20 Days of Gold Making - Day 3

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!

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition

Image © Zoonabar under Creative Commons licence

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 2

The question for Day 2 of my 20 Days of Gold Making challenge is "if you set yourself a goal, what was your goal & when did you set it?"

I'd been casually making gold for a year before I started to get serious about it but the trigger for a goal was set during an ICC raid towards the end of my raid team's life. We had a new couple in the guild who joined us that evening for the first time & in one of those random conversations over Skype, he mentioned that his wife could buy 5 Mechanohogs if she wanted to (that would have been about 80k at the time). I probably had about 20k gold at that point & I thought I was doing well but when he said that, I decided on the spot that I wanted to beat her gold total!

This was in the summer before Cataclysm arrived & shortly before the whole guild implosion which left me guildless & wandering the streets in solitude. This is the point in time when I started to get serious about gold making. I had no idea there was even a thing called Gold Cap (around 214k gold at that point) but once I started reading gold blogs & learning all about addons & auction house stuff, I quickly changed my goal to Gold Cap.

By the time Cataclysm went live (December 2010), I was at around 50k & the Gold Cap was now 1 million gold. I liked the sound of that so that immediately became my new goal. I added jewelcrafting to my maxed professions list & never really looked back. I started this blog around the same time so if you are interested in my journey, it's all there for you to read. 

At around the time I added & maxed my jewelcrafting, Trade Skill Master was becoming more widely used & I hesitated but jumped on the bandwagon anyway. I am so glad I did! It revolutionised my glyph sales & my gem sales to the point where I was spending most of my time on the Obsidium Shuffle & making more gold than I had ever imagined possible!

I eventually hit Gold Cap in July 2011, just 7 months after I really started gold making which isn't too shabby at all. Then I faded! the whole race to Gold cap was my sole driving force to play the game at that point & I struggled to find new goals to push myself towards. I eventually blew a huge chunk of it on mounts & pets so now I'm back below 400k & my new goal is to get back to the million!

I don't tend to set myself intermediate goals - I just poodle along, working the Auction House & trying not to spend too much gold on luxury items in the meantime. I'm not in a rush so I don't want to stress myself out or sidetrack myself from enjoying the rest of the game this time round. If I start setting myself weekly or monthly goals then I will focus on those too much & miss so much content. I'll be quite happy if I can get back to the million by mid to late summer but I am not going to worry if I don't make it.

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition


Image © Erika under Creative Commons licence

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 1

Here we go then - day 1 of my 20 Days of Gold Making. Todays question is 'when did you start gold making & what triggered it?'

I found the lure of gold very early on - in fact, if I remember correctly, I had enough gold for my riding training & mount at level 20 by the end of my 10 day free trial just by questing & selling vendor junk. It helped that I had about 6 different alts all running through starter zones in those 10 days so when I finally took the plunge & converted to a full account, all I had to do was send all the gold to my main.

I didn't set up a specific banker alt straight away but I did allocate one of my lesser played alts to be the auction house alt. As I was only questing at this point, any useful items were checked for sale price at the AH & sold if possible. I do remember clearly finding the cooking recipe vendor in Stormwind & selling loads of those recipes during that first Pilgrim's Bounty holiday. 

I used to keep a daily note of how much gold each alt had - I'm an accountant by trade so keeping track seemed natural & obvious to me. I remember lending 6000 gold to a newish guild member whilst my main was questing in Hellfire. I had all sorts of whispers from my closest guildies, telling me I was silly to trust this guy, what if he didn't pay me back etc but that 6k was only a small chunk of what I had already accumulated & I knew I could easily write it off if he didn't repay me.

2 months into my Wow career :)

My faith in him was rewarded though - he had needed the gold to dual spec so he could fill a gap in the raid team & once he had done that & upgraded his gear properly for raiding, he spent about a week just farming to make gold to repay me. He sadly left guild a while later to join a more aggressive raiding team - we were definitely not serious raiders! I mean we raided regularly but when your 2 healers are prone to giggle fits & the tank is a funny guy, things tend to break down a little, you know?

Anyway, fast forward to August/September 2010 & I found myself guildless & very very lonely in game. Cataclysm was coming but without a guild, I didn't know quite what to do with myself so I turned to the Auction House. It wasn't a conscious decision but as with any new project, I threw myself into it. If you go back & read my very first post here, you will see I thanked Cold & Markco for their useful blogs which I found in those first weeks of my gold making endeavors. From there, I found loads more, created my Twitter account & generally started soaking up information like a sponge!

By the time Cataclysm arrived, I had about 60,000 gold, a specific bank alt & a whole arsenal of markets, professions & tricks to run. Just before Cataclysm arrived, I rejoined my old guild but it was a very different guild with all the raiders having left overnight. I continued to pretty much run solo with occasional guild dungeon runs but I was so busy making gold, I kind of lost interest in social playing! I started this blog in the December & pretty much haven't looked back since.

Edited to add: Cold over at Cold's Gold Factory runs a monthly blogging carnival and in support of my 20 Days of Gold Making, has made Day 1 the topic for the February Carnival. Thank You Cold, for all your help & support xxx

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition


Image © Tao_zhyn under Creative Commons licence

20 Days of Gold Making - Community Idea

Writer's Block? 20 Questions To Help Fix It

I've seen the 20 days of WoW meme on & off over the last few months & have just started it on my non-gold WoW blog She Rides Dragons. Whilst pondering some of the answers, it came to me that a gold making meme might be a good idea too so here goes!

Basically it's just a list of questions for gold makers to answer if they wish. Sometimes it's difficult to come up with a good gold making post especially if you're in a bit of a funk so this list might spark ideas for you or at the least, will fill a little dead space on your blog until you do get a good post idea! 

1. When did you start gold making & what triggered it?

2. If you set yourself a goal, what was your goal & at what point did you set it?

3. What were the first techniques/tricks/tips you used when starting out?

4. Do you use a banker alt/guild? When did you start doing that & why?

5. Do you keep the same banker alt or do you change them up occasionally? Why?

6. Which market has made you the most gold over the years?

7. If you were starting over again (maybe on a new server perhaps), how would you start building some capital & what goal would you set yourself?

8. Thinking back to day 2, did you ever reach your goal or are you still working towards it? If you reached it - have you set yourself a new one?

9.What's your favorite niche market & why?

10. Do you farm materials? Why? Why not? & which ones, where?

11. Most of us use TSM, Auctioneer and/or Auctionator in combo with Postal - are there any other lesser known gold making addons you use?

12. What was your biggest 'oops' moment?

13. What was your biggest 'Yay!' moment?

14. How much of your playtime is devoted to gold making? Do you raid/pvp/pet battle too or is the AH your main playtime?

15. Professions - do you have all of them, some or none? Which is your favorite for goldmaking?

16.Flipping! Do you flip stuff regularly or sometimes? Big ticket items or smaller high volume stuff?

17. Pets - Did you used to do the Vendor pet sales? How have pet battles changed things for you?

18.What is the most important bit of advice you could give to a new gold maker? (not a game newbie though, just a newbie gold maker)

19. Have you bought yourself anything really expensive as a reward for earning all that gold? Or do you have a self-present in mind for when you reach your goal?

20. Lets spread some blog love - which are your 'must read' or 'go to' gold blogs or even other places you go for information & reading matter?


If you do decide to join in, there's no requirements to post every day or even to answer every question - just pick & chose which question you feel like answering. If you do plan to do all of them though, leave a link in the comments so others can find you & it may even bring you some extra traffic.

Image © Drew Coffman under Creative Commons licence

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition

Living Steel - Still Profitable?

Living Steel - Still Profitable?

I think most of us know that Living Steel was a great way to make some really good gold early on during the expansion but as prices dropped, many moved away from this market as the profit margins got smaller. I know I was one of those who left it for a while, especially as the Ghost Iron Ore price didn't seem to come down by much at the same time. However, I recently snagged a bargain bundle of Ghost Iron Ore & decided to look at the costings for Living Steel once more.

I bought 92 stacks of Ghost Iron Ore at around 32g per stack for a total cost of 2944g. I already had 4 stacks in my bags so I converted all of them to Ghost Iron bars (48 stacks of bars), split them in half & sent 24 stacks to each of my alchemists. Converting 24 stacks of Ghost Iron bars to Trillium, I expected 48 Trillium bars for each alt but both my alchemists are Transmute Mastery so in the end, I received 62 on one alt & 61 on the other.

So that gave me enough Trillium Bars to do the Living Steel transmute  for 10 days on both alchemists so I kept a note of how many I received each day, obviously hoping for some nice procs! Without transmute mastery, I would have received just 20 Living Steel but in the end, I received 27.

I've been selling them as I produce them except on days when the price dropped really low. At the last count, I had sold all of them for a total of around 10900g. With an initial outlay of just 3000g, I think it's fair to say that yes, Living Steel is still profitable on my server as long as I watch my raw material costs.

What I haven't done is check for other uses of Living Steel. It may be that crafting Epic armor, the panther mounts or the Living Steel belt buckle would be more profitable but I don't have the patterns yet so plain Living Steel is my best option. As always though, check your own auction house for prices & use your own judgement.

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition



Image © D H Parks under Creative Commons licence

Goodbye 2012, Hello 2013

Happy New Year 2013

It's that time of year again - everyone looking back at 2012 & looking forward to whatever 2013 may bring. I'm no different really although after the year I've had, 2012 is probably going down in my personal history book as a humdinger of a year!

I started the year with a post like this one - my first look back post on this blog. It had been a vague year, reaching goldcap in WoW was probably the highlight for me. This year started off in a similar vein, I set up my US account 2nd January, logged in once or twice then walked away from WoW totally for 3 or 4 months! I had no intentions of taking a break, it was just one of those random things that happen sometimes.

I was having some counselling for my depression & a very good friend online was metaphorically holding my hand every step of the way. I felt myself coming back to life, like snowdrops pushing their heads up through the snow & ice & when I did finally wake up, I realised some major changes needed to happen. Whilst in my cocoon of depression, I had changed & so had some of my closest loved ones. So I made a very difficult decision to walk away & start fresh on my own.

It wasn't quite so easy to actually do that though - finances kind of kept me stuck there so after a couple of pretty rough months, things calmed down to a point where we could start moving stuff along & make our separate plans. That's around the time I found my lump. If you've been reading for a while, you may remember my charity fund raising in the summer. I managed to raise 293GBP for Breast Cancer Care by chopping off most of my hair & donating it to a charity that makes wigs for children with cancer. With fantastic support from my fellow gold bloggers & my lovely Twitter peeps, I managed to keep my head & spirits high & after a short operation, I was given the all clear.

I have to say, I have never been so scared in my life! But so many of you, readers, twitter followers & gold blogging friends sent me positive support messages, it was like little rays of light shining through for me to follow a path out of that particular darkness. It also gave me a new impetus to get stuff done. I finally moved into my own little place & now I have a 'pit' to call my very own for the first time in my life.

I've been blogging like crazy, writing on Squidoo to make some cash there too & I even started a second World of Warcraft blog, She Rides Dragons, for my more general WoW ramblings. With some blogging guidance from my good friend, Cold, this blog has seen a huge increase in visitor numbers. I don't write just for the numbers but I will be honest, it really does make my day when I see just how many visitors are reading my stuff! My old school English teacher would have a heart attack if she saw me voluntarily writing all this stuff! I hated English lessons at school & essay writing homework was always the bane of my school existance!

And then there are the podcasts! I guest hosted with Jim on Power Word:Gold podcast a few times in 2011 & he was kind enough to invite me back for a few episodes this year. I played Hearthcast AoE against Rewt (twice! because of technical problems) & I finally got a chance to talk to Rez & Cold on Eviscerated Gaming Podcast last month. Brandon from Gold Shields blog also set up some Google + hangups late in the summer - just a bunch of gold makers hanging out on Google+ & shooting the breeze - those were fun & there's talk of more in the future once Mists of Pandaria activities die down a bit!

So what does the New Year bring? Who knows? I sure don't. This time last year, I was just hoping to get a job & keep blogging too but the job didn't happen. This year, I feel alive & just about ready to tackle anything! Obviously, I'm going to keep blogging here & She Rides Dragons too but I really want to get my photography blog up & running again. I spent most of my WoW gold too - all those lovely mounts & pretty pets available on the Auction House so I guess I will aim for goldcap once more but without glyphs this time!

I'd like to thank everyone personally but the list was long last year & has just got longer this year. New friends, new readers & followers as well as old friends & early followers - thank you all - your tweets & comments here keep me going & makes this all worthwhile for me. I hope my wordy ramblings help you too - I never did perfect the art of short answers - you can blame my Dad for that!

So I guess after all that I just want to say Goodbye 2012 & ooh hello 2013 - onwards & upwards for me & I hope 2013 is a great one for you too. Happy New Year everyone & thank you all, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you xxx


Image © Vironevaeh under Creative Commons licence

Nev's Top 5 Pre-vacation Goldmaking Preparation Tips

I'm off on my travels again shortly & I probably won't be able to access my EU World of Warcraft account which is where all my main goldmaking activities occur. So I've been slowly making preparations to continue making gold whilst I'm away & thought I'd share a few of my Top Tips with you.

Top Tip #1 - Get the Remote Auction House App

If you have a smart phone, download the WoW Armory app - Remote Auction House access is now free & although you can only do 200 transactions per account per day, it's still very very useful. If you don't have a smart phone but will have internet access, you can access it online at worldofwarcraft.com. Just log into your battlenet account, choose your character from the top right hand corner drop down list then scroll down & you should see a 'My Auctions' section.

Top Tip #2 - Check & Tidy Your Mailboxes

Check your mail boxes on all your alts. You may have mail due to expire whilst you are on vacation & you don't want to lose anything valuable (I speak from experience, I lost 2 Epics last year when I took an unexpected break). If you don't have space in your bank, you can just send it to another alt, it will stay there for 30 days then bounce back to the sending alt & be safe there for a further 30 days.

It's a good idea to empty as much as possible from your mailbox though, especially on your banker - partly because you could lose some stuff but also because it does make the RAH a little bit easier to use. If your mailbox is full, you can only see those items & will have to relist the first 50 items to get to the next lot. With a 200 transaction limit, that can be a right royal pain in the derriere!

Top Tip #3 - Sort Out Bank Access

If you use a banker with your own personal guild and keep stuff to sell in that guild bank - be aware it is not accessible via the Remote Auction House. I've put most of my glyphs & gems into the bankers Guild bank as I have plenty of other stuff to sell. Any items that I pull in & out of the guild bank to sell are now in my bankers personal bank - that IS accessible via RAH.

Top Tip #4 - Tidy Your Bags

Tidy your bags! If you're anything like me, you probably carry around all sorts of useful stuff (*cough*) whilst out questing. My banker is overflowing with stuff so I've had a tidy up in some of my crafting alts bags so I can use those for overflow.

Top Tip #5 - Craft Everything

Craft like crazy before you go. You know which markets are making you the most gold, use that knowledge. If it's gems or glyphs then you may have to change tack a little. Posting those without addons is not only painful but cancel/relisting is not likely to be posssible given the 200 a day limit. I'd suggest looking at crafting leg armors, spellthreads, shoulder enchants, other enchants, flasks & potions, belt buckles & tinker's gears at least, depending on which professions you have.

I've also been able to craft a few Epic armor items on my Leatherworker & I've picked up a few cheap pets on a different server to sell on my home server. I've also bought some 100 Year Old Soy sauce with my Ironpaw Tokens as they do sell albeit slowly sometimes. If you have alchemy & Ghost iron ore is cheap, then don't forget to check Living Steel - there is still profit there on some servers. If Living Steel doesn't look too profitable or you can't resist listing it as soon as you make it (like I do!) then pre-craft trillium bars - not quite as profitable as Living Steel on my server but pre-crafted means I can sell a whole heap of them whilst I'm away.

Bonus Top Tip 

Remove cats (or dogs or whatever pet has decided to take up residence or to help you pack) from suitcase! Not only will you get more in your suitcase, you aren't going to run foul of any animal import regulations!

I hope this helps. I'd be interested to know if you have any pre-vacation tips to add so feel free to leave a comment below. Happy travels

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition


Image © Foxtongue under Creative Commons licence

Happy 2nd Birthday Giveaway Winners

Birthday Giveaway Results

Well that week went by quickly! Here we are at the start of my 3rd year blogging here & my first post for year 3 is to announce the winners of the Giveaway.

I had a few entries but sadly only 5 from the EU region so I generated a bank of random numbers & am giving the prize to the 'number' that showed up most frequently.

Random Numbers generated for EU winner

As you can see if you want to check for yourself, number 3 appeared 15 times in the generated table so Congratulations to @jay376 on Twitter! Thank you for the retweets & your support. Let me know which of the Blizzard Store pets you would like & I'll get that to you as soon as possible.

For my US/Aus friends, there were a few more entries but I decided to do the same again - generate a table & count to see which one turned up most. This was much closer result with 4 numbers tying for 2nd place but by just 1 point, my US winner is @peasap also from Twitter. Congratulations to you & again, let me know which pet you would like & I'll get that to you soon.

Random Numbers generated for US winner

So that just leaves the Cinder Kitten up for grabs. I really enjoyed hearing your stories about which pet you'd choose, what you would name it & why. At first, a couple of the references didn't mean much to me but once I found the video link, I have to give the Cinder Kitten prize to @SgtBinary - comparing Richard Simmons to Lil XT is just hilarious as I had no idea who Richard Simmons was(is?)!

So there we go! Time for me to get my debit card out & send some pets around the world. I have a standby plan if I have problems buying from the US store so no worries there :) I just hope I can resist buying them all for myself at the same time! I still have Xmas presents to buy! lol



image © david.dames under Creative Commons licence

Selling Level 83-85 Green MoP Armor to Cataclysm Levelers

I've been kind of slacking lately with my professions. I finally got my Blacksmith maxed late last week & over the weekend, I decided it was time to sort out my Enchanter's mailbox & bags. Almost every green armor drop I've picked up whilst leveling 3 alts through Pandaria has been mailed to her so after sorting out all the non-MoP stuff, I tackled the green armour.

Where to start was my first thought! I had item level 364's, 377's, 384's, 390's & some 400+'s too & no idea which of them were disenchant fodder & which were saleable. My first stop was Cold's excellent post about stat weight priorities by armor type & which ones to try to sell. It has some great information but I wanted a quick & easy fix for bulging bags & I just wasn't in the frame of mind to tackle such a detailed sorting out. I've bookmarked it for future reference though & will be streamlining my Trade Skill Master auctioning groups based on his post.

Green Armor ilvl 364

Green Armor ilvl 377

Green Armor ilvl 384-390

For now, I initially created a TSM auctioning group for each item level & popped in some basic amounts for my Threshold & Fallbacks. I then went to the auction house as if I was going to post them - just to see what the prices were like for each group & whether a broad brush approach would work. One thing became obvious quite quickly - the item level 400+'s weren't selling for very much at all. This was my gut instinct anyway as I've found so much gear from drops & quest rewards that I've not needed to buy anything from the Auction House.

The screenshots above show which items I currently have in which groups. As I pick up new stuff, I'll just add them to the auctioning group & forget about them! The item level 364's are for level 83 alts, the item level 377's are for level 84's & the item level 384 & 390's are for level 85's. Now these were quite nicely priced - definitely way above any disenchanting value so I kept these armor pieces & disenchanted any of the others in my bags.

Off I went back to the Auction House & ran my usual post cycle, including these armor items. I've set the 364's at 199g, the 377's at 225g & the 384/390's at 249g for now - just to test the market. I've also set them only to list for 24 hours to keep the deposit price down. When I came back the next day, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised - 9 pieces had sold overnight for a princely sum of  just over 2000 gold!

MySales screenshot of Sales for Green Armor

Now I know that's not such a huge amount but bear in mind that this stuff was destined to be disenchanted so actually, I'm glad I spent a bit of time sorting through it all. I've also put gear to one side for my 3 remaining alts who have yet to start their leveling. All three of them weren't very geared by the end of Cataclysm & are my weakest alts too so having a whole bunch of upgrades to start Jade Forest with should make my life a bit easier when the time comes!

Over time I may very well end up buying green armor in these categories if they are priced very cheaply. This is a definite possible replacement market (or addition, depending on your server) for the level 77-80 green armor sales which on my server at least, seem to have almost disappeared completely for now.

I also leveled my enchanting a bit & although I only made the very cheapest enchants to do so, I have been quite pleased with those sales too but that's a story for another post! Have you had much luck in this armor market? How is the level 77-80 Cata greens market doing on your server? Would love to hear your thoughts so you know the score - leave a comment below or maybe tweet me @nevahaddict.

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition

image © dicktay2000 under Creative Commons licence

Flasks - Testing the Market

Flasks & Potions

Just about a week ago, I posted about What to do with Golden Lotuses & came to the conclusion that I should dip my toe into the Flask market. The comments to that post seemed to confirm this so off I went to make some flasks!

Since I wrote that post however, my ever so slow moving Leatherworker finally made it to honoured with the Golden Lotus faction & gained access to the Epic armor recipes. It turns out that what I thought was a good stock of Spirits of Harmony wasn't anywhere near enough so this week, she's been planting Songbell Seeds again, thereby crimping my Golden Lotus herb production!

I thought I'd report back on my market test so far anyway, just so I don't forget.

Over 8 days of planting Enigma Seeds, I gained 47 Golden Lotus - that's almost 6 each day - I like this increased drop rate for sure! Enigma Seeds cost only 1g each so for a total outlay of just 128g & 2 stacks of Crystal Vials, I managed to make 35 flasks & still have 7 Golden Lotus left over. I also only used the other herbs I got from the farm produce - none were bought or herbed. I have quite a few of the other herbs still in my bags too.

I checked the Auction House prices manually & decided to make just 3 of the 5 types of flask to start with. As they sold, I made a few more & also added a few of the other 2 types. As of this morning, I have only 14 flasks left to sell.

I also made 5 Potions of Luck just to see if there was any interest there - not so far but I'll keep listing them as long as their price is above the cost of the Golden Lotuses.

Flasks & Potions Spreadsheet

You can see from the spreadsheet screenshot that so far, my gold made from flasks is over 2500g & as I said earlier, that's with just an initial investment of 128g. So I'd say this was a fairly successful market test but it is a small market & it has taken all week for these few flasks to sell.

To be fair though, I haven't been listing them just before raid time & when I have listed them, I've listed them for 48 hours & walked away. I'm pretty sure, if I had paid more attention to posting times & reposting when undercut, that I would have made that profit more quickly. But this is a side venture for me as I explore various markets to write about & with an eye for future profitable endeavours.

So now what to do? Flasks are showing themselves to be profitable for now but I also need Spirit of Harmony for my leatherworker to craft Epic armour! I guess I'll have to get my DK & Warrior to 90 so I can start expanding their farms! Arrrgghh! more dailies!

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition

Image © Xavi Talleda under Creative Commons licence

Happy 2nd Birthday AH Addict! Competition Time!

Birthday Giveaway - AH Addict is nearly 2

With Auction House Addict hitting two years old next week & coinciding with Blizzard's pet sale, I thought I'd run a little competition here to celebrate.

I started writing here as a diary for one of my little side projects but to be honest, that didn't make for very good reading & I got very bored of writing it too so I turned to more general gold making topics. It's been an interesting couple of years, made new friends in game & on twitter, talked to lots of different people via comments here & even managed to guest on several episodes of PowerWord:Gold podcast, played AoE trivia against Rewt on Hearthcast & most recently, met Rez & Cold on Eviscerated Gaming Podcast.

It's been a fabulous ride so far, even with a few breaks here & there. I'm looking forward to many more, especially now as I seem to have hit my stride a bit & visitor numbers are climbing! I don't write just for the numbers but it does give me a boost to think so many of you visit to read. Please don't tell my old English teacher that I'm writing voluntarily though, she'll have a heart attack! I was a maths & science girl at school & my English essay homework was always my most hated & usually most delayed subject!

Anyway, down to business! What sort of competition & what are the prizes?

Prizes

Well I have both an EU & US account so I'm going to be offering  a pet of your choice from the Blizzard Pet Store (NOT including the Cinder Kitty) & there will be 2 winners - one from EU & one for USA.

I know it's not a superduper mega prize but 1 overall winner will be chosen from the comments here - name your new pet & the reason that makes me giggle or groan the most will win a Cinder Kitty - the newest & possibly the cutest pet in store & of course, it's a charity pet too.

How to Enter

1) Starting today, retweet this post & use #AHAgiveaway = 1 entry per twitter account (I don't want to encourage tweetspamming!)

2) Leave a comment here telling me which pet you'd choose, which region (US/EU) & what will you name your pet & why? Each comment = 1 entry

3) Overall winner will be the comment that makes me giggle or groan the most! So choose your wished for pet & get your thinking caps on & you could win a Cinder Kitty. (If you want to make a naughty joke, keep it clever please, pure filth will be disqualified & deleted, no matter how much it makes me laugh!)

Choosing a Winner

I'll keep two lists (EU/US) of everyone who comments and/or retweets & allocate a number to each. Using a random number generator, I'll get 2 numbers & those will be the pet winners. The Cinder Kitty will be awarded by my choice, once I stop giggling.

Closing Date

Closing date is 6am Friday 21st December GMT - that will be 5am for most of Europe & about midnight Thursday for Eastern & Mid USA.

So there you go - yet another competition/giveaway running right now. If you're on Twitter & aren't seeing loads of Cinder Kitty giveaways in your feed, you should follow some of my peeps - my feed is full of homeless Cinder Kitties right now :P But if you want a chance at some really nice prizes, pop over to Cold's Gold Factory - his 3rd birthday giveaway has TCG pets, mounts & in-game mounts as prizes.

I look forward to reading your comments - just keep it clever peeps xxx



Image © Will Clayton under Creative Commons licence

My Best & Worst Markets in MoP

For this months blogging carnival over at Cold's Gold Factory, Cold has asked us another interesting question. Unfortunately I think my answer is probably not going to be particularly informative as I have been focused mainly on leveling, dailies & yes, dungeons! But never mind, it's still valid & I'm pretty sure many of you have probably found the same markets as I have.

BEST and WORST Markets So Far In MoP

Tell us about your favorite, most profitable, or most consistent market in the MoP era of WoW Gold Making. Then, tell us about a market that you've abandoned, has crashed, or has just plain been a flop. What are your best and worse WoW auction house markets so far in Mists?

My Best Market in MoP

For me, with all the leveling & dailies, my best market that has almost taken care of itself is the vegetables from my farms & any cooking materials I've been picking up whilst out in the world. I haven't been paying close attention to the Auction House & I haven't been crafting much at all to sell so my banker is just selling off any green armor/weapon drops & other random stuff that drops of mobs. My MySales statistics are abysmal! With just 5000 gold in sales last week, I'm not sure I should even be writing a gold blog right now! But in my defence, I haven't been playing much either so from just logging in & relisting what I do have in the mail, that's not so bad, right?

Looking through the MySales statistics though, it's very obvious to me that vegetables, meats & fish are my best sellers. I only went half way down the list to get the numbers but I've made almost 12,000 gold since early October. I know that doesn't sound like much but most of my farm produce has gone to my Main alt to level my Cooking in all the Ways. I finally finished that last week & now I'm in full production on 4 baby farms (4 x 4plots) producing various vegetables each day.

The other nice surprise when I looked at MySales was just how much gold I made from some of the items I cooked to get skill points - almost 2000 gold just from the last few items like Chun Tian Spring Rolls, Sea Mist Rice Noodles & Banquet of the Steamer.

My Worst Market in MoP

Well, I have to say it - glyphs! I'm sure if I was paying attention, relisting 3-4 times a day etc like I used to, that this market could be better but with so many glyphs under 25g each, I've kind of lost interest in it. I can craft a glyph one day based on current market price of say 200g & then the next day, some nice person (thru gritted teeth) has relisted theirs for 15g or 20g. I have almost 1000 glyphs that I just can't seem to move & the numbers aren't going my way at all.

I'd be very surprised to find that I'm making any gold at all with glyphs right now especially when I compare it to pre-MoP days. Just pop back to my Nev's Glyph Strategy post from earlier in the summer & look at those prices!

I've always been a glypher in my gold-making - glyphs probably accounted for over 60% of my 1million although I can't be sure as I lost all my data before I could analyse it (arrrgghhh!).

Where Next?

So once I'm done with all my alts, leveling, dailies, rep grinds, dungeons etc, I'm going to have to find a different way to make my gold. I've been a bit spend happy recently - mounts especially towards the end of the summer - but I'm well below 500k now & I don't like it much!

I'm looking at the Flask market right now after moving my main farm over to Enigma Seeds for the Golden Lotus harvest but having looked at my Cooking results for the best market section above, I think perhaps I should keep an eye on the Banquet market too. It goes without saying that vegetables are still in my plans but over time, I'm sure that market will saturate too & I will have to move on to something else to make good gold.

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition

Image © Tallpomlin under Creative Commons licence

What To Do With Golden Lotuses?

What To Do With Golden Lotuses

Now that Blizzard have upped the spawn rate for Golden Lotuses (Loti?), as extras from normal herb picks & from the Enigma Seeds on your Tillers farm, I wondered whether I could make some good gold from them. Yes, I know, I'm late to the party but I've been focused on completing my cooking Ways & leveling & dailies! I'm also trying to work out which is the best crop to plant to make the most gold from my Farm. I've been planting the Songbell seeds to get Motes of Harmony but as my Leatherworker is creeping so slowly through her dailies, I have more than enough Spirits of Harmony for now.

As far as I can see, there are several options for using Golden Lotus to make gold - the 5 different flasks or transmuting uncommen gems into rare gems (6 colours) as well as the Mists of Pandaria Potion of Luck - all made/used by Alchemists. I could also just sell the Golden Lotus on the Auction House & save myself a fair bit of time & effort by not crafting anything but looking at this graph from The Undermine Journal, an average price of 100g-ish per Golden Lotus is not exactly the most profitable way.

Golden Lotus Prices (from TUJ)

My alchemists are both transmute masters so making flasks is probably not the best option either - the additional procs of a mastery are where the real profits lie as they bring the per item crafting cost down. I could change one alchemist to an Elixir Master at a cost of 8 Flasks, especially as the Living Steel transmute is not exactly profitable right now but I'm hesitant to do that straight away. I think I'll test the market first.

Alchemy Flask Prices (from TUJ)

The transmute uncommon gems to rare gems is also a bit of a non-starter - prices for gems are pretty bad on my server - to the point where my Jewelcrafter is still sitting around not doing much. Again, I've been focused elsewhere so I haven't been watching the JC markets as closely as I used to. Besides cut rare gems though, there are the ilevel 450 rings & necks to make as well as the JC crafted Panther mounts. Looking on the Undermine Journal for my server, it looks like there are some good profits in those for now but I'd need to do the prospect vs. transmute costings before I throw all my Golden Lotuses at those!

JC Rings & Necks (from TUJ)

So what to do? Well for now, I think I'm going to try the Flasks market - just dip a toe in to see how things go - for the cost of 16 Enigma seeds each day, I'm picking up 3-7 Golden Lotus as well as a variety of the other Pandaren herbs so my crafting costs are minimal (yes, I'm ignoring opportunity cost etc!).

Like so many, I'm also limited by time so I think this will be least time consuming whilst I have a better look at prospecting. My other 4-plot farms are still producing vegetables but I may just leave those lie for now - spend that time doing dailies or prospecting instead. I'm beginning to feel as if I'm a long way behind - with the release of patch 5.1 there's a whole load of new stuff to get into but I haven't even seen all of the initial Mists of Pandaria stuff yet and that's without spending much time at the Auction House! My gold flow is just ok but so many of my traditional markets seem to have almost disappeared that I really need to knuckle down & get that gold really flowing again.

What do you do with your Golden Lotuses? Are you feeling time-pressures, falling behind etc too? Let me know in comments - I'd love to hear from you.

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition

Image © Sektordua under Creative Commons licence

Leather Conversions Spreadsheet & Bags

Leather Conversion

I promised you more spreadsheets so today we have a Leatherworker's spreadsheet. I wrote a post way back near the beginning of Cataclysm about converting leather scraps up to better qualities as a way to make some easy gold. It's nice to see that the old tips & tricks still work now that Mists of Pandaria is live & I've included some of the older conversions in this spreadsheet as there is still gold to be made there.

Now there are two ways to use this spreadsheet - you can download a copy of my Leather Conversion spreadsheet & just manually input prices from your Auction House or you can use The Undermine Journal .csv file as I explained in last weeks post Easy Data from TUJ.

If you decide to manually input the prices, you will need to overwrite the VLookup formulas in column B but the rest of the spreadsheet will still work. (If you want to try your own VLookup formulas, keep reading, instructions at end of post)

If you want to try the TUJ data file, follow the instructions in the post to get a .csv file onto your PC. Open it in Excel or Open Office & just copy/paste the whole sheet into tab 2 of my Leather Conversion spreadsheet. It should pull the data through to the main sheet automatically.

Leather Conversions Spreadsheet

So what are we looking at? Well, I've tried to keep it fairly simple but it took me a while to get there so I hope you can follow what I've done! Converting up from the various leather scraps is a bit more time-consuming but can be very profitable - just look at the price of Savage Leather Scraps on my server today (red dot line). Converting up from those scraps means that my Savage Leather would only cost me 33 silver - a big saving over the 9 gold or more that someone is trying to sell their Savage Leather at! If there are enough Savage Leather Scraps to convert to a Pristine Hide (250 scraps, in case you were wondering), that's only 17 gold 50 silver for a Pristine Hide - big profit there or even use the ultra cheap hide to make the scribe or mining bags for even more profits!

Now I've only included the bags here but you can easily add rows for leg armours or anything else you like - add a row for the leg armor & a row for each type of material it uses besides the leather then use a VLookup formula to get the prices from the TUJ data file. A quick a-b formula later & you should see if it would be profitable or not.

Ok so I promised help with the VLookup formula for those of you not sure about spreadsheets. It's really very easy but sometimes the help files make it confusing. This is what Open Office says :-

"Syntax

=VLOOKUP(SearchCriterion; Array; Index; SortOrder)

SearchCriterion is the value searched for in the first column of the array.

Array is the reference, which is to comprise at least two columns.

Index is the number of the column in the array that contains the value to be returned. The first column has the number 1.

SortOrder is an optional parameter that indicates whether the first column in the array is sorted in ascending order. Enter the Boolean value FALSE or zero if the first column is not sorted in ascending order. Sorted columns can be searched much faster and the function always returns a value, even if the search value was not matched exactly, if it is between the lowest and highest value of the sorted list. In unsorted lists, the search value must be matched exactly. Otherwise the function will return this message: Error: Value Not Available."

OK - so the Search Criterion is what you are looking for in that huge table of data - in our case Savage leather, Pristine Hide etc. For this formula to work, your description in the main spreadsheet must be identical to that in the data file so watch for spelling mistakes & random apostrophes.

The Array part of the formula is merely the parts of the huge data file that the formula is going to look at. The formula doesn't need to look at the whole file, it always starts with the item name column so you have to tell the formula which columns to look at. In our case, it only needs columns C & D so I click C1, hold down the shift button & page down to D12000+.

The Index part of the formula is which column contains the data you want to use in the formula - for us that would be column D or 2 (it's the 2nd column in our array). If we wanted to pull data from other columns, we would just increase the Array columns (say columns C to H) & put a 3,4,5 or 6 in the formula to pull data from that column.

Sort Order is important to us here - the data file is so big, we really don't want to sort it in ascending order before we do anything so the last part of the Vlookup formula for us is a 0 (zero).

So for this file, our Vlookup formula looks like this 

=VLOOKUP(A5;'TUJ Data'.$C$2:$D$12668;2;0)/10000

The Undermine Journal data prices are expressed in coppers so I have divided the Vlookup results by 10,000 to get to a gold/silver price.

So there we go! I hope it's clearer than mud to those of you who need the help but if you are having problems, do feel free to comment, tweet me or email me & I will try to help further. 

As for leather converting - don't forget, you can convert the lower leathers up to higher ones too - it's rarely profitable but if you just need that 1 or 2 more pieces to get a skill point, it can be a time saver.

Image © Austin Appraiser under Creative Commons licence

Nev's Daily To-Do List - Downloadable!

Nev's Daily To Do List

Following on from my Improve Your Goldmaking in WoW post a few days ago, I thought I'd share my Daily To-Do list with you. I've transferred it to Google Docs for ease of sharing but I've made it only viewable. Having read a bit more about how Google Docs works, you should still be able to download a copy for yourself but it means that any random edits won't mess up the basic document for others. If you can't download it, let me know either here in comments or perhaps on Twitter @NevAHAddict & I'll have a look to see what's wrong!

So if you'd like a copy, just pop over to Nev's Daily To-Do List & grab it from there. I hope it's fairly self-explanatory - you can add columns for more alts, add rows for other stuff you do regularly or delete stuff you don't do at all.

Bear in mind that this is based on my routine - I may have more time than you or just think in a completely different way & that's ok. The idea here is to make a list that is useful to you so you don't get swamped by all the options - just work down your list & you'll be accomplishing stuff whilst you decide what mood you are in for playing today. I sometimes find that once I've done my banking, I just want to kick back & do something easy like Pet Battles or I may have a bee in my bonnet about finishing a zone or getting to that next level.

Have I missed something that you think is important or useful to others? Let me know - I tend to get distracted easily so having a list works for me but I'm sure there are other things I probably didn't even think of!

I've kind of fallen in love with the ease of sharing files via Google Docs & am working on some more spreadsheets for you. If there are any particular things you would like to see on a spreadsheet, let me know & I'll see what I can do.

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses! Gift Guide - Horde Edition | Gift Guide - Alliance Edition