Vile's Golden Auctions

Cheating Yourself Out Of Profit

2012-02-23T13:15:00.004+01:00

Here i am back with one of my rants. Today i am going to try and cover one of the most important things that i have noticed that people do that are basically robbing themselves out of profit. The thing i am referring to is under pricing, or inadequate pricing.

To try and explain this phenomena i will use two examples. The first one is how the real life economy disparity between countries is. For instance lets say that a person living in country A has pay check of 2000$, another person living in country B has a pay check of 1000$ and a third person living in a country C has a pay check of 300$.

Now what all these people have in common is the need to buy a TV. Lets say that a nice new TV on the market would be 500$, now that would be an OK price for person A, an affordable for person B and damn expensive for the person C.

One of the things i have been actually doing for quite a long time in WoW is asking all the people that i ever traded a single question, and that question is "How much gold do you have?" The reason behind this is not because i wanted to sell it for higher if they could afford it, but i wanted to get a general idea of what's the most common gold circulation among the normal/causal WoW player. The answers i got actually did give me a fairly good idea because i came down with numbers that implied that about 60% of the player base are all under 20k gold mark, then you have some 30ish percent that are 20-100k another 5% with 100-500K and about that same number with people over 500k. For similar numbers you might check some blogs or forums, but the problem with those is that the audit is pretty much from people that are on that site exactly for that reason, to make gold, and in return those are the people that fall into the last 10%.

Well this same example can be seen in WoW as well. The way this happens in WoW is not with a TV but pretty much everything else you are selling. For instance i have seen on way too many instances where a person that has a certain item that he wants to sell it, ends up selling it for a fraction of it's worth and loosing out on the profits that he could have been making. The most common example with this is how people price their crafted items and to a certain degree the transmogrification market.

The way people usually price their commodities is by the group of gold owners they are in (lets say you have 20K). Just put yourself in their shoes, you have an item that could be worth 10k to a person that is in a higher gold owner class then you , but you deem it too expensive because you doubt anyone would pay 50% of your total gold stash and you price it for 4k which seems like a 20% increase of your gold sum.

Now here comes another buyer that has a bit more gold in the sack, and takes your 4k item on the AH and re list it back for 10k. A few days pass but he eventually sells it to someone and makes a 6k profit over doing nothing but buying your item and re listing it back, and there you are happy with 4k profit while you should be pissed for missing out on the extra 6k you should have netted in.

But let us take a look at a more direct market with a more direct approach to prices. Let us take a look at the PvP gear and how people usually price their commodities and how they should be pricing it.

The way this usually plays out is almost always the same. The person that is making the gear deems it a great deal if he spends 100g on the materials to sell it for 200g as in reality that is 100% profit margin, but the problem arises when you take that same item and sell it for 1000g. Then what happens is your 100% profit margin you made is basically still a 100% profit but at the same time a 900% loss as well.

This same thing can be seen the most with the Transmogrification market. Yes, granted some people sell their items for 5,10,15 gold that you buy and flip, but those are not the people missing out, those are the misinformed, the actual people that are missing out on the profits are the people that are re listing the auctions. A perfect example of those would be a forum post i saw where a guy was asking the same question "am i cheating myself out of my profits" and he explains that he prices the items in 3 tiers a 200g, 400g and 600g and the reason? Well he is probably in the first gold owner class where his total gold sum is lower then 20k and a 600g is a good profit for him, and if you tell him that he could have flipped that for 10k he would laugh, or cry if you show him a printscreen of the actual sale.

Anyways not to make this post any longer than it has to be i will leave you with a few last words. If you happen to be selling gear, or pretty much anything on the auction house never limit yourself with setting a low price. For instance like i said with the PvP gear, if the materials are worth 100g then set your high price at 1000g and your lowest price at 200g, that way if no one else is nuking your sales you will end up making a 100% in your worst case scenario, and up to 1000% profit in your best case scenario. Just remember there is no going price, the worth of anything is as high as a buyer is willing to pay for it. So one last time, don't be afraid to set high prices for the things you are selling and i am sure you will find your profits to be much higher then you are accustomed to.

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

Making Gold With Mechano-Hog ... Kinda

2012-02-21T13:11:00.002+01:00

So you have seen those guys in trade channel selling Mechano-Hogs asking for 20k or 30k, so why not look into that market and see if we can make some gold off it.

First things first, when thinking about getting into the Mechano-Hog market there are two things you need to have decided. First thing is do you want to sell the actual mount or get into manufacturing the parts for it's creation, and the second one would be that you have at least enough gold to be able to buy the vendor items from the vendor at K3 in Stormpeaks.

Ok lets look at the first scenario where you would be selling the actual mount. This market really depends on two things, first one is the competition and the second one is the size of your server. The reason why i mentioned the competition is because if there is a fellow engineer making these and posting them on the auction house for a 1000g profit then it is up to you to decide if you want to get in on the action for a cut of the meager earnings, or take the diplomatic route and get to a agreement where you get him to raise his prices to a profitable level. The second thing i mentioned is the size of the server. The mount market is more of a luxurious goods market which means it's slower to move, and it is only logical that the bigger the server is the bigger are the chances that you net in a sell, but you will be combating more competition as well, so it's a more or less a two sided blade.

So not to drag on a simple sale, if you have the gold and the materials make the Mechano-Hog and put it up on the auction house, and it would be a good idea to advertise in trade as this will promote your product and increase the chances for a sale.

Now we are going to look at the second part of this market that i deem it to be much more profitable, and that is the market of providing the materials that are required for the chopper. As you can see on the image the two most important things like i said were having the gold to pay for the vendor items, and the materials.

When we are talking about the materials you should know that there are two items that are the main concern, the first one is the Titansteel Bars as you will need 12 of those for a single chopper, and the second one is the Arctic Fur which you need 2 for each chopper you intend on making.

As far as the Titansteel Bars go there are two ways to obtaining them, first one is farming and the second one is transmuting the Saronite into Titanium, and then smelting it into Titansteel which will require some additional Eternals. If the Eternals are pricy you might want to check out how to exchange frozen orbs to Eternals. Now since no one really likes to farm it is a much more effective way to transmute the Saronite into Titansteel and then post it on the auciton house.

Now i can't say for your server in particular but on my server i picked up some stacks of Saronite for 40g/stack and about 80 Frozen Orbs for 8g each, and then went and posted the Titansteel Bars for 475g and managed to sell 16 bars in 3 days. So there isn't much to say because this market is a very low with supply and even if you are selling the Mechano-hog you want to have some Titansteel Bars up on the auction house. That way you will profit from anyone that wants to have the Mechano-Hog no matter which way he chooses the direct purchase or the materials, he is buying them from you.

As for the Arctic Fur it's down to the Auction house, so whenever you see some up there snag it and put it in your bank for safe keeping.

So a fast recap of the post. Mechano-Hogs are profitable, if you choose to sell them on the AH talk to your competitors and negotiate a mutual price, if you decide to sell Titansteel then go for the Saronite and transmute it from Saronite and keep an eye on cheap Arctic Furs on the AH.

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

Mass Posting With TSM

2012-02-20T10:24:00.001+01:00

This is not going to be a long post, but a rather short and informative for some more then others. It's a given fact that the majority of the players nowadays use TSM for all their posting needs, but what is interesting is that many of those auctioneers are still using the click to post button. Now this is not wrong by any means, and it can be productive if you are posting ten or so auctions, but when you start posting 200 or more auctions it gets tiresome.

In order to be able to use this feature of TSM you need to enable it. This is fairly easy to do and all you need to do is press the Auctioning Groups/Options and then go down to the section that is highlighted in red on the image.

When you get there all you need to do is choose a button modifier ( i usually choose alt ) and then press the create macro button below. Once you have done this all you need to do is go to the Auction House and do a posting scan, then when it's time to post the auctions simply hold the modifier key ( alt in my case ) and scroll up and down. That is when you see your auctions being posted up there rather fast without you having to click that post button 500 times.

I know there are people out there that have been doing this and it is nothing new to them, but this post is more about the people that didn't know about this and were stuck with the clicking to post their auctions.

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

The WoW Ironman Challenge

2012-02-18T17:58:00.000+01:00

One of the best things you can get in WoW from a gold maker's point of view is when you get a new market to dabble in and make profit out of. As of the last patch we got the Transmogrification market and we saw a explosion of posts all detailing ways to make gold off it, and they were all valid as you could make a lot of gold from it.

I don't know how much have you folks heard about this, but there has been a small movement of die hard hardcore players out there that have made a sort of an achievement for WoW players to prove their Elite status, and they have named this The Ironman Challenge.

Now i wouldn't have given this more of a though except, Blizzard has decided to give them some attention and publicity and usually when that happens people tend to go for it. Now if you take a look at the rules for the challenge you can notice a few things, but first here are the rules for it.

1) No items equipped other than White or Gray items.

2) No heirlooms
3) No talent points - no specialization - you may train class abilities
4) No professions, primary or secondary, other than First Aid.
5) No food or water above vendor-quality white items.
6) No groups- no BG's, no instances, no raids, no quest groups. No guilds.
7) No enchants, scrolls, potions/elixirs, or glyphs.
8) No outside financial or equipment assistance (no gold or bags from other toons)
9) THE BIG ONE - if you die, ever, you delete that toon and start over at lvl 1 Any takers? If you're doing it, post on that character and we will track your progress.

CHECK OUT THE ORIGINAL POST ON THE FORUMS

Further down in the rules there is something that caught my eye

Can I use the Auction House: Yes. you can use the auction house to sell drops.
Yes, you can buy white items from vendors.

What this meant was that they are allowed to sell their goods so they are allowed access to the auction house. Now knowing this fact there is an opening for a whole new market that has never EVER been a viable market, and that is the market for selling white/gray items as they will be allowed in the challenge. One item that comes into mind when trying to monetize on these guys is selling the vendor bag "Carriage" Signature Bag as it is a 14 slot bag that you can buy from a vendor.

As it is now i won't go into further detail, but keep your eyes open for this movement as if it takes on some more publicity it might turn in into a valid market.

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

Glyph Profiting

2012-02-17T10:47:00.000+01:00

Usually when i go about telling you fine folk how to make gold from a particular profession it actually is required that you have the given profession. Well today i am going to give you the breakdown of inscription and how you can rack up those profits without even having the profession.

There are a few basics you need to understand about the glyph market, and those are that the worth of ANY glyph is basically the sum of the cost for 3 inks which in most servers is about 15-30g. Well as you can see on the image to the left it portrays the actual state of the glyph market on nearly all servers.

To make it more clear of what that image is, it is basically a scan of the Auction House for the phrase Glyph which automatically scans for all the glyphs. Now the top half is the cheapest ones while the ones on the bottom are the most expensive ones. Well as i just said the average price for every glyph is basically the same so why this disparity in the price tags. Well it is quite obvious, even though it is not that public and thrown out there, but glyphs have a tier as well.

As it is shown on this next image on the right, the costs to make for all the glyphs are the same, while their profits margins are going up more and more. This can be explained with the "tier" system that i just mentioned, and this is how it actually works.

If you are a scribe you encounter the glyphs very early on in the profession, but when people try to make them and then sell them on the auction house they rarely have any luck, or if they sell them they usually sell them under price which is lower then the cost to make them and that usually sways people away from the profession. Well this is the first low tier of the glyphs and is the intro into the market.

Now after the initial tier we have 3 other tiers of glyphs that are much more lucrative. I will refrain from using them as second, third and so on and on tiers as that will make a false priority system. Now as i was saying, the other tiers are the glyphs you get from Northrend Inscription Research, Minor Inscription Research, Book Of Glyph Mastery. Now unlike the glyphs that every scribe gets access to while leveling, these glyphs actually require some leg work to obtain, and no matter how much you want to you can't rush the glyphs as you can only get one research per day. So i would say that it would be wise to consider the researchable glyphs are the Second Tier of the glyphs.

Now the third tier i would say is the glyphs you can get out of the Book Of Glyph Mastery for their sheer price of obtaining. What i mean by this is that these books usually fetch a hefty price on the Auction House that can get up to 800-1500g on some servers and that compared to the usual every day research is a lot higher, which in return makes those glyphs rarer. So with this i think it would be Ok to address these glyphs as Third Tier of the glyphs.

Ok so now that we defined the three tiers of the glyphs, i will get down of explaining how you can take advantage of the high disparity between the prices of the glyphs.

The basic idea behind the strategy is just like the Recycling, where you are taking the worthless trash then flipping it and making it a shiny new product. Well almost, basically because you are not doing this to save the planet nor are you making a new product but rather making the old glyph appear new and shiny.

Ok enough with beating around the bush, this is how the whole deal works.

You will use two things, first is a buying list which you will be able to copy from here, and the second one is that you will be able to pray on 95% of the glyph sellers who are blatantly using the the addons without checking for prices. As you will be checking for glyphs with low supply and low price to buy out and then resell back, you might want to use the baiting tactics to reduce prices on certain glyphs that you deem would sell well. Now in continuation here are the glyphs you can get out of the Glyph Mastery book and the Northrend Research.

***Book Of Glyph Mastery
Glyph of Arcane Barrage
Glyph of Barkskin
Glyph of Beacon of Light
Glyph of Berserk
Glyph of Bladestorm
Glyph of Chaos Bolt
Glyph of Chimera Shot
Glyph of Cloak of Shadows
Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon
Glyph of Deep Freeze
Glyph of Demonic Circle
Glyph of Dispersion
Glyph of Divine Accuracy
Glyph of Divine Plea
Glyph of Explosive Shot
Glyph of Fan of Knives
Glyph of Feral Spirit
Glyph of Furious Sundering
Glyph of Guardian Spirit
Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous
Glyph of Haunt
Glyph of Hex
Glyph of Holy Shock
Glyph of Howling Blast
Glyph of Hungering Cold
Glyph of Ice Barrier
Glyph of Kill Shot
Glyph of Killing Spree
Glyph of Life Tap
Glyph of Master's Call
Glyph of Metamorphosis
Glyph of Mirror Image
Glyph of Penance
Glyph of Raptor Strike
Glyph of Riptide
Glyph of Salvation
Glyph of Savage Roar
Glyph of Scatter Shot
Glyph of Shadow Dance
Glyph of Shadowflame
Glyph of Shield Wall
Glyph of Shield of the Righteous
Glyph of Shockwave
Glyph of Slow
Glyph of Soul Link
Glyph of Spell Reflection
Glyph of Spirit Tap
Glyph of Starsurge
Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem
Glyph of Templar's Verdict

***Northrend Research
Glyph of Adrenaline Rush
Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell
Glyph of Bane of Agony
Glyph of Bestial Wrath
Glyph of Blade Flurry
Glyph of Bloody Healing
Glyph of Chain Heal
Glyph of Chain Lightning
Glyph of Chains of Ice
Glyph of Circle of Healing
Glyph of Concussive Shot
Glyph of Cone of Cold
Glyph of Conflagrate
Glyph of Crippling Poison
Glyph of Dazing Shield
Glyph of Deadly Throw
Glyph of Death Coil
Glyph of Death and Decay
Glyph of Devastate
Glyph of Dragon's Breath
Glyph of Elemental Mastery
Glyph of Felguard
Glyph of Felhunter
Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem
Glyph of Fireball
Glyph of Focused Shield
Glyph of Frostbolt
Glyph of Frostfire
Glyph of Grounding Totem
Glyph of Hammer of Wrath
Glyph of Healing Wave
Glyph of Heart Strike
Glyph of Hemorrhage
Glyph of Holy Wrath
Glyph of Howl of Terror
Glyph of Hurricane
Glyph of Immolate
Glyph of Innervate
Glyph of Intervene
Glyph of Invisibility
Glyph of Kick
Glyph of Kill Command
Glyph of Lava Burst
Glyph of Lifebloom
Glyph of Light of Dawn
Glyph of Lightwell
Glyph of Mangle
Glyph of Mass Dispel
Glyph of Molten Armor
Glyph of Mortal Strike

One fast recap of the entire post. Put in these glyphs in the Lists in Auctionator and then simply do a simple scan and if you see some that have a low price and low supply buy them out and repost them back at a higher price. If you want to get an idea on what glyphs are the best sellers you might want to check out the glyph section on Wowpopular.

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

Six Months Milestone

2012-02-15T12:30:00.002+01:00

15th of February, it's has been six months since i started this blog. In the time it has been up and running i had so much fun writing the articles, making the images for it and meeting new people. In this period i got to meet some of the people that are writing the other articles as well as the readers that are reading them. When i started writing this blog i knew nothing of the authors of the other blogs that are covering the same topic as me, but in these months i got to "meet" with many of them be it through mail or twitter and have grown to really respect them.

Now here are a few of the things that i have had on this blog in this time, and then i will tell you about the things that i hope that i will get done in the coming period.

First off here are the TOP 5 posts that i had viewers wise.

After those posts the next thing i am really proud of was making the first video on YouTube for my blog

And then making my first voiced video, i will link it even though it happen recently

Now after posting the things that i have done, i would like to send some love to the people that i met here, and the people that are making posts of the same topic.

First of all i would like to thank Alto from altosgoldishadvise.blogspot.com as he was the first one that made a link to my blog that helped me get the first leg up and show up on the radar.

I would like to give a shout out to Oligopoly www.warcraftecon.net for publishing My Interview for the 2 million gold club which was a pleasure doing.

Also i would like to mention all the bloggers out there, but i won't link them here because you can see them all in the blogroll on the right side of the blog.

Well after saying this the only thing left for me is to tell you about the plans i have for the future:

Finishing up the design for the blog and then transferring it on a domain that i will have more control of
Finish the WoW Gold Guide that i had started working a while back and put it up
Be a guest on a podcast about WoW
Get some more interactivity on the blog and make it more interesting to browse

As for my plans for the short term i am thinking of taking up the 20 Days Of .. WoW Blogging Challenge but then again mix it up with some gold related posts as well.

Anyways that would be all for today, and hopefully the next six months are going to be even more fun and more interesting. But until then, keep your eyes open for good opportunities out there.

Jewelcrafting Gold Making ... The Tidy Way

2012-02-14T11:30:00.000+01:00

In a previous post for Jewelcrafting i covered how many days you need to play to acquire all the patterns in the game. Now if you weren't swayed away from jewelcrafting and got in the market you might be making some awesome profits off from it but might simply be having a crappy time when you need to restock inventory, or keeping an eye on whatever sells so you can cut it and re list it back on the AH. Well if you are one of those guys read the rest or watch the video, whatever you prefer more.

In order to do this task we will use an addon. The name of this addon is Inventorium that you can download from curse.com or from the curse client itself.

What this addon does is simple yet brilliant. It allows you to give it a number of items you want to keep in stock ( gems in our case ) and then any time your stock gets under that amount ( when you sell a gem ) it gives you a popup window that you can use it to craft that given item.

In order to get started with using this addon you need to right click that new button that appeared on your minimap called Inventorium. As soon as you do this you are going to see on your screen the configuration page which is portrayed on the image above. When you open it up the first thing you need to do is go in the Groups and there set a name for the group you want to make ( gems in this case ).

After making this group what you want to do next it set the amount of gems you want to keep in stock. This is done by adjusting the slider Minimum Local/Global Stock. For gems i have set mine at 10 as i am usually posting in batches of 5-6 gems and that way i can see if i am short on some gem.

Finally after making the group, and setting up the number of gems you want to have it is time to add the items you want those setting to apply to, and that is done simply by clicking the tab called Add Items. For gems i would recommend you add all of the gems in this group as you want to keep a stock of all of them.

Now for the sake of making it visually more appealing and easier to track i have had my bags made into one 14 row big bag with the help of another addon called Bagnon, but you can use any other addon as it will not make a difference. The reason behind my division of the bag like that is quite obvious if you look at the image on the right.

The one above the red line is the same as the one underneath it with the small change being that the one below has my gem groups neatly spelled out for you nice people. So on that lower part you can see that i am missing a gem type from my usual Ember Topaz group as well as multiple gems from different colors. When i say i am missing gems what i mean is that the required number of gems that i have set as a bare minimum (in this case 10) is not met so i will be given a option to craft those missing gems.

As you can see on this image on the left here, this is the crafting screen. What you need to do to get this screen is open up your profession ( Jewelcrafting in this instance ) and then left click the button on the minimap. What this will do is open up the summary which is that big window with all the gems in it, and those 2 buttons at the top saying Queue and Queue All. Those two buttons are where you want to be looking.

If you have a addon that supports crafting queues like Advanced Trade Skill Window ( ATSW ) or Lil SparkysWorkshop then you can press the Queue All button and you will see all the gems that you are missing populate your crafting screen, if you don't have them you can do it manually by pressing the Queue button and then when that new window pops up, all you need to do is take some raw gems from your bank, put them in your bags, and you are ready to click away and see those gems being crafted.

So by doing this you never ever have to worry if you have all the gems up on the auction house, or maybe manually check the stock you have. To clear up another thing, this post was made for Jewelcrafting but you can use this method for any item you might be selling constantly and having to keep an eye for a given stock, best examples for this would be glyphs and flasks.

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

Inscription Gold Making

2012-02-13T14:46:00.003+01:00

In this post i am going to cover all you will need to get your inscription-glyph market up and running. In a previous post i explained all about the glyphs as to how to set up TSM and prices, but today i am going to cover the whole deal starting from scanning the auction house, crafting the glyphs worth making and then posting them. So without further delay lets get down on it.

Inscription Gold Making Broken Down

As you can see on the image on the left, Inscription has a fairly simple way of functioning and getting you from the starting herb position down to the profit. For this case i have only taken the route of the glyph, because i want to focus more on this market.

There is one thing that is very interesting about Inscription as a profession and that is the ability to make 90% of the people that have it loathe it and never use it to make gold from it. The reason behind this is very simple actually, and that is because the majority of the gold in Inscription is made from glyphs, and glyphs have lost their huge demand they used to have back in WOTLK when you needed to buy new glyphs every time you respeced. But even if you leave this aside, people that have never used addons, or consider addons to be a form of cheating in the game find it too much of a leg work to manually check all the prices of the glyphs and then deal with the fuss of posting only to find their glyph undercut in less then 20 min. So if you want to find out how to do the whole this process as painless possible then stick around and keep reading.

First thing you need to have is TSM downloaded. With the latest version of the addon you will see that when you go to the auction house you have a new tab on the bottom called TSM and on the left side there are a bunch of options. Because we want to use the information from the auction house so we know what to craft we need our addon to have a database with it. This is simply done by choosing the first option in the left called Run Scan and then in the middle rollover button we choose Inscription and click on the Run Profession Scan. As soon as this is done we can proceed to the second phase and that is the crafting phase.

The second phase, or the crafting phase is more or less what deters most of the scribes out there from getting in the glyph business because it seems like too much work, well they couldn't be more wrong then this.

The crafting can be the painless process ever if you only take the time to do it properly. As you can see on the image i have my scribe set up to craft some glyphs, and in case you are wondering what i have opened up, that is TSM crafting module. You can open this module by opening up your profession screen and then click on the little button above it that says Open TradeSkillMaster_Crafting.

After clicking this button you will get the screen you see in the image and at start there are no glyphs shown but if you press that + button next to the class names you get a rolldown information of the glyphs that are currently up on the auction house and their worth. Now all you need to do is simply click on the glyphs you would like to make and the addon will make a queue list for you. Best thing about this is that on that bottom window it shows you the inks or pigments you will need to make all those glyphs you have in the queue. This is helpful because you can get stocked up on Blackfallow Inks then go to the ink trader and get all your needed inks.

Now that you got to here it's down to the last step of the way and that is the posting part, but i will not write about that as i have covered that posting part in one of the previous posts i did so you can check it out there. In continuation i leave you with a video that will explain all this and clear up anything that's unclear i guess, so enjoy the video.

Transmogrification Items

2012-02-12T13:15:00.000+01:00

As i said in the previous post, real life activities have been keeping me a bit on the busy side and away from WoW, but as i have gotten some free time i would like to make a post that i can further build upon as time progresses, and it will cover snatch/flip lists for transmogrification. The items on the lists will be taken from various sites and blogs that i will mention in the end of the post. One last thing before i go on, in previous posts i have talked about where to "farm" items for the Transmogrification market, but here i am going to talk about how to resell them off the Auction House and see great profits.

PLATE ITEMS

Just like WoW has different raiding tiers for gear, the transmogrification market has a kind of it's own tier when it comes to rarity of the items. Now unlike the raiding tiers which make your character stronger with every next one, these tiers make you more gold the higher they are, that is if you know what you have.

In the image on the left you can see the appearances of the first two tiers with the most expensive price tags, and the rarest of them all.

Tier I ( 5 - 10k )

Glorious Plate

Lofty Plate

Vanguard Plate

Tier II ( 3 - 5k )

Exalted Plate

Tyrant Plate

Saltstone Plate

Tier III ( 1.5 - 3k ) Tier IV ( 900 - 1500g )

Bloodscale Plate Commander Plate

Jade Plate Warleader Plate

Hyperion Plate Imbued Plate

Brutish Plate

Tier V ( 750 - 1000g )

Now there are more items that you can acquire that are of a lower worth so i didn't mention it here. One other thing that i can advise you to do is when you first log in for the day go ahead and check the AH for under priced items and if you see them simply swoop them away and slap a price tag of 450-1000g or whatever you think it might be worth judging by it's appearance. Now here is the text you will want to import in Auctionator to make your lists.

***Plate Tier I (5-10k)

Glorious

Lofty

Vanguard

***Plate Tier II (3-5k)

Exalted

Tyrant

Saltstone

***Plate Tier III (1.5-3k) ***Plate Tier IV (900-1.5K)

Bloodscale Commander

Jade Warleader

Hyperion Imbued

Brutish

***Plate Tier V (750-1k)

Warmaul

Darkcrest

Boulderfist

Bloodfist

For the full list on all the plate items you might want to check out The Hatchery's post on Plate Mogging as you will see all the rest of the items that i didn't mention over there.

WEAPONS

The weapons market is a bit different from the armor market, and the reason for this is simple, people have different style tastes and while someone would pay 100g for a simple looking sword, someone else would pay 5000g, so it's all a game of wait and see. I will leave you with a list for weapons as well but i will tell you something that you will notice in about two days if you decide to get into the weapons transmogrification market, and that is the bare fact that many of the weapons have doubles when it comes to their model so that kind of puts them on the same playground as the other item.

But as you do the scanning in time you will start to notice that from time to time a weapon will appear on the auction house that is like non other and is listed for some minimal price of <50g and that is when you swoop it and then post it for huge profits.

***Weapons ***Weapons Rare
Abomination Cleaver Phantom Blade
Arcanite Reaper Razor Axe
Assassination Blade Singing Crystal
Avool's Sword of Jin Soul Blade
Axe of Rin'ji Speedsteel Rapier
Banner Slicer Teebu's Blazing
Blade of Hanna The Butcher
Blade of the Titans Unknown Archaeologist's
Blade of Wizardry
Blazing Rapier
Blintstrike
Brainsplinter
Broadaxe
Crystalforged
Dark Iron Reaver
Driftwood Club
Elementium Poleaxe
Elementium Shank
Fel Edged Battleaxe
Felsteel Longblade
Felsteel Reaper
Maldo's Sword Cane
Massacre Sword
Nightfall
Notched Cobalt

So i have written down the basics of your transmogrification business comprised of Plate Armor and Weapons, but like i said there is much more out there as in Cloth, Mail and even Leather to some degree but i think that the majority of the market is around plate and weapons. One other thing, all these lists are basically shopping lists for Auctionator, but in case you don't know how to import lists in Auctionator check Alto's post as he has made a good job explaining it.

Now at the start of the post i said i was going to use information from different sites/blogs so i would like to thank those bloggers for their time and effort into making these lists, and if you found it helpful go and visit them:

http://twitchieenterprises.blogspot.com

http://altosgoldishadvise.blogspot.com

http://www.powerwordgold.net
The Mogfather

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

P.S. The Original Item lists were made by Keelhaul so the real props go to him ... totally !

W-Econ Interview

2012-02-11T14:42:00.001+01:00

First of all i have to say that when you have real life obligation stomp your fun activities sucks, but other then that this post is more or less a self promotion post. Hmm, when i say it like that it sounds lame but more or less i would like to point out to a interview i did for Warcraftecon for the 2 million gold club.

I won't make this post any longer that it has to be, I know i have been a bit low on the post count lately, but i will try and get to my usual posting schedule as soon as my real life schedule clears up a bit. But until then, keep making that gold and enjoying your WoW time.

The Seasonal Lovely Charm Farm

2012-02-08T01:31:00.000+01:00

It's is nothing new, and i have said it before that farming is something that i really, really don't like doing, BUT and this is a big BUT when the payout is very good, then i can cope with a bit of it.

I was determined to stay out of the making gold off the seasonal events because i really don't like them, one might even compare me with the Grinch as far as events go, but then again this year Blizzard decided to throw us a curved ball with the introduction of the Swift Lovebird, which is basically a pink chicken with no saddle that is apparently a mount.

From that last sentence you can see that i am not a big fan of the mount, but then again i am a guy who has the reasoning where you can only have one mount and you don't need more then that. Well despite my own feelings towards the chicken, there are people out there that want to buy it, and if they don't have the time to do the dailies, or they can't do the killing themselves it is up to us to take their gold . But before i get ahead of myself let me go down on the basics.

Every year around this time we have the Love Is In The Air event. This is when it's all about the love, the candy giving and apparently killing many people so you can extract Lovely Charms from the dead bodies, and then turn them into Lovely Charm Bracelet that you turn in to get tokens which you can use to buy stuff, tough love i guess. Well in order to be able to obtain the charms you need a Lovely Charm Collector Kit which you can obtain from a quest giver in your respectable city. After obtaining this kit it's off to do some carnage.

So this is the good part now. After obtaining that Kit you need to head down in the Throne Of The Tide instance. After killing the first boss, which is totally easy to solo nowadays, you can kill the second one or die and re enter the instance.

Now after getting back in the instance on the left side when you come in the fork in the road, you will be able to see a bunch of small elemental like mobs named Unstable Corruption. These guys are the ones you are going to be killing, well massacre is more of the word here are you will be farming them for a while.

The thing with these guys is that you can AoE them down, and they die with a single hit hence producing a Lovely Charm. Why i'm claiming that these guys are the best to farm is because they have about 5 second respawn timer. I did a bit of the farming myself and came up with some very interesting numbers, so let me enlighten you on the matter.

125 Lovely Charms / 10 min
750 Lovely Charms / Hour
75 Lovely Charm Bracelets x ( 50 - 100g )
3750-7500g/hour

That is the basic math. So you average about 3.5k up to 7.5k depending on the price of the bracelets. I've seen some server go as low as 30g while others are at 120-150g price range. But no matter what you can make some decent gold by simply doing this. Though i would recommend one thing, and that would be to gather up those bracelets, or heck if you find them cheap on the AH or on trade buy them out and but that silly looking Swift Lovebird which will be a high price mount as soon as the event is over. As it is now it is going for about 20-45k on the AH, but when the event is over and people are no longer able to obtain them their price will go up. The mount costs 270 tokens, so if you end up buying your bracelets for 50g or even cheaper then obtaining this mount would cost you 13,500g which you will easily be able to sell for 20-30-or even more as time goes by.

Just as a bonus though don't forget to check the price of the Truesilver Shafted Arrow which is a compantion that you will be able to obtain as well that you can flip on the auction house.

For the end here is a quick video of how it looks like when doing it with a bear.

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

Primal Gold Farming

2012-02-06T12:04:00.000+01:00

This post here today is more or less a engineering only earning way, so if you are not an engineer you can't profit from it. If you happen to be a engineer though, and you have been playing back in the TBC era you probably know of it, if not you are about to learn about it.

Now as you are seeing this troll you are probably thinking that i am going to tell you to farm some troll, but no i am not, because i like trolls and more importantly because it would be pointless. The reason why i put up an image of this troll here is because this troll is going to be responsible for you making a ton of gold.

The name of this troll is Mack Diver, and the reason why he is special is that he is a engineering trainer found in Zangarmarsh, but more importantly he is the trainer that is going to teach you how to make a Zapthrottle Mote Extractor. This is a gold making machine, not in the way that it makes gold out of thin air, but rather helps you make money out of air.

Ok now it's time that i stop being so vague and actually tell you how it works. As you can see on the image on the right, that is my engineer using the mote extractor on gas clouds, so i can extract the motes found in them.

Different zones have different clouds, and that means that you get different motes by extracting them. Just so you know. if you keep the actual Mote Extractor it will show you the gas clouds on the mini map when you are close to them, which is kinda cool opposed to the way it used to be when you had to have it equipped on your head to see them, which made your character look "intellectually impaired".

This whole thing was very profitable like two patches away where alchemy respec was done easiest by buying a few Primal Might off the AH, but since the change the need for it has lowered but still there is some demand. One thing should be clear though, if the demand has lowered then the suppliers have moved away as well, so ironically i have seen more sales since then and for higher prices too. People will still need those Primals for their crafting professions, and what better way to make a coin then by hasty crafters.

There are five primals that can be farmed but i will focus on the two that are a fast and high seller Primal Air and Primal Water. Both of these can be farmed by using the mote extractor. Up on the second image you can see my engineer using the extractor to obtain Water and Air motes. The Water clouds can be found in Zangarmarsh while the Air ones can be found in Nagrand, and as you can see they have a different appearance and can easily be distinguished. You can farm the Shadow Primals as well down in Shadowmoon Valley, but i haven't seen the price of demand on those to be worth you a while.

Before i head out a quick recap. If you don't have the mote extractor go and get it, if you happen to fly though Outland check out Zangarmarsh and Nagrand for clouds, and if no one is selling any on the Auction House then you have found your own niche market to hold and control.

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

New In WoW ( Part 3 )

2012-02-04T13:22:00.001+01:00

Here we are back again with another installment in the Starter Kit section of the blog. In the previous two parts of this section i covered what you will do when you are starting out, up until you hit level 20ish. In this post i will tell you how i got though 20 to 40, but will focus more on the actual gold making possibilities opposed to the leveling itself.

See this guy on the image on the left, that is exactly how i was while leveling. Now don't get me wrong, i wasn't transformed into an old Japanese dude pulling a cart with a metric ton of stuff with him, no, i was a druid carrying twice as much as this guy. I mean i kept everything i looted from mobs, and i looted everyone.

Now you might think that this is nothing worth mentioning, but to a new player this is his lifeline of gold income. Remember i started out as any new character would, so no gold to help me out, no friends to give me a hand and no 16 slot bags off the start, so basically just like any new player would.

To be perfectly honest i was surprised at how well some of the "vendor trash" that most of us refer to sells on the auction house. What i mean when i say vendor trash, is all those meats you end up getting while killing animals out there. Also i had some good sales with the cloth i was getting.

Now i originally wasn't going to add this bit to the starting out "guide" but hell it would be a major fail on my end if i didn't tell you. As you can see on the image on the right i got my little 'ol druid in the Mogging market, and it payed off.

With the gold i got from those boots i invested into new 30ish items that i got off the Auction House so i am expecting to see some income from that investment. Another thing i would like to get the people to keep their eyes open for is the leveling greens. What i mean by this is, when you kill a mob and it drops a low level green, don't go and vendor it if you don't need it but instead check out how it's visual aspect is, and if you deem it to look cool then slap it on the AH for a good price.

Another thing opposed to selling the items for transmogrification, and selling the cloth and what not, you should still continue to sell the obvious items as well as sell the pets you can acquire as you move through the game.

Now in the previous posts i mentioned that i took two professions for my druid, leatherworking and skinning. The skinning on it's own can get you on your feet alone as the low level leather is always in high demand and low supply, but me being me i decided that i want to level the leatherworking as well so that huge boost of low level gold was wasted for me, but hey i'm leveling up a profession that will pay up in the future ... or i hope it will, we will see.

I know this wasn't a huge eye opener for many of you that have played through this on many of your alts as i have, but i have something to add before i leave. Leveling an alt on your server, where you have heirlooms, gold and friends to help you out with has nothing on leveling a alt all by yourself on a different server. I mean without the XP boost of the heirlooms i get to see the world as it was meant when Blizzard decided to change it with the Cataclysm, and i can say it's fun. I have 10 characters and pretty much knew all the quests by hearth, but this time around i saw many new and exciting quests, and because i didn't have the heirlooms i actually saw all the quests there were in certain zones.

So a short recap for what to do in this, still low level bracket of the game:

Continue selling the obvious items
Get more into the pet market as it gets more available
Sell the meat you get on the Auction house not the vendor
Sell the cloth you get
Sell the leather you get ( unless you decide to level up leatherworking )
Take your greens and slap them on the AH for the moggers to buy
And most importantly .. HAVE FUN DOING IT ALL

Ok now before i leave i will give you one more thing, and this is a very special picture as it is basically a picture of the fun i've had in game up until now.

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

Transmogrification Gold Run

2012-01-31T13:12:00.001+01:00

Here i am today making yet another Transmogrification post. In one of my previous posts i covered how to get your hands on some items that you can use to get your transmogrification business started, well today is going to be a bit of that same formula, just it is going to be like it's on steroids.

First of all i would like to say one thing, i did this for a while and it was good for me, but then i read about it on a post which i will link it that pretty much took my usual run and made it to be super awesome and profitable What i am talking about could be referred as the Transmogrification Speed Run. The reason why i'm calling it that is because it would take less then 10 minutes to complete, and yet it will yield anywhere from 5-15 items, depending on your server. But enough with the gibber jabber let me tell you what this is.

It is basically a rare spawn run, more accurately would be Blasted Lands run. Why this is so good is that you can take the portal from your major city that leads you to the Outland portal, and from there the hunting can begin right away.

Now like i said, i did this for a while but it was a post from Power Word: Gold that actually did make me take a second look at it, and it was worth it.

As you can see on the map above, that is where you might find all the rare mobs in the zone, and as you might see there can be quite a few of them. As these zones are usually empty all the mobs are just waiting there to be killed. Now how this is very profitable is that when killing any rare mob, except the green item they also drop either a Imperfect Draenethyst Fragment or Flawless Draenethyst Sphere. The deal with these is that you can turn them in at Kum'Isha a mob in the zone that will give you a bag which contains a green or a blue item in every single one you give him. So basically what this means is that you are getting 2 or more items from every single rare mob you kill.

Another thing i would like to say is that i am always about giving credit where it's due, and this is one of those cases, and this is why. Faid from Nerf Faids made a targeting macro that makes this as easy as simply flying around and clicking that macro and it will target that rare mob if he is anywhere around you. So here is the macro:

/tar akub
/tar blackl
/tar cassia
/tar clack
/tar deathe
/tar dreadsc
/tar grunter
/tar magro
/tar mojo
/tar mord
/tar narix
/tar rava
/tar spite
/tar terem

So load up this into a macro, then start flying around and get to killing while clicking that targeting macro. In continuation here is a video of the entire run done in less then 10 minutes that yielded some good amount of items, though i have had better luck.

That is all for now, so as always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

The Spotlight ( January )

2012-01-30T16:49:00.000+01:00

Here we are with another edition of The Spotlight series. In the previous posts i showed you blogs, podcasts, games and anything else i found interesting for that month. For this month i have a few things i would like to share that will prove to be entertaining to all of you that enjoy a good comic book, and after that i will share with you a site that can help you decide which server to go to if you are starting out a new character in WoW.

First comic i will tell you about is the CAD comic. I have been reading this comic for years and years and have always enjoyed doing so. Just so you get interested in the whole deal let me give you a bit of a basic information as to what the comic is all about. This comic revolves around the lives of, initially the two main characters Ethan and Lucas who are two gamers.

If you have never heard about this comic and are a comic fan i would really recommend you start reading it from the first one, and even though it will take you some time to read them all, it will make it so worth your time and you will have so much fun reading it.

The second comic i was talking about is the Looking For Group comic. I am quite sure that many of you out there have heard about this comic, some are reading it while there are still many out there that have been blessed with never having heard about it. Now don't get this wrong, i'm saying blessed because they will be able to start reading this whole comic from the first page and enjoy in it's pure awesomeness.

As a quick intro to the comic. It starts off as a introduction of two of the main characters Cale and Richard. Now Cale is a "kind" of a hunter while Richard is a Warlock and in the first few pages you will get the idea as to what kind of a warlock he is. I will refrain of giving you more details only so you can get on there and actually read about it and enjoy it.

The last page i have for you is wow.realmpop.com . I am showing you this page as it is a visual representation of the population any given WoW server has. This is very useful if you want to know how does the server fare population wise, and what is the average ratio of Alliance to Horde. You can get to the site directly from wow.realmpop.com or you can get there from www.theunderminejournal.com ( i'm putting this down because i had a case when i told someone that the site was beginning with wow.something he accused me of trying to lead him to a hacking site or something like that ... some people )

Anyways this is what i had to share for this month, i am hoping that for next month i will have a more WoW related sites to share with you nice folks, or even better if you have came upon any worthy site that you deem worthy to share put it here and the people will hear about it.

That's all for now, so till next time, keep your eyes open for good opportunities out there.

Profiting With Alchemy

2012-01-28T13:02:00.001+01:00

One of my preferred ways of making my sales has always been to use advertisement. The trick to doing this is actually that you need to get into a market that has a fast moving product, and the sales you do are cheap but numerous. Just so it's more clear as to what i mean when i'm talking about a fast moving product, think about the Mysterious Fortune Cookies. But seeing as this is a post that is more about Alchemy, and less about Inscription, i give to you the Potion of Illusion.

In case you have heard, or used these potions you know that their ability to offer some amusement is very good, but in case you have never heard or seen these potions then the quick explanation would be that they are a appearance altering potion. What this means is that when you drink one of these potions you can look like someone else.

If you look up on the image above i have made a comparation of how the potion looks like when used on different characters. On the first image you can see that my character is a Tauren, then on the second one i stepped next to a warlock and drank a potion and ended up looking just like him, then i did it next to a person that had eaten one of the Savory Deviate Delight that makes you look like a ninja or a pirate, and i copied his appearance. And on the last one i even copied the appearance of a troll druid in his flight form and i became a walking bat, hmm one might say i became a Batman .. or a Batcow.

Ok so now that you know what this potion does i am sure you can see the possibility this potion offers. As we said the cool factor of this potion is high, so if you put a good price on it and then do some advertisement you end up with loads of gold in your pockets. Best thing about these potions is their crafting cost, they only require 1 Azshara's Veil and 3 Volatile Life so basically they cost next to nothing. When selling these though it's a good idea to put them in stacks of 1's and 5's, i have put them in 20's as well but haven't had as much sales as in the 1's and 5's stacks. As for the prices i have sold mine for anywhere in the 15-40g per one price range.

As i said in the beginning the good thing about this item is you can use advertisement to help your sales. What you are going is that you are telling people what the item is, and why they should buy it. As you can see on the image that is the macro that i use, and i have had some good success with it. Now you can take what you learned and go hit the auction house, or you can make one more macro that would be a followup to the first macro. That followup macro is the one i use when someone makes a positive remark about how the macro is composed and they like it. As you can see i take the compliment, then i swing it around and make it so that i

end up further advertising my product, and with that convincing even more people to buy my potions.

So i see no point in further breaking it down as it is fairly simple, yet very profitable venture to get into doing. And as the icing on the cake is the finishing touch, i leave you all with another video in which you can see how this whole sale process is going. ( I know i am not the best YouTuber out there but i will try to make more and better videos in the near future )

A fast recap of this post would be Make the potions, bark the macro, get the gold.

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

Transmogrification, Gold Maker's Style

2012-01-26T11:59:00.002+01:00

In the last few days i was a bit occupied with making the interview with the Mogfather which ended up being a very informative, as well as profitable venture. I did a bit of a research as to how the whole process is done, and then took it upon me to further put the gold maker touch to it. In this post i will cover a few things after which you should have a sold base on which to build on if you decide to get into the transmogrification business.

Before i start to get into detail on how everything works, and the how's and why's i would like to clear up one thing, and that thing is the whole logic behind this market. If you get into this market you will be entering the vanity market, that means that the items you are selling will NOT make the buyer stronger in any way, there will be no buffs, but instead you will make them appear different and with that stand out from the crowd. This is actually a very powerful mover, and it will make people spend huge amounts of gold on a piece of gear that in their eyes will make their avatar look awesome, and the place which is between the buyer and it's ability to look awesome is the place where we will put ourselves at, and profit from the whole affair, so let's get started.

Phase One (Getting The Addons)

Before you start getting anything done there are a few things you need to get. First thing that will make your entire job a much easier is downloading an addon called Mogit.

Upon downloading the addon, what it does is it makes a new view frame whenever you mouse over an item that is equipable by your character and how this makes it more unique then the blizzard frame is that this addon will make your character appear with nothing but the item on him equipped, so you can have a focused view on the given item.

The advantage this addon gives is that it makes your decision whether to buy the item based on it's appearance or not, much easier.

The second addon you want to have is Auctionator, but if you have been in the auction house business for a while i am sure you already have that one covered.

Phase Two (Research and Acquisition)

So now that we have the addons that we will be using it is time we focus on the research and acquisition part of the whole deal. The first part of the research can be done in two ways, a manual way and an automated way. Both of these ways have their pros and cons, and i will try and explain both.

The manual way of doing the research is by simply going over to the auction house and start going through the items that are listed there. One thing though when you are listing make sure you are listing them category by category, and make the search to include items that are in the 1-70 item level range. The reason for this is that the items above that are simply too look alike like the current content and seeing as we are in the vanity market where we sell the pretty and cool, it's pretty much not worth it.

So now that we are on the auction house window and we have set up the range to be 1-70 we can start scrolling and looking for a good deal. Another thing that is important is, if you are selling an item and have the ability check out and see how that model is going to look on a male and a female character, because many of the buyers are willing to spend huge amounts of gold on items that make their female character look like they are in a bikini.

There are three categories that turn out to be most profitable and those are the Plate, Cloth and Weapons. Now don't take this the wrong way and think that there is no gold to be made because that would be wrong. Anyways when you are scrolling through the auction house what you are doing is you are looking for two things: a cool looking item, and a low price. As you can see up on the image above, and the one on the left i found both of those weapons for a 5g and 20g buyout price. Now what i can do is take those and flip them for 200, 500 or even 1500 or more gold depending on the unique aspect of the item. I will refrain from giving out prices for items because i am quite a new player in the transmogrification business and i have only sold about a dozen items, but there are other people out there that you can ask for prices that are more then willing to help you, like the Mogfather. (check the end of the post for the contact info)

If you would like to learn how you can make this whole process on a auto pilot kind of a way you might want to check Jim's Post on Power Word:Gold about it, in which he makes a good and quite informative post about it.

Phase Three (The Go Getter)

This last phase has nothing to do with the basics of the transmogrification business, but is a rather more of a gold maker's view on how to open up a small starting quantity of items for yourself in case someone has bought out all the cheap items and left you with nothing.

The problem with getting your own green items is kind of a problem due to the randomness of it all, but there is a way you can do it non the less. Instead of explaining how to do it though, i went ahead and made a pretty video of it that will make sure that everyone can repeat and no one will get lost. Just as a clarification you will need to get to Scholomance in the Western Plaguelands.

So as you can see in the video, you can get a rather good stash of starting items in a fairly quick manner by just doing this and then resetting the instance and doing it again. Though you can also choose to gather up the mobs in the instance and just kill them and loot them all for additional ways to get greens.

That's all for today, and i am sure i will make an even more detailed post on how to profit further in the transmogrification market as i get more experienced in the market myself. But until then, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

The Mogfather Interview

2012-01-25T10:06:00.000+01:00

I have said it before and i will say it again, WoW has multiple ways to make gold, and lately after the 4.2 patch and the release of the transmogrification a new and profitable market has emerged, the market of the item flipping. This market has been quite profitable for some while others haven't had much luck, yet. I am happy to tell you that i managed to score an interview with the one and only Mogfather, and managed to pick his brain about some of the things he is doing and intends to do in the future, so in continuation read all about the Mogfather.

Who is the Mogfather?

IRL I'm the head of a design research agency consulting behind the scenes of a few different industries. This is sorta the driver behind why my view on transmogrification is so informed. It was also the fuel behind the blog I started back in August, Disenchanting Azeroth, where I broke down a variety of weapons and gear by their aesthetic makeup and provided readers with various tools to help them decide which items would be the most relevant to wear with the release of transmogrification.

When my son was born in September, though, I had to put the blog on hold and have since been living out my WoW experience via iPhone RAH, Twitter and occasional guest posts over at powerwordgold.net.

I've been trying to put together a new article on the DA blog, but it's been a struggle with my schedule. That's where this little mini game of gold-making has been quite easy and it only takes a few minutes each day.

In-game, I've been around since the late stages of Vanilla but I didn't really get into the challenges of gold-making until about a year ago when I had to seek out a different way to play WoW. My life/work schedule got pretty slammed and I just couldn't raid and do all the little things anymore. As it has been for so many others, making gold just became sort-of a mini game within WoW that I could do at my own pace.

Why did you decide to get into the 'mogging market ?

That's an interesting question if you think about it. I'd actually argue the 'mogging market' didn't exist on my realms. I had to create it and structure it in such a way that it was logical and could sustain growth. In terms of why did I decide to go this route, it really came down to a realization that I, myself, was the target customer. I had certain looks I wanted to acquire for my characters (my Priest, Warrior, Paladin, Mage and Druid are all transmogged), and I found myself searching the auction house for those items. The more I looked, the more I found myself snatching a pair of gloves or a belt for 5g with my heart pounding. I was so psyched that I could get the items I wanted so cheaply without having to pay an arm and a leg like you typically do for anything of value on the AH. That's when it hit me, that I was actually WILLING to pay much more than I had. Take the Hyperion chest piece, for example. That was one of the first pieces that really eluded me. I literally had to transfer a toon to the Moon Guard realm in order to pick one up. And once I got there, I would have forked over 5,000g if I had to in order to get it. As a consultant, I know the biggest advantage anyone in sales or services can have is knowing their customer. Well I knew my customer, because I was one of them. I knew players would pay upwards of 5,000g, 10,000g for a green because I was willing to do so, myself.

When that realization hit me, I began buying everything I could find from a list I had in my head that gold-makers now refer to as my "top tiers". So Hyperion plate as well as Glorious, Lofty, Vanguard, Exalted, Overlord and Alabaster. And I moved to Mail and Cloth as well with the same model. I didn't sink into Leather because I personally had no interest in decking out my Druid since he was Feral, and in realizing that my hunch was that left only Rogues for my future customer base in Leather. Did I think no Druids would transmog their gear? No, of course some would. But my hunch was compared with Plate, Mail and Cloth, Leather simply wouldn't generate as much revenue. So I pretty much avoided it, and looking back now I think it was the right decision. I still refuse to put a list together now because I don't think it would be very genuine of me to do so. I built my strategy and made 1 million gold without Leather, so why start talking Leather now? It would be out of character.

One key point to make, too, is that on the surface it looks like the items I value the most are done so primarily because they look "skimpy" on female models. People have commented on this, and while I'll never be able to convince everyone, that was not the reason I placed such high values on them. Readers that followed my work on Disenchanting Azeroth know I'm breaking down visual elements very carefully and there is a methodology for determining visual uniqueness. I haven't produced a visualization analysis of armor, but if I did you'd see the sets I place such high value on rise way out of the crowd of sameness that we currently see in-game. They are so different, that I've argued you could screenshot some of them in front of an ambiguous background and confuse readers into thinking they were looking at armor from a different game, entirely.

So some will continue to say "meh, they're skimpy outfits", and I don't doubt that some players are purchasing them for that reason. But I remain convinced that the majority of the intrigue behind these items is they are just so incredibly different from the norm that players have been forced to choose from within WoW over the last few years. Look to the tools on my blog, get into my head a bit, follow me down the rabbit hole and you'll see where I'm coming from. This is where I believe I've earned the trust of a lot of gold-makers over the last month. For many, valuing items for transmogrification is a qualitative, intangible exercise. With my expertise, though, I can make it very tangible and the proof is in the 1 million I made in less than 45 days.

Which were the first items you ever sold that got you hooked?

You know, the scary thing is I was hooked before anything sold. I was actually willing to just horde everything and use all of the gear on my characters if things didn't sell on the AH. I just thought they were that cool. I've always been a bit of a collector in the game. Not of like, "every mount in-game", but more of an antiquities person that values very niche things. I guess though, if I had to pick something that sold that really sent the message home that my theories were right it would be a pair of Singing Crystal Axes for 10,000g a piece. I had put them up on the AH on Earthen Ring prior to the announcement that you only needed one weapon to transmogrify the items you were dual wielding. So at the time, my theory was put weapons up in pairs so you had a better chance of selling to Fury warriors and Rogues that would buy your items in two's. And the theory clicked because they were only up for about 12 hours and the pair of axes sold to one player. So that was the first sign and was enough momentum to keep me convinced to buy up everything I could at a cheap price right up until patch day.

Do you have a snatch list of items, or how do you go about your business?

Up until a few weeks ago it was a mental list I had in my head. But I was having such great success that others following me on Twitter really wanted what was in my head down on a list that they could import into mods. So currently my lists live over at The Hatchery on Power Word: Gold. I never wanted my own blog to be about gold-making because it's just not who I am. I've always been in it more for the challenge and I have a deeper appreciation for the heart of the matter with transmogrification, so I've been working with Jim Younkin over at Power Word: Gold to get my content up on a site that makes sense for gold-makers. That way I can keep my gold-making conversations separate from my design-related conversations, and Jim's been fantastic in that regard. But yeah, check out the lists over there because not only do I list the items I look for, you also get a sense of the hierarchy among them and what I typically move them for. And two questions I get a lot are:

1) Can they sell for more? Yes. But I've been selling these items on more than a dozen servers since patch 4.3, as I've relocated a number of times to help out others create their transmog market on their realm. So I have a lot of experience on what's too expensive versus what's too cheap. So while someone might get 5,000g for a pair of Glimmering Mail gloves, I've found that's not a sustainable price range. I'd rather move 10 pairs of gloves at 1,000g than one pair at 5,000g. The return is still exponential.

2) Can other items sell as well as what's in my lists: Yes. But again, I do feel the items in my list are going to be the more sustainable items that will appeal to a broader audience due to their unique visual appeal. And I don't flip anything over level 70. This probably isn't mentioned enough. I don't chase anything over level 70 because visually everything looks too close to current content. This is where my theory on the Banner Slicer (polearm) that just came up on Twitter a few days ago will probably be the first thing that bites me in the ass. Gimp over at Gimp's Gold asked me what I thought of it, and the pic I saw was on my iPhone while I was at a stop light (no, I don't surf while driving, haha). So the pic wasn't great, but I saw a unique form, the fact it was one-of-a-kind in terms of its model, it was an extremely low drop rate and it had a banner wrapped around it. For me, it was a no brainer that it could pull 5-10k because I would be willing to fork over that much for it. Polearms are a pain in the ass, if you've ever tried to transmogrify yours. There is nothing unique on the auction house, and there aren't very many models in-game that you could leverage to truly stand out. So it's a weak category in terms of options. So when I saw this blurry pic while in the car, I was convinced it would go big. I later got home and felt my stomach groan because the more I look at it in high resolution, the more I see it looks so much like every other weapon from Wrath of the Lich King. Ugh. So bad call on my part, and I'm now reducing all of the banners I picked up while at that stop light to about 1-2k and I'm crossing my fingers that players who are frustrated with the polearm options decide to go for it anyway for the reasons I mentioned.

We have heard that you gave away 1 million gold away, is that true ?

Yes sir, in fact WoWInsider just released an article on it which really got the word out that I had pulled it off. Again, it's never been about the gold-making. So when I saw the opportunity to flip the equation and give away 1,000,000 gold instead of making it and hording it, the idea felt more relevant to who I was in the gold-making arena.

Well why did you decide to give it away?

Well, partially to see if I could do it. It wasn't that easy, I mean I got banned four times. There was one point where I was almost willing to just leave my account banned and not return, it was really frustrating. I think the other reason to do it was to further differentiate myself from the average gold-maker. It's been a fun ride because I've developed this persona of the Mogfather in the process, and with the transmogrification events I've been holding on various servers and the attention from WoWInsider and even Blizzard customer service, it's gotten bigger than I'd even expected. I think I've even got some fans in customer service because the message I've been getting from them lately has been "we really love what you're doing, keep doing it".

What are your plans for the future, and how do you see the 'mogging market unraveling?

So I've heard a bit of talk about the mogging market unraveling, I've seen it from more than a few people in various places and you're always going to hear me argue against this in force because I really don't hear anyone else taking the PRO side of the argument.

Will the markets we see currently persist over time, where we're able to pull in 10,000g a day? To be honest, I'd answer it depends on what's in your intentory, what your realm size is and your faction. Some of these items are so rare that their value should persist over time because they're that desirable and that difficult to find. I would never want to be on the side of an argument saying that Teebu's Blazing Longsword, the Glorious plate set or the Zulian Ceremonial Staff isn't going to be valuable in a few months. It’s a losing argument. So there are absolutely marquee pieces that will sustain their value.

But even the marquee items aside, if anyone out there thinks that the transmogrification market is going to disappear entirely and that this is a fluke I believe they'd be wrong. For some players, transmogrification transcends the need for ore, enchanting materials and herbs and you can start that theory with two thumbs pointing right back at this guy, in me personally. For those of us who are passionate about personalization, we will always be in the market for transmogrification items from the auction house. When we find what we want, using external resources and websites, we'll not want to wait - we'll want it NOW. And if we have a disposable income, we'll pay for it. And I now know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Look at the followers that flocked to my blog, which hit over 100,000 page views in its first six weeks. Look at the fresh content being generated on other websites, blogs, on Twitter, in conversation and in-game. It's all about personalization and with transmogrification Blizzard has unlocked a key component to the sustainability of their in-game experience. It's here to stay, and to assume the buyers are going to walk away after this wave is rushing to judgement too quickly.

And for those that would argue that once an item is purchased it never needs to be purchased again - and therefore the buyer population is limited, I would say look to the glyph market. Players only need a glyph once and they will never need it again, yet glyph markets have sustained their value since Cataclysm changed the model. I'm not saying the glyph buyer population is the same size as the transmogrification buyer population. I'm saying it leaves the door open to possibility. Let's take me, for example. I've got about 9 characters I could transmogrify. I've done so with 5 of them, but am I done? Far from it. I mean FAR from it. Really only my Warrior is decked out in his bank and Void Storage to the point where clothing options are starting to overflow. But I would LOVE to build the same wardrobe for the rest of my characters. I just don't have the time right now. And with transmogrification, the fantastic thing is if I want to change my look, I can. If I look to my wardrobe and I don't like what I see, I can go to the store and buy something new. The model of buyer interest is no different than you or I going shopping to get some new clothes for Fall, or something new simply because we've been wearing the same thing for the last two months. This has been a constraint with WoW for years, that your look has always been bound by what the current tier gear is. Not anymore. The door has been unlocked and the versatility of this market is probably yet to be truly tapped. So is this market done? No. Far from it.

Now, devil's advocate. Will we pull 10,000g a day the way some of us are doing now? It's going to get harder and harder, that's for sure. My main realm on Proudmoore is a great example of this, because I believe we're ahead of the curve on where transmogrification is going to go. I spear-headed it so early by releasing an entire inventory of relevant and highly desirable pieces on patch day, that I believe we're ahead of the average progression towards more of a mainstream market. We've got more sellers of transmog items on Proudmoore now than I even thought would be possible. Everyone's getting in on it. So have I noticed a decline in my numbers? Yes, I have. But here's the catch: that decline hasn't been a slippery slope, it's just dropped to a lower frequency of items sold and it has leveled out. So instead of bringing in 15,000g a day, I'm bringing in about 5,000g a day and about 10,000g every 3 days. Prices haven't gone down! If anything, they've gone up.

Here's the second catch: This is not a traditional market. It's not crafted items. It's not herbs or ore that you have guaranteed nodes you can track. These are not things you can simply "go out and get" and put up on the auction house. These are world drops, and there's just no guarantee of what you're going to get or what's going to pop up on the auction house that you can flip. So this market is going to be extremely unique going forward in that its resources will be limited and unpredictable. And players are still buying, even on Proudmoore. So will I make 10,000g a day? Probably not. But will I make a few thousand a day and have a big day at least once a week? So far that's exactly what I'm seeing. And these items in my top tiers, they're so rare and hard to find that they should maintain their value going forward.

So the market will be there, I just suspect it won't be quite as glorified and easy as it is right now. But no, transmogrification as a market is not going away. Will there be commodity items? I think so, especially if you look at sets that either have a higher drop rate or they're from content that is being run again and again by levelers which deluges the auction house with fresh meat. A great example here that I see on multiple realms is the Bloodfist plate set. It's a fabulous set, but it's becoming increasingly common. Well where does it drop? Outlands leveling content. Death Knights. Burning Crusade transmog runs. It adds up. So whereas now you can squeeze in a Bloodfist item for a couple thousand gold, I suspect in a few months the Bloodfist set will be a prime example of something that has had its value decline simply because the rate at which world drops can occur will be higher since Outlands is just a popular place again given the rise of transmogrification. But again, this market isn't going to disappear. It's far too important to those that value it.

Anything else you would like to share with our readers?

No sir. Thanks for the opportunity!

So if you are still reading that means you had a chance to see how the mind of the Mogfather works, and how he came to be what he is now. I really did enjoy writing this article because there are many gold makers out there, but only a handful that are original and unique, and this guy is one of those guys. So my thanks goes to the Mogfather which you can find on Twitter @DEazeroth.

The Gold Making Carnival

2012-01-23T11:05:00.002+01:00

This is my first entry for the monthly Gold Making Carnival that Cold, over at Cold's Gold Factory is hosting, so hopefully we will see more posts in the future. For this month Cold decided to choose a rather, how should i say this so it sounds right, it's a weird yet fun subject, namely he choose a topic where we should name our favorite spot in the WoW universe, and then explain as to why exactly do we like that spot, be it for the practicality of the spot or some other connection you might have to that spot.

I will start off by naming my two favorite places due to their practicality, and just so it's clear upfront, they are both in Orgrimmar so they are both Horde oriented, so this isn't a very Alliance friendly zone.

My Bread And Butter Place

The place that i am talking about is the auction house in the Troll district. Now the reason why i love this place is very simple. It is the most efficient place for any auctioneer out there because the bank, the auctioneer and the mailbox are all within reach of each other. I could go about and show you where this place is by posting a image of it, but this time around for the first time i will use a video, so hopefully it will be fine.

So the video is quite self explanatory, and you can see just how close the auctioneer, and banker and the mailbox are close to each other.

Now Cold said that the rules of the post were that the places we share should have a meaning to us, be it practical or emotional or whatever, so the next three places i'll share will be the three places in WoW that i love, and i will even explain why i actually love them.

The first place i will name as the place i love in WoW would have to be Winterspring. The reason for me loving this place dates as back as Vanilla WoW. When i would do the quests in Felwood and then finally get the high enough level i could progress up to Winterspring which was like going from the place of agony and depression to a place of true serenity and peace. That used to be one of the things i used to love about Blizzard that they would make their games to have those kinds of transitions in the game.

The place that i took the screenshot is one that i love the most, and that is the cave that used to be the entrance to the end chain to the Onyxia attunement quest. I remember that back in the days to do the whole quest chain, then go through the cave trying to dodge all the whelps in there used to feel epic, and when you would finally get to the end and get the attunement done, you felt like you have done a great thing.

The second place that was special to me was the Western Plaguelands. For those of you that joined the WoW caravan in Cataclysm and only know WPL as the Alliance farm country side i feel sorry for you.

WPL used to be the most awesome place to powerlevel when you had the level requirement to start doing the quests, but this is not the reason why i chose to mention this place. The real reason why i will always love this place, and the tower on the image in particular is because it was this tower that gave me one of my best WoW experiences, namely it gave me 3 crusader patterns in the course of 4 days farming it, that eventually led to me buying my epic riding skill and horse.

And the last but not the least favorite spot is the Redridge Mountains but more precisely the bridge at Lakeshire.
Like with all the places i named until now this one has a special reason for me to like it as much as i do even though it is deserted like 99.9% of the time.

That reason that i was talking about is that on that bridge, back in the first month of the release of WoW i met a very special friend that i ended up playing with him for about 2 years until i switched over to the EU servers, but to make it even more epic when i went over the big pond to the US i met up with him and had a blast. So it is this place that is responsible in my case that i made a friend that i had awesome time in WoW as well as outside in the real world, and that is why this place is always going to be important for me in a special way.

So that is about all i have to say about the places in WoW that i like, and once again this post is made for Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival. I am hoping that i will continue to make posts for the Carnival in the future, and that next month we will have a more gold oriented topic.

That's all for now, and don't forget, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

The Gold Makers, Who Are We ?

2012-01-21T12:09:00.001+01:00

So all the gold making bloggers, all the hardy goblins hard at work making gold, heck even all the farmers out there, who are we and what is our role in the economy of World of Warcraft? The answer to this question is a very simple answer, yet so complicated as well. We are the life lines of the whole economy.

What was the reason behind this that made me think about this you might ask, well it's one of the whispers i got when i was trying to help a guy make some gold. The given whisper was that the guy/girl asked me what's the point of hoarding gold.

This made me think, and i came up with a rather weird conclusion. The reason why i, and many others like me were "hoarding" gold is simply because that is what we enjoyed in the game. Some people enjoy PvP, others enjoy raiding while we enjoy raiding the Auction House. But this was already known, so i gave it a further thought as in what effect do we have in the economy, and that is when it actually got interesting. The economy if left unchecked simply dwindles down and goes into a kind of recession. To clarify this i will use a few examples:

As a first example i will use the gathering markets. These markets will have their prices totally decimated to the point of getting to be at 5-10g per stack of herbs or ore, and even then there will be almost no demand because 95% of the raw materials are bought out by people that are gold hoarders, or auction house junkies. Another market that i noticed that requires a constant looking after is the jewelcrafting market. This was the market that i used to make all my gold in, and i was very much into maintaining it and keeping it at a decent level. Well lately i decided to get out of it and see what is going to happen with it. The findings were quite interesting as well. In a matter of a week the prices of the gems went from a 150-195g sales down to 10-20g sales. Now i though that this might be the case due to many people switching over to using epic gems, and that they weren't buying the rares as much, and boy was i wrong. True, the epics have taken a piece of the market for rare gems, but still people use the epics only for their best gear possible and not everyone takes the step to improve to the epic ones, so they look back to the rares. What i do is nothing complicated and everyone can do it, heck i have even posted it here how i keep the prices of gems up and my favorite late night shuffle tactic.

So in a matter of a day i managed to take the prices of gems from 10-20g back up to 195g and sell quite a bit of them. Here's a hint if you choose to do this. Red, Purple and Orange gems have the biggest sale rate while the greens have really went into a deep recession so you can prioritize which gems you want to reset first.

Behold this is what you are! And no, you are not a faucet, but more of a gold sink. What this means is that if it weren't for us hoarders the amount of gold that would be in circulation would totally ruin the economy to the point where gold is worthless. Just stop and think for a second. everyone reading this has anywhere from 50k to a few million gold, because let's face it if you are reading gold making blogs that means that you are interested in making gold, and if you are doing any of the things that are mentioned here you are already in possession of quite a good amount of gold. Now with the amounts of gold that we have gathered, we have effectively taken it out of circulation, of a better part of it because we still use a small amount to fund our raw material purchases. I for one have had a few discussions on the MMO-Champion and Blizzard forums about what needs to be done to make the economy better, in terms of introducing more gold sinks. The reason why the gold sinks are important is because they make it so the players actually need to have gold to be able to buy something, or pay for their repairs or anything else for that matter, and if you loose that you will end up with a crippled economy like Diablo 2 had in it's case where gold was so abundant that it was worthless.

So as a bottom line one could come up with a conclusion that we, as gold makers and hoarders are the life line of the economy, we are the life line of the professions and last we are the life line of the game because we make is so that the economy doesn't crash and drive people away, and in return break apart guilds, PvP groups and the community in general.

So when next time someone asks you what is the point of you having all that gold, you can freely go ahead and tell him that you are doing it just so he can continue to play the game, and enjoy it with his friends.

That is all for today, and like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Explanation of Spreadsheets

2012-01-20T14:19:00.002+01:00

Sooooo, i should have known that after making the last post about the Ore Shuffle, and especially the part about the spreadsheets is going to get people to whisper me asking me for how to do it. Well i know i should just put a link to the Consortium where there is an explanation in the posts there and i tried but it only made it worse so here it is, a copy from their comments so everyone can find it easier.

First thing you need to do is go and make an account on The Undermine Journal, once you are logged there you can download your specific server's data as seen on the image.

Upon clicking that you will be asked where you want to save the file, so save it where you want.

Now once you have the file that contains your server's data saved you need to open it with Excel. The way to do this is you go in the Data Tab and open Connections as shown on the image.

Once you open this you get a new window where you need to hit Browse for more and find the file.

Once you have done this you have a choice, you can either set the refresh parameters to make it refresh it's data so it's current, or you can choose to only use the data you have downloaded and not set it up to refresh it's data. ( Very important is that if you want it to refresh make sure the threshold is over 288 minutes due to the fact that TUJ has a maximum number of allowed hashes you can do per day )

Hit OK until you're back to your spreadsheet, and make sure the TUJ data tab is selected. Now from the Data tab, hit Existing Connections

Select your newly-added connection, and hit Open. Make sure it goes in cell $A$1.

After you have filled this and you go back to the Prospecting tab you will find that all the prices are in the given fields, and all you need to do is set the number of stacks you have bought and it will tell you how much time you will need to invest and how much profit you should expect to get out of it. Oh and just in case, all of this that was explained need to be done while in the TUJ data tab which can be found on the bottom as shown on the image.

So that should clear up any confusion that people might have as to how to properly use spreadsheets that use the TUJ data as info base. And i will state once again, these instructions are not mine but were posted on the forums of the Consortium and the real gratitude should go to Baconcheese who is the user that made this walk through, i was only the messenger.

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

The Ore Shuffle

2012-01-18T13:09:00.001+01:00

The Obsidium Shuffle, or the Elementium Shuffle known by most is the grand jewel of Cataclysm that made many goblins very rich. Now here is the funny thing, even though we are nearing the end of the expansion and almost everything is out there, and everyone is making gold off the gold tricks and tips there are still people that have never heard of the Shuffle. The reason for making this post is quite simple, i have been trying to help people make gold on my server for a while now, and since i started the blog i had a place where i can redirect with anything they might want to know, but i saw that i didn't have a topic that explains the Shuffle so here it is.

The Ore Shuffle ( taken from the Consortium site )

As you can see from the image above it is very self explanatory, but i will go into a bit of explaining just in case. Just so you know in order to take the full extent of the profits the shuffle brings you need to have a Jewelcrafter, Blacksmith, Enchanter and Tailor (this one is optional).

The entire shuffle starts with the purchase of Obsidium, Elementium & Pyrite ore. Once you have bought them you have a choice, that choice boils down on whether you want to prospect the ore for the gems or you want to manufacture Heavenly Shards. In order to find out which one would be more profitable you need to check out your prices for the Heavenly Shards and if they are high, or you are low for your enchanting market you might want to go that way, but at the same time you want to check the prices of Greater Celestial Essences and the Infinite Dust as that is what you can get if you choose to take the prospecting road.

If you go with the prospect option you need to know how to get from having Alicite, Hessonite, Jasper and Nightstone into Heavenly Shards adn Greater Celestial Essences. By crafting the gems into rings and pendants and then disenchanting them you get to have the finished product. Now one of the things you should be aware is that if you decide to go this way you should know that you have a chance to get a rare (blue) ring or a Pendant. Now there is a bit of a trick here, and that trick is the item level of the items you end up getting and i will explain why.

If you are using Jasper then you are taking the best deal because the jasper is the only one that requires only one gem to make a ring, opposed to the other ones which will require you to spend 2 gems to make a single item. But this is not the best part, the best part is that when you end up getting a rare (blue) item, it is going to be a level requirement of 79 which makes it ideal for twinks and leveling characters, and i have been selling them anywhere from 300g to 50g, and that for a 3g gem is a 10000% profit margin.

If you are using Hessonite and Nightstone for your crafting you will need to spend 2 of them to get a single item. This on it's own puts it at 50% efficiency, and the other thing is that the rare (blue) items you get have a item requirement of 81 so the twinks are no longer your targeted market. But it's not all gloom and doom, and that is because if you disenchant these rings you get Heavenly Shards, as well as increased chance to get Greater Celestial Essences from disenchanting the green items.

I really don't see a point in explaining that you need to cut the rare gems and post them on the Auction House as that is quite obvious. And at the end of the explanation i can only offer to give you a place where you can get the best spreadsheet that can automatically tell you which road is the best to take, and which will make you the most gold. The site i'm talking about is the Consortium forums which will give you the most awesome weapon you can wield if you take on to do the Shuffle.

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

Inscription 2.0

2012-01-16T14:03:00.003+01:00

Welcome back for another edition in the Inscription profession. In the previous post that covered inscription i went ahead i told you how to get started out in inscription by installing TSM, configuring it and then sell the glyphs you have. Today i am going to tell you how to make profits from the profession by utilizing the other options that the profession offers.

DARKMOON CARDS

I will start off with the darkmoon cards. The deal with these cards is quite profitable, but there is a huge drawback as well and i will elaborate as to why. By making these cards early in the expansion you have a way to get one of the set cards which when you get them all you can turn them in at the Darkmoon faire and get a pretty awesome trinket that in most cases is BiS. Now the huge drawback that i was talking about comes with the introduction of new content patches where new, higher item level gear is introduced. What that does is, it makes them devaulate and loose their BiS status, heck they can be replaced by a instance trinket that might be better then it. But one thing remains, there are still people out there that are trying to boost their item level so they don't mind shelling out some gold for it, though that is very rare.

As a recap for the cards, they are very lucrative and profitable at the start of a expansion but they loose their worth down the road. But if you take into account that Mists Of Pandaria is nearing it's release, then you should know that this market will be a viable market once again, and if you are a scribe you should think about getting in and taking a slice of the profit pie.

MYSTERIOUS FORTUNE CARDS

This right here is the Mysterious Fortune Card. Many have had the good fortune of selling these on the auction house and making a killer sale, and many have had fun scratching these, having fun, and loosing all their gold in the process.

The fortune cards are an awesome item to sell, but their sales are not dependent on simply putting them on the auction house and expect to see the sales as you would with another item. Oh don't get me wrong, its not all that complicated to sell them as it might sound but it will require a bit of your wits, and a small amount of your time to bark a macro. But why am i rambling on and on, heck i'll get down to an example and show you exactly what it is.

There are a few things you need to know about the fortune cards before you start to deal with them.

Rule 1: Never flip the card yourself
Rule 2: Never ever even think of flipping the cards yourself
Rule 3: Ahh .. read Rule 1 or Rule 2

Now that you know the basic three rules i will give you a quick overview on what to expect from the people and who you are going to sell and when.

The cards are basically the Vegas of WoW, which means its the only way you can gamble with a chance to win big. What this means is that people can easily get addicted to it and spend great amounts of gold on it, which in return is a great thing for you because that gold goes to you. Now the people that you are targeting are the ones that like to gamble, but in order for them to actually buy your product you need to make it visually alluring. Seeing as how we can't use the usual marketing tactics, we need to advertise the WoW way. This kind of advertisement is done by barking macros. The idea is to make the macro descriptive as well as tempting to buy. The best results i have had were by linking the item as well as the prize in the same macro. I am guessing you know how to link items in macros as i have explained it previously. So with that in mind the macro that i used to make my gold from the cards is as following:

/2 Mysterious Fortune Card on the AH dont miss out on your chance to score the big win and net in 5000G for a measly price. Get yours while they last

/2 Feel like your luck is in your favor today? Well then why not test your luck and flip the Mysterious Fortune Card for a chance to win Fortune Card. Get yours from the AH now!

These two macros are a few of the ones that i used to make my gold off the cards, but know one thing though, you need to make a few macros that are different from each other buy yet they bark about the same thing. The reason for this would be because no one likes a spammer in trade, but if you are barking 5 different macros in a 1 minute intervals, well then people won't mind that much.

Just one last thing about the cards. If you happen to have cooking you can take your cards business to a whole new level by making Fortune Cookies. The deal with these is that they offer the same "gamble" as the cards but with an added kick, they give a fairly good food buff so you can sell this to raiders and dungeon runners. Same as the cards you get fairly quick results by making an ad about this and barking in trade. I will give you an example of what i have been using to sell them.

/2 Off to a raid,need food [Fortune Cookie] on the AH. Get your class best food buff along side with a chance to get [Fortune Card] and profit 5K gold

PVP RELICS

One of the markets that is generally looked over by the majority of the scribes is the relic market. What this market offers is actually a piece of the PvP profits that we can take for our own. Best thing about the relics is that with every major patch the item level of the relics is being upgraded to match the current honor equivalent.

But without making this any longer that it has to be, if you are a scribe make the Vicious Eyeball of Dominance, Vicious Charm of Triumph and Vicious Jawbone of Conquest.

One of the things you need to know though is when you are buying the needed materials for them, buy them from a vendor don't buy them from the Auction house. You don't want to be on the short end of the stick on a topic that i have covered months ago.

This about wraps up the alternative to glyph inscription market and if you follow them you are sure to make some good profits.

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

Inscription

2012-01-15T12:42:00.003+01:00

As you might have seen i like making my titles a bit on the amusing side but today i chose to go with a simple title, inscription. From the given title you can guess that this post is going to cover the profession Inscription. I will try and break it down, and tell you about my experiences with the profession and what to keep an eye out for, and what to stay away from. Ok lets get down to the core of the profession and start from there.

Glyph Market

Glyphs will be the first of the markets that you will cover with inscription. This market is a rather big one due to the fact that everyone needs their glyphs for their characters to use. This market used to be a lot more dynamic when the glyphs were used every time when you wanted to respec, but since then and the change where it was made into, buy it once own it forever, that market kinda lost my interest in it. Now don't get me wrong, there is metric tons of gold to be made in it.

Inscription TSM settings

Your first encounter with the glyph market will come quite early on in the game, namely while you are leveling your inscription. Now here is good bit of information, don't judge the glyph market according to the price of those glyphs as you will find their price to be abysmally low in the majority of the cases, and yes i am talking about the low level glyphs. The reason behind their low price is not that they are not used but simply a supply/demand issue. As you are leveling through the profession by crafting those glyphs know that other scribes that are leveling are doing the same thing, and then they are putting their finished glyphs up on the auction house, while at the same time there aren't enough new buyers for that particular glyph so you end up with overstock of that glyph.

Now one important thing that i would like to make it clear before anything else is what you MUST do to succeed in this market. It is totally imperative that you obtain all the glyphs, and be able to craft them all so your competition doesn't have the upper hand on you with glyphs you don't have. There are three things you must do to obtain all the possible glyphs, those are the daily research minor and major glyphs, the northrend research and last is the glyphs you get out from Book Of Glyph Mastery. If you do all your researches, and read enough books you will be able to craft all the glyphs in due time.

If you have chosen to take on inscription but you don't like the hassle of having to manually check for undercuts on your 800 glyphs, well then you can make this much easier by using Trade Skill Master. I know i have posted the how to use the addon link in the previous few posts, but i keep finding people that don't know what TSM is, or how to use it, so i like to have it handy for them.

On the image above you can see TSM with a single group named Glyphs. What i have done for ease of use is put all the glyphs i have into a single group, with universal settings for all of them. The reason behind this logic for me is simple, all the glyphs cost the same three inks that you can trade down from the latest links available. The settings for this group for me is as following:

Post Time 12h ( This is if you can log in at least twice a day, or you fancy yourself a camper )
Post Cap 3 ( I've used this amount because it's enough to cover the market before i'm undercut )
Undercut 1c ( This is a no brainer, i always undercut for 1c so i don't bring down the price much )
Price Threshold 20g ( I won't sell if the price goes under this threshold )
Fallback Price 550g ( If no one is selling a particular glyph i have no problem with overpricing it )

With these settings for your glyphs you can turn a nice profit if you are keen on making it in the glyph market. I have made two other posts about Inscription which you can find in the Inscription section and they give out some nice tips about how to make a profit from inscription other then using glyphs. As for the glyph market i am pretty sure i covered the basics, and in the next addition i will further elaborate on how to make gold from inscription by branching out from the glyphs and using the other goodies Inscription has to offer.

Before i leave though i want to give you a link to Croda's Blog. This guy is covering the glyph market in his blog and is rather fond of his profession, so if you want to get some deeper appreciation for the glyph market you might want to check out his blog as well as the FREE inscription guide he has on his blog. Oh, oh before i forget, he has awesome music that you can play while at his blog so you might want to check that out as well.

So, until next time, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Fashionable Gold Making

2012-01-14T18:12:00.001+01:00

For the last few days while i was away, i managed to get access to wireless internet even though i though that i was going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere and would probably end up meeting Courage the Cowardly Dog ( you are awesome if you know him ). Well with the access to the net and no PC or laptop to get in the World of Warcraft i was left with the option to scour the social networks to find some entertainment, and get to see what the other people are doing. Well what i found out was a pure awesomeness in it's raw form.

Without further ado i would like to introduce to you a very interesting individual to follow, The Mogfather. You can find him on Twitter @DEazeroth. Now that i told you what to look at, let me tell you the why part.

If you have been reading my blog you can pickup many tips on how to configure your addons or how to make gold, some is from selling pets, some is from gems, some is from obvious sales but all in all it's how to make gold. Well this guy is taking a different approach at the gold making game, namely he is selling the pretty and the cool, and may i say it he's doing it rather well. Reading up on his Twitter and seeing his posts and sales he is doing more then well, he is doing fantastic and the reason why this is so fantastic is the sheer simplicity of it all.

What this cool cat is doing it buying out all the cheap greens that are Vanilla, TBC, Wrath and everything in between, then pricing it high and then reaping the winnings. I saw a few screens where he bought an item for 4g and flipped it for 1500g, and the best thing is it's not a one time deal, it's more of a constant, every day ordeal with him. So i have told you what this guy does, but now i will tell you why i decided to put the center light on him, with all the gold this guy is making he is pushing for one thing 1 million gold, but check this, he is not pushing to make 1 million gold, but rather give away 1 million gold from the sales he makes and that in my book says he's a worthy person to be following and give him a bit of the followers juice. So if you knew about this guy and was following him, then good for you, but if you have never heard of him then go check him out on Twitter and you will not be sorry, heck you might as well make some serious gold if you take his advice.

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