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Would You Buy a Level 25 Guild? I Did…

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Published on November 1, 2012,

Why buy a level 25 guild? Because it reflects the kind of gaming world that I want.

I was getting very close to my 250,000 wow gold goal.  I was over the 200k mark, and eagerly awaiting being able to announce hitting my goal here on WoW Gold Girl.

Then I saw this in trade:

“WTS Level 25 guild!  All heirlooms unlocked, achievement pets unlocked including Armadillo Pup and Dark Pheonix Hatchling. 7 guild bank tabs. 50k. PST.”

Gahhhh.

I ignored it.  Really, I did. For hours, on multiple toons, I saw that message being advertised, gritted my teeth, thought about my 250k wow gold goal and did not respond.

Eventually, after about 4 hours of seeing this person advertising the guild, I whispered him, verified that the guild really did have everything he said it had (it also had a buttload of stuff in the guild bank), and we settled on a price of 40,000 gold.

I know, I know, level 25 guilds on high-pop servers are selling for much less.  20-25k gold.  But my realm is not high-pop, and our raiding population is nearly non-existent.  Seeing a level 25 guild being sold on our realm is a very, very rare thing.  For all of the perks, all of the heirloom items unlocked, and all of the stuff in the bank, 40 was a damn good price.  (Too bad he kicked out the 650 guild members a day before selling it. The 10% influx of loot from them would’ve been sweet.)

“Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”

The kind of WoW world that I want is one where all of my toons share a central bank without punishment.  I have three other personal guild banks, and with all of them, there’s punishment involved.  If I move a toon out of my beloved raiding guild where all of my friends are into my level 1 personal guild bank, I lose those great perks like Bountiful Bags and leveling boosts. If my enchanter needs mats, I have to log off of her, log onto my bank toon, go pull mats out of the bank toon’s personal guild bank, mail them back to my enchanter, and then log over to my enchanter.  Sure, I could move my enchanter into that personal guild bank, but then I’d lose Bountiful Bags, increased flying speed, and the ability to be able to communicate with my friends.   (I ended up doing that with my enchanter anyway, because I just could not hold the level of enchanting mats she auctions and uses in one little personal bank.  It was very, very lonely over there.)

So now I’ve got this level 25 guild.  It cost me a good amount of gold, but in my mind, it was worth it.  I’ve moved all of my crafters into this guild.  They can share a bank, as well as continuing to use those other personal guild banks I’ve got.  When they do dailies, quest, or go all-out genocidal on old dungeons, 10% extra loot gets deposited to the guild bank, which is more money for me.  They’ve got mass rez for when they do dungeons or scenarios, they’ve got the boost to flying speed, they’ve got Bountiful Bags.   The only thing missing is all of my buddies chatting in /g about funny stuff.  I’ll deal with that.

When I first took it over, there were about 8 people left in the guild. I changed the guild message and guild info tab to reflect that the guild had been sold, that it was no longer a raiding guild, but that they were welcome to stay and enjoy the leveling perks.  I directed them over to my raiding guild if they still wanted to raid, stressing how friendly and cool that guild is, and how the guildmaster is the best I’ve ever met in-game.  It worked, a couple of the toons moved over (including a healer! Yay!).  So in a way, both I and my raiding guild benefited from this purchase.

As a result, however, I’m back down well below the 200k gold mark.  I’m debating with the idea of inviting tons of low-level toons into the guild to enjoy the leveling perks while I enjoy the 10% loot deposits. Hrmm.

Would you buy a level 25 guild? If you did, what would you do with it?

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Cross-Realm Auction Houses Might Be A Boon

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Published on November 1, 2012,

 

This post is a contribution to Cold’s Gold Blogging Carnival.  Each month he poses a topic, and a variety of bloggers write about it on their own blogs.  Cold lists off those articles on his site.  It’s a great way to get a variety of viewpoints in one spot!

This month’s topic:  What’s your opinion on Cross-Realm Auction Houses?

I’m perhaps the only person whom I’ve talked to (or read on forums and blogs) that regularly plays the AH game and who is not hellbent against Cross-Realm Auction Houses.

Maybe it’s because I can see both sides of the coin. I see how Cross-Realm Auction Houses *could* ruin the market. However, I also see that low-population realms desperately need more access to materials and items. When I say access, I don’t mean lower-priced materials than what they currently have. I simply mean actually having that item available on the AH, even if it’s for a premium price. There are items posted regularly on high-pop realms that may only be seen once a year on a low-pop realm, if ever. There are crafters on high-pop realms with patterns that no longer exist in-game, while on the low-pop realm there are no crafters at all with that pattern.

I also see it from a larger perspective. When you say that Cross-Realm Auction Houses would be the end of gold-making, what you’re saying is that large markets don’t work, or they don’t leave room for the single person wanting to make some coin. That’s simply not true. If it were, eBay would have failed within six months. It’s also not true that introducing an additional global market in addition to the current local market would kill the local market. There are still local auction houses (and sellers using them) making plenty of money on estate sales and random items, even though eBay is available. I could host a yard sale next week and make a thousand dollars, even though eBay and Amazon exist and people could get the same items sent right to their door. There are still local hardware stores in your town, even though Home Depot moved in a couple miles away. Kids can still make money mowing grass, even though there are big companies available with entire teams who swarm a person’s yard and get it done in five minutes. Local farmer’s markets still exist, even though Wal-Mart sells cut-rate tomatoes mass-produced in Brazil right down the road.

The whole idea of a Cross-Realm Auction House being a success or a catastrophe depends on how Blizzard implements it. With some creativity, it could be a huge boon to us AH goblins. Who doesn’t want a bigger market to sell goods to?

With that in mind, here are some ideas on how Cross-Realm Auction Houses could be implemented:

  •  Make one CRAH in a remote location, like the BMAH, (possibly instanced?) accessible only by max-level toons with flying. (And I’m not talking somewhere “safe” that you could summon a lvl 1 alt to and then leave them there. How about we get rid of the ability to teleport/summon lower levels into level-restricted zones, while we’re at it? You cannot cross into Outlands until you’re level 58. We shouldn’t be able to port/summon lower levels there. You cannot travel to Pandaria until you’re level 85. We shouldn’t be able to port/summon lower levels there.)
  •  Make the CRAH an offline-only feature; like the Remote Auction House.
  •  Make the CRAH a time-limited feature; say, it’s at the Darkmoon Faire and is only accessible when the Faire is open.
  • Implement CRAH into the Neutral AH, with all associated sky-high fees. (The Neutral AHs would still work as such, there’d just be Cross-Realm stuff posted there as well.)
  • With the CRAH as a separate entitity from the normal AH, limit the amount of a SINGLE item that can be posted on the CRAH per Battle.net account. For example, you can only post 10 auctions of Silk Cloth. Doesn’t matter if they’re full stacks or single pieces; you can only have 10 auctions of “Silk Cloth” across your entire Battle.net account. You could then also have 10 auctions of “Bolts of Silk Cloth”, however, and another 10 auctions of “Mageweave Cloth”.
  • Instead of a Cross-Realm Auction House, implement shared Battle.net account banks. My toon on Madoran really wants that rare Felsteel Longblade pattern (I’m making this up as an example), but it’s been 6 months since it’s been seen on the Madoran AH. It’s available frequently on Illidan’s AH, though. Enable me to roll a toon on Illidan and earn enough gold there to buy it, and drop it into my cross-realm account bank. My toon on Madoran then goes to the cross-realm account bank, pulls out the pattern, and learns it. It would work the same way for trade goods. Prices on Madoran are sky-high for embersilk cloth, while over on Dunemaul the embersilk is going for a song? No problem – just roll a toon on Dunemaul and earn enough money to buy the low-priced embersilk, then drop it into your bank. The toon on Madoran can then pull it out and use it or sell it. In this way, you still have the ability to access items cross-realm, but you actually have to put some effort into having toons on both realms. There’s no one on your realm that can make the uber-sexy Enchanted Thorium set?  I can… let me make a set, drop it into my bank, roll a toon on your realm and post it for sale.  (Yes, I realize the botters would have a field day with this. Blizzard needs to seriously address botting – make it one of their top 3 priorities, in my opinion.  That’s another article entirely.)
  • Don’t make the CRAH worldwide; keep it somewhat separated.  Limit it to a battlegroup.  Limit it so that only PvE realms share a CRAH, and PvP realms have their own separate CRAH.  This would discourage PvPers from “carebear” (their term, not mine) gathering on PvE realms and ruining the opportunity for low-level ganking by asshats with nothing better to do or no ability to fight someone their own level on PvP realms.
  • Or, my favorite:
    Introduce the CRAH as a “Buyer’s Market” AH. A buyer goes to the CRAH and posts a 15 gold bid for a Staff of the Righteous Random Stat. A seller takes his Staff of the Righteous Random Staff to the CRAH and checks to see if anyone wants it. He sees the 15 gold bid; but he wants 250 gold for it, so he takes his staff over to the normal AH to sell it. JoeBob the DK doesn’t want to pay 3 gold per windwool cloth on the normal AH, so he puts a bid in at the CRAH for 10 silver per windwool cloth. His bid sits there waiting for a seller willing to sell it for that price; or until the bid runs out. (Normal 12/24/48 hr time.) When the buyer types in the item he wants to buy, he sees a list of the other bids that are up for that item. This helps him (encourages him?) to raise his bid. In this way, you don’t have 3,000 botters posting ghost iron ore at rock-bottom prices and undercutting each other by exorbitant amounts; instead, you’ve got buyers fighting with each other and *raising* the price depending on how badly they want/need the item.

With any solution to one AH being glutted while another is bare, you’re going to have challenges. Most of my goblin friends are focusing only on the negative aspect: there will be more stupid kobolds to deal with, ruining the market with their undercutting. However, there are positives, such as: there will be a lot more buyers available for your goods. Who doesn’t want a bigger market of hungry buyers?

Also, the gold-making goblins won’t be the only ones to suffer from an influx of stupid kobolds. The kobolds themselves would suffer. With enough of them posting items at vendor cost, it won’t take long for a large portion of them to decide it’s not worth their time and simply drop out of the market. Any market will eventually self-correct and stabilize when exposed to a huge upheaval like the introduction of a glut of goods, a drought of goods, or a new player able to make something more efficiently.

In any implementation of a cross-realm auction house, however, two things need to be taken care of first:  Botters and Gold-Sellers.  I haven’t seen any significant effort on Blizz’s part to address either of these very serious problems – they need to be top priority.  Multiple teams hired specifically to track down and combat botters and gold-sellers (aka account hackers).  Your account CAN be hacked by a gold-seller if you have an authenticator installed and working… my husband’s was.  The prompt and trouble-free restoration of everything that was taken does not negate the fact that this shouldn’t be happening in the first place.  That, also, is another post in itself, so I’ll leave it at that.

No matter how a Cross-Realm Auction House is introduced though, I believe the intelligent goblins will prevail. We will adapt and overcome. Look at how truly horrible the current AH system is; and yet we still find ways to make gold. Lots of gold, if you invest any effort and make use of the tools available to you.  I think the key is that the Cross-Realm Auction House needs to be a separate entity from the current Auction House.  As long as that is the case, everyone will find a way to turn it into a win/win situation.

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Portable Refrigerators Are Coming!

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Published on October 29, 2012,

Nam Ironpaw will be selling a 32-slot portable refrigerator

Food sellers, rejoice!

On the 5.1 PTR, Nam Ironpaw is currently selling a “Portable Refrigerator” -a 32 slot cooking bag- for just 10 Ironpaw tokens.

This is fantastic news for my grocery alt.  Too bad Blizz isn’t hot-fixing these into the game now.  Waiting another month for them is sad. :(

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Quick Gold-Making Tips for Jewelcrafters

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Published on October 22, 2012,

Low Alicite Prices means Good Profits

In the popular WoW gold making forums, I’m seeing a lot of angst about Jewelcrafting.  The abundant supply of ghost iron ore combined with Jewelcraftng alts being able to get nearly all of the new cuts right in Stormwind (or Orgrimmar) means there are a LOT of gems on the auction house and the kobolds are rampant.  If you’re on a server with a very slow or non-existent raiding population, there’s nearly no demand for gems… and the prices for the new Pandaria cut gems can often be found for just 1 gold each, less than 100 gold each for the blue-level gems. It’s a sad situation.

But just because the new market is dismal, that doesn’t mean you can’t still make WoW gold from the old markets.  With all of your professions, take a look back at the old shuffles and gold-making methods.  Those are still valid, and in many cases, they’re even more profitable now because the mat prices have plummeted.

Alicite:  As you can see from the screenshot above, alicite can be picked up for a song.  Craft these into Alicite Pendant (2 gems, 1 jeweler’s setting).  These vendor for 5 gold 50 silver.  You can make a profit just vendoring them, but the real gold is found using an enchanter to disenchant them into Hypnotic Dust and Lesser Celestial Essence.  Turn the Lessers into Greaters, sell them on the AH.  On our server the dust is selling for about 4 gold each, and the Greater Celestial Essence is about 32 gold each.

Making these pendants also procs a blue version with higher stats, which is nice to sell to leveling toons or twinks.

 

Carnelian: These can often be found for less than 3 gold each, sometimes less than 1 gold each.  Cha-ching!

Use your jewelcrafter to turn these into Carnelian Spikes (3 gems, 3 jeweler’s settings).  These vendor for a whopping 19 gold 48 silver each!
On my jewelcrafter, making these spikes at current prices would cost me about 9 gold each.  That’s a quick 10 gold profit for each one.  Every few days I spend a few minutes crafting them, usually making about 1500 gold in the process. Not bad for five minutes of work and having my AH alt cleaning up the low-priced carnelians once or twice a day during her normal mailbox check-ins.

Moral of the story: Old markets are still abundant sources of wow gold.  Don’t discount your professions just because the hot new market isn’t returning the results you had hoped for.  Look to old markets and see what’s still profitable.

Happy gold-making!

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Making Gold with Ghost Iron Ore

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Published on October 14, 2012,

A few days ago my buddy Dealmaker posted an article on making gold with ghost iron ore.  I’ve been needing to do some more prospecting, as I’m running out of rare gems, and thought “Why not?”

I headed to the AH, grabbed up 100 stacks of ghost iron ore, and sat down for a long session of prospecting.

The ore I bought was between 60 gold and 79 gold per stack, so let’s do worst-case scenario and say it was all 79 gold per stack.  That’s 7900 gold spent.
Above you can see the results of all of that prospecting.

Gem Amount Price Total
Pandarian Garnet 113 3.20 361.60
Tiger Opal 87 2.80 243.60
Sunstone 111 1.00 111.00
Alexandrite 99 1.20 118.80
Lapis Lazuli 104 3.80 395.20
Roguestone 94 2.53 237.82
Primordial Ruby 31 173.00 5363.00
Vermilion Onyx 13 193.00 2509.00
Sun's Radiance 25 95.00 2375.00
Wild Jade 13 112.00 1456.00
River's Heart 20 73.00 1460.00
Imperial Amethyst 15 165.00 2475.00
Sparkling Shards 477
^^Serpent's Eye 47 42.00 1974.00
SUBTOTAL 19080.02
- mats cost -7900.00
TOTAL 11180.02

If I were to sell the gems outright, I’d be making an 11 thousand wow gold profit.  That’s nice for half an hour’s work – assuming they sell at that price.
To see just how volatile our AH is right now, compare my prices with Dealmaker’s.  We’re on the same server.  He took his snapshot of prices just a few days ago.  I assure you, three days from now, those prices will have fluctuated yet again.  It’s a Sunday night for me, which means the weekend players have glutted the market and driven the price down on a lot of things (which is why I was able to pick up so much ore so cheaply).  If I sit on these gems and wait until Tuesday night when folks are getting raid gear, these prices will most likely come up.

However, I don’t want to sell those green-quality gems for such a pittance, and fight with the undercutters.
I’d rather turn them into rings and necklaces.

Tiger Opal, Lapis Lazuli, and Sunstone turn into Ornate Band.   Those DE into 1-9 Spirit Dust, or 1-4 Mysterious Essence.
Pandarian Garnet, Alexandrite, and Roguestone turn into Shadowfire Necklace. Those DE into 1-8 Spirit Dust, or 1-3 Mysterious Essence.
Also, both the ring and the necklace have a chance to proc a blue version with higher stats, which I’d sell outright.

Here’s the prices for enchanting mats on my server at the moment:

Spirit Dust  3.50
Mysterious Essence  21.00
Ethereal Shard 60.00
Sha Crystal  900.00   (Whoa.  Yesterday it was 250!)

Yeesh.  At those prices, it’s quite possible I might lose my ass crafting rings and DEing them.  (I need a shuffle spreadsheet!)

The prices for the blue rings and necklaces is all over the board.  Everywhere from 200 gold to 1,000 gold depending on the stats and how many there are available.  Considering that it costs me roughly 8 gold to make each, even the lowest price those are selling for is a windfall.

So let’s craft all of those up and see what we come up with.

Ornate Band: 87 crafted, 12 were blue procs
Shadowfire Necklace: 94 crafted, 4 were blue procs
Leftover:  17 Lapis Lazuli (64.60), 19 Pandarian Garnet(60.80), 24 Sunstone(24.00), 5 Alexandrite(6.00)
So I spent roughly 1311 gold making those rings and necks – going by the price I could have made had I sold them outright.

Now let’s DE them all.
Necklaces: 189 dust, 16 essence
Rings: 172 dust,  7 essence
Total:  361 dust (1263g),  23 essence (483g) = 1746g

That’s not so bad.  That’s an additional 435 gold if I sell them like that.  But… my profits will be even greater if I turn them into enchanting scrolls.  Blurred speed? 400 gold.  Greater parry? 642 gold. Windsong? 294 gold. Plus my daily Sha Crystal, 900 gold.  With tons of dust left over to keep making more scrolls, essence, and crystals.

I still have yet to look at the going price for the ilvl 450 rings I can create with the blue-quality gems, and compare those to the raw gem prices.  I still have to post those blue procced Ornate rings and Shadowfire necks.

That, my friends, is the shuffle.

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Thorium Is Still (WoW) Gold

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Published on October 10, 2012,

I’ve decided to join in to Cold’s Gold Blogging Carnival this month and share a little love with the new goblins who are just starting out.  His topic this month is “Pick A Market Or A Strategy That You Planned To Focus On For The MoP Launch.  What Were Your Results?”

There were a number of potential markets that I put either time or gold into that failed (detail on successes and failures in my last post), but one that really worked well for me as a poor would-be goblin with more time than gold was Thorium Ore.  Since most goblins just starting out find themselves in the same predicament, this is a great method for them to make some gold.

Before MoP launched, thorium was dirt cheap on the auction house.  A goblin with some gold to risk would have done well to buy it up and use the strategy I outline below.  I, however, had plenty of time and sons who were willing to trade a little grunt work for something they wanted.  One son wanted a new $10 game… he got it after farming up 100 stacks of thorium ore for me while I cooked dinner.  *evil grin*

The backbone of my wow gold making mindset is: Always have a backup plan or alternative use for everything.

Thorium is fantastic for this.  It can be mined by a low-level miner, and sold as ore (if your market is ripe) or bars.
It prospects into 5 fantastic gems: Azerothian Diamond, Huge Emerald, Blue Sapphire, Star Ruby, and Large Opal.  Each of those can be sold raw to jewelcrafters, blacksmiths, tailors, and engineers.
All of those gems can easily be crafted into rings, necklaces, and a helm, which can be sold to low-level toons.
Nearly all of those crafted items can be disenchanted into… here’s the kicker… Greater Eternal Essence, Illusion Dust, and Large Brilliant Shards.

Crafts to make from thorium for wow gold

Azerothian Diamonds turn into Glowing Thorium Bands.
Large Opals turn into Simple Opal Rings.
Huge Emeralds turn into Emerald Lion Rings.
Blue Sapphires turn into Sapphire Pendant of Winter Night.
Star Rubies turn into Wizardweave Turbans.

The only one that doesn’t disenchant into Greater Eternal Essence, Illusion Dust, and Large Brilliant Shards is the Simple Opal Ring.  That’s okay though; the Dream Dust can be used to help make the Wizardweave Turbans, and the Small Brilliant Shards can be sold to enchanters wanting to make the Icy Chill enchant (or turned into that yourself).

I didn’t have the bank space to make up a bunch of rings in advance and store them to sell to leveling alts, so I focused mainly on dominating the markets for those raw gems.  If someone came in and undercut me, I’d buy out their auctions and keep my gems as the only ones available.  Buying their gems for less than my price was just fine, as I could still turn their gems into GEE and Illusion Dust.  Here’s my results:

Azerothian Diamond Sales

Large Opal Sales

Huge Emerald Sales

Blue Sapphire Sales

Star Ruby Sales

Now, like I said, it’s not much – but for a new goblin, that’s a nice chunk of gold.  2,393 wow gold just from two weeks of posting… and it was only 243 gems!

The enchanting mats market absolutely tanked when Mists of Pandaria launched, and rather than sell my enchanting mats for 10% of their normal price, I sat on them.  I’ve just in the past week started selling them again as the prices have started to come back to normal, and for the Large Brilliant Shards, Illusion Dust, and Greater Eternal Essences I’ve made another 1,917 wow gold.

  • Success: 
    • 4,310 wow gold in two weeks with minimal posting (once daily)
    • I still have a TON of gems that I can sell or shuffle into rings/necks, or enchanting mats – so this 4,310 wow gold that I made in the past two weeks will continue to grow.
  • Fail:
    • Not making and storing rings/necks beforehand.  I could have kept them bouncing in the mail system, and made some nice gold selling them to the new pandas.
    • Prospecting all of the thorium I got my hands on.  In the first few days of MoP, the price of thorium hopped from 50s to 6g50s per ore. I should have had some thorium stocked up to jump in on that.

So, in conclusion, if you’re wondering how to start out making gold and you’ve got a dual gatherer (if you don’t, you SHOULD!), go mine up some thorium ore.  Use your alts or fellow guildmates to prospect it, craft, and disenchant it.  Watch the gold roll in.

Farming Tips:
My favorite spot for farming thorium is Silithus.  It’s an easy flight/ride there now with the Uldum portal, and is usually deserted.  While you’re there, kill the air elementals in the  Northwest corner for Essence of Air, which on my server sells for over 200 wow gold each. Also, keep an eye out for the Twilight Prophets, who spawn every half hour and drop 10 Encrypted Twilight Text each.

If you’re into the transmogging market, go to The Blasted Lands instead.  While you’re farming thorium, keep NPCscan running and kill the rares (there’s a ton of them there).  They each drop a nice transmog item, and a Flawless Draenethyst Sphere that can be turned in for another transmogging item.  After you’ve farmed out the Blasted Lands, hop up into the Swamp of Sorrows and farm the ore and rares there.  (They don’t drop the spheres, though, and there are far less rares.)  Go back and forth between those two zones.

The best place to farm runecloth for the wizardweave turbans is Upper and Lower Blackrock Spire.  Especially now with AoE looting, your bags will be bursting with cloth by the time you’re done with just one of these instances. You’ll find tons of greens in there that can be sold for transmog or DE’d into GEE, illusion dust, and LBS, as well as rare BoE patterns.  My pally likes to do Lower Blackrock Spire with a few pulls, step out of the instance and onto the little balcony there, pop onto her vendor mount to sell the greys.  Then she DEs what can’t be transmogged, turns the runecloth into bolts, and heads back in (without resetting!) to do Upper Blackrock Spire.  Once she’s done with that one, it’s another trip to the balcony and a reset of the instance (which resets both at once.)

Happy gold making!

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100,000 WoW Gold Goal: ACHIEVED!

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Published on October 9, 2012,

100k WoW Gold Achieved

I’ve done it!  I’ve passed the 100k WoW Gold mark just from my auctions!

The night Mists of Pandaria launched, I had 7k WoW Gold spread across all of my toons.  That’s it.  I also had a TON of profession leveling mats (mostly leather and gems), recipes/patterns, and various items.

In just two weeks, I’ve made enough wow gold through auctions to cross the 100k milestone, and across all of my toons from leveling, etc I’ve got a total of about 130k wow gold.

WOOT!

What Worked:

My biggest surprise market and biggest moneymaker has been cooking materials.  So far I’ve made over 25,000 wow gold just in cooking mats.   That’s an entire fourth of my income.  Who’d have thought so many people cook?

Doing a shuffle of MoP mats has been nice.  Ghost iron ore -> prospecting -> turning green gems into rings/necks -> selling the blue procs, DEing the greens.  Sell raw blue-level gems.  Turn the orange/purple/green blue-level gems into Primal Diamonds, and sell.   Transmuting ghost iron bars into living steel, and selling.  I’ve made a bit over 25,000 wow gold from this so far, which is another fourth of my income.

All of the thorium ore that I and my son farmed up was pretty good to me just selling the raw gems I prospected from it.  The enchanting market crashed along with everything else, so I’ve been sitting on the enchanting mats I DE’d from the rings and necklaces I crafted from those gems.  That market is just starting to recover, so hopefully the mats I have will bring in thousands more over the next month or two.  A bit over 4k gold came from sales derived from prospecting thorium.

Chalk another 5k gold to leather.  All types of low-level leather and hides.  I sold quite a bit of it in the first four days, then all of the leveling toons started dumping their skins onto the AH and that market tanked.  The little bit that I had left, I sent to my own leatherworker to help her level her profession.

MoP gathering materials was both a success and a failure.  Having gotten realm first mining, I was the first on the AH with ghost iron ore and herbs. I made 7600 wow gold that first morning in ore, 3700 wow gold in green tea leaves, and another 2300 wow gold in silkweed.  Three hours after launch, though, the prices plummeted and it simply wasn’t even worth posting anymore – I turned to shuffling it all and using the herbs to level my alchemy and inscription.  So while selling that initial stock was a success, my plan to spend the first week or two doing nothing but gathering and making the majority of my wow gold from that failed horribly.  There were just too many nodes of both ore and herbs, the respawns were fast enough to make you dizzy, and there were too many people with the same plan but absolutely no common sense when it came to posting what they’d gathered.

What Didn’t Work:

My biggest failure has been hoping I could do anything at all with the pet market.  Egads.  Everyone and their brother thinks it’s a simply fantastic idea to sell all of their extra pets for 5-30g each.  Luckily, most of the pets I had were just holiday extras from my alts, a bunch of white kittens for a mere 60s each, and a few black tabby cats I farmed up myself.  The only money I put into them was buying 4 Elementium Geodes for about 200-250g each.  The price on the geodes dropped down to 99g after 5.01 hit, and has just now come back up to 250g.  Hopefully I’ll be able to offload those eventually.  The holiday pets I’ll try to sell; the tickbirds and cobra hatchlings I’m drowning in from opening Oracle eggs are probably just going to get vendored.

My second biggest failure was recipes and patterns.  The auction house crashed so hard and so thoroughly that no one needed non-trainer recipes to get over a rather expensive hump in leveling their profession.  What is usually a 5k gold profession leveling bracket to go 30 or so points turned into a 100g bracket, because everyone was posting mats so freaking low.  These are taking up nearly a full guild bank tab; most of them will get vendored.

Third biggest failure: cobalt ore.  Nearly a full guild bank tab of that and I’ve had to just sit on it, waiting for the price to recover.  The price on ore sunk to 2g50s each, and bars were 3g each.  It’s just now starting to come back up to 6g or so, and hopefully will improve as the pandas all finish moving through Northrend.  Thankfully, I farmed all that ore myself.

I also find myself stuck with a bunch of glyphs and I just can’t take the time to bother attempting to sell them… a large majority of the glyphs on our auction house are being posted for 1g each.  It’s sickening. I might just vendor the lower-level ones, try to offload the ones that sell for a decent price, and work my stock down until I can get out of that market.  Shoulder enchants are selling nicely, though, and might keep their value due to the low mill rate of misty pigment.  Another idea is to bark in trade that I’ll sell a complete set of glyphs for a class for something like 2k wow gold.  (Trust me, as low as prices are on our AH, this would be a profit compared to auctioning them individually. The market is THAT bad.)

What I Learned (or Confirmed):

  • Never underestimate the stupidity of kobolds.  The speed at which the auction house crashed left I and my guild master (realm goldmaking whale) positively stunned.
  • Have a backup plan or use for everything in your inventory.  If it doesn’t sell raw, be able to turn it into something else.  Don’t put too much stock into things with only one use.
  • Multiple streams of income isn’t just for real-life wealth.  ”Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.”  Had I done that, I’d have made no gold at all. Being flexible saved my ass.
  • Don’t be afraid to sit on your inventory and wait for the market to recover (aka wait for the kobolds to decide putting that item onto the AH is no longer worth their time).
  • Keep your inventory flexible so you can respond to shortages.  These last two tips have allowed me to make that 25k in cooking mats.  When the price for something is good, everyone jumps on it or plants it and drives the price down as soon as they can harvest their plants.  Meanwhile, they can’t sell anything else because they’re not keeping an inventory, and other cooking mats have a sudden shortage.  Fill in those shortages, and 24 hours later when the kobolds have harvested their crops for that item and try to pile on the bandwagon, you can stop posting that item and post whatever the next shortage is.
  • Don’t be afraid to buy inventory and flip it, especially if it fits rule #2: have a backup plan.

I’m actually worried about continuing to make gold in the future.  There are just SO many people flooding the auction house right now, who have no idea that time=money and farmed mats are NOT free, and who are willing (and eager) to cut the price of an item in half just to have their auction listed first.  I hope that as raiding kicks back in to eat up their playing time, they’ll go away.  But then you have the bots… and they’re not going anywhere.  The gem market is disgusting.  Cut green-level gems for 1g each, some as high as 15g but that’s it.  Cut blue-level gems all around 150-200g each and they’re not selling. Again, as raiding kicks in and people actually get gear with sockets, this market might improve.  Blizzard’s proclaimed nerf to ore node respawns actually did kick in with today’s maintenance, so perhaps the MoP ore market will improve as supply dwindles.  I wish they’d nerf herb node spawns, as well (not Golden Lotus, though – it spawns rarely enough to be a myth at the moment).

I have reached one mini-goal of getting my druid’s fishing up to 600 so she can take advantage of that Pandaren Fishing Charm she got that first morning.  The charm confuses me a bit though; I’m not seeing a significant amount of additional fish.  No multiple fish drop on one cast.  As best I can tell, it makes it so that you get an extra cast or two out of a pool; so rather than getting 4 fish from a pool and then it disappears, you get 6 fish out of the pool.  Don’t quote me on that, though.  I’ll try to do a comparison between her fishing with the charm, and without the charm, and see how it stacks up.

My one real goal is to farm up Sky Shards and get the lightning cloud serpent mount from that beautiful dragon flying around the Vale.  A better idea would be to farm the shards and then sell the use of them to someone else who really wants the mount… but I’ll have to make that decision once I get ten shards.  So far I’ve only got two. :(
A side-goal is to improve my gear so that I can kill faster and thereby farm for shards faster.  It feels like my hunter kills SO slowly now.
I also need to level up my farming pally, so I can take her out and kill massive amounts of mobs at once.  Cloth and spirit dust might be selling for crap right now, but wholesale slaughter is just plain fun.

That’s how I’m doing so far, I hope you’re doing as well or better!  Next goal: 250,000 wow gold!

 

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Pandaria Realm First Mining Achieved

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Published on October 3, 2012,

WoW Realm first Mining

There it is – my only realm first this expansion. No idea why the date says 24 instead of 25, but I got it within the first hour of Pandaria opening.  While everyone else was buzzing like crazy bees around the ships in the starting area, I hopped straight off of the boat into the water, swam for Krasarang’s shore, and ran up to Halfhill.  From there, I raced around the Heartland mining and herbing everything in sight – focusing more on ore, since I had a hunch that doing both would make me lose both achievements.  Those last ten points nearly drove me crazy; I was sure someone else was going to ding 600 before me – but I got it.  I started to focus exclusively on herbs at that point, but 10 minutes later someone else got that one.

All of those stacks of ore and herbs went onto the AH immediately – ore: 1500 gold per stack, herbs: 600 gold per stack.  They sold quickly and I set out to get some more.  I shouldn’t have bothered – within a mere three hours the prices on the AH had crashed.  Ore was down to 100 gold per stack and herbs were down to 40 gold per stack. The auction house crashed so fast and so hard my head was spinning.  A week later, and it still hasn’t recovered.  Blizz has the respawn rate on both set so high that we’re drowning in Pandaria mats. But I’ve still made WoW gold, focusing on lower mats – more on that in the next post.

WoW dynamic duo - two alts to farm WoW gold

I also grabbed the Ancient Pandaren Fishing Charm on my gatherer while doing all of that mining in the first hour – one caveat… my gatherer is not my fisher; my main is!  My druid has 25 fishing.  One more goal to reach in the next week: get her fishing up so she can take advantage of that charm.  Why oh why did Blizzard make that BoP instead of BoA like the mining pick?  Argh.

While everyone else has been driving the prices down in the auction house in an undercutting frenzy, I’ve been working on getting my main and my gatherer to 90.  I’ve got all of my 85s at Halfhill with their first four farming plots growing veggies (my main has 8 plots), and finally last night my druid dual-gatherer hit 90.  I could have cried when I popped her into flight form.  Questing on her in boomkin form was actually painful.  Where’d the “boom” in boomkin go?

My biggest surprise so far has been cooking materials.  Holy hell… who’d have thought so many people actually cooked?  With Fish Feasts being the prominent go-to buff food (even better than individual stat food, which was a major mistake) all through Cataclysm, you would think people had gotten out of the habit of cooking their own food.  Throw in how no one does any research or reads patch notes, and therefore would have no idea that Pandaria’s best buff food is individual stat meals, and that sets the stage for a slow cooking materials market.

Boy, is that wrong.  I’ve made tons of WoW gold selling cooking materials.  So much so, that I made a new alt just to hold all the mats and do those auctions.

All in all, so far, even with the extreme crash of the auction house and the plummet in prices across the board, I’ve been making a good amount of gold.  Nothing like the big boys, to be sure, but I’m set to cross my 100k gold goal by the end of the second week.  I’ll keep you updated.

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What’s Your Ideal Alt System?

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Published on September 22, 2012,

 

In preparation for MoP, I’ve been looking more at my server’s horde auction house and thinking about how I could maximize my WoW gold making activities.
The horde side of our server is nearly “dead”, and as such there are a lot of opportunities on that AH to play with.

I have one toon over there already, a lvl 85 paladin that loves to solo old dungeons and disenchant anything she can get her hands on. She’s also currently a miner.  As my only toon horde-side, those were the best two choices at the time.
But now I’m thinking of giving her a support staff, and that’s got me considering what to level up to work in concert with her.

Cold’s Ideal Alts series has fascinated me since he wrote it.  It really highlights the differences between playstyles and approaches to making WoW gold.
Cold breaks it down like this:

  1. The AoE herder – paladin, engineer/skinning
  2. The low-level dungeon runner – rogue, enchanting/skinning
  3. The heroic dungeon runner – druid (for healer queues), tailor/skinning
  4. The solo raider – dk, enchanting/JC
  5. The collector – mage, engineering/scribe

I look at that list and I see skinning three times, enchanting twice, and engineering twice.  There’s no alchemy for transmute cooldowns.  There’s no herber or miner to feed the JC, scribe, and engineers. There’s three different dungeon runners, four if you take the AoE herder into dungeons to skin.

That’s a lot of toons doubling up on duties – and even though I have access to far more accounts than I should be paying Blizzard for, I certainly don’t want to double up on professions while separating out duties to such a degree that I need five different toon slots to do two basic tasks (running dungeons, and collecting).  With five toons, you should have all but one of the professions covered. Not to mention, the more toons you have, the more time you need to spend leveling them up and gearing them to be able to take on new content solo.  Having leveled engineering on my hunter main twice, trust me when I say that it’s a royal pain in the ass to level, and it’s not a money-maker. It’s fun for PvP and gives you a bit of mobility and utility, but that slot sure would be better served with a cooldown profession: Jewelcrafting, Tailoring, or Alchemy.

Here’s my list:

  1. The collector – mage, JC/Alch/Fish/Arch (possibly dropping Alch for Engineering,  if you have Alch on another toon)
  2. The dungeon/raid runner – pally, enchant/tailor
  3. The farmer – druid, herbing/mining
  4. (Optional) The skinner – hunter, skinning/Alch, or skinning/LW if another toon has Alch
  5. (Optional) The herb-eater – any class, Alch/Scribe – being able to send all of your herbs to one toon is a real time-saver

I love the idea of an engineer mage with the ability to port nearly anywhere in the world. However, looking at the locations of Horde portals, I’ve come to realize that combination would be much better served to an Ally mage than a horde.  Horde mages get much wider coverage of Azeroth with their portals than Alliance mages do.  Throw in the city portals for Cataclysm zones and you can be nearly everywhere in the blink of an eye, and once we hit 90 we’ll have a portal to the old Dalaran spot in Hillsbrad.
Still, if your server/faction has a slot open for engineered pets (mine doesn’t) or you trade primals, an engineer is still a great choice for a Horde mage.  One wormhole generator hop away from Sholazar Basin plus the zapthrottle mote extractor, and you’re raking in the cash.  The other engineer teleports can also save you a lot of time if you’re frequently visiting Winterspring or Netherstorm for recipes and/or pets.
I would also make this toon the primary Archaeology and Fishing toon, if you’re into those markets.
If your engineering pet, vendor recipe flipping, and primal markets are already stuffed with competition, I’d skip the engineering (especially if you’re Horde) and go with JC/Alchemy.  The glyph market on every server I look at is so competitive that it’s simply not worth getting into anymore.  (You can thank all of those WoW gold-making guides for that. They all stress being a Scribe as being the equivalent to printing your own money.)

For the dungeon/raid runners, I’d collapse them all into a single toon – a prot paladin with enchanting and tailoring.
Paladins don’t need engineering for long-range pulls; their captain america shield and judgement do just fine filling that niche.  Add to it the new glyph that allows them to throw their consecrate anywhere, and you’ve got a nearly-perfect dungeon runner.  The only thing missing is the ability to open chests in those old dungeons.  (Believe me, I growl every time I take run one of my farming pallies up to a chest only to find out it’s locked.)  Cold’s point on only Wrath+ dungeons dropping extra cloth (scavenging) is offset by the sheer amount of cloth dropped in old dungeons.  Do one run of Upper and Lower Blackrock Spire and you’ll be wishing you had a tailor there to roll all of that runecloth into bolts to save bag space.  Also, by having tailoring and enchanting on the same toon, you can easily make use of that cloth to make enchanting mats. (Wizardweave Turban, I’m looking at you!)

For a pure farming toon of mining and herbing, nothing – and I mean nothing – beats a druid.  Instant-cast flight form, plus being able to herb while in flight form trumps every other class, period.  You’ll never herb and mine as fast on any other class as you will on a dual gathering druid.  Get this druid a Kirin Tor ring or Argent Tourney tabard for ports to Northrend, with a Blessed Medallion of Karabor for a port to Shadowmoon Valley, plus all of the Cata city ports, and you’re golden.  (Be sure to give this toon a Gnomish Army Knife and a set of Mist-Piercing Goggles.)

The must-have list skips out on Cold’s choices of skinning, inscription, and the ability to open chests in old dungeons.
I’ll never have a rogue.  I just cannot stand their playstyle.  It’s the same thing that keeps me from leveling a DK past the mid-sixties.  Being forced to wait for your energy to build back up, with no way to actively build it up yourself, is just not fun.  I leveled a rogue to 20 once, and there he sat for years until I RAF’d him up to level 60 so that my hubby could use him to farm lockboxes for the Insane title.  Now he’s just taking up space, still sitting in his low 60s, because neither of us can stand to play him for more than one fight.  I leveled a horde DK to 82 so my hubby could farm her for PvP tokens and achievements, and then happily deleted her.

If you must have a skinner, I’d recommend a hunter. If you’re Alliance, go Worgen for the super-fast skinning racial. Not only are hunters insanely fun to play, their long-range pulling ability and fast killing abilities cannot be overlooked.  You can misdirect tons of mobs to your pet and just keep mowing them down until the pile would make Hemet Nessingwary jealous. Also, as a hunter, coupling your skinning with Leatherworking is a no-brainer; you’ll be able to make your own gear and sell leg armors.  If you’ve already got a leatherworker, then go Alchemy for your second profession – you can never have too many Alchemy transmute cooldowns at your disposal.

If you must have a scribe, then at least be sensible and couple it with Alchemy.  Being able to send all of your herbs to one toon is a real time-saver, and that toon can have its own guild bank stuffed with herbs.
Other than through transmutes, Alchemy hasn’t traditionally been a big money-maker, but I see that changing in MoP.  While leveling in Beta I never once saw a health potion or mana potion drop. If that stays the case in Live, Alchs are going to be making good money with those potions.

 

So what am I going with?

The Farmer druid (troll) for herb/mining, and The Collector mage (goblin) with JC and Alchemy.
As horde, she just has such better coverage of Azeroth that I don’t need engineering for portals.  The primal market on Horde looks slow, and I can always buy eternals with frost orbs. The engineering pet market can’t handle more than two or three sellers normally, and there’s about five on the AH.   Engineering would be a lot of fun, but it won’t make me much money.  Alchemy, on the other hand, has the potential to make me a lot of money with the need for pots coming in MoP, but especially for Potions of Treasure Finding.  Being able to make those, rather than paying markup for them on the AH, will quickly pay for itself… not to mention the transmutes.  Rather than use an engineer portal to get to Netherstorm, I’ll just set my hearth there.   I can get to Winterspring quickly through the Mt. Hyjal portal, and be in Tanaris quickly through the Uldum portal or the Shatt/Dal portals to the Caverns of Time.  Being a goblin will get her serious discounts on vendor items, which will come in handy for recipes/patterns and for the Sands of Time/Pyrium-Laced crystal vial for the sandstone drake.

I’ll also be making sure to get the druid all of the various “port me around” items like the Argent Tourney tabard.

I’ll drop my pally’s mining and replace it with tailoring, and then I’ll have all three major cooldowns covered and the best money-making professions available on just three toons.
(Sorry, but on my server, inscription just is not a money-maker unless you have time to babysit the AH all day long and constantly repost your glyphs.)

Those locked chests in dungeons?  I’ll just have to keep glaring at them as I run by.

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Change This Setting to Keep Your AH Alt’s Privacy

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Published on September 20, 2012,

Check this box to keep your privacy

It’s important to keep your AH toons separate from your raiding toons.  It may not seem like it when you first get into the WoW gold game, but people will see what you’re doing on the AH and associate it with you, personally.  They may not invite you to a raid.  They might start treating you differently. They might shoot down anything you say or brush off any suggestion you give them, simply because you undercut them on an auction or you’re the one selling that rare item they want for a serious chunk of gold they don’t want to pay.  They might bug you endlessly to cancel your auction and sell the item to them at a deep discount, or even simply give it to them.

It does happen.

To avoid that drama, what many of us have learned to do is have AH alts.  They’re not in our raiding guild (usually they have a personal guild bank), our friends and guildmates don’t know about them, and our aim with these alts is to simply stay anonymous. Business is business, there’s nothing personal about it – but others don’t see it that way.  People have gone out of their way to find out who the “main” is of an active auction house whale, and harassment has ensued.  It still happens.

So, there’s something you should know about: GuildOx is now making a full list of your characters available to anyone who wants to know.

They’re using Blizzard’s new achievement-sharing feature, along with the mobile data API, to cross-reference your characters and build a database.  It doesn’t matter if your characters are spread across different factions, or even different realms – GuildOx will find them and happily display a list of all of them on its website.  (Along with any server changes or name changes you’ve made. Isn’t that nice of them?)

So much for the right to privacy.

Why are they doing this?  Because they can.  Because the feature is there for exploiting, and wanting to have a leg-up on its competitors, GuildOx will publish data that clearly oversteps personal (and/or moral) boundaries.
They had to come up with a justification for this, and “it’s for guild leaders to get a better picture of who is applying for their guild” was the best they could do.
I don’t actually have a vocabulary with enough finesse to wittily state what I think of this “feature” (read: exploitation).  Simply stated: It’s bullshit, and it should be turned off immediately.
Having worked with battered women, having been a battered wife myself, having had friends who were stalked in-game and in real-life,  and simply dealing with the drama that can arise from posting something on the auction house, this can’t be stated loudly enough:

There are clear and valid reasons to protect your privacy in an online game.

Usually when someone wants to exploit your private information for their own gain, they require you to opt-in and give them permission to do so.  Not GuildOx!
No, with GuildOx, your information is available by default unless you specifically opt-out.

Doing so is relatively easy, but annoying, and it’s something that we shouldn’t have to do in the first place.

  1. Log on to your first toon.
  2. Hit Escape, then choose Interface, then Display.
  3. To the right you’ll see a checkbox for “Display only Character Achievements to others”.  Check that box.
  4. Hit Okay.
  5. Repeat on ALL of your other toons, on both factions, on every realm, on every account you have.
  6. Make sure this is the first setting you change when you create any new toons, even before enabling auto-loot.

Do it immediately.
I’m serious.  Login to WoW and do it right now.
Don’t assume that no one cares who you are, or that you’re such a small fish in the WoW gold-making game that no one will ever look.  They don’t have to be looking for your AH toon.  They could be curious about your gear on your raiding main, look you up, and suddenly find out that you’re the AH guy with the weird name who’s always got the auctions for the expensive rare mounts in the AH.  Guess what happens next?

Your privacy is not something to be taken lightly.  Trust me on this.

GuildOx, may the fleas of a thousand camels infest the underpants of all of your developers, coders, and website managers.  The decent thing to do when seeing that you had the ability to display this information would have been to offer a checkbox on a toon’s profile that the owner of the toon had to sign-in and click to opt-in to having all of their alts shown.  Instead, you chose to show it by default, forcing all of the people who never wanted this information made public to have to take extra steps to keep your website from violating their privacy.

Shame on you. Bad business decision, bad justification, and bad business practices all around.  Fleas, camels, your underpants.