Invest in this Cross Server Gold Strategy

Booty in booty bay.

Post Submitted by Grumpier from Stormrage

Set Up
This isn't meant to be a cross-faction selling guide, but simply a focus on how you can obtain easily purchased or earned faction exclusive items and sell them on the other faction for massive profit.  For this guide, I will focus on buying items on Horde and sell them on Alliance, sometimes I sell certain cooking recipes and pets for over 40g each. The same thing can be done in reverse for Alliance to Horde selling.

In order to even be able to sell  cross-faction, you will need at minimum one horde character and one alliance character. The two characters need to be on separate accounts, you cannot purchase auction items listed from the same account even if you are using the neutral auction house. So either use a second account yourself (google search or ask in game the best way to do this), or find an Alliance friend that you can trust to help you.

First, I created a new DK on the horde side of the alliance server that I play on. It gave me an instant mount and all the flightpath locations...all except for the new one at the Bulwark between T. Glades and W. Plague. I paid a mage to port me to Dalaran so I could bind my hearth there.

I then proceeded to make a Troll AH alt and sent him from Orgrimmar on the Zeppelin to Grom'gol. I then swam along the coast taking care to be far enough off the coast as to not agro any mobs and swam into Booty Bay, up the ramp and sat him next to the neutral AH auctioneer.

I then parked an Alliance character in BB to be my Alliance side purchaser. I used him to send the Horde exclusive items to my main bank alt.

I needed some cash on the horde side in order to buy the faction exclusive items. There is some amount of gold that you end up with after the DK completes the DK start area, but you will need more cash as you go.

The easiest way to get the starting capital is to place an item on the neutral AH from the Horde character to be purchased by the Alliance character. The item doesn't matter, it can be anything, the object is to build the capital needed to purchase the faction exclusive items. The neutral AH will take 15% of the purchase price for their cut. Don't worry about losing your 15%...you will make it ALL up probably on the first purchase. You can continue to monitor your funding through the subsequent purchases of the faction exclusive items to come.

As you sell the items, be leery of someone looking to snatch your items off the AH before you can purchase them. It has never happened to me, but I've read of it happening to others.

On to the purchases:

Jump on your trusty DK...

First port to Silvermoon, ride out of the city and go immediately west and into the Ruins of Silvermoon. Go into the inn and up the stairs to the far back to find Landrealanis he sells Recipe: Lynx Steak. I normally buy 12 of each item.

Separate Idea Regarding Quantity and Mailbox Management-
I buy 12 at a time so that when my Alliance character buys off the neutral AH I can send each separate item as one full mail package to my Alliance bank alt. For instance I will send 12 Recipe: Lynx Steak in a single email group. When you send a group of 12 items, the mail title displays the first item in the group. I like to keep all the recipes/pets/items separate for easier access and it keeps me from having to check inside each mail group to see what is contained inside. Each piece of mail will contain the remaining number of those items I have left. On a side note, with the Altoholic addon, it will tell you how many of each item you have in your bags/mail/AH. If I see that I have one in the AH, or in my bags I don't take it out of the mail, until the last one sells. One other precaution. Make sure that either you already know all these items or be careful to make sure that the mailbox is opened to the Send Mail page or you will accidentally "learn" the item.

Second item is found by riding directly south of Ruins of Silvermoon to Fairbreeze Village. In the building on the left you will find Jilanne, she sells Golden, Red and Silver Dragonhawk's. buy 12 each and at this point I generally go to the mailbox in Fairbreeze and send all I've purchased to my Neutral AH seller alt.

Third item is Recipe: Bat Bites from Master Chef Mouldier . From Fairbreeze head south to Tranquillien in Ghostlands he is up by the inn. Buy 12 recipes.

Fourth item is a limited supply item found in Hammerfall. Fly from Tranquillen to Hammerfall in Arathi Highlands jump off the platform and go directly east into the building inside the fenced off area. There you will find, Tunkk he sells the limited supply item Pattern: Raptor Hide Harness. Before you auction any of the limited supply exclusive items, make sure you have evaluated the market. These items will easily sell for hundreds, but I've sold them for over 1000g. Use your normal auction house strategies accordingly.

Additional option-
Before proceeding to the fifth item in this list you may want to take a quick ride to Silverpine Forest. There is a limited supply enchant recipe, Formula: Enchant Chest - Lesser Mana (that is also sold in Orgrimmar, see item eight below.) This vendor is named Lilly and is found in a small camp south of The Sepulcher at the location 43, 50.

Also, there is a rare spawn mob in Ambermill called the Dalaran Spellscribe. This mob either male or female can sometimes drop the pet Cat Carrier (Black Tabby.) It is the only way in the game to get this item, and the mob is friendly to Alliance, so only horde can get the item. Do a wowhead search of the Dalaran Spellscribe for more information.

If you decide to proceed through this option once finished, run back to The Sepulcher and take a flight to get you back on route to Brill.

Fifth item is found by taking flight from Tranquillien to either Undercity or to The Bulwark. Ride up to Brill where you will find Abigail Shiel . She is standing in front of a wagon on the left side. Purchase 12 Recipe: Bat Wings.

At this point take the Zeppelin to Orgrimmar. If you hearth now you will waste time at the next stop.

Sixth item is found by jumping off the Zeppelin and head south to Razor Hill. There you will find Grimtak . Buy 12 Pattern: Scorpid Surprise. Send your items to AH character.

Hearth to Dalaran and port to Orgrimmar.

Seventh item is found by locating Xan'tish . He "partols" from Valley of Spirits to the NW entrance to Orgrimmar. Purchase only Brown Snake and Black Kingsnake. Alliance characters can purchase Crimson Snake on Alliance side. Buy 12 each.

Eighth item can be found in two places. Formula: Enchant Chest - Lesser Mana can be found in The Drag at the first shop called Godan's Runeworks. Look for Kithas . It is a limited supply item, so she may or may not have it. I will usually buy all the Strange Dust and Lessser Magic Essence she has. She also sells Formula: Enchant 2H Weapon - Lesser Intellect this is not a faction exclusive item, but can sell for much more than the 4s 50c purchase. As stated earlier you can also obtain this item in Silverpine Forest.

Ninth item can be found by heading to Valley of Honor past the fireworks wagon to Nogg's Machine Shop. (I miss DS9) There you will find Sovik . He sells a limited supply item called Schematic: Red Firework. If you want to buy any of the engineering mats, feel free. He also sells Schematic: Steam Tonk Controller, but Alliance can purchase that item as well.

Tenth item is found by taking the Orgrimmar wind rider to Brakenwall Village in Dustwallow Marsh. Look for Ogg'mar he sells Recipe: Heavy Crocolisk Stew, buy 12. I also purchase Dragonbreath Chili from him because they generally sell well.

Eleventh item is at the Crossroads. Find Tari'qa he sells Recipe: Crispy Lizard Tail. Buy 12.

Twelfth item is in Thunder Bluff. Take the wind rider to Thunder Bluff. This vendor is in an out of the way location. Go to the bottom of the giant totem and go left past the bank/mailbox. You'll see a trail going up to the next level take the trail up until you go under the bridge. You'll see a hut with Halpa . She sells Prairie Dog Whistles, buy 12.

Thirteenth item is found by mounting up and heading south to Bloodhoof Village. There you will find Wilma Darkmane . She is in the large hut in the NE of the village. She sells Recipe: Roast Kodo Meat.

Additional item-
There is a quest where you can obtain Pattern: Kodo Hide Bag from Veren Tallstrider in the leatherworking hut in Thunder Bluff. You need to be level 5 in order to complete this quest. You will need to bring him 4 Light Leather and 3 Course Thread to complete the quest. The pattern is BOE and can be sold cross-faction. It may seem strange, but you can level up to 5 in very little time. I've sold a similar leatherworking pattern from Alliance to Horde for 1500g.

I haven't written it up, but there is a similar process I go through in acquiring Alliance items, obviously the majority of Alliance only cooking recipes are much easier to acquire because they are sold in Stormwind. One thing I've done, but haven't watched it precisely to what it takes in time and mats is to create a Night Elf and go to Dolanaar, there is a level one cooking quest for Kaldorei Spider kabob, it takes 7 small spider legs to finish the quest. I sent in one of my mains to kill a bunch of the spiders to get the legs then either hand them to my level one NE or just send them in the mail. I've been able to sell these recipes for between 400-800 on Horde side Stormrage. Also, if you level up to 7 you can complete the quest needed to obtain Pattern: Moonglow Vest. It will take your character multiple stacks of Light Leather to get to 70 in leatherworking and requires a set of leatherworking items that you turn in to obtain the pattern. I have sold this item 3 times for between 1000-1500g. I'm sure you were well aware of this already.

Marcko-

1) If you want to add it to your guide feel free.

2) If there are any other patterns/pets/other items I should add to the guide, let me know.

3) Thanks for your podcasts and for the website. It really has helped me to look more outside the box on my AH life. I have played toned down versions of many of the ideas that I've read on your site, but it has taken my thinking to new levels.

One of the funnest parts of this was spending a good part of one afternoon selling item by item filling bag after bag and filling mailbox after mailbox of my guildmates with stacks of these items for their mains and alts...LOL!

Mains and alts get really mixed this far into a game. I play an 80  Dwarven hunter named Grumpier and a 75 Dwarven priest named Grumpiest on Alliance Stormwind. I play an almost 80 Troll hunter named Bittershot on AIE's guild on Earthen Ring. I have 70's rogues, paladins another priest and many other characters.
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Markco's Corner - The Blob

Markco working his magic!
The Blobg

Ever see the old science fiction / horror film the blob? Well sometimes I feel like JMTC is the blob, slowly working it's way across the internet growing larger and larger for the benefit of all wow gold aficionados (minus the gruesome slaughtering of innocents).

First off, let me know what you think of the new blog as I've been devoting quite a bit of time into improving the display and amount of information on the front page. Hopefully the two blog rolls on the left hand side of the site will provide you with ample reading material and if I missed a site you'd like included please let me know. I plan on redoing much of the site, but for now I think the key components are all present even if they don't necessarily look amazing. At a future date I will work on redoing the graphics for the site as well. I'd like to thank those readers who already emailed me with feedback and offered ideas for how I can improve the site. On a side note, I put in around 40 hours of work into the blog this week, I may not do anything this weekend except relax with family and my girlfriend.

If you haven't noticed, I've been changing the way I blog (not just looks) as I can never sit still and just allow my blog to plateau. This is because growing JMTC is a very fun and challenging experience for me and recently I've been stepping it up a notch in terms of my involvement in the community. I've been everywhere these past two weeks, reading up on various wow blogs and commenting, recording podcasts, writing guest posts for several major sites, preparing for the carnival on August 2nd, answering/posting questions on social media sites and networking behind the scenes with various bloggers and site owners. As you already know I just don't settle for second place in the wow gold blogging scene. If you'd like to read up on some of the places I've been lurking at you can check out the following articles:
Upcoming Events

I recently recorded episode 11 of Call to Auction and plan on doing the show more regularly with Euripides from outdps/wow.com and possibly Bigjimm from phase 3 profit. This weekend we will have issues recording but a schedule will be figured out soon enough. Of note is the fact that episode 11 was focused entirely on emailed questions that have been piling up in the call to auction mail box for quite some time. It made for possibly the best show we've done yet.

The Blogging Carnival is right on schedule to be released August 2nd and I have currently in my possession 27 articles from various blogs covering a gamut of topics related to making gold in wow. Quite a few authors still haven't finished their articles for the Carnival so hopefully they will be able to get their posts sent to me before August 2nd. Thank you to everyone who has sent in posts to participate as I believe it's going to be a lot of fun reading them all and interacting with one another.

If you like what you see... COMMENT! Let me know what YOU think. I don't often ask for comments but after putting 40 hours into the blog this week I really want to get some feedback.

Auctioneer Stage 2

"Hey Markco,

Been making a steady stream of gold since I started implementing some
of what you talk about in the podcast, blog, and on the JMTC forums. I
purchased your 20k leveling guide as well, and it's great. Up until
recently, I barely scanned the AH with Auctioneer because I didn't
know there was a fast scan button. Waiting 15 minutes for a slow scan
was ridiculous and I never let it finish. Now that I know about the
fast scan feature (double arrow in the browse tab), I have a tip for
people:

Click the button for fast scan, and once you see the loading bar get
to stage 2, you can safely hit escape, go pick up your mail, craft, do
whatever. Stage 1 is downloading, so you can't leave the AH for that
as far as I know. As I wrote this email, though, I was sitting at the
mailbox for stage 2... it's almost done stage 3, so I'm going to go do
a snatch search. Talk to you later!

Thanks,
Domenic D"

Free Cataclysm Gold Forum



Many of you have already taken the journey of registering or even just reading over the voluminous Just My Two Copper Wow Gold Making Forums and are probably excited about just how powerful the site will become when it is the Cataclysm Gold Forums instead of the WOTLK one it is today. Oh and excuse my horrible voice over in this video... apparently I have trouble reading lol.

Just look at the current statistics as of July 28, 2010:

Total posts 35014 | Total topics 4468 | Total members 4385

It's crazy when I think about it as this gold making forum was originally designed as a place for JMTC fans to just hang out and talk about gold, and I never expected it to flourish into the massive gold making library it is today. Just think about how powerful it will be for Cataclysm when all the new profession gold making methods start appearing and new farming locations open up in the ravaged azeroth. Where will you go for Cataclysm gold tips, Cataclysm profession guides and better yet ask your Cataclysm gold making questions? Probably the same place I'll be going to, the JMTC Wow Gold Forums where not just gold capped players but a dozen or so millionaires also share their thoughts. The best part is... it's free with options to help support and pay for the site hosting costs. You can even view 99% of the site without registering or becoming a premium member (small one time payment, no recurring payment).

Quick Link List for the Forums
Cataclysm Profession Help *Currently WOTLK*
OMG I Can't Make Gold
Wow Gold Success Stories
Addon Help

For the comments section, how has the JMTC gold making forum helped you with tips, tricks or strategies? Could you link to any areas in particular which you have found particularly useful? This will greatly help newer forum goers find good information to get started with. Thanks!

QA3 AND Auctioneer


An interesting post yesterday at the Greedy Goblin's blog discussed in great detail whether it was better to use QA3 or Auctioneer in pricing your auctions in world of warcraft. I disagree with several points and I hope to explain to you some things about using these addons in the process of articulating my point of view on this issue. By the way, you can find tutorials on posting with both addons in the tutorials section of the site, as well as by looking up posts under the add-ons tag.

First off, the title itself implies that you must choose one: QA3 or Auctioneer. No offense to Gevlon but I find this concept by itself to be a foolish and narrow-minded premise. Why do I have to choose one over the other? Why can’t I have both? Auctioneer is an incredible tool for finding market trends and exploiting them while QA3 is amazing for camping the auction house. The way I like to break it up is that items which will go on 12 hour timers really should be posted with QA3 because I expect them to sell quickly and if they don’t sell I’ll be reposting them around 12 hours from now or less anyway. With Auctioneer, as long as I’m scanning daily to keep my market data accurate, I can use this addon to buy the mats for items I will sell with QA3 as well as see how much my items are going for compared to market trends. Auctioneer’s batch post is also great for my 48 hour auctions priced right around market value and hopefully demand will take care of undercutting. They are as different as night and day and therefore should be used in conjunction with each other.

There is no “I’m an Auctioneer user vs I’m a QA3 user”! When people talk about one vs the other what they really are talking about is the posting method behind both addons, because well, that’s the only thing that they have in common. Auctioneer has a plethora of tools which you can use to snatch items for crafting, milling, prospecting, smelting, etc. QA3 is solely for posting and canceling in bulk as well as analyzing whole crafting markets instead of just one item at a time. You can do a QA3 scan for glyphs or gems for instance and get a snapshot of how you’re doing in the market place as a whole. Auctioneer’s bean counter is meant for one item at a time so imagine having to look up 100 glyphs one at a time instead of just pushing get data and waiting a few seconds like you can with QA3.

Another point regarding Gevlon’s post… he believes that players posting items for cheap are morons and slackers. Actually Gevlon, prices on the auction house have everything to do with supply and demand rather than the intelligence of the posters. Sure someone could post an item for 10% market value and because the price is so low outliers like that will get purchased almost immediately. If there are lots of items below the normal market value then it can be assumed that there is too much supply and not enough demand. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. The reason why the Inscription market is so strange and random is not because a bunch of kiddies are posting incorrectly but rather due to the fact that demand is entirely random and impossible to predict. The market swings up and down randomly because of the demand, not because a bunch of people abuse addons and ah camp. The camping is actually a simple solution to the demand issue with inscription.

What items should be posted with which addon?

It depends entirely upon your strategy and how quickly you need to get your gold back. High competition, fast selling markets with short durations such as glyphs should really use the QA3 method of undercutting the lowest person by 1 copper or whatever you set it to (I recommend 1 copper). Although you can rely on auctioneer to accurately predict the average price of a glyph, there are too many changes and fluctuations in glyph prices to rely on it for any of the less commonly sold ones. Certain minors such as Glyph of Charge could be posted using Auctioneer because demand for the item will often remove all competition posting below normal price. But since glyphs can go from 60 gold to 2 gold in a matter of minutes and stay that way for days or weeks at a time, it’s not as profitable in my expert opinion to post glyphs with auctioneer. Unless of course you are glyph walling.

Netherweave bags are an excellent item to decide which addon to post with because you can make the argument for either short or very long postings. Let’s say that theoretically on my server 50 bags sell every day. There are usually 20-40 on the ah at any one time and I have to make the decision whether to post my auctions on short or very long. Since so many bags are purchased on a daily basis I can assume that posting at the lowest price will guarantee me sales even if a few people undercut me later in the day or even the next hour. However, the demand is so high for netherweave bags that I could also post in the middle range of prices, say with 20-30 bags below mine and still see them sell in a 48 hour period. I’ve done both and both work. The question is, do you want your gold immediately or are you willing to wait and let them sell for 1.5-2x more gold? Since market trends are the real value behind auctioneer and using its average price as a guide to what the market SHOULD always return to, you will see a higher return posting on 48 hours with netherweave bags at auctioneer’s average price than with QA3 at 12 hours. If you understand the market and when bags will spike then you can post a little higher than market average a day or so in advance of that happening. That’s where auctioneer as the edge over QA3’s posting method but since you can’t predict say the price of glyph of charge a day from now or even an hour from now with anything close to 100% accuracy, I would highly discourage the use of auctioneer to post the glyph.

There’s more to this argument however over which addon is better and Gevlon brought it up by stating:

Using the above logic falls” … (fails) … “only one market: glyphs. If you look at the 1000% profit (4G mats, 40G price), you say it's an M&S” … (morons and slackers) … “market, so 1c undercutting is the proper move. However there are often campers who are not M&S and - despite they sell only a few items a time - are representing a near-infinite selling power. You will not sell anything with QA3 since they undercut you the second you log out. The proper action here therefore Auctioneer, or manually configuring QA3 to cut deep under them.”

This is a pretty bitter statement and probably has to deal with the fact that Gevlon is struggling to make 4k gold a week with his inscription business (admitted in comments on Tobold’s blog). I’m not judging and saying he’s bad for doing that as Gevlon could just be posting two days a week or something with nothing but glyphs. Even though his statement “You will not sell anything with QA3 since they undercut you the second you log out” is a horribly inexperienced opinion, there is reasoning behind the quote you can learn from about your competition. “They undercut you the second you log out” is a topic I’ve talked about in the past with Euripides and we actually discussed it on call to auction recently. Adding opponent’s on the auction house to your friends list is an ingenious way of dealing with people trying to mass undercut you the moment you log off and it brings about some interesting espionage and counter espionage tactics which can make for some really fun auction house battles. If you suspect someone is tracking when you log off and undercutting you, simply log off your toon and post on another about 10 minutes later. Another way to deal with ah campers running QA3 is to avoid using the cancel post until you have run out of stock. This way you have auctions up twice as long as the competitor who runs a cancel scan and scurries back to their mail box to collect and then later post the items.

The take away boys and girls from this long winded post is that you should not choose either QA3 or Auctioneer for posting but rather use them in tangent with each other. For 12 hour postings use quick auctions 3 as well as for bulk canceling items during peak hour undercutting battles with things like flasks, gems, glyphs and enchanting scrolls. For 48 hour postings where you fire and forget, hoping that market value and demand will take care of undercutters such as netherweave bags, leg armors, titanium weapon chains and belt buckles use Auctioneer. There are instances where you might want to use QA3 on a 48 hour timer or auctioneer on a 12 hour timer but as a general rule of thumb that’s how I break them up.

So do you choose one over the other or use them together for posting your auctions?

Why are the common recipes so profitable?

"Hi Marko


(Feel free to publish on your blog, podcast, whatever)

I'm an admirer of your blog and podcast. I've picked up some gold-making gems from you over the past couple of years; thanks very much.
I'd appreciate your thoughts on a recent trend I've observed.

I cut my gold-making teeth back in vanilla WoW making Flarecore Robes. I bought the recipe, bought mats from the auction house and sold the item, which was rare at the time and extremely profitable. I've been repeating this general mode of crafting ever since: buy rare recipe, buy mats as needed, sell.

It's always been profitable to concentrate on hard-to-get and rare recipes. Recipes learned from trainers or used for levelling haven't ever been profitable (except for a few globally required items such as bags, and the profit margin on these is small). This is the conventional wisdom which has been guiding my thinking since day one.

However, I've noticed a definite change recently. The biggest selling items on my tailor are level 80 spellthreads. I sell a dozen of each kind every day, making 50-100g each on the purple spellthreads and about 20g on the blue ones. I also sell items from the Frostsavage set, selling about one full set each day at about 300g total profit. I have also noticed similar trends in the other professions (such as the Inscription off-hands you mentioned in the last podcast).

I've been trying to figure out a reason for this. After all, anybody can make these items, they are trainable from the standard trainer and can be used to level. Surely they can't be this profitable?

I've come up with a couple of ideas, I wondered what you thought and how these might be applied to other professions:
- The window of opportunity for rare recipes is now very small; once a few other crafters have the same recipe you're fighting over the same small number of customers. I think this is due to most people having the same "conventional wisdom" as I did that rare recipes are the profitable ones.
- At this stage of the expansion there are much fewer people levelling professions, therefore it is much less likely that people are dumping these items on the AH at cost.



Thanks


Ayresome
EU-Azsune."

The answer to your question is complicated and a direct result of the supply/demand balance on your server. Have too many crafters for the rarer recipes and supply will overcome demand. Of course the exact opposite conditions would bring about a reversed outcome as well. The demand for the common goods is often so great that no amount of crafters will ever really saturate the market, in fact you'll find that there are times where the market rapidly fluctuates between over and under saturated. It's the job of a good auctioneer to find out when these extremes occur and strike by placing auctions or purchasing cheap items.

First Mate Hat

If you found this in your bags: first mate hat, would you throw it away? Would you disenchant it? Would you sell it to a vendor? Would you sell it on the ah for around 20 gold?

If you fall into that last category you will be my favorite person when I buy that 20 gold first mate hat from you and relist it for 5k gold. That's right, 5k gold for a level 35 hat. Is it best in slot you ask? Nope, it's actually only good for maybe a priest or arcane mage and definitely not best in slot for level 39's. What's so special about it you ask? Well don't let the tooltip fool you, that first mate hat is no hood, it's a real pirate hat!

This pirate hat makes the ultimate wardrobe for bankers trying to look like, you know, a pirate and is also among the rarest hats in the game. Make sure to add to your snatch list and buy it if the thing is going for less than 2k because it's easily worth 5k on a big server. It drops off bloodsail Mobs in stranglethorn and has a .001% chance of dropping (Some speculate it is even lower but I tend to believe it follows the epic drop rate of burning crusade at .001%).

Buy on Saturdays Mornings

Why should you buy on saturday mornings? Well because so many people are asleep and had posted the night before! Therefore you have lots of supply but little demand = rock bottom prices. I posted about this a long long time ago under the title Saronite Saturdays and I thought it was time to rehash this point.

I usually don't get to play on friday or saturday but I recently have been teaching my brother how to run my gold business for me (so he will eventually have his own as well). He's doing a great job and his favorite part is buying out tens of thousands of gold worth of mats just because he can lol. The best time he has noted for buying the most common level 80 items is (shock) saturday morning.

Maybe next saturday morning (if you're reading this post later today) you should leave the alarm on and take a look at the auction house.

Markco's Corner - Blogging Carnival in 2 Weeks!

Blogging Carnival August 2nd

The Carnival has already gotten enough submitted posts to be an excellent read but more keep coming in! If you haven’t submitted a link to your own gold making article you had better hurry up as I will need a day or two to compile the whole carnival (this includes writing a quick description for every post submitted). Each post will have the site's title, a link to the article, and a short description written by myself of what's inside the post. When I finish writing and organizing all the posts the end result will be a useful list of wow gold making inspirations from a variety of authors. It's a rare opportunity to get to share a collective audience with so many bloggers and their readers so be sure to send me a post if you'd like to be featured. I will need the post's link in by probably July 31st in order to have it ready in time.

Wow

Time in game was non-existent this week as I am focusing on blogging activities instead of in game gold experiments. I submitted my 240k gold in 2 months story to http://www.warcraftecon.net/ and hopefully they will have it published soon so I can link to it and show you all how I made so much gold so quickly as a casual player.

Real Life

Been slacking on my runs as I used to do 3-6 miles a day and now I am doing about 2 runs per week. This week is kind of somber as we are having a get together to raise money for the family of a friend who passed away. I spent some time this week writing up a ‘battle plan’ for this blog as well as my other ones to decide how I am going to collaborate more with the community. I’ve been writing to facebook and twitter daily, submitting guest posts to various blogs, interviewing on various sites and collecting posts for the blog carnival. If you haven’t noticed, the readership on this blog has gone up from ~2600 to ~2850 since I started doing this and I hope to break 3k feed readers within a few weeks. What this means for current readers is an increase in great content and ways to get it! Be sure to start participating on both twitter and facebook as the discussions have been pretty good so far. If you have a quick gold question I've also tried to get back to everyone on those mediums that asks.

Importance of Buying Mats

Once you really know what you're doing, have a business set up, have every profession in the game, and are crafting hundreds of items a week you still can run into problems. The most challenging part of moving towards becoming a millionaire is managing all the crap that crosses over into multiple professions. Just look at saronite ore... if you run out then you will most likely lose the ability to craft the majority of items in enchanting, blacksmithing and jewelcrafting. That's a major item, but what about things like eternals or adder's tongues? Everything matters and so you have to set up some kind of ellaborate snatch list and buy every single time the items appear. If you don't and you have a week or two of good sales then you are going to completely run out of materials.

Trust me, it happens constantly and I am the same person who can pull in 30-60k gold in a single week! Just think about an entire guild bank of titanium ore, and then think about prospecting all of it and selling the resulting goods in two weeks. Now imagine buying items of all types whenever they reach certain thresholds. That's how I end up spending 50-75% of what I earn every day reinvesting and keeping my stockpiles ahead of my sales. I'm on a small server... I feel sorry for those doing this strategy on a big one!

Rule #1 of reaching one million gold in wow: don't ever stop buying; don't ever assume you will have enough mats. That's the moment you will run out and scratch your head wondering where it all went!

Flask Auction House Strategy

"Hi,

I am quite new with "goldmaking" in AH since i have started doing this and followed some gold making blog's but i have managed to sell around 30 stack's of flasks each day. Luckily even summertime and cataclysm coming my realm still has a lot of raiders.

I have noticed one thing to help sales of flasks.

 Major boost with sales start around 19:30 server time, so before that pref mid-day or evening try to get flasks prices go up. i mean by that post like 20 of each kind of flask with major overprice. Let's say 27g.

At sometimes after 16-18 your competitors start posting a lot of flasks not too much below your price your have putted.

Just before major boost i put lot's of flasks around 20g (my cost of making flasks are around 15g inc deposit each. i buy all herbs below that threshold) and most don't bother to repost for undercutting but few are but with pretty low volumes allowing my flasks still to sell.


Another nice thing i figured out witch would be good when competing with players. Is trying to catch those your competitors with visual and compare archievements, or to be specific compare stats. It is giving valuable information about their earnings/day and how deep pockets you can assume they have thinking their profit has been decent.


Sincerely,
Someone anonymous :o"

This is an excellent email because it shows a true understanding of the demand behind a market like flasks. I hope you overlook the writer's obvious second hand english and instead examine his ideas. The best thing that could happen to you when you use this strategy is for your competition to cancel their auctions that are well below your initial 'boosted' price and repost at a slight undercut. This removes the items which you will really be competing with when you repost all your auctions back down to more normal values. I advised doing this with Mammoth Meals in my gold guide for the exact same reason of demand spiking just before raid times. It works for any item that has specific times when demand drastically spikes.

Spread the Wow Gold Tips

Ways to tell everyone about Just My Two Copper or any website in the JMTC community (including http://www.castaclysm.com/):

1. Make your forum signature (for any wow topic forum) include jmtc, justmytwocopper, or something else that will help lead players to the site or one of its sister sites (youtube, twitter, forum, etc). Participate in the wow professions and guide sections of the blizzard wow forums and link to helpful information on this site or the JMTC forums.

2. Leave links to relevant information that exists in JMTC on other blogs or websites.

3. Spread the word to your guild.

4. Email wow.com and other popular sites with your favorite JMTC posts which you feel they should cover.

5. Create youtube videos showcasing tips you've learned on JMTC and link back to where you found them.

6. Tweet @Foldberg1 and #JMTC. Especially on Follow Friday.

7. Like Markco Polo on Facebook and then participate.

8. If you have a blog or site, discuss topics I've brought up and measure your own opinion against them (good, bad or additions). In the article, Playing for Second Place, it was suggested that if I write about something than no one else can... by all means, please write whatever you want and then compare your thoughts to my own!

9. Email me (freebeertomorrowonyxia AT gmail DOT com) with what you want to see on any part of the site (that includes youtube videos!).

10. One final tip for blog owners: Collaborate with me. Participate in the Blogging Carnival on August 2nd, do a post swap, ask me to do an interview, do a guest post for my blog, etc. No blog is an island and I feel that the past few months JMTC has become an island with so many blogs quitting and I also blame myself for not reaching out enough to my fellow bloggers.

The more people you bring into the community the better it becomes and I would not be surprised if within a month of this post being implemented by a majority of the readers here that the community would double in size. Bigger community means more ideas being bounced around and more gold information. I am surprised every day when I learn more about making gold in wow, especially with how much a gold guru like myself already knows. Help JMTC expand!

Selling Copper Rods

"Dear Markco,
I have a very good idea that I have been doing for quite some time. I would like to share it with you. I have made 1000g in two days with a lvl one orc warrior by buying boatloads of copper rods from the enchanter vendor. Once you have the copper rods you sell them on the auction house for 5g each compare to the normal price of 17g each. After that wait for all your copper rod to be sold. That it.
Bye,
Trevor
Copper Rod=1-2 silver"

There are several different ways to play this market Trevor and I've experimented with all of them on my server before making this post. Thank you for the tip btw, it's excellent!


Ok here goes:


1. You can post a dozen of these rods at 2-5 gold each and get bought out by the normal sellers who are trying to get upwards of 30 gold per rod.
2. You can compete with the primary sellers and only post 1-3 rods for a copper below the lowest price.
3. You can mix it up and do either strategy every other day depending on who else is selling and for how much.

I found that #3 worked the best, be flexible and figure out the demand on your server as well as how many people are selling.

Goal: Going from 50k to Gold Cap

Good email from a player who is showing you the best way to make gold in the game, so pay attention to his email to see what exactly he's doing that is so good.

"Hey Markco!
I've  downloaded all your podcast , been reading the forums / blog for a bit now and brought the guide ( it rocks) . With this info I have slowly turned 1k gold i got from quest in to 50k + power leveled 3 professions to 450 ,got 3 epic mounts / training so things are going well.
But after reading your post about Another wow blogger hits gold  limit think its time to go big , so with my 50k surplus i have I dropped 25k worth of mats at my snatch price and spent 2 days crafting . I now have lots of stock all made at my price and have taken all the mats from the AH other crafters need, so every  one else will have to pay more than me for there mats.
This limits competition to farming materials themselves or having their own farmers to deal with. As a result, the competition has to sell their wares at a higher price to break even and I can undercut their cheapest sales while still making a profit, so they either lose money to compete or (more likely) wait till I run out of stock to sell their higher priced goods. And with the proper leverage on these raw materials, I can begin crafting and selling finished goods.
Ill let you know how i go , keep up the GREAT work
Darc"

Why QA3 is Not Foolproof

I used to post my frostweave bags and netherweave bags with quick auctions 3 to save time, now I use auctioneer's batch post. Why you ask? Well because I've been selling my bags for about 15 gold less than I could be! You see undercutting the lowest person on the totem pole is not always the best course of action, especially when it comes to items that sell as quickly as bags do. With the demand that these bags have you could easily allow 10 bags (even on my small server) to sit below you in price because demand will eliminate them. Since I post at 48 hour increments it is silly to post 15 gold below premium price. In two days all the bags will sell and I'll have made far more gold than posting them for the cheapest price possible.

Sometimes even the big guys cut corners to save time, but in this case I was actually wasting all the time it took to make additional bags to make the same amount of gold I could have made with far fewer bags. Don't get lazy with your addons like I sometimes do because of how many professions I manipulate at once. ;)

Time is money friend!

Markco's Corner - The Carnival in 3 Weeks

Blogging Carnival August 2nd

Here's a sneak peak at some of the blogs being featured in the Carnival on August 2nd:

Caffeine, Smokes, and Auction House Fees
The AH Pile
Wow Grrl
Warcraft Econ
Wow Confidential
Gold Capped (wow.com)
QQ Pew Pew

...and a host of others! Email me and let me know if you'd like to have your blog featured (new or old posts are ok) and also email me if you know a site that you want to show up in the Carnival.

Check this post for information regarding the Carnival.

Wow

I attempted to sell some epics this week including battered hilts and boe's from ICC. An interesting forum discussion happened when someone asked the question "Server transfering, What ICC BOEs to Sell?" I crushed the 217k gold in two months goal this past week by a landslide... 240k as of last night in 8 weeks! Keep in mind that I didn't even play those full 8 weeks nor did I have time to play every day. I stuck to a strict schedule of about 10 hours per week and tried to maintain a casual style of play. I hope to incorporate some of the lessons learned into future posts.

I did some research on prot changes and am very happy about the changes for prot pvp in cataclysm. Expect me to be back to my old tricks again in pvp.

I should probably spend some time leveling and making gold on my kel'thuzad mage catskan at some point, if I ever find time lol. Now even thunderer is past me in the leveling race!

I have been putting more emphasis on Twitter and Facebook to interact with the audience here, definitely check it out and join the great discussions that have been going on there.

Real Life

Life is rather hectic right now and there's never enough time to get all my podcasts done, experiment in wow, write for the blog, run every day and visit family/friends. Poor Call to Auction podcast has suffered the most from my busyness :*( . I'm going to see my dad since he recently had surgery and so I probably won't have time to do either podcast this weekend.

Frozen Orb to Fire Trade Spam

"Hi Marcko,


I know you are incredibly busy, but I had another question, now this isn't new I have seen people do this before but, once in a while somebody with an over-developed sense of 'morality' will take time out of his day to broadcast things in /2.

In this particular instance, somebody noticed me buying a large number (well, 15 is large for me :P) of his Frozen Orbs, at which point he must have google'd them or seen me immediately listing Eternal Fires, and begun to spam trade chat with that information. At about this time I noticed that within minutes the auction house supply of Frozen Orb for less than 30g had dried up completely (friday/saturday I sell Eternal Fire for 40g+ only reason I didnt buy the AH orbs out completely was because I lost a lot of money on a bad epic purchase and didnt have the cash) so what I did instead, was listed a bunch I had spare that I had bought days before for 20g or less, for about 28g each.


The guy spamming trade immediately began to whisper me with complaints. I asked him why he hadnt simply used his orbs and converted them to Eternal Fires, in response I got "It's wrong to rip people of" followed by a torrent of "Don't buy from this person!!!!" style messages in Trade against my bank alt.


I was just wondering what sort of stance you take when dealing with situations like this?

Thanks for taking time to read this.

Cheers

The_A_Drain"

My Response:
What I do is just laugh at them because now you can use those frozen orbs for eternal fires to transmute epic gems or metas, craft items with the orbs, or w/e you want to do with them and no one else can find them cheaper! He did you a favor, wait a few days and the orbs will go back down to the point where you can buy them again. It cycles like that all the time because someone will get on and snatch everything below fire's price and reset the orb market.


"Thanks again for the very swift response Markco,
I hadn't looked at it that way, thanks a lot for pointing that out to me! I don't have a lot of crafting professions at the moment, so wasn't able to take advantage of them that way, however I posted a handful of Eternal Fire for quite a big markup (as I do frequently) just incase they all sell out, which happens once a week at least on my server because one guy doesn't seem to know how to wait for deals, so he buys a ton at regular market value and just above once a week or so, presumably for enchants or crafting, I see him selling a lot of titansteel and other such things. Anyway, I had
forgotten about them, and was very surprised to see they sold! For 55 gold a piece! :D (usually 24 - 29g)
Btw I got so tired of being scared to use the snatch list and appraiser and those similar search functions in Auctioneer that I finally decided to purchase your gold guide, and it's a fantastic read i'm glad I did for that info alone. I look forward to having more time to read it properly some time in the week."

Snowballs in July?

Domenic sent me an email recommending that I start selling snowballs (which I've had stockpiled for months since last winter veil) in July. What do you know they are actually selling for 1 gold each, it really is Christmas in July! I am using a single trade chat macro such as "/2 Selling [Snowball]x20 for 20 gold, it's Christmas in July!" while posting auctions on an alt and the strategy appears to be working wonderfully.


If you have stockpiled some snowballs give it a shot and see if you can sell them for huge profits! Marketing snowballs is even more fun than selling vendor pets >:-)

Inflation in World of Warcraft

With the onset of Warden 2.0 (bot killing software) illegitimate farmers have been obliterated on most servers and thus materials have been getting more and more expensive on the auction house... in fact many servers can relate to seeing 75 gold adder's tongues, 25 gold borean leather, etc. To make matters worse, many players also have old mats left over which they can craft items with that no one else can compete with. For the time being, there is really no way to combat someone who has a stockpile of materials. All you can do is buy out people who have stockpiled materials and are posting relatively cheap mats without accounting for the new prices. Over time the prices of items across the board will go up along with the materials, so be patient and adjust your buying and selling rates accordingly.

As an example, borean leather has risen to 25 gold a stack on my server. Therefore, I want to sell most epic leg armors for 180+ gold in order to turn more than 20 gold profit per leg armor (I'd much rather have 100+ gold profit). Instead of crafting these items I am simply buying people out who post for 160-300 and relisting for 350-400 gold. Some days I have to buy a dozen or so leg armors and only sell a handful but eventually prices will react to the 25 gold leather. Players just won't be able to turn a profit without increasing prices closer to my own values and so I'm just helping things along. I also buy out borean leather at 20 gold in order to deny supplies to other auctioneers and therefore help inflate the prices further.

Glyphs are going up in value over time as well while many scribes are unable to produce glyphs for their 5-10 gold profit margins any longer. They have been forced to increase the price of glyphs to an average of about 15 gold on my server with all major herbs being above 30 gold a stack. The combination of increased prices on herbs and my temporary glyph wall the last two weeks has pushed three major competitors right out of the market (literally they have not posted for almost a week now) and left me with plenty of room to take advantage of the situation. The vast majority of glyphs I sell are coming back for 40-60 gold each, which makes opening my mailbox even more fun than prior to Warden 2.0's release. More expensive and fewer materials makes selling a very profitable endeavor for the moment, as long as you adjust your prices accordingly.

So don't complain about the rise in material costs and lack of abundance in materials, but take advantage of the situation.

Wow Gold Blogging Carnival August 2nd


What is a blogging Carnival?

A blogging Carnival is an event where bloggers of a certain niche, in this case world of wacraft gold, write articles and have their posts published to one location... the Carnival. These articles do not have to be brand new works, they can also be stable posts written a long time ago but which are timeless and helpful to the reader base. The goal is to provide great content, not necessarily time sensitive or brand new information. It is a great chance to share ideas as well as link to dozens of other great sites. Another result of participating in a blogging Carnival is that you get to share readers with one another.

Once all the articles have been submitted the Carnival operator (the gold guru himself in this case) compiles the authors, posts, and writes a short description of each site. These submissions are then organized into categories and put on display during the Carnival's release day.

What are the requirements to get into the Carnival?

An article must hit one of the predetermined topics which the Carnival is focusing on (see below).
Greater than 250 Words but less than 1000. Images and videos are allowed as well.
A blog, podcast, or other online medium which readers can go to if they liked your article.


What are the topics of this Carnival?

---Tutorials---
This could be anything from gold making trade chat strategies to addon setup to help in gold making. The emphasis is on step by step tutorial though, not ideas or theory crafting.
---Market Tips---
Theory crafting, tips for selling on the auction house, manipulating items through professions etc.
---Farming---
Involves killing or gathering to obtain goods which then can be sold on the auction house.

Where do I sign up?

I will be compiling a list of participants and publishing them every friday to help get more people interested. Simply email me to let me know that you'd like to participate and then be sure to eventually send in the article that you want to be posted in the Carnival.

How Can I Help?

If you are not a blog or website owner than you can help by contacting your favorite bloggers, podcasters, writers, etc. to participate! You can also submit your favorite articles which you've found on other sites, as long as the content is good then I will not mind including the person in the blogging Carnival.

The Undermine Journal

Look at this amazing piece of software, the Undermine Journal, which I saw reading an article from wow confidential, that is going to revolutionize auctioneering in world of warcraft! You're going to have all the data at your fingertips... when competition gets on, what items are selling for, item trends, seller trends, etc. All easily accessible thanks to this handy tool which is currently in alpha. Right now there are only a handful of servers with data available in the tool, but even if yours isn't included be sure to check out the features and explore the various options and graphs.

So why is this so valuable? Well here's a quick example. I can look up epic gems on any server and see what they are selling for. This makes it easy to determine which gem cut I should buy if I'm a new jewelcrafter!

To find out what I'm reading on a daily basis and get even more gold tips then become a fan of Markco Polo on facebook.

Essence of Air Farming Spot - 1k gold an hour

Ok his spelling of my name isn't perfect but this man has a farming spot that I have never written about... SHOCK! Might as well farm it now before cataclysm takes it away! If you have the enchants which use essence of air then consider farming these to get even more back from your enchants or just be aware that you can flip them when you see them cheap on the ah even if you aren't a farmer.

"Marcko

amazing job on all fronts first off!!! but i think i may have discovered a gem hidden in your forums! discovered before but seriously may be missed by a few people who cringe at the "put down your pitchfork and discuss farming"

it really began at 2am my time (england) trouble sleeping after you spend the day in bed with a hangover, when i thought id click on the farming thread! and i clicked on this topic "an hour spent with the silithus elementals" 'Barings' the original topic poster describes his loot drops in 1 hour of farming the area, and desribes it possibly as a 1000g an hour farming spot. Eyes popped out i thought id have a tiny look at that, rubbish laptop in my room, like 6fps in dala, i took the portal to caverns of time, traveled to the nearest flight point, picked up 20 odd gold from the festival in the meantime just for being there, whilst checking out the neutral AH for some steal deals then flew on over to Silithus..... basically top left corner on face value of the map of silithus is some (loads) mobs that drop essence of air... i picked up 9 of these on my rubbish laptop, no mouse, and head pitched on my left hand and no contact lenses in just to see what the fuss was about, i got 9 in literally 7 mins... posted them on the AH undercut silly just for a :) 20g bid 21g buyout>>> nearest competitor was 25g bid 26g buyout! ran a scan turned off wow, watched some 3 v 3 on xfire and passed out! logged in 5 hours later to get ready for work all 9 sold thank you muchly :)

now i have just been in the area again 23 minutes and picked up 35 of these!!! and i honestly cant help but think have i (even at my silly undercut price) made 700g in 23 minutes?!?!? this really needs to be highlighted just in case people may not be aware, and to concrete that fact farming can make money!!!

again amazing job, love the podcasts! listen to them in bed, help me sleep, not that their boring or anything just you know!

Myliá hunter (a good one)
Burning Blade (EU)

would love it if you could just at least drag some attention to this!

take care"

Markco's Corner - You Fan Boys

Sunday I created a post outlying why I feel Gevlon’s strategies (his anti qa3 user strategies to be specific) were pretty fail with regards to his inscription ‘business.’ I had a very specific reason for causing this drama which I will get into shortly, but first let me discuss a few things which came up in the mean time. Stay with me this will be worth it I promise!

Gevlon for quite some time toted that he could defeat qa3 users by massively posting 5 gold glyphs on 24 or 48 hour posting times. My goal was to prove that this was a foolish idea which only worked on auctioneers who have no concept of the value of glyphs. In order to prove it however, I had to actually do it and show that even on my tiny server there were a few auctioneers who understood that buying out a 5 gold glyph and relisting it for 60 was a good idea. I also showed that the profits from this strategy were pathetic in comparison to running qa3. Gevlon however misunderstood my post and responded just as I knew he would. He started crying about how he's using the same sophisticated methods as myself and that he has a 7 gold threshold, 20 gold fallback. First off... that fallback is too low, it should really be around 60 gold and second his threshold is too high... anyone following the 5 gold strategy would cause all his glyphs to go to 20 gold and ruin his chances of selling completely. Ironic isn't it? What's really funny is that he admitted that he has never put the 5 gold strategy to use... just theory crafted it.

I came at Gevlon with facts and he came back by saying I was wrong but … right? It was weird and his comments which I deleted were even stranger… he told me I knew as much about inscription as I do about cows… really Gevlon how do you know that my grandpa isn’t a farmer and I might actually know quite a bit about cows?! He also started deleting comments like crazy… there’s no explanation for my blog having more comments than his, especially on a topic such as this. All I know is that my facts and reasoning pissed Gevlon off quite a bit. Obviously I got under his skin and scared him or else he wouldn't have posted a link to my blog or even made a response. To respond at all lends credibility to the post and reveals how anxious he is when I do call him on his magic act for what it is. Good, that psychopath deserved a kick in the butt and I find it funny that he says our strategies are the same but then says that mine are worse. How hilarious! First I was a capitalist who couldn’t defeat his 5 gold glyph strategy and now I’m a capitalist who has an inferior yet identical strategy with good methods that improve anyone’s business!

Let's learn from Gevlon's mistakes. Gevlon has a very narrow minded view regarding inscription, that is to say that he only posts glyphs and he doesn't look at the wow economy from a bird's eye view, taking into account all professions and methods involved in making gold. This simplicity appeals to the masses of copy cats but does not always work as well as you'd think. Inscription is not just about glyphs, it's also about enchanting through vellums and even effects alchemy because you will need to split profits between milling for glyphs and creating potions of wild magic and potions of speed (plus flasks if you do that which I do not). You can also sell runescrolls, off hands and even possibly rituals of the new moon with each new twilight movie. Gevlon's pricing for glyphs is too rigid and not ideal for making the most money from inscription because he just doesn't care to improve his strategy any further than what initially works. He does not grasp the concept of the wow economy as a living, breathing entity. On Tobold's blog Gevlon stated that he makes 4k a week using his method however I make 4k on a good day from my own inscription business. Why do I make so much more posting at the same intervals twice a day? Well it's partially because I'm also selling off hands, vellums, runescrolls and rituals. Indirectly I'm making gold through enchanting but I do not include that in my numbers. My glyph pricing allows me to make larger margins of profit with my bigger fallback than Gevlon's and my smaller threshold takes care of undercutters who go below Gevlon's 7 gold threshold. This way I'm able to sell more glyphs in a wider range of prices. Hence why I am making many more times as much gold as Gevlon per week with probably less effort as I focus on glyphs that are worth more than 30 gold on average. (these glyphs can still drop like rocks in price so if they do I can still post down to my 3 gold threshold).

I also have a snatch list for glyphs that are the most popular (going as high as 70 gold when supply is super low) and I readily buy up people willing to sell their glyphs for 5 gold on a day when the market is flooded with them. So if Gevlon ever tried his 5 gold glyph strategy (which it appears I have more experience with it than he does!) I wouldn't even be effected. Something Gevlon also probably doesn't do is watch for when his competition logs on, I have them all friended and will wait the extra 5 minutes for them to finish posting and logging before posting my own glyphs.

This whole Gevlon vs Markco thing is funny because it doesn't matter. I'm having fun with this, poking at the psychopath who says he has no social feelings but blows up like an atom bomb if anyone challenges him. He really is a magician who fabricates stories to the point that even he believes them. He can't feel the emotions that most people feel, the feelings of being wrong or hurtful or unfair... I call him a psychopath for a reason after all. There are some fans who get really upset over the whole idea of one blogger poking at another blogger's ideas. Keep in mind, my previous post ONLY attacked gevlon's ideas and blog, there was nothing about his person that I assaulted. Maybe I indirectly targeted his self esteem but that is only because mr. Gevlon can dish it out but he sure can't take it. So for those of you keeping score at home remember who has been attacking ideas and who has simply been name calling and attacking my person. Then toss out the score card because who really cares? Either way you'll be getting fine gold tips from my blog and the occasional gem from Gevlon's. Even if it's the same boring inscription tip over and over again.

And now for the reason behind bringing up this drama and getting Gevlon to blow up like I expected him to... ah yes my master lesson for the fans out there...

You see Gevlon and Markco fans… you’re doing it wrong. That’s right, you are doing it wrong. You follow and you copy and you follow and you copy only to get taken to the cleaners by people who are not following or copying. I am saying this in as respectful a way as possible because I actually do want you all to succeed. I base my strategies and blog on the very idea that everyone can break a million gold if they want to. But if you pay careful attention to the people that have “succeeded” then you will find that all their methods differ. You see they took the ideas of others and they adapted, improvised and improved upon them. What works for one server doesn’t necessarily work for another so while one millionaire might sell thousands of individual iceblade arrows or I might sell 2k gold worth of leg armors in a day or Zamboni might use 10 epic gem transmutes you will not necessarily get the same results! If you follow Gevlon to the letter you will probably see some success and if you follow my blog to the letter you will also see some success,  but if you start thinking and analyzing you will eventually become a much better player.

With regards to inscription, several factors determine the eligibility of a 'strategy,' such as herb prices, number of competitors and when you can post. Don't ever assume you can just copy another player's strategy and if you do make sure you fit all the prerequisites (like having every glyph in the game).

So burn those Markco and Gevlon t-shirts and start having fun discovering your own ways to make gold. I’ll be happy to help you along the way, I’ve been trying for quite a long time and hopefully this drama will wake you up!

You guys rock, keep on selling and buying,

Markco

Posting Glyphs with Competition

"I've been reading your site for awhile now and very much enjoy your work.  I'm taking the slow route to riches and using Inscription to gold cap.  I'm about halfway there now but I'm not in any real hurry.  I want to share a simple technique I use and I'm sure some of my competitors use to discourage constant undercutting.  I keep one of my well known posting alts logged in as much as possible with the AH NPC targetted.  My competition have all friended that character I'm sure so when they log in they can see my alt apparantly posting auctions.  They then might wait for me to log or they might just log out and try again later - thereby keeping my auctions as the first up on the AH.  This doesn't work all the time of course but if it prevents me from having to re-post once or twice a day then I consider it worth it!"

-Mike

Awesome tip Mike! I cannot tell you how many times I've 'sniped' the auctions of my competition by posting at the exact minute after they finish posting and log off. It's so easy to add competition to your friends list and just wait until they all log or leave a major city. Since the vast majority of glyph sales are made until the next major competitor posts, it makes sense to jump in just as someone else finishes.

Traveler's Tundra Mammoth

In the following email I noticed that the included screenshot featured a Traveler's Tundra Mammoth. I am one of those people who bought such a beast and I must say it was worth every penny! If you are a farmer who actually enjoys sitting there for an hour or two killing mobs then having the option to sell items to a vendor 24/7 is pretty sweet. Also, I can buy all the high level reagents for my alt crafters right from one source and simply mail the items to them instead of having to run to nearby vendors. I kind of wish that the traveler's tundra mammoth had ALL vendor sell-able items but hopefully blizzard will add this at a future date. Providing reagents to your raid isn't such a bad deal either. You can even tank in neutral towns with this mount by doing drive byes with friends. There were far more uses before you took damage failing on the mount of course.

If you are considering buying this mount then be sure to have exalted with the kirin tor to make the item less expensive!

Did you purchase a mammoth or chopper with your gold stockpiles you've accumulated from reading the works of the JMTC community?


"Just sent you this email to thank you. I went from 230g here and there, having to go farm to pay repair bills and purchase flasks and potions to 50k without doing anything remotely taxing, just a half hour interval a day. Plus I had fun getting there. This is the first expensive thing I have bought in this game and its all down to you, your guides, your website, podcasts and forums. A massive thumbs up from me. I look forward to repeating the process all over again.

Thank you a thousand times over.
-Kazatem, Kul Tiras EU"

Auction House Theme Song

"Dear Markco, It has come to my attention that auctioneers do not yet have an official theme song, as a result I wrote one for you. I have recently started playing the auction house and I would love any suggestions you have. Your blog is a wonderful way to get started into making money in World of Warcraft and I must get around to buying your guide. Without a further ado here is the song (Short and sweet):

You have to sing it like the United States National Anthem for the full effect.

To the Auction House, I hail to you
In all your gold
I pray to you
So allow my sales to sell
And my profits to explode
My dear Auction house, we love you.
                                                                                                                           From, Matt"

Do you have songs you listen to while playing the auction house? Were you able to make this song of Matt's work in your head cause I sure as hell couldn't. Maybe I'm just tone deaf!

Tailoring Spec Gold Strategy

"Hi Markco,


Love your blog, every so often I see some tips that I like, and want to try out.

Mostly I make money with enchanting, jewelcrafting, and some leatherworking.



I was quite disapointed with Tailoring as a moneymaking profession, but lately, I have been doing very well selling the tailoring cloths that used to require a cooldown, and no longer do.

In the last few months, I've sold about 250 each of Ebonbweave, Spellweave and Moonshroud, with average prices between 40 and 50g.



The important part, with them, is to have a Burning Crusade speciality for the type of cloth you are making - this means that you make 2 for the price of 1. And basically, the cost of the cloth is just a little more than the eternal it is made from. (Eg 2 Spellweave cost 2 Eternal Fire + 1 Bolt of Imbued Frostweave [which in turn costs 2 Infinite dust and 10 Frostweave cloth]).



The thing that isnt immediatly aparent, though, is that you can easily change speciality. In the south section of Shattrath are the three tailoring specialists that can train you. If you talk to the one you are currently specialised for, they can remove your speciality for 150 gold. You can then talk to a different one, and get a new speciality for 20 gold, with no questing required.



So, if you make 170 cloth between changing speciality, then it effectivly adds a single gold to the price of your cloth you are producing. This is MUCH cheaper than only producing 1/2 the amount as a non-specialist.



So stock up on the materials, make lots of cloth as your current speciality, then change. Once you have a good stock of all three, keep stocking up eternals, and when you run low on a particular type of cloth, change again. There are no restrictions to going back to specialities you have had before.



Have fun,

Simbaria"

Gevlon the Magician

Gevlon the Magician

***EDIT: This post by Gevlon is the target of my article.***

***EDIT: For an excellent response to this post please check out Boxing the Cap.***

I’m going to smash Gevlon’s gold making staple: “massive undercutting with inscription” and show you not only why it’s better to use more efficient addons such as quick auctions 3 and ktq for managing your glyphs but also how to defeat a goblin on your server who’s crashing prices. NOTE: I have all 400 glyphs and assume Gevlon does as well.

I’ve always used quick auctions 3 and ktq to maximize my glyph earnings per day (1-2 daily post batches with 12 hour durations) and let’s discuss this method first. Besides selling off hands, rune scrolls, armor vellums and weapon vellums to make gold (sometimes as much as my glyph earnings), I focus on having 6 inscription bags in one character’s bank which houses all my glyphs I wish to sell. For details on what I do with quick auctions 3 please take a look at the tutorials section on the left side of the site. I sell every day of the week and spend about one hour on weekends  crafting to fill the voids after a week of sales. I also try to buy inks of the sea if they are 3 gold or less to save time milling (although milling makes more gold thanks to snowfall inks and what you can make with them). With this method I’m able to focus on the most profitable glyphs (30 gold is my current minimum profit to craft) and avoid posting hundreds of 5-29 gold glyphs which aren’t the most popular anyway. This saves time crafting and time is money friend.

Results: 15,000 gold in a week for one hour crafting and two hours posting/cancelling glyphs.

You could make 25,000 gold a week with 3-4 posts per day. I have done this in the past when glyphs were more popular but I just don’t have the time to do that now during this experiment.

The cost of herbs, inks, frozen orbs and parchments came out to be 1500 gold so that's 13,500 gold profit and it makes sense considering a faces of doom will net me 150 gold profit, glyphs themselves can net 55 gold profit each (you have to have the rare ones for this to work in bulk) and thus all the items I sell are making 5-17x what I invested.

Well that was Markco’s method, let’s look at Gevlon’s.

With hours of more work than what I listed above as you will be crafting every glyph in the game, post on 48 hours and for 5 gold no matter what glyph prices are. You will also need to have much more space to house the glyphs which will make them look nice and pretty in screenshots. Sure you can move this price value of 5 gold up and down a little bit depending on what competition does, but the end result is you still make very little gold. Players buy your 5 gold glyphs because they need them or because they are simply reposting for 40 gold more. Especially with more popular glyphs which not everyone can craft this method fails horribly. Players just relist and make 10x your profit. You may think you’re making lots of gold but in reality you’re making a very small percentage and the smart players are the ones letting you craft glyphs for them to buy up and repost.

I used the Gevlon method and made 8,000 gold in a week after paying for the cost of herbs, inks and parchments. You may think well that’s because you suck Markco and Gevlon simply is better at posting his 5 gold glyphs for the same time frame as you! He’s better at pushing buttons! No, actually  he’s just a good liar. His gold earnings were stated to be 21,000 gold in a week selling like this. Now at the time glyphs were selling quicker than they are this late in the expansion and herbs were less than half the price they are currently, however, Gevlon did not include the fact that using his method means that for each stack of herbs you buy you’re getting 6 glyphs worth 27 gold + a snowfall ink if you sell it for 5-15 gold. That’s 42 gold maximum for the investment whereas my method is making as much as 320 gold per stack of herbs. So that 21,000 gold sounds big but it includes the 13,125 gold needed to make that much! In reality he only made 8125 gold, which is darn near close to my own amounts. The reason I’m so close to his amount even though I have to deal with more expensive herbs and less demand for glyphs is that I posted twice daily with the 5 gold glyphs whereas he posted on 24 or 48 hour increments. 13k invested, 8k earned vs 1.5k invested, 13.5k earned. It’s possible that he was getting all his herbs from farmers for around 15 gold a stack or less, so my numbers may be off but the difference between Gevlon’s gold invested and 1.5k invested as well as only 3 hours played makes Markco’s method far superior in terms of gold per hour.

I got plenty of hate mail with Gevlon’s method from scribes who said I was ruining their business, but it was the other sellers which didn’t send hate mail that knew just what to do. These businessmen and women bought out every glyph worth 20-60 gold which I posted for 5 and then relisted. They gave me hope in humanity lol. Gevlon’s method is pure genius… you think you’re making tons of gold when in actuality you’re just fueling the real auctioneers! You’re succeeding at … failing.

Ok now some of you are saying well wait a moment on my small server there are too many glyph makers and not enough buyers, what's worse players are camping the ah with their glyphs and fighting over every sale. The prices are below 30 gold for every glyph and 1/4 of the auctions on the auction house are glyphs themselves! Well if you find yourself in this unique situation then odds are neither method is going to net fabulous results. If you can, try to focus on the non-glyph methods for making gold as much as the glyphs themselves. Use sites like www.wowpopular.com to figure out the best glyphs to make and only make those, try to focus your efforts and save time. Also, check out when players are logging in that are your competition and keep a little spreadsheet so that you can see when is the best time to be up against the least people. One trick I use to post during prime time is to have like 10 of every top profit glyph and if someone undercuts then I simply repost without canceling. This buys me about 10 very valuable minutes where my opponent has to cancel hundreds of auctions, get them from the mail and then repost. It has proven a very effective method during prime time for me and if you are only posting around 100 glyphs vs the 200+ that other posters are putting out odds are they will consider not canceling their whole stash since 50% or less of their glyphs are showing up as red on qa3.

On my server there is a camper that plays basically the same times I do and I still made amazing profit by using the post but don't cancel method. Using a spreadsheet I was able to find the best times to post and avoid the vast majority of competition. Would you have guessed that 9:00 weekdays was actually the best time to post since my opponents did not undercut me until like lunch time? That gave me three hours where I was the only person with glyphs and the majority of my sales came from there and during prime time in the evening.

On a personal note, Gevlon’s blog is about making his own little world and following his own rules to beat a version of the game that he creates. Everything from pvp’ing in a group with excessive buffs against unorganized one shottable players to beating ulduar in ilevel 200 gear (which actually is the same as entry level epics) on normal modes with nerfs to the content to defeating low level dungeons on twinked pet class characters with enhanced talents not previously available in vanilla while bosses are 30% easier just goes to show you that he simply is in his own little world. He talks of opportunity cost and yet he builds a strategy which does nothing but line the pockets of more intelligent auctioneers. You see this glyph strategy of his is just an extension of building his own rule set for a game that already has rules which the rest of the player base follows. Sure you might make a pittance following his strategy and eventually hit gold cap (gee have fun doing this strategy for 7 months like he did) but I can also farm for the same amount of time invested and make the same gold selling borean leather at its current rate of 15 gold per stack. Some players consider the things Gevlon achieves as really challenging but what would really be impressive would be if he could compete in the game using the game’s standard rules, you know the ones that everyone else is prepared to play with. Imagine if I had gotten to 1800 with blue gear in season 5. Sure it would have seemed impressive but all I would have proved was that bad players were in the sub 1800’s! Instead I took an unknown spec/comp (ret paladin and prot warrior) and as far as I know am one of two teams in the world to get gladiator with that specific spec/comp (there have been a handful of prot players who got gladiator later with beastcleave in 3’s and prot paladin/prot warrior since then). That’s the difference between someone like Gevlon who makes his own little world but makes it seem impressive and someone like myself who takes the same rules and game play that everyone has access to and excels at it.

The genius behind what Gevlon does is that he creates drama and collects accolades for doing things which really deserve neither. If I were to follow this mentality I would seek public praise for my video of going from 2700 rating down to 1000 and winning a handful of games in season 6 playing 2v1. Sure it looks super impressive but in reality I created my own little scenario in which case my opponents had no idea they were fighting a gladiator prot warrior in their 1000-1600 bracket. All I proved was that I could trounce unsuspecting bad players two vs one but if I were Gevlon I would make it sound like I was the best pvper in the world for doing this and no one had done it before so that makes me super amazing!

Have fun with your drama Gevlon! Maybe you’ll come up with some post about how my numbers are off or how I am lying, but if you look at the jmtc forums you’ll see that there are many players there who have done the exact same experiment and came to the same conclusions as myself. All hype and no substance, I present to you Gevlon the Magician. Don't follow his strategy, if you see someone doing this on your server buy them out and relist but stick to the top 10 of each classes' glyphs.

White Smoke Flares

"Hi Marcko,
White Smoke Flares. I guess most people probably see Elemental Blasting Powder and go "WTF is that? Oh well" but from 1 mote of fire, 2 of earth
and 4 netherweave cloth (avg price on my server about 2 - 3g, much less when some farmer dumps his Netherweave) I will get 12 of the things.
I then sell them in stacks of 10 for 7g 50s, not a lot, however I have begun opening dialogues with guilds who use them for raids, some of whom have promised to place bulk orders (1000 at a time from one guild) when their current stock runs out. I have never ever seen anyone else list these on the AH, and they sell very well on big raid nights.
That and Frozen Orbs, if your server has as many idiots as mine, I'm sure you are already taking advantage of the rush to get rid of these orbs, I'm sure it wont last very long, but I'm buying them for as little as 18g each and immediately re-listing them as Eternal Fire for 28 - 32g.
Again thank you for maintaining such a fantastic website, I really appreciate all the help you offer penniless Huntards like myself :D"

The huntard in this email also asked why he couldn't sell the enchanting mats gained from disenchanting blues/greens doing runs for crusader orbs. First off, you don't want to sell them my silly huntard! You want to use them to make crusader, spell power to weapon, and other great enchants for levelers!

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