The market place on Aszune-Eu

Aszune EU is where I am these days and as posted previously, I dusted off my inks, quills and parchments and set up the glyph shop after a hiatus of several months. First couple of weeks were nicely profitable with 10k+ gold each week, with little else to do but open the mailbox and collect the shinies. Its got a bit more interesting since then though.
At first I had only 3 active competitors and I reckon we all did very nicely although I suspect they weren’t exactly pleased to see me. Now however there are about a dozen or so all posting glyphs and at least one of them is posting on two different alts. It’s quite amusing to see as soon one logs off another one appears straight away for the next round of cancel and repost.
The main effect of this is where glyphs were averaging at about 20g each previously they are now averaging half that and a load at under my 3g45s threshold. I even lowered my threshold from 4g15s to 3g34s simply because of the number of glyphs selling in this band. Its good news if you are buying glyphs, but as I’m not it’s hardly ideal. In fact I’m regularly seeing reasonable selling glyphs going for sub 2g, which barely covers the costs and frankly I’m not interested in that kind of mark up. At least one of the original competitors seems to be taking a break (or posting on a different character  regularly and his usual bank character only seldom).

It is however all good fun and while my earning have been forced down I’m still good for about 6-8k a week so while the glyph sellers are out in force, it’s still profitable for all concerned just a bit more work involved. The main thing will be seeing who has the patience to stick it out.

So this is where we are up to now:

For a quick who’s who:

Perren – Gem and anything else trader

Arleff – Paladin and current levelling work in progress (lvl 75) Will also need to level enchanting on this one.

Misera – Shadow priest and Glyph maker

Vitari – DK and JC

Cimetiere – Rogue and transmute alchemist

Phugly – name reserved for Goblin

Phuggly – Glyph trader

So Between them all 115k – not bad going and should see me nicely into Cataclysm allowing for whatever gold sinks are required. Misera, Cimetiere, Arleff and Vitari have epic flying and mounts so no major expenses anticipated.

I try not to be solely reliant on glyphs although they remain the biggest earner. Gems give a smaller income overall but are far less work due to higher profits per item. I’ve been limiting this to metagems and the daily transmute just for ease. Perren also sells off-hands, vellums, snowfall ink and anything else that comes his way, although these items tend to be much slower sellers and I really just consider them by-products.

One of the main influences on glyphs for me is mark up and the price of herbs is fundamental to that. Normally  I go for stacks of Tiger Lily and Dead Neattle plus anything else that is cheap, my general rule is to avoid paying more than 10g per stack. Herb prices fluctuate wildly and can rise by 300%+ overnight, so grabbing them at good prices whenever the chance arises is my way to go. Seeing sellers with high buyouts but low bid prices are always worth a punt and I picked up a few stacks recently for 60s or so per stack – very nice. I also buy big when the opportunity arises. I bought 200 stacks of Adder’s Tongue for 7g a stack when they appeared on the AH about 2 weeks ago, that helps keeps profits at a reasonable level even amongst  heavy competition.

I haven’t got any clear figure in mind of how much gold is enough. Gold cap is easily manageable, it just takes patience – whether I have that or not is debatable. I’ll keep going for the time being, with option of being able to kit out the paladin in i264 crafted goods as soon as he gets to 80 but aside from that I have no major expenditure plans.

I’m  curious to see what will happen to the various glyphs which will be changed in Cataclsym, never mind the new ones. Beta information on Inscription remains limited. The new races should allow for a fair number of re-rollers right from the start of the expansion and they’ll all be looking for glyphs as they level. So the outlook for Inscription remains rosy into the expansion, whether it remains the gold generator it has been up to now remains to be seen, but so far its looking ok. Meanwhile, back to the AH….

Making Gold on the New Server

I’ve now moved my main characters from Nordrassil (EU) to Aszune (EU). Having some time away from work I decided to get the gold making endeavours back into practise. At the start of the week I was sitting with about 45k across the characters.
This was the order of events:

1. Check out the AH prices and the level of competition. There seems to be about 3-4 glyph makers with none of them really ‘owning’ the market. The usual market antics of glyphs selling for 40g one then selling for 2g the next. Aside from the ‘levelling’ glyphs, the general prices are in the region of 2.5g to about 40g.
2. Make the glyph seller and get kitted out with 4 big glyph bags. I’ve set my threshold at just over 4g, anything less then this is more effort than the reward justifies. It does mean I’m missing out about 1/4 of the market and that market sector is most certainly active but there just isn’t enough reward.
3. Getting mats is the biggest problem. Herbs are not cheap here. In Nordrassil I wouldn’t pay over 10g a stack , here there is little below that (lichbloom at 60g a stack? I mean seriously????). There have been times when I have had to gather the damned things myself, which while tedious will also be out of the question when back at work. There are still some bargains to be had with some herbs being listed with massively inflated buyout and very low minimum bids, I got a few stacks for under 1g each, but its not enough for full production. The net result on this will mean paying more for herbs than I’d like but I don’t have a lot of choice. Where are all these Chinese farmers and bots when you need them?

I’ve also been trying my hand at selling some gem. This is quite different from the mass production of glyphs. Aside from my daily transmute, I’ve been focussing on Meta gems. I currently have 3 main cuts which sell at reasonable prices Chaotic Skyflare, Relentless Earthsiege and Austere Earthsiege. This market is very different to what I’m used to. There don’t seem to be any main players and there quantities on the AH are always small, usually between 2-8. They do however get relisted often and I reckon aiming for sales of 2-3 of each gem is going to be the maximum potential.

The big advantage here is to have a transmute master (although I have yet to see a x5 proc) but the free gems on the back of this really add to the profit.

I’ve set up a second trader alt for gems and everything else:

• velums – slowish sales at 8-12g each.
• Nobles deck – which didn’t sell, even though the Darkmoon Faire was about.
• Sapphire Spellthread – very profitable but only sold a couple in the past week and had to relist 3 times per day).
• Some 16 and 20 slot bags – sold quickly for average if not outstanding return.

For gems the problem is still the mats. I don’t like paying 30g+ for an Eternal Fire. So I have been grinding these myself – which due to the lack of bots and farmers is fairly easy. I got 11 in less than 30 mins with about another 100g of vendor trash and greens at the same time. That gives an 800g+/hour ratio which isn’t too shabby for farming. DK with glyph of death grip is a real favourite for me for farming.

By the end of a week I’m up to about 60k, so 15k in a week is pretty good for me. I have also got the paladin to lvl 72 and have replaced engineering with enchanting although this is only at about 120. Levelling enchanting will either be a very expensive process or a very slow one, I’ll probably end up being somewhere between the two.

I’ll be curious to see what kind of target I can reach before Cataclysm comes out.

Spring Cleaning

I hoard all kinds of rubbish in my bank slots. ‘Its bound to be useful at some point, better hold onto it’ is my mantra, resulting in finding 3 characters and a bank alt all had full banks and full bags. I went over it last week and finally admitted it was probably in all likelihood just crap. I was carefully holding onto such useful things as a stack of Peacebloom, 1 Nightmare vine, 3 motes of Earth, 1 mote of Water, 7 linen cloth etc etc. With Cataclysm on the horizon it really was time for a clean out. I started listing it in the AH last week and I’m about 1k gold up already. Turns out there are people out there prepared to buy up rubbish. The big gain isn’t so much the extra gold, but the freed up bag space. I’ll be able to start off Cataclysm with the plenty of space and I’ll just have to make sure I don’t fill it up with more rubbish. Although I’m sure I remember saying the same thing when both BC and WotLK came out too. But I’ll stick to it this time, I promise. Honestly. Well, possibly anyway.

My rule on this kind of transaction is sell it off cheap. There aren’t going to be that many people out looking for motes of Earth so I try to make sure mine is the one that sells. If something hasn’t sold in 3 listings its time to vendor it. So there are people out there who can probably sell for more if they persevere long enough, but my aim is more about clearing off bag space than anything else. If I make a small profit at the same time that all to the good. I’m also not an AH Goblin so the time spent listing and relisting has more value to me than the few extra gold I could make by hanging out a bit longer before vendoring. I’m sitting with about 50k currently between my 3 main characters so that should be plenty going into the expansion. I may try to push it a bit more closer to the time but just now I’m happy where I am.

I’d recommend others start clearing out the bags too. Other people will have accumulated equivalent rubbish over the time and will probably try to AH dump in the near future which will drive the prices down lower. So if you need to clear the bank space I’d recommend now being a good time to sell. Good luck with it!

Inscription and the art of Goblin profiteering.

I never had a great deal of gold while playing Warcraft, always enough to comfortably get by but not the fortunes that some seemed to have. I’d happily sit with between 5-10k and think nothing of it. Enough to meet my needs easily. I’d do a few daily quests and as I didn’t go for any of the high-end gold sinks that more than out weighed my out-goings. That all changed when Inscription came out.
I chose to take it up as the people who I played regularly with covered the other main requirements for professions etc. But when glyphs came out we needed a scribe. It wasn’t meant as a gold making thing.
In fact when it first came out prior to WotLK I levelled it up in one day having stockpiled about 2000 herbs and gave the glyphs away to whoever needed them and pretty much left it at that.
When the Northrend Research hit it was a different story. The new glyphs required  Books Of Glyph Mastery which were trading on the AH for 1k gold plus each and with my 5-10k gold I wasn’t going to get far with the 70 or so new glyphs to be researched. So I got a couple and started selling the new glyphs as I discovered them in order to fund more purchases. They all sold, within a matter of days I was taking in 1000s of gold each day and reinvesting them in new books to learn more glyphs. Within a couple of weeks I had all the new glyphs learned and was selling them. The prices per glyph were dropping as others learned the same glyphs and started selling too.

The down side was the time involved in crafting, listing and relisting when undercut. But the profit was phenomenal. I bought the gold sinks: the Kirin Tor ring, the mammoth with passenger seats and a bunch of mounts and pets. I then gave up as I didn’t really have anything to spend the money on. In fact I probably gave away 10-15k gold to friends who had a use for it.

There are all sorts of sites and blogs with guides on the best way to make Inscription pay, and one rather infamous MMO-Champion one saw a huge surge in people selling glyphs (and a mass decrease in the profits accordingly). But for anyone who is unaware selling glyphs requires two things:

• Automation. Addons are required to manufacture, list and relist glyphs.  Everything needs to be automated – even emptying the gold from the post box into your bags. As any goblin will tell you “Time is money, friend”.
• Supermarket Mentality. The days of selling Glyphs for high prices (on most servers) are gone. Instead its stack ‘em high, keep ‘em cheap and base profit on quantity sales. It involves predatory-pricing to keep newcomers out of the market – no such thing as Competition Law in WoW. Instead of selling glyphs for 10g profit each and selling 50-60 a day it’s about making 1-2g often and selling 100+ per day. But that’s EVERY day, Goblins don’t get time off!

I gave up the glyph business when it dropped to small profits per glyph. If I ever get short of gold I can resurrect it, but it’s too much of a grind these days. I still make Darkmmoon cards which while they don’t sell as well as glyphs have a far greater return per sale.

I’m sitting with a comfortable 60k between my mains and they all have epic flyers so nothing that causes any great need at this point. I have steady small income when I do trade that more than outweighs what I spend (too mean to spend the gold more like!). So currently my time is spent away from the gold lust machinations and more on character development. But next week may be different:)

Show me the money

In the words of the old Dwarven drinking song “Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold….” (I’m not even sure if there is second verse). You just can’t get far in WoW without gold. Getting your hands, paws or even hooves on it is part of the game. To some its a chore, I’ve always found it one of the more fun aspects of the game.

Its possible to play WoW and never have much more than a few gold, but its a lot easier when you have several thousand just sitting for whatever you need. The game has several gold sinks, some more necessary for a player than others. Life without a fast flying mount at 80, irritating as Hell – so there’s 5k for a start. Vanity Pet collection? Well, they’re are not called Vanity pets for nothing, once you want an ark’s worth you can start shelling out plenty. Vanity is never cheap.

Quickly checking my local AH for pets, I see this is top of the expense list. Yours for 12999, its a bargain Sir, lovely plumage the Hyacinth Macaw. Dead Sir? Oh, no its just sleeping.

Sources for gold are:

• Quest rewards
• Daily quests
• Professions
• Auction House Trading
• Buy the stuff with real money

After a while at level 80 the quests dry up and you are left with the other options. They all come down to maximising return for your time. Gold per hour.
Daily quests are the worst investment of your time. They are only of use if you have some secondary goal like badges or rep rewards or an item you can sell to make it more worthwhile. Even then use sparingly.

Professions linked with reasonable use of the AH are a must. That’s where the real money is. I have an alchemist who transmutes one epic stone a day and I sell it for about 150g. Takes me about 3 minutes all told. Even at a very conservative estimate its 100g profit for 3 minutes. Alternatively you can do a minimum of 8 daily quests taking about 80 mins and convince yourself its the same thing as you still have 100g at the end. Daily quests = grinding = avoid where possible.
I’ll talk about my fun with Inscription another time.

Auction House trading is a skill in its own and requires a degree of common sense – which a large percentage of the player base seem to be without. Its also heavily addon dependant. I have never been too keen on trading as I found scanning the AH and getting 75% of several hundred bids returned to be little in the way of fun.

I don’t understand the emotion that buying Gold generates. Its against the Terms of Use of the game and if you buy you run the risk of being banned, I’m not prepared to take that risk so I don’t do it, my choice, end of story. If someone else buys it, I couldn’t care less.
Not so for some others “He bought gold, we don’t want their type in our guild! /gkick his sorry ass immediately!” Shun the pariah!
Why? The usual answer is something about “playing by rules”. Oh, bollocks! Instead you are just trying to justify why you have spent 80 mins on daily quests for 100g, when he bought 1000g for £7. Doing dailies for the equivalent 1000g will take you several hours, while he is off doing instances or whatever else he wants to do i.e. not grinding daily quests. You are trying to justify why spending hours grinding isn’t stupid, its the ‘proper way to play the game’. Just who are you trying to convince?