Vile's Golden Auctions

Diablo 3 Making Gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Gold With A Friend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twinking Profits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Gold With Fishing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 3

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

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

THE CRAFTING ASPECT

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE AFFIXES

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

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

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

HOW TO PROFIT FROM ALL OF THIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 2

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

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

DETAILED LOOK AT THE DIABLO AUCTION HOUSE FEES

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

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

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

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

AUCTION HOUSE PLAY STYLE

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

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

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

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

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

Diablo 3 Preparation Part 1

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

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

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

THE CLASSES

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

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

THE ARTISANS

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

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

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

THE AUCTION HOUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotlight: The New WoW Marketeer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MoP Preparation Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotlight on Twizzcast

2012-04-25T09:42:00.001+02:00

A while back i had a monthly series of posts called The Spotlight where i used to post about interesting sites and podcasts that i had found out about that month. Well seeing as how i wasn't digging up many new sites to make it a monthly thing i kinda stopped, but today i want to make another post in that category.

Today i would like to put the spotlight on Twizzcast which is a new podcast in the WoW podcasts scene, and for those of you that enjoy listening to podcasts you might recognize the the voice behind the microphone as one Twizzletank formally from Rep Grind Radio.

Well Twizz started this new podcast on his own, and if you would like to have something the keep you company for the long commute to work, or help you stay awake during a boring lecture this might be a good place go and download or stream the podcast.

Oh and one more thing, last time i saw they had dubbed Twizz as a "clean" podcast that you can listen to work, or around your children, well that is actually wrong as Twizz can hardly go around and not drop F bombs so the podcast should be rated M for Mature because you will hear a lot of profanity there.

I don't want to make this any longer then it has to be, so once again if you enjoy a good WoW Podcast just about anything WoW related then give TwizzCast a chance and you might find yourself pleasantly surprised.

Arcane Crystal Profiting

2012-04-21T10:58:00.001+02:00

One of the most profitable ways of making profit in a market is when you can find a niche market that no one , or very few people know about or are actively participating in it. Well today we'll take a look at one of those markets, and how you can obtain some quick profits by doing these.

For this Niche Market you will need to have Alchemist that is at least leveled to where he can transmute Arcane Crystals and Thorium bars.

First of all we need to define what is the item that we want to sell, and that is the Arcanite Bar. Now as any alchemist can tell you, you will need 1 Arcane Crystal and 1 Thorium Bar to be able to transmute one Arcanite Bar. This isn't anything complex or confusing at any point that would require me to go into detail, it's simply check the price of the Arcanite Bar and compare it with the combined price of the Thorium Bar and the Arcane Crystal and you will see that in 90% of the time you will turn a hefty profit from doing this. Though if the price of the Arcanite Bar is lower then the price of the combined materials then buy them out and repost them to your liking and your profit margin.

Another thing worth mentioning is that if you happen to come across some cheaper Arcane Crystals BUY them out, and the reason why i'm telling you to do this is simply because the Arcane Crystals are the only ones that you can't obtain through the conventional prospecting way, but you rather have to go and mine Thorium and hope that you get lucky.

Before i head out i want to tell you one last thing, and that is who is going to be your buyer and why. Well your buyer is going to be either the fanatical transmogrification guy that wants to have all of his weapons as awesome looking and unique as possible, or the very smart crafting goblin that decided he wants to take the first guy's gold. What i mean by this is that the Arcanite Crystal is base material in a wide assortment of items that can reach very VERY high prices on the transmogrification market if you happen to be the only one crafting those items, and you don't do the wrong move and craft more then one item and annihilate the illusion that the item is rare and a justified purchase for 10-20k gold.

So get on your AH, check the prices for the Arcane Crystals and the Arcanite Bars, and if you see that there is a room for profit there jump on that wagon and ride the Gold Train Express. But if you happen to have a crafter Blacksmith/Leatherworker you might want to check out what you can craft with the Arcanite Bars. Between the quick shuffle of the market and the very high payout of the Mogging market this can turn out to be a very good deal for some of you, so get to your Auction houses and start selling.

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

Transmogrification Casting A Wide Net

2012-04-18T11:53:00.000+02:00

There are many people out there that are enjoying the advantages and profits that the transmogrification market is offering. Even though it has been commented by many different bloggers on how to get the most of the market, there are many, many people that simply don't want to deal with the hassle on how to import lists into Auctionator and decide that is not a good market for them.

Well if you happen to be one of these people then you need to change your opinion and get into this market even this late. If you watched the video at the beginning of this post you got the idea on what i mean when i say using the wide net approach, but in case you didn't have the 7 or so minutes of your time that you want to spend watching that video i will break it down in text as well.

The whole idea is that you WANT to get in on the market, but you don't want to go after a particular item. So the only logical step would be to go after ALL the items on the auction house that are in the affordable zone. What i mean by this is that you want to manually go through the auction house and scan it for deals.

Now when you think about this, the first thing that comes into your mind is that you are going to have to scrolls through pages and pages of auctions and then sort out what is worth buying, and what is crap that you don't want to have. Well you would be wrong again, as that couldn't be further away from the truth. All it takes is about 5 minutes of your time and a character that is near an auction house.

Once there open up the weapons category and go into the groups like 1h Swords and make the items sort by price from lowest to highest. Once you have done this simply pick up the cheap ones ( usually under 50g ) and go to the next group. After you have scanned the weapons category, go down to the armor category and do the same with the different armor groups. If you have done this you probably ended up with a few or quite a few items depending on your auction house and the competition, so all you need to do is make a new group in TSM and configure it so it posts the items at a high price and a low undercut. In my case i have them reposted at 1950g and a 1c undercut and a lowest price at 600g, but you can define your prices any way you like.

So the whole idea behind this is to simply acquire as many cheap items from the auction house and repost them back at a very high profit margin and simply wait for a potential buyer to take the bait. The image on the right is sales from that same character that i took in like 10 minutes before i made the video so you can see that those items that i bought out for 5-30g price range sold for 100x their worth and netted in some nice profit. If you want to get a better idea on which items to look out for check out one of the older posts about it but that will only give you a outline, if you want to get a much more detailed look at the matter you might want to check out Faid's Clockwork Riot blog, and Jim Younkin from Power Word: Gold as they have both covered the transmogrification market in a more detailed extent. If you are a Twitter user you might want to check out The Mogfather and Farli from The Overcut. If i have forgotten anyone else that is a major contributor to the Mogging scene put it in the comments and i will add him as well.

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

Market Manipulation

2012-04-16T10:28:00.002+02:00

Today we are going to take a look at a very interesting way of making sure you profit from selling an actual item, while selling your services for prices that are so cheap that even Scrooge would yell out BARGAIN !

This strategy that i will tell you about is an old yet VERY effective way to rack in some phat profits. Ok seeing as how i don't want to make this a very long post i will get down to the facts and explain how this works right away.

What this strategy consists of is basically making people buy (item X) that is material for (item Y) that you can craft, and you offer your crafting skills for a very low price. But not to sound too mathematical with this i will get down and explain this with an actual example that should clear up any confusion there might be.

-- Content Removed --

Now this is more or less the same with any item and the logic behind it is that you are advertising a finished product to promote your other auctions that are the materials for that item. This works just awesome when you use it on a rare craftable item, and if you happen to be able to craft an item that has a unique appearance to it you can take a cut from the Transmogrification market as well and make those appearance crazed people to get your item or materials for huge profits.

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

The Darkmoon Faire Shuffle

2012-04-14T09:20:00.001+02:00

The Darkmoon faire got a revamp a while back, and it even got it's own island instead of wandering around like a bunch of homeless gypsies. Well as you have all seen it, (at least i hope you have seen it) it offers some new daily as well as monthly quests which is kinda neat as those quests offer some profession skill ups which can be quite useful at higher skill.

But today we are not going to be looking at the dailies, or the monthly quests for that matter, no we are going to take a look at a little niche market that the Darkmoon Faire opened up with it's arrival.

This niche market that i am talking about is the possibility to profit off from the people that are collectors in the game and want to own every single pet or mount in the game. Well just so it happens that the Darkmoon Faire offers quite a bit of pets as well as a Darkmoon Faire Dancing Bear mount for 180 prize tokens.

So now that we know what the Faire offers, how can we profit from this? Well it is very easy and one might say it is even obvious but yet again very few and on some servers even no one is doing it. This thing that i am talking about is the resale of the prize token turn in items. When i say selling those items i mean selling the items that you will obtain from killing dungeon bosses or raid bosses while having a Darkmoon Adventurer's Guide in your bags that you can get from the Darkmoon Faire.

If you have one of these guides in your bags and you do your instances you might notice the following items dropping:

A Treatise On Strategy Adventurer's Journal

Banner Of The Fallen Captured Insignia

Imbued Crystal Monstrous Egg

Mysterious Grimoire Ornate Weapon

Soothsayer's Runes

These are the items that award the prize tokens and the best thing about them is that they are BoE which means you can sell them and make a profit from them. Well the best deal you can get on these items is to buy them from the AH when the Darkmoon Faire is not in town as people tend to sell them at ridiculously low prices for as low as 10g, then when the Faire rolls in and you have a good stock of items to sell that you previously gathered from the AH you get down to some imaginative advertisement and sell those items back to the people that initially sold them to you.

When i say you need to get imaginative what i mean is that you need to make a bark that you can hit trade with and with it you will tell people to buy your item from the AH. And to make them think that by buying your item they will be one step closer to obtaining a mount or a pet or whatever else you think would make them want to buy your item. As for pricing i have sold the lesser x5 rewarding ones for 450g and the x15 one for 950g but you can go ahead and tailor your own prices. Also if you see some of these items on the AH for a cheap price grab them, it's not like they can be farmed so they will not loose their worth.

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

The Jasper Profit Ring

2012-04-09T09:16:00.000+02:00

Today i am going to point out one of the things that are supposed to be so simple that they are common knowledge but for some reason many, many people keep over looking it, and i will explain what i mean by this. We are going to take a look at the Ore Shuffle but from a different point of view, namely we are going to take a look at how we can profit from it without ever having to prospect hundreds of stacks of ore.

As you can see on this poorly photoshopped image on the left, this thing i am talking about is the jewelery part of the Ore Shuffle. Even though this is the logical thing to do many people that have a Jewelcrafter but lack the enchanter to do their disenchanting decide to take the road of no profit and slap their Jaspers on the Auction House.

Now this has been a thing that i have been doing since they did they first nerf to the Shuffle, and when people started putting their gems on the auction house instead vendoring them for the profit. In this time i have made a metric ton of gold from it and why people decided to basically throw away that profit is beyond my comprehension.

Best thing about this is that you can get these gems off the AH for as low as 3-4g per jasper. One thing that is worth mentioning though, if you are going to do this do it the right way. What i mean with this is, make the rings from the Jaspers and DE the greens, but when it comes to the blue rings slap them on the AH with price tags that are as high as 350g or even higher if you have no competition. Now would be a good time to get into this market because there are people that are jumping in with the RAF ( recruit a friend ) that get a instant level 80 that really needs gear, and that is exactly what you are offering.

While you are at the Auction House check the prices for Nightstones as well Hessonites as they too can be used into making the jewelery, but the reason why the Jasper is the superior choice is because you only need 1 to craft a ring opposed to the two you will need to make a Nightstone or Hessonite one.

So i am not going to make a simple thing into a complex one just so it sounds more fancy, instead i leave you with a simple advice. Don't do things that will loose you gold in the end, that has as much sense to it as this (very well photoshopped) priest trying to heal the tank, he is simply doing it wrong.

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

The Will To Play Restored

2012-04-05T20:21:00.001+02:00

First thing you think when you read the post name is ask yourself "What the hell is he talking about ?", well give me a few moments of your time and i will explain. First thing i want to clarify is that this is not going to be one of my usual gold tips, those will follow up much more frequently in the future i hope.

Ok now to start from the beginning, i have been playing the game back from Vanilla and enjoyed it all the way, in that time i did PvP and PvE as well. In TBC and WOTLK i used to do some hard core raiding and BG running and i enjoyed every bit of it. Mid way through WOTLK i got pulled into the AH PvP and i started loving it. I hit the cap and pushed on making gold and had loads of fun while doing it.

As soon as Cataclysm hit i stopped with the PvE raiding and focused on the gold making, and made my first million, then pushed on and made my second million and even got a interview with wowecon but i didn't stop there either. But then when i got up to like 2.4 million i kinda lost my interest into making gold, and seeing as how i wasn't playing almost any PvE or PvP the game started loosing it's appeal to me. So as this was happening i noticed one thing about the blog posts i was doing, namely they were starting to get more of a theoretical feel to them, as well as a more high level investment ideas opposed to gold making tips that you can continue to build upon yourself. So in order to get back into the game and have fun i decided to do something rather eccentric and borderline weird ...

... as you can see the image on the left, i gave my gold away. A few posts ago i made a post about leveling and selling guilds as that was what i was doing at the given time because the gold went to some friends that happen to play on a different server.

Now to be perfectly honest, i still have 800k left which is still a huge amount for some but then again the reason why i didn't give that away is because it wasn't 1 million which is the cap you can put in a guild bank when you are transferring it, so it seemed like a waste of money. But i am really considering the idea as soon as i hit 1 million to give it away as well ( But i will keep some for me so i have some starting capital for MoP :) )

Anyways now that is done i want to give my thanks to a few of my friends that helped me in my endeavor. As

you can see on the image here, these are the guys that helped for for about a week in leveling up two guilds to level 2 so i could have used them to do the transfer. ( There are 4 characters on this screen, and in case you can't see the 4th, it's the shaman on the dragon in the background.

Anyways these guys stuck it out with me for almost a week of grinding their ass off helping me out and i would like to send out my gratitude to them, and especially to one of them that i woke up early early in the mornings for a few days and then making him endure my voice on Skype for day after day. But on top of it all they even helped me out with the transfer thing, and they helped me by making a character on their accounts so i won't have to delete any of my characters ( have 10 ) when i wanted to make the actual guild transfer.

I won't name any of them so i keep their anonymity but they will know who they are, and all i want to say is I LOVE YOU GUYS as much as one man can love another, without it being gay. So having said all of this, in the future posts i will try my best to give you more quality gold making tips that will be more hands on instead of ideas on what to invest without having to care if you loose some gold while doing it.

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

Farming Infinite Dust

2012-04-03T11:55:00.001+02:00

It is a common knowledge that most of the professions in the game are made so that they can compliment each others, well to be honest Blizzard are kinda leaning away from that model as they are trying to make each profession as independent as possible but this is not the point here. Anyone that has leveled enchanting in the past, or is maybe leveling an enchanter now knows that it is a rather expensive profession to level and especially when you get to the Northrend level of materials and you get to be in very short supply of Infinite Dust.

There are a few ways to go about the acquisition of Infinite Dust, but by far the most profitable way is by mixing up the two top end professions, Jewelcrafting and Enchanting.

The way to actually farm Infinite Dust from Jewelcrafting is very simple, heck it's the predecessor of today's Obsidium/Elementium Ore Shuffle, but to be more precise you are going to be making rings and necklaces yet again. You will need 4 resources which happen to be very cheap, and the best part is you can buy them straight from the AH for almost next to nothing for most of the time.

The resources that i am talking about are the common gems that you get when you prospect the Northrend equivalent ore, and those are the Chalcedony, Bloodstone, Sun Crystal and Huge Citrine. If you check your auction house you will notice that most of the time they are moving for abysmally low prices of some times being as low as 2g per gem. After you have obtained the gems you need to get some Eternal Earth that you can shatter so you end up with the Crystallyzed Earth that you will need as well.

So now that you have purchased the said gems and Eternal Earth what do you do that will be worth calling it Infinite Dust Farming ? Well you take those and you make them into Bloodstone Bands, Crystal Chalcedony Amulet, Crystal Citrine Necklace and Sun Rock Ring. After making these you need to ship them off to your Enchanter to do his disenchanting and you end up with your cheap supply of Infinite Dust. And another thing is that when you are disenchanting these you might end up with Lesser Cosmic Essences that you can sell or use as well.

Just so you get the idea on how important your stock is going to be to anyone leveling enchanting, to level past the threshold you will need 600x Infinite Dust and 30x Greater Cosmic Essences that you will get by combining the Lesser Cosmic Essences, and this is for a single guy alone. So you can see that the demand for this is rather high and the supply is always low.

In a future post i will give you an idea of how to further improve on the profit margin by investing some more time into the enchanting part of the whole deal, but for now i will leave it at this.

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

P.S. If you do get in this market you might want to check the prices of the Abyss Crystals so you can shatter them and obtain some more Infinite Dust and Essences. ( Kudos for the last P.S. addition goes to @Yngvede for noticing it and posting it on Twitter )

WoW Guild Leveling And Selling

2012-04-01T10:28:00.000+02:00

In World of Warcraft there are many, many ways of making gold but in reality it all boils down to two basic things, What are you selling, and Who is your targeted group of buyers. Today we are going to take a look at a rather interesting market that if done right can net you some insane profits, and this market that i am talking about is Buying/Selling of level 2 Guilds.

The guilds in WoW are basically like the houses we have in the real world, except we don't get extra XP, reputation and gold in the house when we kill things but that's not the point here. In before i start going on and on about how to obtain and sell the guilds let me give you the basic idea as to why it is profitable to get in on the guild trading market, and who your targeted group would be.

First of all let me clarify the thing about the Level 2 Guild. The reason why i stated that you want a level 2 guild is fairly simply yet very few people actually know about it, and the thing that they don't know about it is that if you want to transfer a bigger sum of gold across servers you need to have at least a level 2 guild.

So now knowing this you can see what your targeted market group would be, it's the people that want to switch servers and have more then 50k gold to their name. Now if you take into account that MoP is in the Beta and can be seen going live in the foreseeable future, you can see new and returning players hopping back in the game, and the one thing they have in common is that they want to play with their friends that happen to play on a different server. Now their problem is that they can't transfer their gold with them, be it 100k or 1 million. So they come to a impasse as they don't want to part with their hard earned gold, but at the same time they want to play with their friends on that other server. So their choices of the matter boil down to either transfer the character and leave your gold behind or play alone and leave the game in less then a week.

This is where you jump in and try to help them out by offering to solve their problem and give them the thing they want the most, their character with all their gold on that other server with their friends. So the way you do this is by selling them your level 2 guild that at that time to them would be like salvation.

Now there are a few things you need to know about how the guild transfers work in case you want to do one yourself or give further information to your buyers.

There are four major things that you must know or explain to your potential buyers ( or don't tell them ) and those are:

The guild master must have been the guild master for at least 7 days
The guild master must be at least level 10
The guild must be at least level 2 to be eligible for transfer
The account that the guild master is on must have an authenticator active for at least 7 days

So knowing this you can offer the information to your buyer and explain to him that if he decides to buy your guild he will have to wait 7 days no matter what.

And before i head out i will leave you with the last bit of information about how to obtain the guilds, and how you should price them. The first, or obvious way would be to make a new guild from scratch and then level it to level 2 which even though it might sound like a lot of work it's not as you can do it while you are doing your random daily quests, but you will need 2-4 friends to help you out ( this means leaving the guild they are in and joining yours for the duration of the runs, so their rep with the initial guild would be wiped so this is best done with alts). For more information about which run gives how much experience you might want to check the post on the Blizzard forums about this particular thing. And the second way of getting a guild would be trade channel.

Now about the pricing, when you are hunting for a guild and you find someone that is willing to sell you their level 2 guild try and make it sound like they have something that is hardly worth anything and try to haggle it away from them for as low as 2-5k gold, but at the same time when you find someone that is willing to buy a guild from you then make it sound like you are giving them the key to the Playboy Mansion and sell it for as high as 20-50k. The reason why this would be an acceptable price to some is because they want to transfer 800k or 1 million gold and they simply don't want to wait any more so they are willing to pay any price to do so.

So there it is in a bunch, the whole fuss about how to obtain and sell a level 2 guild or as i like to call it, sell hope to the people :)

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

Tailoring Niche Market

2012-03-27T23:44:00.003+02:00

Lately i had people asking me if they can make gold from tailoring ? Well the answer is very obvious, as i have explained before you can make a pretty good profit by selling the bags and spell threads, but today we are going to focus on a pretty nifty niche that has been profitable from Vanilla up until now and it will continue to be profitable.

This little niche market that Tailors can dabble in is the Tuxedo Set. The said set is composed out of three parts, the Tuxedo Pants, Tuxedo Jacket and Tuxedo Shirt . Now knowing that these are the three parts of the set, you need to know where to obtain the patterns that will teach you how to make them.

Your best chance would be to check the Auction House for the pattern as many times there are patterns posted for as low as 10g, but if you want to skip paying that you can purchase it straight from Millie Gregorian if you are Horde, or Outfitter Eric if you happen to play Alliance. A word of advice though, while you are at these vendors check the price of the patterns on the AH, and if there are none up there post a few for 250g for each pattern and you will be simply baffled when they actually sell.

Ok so you have bought the patterns, and even bought some extra ones and put them up for sale now what? Well now we get down to making the actual pieces of the set and selling them on the Auction House. The good thing about this set is that the materials for crafting it is Mageweave Cloth so it is not expensive to obtain it, and at the same time you are selling an item that every Auctioneer that wants to leave a serious appearance must simply own a set, and that is where you come into play.

The best thing about the Tuxedo set is that it is a good item to sell, and there is usually low to none competition on the market. One thing that you shouldn't do is to explode the supply and post 10 of each, it would be a much better alternative to make 2 of each ( Pants, Jacket and Shirt ) and post them at a higher price ( i sold them for 400g each piece ). And one thing that is good about this is that whenever someone buys a single piece, he will buy the other two as well, and that only means that you have made 1200g by investing as low as 10g for that sale.

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

Professions In Mists Of Pandaria

2012-03-25T14:07:00.000+02:00

So i still don't have access to the Beta and can't confirm any of this for certain, but i got to a pretty amazing post up on MMO Champion that should prove to be an awesome repository of information for all of us that like the profession aspect of the game, and in return like to make money off it.

The post can be found on MMO Champion named BETA Mists Of Pandaria, and i am only going to point to a few of the things that i found interesting.

In MoP we seem to have more ways of turning enchanting materials into different materials, being able to change from dust to essence to shards!

Spirit Dust
Lesser Mysterious Essence, which is creatable from 5 dust (Lesser Mysterious Essence)
Greater Mysterious Essence, which is creatable from 2 lesser essences (Greater Mysterious Essence)
Small Ethereal Shard
Ethereal Shard which is creatable in two different ways, from 2 small shards (Create Ethereal Shard) or from 3 greater essences (Ethereal Shard).
Sha Crystal, which is greatable from 3 large shards (Sha Crystal).

So you can go Dust -> Lesser Essence -> Greater Essence -> Uncommon Shard -> Rare Shard

So in retrospective what this means is that in MoP we will be able to turn our dust into crystals, or simply put that would be like if you could make Maelstrom Crystals from Hypnotic Dust. So all in all we are going to have quite the demand for enchanting materials, and some awesome profits that will be there to be made by doing the MoP version of the Shuffle.

So again check out the post on MMO-Champion and if you do find some other source for information share it as a comment here.

Scribes Get Ready For MoP

2012-03-22T14:08:00.000+01:00

Today we are going to talk about how you should get ready for MoP if you happen to have a character with Inscription leveled up. Unlike the previous post that covered investing in MFC's in this post we are going to take a look at how to save yourself thousands of gold, and in return actually make a crap load of gold.

Yup i am talking about glyphs again, but this time with a bit of a twist. Coming MoP glyphs are going to see a bit of a overhaul and we seeing as how we will see a sharp increase in the creation of new Pandas that only means that we are going to see a sharp increase in the need for glyphs for all classes and especially for Monks.

Now the thing with this is rather tricky and if you are unprepared it can turn around and bite you in the ass. Let me explain why exactly so you know what i mean. As it is now making a glyph is more or less an easy task with the existence of the ink traders, so all you have to do is mill some herbs and trade the last tier inks to the ones you need to craft your glyph. Now coming MoP we are going to have the same options but the only difference would be the fact that the price of the new herbs is going to be more or less in the 200-300g per stack price range which is helluva lot more then the 15-40g per stack we can get the stacks at today.

So knowing this it is only logical what our step should be, open up your guild bank and stock up on inks that are of a lesser tier now. So get your inks to your ink trader and get stocked up on all the inks that you need to craft your glyphs, and if you have been in the glyph market for a while you will know that the stock you will need is going to be rather large because when you are crafting glyphs those inks are simply melting.

Two inks that you should keep an eye on would be the Moonglow Ink and the Ink Of The Sea which are the needed inks for your Minor Inscription Research and the Northrend Inscription Research. Now even if you have done all your researches, don't forget you will still need to do them as you will not know the glyphs for the Monk. So those two inks you can even sell on the AH for all the people that will not get their stocks up now.

Third and last thing you want to get stocked up on would be the Books of Glyph Mastery, and the reason for it is like you might guess the new glyphs that will be available from them. So if you find some of them on the AH for an acceptable price buy them out for yourself, or for later resale with a hefty profit margin.

As i have still to get my Beta invite i can only give you preparation tips, but as soon as that Beta invite comes through i will shell out some more solid info, and tell you exactly what to expect from the profession and what to focus on.

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

A Dying Art Called Bidding

2012-03-20T09:25:00.002+01:00

Today we are going to be looking at one of the great ways to obtain items at awesomely low prices, and as you might guess from the title i am talking about bidding on the auction house.

The reason why i called this a dying art is because it is kind of a thing that stuck around from Vanilla and to a degree from TBC where gold was much more valuable, what i mean by this is that back then everyone was trying to get more gold ( higher buyout price ) but were happy to get a normal price for it as well even if it meant waiting a bit for it ( normal bid price ).

As you might see on the image above, the price that we see in green is the bid price and the one in red is the buyout price. The difference between those two is about 50% and that is where this gets to be a sweet deal. When i saw this pricing it had the same pricing structure as a normal auction has where the bid price is normal and the buyout price is above the normal price range ( as you can see at 142% price ), but unlike this guy you will find countless others that don't know what the bid system is for, and those are the people that will make you thousands of gold in easy profits.

As i said there are many people out there that don't realize how the bid system is supposed to work so you will see auctions with a buyout price at 5000g, and then the most ridiculous 100g bid price next to it. It is auctions like this one that will put a smile on your face every time you see them. But like all good things there has to be a drawback at using this strategy and in this case it is the wait time that for some reason the majority of the people choose to go with the 48h post time.

Now even though 48h is a long time you don't have to wait for it because you can simple browse the auctions by time left. This is actually the core of the strategy because all you need to do is go to the AH and check for prices that are posted with a low bid and a short time remaining on them and simply put your bid down. The best thing you could do is to bid on multiple items due to the fact that there will be other people doing this same thing as well and you might get overbid on some auctions, that is why it is best to look at this as a fishing net, the bigger the area is that you threw the net in ( the more items you bid on ) the higher the chances are that you will actually win.

One of the best deals that you can find with the bidding system is in the Transmogrification market where many of the people do the mistake of posting their high value items for 10g bid prices and 8k buyout prices. And when you buy an item for 10g and then flip it for 5k, that is when you feel awesome.

One last thing, after you are finished reading this and you might think "Meh i already knew this" do yourself a favor and check your auction house and i am sure that you will find deals that are staggering.

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

Profession Resale List

2012-03-15T13:00:00.001+01:00

A while back i made a post about the profit that could be made by reselling medium tier leather and got some great feedback from it as people did it and made some nice amounts of gold with it. So i invested a bit more time into this and made a list of all the items that are worth flipping besides leather. And the main reason as to why this is such a great market to get into is because you will cater to the needs of the powerleveling guys that simply don't want to spend time to farm for their materials, but they would rather take it to the Auction House and get all their materials there and give you all their gold. To make it even easier i broke it down into profession categories.

Enchanting

If you have leveled enchanting you know that getting all the mats can be a bitch ( female dog ), but that only means that if you had it rough getting the materials it's a good chance that everyone else is having the same issue. This is why enchanting offers a good market for resales. The items you want to focus on here are:

Dream Dust x 230

Vision Dust x 155

Arcane Dust x 330

The numbers next to the dust name represent the amount of dusts a single enchanter would need to get past the level threshold of enchanting, so if you have 2 or 3 people at a time leveling that given profession you simply multiply that number by that and you see that the need for those items is huge.

The Ore Market

I was originally going to break this down in two categories Blacksmith/Engineering but that would be pointless as both of these professions use the same materials. Given this it only means that the need for those shared goods is going to be very high.

Mithril Bar x 161 + 320

Thorium Bar x 189 + 420

Cobalt Bar x 275 + 320

As you can see the numbers for those bars are very high, and that only means that the need is high while the supply is rather limited. The best time to get into this market would be if you see that the price is not huge for those bars or ores (if you have a miner that can smelt them into bars)

The Cloth Market

This is a rather volatile market as it's prices are always in a flux. What i mean by this is that while sometimes the price for a stack of X-Cloth is going to be 100g per stack, next thing you know someone came if and posted 20 stacks at 20g and then another 5 guys took that 20g as the max price and they bring it down even more to abysmal levels like 5g. But the good thing is that if you target the low tier of cloth you can actually run a pretty good monopoly on them with a little bit of effort. There are two cloth tiers that i focus on, Wool and Silk.

Wool Cloth 180 + 135

Silk Cloth 150 + 780

The two numbers represent the need for those cloths for tailoring and first aid. Just to get into it a bit deeper, the Wool cloth has been a great seller as the level where it drops is low, and as everyone that levels nowadays has heirlooms they shoot past the levels where the wool drops, so their only way to obtain these cloths are either to go back and farm the cloth, or hit the auction house. The Silk cloth on the other hand is usually in a OK supply, and the demand for it is rather high as you can see. So if you ever see that the auction house is low on supply and the price is normal, or even better low, then buy them out and reset the price.

So this should be about the resale list that should cover the lower tier profession material niche. I didn't make a list about the herbs as they are used for alchemy/inscription because the need for a given herb is too low and none of the herbs stands out from the crowd. Now this shouldn't be mistaken as a market that is not profitable, simply i haven't gotten into this market because i haven't done the whole research to see what is selling the best and fastest, but if you think you might get some killer sales in this market by all means get into it and make your profits.

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

General Posting Mistakes

2012-03-13T11:00:00.004+01:00

Today we are going to take a look at something that should be a common sense, but for some reason the majority of the people simply don't follow it.

The thing i am talking about is the proper pricing of the items or goods you put up on the Auction House, bear with me as i will try and explain what i mean.

Let's say for instance you are selling an item A which you can make for a price of 10g. That item sells, and you think "Awesome i will sell some more at that price" WRONG. If you are selling something and you sell it for 10g, next post get it up at 15g and if it sells at that price try 20g etc. So you get the idea, you need to be increasing that price to get it as high as possible before you determine the "normal" price.

The thing what most people do is, they craft that item A and sell it for 10g and from there on they will never up the price, and with that they lose on every single sale they make, sure they get some profit but they are loosing on the good profit purely because they didn't want to extend their price into the proper price range.

Another thing you might want to know is that if you start getting mails like " you won't sell your stock because it is too high priced " from people you don't know, then you are probably doing something right, because you WILL be selling at those prices while the competition will think it is not worth it to get in on that market because no one is buying since your stock is up there for that long and at that price, not knowing that you refresh your stock after each sale. Just remember Haters gonna hate, potatoes gonna potate.

This might sound like a insignificant information because i was using prices as 10 or 20g but in reality it's usually crafted items that are ranging in the 1k-20k mark, so it's not the same if you are selling an item for 500g that you could be selling for 1500g or better yet selling a craftable end game item and selling it for 5k if you can get 10k for it. So all in all expand your prices if you haven't already, and you are sure to get some serious profits racking in.

I will leave this post as short as it is, but i will use it in future reference as well as other posts i will make in the Don't Do It category that will be for things that you shouldn't do, or avoid doing.

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