Today is Day 3 of my 20 Days of Gold Making & the question is "What were the first techniques/tips/tricks you used when starting out?"
This sounded like such a good question when I made the list but now that I sit down & try to write about it, it's kinda tough! It was a fair while ago now after all.
Sell Everything
I think I was selling everything almost from the very start of my WoW time - grey stuff to vendors & everything else to the Auction House. I was lucky that I had a friend or two already playing for a few months so they had told me about the Auction House. I didn't have any Auction House addons to start with though - every green piece of gear I picked up, I would manually look to see what range of prices equivalent items were selling for & price my item in the same range. I don't remember how successful this was but I did it for a fair while so it can't have been too bad.
Learn a Profession
I have no idea how profitable this would be these days but my first character had skinning & leatherworking. I used to craft stuff to get skill points but instead of disenchanting it as so many do these days, I put all my crafted stuff on the AH. Yes, even those level 10-15 basic green items. I used to have a notebook with my calculations in & I remember pushing the prices up by 10-20 silver each time I had to replenish my crafted stock!
Alliance Cooking Recipe Vendor
I found this guy in Stormwind during the Pilgrims Bounty holiday within the first few months of starting to play. I left my rogue in Stormwind specifically to buy the recipes & put them on the Auction House. Up until Mists of Pandaria arrived, I would still periodically buy a bunch & sell them easily for 20g or more each. I haven't tried in Mists as you can now level cooking in Halfhill so easily. It was also a great way to boost cash on a new server too.
Read, Listen, Talk to Other Goldmakers
This was the big one for me - finding gold blogs like Cold's Gold Factory & JMTC really opened my eyes to the wider WoW world. I had no idea there were so many blogs out there about WoW, let alone specific gold making ones. Needless to say, I read everything - I even went back right to the beginning of both CGF & JMTC and read all their old posts too.
I found Twitter & started following a few well known people & from there I found out about these things called podcasts. JMTC had it's Friday night chat thing, Auction House Junkies was just starting around that time, as was Power Word: Gold & these days there's Eviscerated Gaming Podcast too.
Now I'm one of those gold makers & people talk to me via Twitter, comments here & emails - I love it although looking back, I never thought it would turn out like this!
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A good article though I am not sure how much selling everything will work it all depends on the server levels. As much as I wish Blizzard would do something about them it is very unlikely that Blizzard will ever sort out the server inequalities. In terms of professions I usually go with skinning and mining especially if the character is the first I have on that realm, the prices aren't always great but generally you can sell what you gather and slowly build up some gold.
ReplyDeleteI agree but the principle for newbies still applies - so often newbies just vendor everything, not knowing any better. At least if they try to Auction House pretty much everything except vendor greys, they will soon learn what stuff sells & what doesn't.
DeleteOn a new server, I always pick up one of the gathering professions too but I tend to just play the AH on my bank alt & accumulate cash that way!
When I first started playing, my boyfriend told me not to vendor everything. It certainly worked for me. Whilst I'm not a gold-making goddess I'm never short of gold and it all stems from this one simple tip. He also told me to keep an eye on cheap items on the AH that you can buy and vendor for more to make a profit but I'm too lazy to do that.
ReplyDeleteKendor Kabonka has been kind to me, too. His recipes still sell, even today, because levellers don't get to Pandaria for ages. But for me, one particular, very specific tip got me off the ground: collecting pages from a book.
ReplyDeleteThe first thing I learned was to look up the value of items I looted or farmed. I made a mistake when I first started playing and sold the Skullflame Shield to the vendor :(
ReplyDeleteI also learned to check every vendor that I ran into during quests, etc. to see if I could buy anything and put it up on the Auction House. Example: Frost Oil Recipe :) which sold for 500g