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I know – presumptuous hey? But I have the feeling nothing can stop me now and the below is why/how so I thought I’d share:
1) Take risks – and scale your risks as you get bigger. When you’re starting out you might buy abyss crystals whenever they’re under 20g – as you get bigger remember to use your size. Buy out the store – grab every crystal on the AH. You put at risk some known profit as perhaps you paid 28g max on the buy for some items. Your reward though lies in the potential profit of drying up a bunch of enchanters who were going to use those crystals to put competing scrolls up on the AH.
2) Have a system – and work your system with self discipline. You can have every gem in game and a flawless delivery system but if you don’t replace stock when it’s low, or neglect to stay across new cuts when they emerge then your great system doesn’t mean nuts.
3) Always look for new revenue avenues – at a simple level this means opening up new crafter skill sets, at the more complex levels it’s anticipating trends from patches or even more advanced, finding new pathways within the existing framework. Hey! – where do you think the saronite shuffle came from?
4) Marry well – no seriously, those of us who take the golden path towards cap are probably a little “too” goal focussed. After all you can get by perfectly well in this game with 10K, you can have all the latest BOE gear with around 50K – what do you need 214K for!?! A supportive home environment in which to work your magic makes making gold a lot easier.
5) Know your supply chain. Where does infinite dust come from? Who uses it and for what? In what other areas are you competing with them? What changes are upcoming ingame that might effect its value and/or it’s availability. What do you use it for and more importantly what “can” you use it for? What areas of gold making are you neglecting because you don’t understand the products you’re dealing with?
6) Develop relationships – and keep them sweet. If a favourite herb supplier always throws a few items in at the end of the transaction for free are they going to stick in your memory? – you bet. These items (herbs, eternals etc) mean very little in a monetary sense – after all you probably just spent 5K, however “free stuff” still cements him in your memory. In return of course throwing the odd BOE his way that might be useful or interesting is going to work for you. This relationship and the lower-priced goods it garners will “earn” you invisible revenue. Personally I’m working with a couple of herb suppliers now and calculate that these relationships earn me between 500-1500g a week.
7) Addons addons addons – you will never hit the high earning levels without installing and customising time-saving addons. QA3, Auctioneer, Postal, Altoholic, Skillet, these are your bread and butter, unless you learn how to use them you will never hit the high numbers – I guarantee it.
8) Enjoy yourself – reward yourself. You’re making the gold cause it’s fun in its own right. Reward yourself as well to make it even more fun – pets, mounts, the latest BOEs, that chopper you’ve had your eye on… Use your gold every now and then to keep your motivation fresh.
9) Keep your friends close and your enemies… closer. Got a friends list? For goodness sake don’t put your friends on it – to an auctioneer that list is for the opposition. You want to know when they’re on and what they’re doing. I’ve been known to swap to my mage, port to distant AHs and follow the opposition around… who knows what you might learn.
10) Keep it secret, keep it safe. Anonymity is your friend. It’s likely that eventually your guildies will get wind of who your alts are – this is not a great outcome but it’s not the end of the world. Now your opposition working out who your crafters are and being able to tie them in to your posting alts is disasterous. From the safety or your crafters or your main you can see the competition log on, or more importantly off – clearing the way for some retributive posting ; )
11) Read your wow gold blogs – there’s a bunch of talented, scheming, devious gold-making dudes all publishing some pretty interesting stuff on the interwebz – stay across it.
BTW – that 11th one there, that’s for free ; )
M
"To Hold Down a Pillow" means not allowing the enemy's head to rise.
In contests of strategy it is bad to be led about by the enemy. You must always be able to lead the enemy about. Obviously the enemy will also be thinking of doing this, but he cannot forestall you if you do not allow him to come out. In strategy, you must stop the enemy as he attempts to cut; you must push down his thrust, and throw off his hold when he tries to grapple. … The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy's useful actions but allow his useless actions".
From Miyamoto Musashi’s Go Rin No Sho.
My 5G undercutter has shown intentions. Kboom has begun undercutting but only by 1s per time. So it looks like he doesn't have the patience to starve me out (by putting the entire server under 5G and waiting) and also that he feels he is not making enough gold (the 1s undercut tells me he would “like” to be getting the 5G). Even though my 57G glyphs are disappearing at a rate of 1 or more a day this recent development has made me a very happy mogul. If he wants gold then he’s very firmly in my territory.
My strategy with this guy has been to deny him. I am always lower then him with sufficient glyphs to cover the time period. He posts infrequently on a 48-hour post so this isn’t too hard.
I cannot control the price he posts at but I can effect what happens after that. So what have I done? So far I’ve simply dropped my threshold to 3g50s (as he’s still above this) and due to the large stock on hand I have now I can comfortably throw a post in before work without having to cancel. Tonight I’m making kboom his own QA category where each time he drops a glyph I’ll take it out of my main list and add it. The kboom category posts 5 or each glyph instead of three and has a threshold of 2G and should he fail to keep his glyphs up falls back to 57G.
If the 2G to 5G band is to be my new playground then I’m going to revel in it. I’m going render his actions useless. I’m going to hold down a pillow.
Let’s see:
Create a new 4-tab guild bank… tick!
Engage Mr 100 as full-time farmer… half tick! (I think I got him but not sure yet)
Level tailoring… tick! Past 400, making the lesser leg enchants, bags soon.
Start using QA3 – bow booowng Didn’t make it – too much going on, too many stacks to turn to either flasks or inks. This is on the list for next week… along with swapping in Altaholic. Ever since I went to 2 Gbanks my old addon gets confused and doesn’t track mats properly, the Gbanks have become invisible.
Get back into blue gems… tick!
So on the whole – good progress this week.
Midweek Mr 100 turned up with 230 stacks – I bought them all. It felt pretty damn good to clean out a serious farmer. I grabbed all the eternal lifes he had and frost lotuses as well; fodder for my growing flask business. By my calcs I earned about 1000G in the transaction, although I parted with 4200G. It was a lot of fun. Especially the bit where he said “Nothing left lol”.
I’m now swimming in stock – and it’s inspiring me to be a better mogul!
Total liquid - $153,582G
This week’s gold – 10,567G
So not that great but here’s the expenditures:
New guild bank – 4 tabs – 1940G (bought sigs for 10G a pop)
3 Stacks frost lotus – 2475G
230 stacks herbs+eternal lifes+more frost lotus – 4200G
Firefly – 1000G
So there’s about 9K expenditure, the 4200 should come out as although it was greater then I’d normally get (sunk a lot into getting my stack numbers up on herbs) it’s still going towards standard product. So that puts me around the 15K mark.
Oh and the Firefly… what can I say, I couldn’t resist. I used to farm Zanga every time I went through for one of these little fellahs to no avail; they’re quite a low percentage drop. They’re rare on the AH too – only 9 showing from my data and a moving price of 2600G, so when I saw this guy I couldn’t swap to a monied alt fast enough.
He’s a pic of the little guy… awww... I’m going to call him “Sparky”
Now a couple of things before I sign off:
Blue gem market
Is good – I’m posting with a 15G min sell and a 55G max on lesser blues (which is everything except reds). It costs me about 30G on a 12-hour cycle to post and I’m making about 400G back on a good weekend post. This process is young yet and I’ll report back once I have more data; it seems quite viable though. Saronite ore is a problem with stacks fluctuating from 16G to 24G but the surge in chanting mats on our server actually makes the saronite shuffle a reasonable process again – all mats go straight to scrolls for me though. I’m working a “total coverage” angle with 2 of each and every blue going up. This is the way I sold gems in the past and it was very profitable – this time out I’ve been selling greens for 55G. It seems the alt market is pretty big.
Flask market
Is a whimsical beast – On Saturday I got my post time correct and sold almost everything and made a stack, on Sunday I got it wrong and sold 6 flasks. I experimented with Mojo and tanking flasks this week, they sell out quickly. Contrary to what I’d heard I think the flask market makes good money – the difficulty of getting one main reagent though is the problem and I don’t think this will ever be a reliable area of income.
That’s it for the week guys. I’ve been thinking about streamlining my operation so that I’m not double handling – I’ve put two crafters into the new Gbank but am going to overhaul the whole operation and reorganise… all the way down to how I post. More on this throughout the week.
All the best out there guys,
M
24000G people!
Yep – that was this week’s take.
Here’s the numbers:
Total liquid – 143,015G
This week’s gold – 24,270G
Ok, now we get down to how this /boggle of a number happened. Two words – Darkmoon Faire! There’s 4600G from a Nobles Deck, another 700G from a single card + another 400G from a lesser deck. Even without these numbers I pulled an 18K week. Surely this is rare and I’ll drop down to 14K next week again. Surely… ; )
Actually I’m in for a decent amount of expenditure this week as my much-neglected tailoring levelling starts to get up there. I’ve been buying frostweave as I go but the 2750 cloths required is still a fair way off. I was lucky that mageweave finally turned up on the AH for about 10G a stack – I happily paid it; that cloth has been ‘very’ rare over the last few weeks. I almost farmed it myself which is a particularily un-mogulish thing to consider. O.o
My campaign for a half stack of all glyphs is coming together – I added another couple of classes over the weekend but this has been playing havoc on my stock-in-hand. I’m sucking pretty much any herb I find that’s under 17G out of the AH which is hopefully freaking out the competition. Sunday saw neither of my two major glyph competitiors repost for the entire day. Is this a result of them being “herb starved”?!? I doubt it but it’s nice to think that might be the case.
The benefits I’ve found of having this level of stock is that you simply over-posting when you don’t have the time to carry out a cancel/repost cycle. Additionally, it never hurts for the other posters to see that you’re capable of throwing a big chunk of stock up just for convenience’ sake.
Pots went off over the weekend – I posted 100 dps pots (50 of each) on Saturday eve just before raid time and then again on Sunday. I’m posting in stacks of 1, 2 or 3 with a slight discount for numbers. I’ve decided to start looking into other areas of alchemy where profit might be made – particularily elixirs. I’m assuming that I need to make “discoveries” for this but haven’t done my regooglesearch yet.
Focuses this week:
1) Level tailoring
2) Set up blue gem “pathway”. I have set up three categories: low and high selling blues (ie, greens through to reds) and an epic category. I need to establish how I get the gems regularily through to my posting alt. I’m posting prior to raids on a 12-hour time limit - getting much better sales this way.
3) Assess QA3 – yes, I’m still using QA2… I need info as to whether all of my various lists will reset with the new version. If they do then there is “a lot” of work in setting things up again which will slow me down.
4) Complete snatch list – a lot of items/mats are on there now but I need to complete and close this out.
5) Engage Mr 100 Stacks as a permanent supplier – I missed him this week and it hurt. Time to lock him in. I’m going to offer 14G/stack, 38g/Frost Lotus, 19G/Eternal Life. I’m going to ask that it all arrives in a bulk lot though – I don’t want him to think he can send dribs and drabs through as he might decide to send to other buyers that way. A bulk send should focus him on sending just to me! ; )
6) Create a new guild bank – what can I say, I needz more room.
Cheers,
Mogul
The mogul works quietly in his bank chamber. Gems ordered into baskets sparkle flawlessly on the shelves, bundles of glyphs in gossamer-fine wrappings are stacked untidily on the floor, their magic quietened… for now. Potions, elixirs and flasks, images swirling within their cloudy confines, are arranged row upon row back into the darker reaches of the vault. Vellums and inks too; so many bottles that they get underfoot. Skins, ores, bars, fine cloths of every description and above all gold, chest upon chest overflowing with gold – he breathes peacefully in the quiet vault.
Outside he hears the bustle of the market place and from farther away the clang of the auction-house gong. The deals, the intoxicating draw of commerce – closing his ledger he gets to his feet and walks towards the heavy vault door, anticipating new trades and new markets.
Securing the vault behind him the journeyman mogul is drawn towards opportunity… and gold.
