Blizzard has done a fantastic job on regulating bots the past two months and the results are already apparent to most players who buy out herbs and ore regularly. Lichbloom for 50 gold a stack? Icethorn for 25 gold a stack? My my my these are the prices that we saw at the START of wotlk! Sometimes it gets so bad that lichbloom break 100 gold a stack.
It’s funny, I think back to all the posts gevlon has written on how blizzard secretly loves botting farmers and how they are so evil. Blizzard actually HATES bots and has done an excellent job removing them. However, the killing off of most bots is a double edged sword for real gold makers who buy tons of herbs/ore every day. No longer can you employ strategies such as snagging mats real cheap when a farmer posts each day. What’s going to happen eventually is that the price of crafted goods will gradually rise to sync up with the new material costs, but until then the markets will be a little lopsided.
Throw into this mess the holiday as well as kids being back from school and you have a seller's market. Here's a look at how you can respond:
Saronite Ore
Transmute into Titanium Bar – One stack of saronite ore gets you 1.25 titanium bars. With transmute spec this can be a nice 133% return on investment. Titanium bars tend to be around the same price as a stack of saronite ore.
Prospecting + Cutting/Transmuting – You can take everything you get from prospecting saronite and cut gems or use the mats to do epic and meta transmutes. Even with 20 gold a stack of ore you can still make good money doing this. On some servers you can even craft rings and disenchant for profit depending on the price of infinite dust. I see between 16 and 40 gold on average from prospecting a stack of saronite. The key is cutting the uncommon gems and quadrupling their value, as well as transmuting meta gems.
Lichbloom, Adder’s Tongue, Icethorn
Here’s where it gets tricky. These herbs are skyrocketing and it’s going to get tough for glyph makers very soon. The best deal I’ve seen on my server is adder’s tongues for 18 gold a stack and that’s about as good as it’s going to get. These herbs are the best for milling to craft glyphs and other inscription items, so seeing them so expensive really limits what you can do unless you change the price range on your glyphs. Since it’s my blog I’ll tell you how I’m dealing with this :). For starters, I am only selling glyphs that cost 20 or more gold. Next, I’m selling armor vellum III’s for 8 gold or more, runescrolls for 5 gold each, and faces of doom + iron-bound tome for 200 gold each. With these prices I basically avoid the pain of posting hundreds of 1-19 gold glyphs and instead can craft 100 20 gold glyphs for maximum profit to time ratio.
Borean Leather
Haven’t noticed a change on my server for borean leather. If anything the price has decreased and leg armors are making even more profit, especially rare versions of armor kits.
If prices get to the point where they are ridiculous (ie 100 gold stacks of lichbloom) just go farm it! Also, don’t prospect/mill everything you own so that you can take advantage of when material prices get unusually high. Is it time to go farm on your server or continue crafting?
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Stormspire in Netherstorm has two pets which you can buy from a local vendor. Of these pets the Red Moth Egg sells the most for an easy 50-150 gold, and the handful of other pets sell for about 10-40 gold each.
When selling these items be sure to post for 200-400 gold if no one else has any up there. You'd be shocked how many pet buyers are fixated on expensive pets, especially ones with no competition! If anyone is posting the same pets than simply undercut by 1 copper with a single pet. The trick is to maintain scarcity in order to increase the price at which you can sell the vendor pets.
Have you had any luck selling vendor pets not including cross faction?
Epic Shields
With no BOA shields available these items can fetch a ridiculous amount of gold on the auction house. In fact even green/blue shields can sell for decent amounts. Level 15 shields going for 7 to 10 gold are not unheard of.
Useful Recipes for Making Gold or Power Leveling Professions
This would include items such as the recipe for building mechanical squirrels.
Pets
Self explanatory :)
Wool Cloth
On most servers the horde will part upwards of 20 gold for a single stack of wool cloth. Alliance unfortunately have to deal with having the best location for gathering wool cloth in Stormwind. You can turn this disadvantage into a money making opportunity if you cross server trade.
Gems
Any gem past tigerseye/malachite will go for over 5 gold and some reach as high as 15-20 gold each.
Gold making wise I started seriously moving into the uncommon gem market and low and behold it's still worth tons of gold. The saronite shuffle is not dead at all... I just turn the uncommon gems into cut versions for 4-10 gold each! Get a perfect and it's worth 8-15 gold. While moving into uncommon gems I also got back into transmuting meta gems which although no where near as good as they used to be 6 months ago are still returning about 75% investment after cutting them.
What the hell is with the lichbloom, icethorn and adder's tongue prices? Every day they have been skyrocketing... it must be the mobile auction house or else blizzard has just banned every gold farmer on my server! Saronite ore is pretty high as well, but I've managed to snag a good amount for 15-17 gold a stack even though most of the time it sits at 20+ gold. Surprisingly things like borean leather have not gone up, so leg armor kits are selling for the usual profit margins.
Prices have been on the decline for quite some time in all areas of world of warcraft... everything from arctic furs to icethorn has seen a steady but gradual decline in pricing. The reason for this is demand. Patch changes, players taking off from the game, and a host of other reasons all contribute to a gradual decline in demand. Sure there are examples like frozen orbs where demand spikes from a patch but for the vast majority of items there has been a slow decrease.
How can you take advantage of these declines? Well you can start by making money right now. Even though prices have gone down many price ratios have not. I can still make 20+ gold on a cut rare gem and 1-2 gold on cut common gems. Same goes for armor vellums, glyphs, etc while the cost of creating these materials has not changed very much.
Do you have any items which have declined in price yet still yield high amounts of gold?
Here's something that I've been doing for about a month now, with great profit.
"I have an engineer character, and as soon as I got the iceblade arrow recipe I wanted to start selling those, because I heard a lot of gold was to be made from those.
On my realm, there were something like 3 or 4 other people regularly selling iceblade arrows, and we all undercut each other, ending up selling them for something like 2g per stack. One day, because I was tired of making such little profit off these, I sent a mail to each of the other major sellers asking for all of us to only post arrows at 4g per stack. This way, we don't undercut the price too low, and buyers will buy our goods equally. They all agreed, so we have all been enjoying a huge bump in the gold we make.
I just wanted to show how diplomacy can really help you make gold.
Peter"
Who says you can't have diplomacy on the auction house haha. Nice story Peter, usually I get emails about people who can't figure out how to deal with when diplomacy fails, so I think I'll answer that here just in case your strategy does not work for other readers. For starters, do you think your iceblade arrows would of sold at 4 gold per stack if you had allowed them to go a full 48 hours without reposting at a new amount? You'd be surprised how at certain times throughout the day a product like the arrows will completely be bought out on the auction house (such as just before raid time) and so your 4 gold arrows would actually get bought. Many people swear they can't sell items on the auction house but they aren't doing it correctly and allowing demand to take care of the undercuts on their auctions. I'm glad you found a diplomatic solution that works for you however, since you may actually make more gold with your method!
Bidding before Reset
Contrary to popular belief, the armory version of the auction house will go down during resets... so bidding just before a reset will still be an easy way to get expensive goods cheap (if they expire during the reset).
Opening Mail on Multiple Toons
It is actually impossible to perform actions with the remote auction house other than browsing while one of your toons is logged into the same server. If you are on different servers then you could have one toon opening mail in game and another collecting gold on the remote auction house.
Cross Server Auction Comparison
Viewing both auction houses at once has never been so easy! Simply create a death knight or level a character to 10 so that you can view your opposing faction's auction house. This makes finding deals for cross server trading remarkably easy! You can even open two separate windows to make things even more convenient for yourself.
Check Auctions No Matter Where You Are
In a raid group and want to see if you've had sales on your alt or want to browse the auction house while waiting on a pull? Just alt tab and search! If the character is on a different server, you could perform auction house actions from the armory as well.
Auctions in world of warcraft do not stop during server down times, even the 8 hour down times we see about every other tuesday. Server down time may be when you search blogs like this one for every ounce of wow information you can find or listen to podcasts like Call to Auction or Castaclysm but it should also be a time when you sit comfortably knowing that a whole bunch of loot is waiting for you after the maintenance is over.
How you ask?
Well something you may or may not be aware of is that auctions continue to 'roll' so to speak even during maintenance. If I bid on an auction with two hours left just before my server goes down then I will have won it by the time servers come back up. What the game does is check to see if an auction should of ended when servers come online and if it is past its expiration date then the auction is closed and the proper actions taken.
Therefore it is a perfectly valid strategy to place bids on any item with 2-12 hours remaining with a few minutes left to go before server shut down. I do this whenever I have time on a random tuesday morning with maintenance and it has netted fabulous results.
This email is a bunch of awesome tips mixed in with the story of one player who made full use of the JMTC community to get gold capped.
"I started playing wow with a warrior miner/skinner and ran him to 80. In Battlegrounds I was mad I could never kill a pally..So my second character I leveled a pally jc/alchemist...Of course then I needed a herbalist to support my alchemy and leveled death knigh enchant/herb..and finally got a blacksmith/inscription with a tauren hunter.
I amassed about 60k by November 1st...mainly by gold grinding of daily's, skinning and mining adamantite ore. Ore Farmers never seem to mine burning crusade's outland. In November while at my kid's game I was playing on my iphone and googled and found JMTC. And you posted the 22 steps of auctioneer. Well from November 2009 to May1st 2010 I now have 218,000 gold and I am gold capped. Except of course I have the gold spread over several characters on the azshara server. The ways I made most of money:
- Running auctioneer morning when I woke up, when I got home, and when I went to bed. I got a very accurate database of prices to know what is worth something...of course I got burned one day buying two six of chaos because I did not know what it was. It was good lesson to stick to what you know on the auction house. But you would so shocked when you see a dragon's eye for 2gold, or 10 titansteel bars for 70g. People make mistakes when posting or set there opening bid prices so low sometimes they get lost in the dirt and auctioneer and your snatch scans pull those gems out of the muck.
- I read Justmytwocopper.blogspot.com every day for ideas.
- Max out that alchemist with xmute spec and transmute an epic gem a day
- Keep an eye on the trade chat for people dumping honor epic gems and buy them out because when you buy them out they remember you and then they come to you and become your best customer.
- Buying a second account to move items immediately with a desktop and pc between the two accounts. I only got snipped once by another buyer and he mailed the item back to me to teach me a lession. But I moved primodial saronites and no one ever out bid me on my on auction on the cross faction server.
- Dropping Skinning and having two JC's maxed
- Buy up dragon's eye's around 100g and put up nightmare tears at 200g on both factions.
- Obtain as many JC recipes as possible
- Max out that blacksmith get the recipes to Breastplate of the white knight , sword breakers wrists, and other top recipes.
- Have my alchemist of transmute spec and xmute tons of meta gems and saronite bars. Because of the xmute spec it is profitable every day to xmute and crash the market because it is still profitable depending on eternal air and eternal fire prices.
- Buying saronite ore under 11g a stack , smelting half and putting up a complete set of savage saronite plate armor every weekend. Keeping at least 20 eternal belt buckles up on both factions at all times. Prospect the other rest of ore. Disenchant and keep that enchanter busy
Thanks for getting me GOLD CAPPED!!!!!!!!!!
COLMATRIX ON AZSHARA SEVER...MAY YOUR BLADES NEVER DULL!!!!!"
Another wow blog on making gold,Srsbusiness.org, has hit the gold cap! Congratulations!!! Also special congrats should go to Zamboni from the forums here who Srsbusiness based his serious business on. He is what I consider towards the higher echelon of making gold, one of the few people who have a system that makes them a powerhouse on the auction house. The method is simple: buy out materials (using a snatch list or searching manually) every single day if they are below a certain price and do not limit the amount of materials you buy. This way you always have a large stockpile of mats for crafting and you force up the prices at which competition can buy their own materials to compete with you. After taking these materials and crafting their items, people like Srsbusiness then have a set amount of items they will sell from their stockpile on the auction house (using addons like glypher or quick auctions 3).
The really valuable piece of information from srsbusiness and the reason I posted this article is his list of items for what he posts every day. Look at that list and then think about all the items he buys on a daily basis to support that setup. I really liked his inscription section, it is virtually identical to my own (except that I do not post weapon vellums). I was shocked to see no jewelcrafting or tailoring, but without a second account tailoring is sort of a waste of time. Jewelcrafting also requires months of acquiring recipes to really be effective so maybe he was just never able to put the work into it earlier in the expansion and instead went with inscription.
The end result of this method? Steady, predictable income that only grows as the seller becomes able to purchase more and more materials. You'd think buying another 10k gold worth of adder's tongues would drive down your profits but in actuality the market reacts and glyph prices go up. This strategy is all about being in it for the long haul and it should be the quintessential goal of anyone reading this blog. Eventually you too will learn how to do exactly what Srsbusiness and many other players on the jmtc gold forums have learned to do.
It all starts with easy wow gold: buy low, sell normal...
Real Life
"Hello Markco, I have read your blog for quite some time now and I really enjoy it. I got alot of helpful tips from the people on JMTC forums but recently i tried the '22 Steps to Using Auctioneer Correctly' guide, it seemed simple, but for some reason it´s not working.. I do everything as you say but whenever i search under 'Vendor' no items pop up. I have tried to adjust alot but i can´t seem to make it work. Am i doing something wrong or is it just that there are no items to resell on my server?
Thank you for your time
- Migari"
It is entirely possible that there are no items for sale below vendor price, especially with the way the game displays the value of items even if you do not have addons like auctioneer installed. That being said, your issue could be with your profit range, perhaps you should try putting it at 1 copper just to see if items appear.
Be careful though, there are several items which are (perhaps still?) buggy in the vendor search.
"Hey Markco,
My main is Demox 80 Lock on Azgalor(PVP) server. Well populated. Over the past couple months since the new DE feature for dungeons I have noticed that there has been a significant decrease on the amount of the BOE greens in the AH. I know with myself having multiple alts I usually depend on the AH alot of times for gearing them while leveling. Besides the quest rewards there is no real way to properly gear for your class/ spec while leveling. Especially if u stray from the common leveling specs. So my idea has been to grind a few instances on my 80's and start selling them outright on the AH instead of DE'ing them. I have gotten a huge return from this. (Level 65+ Champion items sell for around 80g+ right now quickly!) So this has stirred my thoughts alittle and I have aquired a new toon with a guild bank and bought all the tabs(Besides my current banker :) ). Each tab is going to hold something different ie.... 1st tab Weps 2nd tab Cloth..... I think i will do this over the next few months till cataclysm and keep the quickest selling( Champion, Eagle, Bear items) When Cataclysm drops I will then advertised my own Ah of sorts and see how they sell for they should be in high demand with all the new and current levelers. What are your thoughts with this?
Also thanks for the great community that you have brought together here! It has played a big part to my big spending in the game!
Thanks, JW"
Awesome email... one of the best ways to make money on the auction house while leveling is taking those boe greens everyone else disenchants or vendors and sell them to fill the gaps of other players' gear slots. I know that on my mage on kel'thuzad I am absolutely willing to drop 8-12 gold on a piece of gear and 20-50 gold on a weapon (since I have no BOA gear). Many classes also improve to mail or plate gear at 40 so that is a great point to sell those types of gear to them. Shields for level 15 warrior or paladin tanks using the LFD tool are also really great sellers. Basically anything that fills a void, even gray shoulders can be sold for 1 gold!
"Hey Markco, Iv'e been following your blog for several months now and thought I'd share my latest idea with you, I faction switched my main character to horde, but my other 3 80s are alliance still, I got to thinking and came up with what I think is a great idea, a guild setting made to maximize profits. My thought would be my miner/enchanter who is now horde could make a guild, gather a few players who don't have the time or gear to raid or just pug all day, and get a solid group of people with maxed tradeskills. This would be more beneficial to the people with multiple toons with max professions of all kinds, but lack the reputation or rare recipes that would take weeks to months to get, you'd have a group of people with the works. Let me make an example, I go out on my paladin and mine titanium/saronite for an hour or so, come back and send my ore to the guild JC, get prospects for epic gems and have them cut into the limited supply cuts, smelt the saronite and gather the eternals from mining and send them to the guild blacksmith, get a few belt buckles, turn around and send any green quality gems to the JC again and get a few rings made, disenchant them and make some scrolls. The idea behind it would be to maximize profits from any tradeskill you have, that hour of mining that would net me as a solo player maybe 500g, has turned around and made me a profit closer to 1k, I haven't actually made the guild yet but I did this with a few close friends today and that was my result. Let me know your thoughts, god of gold =).
This is the perfect solution Imme for a group of players who do not have all the trade skills individually but when combined do manage to scrap together every profession. You are basically operating the same way many of the millionaires on the JMTC forums do, but as a collective instead of individually. Be very careful to set proper guidelines and rules so no one gets angry and to avoid any misunderstandings later down the road.
Good luck and let us know how you make out :)
I spoke about this in my glyph wall post and you should be worried about it becoming rampant. As prices drop for herbs (I was buying 5 gold icethorn the other day) you will see people attempting to sell glyphs very low to drive the other scribes off the market. Let's look at the costs for a 5 gold stack of herbs:
6 inks = 6 one ink glyphs
Each glyph costs 83 silver then and an additional 12 silver 50 copper for the resilient parchment. I can therefore sell glyphs above 95 silver 50 copper for a profit.
Imagine if someone posted all glyphs that take one ink to make for 1 gold 50 silver. Just think about how detrimental that would be to the glyph industry. Obviously it would take several people doing it to really make it work, as the glyph industry is just too large for one person to properly control, but if enough people start doing this things could get ugly really fast. The glyph wall is one hell of a weapon :)
What you described is difficult to pull off however, where one toon posts for 50 silver and the next posts for the correct amount. If timed perfectly then your opponents will post all at their fallback rates and you can suffer the minor loss of the 50 silver glyphs selling before the ones at the correct price do, not to mention pick up a bunch of super cheap glyphs to restock your guild bank tabs should they undercut.
Making Munie is a wow gold blog which focuses on Munie making the monies! This is a journal blog which has caught my eye as another example of how one player is marching towards the one million gold mark. Munie's businesses are spread out and very organized, bringing in approximately 30,000 gold per week.
What really made me enjoy this blog though is the level of detail... I mean just look at this post on Saronite Ore, what more can you add to it? Oh there is one thing, Munie suggested to vendor saronite ore after turning it into bars if you find it below 12 gold 50 silver, but I would urge Munie to make use of an alchemist and transmute into titanium bars.
One more thing to note is that Munie has had some road blocks on the quest for making gold... blizzard seems to not like it when players amass too much gold!
Great content and fantastic display of organization by the author, go check out Munie's wow gold blog!
"Hey Markco!
Andrew you are one of the few people out there who actually sees the cycles of wow, in particular with regards to infinite dust. You have researched it and know the best price to buy as well as what to sell it for and in what quantities. You understand that demand for an item can be used as a weapon when pricing your items; in this case you know that eventually your 4.5 gold stacks of infinite dust composed of three dust per stack will always sell in the allotted time period which you post in, so all the under cutters can be left alone thanks to demand taking them out of the market eventually.
Good job :)
Blogging
I got an email from Bigjimm of Phase 3 Profit who had a post on spending gold before cataclysm and asked me to respond. In his article, BigJimm addressed the posts I made regarding stocking up for cataclysm now rather than later. He brought up some good points, the first of which being that it is REALLY early to be stockpiling for cataclysm and I totally agree. However, if you really want to kick butt in cataclysm you are going to want to start saving up items now because I'm sure you will be absolutely astounded when you run out of old world and bc items regardless of how many you stockpiled. Especially enchants for leveling toons, you wait and see how crazy those fly off the auction house! That being said, everything should be done in moderation; you don't want to completely destroy all your current money making efforts or completely drain your coffers preparing for cataclysm. I like to think that about 10% of my income will go into investing for cataclysm and that I will hopefully see a 150% to 300% return on investment.
So what should you do if you have lots of gold and don't want to spend it all preparing for the inevitable inflation? Bigjimm suggested spending it on experience. That is actually a really good thing to spend it on! One thing I suggest is to buy pve runs for your gathering toons to get them 310% speed mounts. I've seen these hard mode runs go for 30k gold per toon on my server and this is definitely something that will quickly pay for itself if you farm consistently on the character, especially if you are a deathknight or paladin (I'm so jealous of you guys!). I like the idea of remembering to enjoy wrath before you lose it, so be sure to do just that with your hard earned gold!
Wow
With everything I do in a day sometimes it's hard to remember that I need to play wow in order to keep my blog current and interesting! The mage is leveling at a slower pace than I'd like and I have not spent my original 1 hour a day playing at all this week. I think I had one day that I even played on the auction house and that was to just empty my mail on my bank alt before doing dungeons on the mage. I hope to have more time next week to play. Thunderer and Jhaman both think that having a guild for castaclysm while we level is a good idea, so I may set that up next week. Stay tuned!
Real Life
Recovering from some kind of stomach virus that was not too pretty. If you heard me on Castaclysm this past week I did not sound too good and to make matters worse I even got my girlfriend sick! I am a terrible boyfriend :(. Also I'm hoping to get back to running as I haven't since a few days after the 10 miler in Philadelphia. I spent some time on the gold guide this week programming what will be the cataclysm page as I felt that the current wotlk version's layout is not what I really envisioned for the guide. I plan on having a single php page which will display all of the guide from that one location thanks to a series of controls which will help readers navigate between chapters and their pages. I think everyone will appreciate having the chapters broken up into multiple pages instead of the giant html screens they currently encompass. A demo of what I have planned is currently available when you log into the guide.
"Markco,
You have a fantastic blog. I have read it daily for the past 6+ months and I am very grateful for all the time and effort you put into sharing ideas with the WoW community. I am a small-time earner (160K gold w/o gems or enchants), but one of these days I plan to kick things into high gear and establish a more formal system.
However, a question occurred to me and I think your response would make a interesting blog post. If making tons of gold is so easy using the glyph market (and I am not arguing with the results as it seems there are plenty of people there doing it), why haven't the Gold Farmers got in on the action on every sever and effectively destroyed the market? With a relatively low barriers to entry, it would seem a natural fit.
Thanks.
Matt"
I'm sure they have Matt! The nice part about the glyph market is that it is so big no one person can really control it without devoting ridiculous amounts of time babysitting, organizing and crafting. Also, I'm not sure how much time farmers actually put into their gold making but there is a lot of setup required to properly run a glyph business; just organizing multiple characters with glyph bags and gathering of thousands of inks is a barrier to entry. These farmers often have quotas to meet, like 300 gold per hour or something, which is also why you see them selling items for so cheap on the auction house: they need their gold this hour to pay for their quota at the end of an eight hour shift. Factor in the gold required to get books of glyph mastery and very few farmers would be willing to do this, at least not the short term ones who basically just want to meet their quota and then allow the next farmer to take their place on the same toon. Many farmers leave nothing for the next person who will take over their shift, so if they tried to leave mats to make more glyphs than the next person would probably sell these to meet their own quota!
Professions in general are usually left to gathering for farmers since this requires no materials in the bags of the farmer to get the job done. A farmer would rather sell a bunch of herbs now for 20 gold than spend the five minutes it takes to turn these into inks and then products to sell for 100 gold over night. It's consistent and that's all a farmer really desires. I'm sure there are some gold selling companies out there who make gold with professions but they are few and far between. As far as individual farmers using professions to craft items goes, it's a rare sight indeed.
Thank you for the tip Epistaxis! This is definitely one of those interesting secrets for making gold which the vast majority of players are unaware even exists! I know a few friends who camp a toon on their server for the sole purpose of farming these cats... every day they log in, check the three locations for the boss and if he's not there log off and go back to playing their main characters. You don't need a very high level toon to do this either, so if you have a mid level alt collecting dust send him/her to silverpine for some easy gold :)
While leveling my mage on Kel'thuzad I managed to gather quite a bit of Flask of Oils, particularly in west fall from all the Harvesters. These oils are used in engineering for the Universal Remote and Jumper Cables which are created by most engineers either leveling their profession or just trying to get all the gadgets available to their character. These oils are often vendored by players or just not picked up because they don't understand what they are used for, but if you actually save these and place them on the auction house you'll be surprised at how much they can be sold for. I sold a stack for 10 gold on my Mage at first and eventually moved towards selling them individually for 1 gold each.
I am passionate about finding new ways to make gold. It’s fun to me and continues to drive me forward into cataclysm. To me, as Sean and Patrick pointed out in their How I Wow podcast interview with me, the gold is not the goal, success is the goal. They knew it just from a two hour conversation with me, after knowing very little about me prior to that discussion. It’s all about passion. You either have it or you don’t and if you don’t then you should go do something that you are passionate about instead of what you are now.
Mobs here in Grizzly Hills drop 50 silver sacred mojo 50% of the time! I made about 10 gold in 2 minutes here... absolutely awesome. Toss in some worg meat from the occasional wolf, a few big gray weapons, and the mid level green and you have a great farming spot for level 80's who can one shot the mobs.
Thank you Wetsuit for the post!
"Hey Marcko,
Before I started selling on the AH (Bloodhoof Horde) I spent several days farming up not one, but two Hyacinth Macaws from the pirates in STV to make some cash (I sold them for 6k each - could have made more, but I was impatient). While farming, I picked up a First Mate's Hat which I promptly tried to sell for some ridiculous amount of gold, thinking someone would pay big money to look "cool".
I spent about a month adjusting the price point, but nobody would bite. Then one day, I saw another First Mate's Hat in the AH for 33k. I immediately listed my hat for 1k and it sold ovenight. Maybe someone suddenly wanted a hat really bad, but I was operating under the assumption that someone with an auction AddOn would scan the hat, find it listed as a "deal", and snap it up without thinking. This was a reminder for me that you should play every aspect of the business: the market, the people, the addons, everything.
Thanks for the great site and keep up the good work!
Anesthia
Bloodhoof"
The reason it happened is addons. That hat rarely appears on the ah, so when someone saw it for the first time, one for 33k and one for 1k, auctioneer (if it saw these for the first time) told the newbie auctioneer that the 1k was an amazing deal. This is actually a very valid strategy for many items, even common ones where you post on one toon for excessive prices and another for slightly above average prices.
Wow
Today's corner is all about the control. In science class you may have learned that the control is the part of the experiment which is used as the normal or unaffected piece which you can compare to the affects of your experiment. In the case of making gold while leveling, Thunderion was the control, Jhaman was the new person trying out a few strategies, and I was the full blown master. The experiment is still going on, but here are the approximate results so far:
Markco Level 26 - 800 gold in bags (mount, gear, trade skill supplies purchased)
Jhaman Level 29 - 40 gold in bags earned (mount, gear, trade skill supplies purchased)
Thunderion Level 20 - 2 gold in bags (skills purchased)
Jhaman is following the simplest methods of my guide, the really noob friendly and basic sections whereas I am moving on to some of the more advanced strategies which require an understanding of market mechanics and item values. Now keep in mind that neither Jhaman or Thunderion are stupid people/players, but they do have limitations on their time and we are all making leveling our primary concern. For this reason I limitted my auction house time to 30 minutes maximum (including emptying mail box), Jhaman is spending about 15 minutes at most and usually every other day and Thunderion hasn't even seen the auction house.
As you can see from the results, if you are more dedicated to making gold and have an excellent grasp of strategies you will easily acquire massive amounts of money quickly in this game, especially while leveling even without professions. Currently I'm using enchanting/mining but I may switch to enchanting/tailoring since I'm quickly out leveling my mining using the LFD tool. I decided to write a small new chapter for the gold guide based on these findings and analyze each profession's usefulness when combined with the looking for dungeon tool. So far I haven't made much use of my trade skills for making gold and have primarily been flipping items on the auction house.
Castaclysm has been exploding in terms of growth, it appears that many players enjoy listening to Thunderer, Jhaman and myself go back and forth about the upcoming wow expansion.
I've been watching for gold making blogs this week and I came across a few good ones, but one that really sticks out as consistently releasing good content is Cold's Gold Factory. The one post I really liked was extremely simple but effective: Flipping Black Vitriol. Check his site out and let him know what you think!
Real Life
The 10 mile broad street run was really fun and I must say I would do it again next week in a heart beat! It was a wonderful crowd (both in the race and cheering us on) and there was plenty of really distracting characters during the race to keep things interesting... a guy running it backwards, people wearing funny outfits, a preacher on a soap box yelling at us in south philly, and so on and so on. I really enjoyed the experience of doing such a massive group event, and I just want to say grats to anyone else who ran the race last weekend.
Life has been pretty divided between my online blogging work and projects outside of the realm of the internet. I played starcraft 2 and I must say it is a brilliantly designed game!!! Little things like units canceling attacks since the target is going to die from another missile are absolutely ground breaking. What's more the editor is just made for someone like myself who loves to program games and provides a lot of power which I hope to tap into some time in the near future.
"Markco,
Here are the most popular twink and leveling enchants for low level characters and how to get them. Make these a part of your enchanter's scroll production pronto! Also make the materials for these items a part of your snatch or resale scans. Either pick them up to make the enchants or flip them for the enchanters on your server who want to sell the enchants.
Enchant Weapon
Enchant Weapon Firey can be obtained by killing Pyromancer Loregrain in BRD.
Enchant Weapon Lifestealing can be gained by killing Spectral Researchers in Sholomance.
Enchant Weapon Crusader can be farmed by killing Scarlet Archmage from Eastern Plaguelands or Scarlet Spellbinder from Western Plaguelands.
Enchant Weapon Spellpower is a zone drop from Molten Core.
Edit: Enchant Weapon - Agility is from the Timbermaw Hold and requires honored with them.
Enchant Chest
Enchant Chest - Major Health and Enchant Chest - Major Mana can be purchased from vendors (mana can also drop in the world... of warcraft).
EDIT: For clarification the math on this email is a little off... the average amount of gold you get for vendoring the results of prospecting saronite ore should average out to about 7-9 gold unless you get very lucky. That being said, prospecting saronite ore will always yield more gold than it cost to buy it for around vendor price if you cut the gems or even sell them raw.
"Hey Markco,
"Hello Markco,
"Hello Markco,
I was browser my local AH today and noticed the prices of Iceblade Arrows dropped. I did a little experiment. Instead of selling the normal stack of 1000, I instead sold a stack of 100 for around 2-3g. The arrows sold with haste and I was able to net in about 100g just from the little amount I put in. Do you think this is a good idea? Is it dishonest, or just using the AH to my advantage?
-Harry"
Well Harry... how about selling them individually for the same price. It's evil so I enjoy doing it to the alliance AH hehe... Ironically on Kel'thuzad there is someone doing this for dozens of pages of arrows at a time, damn someone has too much time on their hands!
The AH Pile (aka Stokpile's blog), is one of the best "journal style" blogs I've seen on the net for making gold in world of warcraft. I love the fact that Stokpile goes into as much or more detail than Tella's blog 'hit the cap', and has a good sense of humor to boot. There are lots of screen shots and great content throughout the blog due to the fact that Stokpile does an excellent job of detailing how he makes his gold.
These style blogs are my favorite because they tell the story of the author as they detail their adventures in making gold. The screen shots are especially nice (something most people don't bother updating to their gold blogs... cough I rarely post images cough) and I enjoyed the information that Stokpile made the extra effort to link to in his posts.
Only thing I didn't like was a tinge of negativity and social elitisim similiar to that of Gevlon's blog, but no where near as extreme. Now I know that's sort of the pot calling the kettle black since I like to play the elitist role for fun and let's face it JMTC is one hot site, but I don't put other players down in the process (aka morons, slackers, etc). Sometimes you just have to put the game in perspective and realize that someone not knowing as much as you or having a different opinion doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Definitely a blog worth reading and it's not one I've seen advertised despite the wealth of information found within it (there is a link on the JMTC forums link love section however).
Go check out The AH Pile!
