Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Analyzing the patch

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I need to start analyzing the upcoming Patch 4.0.
Lots of things are changing in my 2 main markets (JC & Inscription) and I need to be sure what items are changed to stockpile effectively.

I will download the PTR later today and will copy at least my JC/BS character (Paladin) and if that went well my Scribe&Alch char (Priest) will get a copy too.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Gold per ???

Hello everyone,

after yesterday's JC post and me catching up on blogs & podcasts, I got behind since school started 2 weeks ago, I start to think about this.

A lot of bloggers talk about how efficient they can be with maximizing the gold per hour.
I started to think about it, gold per hour is so limited in so many ways.
Gold(profit) per effort would be a better way of measuring how much gold you actually earn.

Example time:
Inscription is an awesome market, even when the prices can be disgustingly low, the items still sell at a decent rate.
On the other hand, Jewelcrafting, is simple cut & repost, fantastic selling rates and requires a lot less effort to maintain, due to the fast(er) selling rates.

The time(effort) invested in inscription is a lot more, but you (can) get more gold for it in return.
Jewelcrafting on the other hand can be done in a few minutes, collecting mails & reposting/cutting is faster and more efficient.

After my most discussed post > Undercutting <, this made me even think more about the effort invested.
Undercutting with 1 copper and having to check the auction house more often to be sure your item sells (due to high competition, ah bots, campers, whatever reason), requires a lot of effort to keep your auctions going.
Your initial gold per hour is your crafting & posting time, but there's the auction/item posting maintaining time.

Would Undercuttin a bit more justify the thought to lower your auction maintenance and thus not increasing your effort to sell your wares and thus keep your gold/effort high?
This was the original thought behind that post, the effort in maintaining your wares by re-undercutting.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Jewelcrafting

Hello dear readers,

today I'm going to list my best JC gems and why I choose to not bother with the other ones.
Most of the Epic (rarity) gems seem to be decent, even though I'm far from having all the JC recipes, my sales are flying through the roof.
Today will be about my 3 best sellers: Cardinal RubyKing's Amber & Majestic Zircon

Cardinal Rubies almost all sell really well, but I stick to the pure DPS/Healing ones:


King's Amber sells decently too, a tad less well than Cardinal Rubies, but certainly worth your time.
All King's Amber have selling potential, however I currently am only selling 4 of them:

Majestic Zircon has a decent sell rate, though there's a very small selection of designs for this one, at least ¼ of it is a decent seller.
Yet I sell two of these beauties so far, the other 2 haven't been doing well back when there still were blue gems.

The reason for Solid Majestic Zircon might be clear to most of you, most tanks and certain PvP character use this as their default gem.
The Stormy Majestic Zircon has it's uses in PvP, to bypass resistance, a lot of classes have skills that are somehow magic based and thus the few gems that are needed to bypass the resistances could be mandatory in higher arena teams.

So this is the list of gems that sell really well for me, I'm easily able to invest 20k and get the 20k back within a week and even end up with more profit.
Gems are easy to flip, in abundance on (AV/PvP) weekends and quite fast selling.

That's it for today, keep your copper coins rolling.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Priority

Hello everyone, I know it's been a while since I've posted and all, but my new study started again and the life that comes with it (introduction weeks & lots of alcohol).

However I did manage to make some spare time to keep my AH game up, even if it was inferior to be noticed by the majority of the community.
I lost one farmer and two gem sellers, but one Saronite Ore farmer stayed loyal and is supplying me once again.

I made most of my money, if not all of it with my JC/BS character, buckles & gems are flying through the roof lately and it even got me to buy around 500 gems today which probably won't last me more than a week.
My inscription market will get boosted again today, because today I've finished all research and will have 100% of all the available recipes for that profession (yay).

While I've been studying and preparing for school I started to Snipe the neutral AH.
Because I wasn't completely paying attention I missed a few good deals, but I'm happy with the 1-2 copper deals I've obtained through those few weeks.
Those alone netted me about 10-15k profit, so it's time well spend (studying & gaming at the same time).

Also because I'm playing more casually I barely spend anything for raids or my achievement/rep farm trips and I noticed my gold increased by a lot more than usually.

All-in-all playing more casually only gave me more benefits (gold wise).
I have to play the market differently, stock up more, post at raid hours, somewhere in the morning and resupply during the time I have instead of the cheap (morning) hours.

For me the WoW market seems to be more alive than ever, casuals/socials getting upgrades in ICC is my guess and they are a large part of the community.


I'll try to bring more (good) info and post frequently again, I can't promise anything and I might become one of those weekend players/blog posters.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Undercutting the competition


Initially this guy might be right, it seems stupid of me to list 5 belt buckles each time I post and undercutting with 2g50s, but in one thing he isn't, I do not cancel and the next day they still all magically appear as gold in my inbox.

Why is this possible?
People see I've undercut them and cancel themselves, leaving me alone on the AH with my 5-10-15 or more belt buckles up, each in a different pricing range.
As the day goes by, demand changes and people will buy more/less buckles, because they PvP, got gear upgrades, want to get their alt some extra slot, whatever reason, they just sell day and night.

Because of this, I don't worry about who undercut me, QA will undercut them the next time I post anyway, all I care about is the cash rolling in the next time I log in.

What is your vision on this, am I just being ignorant, should I undercut less, but more frequent to get my competition away?
I'd really like to see what you guys think about this.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Blacksmithing

Eternal Belt Buckles, the market seems to be totally left alone, I'm the only one posting lately and people still pay up to 150g each at times (every now & then a competitor, but then I'm walling it back to 40g with about 40 buckles).
I'm always out of stock and my saronite farmer(s) at times say they just need a break or simply disappear after a few days of supplying me.


The same thing goes for Titanium Rod, my enchanting scroll market pretty much sucks, but I see a lot of these being sold, apparently there's a rise in enchanters lately, for what reason I don't know, might be interesting to find out.
I haven't tried to sell Titanium Plating yet, I don't know why, just doesn't seem appealing, but it probably has it's Arena uses.
Last but not least, Titanium Weapon Chain, selling once in a while, nothing special, once people have their Season 8 weapon they won't be needing a new one of this, might explain why it's not selling well.


Epic ICC crafts still sell from time-to-time, but that demand is declining, people just get into ICC and gear up that way (probably boosted by guildies).


That was pretty much my BS market, I'm slowly starting to have a grasp on the market, or part of it and I like it.
Occasionally a blue crafted item sells, but people seem to be wanting epics so much more (only purple items will get you into raids because of the higher ilvl; Yes #$@! GearScore addon, I'm looking at you !).


How profitable is the Blacksmithing market for you guys? Any tips on crafts I am missing?

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Steady income, no excuse policy (part 2)

Yesterday's post was about the individual person him/herself. Today will be about helping a friend, a guild mate or yourself through them.

As a player who doesn't have the money to invest in materials and supply someone for craftables, you could offer your services to your guild mates in return for a small fee, using that as investment to get better recipes, your own materials or being able to just diversify your wares.

But as a fellow (rich?) guild mate and a good person, you can help the poorer while they are helping you!
Let them farm for you, anything can be beneficial to them, old content, new content, mining, herbing, skinning, enchanting, tailoring or whatever market you're participating in, they can supply you.
Another thing you could do to help them is let them craft the things you can't and give them a nice tip, that will keep them happy and maybe they'll suggest to do other things for you too, it will always be a win-win situation.

Another option is dragging them along in the Argent Tournament dailies, they are all done faster together than alone and they will see it's decent (daily) income too. You'll be happy because you finished this faster, the other person is happy with the gold he just racked together.

Next time if you see someone whining about not having gold, offer them to supply you with materials.
If you're the one who's struggling with gold, consider supplying someone you know, do your dailies and find your niche market, but the most important thing is diversify!

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Steady income, no excuse policy (part 1)

People are still complaining they don't have gold and use more excuses for it than you could imagine.

  • "I don't _ have_ as much time as you do"
  • "I _have_ to raid, so I can't make gold all the time"
  • "I _need_ epic flying to make gold, else it's too slow"
Seeing the pattern there? People blame others for being able to get gold so 'easy', but basically they are too lazy to bother making gold themselves!
People don't need to raid, but want to, they don't need to have a lot of time, just spend it wise and you can make gold without ever leaving town too, so all of that are just excuses to cover their laziness.

Daily quests might be boring, but they are the best way to ensure anyone of a steady income, every single day.
Effort has to be put into something to be able to reap the benefits from your hard work, without the will or the right attitude to make any gold, you will never be able to get any.

Which concludes this first part of this post, there's plenty of gold around, you just need to be willing to do the effort to make it. Time is there in abundance, it all depends how you plan & execute the things you do.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Book of Glyph Mastery

Now is the time to stack up on these sweet books, in cataclysm a lot less people will be able to farm them effectively in WotLK content and a lot people probably will be interested in the new Inscription system that will be implemented alongside with Cataclysm.

But if people are lacking glyphs they won't sell, which is why they need the books, 57 of them, each person.
You can't have enough of these books, if you don't want to bother with the glyphs, bug the ones crafting them with your ridiculous prices on the books.

Don't forget to stock up on herbs, any kind of herbs, vanilla, TBC, WotLK, stack them all up, they will rise in value and a lot.
The Ink Trader will most likely disappear, so easy ink conversion will be no more, materials will become more expensive, which leads to more expensive glyphs, or just another inflation and a lot of Scribes not bothering with it anymore.

You're never prepared enough, your stock is never big enough and you will profit from cataclysm like no other.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Honour Bots, BG farmers and the JC market

At first I was disgusted by these players, I said and kind of still stand by something I said before; buying gems through honour ruined the JC market.
Yet this is how you can easily make profit and go from 1000g to 2000g in 1 day/week if you're willing to put some time & effort in it.

Since I've been on an investing spree lately I thought, whatever, time to buy up everything below a certain price, cut or uncut and relist or cut & list them at my own price.
I try to keep the gem prices above 110g, but this only seems doable for the normal gems (Red, Blue & Yellow), the hybrids go for a lot less and also don't sell as frequent.

Because of this, my total income from JC has exponentially improved, people seem to know my crafter a bit better and I'm mass buying anything I come across on trade, no matter how much they try to sell.
Gems will always sell at this point, so I can't have enough.

Both the rare and epic gem market have been attacked by me for about 1 week now and some people are disappearing due to my very frequent post, cancel/repost or a simple buy/relist and draining their supply.
I hope this won't be a short success just like my inscription market is/was.

After my success I wonder, are there any other people doing well in this(or any other) market around this time (approaching the end of WotLK).
And last but not least, what is your opinion on the honour gems?

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Snatching the hog

I have been thinking about this, I've currently added it to my snatch list for 14K, but I might increase that to 15K.
Why would I do such a foolish thing you wonder? -- Cataclysm! --
Think about how people will still want it for their goblin/worgen alts, but the material supply has run dry, the price will sky-rocket and that 15K hog just became worth double or more!

Long term investing is worth it, as long you're willing to sit it out.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Stockpiling Dailies

Hello again, I know it's been a while, but honestly, I'm a bit out of creative ideas, never thought it would be so hard.

Daily Quests can be profitable we all know that, but it's roughly 'only' 300g+ per hour, but you could get more out of them, a lot more even!
With Cataclysm coming, barely no one will bother with wotlk dailies anymore, but they still would love to get the pets, that's where your daily quests will kick in.
Keep doing those dailies every day on as much characters as you're willing to do it, stockpile those pets and after about a month after cataclysm is released slowly, really slowly put them on the market again.

People will create new worgen, goblins or just other alts that weren't previously possible (cow paladin, BE warrior, human hunters etc), but once a collector, always a collector, they most likely would like to have pets on their new fancy characters too.
Stockpiling those things that are easy accessible, but require a little effort will generate the most profit time/gold invested vs gold earned in the long run.

To aid yourself in getting those Argent Tournament tokens slightly quicker, you should/could do ToC HC for the extra 3 tokens, team up with people and the dailies will be done in no-time too, it's more time efficient (so more gold per hour) and faster & less boring than when you'd have to kill those quest mobs alone.

Don't waste your time waiting for your auctions to sell, do dailies in between, spend time even more efficient and reap the benefits from that in the long run.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Mining, the other crafting profession

Now that I have leveled my prot warrior to 80, I decided I could use a miner and I choose this character to become my mining slave till 450.

On my adventure to level mining time/cost efficient I saw that ores were cheaper than the bars, once the materials were obtained past the initial leveling zones.
I used the auction house to level up my mining as I do with almost any other profession, gold boosting it.
But I made a profit instead, I was boosting my gold with my 'gathering' profession instead of boosting my profession with gold, it was amazing.

So much people seem to just read what items they need and if it's on the AH for a bit cheaper than the next, they immediately buy the bars up, even if it costs 120g for a stack!
I used this to my advantage, ores were most of the time 10-30% cheaper than the bars and because I had to level mining anyway, I simply bought out all the ores, pressed the create all button and did things in real life.
The most profitable 3 minutes of my wow career, it has been well spend and now I have reached 450 mining (saronite gathering was a bit blergh I'd have to admit), I will use this way of making profit more often.

The downside of doing this kind of flipping is that you'll have to manually check the prices, auctioneer doesn't really have a category for it (yet).
Profit is profit so it's always worth a try.
I realise this isn't entirely new information, but refreshment is needed at times.

Instead of using mining as a gathering profession, it very well can be a really good crafting profession!

Go forth and roll your copper coin (ore?) and amass your desired gold goal!

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Thunderclap

First of all, sorry for the delayed posting, I've been somewhat busy in real life with moving, I'm currently waiting for some things to be delivered even.
I've also been putting a bit more time into leveling my prot warrior alt (did I ever say they are totally awesome? no? Prot warriors are so cool, PvE, PvP, solo or in groups, they're beasts and massive fun!)

Anyway the glyphstorm was a short success or somewhat a fail, I wasn't prepared enough and my stack was insufficient, my competitors let me have most if not all of the market and I was unable to keep up with the demand.
I ran out of glyphs in no-time and re-crafting took too long for me to continue.

I will restock up to 1 stack of each glyph to re-initiate my glyphstorm and craft more frequent.
Also I will adjust my fallback & threshold to allow minor competition, which will hopefully drain their supplies.
I keep buying herbs and eternal life's to keep my usual crafting up (Darkmoon cards, off-hands and such).

Doing the managing on 1 char should theoretically be doable, seeing as there are 345 glyphs and Pack of Endless Pockets provides you with 32 slots each, 11 total bags (4 on your character and 7 in your bank) will allow you to fill (32*11=)352 slots of bag space.
This shows it is perfectly possible to manage your glyph industry on 1 character (or 2 if you send all of it an alt and crafting with your 'main'/(crafting)alt).

I'll just have to keep up on stocking and abuse my guildbank ( soon buying/making a second guild..) to keep up with my supply and the demand from other players.

Hope this will give you guys a little information in case you want to start your own glyph war, I certainly learned a little bit from it and will improve my posting, pricing and crafting methods.

Evaluation: your stock can never ever be big enough, but you can manage an industry on 1 character if you put your mind to it.

Keep your coppers rolling, invest as much as you can and your stockpile is never ever big enough.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Glyphstorm

I've started my glyph wall today, I got tired of fighting over glyph prices all the time and I want people to back off in the inscription market.
I already got the off-hands for myself and can manage to post most of the runescrolls, but the glyphs themselves are undercut almost 24/7 and this has to stop.

I am going to make it a bit harder for myself by limiting my posting characters to 1 and I will still post everything.
I'm still young in all of this, including making gold efficiently, I just need to find a (time) efficient way of distributing my glyphs and post them accordingly.

Anyway, so far nothing special my glyphs are on the AH, I've yet to wait for undercuts and all that, we'll see how it goes. Once I am done with crafting a full stack of every glyph I will be capable to make my afk-time more efficient with Quick Auctions Poster.

More updates will come as I progress today (will do it from a different computer, so I need to reconfigure my add-ons too).
Stay tuned and maybe you will be able to take over the glyph market yourself or learn from my mistakes, either way, you'll benefit from the outcome.

Edit: First hate whisper already is in after 10 minutes, I can't wait for my other competitors to log on (:

Update: I came back from a long long day and I see 275 auctions being sold, including a few darkmoon cards, my battered hilt and this will make me end the current session with 10.5k gold.
Not bad for a first day of Glyph walling and not even posting frequent!
It seems my competitors pretty much wanted me to have the market for now, well, I'm surely reaping the benefits from that!

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Gold Forums

Today Markco features WoW Confidential's Paid WoW Gold Forum and honestly, I was interested in the forum straight away.
My reason is that WoW Confidential got my attention because of the millionaires when I was still trying to find my way into making decent cash on the AH or ju st generally in-game.
I'm really curious about all the juicy stories and well described and worked out information that lurks in that forum, but sadly, my wallet doesn't permit me doing so (students got a hard time you know).

No worries though for those who feel disappointed, Markco also has been so kind to host a free WoW Gold Forum, namely the JMTC Forums.
The JMTC Forums also contains a few millionaires and has tons of useful (free!) information, helpful players and a dedicated community behind to help you and themselves to get more out of this game.
The JMTC Forums are up for quite a while now, a bit over a year I thought, so they contain a lot of useful information, waiting for you to absorb it and put the info into some action.

Now I'd like to know from you readers out there, have you ever paid for gold guides, forums or anything besides the monthly fee to play game, to enhance your game play?
If you did, was it worth it? If you didn't, why not? Found useful (and free?) information elsewhere or what the reason behind your choices, let us know.

Another thing I'd like to mention is that I'm going to try to create a glyph wall on my realm, I already got most if not all of my competitors move to my AH town (Undercity) just to hear them whining I post my glyphs too cheap (I'm still selling glyphs around 50-100g every day).
But now that I found out that they're basically all of them are frustrated by my actions, I'm going to mess things up, or try to.
5g fallback, 3g50s threshold (possibly dropping it to 3g) and undercutting with 1s, everything below my own price will be bought up and relisted.

I am considering to use a new add-on to make this possible during the peak hours of glyph selling (raid hours), it's a new add-on that Zerotorescue quickly put together while I was chatting with him on the JMTC IRC Channel.
The add-on is called: Quick Auctions Poster, what it does is it will scan and repost if you're undercut (it does not cancel and neither will it get mail, run to the mailbox or any other things, it will purely repost if you're undercut).
Wow Confidential also featured this fantastic add-on on their website, you can find the link here: http://www.wowconfidential.com/wow-addons/automatically-undercut-auctions-with-quick-auctions/

More about this when I've actually started my glyph war, I still earn decently with my Darkmoon Faire trinkets, off-hands and runescrolls. The vellums are used by my Enchanter, so I can afford a little glyph war for a while.
The 5k ink supply could keep me up for a while and I'm dominating the herb market by keeping the price above 20g per stack, while I'm buying everything up ranging from 8-19g per stack.
I'm mass purchasing with Auctionator, I can't live without to keep those markets under control.

While I'm milling I'm watching some TV shows, recently started a new one, I'll have to catch up on 50 episodes, which means enough milling time spend 'useful'!

That was all for today, a bit more than I originally intended, but I hope it still provides enough useful and somewhat entertaining information.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Beancounter Export optimised usage

Beancounter Export is a fantastic add-on to track your sales, failed auctions and things you bought out,
yet it still misses a minor feature that probably will be implemented by default in the near future.
That feature is; Filters.

Filters in Excel allows you to display only that info which you wish to see.
In the AuctionsSuccess sheet you can see the ItemName column, but it displays all your items and not per market or whatever you'd like to see them.
This is where the filter kicks in, to apply a filter, you'll have to select the whole column, example shown below:
After which you go to the Data Tab -> Filter;
Once the filter is applied, you see a drop-down menu button next to ItemName, click that button and go to the "Text Filter" -> "Contains" option.
Let's say you want to track your glyphs sold ( so you can adjust your craft amounts or decide which not to craft etc), this is what you will insert into the new window:
Both "Glyph" & "Glyph of" will be usable terms, but it's just a habit of mine to type "Glyph of".
If you look at the first ItemName column I posted, it was disordered, this is what mine looks like after applying the Text Filter:
As you can see, it lists the most sold glyphs( a lot more if I would scroll down of course). This information is very handy to us whom have the Inscription profession, we can increase the amount or frequency of which we craft these hot selling items and filter out the good & bad selling ones, maximizing our profit, minimizing the time and effort we put into it.

Applying filters like these can be used for different sheets & columns of course, a few other possible filters could be:
- sorting on faction if you play the AH on both factions.
- sort on character name.
- sort on buyer (see if someone tries to buy you out often or not).

That's all I could think of right now, but the sky is the limit if you are able to use this well.

Analyse your markets, watch your wares closely and improve your AH strategies.
That's all for today, any questions regarding this or anything else, feel free to e-mail them to me or post them in the comment section.

Keep your copper coin rolling!

Sunday, August 1, 2010

The milling macro isn't effective

My opinion about the milling macro is that it is redundant, adding herbs you want to mill and the herbs not being in the right slot/stack size is bothersome and only brings extra work.
There's a much better way to do it and that's using Enchantrix.
Benefits of the Enchantrix macro above the default milling macro:

  • No more perfect herb/ore stacks needed.
  • No need for 3 different macro's for 3 different professions.
  • No  need to adjust the macro to add/remove items so you can continue with your work.

This should make you think twice before jumping into a profession and doing it the bothersome way, just get Auctioneer's Enchantrix and use the macro below and you are set, no more macro-managing macro's.
/click AutoDEPromptYes

That was all for today's post, tips, tricks, comments, everything is welcome.
Enjoy what's left of your weekend and let's keep that copper coin rolling!



P.S. I removed the automated posts, as it really seems to be against blizzard's ToS and we don't want to promote any malicious ways of playing this game.
I apologise for the inconvenience and take full responsibility for my actions.

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Organisation Continued

Yesterday's post was about keeping track of our inventory, today's post will be about keeping track of your Auctions.

There are a few add-ons that are used by most of the Auctioneers, to mention a few; Auctioneer, Auctionator, Quick Auctions 3 and possibly a lot others.
Yet to see what auctions were successful or not, we will be a bit more dependant on Auctioneer's Beancounter.
The major downside of this mod inside Auctioneer was, the data was only easy to view in-game, Beancounter Exporter changes this.
It's an Excel spreadsheet which converts Beancounter data into readable data for you, displaying items sold, at what price, sold by which of your characters, how much etc, just everything.

This was the utility a lot of us were waiting for and with this, we can filter out the bad selling items and mail those to one of our bank alts to put those for 48h auctions and look every few days if it sold or not.
If we create a plan at the hand of the results of beancounter, we can maximize our profits and analyse the market, weekends (show sales after the weekend, last 2-3 days), midweek (check on Friday's for the last 5 days ), etc.
Once we get used to this and create our own pattern, we can improve our AH game, increase our profits and spend less time doing so.

Examples how to:
- create separate groups in QA3 for the same category of items, ie; glyphs, gems, certain materials and so forth.
- adjust and optimise your bulk mailing add-ons to send only the items you want to sell quick/dump to bank alt.
- change our days, time, frequency in which we buy, sell & trade items.

All-in-all, maximizing profits has become easier by one step.

I hope you enjoyed today's post, keep your copper coins rolling!

Friday, July 30, 2010

Even in Chaos there is Order.

Today's post is about managing your bags, bank and guild bank.
Even though you think your complete inventory is nice and ordered, you should question if it really is.

Do you let add-ons order it, do you manually order it, or just loot from mailbox and see what's next?
This is important, to be able to have a clear view on good sales, you should have a really clean inventory, it's important to know what you have, where you have it and how much of it.
Luckily for the automated kind of person, there are add-ons to manage this.

Bankstack is such an add-on, it is able to sort your bags, bank & guild bank with a few clicks.
Another feature is that it is capable to stack items from bags to bank/guild bank and vice versa, so you won't have random stacks of item "X" multiple times in your inventory stored where only 1 slot would be needed.

Altoholic is fairly mandatory to track which one of your characters has what kind of item and how much of it, so you know what to craft, stockpile or sell.
It can track items on your bank, guild bank, bags, auction house and mailbox, spread over all your characters.

Bagnon displays your bags into one large bag unit and also provides a search feature, so if you can't find an item in your 'organised' bag, you can search for it through that function.
It also displays the amount of total gold you have across your characters, just a handy thing to know (how much liquid gold you have to invest for example).

Last but not least, Addon Control Panel, this wonderful add-on makes it possible to switch between Add-on sets or enable/disable current add-ons in your add-on list. This is really nice when you have to swap from scanning to crafting (some computers crash if they have both enabled) and this is the fast & easy way.
You simply select a set, add, remove or load it stand-alone, reload your user interface and there you go, a complete new UI in a few clicks.

What add-ons would you suggest to use besides these? Or which ones are you using to keep track of your wares?

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Insane in the Membrane

Insane or just clever, that's the question and today I'm going to try to answer it.

I'll admit, I'm one of those foolish people trying to grind that achievement, but casually..
Every time Darkmoon Faire comes by, I try to get as much decks as possible for a reasonable price and sell the cards, but lately, the decks are more expensive than the cards, which results in a loss.

I want to make money, not loose it, not even for an achievement that might be removed in Cataclysm(rumour says it will be).
Prices of the materials for Darkmoon Faire are relatively low during the weeks it's not up, that's when I'm stockpiling it and making a ton of cards & decks.
My mini buy list is this:
Northrend Herbs
- Eternal Life

And that's all I need! I (ab)use my automated milling technique and then just create all decks that I can right after.
Which has lead me to a point that I don't auction Snowfall Ink, but use it to craft decks instead and I have to admit I'm fairly lucky so far with almost 1/5th being Nobles Decks, and Agility/Strength Greatness still selling for 3.5-4k gold each, which keeps me in the profit range by far.
When and if I include the other decks that sell(slowly...), I'm making money out of 'grinding' the Insane title, that's Insane! or brilliant, it's all the same to me.

I'd also like to mention that Cold has made a really nice master-craftables-list, including items that can be produced to sell during the Darkmoon Faire!
Read, absorb the info and use it wisely, stock up and sell in appropriate quantities.

And last but not least, I'd like to ask you, are there any other ways you made a profit doing the Insane in the Membrane achievement or any other achievements?
And don't forget, keep that copper coin rolling!


P.S. Sunday 1st of August 2010 is when Darkmoon Faire arrives again.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

QA, Auctioneer and ...!?

In the recent posts from Markco & Gevlon they questioned and analysed the usefulness of Quick Auctions 3 and Auctioneer and why not to use either or when to use either or both of these add-ons.

However both of the discussions are focussed on selling your ware, I'd like to pinpoint out the importance of being able to buy things in bulk, when you want to sell things in bulk yourself (one needs a stock to craft any of the selling products).
When it comes to buying, I feel that another add-on is left out when it comes to this, mainly for buying and quick cancelling your supply on the auction house.
Whenever I'm stocking up on a specific product, I use Auctionator to do the bulk buying, it's buying feature is a lot nicer than Auctioneer (it's confirmation window is annoying till no extend and for me it's too slow).

Auctionator has this really neat future to create Shopping Lists, similar to default AH "Browse"-tab, but it displays items you'd like to watch to buy at any price and how much stacks at that price.
For example I created an "Eternals" shopping list to have quick access to Fire, Earth, Shadow, Water, Air & Life.
I recently bought 337 stacks of Adder's Tongue to mill, it took me a few clicks and no annoying confirmation window asking if I really wanted to buy it for each item/stack, as you would need to do in the Auctioneer Search tool.

It's selling feature is something I haven't used often yet, I have to be honest that I still am too used to Auctioneer's Appraiser or simply posting bulks of items (glyphs, enchanting scrolls and other items I sell in bulk) with QA3.
Once I'm more aware of it's usefulness, I will certainly make a post about it, as there are people on wowecon's Hall of Fame who merely used Auctionator and a few other addons(mail, item tracking etc) to reach the gold cap(several times).

The "More..." tab is really nice, you have all your auctions listed there alphabetically, once you click one of your auctions, it'll display the query, how much and which of those are yours.
If you're not on top (lowest price) you can choose to cancel the auction (cancels all of that item in 1 click), I love this feature for my best selling items or top selling glyphs, so I'm not reposting all 440 glyphs when I use the cancel option from QA3.
You can also check for undercuts of all your auctions instead of doing it manually for each item.
That's all for Auctionator, it's a small and handy add-on, but it should be used more.

I leave the QA3 vs Auctioneer discussion to the more experienced and gold-capped bloggers, Markco, Gevlon and who else feels to voice his/her opinion about it.
In my case, it's all about preferences and I mix the usage of both, neither is wrong if it is capable of producing more gold than your starting amount.
Use QA3 & Auctioneer both, next to, obviously, Auctionator!

Go ahead and try Auctionator out and keep your copper coins rolling!
Auctionator link: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/auctionator.aspx

Sunday, July 25, 2010

My Markets

Today's post will be about the markets I am participating in, it will be short, but hopefully constructive.


- Alchemy;
Transmution mastery is so nice! Converting Saronite into Titanium Bars and selling them for a stack price of Saronite is pure profit (excluding the procs!).
Crafting my daily Epic gems is a nice way to keep my JC busy too.



- Blacksmithing; 
Work in progress, all the items, or at least the green quality and up are send to my Enchanter to be disenchanted and sold on the AH to keep the investment costs low, unless the materials are useful for my Enchanting business, then I apply them to the destined scroll to be sold.



- Enchanting;
Vanilla scrolls are my main thing, SpellpowerCrusaderFiery (lots of competition sadly), Agility2H Weapon Agility and Chest Stats.
I know I am missing out if I don't post mongoose or any post-vanilla enchants, but the materials are running dry (crystals & shards mainly) and farming instances with my Hunter (Enchanting char) isn't the most speedy thing, I miss my prot pally for those things too much.



- Engineering;
I craft arrows for my hunter and that's it, I even sell them in singles for the price of a stack of 1000, not often, but there are those times when you do your daily heroic and some hunter keeps pulling packs that you wanted to skip to speed up the runs, this is my revenge.


- Inscription;
My cash-cow, I am not yet completely utilizing this profession to it's maximum, that's mainly because I started it really late.
I lack 32 more glyphs and at times I forget to do my daily research or just don't have time to do so.
Every weekend I am crafting 5 glyphs of each type, it could and should be more, around 20 of each, but I simply fail at managing it all.
Furthermore, the books; Faces of Doom, Rituals of the New Moon & Ironbound Tome are part of my to-sell collection.
The vellums are used for my Enchanter, I also keep my Snowfall Inks to create Darkmoon Cards (Insane achievement whoring while making cash at the same time, why not?).

Investing goes purely into buying Northrend Herbs only, I am too lazy to bother with anything else, as I can convert the Ink of the Sea at Jessica Sellers in Dalaran.

- Jewelcrafting;
Tried the blue & meta gem market, but people are simply selling too much at a too low price, I suspect botting, but reporting them haven't changed a thing so far.
Just Epic Gem crafting & flipping, Saronite shuffling to keep my Enchanter supplied and sending bulks to my Alchemist for transmution.

- Mining;
I am releveling mining as I dropped it for Blacksmithing on my Paladin, good old DKs are good for that.

I currently have no Herbalist, Skinner, Tailor or Leatherworker, I might install those professions on my alts (74+ Rogue and 60+ Prot War, 30+ Mage (has Tailoring, but I simply hate leveling)), but not sure what or how I'm going to deal with that yet.
I might create a second Jewelcrafter to speed up my Gem coverage (mainly blue gems on one character and Epics on the other) and perhaps even another Alchemist for specializing in Transmution again or diversify a little and pick up another...

Tips and/or recommendations are welcome.
That's all for today! Tomorrow I will cover disenchanting, prospecting & milling automation, stay tuned!

I toss us a copper

After reading wow/gold blogs daily for quite some time now, I will take a step into the blogging community and try to maneuver my way through.

This blog will be about wow in general, but I hope I can focus on gold making and wise spending, but to give you a better view on the subjects of this blog, I should introduce myself first.

I'm Vennren, a former self-proclaimed achievement whore, I stopped bothering about a year ago when Ulduar progression was hindered by the absence of active players, resulting me to quit the game for a few months.
Coming back when ToC was decently progressed wasn't a great stimulation as upon first entering, it felt like a complete faceroll instance compared to Ulduar, no fun at all, thus resulting in another mini-break.

Coming back for ICC progression was fun for a while, but it still didn't feel as hard as Ulduar initially was, I lost my interest and failed my trial in a raiding guild.
At this point I was tired of the realm I migrated to right before the launch of WotLK and decided to migrate back to my original realm.

As I came back I decided I should focus on playing for fun again and what I perceive as fun is mainly collecting gold and bumming around doing some lame achievements here & there or try out a new alt (prot warrior at the moment and oh damn they rock!).

So here we are, trying to make that one copper roll, rolling to the gold cap and probably eventually one million.
If at all, it would be nice to have at least one of these goals before cataclysm, but my investment vs. profit kind of evens out lately as I'm investing a lot more than I did before.

That's my short introduction, if it didn't make much sense that would be because I think while I'm thinking and that can be very confusing to write down.

Go forth and roll your coppers and let it accumulate into gold, tons of it.