I received a whisper from rawrior, a level 32 warrior on my realm who has made almost a hundred gold in 10 levels with the looking for group tool. How you ask? Well the necklaces that you get from the bag each time you complete an instance can be vendored for over 3 gold a piece! For a lowbie that's insane profit while also picking up the regular drops from an instance run. With everyone running their lowbies through instances wearing the BOA gear it's like having decked out epics for already incredibly easy content. Add to that the fact that there are 5 people doing the instance and that almost any class can tank before level 40 and you have a ridiculously easy way to both earn gold and level up. Let's not also forget the 30% health nerf to bosses and level reductions on some of the larger instances. Now that instances which used to be a pain to set up are fairly easy to participate in, I highly recommend questing while also queing for instances with the LFG tool to level and make easy wow gold.
Have you noticed the insane vendor values for these necklaces too? Does the vendor price scale into the higher levels or remain around the same? Will blizzard nerf these necklaces?
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Hey Markco, Just wanted to tell you another gold tip. With patch 3.1 the JC pattern Citrine Ring Of Rapid Healing no longer requires 2 eleme...
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There’s a lot of information to sort through when bidding, buying, or posting items on the auction house. In fact it’s too much for any one ...
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Besides being a proud American and an enterprising entrepreneur, I am also a member of the Roman Catholic Church (tithing ftl). This being s...
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Wow Crusher : How The Pros Do It As you know, our ground-breaking system WOW Crusher system was released 10 days ago to much fanfare.... -
Scott Alan Smith is a Crook! Edit: Screen shots and proof/explanation of the cookie stuffing Scott has used in the past are present a... -
Just My Two Copper's One Year Anniversary is today! So much has happened and been going on that I didn't really even notice the time...
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Today is going to be really fun if everyone participates. Go ahead and place in the comments section your absolute favorite way to make gold...
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I was selling glyphs every fifteen seconds the first two hours of the patch, and it's the most fun I've had in a while on the auctio...
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The wow gold carnival for September is finally here! Sit back, relax and enjoy the epic pwnsauce that is this month's collection of art... -
Gevlon the Magician ***EDIT: This post by Gevlon is the target of my article.*** ***EDIT: For an excellent response to this post please...
Here's an emailed tip on making gold with sporeggar reputation grinding!
Hello marcko im kylol emailing to share with you another killer gold making secret! Sanguine hibiscus is an outland rep and quest item for the sporeggar bc faction. You can get the sanguine hibiscus in underbog, and it has been selling by me all week for 30-100g per 20. Now, i am on a full server, but this is insane! I never have competition except a few random people who ran underbog and got a few, they post them cheap and i buy em and resell. You can make about 500-900g per hour on your 80 in underbog farming this i bet, it even stacks up to 200 so you save bagspace! Kill everything that moves in the very first room, go up ramp kill boss, go out, reset. Test it! Make a vid about it! The quest that takes 20 of them gives great exp (because its a dungeon quest) but people can complete it in 3 mins using the ah and get all that exp. Plus, the faction that handing in alot of it gives good rewards, http://www.wowhead.com/?item=25828 is a great aoe leveling shield and an item some 70 or 80 players will buy because of its mass aoe potential when running lower levels or otherwise aoeing when you dont need the defenses of a shield. You can also get http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29150, http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29149.
But most of all the sanguine hibiscus sells so well because this faction will give you http://www.wowhead.com/?item=34478...
Goodluck!
Thanks for the tip kylol! Be sure to sell in lots of 20 for the people doing the dungeon quest.
These tips are epic, I love them so much haha!
#1. Zero's Post on the JMTC forums on automatically openning up mail all at once.
"I decided to write a tiny addon that automatically checks for new mail (CheckInbox()) and opens all my current mails in my mailbox using Postal Open All. This addon will no longer require you to press any macro or button when you have loads of mails waiting to be opened but instead it will refresh your inbox every 10 seconds and attempt to open the current mail using Postal Open All (so it will be affected by the rules you change for that). I made it so I can go AFK when I have 500 or more mails waiting for me. Download here: http://zero.isimba.org/MailOpener%200.2.rar"
#2. Increase the speed at which mail loads with HitTheCap, Wow Journal about Hitting the Gold Cap.
These tips blew me away... nice job you two!
Some wow businessmen see the gold cap as their only goal in wow. The glory of getting there is all that matters to them, regardless of who they cheat, scam, or trick along the way. Perhaps they will eventually get there, but it's a long road and there are multitudes of pissed off people left shaking their fists in anger at being cheated.
Let's put something into perspective real quick: This is a game. Wait hold on that's too simple: This is an easy game. And one more clarification: This is an easy game with real people playing with you.
If you think that hitting the gold cap is so important that you need to lie, cheat, and steal your way to the top then you have some serious issues. What's more, hitting the gold cap is not hard or time consuming once you develop honest, simple, repeatable methods to get there.
I bring up this point because I'm seeing more and more people discuss the ethics behind selling 100 bullets/arrows for slightly less than 1000 due to the vague blizzard interface on the auction house which makes it hard to see that there is a missing 0. This is a dishonest and terrible way to conduct business. Each person you piss off by supplying 100 arrows/bullets instead of 1000 will be one less customer you have and they will most likely spread the word about your selling practices.
There's always an honest way to profit that counters the negative scams. For this scenario, unlike the people selling bullets/arrows in stacks of 100, as an honest businessman/woman you can sell your own stacks of 100 but for normal price, thus destroying the scam. You will profit from people who don't realize you're selling in stacks of 100 or you will make profit off those that decide to buy your full stacks instead of the 100's.
Put this to practice on your server and show those liars and cheats a thing or two about how to conduct a real business where you value repeat customers over one time sales or scams. If enough people start posting their ammo in both stacks of 1000's and a few 100's then this argument over who is being a moron or who is being ethical won't even exist.
My first auction house sale was a blue dagger from a level 23 mob (can't remember the name). I ran to orgrimmar from ashenvale to sell this beauty on the trade chat and had no idea what the auction house was. A friendly person redirected me to it... and the rest is history. That dagger sold for 25 gold and it was the most gold I'd had on my poor little warrior who took 25ish days to level to 60 (grinding and staying in X9's for bg's ftl!). From that point on I started to watch the auction house and tried to learn as much as possible about the items within. I remember drooling at the prices of epics and marvelling at why some items were only a copper.
My first real serious set of sales where I was flipping items for profit involved low level herbs and minerals. These items have very fast sale rates and can often be picked off with simple bids. I would search for Herbs and then sort by buyout price to try and find items really really cheap that I could resell for several gold a stack. I didn't have auctioneer and I didn't even know what it was. Combining this with farming got me my epic mount back in vanilla and made me far richer than most of the people who I met in the game. Everyone else seemed to farm and dump their items on the auction house, and I was all too happy to snag and relist the items of anyone foolish enough to throw leveling herbs/minerals up for too cheap.
When I finally discovered auctioneer and started seriously making use of it in burning crusade... GG.
What was your first sale on the auction house and what was your first real series of sales as a businessman?
Diamond tipped cane, tuxedo shirt, tuxedo pants, tuxedo jacket, and jungle hat seem to be the ultimate auctioneer outfit for world of warcraft auction house alts (thanks to mike for an email pointing out the importance of the jungle hat!).
What is your favorite setup? I've seen people using things like pumpkin hats, centurian helmets, etc. Personally I go with old gear from previous arena seasons or with the classic setup that I mentioned at the start of this post.
If you're wondering how you can make money from this discussion, add these items to your snatch list and grab them anytime they fall below 15 gold. You can easily sell these for 20+ gold each. The cane can be worth as much as 200 gold and is obtained from fishing dailies.
I'd like to wish you all a very merry christmas and encourage you to spend as much time as possible with your friends and families today.
I hope that your sales of milk, eggs, and wool cloth have been as ridiculous as mine. Ho Ho Ho!
Here's two videos for your viewing pleasure from my prot warrior + gold tips youtube channel!
4.5k Dps Prot Warrior - Tanking Halls of Reflection
Prot Warrior Eye of the Storm Slaughter (EOTS)
Batch posting is a handy tool used in auctioneer to automate the process of posting an unlimited number of auctions at once. Many do not realize however that you can set the total number of auctions you'd like up at any one time for each item in the batch post. This provides you with a truly powerful way to post based on your sales instead of having to check to see if you have too many posted items before you press batch post.
Let's say you have the enchant "enchant chest powerful stats" and you want to keep only two up at a time in order to keep supply of this enchant low on the auction house. You currently have two up and press batch post, which you already have configured to post two enchant chest powerful stats with each batch post. Now there are three up there. Here's how you could of stopped it at two: Click the checkbox to the left of the word 'Only' in the batch post and then slide the bar above that to the number of items you'd like to see posted in total including what you already have on the auction house. Now if you had this set up before pressing batch post earlier than auctioneer would not have posted your third enchant chest powerful stats.
Incorporate this into your batch post to help automate your sales even more.
Good Luck!
Knowledge is power. The difference between a player that understands a market as well as its sub markets compared to a player who only focuses on the 'surface market' is like night and day. A lack of knowledge regarding the web of interacting markets on the wow auction house is what leads to a noob auctioneer focusing all their attention on the surface market.
What is a surface market? Why do 99% of players that try to control a market fail? Let's use some examples.
Let's just make up a name here, um how about Gevy. Little Gevy the goblin is not happy that her netherweave bags are being undercut by two people. They are posting three bags each for 1 gold less than Gevy and she's pissed. An auction house noob like Gevy will look at this situation and think that she has to undercut her competition in order to control 'her' market. What Gevy doesn't realize is that she still doesn't control the market even after undercutting her competition. In order to truly control the 'surface market' of netherweave bags then little Gevy needs to look at the markets that support it. Netherweave bags only have one supporting market and that's netherweave cloth. With a little research Gevy would realize that simply buying up all netherweave cloth below X gold would allow her to force out her bag market competition because they would no longer be able to make bags cheaper than Gevy.
This little bit of knowledge... the understanding of a sub market controling the lowest possible price of a surface market is what makes or breaks auctioneers in world of warcraft. If you understand and apply this concept then you become way more likely to succeed on the wow auction house.
Now expand on this concept and think about something complicated like snowfall inks. Just think for a moment how you would control this item. First off, you need an understanding of not just what creates a snowfall ink but what it's used for. Just because you control it does not mean people will buy it in droves. You need to force the price to your liking but also have it reasonably affordable for the buyer.
Let's see... you would need to regulate the price of every wotlk herb (by regulate I mean constantly buy it out below price X). You then would need to buy the inks themselves below your new threshold for snowfall inks. The price you pick will need to be affordable for someone buying the inks to make nobles or other items.
Ok you ready for a real mental challenge? How would you regulate infinite dust. Just think for a moment about that, really think about every single market that exists which you can create infinite dust from and then the items used to create those items and so on. For an item like infinite dust which has multiple paths to getting to the same goal, ie disenchant a dust, the answer is actually a lot simpler than you would think... find the cheapest way and regulate that.
Regulating is NOT the same as undercutting everyone with the cheapest goods possible. Regulating a submarket to effect a surface market is about taking away items from your competition which they need to craft/modify and compete with your surface market. Stop allowing your competition to set your prices and instead set the competition's! You don't want to end up like Gevy and participate in undercutting wars for minimal profits.
PCT means percentage or percentage market value for an item. After you have scanned with auctioneer enough you will have an accurate PCT for the average price of any one item. PCT is the most important weapon of an auctioneer when looking for great deals and it's the number one thing I love about the auctioneer addon for making easy wow gold.
So how do you use PCT? First off, look up your favorite item or run a typical resale scan with auctioneer. For help on these topics, please visit the JMTC Wow Gold Forum or my Gold Guide. If you are having trouble correctly running scans with auctioneer perhaps my post on 22 Steps to Using Auctioneer will provide you with a rough outline for using the addon.
After doing your search you will notice at the far right column that it says 'PCT' with different colored numbers next to your search results. These values are color coded as red meaning way above normal value, green meaning a great deal, yellow meaning normal value, and blue meaning WOW BUY THIS ITEM OUT NOW WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR. If you see an item below 50% PCT then that means it is also 50% below the average market value for that item. By buying the item out and relisting it you have a very good chance of making a sale, just make sure that you understand the item's market and when/why/how you should resell it.
There is one key problem with PCT however and that's with searching multiple pages. When you sort a page by PCT auctioneer will only sort that particular page of 50 items. If there are multiple pages then you must cycle through each page selecting to sort by PCT in order to see the best deals. There could be a stack of the item for half price but expensive enough that it doesn't appear on the first page. Be wary of this issue when using PCT to sort with auctioneer search results.
Try out using PCT as a sorting method for making easy wow gold.
Do you feel that your current class/spec/profession setup for your wow account is not good enough for making lots of wow gold efficiently? Here are 10 ways to boost the efficiency of your wow account:
1. Make 10 level 80's.
2. Max out each profession on your characters, except only get one character to max fishing/cooking.
3. Get first aid on all your characters.
4. Get atleast entry level epics. Either purchasable via the auction house or honor/badge gear.
5. Have all professions covered between your characters.
6. Your farming characters should be paladins or deathknights for the speed aura. Getting gladiator on top of that is really fun (or any other 310% speed mount).
7. You should have a paladin or mage for aoe killing.
8. Have at least one pure dps class that can farm forever, ie dps prot warrior (shameless plug for markco), dps prot pally, bm hunter, affliction warlock, rogue, shadow priest, etc.
9. Have multiple guild banks for storing your business crap.
10. Have all boa chests and shoulders for maxing out your leveling speed for all your characters.
For the comments section what is your ideal setup of 10 characters for making easy wow gold? Include transmutes/dailies/etc.
Cross faction auctions remains one of my favorite ways to make easy wow gold in world of warcraft. Especially on an imbalanced server where one side has far more players than the other (even after the paid faction change), it is easy to find items which sell for 30% more on one faction or the other.
On my server, eternal fires sell for 20 gold more on the alliance side than on the horde side. BAM! I just shot myself in the foot revealing this tip but oh well there's always my left foot for walking and kicking noobs in the rear. Why is this item so much more expensive on one side?
It comes down to three things:
#1. Wintergrasp is the most popular place to farm fire but there's only one spot and it is camped by the larger faction (in this case horde) making farming unreliable for the alliance side.
#2. The dailies at hodir is the second most popular place to farm fire and it's just as camped by horde players.
#3. The cave next to the Scions of Storm in storm peaks is not well known but would be the perfect place for an alliance farmer to setup shop killing those little yellowy floating fire balls. I guess not enough people are farming there to keep up with the insane number of eternal fires hitting the horde auction house.
Thanks to population imbalance eternal fires are an amazingly easy way to make wow gold. Excuse me while I dump all mine on the auction house in preparation for the mad rush of players who will try this method on my own imbalanced server.
Elemental invasions occur every 24-48 hours after the leader of each invasion has been killed. If you want to farm easy wow gold from these invasions then I highly suggest that you simply kill the mobs around the lead boss elemental and then when you want to leave kill the boss and clean up the elementals that are remaining. As long as the leader stays alive then all the other elementals will keep respawning. Think of it as milking the cow versus having the steak. As long as no one comes along to ruin your farming then this is a great way to make easy wow gold.
Here are the four locations:
Tempestria leads the water elementals in Winterspring all around lake Kel'Theril.
Avalanchion leads the earth elementals in Azshara around where the elite giants also spawn.
Baron Charr leads the fire elementals in Un'goro Crater around the volcano in the middle of the map.
The Windreaver leads the air elementals in northwestern Silithus.
The drops from these elementals can be sold for incredible prices on the auction house... 13 gold for a breath of wind, 10 gold for a elemental earth, etc. Since you now know the value of these items on the auction house be sure to snatch them off the hands of lesser minded auctioneers that try to sell these for a handful of gold or even less than that. Flipping a breath of wind from 1 gold to 13 gold is definately an easy wow gold making strategy.
It's suggestion box friday and your chance to be the blog author! It's a big seat but don't be intimidated - anything goes today, as long as the comments are about tips for making wow gold.
Community Spotlight: Hit The Cap - Wow Gold Cap Blog Journal
I love blogs that tell an ongoing wow gold story... especially a SUCCESSFUL story about hitting the gold cap. Head over to HitTheCap and see how the author has made 350k wow gold in 13 weeks so far and is still trucking! I trully believe this blog is going to be a huge hit and I also expect the author to hit a million gold within 6-9 months. I was mostly impressed because the level of detail is excellent and every single article has been of a very high quality so far. Subscribe and comment to reward the author for all the hard work that is involved with keeping a high quality journal like the one at HitTheCap.
Comments of the Week:
Regarding Why Bank Space Doesn't Matter
Zamboni said...
All of my working materials are stored in mailboxes. The guild bank is for speculation materials or consumables where I actually need to see what I have. The 2300 stacks of Saronite Ore never needs to come out of the mail.It is important to mail everything at least once. Don't let fresh auction purchases pile up as they will be deleted in 30 days. If everything is mailed to an alt, it comes back after 30 days and then can sit in the mailbox for another 30 days. Everyone else can have items piled up in the mailbox, but the main AH banker - the distribution center - should have an empty mailbox as much as possible.Another spot for piling up a lot of materials for long-term storage is a mule, an alt with a full set of netherweave bags just for holding 216 stacks of assorted junk. Three of these equals a fully-tabbed guild bank. Leveling these up to level 10 will make them restorable if your account is hacked.
Regarding Famous How I Wow Podcast
Robert said...
This was the show that got me started making serious gold in WoW. I really miss How I WoW. After they went off the air (so to speak), I stopped listening to all WoW podcasts. Just didn't have the heart to listen anymore, since there show was perfect (for me, anyway).
Regarding How I Make Easy Wow Gold
Jerry said...
I've started doing this process that you are talking about since a month ago, and have been making a lot of gold with it. I started with about 2k gold and I'm up to 12k gold on my bank alt now.I love being able to check the AH 3 times a day and just pick up bargains which I can sell for sometimes 10x that amount of gold on another day.For people that want to do this, take a look at the addon Market Watcher (made it real easy for me).
Discussion:
WOOOAHHH is my wool cloth flying off the horde auction house shelves! Currently selling at 35 gold per stack and I purchased for as little as one gold on the alliance auction house. I get undercut once in a while but those people get bought out within 20-40 minutes each time. Have you been successful selling eggs, milk, and wool cloth this holiday season? I didn't touch eggs or milk myself but my favorite resto druid sold tons of eggs and milk for .75-2 gold each. Since Dec 1st I've probably sold around 3,000 wool cloth and I've been kicking myself that I didn't do this last year lol.
Here's a brain teaser for you: Is it worth it to buy a few stacks of gingerbread cookie recipes for those new characters/alts who need it later in the year?
I decided to do a little experiment where I used one batch post to post around 2,000 auctions live with the majority of them acquired via methods similar to my 22 steps to auctioneer and auction house viper strategies. After 12 hours I opened my mail box live on XFIRE and produced a whopping 5k gold. By the next 12 hours it was up to 8k gold and by 48 hours it was at 10,400 easy wow gold. The vast majority of these items were simple flips from both normal and cross faction auctions. I did not include an epic gun I sold for 770 gold in these sales numbers as that wasn't a typical item for me to sell. I'd say 4k of this gold came from profession manipulation (infinite dusts, netherweave bags, armor vellums, weapon vellums, snowfall inks, cobalt bars, etc) and 400 gold came from a stratholme run.
What does this mean for anyone starting out with auctioneer trying to make easy wow gold? There's hope and you don't even need professions! All you need is the simple knowledge of individual markets and how they cycle in prices during the week. Buy/Bid low, sell normal... remember? I aim for items that are 50% or lower PCT and I rely heavily on my snatch scan to help remove the 'filth' from auctioneer's normal resale scan and make my purchasing faster. I cannot stress enough the importance of building a snatch scan that encompasses as many items as possible in the game when trying to make wow gold efficiently. This is just for simple flipping, that's not even taking into account buying out items for professions to manipulate and make even more wow gold.
A snatch list of 100+ items is not uncommon among auction house gurus, what does yours look like?
Players are always wondering how people can make thousands of gold in wow, I mean where do they put those materials anyway? Once you get into making an easy 8k+ wow gold a day then you really do run out of space. If you're marketing the materials as well as the crafted goods for several markets at once then you surely will end up with too much mail for your guild banks to soak up.
How do players making thousands of wow gold handle situations where they have more mail coming in than they can physically handle? It's simple really, they use one of their alts as their mail box bot. Every time there are too many items coming in they simply mail the surplus to this designated mail bot, wait less than thirty days and then mail the items back. All it costs is 60 copper and you have an extra bank slot. I don't think that 60 copper per slot is going to really effect your gold making efforts too much.
This doesn't just affect the super rich wow player either. If you aren't a millionaire in wow and you are struggling on bank space this is a great way to alleviate those concerns. I know some players that go to the extreme and don't even buy guild banks thanks to this easy gold making tip.
Do any of you use this tip frequently?
Wow Gold Making Podcast
Click the above link to listen to the famous How I Wow podcast that I did with Sean and Patrick before they ended their series. I managed to meet up with both at blizzcon and thought that they were really nice/fun guys to speak with.
The topics covered in this podcast were:
Real Life and Balance
Gold Making tips
Arenas
Inscription Strategies
Being Successful (not just in game)
I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed recording it with Sean and Patrick. It was an honor :)
As you can see from reading my blog, there are hundreds of methods that I've tried to make easy wow gold. Sometimes I'm successful but the large majority of the time I'm sifting through blunders and missteps on my long journey to gold guru status. My specialty and the thing that got me started using the auction house to make easy wow gold was flipping items. It didn't matter if the item was worth 10 copper or 10 gold, I sold them all with the same feverish dedication and insane patience. If I knew an item was worth 10 gold and someone posted 100 for 5 gold then damn it I was going to buy every single one and relist them two at a time for fifty days until they all sold. This was my bread and butter and recently I decided to get back into this strategy.
So what is my famous strategy for making easy wow gold every single day on the auction house in world of warcraft?
Buy Low, Sell Normal. That's right, BUY LOW, SELL NORMAL. You're probably thinking to yourself, "Self, WTF does that even mean?" The meaning is two fold: first, you are buying items that are under priced and second, you are selling under priced goods at or just below normal value. In essence you're presenting goods to the consumer at or below the normal price range, and if done correctly, all your flipped and posted auctions will sell.
Just how profitable is this method? What if I told you that I can bring in 5k-15k easy wow gold every single 12-48 hours depending on day of the week and my posting schedule? Sure I've had my insane days like when I posted 8k auctions and made 30k gold in a night and a half, but that's not realistic and took way too much caffeine for the average human being. No this wasn't on a weekend either, you'll soon learn that weekends are not necessarily your best days when flipping because of how quickly competition appears and mass undercuts can happen. Weekends are actually your best buying days unless of course you camp the auction house every hour then it's a nice selling time. Case in point for buying days: Saronite Saturdays.
The way I make thousands of easy wow gold every day comes down to being able to pin point not just one or two profitable markets but every single gosh-darn one in existence. It's all about experience, non stop learning, and above all: patience. My goal is to flip 80+% of all profitable auctions on the auction house, which includes any items below 50% market value that I believe can sell quickly. Some nights I will lose money because I invest so much, but that money always comes back ten fold within a week anyway.
What's the best part about the way I make easy wow gold? No one can stop me. You physically cannot stop a person from posting for too little, undercut every auction I post, or even know what I'm going to post tomorrow or the next day. I'm the auction house viper, snaking in to get some gold and zipping back out before you probably even knew I was there. I'm everywhere at once and then suddenly I'm gone again.
This concept is what propelled this blog into existence and grew it from 300 readers into the wow gold making monster it is today. I think it's time to get back to my roots, and yes I will keep experimenting but I want to write more about my flipping style and personal methods which work regardless of level or personal professions.
An excellent find by Thrim on the JMTC forums can be found here.
The gist of it is that you can stand outside by the mailbox that is attached to the auction house, press your hotkey for viewing friendly health bars (shift + v is default I believe) and then you can browse the auction house or open the mail without moving!
Pretty sweet trick and it allows you to do something while you wait for your mail box to load for those lucky enough to have that problem.
When I originally designed this aucitoneer's playground I had hoped that it would be the perfect forum to send people who had wow gold related questions which I saw every day and just didn't have time to answer in detail. At first I thought that I could just write a big FAQ section but the dynamic nature of wow and the diversity among the questions made this unreasonable. A forum seemed like the perfect way for newer users to get their feet wet making easy gold in wow without having to pick my brain to do it. It ended up being far greater than I could ever imagine, and soon even I, the gold making master, found myself learning from the forums as well!
Many have commented that these forums pose a direct threat to my gold guide. Here you have THOUSANDS of players pooling their ideas together creating incredible strategies and investigating every aspect of the game for the sole purpose of making gold. I'd have to agree that this does create an obstacle for the guide, but luckily from the onset I designed a document that taught people how to think instead of how to play directly. By avoiding the do this do that and you'll get rich quick methods of other wow gold guides I actually inadvertently designed a guide that fit perfectly with the JMTC forum.
There was another unforseen byproduct of these wow gold making forums that I never saw coming... people enjoyed writing about wow so much on the forums that they started their own blogs. I've counted dozens that have spawned from readers of JMTC and many more appear each week. Previously, the wow gold blog niche was originally filled with nothing but spammers and gold guide oriented blogs that had almost no real information on them. Now, thanks largely in part to the Just My Two Copper community and JMTC itself, there is a wide variety of gold oriented blogs which discuss real, current information on world of warcraft. When someone thinks gold making blog today they think of Just My Two Copper or a cousin blog founded by one of the forum members.
This friday I'm not here because I'm currently flying out to see my favorite resto druid. Feel free to turn the comments section into your own personal soap box for discussing your favorite ways to make gold in the game but with a twist:
What are your favorite ways to make gold pre level 50? Comment!
While on the trip I have posts pre-made for the blog but will be unavailable for emails/comments/questions/etc until I return on the night of the 14th.
I will check periodically to moderate comments whenever I have a free moment, but that's all I'll have time for.
There are so many ways to trick people on the auction house that I could sit down and write 5,000 words in about an hour on the subject. One of these 'tricks' is something I like to call the Artificial Ceiling. Perhaps someone more astute and in line with marketing jargin can reveal the proper name for this method in the comments section.
It's elementary my dear watson... first you get on a toon and post items for 200% market value. Just a couple as you are not trying to sell these items. Next, you get on another toon and post the same items for 120-150% market value. If there isn't much competition you are creating the stage for someone to come along and think that they see a great deal. Sure someone can undercut you but they also look like a great deal as well! If a new person running auctioneer or even just a noob browsing the ah sees your goods they will possibly buy them out as well as anyone who undercuts you.
Not a foolproof method but still an interesting way to make gold. I used to do this frequently with mammoth meats and it seemed to help me sell about 25% more meat when I set up the artificial ceiling. People just love deals, even if it's only a perceived deal.
If you go on the JMTC Wow Gold Forum you will find people with gold in more than 6 figures... and they haven't been playing all that long either. Although blizzard took steps to reduce the effectiveness of farming, they actually increased the amount of gold circulating within the economy tenfold with this expansion. From daily questing to leveling people now have been given fun new ways to make more gold than they will require for repairs and other minor expenses. The overall effect on the game has been simple: people purchasing expensive items on the auction house or on vendors. If the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth had existed in vanilla or even burning crusade it would of been very rare to see anyone with the mount. With the onset of easy to get gold outside of farming for hours, players can just save up from their dailies and eventually get their vendor toting mounts or gasoline chugging motorcycles.
Blizzard created this system of providing large amounts of gold because of farming concerns. Now farmers can still run around for hours making money but the margin of gold they get compared to someone who just does their dailies and calls it quits is far smaller than it was in burning crusade. With mobs dropping very specific drops per mob type and few boe epics/blues in their loot tables there just isn't much to actually farm at one time. When relics of ulduar were big you could farm seething revenants for insane profits, but now they are about as good as any level 80 clothy you farm with the tailoring specialization.
The only prevelant farmers left in the game are mining/herbing ones, using the fancy fly under the world hack that reminds me of noclipping from doom II. These farmers are awesome because they use the auction house to sell all their goods and at amazing prices for milling.
Eventhough farming was greatly reduced during wotlk the past few weeks I have seen an incredible drop in the number of materials normally farmed by the farmers appearing on the auction house. I can only assume that many have been banned or moved on to other methods of making gold.
Some players (including yourself I assume) have discovered just how to grab up all that excess gold that people have been aqcuiring this expansion with... cough... the auction house! I have to wonder though, how many farmers have learned to use the auction house? What if someone like myself were to start selling gold to gold companies? Hell I can pump out a good 10k gold profit a day with ease if I use all the tools at my disposal... what's that? $20 a day? Now imagine if I played all day farming my mats and then started crafting items for even more profit. That kind of salary would be amazing in some of the poorer countries that setup gold farming companies. The only thing holding back this kind of farmer is the shifting nature of the auction house: their profits would not always be gauranteed with some days being better or worse than others. Businesses don't like to operate that way and it would take an owner willing to gamble on the skills of his farmers to make this happen.
Would you be able to make 10k gold a day if you played let's say 10 hours a day using both the auction house and farming? You'd have to diversify like crazy and make use of every market in the game, but it can certainly be done and consistently at that.
Enchanting mats are such an awesome way to make easy gold in wow. Oh I'm sorry was I typing out loud again? I apologize for that, excuse me.
What I meant to say is that large brilliant shards are one of my favorite enchanting mats to sell and farm for that matter. On my snatch list I buy out these babies for 4.5 gold a piece or lower and I relist them at 6-8 gold depending on market value and day of the week. When I've posted all my auctions and have nothing better to do I go to old world stratholme and farm the whole instance for tons of blues to disenchant. Farming this instance is one of the oldest forms of making easy wow gold and it has been farmable by a single player since burning crusade. Every single blue in the instance becomes a large brilliant shard and there are tons of other great items to grab such as stacks of rune cloth or righteous orbs. If you don't have a dispeller for the nasty diseases and curses you can get from the mobs of this instance then you have two options:
1. Use my video to see how you can skip all the way up to the live side of the instance where righteous orbs can be farmed.
2. Bring potions that dispel the debuffs.
Many players go for Baron runs in an attempt to get the Baron's mount but do not finish the live side of Stratholme. I am the opposite: I always finish off live side with the Scarlet Crusaders before deciding whether or not I want to do the Baron's side. Regardless of whether you do either side or both, this is by far one of the easiest sure fire ways to make gold in wow. If you want to make even more profit from this place then you may want to invest in creating enchanted vellums from the mats you farm. There's a lot of easy wow gold to be made from these enchants and that's the market you're selling to anyway with the dream shards, illusion dusts, and greater eternal essences. That being said, be sure to diversify as sometimes you are selling straight to enchanters trying to level their profession and they don't want your enchanted vellums.
Patch 3.3 Analysis from Just My Two Copper
What's going to happen in 3.3? I'm sure it's on everyone's minds. If you've been checking the JMTC forums then you are aware of several major item changes that will affect the game and making gold in wow.
1. Saronite Bar -> Titanium Bar Transmute Cooldown Lifted
This has sent buyers running to grab up all the Saronite Bars and Ore that they can find in anticipation for transmuting them into titanium bars. What will this do? Decrease the value of titanium bars and all the items made from them, as well as increase the value of saronite bars. Saronite ore will also be affected and this will greatly damage the profitability of the 'Saronite Shuffle.' Infinite dusts being made more readily thanks to a recent hotfix will also help to ruin the profitability of this method. Will it still exist after 3.3? Probably, but it will not be as profitable.
2. Heavy Borean Leather to Arctic Furs
Arctic furs and 10 heavy borean leather are going to even out to the same price.
3. Rare/Epic Gems going up in value along with other with upgrades
People are going to be upgrading at an insane pace thanks to the 5 mans. Not to mention the fact that t9 will also be available for triumph badges and 5 mans will drop it. Getting 25 arena points for the daily bg will help people upgrade somewhat faster as well. Leg enchants, enchanted vellums, titanium ore and spellthreads should see huge price increases for the first few weeks of the patch.
4. Raid Consumables
The more top end raiding guilds you have the better this market will be on your server. Everything from flasks to potions to elixirs to fish feasts will fly off the proverbial auction house shelves.
5. Snowfall Ink Glyphs
Two new glyphs are appearing which cost snowfall ink. Expect the price to rise on your server for these inks. I predict that it will increase even more so than the week of a darkmoon faire.
6. Pygmy Suckerfish Flood Incoming
With the emphasis on fishing and leveling fishing thanks to the new fishing competition expect pygmy suckerfish to flood the auction house. Definitely look for some great deals on turning these into pygmy oils for resale directly or indirectly as potions.
7. Disenchanting Option
Disenchanting option is equal to greed. If you roll a 90 on De and someone with greed rolls an 89 you will win the item in disenchanted form.
8. Random Dungeon
People will run WAY more dungeons thanks to this new tool. Get ready for enchanting mats to drop like a rock with this new option. People will que for dungeons the way they que for battlegrounds, resulting in far more runs and the incentives to try this new tool will have everyone doing it.
9. BOA Shoulder Enchants
Say goodbye to what was left of the Relics of Ulduar market.
10. New Leveling Rings
Say goodbye to the amazing profits of selling low level bis rings. Look into disenchanting if the mats for these rings plumet.
For a second opinion on Patch 3.3 Analysis here is Mark from Wowzer Gold
Hello my name is Mark(not Markco :)) aka The Wowzer and this is what I have done to prepare for Patch 3.3. The obvious ones have been stocking up on Heavy Borean Leather and Borean Leather for the Arctic Fur Exchange and Saronite Bar for the Titanium Bar Cooldown removal. The not so Obvious one are stocking up on things like Pygmy Oil, Flasks, Frost Lotus, Eternal Life, Lichbloom, Goldclover, Tiger Lily and Icethorn, and that's just for One Profession. Other mats are Rare and Epic Wrath gems, Infinite Dust and Abyss Crystals, Glyphs Galore and Nobles cards. Yes, I Don't Believe the new DPS trinket that drops from the new 3-Part 5man is that much more desirably and you could always have both. I predicted the 15th for the drop of 3.3 but am quite happy to be wrong and for it to drop this Tuesday/Wednesday as the Darkmoon Faire is in Elwyn Forest that week (Yup I'm Alliance). Last but not least, Eternal Earth and Shadow for the new ammo as they will take 2 Crystalized of each for a stack of the new ammo. Massive Thanks to Marco for the guest post and all his help.
What do you think will happen after Patch 3.3 hits? What have you done to prepare? Comment!
Cooking, like every other profession has what I like to call 'sweet spots' that make leveling it difficult because materials are no longer farmed on a regular basis.
For Blacksmithing this is thorium bars, for tailoring it's bolts of netherweave (largely due to bag makers buying up the cloth), etc.
When I was going through auctioneer I noticed something peculiar that really surprised me: Burning Crusade fish going for 60 gold a stack. At first I thought it was just some fool dumping his guild bank, but after watching the market for a week I noticed that it was actually pretty active with about six sellers and obviously more than one buyer. Since the food from these fish weren't appearing on the auction house I had to assume that it was for cooking. Having leveled my only cook during BC I never knew this market existed until now!
Spotted fel-tail and Crescent-Tail Skullfish seem to be the real money makers, possibly for the 330 and 335 cooking recipes that these are required for.
Definately add these to your snatch list as they can easily sell at 2-3 gold a piece.
One of my most lucrative business areas of interest right now is none other than the arena. Getting paid 1.5-5k gold to carry someone up to 1800 for their weapon has not only been easy and quick, but also hillariously entertaining.
What I do is join someone's team and have them que me while I simply go in and lose the game (sometimes I play for the fun of it and crush some 1600 teams 2v1). Once my mmr is down to 200 points below the team I'm going to carry, I then proceed to win 6-12 point games all the way up to 1800. By the time we get to 1800 usually we are facing 1700-1900 teams and my partner has learned a thing or two which helps the odds of winning tremendously.
NOTE: The team I'm carrying and the team I tank my rating are different and have different players queing me.
So far I've carried ret pallies, disc priests, mut rogues, resto druids, resto shamans, holy pallies, and even a destro lock. It's been an absolute blast and I'm getting to play with teammates who would normally be strolling around trade chat dreaming of a chance to play more competetive arenas. By the end of the carrying session I hope that they not only had a blast but learned a thing or two.
If you are a gladiator or even a really good duelist don't just sit up at that pointless rating or mmr, tank your team and make some easy gold! Be warned, tanking your mmr too low is pointless; ie more than 200-300 points below the starting team rating of the person you are carrying.
"Hey Markco,
I wanted to ask you about something I've got mixed up in with the greedy goblin.
A guild mate of mine directed me to his main page branding me as "moron of the week" informing me that I was a moron for attempting to explain to this "Jason" on my server why he shouldn't undercut glyphs by 40% (the conversation with Flamybank, who is me).
This person would go down to 11g on ~20g glyphs that I had listed throughout the day. When I went to go check on them, I didn't expect for the price to be as low as it was. Spirestone has four players on it who habitually undercut on glyphs regardless of their price. Several others had undercut his 11g, he undercut again to 5g, and believe it or not, three others had brought it down to 3g per glyph, this particular case being the popular Glyph of Judgement. I believe he's citing his piece about inelastic demand and supply as the source for me being a "moron," because dogmatically, higher prices = higher profits = more sellers (according to his blog). This is definitely not the case on my server, as these four individuals don't seem to mind undercutting to 2 or 3g on important raiding or PvP glyphs.
My only strategy for attempting to sell glyphs in such a market defined by "geniuses" who think everyone else are "morons" is to attempt to sell them as high as possible and hope that players needing the glyphs will go to the auction house while mine are the cheapest. I do post these only at prime hours. I've had conversations with many people on the matter, particularly what they believe a fair price is for a glyph and the herb supply on my server. In my surveying, I have found no reason to believe that individuals are turned away by a 20g price tag for a glyph, nor have I found any reason to believe there is a shortage of ink supply for these four players.
I apologize for the lengthy e-mail, but I was hoping you'd be able to shed some insight on my situation. Frankly I'm quite offended to be publically listed as a moron when very few people are aware of the greater picture (my server's dynamics) and read his blog with a dogmatic knowledge of "right" and "wrong."
Thank you for your time :)
~Flamy"
It's suggestion box friday, so how would you handle this?
I'll give my response, then you guys as a community take a crack at it.
First off, they are mocking you because they are undercutting you and still making money and they really don't care how far they undercut as long as they make a sale. To them they are winners whether you whine or do not, so therefore they don't care what you have to say. If you want to win, then you need to compete with them. Start selling the two ink types themselves, armor vellums, weapon vellums, offhand weapons, cards, and glyphs that are discoverable. This is what I do and I make an easy 500-1400 gold every day.
What you posted to the person screenshotting your conversation was actually a viable way to deal with the situaion. You could also offer to buy his glyphs up every day and relist them. In the end though these players only really hurt themselves. They compete with each other down to the wire and scrape up a small fraction of the profit they could make sharing the market and diversifying. Be smarter than them and expand into the other ways to make money with inscription. Also look into all the other ways you can make money on the auction house; never ever stick to one market/profession.
It's been a long time since this blog has had a guest post (not including the countless gold tips that stream in on a daily basis from normal players) and I wanted to offer the opportunity for any gold making blog out there that would like to reach this astute audience.
Looking for quality information on making gold or even just conversation starting material on patch 3.3. Feel free to email me at freebeertomorrowonyxia AT gmail DOT com with your submission and I'll be happy to respond with an approximate date of when I will be able to display your work.
I ask for these guests posts because I understand that it is refreshing to hear someone else's opinion on making gold and it opens up more discussion as well as provide you the reader with even more blogs to dive into. There are some really high quality blogs out there with the same gold tip sharing orientation as JMTC, and I highly recommend visiting the Link Love section of my forums for a list of wow gold blogs.
Put in the comments section if you have any posts you'd like to see in the near future; which will in turn provide these aspiring authors with some material to work with.
Today I'm going to be openning my mail box live for all to see on XFIRE at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time.
It will be an excellent time to chat up with each other live on xfire and you can discuss what I'm selling and why. All auctions were posted yesterday between 4-8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time and will show up as having 29 days left in the mail box tab.
I expect it will take the usual 45 minutes to 1.5 hours to unload the mail box so feel free to stop in any time between 7-8:30 PM Eastern Standard Time on XFIRE with the name markcolol. I sold items from all of my professions at once except for jewelcrafting and engineering on one toon so that you could see how much money I typically make without having to switch characters.
My XFIRE link is in the side bar but for those reading on a feed, go here.
I highly suggest being intoxicated to help pass the time between mail box loads, as I expect 35-50 of them. See you tonight!
For feed readers today's actual gold making post was on Cataclysm Flasks in PVP.
EDIT: That was fun although I didn't sell as many auctions as I thought I would in the 24 hour period. Ended up with about 800 still being sold on the auction house but from the 20 minutes of openning mail I made almost 6k gold. Not too bad, I apologize to those that came late and were expecting it to go longer :(
This will be one of the greatest level 85 money makers. I highly suggest leveling up a level 80 alchemist with flask specialization before cataclysm hits.
Why? Well because of rated bg's that's why! There is one thing every pvper is going to need for group bg's and that's flasks which persist through death. This will greatly increase the value of the mats for flasks (mostly herbs and oils) as well as provide a constant stream of buyers for the market. Let's not even discuss consumables like free action potions...
Don't delay, get an alchemist today! I highly suggest getting two (potion + flask specialization) but not everyone wants to be as hardcore as me so I understand if you only get one.
Discuss in the comments section :)
There are two ways that I make gold with smelting (mining's better half) and they are titansteel bars and cobalt bars. First, I buy the materials off the auction house cheap every day as I see them. Once I have enough to make a few stacks of cobalt or one titansteel cooldown I craft the bars and sell at 75% market price to ensure that they sell quickly and I get about 20%-30% return on the investment.
Another item you can make gold off your miner with is bronze bar. These take 1 tin and 1 copper bar so check your auction house prices to see if this can also make you money.
Any other bars that you know of that will turn a profit simply by smelting them? It's not usually the case because of prospecting being so much more popular than blacksmithing.
This strategy was written quite a long time ago when snowfall inks sold like hotcakes (they still can for the faire but it's better to convert them into runescrolls and offhands now a days) and herbs were around 20 gold a stack on my server. The experiment went very well and I managed to raise the price of glyphs by several gold over the course of a month or two. Many bloggers still link to this post so I thought it needed this preface and a small update. Enjoy.
Points of this Strategy
- Glyph sellers who are trying to make gold by selling glyphs very cheap need to make up the cost of their original stack of herbs through the sale of snowfall inks. We are talking about true goblins who are camping with 2-3 gold thresholds here.
- By reducing the cost of snowfall ink the glyph sellers must raise their glyph prices or else they will lose money.
- Goblin gives up the market or moves towards a more average price of glyphs in the 5-8 gold range.
Before I explain how to defeat a goblin, perhaps I should discuss what exactly being a goblin entails? A goblin gets their herbs and focuses on selling the snowfall ink to make up for most of their herb expenses. If they sell their snowfall ink for 60-100% of the cost of their initial investment then they can sell their glyphs (using the average 6 inks per stack of herbs) for super cheap and that is where their profit comes from. This profit margin is entirely dependent on how much the goblin paid for his/her inks, but the key here is that the snowfall ink is always the linchpin for their profits.
How then, do you defeat the goblin and raise the price of glyphs on your server? I have a theory and I'm going to implement it very soon on my own server. There are currently three goblins I've found using approximately 3 gold threshold and QA2. They post a 40 gold glyph three times and if anyone undercuts they will in turn keep undercutting down to this 3 gold threshold. To defeat these goblins I've been recruiting dedicated farmers with these mouth watering prices for herbs:
10 gold a stack of lichbloom, icethorn, or adder's tongues
5 gold a stack for any other stacks of WOTLK herbs
Sounds delicious right? Well with that price I can sell snowfall inks for 7 gold and then glyphs for 1.1 gold and make a 10 silver profit (-50 silver each for resilient parchment). The only thing is... I'm not going to sell glyphs! In fact I have almost never sold glyphs (I only focus on the discovery ones), and instead sell armor vellum III's and weapon vellum III's, as well as the inks themselves.
So my plan is to focus on getting snowfall ink [EDIT: I wrote ink of the sea here by accident the first time this was posted... sorry!] down to the 10 gold range (It's going to take thousands probably over the course of several weeks, I'm currently down to the 13-14 gold range) and in a sense cut the legs right out of the goblin method. Next, I'm going to control the armor and weapon vellum markets so that they have no way to compete with my prices. They will be FORCED to sell glyphs for more in order to make any profit at all.
I like to think of it as out-goblining the goblins. What do you think of my master plan? Comment!
Many of you may know Ashe from his YouTube videos on making gold, well he's back again with a series this time... he's going to try to make as much gold as possible on a new server within two weeks. All the gold he acquires will go to his first YouTube subscriber that has apparently helped him greatly since he started putting videos up.
Here's the link:
2 Week Gold Challenge by Ashe
OK so what does this have to do with JMTC? Well I want you guys to get involved with this. Discuss it on the forums, in the comments section here, and on Ashe's YouTube channel. Get involved and see if you can help Ashe make as much gold as possible in two weeks. Who knows, maybe you'll learn something from this as well!
Good Luck Ashe!
Flipping, like undercutting, is a true art form in world of warcraft. In order to perform a plethora of profitable purchases periodically you will need to have a grasp of how much an item is worth (ie auctioneer) as well as how much the item will normally sell for. Just because essences of earth sit at 10 gold almost all the time doesn't mean that people will actually buy them for that price.
What to flip?
Flipping is most frequently used to make money with enchanting mats and other items that require 0 posting cost fees. This allows for margins of error in the flipping and cuts the loss to the flipper tremendously should they fail. The most popular item to flip in the game is probably greater cosmic essences currently. Other items that should interest you are:
Essences of XX, max level glyphs selling less than 2 gold, Vellums, entry level meats, low to mid level herbs/ore, and even high profile epics like gems and armor/weapons... (fill the comments with other items you like to flip as I am deliberately keeping the list short).
How to flip?
Simply buy out when items reach [Normal Selling Value - X] and then repost for [Normal Selling Value]. Notice I said normal selling value, not auctioneer's price. You need to understand the market and have a feel for how much items will actually be purchased at, especially some of the low level stuff that could be ridiculously overpriced.
Deciding on that normal selling value and the X are what differentiates you from a good flipper and someone who is going to lose a lot of money quickly. Practice with enchanting mats first, then move on to items that have a posting cost.
Good Luck!
PS: Word of advice, be careful not to invest too much into flipping or else you will end up being pressured to selling your goods for less than optimal prices.
Happy day after turkey day! I hope you are having a blast with family/friends.
Feel free to write about anything regarding making gold in wow!
Discussion:
Will new glyphs that require snowfall inks in the next patch drive the price of snowfall inks back up to what they were a few months ago? Will the item level 200 trinkets (aka greatness) still hold enough market value to keep people buying snowfalls? Something to think about as many people have stopped producing the cards all together.
Some of you may have heard that new epic ammunition is coming out for engineers. It will require rep with a new reputation group poised against the lich king but I'm under the impression that the new 5 man dungeous will give you plenty of rep with this new faction.
Engineers create the ammunition using 2 crystallized shadow for the arrows or 2 crystallized earth for the bullets and I would definately advise buying up these materials in anticipation for the patch. Earths can spike heavily but crystallized shadow is often pretty cheap so look for some deals while you wait for this new ammunition to hit the scene.
Shadow can be farmed easily in wintersgrasp and the earth can be farmed off of Revenants in stormpeaks.
Pots of Gold - On The Fall of Gem Prices
I loved this article on gems falling in value because it's spot on: Epic gems have been slowly decreasing in price since they were introduced. Many gems I paid 400 gold for when they first come out have dropped down to an measly 160. Why is this? Supply and Demand.
First off, more ways to get epic gems were introduced, everything from transmutes to honor purchases to badges to prospecting. More and more gems appeared but what's worse, gems could be gathered by anyone, not just jewelcrafters and in large supplies.
As supply rose with the easy methods for gathering gems demand could never keep up. People were getting the gems they needed for free and then selling off the extras. This led to lower and lower prices. Myself, I make around 600-1000 gold selling epic gems a week. I buy them wtih honor, badges, and the uncuts off the AH if they are 25 gold below a cut gem's average value.
I also pay attention to trade chat for people looking for cuts and have a few of each gem on hand for this. One word of warning: if you don't make use of the cheap methods of getting gems and just try to resell them you will have trouble maintaining a steady cash flow. Mix it up and look into the badge/honor/prospecting/transmuting route for the majority of your gems.
I fear that all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve. ~ Isoroku Yamamoto
Besides being a proud American and an enterprising entrepreneur, I am also a member of the Roman Catholic Church (tithing ftl). This being said, I have always felt that getting to heaven was the number one goal to hold for myself. I apologize if you are atheist or of a different religion and that offends you, but I have no problem with you expressing your own beliefs anytime you want on my forums or blog. Although Gevlon's attacks against me were a planned (notice he waited 6 days to make his post on a Tuesday?), unprovoked, brutal and brilliant surgical strike against myself and my blog, to retaliate would in no way bring me closer to my number one goal. So therefore I am not going to retaliate, however I will do my best to provide a thorough explanation regarding what happened for you, my readers.
Gevlon's Intent
What Gevlon did was attempt to assassinate my character, because, for whatever reason and I won't pretend to understand his thinking on this, he actually views my blog as a threat to him. Why I am not sure, but the facts all point to this irrationality:
1. Gevlon deleted perhaps a hundred comments from his blog (75 that I know of for sure). Every single deleted post disagreed with him or called him out for his actions. Seems like someone wants it to look like 90% of the commenters agree with the greedy goblin.
2. Gevlon brought Tobold into the mess with the hopes of spreading the news deeper across the interwebs. Tobold accepted and in one of his comments made the accusation that I was performing tax evasion. This of course was based on 0 facts and made him look rather biased.
3. Gevlon posted my personal email. This was not a big deal because I did send it to him. However, when commenters started posting much more dangerous personal information about myself Gevlon left the comments as they were. Judging by how actively he deleted comments he obviously wanted those to remain visible and that speaks volumes to his intent with the tabloid post.
4. Gevlon misinterpreted what I was asking him to do and exploded like he always does. However, in the past the greedy goblin has linked to me talking about how JMTC is the place to go to learn about making gold in wow and this sudden outburst just didn't make sense to anyone who had read those previous posts. In my email I tried to explain (although I was pretty angry in the second) that I wanted him to honestly and truthfully compare my guide to other ones. Coming from him this would of created huge buzz and generated lots of sales, and this would be a wise business decision unless of course your goal is to destroy JMTC.
5. Gevlon used the words lie, scheme, and marketing tricks throughout his tabloid article. First off I never lied in either of those two emails. You can accuse me of stretching the truth on my numbers, however they were based off of projections of readership vs past conversion rates on other blogs/sites. Second, there's no scheme here and the fact that my sales have gone through the roof since Gevlon's post and yet only one person has asked for a refund speaks volumes on the content of my guide NOT being a scheme. Marketing tricks? Since when does the greedy goblin know ANYTHING about marketing? There were no 'tricks' in my sales pitch. You can doubt what I said but that doesn't mean it's false.
6. Gevlon waited 6 days to post his response to my emails and perform his attack. Somehow I feel that if his actions were genuine and if he truly believed that I had wronged him that he would of reacted a lot sooner. The way he wrote it sounds like I had infuriated him into immediate action, but he actually took the time to carefully plan and arrange his assassination attempt.
The Fallout
There were no apparent winners in this Pearl Harbor style attack. The wow blogosphere showed how shallow it really is, with many sites following the greedy goblin and feeding off his every word without thought to the possibility that he could be lying. I have never had the support of the vast majority of wow related sites, but luckily for this blog that has not made a difference on readership growth. Every week hits go up, subscriptions go up, and the forums grow ten people per day on average. This is without the support of wow.com, mmochampion.com and now the wow blogosphere. The real thing I lost in this was my pride, and that's something I am grateful to be rid of as it's one of the hardest things to shake off in your lifetime. I did learn some value life lessons from this, and I am prepared to move on as a better person.
Greedy Gevlon didn't win either. You see he lives off his subscription numbers like an IV to a dying child. This incident only made him cling to them more. Here is a true marketing tip for you Gevlon: hits are king in this business, not subscribers. Evenmore than subscription numbers Gevlon craves attention. This is why he will lie about anything that seems to put him in a negative light. Remember when he said that he was messing up on purpose in the raiding guild that he purchased a spot in? Yeah right, if he was good enough to raid with that quality of players then he wouldn't of needed to buy a spot in the first place. Throughout this dramatic story Gevlon proved himself to be the self indulged, greedy, and just flat out evil person I've guessed he might be all along. This whole incident smacks of him attempting to assassinate the character of someone he deems to be a threat and he's shot himself in the perverbial foot with this tabloid mess. What businessman will ever approach him now? What blogger in their right mind will trust him? In the end Gevlon has shown himself to be the very scum he accused me of being. I forgive him for it, and I pity him.
The True Winners
But someone must have won in this matter right? It's the clash of the titans! Do or die, someone must come up victorious, right?! Well I can tell you that there was one clear winner in this whole mess:
YOU. The readers of this blog.
I received 186 emails the day Gevlon posted. One email was from a 16 year old boy asking for help finding a job. Another email basically said I'm never coming back bai! 184 emails were sent by concerned fans and supportive members of this community. I was overwhelmed by this. Every time I opened an email that said "per the greedy goblin incident" I was expecting hate but got kind words instead. You are the reason I removed many of my comments on other blogs and took down my shameful post which attacked the greedy goblin back. You are the primary reason I managed to get my cool back after angrily reacting, and who wouldn't react angrily to what had happened? Who wouldn't want to lash out at the idea of those close to you being made vulnerable by a lunatic's actions?
I thank my loved ones for their support and the members of this great community for their overwhelming enthusiasm. This is the best gift I could of asked for regarding the one year anniversary. In fact I will go so far as to say that what Gevlon gave me for the blog's birthday was more than anyone could have: Determination.
Here's to another year, and thank you! I promise no more drama posts regarding this matter, I'd like to move on and get back to the gold tips. /cheer
A handful of items are going to see their values plummet during the thanksgiving turkey events:
Netherweave Cloth, Large Prismatic Shards, Ancient Lichen, and Adamantite ore.
These items drop in the instance Sethek Halls and it's part of the pilgrim's plight achievements to kill the final boss wearing the proper attire.
Keep an eye out for netherweave dropping as well as netherweave bags this week. Large prismatic shards aren't used that much but you should still look to flip them for moderate returns after the holidays. The ancient lichen and adamantite ore are not in very high demand but if the prices get low enough look to pick them up and flip just like the prismatic shards.
Drink too much, eat too much, and enjoy your time with your families!
I wanted to start carrying friends in 2's but it was getting really difficult because of my 2700+ mmr. Therefore I decided the only solution was to go 2v1 until I bottomed out at whatever rating. That rating ended up being 1,000. Here are some of my wins while I was tanking down from 2700, including the first one which was an ~1850 team. Enjoy!
I've had this article in my que for about two weeks now and I have made 10,600 gold so far from carrying teammates to 1800. Everyone I've carried so far has had an absolute blast (that's part of my goal to let them have fun) and I think many of them emerged a better player. Not to mention the fact that they walked away with a shiny weapon to pwn in bg's with.
Some of you may not know what the Saronite Shuffle is, well in lay mans terms, it's the process of prospecting saronite ore, creating necks/rings, and disenchanting said rings or doing other things with the gems to make gold.
The game was recently patched (around two weeks ago) so that infinite dusts now drop around 1 more on average from level 71-80 greens. This greatly increased the value of greens for disenchanting, especially crafted greens.
Check out A Gnome's Conquest for this article on the Upgraded Saronite Shuffle to learn more.
Suggestion Box Friday is when I, the gold making guru, step down from my saronite plated frozen thrown (what else are you supposed to do with all that extra saronite anyay?) and allow you, the loveable auction house amateurs take a stab at making heads or tails of wow economics.
Feel free to discuss anything gold related, here are the comments of the week:
Regarding Vendoring Saronite Bars
Jeff said...
Stacks of green WotlK gems have been selling for 2g on my server. :-) Cut and sell for 5g, more if you get perfect cuts....
Regarding Titanium Bars vs Saronite Bars after Patch 3.3
Mus1k said...
I concur with Euripides mostly. I'd stack couple of tabs of saronite ore just in case, but won't be hasty to convert it to bars even, so that i can prospect em, if titanium hits the ground.
More interesting question is: how will the tit.bar price affect the ore price. One would think that the ore price must fall accordingly, but i feel it will not be the case for a while after the patch hits.
Discussion: Patch 3.3 2 weeks... 4 weeks.. 2 months away? What are your thoughts? I'm betting on 3-5 weeks with the arena season ending about 2 weeks after.
Knothide Leather is something that everyone has to burn through in order to level their leatherworking. I found an absolutely fantastic place to grab the knothide leather quickly and efficiently:
Talbuk Thorngrazers are your primary target, although you will find the occasional elek and Clefthoof Bull to skin as well. There are groups of four or so around every tree as well as by the lake which will provide you with a steady stream of fresh kills. What's more, by the time you finish killing them the original pack of 3 or 4 should have respawned, allowing for constant farming and skinning. One run through this place netted me almost 1 1/2 stacks in around 5 minutes. Not bad considering the heavy version of this leather can go for as much as 12 gold a piece.
One of my favorite ways to make gold is by simply buying items people posted on the ah below the price that a vendor is willing to pay for it. Upon purchasing these items I either use them in one of my professions or simply vendor for usually a small profit. One item I consistently see falling below market value is Saronite Bars. Eventhough blizzard included a small tooltip which tells someone how much the item vendors for on mouse over, people still post below vendor value.
The vendor value of Saronite Bars is 1 gold 25 silver per.
I have probably bought and vendored thousands of saronite bars over the course of a month, each one netting as little as 3 silver or as much as 75 silver per. What's more, I often find these get sold in stacks of 20 when they are below vendor price so it makes for some nice profits.
Are there any items that you often find below vendor value?
Some vendor items which auctioneer confuses for being worth more than they actually are:
Fish feasts, corpse dust, and fel hides. Watch out for these!
Just My Two Copper's One Year Anniversary is today!
So much has happened and been going on that I didn't really even notice the time going by like a freight train. I hope this year has been an amazing time for you as well and that I provided you with the information, inspiration, and most imporantatly the intellectual enhancements you needed to become an expert at the world of warcraft auction house.
In celibration of the one year anniversary of the blog I've dropped my gold guide's price down to $27 for the holiday season as well as added an amazing update with a niche market I discovered that provides an average of 600% profit on investment depending on server prices (based on testing on a dozen live servers). The item involved will blow your mind because I gaurantee you weren't expecting it to be this valuable. Besides this sweet method, I've also upgraded the guide to include several walkthroughs for key addons that will make your life so much easier in world of warcraft. Guides for professions have been updated as well with a few minor specific methods.
Please comment on your experiences with the blog and how it has impacted your wow life, or perhaps your real life as well. As mentioned on the how I wow podcast (RIP), I'm a pretty good motivational speaker and I hope I've positively influenced your habbits both by my words and my achievements.
Never stop learning, reading, experimenting, and most importantly... HAVING FUN!
Thank you for this amazing year. Looking forward to another!
I've had several conversations in the past with both interviewers and friends who jokingly assumed that I must dream of wow to have all these ideas about making gold constantly pouring from my overused and abused brain. The truth is... no I have never dreamt of wow.
Have you dreamt of wow, whether it was your character, an action within the game, or just the world of warcraft universe in general? Share your stories in the comments section :D
All right this is a blog about making gold so here's a very easy to make potion that is great for raiding 80's, especially warlocks: Major Dreamless Sleep Potion. (New WOTLK Version here: Potion of Nightmares
Check the comments on wowhead for the locations for horde and alliance to buy this recipe.
My Server Pre Patch 3.3
Saronite Bars - 2 gold each (16 gold for a transmute)
Titanium Bar - 30 gold each
If you buy out Saronite Bars now on my server at the current price you will be able to sell after patch 3.3 for 18+ gold and make a profit. Just how low will Titanium Bars drop? I guess I should pull out my crystal ball and tell you... 20 gold each. I am predicting that Titanium Bars will fall 33% in price and saronite bars will go up to the point where one stack is worth around 2.5 Titanium Bars.
So let's say my perfect storm happens and Titanium bars fall to 20 gold, Saronite Bars rise to 50 gold a stack. Regardless of how you stockpiled bars to resell them as titanium ore you would be selling for the same price as just selling the bars post patch. This is important however, for if you do buy up saronite bars for 2 gold a piece or lower pre patch 3.3 then you will be able to sell both titanium bars and saronite bars for the same profit margin, thus making it easier to unload your stock faster.
What do you think will happen with the prices, make a guess in the comment sections on the price of a stack of 20 saronite bars vs a titanium bar.
If you'd like to participate in the next brawl plz contact myself or brutality (Alliance) on Onyxia.
This is your day to be heard. You can talk about anything related to world of warcraft, so go nuts :) !
Cool Contest at WowStability.com
Want to win a 60 day Wow time card? Check out this post at wowstability.com for more info. All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on the site with an answer to the question: "If Arthas took the job of Santa Claus, what kind of Christmas would it be?" Contest ends November 30th 2009. Go show your support for this new wow resource and maybe win that 60 day Wow time card!
Gold Guide Announcement
I have been making some serious changes to my gold guide, including dropping the price down to $27.00 for the holidays and adding a super secret gold making tip so powerful that it has made me 600% of my investment every day that I've tested it. Several minor updates were made for patch notes and changes to certain strategies as well.
Your Comments of the Week
Regarding How to Deal with Undercutters
Anonymous
I use to make gold with the 100+hp twink enchant, the mats are 2 X Small Brilliant Shard and the price per shard is about 1-2g/each on my server, still I manage to sell the enchant for ~70g, and I sell several each week. By simply buying out all of the shards, so I deny all my competition. I totally agree with Daxenos that buying out all the netherweave cloth would be the greatest strategy, if the mats are gone the competition will be gone soon tooGood luck
Regarding Endless Rage and Frost Wyrm Alchemist Spreadsheet
Zeran said...
I agree with you honors, but you have to think about the numbers. Even if tanks (I know I am) are twice as likely to flask as dpsers, there is a minimum of 2.5 dps per tank (using a 2tank 3healer 5dps setup) the ratio gets worse as you look at 25man raids (I've never seen more than 4 tanks in a 25man, but even if you had 5 and 5 healers you still have 3 dps per tank). Thus, while I wouldn't overlook stone blood, dps flasks will sell better.
Regarding Auction House Tycoon Gold Strategies
goth said...
I agree with you views on the auction house. While I myself don't feel that I have reached tycoon status, it is the next logical step to breaking into triple figures. I pay close attention to some of the big tymers on forums, but still feel it takes much longer for me to learn a new market. I am more the type that tries to hammer a square peg into a round hole until it finally dawns on me to try a different approach.Hopefully, they will open up the mail system for player characters on both factions. Right now it is a major pain to get good across factions, plus the fees are a killer.
Discussion
Will saronite bars rise in value with the removal of the titanium cooldown? Will titanium bar prices fall as the saronite bar prices rise? Is it worthwhile to start buying saronite bars at the current price and then sell titanium one week after the patch lower than everyone else?
I received this email, my response is below it:
"Hi Markco, hanks for your blog. I've been following it for a few months now and managed to cross the 50k gold threshold for the first time this week ;)
I have a question for you regarding bidding wars. One of the tips I picked up from JM2C was making netherweave bags. The profit margin on these was pretty good. Mats on my server usually come to around 5.5G per bag and on a good day they were selling for 13G. There were already a few people selling large numbers of bags on the AH, so, not wanting to be seen as a threat, I would only post 3 or 4 bags at a time. This way, I figured, my bags would definitely sell and some of the competitions probably would too. I would do this three or four times a day (don't have time to be on all day long) and was turning a pretty nice profit.
Yesterday, however, disaster struck - a price war erupted between the major manufacturers. Each of the three main players started undercutting each other. And not just with three or four bags, but dozens at a time. This has meant that each time one guy got undercut he had no choice but to further undercut because with 30 to 40 bags on the AH cheaper than his there was no way they would sell out in 48 hours. Today bags are on the AH for 7G a piece - next to no profit for anyone. I'm not posting any new bags right now.
Any advice on how to deal with this situation? I guess I could try buying out the cheap bags until the price was back up to 13G, then resell them. But thats a significant investment and the (dumb) competition could just start another price war. Any ideas you have would be welcome.
Regards,
Whiteleaf"
Great question Whiteleaf and there are a few ways to go about beating your competition when they do this. First off, never assume that someone is not making money or that everyone has the same minimum profit range. It could be that the person posting has a farmer selling them items cheaper than you can get them.
Here's what I would do because it is unlikely that anyone farms the cloth for netherweave bags anymore (botters wouldn't anway):
Realise that this is just two or more people attempting to control the market. Buy out the bags below minimum profit and wait till after the weekend to sell your bags again. Continue doing what you're doing with a few here or there to allow for competetition and avoid price wars. Your competetition right now is too dumb to think like you did, so until they give up you will just have to wait it out and be patient.
Hope that helps!
Markco
Check out this forum post on Whittaker's alchemy spreadsheet which he developed for his alchemy business. I really like his style and how he handled the creation of this spreadsheet. Definately worth the download!
The spreadsheet focuses on Endless Rage and Frost Wyrm flasks which are key dps raiding flasks at the moment and will be in high demand while raiders push to take down the lich king in icecrown.
I'm no statician, but I'd bet money that less than 1% of the players in world of warcraft would be willing to try something as complicated as the Saronite Shuffle.
In building a strategy for becoming an auction house tycoon, you should keep in mind that the more steps involved in your schemes, the safer you will be against copy cats. You may be wondering what makes a scheme difficult to copy, so let me break it down for you in a quick list:
Having connections with the opposite faction (you will need friends for this since you cannot buy auctions from any of your own characters), commanding multiple professions on multiple characters, aquiring high amounts of startup cash, and managing to snag rare patterns or mats greatly distinquishes you from your fellow auction house tycoon. Less tangible and measurable assets would include: cyclical knowledge, understanding of supply vs demand, psychological understanding of buyers and sellers, as well as experience working with large amounts of auctions.
So the next time you come up with a clever way for making gold, be sure to always be on the look out for additional income paths stemming from your original idea which will complicate the way you're making gold and cover your wow auction house tycoon tracks. Work towards building up your own mini-cartel among your characters by getting them to atleast level 65 and maxed out in their professions. Something my girlfriend tried was making four alchemists and taking advantage of their gem transmutes. She makes thousands of gold each week doing almost nothing but transmutes and relying on alchemy procs for easy cash. Now how many people do you know who have four alchemists? Not many right? There's an example of covering your tracks by having complicated requirements for making gold.
Silently Farming,
His dusty pickaxe in hand,
Making the Golds
Farmers are a wonderful thing in world of warcraft. Now I don't mean gold farmers who try to sell accounts or make gold and what not. Though I must admit I have a blast kiting bots to opposing faction cities... maybe I'll make a video of that some day hehe. Who I'm talking about are the people who devote an hour or two a day (sometimes more) to grabbing in game materials and then they simply dump them on the ah for the cheapest price in order to get instant gratification and fill their coffers.
Taking advantage of these people will not only give them the instant gratification they live for, but also give you the materials for crafting at excellent profit margins. It's all about ROI after all (return on investment).
How do you find a farmer? It's actually quite easy, you simply look at the auction house and whisper people who post everyday. Be kind but don't let them know why you want the items. Simply say that you leveling a profession, that's the easiest cover up for whatever devious plans you have for their materials.
Buyers are just as important as farmers. If you can find the ultimate cycle, you will have a farmer giving you materials, you'll be crafting some item for super cheap but making excellent profit, and you'll have a buyer waiting on the other end who can't wait to buy every last item you created. Everybody wins! This is the basis for the wow economy after all: farmers, crafters, and buyers.
Here's how I make 1-2k gold a day from inscription without selling a single glyph:
1. Get herbs from three different farmers for 15-17 gold a piece.
2. Mill everything while talking on the phone or reading a book or w/e.
3. Craft everything into inks and sell the mats to buyers who have sent letters requesting snowfall inks or inks of the sea for their own crafting desires.
That's not the most profitable way to make gold with inscription, after all I could change places in that pyramid of players so that I'm the person buying the crafted goods to resell for more profit, but it is a very profitable methods for making gold. I gave it a try and it was definately a great way to make gold without risking anything.
Give it a try with other trade skills such as disenchanting, prospecting, or any form of crafting. Find a farmer, craft your goods, sell to a person who will try to resell them or craft something else from your mats.
It's a lot of work but it's gauranteed gold for those that need it, so I definately recommend this for someone who is hard on their luck for cash. Also, be prepared to reinvest a lot of what you make to keep your business running, I tried this for a few days and found myself buying herbs with 75% of my profits each time and expanding by 100-200 herbs purchased every day.
