The Happy Scribe

Quitting

2009-12-26T07:00:00.004+01:00

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

Nothing more to say really except for good bye.

It Can't Be Stopped!

2009-12-18T07:00:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

Get this dragon off me!

2009-12-14T07:00:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

Patch 3.3, gold and instances

2009-12-11T07:00:00.001+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitting 80

2009-12-09T07:00:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Quite Dead

2009-11-29T07:00:00.000+01:00

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

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

Slow Updates

2009-11-18T07:00:00.000+01:00

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

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

The Nobles

2009-11-14T07:00:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screwing up

2009-11-12T07:00:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Speedy Goblin

2009-11-10T07:00:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing Chaos and Destruction

2009-11-07T07:00:00.004+01:00

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

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

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

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

Preparing for The Grand Return

2009-11-02T07:00:00.002+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updating The Blog List

2009-11-01T07:00:00.006+01:00

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

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

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

Spain

2009-10-22T07:00:00.001+02:00

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

2009-10-18T12:42:00.005+02:00

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

2009-10-13T07:00:00.002+02:00

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

2009-10-10T07:00:00.000+02:00

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

2009-10-07T07:00:00.005+02:00

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

2009-10-05T07:00:00.001+02:00

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

2009-10-03T07:00:00.000+02:00

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?

2009-10-01T07:00:00.001+02:00

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

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

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

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

Bugs and Herbs

2009-09-28T07:00:00.002+02:00

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

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

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

Changes

2009-09-27T07:00:00.000+02:00

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

Conclusion on the Gered Experiment

2009-09-26T07:00:00.001+02:00

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

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

Gearing up a tank for less than 2000

2009-09-25T07:00:00.001+02:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Them Prices Be Riding A Crazy Train

2009-09-24T07:00:00.000+02:00

Today it was patch day here in EU and it brought a few nice, and a few nasty surprises. We'll start with the bad news, herb prices have skyrocketed, there are only a few stacks left on the AH and they are all between 24-30g. But as you can see on the picture snowfall is way up. I hadn't planned on sell them though (well I did at the time I took the picture), I am going to make far more out of them.
If you have kept an eye on the patchnotes you are most likely aware of the Runescroll of Fortitude that gives a buff similar to the priest fortitude buff. I made a few and spammed trade with them, the AH price was about 20g each with a few for 10.

The mats are one snowfall ink and 5 resilient parchments for a stack of 5. If you've done the math you realise that even at 10g the snowfall will be worth 50g! So how did it sell?
First I got whispered by an old guildie and sold him 33 scrolls for 400g, or 12g per scroll which means the snowfall price was 60g.

The second trade I did must be seen to be belived

Yes, that picture is not fake nor was it a mistake on his part (or well, it was as he paid 33g for a scroll). I still haven't gotten anymore trades and I wasn't really active on the AH today so I'm sitting at about 13 500g.

No luck with the Brewfest stuff so I drank it all to celebrate my sucess with scrolls. According to me Brewfest is pretty much worthless for making gold except if you're going to buy Tankards and sell in a few weeks. Nothing I recomend.

Brewfest 2.0

2009-09-23T07:00:00.000+02:00

Before anything else, yesterday I promised you a post about making gold during brewfest. The problem is, there aren't really any. The only confirmed way of making gold so far is getting a Tankard O' Terror which is a drop from Coren Direbrew with a lot of competition. I saw about 10 or 15 of the AH just a few minutes ago.

So is Brewfest worthless for gold making? Pretty much, yes. But there is still one thing I'm trying out, without any results so far but I'll see what happens over the night. What I have done is that I bought up one of every brewfest food and drink and put it up on the AH for 4g each. You know how people pay a bunch of gold for ice cold milk during winter veil? I hoped that it would work here as well, unfortunantly I got no result yet.

Now I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Also, I got to level 70 on my death knight today and bought an epic flying mount putting me back about 4.8k (thanks to rep discounts) to 13 000 gold.

Goldfest!

2009-09-22T07:00:00.001+02:00

I assume you have noticed that brewfest is here, possibly by checking your calenders or maybe because of the people riding around on rams in Ironforge. No matter how you found out there may still be gold to make! How? Well, at the moment I have no idea, but that is what I will do tomorrow. If you got any ways to make gold of the brewfest event feel free to make a comment about it.

I didn't really do anything today except for killing Direbrew (no mount), doing the Brewfest quests and an (incredibly failed) ToC. One of my addons (I suspect it's either auctioneer or auctionator) is currently not working right and freezes the game almost every time I search making it close to impossible to actually post any glyphs. I did make some money over the weekend and I have now ended up at about 17 700g.

Due to the above freezing problem I haven't really been able to do anything so all I could do for today's post was to write a short preview to what's coming up tomorrow.

Leveling

2009-09-21T07:00:00.000+02:00

Today I spent most of my time leveling, and as I am now level 68 I just hit Northrend and took my first steps there (unless you count leveling my main and doing the JC dailies). I hit level 69 and got a bit on my way to 70, where I will get my epic flying mount for 5000g *cries*.

Except for my upcoming depression due to losing 5000 gold I have been doing pretty good today. Not a big increase in gold which I have about 17 000 of, but instead I got myself a bunch of herbs ranging from between 15 to 18 gold. Due to a few reasons I will not tell you the exact amount but I will be well prepared for a short term price increase.

I am also trying to find a way to get my jewelcrafting more profitable as it's currently just sucking the gold out of my pockets as my gems never sell.

That's it for today.

Spending Day!

2009-09-19T07:00:00.000+02:00

As the title says, I have spent a lot of gold today. About 2.5k I think (got some income that makes it hard to be completly sure) on various stuff putting me back to about 16.5k gold. But how did I manage to spend all this gold? Well, I did 3 things:
1. I got my death knight a new haircut and leveled her to 68 and bought a cold weather flying book.
2. Bought a bunch of cheap herbs.
3. Bought a third guild bank tab to store all the herbs.

By combining these three I lost a whole lot of gold, but I see all of them as investments so I haven't really lost anything.

It's late so I won't write anything more today.

A Special Reader

2009-09-18T07:00:00.003+02:00

Today as I was standing reposting my auctions I got whispered byt one of my competitiors. As usual I prepared myself for a flame of some kind and thought a bit on what he could want to complain about. Too my surprise he said that he liked my new layout and I assumed he had found my blog, but just to be sure I asked him what he was talking about. He confirmed my guess and we started to talk a little. We got along pretty well, or at least as good as you can when you are two scribes on the same server.

So, I have just got solid proof that another scribe on my server is reading my blog. Am I worried? No actually. I have no problem with this for a few reasons.

First, my competitior told me he's not very serious about gold making and also that my threshold is lower than his (hope I don't make him serious with the upcoming sucess story).

Secondly, even if he was my worst competitior who undercut me 10 minutes after I posted and had 5 of every glyph up on the AH at all time with zero ink costs (luckilly there isn't a person like this, if there were I'd leaft a long time ago) I wouldn't be very worried. The reason is that through my blog I can easily spread misinformation, something I will avoid doing unless I feel it's really necessary. By the way, did I tell you I just bought 5000 stacks of adder's tongue for 2g/stack? ;)

I mentioned a sucess story, and a really good one too. Yesterday I wrote that I had about 14 800g, while I am writing this I got 17 300. So what did I do to make 2.8k in one day? The answer is simple, glyphs. Lots and lots of glyphs (and some scrolls) :D I did a new crafting session today and I now have so many glyphs I can't even fit them all in the bags of my two glyph posters. I am still in search for a herb supplier with no sucess, but I have stocked up some lichbloom in case of a price increase.

Well, that was all I had to say today, I aim to hit 18 or maybe even 19k tomorrow.

New Layout

2009-09-17T07:01:00.000+02:00

I decided to try out a new layout for the blog and would like to get your oppinions on it. So which one do you prefer, this or the old one?

Upswing

2009-09-17T07:00:00.002+02:00

Imagine this, you are happily logging on to WoW to check your auctions. You plan on doing the normal rutine of picking up the gold from your mailbox, canceling and then reposting. You go to the mailbox and notice something is not right! There are only 3 auction sucessful mails in the mailbox, you open them and notice that none of them contain more than 10g! You decide it's just bad luck and post all undercut auctions. The next day you return and notice the same thing and this goes on for a whole week.

If the above scenario was real, what would you do? Well, for the last weeks I have been having that situation and have yet to found a solution. Or well, that was true until today when I finally noticed the reason. What was it? As I may have told you my server currently got pretty low glyph prices, though they are slowly going up. In short, I realised that I didn't have enough glyphs up to get enough sales for it to be profitable, so what did I do?

As the problem was a too small coverage of glyphs I decided the best way to counter it was getting more glyphs. So what I did was that I queued up enough glyphs to make sure I had 3 of each glyph I can make by using Kevmar's addon. This used up most of my ink of the sea and a huge part of my stocked up ink from the big screwup, and I assume Kevmar doesn't like I'm doing that. However I felt it was necessary. Was it worth it? Well, you can decide that yourselves.

The above picture was taken within 30 minutes of my posting and I have already sold more than I sold in a week earlier, not too bad. What I need to do now is finding a supplier, something I haven't bothered with so far as my glyphs have been moving very slow, but now when I start selling them at this rate it seems like I need to get them back.

Well, except from a huge glyph sucess nothing has really happened today. I did a lot of saronite and infinite dust purchases yesterday so I'm down to about 14 800g. I have also started leveling my DK so I can do the JC daily without having to spend stupid amounts of time to kill a mob 5 or 6 level higher than me to notice it didn't drop. I reached level 66 today and aim for at least level 70 for epic flying in Northrend.

No post

2009-09-16T07:00:00.000+02:00

Due to my illness there will be no post today. I managed to do a whole lot of stuff today though, including getting exalted with the Netherwing! Say hello to Zoya, a nether drake of unknown gender. Well, at least I got a post coming up for tomorrow so you don't have to worry about that.

End of the Faire

2009-09-15T07:00:00.001+02:00

Finally the darkmoon faire is over, and that means two things.
1. Snowfall ink will be harder to sell
2. Herbs will go down

I have already started to notice both these things and have stocked up about 3-400 extra inks as most of my stock is now turned into lower level inks. I also had some sucess with selling Obsidian Hatchlings for a 50-100% profit. That combined with some sold scrolls and glyphs (though they sell really slow even if I'm the lowest poster) and potentially some gold from the netherwing dailies have put me up to about 15 400g, so I have now reached the 15k mark :D

Sorry for the very short post but I'm feeling really sick today (again) so I am just to tired to make it any longer.

LF Tailor!

2009-09-14T07:00:00.000+02:00

A few days ago I made a post about how I had gotten a few free enchant scrolls and at the same time discovered that there was a nice profit in Mycah's Botanical Bag, and I was correct. I had sold both the bags I made within 2 days for about 50-80g profit. Nothing huge but as there isn't a lot of work it's fine for me. The only problem I have had is finding a tailor that knows the recipie. It's a faction reward for being revered with sporregar, and as there aren't a lot of people farming reputation with our favourite mushroom men anymore it's pretty hard to find a tailor with it.

Everything is working good, the herb prices are starting to have some temporal drops, nothing huge but I did manage to snap up 20 stacks of adder's tongue for 18g. The netherwing rep is increasing and I am at about 8000/21000 to exalted.

I'm sitting at a little more than 14 500 gold and should hit 15k in the begining of this week.

Learning Auctioneer: The Basics

2009-09-13T07:00:00.004+02:00

Here you go, as promised, the second post in the Learning Auctioneer series. I apologise for it taking so long but here it is.
So lets start with the first thing you see when you open auctioneer, the search window. Sorry about the crappy quality and the small size, I've spent about an hour trying to find a way to fix this but had no sucess so far. So you will have to click the picture to see what I mean.

On the top left corner within the red box you see a bar with a play button and a few other buttons.
Start Scan: The play button allows you to start a full AH scan that will gather all price information of every item on the AH and store it. This will let you easily see how much an items average value on the AH is by just mousing over it. That way you can easily price your items, though I suggest you also check wowhead and search for it on the AH to see if the auctioneer data is correct.

Stop Scan: On the left there is a "stop" button that (pretty obviously) lets you stop the current scan.

Pause Scan: To the right of the Scan button there is a pause button. Could anyone tell me what it's used for? Yes Timmy, that's correct. It lets you pause the scan.

GetAll Scan: The fast forward button to the right of the pause button lets you do a quick GetAll scan that should take about 2-3 minutes. If I understood it right it will be exactly like a normal scan but faster. Thanks to Jonathan Hunt for telling me what it does and also giving me this link.

I have no idea what the magnify glass buttons does but I have been doing fine without it so I guess they aren't very important. Or at least not necessary.

As you see I have made a search on "Rituals of The New Moon", a nice inscription made book that lets you turn into a wolf.

If you look above the search results you see a yellow bar where I have made some markings.

The # Symbol: On the left side of the bar, marked with pink, you see a "#" symbol. It shows how big the stack is. As Rituals of The New Moon is not stackable it will always show 1 but when it comes to stackable items like adder's tongue it can show between 1 to the maximum stack size.

The Green Fields: Both to the right of the "#" symbol, down in the right corner and a bit down to the left there are three green fields, these are pretty much self-explaining so I wont bother saying anything about them.

PCT: On the far right side in a blue marking there is the PCT value. It shows how much more or less an item is priced for compared to the market value. In this example it is at 208% of the market value, the only reason I put it up for so high is that I am the only poster and I know that if someone wants the book they will have to buy it from me.
The PCT is color marked. If the value is red it's above 150%, 80-149% yellow, 50-79% green and any less is blue.

Amount of Items: Above the green field down to the right there is a yellow/white field that says "Items 1-1 (1 total)". The items 1-1 part means that on this page item 1 to 1 (as it's only one item up) are shown and the (1 total) part means that there is only one up on the AH.

Price Per Unit: To the left of the amount of items you find the Price per Unit check box. This is a really great function in auctioneer, when checked it lets you see stack prices in singles. Lets use an example. There are two stacks of goldclover on the AH, one that contains 5 herbs and one with 12. The 5 herb stack costs 6g22s while the 12 stack costs 15g. Sure, you could do the math to see which one got the lowest price per item but you can also check the Price Per Unit box. It will take the cost of the stack and split it with the amount of items contained in them and will let you see which one is cheapest.

There are several more options which will have to wait. I will still use the first picture in the future post, that's why there are some markings I haven't said anything about here yet.

If you wonder why some markings look diferents than the others it's because I felt that paint just wasn't enough so I downloaded a free picture editing program to do the rest of my markings. As you can see the marks on the bottom on the page are a lot clearer than the other ones.

No post

2009-09-12T07:00:00.000+02:00

Well, once again I'm feeling sick, got a headache, a sore throat and so on. That means I wont be able to give you a new post today, but don't panic. Instead you will get a new post in the Learning Auctioneer series on Sunday. You may remember the last one was pretty crappy, more of a description than anything else, I had planned to make this one a little more detailed.

Free Enchants and Herb Bags

2009-09-11T07:00:00.001+02:00

As I was standing in Stormwind, taking care of my own business I saw someone advertising in trade that he gave away free enchanting scrolls at the bank, I decided to check it out and he gave me a few scrolls, not very good ones, most from the 300-350 range I think, about 10 of them.

When I asked him why he had given them away he said that they were just leveling enchants and thus worthless. I told him that all those scrolls were worth about 200g together, he said that if they were greatly overpriced (that would be the regular market value according to auctioneer).

We got into a small discussion about the value of selling lots of cheap stuff compared to selling a few expensive stuff. None of this would have been really important and I wouldn't really have mentioned it in this post if it wasn't for the thing he did next, he linked me a Mycah's Botanical Bag and told me he could sell it for 230g.

I challenge you to guess what I did next! If you guessed I bought it from him to resell it again later, then you guessed wrong. If you on the other hand guessed that I checked the mat prices for this bag and saw if it would be profitable selling it, then you are completly correct. I did a quick search and guess what I saw, the mats were selling for about 130g per bag, that means a 100g profit per bag :O I bought the mats for 2 bags and found myself a tailor who could make the bag (the pattern requires sporregar revered) and had them made.

I put them up on the AH for 30g less than my generous friend (who also happened to be the only poster) and now I'm waiting for them to sell. So I can thank this guy not only because he gave me scrolls worth a few hundred gold but he also showed me a potential new market, I'm also gonna check the netherweave bags market to see if I could have the tailor who made me the herb bags make me a few.

So what's the moral of the story? Well there are two:
1. Never tell another player how you make your gold, especially not if this player shows even a slight amount of intelligence.
2. Ethics have no place on the auction house, if it profits you, do it.

Helping a Noob

2009-09-10T07:00:00.002+02:00

I may just be wasting my time, or I am saving a noob from a life of poverty. Well, you propably don't understand what I mean so I'll take it from the begining. Today while I was taking care of my glyphs as usual I saw a guy yelling that he wanted to sell a Black Rose for 2g. Auctioneer instantly told me it could be bought from a vendor for 50s. I decided to whisper him and do my regular routine (surely spelled wrong) for annoying people.

So I whispered him, offered him 33s for it and we got to the usual begging with "plz", "my main is hacked" and so on, I prepared to do some last comment on how he should make his own gold before ignoring him. But I didn't. For some reason this begger had made me feel like helping him. After trying to help him out I can tell you guys he is a mostly like the average noob, but he do have some experience of the game and is relatively smart (for being a WoW noob).

But to let you know about the helping part, I first told him to install auctioneer, then I spent a while showing him the vendor search function. This part in particular took a while as he went afk when I had made him start the AH scan without listening to the last parts of how to search, so I had to wait for him to come back. All in all this took me about 30 minutes, wasted time you may say, and I am close to thinking so as well.

But there is this small chance that he will use my advice to get into the AH, use the basics I learned him and learn how to use the AH in more complicated ways with professions and other stuff. I will keep track of this guy over the next few days/weeks to see how he's doing and find out if my time really was wasted.

So, with that done the only thing left to tell you is how my economic situation is right now. I got most of my snowfalls sold which netted me about 600g, combined with some glyph sales (still don't make all that much from them, about 200-400g/day), gems and scrolls I am sitting at a total 14 300 gold, approaching the 15k mark :D

Unfortunantly the herb prices have gone up, adder's tongue are up to 30g/stack while the others are a bit cheaper lying a little above 20g/stack,

How to Destroy Stocked Up Ink

2009-09-09T07:00:00.000+02:00

Today I screwed up. Not one of those small stuff like pricing an item wrong or buying overpriced stuff. If you use Skillet you are propably aware of the buy reagents feature. For you who don't know Skillet lets you queue up a craft list that you can then craft that list by pressing a single button (though you got to press it everytime you want to craft a new kind of item) and also lets you purchase all the needed mats from a vendor (but only if the vendor sells it of course) with a single mouseclick.

This is were the problem is. I am currently storing my inks in my alts' Guild Bank, so I sent some to Belsebub after making a queue and went to the ink vendor to buy what I needed. I then noticed that I didn't have enough inks on me, so I went to get some more from the Guild Bank. When I came back to the ink vendor I once again pressed the buy reagents button trusting skillet would take care of all my purchases for me. Well, that wasn't the case, instead of buying the remaining inks I needed it went through the whole crafting queue buying the exact same inks I had previously (not exactly the same as I had less inks).

So what does that mean? Well, it means I have now traded my whole ink stock for low level inks. While it wont kill me as I will still have the inks, it is annoying and will reduce my flexibility until I get some more, and with the current prices of herbs that could take a while.

On the other hand I have now finished my crafting and got both my glyph alts' bags close to full at the AH and about 3-400 glyphs resulting in a lot of sales. It's nice being back in the glyph buisness again :D

The Joys of Milling

2009-09-08T07:00:00.000+02:00

As I told you yesterday I bought a lot of herbs, that's great. But now comes the real work, milling. As I now have about 70-80 stacks of herbs and each stack can be milled 4 times I will have to press that button about 300 times.

In addition to that I have the time required to make the inks, luckilly that counts as AFK time and I can do other stuff, like writing on this post or watching TV, while making them. I wont have time for any long post today as my free time has been incredibly small today, so all that is left is to make the inks, and maybe get ready or even do a whole crafting session to stock up on glyphs. I had planned on making 3 of every profitable one which should leave me with a pretty good stock of inks while getting enough glyphs to start getting competive again.

Unfortunantly there has once again been a price increase, I could have choosen to sell the herbs which would have netted me a nice profit but I decided that getting back into the glyph market was more important than some short-term profit.

My enchanting scrolls sold great and I were able to pick up about 600g from the mailbox, at the moment I'm just bellow 13 000 gold, something that will drop once I buy the parchments for all my glyphs but I should be able to survive.

The Darkmoon Faire

2009-09-07T07:00:00.002+02:00

If you have read my posts the last week or so you can't have missed that the Darkmoon Faire is coming up, or to be more precise, tomorrow. With it comes some good stuff, and some bad stuff. Today I started to panic as I had less than a day to get ready for a possible jump in the herb prices. As I am already having issues with nearly all of my glyphs being sold out and only 700 inks that I would like to have stocked up in case of an emergency.

So what I did was that I bought up a few stacks of herbs, not any huge amounts, but enough to keep up for a week, for 20g/stack. I then started doing the Netherwing dailies to get a nether drake, just for fun with no gold involved. WoWwiki says that in one day I should be able to reach neutral, but by gathering eggs and using the human reputation bonus (love that thing) I am already up to 2000 rep from honored with 2 netherwing eggs.

But that got nothing to do with this, as I said, I bought some herbs. Later I checked the AH again and saw 56 stacks of adder's tongue for 17g which I instantly bought (Carbon, I can't thank you enough for telling me about Auctionator), the total price was a little less than 1000 gold. A while later the prices had dropped down to 16g but I didn't buy anything as I wanted to let the market drop. With these purchases I'm sitting at about 83 stacks of adder's tongue and icethorn. As I get 6 inks per stacks I can turn them into about 500 inks.

With these herbs I am able to restock on glyphs, but first I'll wait and see if there's a major rise in the herb prices during the week.

Even with this huge purchase I am only down to 12 600 gold thanks to JC and enchanting which means I was up to a little more than 13 500 gold today. So a really great day.

No post

2009-09-06T07:00:00.000+02:00

As usual, no Sunday post. But I can tell you things starts to look a lot better now ;)

Gems and Enchants

2009-09-05T07:00:00.000+02:00

How has my day been? Pretty good, still no low price herbs and nothing from my farmers, I also got a picture that will propably make every scribe looking at it scream! See that search window? Now look at the search results. Who could do such a thing to an innocent herb market?

On the upside I have found a new way of making gold, enchanting and JC. Until now I have been doing some gem posting and made a few scrolls and made a few gold by doing that, but never any real money. Today I decided to start using them and made a bunch of gems and enchanting scrolls, put them all up on the AH. The results were great. The gems were selling pretty slowly, but I got a few epic gems sold. The enchant scrolls sold incredibly fast though. It may be the new arena season or I might have found myself a fountain of gold. Lets hope for the fountain part.

All in all, except for the herb part I've had a really good day. I'm sitting at 12480 gold with sold auctions that have yet to arrive included.

Need More Farm(er)s

2009-09-04T07:00:00.000+02:00

Well, I don't have a lot of time to write this so it's just a quick update. Herb prices are rising, my farmer is nowhere to be seen and I'm running out of glyphs. Luckilly I found another farmer who sells me herbs for 17g/stack. While I don't make any real profit from them I still don't loose money and will be able to put up a fasade of some kind of controll for my competition.

These last few days have really shocked me. I have been used to never have enough money to buy all I need and had that as my only limitation. But now, I am suddenly relying on every move of the herb market to get any profit. I belive it has to be experienced to really be understood...

Well, that's it, I'm approaching 12k and really need to fill up my glyph stock to prevent my competition from getting a foot back into the market.

11k is more than 7000

2009-09-03T07:00:00.001+02:00

About a month ago I did a mistake. A huge mistake that may have slowed down my entire AH progress. "What could he have done that caused such huge consequences" you might ask, well, the answer is simple. I bought a Nobles Deck.

Ok, I bought the cards to make a deck. The cost was pretty close to 4000g. Now I decided to sell it with the fair coming up, how much did I get? 4400 gold. That's a 10% profit after a months waiting. I could have made a lot more than that by using the gold spent. Well, too late to do anything about it now, but luckilly this means I just added 4400 gold to my gold pile putting me at over 11 000!

I have also sold all my snowfall ink and got a lot of money from it. So with my newly earned "fortune" I decided to go shopping, Scribe style. First of all I wanted to fill up my stock of ink of the sea some more, I "only" got 708 inks. But as the AH prices were crazy I decided to take a look in trade, every good AH players best friend as the prices are usually very low.

I instantly get whispered by a guy who says he got 350 stacks of adder's tongue. I of course get extremly happy beliving I had found myself a gold seller. He then tells me he want 350g per stack! I told him I wouldn't give him more than 15g per stack for it, he lowered his price to 50g and I gave up.

I checked both Icecrown and Sholazar for farmers but no sucess. I am actually getting a little worried, I got the maths to make lots of gold, now I only need the mats. I haven't heard from my farmer (the other one decided he didn't have time for farming) so I got no herbs today.

I am preparing a huge crafting session to make 10 of every glyph makeable, this will require about 2500 diferent inks. That means I'll need 416 stacks of herbs which will, at 15g each, cost me 6250. I do have lots of gold but I'm not willing to make such a huge risk yet, I will propably just make some of them and do the rest when I get the gold/mats.

Spending spending spending

2009-09-02T07:00:00.001+02:00

Carbon at A Gnome's Conques t said:

"So I thought about it for a little bit (all of 20 seconds) and decided "what the hell? I've been broke my entire wow career. Worst case - I'll be broke again" lol. And proceeded to invest about 3k into saronite ore and cleaned the AH of eternal earths. All in all I spent 4k or so and was officially broke. Again."

After reading this I realised how right he was, you can't make gold without spending it. So what did I do? I spent a lot (a lot) of gold on eternal earth and saronite ores and I'm right now in the process of making infinite dust for the new season tomorrow as I've just realised I had no preparations for it. If you look at the picture you can also see that I got a lot of gems stocked up, that is mostly rests from old prospects of titanium and saronite when I was to lazy to get rid of them. I also put my death knight in Smacky's guild as it will be easier to acess stuff from one char to another.

With the new arena season coming up there will be a huge increase in the demand of enchants, gems and also glyphs. So I am now using all my huge citrines, bloodstones, sun crystals and chalcedonys to make rings and necklaces to disenchant. So I put my death knight to work making huge citrine necklaces, what happened? This:

That's only about 2/3 of all citrine necklaces and I still got a lot of chalcedony, bloodstone and sun crystal stuff coming up. I have yet to decide if I will sell the mats on the AH or use them for enchants, I will decide that when I see the prices of both enchants and mats.

The glyphs are still selling well, but low, so I have nothing to say there really. I did put my old nobles deck up on the AH and hope to get it sold within the next few days, a 5-6k gold bonus would be nice to have.

Well, I thought I was finished with this post but apparently I'm not. I just went to check my auctions one more time and guess what I found. All my snowfall on the AH had sold out. That means I have sold 84 snowfall inks in just 2 days! When I posted the 12 I had left (got more now as I just did a milling/crafting session) I had sold 3 within just a few minutes.

I assume this is due to the faire coming up but what this means is that I am very close to having free inks :D As I get 12g 19s due to the AH cut that makes the cost for a stack of herbs 2g81s, split that in 6 and you get 46 silver per ink!!! Using the previous calculation of glyph costs that puts the maximum cost per glyph at an amazingly low 1g42s! (I know, I use exlamation marks far to much in this post)

So with my threshold of around 2g50s I make a whole lot of gold, also I don't have to worry about being undercut as I am way bellow everyone else when it comes to costs (or they are just to greedy to sell glyphs for this low).

On top of that I got about 7-800 ink of the sea stocked up and some snowfall that will hopefully sell during the night. All in all I'm sitting at 6432 gold.

World of Glyphwar

2009-09-01T07:00:00.000+02:00

I am unable to upload an image for today's post for some unknown reason so we'll have to do without it. Today's topic will be the glyph market.

I may have said earlier that I have lowered my threshold to between 2 and 3 gold, making my glyphs very cheap. By having this low threshold I appear to have shocked the market, there is almost no one undercutting me. I have yet to have to cancel more than 25 glyphs (less than 10%) at any time today. None of these were undercut by any of my major competitiors.

So what does this mean then? Yes, that I have found a price where my competition can not get to me without loosing out on too much profit to make it worthwhile. I on the other hand do not care as these prices still keep me above the point where I'll loose gold although I wont make a lot, a price I'm willing to pay to drive the competition away.

So, here's the situation, I got acess to a decent amount of herbs (I just found myself another supplier that can get me the same amount as the other one for the same cost) coming in for a good price, I am not very dependant of the herb prices on the AH and I got a lot of glyphs and ink stored up (though the glyphs are selling out really fast right now).

This means I can dump the prices, get profit and keep my competition out of the market, at least temporarily. By doing this I can hopefully get a bunch of the low sellers, and maybe some of the bigger ones, out of the glyph market. I am also considering lowering my fallback to really show them I'm serious about this.

The problem is of course, the snowfall inks. While my plans look good on the paper (or the computer screen) they are pretty hard to get to work in reality. The big problem is finding a buyer. I have to have a deal that is good enough to make it worth it for the buyer but it must still make up for my costs. The 5 ink of the sea for a snowfall works good for that as I get a nice amount of inks while the customer makes more than he would if he had gone to the ink vendor.

Unfortunantly my server doesn't really have any big card makers. I looked at the AH and saw that there were no one who had more than two or three cards up. This is some trouble for me as I rely on these people to make gold.

So to make sure I got all ways to get rid of snowfall covered I put them on the AH. After a while I got undercut pushing the prices down from 19g to 13-14, so I decided to give back by pushing them down to 12g 80s. This is still profit for me, it's actually more than they would have been worth if I traded them for snowfall.

After buying some titanium for 200g/stack I am down to 7000g, but I did get a little more epic gems than expected (1 more on 5-6 stacks, not anything huge but every little bit helps).

Finding A Farmer

2009-08-31T07:00:00.004+02:00

Well, as my glyphs have now started selling and I have lowered my threshold to a little above 2g, resulting in me now having about 440 glyphs on the AH. Although most of them are bellow 3 gold, I have decided to find a farmer.
I spent a while trying to find one without any sucess, but when I tried again later in the evening I found one, and a good deal too.

This farmer is now gonna supply me with 10 stacks of adder's tongue per day for 15 gold per stack. He got more and I can increase how many I will get per day at any time if I find 10 isn't enough.

I also bought a lot of herbs during the day (and used some old ones lying in my mailbox) and made them into inks. In total I now got 517 ink of the sea and 85 snowfall inks after spending about 5-600 gold on herbs..

I also feel I should make a small note about yesterday's post. After milling a lot of herbs I notice that there is a slight delay between each mill so I will instead count milling at 3 seconds. While this may not seem like a lot it can drastically change the end result, therefor I changed the whole post to fit in with this change.

I also added an edit saying that the prices where wrong as well and I then re-directed you to this post. Well, you see, in my calculations the price per ink of the sea was 0.33 gold (or 33 silver) as I sold my snowfall ink for 2 gold bellow the herb price per stack. But as I make more snowfall ink I can no longer sell it all so I am now trading it for 5 ink of the sea in trade (a good deal for the other guy as he gets twice as many inks as he would have gotten at Jessica Sellers.

The problem is of course that 5 ink of the sea is not enough to cover the herb cost as good as an snowfall ink can. So if I get 6 ink of the sea and one snowfall from each stack of herbs I can turn it into 11 ink of the sea. 15/11=1.36, so I now pay 1.36 gold per ink of the sea. That increases my glyph costs by a lot.

I also did the mistake to add the parchment prices when I calculated the average glyph price so I did do some stupid mistakes. So here is the (hopefully) correct version:
I get my inks for 1.36g each, that means that the cost for two inks is 2.72g, which then puts the average price for the inks (still assuming one third are two ink glyphs) at (2.72-1.36)/3 = 0.45
1.36 + 0.45 = 1.81. If we then add the parchment cost of 50 silver we get a total average price of the glyphs at 2g31s.

Well, I think I should push my threshold up a little bit.

I have now also installed statcounter on the blog, with pretty surprising results. So far I have thought I maybe had 3 or 4, maybe even 5 readers but it seems like it's a lot more. From the begining I had planned to post the results here but as the counter goes up far too fast for me to give any accurate results so I will just display the counter at the bottom of this page.

Just remember it only displays unique visitors and decides that by using a cookie, so as some people propably have cookies disabled the results wont be completly accurate. Also note that once a person has visited the page he wont be counted if he visits it again within 24 hours.

No new post

2009-08-30T12:40:00.002+02:00

Well, I have said it before but decided to post a reminder. There will be no Sunday post. I also suggest that you don't trust yesterday's post blindly, I noticed I had done some mistakes and I will point them out tomorrow.

Math Class: The Profitability of Glyphs

2009-08-29T07:00:00.008+02:00

Edit: By re-reading the post today I see it is not quite as horrible as I thought yesterday when I wrote it. So don't worry about my comments on how hard this is to understand, I was pretty tired when I wrote that.

If you have read my first "Math Class" post you can see I came to the conclusion my inks cost about 0.33g/each. That means that my glyphs cost between 0.83g (0.33g for the ink and 0.5g for the parchment) and 1g16s for those who uses two inks (0.66 + 0.5).

So why am I bringing this up? Well, I guess most of you know about the goblin saying "Time is money" and what opportunity cost is. For you who don't I will give a short explanation:

Ok, I will give you an simple example. Lets say a player got mining and blacksmithing and wants to make some eternal belt buckles, he then goes to wintergrasp to mine some saronite and farm some eternals. He has now farmed 8 saronite ores, 1 eternal water, 1 etarnal earth and 1 eternal shadow.

On the AH these sells for 6, 8, 7 and 4 gold respectively. That means the total value of all these items is 6 + 8 + 7 + 4 = 25 gold. He looks at the price for the belt buckle at the AH and sees that it's selling for 23 gold.

Without thinking this person posts his buckle on the AH for 20g to get it sold fast. If you compare this to selling the mats you see he looses out on 5 gold by doing this (not to mention that farming the mats yourself is incredibly unefficent).

So the above is an example of opportunity cost, while he did make some money he could have made more from selling the mats. So in short, opportunity cost is (when it comes to money) to choose between two or more things that both are profitable to choose the most profitable one.

But as you propably didn't understand a word of that, here's a wikipedia page.

Here you who already know about opportunity cost can start reading

But what my point with this post is to see how much I will have to sell my glyphs for to get an good gold/hour ratio. Let me explain in a little more detail:

As I mentioned in my previous Math Class post it takes 4 seconds to make an ink, I decided to add 2 to make up for human error but I don't think it's necessary right now.

So lets see how long it takes to make one glyph. 3-6 seconds per mill (some glyphs require 2 inks = 4 pigments, I also added an one second delay on each mill) which means 2-4 seconds milling per ink (3 pigments per mill but only 2 per ink), 2-4 seconds to make the ink (once again, some require 2 inks) and 3 seconds to make the glyph itself.

For a 1 ink glyph that is 2 + 2 + 3 = 7 and for a two ink glyph 4 + 4 + 3 = 11.
I'd say about a third of all glyphs require 2 inks (propably wrong but shouldn't be too far of) so that means that we'll have to add the time diference between a two ink glyph and a one ink glyph divided by three on the time of a one ink glyph.

11 - 7 = 4 which divided by 3 is 1.33. That means the average time per glyph is 7 + 1.33 = 8.33seconds.

So, as I said in the beginning my one ink glyphs cost 0.83 gold to make and the two ink ones 1.16 gold. Now lets do the same calculations as we did with the time spent. The price diference is 0.33 gold, one third of the glyphs are two ink ones, thus we add 1/3 of 0.33 gold on the one ink glyph price. This puts the average price at 0.94 gold (0.83 + 0.11).
Edit: The above prices are calculated using the cost if I sold all snowfall inks, see the next post to see why this no longer is true.

So what does this tell us? That the time cost per glyph is 8.33 seconds and the gold cost is 0.94 gold (or 94 silver). Since each hour got 3600 seconds I can then make about 432 glyphs/hour (3600/8.33).

This means, that every gold above 94 silver I sell my glyphs for I make about 300 gold per hour (canceling and reposting does take a lot of time). So that means, I can put my threshold as low as 1g94s and still be pretty sure to make at least 300 gold/hour, but of course it will be a lot higher as most glyphs will sell for more.

I find these high numbers very impressive and have a hard time beliving I did all calculations right (but I do hope so), but I am currently way to tired to check it all up but just make a comment if you notice any mistakes.

If nobody notices any huge mistakes I may even lower my threshold down to 2 gold as I will still make a good gold per hour while going lower than most other people.

No new post

2009-08-28T07:00:00.000+02:00

I have been walking around with a headache all day and think I'm getting a cold so I have no new post for you today.

Smacky's Back in Business!

2009-08-27T07:00:00.000+02:00

Yes that's right, the glyph prices are starting to rise, at least partially. If you check the picture you see I posted 94 auctions. This is with my old 12g threshold so if I lower it I should be able to get even more glyphs up on the AH.

In addition to this I also got an alt with a pretty big stock of glyphs I have not told you about as I was planning to use it to get more effect if I had to price dump to drive my competition out. Something that seems to not be needed now. I will still not give you the name of this alt as I prefer not to give out all my secrets at once.

So far the sales have been slow, I have only gotten one glyph sold. Luckilly it was at my fallback price so I got 90g for it.

I also did a major screwup today. I was working on getting hit capped as my guild is working on getting ready for raiding so I figured I should buy a Ebonweave Robe. I checked some prices and saw I could save a few hundred gold by getting the mats and find a tailor. Unfortunantly I missed the fact that I needed 8 ebonweave cloths instead of 4 as I belived.

So I bought the mats and found a tailor and asked him to link his tailoring. It was about now I noticed my mistake and realised it was cheaper to buy a robe from the AH for 700g than buying 4 more ebonweaves. So I have now put up my frostweave bolts (which sold within minutes) and ebonweave which I hope will sell eventually. These mistakes combined with the buying of a robe has put me back about 1.4k gold down to 7000.

Shopping Spree

2009-08-26T07:00:00.000+02:00

Yes, I decided it was time to start focus on leveling enchanting as it has proved to be a good source of income even at lower levels. So I went on a shopping spree spending nearly 500 gold on mats (some of you wont consider this much but I do) in the form of saronite ore (10g per stack), eternal earth (6g) and greater cosmic essences for just 10g per essence, an opportunity I couldn't miss out on and some eternal air.

So at the moment Ferni is sitting on about 2700g and in total I got 7900g (was 8500 before I started to buy mats so I spent more like 600g). I have also sold out on Scroll of Enchant 2H Weapon - Greater Savagery (that enchant could make me rich all by itself) so I made a few more to put up. Nothing beats the fealing of earning 50g for 5 minutes work.

Nothing more to say today really.

Meat Trading

2009-08-25T07:00:00.000+02:00

You often see lowbies begging for gold in cities, desperatly trying to find someone who is willing to give them some gold, or even just a few silver.

As you know I am currently testing how much I can make from simply buying and selling at level 1. Today I decided to try an alternative method for low level gold making, begging.

So I started running around in the SW trade district begging for a gold. I ran around for about 15 minutes trying to get my fellow players give me some of their hard-earned gold. The result? None!

Not a single reply, the only thing I got was a "shoo" emote from another banker when I jumped up to the auctioneers and started typing in caps.

So after15 minutes of work I hadn't made a single copper. Doesn't sound like a very good moneymaking method to me, but it appears that some people get it to work. Why would they else spend their time on it? Or they are just stupid.

Now when we're done with begging, lets see how Gered is doing. My wolf meat investments went great and it had sold out when I logged on today. This put me a nice bit over the 2g mark. I decided to use my newly earned gold on some clam meat. I bought 35 succulent clam for about 4 silver each.

I then put them up in stacks of 5 for 1g 70s which is about 70% of the average auction house value. I am now only waiting for some buyer to show up and buy them. So not including my clam meat I now got 1g 72s 87c. This is after just a few days at level 1 without any help from other characters.

There's nothing special going on with my other characters, glyphs are still low, I am trying to raise my enchanting when I am not to tired and the stuff I made while leveling enchanting/JC is selling and gives me a pretty steady, but at the time small income.

All in all I'm sitting at 8244g.

School has started

2009-08-24T07:01:00.000+02:00

This affects a lot for me, both in-game and in real life. In the game it will obviously change the market, and in real life it means I will have less time and be a lot more tired (at least until I get used to get up early in the morning again). Due to this you will have to excuse any crappy posts I may do the next few weeks.

Also I will not always have time to make new posts but those days should be predictable and I will see if I will have to change my posting frequency from every day to every second day or something like that. I should be able to give you more information about this sometime around the middle of this week.

Learning Auctioneer: Introduction

2009-08-24T07:00:00.000+02:00

I'm pretty sure you have all heard about the addon Auctioneer, the addon which is considered a must have by most AH players. I have now decided to make a few posts about it. Today it will just be a short introduction (the reason to why this and all posts the last days have been so short is in the other post today) to what auctioneer is but I will get more in-depth later on.

Basically auctioneer lets you scan the AH and it will then give you the average price for an item by hovering over it with your mouse. It will also allow you to see the percentage of the average price of an item when browsing the AH, you are also able to watch the prices on the AH as price per item.

No new post today

2009-08-23T07:00:00.000+02:00

Yes, I'm sorry but I am just to tired right now to write anything. Because of this I will give you a post tomorrow instead. I will propably continue doing it like this and skip all Sunday posts and put them on Monday instead.

My Ten Copper: First 50 silver

2009-08-22T07:00:00.001+02:00

After 3 days of working on my new alt, Gered, I have just hit the 50 silver mark. During these days I have only used the vendor search function of Auctioneer to find stuff to sell. As you can see it's very useful even on lower levels.

Now when I have started to get some more money I belive it will be a lot easier to get into a few small investments. I can't describe how hard it is to buy and resale or even just buy to vendor when you only got 10 copper.

Not a very long post today, but I promise you'll get more tomorrow.

Time to leave the glyphs

2009-08-21T07:00:00.000+02:00

At least temporarily due to the incredibly low prices. Out of 90 kinds of glyphs I got 2 posted today, I do have a high treshold at the moment (12g) to avoid dumping my glyphs too cheap. It has now gone so far that I have decided that the time spent just posting is not worth the money I make from it. Therefor I will quit inscription, for a while. Of course I will still have the profession, but I will leave the glyph market completly until it starts to look better and focus on enchanting and JC to make gold and hopefully return in a week or two.

My Ten Copper

2009-08-19T20:21:00.005+02:00

The normal business is going well (except for the glyphs) so I see no need to give any detailed info on how it's going. Instead I will tell you about a new alt I started today, say hello to Gered!

His use? To make gold by only buying and selling. And as the title of this post implies, he started out with only 10 copper that I made by selling the starting food!

Within a few minutes I had made that 10 copper into 1s 23c just by buying Red-speckled Mushrooms with the vendor search. I then decided to invest it in some boar meat (one silver for a stack of 13 :O) a piece of coarse thread from a vendor to see if it sells, and a few more bids on the vendor search. I ended up with only 5 copper left, but I should be able to see some money come in tomorrow.

Back to leveling...

2009-08-19T07:00:00.000+02:00

I have said in a previous post that I do not like leveling, and I prefer the end-game. However, sometimes we're forced doing things we don't like, like leveling an alt.

I did it a while ago on Ferni to get her enchanting and JC up, unfortunantly it appears level 65 isn't enough. Sure, it allows me to skill them up to 450 but that's not enough in the case of JC.

As any jewelcrafter I will have to do the dailies to get the good cuts, the problem is that these quests takes you out in Northrend to kill mobs that are at least level 70. I don't know if you've tried to kill a mob 5 levels higher than you but it's hard, even as a death knight.
First you have the fact that they have more health than you, additionally they have crushing blows and you'll miss, a lot.

That's why I have decided to level Ferni to at least 68 to be able to kill a mob in less than 5 minutes. The first thing I did was to buy a flying mount, setting me back about 600g. I am not logged on right now so I am not completly sure but I belive I currently have 6500g after the mount purchase meaning I made quite some money today, mainly through gems and enchants, glyphs are still not selling well (see the picture, click to magnify it).

The titanium prices are finally dropping and I had the chance to buy a few stacks for 250g today, but I didn't think it was worth it. On AH they were on for 300g so within a few days the prices should be down. I have still not decided on what to do about the glyph situation, I can either wait it out or do something about it, today I made a list of all glyphs even remotely worth selling in skillet in case I would decide to do some price dumping of my own.

I put about 5 to 10 in it, but the issue is, of course, inks. It appears as that there's some kind of bug in skillet making me unable to see the amount of inks I need (it showed x pigments and y inks in the shopping list, in some cases the inks were exactly half as many as the pigments and in others they weren't), but it appears as that this would require between 600 and 1300 inks of the sea. 1300 would cost me about 3000g if I made them myself but if I sold all snowfall ink I would get it for only 400g (if every snowfall ink sold for 13g).

I would propably be able to sell them eventually but I am not willing to risk half my pile of gold at something like this. I might do once I get an answer from a guy I mailed today asking if he would want to have a steady supply of snowfall inks (he bought all 8 I had on AH). He is propably just doing as a one time thing to get himself a nobles deck but it's worth a try.

Math Class

2009-08-18T07:00:00.001+02:00

Once upon a time... No, that's not how I'm going to start this post. Instead we'll take a look at the glyph market. The first thing I noticed when I logged on and posted my glyphs was the lack of other posters. It appears as that the price dumper(s) plan have worked, I only saw 2-3 posters at each glyph and no competition at all on some. Unfortunantly I only got 225g from glyph sales during the weekend, but I suspect the prices will rise soon.

I also made about 450g from enchanting/JC, it has started to become a gold mine.

On top of that I decided to do some calculations on the how effective making your own inks is compared to buying it of the AH. The price for one ink on the AH is 2.5g. It takes about 6 seconds to make an ink (2 for milling and 2 for making the ink, I added 2 seconds to make up for lag and human error). One hour is 3600 seconds thus I can make 600 inks/hour. The price for one ink if I make it from a stack of adder's tongue bought for 15g is 0.33g (15-13 = 2, 2/6 = 0.33) if the snowfall ink sells for 13g, the higher it sells for the cheaper my inks are. The money saved by making my own inks is 2.5 - 0.33 = 2.17. So if 6 seconds of my time are worth 2.17g or more I should buy the inks of the AH, otherwise I should make them. In one hour I make 600 inks so 2.17g * 600 = 1302g. That means that when I hit the point I make 1302g per hour I should start buying them of the AH. However, as I did my calculations with 6 seconds instead of 4 this is not correct.

If each ink took 4 seconds to make that would mean I made 900 inks/hour putting the gold/hour cap at 1953gold/hour. But as this is the case in a perfect world and not likely to happen we can say that the cap is propably between 1500 and 1900g per hour.

Now, if you are still awake, I will tell you that the titanium prices are still high, about 18g per ore, but they are showing some signs of decreasing in price and they will propably be down to reasonable prices sometime during next week.

To finish the post I'm just going to write how much money I got at the moment. Smacky got about 3400 and Belsebub got 900 putting them at 4300g while Ferni got 1900g. In total I got 6300g (I know it doesn't add up, I got a few old alts with a few g on my server and the addon I use to see how much gold I have adds them all together), and I am once again starting to make profit from my AH work.

That's all for today

Gold! Precious Gold!

2009-08-16T07:00:00.000+02:00

It's propably because it's weekend but I've had a good night, or at least better then the previous have been. I made about 240g from glyph sales, not great but better than nothing, and about 340g from my new-found gold mine, Enchant 2H weapon - Greater Savagery. The mats cost about 50g when bought from the AH and they sell for 90. I made 3 of them while leveling and all had sold when I logged on today so I plan to make some more and see if they sell as well.

Today I also posted two titanium powder for 35g each, and they sold! I have no idea why anyone would pay that much as it means you pay 350g per token and over 1000g for a blue gem cut. Unfortunantly not even this makes titanium worth prospecting as it is still ranging between 3-400g/stack despise it being weekend.

I also bought my second JC cut with 3 of my 4 JC tokens, some kind of yellow gem.

Additionally I have started working on a plan to drive my competition out of the glyph market, I wont give you any details yet due to the small chance someone one my server hears about it. However, I can tell you that it will involve a whole lot of undercutting and lots of glyphs.

Pretty short post today as I spent most of the evening with some friends but I hope you'll manage. Just a reminder, there will be no Monday post.

Organization is the key!

2009-08-15T07:00:00.003+02:00

One of the most important parts of sucess is organization. It doesn't matter if you play football, work in the army or sit at your computer trying to make gold from the AH, you will always need organization. I must admit I've been lacking it during the weeks I have been writing this, something I plan to change.

The most important change I will make is to separate my alt's economy making it easier to see where I loose money and what I need to work more or less on. I will also try the new Excel addon to see if it will be able to give me a good overlook of my glyph sales.

So here you go, a complete list of all my (active) alts with their current uses and gold and with some luck none of the other scribes of my server will use this open window into my mind to counter my actions.

First we have Belsebub! No applauds? Oh well, he's my main, 450 inscription, 450 engineering used mainly for having fun or get stuff that are to hard for my other chars to obtain. Sitting at 650g at the moment.

Smacky (I know, crappy name) the glyph poster and inoficial trade channel alt (mainly because he's usually my richest alt). Got 2700g.

As I said I will try to keep my diferent characters separated, however, as Belsebub has no real income as Smacky does all the posting I will add their gold together. This puts them at 3350 gold.

Ferni (my brother made it because he wanted to try death knights and I decided to steal it for my professions, no comment on the name), works with gems and enchanting scrolls/mats. She's got 760g right now, something I hope to increase with all the scrolls I made to level her enchanting to 405.

That means I am now sitting at a total of 4184 gold, a lot less than yesterday. This is mainly because I bought some eternal earth and greater eternal essences for my enchanting leveling but also due to the current glyph situation. So while it may look bad I have some hope that I will be able to make a lot of gold soon™.

That's it for today, the glyphs are still low and I still haven't gotten a response from the guy I mailed so I will have to assume the price dumping is intentional. I have raised my threshold to 14g making sure I get some income from glyphs without throwing them away for 3-4g each.

The goldpile is... sinking...

2009-08-14T07:00:00.001+02:00

Yup that's right. I am sitting at 4700g. A loss of about 1500g. You may ask yourself, what happened? Well, it's not as bad as it looks.

When I woke up this morning and logged on I picked up my expired glyphs and a few sold ones hardly worth mentioning. After doing that I didn't really feel like working on the AH today so I toke a day of to get some rest.

I decided to try out trial of the champions, the new 5-man dungeon, today and it went good. We did it on normal 2 times, both with good results even if we had to do it with only four people on the second try resulting in a wipe on the black knight. On the second attempt we got him down to the ghost form and I... died. His mark of death really hurts. I flew back and entered the instance just in time to see the the healer and the other DPS get killed before the tank killed him.

But to get on the moneymaking subject. I've written to the price dumper I talked about yesterday without an answer. However, he/they have posted more auctions so I find it likely that this is intentional and not, as I belived, a configure error in QA2.

So what will I do about this? Nothing. Nothing at all. I will just stop posting for a few days and wait them out. If I'm lucky they may even suceed in driving some competition out. The worst thing that could happen is that I am forced to contact the other big glyph posters on my server and get them to join me in a even bigger price dump.

That would be absolutly worst case scenario and I really hope I wont have to take it that far.

On my enchanting/JC alt there hasn't been a lot of stuff going on either. No posted gems today and all I've sold is a few old enchanting scrolls from leveling. The price of titanium is at about 15-20g per ore, still far too much for me to even consider buying it, but I predict a price drop during the weekend.

I guess there is just one thing left to write. How did I manage to loose 1500g over 1 day. The answer is simple, it's called Jeeves. Most of you should have heard about it but if you haven't here's a short explanation.

Jeeves is like a regular repair bot with two important diferences.
1. He is not destroyed upon use and
2. He allows me to acess my banks from anywhere in the world.

I have never bothered with the old repairbots as I do not raid but I did see the usefulness of having acess to my bank so I decided to make it.

The mats however was pretty expensive so I ended up pretty poor, especially as I didn't have any income.

Well that's it. Hopefully I'll get a better day tomorrow.

Quick Auctions 2

2009-08-13T07:01:00.008+02:00

Update 21/8: Added a part about the summary and craft queue part of QA

Edit: The pictures were put in pretty bad, sorry for that, but just follow them in the order they appear. If you have trouble seeing what's on them just click and they will be magnified. I also decided to put a "(PICTURE)" where I am moving on to another one to make it a little easier to read.

Hi and welcome to the first part in my Addon section. Here I will discuss all the important addons that are needed to make the process of goldmaking faster and easier. Today we'll start with "Quick Auctions 2".

Basically it's an addon that posts your auctions and cancels your undercut ones, I can't describe how great it is as a scribe, but it's a little more complicated than that.

The big diference between quick auctions and quick auctions 2 is how you configure it. In the original version you configured it from the chatbox where a command like "/qa undercut 25s17c glyphs" would set the undercut amount to 25s and 17c for all glyphs. In the new version there are no premade groups (like glyphs where all glyphs are gathered) so you'll have to make them yourself, somthing I'll show you later.

First you open the configuration window by writing "/qa config" this is what you should get (PICTURE). It's not great quality (my graphic card is broken and I should get a new one in just a few days), but you should be able to recognise most of it if you use it yourself.
These are the general settings that are true for all items unless you want to override them (we'll come to that later), but the only thing you have to care for right now is the "Smart undercut" checkbox at the top. I suggest you uncheck it as if you don't it QA2 will round all your auction prices down to the nearest gold which can be pretty bad when you are selling glyphs.

On the left side there is a "item groups" button, when you click it you'll get this window (PICTURE):

Here you'll write the name of your new group (I reccomend glyphs if that's what you're going to put in it). After that you will come to this page (PICTURE)

Here you can do all group specific settings.

First you'll have Undercut. First you check the "override undercut" box, this allows you to override the general settings that you saw earlier and you'll have to do this to every setting you want to change, then you can change the undercut amount of your glyphs by enering the amount as for example 3g52s19c. Just remember to fill the gold amount as zero when you're going below 1 gold (not sure if this is necessary but I can't check it right now). Then you press okay.

You'll then have Threshold. This is the lowest price your glyphs will be sold for and they wont be put up if your competitiors are bellow this price. You fill it the same way as with undercut.

Fallback is the price your glyphs will be posted for if there's no competition. I have my fallback at 97g, some would consider it high but they sell.

Now you'll get to the Fallback After slider. This is how much the price should be above your fallback before it goes down to it. so lets say your fallback is 5 g just for this example and the slider is at 500%. If the lowest priced item is up for 23g then QA2 will undercut it by your undercut value, but if the lowest priced item would be at 27g (more than 500% of your fallback) your item will be posted at 5g.

Then comes Bid percent, this is how many percent of your buyout price your bid is supposed to be, I have mine at 100% as people almost never bid on glyphs.

Then you get the Post cap. Here you'll set how many of each glyph you want to have up at once.

After that we have the Items per Auction where you can set the stack size of the items in the group.

Finally you have the Post Time, which you can propably guess is how long you want your items to be up.

The above settings works for all items in the group so be careful not to mix lots of diferent items in the same group.

Above the settings you'll see three tabs: "General", the one you are on now, "Add items" and "Remove items". Press the Add items button and you'll get here (PICTURE):
From this page you can click on items to put them in your group or just write their name in the field at the top. To add all glyphs in your bag you'll just write "glyph of" and all glyphs will be added. Now you'll just have to go to the AH, click on the auctions tab and click post at the top of the window.

That will post all your glyphs while following the restrictions you put up on the previous page.

That's it, next to the post button there is also a cancel button which will cancel all auctions you are undercut on.
One warning though, as the group will only contain the glyphs you had in your bags when you made it you should see if you have any new glyphs to add every time you make them. I just noticed that I hadn't added any of the glyphs I made a few days ago so basically, only those I had before have been posted.

Due to a request from a reader I made a short guide on the summary and craft queue as well so here you go.

First you write /tradeskill (this is still done from the chat window as it was in the previous versions of QA), I belive it can be done on any character you got.

You then log on the character who has the tradeskill you want to be used, open it and maximise all the categories. You can then go to the AH and click summary.

Choose the category the items you can make are in and click the get data button bellow the categories. You should now see red crosses in front of all items you can't make, you can also see how many you have, how many you have on the AH, how many that are up on the AH and the lowest price right now.

To put an item in the queue double-click on it and there should appear a zero on the left of the name. Just write the number of that item you want to make and they will be added to the craft queue.

You then open your tradeskill window and open the queue list by pressing the QA button on the top right corner next to the red cross close button.

If you look at the bottom of the queue (you may have to scroll down) you will see all materials needed to make the items in the queue.
Now you'll just have to click the items in the queue to make them.

The nice thing is that you can search your queue at the same time as you search the ordinary trade window making it a lot faster to find a specific item.

Another guide (with pictures!) on the summary and craft queue features is this great post at the Just My Two Copper forums.

Price Dumpers and Whiners

2009-08-13T07:00:00.002+02:00

Please read through the Quick Auctions 2 post before reading this.

If you are able to see my crappy image you propably notice two things.
1. My glyph sales are going pretty fine and
2. There have been a price crash on most glyphs.

Today I also got contacted by a scribe colleague who wanted me to know that the price dumping I and the other scribes on my server did was really imorallic and bad for the market. I who had no idea of what he talked about, decided to play along as I was pretty bored and started teaching him about driving competition out of the market. We kept going for a while before I decided I didn't have time for this and left. I sent some screenshots to Gevlon to see if he was interested in putting them up on his blog as he do have a lot more readers than me, if I even have any right now.

However, even if I acted unconcerned this could cause some problems. The big issue is, of course, the price drop. There are a few ways this can be countered in a few ways:
1. I'll wait it out, hoping the prices will rise.
2. I'll contact the price dumper trying to talk him out of what he's doing.
3. I'll do some really serious price dumping (paid for by my JC and enchanting) and hope the price dumper will leave.

Before deciding I wanted to see who the price dumper was, and when I did I got a nasty surprise. 3 of my main competitiors, of which two post about as many glyphs as I do and 1 a little less, had all posted their glyphs at 5g 98s. I can just hope this is because they are all used by the same player and he has gotten QA2 (See the other post today) and done some mistake in the configuration.

The worst case scenario would be if this is one player posting from multiple alts to scare others of, as that would mean I got a competitior posting 3 times as much as I that have now decided to price dump. If I am faced with 3 diferent glyph sellers however, that would make things easier as I can just wait until they'll quit. Keeping a trade agreement between 2 people is hard, if you throw in a third you got problems.

So I now have to change my options, the first and second are from the previous list:
1. I wait it out.
2. I'll price dump
but I decided that I wont be able to talk him or them out of it so:
3. I may have to contact the previous mentioned "whiner" (though I see his point now).

But I do see one light in the end of the tunnel! All glyphs are fixed at 5g 98s, no matter the normal price, supporting my theory that this is due to wrong settings in QA2. Also, the 5g 98s is a price that could be used as a threshold making my theory even more likely.

So first I'll try contact the price dumper and see if he has checked his settings, if not I'll wait for a while until finally contacting the non-price dumpers.

I am now sitting at 6400g so I've made a whole 400g since I started two weeks ago! That averages out at about 28.57g/day!! Ok, not that much... But as I have now started making money instead of losing it I'm on my way towards those big numbers.

Nothing new on the JC/inscription part. I've made a lot of rings and DCd them and leveled enchanting to 380.

The Goldpile is Rising...

2009-08-12T07:00:00.001+02:00

slowly...
I spent a lot of time making glyphs today (all in all about 500 spread over about 100 diferent kinds). So you can propably guess I am extremly tired right now. Also I hit the cap where I have too many glyphs to fit in my 4 inscription bags which will most likely become a pretty big problem. So as I'm making some good money of inscription I've decided to cut down on the glyph part and start to focus on my other 2 ,well 3, but I have no idea what to do with engineering, professions. Jewelcrafting and enchanting.

As I wrote yesterday I decided to buy the design for defenders dreadstone for my 4 only tokens. A huge mistake. I started out with putting them up for 500g each but have now been forced to drive the prices down to 250, and none have sold.

Luckily, I did get some blue gems sold so I've made some money back from the leveling. There have been a slight drop in titanium prices but I expect them to go even lower during the weekend so I'll wait with buying until then.

I had also planned to level my enchanting tomorrow as it has shown some good results even with only 2 diferent wrath scrolls on the AH.

Well, we can end todays post with saying that I am now sitting at 5800g. If nothing changes I will soon get into the profit area.

Diving Into Gems

2009-08-11T07:00:00.000+02:00

Today I leveled up the last 20 points of JC on my death knight and started prospecting titanium. Now lets do some math!

The chance to get each specific epic gem from a prospect is 4%. There are 6 diferent epic gems making the chance to get one 24% per prospect. 24 * 4 (the amount of prospects per stack of titanium) = 96% chance to get an epic gem per stack. I had about 8 stacks stocked up and later I bought 1 more to get 2 more titanium powders, this should've given me 9 gems (well, 8.64 but well round it up to 9). Instead I was lucky enough to get 13 (may have been 14, not completly sure about that). The point is, I got really lucky.

Additionally I also got 22 titanium powders. Compared to the 23.4 I would have gotten in a perfect world I made a small loss but the gems I got made up for it. And of course I also got a whole lot of green and blue gems.

I also did my second daily JC quest and handed in 20 titanium powders and bought the recipe for Defender's Dreadstone. Some people would propably have considered it to be better to buy maybe a red or blue cut but I decided that as there was a low supply of these (only two other sellers on the AH) and it sold for a lot (500g) it was my best choice.

I also got a lot of cut gems sold so I made a nice profit during night. On the other hand those last 20 skill points were expensive (25-50g per skyflare diamond hurts), but I should be able to get most back on the cuts.

I ended up with 5100g, a loss compared to yesterday but nothing too big. I also need to refill my stock of glyphs, after doing that I should get some more profit from them. That's pretty much all I have to say say today.

Patch day

2009-08-09T07:00:00.000+02:00

Patch day, the greatest day for every moneymaker in WoW. The day where morons throw all their money away on gems, enchants, gear or just shopping for fun. Nothing beats patching day. And I missed it... As you can see in previous posts I was away for a week beliving the patch wouldn't be released. Unfortunantly I was wrong I just finished the download while writing this.

However, all is not lost of course. There are still tons of moneymaking opportunities out there waiting for me. First of all I got my titansteel investment which is now worth about 110g each, which is a nice profit as I bought them for around 80. I've also got some titanium that sell for about 14g each. Considering they sold for about 10 earlier I could sell it for profit, however, I will first check how profitable prospecting would be.

On the glyphs I made quite some money. around 400g putting me at 6200 gold. On top of that almost every glyph has skyrocketed in price to about 2-4 times the normal price. I hope to make a lot of profit of this. Later I picked up 600g from glyphs.

Two of nobles was down as well to about 400g so I bought one and I now have a complete deck to sell when the fair is back.

I have also leveled my DK to level 65 and prospected about 1700 saronite ores. I am now at about 430 JC but due to some crazy gem prices I have problems getting it higher. The days around a patch are propably not the best for leveling a profession.

All in all, a good day. I ended up with about 5700g, 100 less than I started with, but I got a lot of stuff done and I should be able to speed things up a little with JC and enchanting on my death knight.

Also, there will be no Monday posts due to real life reasons. But I should be able to post more now as I wont go anywhere and I will try to post every day.

Leveling

2009-08-01T08:00:00.001+02:00

Not really much to say today, my glyph buisness is going good though I will need to fill up glyph stock but I will wait with doing that until the end of next week (see the other post today).

But I will give you a little more detailed look into what I've been doing

The night was good and I made about 400g. About 100 of these was due to my high fallback (107g). As I posted my glyphs today I put up 38 of 300 glyphs for that price out of which one had sold within 15 minutes. Unfortunantly many of my main competitiors logged on a few minutes later so I canceled my undercut glyphs, logged out and now I wait for them to log out before going in posting my glyphs bellow their price.

I also bought 240 lichbloom for 200g which is about 100g bellow market price. A pretty good investment in my oppinion (trade chat is really a gold mine if you know what you're doing). I noticed another thing when I posted my glyphs, it appears as that I've somehow become one of the biggest posters of glyphs on my server (though I post in stacks of four), with about 1/7 of all glyphs on the AH.

When I'm now writing this I'm sitting at 5833g over the whole server. So as I've started out with 6000g two days ago and had 5000 yesterday I've lost 200, but considering as the cheap ores I bought doing a lot better than normal so far.

Also, my death knight hit 64 today which will hopefully allow me to get her up before the patch.

This was all for today and I hope I will have an even better day tomorrow.

Out of town

2009-08-01T07:00:00.000+02:00

This sunday I will leave town for about a week with no internet connection. During this time I will obviously not be able to post anything here. So you will now have plenty of time reading through my previous posts and try to understand what I meant ;)

Looking good

2009-07-31T07:00:00.001+02:00

First a quick update on my glyph buisness. I had a pretty crappy night with about 56g gold in total. However I noticed that I had forgot to pick up a bunch of the glyphs I made yesterday from my mailbox so I had 12 diferent well selling glyphs which I hadn't put up. Now when I put them up I've made about 400g so far today not cunting the money I got yesterday with glyphs for about 60-70g pending.

Later I bought 6 books of glyph mastery for 59g each, so I am only lacking 4 now. But the greatest investment I did today was buying 800 saronite ores for 10g per stack. Yes, it's not a typo, 10g/stack. I'm aware of that it propably was a botter or chinese farmer (and bottter) but I wont say no to an offer like that, even if it is not "moralic". Of the same guy I then bought 4 stacks of titanium. I haven't been a fan of buying tons of titanium for the patch as I everyone else will do the same thing, but decided to have a small stock as my DK will propably get to 450 JC before the patch.

Before I finish I will give you a quick look at my alts and their purposes:

I have propably said I got two alts for my auctioning on top of my main. The first one, a level 7 paladin I use for glyph posting and buying those underpriced stuff you sometimes find in trade.

I also got a death knight which is currently at level 63 making her way to level 65 for getting enchanting and JC up.

All in all I'm currently sitting at 5000g with 7 nobles card stocked up. This is about 1k less than I had when I started but considering my investments in ores I feel I'm doing pretty good.

Good start

2009-07-30T07:00:00.004+02:00

So, the time has come to make my first post on the topic we all came here for, gold.
Today I decided to start doing something about my inscription and bought a few books of glyph mastery at 70g and then checked the summarise option of quick auctions.

For you who don't know quick auctions is an addon that allows you to post both individual items and item types (glyphs, enchanting materials, ores) with a pre set undercut value. You can also choose a treshold (lowest price to post the items for) a fallback price (maximum price that will be used if no other auctions are up) and the number of this item you want to have up at any time.

The summary feature is better explained over at the just my two copper forums.

What I did was that I made between 4 and 6 of each glyph that was above 10g and posted them at the AH. If I had done this before I would be a lot richer than I am now.

Earlier I've spent a lot of time taking care of my auctions but have still only got maybe 100g/day in profit. Today when I used the summary feature I have made over 250g before going to sleep with about 30 - 45 minutes work. This is a huge step for me and hopefully it's not just temporary.

I'm posting about 200 auctions with 50 up resulting in a total of 250. Though I have set the post cap to 4 so I only have around 70-80 diferent glyphs up but I hope this number will grow as I get more recipies.

Information page

2009-07-29T23:30:00.011+02:00

I am, as many propably have been before me, slightly annoyed about the limited format on the About Me section so I decided to steal something Gevlon did on his blog, to put it in a post.

Time to get to the point then. First I'd like to welcome you here and hope you'll find your time here enjoyable. Here I will write about my attempts to fight my way deeper into the AH (and others, but mainly AH) buisness. Starting with a decent 10k gold (about half of it is in a nobles deck investment I expect to finish soon though) I will try diferent methods to make that money grow.

I will put my post into categories:

News are announcements that I make about stuff that happens IRL preventing me from posting or similar.

Professions, here I will gather all the posts below:

Inscription is, as the name says, posts about my glyph buisness and inscription in general.
Enchanting is, well, I assume you've already realised what these will be about by reading above.
Jewelcrafting, I hope I wont have to tell you this time.
Engineering, I wont even make a comment on this one.

Belsebub, here I will write about everything that concerns my main character Belsebub which is not related to any other topic.

Alts, no auctioneer is sucessful without a few alts to take care of his buisness. In this section I will write about my two main bank alts.

Addons, all posts where I write about what addons I'm using.

Gered is an alt I work on attempting to make money while starting with only 10 copper.

This should be everything that is needed at the moment and more will be added when I feel it's necessary.

Welcome

2009-07-16T00:33:00.006+02:00

Hi!
First of all I'd like to welcome you to this blog. What you're reading is just another world of warcraft blog based around money making. So why should you read mine instead of one of the dozens other out there? Honestly, I have no idea but it wont hurt trying right? I will put my main focus on using inscription and buying/selling (thereof the name of the blog) but also try some other ways when I get the time to do it.

But you wont have any idea of what I'm talking about if you don't know anything about me so here's some basic information.

My main character is a human warlock named Belsebub with 450 engineering and around 440 inscription. I also got two alts I use a lot, one ordinary bank alt and a death knight currently leveling up to 65 for profession purposes.

I've been into the AH buisness for a few months but haven't made any real progress so far and have never been above 10 000 gold at the time. So therefor I made this blog as a mean to push myself a little harder and, of course, share my experiences with others.

Well, you can propably see I am far from a noob at the AH but I still don't consider myself an expert. Making a blog in this situation where I am making some gold but not anything like 3000 per day may be either a crappy or great idea, only you readers can decide that.

To help me make gold I will use blogs and forums such as Greedy Goblin and Just My Two Copper bu also my own common sense (which is a must have in this buisness). I will not pay for any gold guides with real money or anything similar as I consider it a waste of money.

I am quite infamous for my worthless writing skills so I can't promise that this blog will be even slightly enjoyable to read, but I'll do my best to prevent that from happening. Just remember, by reading this you agree on that I wont be held responsible for any boredom, headache or brain injury caused by reading this blog.

So I hope you liked this beginning of my blog and will continue reading it. If you have any suggestions or questions about the blog just put them in the comment box.