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!