Well I finally got all my saronite prospected and started making the JC rings and shipping them off to my friend who disenchants for me for 20% cut. To give you an idea of how many uncommon gems I got from prospecting I got 650 chalcedony alone. I have about 5 bags of the other 3 gems. I didn't worry about posting on the AH or anything last night so I still haven't made any money since being back.
Today my goals are going to be finish burning up the gems and getting them d/e'd and getting caught up on my glyphs. Once that's all finished I'll worry bout carpet bombing the AH with everything.
Still doing more research on various addons for my follow up to my tools of the trade post. So if you have anything you'd like to see mentioned let me know :)
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Return of The Gnome
Hey everyone. I got caught up in some RL issues yesterday and combined with my bad latency I didn't really do much in terms of anything online. To give you an idea of how bad it was it took me an hour to d/e 20 stacks of titanium.
So a mental note out there for all you AH players who have various amount of people CoD'ing you stuff. Make sure you tell them your taking a few days break if you ever need one. I logged in yesterday to over 7k worth of CoDs awaiting me in my mail. Mostly titanium ore (I think they were buying it when it dropped below 325g a stack and cod'ing it to me for my price which is fine with me cause I wasn't on anyways).
Currently I'm sitting at about 32k gold and have 0 supplies ready for your typical Tuesday rush but that's fine. I'm just going to sit on the supplies I have and get everything processed and caught up. Then I can worry about playing the AH and get the ball rolling once I have everything caught up.
I have about 14 tokens worth of titanium dust and will use it to pick up 3 or so epic gem cuts.
I'm still going to cut a bunch of gems and post them and carpet bomb my glyphs since those take relatively little time w/ QA. And I'll send my d/e friend a huge batch of rings as I have 200 or so stacks of saronite prospected and the gems awaiting and another 300-400 stacks yet to be prospected.
I'm glad to be back and finally making money again :)
So a mental note out there for all you AH players who have various amount of people CoD'ing you stuff. Make sure you tell them your taking a few days break if you ever need one. I logged in yesterday to over 7k worth of CoDs awaiting me in my mail. Mostly titanium ore (I think they were buying it when it dropped below 325g a stack and cod'ing it to me for my price which is fine with me cause I wasn't on anyways).
Currently I'm sitting at about 32k gold and have 0 supplies ready for your typical Tuesday rush but that's fine. I'm just going to sit on the supplies I have and get everything processed and caught up. Then I can worry about playing the AH and get the ball rolling once I have everything caught up.
I have about 14 tokens worth of titanium dust and will use it to pick up 3 or so epic gem cuts.
I'm still going to cut a bunch of gems and post them and carpet bomb my glyphs since those take relatively little time w/ QA. And I'll send my d/e friend a huge batch of rings as I have 200 or so stacks of saronite prospected and the gems awaiting and another 300-400 stacks yet to be prospected.
I'm glad to be back and finally making money again :)
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Planning For My Return Tomorrow.
Well Today is my last day of my so called vacation. My account is sitting at 40k or so gold from my spending spree earlier this week and I really want to break 100k here soon (2 weeks or so).
I'm probably going to delete my bankers and reroll new ones and start with fresh chars. I figure now is a good time since my name has died off a little for my competition I could theoretically roll up with fresh alts and nobody would think it was me.
I don't really have much to talk about as I haven't really be active in wow the past couple of days. I put up a new poll (for you google readers :D) about what professions you use to play the AH.
I got my Dr. pepper and Vault ready for tomorrow after fishing. Going to burn the midnight oil and get the ole machine fired up again. I feel bad for my competition though. They have probably enjoyed the past few days and going to be nerd raging at my return.
Oh and for the love of everything holy. Never ever decide to clean out your mailboxes when your at someone's house who doesn't have postal. I was honestly cleaning my glyph mailbox out for over an hour, GG.
If you haven't checked out the Tools of the Trade post please do so. I'd like your feedback (via comments on this post) about addon's you cant live without. I realized I left a bunch of addons out of that list and I'd like to do a follow up. So drop a comment here, mail me on JMTC, hit me up on yahoo IM, I don't care just let me know what addons you guys love and I'll personally download them and check them out and write up a review on them (They have to be found on curse or wowinterface. I'm not downloading addons from a site I don't trust and I can't recommend people to download addons from a site I don't trust. I'd hate to hear that someones account got hacked because they downloaded a link I posted on my blog >.> not cool lol)
I'm probably going to delete my bankers and reroll new ones and start with fresh chars. I figure now is a good time since my name has died off a little for my competition I could theoretically roll up with fresh alts and nobody would think it was me.
I don't really have much to talk about as I haven't really be active in wow the past couple of days. I put up a new poll (for you google readers :D) about what professions you use to play the AH.
I got my Dr. pepper and Vault ready for tomorrow after fishing. Going to burn the midnight oil and get the ole machine fired up again. I feel bad for my competition though. They have probably enjoyed the past few days and going to be nerd raging at my return.
Oh and for the love of everything holy. Never ever decide to clean out your mailboxes when your at someone's house who doesn't have postal. I was honestly cleaning my glyph mailbox out for over an hour, GG.
If you haven't checked out the Tools of the Trade post please do so. I'd like your feedback (via comments on this post) about addon's you cant live without. I realized I left a bunch of addons out of that list and I'd like to do a follow up. So drop a comment here, mail me on JMTC, hit me up on yahoo IM, I don't care just let me know what addons you guys love and I'll personally download them and check them out and write up a review on them (They have to be found on curse or wowinterface. I'm not downloading addons from a site I don't trust and I can't recommend people to download addons from a site I don't trust. I'd hate to hear that someones account got hacked because they downloaded a link I posted on my blog >.> not cool lol)
Friday, September 25, 2009
Poll On New Layout Closed
Nothing is more fun then waking up at 5 am to go stand in the middle of a river while its 35 degrees. :p
Anyways the poll on the new layout is finished and it seems more people like it how it is (11 to 15) with even more people saying do what I want and as I like the black background that's what I'm doing. Sorry to the people who have a hard time reading my blog but if you have a suggestion on a backround / text I'd be happy to play around with it to see if I like it.
I do want to keep the colors inverted (dark background / light text) so keep that in mind if your going to suggest something for me to try out.
As for my break its been really nice not logging on to wow and I'm already getting antsy to get back into the swing of things but I'm going to tough it out a little more. I might break down in the middle of the night and wake up to me prospecting in my sleep or something.
I picked up the breastplate of the white knight and the saronite swordbreakers (ToC crafting tank pieces) for my tank yesterday (or the day before I don't remember lol). I'm now sitting over 37k unbuffed health. I was running heroics with 42k health (yay drums). I dropped 17k or so on the chest piece and another 9k or so on the bracers. I picked up the ulduar crafted tank belt for another 3 or 4k so I'm pretty much done with all my crafting pieces until 3.3 comes out. Now I could have waited on the pieces but my guild does loot council. The way they decide who gets gear is whoever is best geared already gets the upgrade (and seniority comes into play).
It makes sense in my opinion because it rewards the people who put in the time and effort to be their best gear wise. It could be viewed as kind of favoritism but a friend has been in the guild just as long as I have and has already picked up 3 or 4 pieces of CC25 gear so they are pretty fair about it. Plus they are the top alliance guild in terms of pvp and pve so really its something I'm willing to deal with to raid with the top. Last season I believe 5 or 6 people in my guild got Glad with another 3 or 4 getting Rival. All around a great guild. :)
Sorry about the off topic post but I figured I'd still give you all something to read. :D
(oh and I am officially admitting I have a smilie problem <.< .. >.> )
Anyways the poll on the new layout is finished and it seems more people like it how it is (11 to 15) with even more people saying do what I want and as I like the black background that's what I'm doing. Sorry to the people who have a hard time reading my blog but if you have a suggestion on a backround / text I'd be happy to play around with it to see if I like it.
I do want to keep the colors inverted (dark background / light text) so keep that in mind if your going to suggest something for me to try out.
As for my break its been really nice not logging on to wow and I'm already getting antsy to get back into the swing of things but I'm going to tough it out a little more. I might break down in the middle of the night and wake up to me prospecting in my sleep or something.
I picked up the breastplate of the white knight and the saronite swordbreakers (ToC crafting tank pieces) for my tank yesterday (or the day before I don't remember lol). I'm now sitting over 37k unbuffed health. I was running heroics with 42k health (yay drums). I dropped 17k or so on the chest piece and another 9k or so on the bracers. I picked up the ulduar crafted tank belt for another 3 or 4k so I'm pretty much done with all my crafting pieces until 3.3 comes out. Now I could have waited on the pieces but my guild does loot council. The way they decide who gets gear is whoever is best geared already gets the upgrade (and seniority comes into play).
It makes sense in my opinion because it rewards the people who put in the time and effort to be their best gear wise. It could be viewed as kind of favoritism but a friend has been in the guild just as long as I have and has already picked up 3 or 4 pieces of CC25 gear so they are pretty fair about it. Plus they are the top alliance guild in terms of pvp and pve so really its something I'm willing to deal with to raid with the top. Last season I believe 5 or 6 people in my guild got Glad with another 3 or 4 getting Rival. All around a great guild. :)
Sorry about the off topic post but I figured I'd still give you all something to read. :D
(oh and I am officially admitting I have a smilie problem <.< .. >.> )
Thursday, September 24, 2009
The Joys of Life
First off my apologies for not posting sooner. As some of you may know I've been kind of taking a break from wow in general. No, I'm not going to quit lol. I was just getting burned out playing the AH all day everyday. I honestly blame the batch of 600 stacks of saronite that burned me out. I got about a third of the way through it the other day and still haven't finished. :P
I'll still poke my head around the forums and what not and I'll try to update my blog but I won't be around much this weekend.
My goal is to get the ball rolling again Sunday night / Monday morning. Figured taking the weekend off from wow in general should refresh me :)
If you have any questions and the sort feel free to drop me a mail on JMTC forums / comment here / blah blah you know the routine.
I'll still poke my head around the forums and what not and I'll try to update my blog but I won't be around much this weekend.
My goal is to get the ball rolling again Sunday night / Monday morning. Figured taking the weekend off from wow in general should refresh me :)
If you have any questions and the sort feel free to drop me a mail on JMTC forums / comment here / blah blah you know the routine.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Just a daily update.
Well I think I finally got my connection stable enough to leave the city and actually play the game now. So that's what I've been doing after 5 weeks of grinding the AH.
With prices on crusader orbs dropping like a rock I decided to purchase my ToC tanking chest piece. The 8 crusader orbs cost be about 16k (2k each. Were 6k+ each when servers came up) and I spent about 1k on the titansteel. I also had the ulduar crafted tanking belt made as well which now pushes me almost to 37k hp unbuffed. All in all I dropped about 21k for 2 new pieces of gear.
Gold wise I dipped below 40k for a bit last night and bounced back up over 50k by the end of the night.
The scribe fort scrolls are sellin relatively well for the little bit I sold them. Since I'm a card maker I didn't want to burn to much testing that market but they are selling easily for 10-15g on my server.
With prices on crusader orbs dropping like a rock I decided to purchase my ToC tanking chest piece. The 8 crusader orbs cost be about 16k (2k each. Were 6k+ each when servers came up) and I spent about 1k on the titansteel. I also had the ulduar crafted tanking belt made as well which now pushes me almost to 37k hp unbuffed. All in all I dropped about 21k for 2 new pieces of gear.
Gold wise I dipped below 40k for a bit last night and bounced back up over 50k by the end of the night.
The scribe fort scrolls are sellin relatively well for the little bit I sold them. Since I'm a card maker I didn't want to burn to much testing that market but they are selling easily for 10-15g on my server.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Return Of The Broodmother
Well I ended up buying more titanium yesterday. I invested in about an additional 20 or so stacks putting me at about 60-70 stacks of titanium purchased. I also picked up another 150 or so stacks of saronite through out the day and am still working on prospecting them. My liquid has taken quite a dip down to 59k but I have a feeling it'll rebound once I get everything processed and the ball rolling again.
The lowest I'm allowing my liquid to go is 50k so I'm figuring that the last 9k or so I have will be reserved in case the farmers poke their head around and so I can purchase my cod's in a timely fashion.
With patch 3.2.2 being launched today there are a few things leatherworkers should keep an eye on (and scribes too). LW is getting 2 drums. Drums of the forgotten kings and Drums of the wild. Both of these items will cast (untalented) the highest level of kings and Gift of the wild. These do not stack with the actual buffs and are a way to help 10 mans and 5 mans. Scribes will be able to make a scroll for the same thing but for fortitude. These additions are part of the "bring the player not the class" thing blizzard is trying to implement.
I'm really not sure how these are going to sell to be honest. I think they have the potential to sell well depending on how active your server is in terms of min/max players (which most raiders should be anyways imo).
On second thought I think the kings one is going to be a hot seller if the following is allowed to happen. You can still bring a paladin to the group and use the kings drums and then have the paladin give an additional paladin buff. So you can essentially have 2 pally buffs with 1 paladin.
For you scribes there is a few changes that caught my eye to glyphs. DK glyph sales should be really high today as there was quite a few changes to multiple glyphs.
Here are the glyph changes:
Glyph of Bone Shield: Adds 1 additional charges to your Bone Shield. (Down from 2)
Glyph of Flame Shock: Redesigned. This glyph now makes Flame Shock periodic damage able to be critical strikes.
Glyph of Mind Flay: This glyph no longer reduces the magnitude of the movement reduction on the Mind Flay victim.
Glyph of Scourge Strike: Your Scourge Strike increases the duration of your diseases on the target by 3 sec, up to a maximum of 9 additional seconds.
Glyph of Typhoon: This glyph now increases the range on Typhoon by 10 yards in addition to its current effects.
Glyph of Unbreakable Armor: Now increases the armor gained from Unbreakable Armor by 20%.
Glyph of Vampiric Blood: The glyph now increases the duration of Vampiric Blood by 5 seconds instead of 10.
The lowest I'm allowing my liquid to go is 50k so I'm figuring that the last 9k or so I have will be reserved in case the farmers poke their head around and so I can purchase my cod's in a timely fashion.
With patch 3.2.2 being launched today there are a few things leatherworkers should keep an eye on (and scribes too). LW is getting 2 drums. Drums of the forgotten kings and Drums of the wild. Both of these items will cast (untalented) the highest level of kings and Gift of the wild. These do not stack with the actual buffs and are a way to help 10 mans and 5 mans. Scribes will be able to make a scroll for the same thing but for fortitude. These additions are part of the "bring the player not the class" thing blizzard is trying to implement.
I'm really not sure how these are going to sell to be honest. I think they have the potential to sell well depending on how active your server is in terms of min/max players (which most raiders should be anyways imo).
On second thought I think the kings one is going to be a hot seller if the following is allowed to happen. You can still bring a paladin to the group and use the kings drums and then have the paladin give an additional paladin buff. So you can essentially have 2 pally buffs with 1 paladin.
For you scribes there is a few changes that caught my eye to glyphs. DK glyph sales should be really high today as there was quite a few changes to multiple glyphs.
Here are the glyph changes:
Glyph of Bone Shield: Adds 1 additional charges to your Bone Shield. (Down from 2)
Glyph of Flame Shock: Redesigned. This glyph now makes Flame Shock periodic damage able to be critical strikes.
Glyph of Mind Flay: This glyph no longer reduces the magnitude of the movement reduction on the Mind Flay victim.
Glyph of Scourge Strike: Your Scourge Strike increases the duration of your diseases on the target by 3 sec, up to a maximum of 9 additional seconds.
Glyph of Typhoon: This glyph now increases the range on Typhoon by 10 yards in addition to its current effects.
Glyph of Unbreakable Armor: Now increases the armor gained from Unbreakable Armor by 20%.
Glyph of Vampiric Blood: The glyph now increases the duration of Vampiric Blood by 5 seconds instead of 10.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Expanded In A New Market
Well I ended the weekend at 72k liquid but peaked at about 90k liquid. Now your probably asking me how I possibly went backwards when I was pushing forwards.
Well as you read yesterday I really wasn't home majority of the weekend but I did have time to check the AH and buy up cheap mats and the sort.
Currently I have over 500 stacks of saronite ore sitting in my mailbox, just got done prospecting 42 stacks of titanium ore, and a good 100-120 stacks of both low and high northrend level herbs. Also I picked up a handful of eternal life and shadow. Eternal earth got flooded this weekend so I ended up picking about 20 stacks ranging from 4g to 6.5g each (80-130g a stack)
If your a reader over at JMTC I'm sure you've seen me post that I don't play with epic gems because they aren't stable enough. Well I've been watching titanium prices and epic gems and they seem to be hovering at about 200-300g per cut and 100-150g per uncut. Titanium ore seems to be sitting in the high 300s to low 400s per stack. So when I saw 40+ stacks in the AH ranging from 300 to 350g per stack I jumped all over it and decided that was the moment I was waiting for to get into the epic gem game.
Prospecting it all gave me 6-12 of every color epic gem and enough titnium to pick up 4 new cuts. Already having Purified Dreadstone and Smooth King's Amber I decided to pick up a good cut for every other color so I could at least use every color gem I got from prospecting.
I ended up with Vivid Eye of Zul, Durable Ametrine, Solid Majestic Zircon and Runed Cardinal Ruby. The durable and solid cuts both were empty in the AH and all my other cuts are currently going for 220g+.
While I did go backwards quite a bit I'm hoping tomorrow I can recover a large portion of my investment. Prospecting the 500ish stacks of ore I have will give me more then enough uncommon gems to stock up on enchanting mats.
Well as you read yesterday I really wasn't home majority of the weekend but I did have time to check the AH and buy up cheap mats and the sort.
Currently I have over 500 stacks of saronite ore sitting in my mailbox, just got done prospecting 42 stacks of titanium ore, and a good 100-120 stacks of both low and high northrend level herbs. Also I picked up a handful of eternal life and shadow. Eternal earth got flooded this weekend so I ended up picking about 20 stacks ranging from 4g to 6.5g each (80-130g a stack)
If your a reader over at JMTC I'm sure you've seen me post that I don't play with epic gems because they aren't stable enough. Well I've been watching titanium prices and epic gems and they seem to be hovering at about 200-300g per cut and 100-150g per uncut. Titanium ore seems to be sitting in the high 300s to low 400s per stack. So when I saw 40+ stacks in the AH ranging from 300 to 350g per stack I jumped all over it and decided that was the moment I was waiting for to get into the epic gem game.
Prospecting it all gave me 6-12 of every color epic gem and enough titnium to pick up 4 new cuts. Already having Purified Dreadstone and Smooth King's Amber I decided to pick up a good cut for every other color so I could at least use every color gem I got from prospecting.
I ended up with Vivid Eye of Zul, Durable Ametrine, Solid Majestic Zircon and Runed Cardinal Ruby. The durable and solid cuts both were empty in the AH and all my other cuts are currently going for 220g+.
While I did go backwards quite a bit I'm hoping tomorrow I can recover a large portion of my investment. Prospecting the 500ish stacks of ore I have will give me more then enough uncommon gems to stock up on enchanting mats.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Gone Fishing
Just wanted to give you guys a brief update while I came home for lunch. Since I was gone most of the evening yesterday and majority of the day today I most likely wont hit my goal of 100k. I love fishing (irl .. not in game) and its salmon season up here so I've spent the past couple of days fishing for salmon down in the river by my house.
Caught 6 Pinks last night and 5 today and about to go back out after lunch to finish up our limit for the day (4 per person so 12 total).
To anyone who likes fishing but hasn't been salmon fishing I highly suggest it. It's one of the only things that I would rate more fun (and addicting) then wow.
I will have an actual wow based post for you guys tomorrow though :)
Caught 6 Pinks last night and 5 today and about to go back out after lunch to finish up our limit for the day (4 per person so 12 total).
To anyone who likes fishing but hasn't been salmon fishing I highly suggest it. It's one of the only things that I would rate more fun (and addicting) then wow.
I will have an actual wow based post for you guys tomorrow though :)
Post Later Today
Sorry about not posting yesterday. Got caught up with some real life stuff and wasn't home most of the day. I'll have an actual update / blog later today when I get home. I'm about to go out for the first half of the day.
I blame Salmon season :P
I blame Salmon season :P
Friday, September 18, 2009
Misson Failure
Well as you read yesterday I was planning on staying up all night and get caught up. Well I realized that I'm getting old and ended up going to bed after prospecting my 100+ stacks of ore.
On a plus note I woke up about 3.5 hours ago (slept for like 4 hours) so really it was just a cat nap. :P
I bought about 2k worth of herbs and ore yesterday to bring me to 79.8k or so liquid. I then turned around and sold 38 stacks of green quality gems for 35g a stack. So I picked up a little over 1.3k from that.
This didn't have a real impact on my disenchanting process as I still had about 10 stacks left over and this was before I prospected all my ore. I'm currently sitting on over 1k rings waiting to be disenchanted and I still have about 200 or so huge citrine and 100 chalcedony to burn up so I should be good on enchanting mats. That's not including the 30 or so stacks of leather I can burn up for more if I need it. I really hope I don't.
Yesterday sales were pretty good considering I posted once at around 8 am server and collected about 5k out of all my mailboxes. I think it's to the point where I have so much stuff on the AH at any given time I really don't need to babysit it.
I've noticed everyone changing their layout and it got me thinking. While I really like the black background I don't read my blog on a black background (new post is white background w/ black text :P) so I'm tossing up a new poll to get your guys' opinion. Tell me what you think since you guys are the ones reading it I'd be glad to cater the design based on your guys' feedback. :)
On a plus note I woke up about 3.5 hours ago (slept for like 4 hours) so really it was just a cat nap. :P
I bought about 2k worth of herbs and ore yesterday to bring me to 79.8k or so liquid. I then turned around and sold 38 stacks of green quality gems for 35g a stack. So I picked up a little over 1.3k from that.
This didn't have a real impact on my disenchanting process as I still had about 10 stacks left over and this was before I prospected all my ore. I'm currently sitting on over 1k rings waiting to be disenchanted and I still have about 200 or so huge citrine and 100 chalcedony to burn up so I should be good on enchanting mats. That's not including the 30 or so stacks of leather I can burn up for more if I need it. I really hope I don't.
Yesterday sales were pretty good considering I posted once at around 8 am server and collected about 5k out of all my mailboxes. I think it's to the point where I have so much stuff on the AH at any given time I really don't need to babysit it.
I've noticed everyone changing their layout and it got me thinking. While I really like the black background I don't read my blog on a black background (new post is white background w/ black text :P) so I'm tossing up a new poll to get your guys' opinion. Tell me what you think since you guys are the ones reading it I'd be glad to cater the design based on your guys' feedback. :)
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Another Quick Update
Well this morning when I woke up I had broke the 80k liquid mark. As you probably have read I started around August 11th (a week after 3.2 came out) and this past Tuesday was my 5th week playing the AH.
I've been spending more time leveling my soon to be tailor so I can get into the bag market so I haven't been spending all that much time playing the AH. I do my usual routine of stocking the AH throughout the day but have been kind of taking it easy lately in terms of playing the AH.
Well my flight from duskwood to IF is finished. Time to run to southshore >.>
My goal for this weekend is to break 100k. I've got the coffee maker sitting next to my computer and I'm going to pull an all nighter tonight prospecting, milling, making glyphs, disenchanting and basically getting 100% caught up so I can effectively push as hard as I can this weekend. Now 100k doesn't seem really possible but it's something to push for and to motivate me to hit. I'll honestly probably end up around 95k. Who knows though as I still have about 7 darkmoon trinkets I could push this weekend.
I'll keep ya guys updated :)
I've been spending more time leveling my soon to be tailor so I can get into the bag market so I haven't been spending all that much time playing the AH. I do my usual routine of stocking the AH throughout the day but have been kind of taking it easy lately in terms of playing the AH.
Well my flight from duskwood to IF is finished. Time to run to southshore >.>
My goal for this weekend is to break 100k. I've got the coffee maker sitting next to my computer and I'm going to pull an all nighter tonight prospecting, milling, making glyphs, disenchanting and basically getting 100% caught up so I can effectively push as hard as I can this weekend. Now 100k doesn't seem really possible but it's something to push for and to motivate me to hit. I'll honestly probably end up around 95k. Who knows though as I still have about 7 darkmoon trinkets I could push this weekend.
I'll keep ya guys updated :)
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Goodbye Warsong
So my usual update. Yesterday I broke 70k and actually ended up the day at about 73k. I've changed my posting ways and it's actually making somewhat of a difference. Yesterday I pulled in about 2k in glyphs, 3k in gems and 3k in enchanting mats.
Now as you read in yesterdays blog I was thinking about not camping the AH. I repost 2-3 times during peak hours and whenever I feel like it but I'm actually leveling alts and the sort now. So far so good which is really nice because I was starting to get burned out camping the AH.
Now today's blog isn't really about economics or anything. I wanted to dedicate today's post in memory of a good friend.
Many good times were spent running around WSG kicking the crap out of horde. Unfortunately the twink bgs are dead on my battlegroup so I decided to level her in WSG. In memory of my twink lock, Puntindots. /cry
Here is a screenshot of my last bg as a twink. Now its not all that great as I was pretty much the only 19 on my team and we were going up against multiple twinks on the horde side. Still even with that in mind check out the damage done. Good times on that char. But like all good things, it was eventually going to come to an end.
Now as you read in yesterdays blog I was thinking about not camping the AH. I repost 2-3 times during peak hours and whenever I feel like it but I'm actually leveling alts and the sort now. So far so good which is really nice because I was starting to get burned out camping the AH.
Now today's blog isn't really about economics or anything. I wanted to dedicate today's post in memory of a good friend.
Many good times were spent running around WSG kicking the crap out of horde. Unfortunately the twink bgs are dead on my battlegroup so I decided to level her in WSG. In memory of my twink lock, Puntindots. /cry
Here is a screenshot of my last bg as a twink. Now its not all that great as I was pretty much the only 19 on my team and we were going up against multiple twinks on the horde side. Still even with that in mind check out the damage done. Good times on that char. But like all good things, it was eventually going to come to an end.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
To Camp or Not to Camp?
That is the question.
I've been somewhat cutting back my play time trying to find a job in real life I didn't have much time playing the AH yesterday so I didn't expect my sales to be all that great.
To my surprise I woke up this morning to over 4k in my mailbox across my bankers pushing me to barely under the 70k mark. 69,219g if you want to be exact.
This really makes me wonder as I've read it plenty on the JMTC forums. Do you really need to AH camp to make money?
Maybe yesterday was an exceptional sales day and I only made money because of that. Could I have made more though is what I'm wondering. Yesterday I had an average sales day that would be comparable to a normal day of AH camping and staying on top of my auctions.
So I'm going to try out a plan for the next few days. I'm going to post 2-3 times through out the day and only work half as much. This would give me time to level my alt up so I can get into the tailoring market plus would keep me from getting burned out.
How do you guys do it? Do you guys AH camp? Or do you fall back to the post and go do something else tactic? Leave a comment and let me know :)
I've been somewhat cutting back my play time trying to find a job in real life I didn't have much time playing the AH yesterday so I didn't expect my sales to be all that great.
To my surprise I woke up this morning to over 4k in my mailbox across my bankers pushing me to barely under the 70k mark. 69,219g if you want to be exact.
This really makes me wonder as I've read it plenty on the JMTC forums. Do you really need to AH camp to make money?
Maybe yesterday was an exceptional sales day and I only made money because of that. Could I have made more though is what I'm wondering. Yesterday I had an average sales day that would be comparable to a normal day of AH camping and staying on top of my auctions.
So I'm going to try out a plan for the next few days. I'm going to post 2-3 times through out the day and only work half as much. This would give me time to level my alt up so I can get into the tailoring market plus would keep me from getting burned out.
How do you guys do it? Do you guys AH camp? Or do you fall back to the post and go do something else tactic? Leave a comment and let me know :)
Monday, September 14, 2009
Brief update
Sorry for the delay in today's post. Been busy with real life things but wanted to give you a quick update.
I did not hit my goal of 70k for today. Sales were kind of slow and I decided to call it an early night. I'm currently sitting at 63-65k liquid with about 20-30k in mats. Hopefully sales pick up tomorrow with arena points being awarded after maintenance.
I'll hopefully have time to write an actual blog tomorrow :)
I did not hit my goal of 70k for today. Sales were kind of slow and I decided to call it an early night. I'm currently sitting at 63-65k liquid with about 20-30k in mats. Hopefully sales pick up tomorrow with arena points being awarded after maintenance.
I'll hopefully have time to write an actual blog tomorrow :)
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Bumping Into an Old Friend
Yesterday was an interesting day to say the least. Sales were alright and I'm hovering at around the 65k mark. Herb prices are slowly comming back down due to the fair being over which really makes me happy. If you remember about me talking about inflating the herb prices before the fair well they are just now starting to fall back to normal prices. Throughout the entire fair herbs were 20-25g a stack and some even higher at almost 40g a stack.
So I was doing my usual prospecting and the sort when I get a whisper from two different people telling me that people were bitching about me in guild chat from my former guild. As I still have alts in that guild I figured I'd log over and listen in on the fun (I'm still good friends with majority of the guild). As soon as I log on guild chat erupted in lols and roffles because I happen to log into the middle of one of the guild members complaining about me undercutting on glyphs.
He still doesn't know who I was and was complaining basically about me carpet bombing and I join in on the complaining to add to the humor for those who knew who I was. It was pretty fun calling myself an asshole and an inconsiderate prick with no AH ethics. All the meanwhile my friends in the guild were literally dying from laughter. After about 15 or 20 minutes of messing around with this guy I announced that it was 3 minutes til my hourly carpet bombin of glyphs and I had to go and logged off. That was the end of that for then.
Later in the night I hopped on their vent to hang out and talk and the guy who was complaining about me was in vent and people started chuckling. I come to find out that this guy used to be a guildie and fellow officer from the raiding guild I was in back in BC with and we started reminiscing about good times and funny stories. Eventually we get on to the topic of playing the AH and making money. I avoid talking about glyphs the entire time because I still didn't know if he knew who I was or not. Then he randomly goes off about me undercutting auctions and we both laugh about it. I finally knew that he knew and we started talkin business.
He was more annoyed that people were being dumb and undercutting by 5-10g and I'd come in and undercut them. I explained that I have my addon set up to undercut by 1c and he admitted he fully supports undercutting by 1c.
Now I have no problem sharing markets and have no problem helping others make money. If I'm explaining to them tips and the sort on how to play the AH then I'm still one step ahead of them in a sense and who knows they may teach me a thing or two in the future. So I explain QA to him and how it works and he thought it was pretty cool but felt it wasn't needed as his inscription is only in the low to mid 300s.
We then get on the topic of JC / enchanting and other various markets and pretty much wrap up that conversation agreeing we both don't mind competition and we both wouldn't take offense to each other undercutting because business was business.
Overall it was a pretty fun conversation and really good catching up with an old guildie I hadn't seen in over a year.
So I was doing my usual prospecting and the sort when I get a whisper from two different people telling me that people were bitching about me in guild chat from my former guild. As I still have alts in that guild I figured I'd log over and listen in on the fun (I'm still good friends with majority of the guild). As soon as I log on guild chat erupted in lols and roffles because I happen to log into the middle of one of the guild members complaining about me undercutting on glyphs.
He still doesn't know who I was and was complaining basically about me carpet bombing and I join in on the complaining to add to the humor for those who knew who I was. It was pretty fun calling myself an asshole and an inconsiderate prick with no AH ethics. All the meanwhile my friends in the guild were literally dying from laughter. After about 15 or 20 minutes of messing around with this guy I announced that it was 3 minutes til my hourly carpet bombin of glyphs and I had to go and logged off. That was the end of that for then.
Later in the night I hopped on their vent to hang out and talk and the guy who was complaining about me was in vent and people started chuckling. I come to find out that this guy used to be a guildie and fellow officer from the raiding guild I was in back in BC with and we started reminiscing about good times and funny stories. Eventually we get on to the topic of playing the AH and making money. I avoid talking about glyphs the entire time because I still didn't know if he knew who I was or not. Then he randomly goes off about me undercutting auctions and we both laugh about it. I finally knew that he knew and we started talkin business.
He was more annoyed that people were being dumb and undercutting by 5-10g and I'd come in and undercut them. I explained that I have my addon set up to undercut by 1c and he admitted he fully supports undercutting by 1c.
Now I have no problem sharing markets and have no problem helping others make money. If I'm explaining to them tips and the sort on how to play the AH then I'm still one step ahead of them in a sense and who knows they may teach me a thing or two in the future. So I explain QA to him and how it works and he thought it was pretty cool but felt it wasn't needed as his inscription is only in the low to mid 300s.
We then get on the topic of JC / enchanting and other various markets and pretty much wrap up that conversation agreeing we both don't mind competition and we both wouldn't take offense to each other undercutting because business was business.
Overall it was a pretty fun conversation and really good catching up with an old guildie I hadn't seen in over a year.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Expanding Your Empire
So I had originally thought my goal to hit 60k by yesterday and 70k by Monday wouldn't happen. Well, I was wrong. After about 3 hours into the peak hour yesterday I had made roug
hly 12k. Which was enough to push me over the 60k liquid mark. It's looking like theres a very good chance for me to hit the 70k mark Monday as well.
There are a few different strategies when it comes to playing the AH. Some people like to focus on 1 area and try to create a monopoly. For a long time in burning crusade I was one of those people who did that. I would try to lock down markets by inflating mat prices so high it just wasn't worth buying them. An example was when I was an alchemist, I would buy out all the dreaming glory from the AH and most of the felweed. Anything under 50g a stack for dreaming glory I would purchase and I was selling mana potions for 25g per 5. As a potion spec alchemist I was making what I thought was a lot of money. In a week I had made about 2k gold. There are both pros and cons to this strategy. The pros being it can be alot easier to maintain. Given you stayed on top of it there was little to no work to be done but you generally spend alot of time camping the AH making sure mats dont get flooded in or whatever product your selling gets undercut.
The cons to this as I soon found out is your putting all your eggs into one basket and eventually your going to hit a pothole in the road and bust. Things were going good til I couldn't log in for 1 day and that's all it took to bring down my little mini empire. Within the evening I couldn't log in the price on mana pots crashed to 5-7g per 5 and there were hundreds of them. Mat prices also got flooded to no end and I couldn't buy everything out. I just didn't have enough money to invest and I walked away from the market.
What I didn't realize then was I had learned something that would make me as successful as I am today. I learned in order to truly successful in the long run in the AH you cant focus in just one area of a market. If your going to play the AH your going to have to jump with both feet in and basically go with the flow. Which brings me to the next strategy of playing the AH.
You start with one area and slowly expand into other markets. This is crucial that you get situated in other profitable markets for a few reasons. One of the reasons is that when prices crash in one market your simply not affected. You can focus in another market and still make money. I'll compare it to my strategy now for playing the AH.
Right now I'm currently a large presence in enchanting mats, gems, glyphs, LW leg armors and cards. Shortages in mat markets don't nearly affect me as much as others because if I cant get saronite ore cheaply I can just buy borean leather and make arctic boots to disenchant to get my enchanting mats. Because I'm in so many markets I have to have a decent backstock for each market which means I'm always buying raw mats when they are cheap.
Another perk to being in more then one market is you can manipulate things a lot easier without it affecting you as much. I regularly crash the gem market on my server about once a week. The reason for this is it helps me control my backstock. I usually keep 300 uncut gems of a color. When I get more then 300 of a color i'll burn them up and cut a bunch down to ~275 uncut and flood the market at 8-10g a gem. This only works if your competition is active about resetting markets such as mine. I can throw up 10 gems for 10g each and my competition will buy them and reset the prices and I just made double the money that I would have if I just vendored them. (plus you get the annoyed competition whispers for bonus points)
There are a few downsides to this strategy like anything else. The fact that your in so many markets its hard to focus on just one market and it's extremely time consuming to have a monopoly in all of them. You're dealing with so many competitors that it becomes a game within a game almost. I haven't raided in weeks due to my connection but that doesn't bother me because I always have saronite to prospect, AH prices to check, carpet bombing glyphs and enchanting mats, herbs to mill. There really is no end to it.
Another downside is it takes alot of money to get into multiple markets. I took the risk of powerleveling inscription when I only had 5-6k liquid and it's saved my butt a few times as there is no competition in my glyph market really. I now pull 1-2k+ a day in glyphs and about 1k in gem sales alone. Add in enchanting mats and leg armors and I regularly see 4-5k sales days and 10k+ sales days are becoming more and more regular.
So to wrap this up just think about what you want out of your AH game. Do you want to play the AH full time and not really do anything else? If so I'd suggest getting into multiple markets.
If you just want to make some money on the side with low maintenance then stick to one market.
In the end it all comes down to what your looking for. For me I've done pretty much everything in the game in my 4 1/2 - 5 years of playing. The AH for me is the only entertaining challenge left in the game for me. :)
hly 12k. Which was enough to push me over the 60k liquid mark. It's looking like theres a very good chance for me to hit the 70k mark Monday as well.There are a few different strategies when it comes to playing the AH. Some people like to focus on 1 area and try to create a monopoly. For a long time in burning crusade I was one of those people who did that. I would try to lock down markets by inflating mat prices so high it just wasn't worth buying them. An example was when I was an alchemist, I would buy out all the dreaming glory from the AH and most of the felweed. Anything under 50g a stack for dreaming glory I would purchase and I was selling mana potions for 25g per 5. As a potion spec alchemist I was making what I thought was a lot of money. In a week I had made about 2k gold. There are both pros and cons to this strategy. The pros being it can be alot easier to maintain. Given you stayed on top of it there was little to no work to be done but you generally spend alot of time camping the AH making sure mats dont get flooded in or whatever product your selling gets undercut.
The cons to this as I soon found out is your putting all your eggs into one basket and eventually your going to hit a pothole in the road and bust. Things were going good til I couldn't log in for 1 day and that's all it took to bring down my little mini empire. Within the evening I couldn't log in the price on mana pots crashed to 5-7g per 5 and there were hundreds of them. Mat prices also got flooded to no end and I couldn't buy everything out. I just didn't have enough money to invest and I walked away from the market.
What I didn't realize then was I had learned something that would make me as successful as I am today. I learned in order to truly successful in the long run in the AH you cant focus in just one area of a market. If your going to play the AH your going to have to jump with both feet in and basically go with the flow. Which brings me to the next strategy of playing the AH.
You start with one area and slowly expand into other markets. This is crucial that you get situated in other profitable markets for a few reasons. One of the reasons is that when prices crash in one market your simply not affected. You can focus in another market and still make money. I'll compare it to my strategy now for playing the AH.
Right now I'm currently a large presence in enchanting mats, gems, glyphs, LW leg armors and cards. Shortages in mat markets don't nearly affect me as much as others because if I cant get saronite ore cheaply I can just buy borean leather and make arctic boots to disenchant to get my enchanting mats. Because I'm in so many markets I have to have a decent backstock for each market which means I'm always buying raw mats when they are cheap.
Another perk to being in more then one market is you can manipulate things a lot easier without it affecting you as much. I regularly crash the gem market on my server about once a week. The reason for this is it helps me control my backstock. I usually keep 300 uncut gems of a color. When I get more then 300 of a color i'll burn them up and cut a bunch down to ~275 uncut and flood the market at 8-10g a gem. This only works if your competition is active about resetting markets such as mine. I can throw up 10 gems for 10g each and my competition will buy them and reset the prices and I just made double the money that I would have if I just vendored them. (plus you get the annoyed competition whispers for bonus points)
There are a few downsides to this strategy like anything else. The fact that your in so many markets its hard to focus on just one market and it's extremely time consuming to have a monopoly in all of them. You're dealing with so many competitors that it becomes a game within a game almost. I haven't raided in weeks due to my connection but that doesn't bother me because I always have saronite to prospect, AH prices to check, carpet bombing glyphs and enchanting mats, herbs to mill. There really is no end to it.
Another downside is it takes alot of money to get into multiple markets. I took the risk of powerleveling inscription when I only had 5-6k liquid and it's saved my butt a few times as there is no competition in my glyph market really. I now pull 1-2k+ a day in glyphs and about 1k in gem sales alone. Add in enchanting mats and leg armors and I regularly see 4-5k sales days and 10k+ sales days are becoming more and more regular.
So to wrap this up just think about what you want out of your AH game. Do you want to play the AH full time and not really do anything else? If so I'd suggest getting into multiple markets.
If you just want to make some money on the side with low maintenance then stick to one market.
In the end it all comes down to what your looking for. For me I've done pretty much everything in the game in my 4 1/2 - 5 years of playing. The AH for me is the only entertaining challenge left in the game for me. :)
Friday, September 11, 2009
In remembrance...
Today I wont be writing a blog as I knew people who lost loved ones in the 9-11 incident and this is my moment of silence for those friends and the rest of the country who lost loved ones.
Sorry if you were looking forward to a blog today but I will have one first thing in the morning tomorrow.
If you have suggestions or anything type of economic topics you'd like to see discussed feel free to let me know via Yahoo IM (silence42202) or leave a comment here. :)
Sorry if you were looking forward to a blog today but I will have one first thing in the morning tomorrow.
If you have suggestions or anything type of economic topics you'd like to see discussed feel free to let me know via Yahoo IM (silence42202) or leave a comment here. :)
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Making Lemonade Out of Lemons
Sorry about the late post as I've been busy as the farmers have started to come back around. My original goal was to get to 60k by tomorrow but I definitely wont be reaching that as I'm sitting at 42k liquid right now. I figured the cheap mats that are surfacing are more important then hitting 60k. I really don't want to drop below 40k in my guild bank so I'll probably only accept the COD orders people send me.
I now have two herb farmers, two to three ore farmers, and one leather farmer. My leather farmer is also a miner so he pretty much just CODs me everything he gets. Hard to pass up 6g stacks of borean leather that I can craft into items and d/e.
I'm pretty far behind on things right now but I don't want to not give you a post so I'll briefly talk about turning items into enchanting mats. Alot of times this is completely server dependant and wont work on every server. It's generally the direct result of people flooding the market.
For Leatherworker's take a look at Arctic Boots. If you can buy stacks of borean leather for 10g or less and Infinite dust sells for 3g or more you can make some easy money. These boots disenchant into the same mats as the JC crystallized jewelery (1.5 dust, 1.5 lesser essence, 1 small dream shard). They take 8 leather to create which is 4g if you buy at 10g a stack.
For Jewelcrafter's take a look at my Shadowmight vs Crystallized blog. Pretty much self explanatory.
For Tailoring I don't know of any wrath recipes that work for the d/e process simply because almost all of the tailoring products take imbued frostweave which would be counter productive. However there are a few BC options that can still be profitable for you. Check out Netherweave Bracers. They take 15 cloth to make and d/e into 2.5 dust, 2.5 lesser essence, or 1 small prismatic shard. If your looking for large prismatic shards check out Arconoweave Bracers or Imbued Netherweave Pants. It depends on silk vs dust prices on which would be more profitable to produce.
For Blacksmithing I don't see many options looking through Wowhead but Deadly Saronite Dirk. And even then it could be borderline on the profitability.
If you know of anything I missed or even some old world recipes that are great for disenchanting feel free to leave a comment.
I now have two herb farmers, two to three ore farmers, and one leather farmer. My leather farmer is also a miner so he pretty much just CODs me everything he gets. Hard to pass up 6g stacks of borean leather that I can craft into items and d/e.
I'm pretty far behind on things right now but I don't want to not give you a post so I'll briefly talk about turning items into enchanting mats. Alot of times this is completely server dependant and wont work on every server. It's generally the direct result of people flooding the market.
For Leatherworker's take a look at Arctic Boots. If you can buy stacks of borean leather for 10g or less and Infinite dust sells for 3g or more you can make some easy money. These boots disenchant into the same mats as the JC crystallized jewelery (1.5 dust, 1.5 lesser essence, 1 small dream shard). They take 8 leather to create which is 4g if you buy at 10g a stack.
For Jewelcrafter's take a look at my Shadowmight vs Crystallized blog. Pretty much self explanatory.
For Tailoring I don't know of any wrath recipes that work for the d/e process simply because almost all of the tailoring products take imbued frostweave which would be counter productive. However there are a few BC options that can still be profitable for you. Check out Netherweave Bracers. They take 15 cloth to make and d/e into 2.5 dust, 2.5 lesser essence, or 1 small prismatic shard. If your looking for large prismatic shards check out Arconoweave Bracers or Imbued Netherweave Pants. It depends on silk vs dust prices on which would be more profitable to produce.
For Blacksmithing I don't see many options looking through Wowhead but Deadly Saronite Dirk. And even then it could be borderline on the profitability.
If you know of anything I missed or even some old world recipes that are great for disenchanting feel free to leave a comment.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Fishing the Auction House
So I recently learned how to track visitor data to my blog via Google Analytics and I'm really blown away at how many page views I've got and found that a good handful of my visits come from other blogs in which have mentioned my blog in some way or another. So I wanted to say a big thanks to all of those who have linked my blog on theirs and if you haven't taken a look at some of the blogs on my "Blogs to Check Out" section I would greatly appreciate checking them out as well. They are knowledgeable writers and they are the ones who inspired me to start my own blog. (/endsappymusic)
So I recently started to try an experiment that I thought I would share with you all.
I buy a large quantity of items in bulk and generally try to get the best deal I can. What I've been doing the past day or two is "baiting" the AH. People rely on addons so much they will generally blindly post items just to undercut someone and be the cheapest. So what I do is simple, If I buy all the saronite ore up to 15g per stack I'll then turn around and repost one stack in the AH at say 13g 99s.
Yea it might not work and someone might buy it out. Fine with me I lost 2g. I'll throw up another stack in a few minutes and try again. So far I've only had four or five stacks of herbs / ore bought out but tonight alone I've managed to snag 60 stacks of adder's tongue for 13.5g a stack when the next cheapest stack was 20g a stack. I've also managed to snag 30 or so stacks of saronite for 11-12g a stack when the lowest was 15g+.
The saronite actually chained where 1 posted a couple of stacks and the next few people undercut them. I came in and scooped em all up and since I cant buy my own auctions my ore stayed there.
As I said it wont always work but if you can manage to get someone to dump their load of herbs or saronite and use your auction to undercut then it pays off for the 1 or 2 auctions you lost.
Try it out and let me know how it works out. I'd be really interested in hearing how this has worked for others.
A small update on my progress so far. Tonight I was sitting at about 55-56k gold when all this baiting action happened and I ended up buying about 10k worth of ore, herbs, leather, and eternals. Which dropped me to 46k or so. I then decided to pick up my 6th bank tab so from here on out I can focus on making money and have no real "expenses" left. I'm pushing to break 60k by saturday and my goal for this weekend is to break 70k by Monday. I have the supplies to do so I just have to stay on top of my auctions and I should be fine.
Again at the top of my blog on the right is some other blogs you should check out. A lot of great information can be found on their blogs as well and once again a big thank you to those blogs who have mentioned my blog and have my link up as well. :)
So I recently started to try an experiment that I thought I would share with you all.
I buy a large quantity of items in bulk and generally try to get the best deal I can. What I've been doing the past day or two is "baiting" the AH. People rely on addons so much they will generally blindly post items just to undercut someone and be the cheapest. So what I do is simple, If I buy all the saronite ore up to 15g per stack I'll then turn around and repost one stack in the AH at say 13g 99s.
Yea it might not work and someone might buy it out. Fine with me I lost 2g. I'll throw up another stack in a few minutes and try again. So far I've only had four or five stacks of herbs / ore bought out but tonight alone I've managed to snag 60 stacks of adder's tongue for 13.5g a stack when the next cheapest stack was 20g a stack. I've also managed to snag 30 or so stacks of saronite for 11-12g a stack when the lowest was 15g+.
The saronite actually chained where 1 posted a couple of stacks and the next few people undercut them. I came in and scooped em all up and since I cant buy my own auctions my ore stayed there.
As I said it wont always work but if you can manage to get someone to dump their load of herbs or saronite and use your auction to undercut then it pays off for the 1 or 2 auctions you lost.
Try it out and let me know how it works out. I'd be really interested in hearing how this has worked for others.
A small update on my progress so far. Tonight I was sitting at about 55-56k gold when all this baiting action happened and I ended up buying about 10k worth of ore, herbs, leather, and eternals. Which dropped me to 46k or so. I then decided to pick up my 6th bank tab so from here on out I can focus on making money and have no real "expenses" left. I'm pushing to break 60k by saturday and my goal for this weekend is to break 70k by Monday. I have the supplies to do so I just have to stay on top of my auctions and I should be fine.
Again at the top of my blog on the right is some other blogs you should check out. A lot of great information can be found on their blogs as well and once again a big thank you to those blogs who have mentioned my blog and have my link up as well. :)
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Profiting Off Your Competition.
Well yesterday was a really nice day. I decided I was going to level my shaman strictly via paying for runs through instances and got to level 26; still a long ways to go but its a start. I posted glyphs only 3-4 times throughout the day (my usual is 5-7 times) and posted a good 20-30 stacks of dust and 75 or so essences. By the end of the day I had made ~2k off glyphs (which I think is my new daily high) and ~3k off enchanting mats. I let all my gem auctions expire so I had 0 gems up for a small portion of the day and only made 200g or so from them. The reason I didnt stay caught up on the gems is I want to let the market reset. My other competition will most likely buy up all the cheap gems and repost em allowing me to come back into a fresh market and aggervate them some more.
Today I'll talk about how to profit off your competition before they are even your competition. Many professions have bottlenecks in which it gets really expensive to level through and you can make it even harder for future competition and in a sense get into their head.
I'm going to focus on jewelcrafting for an example but every profession has something similar. In jewelcrafting your bottleneck is at thorium ore. I think it's pretty much accepted that on most servers thorium is pretty pricey. Even more so now that people are leveling quicker and the RAF.
Large Opal, Huge Emerald, Azerothian Diamond, Blue Sapphire, and Star Ruby are the common gems you get while prospecting thorium. You will rarely get outland gems and generally will get 4-6 gems per stacks of ore.
Now your server will vary of course but I'm going to use my server as an example where thorium ore drops down to 40g at times. This is when I buy it up and prospect it. On my server all the gems minus blue sapphire and star ruby sell for 15-20g each. Blue sapphire and star ruby sell for 10-15g. The average value of prospected gems I get from thorium ore is about 55-60g.
By no means is this a huge profit and you may have to repost 2-3 times before the gems sell but they will and when they sell generally you'll sell 90% of them at once due to someone leveling JC.
Now the thing I like about this the most is in a sense you already getting into your competitions head. What I mean by that is that if your competition knows they are buying gems and other goods off you to level up and then they get to wrath quality gems and see your name everywhere it might intimidate them from going full out.
Also another positive side from buying thorium is it keeps the price high on it making it even more spendy for future competition.
Like I said there are bottlenecks in every profession like that. Some of the others I know off the top of my head that you want to check out is high end vanilla enchanting mats and outland enchanting mats; Also greater nether essences on my server sell for 90g per 10. Mageweave cloth is also a well known choke point. On my server this goes for 10-20g a stack. For herbing pretty much all the mid to high level old world herbs sell really well. I've been able to sell an abundance of blindweed (among other kinds) for 30g a stack.
Just something to keep an eye on and snatch up the good deals in these markets. It also provides a nice side income to simply investing a little bit of cash when the prices dip low.
Today I'll talk about how to profit off your competition before they are even your competition. Many professions have bottlenecks in which it gets really expensive to level through and you can make it even harder for future competition and in a sense get into their head.
I'm going to focus on jewelcrafting for an example but every profession has something similar. In jewelcrafting your bottleneck is at thorium ore. I think it's pretty much accepted that on most servers thorium is pretty pricey. Even more so now that people are leveling quicker and the RAF.
Large Opal, Huge Emerald, Azerothian Diamond, Blue Sapphire, and Star Ruby are the common gems you get while prospecting thorium. You will rarely get outland gems and generally will get 4-6 gems per stacks of ore.
Now your server will vary of course but I'm going to use my server as an example where thorium ore drops down to 40g at times. This is when I buy it up and prospect it. On my server all the gems minus blue sapphire and star ruby sell for 15-20g each. Blue sapphire and star ruby sell for 10-15g. The average value of prospected gems I get from thorium ore is about 55-60g.
By no means is this a huge profit and you may have to repost 2-3 times before the gems sell but they will and when they sell generally you'll sell 90% of them at once due to someone leveling JC.
Now the thing I like about this the most is in a sense you already getting into your competitions head. What I mean by that is that if your competition knows they are buying gems and other goods off you to level up and then they get to wrath quality gems and see your name everywhere it might intimidate them from going full out.
Also another positive side from buying thorium is it keeps the price high on it making it even more spendy for future competition.
Like I said there are bottlenecks in every profession like that. Some of the others I know off the top of my head that you want to check out is high end vanilla enchanting mats and outland enchanting mats; Also greater nether essences on my server sell for 90g per 10. Mageweave cloth is also a well known choke point. On my server this goes for 10-20g a stack. For herbing pretty much all the mid to high level old world herbs sell really well. I've been able to sell an abundance of blindweed (among other kinds) for 30g a stack.
Just something to keep an eye on and snatch up the good deals in these markets. It also provides a nice side income to simply investing a little bit of cash when the prices dip low.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Labor Day!
Being the hard working gnome I am today I'm pretty much taking the day off from writing the blog today and taking it easy in game as well.
I threw up a bunch of gems and enchanting mats to last me through the day and I'll still repost glyphs but other then that I'm kickin back and leveling my shaman so I can work yet another market lol.
Have a good holiday everyone and I'll either talk to ya on the JMTC forums or tomorrow :)
I threw up a bunch of gems and enchanting mats to last me through the day and I'll still repost glyphs but other then that I'm kickin back and leveling my shaman so I can work yet another market lol.
Have a good holiday everyone and I'll either talk to ya on the JMTC forums or tomorrow :)
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Shadowmight vs Crystallized Jewelery
A quick update about things before I go off and ramble. This weekend has been really good to me, I finally broke the 40k mark and was sitting at 44k when I splurged on about 3-4k on herbs, saronite, eternal earth / shadow, etc and stocked back up for a day or two.
Glyphs have been selling really well and gems even better. It might be because I've recently started my goblin tactics in gems again due to competition complaining non stop and using vulgar insults. I decided I'll pretty much just sell the gems as I get them for cheaper then sit on a large backstock and duke it out with competition. I'm currently planning on trying out a new tactic that might save some time and money. Here's what I'm planning on doing:
I recently stumbled across a buyer for my citrine, bloodstone, chalcedony and sun crystals. Basically a horde side JC / enchanter was looking for bulk amounts and was paying 35g a stack (1.75g each). Now I buy all my saronite at most for 15g a stack; Often times its in the 11-13g range. (I'm alliance so his business doesn't conflict with mine)
On a large scale platform I'm going to assume (correct me if I'm wrong) that its safe to say I will get 4 non jade / shadow gems in a stack of ore given the fact you can proc 2x green gems and its pretty common to do so. Given I sell my green gems for 1.75g each I'll get 7g off my saronite prices.
If I buy saronite for 15g a stack I'm now paying 8g a stack for saronite as my high. My low for saronite would be 5g a stack. With my "goblin" tactics I'm now selling my blue gems for 10-15g cut and rubies for 35-50g. The chance to get a blue quality gem from a prospect is 24% iirc since wowhead is being dumb at the moment and taking forever. The way I got this was 6 different gem colors with a 4% chance (6*4=24 for those of you who don't like math :P).
On a large scale the [i]average[/i] rate for blue gems is 96% from a stack of saronite. Given the fact you can proc double rare gems on a prospect (<3 double scarlet ruby procs) I'd say roughly 2-5% of the time that's enough consider it 100% (on average) for 1 blue gem to 1 stack ratio.
Now if that saronite cost me 8g and I sell any gem for 10-15g I'm profiting. Scarlets sell easily for 40g on my server which helps shift the profit margin a little better towards my favor. When I raise back up my gems to normal 15-30g prices and 40-70g for rubies I'd be making even more money.
Since I'm selling my green gems off I can no longer make crystallized jewelery. To get around this lets look at shadowmight rings.
I'm currently sitting on over 50 stacks of eternal earth all of which were bought between the prices of 3g and 6.5g each. Eternal shadow prices go for 2-4g on my server.
Lets take the worst case scenario for pricing and say I buy for 6.5 and 4g. That's 10.5g for a shadowmight ring. Shadowmight rings can give 2-5 (norm is 3.5-4g each) dust or 1-2 Greater essence(10-12g each) or 1 dream shard (12-14g each) .
2-5 dust would mean on average your going to get 3.5 dust, 1.5 essence, and 1 shard.
According to Wowhead shadowmight rings have a 75% to give dust, 22% chance to give essence and 3% chance to give dream shards. Lets do a 1000 ring test sample.
1000 eternal earth rings at above prices worst case would be 10k gold.
In 1000 rings ill have 750 dust procs, 220 essence procs, 30 shard procs.
3.5*750 = 2625 dust.
2625/20 = 131.25 stacks of dust. Given I sell dust at 60g a stack the dust would have 7875g value (9187.5g value if I sold at 70g a stack but I'll stick with 60g since I often times sell bulk at that rate)
Now for essences.
1.5*220 = 330 greater essences
10*330 = 3300g value at 10g each (low). 12g each would be 3960g.
Now for shards.
1*30= 30
30*10g = 300g. (12g would be 360g)
Given I sell at bulk prices 1000 rings would give 11475g. If I were to sell at normal prices I'd get 13507.5g.
Now I could get more dust for my eternal if I just did the crystallized jewelery sure. But lets factor in time now. Disenchant is a 3 second cast. To make it simple I'll just pretend we're machines with no error (which some of us pretty much are by now).
3*1000= 3000 seconds disenchanting 1000 rings. 3000 seconds is 50 minutes. In 50 minutes of time I can produce 11475g worth of bulk priced enchanting mats for a profit of 1475g where if I did the crystallized jewelery I'd be looking at:
1 eternal = 6g
5 uncommon gems = 8.75g (1.75g since I could be selling them)
5 rings total = 14.75g
1 ring = 2.95g
1000 rings = 2950g to make
1.5 dust, 1.5 lesser essence, 1 shard are the averages. And the % is the same as shadowmight (75, 22, and 3)
1000 rings would be 750 dust procs, 220 essence procs and 30 shard procs.
1.5*750= 1125 dust (56.25 stacks)
1.5*220 = 330 lesser essences / 3 = 110 greater essence
1*30= 30 small dream shards /3 = 10 dream shards
Given bulk pricing I'd get 3375g for the dust, 1100g for the essences, 100g for the shards. In total I'd have 4575g worth of enchanting mats. Which comes to 1625g profit for 50 mins work.
Now that my brain hurts from doing the most math I've done since I can remember you can argue that the crystallized rings have a higher profit rate which is true. But as a counter argument you can say that I'm also paying higher prices for saronite since I am not selling the gems.
So in the end I can pay cheaper prices for saronite and sell my green gems.
Or I could make the crystallized jewelery for 200g more profit per 1000 rings / 50 mins of work and pay almost double the cost for saronite.
Now I know the actual cost of my uncommon gems wont be 1.75g since I technically get them for "free". But their "free" in the same aspect of the noobs running around selling things at 75% of the mat cost and claiming its all profit since they farmed the mats themselves.
Any thoughts on this? I honestly wasn't going to write about this for today's blog but I think I wrote enough for today. :P
Let me know what you guys think and maybe a different point of view im not seeing it from.
Glyphs have been selling really well and gems even better. It might be because I've recently started my goblin tactics in gems again due to competition complaining non stop and using vulgar insults. I decided I'll pretty much just sell the gems as I get them for cheaper then sit on a large backstock and duke it out with competition. I'm currently planning on trying out a new tactic that might save some time and money. Here's what I'm planning on doing:
I recently stumbled across a buyer for my citrine, bloodstone, chalcedony and sun crystals. Basically a horde side JC / enchanter was looking for bulk amounts and was paying 35g a stack (1.75g each). Now I buy all my saronite at most for 15g a stack; Often times its in the 11-13g range. (I'm alliance so his business doesn't conflict with mine)
On a large scale platform I'm going to assume (correct me if I'm wrong) that its safe to say I will get 4 non jade / shadow gems in a stack of ore given the fact you can proc 2x green gems and its pretty common to do so. Given I sell my green gems for 1.75g each I'll get 7g off my saronite prices.
If I buy saronite for 15g a stack I'm now paying 8g a stack for saronite as my high. My low for saronite would be 5g a stack. With my "goblin" tactics I'm now selling my blue gems for 10-15g cut and rubies for 35-50g. The chance to get a blue quality gem from a prospect is 24% iirc since wowhead is being dumb at the moment and taking forever. The way I got this was 6 different gem colors with a 4% chance (6*4=24 for those of you who don't like math :P).
On a large scale the [i]average[/i] rate for blue gems is 96% from a stack of saronite. Given the fact you can proc double rare gems on a prospect (<3 double scarlet ruby procs) I'd say roughly 2-5% of the time that's enough consider it 100% (on average) for 1 blue gem to 1 stack ratio.
Now if that saronite cost me 8g and I sell any gem for 10-15g I'm profiting. Scarlets sell easily for 40g on my server which helps shift the profit margin a little better towards my favor. When I raise back up my gems to normal 15-30g prices and 40-70g for rubies I'd be making even more money.
Since I'm selling my green gems off I can no longer make crystallized jewelery. To get around this lets look at shadowmight rings.
I'm currently sitting on over 50 stacks of eternal earth all of which were bought between the prices of 3g and 6.5g each. Eternal shadow prices go for 2-4g on my server.
Lets take the worst case scenario for pricing and say I buy for 6.5 and 4g. That's 10.5g for a shadowmight ring. Shadowmight rings can give 2-5 (norm is 3.5-4g each) dust or 1-2 Greater essence(10-12g each) or 1 dream shard (12-14g each) .
2-5 dust would mean on average your going to get 3.5 dust, 1.5 essence, and 1 shard.
According to Wowhead shadowmight rings have a 75% to give dust, 22% chance to give essence and 3% chance to give dream shards. Lets do a 1000 ring test sample.
1000 eternal earth rings at above prices worst case would be 10k gold.
In 1000 rings ill have 750 dust procs, 220 essence procs, 30 shard procs.
3.5*750 = 2625 dust.
2625/20 = 131.25 stacks of dust. Given I sell dust at 60g a stack the dust would have 7875g value (9187.5g value if I sold at 70g a stack but I'll stick with 60g since I often times sell bulk at that rate)
Now for essences.
1.5*220 = 330 greater essences
10*330 = 3300g value at 10g each (low). 12g each would be 3960g.
Now for shards.
1*30= 30
30*10g = 300g. (12g would be 360g)
Given I sell at bulk prices 1000 rings would give 11475g. If I were to sell at normal prices I'd get 13507.5g.
Now I could get more dust for my eternal if I just did the crystallized jewelery sure. But lets factor in time now. Disenchant is a 3 second cast. To make it simple I'll just pretend we're machines with no error (which some of us pretty much are by now).
3*1000= 3000 seconds disenchanting 1000 rings. 3000 seconds is 50 minutes. In 50 minutes of time I can produce 11475g worth of bulk priced enchanting mats for a profit of 1475g where if I did the crystallized jewelery I'd be looking at:
1 eternal = 6g
5 uncommon gems = 8.75g (1.75g since I could be selling them)
5 rings total = 14.75g
1 ring = 2.95g
1000 rings = 2950g to make
1.5 dust, 1.5 lesser essence, 1 shard are the averages. And the % is the same as shadowmight (75, 22, and 3)
1000 rings would be 750 dust procs, 220 essence procs and 30 shard procs.
1.5*750= 1125 dust (56.25 stacks)
1.5*220 = 330 lesser essences / 3 = 110 greater essence
1*30= 30 small dream shards /3 = 10 dream shards
Given bulk pricing I'd get 3375g for the dust, 1100g for the essences, 100g for the shards. In total I'd have 4575g worth of enchanting mats. Which comes to 1625g profit for 50 mins work.
Now that my brain hurts from doing the most math I've done since I can remember you can argue that the crystallized rings have a higher profit rate which is true. But as a counter argument you can say that I'm also paying higher prices for saronite since I am not selling the gems.
So in the end I can pay cheaper prices for saronite and sell my green gems.
Or I could make the crystallized jewelery for 200g more profit per 1000 rings / 50 mins of work and pay almost double the cost for saronite.
Now I know the actual cost of my uncommon gems wont be 1.75g since I technically get them for "free". But their "free" in the same aspect of the noobs running around selling things at 75% of the mat cost and claiming its all profit since they farmed the mats themselves.
Any thoughts on this? I honestly wasn't going to write about this for today's blog but I think I wrote enough for today. :P
Let me know what you guys think and maybe a different point of view im not seeing it from.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Busy Holiday Weekend
Not so much an economic blog today as an update on things. Remember how I told you about me inflating prices on my server? Well due to the fair and other things the prices have fallen a little but they are still double what they normally are. It's somewhat hurting my competition and I have noticed a slight increase in sales but it's also a holiday weekend with a new arena season so it could just be that.
I bought and flipped my first Trading Card Game item today. I purchased http://www.wowhead.com/?item=49285 for 10k. I thought I would have been able to flip it for atleast 20k but after a few hours of trying I was informed by multiple people that the last two this month have barely sold for 5k. I felt like an idiot and decided to sell it for 12k and couldn't find a desperate enough buyer and I figured it was just going to go to my mount collection but first I tossed it in the AH for 12k.
A couple of hours later I found this gem waiting for me in the mailbox. Now to just find one cheaper under 4k for me to flip again lol.
With the darkmoon fair around the corner alot of deckmakers are pumping out decks. As snowfall ink couldn't be given away on my server I decided to turn it all into cards and test my luck. My most recent batch of cards was 34 cards and my second most recent batch was 72 or so.
In total I have 2 noble decks, 7 prism decks, 1 undeath deck, and 3 chaos decks. I did spend about 1500g on various cards to complete the decks but I feel that I'll still come out ahead.
I talked to a large cardmarker on my server and almost had him interested in buying my snowfall ink for 5g each but in the end it fell through. He was somewhat foolish enough to give away alot of freebie tips for selling cards on my server so I'll pass some along to see if they help you out any.
Wait until a week after the fair is gone and you turned your cards into trinkets. Noble decks go for 4k on my server while the actual trinkets go for 5-6k. Prisms go for 700-800 while the actual trinket sells for 1k. If this is even remotely true then I have approx. 20k in trinkets and given I can sell them all I would be sitting at roughly 56k, well past the 50k mark. :D
I've been busy prospecting ore and making glyphs I wish I had more time to write but I guess I'll save it for tomorrow's post. :)
I bought and flipped my first Trading Card Game item today. I purchased http://www.wowhead.com/?item=49285 for 10k. I thought I would have been able to flip it for atleast 20k but after a few hours of trying I was informed by multiple people that the last two this month have barely sold for 5k. I felt like an idiot and decided to sell it for 12k and couldn't find a desperate enough buyer and I figured it was just going to go to my mount collection but first I tossed it in the AH for 12k.
A couple of hours later I found this gem waiting for me in the mailbox. Now to just find one cheaper under 4k for me to flip again lol.
With the darkmoon fair around the corner alot of deckmakers are pumping out decks. As snowfall ink couldn't be given away on my server I decided to turn it all into cards and test my luck. My most recent batch of cards was 34 cards and my second most recent batch was 72 or so.
In total I have 2 noble decks, 7 prism decks, 1 undeath deck, and 3 chaos decks. I did spend about 1500g on various cards to complete the decks but I feel that I'll still come out ahead.
I talked to a large cardmarker on my server and almost had him interested in buying my snowfall ink for 5g each but in the end it fell through. He was somewhat foolish enough to give away alot of freebie tips for selling cards on my server so I'll pass some along to see if they help you out any.
Wait until a week after the fair is gone and you turned your cards into trinkets. Noble decks go for 4k on my server while the actual trinkets go for 5-6k. Prisms go for 700-800 while the actual trinket sells for 1k. If this is even remotely true then I have approx. 20k in trinkets and given I can sell them all I would be sitting at roughly 56k, well past the 50k mark. :D
I've been busy prospecting ore and making glyphs I wish I had more time to write but I guess I'll save it for tomorrow's post. :)
Friday, September 4, 2009
Tools Of The Trade
Just as important as any auction house strategy is the tools you use. I at one point was completely against using any addon what so ever. In fact all I had installed was Omen and Recount for raiding because it was mandatory (well not recount :P). And you guessed it, I was broke.
So I'm basically going to cheat on todays blog and talk about the addons I personally use.
First up it's the addon we all know and love. Auctioneer Suite is a powerful addon for any auctioneer whether your just an average farmer or trying to manipulate markets and take over your auction house.
I honestly did not know how to use Auctioneer properly like many players until I read 22 steps to using Auctioneer correctly over at JMTC. I'm not going to spend really any more time writing about auctioneer for two reasons. One, marko explains it better then I ever could. And two, I personally don't use auctioneer anymore as I have connection problems at the moment so less addons the better. (Auctioneer is a monster on system resources)
One of my personal favorite addons is Auctionator. This addon works similar to Auctioneer but is alot easier on your resources and alot simpler to use. There are 3 main features about this addon that I really like which are the new Buy and Sell tabs and the ability to check all your auctions to see if any are undercut.
To the right is a picture of the sell tab in which I blatently stole from curse so I didnt have to log in and take one myself lol.
You drag the item you are selling into the upper box and the following information appears. The price per item, how many of that item is being sold for that specific price, and on the far right is price for 1 buyout (i.e. Eternal eart is going for 6g each the far right information will read 120g even if theres 5 stacks for 6g each)
You will notice a yellow highlight on the prices. That's where you can select the pricing you want your stuff to undercut and post at. Posting is really similar to auctioneer's posting of breaking up the stacks automatically and posting for you.
The buy feature is extremely convenient for buying things. The same kind of list appears and when you go to buy something off that tab a window pops up asking how much of the item at the price you want to buy. You enter in say 6 for 6 stacks and click buy and viola all 6 stacks are purchased instantly.
The next addon is of course Quick Auctions2. I know every blogger has a blog about QA but its such a powerful tool theres a reason why its mentioned so much. It's only really useful if you carpet bomb glyphs or gems.
The reason I didn't crop this picture was because it's my only picture I had of QA and it just so happens the tool from yesterday's blog was nerd raging on me yet again lol so I figured I'd humor you guys with a good laugh.
I had originally given a brief walkthrough of QA2 until I realized it was nothing compared to what Belsebub, author of The Happy Scribe, had written up. So check out this great guide written by Belse.
That pretty much wraps it up for the AH based addons now to talk about some of the support addons I use.
For your profession window you generally have 2 common addons. ATSW and Skillet. I have both and I use both depending on the situation but I lean towards ATSW as my favorite based on sheer looks. ATSW is pretty much the default tradeskill window modified slightly but is easy to use and really quick to get used to. Skillet on the other hand completely reworks the window into its own window and takes alot longer to get used to. Both are great addons depending on your personal taste and both pretty much do the exact same thing. It just boils down to preferences on the look you want.
The key features to both of these great addons is the ability to create a queue for making your items. You add it into the que and click process and it'll make the things in order. If you queue up say a frostweave bag it will add a bolt of frostweave and a bolt of imbued frostweave before the bag simply by just adding a frostweave bag to the queue.
The second important feature is the ability to automatically purchase reagents from the vendor. Great if your a scribe. Have a bunch of Ink of the Sea on you and head to the ink trader with everything in queue. Click buy reagents at the top of the merchant window and viola it automatically converts your ink of the sea into all the inks needed to make whats in your queue.
Now we're on to mail addons. In my opinion there is only one addon worth mentioning that I've found that that's postal. This addon is a godsend and is a must have. It's self explanatory and not really worth a screenshot but the main feature of this is the "open all" ability. One click and everything in your mailbox gets opened and put into your inventory. (cod items are not affected by this until you pay for them.)
Last but not least we have Altoholic. This is another godsend addon especially for those of us who have banker alts to do our dirty work. This addon will tell you who has what on the tooltip of the item. You can even bring up the altoholic window and browse other character's banks and even your banker's guild bank. A definate must have.
Well, I thought today's post was going to be short and sweet but what can I say? There's a ton of great addons out there. And using them definitely gives you an advantage over your competition if their not using them.
As with all things you download, always download from a trusted source. My 2 recommended sites for addons are Curse and wowinterface. If you cant find what your looking for on these two websites then its probably not legit. :P
So I'm basically going to cheat on todays blog and talk about the addons I personally use.
First up it's the addon we all know and love. Auctioneer Suite is a powerful addon for any auctioneer whether your just an average farmer or trying to manipulate markets and take over your auction house.
I honestly did not know how to use Auctioneer properly like many players until I read 22 steps to using Auctioneer correctly over at JMTC. I'm not going to spend really any more time writing about auctioneer for two reasons. One, marko explains it better then I ever could. And two, I personally don't use auctioneer anymore as I have connection problems at the moment so less addons the better. (Auctioneer is a monster on system resources)
One of my personal favorite addons is Auctionator. This addon works similar to Auctioneer but is alot easier on your resources and alot simpler to use. There are 3 main features about this addon that I really like which are the new Buy and Sell tabs and the ability to check all your auctions to see if any are undercut.
To the right is a picture of the sell tab in which I blatently stole from curse so I didnt have to log in and take one myself lol.
You drag the item you are selling into the upper box and the following information appears. The price per item, how many of that item is being sold for that specific price, and on the far right is price for 1 buyout (i.e. Eternal eart is going for 6g each the far right information will read 120g even if theres 5 stacks for 6g each)
You will notice a yellow highlight on the prices. That's where you can select the pricing you want your stuff to undercut and post at. Posting is really similar to auctioneer's posting of breaking up the stacks automatically and posting for you.
The buy feature is extremely convenient for buying things. The same kind of list appears and when you go to buy something off that tab a window pops up asking how much of the item at the price you want to buy. You enter in say 6 for 6 stacks and click buy and viola all 6 stacks are purchased instantly.
The next addon is of course Quick Auctions2. I know every blogger has a blog about QA but its such a powerful tool theres a reason why its mentioned so much. It's only really useful if you carpet bomb glyphs or gems.
The reason I didn't crop this picture was because it's my only picture I had of QA and it just so happens the tool from yesterday's blog was nerd raging on me yet again lol so I figured I'd humor you guys with a good laugh.
I had originally given a brief walkthrough of QA2 until I realized it was nothing compared to what Belsebub, author of The Happy Scribe, had written up. So check out this great guide written by Belse.
That pretty much wraps it up for the AH based addons now to talk about some of the support addons I use.
For your profession window you generally have 2 common addons. ATSW and Skillet. I have both and I use both depending on the situation but I lean towards ATSW as my favorite based on sheer looks. ATSW is pretty much the default tradeskill window modified slightly but is easy to use and really quick to get used to. Skillet on the other hand completely reworks the window into its own window and takes alot longer to get used to. Both are great addons depending on your personal taste and both pretty much do the exact same thing. It just boils down to preferences on the look you want.
The key features to both of these great addons is the ability to create a queue for making your items. You add it into the que and click process and it'll make the things in order. If you queue up say a frostweave bag it will add a bolt of frostweave and a bolt of imbued frostweave before the bag simply by just adding a frostweave bag to the queue.
The second important feature is the ability to automatically purchase reagents from the vendor. Great if your a scribe. Have a bunch of Ink of the Sea on you and head to the ink trader with everything in queue. Click buy reagents at the top of the merchant window and viola it automatically converts your ink of the sea into all the inks needed to make whats in your queue.
Now we're on to mail addons. In my opinion there is only one addon worth mentioning that I've found that that's postal. This addon is a godsend and is a must have. It's self explanatory and not really worth a screenshot but the main feature of this is the "open all" ability. One click and everything in your mailbox gets opened and put into your inventory. (cod items are not affected by this until you pay for them.)
Last but not least we have Altoholic. This is another godsend addon especially for those of us who have banker alts to do our dirty work. This addon will tell you who has what on the tooltip of the item. You can even bring up the altoholic window and browse other character's banks and even your banker's guild bank. A definate must have.
Well, I thought today's post was going to be short and sweet but what can I say? There's a ton of great addons out there. And using them definitely gives you an advantage over your competition if their not using them.
As with all things you download, always download from a trusted source. My 2 recommended sites for addons are Curse and wowinterface. If you cant find what your looking for on these two websites then its probably not legit. :P
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Monopolists - The Other Pest.
Sorry about the delay in the post. I was having internet troubles and passed out about 6 hours earlier then normal.
So I've received a handful of suggestions to go back to the white text on black instead of the green and as you all are the ones reading it I'd be more then happy to change it hehe. (haters)
Briefly, the new arena season has been awesome so far. Sales are way up for your average weekday and it's making me glad that I spent the past week turning all my profit into backstock. I have enough mats to last quite a while so I'm really enjoying the increase in sales.
I don't feel we've seen the "worst" to be honest. A new arena season + a holiday weekend coming up should mean it's most likely going to get pretty hectic this weekend.
I'm going to go ahead and write the other part of last nights blog about what to do if you have more monopolist competition rather then a bunch of smaller competitors.
This is all based off my personal experience where on my server I have both a handful of smaller competitors and 2-3 monopolists in both glyphs and gems. Yesterday I told you about how I dealt with smaller competition by inflating mat prices to try to drive them away. The reason this isn't as successful with larger competition is because if they were smart they would have enough backstock to last awhile and ride out the high prices.
Now my approach to larger competition is generally the goblin method. When I first got into the gem market on my server there were 2 large competitors in which 1 of them had pretty much had a domination on the market since wrath launched. I know he has a large backstock of ore and gems because I used to supply ore to him when I was addicted to mining.
The rare gem market on my server is decent. Average scarlet ruby sells for 40-70g and the others sell for 20-40g. The only exception would be the forest emeralds which generally sell for 10-15 often lower.
Now before I got into the cut gem market I was simply selling uncuts. But soon enough I had way more backstock then I could ever push out as uncuts and decided to give the cut market a go simply so I could burn through my backstock quicker to afford more ore. (at that time I was only sitting on 3-5k) .
Since I had been used to selling uncut gems for under 10g each and making money off it selling the cut gems for 10-15g was profit for me still and the gems sold relatively quicker then the uncuts. They sold quicker because my competition made the mistake of buying out my gems and relisting them thus funding my growth to what it is today.
That screenshot is of one of the monopolist thats had control of the market since the start of wrath.
My main goal was to pretty much take the market from him and from the looks of it that's pretty much what I've been doing.
As of lately I've stopped my goblin tactics and became more greedy and started selling gems at normal competitive prices. However, my competition doesn't undercut me nearly as much anymore and they don't harass me about my ways of selling gems.
If you take this approach and then later raise the prices be careful of revenge seeking competition such as the ones on my server who pulled the same tactics I used on them against me when I tried resetting certain gem markets. I'd buy all the low gems and relist them at 40g and I noticed my competition would keep listing at the 15-20g range. This really pissed me off as I thought I was doing them a favor and in turn they pretty much gave me the finger.
So what did I do? I went back to my goblin ways to show them how much of a force I really was. I cut 10-15 of every gem cut I had and listed everything at 8-10g. Within an hour everything had sold (to my competition) and they backed prices back up to the 40-50g mark. Since then they havent bothered me when I reset markets. They still undercut me but never more then 1g which is fine with me.
Hopefully you can still get the point of that story as I don't think it was very economic based but at least it gives you a scenario that is possible to compete with heavy competition. I'm technically a nobody when it comes to auctioneering and playing in the AH. I'm sitting on 30-35k liquid while my competition is sitting in the 70-100k liquid range and yet here I am playing hardball with them.
Be a strong presence and show them that your not going anywhere. Let them buy out your cheap gems / auctions and just post up more. It really aggervates them when they can hear you cutting more of the same gem as they just bought 15-20 of your gems. As long as your making profit it doesn't matter who is buying your stuff because really all they are doing is funding you to be an even stronger competitor.
Now if you don't have competition that's willing to buy out your auctions and just undercut you then the only suggestion I can really give is to post smartly. Add them to friends and post when they log off or leave a city. Post during peak hours and during raid times because your surely not going to win against brute strength. Never post more then 2-3 gems and never longer then 12 hours. If your getting undercut alot it's better to sell 2 gems and lose the sale of another gem then it is to post 10 gems and sell 2 and get undercut. That's another reason my competition was buying out my gems. I'd only post 1-2 of the gem at a time instead of flooding the market. Take advantage of their errors and eventually you'll show them your not going anywhere. :)
So I've received a handful of suggestions to go back to the white text on black instead of the green and as you all are the ones reading it I'd be more then happy to change it hehe. (haters)
Briefly, the new arena season has been awesome so far. Sales are way up for your average weekday and it's making me glad that I spent the past week turning all my profit into backstock. I have enough mats to last quite a while so I'm really enjoying the increase in sales.
I don't feel we've seen the "worst" to be honest. A new arena season + a holiday weekend coming up should mean it's most likely going to get pretty hectic this weekend.
I'm going to go ahead and write the other part of last nights blog about what to do if you have more monopolist competition rather then a bunch of smaller competitors.
This is all based off my personal experience where on my server I have both a handful of smaller competitors and 2-3 monopolists in both glyphs and gems. Yesterday I told you about how I dealt with smaller competition by inflating mat prices to try to drive them away. The reason this isn't as successful with larger competition is because if they were smart they would have enough backstock to last awhile and ride out the high prices.
Now my approach to larger competition is generally the goblin method. When I first got into the gem market on my server there were 2 large competitors in which 1 of them had pretty much had a domination on the market since wrath launched. I know he has a large backstock of ore and gems because I used to supply ore to him when I was addicted to mining.
The rare gem market on my server is decent. Average scarlet ruby sells for 40-70g and the others sell for 20-40g. The only exception would be the forest emeralds which generally sell for 10-15 often lower.
Now before I got into the cut gem market I was simply selling uncuts. But soon enough I had way more backstock then I could ever push out as uncuts and decided to give the cut market a go simply so I could burn through my backstock quicker to afford more ore. (at that time I was only sitting on 3-5k) .
Since I had been used to selling uncut gems for under 10g each and making money off it selling the cut gems for 10-15g was profit for me still and the gems sold relatively quicker then the uncuts. They sold quicker because my competition made the mistake of buying out my gems and relisting them thus funding my growth to what it is today.
That screenshot is of one of the monopolist thats had control of the market since the start of wrath.
My main goal was to pretty much take the market from him and from the looks of it that's pretty much what I've been doing.
As of lately I've stopped my goblin tactics and became more greedy and started selling gems at normal competitive prices. However, my competition doesn't undercut me nearly as much anymore and they don't harass me about my ways of selling gems.
If you take this approach and then later raise the prices be careful of revenge seeking competition such as the ones on my server who pulled the same tactics I used on them against me when I tried resetting certain gem markets. I'd buy all the low gems and relist them at 40g and I noticed my competition would keep listing at the 15-20g range. This really pissed me off as I thought I was doing them a favor and in turn they pretty much gave me the finger.
So what did I do? I went back to my goblin ways to show them how much of a force I really was. I cut 10-15 of every gem cut I had and listed everything at 8-10g. Within an hour everything had sold (to my competition) and they backed prices back up to the 40-50g mark. Since then they havent bothered me when I reset markets. They still undercut me but never more then 1g which is fine with me.
Hopefully you can still get the point of that story as I don't think it was very economic based but at least it gives you a scenario that is possible to compete with heavy competition. I'm technically a nobody when it comes to auctioneering and playing in the AH. I'm sitting on 30-35k liquid while my competition is sitting in the 70-100k liquid range and yet here I am playing hardball with them.
Be a strong presence and show them that your not going anywhere. Let them buy out your cheap gems / auctions and just post up more. It really aggervates them when they can hear you cutting more of the same gem as they just bought 15-20 of your gems. As long as your making profit it doesn't matter who is buying your stuff because really all they are doing is funding you to be an even stronger competitor.
Now if you don't have competition that's willing to buy out your auctions and just undercut you then the only suggestion I can really give is to post smartly. Add them to friends and post when they log off or leave a city. Post during peak hours and during raid times because your surely not going to win against brute strength. Never post more then 2-3 gems and never longer then 12 hours. If your getting undercut alot it's better to sell 2 gems and lose the sale of another gem then it is to post 10 gems and sell 2 and get undercut. That's another reason my competition was buying out my gems. I'd only post 1-2 of the gem at a time instead of flooding the market. Take advantage of their errors and eventually you'll show them your not going anywhere. :)
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Pest Control in the AH
Well before I get into today's post I wanted to talk about my success today with the start of the new arena season. Prices jumped significantly as predicted (infinite dust 60g to 97g a stack within 30 mins of the server being online and greater essences from 8-9g to 15-16g each) and I've been jumping between the 3 of my characters cutting gems, posting glyphs, or desperately prospecting ore hoping for a few autumn's glow as I'm completely out >.<
Within the first hour I made 800g off rare gems and about 300-400 in glyphs. In the hours following it was literally non stop AH spam every few seconds. I didn't even have time to cancel my glyphs to repost. I just threw more up to save the 5 mins canceling and digging them out of my mailbox. At the moment I'm really not looking forward to the morning as I have over 800 glyphs posted in the AH all on 12 hour listings.
All in all I made about 6k off glyphs, gems, and enchanting mats. Not to shabby considering I'm on a medium low population server. I could have possibly made more had I been smart enough to post all my auctions on 24 hour listings instead of 12. Im pretty sure I lost a good chunk of sales digging 100 or so gems and 400 glyphs out of my mail and posting them. GG blizz on extended maintnance.
Anyways that my evening and now on to today's actual blog :)
There are many different ways to handle with competition in the auction house. I'm one of those people who thrives off competition. Knowing I can mess with someones market and make money off of it is my kind of motivation. I guess you can say I play to grief other players and the AH is the perfect place to do that. ;)
First off, what to do if you have no "monopolist" types of competition but you have tons of small time competition who are merely an annoyance to your plans on auction house domination. While we may have our different ways of handling this kind of problem I'll toss out my strategy which I'm currently using myself in the glyph market on my server (and it's working so damn beautifully lol).
Gold farmer's are believed to bounce from server to server flooding markets and then leaving once they saturated that server. I saw the farmer's leaving slowly and decided to take action. In a sense I was testing out to see if the farmer's were still on the server so I bought out all the northrend herbs from the AH minus lichbloom (I can't bring myself to mill it lol). Yes, that's right, all the herbs. There was not a single goldclover, tiger lilly, deadnettle, adder's tongue, icethorn or telandra's rose (or whatever its called :P) to be found anywhere in the AH.
My reasoning behind this was simple. I needed inks anyways as my backstock was down to 500 or so and one of two things would either happen (in theory):
1) The gold farmer's had left to another server thus the supply was gone. Me clearing the AH would inflate prices to unbearable prices for fellow competition while I sat on hundreds of stacks of herbs and able to still craft glyphs cheaply. This would give me a significant advantage in 2 markets, Glyphs and cards. I had just got done making approximately 72 or so darkmoon cards of the north and so naturally the AH was low on those as well and pushed prices to almost double.
2) There was still an abundance of supply on the server and this would be like turning on one of those bug lights that zaps bugs. People / farmers would see an empty herb market and start flooding their stashes into the AH thus crashing the market and allow me to buy everything up and enforce theory 1.
Now I had tried this a few days prior and it didn't work out as well as I had planned. A few days ago prices spikes about 50% but by the next morning they returned to normal. This time around I planned it almost to perfection in my opinion. The darkmoon fair is less then a week away. Herb stashes were already low from card making, Arena season is starting so people will be focusing on pvping instead of sitting around farming, and the farmer's were starting to show signs of departing the server for the time being.
The result? For the past 48 hours or so the AH has been clean dry of any herbs minus lichbloom. Well until this evening when herbs finally started making their way back on the market.
The prices are the following:
Goldclover - 20ish stacks at 40g (normal under 10g)
Tiger lilly - 5 or so stacks at 35-40g (normal under 10g)
Deadnettle - Empty
Adder's tongue - 30ish stacks between 40-50g (normal 10-13g)
Icethorn - 20ish stacks stacks at 30g (normal 12-15g)
Rose - Empty
Now I know this wont stay for to much longer and prices will fall back to normal but its giving me a few days of low competition glyph making and putting a strain on card makers. I've been checking the markets and I keep buying anything that gets posted under 20g a stack to kind of prevent the prices dropping back down to quickly.
The result on my competition? I've seen 2 glyph makers in trade advertising they are trading snowfall ink for ink of the sea and various people in trade trying to buy herbs for the past few hours on end.
While this is not a permanent solution it's definitely something to consider when your dealing with lots of low level competition or even the infamous goblins.
I was going to write about how to put some stress on your monopolist competition but I didn't realize I was going to write this much on that topic.
Thanks for reading and if you have any success with this or have done anything similar feel free to drop me a comment and tell me about it :) As usual try anything I say at your own risk. Don't invest your life savings into these kinds of strategies because they are highly risky and can backfire. There now i feel less guilty is someone goes broke listening to me :P
Within the first hour I made 800g off rare gems and about 300-400 in glyphs. In the hours following it was literally non stop AH spam every few seconds. I didn't even have time to cancel my glyphs to repost. I just threw more up to save the 5 mins canceling and digging them out of my mailbox. At the moment I'm really not looking forward to the morning as I have over 800 glyphs posted in the AH all on 12 hour listings.
All in all I made about 6k off glyphs, gems, and enchanting mats. Not to shabby considering I'm on a medium low population server. I could have possibly made more had I been smart enough to post all my auctions on 24 hour listings instead of 12. Im pretty sure I lost a good chunk of sales digging 100 or so gems and 400 glyphs out of my mail and posting them. GG blizz on extended maintnance.
Anyways that my evening and now on to today's actual blog :)
There are many different ways to handle with competition in the auction house. I'm one of those people who thrives off competition. Knowing I can mess with someones market and make money off of it is my kind of motivation. I guess you can say I play to grief other players and the AH is the perfect place to do that. ;)
First off, what to do if you have no "monopolist" types of competition but you have tons of small time competition who are merely an annoyance to your plans on auction house domination. While we may have our different ways of handling this kind of problem I'll toss out my strategy which I'm currently using myself in the glyph market on my server (and it's working so damn beautifully lol).
Gold farmer's are believed to bounce from server to server flooding markets and then leaving once they saturated that server. I saw the farmer's leaving slowly and decided to take action. In a sense I was testing out to see if the farmer's were still on the server so I bought out all the northrend herbs from the AH minus lichbloom (I can't bring myself to mill it lol). Yes, that's right, all the herbs. There was not a single goldclover, tiger lilly, deadnettle, adder's tongue, icethorn or telandra's rose (or whatever its called :P) to be found anywhere in the AH.
My reasoning behind this was simple. I needed inks anyways as my backstock was down to 500 or so and one of two things would either happen (in theory):
1) The gold farmer's had left to another server thus the supply was gone. Me clearing the AH would inflate prices to unbearable prices for fellow competition while I sat on hundreds of stacks of herbs and able to still craft glyphs cheaply. This would give me a significant advantage in 2 markets, Glyphs and cards. I had just got done making approximately 72 or so darkmoon cards of the north and so naturally the AH was low on those as well and pushed prices to almost double.
2) There was still an abundance of supply on the server and this would be like turning on one of those bug lights that zaps bugs. People / farmers would see an empty herb market and start flooding their stashes into the AH thus crashing the market and allow me to buy everything up and enforce theory 1.
Now I had tried this a few days prior and it didn't work out as well as I had planned. A few days ago prices spikes about 50% but by the next morning they returned to normal. This time around I planned it almost to perfection in my opinion. The darkmoon fair is less then a week away. Herb stashes were already low from card making, Arena season is starting so people will be focusing on pvping instead of sitting around farming, and the farmer's were starting to show signs of departing the server for the time being.
The result? For the past 48 hours or so the AH has been clean dry of any herbs minus lichbloom. Well until this evening when herbs finally started making their way back on the market.
The prices are the following:
Goldclover - 20ish stacks at 40g (normal under 10g)
Tiger lilly - 5 or so stacks at 35-40g (normal under 10g)
Deadnettle - Empty
Adder's tongue - 30ish stacks between 40-50g (normal 10-13g)
Icethorn - 20ish stacks stacks at 30g (normal 12-15g)
Rose - Empty
Now I know this wont stay for to much longer and prices will fall back to normal but its giving me a few days of low competition glyph making and putting a strain on card makers. I've been checking the markets and I keep buying anything that gets posted under 20g a stack to kind of prevent the prices dropping back down to quickly.
The result on my competition? I've seen 2 glyph makers in trade advertising they are trading snowfall ink for ink of the sea and various people in trade trying to buy herbs for the past few hours on end.
While this is not a permanent solution it's definitely something to consider when your dealing with lots of low level competition or even the infamous goblins.
I was going to write about how to put some stress on your monopolist competition but I didn't realize I was going to write this much on that topic.
Thanks for reading and if you have any success with this or have done anything similar feel free to drop me a comment and tell me about it :) As usual try anything I say at your own risk. Don't invest your life savings into these kinds of strategies because they are highly risky and can backfire. There now i feel less guilty is someone goes broke listening to me :P
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Auctioneering Season 7 Starts Tomorrow
Tomorrow (technically today but meh I haven't slept yet) is supposed to be the start of Arena Season 7. What does this mean for you as an auctioneer? Many auctioneers are preparing for the sudden influx of pvpers getting new gear on top of the normal tuesday rush from the raiders on your server. Glyph sales should be similar to a typical weekend with all the pvpers switching around their glyphs to fit the new flavor of the month specs on top of the normal glyphs sales. I could be completely wrong and it could be dead slow, who knows. What I do know I am ready to last until atleast the weekend of moderate increase in sales.
Here's pretty much what Im staring at when I open my Gbank. Organization is a huge help when it comes to success in the AH world. Being able to know exactly where stuff is to pull it out and throw it in the AH at any given time instead of spending 5 minutes digging around for it.
Tab 1 is for various cards and deck and kind of my landing pad of "to be processed" items if im running behind on things. I have my cards lines up from Ace to 8 with the blank spots being cards I'm out of. Bottom of first tab are decks I'm holding on to for the fair.
Tab 2 is my gem and eternal tab. Kind of self explanatory. As a JC/enchanter I can never have to many eternal earths :)
Tab 3 is my saronite ore landing strip. I at one point yesterday was completely caught up on prospecting. At the time of this writing I have what you see there and another 8 crates from my farmer who cods me ore at 11g a stack. Even if I dont need ore I still make money by turning it into bars and vendoring it haha :)
Tab 4 is my enchanting mat tab. I give props to a good friend of mine who does 90% of my disenchanting work for me. What you see if pretty much his work over the last day and a half and he keeps bugging me to send him more. :P
Tab 5 is my future Ink tab. in the first 3 tabs you can see there isnt tab 5. I decided it was time to upgrade to 5 tabs if I was going to take a screenshot of my gbank.
So that's pretty much my randomness rambling. Now for some economic based talk since I'm sure thats why you're still reading.
If your from JMTC forums chances are you've seen my thread floating somewhere around there about hiring friends to work for you. An old guildie of mine offered awhile back to help out with disenchanting and at the time I didn't really need the help. I wasnt busy enough to where I couldn't do it. Then I realized I had 400+ stacks of saronite (37 or so crates w/ 12 stacks per crate. ~444 stacks of ore) and I was falling behind quick.
Some people are against it and have trust issues which I understand completely. And I was one of those people until the other day when I had contacted my friend to see if he would still be interested in "working" for me. I wouldnt pay him directly but I originally let him keep 10% of every he disenchanted. When I sent him 24 crates of rings today I told him to take 20% of everything. Here's why: (and I'm sorry if some of this is repetitive from my thread but you all <3 me anyways :P)
I buy Eternal earths at a max of 130g a stack ( 6.5g each). I'm going to say the average is 6g per eternal (120g a stack) for the sake of simplifying the math at 2 am in the morning (and its really the price all my farmers sell to me.)
20 earth = 130g (worst case here)
1 earth = 6.5g
5 rings = 11.5g (1g per green gem is about standard. Even though I never buy these I'll include em in the pricing since I could technically AH them for money.)
1 ring = 2.3g
20 rings = 30 dust / lesser essence / lesser shards on average. (low would be 20 and high would be 40. 30 is the happy medium average and is generally accurate since I deal in 1k+ batches of rings at a time)
Dust generally sells for 70-80g a stack with spikes as high as 100g. I'm going to use 60g per stack as a worst case scenario here and just to prove how much I'm still making even with my friend taking 20%.
It's safe to say on average every 20 rings he will get 30 dust / essence / shards. His cut of that is 6 dust / essence / shards.
30 dust @ 60g a stack is 81g. His 20% cut is is roughly 16.2g per 30 rings. That leaves me with 64.8g given I sell it at 60g a stack (often times its higher).
My cost for 20 rings 46g (2.3g * 20) . That leaves me 18.8g profit for simply making the rings, mailing them and posting the end product. While I'm not making as much money as I would if I would have if I did it myself this now gives me more time to spend making glyphs, milling herbs, prospecting ore, cutting gems, whatever needs to be done. I make money and save time.
I'm not advising everyone who happens to read this to go out and get your friend to do this. There are alot of shady people in the game who will backstab you for 10g. I trust this friend as I've loaned his RL friend part of his epic flyer money and it was paid back in a timely manor. Plus money is just an in game item to me. If I have to lose 1k gold to find out someone is going to hamstring me I'd rather find out then instead of at a later date and lose more. Plus I'm extremely good friends with his GM ;)
That wraps up pretty much my 2 "backround" stories. From here on out I'll pretty much be talking about various ways to play the AH and what you can do to dominate a market by sheer force through manipulation of the AH. :)
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