Pet Battle Gold Making - Two New Possibilities?

Pet Battles - Fighting to Make Gold?

If you're playing WoW regularly at the moment then you know that Patch 5.1 hit the US servers yesterday & the EU servers earlier today. There's some interesting stuff in there - some class changes, a new PvP area in Krasarang Wilds with dailies too, some new scenarios, adjustments to various raids and of course, the new Brawler's Guild. But for me, the best bit of the whole patch notes list is the huge amount of changes to the Pet Battle stuff.

If you want to read through all of the patch notes, you can find them in various places but here is the WowInsider version. My favorite bits are below though:

Pet Battles

• A new item has been introduced that can be used to upgrade the quality of Battle Pets: Battle-stones.
• Battle-stones are available in two basic types, general purpose Battle-stones that can be used to upgrade the quality of any pet, and family specific Battle-stones, which can only be used to upgrade pets of a specific pet family.
• Battle-stones are available in two qualities: Flawless Battle-stones can upgrade pets directly to Rare quality, while Polished Battle-stones will upgrade a pet to Uncommon quality.
• Players will have a very small chance to obtain a general purpose and family specific Flawless Battle-stone after winning a match against wild pets; defeating higher level opponents increases the chances of obtaining a stone. Family specific Flawless-Battlestones will be of the same family as the pets that were defeated. These valuable items are not soulbound, and can be sold on the Auction House.
• Family specific Flawless Battle-stones can be found in the Sack of Pet Supplies obtained from performing Pet Trainer quests, and are Bind on Pickup.
• General purpose Polished Battle-stones can be purchased for 1000 Justice Points.
• Players can now keep up to 650 pets.
• The Dragon Kite can now be used in Pet Battles.
• The Imperial Silkworm and Imperial Moth pets can now be created by Tailors.
• Two new Battle Pets now roam Darkmoon Island waiting to be caught.
• Pets can now be filtered by name, type, rarity and level, and filters will remain in place each time the Pet Journal is viewed.

The first thing I thought when I saw these notes was that it would be easier to find the pet I wanted in my journal - it's been a pain to find a specific pet until now & I only have 170 or so. I hate to think how frustrating it was for the really serious pet collectors! Then I re-read the battle-stone stuff - the battle stones you can win from a pet battle in the wild are not going to be soul-bound so that will be a new niche market to keep an eye on. If you already have a good team built up then perhaps using these battle-stones won't be quite so important to you & you can make some good gold on the Auction House with them.

It does say there's only a small chance to pick up battle-stones from a wild pet battle though - the other source is the Sack of Pet Supplies from Trainer quests & those will be Bind on Pickup - if you do decide to sell your battle-stone early on, price them high - with a possibly small supply, prices should be able to stay high for quite a while, at least until more people start pet-battling!

Secondly, there are 2 new pets for Tailors to make - the Imperial Silkworm & the Imperial Moth. Until now, crafted pets have not been very worthwhile in pet battles but with the introduction of battle-stones - might we see a renewed interest in the crafted pets? I'm sure many Engineers are hoping so - Engineering pets have traditionally been a good gold earner for Engineers (think lifelike mechanical toads especially) & I know several scribes who made fairly good gold from the Inscription pets.

The only thing we really need now is for the Auction House interface for Caged Pets & Companions to be 'fixed' somehow. At the moment, there is no way to see the prices of both versions of a pet except by searching them separately & that is a nuisance!

image © Florence Ivy under Creative Commons licence

Improve Your WoW Gold Balance - Tips for New Goldmakers

Get Organised!

Do you have several high level alts with professions you don't use? Got a level 90 or two or maybe a bunch of 85's just sitting around not doing much whilst you concentrate on your Main toon? Are you always short of gold to buy the stuff you need to raid or pvp? Well, if you answered yes to any of those questions, keep reading - I hope I can give you some pointers that will get your gold flowing into your bags rather than out of them!

The first thing to do is get organised!

• Look at your alts - what professions do they have? Have you maxed them where possible & are you using them effectively? You can max professions on a level 85 so make sure you are doing the daily cooldowns wherever possible - Inscription, Alchemy & Tailoring spring to mind. 
• Do you have a lowbie toon to use as a banker? I always use a lowbie as I'm less tempted to take them out into the world & away from the Auction House.
• Here's a tough one - are you spending way more than you need to? Or perhaps just more than you are earning - making adjustments to your spending habit can have a huge effect on your gold balance.
• Have you tried using an Auction House addon of some kind? My favorites are Auctionator & Trade Skill master (TSM). TSM is fantastic but does have a huge amount of stuff to learn to make best use of it so if you are new to AH addons, just stick with Auctionator for now.
• Have you got a Tillers farm started on all your level 85+ alts? At 85-89 you can only have 4 plots but some crops sell for 10g or more each & you can get 5 vegetables per plot. Tilling & planting 4 plots should only take a few minutes at most. Once you hit level 90 you can max your farm to 16 plots & farm for Motes of Harmony or other useful profession materials. That 1.6 Spirit of Harmony a day can then be used for crafting gear to sell.
• Have a think about areas of the game you know well - you can sometimes utilise that knowledge to make gold - I'm thinking twink related stuff like enchants or gear, PvP stuff like crafted gear or speed potions/buffs etc or raiding - buff foods, flasks, high level gear etc.

OK, so you've sat down & had a think about this stuff - what next? Well, I hate to say it but patience! When you see gold bloggers talking about their millions or guildies flashing their half million - you have to remember that it does take time to accumulate wealth. Yes, there were some players who made their million very quickly when transmogrification first arrived but those guys were the exceptions, most of us take much longer to get there so when you feel yourself wanting to rush to get a sale, slow down - it's that rush that can cost you profits in the long run.

Not exactly the list I had in mind!

• Start with small-ish stuff - if you only have 5000g across your characters, don't jump in the deep end & buy a 4000g item to flip - that's just asking for trouble with using all your nest egg at once. 
• If you need to build some capital up & have a level 85 character with good professions but you were going to focus on your main, you may want to reconsider - have you ever wondered how much gold you can earn leveling from 85 to 90? I did & this time around, I actually managed to keep track of it too - almost 6000g just from quest rewards, vendor trash & looting while questing.
• If you are already at level 90 then I am going to say it, I'll apologise in advance - but Dailies! At about 20g per daily quest reward plus loot & drops, you could easily add 200-400g a day to your income on just one character, more if you can bear to do dailies on more than one character of course!
• I know it's a bit time consuming but if you're short of capital, you will need to farm herbs & ores yourself to level your professions. Obviously you don't have to but it is definitely the cheapest way unless your play time is severely limited then time becomes a cost to you. If you have limited time & don't want to spend it farming, just level your profession as cheaply as you can via the Auction House - take a few extra days & only buy the very cheapest materials.
• Do some reading - you're here so I guess you know about gold blogs - my blog roll has a whole load of them for you to skim through. You don't need to read everything - just skim until you find something you understand & think you can do easily. Look for Ghost Iron Shuffle topics, Ironpaw Token Shuffle, Enchanting Materials shuffle or if you like to run old instances - maybe transmogrification articles will interest you.
• Join a gold focused forum like The Consortium or join in one of the goldmaking Reddit sub-reddits like /r/woweconomy, /r/goblinism or /r/wowgoldmaking and read & ask questions. There's loads of advice out there & freely available.
• Make a list of things to do at the start of a gaming session. This could be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be - some items will be every day at least, others will be as & when your time permits.
• There are a huge number of options for making gold in game - the long term goal is to diversify across as many markets as possible but you need to know your markets & your Auction House - pick one or two markets to get into, spend a little time watching them then jump in. When you think you have them worked out, add another market or two. Try to think outside the box too - as a newbie gold maker, you may see something that more experienced goldmakers have forgotten about or overlooked.

So there you go - some basic tips & ideas for improving your gold making in WoW. I haven't gone into specifics today - many old favorite methods are already in old posts but you can find them under the 'Basics' tab at the top of the page. If you have a specific question, you can always leave a question in the comments section below or email me. I hope this helps but remember - have fun at it too - don't stress yourself when you see people talking about 10k+ a day - you're just starting out, you will get there eventually.

Edited to Add: I've made a downloadable To Do list, you can find the link in my post Nev's Daily To Do List

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More Spreadsheet Stuff - Easy Data From TUJ

One of the comments that kept cropping  up on my Ironpaw Token Shuffle posts was easy access to The Undermine Journal data. If your desk is a mass of post-it notes or scraps of scruffy paper, then maybe this post will help sort that out - at least as far as Auction House stuff goes! I didn't know about TUJ data being available myself until Molsan pointed me to his recent post on how to download the data using IQY but as I use Open Office not Excel, I couldn't get it to work (that may just be me messing up though)! Instead I used the .csv file facility so I thought I'd show you how to get it for yourself.

It's a huge file though - almost 13000 lines for my server but as we're not going to wade through it manually that's not really a problem. This data file only needs to be downloaded each time you want to update your spreadsheets with a limit of 10 times per 24 hour period. The great thing about it though is that you can use the same file for all your WoW related spreadsheets. I have most of my spreadsheets in one file, each one on a different tab or sheet & I just copy/paste the fresh data file over the old one in the relevant tab. This will then update all my sheets at the same time.

OK, so enough chit chat, how do you get to this file? Go to The Undermine Journal for your region & login. If you don't have a TUJ account yet, just follow the instructions on the site (I linked it to my Twitter account for easy access). Once you have your account set up, you should log in & it will take you to your account page - look for the 'Market Data XML & CSV' & choose your realm from the drop down box. It will give you two URL options & a IQY link. Just copy/paste the .csv link into a browser window & it should download the file automatically for you.

Next you will need to open the file in a spreadsheet program of your choice. If you are given options, this file is comma separated so choose that option & it should open nicely laid out, with columns already set up similar to the screenshot below.

Sample .csv File from TUJ

Once I have my data file opened like this, all I do is copy/paste the whole thing into my master spreadsheet file & the formulas I have there will pull all the data to the various sheets. I use the VLOOKUP function so you could have a look how to use that or if you're patient, I'll be doing some more spreadsheet posts over the next week or two which will use the VLOOKUP function so you can just wait & use my spreadsheets! lol

I hope this helps - I know there are one or two readers who will love this & probably race ahead & sort out some glorious spreadsheets for themselves but for those of you who haven't used spreadsheets before, bear with me & we'll get you some nice sheets to use.


Image © pjohnkeane under Creative Commons licence

Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffle - Revisited

Ironpaw Cooking Materials Shuffle

After some comments, email feedback & a conversation with a fellow gold blogger, I've added some more stuff to the Ironpaw Tokens spreadsheet I uploaded a few days ago. It seems that as long as it took me to get my head around what I was trying to do, I still didn't quite manage to communicate it very well in my Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffling post!

So version 2 has a whole bunch of extra columns which should show you at a glance which cooking material will make you some profit if you convert it to another via the Ironpaw Tokens trade-in. I've uploaded this as a second file called Ironpaw Conversion and Profits which you can download & edit freely. Please though - make sure you download before you edit - it just makes it easier for others if the original file is left untouched.

Ironpaw Token Profit Shuffle Spreadsheet

I took the original spreadsheet and extended the columns - one for each cooking material. Now all you have to do is type in the prices (in the yellow boxes) for your Auction House & it should calculate where any profitable conversions are. To use it, just choose the cooking material you have from column A & read across that row to find which other cooking material to convert it into for profit (or savings if you're leveling your cooking of course).

You don't need to worry whether you are converting vegetables to meat/fish or vice versa - I have adjusted the profit calculations accordingly within the sheet.

Also, you may want to sort each section (vegetable rows, fish rows, meat rows etc) by Column B once you've entered your AH prices - make sure you sort the whole section though otherwise the formulas will mess up big time! lol Sorting is optional but it does make it easier to read if your cheapest price is at the top of each section.

So an example might help I guess. If I have plenty of Wildfowl Breast & want to use those to convert to vegetables - I can see by reading along row 29 (wildfowl breast, column A) that converting to Juicycrunch Carrots, Green Cabbages or White Turnips will give me a loss, converting to Witchberries will give me profit of 1g63s per item but converting to Jade squash will give me a very nice profit of 6g 67s per item!

Please remember though - cooking materials are very volatile right now & prices are likely to vary widely over a few days - don't sink loads of gold in today then find out your 'profitable' material from the list above is the cheapest on the Auction House tomorrow. Spread your risk too - don't invest loads in just one cooking material - if you are going to convert a lot, convert to a range of different profitable items so that you are covered as prices change.

So there you go! Thank you to all the commenters, emailers & others who gave suggestions on the earlier version. I hope this one is closer to what you were hoping for from the earlier version.

Good luck & have fun

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Set Up A Shopping List in Auctionator

Auctionator Shopping Lists

One or two comments I've received lately made me wonder whether people are using Auctionator easily so I thought I'd put together a basic guide to setting up a shopping list, just in case anyone needs it. I'm using Cooking Materials for this example so it links nicely with my earlier Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffling post. If you'd like help with any other Auction House addons, just let me know & I'll see if I can help.

OK, so you've installed Auctionator from Curse.com & opened your Auction House window for the first time - what do you see? You should see just 3 extra tabs at the bottom of your window - ignore the beancounter & TSM tabs in my screenshots - I really should get around to removing Beancounter as TSM-Accounting now has all the data I used to use in there. I only really use the Buy & Sell tabs - to be honest, I'm not sure I could even tell you what's in the More tab off the top of my head!

A basic search is easy - just type your item into the search box & hit enter (red dot at top in screenshot). Your most recent searches will then be stored in the window on the left - as you can see in the image. You can also search a range of items by clicking the + button (red circle in image).

You can search for a named item within a category or you can search for a subset of a category. In this second screenshot, you can see I've chosen Trade Goods from the drop down category list & then I'm about to choose Cooking in the sub category. If I was searching for level 77-80 green armor for example, I'd also add 77 & 80 in the level range boxes. If you do want to search armor - I like to pick the armor type too (in the sub category section) so I only get a small range of items to glimpse through. It just makes it easier to look through 20 Cloth pieces then say 25 Mail pieces rather than trying to look through every green 77-80 piece in one long list! 

For Cooking Materials however, we are only really interested in the Mists of Pandaria items at the moment but this list includes every cooking material in the Auction House. When the search results first pop up, they are automatically sorted by highest price first so naturally in this third screenshot, you can only see Pandaren cooking materials, however when I scrolled down, some of the cheapest Pandaren items were mixed in with earlier, lower level materials.

You can easily re-sort the search results list by just clicking on 'Lowest Price' marked with a red cross in the screenshot. This is a little misleading at first - it's not sorted by Lowest Price, it's showing the Lowest Price for that item. You have to click the individual item to get the details of available auctions but it's quick & easy & there's a Back button to get you back to this main list.

This is a great way to look for cheap herbs too - once it's sorted by lowest price first, if you see a herb like Goldthorn on the first page of results, you should probably snatch it up quickly! Currently the Cataclysm herbs are showing up on my first page which is great because I'm still making Mysterious Fortune Cards.

So to exclude materials I am not interested in, I created a shopping list specifically for Pandaren cooking materials. To create a new shopping list, click the New Shopping List button at the bottom left - it will ask you to give your new list a name so pick something easy like 'Cooking Mats' and start entering the items you want to add. I don't know if there's a quick way of doing this but I just type the item name in the Search box then click the Add Item button!

Now I have an easy way to look at individual cooking materials or I can use the 'Search for all items' button (bottom left, red button) to get an overview of the category. I use this list to get the prices for my spreadsheet so I can easily see which items are the best for IronPaw Token shuffling.

I also have shopping lists for hard to find items that I want to pick up cheaply whenever I can, lists for level 77-80 armor, lists for MoP green armour, list for each profession (not all mats, just the ones I use most often) & generally a list for everything I find I look for regularly!

So there you go - a quick & easy way to make Auction House searching so much easier - be careful though - making lists can be addictive! I have to periodically go through & check my list of lists & delete any that are no longer used but then I have been using Auctionator for a long while now. I hope this reads as clearly as I wanted it to - if there are any points you think need further explanation or if you've found an even easier way then please, do let me know in the comments.

Have fun peeps 

Shopping List image © Erica Schoonmaker under Creative Commons licence

Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffling

Ironpaw Token Shuffle - Veggies, Meat & Fish

Over the last few weeks, I've been talking about making gold with cooking materials & fishing quite a bit here. That's because right now, it's about the only thing I'm really doing in game alongside dailies & some leveling! About 2 weeks ago, I did a post about how to make easy gold with Pandaren Cooking & in the comments it was pointed out to me that I missed an obvious trick! I edited the post at the time but it also got me thinking a little clearer about this whole Ironpaw Token Shuffle.

I went back to The Undermine Journal, to the Cooking section under the Gathered category & just stared at it a while. I realised that for me, at least, it didn't go far enough so I built another little spreadsheet for that extra step. This screenshot (from The Undermine Journal) shows how much it would cost to make a container of meats/fish or vegetables from each material available on the Auction House. In effect, it's the cost of an Ironpaw Token, dependant on which raw material you use. I've included the 100 Year Soy Sauce & Black pepper section because those are still selling well on my server & from this screenshot, you can easily see that there is profit to be made just by converting the cheapest raw materials to Ironpaw Tokens.

The Undermine Journal, Cooking page, Ironpaw Token Calcs

But what if you don't want to sell 100 Year Soy Sauce or Black Pepper? What if you need cheap materials to level your cooking Ways? Out comes the calculator to work out whether those 20 cheap Redbelly Mandarin are actually cheaper than 5 Raw Crocolisk Belly via an Ironpaw Token or should you just buy the Raw Crocolisk Bellies? (Just in case you don't know, 20 x  a meat or fish or 100 x a vegetable can be converted to an Ironpaw Token which in turn can be exchanged for 5 x a meat/fish bundle or 25 x a vegetable bundle)

That's where my spreadsheet comes in. I wanted to put some clever gizmos in there to make it even easier but my spreadsheet skills are extremely rusty & I just couldn't get my head around it! So I took the basic Undermine Journal data (columns C & D) to start with - this is just the same data as the screenshot earlier. Then I took the Container Cost & divided it by either 5 or 25 (meat/fish or vegetables) for columns E & F.

Calculate Ironpaw Token Shuffle Costs

So what does this actually do for me that I can't do quickly in game? For me, it quickly identifies which raw materials to buy to shuffle to the other materials I require. Currently I need Giant Mantis Shrimp but at 34g80s each, I don't want to buy them directly. My spreadsheet shows me that even if I use 100 Pink Turnips to convert to an Ironpaw Token & then buy 5 Giant Mantis Shrimp, I will save 42 gold! (purple dots).

It's going to be fairly rare for 100 vegetables of any sort to be a cost effective way of buying just 5 meat or fish - Giant Mantis Shrimp are just exceptionally expensive on my server today but using a single 20 stack of meat or fish can easily be cost effective to buy either 5 meat/fish bundle or a 25 vegetable bundle.

You can see that the Raw Turtle Meat & the Reef Octopus (red dots) are both really cheap today & in column F, it shows them at a converted price of 1g66s & 1g59s respectively - that means using either of these to buy a vegetable bundle (25's) will be the cheapest way to buy any of the vegetables except Pink Turnips & Mogu Pumpkins. The Reef Octopus is so cheap today that it's also the cheapest way to buy Wildfowl Breast, Raw Crocolisk Meat & Raw Crab Meat as well as all the fish below Jewel Danio in the fish section!

I've added this spreadsheet onto Google Docs & fingers crossed, in an editable, downloadable form. Just click Ironpaw Token Conversion spreadsheet and you should go straight to it. Feel free to edit it to suit yourself but please, only edit a downloaded copy. I tried to put a macro in for easy sorting but it didn't work (or I couldn't make it work!) so don't worry if you get a 'contains a macro' warning - I couldn't find it to get rid of it!

I hope this helps make the Ironpaw Token Shuffle a little easier & quicker for you. If you have any problems downloading or editing it, let me know either in comments, by email (top right under profile) or on Twitter @NevAHAddict & I'll do my best to help.

Edited: I had to change to Google Docs link above to return the file to it's original format. Please, please, download a copy before you edit anything. Thank you :)

Edited yet again! Following some feedback, I've extended this spreadsheet & uploaded a version 2 to google docs - I've also added some more analysis in a second post Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffling - Revisited so to make sure you've got the most up to date version, pop over to the Revisited post & click the google docs link there :)


Image © USDAGov under Creative Commons licence

Fishing for Gold - Laid Back Mode

Gone Fishing  - Laid Back Style

I've spent most of the last week doing my Order of the Cloud Serpent dailies & Onyx Egg hunting - I really wanted those Cloud Serpents so my gold making activities have once again taken a back seat. One of the quests over there though, requires Golden Carp & another requires Sugar Minnows - both from Fishing. As I hadn't leveled my Fishing to 600 yet, I decided to bite the bullet & get it over with! As I wasn't too worried about gold & fishing in Pools for the 'right' fish, I just plonked myself down at the edge of the circular stream right there in the Arboretum & proceeded to spend an hour or so, just fishing & listening to some music.

Fishing Area at The Arboretum, Jade Forest

Imagine my delight when I started fishing up Jade Lungfish & Redbelly Mandarins as well as the Golden Carp I needed! Both fish are required for the Way of the Grill cooking recipes & Jade Lungfish are also required for the Way of the Pot too so their prices have remained fairly good on the Auction House. Now I was only here for an hour or so but in that time I managed to pick up 48 Jade Lungfish, 54 Redbelly Mandarin & 168 Golden Carp. I sold most of them within 24 hours on the Auction House although I kept most of the Golden Carp for the Cloud Serpent daily & for converting to an Ironpaw Token for cooking materials later.

Golden Carp - Easy Fishing Gold 

Jade Lungfish - Easy Fishing Gold 

Redbelly Mandarin - Easy Fishing Gold

Overall, I made just over 700 gold in that hour - not a huge amount but still a nice little chunk for something I would have to have done anyway. Best of all though, it got all of my professions to 600 so I gained the 'Serious Skills to Pay the Bills' achievement too - always a good side effect of making gold!

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not suggesting this as a great way to make lots of gold - there are much better ways of course but if you find yourself over at the Arboretum doing your dailies & a friend or guildie wants to chat - you'll probably end up just standing around whilst you have your conversation. That's when I do most of my fishing to be honest! Or perhaps you like to PvP and have 5 minutes between battlegrounds where you normally just hang around - plonk yourself down & do a little fishing. Now that you don't have to equip a fishing rod, there's no risk of forgetting to swap back your weapons when the BG queue pops!

There are no hostile mobs to worry about here either & there's a mailbox over near the dailies quest hub so if you get carried away & fill your bags, you can easily send all your slinkies off to your bank alt.

Do you have a favourite fishing spot? Whether for a bit of quiet time or for gold fishing, I find it quite relaxing sometimes & the gold is always a nice bonus especially now that Mists of Pandaria has brought Cooking & Fishing into the limelight.


Image © Helen Shorey (me) available as a print in my Society6 shop

New Blogroll Additions & Guest Post Opportunities

New Blogs & Guest Post Opportunities

When I first started this gold blogging lark, I had no idea how much time & effort it would take to keep it going but I also had no idea how much fun it would be & how many new friends I would make. There were only a few 'big' gold blogs back then & when I got a mention or a response from them, it really made my day.

Now, I don't consider myself in their leagues but I do have an increasing number of visitors so I thought it would be nice to highlight some of the newer blogs I'm adding to my blogroll these days. The gold blogging community is expanding all the time and I would also include the goldmaking Livestreamers & Youtubers in that too - just because blogging tends to be written doesn't mean that the video/audio peeps have any less valid input.

So if you have time today or over the weekend, maybe go say hello to some of these lovely new blogs - I promise you, it will give them encouragement & maybe find you a whole new source of reading material :)

New Gold Blogs

• First up is a very new blog from Matt a.k.a @mcKinnon81 called Arllan's AH Game - just a few posts for now but I enjoy his writing style & hope to see lots more from him over the coming months.
• Next up is Xtreme - yay for another female gold blogger (@XtremeAHGuru)! She used to write for Goldgrubs (more about that later) but has branched out & has started her own blog, called The Xtreme Gold Blog. Just a few posts for now but again, I look forward to reading more.
• I also found another female gold blogger (watch out guys, we're coming out of the woodwork!) but I have no name for her - the blog is called WoW Gold Girl & she writes beautifully detailed posts full of useful information.
• Not quite so new but just ramping up a bit is WoW Tungsten written by @wowtungsten. Easy to read & well written, I always enjoy his posts.
• Lastly Auction House on Farm, written by Dealmaker has been going since May but was a bit quiet over the summer & appears to be on a roll recently. Another well written, informative blog that I enjoy reading whenever a new post is published.

Guest Posting Opportunities

Now maybe you have a topic you have some opinions about or a subject you think you have something to contribute to but you don't feel that starting a blog is for you. Luckily for you, many gold bloggers welcome an email to discuss a guest post - I am certainly open to hosting a post for you especially if it's something I haven't already covered!

I'm easy to contact too - you can find me on Twitter @NevAHAddict or email me at auctionhouseaddict@gmail.com - drop me a message or an email & we can discuss your idea further.

Now I also mentioned Goldgrubs earlier - I used to contribute there & if I get an idea for a more basic level post, I'll be sending more posts over there too. It's run by Cold from Cold's Gold factory and his idea was to form a teaching type environment, hence the name Goldgrub's Goblin Academy. With previous contributors such as Wes from Capped by Cata, Rewt from the Hearthcast podcast, myself & of course Cold too, if you submit a post there, you will be in good company. You can contact Cold via Twitter @ssmith0911 or via email on the Contact Us page.

Other New Gold Making Stuff

Lastly I want to mention a new subbreddit, moderated by Cold & Eric from The Golden Crusade called /Goblinism - quite a few regular bloggers are publishing their links there so it's a nice easy way to find information.

It looks as though the main /WoW reddit is also forming it's own goldmaking subbreddit in direct competition with /Goblinism & /Wowgoldmaking. I have no idea why but we'll just have to wait & see how that works out!

Summary

So there you have it - all sorts of new stuff & places to check out - just in case you haven't got quite enough dailies to do in Mists of Pandaria! Oh and I almost forgot to mention my new blog! I'm branching out a little into non-gold making areas of WoW so if you're feeling a bit curious as to how I spend my time when I'm not making gold, pop over to She Rides Dragons and come say hello - I don't bite, I promise!

Have you started a new Gold Blog recently? Let me know & I'll add you to my blogroll & maybe feature you if I do another post like this in the future.

image © so_tabulous under Creative Commons licence

Cross Realm Auction House - Yes? No? Maybe?

Cross Realm Auction House - Carnival Entry

It's that time again, thinking of a post for Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival proves a challenge most months for me. This month is no different. I'm not the most organised gold maker or a particularly deep thinker about tactics or strategy so this was really tough once again! Thanks Cold! lol

Cross Realm Auction Houses? What's Your Opinion?

Is the CRAH a good or bad idea? What would you predict would happen to the auction economy? Would a CRAH be good or bad for WoW?

Whilst it's only a remote possibility, the spectre of a Cross Realm Auction House within World of Warcraft has set gold makers minds spinning & numerous debates have sprung up across various forums.It all started because of this blue post (see screenshot below) & from what I've seen, if it ever does happen, it will need to be designed very carefully to ensure the viable economy he talks about.

WoW Cross Realm Auction House Blue Post

Cross Realm Auction House - The Good Points

• could be great for low population realms with small Auction Houses. Small population often means low supply of all sorts of items including trade goods so it can difficult to level a profession without farming materials yourself.
• Much bigger buyer pool - with the inevitable lower prices (see Bad Points below), the larger buyer pool will likely take up the slack in all the extra items being posted - think of it as a discount style store - sell more but for lower prices = same level of profit.
• With more sellers in a market place, rare items might turn up more frequently - keeps recipe/mount/pet/rare items collectors happy & for a player who finds something rare occasionally, it will probably sell quicker too. 
• Good for buyers, it will probably be much harder for any one player to control a niche market - not so good for gold makers who like to control certain markets.
• Could be good for realms with a severe faction imbalance - one of the suggested alternatives is for there to be just one auction house per realm - a Neutral AH if you like. That would be great for imbalanced servers - no more Neutral Auction House/2 accounts required to get items/cash from one faction to another.

Cross Realm Auction House - The Bad Points

• Mixing different levels of inflation & economies across multiple servers is likely to cause a fair amount of chaos & instability at first, not least of which would be price crashes & rampant undercutting in probably every market!
• Huge number of items listed will probably cause slowness in general and most auction house addons will break as they struggle to pull that much data from the Blizzard API. Imagine how cumbersome the current auction house interface will be when you have 200,000 items to look through instead of 20,000?
• Gold sellers & bots will have a field day - botters will be able to go to dead servers & farm undisturbed then just put their stuff on the CRAH. Gold sellers won't have to have 100's of different accounts to cover all servers, they will just be able to use the CRAH to transfer gold.
• Players who consider themselves gold makers (like myself) will face stiff competition from other goldmakers - we do already but now add in multiple servers worth of keen goldmakers & of course, don't forget the new breed of Kobolds & in game life will be a real challenge!
• Really rare or very high quality items will probably get listed with a bid price only as the seller takes advantage of huge demand to watch bid prices rise (just like the Black market Auction House but with players as the sellers)
• Raw materials of all sorts will probably see their prices crash as supply across multiple servers is way above actual demand - even with the larger pool of buyers. This could be counteracted by a reduction in farmers though - why continue to farm ores or herbs if the prices have dropped silly low? Eventually material prices will stabilise as a balance is reached but in the meantime, chaos!

Cross Realm Auction House - Other Possibilities

So what do I think? I think it could be an interesting option but only if designed with extreme care & attention to details. Some thoughts & ideas I came across whilst researching this offered possible variations although Blizzard haven't offered any real ideas as to how it would work yet! I sometimes think they leak these comments so they can pick our brains for their design process!

• Having one central AH per battlegroup for example, might be one way of keeping overall size down but if a battlegroup is full of high/medium population servers, it will still be a huge database required. 
• It will undoubtedly be a great idea for low population servers which Blizzard seem reluctant to merge - perhaps when a servers population falls below a certain size, it could get added to the Cross Realm Auction House - leaving the medium & high population servers alone.
• As mentioned above - instead of a Cross Realm AH, maybe a Whole Realm AH could be implemented - great for servers with a big imbalance between factions.
• Just leave it alone & improve the current auction house interface - many players actually transfer servers to play different Auction Houses - Blizzard would lose those transfer fees if they implemented a Cross Realm AH!

Summary

For many players, especially those on low population servers, a Cross Realm Auction House could certainly offer a lot of benefits but for medium/high population servers, it could be equally as bad with chaos, price instability, lag & general 'arrrggghhh' factor every time an auction is undercut within miliseconds. I think Blizzard will need to analyse everything they can & to design a system which takes into account so many variables seems rather unnecessary to me. The current system isn't so bad - a bit of interface redesign, perhaps a few tweaks here & there & I'd guess most players will be happy with that.   

For me - I do hope they leave it alone but if they do go ahead, I'll deal with that when it happens. In the meantime, I'm just poodling along, making a few gold here & there, quite happily thank you :)

Image © Mishimoto under Creative Commons licence

Converting Enchanting Materials For Easy Gold

Converting Enchanting Materials for Easy Gold

I haven't actually done anything with my Enchanter yet during Mists of Pandaria but I have been seeing lots of tweets & chit chat about converting enchanting materials for profits so I thought I'd have a look into it. I quickly realised that a mini spreadsheet was the way to go so once I got my head around the formulas, this is what I ended up with!

Last time I posted a screenshot of one of my mini spreadsheets, lots of readers asked for it to be available on Google Docs - well I didn't have a clue how to do that then but this time, I managed to work it out! You can access the Enchanting Materials Conversion spreadsheet via Google Docs (or Google Drive, whatever they call it now!) & I hope I've made it freely available to view & download. If not, let me know & I'll see if I can get it sorted out!

Enchanting Materials Conversion Spreadsheet

All you need to do is to change the prices in the yellow boxes to the prices currently on your own server Auction House. As you can see, converting down is rarely going to be profitable but I wanted to include it, just in case! The figures above are from my server today - Ethereal Shards are slightly underpriced today based on the conversion rates so there's no point converting materials up to those. However, being so 'cheap' they do make the best material to convert up to a Sha Crystal if I want to use my daily enchanting cooldown for that. The only other way to get a Sha Crystal is to disenchant epic armour & weapons & I don't think anyone is going to be doing that for a while yet in Mists of Pandaria (except maybe raiders gearing up of course).

The Undermine Journal, Sha Crystal  Supply & Price Chart

You can easily see from the Undermine Journal screenshot how low the supply has been over the last week but also how the Ethereal Shard price has moved too. It's the Ethereal Shard price on the green line, in case you were wondering.

This means that Sha Crystals are probably going to remain pretty expensive for the next few weeks at least - once more people have access to epic gear & epic crafted items through dailies & reputation grinds then we may see the supply of Sha Crystals increase. But until then, it's probably worth keeping an eye on this market - I know I'm going to but I'm going to be careful too - I got a little hurt by the maelstrom crystal market at the start of Cataclysm although I was a very new gold maker at the time. Hopefully I've learned quite a few lessons since then!

Oops! Seems Molsan & I share a brain! He did a great post yesterday on almost the same subject so maybe pop over there for a second viewpoint if you have time :)

If you're leveling your enchanting & need infinite dust then this 'Hunt for Infinite Dust' post may be useful - just adjust the prices for your server of course!


Image Fairy Dust © Valerie Everett under Creative Commons licence

Still Useful Farming Posts Recap

With everyone so focused on Mists of Pandaria dailies, leveling & raising new Pandaren alts, it's easy to forget that some of the old tried & tested items can still make good money on the Auction House. I thought I'd cheat a little today & just recap some of my old posts that I'm still finding useful on a regular basis especially as these items can be snatched up pretty cheaply at the moment.

All these items are on my snatch shopping list & I check them almost every time I'm in the Auction House. There are so many new alts being raised now that these items find their way to the Auction House by players who have no idea of their market price or their niche uses & who just want to make a few gold here & there. That's where the experience & time learning comes in handy for gold makers!

• Essence of Air - used mainly for 2 enchants for Heirloom weapons and usually sell for 150 gold or more. There's a nice where to farm essence of air map in this post. I've seen these as low as 20 gold on my server recently. The enchants aren't selling for me at the moment but I know that they will sell once the shinyness has worn off Pandaria a bit!
• Spider's Silk - I tested 3 farming areas in Where To Farm Spider's Silk post early last summer & it's still relevant. Spider's Silk is used for the Spidersilk Boots (rare quality) tailoring pattern & the Toughened Leather Gloves (rare quality) Leatherworking pattern, these items are steady sellers especially for low level PvP'ers. Spider's Silk is also used for the Spidersilk Drape but with the advent of heirloom capes, the market for this item dried up last year. I usually snatch Spider's Silk up for 3 gold or less whenever I see them but I have so many now, I've been selling a few at 25 gold each.
• Essence of Water & Globe of Water - I started farming Globes of Water for the Mechanical Yeti pet when all the Battle Pet excitement started but I've stopped now - the pet market has changed completely & until it settles down, I'm just going to keep an eye on it. The Essence of Water however, I'm still snatching up whenever I can. Once other transmutes with cooldowns are no longer so profitable (thinking Living Steel at the moment), I will return to the Essence of Water to Essence of Air transmute. I started testing for the Farming Globe of Water post not knowing about the Water/Air transmute but when I picked up so many, I had to change the angle of the post to include where to farm Essence of Water too!
• Large Fang - Oh how I hate these large fangs! I tried to find a place to farm Large Fangs but it was really painful so I've resorted to buying them whenever I see them on the Auction House. I've not even bothered to make the Barbaric Bracers as I can sell large fangs for 25 gold each, having bought them for 5 gold or less.

Are there any items like these that you farm regularly or would like to know where to farm them? I'm quite happy to go test areas out so let me know in the comments section :)


Image © Natalie Maynor under Creative Commons licence

Buy Low, Sell At Market Price

Buy Low, Sell Higher

I think most goldmakers know the principle of Buy Low, Sell High and possibly even newbie goldmakers too but there has often been some discussion about the 'sell high' bit. Buy low, sell normal or sell at market price is often used too but again, what is normal or market price is also subject to variations per server & even by day of the week! Buying low is always the best, no matter what stage of gold making you are at but with experience & knowledge of your own Auction House, it does become a little easier to find those low priced items.

I tend not to 'sell high' as my server has a few fairly high profile goldmakers who usually beat me to the best markets. I'm very casual in my gold making, especially now with all the distractions provided by Mists of Pandaria! Selling high is also a subjective thing - what is a high price to you may be an okay price for others or it may be seen as an extortionate price and gain you some troll mails.

I prefer to 'close the gap' in some markets, especially Trade Goods like herbs, ores & enchanting materials. I look for an item that has a fair few auctions listed at a spread of prices & look for the big gap in the item price. It's often possible to buy out the lower priced items & just relist them immediately at the price at the top of the gap. I guess you could say I 'buy low, sell higher' - it may only be a few gold here & there but it's a great way to build a little starter cash with pretty low risk.

Buy Low, Sell Higher

I use the Auctionator search function (circled in screenshot) to search all the herbs at once. It gives me a nice list of all the herbs available in a summary format & I then start at the cheapest herb & click through to the individual herb screen as shown above. I didn't bother to buy these 5 cheap Peacebloom today but if I was starting fresh on a new server, I would have. Turning 1g 50s (cost for the 5 cheap herbs) into almost 10 gold just by relisting them at 1g 95s each is good practice for larger buys later on in your goldmaking career :)

Using the back button to get back to the summary list, I can quickly run through all the herbs in the list to see if there are any 'gaps' similar to that shown above (32s -> 1g 95s) & snatch any cheapies up too.

Now you do need to use your brain a bit here too - sometimes that top price is just stupid high & the apparent low priced items are actually at the correct price. By regularly scanning the Auction House with your Auction House addon, you will build a picture of average prices so hopefully you won't get caught out by those stupid high price items. If you're not sure of something, especially if it's a more expensive item than just a few herbs, don't forget you can check The Undermine Journal for your server. It will show you an average price & a graph of most recent prices - both of which will help you judge the local market price for your item(s).

The most important part of playing the Auction House is to use your own brain - it's great to read tips from blogs like this one but I can only speak for my own server, you have to apply the tips & tricks to your server & decide for yourself if you want to follow my methods or develop your own. The other part of playing the Auction House is time - it takes time to learn the trends & prices & peculiarities of your server but it also takes a whole chunk of time to reach the big numbers of gold. Be patient & don't forget that even a few extra gold here & there (as shown above) all adds up eventually.