JMTC Blogging Carnival - How would you make gold if you had limited play time?

It’s almost the 2nd of the month and that means JMTC is hosting another gold making blogging carnival! This month’s topic is: How would you make gold if you had limited play time? I couldn’t resist this as it perfectly describes where I’m at with regards to my gold making.

I started playing WoW back just after BC came out – at that time I had a girlfriend. That girlfriend is now my wife and I’ve got two kiddies into the bargain, one at 7 months the other just gone 2 and a half years. I usually get some playtime once everyone has gone to bed for the evening – sometimes it’s a couple of hours, sometimes less.

I should say at the outset that for me a gaming session where I only play the AH and/or craft items is a good one. I really enjoy the mini-game that is making gold – hence the blog :P That said, I also like levelling, so…

Let me answer the question of how I make gold with limited play in one word: Handling!

Handling : definition
1. the manner of treating or dealing with something; management; treatment.

There are other definitions of course but this is the one that I think applies to making gold quickly and efficiently. You need to be mindful of the efficiency of your operation and try to do things with limited handling. If you’re spending all your time flicking between alts on a crafted item by item basis then you’re doing it wrong. You need to group your tasks so that you have as few links in the chain of your daily AH activities as you can.

For example, you have an alt who is your JC crafter and your glyph crafter. Before you swap to that alt to restock make sure your have done your mat buying first on your bankalt. And while you’re at it make sure you do all your buying for the evening at once and then send mats to your crafters, don’t flick.

People will tell you not to double handle but the opposite of that, single handling, is potentially more wasteful of your time. Imagine if you wanted to make a complex BS item which required a cloth element, a gem and a metal element. Under single handling you’d need to go to each one of your suppliers for each component before crafting and then do that all again for the next item.

So here’s my process:

Daily
Log on to bank alt
Collect sales
Repost
Make trade good purchases
Distribute goods to crafters

Log onto individual crafters
Use cooldowns
Carry out dailies
Create items to restock
Send items to bankalt

Log on to bankalt
Post

Every 48 Hours
Log onto each of my three glyph alts
Gather sales
Gather glyphs
Repost

Every week
Log on to glyph crafter
Gather mats
Mill
Create glyphs
Distribute to glyph alts
Post

That’s it in a nutshell people. There’s a couple more few things I should add though on the ‘handling’ front.

Post for 48 hours unless it’s going to make a difference
I post glyphs every 48 hours as I pretty much own that industry on server but gems, patches, potions are all posted daily due to competition. Metals are posted daily due to high listing costs but other areas such as rods and BS items where competition is low are posted every 48 hours. The upshot of all this is that your competition in each area should be your guide to frequency of posting.

Use your addons intelligently
I use Zero Auctions to post and keep my posting lists. Every single item I craft is automated by this program (well, such as the automation is in this post 4.0.1 world) from the bags of my bankalt. Simply, I craft something new I send it to my bankalt and after the posting is done I check what’s left in my bags and create new categories for the items or add to an old category. The exception to the rule is the netherweave bag market where margins can be quite small – I still like to do that manually. ; )

So that’s it folks – I’d like to thank the good folks over at JMTC for organising these carnivals and remember to check out the rest of the articles at the Wow Gold Blog Carnival! . This is my first run through and I’ve had a bunch of fun.

Stay liquid guys,


Mogul.