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.