WoW Players and You

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

This post was submitted by Alisha as her application to write here at JMTC. If you enjoyed Alisha's post then please give her a thumbs up in the comments!

Whether this has been discussed or not before, it is a topic that I feel needs to be brought up when a person is thinking about making gold. That topic is your fellow WoW players. Almost everyone who plays this game is looking to make some gold. It is a necessity in the game. There are dedicated herb farmers, ore farmers, fish farmers, etc. Why not take advantage of the opportunity you have to make money without spending countless hours leveling every profession? Why should YOU have to be so hardcore to make money? That’s right. This blog is for you. The person who only has a few hours to spend on WoW and can’t honestly be asked to spend all day Saturday mining, but still wants to bring home the bacon (and never, ever be one of those people asking for gold for repairs outside the AH).

I made my first 50k by starting a small business in WoW. I was new to the server and still gearing for raiding. My tailoring and alchemy were maxed, but I didn’t have time to level another character just for her professions because raiding was my top priority. I saw that gems can make a fair profit and wanted to get into the trade but I was lacking a jewelcrafter and an herbalist. I had only been in my guild for a couple of months, but I already had learned who did what and so I approached a jewelcrafter. I asked him whether he would be willing to cut my gems for 10% of my profits. Normally, I would have asked for it to be free (say if I only wanted one gem, and he would happily oblige me) but since this was going to be a mass producing job, I wanted to be fair. He tried to haggle with me and get 20%! We eventually settled on 15% of the profits going to him, but he also had to mine and prospect the ore.

Each day, I would log on and pull stacks of green gems from my mailbox, buy the herbs, transmute them, and send them back to him outlining what was selling best at the time. At which time he would cut them, return them, and I would list them. Money started rolling in. Within the first week I had earned around 15k just by running this small business deal.  It took nearly none of my time up and since I was a transmute master, there were many times when I would have a free proc and that, my friends, is free money. However, herb prices were rising on the AH, and my profit margin was diminishing so the 2nd week of my business, I messaged three herbalists in my guild, offering them 10% of my profits if they would farm herbs and send them to me.
The first wanted half my cut. The second wanted 35% at the very least. The last said yes. He, like myself, didn’t have all the time in the world to level characters or professions, was spending most his time gearing for raiding, and was more than happy to send me half of his farmed herbs for 10% of my gem profits. Herbs were coming in, green gems were coming in, transmutes were going out and coming back as blue gems. It was insanely easy.

Here’s an example: Brilliant Inferno Ruby (BIR). At that time, the BIRs were selling for around 125g each. A stack of green gems and a stack of heartblossom would yield 6 (without procs) blue gems. So far, I’ve not put out any money. It did cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of 2g to list it on the AH once I received the cut BIR back. BIR sold for 125, AH takes 12.5g (greedy goblins) and I’m left with a profit of 112.5g. Then I take out 25% for my workers (17g to my jewelcrafter and 11g 25s to my herbalist) and I have made 82g 25s on the gem and have done little to no work. My first week I sold around 250 gems in this fashion. My small business continued humming for several months, long enough for me to level a DK and a druid and start doing my own herbing, mining, and jewelcrafting. When it was all over with, I had made 90k in profits and my counterparts made several thousand as well. If you are short on time and patience to level more characters, it never hurts to make an offer. Most times, as was my case, players are herbing and mining anyway and wouldn’t mind getting into another area of the market.

In addition, if you see someone selling something in bulk in trade chat (such as volatiles) for a “cheaper than AH” price, I highly suggest striking up a conversation with the person. I needed volatiles for tailoring and the farmer selling them was undercutting AH prices quite liberally. I made friends with him and asked him to whisper me first when he had available volatiles. Each week, I would get a whisper asking whether I was in the market for “85 Volatile Earth for 3g per” and I nearly never turned the deal down.  Not only will they be useful for tailoring and alchemy, but I can sell them for a nice profit on the AH. Just by talking to him, I made a business contact who still to this day supplies my volatiles.  Never underestimate the things that you can do when you work with other WoW players! 


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