Markco's Corner: Gold Guru

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

Wow

My mage on kelthuzad took a leveling break and I focused on my toons on Onyxia to try and make some gold (I wanted to see if I still have the guru magic!). Besides thunderer has to get his rogue higher so the three of us can play together again in dungeons.

Ok here’s a breakdown of my toons and their profits this week:

Scribe: 8k

Transmute Titansteel(I have two of these cooldowns)/Vendor Pet Seller/Iceblade Arrow Singles: 2k

Transmute Titanium/Transmute Epic Gem: 1200 (I did no epic or rare gem sales this week)

Tailoring Bags: 3k

Leatherworker Leg Armor Kits and Bags: 3k

Blacksmithing Belts, Plating and Rods/Enchanting Scrolls and Disenchanting: 4k

Time played: Sunday (3 hours – mostly crafting, some posting), Monday (1 hour – posting only), Tuesday (2 hours – some crafting, mostly posting). For my daily transmutes and cooldowns I only had 3 days worth.

I only played a couple of hours, but with the amount which I did I raked in 21,200 gold by the end of the week from all the sales. Sales are probably still coming in as I will post Thursday for 48 hours since I won’t be in all weekend (I am writing this article Wednesday). I’m hoping to break 30k for the week and considering the amount of played time that’s pretty damn impressive. This included crafting/stocking which I desperately needed to do on every single toon. I didn’t do any cross server auctions as I just didn’t have the time but I’m guessing if I had I would have almost doubled my inventory and therefore sales.

So what did I do differently this week versus other weeks that I have focused on making gold? Well for starters I removed items from my sales cycle, specifically glyphs below 20 gold in value and added other items with the time I saved not crafting/posting inexpensive glyphs. I also saved time not having to go through hundreds of unsold glyphs which ate up a good 5-10 minutes reposting for very little money in return. With the additional 5-10 minutes of play time I was able to add vendor pets as well as transmuting titanium bars to my routine. I didn’t want to tackle jumping into the epic/rare gem selling business full swing because my QA3 settings are months old and I didn’t have time to fine tune them. I also have literally 3 epic gems in stock and I ran out of rare/uncommon gems last week. With saronite ore prices soaring this week I was unable to resupply.

There are little things I do in between these activities such as transmuting to eternal water for the belt buckles or crafting cobalt war axes for disenchanting purposes. Also I have two accounts so one is always crafting or buying while the other is posting and the one that is posting is usually crafting at the same time. On the rare occasion that I am crafting on one toon and have nothing for the other account to do I will farm herbs or ore. This happened Sunday when I was crafting a hundred and thirty three netherweave bags which took like an hour. Normally that hour would be a waste since that’s only 1330 gold profit (approximately) but since I’m doing other things at the same time on a separate account like posting, crafting and farming it’s totally worth the effort. (During the time played this week I actually never farmed, but that is an option while one toon is posting if my other toon is out of chores to do).

I was disappointed in my stocking as I’m still getting back into the grove of making serious gold. I tend to run out of items too fast and have to waste time resupplying. For instance I ran out of all my non combat pets except red moths and squirrels by Monday and had to go around collecting/crafting more. I’ve spent so much time trying to make gold as a ‘normal’ player in order to craft strategies and build material for the blog that sometimes I lose that guru edge which got me my mountain of gold in the first place. I spent this week getting it back and next week I will return to leveling on the mage. I still haven’t taken the time to do a proper resale/vendor scan on kel'thuzad and Jhaman’s priest found a 1k gold pet in wailing caverns which means he is probably going to pass me in making gold. I’m at like 1k myself but it’s been 90% from just selling the items I get while leveling and strange dust from disenchanting low level greens I buy on the auction house. I need to step it up a notch next week and do scans every day. That should make me about 300 gold a scan and then the items I get while leveling should double that. If I stick to 80% leveling and 20% making gold I should hit 80 with a decent played time and way more than 20k gold.

SC2

I played with the editor and created a third person view game (with alternating cameras at key points). It took about 8 hours of playing around with it during Saturday/Sunday but I made it so you can move with the ASWD keys as well as strafe with the QE keys. Space bar fires a shotgun blast which hits the nearest target in range and also create a bunch of shots in front of you to add some random bonus damage. I put in little blue circles which replenish your health that you can pick up by running them over. There’s a bug where you can shoot and make them disappear but I wasn’t sure how to fix it (I made the attack ignore invulnerable targets but I think the splash still targets them). [Update: It's not in the video but I have mouseturn working currently!]

Some issues so far: I haven’t figured out how to make the unit not shake when moving the camera. I’ll have to start looking into how other map makers are doing it. I cannot wait until we are able to do functions and preset variables. Also, I’m looking forward to building a third person RPG with saved states and the ability to ‘log off’ the map and come back later to the same game. My programming abilities really help with the map making but they designed the editor so well that you can pretty much do anything without real programming. Some rudimental knowledge of while loops and simple functions are all you need to make really killer maps.

If I have time I’ll put a copy of the map on my 20kleveling.com server and allow you all to download it that have star craft 2: wings of liberty Beta as well as the galaxy editor. I might create a video of me playing it as well since I have to assume most of you don’t have the beta. I'm looking for feedback on whether I should create a seperate website for custom starcraft 2 maps.

Real Life

Busy busy! Another big family outing is this weekend so I’ll be out of commission most likely until Sunday night (and probably won’t answer emails or moderate comments while away). I’ve been working on selling my Successful Blog Story and it’s doing ok but I focused 90% of my attention this week on JMTC and the podcasts.

Podcasts

I recorded for castaclysm this week but wasn't able to hook up with Basil for Call to Auction. Call to auction actually has an episode now waiting in the wings so we can go into normal production with one episode hopefully coming out every week or so. Castaclysm is doing sensationally well and one commenter stated that we are the ‘tightest’ podcast out there for wow mostly because Thunderer constantly keeps Jhaman and myself on track while all three of us maintain a humorous attitude no different than when we are together on vent playing the game. Definitely check out both podcasts if you haven’t already.