Gevlon the Magician

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

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.