Thursday, 13 August 2009

Quick Auctions 2

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

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.






Wednesday, 12 August 2009

The Goldpile is Rising...



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.

Tuesday, 11 August 2009

Diving Into Gems

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.

Sunday, 9 August 2009

Patch day

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.

Saturday, 1 August 2009

Leveling

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

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 ;)