Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Pet Speculation


One of the new features for Mists of Pandaria is the new pet battle system. It is really hard to say whether this will be a fun feature or not. I personally loathed archeology as a horrible time sink, but I loved the mini-game for the sunflowers vs zombies up up in northern eastern kingdoms. I've only read a bit about it, but pets will be universal for your account, and they'll fight in mini-pet teams. This could be a great way to have fun outside of raiding or pvping. The game certainly needs alternate routes at the high end.

I am no stranger to pets. I am buy no means an expert, but I've acquired enough to know a bit about the subject. (One of the few I am missing is the accursed Tol Bard Fox.)

 

The question is if this system is fun, then how can we turn a profit from it? I mentioned in my lantern mongering post, that limited availability pets might be a good investment. If you are looking to start a business, I am sure you've heard for many of the high selling pets. This is certainly something worth farming.

Fireflies, disgusting oozlings, the whelps (crimson, emerald, dark, and azure) and the like are some of the most highly sought after pets. One my server during wrath, each pet would go between 3 to 5k. Today 15 to 20 is a common price. There's a natural increase in value as inflation. I dabbled in a few pets, mostly buying them super cheap and reselling.

Pets aren't faster sellers by any means. It takes a certain level of dedication. When buying high ticket items, it is important not to panic. Sometimes, it comes down to admitting, you can't sell an item and just using it yourself. That's always a nice backup plan.

Sometimes, it is just being patient. I had a Big Battle Bear (not a pet but a mount from the card game). I paid a king's ransom for it, 80k. Then I spent the next 4 months trying to sell the thing for 100k. The problem was there wasn't anyone on my server that was interested in such a high price item. Through the end of wrath, I maintained my faith and stuck with it and eventually partway through cata, go 85k for it. At the end of the day, 5k wasn't a huge profit—6 and a quarter present. One the other hand, I never needed the money really for anything, so it was better than having it sit idle all that time.

Pets are a nice form of speculation. Maybe every pet team will want a disgusting oozling? The value might increase. People might get more interested in pets in general because of the expansion's focus on them. For whatever the reason, pets are a pretty solid investment. It is not without risk, but that's what makes the game interesting eh?

Sunday, January 29, 2012

The Best Redundant Profession is ...

I had a really good run today.  With my two log ins, I cleared around 10k.  That's rock solid from what I was doing before.  It must be the weekend rush really kicking end.  Unless my competitors don't log on as much during the weekend for whatever reason.  My inventory value continues to fall, but I can hardly complain.  At this point, I've really accomplished my original goal.  In many ways, writing here has rekindled my interest in making gold, though we'll have to see how long it lasts. 


I managed to find a decent price on whiptail and bought as much as I could find.  It ended up being around 230 stacks.  To be honest, it was tedious milling it, but I used the hotkey I mentioned before and got right to it.  A movie later, and I was ready to afk and turn it all into ink.   The best part is I've almost four bags of ink now, so I am protected from the markets twists and turns until my inventory runs out.  I'll keep checking for good prices, but it isn't as critical.  The nice side-effect of milling so much whiptail is again inferno ink.  Inferno ink is a great way to generate darkmoon cards or heavenly shards.  I am honestly leery about darkmoon cards this late into the expansion, but I might gamble and go for it anyway.  I never have lost money on a fair yet.

I managed my side businesses as well today.  I suppose I should reveal all my professions.  My shaman is an enchanter/tailor, my druid a alchemist/jcer, my paladin an alchemist/engineer, and Dk of course is an alchemist/inscriptor.  The only reason my paladin is an engineer is because I was challenged by my guild mates to get raid ready in one day--and the 359 helm was too good to pass up.  Enchanting, jewelcrafting, and inscription are all solid money makers but each skill requires large time investments.  I believe alchemy is the best skill for redundant characters.  It all comes down to transmuting.  If I want to do jewelcrafting say, a second jewelcrafter offers little advantage in the long term.  Basically, I could do the JC daily twice instead of once.  For something like smithing or leatherworking the benefit is almost zero.  Each alchemist allows me to transmute once a day for a minute's time.  That's a huge amount of profit for the time frame.  Without any procs, at the start of the expansion I could buy life for 15 and sell it for 45.  That's 30 gold per life or 450 gold per transmute.  One of my friend's has 8 alchemists, so he made 3,600 gold for logging in each day--with a 15 percent buff for procs, that's 4,140!.  Of course, after this became less profitable, there was always true gold.  He had a huge advantage in making true gold because he could craft all his other elements from life.  (If you aren't aware, if you transmute in uldum you always get air, and Vash always gives you water, deepholm earth, etc.)   True gold was great all through 4.2 because of the crafted 365 gear.  Admittedly if the recipes would have been more accessible early on (basically you couldn't get them for almost a month), then maybe the demand would have been even higher.

Thus, the best redundant skill is alchemy.  You get something for almost no time investment.  I can't stress that enough.  Your real money maker might be jcing or inscription or enchanting, but alchemy compliments any array of skills better than almost any other choice.  In this current expansion, Blizzard has not allowed for epic gem transmutes, but if they revert back to a Wrath model, then they might in the future.  The other really nice thing about alchemy is I could level it for 2 to 3k.  Engineering almost cost me 10k.  I also will admit, I like alchemy because I just make the flask at the start of the expansion for the extra stats, and then forget about it.  Every other "perk" from a profession is a repetitive enchant.  Plus a nice trinket never hurts!  Anyway, that's my musing for the day.





Saturday, January 28, 2012

Patch Day Stockpiling

    One of the most exciting times for any gold maker is patch day.  My first really big patch day was with the release of Ulduar.  Before that point, I really only focused on making sure I had enough materials before a given patch.
    I had been selling flasks during Naxx and making a good profit doing it.  Raid leaders on my server, required people to use flasks to raid, thus, people were required to do so.  After awhile, I couldn’t farm enough myself anymore and simplify bought materials from the Auction House to meet demand.  With less time spent farming, I really started to make great profit.  The week before Ulduar, I made a decision to go all in..
    I had about 60k at the time and I bought all the lichbloom, frost lotus, gold clover, ice thorn, and premade flasks (both attack power and spell power) out of the auction house.  I dropped to 20k, then a mere 6k after buying a second surge of materials.  Then I doubled the price.  There was hate tells.  Why was I charging 80 gold for a 40 gold item?  They wouldn’t pay it--they’d farm it themselves--I was a bad person.  But at the end of the day, most people did pay it.
    After wiping the market out for a full ten days, it recovered faster than I could keep up.  The damage was done though.  The price had skyrocketed on these items and for the most part it never recovered.  Throughout most of Wrath, the price was 60.  It took until the end of the year of ICC for the price to really decline.
    Flasks aren’t profitable anymore because of the guild cauldron perk.  The market has shifted to gems and enchanting materials these days.  I’ve noticed Elementium ore on my server went from as low as 30 gold a stack to now 150+.  Red gems have gone from 50 to well over 300.  The demand is much higher than it was for Firelands and 4.2.  Why though?
    The new 5 mans are easier than the troll dungeons, so there’s some pick up there.  But the real reason, clearly is the Raid Finder.  LFR has brought a larger casual player base into raiding.  This extra content for really casual players has enticed them to by the best gems and enchants.  I’d imagine those that stockpiled pyrite for epic gems and didn’t panic sell it, are making a fortune
    What about future patch days?
    I‘ve mentioned this before, but during Wrath I stockpiled 16,000 glyphs.  The reason was because I was making them from 1-2 gold each.  I decided the value of the glyphs would appreciate more than gold would.  With my market manipulation, I’d assume that probably got over 200,000 gold for that small investment. 
    This tier of raids is over, thus the materials have a shelf life.  The thing to stockpile are materials on the leveling path for trade skills.  After all, all the new pandas and monks are going to need to level professions.  It is doubtful many will want to do it while they level.  Outland materials are already a royal pain to gather and prices will doubtless be high for those and wrath materials.  There’s a huge opportunity to pick up materials during “the dumping” as the people get rid of this expansion’s materials as well.

Finally, I sold some more glyphs and have turned a small profit on my investment.  I still have a large amount of inventory as well.  My overall value has plummeted as the invisible hand has begun to thwart the strings I pulled.



Friday, January 27, 2012

A Small Experiment

Perhaps because of my last entry, I got inspired and  started using Auctionator to buy out glyphs.  I invested about 4k in all into the market and ended up filling my bags with cheap glyphs, mostly in the 5 to 20 gold range.  I'd look at the cheap glyphs with the addon and I found there were a quite a few that were cheap, and then a huge gap where a guy had posted glyphs for 350 gold.  I basically reposted the glyphs at 349.




I didn't check my auctions for 13 hours, and had only sold 16 glyphs all day.  I made 2325 gold from those glyphs.  Some were probably glyphs I hadn't reset yet, but my average was 145 gold per.  Before I was selling and having to craft and mill each day.  With so few glyphs sold, that's not as much of an issue now.  So I have less work and about the same profit.  I can accept that.  Naturally, it will get worse as an undercutting war starts, but I'll try to babysit my glyphs alittle more (while watching TV or listening to my NPR podcasts).

As a side note, my overall worth in glyphs was 10k before.  That's really not very much.  With inflating, my value is supposedly over 100k now.  I'll never get that much, but it is fun to see your value increase so radically.




Anyway, so far this small experiment has been a success.

Edit: I sold another 12 while writing this for 1851.  Again average is 154.  That's not too bad for almost no work.  It also suggests that I need to cycle my glyphs more often.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Market Mantipulation

Last year, Blizzard made a terrible mistake.  They removed the recipe for the mage armor glyph, but did not actually remove the glyph.  Thus, there was a limited supply of mage armor glyphs--those that had been previously created.  At the same time, Blizzard had buffed arcane mages significantly.  This created an insane rush on the limited supply of preexisting ones. 
    At the time glyphs went from 15 to 50 gold on my server.  I quadrupled the price to 200 gold and sold my entire stock over the first two weeks.  When I had just a handful left, I started radically increasing my price because I realized Blizzard wasn’t going to patch and fix this immediately.


    The screenshots I submit show selling a single glyph for both 2,000 and 1,000 gold.  It seemed absurd, but such was the situation that the shortage created.  It is the basic idea of supply and demand.
    During the start of Cataclysm, I sold glyphs at a very low rate.  I utterly drove out all my competitors.  Everyone thought it was the end of the world for glyphs.  With glyphs being permanent items, the age old competitors I’d competed against for 9 months…all vanished.  As I watched our server wide glyphs fall from 16,000 to 2,000, I realized that there was still money to be made.
    I began buying out glyphs at prices that were cheaper than I could craft them myself (as I always had done) and even those slightly above that price if I could clear the entire market out.  With the market cleared out, I reset it to the outrageous price of 275 gold a glyph.


    Some people balked I am sure, but the impatient would buy them up.  After all, they were less than a red gem and you’d never have to buy them again right?  Some competition came back and we’d bitterly go back and forth.  On my days off, I’d read a book and watch TV and every 20 minutes recycle all my glyphs from the AH to the mailbox, to undercut by another tiny amount.  At 275, gold, the glyphs would very slowly fall back down, to the point where I bought them again and continued the loop.  I could never win the market indefinitely, but I could take it over for 12 hours or so at a time.  This was plenty of time to see massive profits.
    This was great because most of the tedious work went out of the business.  I was reselling more than actually crafting.  I didn’t have to mill as much anymore.  Some glyphs like sap, lightening bolt, and void walker were poison pills and I avoided them at all costs, but most resold fairly quickly.
    The average person doesn’t want to find an inscription.  They don’t get mats like they do from enchanting from running dungeons.  And they feel they need glyphs to be effective.  Some glyphs are game changing like the unleashed lightening bolt glyph for elemental shamans.
    This full-scale market manipulation is a powerful way to generate cash at very low risk.  If you buy  30 glyphs for 10 gold each and sell but one of them, for 300, then you’ve broken even, plus 29 glyphs.  Those with massive gold backing can buy up mass quantities of low level herbs as well as high level to control the market.   It was impossible to hold the market forever, even doing this, but it often would create day long periods of wealth.
    This is a more advanced and risky technique, but certainly a way to generate revenue.

    On a side note, as I’ve gotten better with Trade Skill Master, the buying functionality basically works like Auctionsnatch.  Auctionsnatch still has usefulness in making large premade lists.

The Darkmoon Fair, a rich person's game

If your bank looks anything like mine, after doing glyphs for awhile, you get an excessive amount of inferno ink?  What to do?

As a side note, I order my darkmoon cards by number, so in one bag, I know where to put each new card.

During its pinnacle, the darkmoon trinkets were incredibly profitable.  Before 4.3, I was making between 100 and 300k a month doing darkmoon cards.  Why was that?
    The demand for the trinkets was really high.  Volcano and tsunami were best in slot (or nearly so) for all 4.1.  For 4.2, they were still strong choices especially for new characters leveling up.  Even in 4.3, the darkmoon cards were still useful for allowing access for alts to LFR and 5 mans.
    The darkmoon cards like everything with inscription is counter intuitive to Blizzard’s belief  in a causal friendly game.  The crafter has a 1/64 chance of making the card they are looking for.  The chances of making a deck of  your choice are really, really poor.  This cripples people without the ability to devote larger amounts of money to it.  The average person simply can't finish decks without buying cards and paying higher prices.  This as akin to trying to start a card company...the average person doesn't have the capital.
    By spending over 100k a month, I was able to complete crazy amounts of decks.  Each month, I’d make between 30 and a 100 decks.  Now, I’d spend an entire of month of selling glyphs and reinvesting the money into herbs and then make massive profits during and after the fair. 
    Certainly, competition was a factor, but most people were impatient to sell, and I’d keep prices low and then up them once my competition sold out.  My impatient foes would sell out rather quickly.  You never would buy many materials during the fair itself, but before and after, was a great time to stock up.
    For card singles, sometimes I would sell but more often than not, I would not.  You would sell when you gained massive amounts of extra cards of a single type.  Buying cards was likewise distasteful, but it was worth monitoring prices.  Sometimes, buying a card for 500, would grant you an extra deck.
    The best thing about doing glyphs is all the inferno ink you’d gain as a byproduct.  If the darkmoon cards aren’t big enough on your server and you can’t sell inferno ink.  Vicious Jawbone of Conquest is an interest option to craft.  If you have an enchanter, you have more options.  For the cost of 5 ink (effectively worthless if you can’t sell or make anything out of them), then 12 volatile life, and a bleached jawbone.  Then you can disenchant them into shards.  With guild perks, you can even get extra shards.  It’s a nice bonus.  Shards are really high on my server, over 200 gold each sometimes.
    Pricing wise, I always follow the market demand.  Originally, I got over 20k for tsunami cards and 15 for volcano.  Hurrricane were lower from 10 to 12 and earthquake a mere 4k.  Today, tsunami are 9 or 10, while volcano for 8....and hurricane are 4 and earthquake a mere 2. 
   Depending on your skill and luck, perhaps for the new expansion you can be poised to really rack in the cash.





Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Lantern Mongering

Instead of writing about the Darkmoon cards like I was planning, I thought I'd mention the current holiday event.  The interesting thing about this event are the two new pets, the Lunar and Festival Lanterns.  Alliance get a blue one and Horde a red.  Why are we interested...because they are BOE.



Essentially any pet collector will want both.  If you have access to two accounts, you can put them right in the opposing AH if you are adapt at transferring your goods early in the morning through the neutral Auction House.  Otherwise listing them in the neutral auction house isn't a bad move at all.



On the alliance side I see the lunar going for 3800 in my auction and 20k in the horde AH.  So with doing no work besides a chain of characters,  I could potentially make 16k profit.  Also there's only going to be a limited number of them until next year!  Prices might go somewhat higher after that.

The other fun fact is you don't even have to pay 3800 gold or whatever your server's price is to start up.  You could simply just grind it out by doing the event.  This would give you a nice amount of gold to start your own warcraft gold business.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Milling and Crafting

I generally look to buy herbs between 20 and 30 gold a stack.  Your server might be different.  If you can get them cheaper, all the better for you.  If your glyphs sell for more, then you can afford to pay more.  I usually count on getting 6 inks (this is a bit low) out of a stack of herbs.  That's two glyphs per stack...so glyphs will cost between 10 and 15 gold to make.  Thus, my threshold of 15.

As I mentioned in the previous post, inscription isn't for your average player.  I noted, you'd go mad trying to put all the auctions up by hand.  The basic blizzard auction house ui is equally poor in design.  It's natural safeguard of conforming every buy, prevents us from buying the quantities we want quickly.  As the goblins say, time is money, friend.



To combat this, I use an addon called auctionsnatch.  I am not entirely sure if TSM does this function or not, but because I've used auctionsnatch in the past, I continue to do so.  Basically, what it does is search the auction house for items on your list and it filters them out if they are too expensive.  It is honestly alittle buggy but the best addon for the job.  I can click very quickly and buy massive amounts of goods.  If you've ever sold massive quantities of materials and seen them sell super fast...faster than anyone could click the confirmation button--they are probably using an addon similar to this.

Random gold making tip--some people use this addon to search the auction house for massively long lists of things that aren't sold often.  Instead of manually typing in X item and Y item every day, you simply search whenever you at the Auction House.  Not what I use it for at all, but still a very powerful way of finding deals.



I tend to use 4 inscription bags to hold inks/glyphs, so herbs become a problem.  In order to combat this, I actually use herb backs to hold herbs.  Starting out, this won't be a big problem.

Once you've lined your bags with herbs, you can begin the milling process.  If you are doing many different types of processing (prospecting, milling, and especially disenchanting, I suggest the Addon Panda.  It provides a great interface for this type of grunt work.)  If you are only milling or prospecting, then you really don't need it.  You can make a macro to do it.

The macro reads as follows:
/cast milling
/use whiptail

You can then add any number of other herbs after whiptail.  Say you also get cinderbloom cheap, then add /use cinderblom.  There's a few other quirks.  It looks at your first bag, then finds the first herb, and checks to see if there are 5.  If they aren't 5, then it won't go.  So if you buy an odd number, say 97 whiptail, you need to put the last 2 in their own slot away from the first or it won't run.

Don't get me wrong this is tedious work.  I usually watch a movie or television while doing this.  I basically turn myself the other direction and click one button every few seconds.  With my attention elsewhere, I find less work than actually farming.

Eventually your bags will look like this.  I usually will remove the inferno ink into the bank and continue onward.  Naturally, if you aren't buying massive amounts of materials, you won't have this problem.

Once you've milled all your herbs down, you want to stack as many pigments as you can in your bags.  Creating thousands of ink, takes huge amounts of time.  Sometimes as long as 45 minutes.  Thankfully, you can afk during it--completely.  You set it to autocraft and then go grab a snack or do homework or laundry or whatever else you've been meaning to do.



So now, you have some amount of ink.  What to craft and how to decide what do craft?  Thankfully TSM, does the heavy lifting for you.  Just like we had to set the rules for posting, we have to set the rules for crafting.



The first settings are about how many of each glyph do you want on hand?  I only want a thin layering of glyphs.  During wrath, at my high point, I had 16,000 glyphs and it took more than one character to manage them all.  These days 2 of each glyph is plenty for me.  This prevents me from tying up too much money on inventory and it allows for spending so little time cycling glyphs in the mail.

You also have to decide how much profit is worth your time?  At this point, I set a very high ratio of 18 gold to craft a glyph.  You could choose a much smaller number, if you are willing to accept to work for less.  The other settings aren't too important for our glyph making.


Once you've set your perimeters, then it is a simply business of clicking restock queue.  You then match the number of inks and vendor bought items with the number required.  After that, you simply click craft next.

One nice feature is it tells you the price of the materials and what at current market prices, they'll eventually sell for.  This isn't foolproof because markets change radically, but it gives you a rough idea what you might gain.  In the example shot, 5826 in estimate profit, over 1271 in costs, suggests 458 percent profit!  So for each gold I spend in materials I am likely to get 4.5 gold in return.

Naturally some of the glyphs don't sell quickly or often.  This is alright because I'll never gamble more than crafting 2 of a given glyph.  Thus, after that first gamble, I never need gamble again until it pays off.

This post and the last covered the basics of glyph making--how to make groups, how to post and cancel, how to mill, how to know what to craft, all in an efficient manner.  Once your infrastructure is set up, then really this is all you need to know.  Of course, once you are established, there's surely more we can delve into.



The Nature of the Beast, Inscription and Posting Auctions

I'll start with talking about inscription.  The greatest thing about inscription is...it is the worst design blizzard has ever done.  I have to hand it to them on how most of their tradeskills are designed.  There's roughly thirty or so items each produces that players actually want per tradeskill.  The really strong sellers are usually even less than that though.  Jewelcrafting is mostly about red gems (three cuts to be precise) and stuff to disenchant, smithing is about belt links, tailoring is about bags and leg enchants, leather working is about leg enchants, alchemy is about transmuting and flasks, but inscription is a monster.  It is not friendly to the casual player at all (and neither is the darkmoon cards, but that's an entry for another day).

To make a predict, I feel blizzard will try to address this.  There's been some talk of removing prime glyphs because there's little choice involved in them.  I believe this is a bandaid to their poor design.  But I digress.

The average say jewelcrafter can cut a dozen gems and post them by hand without the aid of addons.  One of my friends does it.  He'll spend a half an hour doing gems each day before raid time.  That's as fancy as he's willing to get, despite my protests.  The thing about inscription is it is much bigger.  The average person won't post 350 different glyph types per hand.  It just isn't feasible.  They won't devote a character slot to a guy using inscription bags and the idea of what to do with all the glyphs when they aren't in the auction house is another mess.  Especially when someone like myself can use an addon and cancel all my auctions in repost in under 8 minutes.  Thus, the scope of inscription is too big for you to do it alone.  That's why we use addons.  Addons make inscription feasible.  It simply isn't without them.  That's great for us because it means most people won't have the tools necessary to compete.  It helps us move towards a natural monopoly.

The next problem with inscription worth noting is the fact, that it takes forever to going.  With so many recipes found from research or glyph books, it takes many months of doing daily research (major and minor) to collect the recipes.  Glyph books were common in Wrath, but not so easy to obtain today--I bought them for under 15 gold each (around 60 of them), today they are 500 each.  It takes 9 days to get the three red cuts (delicate, bold, brilliant) and another 6 to get a purple and orange cut (say purified and reckless).  In two weeks type you can compete with most other people.  Inscription just doesn't work that way.  I am fairly consistent, but even when I step away from doing it, I still have the infrastructure of a glyph mule with all the recipes.  I can't do anything to speed this process up; this is a strong barrier to entry.  It protects you though when you get past this point.

People far more adept than me have been making great addons to handle this since Wrath.  I started using Quick Auctions 3...I don't know anything about previous addons before that point.  That addon was great.  It basically did everything for you.  In order to limit it, Blizzard required you to click once for each auction instead of it automatically posting.  Thus Auction Profit Master (APM) was born as a reworking of quick auctions.  It was supposed to be a temporary addon and quickly discontinued, but I used it for the better part of a year.  Finally, I've recently begun using Trade Skill Master (TSM).  This addon is like a perfected mouse trap.  It really does everything from accounting, to crafting, to posting....it is pretty impressive.  If you aren't familiar with it though, it can be daunting to use.

Here's the technical stuff.   The most fundamental thing to learn to do is posting.

This most basic function is to create a group.  You want to include items that cost a similar amount to craft.  Glyphs all take three inks and red gems all take an inferno ruby.

The first line is about how do you want them posted.  The three basic questions are how long, how many in a single auctions, and how many at one time.  There's no negative for posting glyphs for 48 hours (since you can cancel early), most people just want one of a glyph, so that's an easy choice, and finally, posting 2-4 is usually plenty.

The second line is how much do you want to undercut by.  This type of addon is how you see people undercutting by a single copper piece.  They aren't typing it in manually, they are having an addon follow script.

The threshold is how cheap will you sell it at and be happy.  That's the lowest you'll accept.  Fall back is if there's none on the market, then what do you want to post it at.

As you can see the numbers, I use are quite low.  Throughout most of cataclysm, I had a fall back of 275!  The reason my fallback was so much higher than it is now was because I was willing to babysit the auction house and undercut every hour or so.  This forced my opponents to do so or be undercut.  At this point, I am trying to drive my opponents out of the market.  I am willing to accept lower profits to simply not spend as much time doing it.




Basically you need to craft one of each item and then you add it to your master list.  Thankfully, you don't have to do each glyph manually, you can simply type on "glyph" and mass add them.  This gives you a pool of items you are looking to sell.


On the right hand side of the auction house, there's a button called "TSM."  It brings up a menu and the first option is posting.  Then you have to click "post auction" once per glyph.  This can be done fast enough, with little attention.  I tend to do it while watching TV.  The best thing, once you've set yourself up, you only have to do this final step on a daily basis.




The second button is cancel.  This screenshot is almost the same thing.  You click cancel and the addon does all the work.  It scans through your auctions and with a click from you, it sends the undercut ones to your mailbox.

Manually opening mails would be too tedious. so the addon opens them all for you.  It can only load 50 auctions at a time, so most of your 8 minutes is spent getting them out of the mail.  If I have alot of auctions, say 500 to 1,000 in the mail, I'll grab a morning cup of tea or coffee while the addon puts them in my bags.  Then you go back to the posting step.

This all seems really basic, I'll admit, but posting massive amounts of auctions like this seems inconceivable when you are starting out.  This entire process could be done with gems as well.  When I used to do gems, I would separate red gems from the other colors.  While glyphs are pretty much all the same, red gems are different enough from the other colors.

It makes it easy to flood your auction house with glyphs.  The questions of course are, how do I get materials to craft glyphs and how do I know what to craft?  This leads us to milling and restocking, which will wait for another day.





Introduction

I am no stranger to "blogging."  Back in 1999, I started my first blog and kept it up for ten years, on and off.  It still exists, but I no longer write in it.  In part because I can't remember the password and in part because I've changed so much sense I used to write there.

Two of my friends have started blogs lately.  So in part, I want to response to them.  I've been using a very old aim address in order to comment, but I figure I might as well actually start writing and get a better fitting name.

I've played more than a few mmo's over the years and, I have found I enjoy generating gold.  There's two basic types of gold earners.  Those that want to buy something and those that wish to simply want more gold for no good reason.  Most people fall into the first category.  There's an item or future items that a person wants.  It can be a luxury item like the Sandstone Drake or just gems and enchants.  This person would rather be playing the game than making gold.  Gold generating is means to an end.

The second type of person is not rational.  This type of person wants to make money simply because they can.  Maybe they'll justify this irrational behavior and maybe they won't.  This is the type of person I am.

Of course this is a gross simplification of human behavior, but I digress.  First, I suppose I should talk about why I think I am qualified to even writing this blog.

This picture is actually a bit of a lie.  I've spent quite a bit of my gold since that high point.  Maybe I'll talk about that in a future entry.

For most people, once they reach their goal, then they stop and do whatever they'd rather be doing--running dungeons, pvping, doing achievements, leveling alts, etc.  I am the type of person that is too lazy to bother farming, so instead I do an auction house run each day.  In a normal day, I'll spend about 15 minutes a day doing it, usually in 2 sessions about 7-8 minutes each day.  Additionally, depending on sales, I'll spend as much as 1-2 more hours in a longer session making new things and preparing materials.  This is just a rough number, sometimes my 15 minutes might stretch out to be 30 minutes if there's much to do.  This sounds like quite a bit of time, but even the two hour sessions usually involve lots of watching TV while I hit a mill/prospect macro.

So how much do I make each day?  To be honest, it depends.  When the market is up, I've cleared as much as 7 or 8k in a single day.  When it is down, I've done as little as 500.  Also, competition is a factor.  If it is fierce, you have to constantly undercut increasing your time spend dramatically.  Once you feel out how low your foes will go, you can decide if constant surveillance is worth it or not.  At this point, it isn't worth it anymore for me.  Here's today for example from 8pm to 2am.




If I can work up the interest, perhaps, I'll go step by step into how to do everything I do.  I am leery about giving up all my secrets, especially with Diablo 3 upcoming.  Anyway, happy gold generating!