Finally Back - With a New Rig!

It sure has been a while but I'm back at last.

Unfortunately my long absence was unavoidable as first I got smashed by uni deadlines for a few weeks and then my poor long-suffering old computer gave its last shuddering cough and died.

Pretty much my exact expression when it happened.

I finally got around to buying a new rig so I'm back! And what a magnificent specimen it is too since a mate and I custom built it ourselves. I won't go on and on about it but suffice to say I've gone from playing wow on the lowest graphics settings at 5fps to playing with maxed settings at 60fps!

 My beautiful new baby

So anyway, expect some more posts about gold making etc soon as I kick things back into gear and turn the old gold machine back on.

Seal

Day 2/3: It starts to get interesting

Due to a particularly busy weekend (the beer wasn't going to drink itself) I was only able to play for around an hour over the two days. But even with that minimal playtime things are starting to take shape nicely.

With such limited opportunity my main objective was to try out one of the strategies offered by another blogger in JMTC's most recent blogging carnival: How do you make gold with low Capital? Given my time constraints I opted for one that once set up would only take a minute to execute when necessary.

What I chose:

Given this criterion I went with a nice little strategy by Flux over at the excellent Power Word: Gold blog which involved selling vendor cooking recipes found in Stormwind to the horde via the neutral Auction House. I won't detail exactly how the strategy works as Flux says it perfectly so if you're interested check it out here: Making Gold Selling Alliance Cooking Recipes to the Horde.

So with my tactics outlined perfectly I ran my auction alt to the recipe vendor and bought the recipes in question and then sent them to another new alt who had drawn the short straw for the trek from the human starting zone to Booty Bay. Needless to say this trip was very painful as a lvl 1 toon with no mount, but 27 minutes (!!!) and 2 deaths later I was sitting safely on the dock in BB next to the neutral auctioneer. Having safely arrived I listed each of the recipes for 20g apiece, logged off and promptly forgot all about them.

A good 24 hours later when I logged back in to check mail and presumably re-list the unsuccessful auctions (I'm cynical at the best of times) I was greeted with the very welcome site on the left. Over half of the recipes had sold and I couldn't have been happier.

All in all the sales netted me about 120g profit thereby quadrupling my total gold in an instant. The best part about this strategy is the fact that once the initial outlay of time getting to Booty Bay has been spent, this is an activity that will take 2 minutes max to rinse and repeat as necessary as the auctions either sell or expire. Having it confirmed so quickly that the recipes will definitely sell is a nice weight off of my mind also.

Oh and I almost forgot the best part: All of the recipes together cost less than 1g to buy!

So far this is a perfect example of exactly what I am looking for in this challenge: cheap, effective, and quick gold making techniques that can be used by a player completely new to wow. Good on you Flux!

So with the first few days of my challenge behind me this is how my finances look so far:

So far I couldn't be happier with how I am progressing. With minimal playtime and no boosts of any kind (help from others, heirlooms etc) I already have over 150g and a quick and easy moneymaker locked away for continuing profits. I can only hope that each new trick I try is as good as this one.

The empire continues to grow!

Day 1: A New Beginning

Well after a very little bit of research I decided my new home for this challenge would be the Aman'thul server - Alliance side. Why those? Aman'thul because it seems to have a decent population and alliance because the Stormwind auction houses look the most 'commercy' (yep, that was the basis of my faction choice). I like the idea of building an empire from a big stone bank instead of from a wooden shack, it'll go way better with my tuxedo, monocle and top hat.

So with my server choice made I stepped out into the world as a fresh human rogue (humans start right next to SW so this was a no brainer, plus the extra rep will save me money if i decide to buy mounts in the future).

Unfortunately due to RL commitments I could only spend about 40 minutes playing today so I didn't get quite as much done as I'd hoped. Having said that I did manage to train skinning and mining and grab a few nodes/pelts which I then threw onto the AH. This part was fairly dicey as I'd completely forgotten about posting costs but luckily I only had a few things to sell so I posted them all with a whopping 61c to spare.



 As of writing this post I have made 3 sales bringing my grand total up to around 13.5g! It's a tiny sum in the scheme of things but given I started with nothing, over 10g in just over half an hour makes me very happy.

The first brick has been placed and now the empire will grow around it!

Noob Challenge!

I have been inspired by this month's blogging carnival over at JMTC: How do you make gold with low Capital? to put my own startup skills to the test and see if I can build a tidy fortune from scratch.

The Challenge:
Start fresh on a new server with no heirlooms, no gold, no friends to boost me... nothing!
The only help I will use will be addons as anyone can get them whenever (sure genuine first time players might not know about them, but really with all the information and detailed guides out there it's not hard to work them out).

I will be updating my progress here whenever I play.

I would like to stay on an oceanic server to minimise lag so if anyone has a suggestion for my new home (Nagrand is my current home), or even a faction/race/class suggestion post it in the comments and I'll be happy to oblige.

Key to Success #2: Opportunity Cost

Hey long time no see! I've taken a break from wow for the time being to focus on university but that doesn't mean I can't still provide some useful gold making tips while I'm away from the game (they'll just be a little bit more general).

So anyway on with the post:

Opportunity Cost?

The Skinny

Nothing is free. Every action you make in-game or out has an inherent cost attached whether it be time or money or whatever. Opportunity cost is basically what your resources could be doing instead of their current use. Using the pic on the right, the opportunity cost of going into door A is missing out on whatever's behind door B. In wow terms, a common misconception is that anything you farm personally is 'free' but this couldn't be further from the truth. If you farm 2 stacks of ore in 20 minutes sure you may have made 80g but that 80g has cost you 20 minutes that could be spent elsewhere. If you had instead used that 20 minutes to buy herbs, mill them and sell the inks for 200g profit then the opportunity cost of farming is the difference between the two: 200g - 80g = 120g.

It may seem like a fairly simplistic concept but it really is that simple. What it boils down to is ensuring that you spend your time on the most profitable activities possible. What those activities are depends on your tradeskills, market knowledge and server but with a little research and trial it is fairly easy to work out.

Where else it's important

Not only is opportunity cost important in terms of your precious time, it is also critical to consider when stockpiling as well. Whenever you buy a large amount of an item to put away for a future where it will be worth more you should consider other potential uses for the gold you spent. When you invest in the future that gold is tied up indefinitely until you sell the stockpile and cant be put to any more productive uses.

For example: if you buy 10,000g worth of ore today and sell it for 30,000g in three months you've made a 20k profit, not bad. However if you instead used that original 10k to buy items cheap on the weekends and then resell them for more midweek your 10k could be constantly growing and working for you as you can then reinvest larger and larger sums.

This is particularly important for those who don't have a massive bankroll as investing a high proportion of your total gold in stockpiling can be extremely counterproductive. As the old saying goes "it takes money to make money" and a 1,000g profit tomorrow that you can reinvest and continue to grow is worth so much more than a 20,000g profit in 3 months that is useless in the meantime.

My parting thoughts

The most important part of this theory is the fact that there is no universal solution; the most effective money making scheme for one player usually wont be the best for another. Working out what you are best at and cutting down on the less productive activities is the key to maximising your profit.

My snap decision - the results so far.

Well, 3 days on from my Snap Decision post and hings haven't turned out quite as I had hoped or planned for in the original post. However that's the nature of speculation, sometimes it pays off big other times it doesn't. As the picture below shows, the whiptail market is still flooded with super cheap stacks and it is now mid week.

This would be a problem if my only plan for profiting from my speculation was to flip all of my stacks back onto the auction house. However, as anyone who's had success making gold in wow will tell you "there's more than one way to skin a murloc". So instead of re-listing the mountains of whiptail I had for a significant loss I set to using it in a more financially beneficial way. Not only did I listen to the suggestion from Faid of Nerf Faids of "Darkmoon cards gooooooooooooo!" but I also listed burning embers, inferno ink and blackfallow ink in various stack sizes, made a few mysterious fortune cards, and also a ton of glyphs.

As of writing this post I have made back all but about 4k of my original 15k investment. Not only that but I still have about 400 blackfallow ink left to make more glyphs with as well as about 75 more stacks of whiptail waiting to be milled and heaps of glyphs listed to sell.

What's the moral of the story?

Know your markets. If you are thinking of spending big gold (or any gold) on speculative items do your due diligence first. If it seems like a good deal that's great but make sure that you also have an exit strategy for if your plan falls through that doesn't involve wearing a big loss. If the item only has one use and that doesn't pan out you're screwed, however if the item has several uses the risk diminishes exponentially.

Trying something new

 As usual I made my rounds of the gold blogosphere this morning and found THIS post over at Alto's Gold"ish" Advice which basically details a guest post Alto wrote for JMTC about farming mobs while under the effects of [Potion of Treasure Finding]. Now I usually wouldn't touch farming with a 10 foot pole but Alto has found a great spot to farm using this potion so I thought I'd check it out myself to see if this would be viable for me as another layer of diversification. My results are below:

cash looted: 96g
vendoring [greys]: 71g
13 [green] items disenchanted into:
15 [Hypnotic Dust]: approx 75g*
8 [Lesser Celestial Essence]: approx 120g*
34 [Embersilk Cloth]: approx 100g*
18 [Volatile Fire]: approx 243g*
total: 705g
*these figures are based on monday morning ah prices so may be a bit skewed after weekend trading*

11 [Tiny Treasure Chest] containing:
25g cash
1 [green] item de'ed into:
2 [Hypnotic Dust] : 10g
52 [Embersilk Cloth]: 156g
15 [Pyrite Ore]: 150g
4 [Volatile Fire]: 54g
4 [Volatile Life]: 46g
10 [Volatile Air]: 200g
5 [Volatile Earth]: 67g

Grand Total minus 170g for potion: 1093g

So similar to Alto's results 1100g an hour isn't an amazing return, however I did gain 5 bars of experience in the process which took my paladin to lvl 84. Also I imagine that mid week the ah prices on most of these items would be higher as well.

I'm not sure I'd bother with this again as my time is better spent elsewhere (opportunity cost and whatnot) but it is certainly viable as a way to make decent low-risk gold to bump up your bankroll, especially if you are just starting to try and make some serious gold.

If you want to give it a crack, check out this post at Alto's excellent blog.

Snap decision

I woke up this morning and did my usual rounds of the gold bloggers on my blogroll and found THIS post from Alto over at ALTOs Gold"ish" Advice. Based on Alto's excellent research (pretty pictures always help), it appears that the recent boom in supply of whiptail from the Uldum zone is over and the incredibly fast node respawn times are no more.

What does this mean for any aspiring Goblins?

If this truly is a hotfix and not just a really unlucky night for Alto, it means that the price of whiptail is going to go back up to a level similar to before patch 4.0.6's explosion in supply. With that in mind I quickly jumped onto my bank toon and purchased all whiptail stacks up to a cost of 100g per stack. The price of a stack of whiptail on my server before supply went crazy hovered between 140g and 200g per stack so I stand to make quite a large profit just by flipping the 130 odd **Edit: 200 odd** stacks I just bought.

If on the other hand prices stay low, well I'll just have to be more creative in how I offload so many herbs to recoup my losses but you can be sure that inscription will play a central role.

Taking a leaf out of my own book.

Dropping off the top sellers list for Alliance Nagrand on The Undermine Journal this weekend has prompted me to take my own advice and expand the markets that I am operating in. To this end I dropped mining on my lvl 70 druid (who already has 450 JC) and picked up Alchemy as a transmute master should work nicely in synergy with Jewelcrafting. Not only this but I figured that the weekend was the perfect time to powerlevel a new profession thanks to an abundance of cheap herbs on the auction house. As a result I have been questing like mad today in an effort to hit lvl 75 and open cataclysm crafting as soon as possible which has slightly curtailed my gold making activities but the end result should be more than worth it.

My main reasoning behind this decision is the fact that I want to grow my earning capacity and as my first Key to Success post explains, diversifying is a great way to achieve this. Alchemy/JC was an easy choice for this due to the fact that ore prices have been steadily dropping lately while demand for cut gems is still strong. Guilds are starting to down raid bosses and need to fill all those empty sockets introduced to epics with patch 4.0.6 so there is plenty of opportunity for profit here.

Hopefully I'll hit lvl 75 in the next day or two and then I'll update shortly after that with the initial results and my impressions of sales so far.

Key to Success #1: Multiple Markets

What's this all about?
This post marks the first in what will be an ongoing series of "Key to Success" posts. At this stage I am hoping to post one of these per week and they will be aimed at highlighting the fundamentals that any aspiring auction house goblin should know and use. So anyway, one with number 1...


Taking advantage of multiple markets.

The long and the short of it

Up first is a relatively uncomplicated concept to understand and implement. The short story is basically that if you sell across more than one market instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket, you will make a lot more gold. Diversification is the key to big time results for the simple reason that if one market tanks you still have several other markets to keep your profits solid until it recovers. In effect if you find an area is in a major slump your daily/weekly/monthly profits will not be too badly affected. On the other hand, if you have everything invested into one market and the bottom falls out due to whatever reason you are basically screwed.

How to go about it

Research is the key to success in diversification, find areas that will provide consistent sales on your server and then climb on board the gravy train. Finding these multiple markets does not necessarily mean finding the three or four biggest volume markets on your server as these typically have the most competition and are often rife with deep undercutting and generally frustrating behavior. The strategy that I have found to work best is to focus on a single big ticket area (in my case glyphs) as well as a bunch of smaller areas as well (bags, enchanting rods, darkmoon cards, ore shuffling, flipping etc).

This is a rough breakdown of my recent sales on the auction house from The Undermine Journal (a fantastic resource and awesome to see it back in action!). As it shows, I get a majority of my sales from the glyph market with about 1/3 coming from other sources.

I am not particularly happy with this as I am relying a little too much on one source for income so I am branching into other markets as we speak (my jewelcrafter/alchemist is a hair away from lvl 75 and all the cataclysm recipes). But still the basic principle is reflected in the above graph; if for some reason the glyph market takes a tumble one week I haven't lost 100% of my earning capabilities.

In my regular travails around the wow blogosphere I found a paragraph written by Markco over at his awesome site Just My Two Copper which sums up how to successfully diversify perfectly:

"Keep in mind that diversification does not mean equal attention to all markets. You should plan and set different amounts of crafting depending on which markets perform the best. No different then investing in the stock market, you wouldn't put all your money into the worst performing stock nor would you put equal amounts into every stock you invest in. Diversify but put intelligent analysis behind it."

That last sentence is the kicker. Backup whatever moves you chose to make with adequate research and analysis and you can't go wrong.

Darkmoon Faire Opportunities

There are numerous opportunities for cash that come with the advent of the Darkmoon Faire each month which can increase your bankroll significantly for very little effort. Altolycus over at ALTO's Gold"ish" Advice has a great rundown of stuff within the faire boundaries itself so I'm going to focus on the Darkmoon Card side of things.



For Scribes
The first port of call for scribes is of course to make and sell your own darkmoon decks and it is pretty much a no-brainer: buy herbs and volatile life when it is cheap (especially on the weekend) > make cards > convert to decks then trinkets > profit.

There are 2 other ways that scribes can profit from darkmoon cards that can prove every bit as effective as making and selling completed trinkets.

1) INDIVIDUAL CARDS:
Selling cards individually on the auction house or over trade chat can net you some nice income if you don't have enough to complete a set or simply can't be bothered. Once again scribes can make these directly to post but there are a few other ways to help increase profits.

Firstly you can watch the auction house for any cheaper than average cards to flip (usually easy to pickup on the weekend). Secondly, if you get unlucky with the RNG in your crafting and only get the least valuable cards on your server (most stones cards on mine), you can try to trade them over /2 or create a dedicated card trading channel and advertise that. Doing this you should be able to trade away your less valuable cards for ones that will turn a nice profit when auctioned.








2) SELLING DECK TURN-INS
Yep. Although it seems like small potatoes compared to what you can make selling the cards, decks and trinkets themselves, you can make some nice bonus gold for no effort at all. It is super easy to do too, when you want to turn in your completed decks just advertise in /2 that you are selling darkmoone faire rep turn-ins for however much you  think you can get. I tend to have most success in to 100-200g range but really, depending on the buyers on your server the sky is the limit. 
One thing that must be considered when doing this to make it very clear to any buyers that you are selling the reputation only and the completed trinket must be returned after the turn-in takes place. Demand something as collateral if you want but make sure you are covered against the "haha thanks for the trinket n00b! lolz" people that are out there.


For Non Scribes - Flipping
Yes it's a fairly boring option but if you don't have a toon with maxed inscription buying trinkets off the auction house then flipping them for profit is still a viable way to make some cash. This is especially useful at the start of the darkmoon faire week (umm... now!) as there is generally an influx of trinkets as people have been sitting on their decks for 3 weeks waiting to turn them in.

The above picture is from my server this morning. The day before the faire started there was maybe one ore two trinkets TOTAL up for auction across the four different types. Not only this but during non faire times, each category sells for anywhere between 25% and 75% more than the prices above.


So there you have it, a couple of ways to make some nice gold while the darkmoon faire is in town. If I've left anything out or got something wrong feel free to let me know in the comments, otherwise stay tuned for more posts soon...

Auction House Junkies FTW!

Following in the footsteps of many distinguished gold bloggers before me I would like to add my two cents on the new podcast by Cold and Wes called Auction House Junkies.

As the name suggests this is a podcast which should be right down your alley if you are reading my gold blog (which you are) as Cold and Wes bring their goblin ideals and ideas straight to your earholes.
While it's still a little rough around the edges they have managed to put together a very interesting and detailed two shows so far and it's clear that the guys share a good rapport and are also very knowledgeable  about making wow gold.

It is a very easy podcast to listen to while I mill herbs and do my daily auctioning routine and the cameos from Hagor da Goblin have me in stitches every time - hilarious!

Keep up the good work guys!

New name, new focus! Also, Darkmoon Cards and big $$$

I'm Back!

After a fairly long hiatus I've decided to return to the blogging scene with a more refined focus. From now on this blog will be about the subtle art of making a Scrooge McDuck style vault full of wowgold for my toons to swim around in as I push towards the new gold cap of 1,000,000g.

Or ski in if they so desire.

Hopefully along the way I can share some useful and interesting tips for all the other budding goblins out there. So with that out of the way, lets talk gold.

Darkmoon Cards

I've been hovering at around only 5k liquid lately as I have invested very heavily into making the new darkmoon cards. I haven't been keeping proper records of my spending on herbs and volatile life stacks but at a guess I would have spent around 60k gold total. The reason I've been putting all of my eggs into the darkmoon basket so to speak is the fact that there is still a very limited supply of the various trinkets on my server. As I go about my daily auctioning routine I generally check the prices of these trinkets only to often find that there are none for sale at all. Coupled with the extremely limited supply is the fact that this early in the expansion and with only the first tier of raiding available there are very few substitute trinkets so demand is high as well. It is basically a no-brainer: make cards > turn them into trinkets > profit.

What I have gotten in return and the usual sale price per item on the ah on my server for the completed trinkets (as I will be turning in the cards and selling the trinkets themselves):
- 3 x Hurricane Deck (30k+ each)
- 2 x Earthquake Deck (15k each)
- 2 x Volcanic Deck (30k+ each)
- 1 x Tsunami Deck (35k+)

Total if all sell at the above prices = 215k for a total profit of 155,000 gold. Not bad for a few hours spread over a few weeks.


The darkmoon faire starts tomorrow and given that it's the weekend herbs and volatiles are super cheap so I may even manage to squeeze out a few more decks to pump up the profits even more.