Vile's Golden Auctions

Massive Early On Inscription Profits

2012-10-07T14:12:00.001+02:00

It's always a great time to play WoW when it is in the starting phase of a new expansion. For the majority of the people it's the new content, the new instances, the new raids, the new PvP seasons but for some it's the new opportunities to make gold. Well if you are one of those people that enjoys a combination of those options, but you also value the last one as well then read on about the possibly most profitable profession early on in the expansion.

This profession as the title says is Inscription. For this expansion the Scribes will have additional ways of making gold besides the normal glyphs/MFC.

But first lets make one thing clear, the old ways of making gold with Inscription are still very much going strong, and even more because it is the start of the expansion. This old way that i am talking about is the Darkmoon Card Of Mists , which is as the name explains the new version of the Darkmoon Faire trinket card. As you can see on the image above, the sale price for those cards is quite high, i've sold mine for anywhere from 3-10k depending on the card, and the best part is that they do sell quite fast. There is a catch as well here though, in the previous expansions we could mill away and make a metric ton of the cards due to our supply of inks, but in MoP this has been modified a bit because in order to craft one of these bad boys you will need a Scroll of Wisdom, and you get this from a daily. So more or less you can produce a single card per day ( 1 extra per week if you do the weekly quest ).

Another one of the really good income sources for Scribes in MoP is going to be the shoulder enchant market. Unlike the Cataclysm expansion where in order to get a shoulder enchant you needed to grind reputation, in this expansion you need to buy it from a Scribe or the AH where a smart scribe has posted his stock.

The only thing that kinda sucks is that crafting the shoulder enchants like Intellect one as well as the rest of them is quite cheap to make if you do a lot of milling and have a steady income of Starlight Inks, so this should be a good earner as well.

Last but not least, with the release of MoP we see the arrival of new people, and the return of some of those people that didn't play in Cataclysm. What this means is that these people haven't heard about the Mysterious Fortune Cards, and now it's all up to you to introduce them to the wonderful world of gambling their gold away. And if you are wondering how to get more inks to craft them, don't worry as with this coming server restart they will update the ink traders to work with the latest inks so you will be able to trade down.

So the important thing to know about Inscription is:

Do your daily, and make a card from the Scroll of Wisdom
Don't forget to renew your glyph stocks
Get in on the Shoulder Enchant market
Get in on the Mysterious Fortune Cards

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Selling To The High Roller Mount Club

2012-10-05T12:24:00.001+02:00

In one of the previous posts i covered all the bases about the Tillers faction, and if you ended up reading that post and started your farming career good for you, if you haven't at least go and plant a few seeds so you can get some quick cooking ingredients that you can turn into some quick gold. But anyways enough about the Tillers, today we are going to take a look at another faction, namely the Order of The Cloud Serpent.

I want to make one thing clear from the start, this is a Jewelcrafter only deal, so for all of you people out there that aren't Jewelcrafters, go and level one.

I won't go into lengthy speeches about this faction, but instead i will get down to the juicy gold making points that we all like. This faction starts giving you quests at level 90, so on top of having to be a Jewelcrafter you need to be max level as well. If you have leveled to 90 and you are a JC, then simply go to their camp in The Jade Forest, in The Arboretum and talk to the guy that's giving you the quest there. After a few short kill quests your reputation will increase just enough so you can get access to the vendor.

The reason why you want to get to this vendor right away is the Jewelcrafting mounts that you can make by buying the pattern from this guy. There are 5 different Panther mounts, 4 of them are different color while the last one requires you to have the 4 in order to be able to craft it.

You need to know one thing though before you set out on a selling spree, one of the ingredients for making one of these mounts is a Orb of Mystery which is a vendor material that you can get for 18k (with the guild perk for cheaper prices), and that is sold by Big Keech in Vale of Eternal Blossoms. So if you can shell out 18k for that, and you have the rest of the materials you can get in on this very lucrative business. Best thing about this mount though is the fact that it doesn't require a Spirit of Harmony, so as long as you have the gold to craft it you can make it.

Another thing before i leave, if you decide that you want to get in on this market you might want to think about a little advertisement in trade channel. I mean people will want to pay your overpriced mount that costs you about 25k up for even 50k, but in order to get this profit you need to inform people that these mounts exist and that you are the guy that they can buy them from.

Another cheap shot tactic you can use is simply reselling an Orb of Mystery. The chances for a sale are slim because people that inform themselves properly will know where to get it, but there are always naive people that run to the AH first thing when they need something. So if you are going to craft one anyways, buy the Orb from the vendor for 18k, post it on the AH for 25k and start advertising that you are selling the mount for 40-50k. If you get a sale you will earn about 20-30k profit from a single mount, but if someone goes about making one for himself and he decides to buy your Orb from the AH then you will be up about 5k after AH houses. So no matter what you win.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Jewelcrafting in Mists of Pandaria

2012-10-03T13:17:00.002+02:00

In one of the earlier posts i did about Jewelcrafting i broke it down to the basics and came out with the fact that if you wanted to get into the jewelcrafting market you would need to invest 207 days of dailies in order to get all the patterns from the vendor. Well in MoP we have a different approach to how the patterns are obtained, namely you are given the chance to research a color of a gem by spending 3 uncut gems, and if you have learned all the cuts that you can have from that particular color then you can get a different color gem.

If you take this into account and compare it with the previous 207 days you needed to do dailies, with this new way of obtaining cuts you are down to 68 days of dailies, but if you take into account that you can obtain gem cuts by spending 3 Spirits of Harmony you can knock off a few days from that count as well.

Now that we looked at the time table needed to level a jewelcrafter, lets take a look at the gems and how they are going to work.

In Cataclysm we had The Ore Shuffle where we would prospect ore, cut and sell the rare gems and DE the rings and amulets we got from the shuffle to get Enchanting materials. Well in MoP this formula is a tad bit different, namely there are no rings and amulets right off the bat, you have to go and get them from a jewelcrafting trainer in The Jade Forest, but even when you get them there will be a catch. Namely this catch is the fact that in order to craft those you will need to spend 3 different kinds of gems for the green item, or if you want to craft the rare version you will need to spend 6 normal gems and 6 Serpent Eyes.

So as we can see the difference is huge, in Cataclysm all we needed was 1 gem and a setting, and now we need 3 different color gems, or 6 gems and 6 serpent eyes. It remains to be seen if this is still going to be a viable way to deal with the gems when the prices normalize.

Now as you can see on the image above, there is another way to go about with your normal gems, and this way is to cut them. You see when you cut them you have about 15% chance that they will be a rare quality "perfect" gem. This means one thing though, you can choose which gem you want to make even if you don't have the pattern learned by now. For instance, if you want a 240 Stamina gem, but you don't have the cut learned just yet, then take a stack of Lapis Lazuli and get down to cutting, and with a bit of luck you will get a perfect one that has the same stats as the rare one.

Ok now we know the time table, as well as how to cut any gem we need, what is left now is what to expect from the JC market.

At the moment the Jewelcrafting market is very slow, and the reason for this is simple, people are still leveling or they have leveled up but aren't still geared enough to be able to start doing heroics, raids and LFR. Once this has been surpassed we will see a sharp increase in the gems market, and with that a sharp rise in the prices of gems.

What you want to do to prepare for that is quite simple, from time to time browse the market for the cut gems, as well as the perfect cut version of the gem and if you see any cheap ones buy them out and store them. The reason for this is simple, the amount of uncut gems that is in circulation is alot smaller then the amount of gems that is going to be required once the people start getting gear that requires gems.

Anyways here are the things that you might want to know if you want to get into this market:

Do your daily research cuts
Check the AH for low priced gems and buy them out
Prices of uncut gems are going to be higher then prices of the cut ones for a while due to people buying them so they can use their daily cool down, so if you have some for sale, sell them uncut.
You want to be playing your JC character because that is the only way to obtain the Meta gem patterns and the Spirit of Harmony that you can use the expedite the research of new cuts.

So by knowing this you should be well armed to start on your way to sail the waters of the JC market.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Tillers Farming in MoP

2012-10-01T13:41:00.000+02:00

There are new posts about places where you can go and "farm" certain stuff that you need in the game, be it ore, herbs, cloth or even Motes Of Harmony. Well today we are going to take a look at a certain fraction in MoP that deals exactly with this, the farming part. This fraction i am talking about is The Tillers, but if you are asking yourself why are they so important to mention them, well it's quite simple they allow you to actually have a farm where you can plant seeds and then pick them up where you can get materials for professions, Motes Of Harmony ( yes a viable way to farm these bad boys with certainty ) or even pets like the Terrible Turnip.

For this post i decided that it would be much better to copy a piece of info that the use LORE made for Wowhead, but he had it in the comments part and i thought it deserved to be out in the open for more people to see it and get informed. So here we go i will try and get it as close to perfect as possible with all the links.

This is a rather long post, but it covers everything there is to do with the Tillers faction starting from the intro quests, down to every daily there is to do. And again Kudos go to Lore for writing this for wowhead.com.

INTRODUCTION

When you begin leveling on the continent of Pandaria, at around level 85 - 86 you should reach the Valley of the Four Winds. During your time questing here you will slowly make your way to Halfhill, the main hub of the area. Halfhill is the center for all cooking and farming in Pandaria, so settle in because you'll be back here a lot during the expansion.

It is here in Halfhill that you will meet Farmer Yoon and the Tillers for the first time, and in doing so have the chance to work on your very own farm.

Once you start on the quest chain Learn and Grow, the small farm Sunsong Ranch will be phased so that you are the only player that can enter your particular farm, alowing you peace and quiet to toil as you see fit.

At the moment, you can start your farm and enjoy the initial quest line, all the way up to Learn and Grow VI: Gina's Vote, but after recieveing your introduction to the Tillers Union you will have to part ways. As it currently stands you will have to wait untill level 90 before you can continue your farming career. You can still plant, grow, and harvest on your four initial starting spots, but any more will require significantly more reputation than you can acquire at level 85.

The quest chain: Learn and Grow

The Tillers quest line starts when you visit Farmer Yoon in Halfhill. When you approach him you will immediatly see the sorry state of Sunsong Ranch.
Yoon's Grandpa has left him the farm, and as Yoon isn't much of a farmer he'll need your help to get things started.

You begin by accepting the quest A Helping Hand, and start to clear Sunsong Ranch, by using a pick to smash the loose rocks scattered around,
With the rocks broken, you approach Yoon again to show him your work. Just as you do, Haohan Mudclaw and his lackies walk up to the farm and start berating Yoon and his poor farming skills.
After the short confrontation Yoon turns to you, determined to prove them wrong, and asks for your help to become a master farmer.
The Family Farm. It is here that your partnership is forged and you begin to grow crops on the farm under Yoon's tutelage.

Learn and Grow I: Seeds
A short trip off to halfhill market and you're introduced to your seed vendor, Merchant Greenfield. The first seeds he will give you are his own special 'Ez-Gro' seeds. Take them back to Yoon and you can get down to planting.

Learn and Grow II: Tilling and Planting
Now you have your seeds Yoon will teach you how to till the first two patches of bare soil on his ranch. A simple case of righ clicking the mound of earth. Once tilled you can select the soil, and plant your Ez-Gro Green Cabbage Seeds.

Learn and Grow III: Tending Crops
As if by magic all planted seeds instantly turn into sprouting crops, due to the special soil in the valley. As you'll soon see though, the crops are parched and need watering. Yoon will give you his Rusty Watering Can allowing you to turn your Parched Cabbages into Growing Cabbages.

Learn and Grow IV: Harvesting
While talking to Yoon your Growing Cabbages immediatly turn into Ripe Cabbages. While this change would normally take 24 hours, the special EZ-Gro seeds from Greenfield make this one off set of crops grow extra fast.
Now it's time to harvest your first vegetables. Doing so gives you the achievement Green Acres and returns the soil back to untilled soil, ready for you to start over with new seeds.

Learn and Grow V: Halfhill Market
Whilst you only have 2 Cabbages, Farmer Yoon still thinks it would be a good idea to take them down to the market, and sell them to Gina Mudclaw.
Before you set off you're told to investgate the small patch of Dark Soil under the farm house, where you will find a Marsh Lily. Handily the perfect gift for Tina as you make your introduction.
Now that you've introduced yourself to Gina and given her a gift, you should find yourself at friendly reputation with her, allowing her to ask you for assistance in her own work.

Learn and Grow VI: Gina's Vote
Gina tells you how she has been supplying the chefs in the area with their ingredients to cook all their meals, but now she's run out of Scallions. The perfect oppertunity to put your new farm to work.
Walk over to Merchant Greenfield, and this time you'll see his whole inventory open for sale. A short browse and you should find the Scallion Seeds you're looking for. When you return to Sunsong Ranch you'll see you have four patches of untilled soil available, not just two.

Simply till the soil the way you did before, and they're ready for planting with your seeds.
While your planted scallion my be 'Parched' like the cabbages were before, there's also a chance they can require other tending before they're ready to grow.

Thankfully Farmer Yoon will tell you anything you need to do to get your crops nice and healthy and growing.

How do I care for my crops?

Bursting Crops - Instantly become harvestable the moment they're planted.
Parched Crops - Use the Rusty Watering Can to water them (found in your inventory, or next to the tree stump).
Infested Crops - Use the Bug Sprayer on the plants to clean them (found in your inventory, or resting against the stairs).
Wiggling Crops - Pull out the Virmen from the ground and kill it.
Alluring Crops - Click the light and then defend the plant from incoming birds.
Smothered Crops - Grab the weed smothering the crop and pull it out.
Wild Crops - Hit and bite the weed into submission while it wrestles you.
Runty Crops - Grab the plant and jump up to pull it out of the ground a little.
Tangled Crops - Grab the weed constricting the crop and run away, pulling it out of the ground.

If at any time you find you've planted the wrong crop, or planted it in the wrong place, you can pick up the shovel from the set of tools near by, and uproot your growing plant, destroying it but leaving it's space available for re-planting.

Now we do the hardest part of the quest line, waiting as our planted and tended crops grow over night.

Any growing crops you have planted will turn to harvestable crops at midnight. So if you've stayed up late, or come back the next day, you'll be ready to continue with your farming.

Now that your plants have all grown up, you should have your first healthy crop of Scallion, ready to pick from your farm.

Simply yank up the vegetables, and carry them over to Gina Mudclaw to complete the final part of the Learn and Grow series.

. . . . Hooray, you're officially a professional farmer . . . .

Once you give Gina the Scallion, she will be very grateful that she can supply the Ironpaw chefs again. After the quest completion she will escort you back to your farm, to personally thank Yoon and yourself for all your hard work.

As a further reward for helping her, she will offer to cast her vote as a member of the Tillers Union, pledging to accept you as a member.

She will then walk over to the Tillers Shrine (which I'm sure you were all wondering what it did), and light an incense in one of the offering bowls in front of it, signifying her vote.

Now that Gina has activated the shrine, you have a handy new tool for tracking your reputation with the various farmers across The Heartland. It will also act as a new display, to show you how many of the five votes you have gained for entry into the Union.

Unfortunatly if you're reading this while questing, it will be a little while before you can follow through with the rest of the guide.

For those of you at level 90 however, you have only just begun to skim the surface of the farming experience.

With your soil all planted and your crops growing, you can make a start on the Tiller daily quests, in order to raise your reputation with the faction.

As you complete more daily quests, your Tillers reputation will slowly increase allowing you access to more of the faction's rewards, such as new seeds and land expansions.

You can find a list of all the new daily quests in the next section. Or follow on to the next part of the Tillers quest line here.

Daily quests

Each day you can complete six of the Tiller daily quests listed below, and gain up to 1075 Tiller reputation.

When the new day starts, two of the farmers from out around The Heartland will come to Halfhill Market, and ask for help with a particular problem. This gives you a chance to gain some extra reputation with the various farmers in the area, at the same time as gaining your Tiller rep.

Two of the following daily:

Not in Chee-Chee's Backyard +150 Tillers rep, +2000 Personal

You Have to Burn the Ropes +150 Tillers rep, +2000 Personal

Water, Water Everywhere +150 Tillers rep, +2000 Personal

The Kunzen Legend-Chief +150 Tillers rep, +2000 Personal

Money Matters +150 Tillers rep, +2600 Personal

Pest Problems +150 Tillers rep, +3300 Personal

Weed War II +150 Tillers rep, +2000 Personal

Chasing the Chicken +150 Tillers rep, +3000 Personal

Where It Counts +150 Tillers rep, +2000 Personal

They Don't Even Wear Them +150 Tillers rep, +2000 Personal

Just outside the market, Andi will ask you to collect a potential gift for one of the visiting farmers.

One of the following daily:

A Gift For Chee Chee +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

A Gift For Ella +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

A Gift For Fung +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

A Gift For Fish +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

A Gift For Gina +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

A Gift For Haohan +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

A Gift For Jogu +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

A Gift For Old Hillpaw +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

A Gift For Sho +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

A Gift For Tina +150 Tillers rep, +1400 Personal

From your own farm, Yoon will ask you to complete two daily quests. One which he believes will help the farmland, and a second to crow a specific vegetable for the next day.

One Farming quest, and One Killing quest daily:

Farming:

The Cabbage Test +350 Tillers

That Dangling Carrot +350 Tillers

Why Not Scallions? +350 Tillers

A Pumpkin-y Perfume +350 Tillers

Red Blossom Leeks, You Make the Croc +350 Tillers

The Pink Turnip Challenge +350 Tillers

The White Turnip Treatment +350 Tillers

Squash Those Foul Odors +350 Tillers

It's Melon Time +350 Tillers

Which Berries? Witchberries. +350 Tillers

Killing:

The Lesser of Two Evils +275 Tillers

Stealing is Bad... Re-Stealing is OK +275 Tillers

Stalling the Ravage +275 Tillers

The Kunzen Hunter-Chief +275 Tillers

Simian Sabotage +275 Tillers

Joining the Tillers Union

Now that you have Gina's vote you are set on the road to becoming a full member of the Tillers Union, and helping Yoon become a master farmer.

Once you get a little more reputation with the Tillers, Yoon will send you out to do quests for the other voting members of the Union. Gaining their favor in order to secure the remaining four votes.

First off you will be sent up to see Mung Mung, a farmer who works for Haohan Mudclaw.

Mung-Mung's Vote I: A Hozen's Problem

To secure his vote he will ask you to help out on the farm a bit by gathering up partially chewed carrots.

Mung-Mung's Vote II: Rotten to the Core

When the carrot eating culprit can't be found, Mung Mung asks you to replace the carrots with ones grown on your own farm.

Mung-Mung's Vote III: The Great Carrot Caper

The next day when you harvest your carrots and return to him, he will use them to replace his lost crops and save his job. He will then meet you back at your ranch to light his incense, and give you his vote.

With two votes for the Tillers Union gained, Yoon will send you up to Farmer Fung in order to earm your third.

Farmer Fung's Vote I: Yak Attack

When you speak to him, Fung is adamant that he won't be voting for Yoon or yourself. However he lets slip about his yak problem on the farm, giving you an oppertunity to befriend him.

Farmer Fung's Vote II: On the Loose

Fung is so grateful for you returning his Yaks, that he changes his mind about you. He offers to vote for you if you can help feed hes herd of Yaks with cabbages.

Farmer Fung's Vote III: Crazy For Cabbage

The following day when you present your cabbages to Fung, he is taken aback but just how perfect your fresh cabbages are. So good in fact he heads straight over to your ranch and casts his vote for you, insisting that you join the union.

Three down, two to go. Only the senior members of the Mudclaw family to impress now. Yoon suggests you start with Nana Mudclaw first.

Nana's Vote I: Nana's Secret Recipe

Nana's speciality it seems is brewing, but not just tasty drinks, brews that will heal and rejuvinate you. For this she requires the magical waters from the northern waterfall. This is where you can come in, but unlike the previous quests be prepared to do a little killing.

Nana's Vote II: The Sacred Springs

The other ingredient Nana needs for her brew is fresh Witchberries, and you guessed it, you'll be the one growing them.

Nana's Vote III: Witchberry Julep

When you grow your berries and bring them to Nana she can't wait to taste them, their sweet flavor bringing back to her fond memories of Yoon's Grandpa. Such fond memories that she trots straight on down to the farm to issue her vote and reminisce with you both about her old friend Grandpa Yoon.

Your last vote is going to be the hardest, convincing Haohan himself to let you into the Tillers Union.

Haohan's Vote I: Bungalow Break-In

When you meet Haohan, he is too preoccupied with his farm house being broken into, and so much damage being caused to talk to you. Maybe a freindly farmer like yourself can help him out.

Haohan's Vote II: The Real Culprits

You put on your CSI sunglasses and take a look around the farm. Finding the tell tale footprints of the intruders, you trace them back untill you run across the culprits of all the theft and damage.

Hozen! So they're the ones behind all this.. *takes off sunglasses* ..Monkey business.

The Who plays as you go back to Yoon to inform him of your discovery.

Haohan's Vote III: Pure Poison

Recognising the oppertunity to impress Haohan, Yoon sends you off to collect ingredients from the Virmen, to make a poison to 'deal with' the hozen.

Haohan's Vote IV: Melons For Felons

Time to start growing crops again, but this time your delicious work will go towards a more sinister end.

Haohan's Vote V: Chief Yip-Yip

Poisoned mellons in hand you make your way to the hozen summit and face Chief Yip-Yip. As you attack you realise that he has 12 million HP. Thankfully the poison in the mellons carries a hell of a kick and allows you to kill him with ease.

By the time you return, all five voting member of the Union have heard of your triumph over Yip-Yip. Amazed at your work they all gather at your ranch to thank and congratulate you, even Haohan has high praise for you saving his farm.

With his final vote cast, all thats left is for you to lite the last incense on the Tiller Shrine, and join them as a full member of the Tillers Union.

More plant types

As you progress with your Tillers quest line, and complete more daily quests, the full range of rewards from farming start to open up to you.

One of the main benefits of a higher reputation level with the Tillers, is that Merchant Greenfield will sell you a wider variety of seeds to grow at your ranch.

A higher reputation can also let you grow the farm it's self.

The basic crop seeds you can plant at friendly ( Scallion Seeds etc), will most likely grow into 'Ripe Vegetables' and yield the results listed in the table below. However there is a moderate chance that when they grow over night, they will form 'Plump Vegetables' instead. When harvested plump vegetables will give 8 items instead of the usual 5.

There is also a small chance when you harvest any plant on your farm, that it will give you a rare item for reputation, such as Lovely Apple, in addition to it's typical loot.

Very occasionally, in place of the regular seeds that have a chance to drop, you can recieve Ominous Seed, which when planted will grow into Terrible Turnip.

Some of the seeds you can buy at revered will allow you to not only farm cooking ingredients, but also grow primary profession materials, such as cloth, metal, and enchanting materials.

In addition, any crop you harvest will grant 50 reputatation with the Tillers, regardless of it's yield.

Early on MoP Shuffling

2012-09-30T11:45:00.001+02:00

Today we are going to take a more detailed look on a most profitable venture that we can use to our advantage to make a metric ton of gold in a short time. This is going to be a viable option for a short term because it will catch on very quickly and people will start realizing that they can skip paying the extra gold for it, but anyways let me get down to the juicy, and profitable parts.

For this to work you need to have 2 characters, one of them needs to have alchemy, while the other one needs to have mining, or if you have those two professions on the same character then you don't need 2 characters.

As you can see on the image it all starts with Ghost Iron Ore. The way to get the ore is obvious, either mine it or AH, either way is OK but i would advise you to go for the AH approach simply because it's a short window of opportunity on this plan, and it is surely going to loose it's momentum in a short time when people get more informed. But anyways back to the point, when you get the ore you will need your miner to smelt the ore. If your miner is not high enough to smelt it don't worry, it takes about 10 min to run around the starting Pandaria zone and your miner will have the skill to smelt the bars.

Ok now you have Ghost Iron Bars in your bags, so what now ? Simple you can take one of the two possible roads, you can either sell the bars for profit on the AH or you can choose the take the further refinement of the bars. If you simply want to sell the bars on the AH that's good, as you will still make a near 50% profit on your ore investment, but if you want to continue on with the whole deal keep reading.

After you get the Ghost Iron Bars send them to your alchemist who will take them and transmute them into Trillium Bars. If your alchemist just trained up and all he got was two patterns don't worry, he isn't bugged it's the way the new system works for Alchemy, you will need to make about 20-40 potions and the patterns will be revealed that way. So keep making those potions until the transmutation for Trillium Bar is revealed.

After you have the transmutation available start making some Trillium Bars and selling them on the Auction House. As you can see on the image on the right i am making a good deal of profit on each bar, and the price for one Trillium bar is 10xGhost Iron Bars which in turn is one stack of ore. Just as a comparison, i bought the Ore from the AH for 75g per stack and sold them as Trillium Bars for 280g. That is 300%+ profit on that investment, and the best thing about it is that you don't really spend anything, as this transmutation doesn't waste your daily CD that you can use for the last step. Oh and just so i don't forget to mention, you can get extra bars if you are a transmutation master and your transmutations proc as you can see on the image below.

And the last part of this plan is to take the Trillium Bars and use your Alchemist once more and use his daily CD to make 6 Trillium Bars into a Living Steel. The Living Steel is the new hot cake when it comes to crafting armor, so the demand for it is going to be high for a while, and if you are a transmutation master you have the chance to proc on it as well.

So in short that is the way to go with the early on MoP metal trading, and no matter which route you choose to go know that the profit will be there, but if you have the ability then take on the three markets so you don't miss out on any of the possible profits.

One last thing before i leave though, if you choose to sell the Trillium Bars know that the best time to put them on the AH is right before midnight ( that is when the CD for the Living Steel is reset ), because that is when people want to buy it the most. In the mind of the casual player it's "6 trillium bars for nearly 300 each is 1800 and the living steel is 2500, awesome i'll buy some" And that is how we get a hefty profit.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

MoP, Selling Caged Pets

2012-09-27T12:11:00.001+02:00

Mists of Pandaria is well on it's course, and from what i have seen already it is setting up to be an interesting expansion. We have new things to do, and new ways to make profit off from nearly every place we take a look at. Well today i chose to talk about a market that i think is going to be the next luxury market in WoW. As a clarification ,when i say a luxury market what i mean is a market that people buy/sell for commodities that aren't used to boost your raiding performance, nor make you a lean mean killing machine in PvP, an example for these luxury markets would be the Transmogrification and Pets markets.

I have covered the section about making gold with pets in the past where we would craft or resell pets to people that were collectors and were willing to shell out top gold for them. Well with the new MoP pet battle system we have a whole new crowd coming in on a rather old market, and with their arrival the rules for the market are going to change.

What this means is that, we used to sell the pets to people that only wanted them for the look, and now that they can do battle we are going to have people that are buying them for their combat abilities as well.

One thing that is important to know about combat pets is that you can tame a wild pet in the outdoors, but when you do that you can't "cage" him and then sell him on the AH (as far as i know and from what i have seen) but if you take a pet that you learned from an item, be it from a rare drop or a vendor pet and you level him up, then you can right click him in your pet list and from there you can choose to put him in a cage and then you can sell him on the AH for a hefty profit.

There is another thing that is quite amazing with this patch about the pets market though, in a way Blizzard has made the pets to be shared across all your characters on your account, which in turn means that you end up on a globalized pet market. What i mean is simple, you want a pet Rat, but that Rat on your server is 1000g, you pop up on another server and you see it there for 1g, you buy that Rat there for 1g come back on your server and Boom you have a pet that you can either use, or resell for a hefty profit. Plus that same goes both ways, you can buy a pet from your server and then sell it on another server and make a starting capital if you want to change server.

But back to the same server pet trading. One other thing that you might want to do is use up some smart advertising for your pets. Why this is a good idea is because people are still leveling their characters, and some by chance see the pet trainer and then they get hooked on the battle system. That is when you want to come in line and sell them the pet that they want, and the pet that will help them in the long run.

So first thing you want to check is the AH, and see if maybe someone has posted a "leveled up" pet on there for a cheap price, then if they have you snag it and then try and peddle it, or if they haven't you have to level one yourself ,which is not all that hard. Your macro should be inviting and alluring to them, so use something like:

" Are you sick and tired of seeing your pets loose in a pet battle, well get your high level [Insert Pet Name] and never loose again "

In reality that is a bit of an over sale as the level of the pet has nothing to do with winning or loosing when he's facing a same level opponent, but that doesn't concern us, what we are interested in is making gold.

So i am really curious to see how this market is going to morph in the coming months when people are done with leveling and are hard into the pet battle system, and they start buying/selling leveled combat pets.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Maximizing MoP Profits

2012-09-24T14:32:00.001+02:00

So here we are counting down the last hours before we say farewell to Cataclysm and open our hands and prepare to embrace Mists Of Pandaria. Well while we are waiting that doesn't mean we should just stand around in our capital cities and do nothing, on the contrary we should be hard at work to prepare.

Maximize your profits by Syndicating

In the previous posts i covered the things that should be on your watch list for making profit by stocking up on materials, and then reselling them later on for profit. Well today we are going to take a look at a different thing that will be more about optimization and maximization of the profits that are to be had in Mists of Pandaria.

So i will try to keep this as short and informative as possible. Few of the most important things that we want to make sure we don't botch would be to stay on the up side of the supply / demand curve and always be ready to sell what the people are looking to buy. But lets get down to more specific examples.

Let's face it, the majority of the people that are playing this game have been playing this game for quite a while now, some are playing since the start of Cata, some are playing from WOTLK and there are even some that are coming from the Vanilla/TBC era. Well the same thing that all of these players have in common is that they all have multiple characters (alts) and they have different professions on them. Well if you are one of those people then you should make sure that even though you can't level all of your alts at the same time, you can at least make sure you aren't missing out on the things that are limiting your progression by a time table.

What this means is quite simple, if you have a Jewelcrafter, Scribe, Alchemist or any other profession that has a "daily" quest to do, make sure you do it and don't skip any of it. The reason for this is, even though it's it going to be very alluring to play your main and race for the top level 90, in the long run it will be very profitable NOT to skip on doing your daily profession quests, even though you might have to put some time into doing that.

A great example for this would be the new Inscription daily research in the form of a Scroll of Wisdom that will be the new way to obtain those glyphs. There are 21 glyphs to be learned from that scroll which means that if you skip on a single day then you are skipping on getting some serious profit because there are no other ways to get that glyph except for the research, which in return means that not even your competition will have them so you could have a monopoly on that given glyph for a day or a week depending on the competition's luck of the draw.

And last but not least, as i put in the first image above that says "Maximize your profits by Syndicating" you should really think about doing just that. I covered a variant of this tactic a while back in a post that was about making gold with the help of a friend, but now we are going to take that idea and further build on it.

To make it as simple as it can be i will get down to the idea right away. You want to make a syndicate of a given profession ( Jewelcrafting in my case ) and invite the top sellers in the market to join you for the greater good of all of you. What this means is that you all get to an agreement on who takes which gems patterns and then among yourselves you can have 4-5 or even more people all gathering their profession tokens and working as one opposed to all of you going for the same gems and then miss out on the profits that are to be had by selling a particular gem that someone was looking for, but couldn't find it because noone had learned the pattern.

Though to clarify, when i mentioned that you want to divide the cuts what i meant is that if JC 1 learns to make STR red gem, JC 2 learns to make INT red gem and i learn to make the AGI red gem, then i send a stack of uncut gems to both of them, and they do the same to me and we get back a cut version of the gems. So that way in a single cycle that will be needed to get one pattern you end up with 3 patterns, and the market is going to be controlled by your syndicate, meaning the opposition will need a much longer time to get in on your market while you will be up posting ALL your gems and undercutting only with the people that are in your Syndication. But if you decide to play it fair you can put your friends in your white zone so you don't undercut them but that is between you and them.

So bottom line, while you are waiting for MoP it would be a good idea to talk to the major players in your server economy and give them the opportunity and the idea of a syndicate, and try to explain why this would be a great profit making idea. So for now i leave you with that and wish you a great time and fun in MoP

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Back For MoP, Back For Gold

2012-09-23T10:24:00.003+02:00

So here we are back after quite a while with a new post, and hopefully the first in many posts to come. First of all i would like to say that i stopped with writing new articles on the blog for one reason and that reason was simply the fact that i didn't think there was anything new worth writing about, and i didn't want to make "new" posts that would be simply same as the old ones but from a different points of view.

Well all of that is about to change with the release of MoP. What this means is simply that all the markets are going to explode and be alive and ripe for the picking, and all you will have to know is how to make the optimal profit from those markets, and that is exactly where i will try to give you all a hand.

Just like any market, or deal that transpires in the real world where the research and preparation are the key to being a success, the same goes for World Of Warcraft expansions. Knowing what to expect, and more importantly preparing for the upcoming expansion is 50% of the profit already in your pocket. I won't go into details on what you should have bought so far, simply because i made a post in two parts that was more or less a spot on about which items you should have stocked up on, the first part and the second part covered a wide market so you might want to check them out.

Ok i am done with the words of wisdom, but now lets take a quick look at a tip that will actually make you a very hefty sum of gold in the longer haul, and it will make you go "Daaaaamn that was profitable"

If you read up on these previous two posts back when i posted them, and you did some preparation and stocking up you should have a nice stock of soon to be older tier of materials, but if you haven't it's not all over as there are still almost two days left for you to pick up some bargains of the year. I will tell you exactly what to look for and what i stocked up and the reason behind it.

First up i followed up on my own tips about the inscription and the inks in particular, i bought up all the cheap herbs that i could find up on the AH. The reason for this is that when MoP ships the only way to get the older inks would be either mill the old herbs (which are always rare to find) or exchange them for the newest inks (which will be expensive as hell), so this is why by buying inks now and then either reselling them or making glyphs with them in MoP is going to score you some awesome profits. While at the Inscription profession, you might want to take some Moonglow Ink, and Snowfall Ink and put them on the AH in stacks of 1, and the reason for this is because you want to cover the market for all the new Monk Scribes that will pickup Inscription and will want to do their Minor and Northrend inscription research.

If you have a Jewelcrafter that has been a good boy/girl and has done his dailies and picked up on the epic cut gems then now would be a good idea to pick up the epic raw gems that are up on the Auction House for ridiculously low prices. Just for reference i picked up raw epic gems for 30-80g each, and i am well aware that in a few months i will sell those gems cut to twinks/alts for 1500-3000g easy. The reason behind this thinking is that the supply for these gems is finite and unless they introduce a way to get those gems by transmutes (which i doubt they will) you will end up with a VERY valuable piece of commodity.

Lastly if you have an Enchanter you might want to pick up on some of the very under priced Maelstrom Crystals, or any of the other enchanting materials that you are low on stock. Just know that the price of the Maelstroms is going to crash in the next few days while anyone and everyone that has an Enchanter is going to be DEing their old gear and trying to sell the Maelstroms on the AH. The reason for stockpiling on these materials is simple, you will want to keep the Cata market covered for twinks that are always there, but the down side is that this is actually a longer term investment but a very lucrative one for that matter. Right now you will be able to pickup the Maelstroms for like dirt cheap prices of like 10-20g and after the dust settles they will be worth at around 100-140g (the vendor price for the ones that know how)

So i leave you with this for now, but i will continue with new posts and more importantly posts about things that are profitable and things that will help you make a lot of gold.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Preparing For MoP Investments Part 2

2012-08-16T19:02:00.000+02:00

In the previous post about the pre-launch for MoP we gave the companion and Inscription market a quick glance, and today we are going to take a closer look at a few more markets that would be very lucrative to take advantage as we send off Cataclysm on it's merry way, and welcome to arrival of the new expansion.

CRAFTING

First market that you would want to keep your eye on would be the materials market. Now to make it clear, i won't focus on telling you about each crafting profession separately but am i quite sure you will get the idea.

The idea behind the crafting market, and its potential to be a huge profit margin is quite simple, yet very few people will see it. The actual idea is to buy the materials you usually use to craft your items, be it PvP set items or PvE epic items. The reason for this is because their price is dirt cheap seeing as how it is the end of the expansion and very few markets are moving any goods at all.

So the price of the given "raw materials" is cheap, the supply is abundant and the competition is really not in the mood to buy it out. Everything sounds like it's setting up to be a sweet deal, but wait that's not all. By buying your materials now you will buy them at prices that aren't affected by the incoming inflation that will hit when MoP ships out. So as an example, if you spend 20g for a stack of Obsidium or Elementium Ore, expect that same ore to be 100g or even more depending on the inflation scale when MoP is the new dog in town, and Cataclysm is left in the rear view mirror.

But lets take another look at what we want to keep our eyes open for in particular:

You want to keep an eye on the price of Elementium Ore for it's use in crafting all the level 85 plate PvP items. You also want to keep a healthy stock of Pyrium Bars which you can use later on to continue crafting Ebonsteel Belt Buckle, these will always be in demand from the people that end up twinking their level 85 characters. Another very important thing would be to keep an eye out for the volatiles, and their price. They are easy to obtain now and their price is cheap, but as soon as MoP hits their demand will go down but the supply will simply borderline dry out, so get yours now while you still can.

Another material you might want to get stocked up on would be leather, even though it's price is still a bit steep remember that inflation still hasn't set in and everything is still rather cheap. So if you were in the PvP leather market it would be a good idea to get stocked up as well.

There are a few markets though that i wouldn't stock up too high on, and that would be the cloth market. The reason behind this is that with the introduction of the mass looting system it is going to become very easy to obtain cloth and it's price is going to be rather "volatile".

Last of the professions that would be worth stockpiling on would be the enchanting market. As it is now the price of the Hypnotic Dust as well as all the other latest materials is cheap because the influx is rather high from people still doing the Ore Shuffle but as soon as that is over the price for the dust as well the essences will go up. While on this topic it might be a very good idea to stock up on some Jasper and Alicite which you can use later on for some post Cata DE action, as well as crafting and selling the rare rings to people that are leveling alts, or the new Pandas.

Ok i'll end this post here, but in the next post we are going to take a look at how to approach the end of the expansion as a Jewelcrafter, as well as a trader that wants to bank on the uprising of the new "PANDAmonium".

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Preparing For MoP Investments

2012-08-12T14:18:00.000+02:00

So in about a month Mists Of Pandaria will ship out and finally we will have something new to do, kill new baddies, raid new places, level our professions and open up new opportunities to make gold. But before MoP finally ships we are going to have some time to make some pre launch investments that will pay out big in the near future, and i will further explain how and why.

As the sign on the side here says, we will be buying the "used" goods, or translated into WoW terms we will be buying the soon to be old tier stuff.

What i mean by this is simply the same thing that happens with the release of every expansion, the week or so before the release of the expansion people get into insane mode, and they are trying to unload everything they have in the hope of making some quick gold off it while it is still current. This has some basic logic behind it, but if you give it a second thought and realize that even though it won't be the current end game tier there will still be market for it, and it will probably end up being much more expensive than it is now.

But enough with the vague talks about what is going to happen, let's take a look at some actual items that will be worth buying when the big "Yard Sale" begins.

PETS

Pets or companions will be in great demand in MoP, especially with the whole new Pokemon like pet battles. Up until now there was a demand for these pets from people that simply wanted to have them walk next to them, but now that they will be able to actually make them fight, and level them the demand will go even higher. But not everything is as jolly as it sounds, with the shipping of MoP Blizzard decided to make one crucial change and make all the mounts and pets be account bound. What that means is what ever you have on one character, it will now be shared on all of them.

So there will be a huge increase on the demand for pets early in the launch of MoP, but that demand will be saturated rather quickly for the more common (vendor/crafted) pets, while the demand for the more rare and extremely rare pets will be further increased, and with that the prices for those pets will inflate quite a bit. I have covered a bit about the location of the pets in the world, as well as the vendor location in a previous post so you might want to check that out, but if you are looking for more information about pets, you might want to check out some of the other blogs that are on the blogroll.

SCRIBES

MoP will open up a huge profit market for the crafty scribe that will be up to the task to pounce on the possible profits that could be made early on in MoP. To be even more precise i am talking about the whole new Panda glyphs that will be available at the start.

Now even though everyone will have them, not everyone will be able to craft them in high volumes. The reason behind this is pretty simple, they will still require 3 inks, but instead of requiring the overstocked inks from Cataclysm it will require the new Ink Of Dreams which will be expensive as hell for the first two months or so. So knowing this here is the punch line, BUY YOUR INKS NOW WHILE THEY ARE STILL DIRT CHEAP !!

I can't stress this enough without putting them with big red letters so i did just that, and as for the Panda glyphs the majority of them will require Ink Of The Sea, so make sure you stock up on those in particular.

If you are looking for some more info on Inscription and how to prepare for MoP as a scribe, then you might want to pop over to Croda's Blog where he covers all about Inscription.

I will cut this post short here, because if i continue on it will end up like a wall of text and we don't want that do we. Anyhow in the next post i will cover the preparation and shopping lists for the Enchanting, Jewelcrafting and the major crafting professions. But for now i leave you at this, and remember like always keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Mists Of Pandaria ... Sets Sails

2012-07-25T17:46:00.001+02:00

As the title says Mists of Pandaria will launch later in September, 25th of September to be more precise. Now this is not a ground breaking news if you follow any of the major information gateways, or if you happen to check out the Battlenet site, but the reason why this is a good news is that with this information going public people will know that there will be new baddies to beat, and new gear to obtain. Taking into account that those same people will want to get into MoP with as much as gold possible, it is only logical that they will try and sell some of the stock they have obtained, and get a quick turnaround.

Needless to say, this is going to open up a whole new market for the worthy gold making goblins that will fill their coffers to the brim by doing highly lucrative deals with a huge return in a very short time table. But anyways, after a long and boring wait due to almost nothing happening in WoW, i will re-start with the posting on ways to use the auction house to make a profit and hopefully greet MoP with a gold sum that will allow you to buy anything you might deem worthy of buying without having to deal with the fact that you are broke.

So heads up and prepare, there is a huge profit storm coming and you want to be on the side of the people that will profit and not on the side of the people that will be carried away by that storm. So keep on reading the blog as well as the other informative blogs that you can find on the blogroll on the side and together we can all make a pretty decent profit.

Protecting Your WoW Account

2012-07-04T19:00:00.001+02:00

Lately i have been away from WoW as well as Diablo, but that doesn't mean that i have lost interest in the games. Well to be honest i kinda lost my interest in Diablo as the feeling i am getting while playing it is simply like i am playing a beta game. But that put aside i still have my interest in WoW, and the economy part in particular, even though we have hit a rough patch of boring as it is.

As a gold making oriented individuals we love to play the game for it's virtual currency making aspect, where if you play it right you can influence and shape a whole economy. Well today we are going to take a look at the ULTIMATE way to influence the shaping of an economy by doing the most important thing that you can do, protect yourself from hackers and keeping your hard earned gold in your account and away from the black market.

First of all lets clear one HUGE misunderstanding, whenever someone says that the Chinese farmers are the people that are responsible for the economy going to the gutter, you are dead wrong, it is in reality your own fault. Now let me explain the reasoning as to why i am saying this.

Let us begin by defining the usual suspects:

Chinese "farmer" this is basically some guy or a girl that sits in front of the computer and makes gold by actually playing the game, be it by actually farming or playing our beloved AH PvP. ( In many occasions these individuals aren't Chinese, but still the term is the term )

Botter this is a guy that doesn't like to sit and spend his time at the keyboard , so instead he is using bots (automated programs) to do all his work for him.

Gold Selling Sites well pretty much everyone that has ever gotten up to a major city without turning off his trade channel has had a run in with these guys. They don't actually farm anything as they are more or less a "middle guy" in a otherwise simple transaction. They connect the buyer of the gold with a seller and take a piece of the profit for them selves.

Hacker this is the highest threat to the economy of any game. These are the guys that steal your account information and then log in and pick clean your entire account in a matter of minutes.

Like i previously said the hackers are the biggest problem by far. The reason why this is so is simply because of the gravity of the impact they have on the economy. When they steal your gold they transfer it away somewhere where they will be able to store it until they find a buyer that they can offload to and get their money. Well the issue arises because when you file a report saying that you were hacked you always get your inventory and gold back, but rarely is your original gold found before it ends up to a buyer. The reason why this is an issue is simple, lets say for an instance that you had 500k on your account. Now if you were hacked, the hacker got away with a 500k worth of loot for a 5 min work he did, that same 500k is now into circulation because it will end up on your same server to some other guy that paid money for it.

Now comparing the 500k a hacker for a 5 min work, to a botter is like comparing your local grocery store to a fortune 500 company. They will both make money but the difference in cash/hour is going to be huge. Don't get me wrong though, botters do have an impact on the economy, but they are dependent on the community to buy their farmed goods and are more or less a factor in the every day economy in WoW.

So how do we protect ourselves, do we take up a bulwark and try that way, or magic or stealth ? Well the answer to that would be ... don't be ridiculous this it the real world. But still there are ways to protect yourself, and i will give you a few hints as well as the kryptonite of the hackers.

GET AN AUTHENTICATOR !!
This is the the one thing that you MUST get if you are serious about keeping your account safe. They are cheap to get on the market, but if you have a smart phone you can get one for free.
GET A SOLID ANTI VIRUS !
This shouldn't really require a description as to why as it is always nice to have something that will stand in the way of malicious software trying to steal your information ( keyloggers in our case)
DON'T BUY GOLD OR POWERLEVELING SERVICE FROM SITES !
Really there is no need for you to spend your hard earned cash to get some quick gold, or even worse for someone to play or bot the game that YOU bought, and YOU are paying a monthly price. If you need gold simply read up some of the articles that are on the blog, or some of the other FREE blogs out there and you can get your gold fast and FREE and you will have some fun making it. And not to mention the fact that giving your account information, or even worse your credit card information to a individual or a site that you don't know is not the smartest thing to do.
!!! CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS !!! DON'T GET HACKED !!!
This is that kryptonite that i was talking about. This is where more then 90% of the black market gold comes from. But to make it more clear, NEVER EVER use the same password you have on your account and your email that is attached to that account. On top of that, NEVER EVER use the same password on community sites that require you to put in a e-mail. The reason for this is that many, many people do that mistake where they would make an email and put in a password like (qwerty or 123456) and then use that same password for their WoW account and pretty much any other account they make on any forum or community site ( MMO-Champion and similar).
The reason for telling you this is because many people do this mistake and then they wonder how they got hacked. YOU didn't get hacked, but the community site that you are a part of got hacked and their info was used to feel your account up and see if the passwords match, if they do then you are screwed. So i say it again, NEVER use the same password for your e-mail and community sites that require your password.
And another thing you might want to do if you want some extra security would be to change your passwords on a monthly basis.

P.S. If you are by chance actually using a password such as QWERTY or 123456 then you do deserve to get hacked !

So i hope you had a nice time reading this, and i really hope that you didn't find out anything new ( it means that you already did everything right and you are protected) but if you did read something that you didn't know, then apply that to better the safety for your account, and stay safe and protected, and keep those hacking SOBs away from your hard earned gold.

WoW to Diablo Transactions

2012-06-22T13:23:00.001+02:00

It's been a while since my last post, but the reason for that is not because i don't want to make any new posts but simply there is nothing new introduced in the game to make it worth blogging about. I previously said that any "new" post would have to be a spin off from another post, but actually today i found out about something that is really interesting and rather unique.

This rather unique thing i am talking about is a little something that started to show up in trade channels, and more importantly on the Blizzard forums, and that is people offering to sell/buy Diablo gold for WoW gold.

Now at first glance this might not sound like a big deal, but belive me it is. As the rules are now, you are not allowed to sell your gold for anything that would be making you money, and you could get banned. But when you are simply trading your gold for another type of gold in a different game that is owned by the same company that you ultimately would either invest or sell on the RMAH, Blizzard doesn't mind. Well with the start of the RMAH and the ability to sell gold coming up any day/week now, does this mean that we will be able to actually have a way to sell WoW gold in a way that would be borderline gray zone but still legal ?

So the question here is if you played WoW for a long time and decided to go for Diablo as a change of scenery, or if you tried Diablo but got sick of it and went back to WoW can you transfer your gold from one game to the other and profit from it ?

Well the answer to this question would be YES. It is possible but you simply have to work a bit on the finding an interested buyer on your own server in WoW.

So for now it's worth a while to know that there is some kind of a "trade" going on between the games, but if there is no problem between trading on those two games, then we might be ushering in a new era of the RMAH hitting WoW in a indirect way too.

All in all it's something that is worth keeping an eye on, and hopefully this "RMAH experience" that Diablo is offering won't spill into WoW and further screw up a failing economy.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Diablo 3 Issues, The Last Shine

2012-06-13T16:03:00.000+02:00

Ok so for the last month or so since D3 launched i spent it in playing and "enjoying" the game. Well in that time i got the perfect diversion to help me go through the very boring patch that World of Warcraft has hit. Well in the last week or so i kept getting this feeling that the game has gotten very side tracked and today, while browsing the forums i found a post that simply outlined all the problems that i felt were an issue in the game and i would like to share it here with you.

Oh and another thing, this will be the last post that i do about Diablo 3, coming next post (hopefully soon) i will get back to covering WoW and ways to get rich there. So here we go, brace yourself for an awesome read and a pretty big wall of text.

Original post on Diablo 3 forums

Dear Blizzard,

After playing 18 years of your games (started in 1994, Warcraft: O&H), you WERE one of the best company producing games. I’ve been with you for all this years. I spent much time to play your games. I’ve been playing all your games universe (SC, WC, Diablo), also paid a lot for your games (about £1200).

At beginning your games was like step in future. Wacraft & Warcraft 2 was delicious, after that, brilliant H&S Diablo and then my beloved game Starcraft. I’ve started playing starcraft in 1998, this game was just awesome. played till 2002 then gone to Diablo. I’ve played D2 till 2005 and this is a year of the end Diablo 2. After World of Warcraft success in 2004, you started give a !@#$ about other your games. Diablo 2 was killed by bots, cheats and other stuff. Same ballruns for 365days/year and you did nothing to prevent this, even if peoples written to you, you didn’t ban account for botting, cheating and others. For me in 2005 Diablo 2 was DEAD. I’ve been back to Starcraft. After few weeks I saw maphack was a HUGE problem and you still gave a %^-* about it. Starcraft Community made antihack for game. NOT game producer but community. Game lost sense to me. In 2007 started playing World of Warcraft – in TBC game was great, if there was bot – instant banned. You gave big care about this game till summer 2009. After summer 2009 bots where everywhere, furthermore cheats – speedhack, flyhack and many others. And after 5 years of WoW – again you gave a !@#$ about your game. I was a farmer and I reported to you 10 botters/day – and what I’ve seen? They could still play! Cheers for you Blizzard. What was sense of wasting my time to farm gold and buy best gear on AH in game if I could buy gold on ebay for 1£? Stopped to play after release of Cataclysm, when I made clear run of 10 in blue items. Game lost sense – bots, hacks, to easy contents. You made game for kids to leach money. Then in 2010 Starcraft 2 shown up – campaign – brilliant, multiplayer – well after almost 2 years it’s on very good balance level – but still maphacks since open beta release. Played Starcraft 2 like maybe 3 months(with huge breaks) – it wasn’t at all that good as SC:BW. And problem of cheats :).

After long introduction, time to go to main game DIABLO 3.

15th of May 2012. Game of the Year (or even a decade) – TOTAL FAIL. So let’s go from beginning.

1. Servers

15.05 – About 6 P.M. – You can’t play – to many players situation last for 3 weeks. Last week was good, without any breaks(but sometimes lags). You had statistics how much copy will you sell, so you could do something to prevent this. But no – ‘we have money on our account it’s good. People will get angry’ – but we do nothing, they are away – ‘Sorry guys we don’t give ETA but we would like to apologize’ - In my mind was something like this – ‘sorry guys, you paid money for BETA(cause we wanted to be faster than Guild Wars II) and now we give %^-* about you, we still working on game, you paid for testing game’. Me and many of my friends feel like this way.

2. Bots, speedhacks, maphacks, autoIT.

There are available bots. You want names? D3A, mmBBQ, MythBot, D3BOT, InfinityBOT. Good Job blizzard. After 25 days, we got whole gamma of bots. Furthermore Maphack – Simple Map reveal, D3Advanced Maphack. Speedhacks ? No problem – you have movie even here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O8sQptCTxM. Noclip hack? It’s so simple: D3CLIP.
After 10 years of online gaming community is smarter, so what the hell – let’s use MACROS. AutoIT v3. Will be very cool – let’s make scripts – Royal crypts, ACT 3 Meteor, even ACT 3 chest near jeweler . We won’t get banned cause we do not inject to DLL files – EPIC WIN.
Tell me dear Blizzard, what you will do with botters ? And we can go to point 3.

3. Hotfixes.

Ok, so you did hotfix to Royal crypts, goblin in act 2, meteor act 3, Tyrael. Why? Cause it wasn’t work as intended? In my humble opinion it was – especially royal crypts ‘cause been in beta. Time to say to community – we are so sorry, We’ve failed, our release was to fast – we give back your money – cause we cannot stop botters, game is not ready yet.

4. Exploits.

List of exploits is so long, that I even won’t write about it. Starting with AFK leveling, going through, afk gold farming, ending at bosses (each one can be glitch, butcher, belial, azmodan, siegebreaker, izual, diablo).

5. And now ladies and gentlemen, one of the biggest FAILS in this decade. AUCTION HOUSE.

RMAH should be deployed @30th of May. Now it’s 11th of June. But I ask you blizzard if you are ready for this? After EPIC fail and silent hotfix today?
The thing is about canceling auction – you can rollback system date 2 days before and you can easy cancel your auction. Simple right? So Like 4 hours ago, before hotfix Imagine this situation:

2 Players, Player A sending item on AH, person B buy, Person A take money for item, person B, reroll system clock before transaction. You get your money back - rinse and repeat:). I have news from people who made that like 3 billion of gold by this method in 3 hours. Good job blizzard!

Now think about this. Method was available since patch 1.0.2a been released. I think about 1000-2000 people would know about it. RMAH should be on 13/06. 1KK of gold will cost about $0.1-$0.5. There will be so much inflation. So I’m asking you blizzard. What you will do?

Going straight to end:
When I heard about RMAH idea I was like – finally, game will be protected, there won’t be bots ‘cause of RMAH, I can be a gold seller and earn money on thing I like. You wanted to do money on selling items. You wanted to get profits on it – and it would work. But implementation of idea is totally missed. I was counting on you blizzard. I thought that after 2-3 years I can write in my CV gamer as a job title – cause it was possible. The experiment you wanted to do was great – but you failed. The point 5 from my post ruined not just your company and RMAH, but others game producers going to think twice before implementing RMAH in theirs games. Your Idea was great, but first you should take care about game, bugs, exploits, test it thousands of times, then think about making money on RMAH.

Best Regards.
Lupi

Edit:
Continuation of the thread with proper criticism
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4698799997

Regards,
Lupi

Diablo 3 Magic Find

2012-06-07T17:21:00.001+02:00

Here we are back again with another post that will be covering D3, and more specifically it will be covering the Magic Find portion of the market. Before i get in deeper into this i want to give you a small intro in how magic find works, and why people like to have it on the gear they are buying from the AH.

Magic find is important because it increases the chance for you to get a magic or rare item, but it doesn't stop there. For instance lets say you kill a random monster on Inferno Act 1 and it drops you a weapon with 2 affixes ( 50STR + 50VIT ), this was dropped because you killed that monster with 0% magic find so you got a random weapon with 2 affixes. Now if you had extra magic find your chances to get an item with 3,4 or more affixes is increased, lets say you killed that same monster with 100% magic find, that means that the chances for that same item to show up with additional properties is increased double, if you ramp up the magic find to 220-230% and kill that same monster you have a chance to get that same weapon with 4-6 affixes, which in return would mean a more expensive and better item.

Add to this the 5 nephalem buffs which add 75% (for now) to magic find and gold find and you end up with a staggering 300% or more increased magic find and a chance to fish for those legendaries, set items and all round awesome items.

So as you can see the difference between getting an item that would sell for 10k and an item that would sell for 10 million is hidden in a bit of good luck and a hyped up magic find gear. Now i will get to the core of this post and the way to use this need for a better magic find to your advantage and more importantly to your profit.

As you can see on the image on the side (that took quite a bit of time to make it), different pieces of gear have a different price tag as their magic find amount increases. Just as an added clarification i started noting the prices from when they were worth it (20k and above), and you will see items with lower amount of Magic Find that i didn't put in the list but that is because their price was too low to mention, so i end up vendoring those.

One of the things that would be a good idea is to either download the given image on your PC/Mac, or bookmark the post and have it open while you are playing the game. The reason behind this is that when you are randomly killing monsters and they go about with dropping magic items, at times they can drop items with Magic Find that would be extremely expensive (300K+), but due to their blue color and nothing making them stand out from the crowd you can end up vendoring them and missing out on a great deal of gold. So like i said have that image in the background or the post bookmarked for easier refference to help you with the deciding of the worth of the magic find items you have for sale.

One thing though, if your piece of gear has a nice amount of a primary stat (STR, VIT, DEX) on top of the magic find that would only mean that someone can use it as his primary gear set and that he would be willing to pay a higher price for it, so price them accordingly. The prices that are stated in the image are all based on the Magic Find only, so if there are other stats that are important the price will be much higher. For instance if you find a high Magic Find item with DEX, VIT and Resistance to All, then you've found an item which is perfect and you can sell it for huge profits.

When i said his primary gear set, what i actually meant is the gear that you are always wearing for his killing opposed to the gear that you have in his bags ready to switch it before that elite champion dies. Oh, in case you didn't know what i mean, you need to have two sets of gear (prefferably), where one would be your HIGH survivability/damage build, and the second one would have a HIGH Magic/gold find on it (more magic then gold). Like i said it is pretty simple, you wack the champions with your damage build, and right before they die you quickly change to your magic find gear and finish them off. That way you have all the advantages of having a high damage gear as well as a high magic find gear.

An item in the 490k bracket being sold for 250k

Ok enough with the explaining on how it works, lets see how we can use this price list for making some profit. All you need to to is simply choose armors from the AH, then choose a piece of gear (lets say helm for instance) and then in the affixes field put in magic find. After that choose a percentage you want to see, put in 33% and check the prices from lowest to highest. Usually you will see that prices will be from 150K - ?? Millions, but what you are acually interested in is the lowest price. Many times people that don't know what they have will list their blue items for as low as 10k or 20k and think that they made a massive sale because they got 20k opposed to selling it to the vendor. So you simply buy it from them and relist it back at a discount on the average price, if the average price is 150k list it for 130k and it should take you anywhere from 10m to about an hour to sell it.

So that is the basic idea behind the auction house flipping, you need to have a base price to work from (the list), you need to factor in the 15% auction cut and you need to know which particular market you want to take a swing at (the magic find market).

Now as a unrelated topic. I have had mails of people telling me how i have been doing a good job with the blog and that they enjoyed it. But seing as how WoW hasn't had anything new added to it in a long time, and the economy has slowed down alot, i kinda set the blog in a low activity mode as i didn't want to make posts that were a different approach to something that i have covered in some previous post. And the second thing is that i don't want to make posts about the BETA because that is what it is BETA, it changes alot and nothing is set in stone. I hope that Blizzard will add something interesting in WoW that will rekindle my interest in the gold making aspect of the game, and in return i will have more things to write about. Until then i will make post, but it won't be the usual 3 or more posts per week, and i might transfer the Diablo posts over to Jim Younkin's site he has about Diablo, but i will announce it if i do that.

That's all for now, i hope you liked this D3 post, and more importantly i hope you are having fun in the game, be it WoW or Diablo 3.

Diablo 3 Making Gold

2012-05-27T13:18:00.003+02:00

So it has almost been two weeks since the launch of Diablo 3 and the only thing i can tell you about the game if you are not playing it is to go and get it. Ok now that my persuasion has worked on you, and you have the game, it is time to tell you why this game is awesome and how you can be awesome in it by being a successful economy driven goblin. If you haven't heard anything about Diablo 3 you might want to check the three introduction posts i did before the launch of the game to get a general idea on what to expect.

First place that i want to start would be the auction house. If you watched the video you get the general idea on what to expect, and how to navigate through the auction house. If by chance you are one of those people that doesn't like to watch videos i will try and sum it up for you as well.

When you go to the Auction House you need to know what you are looking for. Now even though this might sound like a stupid thing to say or even think because if you went to the auction house you wanted to get something anyways, it is not because the way the D3 auction house works unlike other games is that it will require a greater deal of information on what exactly you want to buy in order to give you a list of those items.

First off, as you can see on the image is that you will need to chose a template of a sort on which class you want to look for. ( so it knows if you prefer INT,DEX or STR) Then after you have chosen the given class you need to choose an item you want to buy, be it armor or weapon.

Now that you have chosen what you want to buy you want to define which affixes are found on that item. As you can see you can define an item with up to three affixes. Another important thing to help you with sorting out is to define a numerical value to your affix search ( adding a number in the little red square next to the name ) that will sort the items that have the minimum of that amount of that given affix. And last but not least, you want to put a price you are willing to pay for your item unless you want to get items that are all in the millions of gold range.

So if you have done everything right you will find an item that has the affixes that you want, is within your price range and is generally a good upgrade to your character.

After finishing up with reading about the auction house, lets take a quick look at how exactly we can use the auction house to make some gold without having to do much work.

As you can see on the video here, one of the easiest way to get some profit is by doing the same exact thing that we have all done in WoW, where we sold vendor pets and vendor items. Well in D3 there really isn't much need for pets of any sort but vendor items are still a big YES.

In general you can sell pretty much any piece of gear that you can find from the vendors that has decent stats, but the best luck i have had has been with selling the trinkets. When i say trinkets i mean rings and amulets that the vendors in each town sell.

One thing you need to remember is that the vendors have a wide variety of items that they sell, and it is very rare to find him selling the same item twice, so if you see something that is worth it you better buy it and if you are pretty sure that it is a good item you better buy a nice stock of it as well.

So after you have bought up a stock, next step would be to define a price and start selling all those rings/amulets that you bought up.

The right way to defining a price for your items would be to start off with a lower price ( in my case i started off with 29950) and if you notice the items are selling and selling fast you gradually increase it up a notch ( got mine to around 45k). Now take into account that i bought all of these rings for around 7k and you will end up with profits that are in the 20-35k per ring sold.

Ok since you are still reading i will give you one last tip on how to make gold, and mind you this one might be the BEST obvious thing out there that 90% of the people aren't doing, or simply haven't seen that it is there.

This great little thing i am talking about is D3's very own trade channel. First things first, in order to get to the trade channel you need to press that cog like button in the corner of your chat screen and from there to access either the Trade or the General chat.

I am still not sure as to how exactly it places people in channels, it might be by difficulty or localization, but that really isn't that important, what is important is that you have a place where you can advertise your items and hopefully get a sale done with someone that might be interested in buying a piece of gear that you would otherwise vendor or salvage.

This little thing is almost one of the best things that you can use in your selling arsenal when your auction house slots are all filled up and you still have items that you want to sell. And on top of this you can mix it up with the vendor strategy and advertise vendor items for a price. As an example, if a vendor is selling an item for 8000g you advertise that item on trade or general for 40k and see if someone bites, if they do you just scored 32k profit as there will be no AH fee of 15% deducted from this transaction.

One last thing you might want to know about D3 though. After you are finished with Hell and you step into Inferno, don't be mad if you get one shot by mobs as that is what the design of Inferno is. In order to progress you will have to deal with the gear check and kiting ability check in order to progress with the game. There will be moments when you start freaking out, and even making up new cuss words and that will all be normal. Then just remember one thing, the auction house has what you need in order for you to be able to progress further in the game and all you need is gold. So if you thought that you were good in the economy in MMO's now would be a great opportunity to actually prove that and really rock the auction house and deck out your character.

That is all for now, and i am hoping you people liked this post and that it gave you some ideas on how to work up the auction house, and how to make some gold even if you don't have the time to really sit down and go kill monsters and demons.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Making Gold With A Friend

2012-05-23T11:57:00.003+02:00

It's been a while since my last post, but in my defense it was Diablo 3 fault but non the less i am back again today with another post on how to monetize in WoW. Usually every time i cover a certain subject it revolves around the reader needing to have that particular profession, and hopefully have the patterns or materials needed to craft that item, well today we are going to take a look at how to use your friends/guildies to help you out when you don't have the aptitude for a certain profession.

I will further explain as to how exactly does this work for the given market that is of interest for this particular post, and that is the WOTLK gems market.

First of all why did i choose this market ? Well i did this on a different server then my own where i have millions to throw at the AH and not be afraid to loose them, so i needed something that i could control to a degree and something that i had experience with. The WOTLK gems are the bread and butter for all the twinks in the 62-80 bracket as well as the people that are leveling, and if you take into account that 80% of the people that have JC now didn't play in WOTLK or for some reason respeced and lost their WOTLK gems you end up on a market that is usually controlled by very few people or if you are lucky no one at all.

So now that you have chosen the market that you want to go into, it's time to get down to asking your friends or guild members to see if they have the ability to cut those gems. Don't be amazed if you find someone that has all the cuts of WOTLK and Cataclysm and claims that he can't make money from Jewelcrafting, those are the best kinds of people that you can encounter because they did the dailies not to make gold but simply because they were there.

If you are unfamiliar with the WOTLK gem market you might want to check out one of my older posts that covered that particular theme, but if you are you will know that this market can be a bit of a volatile sort, so before you jump in head strong just scope out the competition, and the availability of the raw gems that is up on the auction house.

So provided you have found a friend to help you out with the cutting of the gems, you checked out the prices and competition and they were in your comfort zone, the last thing you need to do is define the prices. In the previous post i explained that i i had priced my gems at 95g for the rare ones and 195g for the epic ones, but after i wrote that post i kinda changed my prices and added an extra 100 to those so the prices are 195/295g for the rare/epic cuts and they are still selling like hot cakes. So like the image here explains your server might be a lot different from the one i play on, but by following the simple supply/demand chart you can come up with a price that is just right for you.

For this market you want to check out the prices of the red gems first, and when it comes to rare red gems you want to see if you can find someone to craft Brilliant Scarlet Ruby simply because crafting it would require one to be exalted with the Kirin Tor to obtain the pattern and that is kind of rare nowadays.

Another thing before i go though, if you do decide to use a friend to do your cuts, or what ever it is that you want to sell, make sure that you give him some kind of a reward. In my case it was 10% of the profits that i made which was a pretty heft sum for him seeing as how he cut about 200 gems for me, and i managed to move half of them in the first 3 days.

I gave you this Jewelcrafting example because i have the most experience with this market but you can use your friend's help with pretty much any market that you want to jump into but don't have a character that can craft those items, and just to name a few PvP Armors ( Plate, Cloth, Leather, Mail ), Glyphs, Pots, Pets and pretty much everything you can think of that would sell, because remember WoW is a community game, and if you can't use the community to make gold then what good is the community.

That's all for now and like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

The Black Market Auctions ... BRING IT ON !!!

2012-05-13T14:23:00.001+02:00

So it finally happen, Blizzard took the first step towards combating inflation that will come with MoP. Most of you have already read on MMO-Champion a bit about the coming new feature called Black Market Auctions.

First thing that we need to understand is how exactly this black market is going to work.

From what we know so far, there will be a kind of an auction house that will offer limited supply items that are of worth. These items will include mounts, recipes, pets and pretty much anything that is rare and valuable. Now the catch here is that only NPC will "post" auctions on the black market, and there isn't going to be any buyout price so the only way to obtain an item would be through the bidding process.

One of the most important things mentioned about the black market is the fact that it says that different servers will get different auctions posted on them. Now just imagine on your server you see the Spectral Tiger on auction starting at 10k, it would be a safe assumption that within an hour it's price will be driven to 200k and by the time Its time is up it will probably get to the "normal" moving price. That would be the usual scenario we can expect to see, but and this is a bit BUT, what if you are playing on a low population server that doesn't have all that many people with millions of gold to spend and you see a rare mount that is expiring at odd hours like 3am or 4am, well in that case with a ordinary alarm clock you might be able to pick up a very expensive mount or pet or anything else for that matter.

Now the problem is that we still don't know enough about the Black Market to be sure on what to expect, but i know one thing for sure, if they put in BoE Mounts, or let you cage the pets you get from the Black Market and sell it as a caged pet then this Black Market might be one of the best playgrounds for any gold loving goblin out there.

Another great thing about this market is that is going to be a great gold sink. A while back i made a post about gold makers and how we are a kind of a gold sink but that was just half way true as even though we pile up large sums of gold and keep it out of circulation, in reality we do invest part of that gold back in the economy. Well the black market is going to be a True gold sink as anything that is spent there will be removed from the economy. What this means is that instead of people having 10-100k or much, much more then that like some they will want to obtain those shiny items from the Black Market and will pour their gold into it, and in return what this would mean is that the casual buyer will have a smaller pot of gold and the prices of goods will have to adapt to that, and ultimately we will see lower prices then what we were expecting with the increased inflation.

As of now i will leave it at this, a simple introduction post, but as we get more information and hopefully get the information that BoE items are going to appear there we can then take a more detailed approach to the Black Market and how to use it to our advantage. Until then keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Twinking Profits

2012-05-11T16:46:00.000+02:00

One of the most profitable market to dabble in has always been the twinking market. The reason behind this is fairly simple, it is a market that is selling the best possible items for a given level to a character that simply wants to be the best in PvP at that given bracket. Well for the duration of the last two expansions i have been silently racking up quite a bit of profit from selling a given item, and today i am spilling the beans.

I won't get into making this a very long post as unlike the usual topic that i like to cover in my posts, today i will cover just a given item. This item that i am talking about is Hard Khorium Band and as you can see it is a ring that just happens to be BiS for Agi users.

The reason why this is a very good market is that if you are able to craft the given item you can monopolize on it as it is a niche market that very few to none suppliers are looking at. There is a tricky part to this though, in order for one to be able to craft this item you would need to obtain two patterns, the first one is for the actual Hard Khorium Band and the second one would require a miner so you would be able to Smelt Hardened Khorium.

Now you know how to make the item and how to smelt the given materials, so the next step in selling the item would be to define the means on how to sell the item. There are two ways you can go about this, the first one is to put it up on the AH and wait for people that know what they are looking for to buy it, and the second way is to actively advertise it as a BiS item. The second way has a much higher selling chance but at the same time you will be opening up your niche market to the competition. I will leave it up to you to decide the course you want to take, but if you are going for the second option make sure that in your barking advertisement macro you put the spotlight on the fact that the ring is BiS for Twinks, and that if they want to be the best they need to get it. ( Just make sure your macro is catchy, informative and borderline cheesy )

And last but not least, if no one is holding this market you will have the chance to set the price to your liking. The going price for this item has been moving from 1k in TBC, then 3-5k in WOTLK and nowadays it can be sold for up to 10k as people don't mind paying the price if you can make them think that they are paying for THE BEST item they can get for their character.

So to sum it up before i finish up, you will need a character that has Jewelcrafting and Mining (ideally), you will need to have the two patterns that both drop in Sunwell and you need to know that you will be marketing your item to Rogues, Shamans and Hunters that are twinking in the 70's PvP bracket. So by knowing all this and hopefully having these patterns you can make a decent profit if you decide to hold that market.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Making Gold With Fishing

2012-05-07T17:44:00.002+02:00

We are at a interesting point in the natural course of WoW as a game. We are waiting for MoP to be ironed out so we can all jump in and take our dose of Panda lovin'. Well until that happens we have a choice, either play PvP, PvE or prepare for MoP by filling up your coffers with gold. I am one of those people that chose the last option, and today we are going to take a closer look at how to achieve that by using a secondary profession that everyone can use, namely fishing.

Previously i have mentioned that you can make gold with fishing by fishing the savory delight fish, well today we are going to take another look but this time we are going to look at a different place to do so.

Every month the Darkmoon Faire rolls in and makes it's quests, and island available for everyone to go to. Well quests and pets and mini games aside, the darkmoon faire offers one of the best opportunities to make gold by simply fishing it out.

To make that more clear you will only need to have a fishing pole, and fishing skill to be able to use the fishing profession. Seeing as how you are going to be fishing in fish pools your skill in fishing wont be an issue as you will always be catching fish as long as you are tossing your floater in the fishing pond.

Now as we said you will be catching fish in pools, and the names of those pools is Shipwrecked Debris and the "fish" that you will be catching is Sealed Crate.

As you can see on the map, the place is swarming with spawning zones so finding the fishing spots wont be an issue. A word of advice though, if you are going for the most northern pools it would be wise to get some water walking pots to help expedite things.

So now that you know where to find the crates let's take a look at what you can get from it, and why this is a good thing to do. The Crate is the same as the one you get from using the Treasure Finding Potion but the different thing is that you won't have to kill anything and you will always get 1-2 drops per fishing pool, and on top of that you have a chance to get Heavy Savage Leather and Darkmoon Firewater as well as a ample amount of Embersilk Cloth and every possible pot and volatile that is available in the game.

If you are interested in how much you can make by doing this i will give you my rough statistic for 1h session.

I got 23 stacks of Embersilk Cloth, 7 stacks of Heavy Savage Leather, 67 Darkmoon Firewater, 60 pots (different kinds), 8 stacks of Ore ( Elementium, Obsidium and Pyrite ) 9 stacks of herbs (different kind), 140 volatiles (mixed kind) and a bunch of "trash lower level food". Take these numbers compare them to your auction prices and you will see that the profit is a very sweet number.

If you are still not sure if you want to do this let me tell you one last little detail. While fishing in all of these pools you have a chance to obtain a very rare mount, the Sea Turtle as well as a extremely rare companion the Sea Pony. So there you are, if you are not into fishing for profit maybe you will be interested into catching the rare pet as well as the rare mount.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 3

2012-05-05T10:47:00.000+02:00

Here we are for the third and last part of these mini D3 preparation posts. In the Part 1 and Part 2 of the posts we had peek at what to expect in the fees section, and we saw a bit about how the auction house is going to work. Well today we are going to take a look at the crafting portion of the game, the affixes and a general idea of what to expect for the first month that the game is going to be out.

THE CRAFTING ASPECT

Crafting is going to be a big part of the Diablo 3 economy, and a very important aspect that will make the game all that more exciting.

Just like in any game that has a crafting system, it need to have some sort of different levels and skill you must master in order to be able to craft the most powerful items and weapons. Well in D3 this system is kinda similar to that, but with a bit of an added twist.

Namely if you want to level up your crafters, or artisans as they are called, you will need to fork out gold. Every time you pay an artisan some gold he will progress further more into his craft and gain an additional item that he will be able to craft for you. With each payment that you give the artisan, he learns a more powerful item and a higher level item for that matter. After a certain amount of payments have been given the artisan he will "level up" which will be easy to notice as his store will change it's appearance into a more advanced building.

Lets say that you managed to get all the gold needed to level your artisans and you feel you have mastered that artisan, well this is where that twist i mentioned earlier comes in. The game has extra world drop patterns that you can collect from killing monsters, or purchase from the Auction House (RMAH or GAH).

So here you are, you have leveled your artisan a bit, you have made some gold and now you want to craft some items, so what do you do ? Well crafting takes a bit more then a leveled artisan and some patterns, you will need materials in order to be able to craft items. The way you obtain these materials is by salvaging items with magic properties in them, it's the WoW's equivalent of disenchanting. So now that you have the leveled artisan, you have the materials to craft with all you will need is some gold to pay the artisan to craft your item (yeah he's like that, you pay him so he can expand his store and then he turns around and charges you) and you will have your item.

One last thing i want to explain about the crafting system before i skip over to the next thing. When crafting items in D3 you will never know what you are going to get. What i mean with this is that the affixes ( the magical bonuses ) are always going to be different, and it will all boil down to your luck at getting a piece of gear with awesome affixes.

THE AFFIXES

The affixes, or the stats that can appear on items in D3 are quite a bit. To make it easier to understand it would be ok to divide them into two categories, affixes for combat and affixes for "farming". As you can see on the image above, there are affixes like +Pysical and Elemental ( cold, fire, etc.) resistance, thorns ( returned damage ), movement speed etc. There is no need to name them all as you can see them from the picture and get the idea.

What i want to explain about the affixes is why i said you can divide them into two categories. Well the first category is the combat oriented buyers, they will always be on the lookout for pieces of gear that will have +Primary Stat and +Damage on it, at the same time the other category of buyers will focus on +magic find and +gold drop.

One thing that is kinda important that i haven't mentioned until now and it is about affixes is that while being in a group the +magic and +gold find are shared with the group. So if you have a group of 4 people and one of them has gear that is all +magic find, at the same time the second person has +gold find gear on then the remaining two even if they don't have any magic/gold finding gear on they will get that bonus from their friends. So as you can see it will be very profitable, and that much more interesting to play with your friends rather then play on your own.

HOW TO PROFIT FROM ALL OF THIS

So we saw how everything works in the AH, we saw what the affixes do, we saw how the artisans work and now for the end i am going to give you a few free tips on how to take all of these informations and use them to get some profit.

As i mentioned before the RMAH is going to be delayed for about a week, what this means for us is that we are going to have about a week to earn some gold that we can put on the RMAH and profit off the huge demand there's going to be for gold in the first month while everyone is starting out.

The best way to use that initial one week wait would be to have fun and actually play the game. After you have played for a while you are bound to pickup a few rare items on your carnage. What you need to do is define if that item is Combat or Farming item and price it correctly. In the beginning you will have a much better luck selling +magic/gold items as people will not understand that a +100% magic drop doesn't mean you get a magic item from every kill, but rather if that mob has a 1% chance to drop a magic item with your +100% Magic drop increase that same mob will have a 2% chance to drop an item. So to sum it up with these stats, it is going to be a very profitable to sell the +M/G drop items, and when pricing them check the Auction House so you get an idea on how much it is going to be worth it and either put it up at that price or undercut for a very small amount, and if there isn't any up there put it up for 80% of the gold you made that day.

One of the best things that you want to profit off is going to be selling the weapons. To clarify, a weapon with higher DPS would be superior to any gear that offers +stats on anything pretty much damage wise. So it's a fact that weapon DPS is king when it comes to racking in high prices on the GAH or RMAH. At the same time if you get a weapon that has +Magic Find/Gold Drop then you can market that weapon to the "farmers" as well, so that weapon would be even more valuable.

And last tip i leave you with that made me a ton of gold in the Beta would be the vendors. Just like you can profit off the vendors in WoW by buying and reselling patterns and items on the AH, you can do the same in D3 but instead of patterns you would buy out gear, rings to be more precise. There is a vendor that sells these rings but he is a bit in the background so many of the people usually don't see him when they are out and about killing monsters and raiding dungeons. I sold quite a bit of those items and i am sure that they will sell just as good when the game goes live.

For now that is all that you should need to know to get you started and prepared for the release of D3 and if there is anything else that you would like to know just put it in the comment. If you would like to know anything else about D3 and how it is going to work, again put it in the comment and i will try to do my best to answer any questions that i have the answer to.

This was the Third part of the mini Diablo 3 preparation category, you can find the Part 1 and Part 2 in the Diablo 3 category. Anyways i hope you guys enjoyed reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it, so have fun and i'll see you in Diablo 3.

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 2

2012-05-03T09:22:00.002+02:00

In the previous post i went over the basics that you need to know if you want to play Diablo 3. Today we are going to take a more detailed look at Diablo 3 economy, and more importantly going to take a look at how to use some of the ideas to make some gold, but first we are going to take a closer look at the Auction House.

DETAILED LOOK AT THE DIABLO AUCTION HOUSE FEES

First thing you need to understand about how D3's auction house is going to function is to understand the fees you will be paying to Blizzard. They made a system where they will allow the common player to be able to make real money by playing the game, but at the same time they implemented their fee on every single transaction as well.

As you can see on this table here, on every single transaction that you do on the RMAH Blizzard will charge you depending on what you are selling, if you are selling a weapon or armor you will have to pay 1$ fee to Blizzard, while at the same time you will be paying 15% fee on commodity items ( crafting materials and gold ). So knowing this you end up with prices having a bit of a weird threshold as 0c profit is basically 1$, which in return means that you have to sell your items at prices above that.

Now i mentioned that you will be able to make real money, and you can if you have a Paypal account associated with your account but there is going to be one more thing you need to know if you decide to take this route. Blizzard has a double dip effect if you choose to take the money out instead of putting it in your Blizzard account. What this means is that if you sold that item for 10$, Blizzard will take their initial 1$ and then on top of that they will take an additional 15% before your cash is transferred into your Paypal. So to make it more clear, you sold an item for 10$ and after the fees that Blizzard has in place if you deposit that amount in your Blizzard account you will get 9$ but if you decide to get it to your PayPal account you will actually get 7.65$ Another way of looking at this is like Blizzard being the big brother and he wants his 30% taxes.

Ok now that we got the boring financial jibber-jabber out of the way lets take a look at how we are actually going to be using the Auction house in game.

AUCTION HOUSE PLAY STYLE

Like i mentioned in the Part 1 of the Diablo 3 posts the D3 auction house is going to be kind of limited as you will only be able to post 10 auctions per auction type ( RMAH and GAH ), so you can only have 20 auctions up at any given time. By knowing this fact we actually are facing a rather unique challenge where we will need to do a selective posting, as you really don't want to spend your 10 AH slots for items that are worth low to nothing when you could have made some serious gold by placing the right items. In the next Part 3 of this series i will cover the affixes in D3 so you will get the idea of how much a given item is worth.

One of the most important things that will make you money from the D3 AH is the all so known bidding system. You see even though you are going to have 10/10 slots to post your items, there will be no limit on the amount of items you can bid on. A while back i made a post about bidding in WoW but if you read that one and then you log onto Diablo 3 AH you will see that the same principal still holds. This is going to be especially profitable during the first month or so when people are just starting out and they don't know how to price their commodities. A perfect example for this would be what was happening on the Beta. When you would go through a Skeleton King kill you usually end up with a rare ( yellow colored ) item that had some good stats on it. Now people that played it for the first time they would go and kill the SK, then if that item wasn't for their class they would put it on the AH, and depending on how much gold they have at that moment they use that as a reference, and that is how there were rare items on the AH for 500-2000g. Now at that time you usually get about 1000g from killing all those monsters and looting all those chests, but what i did was bid on those items and pick them up for as low as 300g and then turn around and relist them for 15-40k depending on the affixes they have.

One of the things worth mentioning is that when you go for an item using the bid system you have a option that will let you put down your bid, but at the same time you will set up a threshold for bidding. What this means is that you want to bid on an item and you put down 100g for it, but you want to make sure you get it even if the price goes up to 300g. So by setting your threshold at 300g, if someone undercuts your 100g your bid will go on above his if he is still under your 300g threshold. So more or less it's like you are there bidding even though you are away.

So in this installment we covered the fees you should expect to see on the RMAH, covered a bit about the auction house and the bidding system. Up until now we've looked at how things will work in D3, but in the last Part 3 i will cover all the bases for affixes, crafting and dungeon running so those will actually be about direct ways to make gold. But until the next post i leave you with what we have here.

For the full post check out Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 of the Diablo 3 preparation post.

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 1

2012-05-02T09:41:00.000+02:00

In the previous month i had made a voting poll asking you, the readers what are your plans regarding Diablo 3, and whether you will be playing the game or not. Well the poll didn't surprise me much as it showed a more or less a 70% of the population that is playing WoW will be dipping into the Diablo 3 franchise as well, and on top of this you will get the old Diablo fans that will be flocking in to the game.

So this meant only one thing, i could have gone on and made a new blog about Diablo and it's economy, but seeing as how my free time is getting on the slim side i decided to throw in a few posts in which i will explain some of the tricks and ideas i got from playing in the beta, and hopefully help out anyone that is starting out to make some gold, but on top of that if they play their cards right they can earn some real money as well. So without further delays let me get down to the basics.

THE CLASSES

Diablo 3 will have 5 different characters for you to choose from. The Wizard, The Witch Doctor, The Demon Hunter, The Barbarian and The Monk. All of these characters have their own specific game play style, but i won't get into how they play out as that really doesn't make any difference when it comes to making gold in the game. Well the real reason for mentioning this is because i want you to know what you will be choosing from the start up. What i mean by this is that the characters in D3 will be defined by the main attribute it will be using on it's gear, be it Strength, Dexterity or Intelligence and last Vitality.

The reason why this is important is because the way the attributes work for different classes, Strength is what Barbarians will want, Dexterity is the sweet spot for the Monk and Demon Hunter while the Intelligence is what the Witch Doctor and Wizard will want on their gear. So with this fact you might figure out that the demand for the Strength gear is going to be lower opposed to the other gear because only the Barbarians will want it, so if you happen to choose a Barbarian as your main character expect to find cheaper items for you on the AH and all the other gear you acquire while hacking and slashing that has DEX and INT on it you will have a broader buyer pool to sell it to.

THE ARTISANS

In the start of the Beta for D3 there were 3 artisans, The Blacksmith, The Jeweler and The Mystic, but a few patches ago the Mystic got sacked so for game launch we got left with only two of them. The way the artisans work in D3 is you need to find them, then do a quest for them and then they agree to help you out, for a fee of course. Well in the Beta we saw the Blacksmith, and what he was capable of, and in the next post i will get into more of a detail on how to use him to make a hefty profit early on in the game.

For now there is one thing you should know about the artisans, they will require gold to craft things for you , and they will require even more gold to level them up, so they are going to be the gold sink that everyone is going to have to drop in a lot of gold into to be able to level them up. What this means for us is that the demand for gold on the RMAH ( Real Money Auction House ) is going to be a lot higher in the first month or so when people are starting out, so if you have any intent on making cash from D3 you might want to get on this market early on, but then again i will cover this in the next post as i want to keep this more of a informational orientation post.

As for the Jeweler, no one can tell you nothing because no one managed to see him because the Beta only allowed you to go up to level 13 and see about 1/3 of Act I, and the Jeweler comes later on in the game, so everything there is to know out there about him is simply data mined information, and information from Blizzard's site.

THE AUCTION HOUSE

The Auction House in D3 is probably the most innovative feature in this game. Now what i mean is, D3 is taking a whole new approach in the gaming industry where they are offering the chance to sell your virtual goods for real cash, and all of that is legal and can't get you banned.

To everyone that has been playing WoW the layout of the Auction House should be pretty recognizable. There is only one thing though that is going to be rather unique about it, and that is the amount of auctions you can have up at any given time, and that is ten auctions on the GMAH and ten on the RMAH. Blizzard decided to take up this route as they wanted to make sure they keep the auction spamming at a minimum, and lets be honest it might be a bit on the low side but if this didn't happen can you imagine the amount of crap you would have to scroll through to find an item you like if everyone could post 100 items or even more, it will literally crash the servers from the overload.

Another thing is that unlike WoW that had EU, US and Asia side servers, and all of them had servers with their own separate auction houses, D3 is going to be on a Global scale and the only way the RMAH is going to separate people is by the currency they use to pay for the goods. What this means is the Auction House is going to be hectic and very fast. Just to compare it with WoW's AH, if you post all your auctions you might get 2-20 min of being the top dog depending on the server you are on, well in D3 you might be the top dog for about 5-20 sec, but then again that might be the time it takes for you to sell your item as the buying crowd is going to be a lot higher as well.

In the next post i will give you a few ideas on how to take advantage of the Auction House, and how to make some gold by doing the oldest trick in the book, but for now i will leave it at this.

Ok so this was the Intro into the D3 world, in the next post i will focus more on the how to make some gold and how to take advantage of the Auction House and earn some profit.

For the full post check out Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 of the Diablo 3 preparation post.

Spotlight: The New WoW Marketeer

2012-04-30T09:44:00.000+02:00

Well i'll be damn. A few days ago i made a post in the Spotlight section after months of not posting anything in The Spotlight section because i had nothing to share with you, and here i am today with another installment about a new site that i found that is worth mentioning.

Some of you might have heard about WowMarketeer as he was and if i am right still is making videos about the WoW Economy, but this is not a post about that, no, this is because the original site was revamped and made into a information central hub.

From what i saw, their idea for the site is quite admirable. They want to make it a hub where you will be able to get all your information about WoW, be it PvP, PvE or Auction House Gold making.

Another thing worth mentioning is that you can find quite a bit of links to other sources about WoW as well, you can find links for different Blogs, different Videos and they even have a Live Stream corner. On top of all this they have their own section for guides ( kinda slim at the moment but hopefully it will get better with time ).

The best thing about this is that they have an open policy for suggestions, so if you happen to know of a blog, or a site that covers WoW and they haven't put it up on their watch list drop them a mail and i am sure they will want to put it up there. Also if you happen to be the owner of a blog, or a podcast or even a Live Stream that you do about WoW holler at them and see if they would like to add you to their Syndication.

So like i said they have an awesome idea to make a site that will cover all bases of WoW, and the best thing about sites like this is that if they play their cards straight and get some feedback from the community by telling them what they like, and what they would like to see, they can turn into a great informational site. Remember one thing, today's Mega popular MMO-Champion started out just like this and now it's very valuable resource for every WoW player. So give them a quick glance, and lets hope they play their cards well and make this site into everything it can be.

MoP Preparation Part 3

2012-04-28T16:00:00.000+02:00

As time passes without any new content it is more then obvious that the economy is slowing down. Well this was expected as it is the same cycle we see before every expansion, but one thing that is actually a positive about the expansion ending time is the amount of gold one can make with some smart investments. In the previous posts in the MoP preparation category we covered some of the things that will be profitable to stockpile on for the expansion, and today we are going to take a look at another profitable venture that we can take advantage of.

Raw Materials, yup that is going to be a great market to invest in for MoP. To clarify a bit, when i say invest into raw materials i mean scope out all those materials that people will want to powerlevel their professions. If you want a better idea as to what those items are check out a previous post i did that covers that particular area, or you can simply jump on over to WoW-Professions to see the list for each profession.

The reason why this is going to be a great market to invest is due to it's potential for sales, and the increased demand for those materials for when the Pandas are unleashed in the world.

From what i have gathered from talking to different people is that they will make a Panda as soon as the expansion hits the live servers. Now when that happens you will see a bunch of people that will shoot past leveling professions because they will want a shot at the server first Panda achievement, well those people are not the market that we will be aiming for, rather we are going to take aim at the bigger portion of those people that will want to play their Monk as their main character and would like to level their profession while they are leveling their character.

Weirdly enough from what i have gathered, the majority of the new people that were talking about starting a Monk told me that they would choose to level Jewelcrafting as their main profession due to the fact that the profession gives a major boost to their stats, has Awesome gold making potential and will be able to make mounts in MoP that you can turn around and sell for profit ( allegedly ), so i would take a closer look at the jewelcrafting leveling market.

In another post i talked about whether MoP will bring inflation or deflation in the economy, but seeing as how the item level squish didn't happen we can only see inflation of the prices, which in return would mean that the worth of the gold would decrease, and by knowing this the worst case scenario would be to hold liquid gold as it will loose it's worth for about 20-30%.

So to sum it up, don't be afraid to invest your gold into materials that you will turn around and flip back on the auction house. When looking for items to sell, check items that have a higher price but stack in a higher number ( certain gems are the ideal candidate ), and i'll say it again as i can't stress how important this is, DON'T be afraid to invest, as anything you spend 10g on now is going to be worth 15g coming MoP.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.