The Happy Scribe

Quitting

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 06:00:00 +0000

I am quiting WoW. Most likely not permanently but I think I wont be back before the summer. The reason is mainly that I don't enjoy the game as much as before and it feels like when I'm logged on I either just wait for a raid or sitting in Dalaran doing nothing. Also this spring is quite important to me when it comes to school so I will have to focus a lot more on it than earlier. My game time will expire on January the 15th so I will still play for a few weeks. What I will be working most on during this time is preparing for my return, stocking up on mats that might rise in Cata and sell those that wont. There may or may not be any new posts during this time so this might be my last post. I will still keep an eye on the WoW blogs I'm reading to stay up to date with what's happening.

Nothing more to say really except for good bye.

It Can't Be Stopped!

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:00:00 +0000

The last few days gold has been flowing in. From 23-24 000g a week ago I am now up to, as can be seen on the picture (even though the quality is crap) just above 30 000! Normally I would be way over 30k but I've spent a lot this week and bought a whole lot of herbs. You can't refuse a 9g/stack offer for Adder's Tongue.

I still haven't got all my dust sold and sales seems to have slowed down but I can still get a few ones sold for 5g each in diferently sized stacks. I also got some Darkmoon decks I was going to turn in last sunday just to notice the fair had already left. So I'm now sitting with cards up to my neck waiting for the next one.

My next goal will be hitting 50k, something I most likely will be able to do around the release of Cataclysm but we'll see how it goes. And now to something completly diferent. The winter holiday starts tomorrow so I will stay in a mostly sleeping state until January, but I will get time to post more.

Get this dragon off me!

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:00:00 +0000

As I have now gotten a bit into tanking some of my posts will be about it. Before I say anything else, here's my tank (if you were paying attention you might have noticed I just showed you my realm, nothing that you couldn't have figured out yourself anyways). As you can see her gear is not perfect but it works pretty good.
I have now been level 80 on her for a week and have now done quite a few heroics. My impression of tanking so far is simply, awesome. Besides getting a group in seconds with the new LFG tool in combination with the lack of tanks I can't help loving the power you get while tanking.

Being the tank of a group is way diferent from being DPS. If you have low damage or overaggro a lot as a DPS you will be kicked while as a tank all you have to do is tell your DPS to watch their threat if you get overaggro'd . The only possibility to be kicked as a tank is if you got ridicously low threat so the boss will enrage before it dies or you die like a fish in a desert which shouldn't happen with decent gear and healer(s) who knows what they're doing.

So I have now praised tanking as if it was the best thing ever, but if it is so great why doesn't everyone do it? There is one reason, a pretty obvious one. Responsibility. Even if you often can blame minor stuff on the DPS most major things as wipes and so on will be blamed on you. Often it wont matter who really caused the wipe, it will still be your fault because you didn't pick up the add. Nobody cares if someone started nuking it before it reached you, everything will still be your fault.

As if that wasn't bad enough tanks are in most cases the ones who will get criticized for their gear. A few days ago I was doing UK heroic, one of the easier heroics in the game at the moment and one of the DPS started complaining about my gear. Well, nothing weird about that, everybody is entitled to their oppinion and if he doesn't consider my gear good enough I wont try to convince him. The thing was that I had about 15-17% parry/dodge, 25k hp self buffed and defense capped at the time. He kept overaggroing and whining and eventually left. We replaced him and cleared the whole instance easily.

So if you want to tank, do it, it's really fun but just remember to never listen to what the DPS tells you. If you think you can tank it, you most likely can.

Patch 3.3, gold and instances

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:00:00 +0000

We're now a few days into patch 3.3 and I must say it has been going quite well. I've sold close to all my Heavy Borean Leather for 120-130% of the average market value and they sold incredibly fast so I think I underpriced them. Infinite Dust have been selling for quite a lot too as you can see in the image (as usual, just click it to get better quality), I've managed to sell several stacks for 5g per dust giving me 3g profit per dust sold which will result in about 7100g in sales, or 4300g profit if I sell them all at this price.

Glyphs are also selling quite well, as can be expected when a new patch comes. The same goes for gems which I've been making quite a lot from even though I got way to many autumn's glow cuts, I got about 40 scarlet rubies in my bags and not a single autumn's glow. I also think gems will stay quite strong as people will be getting new gear slowly as ICC is released over the next few months and better gear with emblems of triumph.

I'm right now sitting at about 23 gold liquid qith a sold nobles deck (and a bunch of cards which due to a lot of doubles can't be made into decks for another 1000-2000g) for a little less than 5000g coming in and maybe a thousand more in glyph sales. So I am very close hitting 30k and will most likely do it this week.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead:
In-between my crafting I have also done some of the new instances (on my main, my DK is nowhere near geared for them) and really like them. If you haven't tried them yet, it is as going from python to C, or for you non-programmers, fishing in a lake and then go walehunting. The thrash is comparable to the bosses of an ordinary heroic and the bosses are even worse. It's not too bad in the first 2 instances, Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron but once you get to the third and final one, Halls of Reflection things get nasty. There will be 10 waves of thrash consisting of 4 to 5 mobs I think (in heroic) spawning around a round room. Out of the 4 diferent adds you can get 2 are ranged, in short: A tank's nightmare.

Luckilly I'm DPS and free from the responsibility to make sure that mage is not ripping the healer apart and just have to watch my aggro, which can be quite hard in this instance. After 5 waves the first boss spawns and after 5 more the second. There's not really much to worry about except avoiding stuff on the ground and nuke.

The final boss is an escape from the Lich King where he will summon adds that you will have to kill to move on as there are huge ice walls in your way. If he catches up with you, you're dead. I've yet to sucessfully do it in heroic but managed to do it in normal today but even then it was quite close.

So in conclusion these are not your ordinary "pull and AoE" instances and even on normal they can be quite a challenge. But if you're lucky Battered Hilt will drop (only in heroic) which you can either use yourself to get an iLvL 251 weapon or sell for a nice amount of gold. I've seen people willing to pay over 8k for it on my server.

I hope you enjoy the patch and are doing well with the AH game.

Hitting 80

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Yes, I've finally hit 80 on my death knight and started to gear her up, and I'm already having good enough gear for most heroics (except for maybe ToC and some of the harder ones). I haven't focused a lot at making gold for the past few weeks which in combination with buying some enchants and such has brought my total gold down to about 22k. With the patch coming out tomorrow (today for you readers) I've decided to get back in business. I got a lot of stuff stocked up for the patch for example a lot of infinite dusts and heavy borean leathers and also a bunch of snowfalls and eternal lives that I will make into cards once I see how the patch affects the prices, but as I've said before, I'm not worried.

On the other hand I have completly forgot to stock up on glyphs and as I have a test tomorrow I don't have time to recraft them today. So the first thing I'll do tomorrow is to refill my glyph stock to make sure I get as much money as possible out of the patch.

Right now I got about 1500 infinite dust bought for around 2g each, and if I get the price rise to 3-4 or even 5g as I want I can get anywhere from 4500 to 7500 gold for them. With the increased demand for saronite there will most likely be less dust on the market, and combined with the regular demand increase of enchanting mats that comes with every patch I am confident I'll get, at the very least, my money back.

I also got about 1000g of heavy borean leather that I trust will go up once you can buy arctic fur with them. I've also done pretty much none work in the gem market so I still got a lot of raw gems left that I can cut and sell for a good price.

As I have now hit the (level)cap and school is calming down for the holidays I will try to be more active with my posting and goldmaking. I am quite interested in trying out the pure goblin way of glyph selling instead of my weird mutated alternative after Kevmar said he had a lot of sucess with it. Right now I'm trying to find a way to make KTQ use the market value instead of the lowest buyout of the last scan, but as I know nothing about lua it's not going well. With some luck it shouldn't take too long to fix it but if anyone with some knowledge of lua could take a look at it I would be very grateful.

That's what I've been doing the last few weeks and hopefully I'll be able to speed it up a bit in the next few days.

Not Quite Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

As you may have noticed I haven't been posting anything here for the last week or so. The main reason is that I never had anything to post about, writing about putting a few hundred glyphs up on the AH is not very meaningful. I have nostly focused on getting the pilgrim achievment and leveling my death knight to 80 (she's 77 right now) and get into tanking just because I'm a crazy madman who loves having power over people. Other than that I am doing pretty well. Glyphs are selling and I can manage to pull in about 7-800g in sales every day by posting once of which at least half always is profit, but often a lot more.

I'm sitting at about 27 400g right now, which would be a bit more if I hadn't decided to suddenly buy all nether drakes setting me back 1000g. Luckilly just a few moments after I got Chestguard of the Vanquished Hero and sold it to someone for 500g. Of course, if I hadn't bought those drakes I would have had both the 500g and another 1000g at the same time but lets avoid any kind of logic here. So all in all, not much going on at the moment.

Slow Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

I've been a bit busy these last few days preventing me from doing any posting so lets just do a quick summary of the last seven days. I revealed my "new revolutionary" posting method which, while proven to be not-so-new have worked out pretty well. I have noticed a decrease in sales but since yesterday stuff has started to work out very good, though I did make my fallback higher.

I also gave engineering a try to see the moneymaking potential. While many low level items seems pretty profitable the time spent finding the mats, crafting all diferent parts and so on is just not worth it. So I went back to mainly work inscription, which is now working out pretty well for me and I make enough gold to don't have to worry about it anymore. So for the time I am going to be a bit casual on the AH and just be using my JC and inscription to make a few hundred gold every day, which really is more than I need.

The Nobles

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Today I decided to take my first real look at the new Icecrown 5-man gear. Many other scribes, including myself, have been worried that the trinkets in IC will make Darkmooncard: Greatness obsolete. After taking a look at the trinkets in question I am now much calmer. Lets take a look at the new trinkets.

First we got Ephemeral Snowflake. As it is a healing trinket we don't got much to worry about here as the biggest market is for agility/strength.

Then we have Needle-Encrusted Scorpion, a physical DPS trinket. While it may be slightly useful it only got a 10% proc chance on critical hits for less ArP rating than both Grim Toll and Mjolnir Runestone. It may be easier to get but as most people should be able to do Naxx without any problems by now it's not really a problem. Additionally it focuses on completly diferent stats than the greatness cards.

Then at last we got Ick's Rotting Thumb. Considering it's a tank trinket with no offensive stats while the greatness cards are mostly used for DPS they will be used by two completly diferent groups of players.

So in the end the only trinket that might cause some trouble is the scorpion, but as there already are better trinkets which should be (I don't know how hard Forge of Souls is) about as easy to get there's no need to worry. So be happy all scribes out there, those cards will most likely keep selling just as good as earlier.

There are still no spell DPS trinket which indicates that the loot table is not yet finished so any stats on these trinkets may change later on.

Screwing up

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

If you read my last post and the comments to it you saw how both Liene of Kul Tiras and Marketeer commented on how my pricing methods had nothing to do with the Goblin method. Unfortunantly I got to say that they are correct, I made a huge mistake and got Gevlon's posting method completly wrong which I, after some rereading, now realise. This however, does not make my pricing non-valid (as pointed out by Liene), just rare. If you ask many of the big glyph sellers of what the best way of selling glyphs is they will most likely tell you that it is crafting a bunch of every glyph, try to get your threshold as low as possible and carpet bomb. A very commonly accepted method to make as much gold as possible by getting a large volume of sales. Thus making you lots of gold but decreasing G/h. To show the results of my method I
took a few screenshots:

So, 800g in sales over 24 hours, not much, most people get that easily in a day. But if we then compare it to the amount of glyphs I sold, about 100, we see that the average price of each glyph is 8g. Not much you say? You sell glyphs at your fallback for a lot more? Well, remember this is an average. If we now take a look at the production cost, which we can see here:

((Herb-Snowfall)/6)*2+0.50 There you go, the maximum price I pay to make a glyph. Now, lets say that herbs go for 17 (they usually go for less) and snowfalls sell for 13g (my valuation when making cards) we get:
((17-13)/6)*2+0.50=1.83
Then we take the average price of each glyph and subtracts the glyph cost from it:
8 -(((17-13)/6)*2+0.50)=6.166666666666667 ~ 6.16g

That is of course for glyphs that takes two glyphs (I like to use worst possible scenario, you can only be happilly surprised) for one ink glyphs it is:
8 -(((17-13)/6)*2+0.50)=6.83g profit.

Milling takes a little less than 2 seconds while crafting a glyph takes 3. That puts the time at just below 8 seconds if counting lag and such which means I mage 6g in 8 seconds. 3600/8=450 glyphs per hour. 450*6= 2700g per hour! Sure, I don't always sell that much glyphs but the gold:work ratio remains pretty stable. Of course we got to take into account the time spent posting, but that is mostly spent AFK doing other stuff, but even if I spent as much time posting as crafting I would average out at about 1350g per hour, a very good profit.

I know, lots of numbers. One of my (many) flaws is that whenever I'm going to show people something I have to do it with all the calculations made to make sure nobody misses anything.

The Speedy Goblin

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Most of you are likely to have noticed the big QA vs Auctioneer "battle" Gevlon caused with a few of his posts not long ago which resulted in a huge argument on wether QA or Auctioneer's batch post function was best for glyph posting. Gevlon claimed that QA was "an automated noob" which could only undercut by 1 copper. I wont point out the flaws in his arguments, enough people have done that so there's no need to.

This was almost a week ago and most people have stopped caring about it, so why do I bring it up? Well, the way Gevlon defended his strategy got me thinking that if he cares so much about it it must work, so I took a look at it in detail.

As seen in this and this post he has already explained his methods twice, but I didn't really pay much attention to them. Now I notice that what is very special about this way of posting is that instead of crafting a bunch of every glyph and throw them up on the AH while trying to keep your threshold as low as possible to avoid being undercut is that it uses the Auctioneer market value, both to decide if the glyph is worth making and if it should be posted. He set a minimum value they need to have to make them and then starts crafting. Auctioneer is configured to not post glyphs at less than 60% of their market value. This makes sure he gets a good profit on close to every glyph he makes and gives a very good gold/hour ratio, but it can't be compared to carpet bombing when it comes to pure gold gain. So I started thinking, I don't got all that much time for working the AH, so why not try to optimise gold per hour?

I started thinking of trying the goblin method, but I saw a few flaws.
1. It takes a while to choose all glyphs that are going to be made (can be solved with KTQ though)
2. It's very dependant on regular scanning of the AH which I sometimes forget.
3. It relies on market values that doesn't instantly show changes to the price. A glyph with a market value of 20g may only sell for 7.
4. Market value is a subject to change over time. A glyph that is worth 20g according to auctioneer maybe only got a market value of 4g in a few weeks if it hasn't sold, resulting in a loss.
5. Many pointed this problem out in the discussion, auctioneer posts very slow and it takes really long time to get all glyphs up.

So why don't improve it? If I use QA instead of Auctioneer I can rule out most of these points, it's fast removing point 5, I can set it to a specific threshold to never go with a loss and scanning doesn't matter. That leaves only point 1 and 3, 1 can easily be solved by using KTQ to craft all glyphs, and only recraft those I have sold. That way 3 is also solved, I don't focus on any specific glyphs but go for them all, no matter value knowing that they will sell in the end.

By then having a high threshold and a low fallback I will put every glyph on the AH in that area unless I'm undercut below my threshold. So how will this work then? It's simple, the AH goes in cycles. You've all heard of the price cycles for example flasks and such over the week, but glyphs are slightly diferent. They don't depend on buyers as much as sellers. Lets say a glyph sells for 35g, I then come and lower it to 17g(made up fallback, pretty realistic though) where I will get undercut by a certain amount of silvers/copper which results in the undercutter himself getting undercut ending up in a spiral of doom leading the price downwards until it finally reaches my threshold.

At this time I will jump out and stop posting that glyph while my competition stays and fight for the profit of this glyph. The prices then reaches the point where only one person is posting as he's below everyone else's threshold which will result in no glyphs of that kind on the AH once they expire/sell causing someone (maybe me) posting the glyph at their fallback making the whole thing start over again. So as you can see I'm giving sales away at those low prices while focusing on only selling glyphs at a good profit margin. I wont tell you my prices but in a worst case scenario I make about 400g/hour selling glyphs and a lot more normally. This is including the time spent posting, something I only do once or twice a day, maybe three if I have time (unlike Gevlon who is only posting once every 48 hours).

So far doing this has proven very effective and I really start to see Gevlons point even if I don't completly agree with it.

Bringing Chaos and Destruction

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Finally, after close to 3 weeks of barely any presence in the glyph market my glyph stock is finally filled and I got 5 of each glyph sent to my new alts using BulkMail2 an addon I have had for a really long time without noticing it's true potential. What it does is that it lets me set my glyphs to be autoposted to my diferent alts, and they can be set my class so half of them goes to bankalt A and the other half to bankalt B with a single click. It sure beats putting every glyph in there manually.

But to get back on recrafting and posting, I had almost forgotten how painful it was to make glyphs. If you really want to test someone's patcience just hand him a bunch of herbs and ask him to make glyphs out of them. If he hasn't made a whole through his screen by the 300th glyph you got someone with superhuman patcience or, if he giggles, someone who is incredibly easily amused and quite possibly crazy.

Now, in my last post I told you I wasn't sure on how I would set my pricing strategy, but I am now. I wont go into any details but I can tell you it's a combination between Gevlon's post method and the (in)famous QA2 camping. As I said, no details but I will tell you a little more about it once I got things set up, I expect to get quite some hatemails though.

That's all for today, hope you all will have a good day. I suggest you check out Carbon's post on subscribing. I've never tried it myself but as I am currently reading 16 diferent WoW blogs it's hard to keep track of them and after reading the post I decided to give it a try and was surprised of how easy it was. So I suggest that you all give it a try, both to encourage the writers (even those coldhearted goblins enjoys getting approval from their readers) and to simplify reading.

Preparing for The Grand Return

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Hello there. I am finally back in cold, cloudy Sweden and am right now sitting in front of my computer preparing for El Retorno Grand! (yes, I'm bad at spanish so I used google translator) Before the vacation I may have told you about my really low glyph stock which I had planned to fill up now.

So, right now I got close to no glyphs, haven't touched the AH in a week and have slowly reduced the amount of glyphs I post on the AH. You may already have noticed the great opportunity I got here. To you who haven't, take a look at this through my competition's eyes.

A competitior is posting fewer and fewer glyphs on the AH for every day and finally disappears from the market. You don't hear from him for a whole week.

What will they think about this? Most likely that he left the market. So is there any way I can use this to my advantage? At this point many of you may have realised what I'm planning to do, new bank alts. I already got two actually though I haven't used them for glyph posting. Before doing anything I will stock up on all my glyphs (1100 in total) and then go into the market.

I will most likely be able to scare of at least a few smaller sellers but the bigger ones will be tougher. I have noticed that while I've been gone there have appeared new sellers and I got about 90 pages of glyph on my server's AH, something I will try to fix. All I need to do except crafting lots and lots of glyphs is deciding a pricing strategy.

I can choose between undercutting by one copper, a few silvers to avoid loosing the customers that don't buy stuff from people who undercut by one copper or more to scare people off. I am leaning to using a pretty big undercut at first as I know that my threshold is one of the lowest ones on my server (at least before I left) so I will surely be able to cause some people to leave.

As I am unable to decide right now I'd appreciate any advice that you may give me.

Updating The Blog List

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

If you are reading my blog you have most likely been linked here from some other source, most likely another blog. The odds are that this blog was also focused on the economical aspects of WoW. There are many great Gold-blogs out there, some better than others but with blogger making it so easy to make your own blog anyone with some time on their hands and feels like doing some writing can do it. The hardest part when starting out with a blog is getting readers. I used the JMTC forums to make people hear about The Scribe and it has worked out pretty well. Another way is getting a bigger blogger to hear about you and get them to link it on their own blog.

While I was trying to read at least a few of all the blogposts I had missed during my week on Lanzarote (which was great by the way) I realised that I was reading a lot of good blogs that I hadn't linked in my blog list (to the right below the subscription button). So I have now added all wow economic blogs that I am currently reading, I may have missed one or two though. Make sure to check them out. Also, if you're a new blogger who's got problems with getting readers feel free to mail me by clicking the Email link found here and I will check it out and possibly add it to my blog list if I find it good (I most likely will unless you overuse "lol", "n00b" and "im so l33t".

I'd like to make a special mention to Cameron from WoW Economic Review who have gathered links to most major Gold-blogs. Really great job.

Spain

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Hello everybody! Sorry about the slow updates lately, I haven't had a lot of time to write the past week du to a lot of stuff in school. Nothing new has really happened so today's post wont be about gold making. What will it be about? Well, this:

Beaches? No. The picture above is taken on Lanzarote, one of the Canarian Islands, which is where I'm going during the next week. During the whole week I wont have any acess to WoW and very limited or none internet connection. Thus, no new post for at least a week.

That's all I had to say for today.

Slow Week

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 10:42:00 +0000

The last week has been very busy for me, a lot of homework and all that, which has really limited my playtime and have barely given me any time at all to write. But even with my lack of time I have managed to make quite some gold. Even if it was maybe a week since I last restocked on glyphs my stack of 5 of each glyph has managed to keep me going, the only thing that I fear is having to refill it...

Glyphs have given me about 6-700g per day in sales and sometimes even above a thousand. Something else that has started to pay off pretty well is JC, I still don't have a lot of cuts but I usually sell close to all I have up on the AH during a good night resulting in me picking up about 5-800g in sales the next day. A problem I have noticed is the acess to gems. I post using QA2 and have a group for each gem using the market value of the raw gem or a little more as my threshold, as I get the gems much cheaper by prospecting saronite.

Prospecting obviously gives me an equal amount of each blue gem, unfortunantly that is not what I need. When I started out with JC I bought about 3 or 4 autumn's glow cuts and right now I require stupid amounts of it to keep going compared to the amount I get from prospecting. I could easily solve that by prospecting more saronite, but that'd increase my production of every other gem, for example, I got about 40 scarlet rubys I don't know what to do with.

My only way to solve it would be getting more cuts, something I will get in time.

That's glyphs and gems, but in my last post I told you about how I entered the card market. Yesterday, 5 minutes after putting my greatness card up for 5000g on the AH it sold. After the AH cut (damn that AH cut) I got about 4700g, pushing my total gold way above the 20k wall, all the way to 24k.

I know, I didn't post this at the ordinary time (seven in the morning) as usual, it's due to a small mistake in setting the date. I hadn't planned to post this until tomorrow, but it doesn't really matter.

Cards and Hiring

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0000

This week darkmoon faire was in town which resultet in hugely increased snowfall prices. I did get a lot of my stock sold for very good prices, but with it ending tomorrow (at the time writing) I will not be able to get it all sold as I sit on about 80 snowfalls. Thus I decided to start working on the darkmoon cards, the timing may have been a bit bad but I thought it could be a good way to get rid of my inks before I got too many. I should have realised before that 80-100 inks is not enough to start making cards, but I didn't. The end result was that I got about half the cards required for each deck except for chaos where I only got about 2 or 3. That made me panick a bit as the faire would be over by the next day and I would be forced to wait a whole month to get any gold out from my cards. So I decided to buy up some missing cards, but due to ridiculous card prices the only deck I managed to complete was the nobles deck. Stupid as I was that day I bought some cards before I had checked the prices of the rest, so now I had about 4 to 6 of each card.

I went to Mulgore to get me a strength card and left by taking the cannon. For you who don't know, that cannon happens to be placed in the city itself, and not at the faire area as it is in Elwynn Forest. That forced me to take a small run through the city, outrunning some guards and quickly jump into the cannon before flying all over Mulgore with the help of the normal wing buff and my secret little engineering trick.

After doing that I was down to less than 16 000g...

Later I found a begger in SW, I talked to him a little and decided that, instead of telling him that he could make all the money he need by himself I would pay for his mount, which was costed me 5g. Why did I do that? The reason was, to make me more gold. I didn't just give him the gold, I told him that if I gave him the gold, he would send me all white quality items he'd find while leveling. I would pay him 30 copper per mail to make up for the cost to send it and also add a small tip depending on what it was worth. I did actually make a small lie about my reasons, he belive that I am giving it away to guildies. Yes, it was immoralic but necessary. It's pretty obvious that telling him "I'm gonna sell it at the AH for 10 times more than I paid you for it" wouldn't work. So far I've only gotten a single cooking recipe, worth a little more than one gold, still not too bad.

The reason this worked is simple, the begger is social. Yes, I am completly aware of that I am starting to sound like Gevlon, don't worry, it's just temporary.
By paying the begger I put him in debt to me. Due to that he felt he needed to repay me, but the problem is, that by being social he could have done the exact opposite. We all enjoy feeling that we've tricked someone to do something that gains us, that's one of the reasons we even play the AH. So what he could have done was not sending me anything while laughing as he had made me give him 5 gold for nothing. In this case he didn't do that due to the simple fact that there was no point. Those white items are worth nothing more than their vendor value to him so he isn't really losing out on anything.

Well, I would have made todays post longer but it's late and I feel like my head is about to explode right now so that's it for today. I just want to give you one small update first though, I currently sit at just bellow 17 000g, glyphs and gems are selling like never before and I should be able to hit 18k by tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

The Arts of Jewelcrafting

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Hello there, today I will be talking about, as the title says, jewelcrafting! I leveled it long ago and have several times decided to start making some serious gold with it but it has always ended up with returned gems and so on, but now I have decided to really start to work it, and this time I wont fail. How do I know this? Well, it's simple. This time I will use macros.

I've mentioned Kev Tool Queue (or KTQ) a few times but I don't think I've ever made any description of it. It's pretty simple really, it allows you to queue up items in skillet by making a command in the chat window. It goes like this:
/ktq queue number keyword

The "number" and "keyword" are replaced with other stuff depending on what item you want to queue. Let's say I want to queue 3 inscribed monarch topaz(es?) I just write:
/ktq queue 3 inscribed monarch topaz
But usually it's enough with:
/ktq queue 3 inscribed monarch
as the addon searches for items that contains the keyword and will add all that do so to the queue.

There is also a function that allows you to queue up all glyphs by using "glyphs" as the keyword. I got to admit I'm not happy sharing this but as it's very important for my buisness I can't give you more detailed info without telling you about this addon. Also Kevmar posted it on his blog and I don't doubt he got a lot more readers than I do.

But that's not all, by using altoholic KTQ will see how many of the items you want to queue you have and will only make as many as you need to go up to the desired amount. So lets say I have two Inscribed Monarch Topazes and write:
/ktq queue 3 inscribed monarch
the addon will only queue up 1 gem which will put me at 3 in total.

So what does this have to do with macros? Well, lets say I make a macro that says:
/ktq queue 3 inscribed monarch
/ktq queue 2 rigid king's amber
/ktq queue 2 delicate scarlet ruby

By clicking it I will instantly queue up the needed amount of gems to fill up my stock to the desired amount. By having every blue gem I can make that got at least some profit potential in this macro (two actually) I can keep restocking on gems as soon as I sell one. Just today I've sold a bunch of gems and have started to liquidate my huge stock of blue gems. I am right now above 19 000g and may even hit 20k tomorrow. Unfortunantly I got a lot of glyph crafting to catch up with (my daily sales are starting to get below 100g!), it's been a tough week and I haven't had time for much crafting but I may be able to fill up tomorrow.

1vs2

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Due to a request in the comments I decided to replace all pieces of lua code in download links to make it easier to compare to the .lua file used by quick auctions 2. Sorry about the 60 second wait to download but it was the first thing I found. If you don't get what I'm talking about you will when you read the rest of the post.
Ink is the thing with inscription that matters the most when setting prices, or to be more precise, ink of the sea. Snowfall also plays in here by reducing the IoS price but in the end it all comes down to the IoS. So what every scribe tries to do is to reduce their ink cost in one of 2 ways:
1. Either they reduce the cost of their herbs or
2. they sell their snowfall ink or uses it to make cards, offhands or, since the patch, runescrolls. There are two points in reducing the price, both to get more profit of each glyph and, to me the more important of the two, to make you able to undercut lower than your competition.

Pretty simple and common knowledge to most scribes, but there is one more thing to it, something I should have done long ago. While most glyphs have the requirement of 1 ink of some kind (= ink of the sea) and 1 parchment. But of course that's not all, many glyphs use 2 inks, making the price the double - 15c to 50s depending on the parchment used as it still only takes one parchment.

So to not loose money you'd have to put your glyph threshold at the cost of 2 ink of the sea plus 50s. Considering most of your glyphs only requires one ink this is a huge loss of how deep you can undercut, so what is the solution? If you thought of making two diferent QA categories you were completly right. But how are we going to do it? Checking every single glyph up would take stupid amounts of time and you's have to check every new one you learnt up before adding it to your group. The solution is on the JMTC forums!

In the thread linked a few of the great people there are discussing how you could set up QA2 to post 2 ink and 1 ink glyphs separately, and they found a way to do it! Just a bit down on the first page Debussy posted a list to paste into your Quick Auctions file in the saved variables folder.

To find it you just go to your WoW folder, open the WTF folder, choose account and open the folder with the same name as your account (it's usually only 1) and then got to Saved Variables (it may be a bit hard to find but it's there). Inside that folder there is a bunch of text files, find the one named QuickAuctions and open it. There you go, but I reccomend you make a copy of it in another folder before trying this.

Download

That's the code, now you just have to put it in the file, or do you? While this piece of code is completly correct, there is one way to improve it, and it has already been partially done by barrettj on the third page:

Download

As he says, you are supposed to paste the code after this part. But as a none programmer you may find this part hard to get right, at least I did. If you can't find this part remember that all information about your groups is stored in this part making it look diferent for every user. The important part about this code is:
["groups"] = {

If this part gets changed at all the whole addon may stop working (this is true for all part but this is the one you'll risk to break), to prevent this I decided to merge the two pieces to make it a little easier for users with no programming experience.

Download

As you see you are supposed to place the whole thing below the groups part and at a certain distance of the left side of the document, this is the same for all items so just make sure they are at the same distance from the left side as all other items in your other groups. Do the same with the name of the group compared to the names of the other groups, in the programming language used for WoW addons (lua) whitespace is very important.

The result of these modifications in the code is that you'll get a group only containing 2 ink glyphs, you can then add all other glyphs to a 1 ink glyph group. After doing all this you can set your prices a lot more precise than you could previously.

Now I better stop writing before my brain melts from all this code...

Update

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0000

I know I told you that I would make another post about the MMO-champion guides but I decided that there was no point in it as most of you should be able to see what is wrong with it and it has already been written about too much. So instead I'll make a post about how the last week has been for me.

In short, Great! I've been selling a bunch of glyphs and made lots of gold from that, almost emptied my stock of scrolls (they sell reaaaaaallyyyyy sloooow...) and now I am up to just above 17 000g! The snowfall is selling like it was the faire (well, it is in a few days but in mulgore) and the herbs prices are relatively low and I have over one guild bank tab full of adder's tongue, icethorn and some lichbloom which I in most cases got for 15-18g per stack! Considering that even in a really bad situation with 18g herbs and snowfalls selling for 12g each I'd get my glyphs for a maximum price of 2.5g, and that is a 2 ink glyph with resilient parchment.

Things are going on like crazy at the moment and I really need to restock on glyphs again, maybe even increase my stock from 3 to 5 once I see what effects the faire will have on the herb prices but with my stock I don't think there will be any problems.

MMO-Crashion

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Note that all prices in this post are made using my servers economy so what I say here may not be true for you.

Yes, I am aware of the bad wordplay. If you have been following the gold making community the last few days you must have noticed the huge impact Bouboille's (the guy from MMO-champion) AH guides for enchanting/JC/and the other crafting professions and inscription have had on us.

These guides, while badly written only explaining "do that and get rich" with no tips on what to do when that doesn't work out due to the army of people doing it as well. So I have decided to pick apart both his guides and correct them, just for my own amusement.

First the enchanting guide.
First he started out by reccomending two addons, first we got (big surprise!) Auctioneer. After that he mentioned another addon which makes the post a whole lot more dangerous for us scribes, QA2. While a guide to enchanting shouldn't really hurt me as a scribe (only my enchanting/JC business) but by telling people about this addon he have given a lot of scribes that may not have known about it before a very powerful tool. Luckilly it's not about the tools you have but how you use them, more about that later.

After that there were some advice about buying borean leather/cobalt and craft items and sell them to a vendor. It doesn't really affect anyone who isn't working leatherworking or blacksmithing for gold. Also, if the prices are that low they could use an increase, 1g38s for cobalt and 44s for borean leather are the "caps" for this to be profitable, I don't thing you can make a lot from it but as you can do it while AFK it could work out with the right prices.

But here we come to the really interesting pieces of information, enchanting. The only thing he did was to tell people about the old well known crafting and disenchanting. While simple it must have been amazing for the average farmer to hear about this great moneymaking opportunity and they instantly bought up all eternal earth, shadow, cobalt leather and green gems. Luckilly this don't seem to have affected the economy at all long-term. The infinite dust price has actually gone up! There was a rise in eternals earth at first but it went back to almost normal in a few days.

But that the dust prices have gone up doesn't mean there are no people following this guide on my server, actually I belive it's the opposite. The reason is that Boub didn't suggest people to sell the mats but to make scrolls and sell them instead.

After that there is just a guide to QA2 that I wont bother commenting.

So what is my impression of this guide? Well, the fact he spreads this kind of information, that only works for a limited amount of people, shows that he's got some unknown reason for doing it. I don't buy his "not only those who knows about certain addons should be able to make gold" stuff. There are a few possible scenarios:
1. He's planning to use this to make more gold.
2. He's trying to get more traffic
3. It's an "experiment" to see what he can do to affect the economy by just writing a post.
4. He really belives that this will help people. And at last...
5. ...he's just being an ass.

I lean towards thinking it's either 2, 3 or 5. 1 is very unlikely as MMO-champion is a site with a good reputation and he would probably not risk it just to make more gold as he already got a bunch of it. 4 is even more unlikely as he is quite intelligent, and no person who is smarter than the average WoW player would ever belive this would help anyone.

That leaves only 3 more options which I find the most likely but I have no idea of which one it is, or if it even is one of these and not a 6th option I haven't thought of, maybe time will tell.

Efficency?

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:00:00 +0000

No matter if you have followed my blogg for a long time or just for a few days you may have noticed how slow my actual gold progress has been. I started to seriously work the AH about 1.5 months ago if I remember right and so far I only got 14 000 gold. If you split 14 000 with 45 you get 311, thus my gold per day should have been 311, but if we then count in the 6000g I started out with and the 4000g nobles deck I had that pulls it down to 4000 gold in 45 days, which brings the gold per day ratio down to 88g per day!

So is my whole AH life a big failure and I'd be better of doing dailies? The answer is no. Why? Well the reason is simple, what I currently have in gold is not what I have earned from it, just what I haven't spent. So if we take into account my recent major expenses outside of the AH, cold weather flying (1000g), normal flying skill (around 1000g), epic flying skill (4750g) and dual spec (1000g) which I bought for my DK a few days ago we get the somewhat large sum of 7750 gold! In addition to that I got at least a thousand g worth of herbs and even more in glyphs.

That puts the total amount of gold I've earned at at least 21 000 (as you can't really add the herbs and glyphs in as they are investments), that means I've earned at least 11 000g since I started writing the blog, and if you split it by 45 it is at least 244g/day. Considering I don't always focus on making gold or play every day that gives me a pretty decent gold/day ratio.

Sorry about this pretty much pointless post, I was busy studying the whole week and pulled this one together in about 30 minutes today (yesterday for you).

Bugs and Herbs

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0000

A few days ago I got contacted by DahL from All My Nuts about his sucess with finding a farmer and as he got a good one he was going to be nice and send me a few for the same price he bought them for, 14g per stack. This combined with a few nice deals from the AH have really started to fill up my herbs stack, and as it was a while since my glyph stock is really going down right now I would have done it earlier, however there was one major problem. Kev Tool Queue, or rather, the skillet version required for KTQ, broke in 3.2.2 making me unable to queue up glyphs without doing it by hand.

So I was stuck with a mountain of herbs that I couldn't move until I either started queuing glyphs by hand or were able to get KTQ working again. But today I solved the problem by downloading this version of Skillet and got it to work, so this Monday (today) I will get crafting again.

Also, this week I will be busy studying for a test on Wednesday and Friday (there's a lot of them right now) so next post will probably not be until Thursday.

Changes

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0000

The last few days while studying for a test in school I have realised that writing this blog takes quite some time that could be used for studying and/or gold making (no gold made, no stuff to write about) So to help me manage my time better I have decided to make fewer post with 2-3 days breaks between them to both make the posts longer and more interesting and to help me get time to do other stuff.

Conclusion on the Gered Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0000

You may remember the level 1 dwarf I made a while ago in an attempt to start making gold at level 1 with only 10 copper. I made a few posts about it and then stopped. Why? Well, the reason was because I didn't do anything. After the first 4-6 days I had made about 25g that, while not a lot, proves that it's absolutly not necessary to be high level to make gold. By making 25g while starting out with 10 copper I've increased my gold amount by 250 000% in less than a week. Obviously the gold increase percentage wise is a lot bigger at lower amounts but it's still a lot.

So I then left him, not feeling it was worth the time any more, but now I have decided to get him back in business, with a small pocket change on about 2000g. He will mainly be used for finding new markets and working them.

Gearing up a tank for less than 2000

noreply@blogger.com (Belsebub) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Not a gold related post today instead I'm focusing on tanking.

I have planned to start tanking on my death knight once she hits 80 (or earlier) and therefor I need to find a good tanking set to start out with, and as I am of the oppinion that everything can be bought for money I decided to focus only on stuff that can be bought before even setting a foot in an instance. So here's what I have so far, you may notice that the legs and boots aren't buyable but drops in ToC normal. I took them as they were the best stuff I could find that is easily avaible. Bear in mind I will use Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle that gives 25 defense skill, which will put me at 1 defense rating below the cap.

I also haven't got that much expertise but I think I will be able to manage with what I have, I think it is around 26-30 expertise (I get really confused by all those ratings) so it's enough to beat the dodge cap, but still not enough for parry (which is at 56 if I got it right). I also lack some hit (got like 10 hit rating with that set) which I plan to find a way to get, maybe through enchants.

Even if this set is far from perfect it should give me a pretty good view on how much it will cost me but as I am using wowhead to see the prices right now it may vary in-game.
I wont bother writing all the names as you can see them yourself by looking at the comparision.
The gear itself will cost a little less than 1800, that's pretty low as I will most likely get the JC epics cheaper as I can make them myself. The epic gems (which I may replace with rare gems instead as I probably wont keep my gear for very long) will together cost 375g + about 300g for the dragon's eyes required for the JC only gems.

That puts the total cost at 2500, or 1850 (I don't know how I got to that conclusion as I said earlier that the gear costs 1800 but I don't have time to check everything up once again) if I use rare gems, which I most likely will do. I consider this to be the maximum price I will pay as it will be pretty easy to get the stuff cheaper than that during a longer period of time (leveling from 70 to 80) by buying underpriced stuff or having them crafted with my mats. That is not counting enchants as I haven't decided what to get yet. The prices may not be exact due to the now ridicolous prices of titanium, but I'll take care of that later.

I'd love if someone good at tanking could give me some advice on either my gear, gems or enchants or just tanking in general.