charge, move mouse, click rend, move mouse etc. As a healer click a player, move mouse, click heal 1, move mouse, click player, click heal 2 etc.

What should be done is click player, hit button 1 to heal click next player hit button 2 to heal. That sort of thing. It may not be a lot of difference in time, but over the course of a 5-10 minute fight it adds up really quick.

When using a click addOn to heal it's usually just left click for heal A, right click for heal 2, alt+left click to de-curse and so forth. For dps there shouldn't be any clicking involved aside from the extra long, once per fight, CD's that I mentioned. As a DK I'm not going to waste a bind on army of the dead, I cast it once per fight or every other fight depending on recovery time. While tanking I click my "go go uber threat" abilities because they also only get used once or twice per fight. They aren't used nearly enough to add another bind to memorize and commit to muscle memory.

Keyboard turning is wrong.
Again with the keybinds. You have strafe and run keybound by default and, if you're not clicking your spells there is no reason not to hold down your right mouse button to turn. You're slow, you're clumsy, and you're losing a ton of dps-heals-tanky positioning. Yes a lot, and yes if you keyboard turn when you have a perfectly good mouse you're wrong.

Here's a link to an image that illustrates (see wut i did thar) this fact far better than I ever could.

Bad stuff is bad.
Obvious point is obvious. If your graphics setting are even remotely decent, there is no excuse to start running immediately when you're on fire. This is the main reason why I would make a terrible raid leader or GM. If you get hit by the bad stuff for more than two ticks EVER I would instantly kick you from the guild if I could and spam your account information all over the interwebs to make sure you get hacked so nobody will ever risk playing with you ever again. Now if the bad stuff has an obvious warning like, I don't know, the sound discs on Atramedes there is no reason to get hit once. No reason, no excuses. If you get hit you failed terribly at the most basic human instinct, don't get set on fire.

Yes +5 stats are worth 2k.
I've already proven how easy gold is made in this game. No I'm not referring to my 2 million gold, I'm talking about when I had full epic gear, gems, top end enchants, epic flying, full BoE purples, AND 50k in under 2 months with a single toon that had zero help from a single person. For a DK 5 strength is equal to about 10 dps (using simple numbers here).

If you include tanks and assume 8 healers in a raid, that means there are 17 people doing damage on the boss. 17 people X 10dps X 300 seconds in a fight = 51k more damage. Now multiply that by another 5 gear slots and that's over 250k more damage. I don't know about you, but I've seen MORE than my share of sub 200k wipes. If you wouldn't be so lazy and get the top enchants, you wouldn't have those frustrating wipes.

Skill > gear.
Ulduar was done by Gevlon with a raid wearing only blue gear. World first Neferian kill was done in 333 blues and a few greens. Your raid is probably in all purples now with a few actual epics by now. If you're wiping on Chimeron still, that's because your healers have no idea how to do the fight. If you're wiping on halfus it's because your DPS are plain retarded. You do NOT need better gear, you need to learn wtf to do!

This is, was, and always will be a cold hard fact. If you think you need better gear for normal modes then don't ever join a raid with me or I will cut you. My shammy was doing over 11k dps the moment they hit 85 with not a single boe purple. That means they're ready to raid 3 minutes after hitting the level cap. Why? because I learned how to paly while leveling instead of hitting the "any-key" to continue the grind. Get better, get loot.

No you are not in paragon, no you are not in midwinter (well maybe not), but that doesn't mean that you have to act like the lol-kids that click 1-2-3-4 all night long. Take some pride in doing something well for gods sake. Just because you're not the best doesn't mean you can't try. Aim for the moon and reach the sky and all that jazz.

BiS > purple.
Outside of the odd racial bonuses, if you're wearing a pvp weapon and don't roll on a pvE weapon of the same ilvl then you are wrong. Resil does nothing to help you pew pew. If something is an upgrade and you don't take it then you're most likely doing it wrong. The rare exception is if you're next in line for a weapon or OP trinket or 4pc tier and if you take a second best item you won't be next in line for BiS anymore. That I get and agree with, that's a legitimate investment there. But if you're using say the boe strength trinket and the BiS trinket drops from chimeron and you pass...you're wrong. That would constitute you being called a loot whore.

Why? Because all you want is loot and lots of it and you don't give a damn what it is or if it's even good. Just higher numbers and more purple than the last purple. This is why I wore (wear) tank gear because it was an upgrade over my blue dps gear. And lastly, if you're claiming that you're passing on loot to save DKP for gear in firelands, then you have no business in a guild that is even remotely interested in progression. Go join the social raiding guilds, max out your valors there and let the guild replace your monkey ass with somebody that wants to down more than 5 bosses a week. You're holding them back not the other way around.

Dead DPS = zero dps.
The moment you die your super good dps is worthless and has no meaning, no matter how high it is. I recommend to every single person that raids to never have recount running. It's a terrible distraction and promotes shitty playing. However if you still insist on it, look at damage done during a fight, NOT your dps. 20k dps is like a 20" dick. Sure it's great to brag about, but it's worthless if you don't know where to stick it. If you think you're top shit because you can do 30k dps and die from fire standing 20 seconds later, may I suggest to you a blender. WILL IT BLEND!?

For the tanks: Stamina is no longer your god.
Back in ICC and ToC heroic where 2 hits could easily kill you, stamina stacking was the only way to go to ensure that your healers (and their infinite mana bars) could land a few heals to top you off. Now two big heals won't fill you up at all, and especially not if you cram stam gems everywhere. Now it's about taking as little damage as possible, not being able to take more. In other words, dodge enchants are your friend and mastery is the new stamina or whatever the bear equivalent is. In current gear, shield tanks are very close to blocking every attack.

A DK and a bear can pump up their pseudo shield pretty high and are able to ensure it's up back to back almost all of the time. That's a huge amount of damage taken off folks, your stamina does nothing to reduce mana and let your healers top off the raid. In other words if you're stacking stamina gems or wearing dual stam trinkets and not working on HM progression, you have no business in tank gear. You're wrong.

Thanks for stopping by!

How I shuffle: Part 2

2011-05-17T09:20:00.001-07:00

Continuing on from yesterday where I spoke on all of the useful things that can still be had from the shuffle. Today I'll talk about my stokpiling and balancing methods on gems and enchanting mats. It may sound simple, but when you work all gems, metas, and scrolls full scale it is infinitely easier said than done. This balancing act is critical to being on top of all three markets and not having to worry about running out of materials at the same time.

Here's what I'm doing with all of the gems that I get in better terms than just DE crap and cut rares.

Rare orange, red, and purple: Stokpile 9 stacks of each and cut the rest to AH.

Rare blue, yellow, and green: Since I have such a massive amount of these right now, I just vendor them. At over 400 of each raw hanging around I don't foresee needing more until I hit level 86.

Common blue: keep 6 stacks in the bank. I use two stacks for the daily, 3 stacks for future meta gem xmutes, and another stack to sell for the daily. All others that are in excess of 6 stacks I merely vendor.

Common green and purple: Same as blues, but any extras that I prospect get turned into JC gear to DE and AH the rare procs.

Common yellow: 3 stacks in storage for meta gems at all times and extras are turned into JC gear if I need more dust.

Common orange: This is where things start to get tricky. I try to keep a stokpile of 7 stacks of ember topaz in the bank and 2 full stacks on my crafter. If I ever go below that amount by a significant amount, about 3-4 stacks or so, then I send off ALL of these gems to my alchemist to xmute into more orange rares. They sell at a rate of around 15-20 mixed cuts per day, so I really need to keep on top of it.

The problem that comes up is when I'm short on meta gems and rares at the same time which is when I need to do the AH juggling act and guesstimate what is going to have higher rates of sales tomorrow instead of lumping it all into one giant stokpile as usual. But when I'm well stoked up on both metas and rare oranges, I stuff all of these into the bank because I know for sure I'll need them come next week.

Common reds: Now here is the really hard part of the shuffle. A carnelian can be turned into a meta, a high profit and high rate of sale rare gem, or a very in demand enchanting material. As you saw above, GCE's are my top priority in terms of what I want to get out of the shuffle. With all of the cata scrolls that I move every day my normal stokpile of 500 just isn't enough, let alone easy to reach or maintain. But if I have at least 200 in my bank I'll count that as good enough to consider the rest of the list. Because as important as it is to keep working enchanting, supplying two markets is more important than just one.

I try to keep 9 stacks of rare reds and I am -very- diligent about this because I can sell over two full stacks worth of cut reds in a single day. If that stays consistent for a few days in a row, which it has many times, then this stokpile will vanish into thin air rather fast. And being out of mats is never a good thing even when it makes you rich. I basically try to keep a bare minimum stokpile of everything that common reds go into. 200 GCE, 60 inferno, and 80 metas. If I'm under any of those, that's where every last gem will be pumped into until I reach that plateau. If I'm low on all three of them I refer to the list I mentioned above and only go up to the bare minimum instead of the full happy and cozy stokpiled amounts.

First I'll go up to 200 essences then 60 infernos and finally 80 metas. However if I'm seeing a higher rate of sales than usual on rare reds then that means that either my campers and/or competitors are on break and are leaving the market to me. In which case I'll see double the rates and thus need double the materials. This is where it is paramount to watch your markets very carefully. You don't want to miss out on having free reign on red gems because you turned them all into metas that are now being camped. You got to be careful out there.

Thanks for stopping by!

Going to rift

2011-05-13T23:11:00.001-07:00

Remember when I said I was going to be sticking around for a while? Well I lied apparently. Wow just can't hold my attention that much anymore. I raid 3 nights a week, do auctions occasionally and the rest of my time is me afk or gearing up umpteen alts with my gf. Not that interesting, especially for a monthly fee. I suppose you could say that the straw that broke the camels back was having my account locked for the third time in a week because I have to reset my router daily and that gets blizz to thinking I've been hacked into.

Meanwhile a bunch of people I used to run with and had fun playing together have gone to rift including half of their guild. So my wow account is officially canceled (again) and I have started up Rift and this time it seems I'll be gone for good.

I'm glad you all kept on reading and if you have any interest in playing Rift you can look forward to me doing the blog thing on there. Same place, same schedule.

Thanks for stopping by!

How I shuffle: Part 1

2011-05-13T11:18:00.001-07:00

This was originally written as a single entry but, as per usual, wound up being far bigger than intended. So I'm splitting it up into two parts, the first is about what can still be salvaged from shuffling ore around and the second will be about what and why I shuffle around.

Last week I wrote about how the shuffle is still viable and today I'm going to talk a little about how I'm doing it. Seeing as how the botters or uber farmers have returned once again to ysera I'll just assume that they're either returning to your server or are just about to. Since I was one of the last people to enjoy the vendor shuffle I think this is a fairly safe assumption. The idea here is to point out the many uses that the shuffle still has and to put it all into practical terms of what to do with it all instead of "go make gold fool!"

First I'm going to reiterate that if you want to shuffle you must, absolutely must use everything you get. Just as the Native Americans used every part of the buffalo to survive, so shall you use every part of ore and it's byproducts to get rich. Ok now that you have been forewarned, on with the show.

After I buy out a few billion stacks of ore and prospect it I take stock of what I have, what I need, and what materials I may run out of sooner than others. Here is my order of priority of all shuffle related products:

1. Celestial essence
2. Inferno ruby
3. Ember topaz
4. Meta gems
5. Other rare gems
6. Hypnotic dust

Let me give a bit of explanation on that order real quick. GCE's are very hard to come by on a decent price and there's still a few out there with a stokpile of them that were gotten very cheaply. After that is rare red gems because they're the most profitable gem cut and sell in stacks each day. After those are orange rares because they can hold a primary stat and a useful secondary which makes them almost as popular as red. Add onto that their exceptionally wide range of secondary stats makes the quantity scale tip over.

Next in line are meta gems because they have huge rates of sales. Even though they sell more often than orange gems, they rank lower because they take less to craft in that the other colors of gems are not used for much of anything at all. That and they're xmuted and make at least 2 per craft means that I'll generally get more of them than other rares making their supply much greater than a specific color.

Next are the other assorted colors of rare gems. These only rank above dust because they're not typically cheap enough to buy and cut on the AH. And bringing up the rear is the dust you get from DE'ing the not so worthwhile common gems. I put this as the bottom rung simply because I can just buy the dust from the AH at my standard price a few days of the week. They're a part of the shuffle because, well, they're a natural part of it. That and it's one less thing to search for and they give me options to not DE them, but sell them as is on the associated daily.

The purpose of shuffling now is to continue to be cost effective and not to get free money. Right now my maximum buying price of ore is 40g per stack where as pre 4.1 it was the usual 55ish range. Instead of prospecting anytime I wanted to make some easy money I only do it when I need mats. Unfortunately with the massive demand currently that means a ton of shuffling for me just to keep up with it all. As I wrote yesterday, you should look at the shuffle as an option, as an investment in materials, not as "insta-gold."

Continuing on with this tomorrow.

The Shuffle Lives On

2011-05-11T02:40:00.000-07:00

Many claim that the shuffle is dead as of the patch, even I said so. But after watching the markets since then and giving a bit more thought on the matter, I don't think that's entirely correct. I honestly believe that the shuffle is down, but not out. Not for now at least. Why do I think that? Because you can still profit from prospecting ore and if you can do that then you can shuffle. You just have to be very mindful now instead of smashing your face against your prospect macro.

Bottom line points on the shuffle:

It still works
Requires JC, xmute alchemy, and enchanting
No longer free money
All mats and gems are an investment at an "assumed" vendor price
There is no vendor everything safety net
You must exploit every aspect of the shuffle to profit
Continues to fuel several markets with huge cuts on costs

I'm going to be covering how the shuffle is still clinging to life today by giving several examples of how you can profit from it in the same way. First thing to point out is the new floor price of 30g per stack of ore. That's the new vendor everything and profit price range. Before 4.1 you would ask "how much should I vendor" where as today you will ask "should I vendor?" To be honest, I feel a little guilty writing this entry because it feels like fake content in a way because things are mostly the same. But it's the "mostly" part that is pushing me to write this up.

The things that are the same are, well, everything minus the cut uncommon gems step. Buy a ton of ore, prospect, vendor useless greens, DE stuff, so on and so forth. The primary difference is what pricing points you put on gems, enchanting mats, metas, and what you intend to do with them all. Also the main thing to keep in mind is that with probably 90% of the people that were shuffling ore totally gone there isn't a flood of gems anymore and there won't be again if things stay the same.

So bearing that in mind the obvious price increases have happened and are compounded by the increased demand. All supplies are drying up fast, even mine. So that means that if you can outlast the competition you're going to be in a happy place.

Assuming a stack of ore sells for 40g, you'll get no less than 4 common gems but it will average out to 5 and a fraction of a rare. I believe it's 1 rare per 3 stacks of elementium ore? In any case, 2g per ore makes 10g per prospect and that translates into paying 10g per common gem. That's only a single coin more than before the patch that they were all valued at anyways, but the difference this time is that you can't get that money back from a vendor. This assigned value is an investment that must turn a profit in and of itself or you lose your money. So what do we have available to us that can use the same pricing method of a 10g common gem?

Metas.

Once you factor in the vendor price of the rares and xmute spec, you're looking at around maybe 7-8g or so per common. This gives you a lot of wiggle room where most of the other JC's out there have none. You DO have xmute spec don't you? Good I thought so, you're learning! So at somewhere around 40-45g per stack of ore, the method of shuffling ore with the intent of crafting meta gems has not changed what so ever.

On my server these are now selling for at the lowest price of 150g with a top price of 500, but lets go with a more realistic price of 200g across the board. That turns the shuffle into a 160g profit for every set of gems you put together with a very healthy market and a reliable customer base. Meta gem sales were great before the patch and now they're even better with the increase of demand. Once the demand simmers down the lack of competition will compensate for that thus keeping this an extremely profitable market to be in.

So 10g (ish) per common gem, what else can we do to match that up from before? Disenchanting. The biggest change here is based entirely on how the enchanting material prices are shifting on your server. The only real thing that I can say here is that if they have gone up you can safely shuffle for DE mats to sell as is.

Ok I think that's enough of that. What's the purpose to stating all of the above? The simple fact that at 40g per stack of ore you can continue to shuffle to your heart's content but without a safety net. In other words, don't buy 9000 stacks of ore, only buy it as it becomes available or as you need it. But what can we do now? Ore prices are likely still in flux right now, I know they are for me. But I haven't mentioned rare gems. This is where things get tricky. If you assume selling the average rare gem for 50g then the shuffle is alive and well just as it was before even at 50g or so per stack of ore.

We can still make metas, we can still get easy DE mats, and we can still sell rare gems for great prices. The only change is that none of this is free and your threshold has to be above the vendor price. The short version of all of this is if you add 15g to the vendor price of anything you get from the shuffle and sell it all at that price, you're going to profit no matter how much you do it.

Thanks for stopping by!

Report: 5-10

2011-05-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yes it's that time again. Today's the day of resets, updates, and weekly collections. Here's my weekly report of what I've been selling and in what markets. I also give a few notes on them with up to date market observations in addition to the weekly profit from everything combined. As always, numbers and bottom lines come first.

No screens this week. Apparently, blizz has once again "detected a change in my log in process" and has disabled my account until I reset my password. Thank god I never have problems when I have to reset it...o wait.

The upcoming craftable recipes for 4.2 are up on mmo champ. The short version is stokpile a billion volatile fire and water. Also load up on pristine hides and, if you're going to craft some yourself at some point, chaos orbs as well. Each recipe minus cloth takes 3 each while the tailors need 8ish dreamcloth per.

Detailed Recap:
--------------------
Another week, another round of amazing profits. And also the guild is now 9/12 in 25m with chogall at 27% after our 6th attempt. I was spot on with my prediction of heavenly shards going up in price, they've more than tripled so far with an average price of 40g or so. More of them are getting used in enchants and more people are pounding away at the new heroics that only give crystals. This puts a damper in my market because shards aren't easily gotten from the shuffle which is my primary source of enchanting mats. As such I've adjusted my buying and selling prices accordingly. Damn good thing I stokpiled a few hundred of them pre patch that's for sure.

I'm really looking forward to the next arena season, I'm curious where and how the new pvp gear recipes will be obtained from. Most people thing they'll be sold by the vendors in the TH for material exchanges. Either way, I'm going to be the first to grab them and start selling them off for a killing. With the awesome luck I'm having now with the current crafted gear, the new and improved versions should have new and improved sales to match.

I sold yet another motorcycle this week for over 16k gold, this market just too easy.

There's been some pretty hot items this week that have been selling far more than usual. Buckles have gone up so far that I've gone through 5 full stacks of the things this week. The same goes for mending and heartsong scrolls, they've been selling like crazy. And rounding that off is enchant scrolls of executioner, as in the recipe that used to drop in the old level 70 ZA raid instance. It obviously has very little use these days, but has been making me a few hundred gold every day.

Early in the week I took to resetting the price on red stat gems. I bought up anything that was 100g and below while my threshold is in the 80g range. I wound up with between 20 and 30 of int, strength, and agility cut gems after buying them all out. And before the week was over they had all sold for 150g and up. Now that's a nice amount of profit right there. The biggest advantage that being rich in this game gives you is the ability to take large risks on investments like this on a whim. It sure is exciting and very gratifying when it pays off.

I've had to change my buying price and thresholds for any enchants using heavenly shards. I'm now paying as high as 45g for each of them since the supply is basically gone. Everybody is running the new heroics and there just isn't any way to get them cheaply. I may look into craftable items to DE into full shards, but I doubt there's any cost effective options for this. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Closing note on a random enchant scroll. It's a BC enchant for major intellect and for some reason it has been selling CONSTANTLY all week. It's a drop from a random mob in the nethertorm that takes about 6 minutes to farm and is BoP. I'm not sure why it's been so hot lately, but it sells one a day for a few hundred gold profit. If you've got an enchanter, give this one a shot and see how it goes.

Thanks for stopping by!

Glyph of jewel crafting

2011-05-08T20:53:00.001-07:00

NOTE: This entry was written before the nerf to the shuffle but I am still posting it because it does contain a lot of useful information. Check in after my weekly report for my thoughts on why the shuffle is still viable.

Today's entry was inspired by a conversation I had a bit ago with an Ysera local AH baron. Also please note this was before the announced nerf to the shuffle. It seems that even today people don't get why I undercut by large amounts and why most successful (read, non campers) goblins do the same thing. Even though I have covered it in depth many times over. Today won't be a rehash of all of that per sé, but more of a "how to" for those that want to work gems to it's fullest potential. We'll be covering undercuts first, but before I get into it allow me to ask you a pair of questions to illustrate the points that I'll be making.

Do you know why I can sell a mechano hog for 17k? Because that's what it's worth.

Do you know why people will sell a bold inferno ruby for 30g? Same answer, because that's what it's worth.

...to them.

That's the catch right there, that 17k mechano hog is worth exactly that much to the one that bought it. Conversely the 30g inferno ruby is worth that much to the one that sells it. If They didn't feel that it was worth that much they wouldn't be selling it. Meanwhile I wouldn't be selling a bike for 17k if I didn't think it was worth that much to somebody.

You'll notice that each entry that I linked above not only spans the entire life of this blog, but they all deal with campers. They all deal with getting rid of competition. And in the current gem market, there is no shortage of that on any server. The point of the large undercut is that it will drive away a ton of competitors all on its own. That's because 90% of the people that sell gems are doing it ONLY because of the shuffle giving "free" rare gems.

Once prices get down to a certain point the market is then labeled as fail, unprofitable, and boring then they move onto something else. That leaves you with only the people that know the score and just wait as prices always go back up. That and the one thing that fuels the massive banks of every goblin, quantity over quality.

Let me make the obvious comparison that nobody (that I know of) has made yet. In doing so, allow me to give you the short history on how the glyph business used to be ran during wrath.

- Buy a ton of herbs to mill.
- Sell off the uncommon inks or turn into them into DMC cards or scrolls. Set aside a few for your daily research.
- Sold uncommon inks pay for the entire stack of herbs, making every glyph "free."
- Learn every recipe for glyphs and craft a few of all of them.
- Undercut everyone fiercely while making a profit on every sale to get rid of casual sellers and campers.
- Slowly start to raise your sale price and reset prices on many glyphs at once.
- Get crazy rich 2 months later.

Make sense? Now let me reword that just a tad with a copy/paste of the above and you'll see what I'm getting at.

- Buy a ton of ore to prospect.
- Sell off the uncommon gems or turn into them into DE gear or metas. Set aside a few for your daily quest.
- Sold uncommon gems pay for the entire stack of ore, making all of the gems "free."
- Learn every recipe for gems and craft a few of all of them.
- Undercut everyone fiercely while making a profit on every sale to get rid of casual sellers and campers.
- Slowly start to raise your sale price and reset prices on many gems at once.
- Get crazy rich 2 months later.

In case you can't tell, the gem market now is 100% identical to the glyph business of wrath under different names. There is only one small catch and that's the comparatively large deposit fee, but in all reality that's something that can be almost entirely ignored. But why are people getting all QQ about low prices and big undercuts when they understand the whole mentality when it comes to glyphs which is the exact same method that works so perfectly? The main reason that people are complaining about gem prices now is because they are simply too used to the big numbers that they see in their mail box next to a sold gem.

But the sale price does not, has not, and will not matter when compared to the profit made on that sale. This method has worked well for any successful goblin you read about and it will continue to work well until the optimal method changes like it did with the 9g vendor price. If or when the nerf to the shuffle changes then so will the method, but until then this is going to remain the best way and the best market to get rich with.

And for the people that still cling ever so desperately to the notion that when you undercut by more than 1 copper you're losing money, check out my business reports over the last few weeks and look at the gem sections. That's right, around 80k on average in profit every single week. Are large undercuts always necessary? Of course not, I've said so many times and pointed out specific markets and items that should never be undercut by more than a couple gold at the most. But those very few specific things aside, the gem market is the same as glyphs and warrants the same methodology to get the most out of it.

Thanks for stopping by!

A few gems from "Ask the devs"

2011-05-06T06:45:00.001-07:00

If you haven't heard, a thread on the official forums is being voted on for ask the devs on the topic of professions. They're taking hundreds of public questions and will answer a dozen or two of them later on. I sifted through a few pages and found some interesting ones that I'd like to see answered in depth. And of course, I found a few people that...ugh. People that just don't get it. See? I don't have to say moron every time I get annoyed. Wait, woops.

In any case, here's a few of the choice questions that I found with my own thoughts on them and a few that I pulled out just for the lol's. So you all get some gold theory and laughs today, aren't you lucky! It will be fairly long as there are a good number of interesting questions to be had and some seriously dumb one as well which is why I'm posting this on a Friday. But at the end of the day, it's an entry about a discussion, so it's meant more for entertainment and to be an "interesting read" more than anything else.

While you're reading it, think of how you would answer these select few questions if you were a developer, trying to balance use and fairness while catering to both socials and casual players. Not so much considering goblins though as we will always find a way to profit from a profession. Enjoy!

"Given that alchemists & herbalists have such a gigantic income (more so than jewel crafters, enchanters and blacksmithers) due to their unique ability to create disposable items, such as potions, flasks and elixirs."
Krakan
Undead mage

I had to start off with one of the silliest I found. Gems are consumables and so are enchants. Gear gets replaced, alts get gear, off specs and off off specs. There is more than enough gear to take care of. My weekly 100k+ profits say so. And as for alchemy being profitable, either you spend a dozen hours farming "for free," are on the luckiest server for an alchemist, or are simply clueless.

"Gathering professions are unattractive to both pve and pvp players .Do you have any plans on making them ither more fun ,moving them to a separate profession tier(and allow to have 1 with 2 craft professions) or merging them with the professions they are needed for - eg herb for alchemy and insciption ,mining for jc and bs ets."
Aprix
85 Human Warlock

This I think would be pretty cool, sort of like a tertiary profession. You get two crafting professions and one associated gathering profession. It would make deciding on profs a lot easier and make the leveling process streamlined a bit more I think. Would this be something you'd like to see? I mean I don't exactly farm a lot (at all) but it kills me when I see a line of 50 dead crocs and not one hunter in site or a string of rich ele nodes in a row. It would drastically increase supply of all materials minus ench mats and the gold wouldn't go to people that only speak binary.

"Are there any plans to make potions divisible into two types like elixirs? It can be annoying when you're unable to heal yourself under pressure because you had to add more dps to the target, and vice versa, so would it be possible to allow use of one restorative potion and one that grants a certain amount of a stat per fight?"
Maievs
85 Night Elf Rogue

Any love that alchemists get from Blizz the better I say. And this would be a massive boon to any guild that raids more than twice a week socially for the lulz. Since healer mana is very strict right now, and looks to stay that way, healing potions are amazing. In fact they have saved my life a couple of times to be honest. But then there are fights like Chimeron and the Ele council that throw that out the window. Big dps check and tons of strain on healers so you have to make a split second decision of "will I die? Will the extra few thousand damage mean a kill?"

That and it would make pot spec alchs a little bit more rich which is a great thing as I mentioned. I like that we have to make decisions on potions, but when you miss a prime time to use a dps pot (i.e. bloodlust, aligned proc bonuses) you can drastically lower it's value and you may not even need a healing pot the entire fight. Decisions are good, but when you choose wrong it's a near waste isn't so great.

"For a lot of the player base Archaeology is soul destroying. For some people having to complete over 1,000 artifacts to get the item they want is neither fun, nor casual (which was the purpose of this profession?). It is also gut-wrentching when you hear of someone who got the same item in less than 50 artifacts. Are there any plans to address this?"
Everybody
1-85 farmer/lore hound

Fuck that shit!

"Can we have an XXL JC bag? Those of us who cut gems for AH would have easier times with a 36-40 slot JC bag, as cut gems don't stack. Or just make cut gems stackable."
Ceriulun
85 Night Elf Druid

Dear god, how many times have I written this in an entry? Or times I said it in a comment? Seriously people, it kills me to see a 32 slot LW bag and a 24 spot gem bag. Who the hell has 32 different stacks of leather at once?

"Any plans about enchanting/disenchanting? I spent lots of gold lvling it. Yet it doesnt seem to give proffit,people just farm mats and dont give tips. Maybe give only the enchanter the possibility to dissenchant?"
Captivity
85 Tauren Priest

Yeah, look at my weekly reports and you can go cry. Thake a shower, wash off the shame, because you can't do it because you have failed.

"Will daily cooldowns become 7perWeek like Valors from heroics now?"
Melena
85 Human Priest

Not a likely occurrence, but this is a very interesting thought. If you could craft 7 truegold all at once and throw them on the AH all at once would you? I sure hope not, but a lot (90%) of people will. It would make for great flipping bargains and cause prices to swing heavily every Tuesday. This would mean that you have to at least be aware of this happening and then you can make some good money without any professions at all. More chances to make gold, more chances for the lazy and the stupid to, well, stay lazy and stupid.

"Are there any plans to allow a player to train more than two primary professions?"
Cyrogen
85 Draenei Shaman

The day that this happens is the day that 4,681 new bankers are born on every relm. /Hope

"Will there be any major quest chains or titles related to professions in the future?"
Isseit
85 Dwarf Paladin

This would be pretty cool I think. It would be pretty sweet to get a title or some such to have every BS or JC or Ench recipe in game. It would also make linking a profession easier to get a few oooh's and aaaah's from trade and pull out a few extra sales from people that want to touch your awesome. That and it would be wicked fun linking it in trade, or walking around with the title only to ignore/deny any requests for the service. Or just be an excuse to charge 400g to enchant earthen vitality teehee.

-insert 30 questions on epic gems, 10 on enchanting is terrible, 50 on get rid of the auto de because enchanters can't make money, another 6 on why is inscription so terrible at everything, and 20 more wanting goggles and alch trinkets upgraded-

"Make new dailies for every profession, maybe?"
Tumargran
85 Tauren Warrior

This I'd like to see only if it gave something more tangible than gold or profession currency. I'd like to see them give a random batch of materials for that profession or a chance at a bop recipe for a vanity item or a 346 crafted weapon that's cheap to make.

"With some professions, particularly Inscription, converting raw materials into items can be a very lengthy process. Inscription for example requires you to mill 4 times per stack of herbs to get pigments. You then convert these pigments into Inks, and then you can craft your item. Are there any plans to shorten this process?"
Almyna
85 Goblin Priest

This I believe was mentioned as something that Blizz wants to do in the future. Unfortunately I think you'll be raiding kara at 95 by then and I'll be long gone, but if this was implemented sometime soon... hoo boy! Every goblin siddenly gets triple their g/h by being able to either automate the process or cut it in half. Imagine if you could prospect 3,000 ore in a few minutes? Hell, I'd even be happy with prospecting an entire stack with one click instead of 4.

Thanks for stopping by!

Where to start?

2011-05-04T21:00:00.001-07:00

Kammler recently wrote that it seems most of us are writing mostly for each other. In other words each entry is more of an "advanced only" level of understanding and doesn't offer much in the way of help for anybody really getting into (or back into) the AH game. Lets be honest, if you read my last 10 gold posts you won't really know what I'm going on about more often than not if you aren't already experienced in it to some degree.

Today I'm going to give a handful of tips for people that already are familiar with the AH game, but only on a smaller scale. So if you're literally just starting out this will be useful to you, but still requires a small amount of knowledge of the AH game. Or if you happen to just be returning to the game this will be perfect. The idea here is to write up something that can be useful now and not something that requires large amounts of planning ahead.

If you're already having success working your market of choice but want to improve how well you run it or just want to expand, read on. I will be covering not only what to do, but how and why as well. Note that the how's and the why's are the most important in the long term, but the what's are the things that you can do now to make gold now. Now mind you, I'm not going to say go sell this and that because if you haven't figured out that you should sell something, I'd venture that you're beyond help. If you need some suggestions on things that are profitable, check out the list. It has everything that I sell for a profit, just pick something that you can craft and see if you can turn a profit on your server with it.

Diversity is king.
Getting the most obvious out of the way first. More markets means more gold. Period. You want to have access to as many different crafting professions as possible so that no matter what happens to one market you'll have another to fall back on. Right now the best ones to have are JC, enchanting, and xmute spec alchemy. JC does the shuffle, alchemy makes the meta gems, and enchanting is plain awesome on it's own in addition to having a place in the shuffle. Do note though that currently, alchemy is 99% worthless if you don't have access to meta gem cuts from JC.

Patience is a virtue.
When supply starts to thin out, don't jump ship immediately or raise your buying price just yet. Give it a day or three to see if it returns or evens out and you can save a lot of gold.

The hardest part of making gold is not spending it.
I think that about sums it all up. You may read of other big time AH barons talking about buying 40 boe epics for their alts off spec and donating 200k into their guild bank from time to time. I know I'm guilty of doing my (more than) fair share of wasteful spending on stupid things I don't need. The simple version is this: you are not us. You do not have a million gold to throw around as you please.

Don't take this as an insult because it's not, just something very important that you need to realize. If you want to make gold for the 100 mounts achievement then go for it. Just don't spend your bank total of 50k on three mounts because then you'll only have to start all over from the beginning. And starting up is the hardest part. Spend your money as you wish, but spend it wisely and always keep a decent sized reserve to keep making more.

Keep learning more.
Obvious point is obvious. The more you know and the more you learn, the more you can open up new markets and gold making opportunities that you didn't have before. If you're reading this, you're already in the right place.

Above all else, know your resources. Check out all of the gold blogs out there, a lot of them either have a list of everything they sell or talk once a week on what has been selling well for them. Look into them and pick out what you're able to craft. Then go through the AH and see if there is any profit to be had for you in that market.

Craft everything.
Once you have a decent amount of gold saved up, you can start to invest into certain items that have high profit margins but low rates of sales. Not necessarily things like a mechano hog as that's a very large investment, but things like twink enchant scrolls or crafted mini pets. These different niche markets all sell consistently for great profits but they tend to take a while to go through. But when somebody with a lot of loose cash is looking around for a mini fel reaver, don't you think that it should be you selling it to them?

Take it one day at a time.
If you're low on gold and you can't bank roll a massive stokpile and the ability to plan ahead this is what you really have to do. Only buy materials as you need them to craft only what will be turning a profit today and tomorrow, not next week sometime. This is the best way that you can save up money and avoid investing in the wrong thing at the wrong time.

The main idea here is to keep making gold in multiple markets without extending yourself too much. If you only have 20k or so then the last thing you want to do is invest 20k into enchanting mats. Even though you'll eventually make a profit on them, all of your other markets will come to a halt because you can't fund them any longer. This will also give you the added benefit of learning your markets inside and out which is absolutely imperative for when you really want to go big.

Profits margins > big sales.
When deciding on what to sell always go with the highest profit margins. That is, the total sale minus the price you spent on materials. If you buy a raw gem for 50g and sell it for 60, that's a 10g profit margin so you would be better off selling a 10g gem for only 30. This is the best way for you to start off when picking a market.

Farming is not free!
This is something that you need to get in your head right now. Here's a link to a perfectly written post by Gevlon that sums it up completely. If you do not agree with this or are just unable to get through to yourself that the flower you just picked up is not worth zero gold then there is no way that you'll ever get a decent amount of gold together without spending your entire week farming. Fact. I cannot emphasize this enough, everything has a price even if you didn't pay it. The point of playing the AH is so that you don't have to work at a very boring and repetitive task for 5 hours for a meager 400 gold. And if you want to counter with "well I didn't spend any gold to get it so how is it not free" you are still wrong. You're wrong, wrong, WRONG!

Thanks for stopping by!

Changes and decisions

2011-05-03T20:55:00.001-07:00

Once you reach certain milestones thing tend to change a lot. Your whole outlook has turned around from when you first started your journey. Making the wow gold is no different once you hit two million and as such I'm changing up my AH game, methods, and markets. That's what today's entry is all about, what I'm doing with the AH now that I have absolutely no reason to play on it outside of some extra kicks here and there. I'm sure I can buy literally anything and everything forever right now.

The first thing to change is my posting habits. I usually post everything I sell in 12 hour cycles starting at 11am server time and go from there. Now I'm only going to list gems once a day at some time in the evening, preferably before my guild starts raid invites. This is mainly because of the sheer amount of gems that I sell that clog the mail box with sales and expirations. Add on top of that the necessity of two cancel/post cycles this takes a while. So that is going to be the first thing I cut out.

After that is tailoring and enggy. These are going to be cut out entirely with the exception of motorcycles simply because it's too fun to see a 16k sale to resist. The enggy pets require a lot of material juggling that can get hectic at times and tailoring is plain worthless imo. This will also free up a ton of volatiles to be used elsewhere.

Next is smithing. I'm going to stop selling enchanting rods completely and only sell one set of pvp dps gear at a time instead of the normal 2 sets of dps and 1 set of healing. Too much inventory space is needed to keep a few hundred bars and several stacks of volts hanging around.

Leatherworking is also going to be cut down to just the profession bags from wrath. The constant supply droughts on cata leather and the inability to stokpile it is a major hassle, especially when you want to sell the hides for a premium in addition to the leg armors and pvp gear.

Enchanting is going to be the only market of mine that remains entirely untouched. This is for two, technically three, reasons. The biggest reason is that my main is my enchanter and enchanting banker. Duh. The next is that it is still the most fun to play around with, especially now that top end enchants have a market. Lastly of course is the fact that it is as awesome as JC profits with less effort involved. I'll still be listing in this market at my semi usual times, if nothing else it will remain twice a day whenever I get around to it.

As far as spending goes, I intend to buy anything and everything that I damned well please. When craftables come out in 4.2 (which has been confirmed) I'll be the first one to pay 10k each for the "fire lands thing of crafting things" and the associated recipes. Any of my alts that I enjoy playing regularly will be decked out in whatever boe purples I can find and the same goes for my GF.

I'm basically leaving the Lunch Money bank perpetually open for any and all purchases. I do however wish there was something really significant and memorable that I could buy like I did in wrath. I'd love to buy a max level guild, but I highly doubt that would be possible due to all of the members that would have to be considered.

What would you do with two million gold?

Report: 5-3

2011-05-02T22:46:00.001-07:00

Yes it's that time again. Today's the day of resets, updates, and weekly collections. Here's my weekly report of what I've been selling and in what markets. I also give a few notes on them with up to date market observations in addition to the weekly profit from everything combined. As always, numbers and bottom lines come first.

Previous week gold total: 1,823,000g
Total sales: 445,000
Weekly profit: 241,000
Current gold total: 2,064,000

Profits from MySales:

Gems, LW, & misc:

Yellow, blue, purple, meta, common gems:

Tailoring & vendor pets:

Enchanting & smithing:

Engineering & mining:

The first week of the patch is over and it sure was kind to me. Lots of profit and HUGE gains in dps. I managed to consistently top the dps charts in raids this week and only need to replace my helm to be in all dps purples. Looking sharp!

Detailed Recap:
--------------------
Out of all the things that happened with the patch, the one thing that I grossly underestimated was engineering. I thought my normal stokpile of a dozen of each pet was enough. Holy shit was I ever wrong! In two days I had sold out of everything except for the yeti, not sure why that old boy was left out. And to top all of that off, over the course of two days I had sold four mechano hogs. Yes four of them and for full price to boot. To put that into perspective, I usually sell 2 every month. In other words all pets aside, enggy just made me a massive 9000g profit over two days. Woo woo!

I never wanted the recipe for the toad mini pet than I do this week >_<

The lack of power miners and bots are definitely being felt already in my non jc markets, namely the lack of volts. I'm almost out of fire and air with a stack of life and water remaining. Even with doing 3 elemental xmutes each morning with the spec I'm still starting to fall behind. I did a damned good thing with stokpiling earth though, belt buckles have been flying off the shelves and I have to craft another 5 stacks to keep up with it. And they're all selling for over 200g and steadily.

Another nifty thing that worked out was flipping epic spellthreads. Just before the patch came I got a handful of each at only 400 a piece which have all sold for 1k even. And on that note rare threads have been going for triple their previous (lack of) value along with rare leg armors from LW.

Holy shit enchanting! Oh damn am I happier than ever that I like to stokpile! I've almost sold out of all my heavenly shards (300) that have gone up by 10g and are in short supply. My massive supply of dust (1800) is down to a mere fraction of that and the GCE what I had (700) now need to be completely replenished. Profits from thsi market are just insane, I've been selling earthen vitality scrolls for as high as 150g when they only take 2 dust to make! The same goes for mighty stats (2 lesser essences) are going fro as high as 250 per scroll. And I sold all 5 I had up last night.

I have now sold one of every scroll using maelstroms with the exception of the tanking weapon enchant. Each one sold with a threshold based on 700g per crystal which are now as low as 400 each. I suppose I was waaay off on my guess to where their price would end up settling down. If things keep going at this rate they may get as low as 200g a piece. Pretty crazy when they were as high as 2k only a week ago.

Random note, the leather pvp gear has seen a massive spike in demand. Is this because people want it to get their ilvl up fro the new heroics? Is it because all of the leather is being turned into hides, thus reducing the overall supply? All I know is I'm getting as high as 150g profit instead of the normal 80ish from before.

I'm quite happy to say that wrath enchants are still just as popular as ever. This was one niche market that I was worried would go away, but it seems that it is still here to stay. And I don't mean enchants that are still BiS like certain agility ones that don't have a cata equivalent, I mean things like berserking, wisdom, and staff enchants. The demand for these scrolls hasn't changed one bit with the patch, but the demand for all current scrolls has basically tripled. Happy goblin is happy.

Fun fact. It costs me about 170g in deposit fees to list a full set of all of my gems. I do that twice a day, 7 days a week so I'm spending about 2,380 gold every week in only deposits for gems. Pretty crazy, eh?

And on the topic of scrolls, twink enchants have seen a huge demand spike as well. Caster ones and health to chest have been selling far more than before along with crusader. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I am definitely not going to complain since I'm the only seller as per usual.

As the weekend draws to a close, I sold yet another bike and a few more top end enchants which included wind walk. I also sold the last of my crafted epics for a good 1k profit on each of them as well. As expected mighty stats has been selling at least 4 scrolls a day, all over 100g with the pitiful material cost of about 20g. On monday afternoon I pulled a massive 20k out of the mail in sold enchants and smithing goods. I think that's a personal best for one night.

Thanks for stopping by!

I have 2 million gold

2011-05-01T01:03:00.001-07:00

Yes. Really.

Full screen image.

Somebody out there has over two million gold and plans to do absolutely nothing with it but make more. Even more unbelievable is that that someone is me and actually does have a life. Be afraid, be very afraid. Much like my other success entries, this is where I allow myself a bit of a pat on the back and to brag a little. But fear not, as always I will give you a few keen tips on how to make the wow gold. I'll skip the whole defending the fact that I have a life and a job etc outside of the AH because that's not necessary. And if you think that, well, stop being jealous.

How I did it can be summed up in one word and one word alone: Persistence. Don't give up, don't lose sight of your goal, and don't compromise. That is probably the best advice that I or anybody else can ever give. If you want to hit seven figures then you have got to keep at it every day and that is just what I did. Stick out every drought in every market because no matter what, they will pick back up eventually.

To date, my most profitable markets have been rare gems and enchanted scrolls. Knowing when raids let out the most throughout the day is very important to working these markets so ask around on your server. Talk to guilds that are known to down more than 2 bosses a week, ask in trade or just watch trade chat if pugs are fairly popular and successful. By successful pugs, I mean that they get through at least 3 bosses or else there won't be much gear handed out that needs gems and enchants.

Anytime a patch is coming, be damned sure to keep a close eye on the changes. Check up on the patch notes every day to see if there are any potential changes coming that could effect the AH. And don't just look for ones that say "Enchanting materials are changing." Everything effects everything on the AH, it's one big ocean out there. An effect on gems will effect enchants which will effect farmers and so forth. With every change to professions (and sometimes even classes) there will be a market and supply shift.

Speaking of classes, keep up on what the "flavor of the month" class and spec is for pvp, usually in 2's. If the community decides that a certain spec is OP faceroll easy, start to sell resil/stat gems that match up with them. Even if they're not really that broken, do it any ways and reset prices if you have to. People that know nothing about pvp but still want "lulpwnface" will clamor to these things even if they're a terrible option. Don't judge their purchases, just make sure they purchase from you!

So what's next for Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny? First, I'm going to mix myself a sweet gin and tonic. Then I'm going right back to work making pretty pictures IRL. And I suppose I'll play the AH until I see 3 million. That's right I'll be sticking around yet. Though I will say this: the day blizz recycles another piece of old content is the day my account is deleted. But until then yours truly will be hanging around to provide you with quality content every week day.

Now don't you have some gold to be making?

Weekend discussion: 4.1 and you

2011-04-29T01:23:00.001-07:00

Since last week's discussion entry did fairly well I decided to put up another one of the same vein for this week. Same deal as last week. Keep the discussion polite, constructive, and try to add in your own thoughts to each comment. Think of this as just another thread on a random forum about making the wow gold.

The topic for this week is how has 4.1 effected your market of choice BESIDES not being able to get free gold anymore. I'm sure that one thing that has hit all of us. What I'm mostly looking for is smaller things that we may not have noticed or thought about right away, but now that they're happening we can see them with perfect hindsight. As with last week I'll go first.

For me the biggest effect that I'm feeling is the sudden lack of volatiles. Obviously this is due to the shuffle nerf, but that's going to be the very absolute base starting point of any problem that's come around with us. The sales of pvp plate gear have gone way up and I'm almost of of materials for them even with over 5 full stacks saved up in advance. And accordingly the price on them has gone up as well so I am able to take advantage of that which is a great thing for sure.

They're not going for double the average price from last week which was only 200g or so. Now they're a steady 400-450 because not many people are able to craft them with the lack of supply.

How can a drought in supply be turned into profit? Simple. I start doing my elemental xmute for fires instead of air and put a pause on that stokpile. I already have a semi decent amount of them hanging around, but being able to keep selling the pvp gear at such huge profits is going to bring in much more gold than something that I don't need right now.

Sometimes you just have to make a judgment call and weigh what is going to profit you more, selling something now or something else later. Yes it is very important to stokpile for the long term, but you never want to miss what could vanish tomorrow.

So what odd changes in your markets have come around since the patch? What are the problems that they've caused? What possible benefits can be had from them no matter how big or small?

Thanks for stopping by!

Hooray for patch day!

2011-04-27T20:47:00.001-07:00

So patch 4.1 has come and is shaking up the markets all over the place. The most noticeable effect was of course the nerf to the shuffle, so no more free money and such for us. In all honesty I'm so glad this came through as there is going to be a massive wave of people leaving the JC market. Today I'm going to cover some of the major effects that this patch has had already including the shuffle. One last note on the shuffle note though, I won't be going too in depth with it because I've already covered the wide range of effects that it will be having in older entries.

How did I do?
I wasn't around most of the day, so I only had a patch "night" explosion. Regardless of that though, I made well over 50k in a single night from all of my markets. Makes me wiggle. That and I managed to sustain 20k dps on chimeron until death strike spam became a priority. Loving these buffs, the frost rotation is so much more fun to play and is a ton more fast paced than before using frost presence.

What's hot?
Second best enchanted scrolls. Things like mighty stats, avalanche, and hurricane are flying off the shelves for me and are selling at almost triple the profit as they were all of last week.

Next is any gem with agility on it. I find that a little strange as strength gems have historically been the best selling ones, even in this expansion. Regardless, delicate rubies have been selling for well over 200g a piece and I sold over a full stack on patch night.

After that are enggy and vendor pets. Yes the new achievement brought a breath of fresh air into these markets and mini fel reavers are back up to 900g and selling a ton. The cheaper enggy pets are a solid 150-300g sale on each with only a 20g investment on the mats.

Tanking enchants. Out of all of the enchants from level 10-85 ones relating to tanks are selling the best, especially ones requiring dream dust. I've sold several sets of those on patch night and they're taught by a trainer so get to it if you aren't already. This even includes heavy borean armor kits from LW.

Got lag?
Try turning off recount. My entire guild was having problems with mega lag all night, but once we turned off recount (even the updated version) it up and vanished. So if you started having lag after the patch and weren't before give this a shot.

What's new?
Top end enchants are now selling on scrolls for a consistent profit. Woohoo! On my server crystals have dropped to 850ish and I've picked up a few at 700. It looks like once more gear starts getting DE'd they may drop down to a mere 500g or lower. What are they at on your server?

The price of ele ore and bars have predictably gone up since nobody is buying it wholesale anymore. And because of the lack of insatiable demand the prices aren't being undercut nearly as much.

On the subject of ore, hard ele bars are now much more profitable than before. If these were selling at a loss on your server last week, give it 2-3 days and check back in on this market. You just might find yourself a new niche to work.

Lastly are rare LW leg armors. These things used to be totally garbage, but are now selling for triple the material costs as opposed to half. Finally LW is getting some love.

The shuffle.
Instead of saying why it's dead and the effects it will have, I'm instead going to give a few thoughts on the current state of JC. Now that there won't be any more free rare gems to be sold prices are obviously rising to match the new demand with the influx of gear, this means that we're all going to burn through our stokpiles rather quick. So now we need to find new supplies for our gems and how to go about matching them with prices. Unfortunately there are only two places we can go for gems: prospecting now expensive ore and buying raw ones from the AH. Shocking, I know.

Luckily if you've been in the JC biz for a while this won't be anything new to you. Once the prices get back onto an even keel simply buy a few gold below market price for the raws and sell the cut versions appropriately higher. However, I'd still keep your thresholds the same as they were before the patch because those rares are still paid for and can be sold as low as 5g for a profit. Once prices get low enough compared to the "new" market price of raw rares buy them up to relist later one. This will help you keep a sizable stokpile while everyone else burns through theirs in the coming weeks.

What have I been up to?
First of all, I spent about 60k on patch day. That's right, I spent every last bit of the mega profits that I had made that day. As always, any type of expenditure like this is an investment, even if it's gear. Spending on gear allows me to avoid having to do normals and skip ahead on heroics and the like, buying trade goods and such is no different.

This time however I've been buying cut gems and enchanted scrolls. Basically I've been resetting the prices on just about everything that's in high demand right now. I've also spent a good amount on crystals, but that's mostly so that I could have their groups already set up in ZA for when they become a regular sale.

The reason for buying the gems and scrolls up is because their material costs have been significantly increased and all of the ones that I bought were under the new prices. That means that if they want to keep making more they'll need more mats, but they won't be able to continue selling at that price.

That's where my stokpile comes in.

Like I wrote about the shuffle, I'm doing the same thing with gems and enchants: take the prices back up and buy out all of the cheap stuff. With my bank tab and a half full of raw materials I can out last and out price almost anybody while still turning a profit. With the massive demand from new gear, which is going to keep increasing for several weeks minimum, I should be able to make a killing by flipping all of these things. I spend a ton of gold now so I can make even more gold later, high risk high profits. Now this is exciting!

Thanks for stopping by!

Enchanting class reference

2011-04-26T22:31:00.001-07:00

NOTE: This was written before 4.1 so I'll be updating it as I go over the updates on EJ when they go through.

For those of you who are still having difficulty with enchanting and aren't sure what to sell this entry is for you. Basically it's a quote from EJ and every class/spec forum of the recommended enchants for every slot. I'm also including the lower cost alternatives such as mighty stats instead of peerless stats. You'll also notice that many wrath level enchants make an appearance as well.

Anything that is not from cata I'll mark with a star and any enchants that are for different specs of a certain class I'll make a note of as well. This listing will also serve as a quick reference guide for anybody that is unsure of which enchants they should be using. Simply put almost every one of these enchants will sell on a scroll for a profit.

Please note that enchants for tanking and healing specs are very subjective and are based more on personal preference and necessity rather than a one size fits all for dps. If I have made any mistakes on ones that are "for sure BiS" please leave a comment and I'll edit accordingly.

Death knight:
Cloak - greater critical strike or critical strike
(blood: protection)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats
(blood: greater stamina or stamina)

Bracers - major strength or critical strike
(blood: major stamina* or dodge)

Gloves - mighty strength or exceptional strength
(blood: greater mastery or mastery)

Boots - lava walker or earthen vitality
(unholy or frost: haste)

Weapon - N/A

Druid:
Cloak - greater intellect
(bear: protection or major agility*, cat: major agility*)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats
(bear: greater stamina or stamina)

Bracers - mighty intellect or critical strike
(bear: agility or major stamina* or dodge, cat: agility or critical strike)

Gloves - haste
(resto: mastery, bear: greater mastery or mastery, cat: mighty strength or exceptional strength. Yes really.)

Boots - lava walker or mastery
(bear: lava walker or earthen vitality or assassin's step or mastery, cat: major agility)

Weapon - power torrent or hurricane
(bear: windwalker or mighty agility, cat: mighty agility, resto: power torrent or heartsong)

Hunter:
Cloak - greater critical strike or critical strike or major agility*

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - agility or critical strike

Gloves - major agility*

Boots - assassin's step or major agility

Weapon - mighty agility

Mage:
Cloak - greater intellect

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - mighty intellect or critical strike

Gloves - greater mastery or haste

Boots - mastery or earthen vitality or lava walker

Weapon - power torrent or hurricane

Paladin:
Cloak - greater critical strike or critical strike
(prot: protection, holy: greater intellect)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats
(prot: greater stamina or stamina)

Bracers - mighty strength or critical strike
(prot: major stamina* or dodge, holy: mighty intellect or critical strike)

Gloves - mighty strength or exceptional strength
(prot: greater mastery or mastery, holy: haste or mastery)

Boots - mastery
(prot: earthen vitality or mastery or lava walker, holy:haste or lava walker)

Weapon - landslide or hurricane
(prot: windwalker or mending, holy: power torrent or heartsong)

Priest:
Cloak - greater intellect

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - mighty intellect or critical strike
(shadow: mighty intellect or speed)

Gloves - greater mastery or mastery or haste
(shadow: haste)

Boots - mastery or earthen vitality or lava walker

Weapon - power torrent or heartsong
(shadow: power torrent or hurricane)

Rogue:
Cloak - greater critical strike or major agility*

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - agility or speed

Gloves - greater mastery or mastery

Boots - major agility or assassin's step

Weapon - landslide or hurricane

Shaman:
Cloak - greater intellect
(enhance: major agility)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - mighty intellect or speed
(enhance: agility or speed)

Gloves - greater speed or haste
(enhance: greater mastery or mastery)

Boots - lava walker or mastery or earthen vitality
(enhance: major agility)

Weapon - power torrent or hurricane
(enhance: landslide or avalanche)

Warlock:
Cloak - greater intellect

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - mighty intellect or critical strike

Gloves - greater mastery or haste

Boots - mastery or earthen vitality or lava walker

Weapon - power torrent or hurricane

Warrior:
Cloak - greater critical strike or critical strike
(prot: protection)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats
(prot: greater stamina or stamina)

Bracers - mighty strength or critical strike
(prot: major stamina* or dodge)

Gloves - mighty strength or exceptional strength
(prot: greater mastery or mastery)

Boots - mastery
(prot: earthen vitality or mastery or lava walker)

Weapon - landslide or hurricane
(prot: windwalker or mending)

Thanks for stopping by!

Report: 4-26

2011-04-25T21:20:00.001-07:00

Yes it's that time again. Today's the day of resets, updates, and weekly collections. Here's my weekly report of what I've been selling and in what markets. I also give a few notes on them with up to date market observations in addition to the weekly profit from everything combined. As always, numbers and bottom lines come first.

Previous week gold total: 1,778,000
Total sales: 266,000
Weekly profit: 45,000 (110,000 before epic purchases)
Current gold total: 1,823,000

Profits from MySales:

Gems, LW, & misc:

Yellow, blue, purple, meta, common gems:

Tailoring, misc glyphs & vendor pets:

Enchanting & smithing:

Engineering & mining:

With my extra spending this week my prediction seems to be right on time.

Detailed Recap:
--------------------
It's been a pretty awesome week for business once again. The boe plate gear has finally started to sell again. While the profits aren't as high as they were before,the rate of sales is definitely higher. So much higher in fact, that I've had to start buying up a couple thousand volt fire. Yes thousands, as in plural. In fact everything relating to volatiles has been up high this week that I've had to cave in and get a few extra stacks from the alliance side.

Mini fel reavers have sold out so I had to convert a full stack of air to the ether thingies. I crafted another dozen of them and have since sold four the following evening. I wonder if I should power level enggy on another toon so I can have a gnomish spec for it as well. Now that's hard core. But now that I think about it my gobby WILL have an extra profession slot open once they don't need herbalism anymore...

Meanwhile leather pvp gear has been sucking up all of my waters and life along with a few fire as well, the same goes for the int plate from smithing. And to top all of that off, I've been using 3x alchemists xmute CD to keep up with all of the volatiles so much that I've been getting pretty low on life as well. Kind of funny in it's own way.

I saw my first epic drop from trash the other night since joining my guild. It was the caster sword from the very last trash mob we killed that night which was kind of amusing. Since nobody wanted it for main spec it went up for sale. Naturally I gave them a good price of 30k and bought it right after raid. I threw power torrent onto it and...gave it to my gf. Come on, you should know by now that I'm not into flipping epics! So that was a nice dent into my profits along with getting a pair of upgrades that needed some 5k enchants done to them. The bank says owwie!

The goblins that me and my gf have been leveling are now several levels into cata zones and are coming along nicely. Mine has their alchemy high enough to xmute volts which is as high as I need it to be. The rest of their skill ups will mostly come from that, but once it goes gray I'll drop the extra gems and flowers on maxing it in preparation for epic gem xmutes. That will bring my alchemist count up to 3.

In addition to that, I've decided that I'm going to eventually drop herby on them and level up gnomish engineering. Why? Why not? Ok I'll be honest, it's because I want to be able to craft the new mini pet that gnomish spec can make. Granted it'll take a month or two just to make up the cost of leveling the profession but what else am I going to spend my moneys on?

Ending on a personal note, me and my gf got our goblins to 85 the other day. So naturally we celebrated by getting all sorts of purple goodness so we can skip the terror that is normal dungeon groups. We each spend around 30k in total not including the mats used up for enchants and gems. I've been playing as sub and actually have the most complicated rotation in game down very well. I walked into doing almost 10k dps in greens.

Not too shabby for only 15 minutes of reading. And just before I did my weekly collections I dropped another 30k on tank shoulders for my DK for, yup you guessed it, a dps upgrade. Well at least I don't have to worry about drops in the new heroics!

Thanks for stopping by!

Random screen shots #83

2011-04-25T01:14:00.001-07:00

Aloha all it's been a while since I posted a ton of random screens and they've been building up. As usual, no real gold tips just a ton of random giggles for you all today. Also it appears that the patch is going to hit tomorrow, so get your tank gear ready for randoms and sell your crafted epics asap.

Enjoy!

Contrary to popular belief, I have actually convinced all of the auctioneers to give it to me as protection money.

No camper is safe when banker girl is on the watch! Om nom nom!

Never before has avian genocide looked so bright and colorful.

A few random enchant scrolls that you wouldn't think sell but still do.

People just love the Stokpile.

Mind you the vendor sold mats are 12.5k and as low as 11.25k if you're a goblin...

Time to buy!

The potential hazards of stokpiling when blizz nerfs a vendor price =(

If you want a GEE or any other essence you have to go through this guy who likes to keep the prices high. Or just ya know, go through the alliance AH like I do. And who says you can't make money on my server? This person seems to be doing just fine since they've been at this since wrath (I think).

Organization. Sometimes I lack it.

Enggy still makes the bank.

Erm, wtf?

Gems, I has dem!

Came across this gem of NPC banter while leveling my goblin. Maybe I am and maybe you should!

It's always nice when the healer appreciates good dps.

Stokpiling done right...or terribly wrong.

Sometimes LW does fetch a good price afterall.

Quite possibly one of the funniest things I have seen in wow.

I love it when I get to take a screen like this.

What happens when I'm done buying.

While grinding rep in the netherstorm, I came across a completely random boat that is literally out in the middle of nowhere.

Yep, they still love me!

Not bad for two pieces of tank gear, unbuffed, and not using any CD's. Oh and the tank gear. Did I mention yet that I'm wearing tank gear to DPS with?

As sad as it is, I gotta admit. I lol'd.

Something random I found in Shat that I've never seen before. Any idea what this is?

Thanks for stopping by!

Weekend discussion

2011-04-21T21:17:00.001-07:00

Writing up this entry today to generate some discussion over the weekend as the title suggests. I felt the blog could use a bit more of discussion oriented content so this is my attempt to remedy that. The subject is your biggest personal short coming when you play on the AH. The goal here is to talk about what our weak points are and how we can go about improving upon them.

I ask that all readers chime in with their own faults (no matter how big or small) and ideas on how to help those that are mentioned. I'll be keeping an eye on the comments over the weekend and add in my thoughts. As per usual with the comments, please keep it constructive, serious, and informative. And also this is not a blogging carnival or anything of the sorts. Think of more as a thread on an AH forum so there's no need for 5 page long responses.

I'll start things off with my own.

My biggest short coming on the AH is my absolute reliance on addOns. If ZA and other similar ones broke tomorrow, I'd be out of the game the day after. The biggest issue that comes with this for me is what I wrote about a long time ago in an entry called Manually automatic. The abridged version of that entry is that when you do things by hand you can get a much better feel for what's going on in a given market.

You'll know when certain competitors are gone or when it's time to raise/lower your selling prices and thresholds. This is something that I've gotten out of touch with a lot lately and am not sure how to go about getting back into it without entirely dropping my addons and doing it all manually. Hell I don't even know how the new(ish) auction house functions work. Any suggestions?

Please drop a comment or two with your thoughts on how to help me or others that have commented along with what part of your AH game could be improved.

For the potential blogger

2011-04-20T21:14:00.001-07:00

Not exactly a gold making entry in the traditional sense today. I hear a lot from people that I talk to about making gold that they would love to start a blog or have thought about it and such but are still undecided. So if you fall into that category this entry is for you. With a small dose of luck, all of us bloggers will have another name to add to our blog rolls while all of the readers will have yet another gold blog they absolutely must read each and every day.

The beginning.
I first got the idea after reading Gevlon's blog and seeing how successful he was with it, this was back when he was talking about making gold 95% of the time. But after reading it for a while along with a few others I noticed that they were all missing a ton of potential things to talk about even after I had read over most if not all of their posts. And with having so much gold making ideas floating around in my mind and no decent way of organizing them I figured screw it I'll start a blog too.

Why not?

I didn't advertise, didn't set up any fancy system to track who was coming or desperately try to increase my traffic to make money on ad space while giving half assed gold tips like some others out there. The only advertising I did was a single post on the paladin forums I used to frequent and that was it. Hell I didn't even know I could check how many page views I get a day and from where and so forth until a few months ago. Did you know I have a few readers from Portugal? Fucking cool! Though I will admit that lately when I get a great group in a random I'll post a link for my blog at the end for the hell of it mostly. Any way moving right along.

Actually writing.
I like to think I am fairly well spoken when I want to be and that translates into how I write every entry with loads of detail. Combine that with a logical mind and I can point out almost every nuance of how I work the AH and can describe it well enough (or so I like to think) that anybody with half of a brain can grasp it well enough to mold it into their own method. The best tip I can give anybody on the actual writing of a blog (not the content) is to write how you think. Not how you speak.

If you were to read over a conversation you have in game or listen to a recorded conversation you had you may be surprised at what you would find. It's fairly common for the average person to say "um, like, well, but" 500 times in any given conversation. However when you think all of that gets cut out to quicken the process. So my advice is to pick a topic and write out your thoughts on it and then go back and "clean it up" so to speak. The benefit of writing is that you can change what you said 10 seconds ago, so take out all of the extra words that aren't necessary. Word things better, use proper grammar and abuse that spell checker! Anybody that's talked with me in game can swear that I can't type to save my life so take advantage of all the crutches that writing provides you.

Content.
Obviously the most important part of any blog is the content. And anybody that's a writer will tell you to write what you know. Are you a cop that wants to write a novel? Write a crime novel or a comedy buddy cop type of book. Are you into making the wow gold? Then write about it! What markets do you like to work the most? Why are they so fun? What are the small little tidbits and pro tips and tricks that help you eek out a bit more coin each week? Do you mess around with any niche markets?

Talk about who they sell to and why they sell. Tell us all how you got into it and what the competition is like. Hell you can just mimic any other gold blogger out there and pick a topic and just spell out every last bit of that market with all of the gory details. In other words what you write about is entirely up to you which can be quite daunting to a lot of people. So don't put it off by saying "zomgz there are so much stuph! What does I talk about!?"

Just pick a single market and then run with it. Take craftable bags for example. Tell me who they sell to, when the best times are, how you can advertise them in trade for a few more sales. Just don't skip anything when you write because every last detail is important. Even if it seems obvious to you, it might not be for a few hundred billion people out there.

Getting nervous?
The main thing I think that holds people back from starting a blog is simply fear of failure. People worry that nobody will like them or say that their tips are shite and they're totally wrong or simply that nobody will ever read it. When I started writing this blog I didn't care if I have 5 people reading or 5 million. And I still don't. Like I've said dozen times I write because I want to and because I enjoy it. Meanwhile if I happen to help a bunch of people in making gold then that's an awesome bonus for sure. Just like making thousands of gold, do it because you want to and because it's fun.

And if you're worried about people making fun of you and telling you off in comments saying you suck you fail and so forth there's something that you need to be aware of. When you run a blog you have this AMAZING feature called the "delete comment button." It is a wonderful thing. If somebody is rude, screw 'em! Just delete the comment and move on with your life like it never happened. I've gotten a few trolls here and there and it hasn't bothered me once because once it's gone, it's gone for good.

As for getting people to read it's as simple as writing well, making a new post every day, and writing quality content. With the amazing one post link that I did, I get a noticeable amount of hits every day. If you're good people will find you. And as for just wanting to be popular, if that's the sole reason you want to write a blog... don't. Most likely you will be severely let down. But if you want people to comment so that you "feel" like people are reading and care about what you think let me share a quick example on how the amount of comments isn't that important.

My entry called What have you got to lose had 200 page views. And 4 comments. Yes out of 200 people that read it that day only 4 of them had anything to say about it. More often than not if I read a blog post and I completely agree I won't leave a comment. Why not? Because I have absolutely nothing to add other than "My name is Stokpile and I approve of this message."

While we're talking about traffic, just so you know my average amount of hits each day is between 200-300 so it was a fairly average day as far as that day's traffic goes. That's every day and I don't get many comments at all, but I still have a lot (relatively speaking) of people that come to hear what I have to say every day. In other words, don't sweat it if you don't see 50 comments an hour after you start.

Have fun, be interesting.
Once again repeating a mantra of mine, have fun with what you do. If you have fun with your writing then by default you will be interesting to read. If you notice not every last one of my entries is about making gold, but people still read them. There's a ton of blogs out there that I read and a lot of the topics they cover I'm already familiar with, but I enjoy them regardless because they're interesting. Seeing things from a different point of view is always fun for me and it seems that is the case for many others as well.

In short don't make a blog out to be a chore. If you enjoy yourself writing then so will the people reading.

Final advice.
The last words of wisdom that I can give you is to be consistent. If you update everyday for a month and then stop for a few days, a lot of people may think that you've just stopped writing all together. If you won't be writing an entry for a few days, write one up to say so. Just write something, anything to keep people interested. Personally if somebody doesn't update in a week I stop going to their blog entirely. If you want people to read and hear what you have to say, well, you have to talk to them.

Thanks for stopping by!

Dual monitors

2011-04-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

NOTE: Looking for a recommendation on where to acquire Wildvine that doesn't require herbalism. I remember them dropping quite well from trolls, but since cata removed tons of old mobs I don't know what is still in game.

This is something I'm a little surprised that I haven't written about before. I recommend to anybody that uses their computer for anything more than sending email to do immediately. Get a second monitor! Most video cards these days have a second port that you can plug another monitor into and it is (for the most part) plug and play. Hook up the second monitor, shuffle your desk around some to fit it and 15 minutes later you're done.

To get a decent size monitor is extremely cheap today, especially when compared to only two years ago. Hell you can probably get a good sized one of average quality for only $100 if you look. No this isn't going to be a techy entry today, this relates entirely to making the wow gold and then some.

Simply put, using two monitors makes life infinitely more convenient in so many ways, especially if you're a gamer and is a necessity if you actually work on your home computer. I've been using two for something like 8 years now and have no idea how I could possibly use a computer without it. Yes it is that amazing. Please, allow me to tell you why!

Multitasking. That is the name of the game and has always been one of the most important skills an AH baron could ever have. Having a second monitor lets you spam your post auctions macro while reading such fine blogs as theahpile.blogspot.com for example. Also while collecting mail or scanning the AH you can still keep an eye out on trade chat while doing your normal irl business.

Here's another practical point for it. You'll never have to worry about saying "sorry, was tabbed" ever again. Ever. You can be sitting in raid waiting for a ready check and watching cartoons or what have you and you still won't miss it. Also you'll never need atlas loot or half of the questing addons out there. You can search wowhead while playing wow (so you can wow while you wow or something like that).

Also if you're like me and try to have as few things open in wow as you can, you can look up a recipe on wowhead and look for the mats on the AH or start heading toward the vendor that sells them. Another thing I use it for is to be mass crafting or de'ing stuff while writing entries for the blog like this one. In fact I'm currently crafting a ton of enchanting rods while I write this sentence.

As a personal note on the ease of play that two monitors gives me, I can be busy drawing in photoshop on one monitor while watching for the pull on the other so that lets me get even more work done in an average day. Think about your average day on wow. There's constant times where you have to wait 2 minutes here, 5 minutes there and so forth. That's a lot of time that you could be doing something instead of sitting on your hands and just waiting.

Like I always say, time is the most valuable thing in the world because you cannot create more of it or get back any that you've lost. Simply put, having a second monitor allows you to do so much more in those small blocks of time. And of course if you do any irl work on the computer you'll make life a whole lot easier by not having to move windows around. Trust me on this one, it is most definitely a worthy investment.

Is there anything that you have/do IRL that improves your AH game?

Thanks for stopping by!