Spain

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

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

That's all I had to say for today.

Slow Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cards and Hiring

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Arts of Jewelcrafting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1vs2

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

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

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

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

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

Download

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

Download

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

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

Download

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

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

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

Update

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

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

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

MMO-Crashion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Efficency?

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

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

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

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