From the ground up: Week 1

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

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

Level: 38

Gold: 245

Inscription skill: 145

Herbalism skill: 225


Just starting out
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Thank god for BoA gear is all I can say. the first 5 or so levels were excruciating, I could barely afford to train my skills and buy water. Things are definitely looking up though, I got extremely lucky and found three bags off of mobs, a pair of 6s and a 4. Very nice! Bag space is always my biggest complaint when leveling and is especially noticeable when you don't have a banker.

I sold my first auction! It was basic armor vellums which got me an amazing 50 silver. Woo shiny! Heh. I'll be saving that coin for my riding training when I hit 20. It costs 4g to train and another 1g to buy the mount before rep discounts. I think I'll be honored by then so that'll save me a bit of silver which I can put to training my skills and water. I find myself getting excited at finding treasure chests far more than ever, even more than my first toon. Reason being you can get things like silver ore that will sell for at least 2g on auction. Each time I think about my finances I can't help but giggle at the fact that my priest is busy counting their silver while my full business empire is able to drop ten THOUSAND gold on assorted junk in a heart beat without even flinching. When I saw a skill costing 5 silver to train I hesitate and make sure I'll be using it. Things like Fade and Ressurect I still haven't trained as I'll never be casting them so it'll be
wasting money. Hey every silver counts when you're broke.

I found a few greens of the monkey and a pair of common gems which I hope to sell for another few gold. If they sell I'll be saving up for my first major purchase: 32 spot inscription bag. Since bag space is at a premium and the fact that glyphs take up so much damned room this will be a very worthwhile purchase.

I sure am loving my power shield, being completely immune to spell push back is a god send, especially at lower levels, I don't even have to use inner fire. Saving mana = save money on water. Yes I'm being that careful with my funding. Since I have no way of making gold short of begging it's a necessary evil. My plan for the time being is to finish up the starter areas on bloodmyst isle and then head to stormwind and see if I can catch somebody offering some gold for charter sigs. I'll probably just afk there for a bit while I work on other things and occasionally check over to see if there's anybody offering. That is the easiest way to make gold at level 1, albeit unreliable. But money is money, and I sure need it.

I never noticed just how much it costs to train profession skills when you're relying on quest rewards and trash drops for income. Just skills and professions are taking up almost every bit of silver I am getting. If I can sell a few of the random thing I get for a few gold that would provide some much needed breathing room, but for now I need to watch what I buy. Wouldn't it be embarrassing to buy a piece of resilient parchment by accident instead of light parchment? Heh that'd take every bit of cash I have!

Level 15 now and I can pick my first glyph to use. The only ones that will help me are of power shield and smite. But since I'm barely taking any damage with power shield I'll be grabbing smite when I hit 20. That is of course assuming I'll be able to craft it then. Sadly I'll have to be around level 35-40 to find the herbs needed for the ink. Still there's no way I'll be buying it for a few gold when I can wait a bit and craft it myself for far less and get a skill up on top of that. The nice thing about being a scribe is that you can start making good profits right away. I'm only able to use midnight ink right now and can still craft several profitable glyphs: power shield, maul, corruption, mend pet (my first research glyph). If I can sell
them for even a lowly 3g that's almost enough to cover my riding training.

Once I get a mount I intend to spend a bit of time actually farming (/shudder) so I can make at least a dozen or so glyphs and have enough low ink to do my minor research with for a while. At least herbs at low levels are all over the palce so it shouldn't be too hard to get a decent supply for now.

Logged in tonight for a bit of game time and collected some sold auctions, 15 gold! I sold some clam meat, linen cloth, and a few common gems I found. To the AH I go buy some bags, thank god. Spent 6g there and still have enough to pay for riding skill in 5 levels. Still need a lot of herbs to level up inscription, I only know 3 glyphs. The bags were a major spending decision because I have zero income and can only rely on what I have in my pockets. In this kind of situation you have to be very mindful.

Came across a quest where I had to kill over a dozen lvl 18 elites. Granted I'm 19 and in boa gear, it's still not easy and having to repair many times or take res sickness is not an option. Went ok, Pull with 3x smite, power shield, fear when it breaks, dot, power shield, repeat. Thanks to the racial Gift of the Naruu I was even able to take on two when I "oopsed" and fear pulled a second.

The glyph industry has officially started! Woohoo first glyph has sold! Was a hunter glyph amusingly enough, serpent sting which sold for 6g. I also trained a handful of other profitable glyphs which I used for skill ups. I wonder how long I can continue my casual selling until I get noticed and hatedly camped once again. Probably a while because I haven't pissed off any of the goblins of the alliance.... yet!

Ding 20! Just spent half of my gold on training, mount, and skills. Ouch. To top that off mana has become an issue so I had to learn first aid as well so I can top myself off in between battles and not spend mana.

I think so far the thing that has served me the best are my observational skills. Just knowing what might be worth something to a player is what's gotten me a few gold so far. In fat as I'm writing this I've seen 4 random greens sell, each of which were priced at 2.5g each. Not bad I say not bad!

One thing that I'm having to do so that I keep my income high is raise my selling thresholds by a significant amount. Alliance side I'm selling glyphs now for up to 20g. I sort of forgot about this part the other night and probably lost a lot of potential money for my first night of glyph sales. But alas, this is all part of the learning experience from the ground up. Normally I price glyphs at 7g to control the market, but I'm far from a position to do that so I need as much profit as I can get, especially if I'm planning to buy dual spec and epic flying on the level. Though with the speed that I'm leveling at I doubt that'll happen simply because a natural amount of time wouldn't have passed for me to collect that much. Also as you can see at low levels (and low prof levels) there isn't a huge variety of ways to make money. The point of that being is that I can't afford to cap the glyph prices at 7g like on horde side because I don't have the resources to do so and I need to "get while the gettin is good."

I'm in mid 20s now and healed my first instance: BFD. It actually went so well that I did a bunch more. I swear, power shield is OP! I barely had to actually heal a damned thing, just shield the tank and then alt tab while I have a dps on auto follow. Ok not really, but damned close. Once I hit 30 I'll get the glyph for power shield to make it heal for 20% of the absorb amount and then it'll be really cake. Hell I'll be half dps by then because I won't have to heal much and can't just let my mana regen time get wasted.

Ding 30! Power shield glyph ho! I'm up to 100g holy crap I'm rich! I sold another fistful of glyphs last night and collected 50g from my mail. Made me feel very hopeful about the coming weeks of questing. I'll definitely be able to afford my epic land mount and training now. Now I just need to get me some more lion's ink as I just learned to make glyph of judgment and eviscerate, two glyphs that always sell well. I have no idea where to go questing after ashenvale, so I'll head over to dusk wood, my addon Carbonite tells me that it's up to a level 30 zone so I'm sure there's a few quests left over I can do. After that I'll be heading into STV where I
know for sure that the herbs I need can be gotten. After that... I am totally clueless where to go. Maybe arathi highlands?

It seems that I'm going to have to spend a bit of time farming herbs. I can't seem to find any that give me lion's ink, only emerald which means I have to back track a little bit to find them as I can't afford to buy them at 50g a stack.

Closing up shop for this week, things are definitely looking up. I can afford all my class skills at max level and epic riding once I hit 40. The only thing I can't afford is dual spec which doesn't surprise me since I've been doing so many random instances and leveling that way. That means less herbs are found so less glyphs are made. I never thought I'd say this but healing random old world stuff is fun!


Thanks for stopping by!

Brain-webs

It's been a while since I did a post of collected random thoughts so I figure it's high time I cleaned out the cobwebbies again. Granted "a while" is quite relative since any time I'm on wow it's likely for the AH game so it takes up a lot of the "warcraft info storage" of my brain brain. In any case each part of today's post will still closely relate to making the wow gold as per usual.

Heartseeker Scopes.
Another random goodie I discovered. I believe I saw it noted on Anaalius' blog first, but not positive. It was about a week ago. Any ways, these things are actually selling rather well for a respectable 30g+ profit. They take 10 saronite bars and 2 twilight opals to craft one from an engineer. Hell I managed to max out my engineering just by making this and nothing else from the level I was able to start making them at. Cool huh?


Things I buy the most no matter what.
I always buy saronite ore and bars until I have an entire bank tab of the stuff. Once I have a tab filled up, the rest will be xmuted into titanium bars to be used on many other things. The same goes with eternal earth, there is no possible way for me to have enough of it. Because when push comes to shove I can do light grinding and craft rings to get DE'd if dust is super scarce. Also buckles tend to run out rather quickly so having a massive supply of the raw materials and crafted buckles on hand is very important. I recently picked up a massive stock of 400 eternal fires and stopped buying a good amount of time before the prices started creeping back up. I did this once before and was scavenging for them by the time prices dropped in my favor again. I won't make that mistake again.


Check page two.
I notice this the most with enchanting mats. When I search for abyss crystals a lot of times I'll see the first of two pages filled with singles at too high a price. But when I go to the next page I'll see a handful at super cheap in stacks. This is because of the "order by %" feature that auctioneer has. The lowest market priced items appear first and are then ordered based on stack sizes. So when looking for stuff to buy you'll often see a page of singles and on the pages of the AH towards the last few are where the good deals are all at. The most obvious example is with infinite dust. There's a dozen pages of singles at 2g a piece but once you get to the full stacks of 20 you'll see that they're only a gold each. So from now on when you're looking for good deals on stuff don't just look at the first page and let that tell you the prices. Look deeper my friends.


TRY POWER STATS!
Every time I go to make a scroll of enchant Powerful stats I ALWAYS giggle. I can't help but think of it in the POWER THIRST voice. I'm completely serious, I think that video is pure genius made of concentrated awesome. If you have no idea wtf I'm going on about, go to this youtube link and thank me later.


Why a blog?
Ya know something, I never thought of myself as a "blogger." I always found the idea a bit on the silly side to be perfectly honest. But with so much to keep track of there was no way I could keep it all in my head and with so many sections, sub sections, costs, markets, etc. etc. it became an exercise in futility to mentally organize it all. So I started this blog to basically write it all out in a manner that would force thoughts to be organized. I wound up spending too much time and hassle figuring out the changes in my thresholds, keeping track of my profits from week to week, what I had bought and so on. Argh!

Hurts my brains. Accounting is a very important part of the AH game since you need to know how much profit you're making and if you're making any at all. Since it's easy to THINK you're doing great even when you're making only a tiny razor thin profit each week. If all you base your profits on is the amount you get in the mail you're doin' it wrong! So find a way to keep your thoughts organized and go with it. Blogging just so happened to be my way, find your own.

Random notes on my writing style. I write as I speak for the most part and generally don't write posts that far in advance. I write my business reports through out the whole week after I posted the previous ones. Then once Monday comes around I read through it and edit it accordingly which helps to keep things as "real time" as I can while covering a week of time. For all other posts I simply write whatever happens to come to mind and strikes me as "hey this could be useful to somebody somewhere."

Doing that also helps me identify specific AH tactics that I normally just go with. Once you identify a particular strategy consciously you can then modify it for more detailed and specialized purposes. Blogging also keeps me in the habit of properly spelling, capitalizing, and punctuating all of my sentences. My grammar is still made of fail and lulz though.


I hate that guy!
Got another goblin on your server giving you grief? Want to mess up their markets too, but you're not sure what else they sell? Well with the auctioneer addOn you can order AH search results by "owner" and can use this to do just that. What you do is when you open the AH window select a section like trade goods, armor, consumable, glyphs, or gems and just search without typing anything in. That will bring up every last item on auction in that category. Arrange the results by owner and cycle through the pages until you see your competitor. That will let you know exactly what they sell that you don't know about. From that info you can easily deduce what secondary markets have an impact on their primary markets and you can proceed to buy up all the raw materials to jack up the prices. Remember that this won't result in any profit if you don't have a use for the materials you're buying. In fact this might wind up being a loss, but it will definitely piss them off something fierce, especially when they find out it's you.


Prime time grind time.
If you work in markets that need mass amounts of eternals (especially fire) keep an eye out on when your faction controls WG during prime time. WG is the most common place that people will relentlessly grind eternals and then once the next battle begins 3 hours later, they'll fight, lose, and return to the AH to flood it with their now cheap as hell eternals. I've watched prices drop from 50g to 15 in the span of a single WG win/loss cycle. While the battle goes on after your faction wins is when I'll do the bulk of my scanning on the AH for mat purchases while crafting inks, leathers, or DE fodder. This also provides you with some great opportunities for flipping the eternals once prices go back up. Always be observant of behaviors, trends, and timings it can save you a lot of gold and make you even more.

Auctioneer of choice.
I'm always at the far left auctioneer in Org, Stampi in TB, and Epitwee in undercity since they're right next to a mailbox and parchment vendors. I never go to silvermoon because as beautiful as it looks, is very impractical for business.


Boring professions.
I have to say even with the AH PvP that has ensued since my start up, alchemy is an incredibly boring market. Don't ask me why. I consider my pair of daily xmutes a serious grind as having the bag space to ensure I never have to mail out more or make an extra trip to the bank is rather annoying. If it weren't for the fact that gem xmutes are such great profit I wouldn't even bother, hell I haven't even done the JC token daily in months.


Inscription nay sayers.
First, it's S-C-R-I-B-E! It is not INSCRIPTIONIST! That is a made up word and anybody who says it deserves to be beaten with heavy mining equipment! Rawr. Ok now that that's out of my system once again. Every time I see somebody complain about scribes making no money and that glyphs are a terrible market it always makes me facepalm something fierce. You don't have to like the inscription racket, you don't have to like selling glyphs, hell you don't even have to like the people doing it. But for god's sake don't be a retard and say it makes zero money.

You'll always here some failbot bitching about how glyphs used to sell for X gold but now they're down to only X-50 gold. Well now that you're out of it guess what? There's now only 2 people selling them and are raking in ridiculous amounts of profit. It is the hardest market to fully get into with the largest upfront time and gold investment. That's the reason that you'll see so many complaints about it. The other reason is that as I've mentioned before your average scribe player sells their wares for 15g maybe. So if you see a dozen different glyphs at 4g each and only a few for more than 10g your average WoW M&S will be thinking zomgz this blows.

It does for you, but not for me. Before I got some serious competition in the glyph biz I could make several thousand gold per day. Now that there's a few campers it's only 1k, but the potential to literally print money and pull it in hand over fist cannot be denied by anybody with more than a double digit IQ and has spent more than 5 minutes looking into how the glyph game works. It annoys me to no end when people will blatantly deny the obvious solely because they themselves cannot do it.

Sorry, glyphs take effort to get into and you have to PLAY the game and be competitive. But to these fools, "competitive" = "I win just by playing." Sorry bro it don't work like that!

/rant


Bag space.
Dammit it's always a problem I swear! I would give almost anything for another bag spot or blizz to just hotfix in a change to the basic back pack. The biggest problem is with my scribe and enchanter. My scribe has to keep tons of parchment and inks on them at all times so crafting a ton of glyphs I lose a bunch of time mailing things off while I'm in the middle of crafting. Also painful when I have to run to the vendor for parchment. My enchanter only has a real problem because for some strange reason enchant scrolls won't go into an enchanting bag, go figure. They have all the necessary stock of materials in a single enchanting bag and the rest of my portable holes are filled up with pre-crafted scrolls which is quite a bit, I might post a screen shot of it at some point.

Point being, don't skimp on the price of bag space, don't waste time with plain old netherweave bags unless the banker using them is in a tiny market. Just go right for the frostweave bags, possibly imbued or portable holes if you need it that much. Granted I hate the idea of spending 3k on a single bag just as much as you do. However I also despise the aggravation of always being out of bag space more than the price of an extra hole to stuff assorted goodies in. Heh. Also don't waste money by instantly maxing out your bag slots in your personal bank. Chances are good that you won't be needing them, personally I rarely have much of note in my bank and just use it as an extension of my bankers personal space. My scribe has extra IotS sitting in there along with unmilled herbs. But anything I use regularly I keep a solid supply on me at all times to save me time going to the bank as much as possible.


Stop buying!
Sometimes I get a real twitch to make more gold. I don't know I just get "in the mood" to do some business. Unfortunately the only way to actively make some extra cash after you've finished your round of crafting and posting is to farm. Screw that. So the only thing left to do is buy more crap to use. Unfortunately I've been at a point where I'm VERY well stocked up on everything. If you read my business report this week you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about. This is an easy mentality to get into, especially if you don't move massive amounts of inventory across every feasible market. You can think of this like the classic logical fallacy "You should be glad I bought X because it was on sale!" Spending money does not mean you saved money, good price or not. Period! Buying things that you do not have an immediate or nearly immediate use for is a waste.

You may think this goes against my constant yammering on about the need to stokpile mass amounts of stuff but it doesn't. I recommend you stokpile things that you use daily and in notably large amounts. Things like golden pearls that you DO use for 30sp enchants you have no reason to buy 500 of them even at 20g a piece. Or for that matter any old world or tbc materials have no need to be taking up 20 bag spots. Sure somethings that are very uncommon to find at a decent price you'll always want to take full advantage of because in that case you never know when you'll have another supply come in or when you'll be running out. It could be sooner or later so sometimes it's best to play it safe and stock up in advance.

If you get this sort of feeling come up from time to time like me, take your AH game into /2. See if you can fish up some people that will buy in bulk or happen to be in need of an i245 piece of purpley goodness at the right price. Just remember: never feed the trolls!


Thanks for stopping by!

From the ground up

The empire of Rome sure wasn't built in a day. Neither was the empire of Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny. Something a lot of accomplished auctioneers have considered doing has been to make an alt on an entirely different server and see how much gold they could acquire when starting with no professions or support. You might remember a few talking about it and even Gevlon did so and succeeded quite well. So as you may have guessed by now, I'm going to do the same. I've started an alt on the alliance side of the server my primary enterprise is on. I could make one on a different server, but that would do nothing really, different faction is the same as far as starting with nothing.

Though I'll be honest and say I am receiving some help: BoA gear. It does nothing but make the leveling process smoother and less painful than it's going to be without any gold. Using BoA gear doesn't effect anything relating to making money unless I was dead set on farming mobs endlessly for some cash which I'm sure you can imagine I am not. All it does is take away the absolute migraine that will be caused by leveling without even a set of bags with more than 6 slot. I will be attempting to use my professions and dubious AH skills to make a sizable amount of gold alliance side with only a single character.

Something worth noting is that I won't be abandoning my primary markets during this time, but once I hit a million I'll definitely be slowing down quite a lot. Since I'll probably be hitting a million gold before I hit level 80 on my priest, know what that means? I'll be sticking around a bit longer to keep this blog up and running. So the tentative plan is that Once I hit 80 on my priest and hit lets say 50k gold or have a large stake in two different markets is when I'll be closing up shop for good. I think that if you read my blog and see the business reports that you can VERY safely assume that with a good portion of two different markets I'll hit the gold cap. Yes these are rather lofty ideas and quite long term, but none the less they are possible. After all, it's the journey that matters the most and not the destination.


The Class.
I chose a priest as the class to level (Dranei) and will be leveling as Disc. I chose a priest because I already have the BoA gear enchanted for a caster and I always wanted to play a priest. Also a priest gives you all the tools you could ask for to make leveling easy. You got shields, heal buttons, dots & hots, reflective damage, you even get a aoe damage/healing combo spell, debuff cleansing, the works! As an added bonus the Dranei racials gives you 1% hit which is spectacular for leveling a caster and an extra hot with no cost. Some nice little perks. Also it's easy to get a load of spirit/int gear while leveling up to keep you up to speed with throughput and longevity since PW: Fort takes care of the lack of stamina. And as disc spec if I get so inclined, I can heal a random regular instance which will end badly. I have never done an old world instance on the level nor have I healed. Heh.


The Professions.
I'll be leveling inscription and herbalism as my first professions. Yes I'm once again starting the massive undertaking of taming the wild monster that is the glyph market. And herbalism because I have no financial backing to buy the herbs, I'll have to pick them up as I go. In fact I might end up having to spend time actually farming the herbs depending on skill ups. Once I have inscription maxed out I won't have a need to farm herbs any more, but I'll be keeping the profession until I hit 80. Gotta have a gathering prof while leveling after all. Once I reach 80 I'll be dropping herbalism for enchanting. I know that's thinking quite a bit ahead, but there ya go.


The Plan.
I'm not entirely sure what a reasonable goal would be. I know you can get epic flying and such by the time you're 80 just from quests and not wasting money. I think maybe 5k by the time I hit outlands is a good number. If not I'm sure I'll have a decent amount by then even by starting with not a single copper coin. But the whole idea behind this is just to show once again that you don't have to be lucky or spend hours mindlessly farming to get a large amount of gold. Plain and simple you just need to keep an eye on your money, markets, and not be wasteful. In fact the only reason this toon will be getting epic flying is just to prove that you can get it while leveling.


Every week I'll be making a post over the weekend about this project which will be in the form of a journal entry. I'll give updates on my level, gold total, profession status, and all of my thoughts and feelings about the trip to 80. This project won't be about giving you new tips, awesome ideas and niche markets. No it is just to prove once more than it can be done. They'll be rather long I'm guessing since they're covering a lot of time and game play, but if nothing else I'm sure it'll make for a very interesting read about my journeys, struggles and hurdles that I have to overcome in order to make it in a world without help and without charity. Not me, I'll be taking an MMO and turning it into my own single player economic survival game. Or something.

Now if only there were zombies...


Thanks for stopping by!

Alchemy: further observations

Another post on my continuing efforts to break into the flask market. After this post today, I expect to be making two more focused completely on my entrance into alchemy. One will be another "How To" type of post, another will be my closing thoughts on entering the market.

As you can see from my business report yesterday, I have made up the 4k deficit in roughly one week. I spent an estimated 4k on materials and profession leveling cost and then deposited just over 4k into my bank. Remember 4k of my flask sales were not profit, that gold was recovering my initial losses. Big difference.

OK either I am a lucky bastard or elixir mastery procs a ton more than the advertised 20% extra. Each time I go to craft another stack of flasks I always wind up with at least 8 bonus ones, that's over 30% more for free. I also have noticed that there's a few other herb UF left on the server so I'm picking up lotus for as low as 15g instead of the estimated 20g average. That means that if I sell a flask for 19g I'm making a noticeable profit and not bordering on losing money. That's a good thing! Unfortunately I can't say the same thing about lichbloom which I've always noticed has some serious price fluctuations.

I have also started to craft flasks of pure mojo which are selling just as much as the rest. And speaking of sale quantity, I'm starting to look at flasks as if they were nothing more than expensive glyphs. By that I mean sure you might not get a huge HUGE amount of profit on each sale but you sure will sell an ass load of them, I mean really. I'll post a stack of flasks as singles, log back on an hour later and they're all gone! So this is leading me to reevaluate my strategy a bit. Since my main competitor spends most of their time in sholozar farming materials "for free" that means that they're not at the AH posting more. So what I'm going to try and do this week is post my wares for a gold more than them at the range of 20-22g per flask.

The idea being that they'll sell out theirs while not noticing me much more because they'll still have half a page worth of flasks they made that have sold. So they get to keep their place in the market without any noticeable effect because of me. Meanwhile they'll be posting their stack of flasks on the AH and I'll be posting two stacks just above while making a significant amount of profit more than they are. Hell I may even wind up posting several stacks! The potential of having another market like glyphs where I can massively craft a ton of inventory while afk, post hundreds and then completely walk away knowing almost all of it will sell by the time I look back is very exciting.

The tactic of being second lowest is a very viable strategy for any market where the item being sold usually sells in very large amounts like buckles or glyphs. The only thing to keep in mind is that if you're using the auto fall back feature in QA3 you'll have to set your fall back price to a specific price and have to check to see if the prices have gone up manually. With the material prices, I'll once again point out that the market price of materials doesn't matter when you sell a flask. The only thing that matters is how much YOU paid for the materials. Just like gems or transmuting titanium bars, so long as it's you making a profit and not somebody else all is well.

Here's a brief explanation of what I'm talking about with the QA3 and fall back bit.

You go to start an auction.
QA3 checks the lowest price on AH.
lowest price = 19g
QA3 checks your threshold
threshold = 20g
QA3 cannot post
QA3 checks if you have a fall back
fall back = 20g
QA3 check if you want to post even if you're not the lowest
auto fall back = true
QA3 posts auction at 20g

What the above does is based on your threshold and max price being the same with the auto fall back feature enabled. In other words no matter what the prices look like for any flask you'll only post yours at 20g and ALWAYS post flasks weather you're the lowest or highest priced.

Random thought. For the last week my daily random for my DK has been Nexus every single time. Annoying!

It seems that the UF never checks their auctions or is very adamant at their threshold price of 20g per flask. I've been selling mine at 19 a piece for roughly 5g or so profit. So for the time being I can freely post my wares without any worry or thought about the no lifer UF. But once they finally notice that they're not getting any sales, which will be soon, that's when the real battle on the AH will begin. I'm expecting that will happen within a week, most likely less.

Once I'm officially on the radar as it were I'll begin with my tactics of posting just above them first. I'll continue with that for a certain amount of time then if that doesn't get me anywhere I'll attempt to buy them out while posting at a gold above their price. If that doesn't work I'll just resell below them in an attempt to completely take them out of the equation. And if god forbid that doesn't work I'll be leaving the flask market. Yes it's a real possibility that I won't be able to compete, but it's simply a case of time and effort. I won't be breaking my back to get into a market when I have no "need" for one, but I definitely won't be giving up easily! Rawr.

So I'm going to give things a bit more time before I give my final say on the matter, but things are definitely looking good. Only let down so far is not getting to have a truly epic battle on the AH right away. Later on down the line depending on how things go I may just try and buy out the UF and see if I can get flasks to raise in price by a few gold. Since they're the only one that has a real say in the market price they're the one that has to be bought to make a change. Sure people love cheap flasks for raiding, but people also love to make a noticeable profit with their profession. Sorry folks, you can't eat your cake and have it too.


Thanks for stopping by!

Report 4-27

NOTE: I have started up a new project which I'll be covering every Saturday starting this week. It looks like it will be very challenging and a lot of fun, so start checking in on the weekends and see what's going on.

It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting blizz to get servers back up. Massive wall of text coming in, it's been a long interesting week. As usual, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Income per banker
Epic gems, rare orange gems, vendor pets: 70,000

Rare gems, meta gems, LW, misc: 27,000

Smithing and enchanting: 54,000

Flasks: 12,000

Glyphs: 9,000

Total weekly sales: 172,000
Total gold: 883,000
Weekly profit: 23,000

Well I hit gold cap number 4 this week, so my goal is closing in rapidly as is my time here. One more to go! Like how flasks are now a part of my weekly report? Always good to see something new especially when it's gold. Something of note is the incredibly low profits. Now that's something different that I don't like to see. But at least I managed a profit still. Read on!


Detailed Recap
--------------
Lots of fun cool stuff going on this week! Zomgz so excited! As far as buying and stokpiling goes, this has been a week for the record books! Holy crap man, the supply has been insane and the sales can barely keep up! Here's a quick look at what I've bought so far. I don't normally list what I've bought but the sheer amount of it is just so astounding I can't resist. Normally my MO is to have a massive stokpile and then once I have it built up I'll just maintain it. Heh not this week and likely not for another few weeks!

100x cardinal ruby, dreadstone, ametrine
60x king's amber, majestic zircon
800x titanium bar
600x heavy borean
400x abyss crystal
300x greater cosmic
300x frost lotus (feels so strange being excited about this)
500x eternal fire
1,000x netherweave cloth
80x scarlet ruby
50x crusader orb
20x mongoose enchanted scrolls
1,000x infinite dust
350x adamantite bar
200x large brilliant shards
40x dragon eye

Granted my profit this week hasn't been my normal 40k average, but who can say no to 5 stacks of epic gems at 120g each? Not me that's for sure. It's been a very long time since there's been a supply flood in so many markets that I'm a tad overwhelmed and a tad leery if it's a sign of an impending crash. In any case I'll be continuing on with my normal operation.

First a few small things that I've been up to. I ran a pug ToC 25 on my mage and DK this week and my DK got as far as an epic wipe fest on...Jaraxxus. My mage however actually killed Anub! In a pug raid! Astounding isn't it? In any case, with those two raids I made out like a bandit. I picked up the patterns for Merlin's robe, the Breastplate of the White knight along with 4 crusader orbs to get my crafting a nice lil boost. I could have sold the patterns for 2k each EASILY as they're never below 3800 on the AH.

But always planning ahead like a good AH player, I saw opportunity instead of dollar (gold) signs. Later on over weekend I ran another on my pally. Failed horribly on Anub but still managed to get a beastly looking axe along with the pattern for the hunter/enhance dps bracers. I had to make a handful of i200 epics to get the last 5 skill-up's to max out LW and have yet to sell the bracers. I sure hope I sell at least one so I got more than a handful of abyss crystals out of the deal.

I corralled the required materials across several different toons to get each of them made, with yet another razorplate that sold, and threw the white knight BP and Merlin's up on auction. And guess what happened. If you guessed that they sold within a day for a hefty profit you'd be right, but that's not what I was talking about dammit! I have a new competitor in town. And of course they're another damned camper, I wouldn't have ever noticed them if they weren't. They are camping my spell threads, leg armors, toc gear, and basically anything purple outside of gems. Camping epic gear which is now posted for a potential 200g profit BEFORE the 150ish AH cut. Ouch! Who has that kind of time?

I managed to sell my first pair rather quickly but they immediately noticed my tags on the gear and started camping that market in addition to leg enchants. So as of this writing if you're on my server, don't even bother with the patterns I mentioned. It's a fools errand trying to profit while two goblins are fighting it out. Especially when one is a fierce little bastard that's bordering on a million.

/war faic!

So as you can imagine, I'm also buying up every cheap crusader orb I find (170 and below) in addition to my normal frozen orb purchases. With there never being more than 12 decently priced orbs on the AH at a time the materials for the gear is very difficult to come by and definitely cannot be farmed. And before you even CONSIDER mentioning chain heroics, keep in mind you'll have to spend a couple hours to win enough frozens to trade for a crusader (even if you're an instant tank que). That means almost an entire 24 hour period to get the 48 orbs you need to craft a singular ToC chest piece. So if your first thought was to run heroics for frozen into crusader trades... you're a mouth breathing halfwit.

Last bit on that subject is that I'm still hunting for the BS tank/melee dps bracer patterns. I also won't be looking into the caster dps bracers as the gems are worth far more cut though with the massive supply I've come into, I'll consider it if the price is right.

I also bought the pattern for Enchant weapon - Healing power, cost me 1600g. It's an old world raid drop (AQ 40 I think) for +29 spell power. The materials needed are far cheaper than 30sp since it doesn't need the 100g a pop Golden Pearls so I think it could definitely sell. Since it'll sell to people who are willing to spend a lot, but know an absurd (550g) price when they see one. So I'll be capping the price at 400g with a min sale price of 140 giving at worst a 20g profit. So far I've sold two and don't have the mats for more. Good decision on my end so far.

The only annoyance is that essence of water is impossible to find. I expect that also not many people know of the enchant and just think more is more then go for the massive +1sp increase for another few hundred gold. Not like I mind because as you know... if the cash is there we do not care! First person to catch that movie reference gets a cookie. As for the people that do know about the enchant, they most likely have compared the mats and while gathering or looking at scrolls see that it's far cheaper then buy the +29 SP enchant. Granted I'm selling both, but why let somebody else sell the 29 SP enchant when it could be me!

Lastly on enchanting I managed to get a nice supply of abyss crystals, picked up a pair of stacks for only 400g! I took those and replenished my stack of +10stats scrolls and a pair of blood drain and blade ward scrolls. I swear the uld enchants are an absolute gold mine. I've sold both of the BW enchants for almost 600g each and the blood drain scroll for 400g. That was a mere two days after I made them no less! So if you have easy access to those... DO EET! Cosmics however are in a drastic shortage, I have 10 left and the cheapest on AH is once again in the 30g range. So I'm only using them for weapon enchants and +23haste to cape. Normally under these circumstances it's best to just sell the raw materials, but I know that my competitors are low/out of stock as well. That means that I can sell the scrolls for a premium with only occasional others posting.

Leather working is still holding on for dear life. I'm managing to pick up just barely enough leather to stay with a full supply on the AH of bags, armor kits, and heavy borean. I think that I'm just not catching the UF in time as I know the three different names (or people) that post and I only catch them with a page or less worth of stacks for sale. Maybe I just had wicked awesome timing the last few weeks catching them with a few hundred stacks up for my price.

Smithing has taken a nose dive as buckles are now a gold over material cost which are being posted by (que ominous drums) the UF who runs the flask game which I am fervently invading like a horde of drunken blood thirsty barbarians. So it's only natural that they'll try and screw up one of my markets. And I hope they continue to do so believe it or not. You can't mine a node and pick a flower at the same time. When you spread yourself too thin, which is what farming for two markets does immediately, you become extremely vulnerable to being bought out.

Especially when somebody (me) can afford to buy everything at once and immediately flip it for a profit that same night. Aside from all that nonsense there's been a huge shortage of TBC ores and bars so my huge stockpile of associated enchanting rods are selling like hot cakes for 85 gold a crack. Props to stokpiling.

Epic gems are still being camped a ton and there's been a massive flood of raw gems. I picked up FOUR full stacks of red, blue, orange, and purple epics and a fist full of yellows. With a new raid coming in fairly soon I'm well prepared for another large gear rush. And since I managed to pick up these gems for anywhere from 10 to 40 gold under the lowest average price I lowered my thresholds on them all by another 10g to further ensure my friendly campers make as little profit as possible. That new raid that blizz said was coming better get released soon.

I feel moderately uncomfortable spending 10k plus on raw epic gems and not being able to move a bunch, especially with small margins. Still waiting on that one last push for JC with the release of tons of new gear. As the week went on the prices of cut gems obviously dropped considerably so my profits became razor thin at the end of the week due to my overly aggressive AH play style. Not regretting it, but still a bit annoying.

Rare gems are still on their own roller coaster ride from a page of gems at material cost (which I bought) to there being none except for mine. The same goes for metas, the supply of eternal fires was great at the start of the week but the prices went way up later on in the week to 50g. Likely because WG hasn't been horde turf during prime time this weekend for the farmers to get to work for me.

Tailoring is still more of the same (but now I'm the only seller of nether bags so go me), glyphs are still 1k per day, and flasks will be covered tomorrow in another alchemy centric post.

I think that just about covers it all as far as professions and fun stuff goes.


Thanks for stopping by!

Dude. Wait, what?

Normally I don't post on the weekends, but I'm going to post what I had for Monday a day early since it's about such an odd occurrence.


Ok I had an entirely different post lined up for today, but because of a bizarre instance with the AH, it must be delayed. You'll be reading a bit about it in my business report tomorrow, but I'll be going a bit in depth with it today. Last week starting on Wednesday day, the epic gem market was absolutely FLOODED! I mean retarded amounts of raw gems being posted in droves by hundreds of different people. The price of a raw gem dropped by over 30g in a single night. Cardinal rubies was down to 140g when it's normally seen at 170 for god's sake. Then as you'd imagine over the next two-three days the prices of cut gems dropped accordingly.

However once the Sunday rolled around the prices of raw gems went back up, followed by cut, and then supply was all but dried up. Ok you're probably thinking so what, floods and spikes aren't exactly news worthy. Shit happens. You are absolutely correct my friend, this sort of thing does happen in every market. But here's the kicker. If you read Anaalius' blog (points over to yonder blog list) you'll see that they had the same thing happen on their server around the same time as it did on mine. And yes they are on a different server than me. I also spoke with a few people I know on other servers as well and the exact same thing happened with them at roughly the same damn time. An unprecedented flood of epic gems. Complete crash of the market. Two days later it's as if it never happened and it's back just business as usual. What gives?

Naturally my gut instinct was telling me not to buy because we all know the market is going to crash some what soon. However with a new raid coming and the next expansion still being a long ways off I resisted the urge to flee and kept gobbling up all the cheap as hell gems that I could. In fact you could probably even hear my mage yell "OM NOM NOM!" with each buy out. That's how I wound up with the gigantic stokpile of raw epics that I have now. It's a damned good thing I kept buying because prices are back to normal and I haven't seen any 90g gems being posted in the last few days. Not even a single "titanium farmer" has been selling them in /2 lately.

Now this just begs the painfully obvious question... wtf? How could this huge AH event happen on several servers in the same time frame without it being patch day or some otherwise common occurrence (generally with advance notice). Normally when somebody on my server comments on a price spike or price crash I usually reply with "yeah sorry about that" because with my massive buying and competitive style I almost always have a large hand in it. Now I might be good at the AH game, but I'm not THAT good. I can't effect an entirely different server with my antics, though that would be pretty damn bad ass if I did.

So what are the possible reasons for this? Aside from these three possible answers, I am completely clueless as to any other explanation. Do you have any ideas? Has this temporary crash of the epic gem market happened for you as well?

Here's my three guesses.

Coincidence.
You'll get your biggest supply of epic gems shortly after a WG battle ends because of all the honor that gets accumulated from so many people all at once. From HK's to quests to turning in SKS. What could have happened is that a ton of people did their full set of WG quests at the same time and went right to the AH. This is possible as sales have been rather slow during the week so maybe not many people were playing until Friday-ish and they all had their WG quests reset. Possible, but what are the chances of that happening on several unrelated servers? Who knows highlander!

It could easily be something as simple that this sort of coincidence happens all the time and this just so happened to be the first time that it effected me. Anything is possible I suppose.


Server glitch.
Again going with the WG theory. It's possible that something could have happened on Blizzard's end that caused all the WG quests to reset for everybody. Since you can get precious EoF and top of the line end of expansion gear, on my server there's always a massive amount of people trying to do WG. Lots of people going in every 3 hours and getting a handful of gems leads to this sort of market crash. But unless there's a big patch or server maintenance going on the WoW servers are pretty damned reliable. However this is still a possibility because bugs do come up and nobody is perfect so something could have easily gotten mucked up to cause it. I have no idea for sure as I haven't done WG in ages.

Anaalius says:
Direct rip from a comment blow.

"I guess it could be the time of the pvp season where most / a lot of people have completed gearing up in the gear they can buy with honour, yet they are still doing the daily battleground for arena points.

Nowadays when you win the first bg of the day you get normally at least 5k sometimes 8k honour points as well as the 25 arena points. this should mean after just 2 days everyone who does this daily should be able to buy a gem to sell, and this is after only one battleground a day. The poorer people who just need gold for repairs / flasks may just grind these bg's for the easy honour nowaday."


The obvious answer.
It was a wizard.


Thanks for stopping by!

Auction house! Do you speak it!?

DISCLAIMER: Please excuse any spelling and/or grammatical errors in this post, I wrote in notepad before I copied it over here and I CBA to go through everything with a fine tooth comb. Apologies.

Just a short post for fun today on the lingo, "industry" terms, and short hand of the auction house game. I'm sure you'll know a good number of them just from reading gold blogs or from your own experience, but I'm sure you'll find a few new words here and there. By all means comment with any you think I missed and I'll edit them in once I see the comment. Plus three Internets if you catch the title reference!

But since a gold blog isn't a gold blog without tips and tricks I will post this one quick tip for making some extra gold: where there is one there are many. For example when you see the same person posting a bunch of Dreadstones for significantly cheaper than the normal price, check all of the other epic gem types. You're very likely to see the same person listing a fist full of those for well under market price as well. If you see a lot of saronite ore being sold cheap, check eternals and rare gems. See cheap enchanting mats? Check the rest.

#
/2 - trade chat
2% - the estimated amount of all WoW subscribers that have over 100k gold
80/20 rule - 80% of your profits must come from 20% of your effort. Time is money friend


A
AH player - a person who gets great enjoyment from buying and selling on the auction house. Usually one who works within several different markets at a time.

Artificial inflation - when an item is listed for an extremely high price to fool auctioneer and similar add ons to thinking that a normal priced item is far below the average market price. People love getting a good deal even if the deal is as real as the cake

AFK crafting - Crafting a massive amount of items such as heavy borean leather or belt buckles while you are away from the keyboard or otherwise occupied.

AH - Auction House or to sell an item on the auction house.

Adam - adamantite ore or bars

Alch - alchemy


B
Boa enchants - enchantments which do not have an item level restriction and thus are sold at a premium to people leveling alts

Badges - refers to emblems, comes from the burning crusade expansion where bosses in a heroic instance or raid would reward you with a Badge of Justice. They were originally used much in the same way that emblems are now

Blue - a rare quality item

BS - Black Smithing


C
CD - Cool Down

CBA - Can't Be Arsed/Asked

CoD - Cash on Delivery, when an item is sent by in game mail to be purchased by the receiver when it arrives. Will stand in the mail box for two days. Beware though as the two day wait period can be taken advantage of, see this wow wiki page for details.

Ceiling - maximum price that nobody is able to post above due to a player consistently listing specific items at a fixed price

Commons - items of common quality, also known as greens

Casual seller - a person who only sells a few items in a certain market every so often as opposed to an established AH player who posts many items each day

cool down profession - a profession which has the ability to craft expensive items with very cheap materials but has a long cool down. Such as icy prisms or epic gem transmutation

Camp - to spend large amounts of time watching your auctions in order to instantly cancel any you are undercut on and post again immediately.

Cancel/post - the process of canceling all undercut auctions, retrieving your mail and posting them back on the auction house.


D
Discovery - a recipe that you can only learn by using a research cooldown or crafting items of that type which allow you to "discover" how to make others. Examples are Inscripition research and flask discoveries

DE - Disenchant

DE fodder - something that's only used is to be disenchanted


E
Entry cost - the amount of gold you must spend on materials and/or profession leveling to start working in a certain market. Also known as start up cost

Enggy - engineering

Ench - to enchant

Enggy pets - mini pets created by engineers, usually refers to Lil' smokey and Pet Bombling


F
Flood - a much larger than normal supply of materials or crafted items

Flagged - when Blizzard notices an account doing what they consider to be questionable actions

Fan mail - in game mails or tells that you recieve from angry competitors

Farm - to use a gathering profession to acquire raw materials

Flip - to buy something (such as a battered hilt) for a low price with the intent to resell for a profit.


G
Gevlon - A well known blogged who writes The Greedy Goblin blog

Goblin - A very aggressive auction player who is willing to accept little or no profits for an extended period of time in order to force others out of a certain market.

G - gold

Gold cap - the most gold a single character may hold at a time totaling 214,748g 36s 46c

G/H - gold per hour


H
Holes - Portable hole, a 24 spot bag sold by Haris Pilton

Hunter - a class which has no spec that needs glyphs. Ever.

Homework - researching a market and it's sub markets along with the main people that sell those related items and raw materials.

Haters - gonna hate

Harassment through Obfuscation - the technical terminology for that ass hat that posts 50 pages of infinite dust in singles.


I
IotS - Ink of the Sea

Inscriptionist - A made up nonsensicle word, used when the speaker has never heard of the word scribe.

Income - the total amount of gold you collect


J
JC - Jewel Crafting

JMTC - Just My Two Copper, a popular gold making blog


K


L
LW - Leather Working

LSW - refers to the add on Lil' Sparky's Workshop

Leveling kit - a collection of all materials needed to level an entire profession

L2P - Learn To Play


M
Murlocs - the most awesome and race in all of Warcraft

Mail bank(er) - a character who's sole purpose is to have massive amounts of different things sent to them in the mail without opening them. This is done because all in game mail will be held for 30 days before they are automatically returned to the sender

M&S - Morons and Slackers, a term coined by Gevlon

Mat cost - the total price of all materials used to craft something


N
Niche market - a small market which has a small customer base with a high demand. Usually has little to no competition

Nightmares - a prismatic gem crafted with a dragon's eye and infinite dust. Commonly used to meet the blue gem requirement for a meta

Ni Hao - A Chinese greeting roughly translated into English as "hello" or "hi." Is also used as a derogatory term for a stereotypical Chinese gold farmer.


O
Old world - refers specifically to only Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms

Opportunity cost - the cost of an item that is not in the form of gold. For example the Opportunity cost of a flask you farm the materials for is the time you spent farming and not doing something else. Another example would be using materials to craft an item which sells for less than a different item using the same materials

Orb - refers to crusader, runed, or frozen orbs depending on context


P
Patch day - the day when a patch is released, the highest day of selling for most auction players

Prof - profession

Primo - primordial saronite, pronounced prime-oh

Profession bags - large bags which can only carry specific items related to a named profession, such as mammoth mining bags or bag of jewels

Profit - the amount of gold you earn after subtracting the cost to make it

Proc - Percent Rate of OCcurrence, refers to when a random effect happens such as creating extra flasks from alchemy.

Prime time - the time of day when the largest amount of players are actively signed onto WoW, usually between the hours of 3pm and 9pm. May also refer to the hours between 11pm and 2am in which most raid groups are finishing and therefore buying the most amount of items at once


Q
QA - the add on Quick Auction


R
Reload macro - a macro which when hit will reload your user interface. May be written different ways:

/console reload ui
/reload ui

RMT - Real Money Trading , refers to the act of selling WoW gold for real world currency. Can result in a permanent ban from Warcraft

Re roll - entirely unlearning one profession to level a different one. May also refer to only unlearning a profession spec or mastery in favor of a different one rather than the entire profession itself

RED - Relentless Earthsiege Diamond, most commonly used meta gem for physical DPS classes

S
Shard - to disenchant an epic item

Secondary market - a market which is relied upon by another to exist. An example would be saronite bars being a submarket of belt buckle markets as the latter cannot exist without the former. Note that this does not always refer to raw materials

Snatch list - a list of items that will be automatically purchased when scanning the auction house via the add on Auctioneer

Short stack - a group items in a stack size smaller than the max size allowed

Silks - usually refers to different forms of spider silk. Different levels of spiders will drop different types of spider silk

Stokpile - has got what you need!

Spec - an additional skill learned by several professions that gives you access to different craftables or ability to create multiple items for the price of one. Is also interchangable with Mastery

Specialty cloth - refers to moonshroud, ebonweave, or spellweave crafted by tailors.

Scribe - a person with the trade skill inscription

Standard inventory - an item which you will always keep in stock

Secondary inventory - an item which you will only craft or sell when it is not needed for anything other markets you work in

Saronite Saturday - refers to the fact that saronite (and all other raw gathered materials) will be in large supply and at low prices during the weekend

Stack sizes - a method to keep track of what you have sold and need to craft based on a set number of how many items you have in a stack at any given time

Scroll - refers to either a rune scroll of fortitude (crafted by scribes) or an enchanted armor/weapon vellum

Saronite shuffle - The act of prospecting saronite and using all the gems to create rings with jewel crafting to sell or disenchant, craft meta gems, cut rare gems, etc. See this image for a nice flow chart of the possibilities.

Saronites - when "Saronite" is made plural it is most often referring to Primordial saronites


T
Threshold - the highest price you are willing to buy at or the lowest price you will sell at

ToC epics - item level 245 gear which is crafted from bind on use recipes found in Trial of the Crusader

Twink - originally used to refer to a character made for the purpose of PvP to get the best quality, and therefore most expensive, gear and enchants they can obtain at their level. Has grown in use to refer to all leveling characters

TSW - trade skill window

There is only Zul! - a Ghost Busters movie reference that is said when only receiving a single eye of zul from the satchel of gems dropped by onyxia

TBC - The Burning Crusade expansion or referring to things associated with Outland

Threads - spellthreads crafted by tailors which are used by casting classes leg enchantments.

TS - titansteel

Titans - titansteel


U
Uld epics - item level 226 gear which is crafted from bind on use recipes found in Ulduar

UF - Uber Farmer, one who spends large amounts of time using a gathering profession usually to sell the materials at very low prices. Also known as a power farmer


V
Vendor jumping - the act of buying items from out of the way or otherwise obscure vendors to sell on the auction house with a large mark up

Vendor bait - an item which is better sold to a vendor than used


W
Wrath - the wrath of the lich king expansion, may also refer to northrend

Wall - putting up so many items of the same kind that it takes up several pages on the auction house

World drop - an item that may drop from any mob of a simillar level


X
Xmute - Transmutation or to transmute.


Y
YMMV - Your Millage May Vary. Meaning that what the speaker is saying may not always be the case to with the listener

Z
Zone drop - an item that may drop from any or most mobs in a particular zone


Thanks for stopping by!

How do you kill that which has no life?

Another day of alchemy research. It seems that one of the major herb farmers and suppliers of the whole server is THE flask distributor. They have almost a full page of flasks roughly at material cost along with one other person. The problem here is that they are on nearly 24/7 and almost all of that time is spent in sholozar or ice crown doing exactly what you think... farming for free. For most people, spending all day every day farming is entirely out of the question. Hell for a lot (such as myself) even farming for an hour is not up for discussion. So what do you do?

Treat them like any other camper, but the catch is they're used to this and are convinced it's the way to go. When you see two flasks selling for for a gold over materials you know something is up. Botting? No they're not a bot and I'm actually sure about that. I know it because I happened to get into a pug raid with them as the healer. Go figure eh? They had the same guild tag as their banker so out of curiosity I logged to undercut them, announcing in raid that I had to get something from an alt. I popped back while the raid was still forming and lo and behold. They changed toons to undercut me as soon as I got back. Heh, I actually lol'd.

The usual go to method of dealing with somebody posting at material prices is to just buy them out. However since they've been spending countless weeks and months doing this they probably have a rather large supply, also because they only sell herbs that are not used in flasks. This leads me to think that that might not be a great idea at the moment. The other competitors I'm positive I could buy out and just use their flasks to compete with the uber farmer (UF). And to top this off, I tend to have bad luck when it comes to procs. I've barely gotten any bonuses from transmutes even when I make a full stack of materials worth so I can't count on mastery gambling to help me out. And the fact that they're likely an elixir master as well makes this the case even more so.

Now what? I'm completely convinced that alchemy is a profitable profession even if you aren't a camper or another UF. But learning to deal with them is something that applies to every profession, so I'm going to be going forward with this no matter what. After all, I do enjoy a challenge. Most likely my plan will be to buy out them and the competition and spend a few days doing this while trying to flip their flasks before I start crafting my own. Besides, why buy materials when the product is cheaper?

If that doesn't work, I'll just have to time my posts better and use a few tricks of my own and mess with my QA3 settings a tad. This is something that I've mentioned before, albeit briefly. When listing something that is in high demand, being the lowest isn't always necessary to make a profit. Things like stamina gems, dps red gems, buckles, glyphs or... flasks (gasp!) are almost always purchased in multiple amounts. Tank gear is always loaded up with stamina gems and same with dps gear and associated gems, and since all that gear has several sockets you can expect them to buy more than one.

What that means is that if you post just a tad above the lowest price (opposed to below) you're likely to still get several sales simply due to the demand. So if buying them out doesn't work after some time of trying it, I'll start posting above their price with a 48 hour listing. Since I'm not usually around during prime time for flask sales I'll have to just eat the deposit cost. I can deal with that. The idea here is to allow them to have their place in the market indefinitely and be forced to UF all day every day. Nobody likes to be forced to farm, even if you're used to doing it all day by choice. It's just human nature, don't force me bro! Bear in mind that this strategy means that you need to pay more attention to the market and your competitors, it cannot be just set it and forget it.

Meanwhile I'll be posting just above their auctions and they can't do anything except farm even more herbs, craft even more flasks, and lose even more money on deposits (which they're listing at 24 hours already). Even with that all they can do is make more work for them and lose more profit without being able to stop me or force me out of the market. I like knowing that.

You're creating a price ceiling that they cannot break through without buying everything you own. That's not an option for an UF as they're losing a lot of money doing so since they have to sell your products for less than they paid in order to make a profit. It's either that or raise their bottom price which you'll then immediately take over. Effectively you're FORCING them to switch places with you, the upstart alchemist, with superior knowledge of both people and the AH business. This is a very important tactic to remember, it can save you a load of trouble in the future.

The only reason I'd leave a market is if I was losing a significant amount of money with no chance of profit in the foreseeable future. The main thing to keep in mind is that even if I absolutely cannot compete, which is a very real possibility, I can always sell my flasks in trade for several gold under them twice a week during prime time and make most of the money back and the left over herbs can always be milled into glyphs. After that I'll still have another alchemist to xmute more epic gems to fuel my more prominent market.

With all that being said, I've certainly walked into quite the challenge. Sadly the whole purpose of this was to give a sort of guide in entering a new market which, due to the circumstances, won't be as great as I hoped it would be. Believe it or not I actually wasn't entering a new market for the gold, just the entertainment and educational value of it... gasp! However I'll still do my best to keep my focus on that and not let this turn into a 'how to beat an UF' series. Although it's fairly clear that that is what several posts will be focusing on. In any case, the next several posts I make will still be on the subject of entering new markets and be quite in depth each time with their particular focus.


Lastly, here's a screen shot of my primary banker (and who the blog is named after) that is Stokpile. It's his armory with a pricing of all the useless junk I bought for him when I got my first gold cap. Long story short, over 18k spent on crap + bags. I figured it might give some of you a giggle or three.

Thanks for stopping by!

Alchemy: Door Charge

EDIT: gold cap number 4 has been reached! Screen shot be here. Time to buy myself a hilt and see what all that is about.

Another post on entering the real alchemy market.

For the most part, this post is going to be me "thinking out loud" (then again that is what blogging is for). Mostly as a way to kind of help organize my thoughts on the matter. The first thing you need to look into for a new market is the material cost of everything you intend to craft to start off with. For me it's the 3 basic types of flasks. This is a rather easy one to figure out for me since I have a very strong grasp on the average price of herbs due to my working with glyphs. Here's what I'm expecting to pay for flask materials.


Flask of stoneblood, 41g material cost
7x lichbloom - 14g (2g each)
3x crystallized life - 6g (2g each)
1x frost lotus - 20g
1x enchanted vial - 1g


Flask of endless rage, 37.5g material cost
7x lichbloom - 14g (2g each)
3x goldclover 2.5g (80s each)
1x frost lotus - 20g
1x enchanted vial - 1g


Flask of the frostwyrm, 35g material cost
5x lichbloom - 10g (2g each)
5x icethorn - 4g (80s each)
1x frost lotus - 20g
1x enchanted vial - 1g

On top of all of this is the entry fee of a new profession (and mastery spec) of about 2600 gold. Quite a bit especially when you consider the time it takes. With all this information you get the door charge just to start your trade on the AH.


Since each craft makes two flasks, that means that my threshold will be around 25g or there about to make a decent profit on each flask. Also of note is that I've noticed that all flasks have an average sale price of anywhere from 35g to 45g. That is the lowest and the highest I've seen them when buying flasks, but I'll be paying much closer attention in the coming days.

After the profession leveling and material costs being figured out, I need to decide just how much inventory I'll be creating at the start. A good number I think would be enough mats for two stacks of each type, not including procs. That makes my total "market buy in" price in the area of 1100g for basic flasks. Add that with the profession cost brings the grand start up total to almost 4,000 gold.

Granted that's about the same price of crafting two ToC epics, but it's still a high price for something that's completely unknown and something of which I'm entirely inexperienced with. Since I'll be leveling the profession right away and stocking up in the process, I'll be taking about a week or three so making zero profit with alchemy and then need to make up that 4k that I just spent (all of which will be zero profit).

With this knowledge you need to decide if it's worth the potential profits you can make per day/week. My personal goal will be to make up that 4k in the same amount of time I took spending the gold to start up. I think that sounds reasonable enough.


Next string of numbers and gibberish to look at is the potential profits you can make on each craft.

Flask of the frostwyrm:
crafted at 17g per flask
minimum sale price of 22g each
5g profit

Flask of endless rage:
crafted at 18g per flask
minimum sale price of 23g each
5g profit

Flask of stoneblood:
crafted at 20g per flask
minimum sale price of 25g each
5g profit

Considering that your average raid lasts for 3-4 hours you can expect your typical buyer to buy 4 at a time. Normally that would say to me that selling flasks in stacks of 4 would be best, but I would be surprised if most thought to buy the exact amount they'll need. So that gives us a 20g profit per person per sale at the least, not a bad number considering how many raiders are out there that flask up even when not provided by their guild. One last thing to make note of here is the actual consumption of these flasks and who, specifically which class, is using them the most. How often do you see a dps class without a flask on? Nearly all the time, ICC or not. How often is a healer without a flask? Usually, but it's fairly common for them to flask up.

What about a tank? I have never once seen a tank without a flask that didn't legitimately outgear the raid (think ICC gear in a normal toc 10). And with tanking flasks being the most expensive, they just may have the best rate of sales. However more classes use SP than there are tanks, but a lot of them CBA to buy them (if they can even afford it). This is all just pure speculation at this point so feel free to correct me if I'm way off base here. Tough to say at this point, but with the many other alternatives to an SP flask, I'd venture to guess tha frostwyrms sell the least of the three with stonebloods at the top. Naturally I'll be watching the influx and supply of flasks on the AH for the week, especially on Teusday, Friday, and Saturday.

Since flasks are sold solely to raiders for the most part (know your market even if it's obvious) the best time to post them on AH is bout 30 minutes before raids tend to start which is around 8ish on my server. This makes things rather interesting as my normal post time is several hours before then and several hours after. Flasks it seems, is the only market that has it's prime time BEFORE raids opposed to afterwords like enchanting or gems. Since I'm definitely not going to change my day around when to post flasks this will surely effect my profits greatly so it'll be interesting. Regardless I'm sure I can make some form of profit from the market, but it's a question of how much it's worth and how long it'll be worth doing it for.

So for the time being, I'll just use the round numbers of 4k gold lost and about 2 weeks of time to make it back. Quite a daunting task, but with the constant demand for flasks and the potential of severe campers/UF it's quite exciting!


Small research note:
Last night during the wee hours of the evening, flasks were all at 39g a piece, which is about 35g profit on a sale. This could easily be due to the fact that the cheap ones had already been bought out due to the time and only the pricey ones were left up on the AH. Come the following morning there was a page or two of flasks by a few people, one being a power herb farmer, for below material cost. Looks like I'm going to get to have some fun.


Thanks for stopping by!

Report 4-20

It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting blizz to get servers back up. As usual, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Income per banker
Epic gems, rare orange gems, vendor pets: 46,500

Rare gems, meta gems, LW, misc: 34,000

Smithing and enchanting: 61,000

Glyphs: 9,000

Total weekly sales: 150,000
Total gold: 837,000
Weekly Profit: 73,000

Slowly but surely creeping upon gold cap number 4. I decided that when I hit it, I'll reward myself by buying a battered hilt so I can check out the quest chain (I hear it's quite epic). Granted the sword will rarely be used, or seen for that matter, I'd still like to see what it's all about. Besides I'll probably collect the 12k I spent on it from my mail boxes by the time I finish up the quest chain anyways, hehe. I'll be getting the nifty 1h sword for my DK of frosty goodness, might help me break the 7k dps mark (at 6.5 atm) which isn't bad for a mix of i232 and i219 gear. I'll likely be hitting it tomorrow or the day after so I'll give you all my take on the quest chain.



Detailed Recap
--------------
Surprisingly glyphs have STILL been pulling in 1k per day every day even with my prices capped at 7g per sale. Also, I've slightly altered how I work this market. When I log on to make glyphs, any ones that I've sold out on I'll craft a set of 10 of that glyph instead of my normal stack size of 5. But if you remember my inscription redux post, I'm still making a select few glyphs in stacks of 10 no matter what. So far I haven't sold out of any of those aside from DK minor glyphs, perhaps I'll up their stack size to 15 sometime soon. I'm doing all of that for a few reasons.

One is to ward off any potential competition that is flipping the glyphs that I craft. While I don't mind this too much (since I'm still getting a profit) I'm more interested in the long term and being the main supplier of glyphs at a higher price than my current 7g. If somebody starts to resell my glyphs and then sees that I undercut them with another TEN glyphs instead of 5, they'll tend to lose interest rather fast. Once they leave the market (even partially) I can raise my prices and get just as many sales from others as I got from the person doing the flipping but with a much better profit.

The other reason is that there will always be a new flavor of the month class and/or spec, and they all need glyphs. Whenever a new patch comes it's obvious what's going to be it, but it still happens fairly randomly because of different people hitting 80 with different classes and the sort. So if I happen to sell out of a certain glyph, chances are I'll still be selling a bunch more of them for another day or two.

Crafting an extra handful ensures that I'll be the one that's doing the selling. Luckily though, it seems that towards the end of the week the campers have eased off (maybe they weren't playing this weekend at all, who knows) but I hope that means that they're backing off of me for a while now. That means that prices soon will be allowed to inflate once again but still won't be the 40g price tag people were used to before I showed up.

Leather has still been great fun just like last week. I sold out of all my leather in various forms and wound up spending another 2k on more (heh, that sound familiar?). Sad to say though, the supply dried up towards the weekend so as of this writing I'm on my last leg of this market. Still a solid stock of bags, armor kits, and assorted goodies to last another few days.

Epic gem supply has gone waaay down over this week! That's actually a good thing because when supply goes down, prices tend to go up and is proven by the many 200g+ gems I've sold over the weekend while snatching up any I can find for 130g and under. When you notice a supply shorting out take that as your cue to start stockpiling on whatever it is in anticipation of a price spike. Naturally I'm referring to your normal run of the mill supply shortage and not caused by a patch or otherwise significant change.

Rare gems have been flooded with people posting at dumping prices again so I just said screw it and bought them all out starting at 11g and below. Sure enough within a few days most of them have sold for a profit, some small as 2g, others as great as 30g. Not bad for a few moments of effort eh? Hopefully that combined with my continuous buying of cheap raw gems the prices will return to the normal 20g range.

As for enchanting... bleh. Just bleh! Materials have been in even shorter supply than last week! I am sold out of many weapon enchants and a handful of popular armor enchants with prices of mats still sky high (30g for cosmics and 50 for abyss). Hell a bit ago I even ran out of materials from TBC so I was sold out of mongoose scrolls and shield stam scrolls as well. Made me happy since goose was sold for over 500g each time and the shield ones went for at least 80g.

But even with huge profits, I don't like having to STOP making them. So at the end of the week I finally caved in and upped my buying price for crystals and cosmics just so I can continue to keep a stake in the market. Because if I'm having inventory issues then so is the competition which might give me a shot at a temporary monopoly. Who knows, we'll see what happens.


Lastly on a completely unrelated note, I was recently (sorta) interviewed on warcraftecon.com under the name of my main (Stokpile is just my fancy banker) for hitting the gold cap. Shortly there after I got a tell from another lvl 80 paladin on my server telling me how much they were inspired by my interview, that they enjoyed it very much, and that I should be very proud of my accomplishment. Well, I am very proud of myself. Like anybody who sets a long term goal and succeeds, you have every right to be glad about it and are entitled a small amount of bragging rights.

Just pointing this out because I always try to emphasize that if you want to learn to make gold in this game you can. And most importantly, as always, have fun while you're doing it. If this AH game wasn't fun for me right now, I'd be closing up shop tomorrow. Suffice to say, I hope you enjoy yourself and learn a thing or two by reading my blog because that's what I'm here for. To enlighten and to entertain.


Thanks for stopping by!

Coming soon!

Out of all the different professions and niche markets out there, there is one that has remained completely untouched by Stokpile: alchemy. Sure I transmute a bunch of stuff every day, but that's as far as it has ever gone. Hell I don't think that even counts as alchemy because it's really mining and JC that are making the money from that, not alchemy. But I decided that since I have a toon with an open profession spot that I'd finally take a jump into another market and see how I do. So that means coming soon is a proper how to alchemy post. But in the mean time, I'll be giving you the play by play on how I'm going about entering a new market.

It will be complete with research notes, material prices, product pricing guides, and more. Throughout this week I'll be making posts on what part of "doing your homework" I'm at and things I come up with. However it won't be something as simple (and pointless) as the price of X is Y so I'll sell for Z. No I'll be giving an actual analysis as best as I can to give you a glimpse into my mind so you can better understand the thought process behind it. Since I've mentioned sporadically here and there of different things you need to do when considering entering a new market, I feel it's important to go much more in depth with it.

Entering a new market is a rather large risk, especially if you do what I'll be doing and rolling an entire profession for it. There is so much that goes into this with the material gathering, start up costs, market research, post times, etc. that randomly mentioned tips and thoughts really doesn't cut it. Take these up coming posts on this subject as a sort of loose guide for any other markets you're considering getting into. Just replace the materials I mention with those of your target market, do some math, a bit of similar research, and you'll have a solid idea of where to go.

First the obvious question: wtf am I going to do with alchemy? At the beginning, I'll be starting out small with just the essential flasks for AP, HP, and SP. Eventually I'll be branching out into elixirs and possibly potions all depending on how the flask market treats me. All in all I'm quite excited to get into a new market. Especially since there's a lot of very established people in the flask business.

I would always see a page or two of the same people selling the same thing and buying lotus in /2 for the same price that I would be trying to buy them at. I used to buy lotus because the guild I was in at the time allowed a donation of 2 lotus for a small amount of DKP (which they used to provide all raiders with enough flasks for an entire night every night).

With all that being said, this week should have a good amount of very useful information and thoughts for all the AH players out there.


Thanks for stopping by!

L2P

Sometimes education can be a great business opportunity. Since your standard AH player makes the bulk of their income from the M&S and other assorted retards, you may wonder why you should enlighten them on how to play. This is because a lot of people have the potential to play well, but for their own reasons haven't spent the time learning. You can take me for example. I wasn't always a great tank, I wasn't always able to do max dps with my gear or even able to make more than a few hundred gold a day outside of farming. What happened? As far as I knew, farming was the only way to make money since so many other games are like that. I continued like this until I was informed otherwise.

Now I'm sure I'm not the only person in wow like this with a similar story. I wouldn't be surprised if it's your story as well. Helplessly grinding away because you didn't think it was possible for it to be different for whatever reason. But here you are, educating yourself, making far more (I hope at least) than you were before. And guess what? People with a story like us are good candidates to make a profit from!

On average a black magic scroll sells for far more than any other wotlk SP enchant, but a while ago you couldn't even give them away.

What about the many mages and other caster specs that love haste? A while ago the enchant black magic was changed to proc haste making it the best enchant and, depending on gear and other factors, could even surpass 81 SP to a staff. But many didn't know about this and kept buying spellpower enchants. It's completely natural to think that black magic, along with many other enchants, are completely useless and will remain that way so why bother looking into it every patch?

This is until they were educated. Until they were informed that things might not be as they think they are. The average person with a bit of curiosity looked it up on EJ and said 'wow this actually IS better!' And since dps love to do more dps, so long as it doesn't take huge extra effort, will spend the money to change the enchant. And of course, you will always be there to provide them with the needed service.

Sure not every player is like this and of course many already knew about the enchant change in advance from daily reading, but there is still a large group that doesn't. A group that needs only to be informed of a change and it's value to change their thinking.

You can apply this same thinking to glyphs, gems, any gear based enhancement product. Are you into pvp but have trouble staying alive as a priest? Try my fancy new earthen leg armor! It's loaded up with stamina and resilience to keep you alive just long enough to heal up and vanquish your enemies, rawr! Or what about my mystic king's amber gems? They sure do the job because if you're dead you're not going to heal anybody. Are you a mutilate spec rogue? Well did you know that ap/haste gems are better than agil/crit gems for yellow sockets? Well now, I happen to have many for sale and I got the best deals anywhere. Do the same with glyphs even for specs that get changed in a patch.

Hell if you want to be devious you can even lie so they'll buy the wrong item, then find out it's terrible, then buy a replacement from you all over again. Naturally I don't recommend this, but hey, it's an option. And educating you on all your options is what I'm here for (and what this whole post is about) after all right?

What can you take away from this post to put some extra gold in your pockets? The next time you see somebody discussing what's best for what in regards to something you sell, let them know. You don't have to spell it out (or even reply to a pm), just tell them what's what and where to find out for themselves. I've sold many 22 int enchants for boa weapons by just saying that "sure 30sp will make things die faster, but you'll spend so much more time drinking and using pots on CD that it's not worth it. And guess who happens to be the sole supplier of these enchants? Yours truly of course. And guess what sells for more, 30sp or 22int? Right again my friend, 22int sells for about 100g more on your average day.

It's not your place to decide if something is worth the price or not, after all you're not the customer in this case. Just let people know what is the best and allow them to decide if it's worth it or not. Your job is only to inform people of their options and to sell said options to them. And as an added benefit, you'll be doing your part in helping my random heroics be mildly less painful and just might not run into any more resto shammy's wearing a mirror of truth or needle encrusted scorpion... BECAUSE CRIT HALPS MAH HEALZ SPELL! I wish I was lying, but trust me. It's happened more than I want to admit.


Thanks for stopping by!

Giggles!

Ok I haven't done any AH giggles in a while and I couldn't come up with anything new to write today as I have been far too busy with work and other projects. So instead I give you a bunch of screen shots I've taken over the last few weeks (or months, I'm not sure) that may give you a few laughs or something to find interesting. As a side note I have not tried to sell the leveling kit and decided to just sell it off in pieces. It was taking up far too much room and I'm almost never around during a good time to sell it. So all that combined just made it not worth the time.

The profession was black smithing and it only took a week or so to collect everything. I can't comment on if it's worth it to you to try or not as I didn't even bother trying to sell it. But a few words of advice, make sure you have a good amount of spare game time during prime time to buy cheap mats and sell the kit along with an ass ton of storage space!

In any case, on with the show! Click on the description to see the whole thing.


A bunch of gem sales with the profit on each typed on top of the screen.


Screen of how many glyphs I have up on auction after collecting 180 sales from the mail.


What I saw in the middle of a buying spree for epic gems, leather and saronite. Scared me half to death!


When I say stokpile herbs and inks...


...I mean REALLY stok up!


Day to day tailoring sales.


My average morning when I log on my epic gem banker.


Selling epics is all fun and games until you look at the AH cut


More gem and leather sales.


I have no idea how to comment on this other than being polite can pay off from time to time. /shrug


More words of encouragement from my biggest fan on Ysera!


Ever wonder what an entire bank tab filled with saronite would look like? Well now you know, and knowing is half the battle!


The black smithing goods and accessories tab of my personal G bank. Tons of eternals, a weeks supply of rods and assorted bars.



Ok that's all that I got, hope you got a few giggles out of all that today.


Thanks for stopping by!