30 Minutes a Day Project - Days 22 - 24

OK, time to play catch-up! I'm a few days late writing this up so it may be a bit sketchy on the details! Had a lovely quiet Christmas Day with just Mum and Bro and then Boxing Day there too (that's the day after Christmas for my US friends), so I didn't get much time online.

Day 22
Basically I just emptied the mail box and had a quick skim - saw a whole bunch of cheap Mageweave Cloth, grabbed it, relisted and dashed off to Mum's for lunch! It was nice to see such high prices for the Bolts of Linen Cloth and Silk Cloth though. I find it really hard to understand why the Bolts sell for so much more than the cloth - it's the same with the Bars of ore versus the ore prices - you can almost always guarantee that Bars/Bolts prices will be higher than the simple material cost.

Yes, I understand that one more process and therefore a bit of additional time has gone into making them but to buy cloth at 10 silvers and sell the bolts for almost 1 gold is crazy mark-up! I'm not complaining though - it's a great way to make some starting capital as you only need the most very basic training in Tailoring or Mining to craft them both and you can easily make a lot of gold if you have the time.

Day 23
So the holidays are over and it's time to get back to the Auction House. Not many sales but a nice chunk of change in the mailbox today. The 3 stacks of Silkweed netted me almost double the amount of gold I paid for them and the Mageweave all sold too.

I spent almost all of my 15 minutes today snatching up the cheapest items from a variety of categories. Herbs have proved to be a good source of profit so of course, I look there first. Today though, I also checked out the Mists cooking materials, the cloth and the Ores/Bars markets. There were loads of listings for herbs at silly low prices - Terocone and Talandra's Rose had really large gaps to the next priced auction so I nabbed those. I just hope they sell for that crazy high price!

I am having real problems spending large amounts of gold though - I'm so risk averse and very aware of my time limits so I'm going for the obvious bargains. I think perhaps if I had given myself more time, I'd be taking a bit more of a risk with the level 83/84 green armor market. I don't want to be left with a bunch of stock at the end of this project so I'm playing it safe I guess.

If this was going to be my new playing server, I think I'd be more inclined to just go for it, knowing that the stuff would sell eventually. I'd also be leveling alts, picking up stuff to sell or use and having professions leveling too. I'd be gathering on the first couple of alts just to provide materials for professions and then to sell excess stuff. Add in copious quantities of vendor trash and my gold stash would be building quite nicely I think!


Day 24
Yet another lazy day but what a great haul out of the mailbox! I listed fairly late last night and this was late morning so only a few auctions had expired. I planned to come back later in the day to relist any other expired auctions and to grab some bargains but time kind of got away from me and I didn't make it back into game to complete my 15 minutes!

At least I've stopped making silly mistakes from rushing to much now but that doesn't make me feel any better about my poor performance in this project! It does show me how important it is to keep up with the markets though and how much time is needed to really make this work.

I'm definitely going to do this again soon but with a different set of rules for myself. I think the time constraint was a good idea and it was designed to make me log in and do something productive in a short amount of time rather than to log in and faff about for hours. Knowing you have a whole evening ahead can sometimes put you off logging in when you're in a bit of a slump. You need to give yourself goals or a mini project rather than wandering aimlessly which is what I've been doing for a while now.

I have my to-do list on my other blog and I have a baby Shaman and Warlock fighting for my attention but I have this nagging main Pally that just won't let me rest! I'm trying hard to ignore her for the time being but I still find myself logging her and then getting disheartened when she's still rubbish! I think I'm going to have to turn my music up loud and drown her out for a while - I've got stuff to get done you know! lol

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30 Minutes a Day Project - Days 19 - 21

With Christmas fast approaching, I've been trying to keep on top of this little side project and my main server. I did get a little distracted by my shiny new baby Warlock so the baby Shaman I'm supposed to leveling with this bank alt has kind of been sitting around. I'm also late posting this update as you may have noticed!

Day 19

Not a huge haul from the mailbox today but I did go on a bit of a shopping spree in the herb section again. The Strange Dust market has finally been overloaded and prices have dropped considerably and although it's still very profitable, I don't particularly want Strange Dust to be my main source of gold in this project so I haven't bothered with it today.

I did buy just one level 83 green armor item just to see if that market is viable on this server. It's probably too late in the month to make huge amounts of gold from but it's also a market that requires a bit of capital and storage space. It's well worth checking out if you have a bit more gold than I do here at the moment though.

As you can see from my bought list and listed prices, I'm hoping to double my money on quite a few purchases today. Some, like the Ghost Iron Ore, will be a very nice chunk of change coming in, others, like the Silverleaf or Bruiseweed, will still be double their purchase price but there weren't so many cheap ones available.

It was nice to see the Spider's Silk so cheap but with a top end price that made the flip worth the risk. It was always one of my favorite things to snatch cheap on my main server for making the Spider Silk Cloak and Boots although those have been relegated now with the advent of additional heirlooms for those slots.

Day 20

Today is Christmas Eve and due to family duties, I only had time to empty the mailbox and list some of the stuff from the Shaman's leveling adventures this morning. I still have plenty listed on the Auction House from last night soI'm still hopeful for more sales later in the day which I can pick up tomorrow morning. I was really pleased to see the Ghost Iron Ore sold and the Stitched Shoulderpads - I'll have to remember this level 83-84 green armor market if I do another project in January!

Day 21

Christmas Day has finally arrived and as I logged in to Ironforge, I realised I should have taken my banker back to Stormwind! The lag was horrendous, with so many players trying to get their Winter Veil presents from under the tree and some really obnoxious idiots who refused to get off their giant mounts or move away from the area, no matter how nicely people were asking them to!

It's another family day too so I grabbed the gold out of the mailbox (eventually, stupid lag!) and hearthed back to Stormwind to spend a few minutes in the Auction House. I relisted any expired auctions and grabbed just a few deals before heading to Mum's house. 

One of the markets that has surprised me over the last week or two is the Silk Cloth market. I haven't leveled a lowbie in a long while but I know some of the loot tables changed a while back. I always used to pick up loads of Silk Cloth when leveling but I'm guessing it's not so plentiful now. With Bolts of Silk Cloth listed for 10g or more, I may have to rummage through my main banks to see how much gold I'm sitting on!

I was surprised to see Small Eggs are still holding a price of about 2gold as well - the Wool Cloth & Rugged Leather markets are almost back to normal prices and Copper Bars never really moved upwards at all!

Closing gold balance after purchases today was 979 gold - woop woop! So close to the 1000 gold mark now, I can't believe how excited I am! It seems kinda silly, given how much I have on my main server but I've been enjoying this challenge and once I saw how slowly it was building, I wasn't sure I'd even make the 1000 gold point by month end!

Early on, I bought just a few cooking recipes from the vendor in Old Town. Some sold but some didn't and through leveling, I've picked up a couple more which aren't selling either. I guess with the changes to cooking at the beginning of Mists where you can level cooking almost without leaving Halfhill, this is another old market which is dying if not dead already. It's a shame really as it was a great way to pick up some starter capital for new players.

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30 Minutes a Day Project - Days 1-3

I went to wowrealmpop to chose my new server - I wanted a high-ish population server and when I saw that Thunderhorn has just been merged with Wildhammer, I thought I'd have a peek at how the new connected realms are working out. I have a friend playing on Thunderhorn already although he's on the other side (Hi Scummy!) so I'm not cheating on that bit!

Today is day 3 already and my Shaman (Lyss) is just level 4 - she does have a tiny bit of cash and some new bits of gear from the initial quests but 15 minutes for questing really isn't much time at all! I'm pretty sure I can do this bit of the project ok.

Day 1

My banker is a human rogue, Kala for short and I had a bit of a backfire on my plans for this young lady. On Day 1, I ran her straight to Stormwind and once there, straight to the Fishing Trainer. I'll leave the next bit to your imagination but fishing training costs 95 copper! I'm pretty sure I went through my whole swear word vocabulary as I hearthed back to Northshire to do a few quests and promptly ran out of time!

Day 2

Day 2 went a little better but not much. Having done just 2 or 3 of the start zone quests, I once again ran all the way to Stormwind with my hard earned coppers in my hand and promptly started swearing again as I found out that not only is fishing training 95 coppers, you also need to be level 5- arrrgghh! I was level 4.5 so I just ran to the area outside Stormwind gates & killed a few wolves. Once I dinged 5, I went back to the fishing trainer for the 3rd time & finally got my training!

That left me with maybe 2 minutes left to do a bit of fishing & to run to the Alchemy shop to buy any cheap herbs from the Alchemy supplies lady there. I managed to pick up 2 silverleaf & 3 peaceblooms - all for 38 copper each (1s 90c total).

Day 3

Day 3 started off much better! I did a bit more fishing and listed the herbs on the Auction House for 59silver each with a 1 silver listing fee. I did a full scan of the Auction House using TSM (Trade Skill Master) and then did a vendor search - only 2 items turned up - both costing over a gold each so that wasn't much use for me with only 6 silver in my bags.

I had a look at all the usual items at the bottom end of the price scale - copper ore, linen cloth, peacebloom & silverleaf - looking for a few that were cheaper than most of the others so I could flip them. Wow! Even linen was at 60-80silver a piece so that was a bit of a shock to my system! I wasn't going to put a profession on my Shaman but I think I may have to in order to get some gold flowing! When I find the profession trainer, I'll pick up herbalism & mining or skinning & just send it all to my banker.

Twitter Question

Bill asked if I'd be listing addons, sites & spreadsheets used - I'm not sure how much use it will be but I think I will create a spreadsheet to keep track of sales/purchases etc. As for addons - I use a combination of TSM & Auctionator in the Auction House. I like the vendor search function of TSM & the full scan too but I really like the way Auctionator shows search results. Until I get much higher up the gold ladder, I'm not likely to use TSM groups for auction listing either so I'll most likely be doing most of my flipping manually using Auctionator to list my items.

For questing, I use Carbonite - I like the extra mini map as I can resize it to how I want it & I can zoom in/out using my mouse scroll wheel. The ingame minimap is just too small for me to get my bearings when I'm out questing too. Cold gives me a lot of stick about my reliance on Carbonite but I love it!

Other addons in regular use are Postal (slowly being superceded by TSM Mailing though), My Sales (for the simple screenshots for my weekly sales reporting) and Bartender to change my toolbars to how I like them. I have DBM (Deadly Boss Mods) and Skada installed but I'm not likely to use them much for now!

Another tip from Twitter

@NevAHAddict don't forget to hope for a blingtron during your 15 mins per alt. Make a macro that asks for one in trade. #freegold
— Copper to Gold (@Selltacular) December 4, 2013

So there we go - not much gold flowing yet! I should be ashamed of myself but it's been a long while since I started fresh & I have never played on a high pop server either. If you have any tips or suggestions like Selltacular's tweet, feel free to pop them in the comments or tweet me. If you feel like trying this little side project yourself, keep notes and maybe write up a guest post for me if you don't have your own blog. We all do things differently so it would be interesting to see how you get started fresh.

Til next time, have fun :)

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30 Minutes a Day Project - The Plan!

Meet Kala & Lyss

If you've been reading here a while or listening to the Journal of Marcus Ty podcast, you'll know I'm in a bit of a WoW slump at the moment. So I've come up with a mini project to try & rekindle my enthusiasm for WoW and wean me off Hearthstone!

Yes, it's another new alt, new realm project - you'd think I'd already have enough baby alts dotted around but I do like these mini projects. This time though, there is a slight difference and as the next month includes not only my Christmas/New Year break from work but also some sick leave, I should have plenty of time to see this through!

The Plan

• Create two new alts on a new server - mid-high population & run one straight to Stormwind - no questing, nothing, just 15 mins a day for a month (at least, maybe longer if I've got my mojo back!) & see how much gold I can make
• The second alt will be a Shaman and I will be levelling her without heirlooms but again, only for 15 minutes a day.
• Each day, I will screen shot the played time for each alt (or perhaps the altoholic window) & number them.
• For the banker, I will document everything done - flipping, selling stuff from the leveling alt, crafting etc
• To get started, I will join any guild that is offering gold for signatures
• If no guild signatures then I'll sell my bankers start-up gear, buy fishing rod & train. I'll fish for the remainder of the time that day & sell it all to the vendor.
• I might cheat a little by having a 1st day extension of a few minutes if I get enough cash from vendoring the fishing spoils and run to both herb vendors & list those herbs on AH - log off
• Then log to Shaman & level a bit. At 12 minutes in, run to mailbox, send stuff to banker & log off.

I did think about not using addons either but I think that's probably going too far! I love my addons! I think this could be a useful exercise for me as it has been a long while since I tried making gold at low levels and I've never played on a busy realm before either. It will be interesting to see how different things are and the 15 minute time limit will help me stay focused too.

As I mentioned in the podcast last week - part of the big attraction of Hearthstone for me is the shorter time frame for games - I know I can log in & just play a couple of games & not lose 2-3 hours. With WoW, I can lose an hour in the Auction House alone, let alone chatting with friends and guildies or doing any of the crafting cooldowns or even questing!

So the plan is to start 1st December & keep going all the way to the New Year - I may have to miss a day or two as I'm going in to hospital but I'll treat myself to some extra time in the days following! I'll be keeping good notes but I won't be posting every day - probably just once a week so keep an eye open if you're learning to make gold - I may stumble over something useful for you :)

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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!

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Turning Linen Cloth into Gold

Girls Gone Shopping?

Linen cloth turned up on my Project Shoofly server at 3 - 5 silvers a piece! I just couldn't resist so I logged my other banker on that server (I have a normal, everyday banker for this kind of thing & my project banker, just to keep things seperate) & bought all the super cheap linen. I ran my little level 5 over to the enchanting trainer, made my copper rod then ran to the tailoring trainer. By the time I had converted the linen into bolts of linen, I had enough skill points to learn the Brown Linen Pants pattern. For just 2 bolts of linen & one coarse thread or about 15silvers, I then disenchanted them & got 3 Strange Dust.

Now of course, being the good goldmaker that I am, I didn't just make 1 pair of pants - oh no! I made 40, using up 8 stacks of Linen Cloth in the process. I ended up with 68 Strange Dust & 11 Lesser Magic Essences, most of which I promptly listed on the Auction House for good prices.

I listed some of the Strange Dust as 3 stacks of 10 initially - at around 3g50 per item, I guessed smaller stack size might be more affordable if a buyer was watching their gold. When I logged in earlier today, all 3 stacks of 10 had sold, netting me a nice 99 gold. I'm averaging the cost at 1 gold per stack of Linen Cloth used so with 8 gold spent, I made profit already on just 30 Strange Dusts & I still had 38 dusts to sell.

Next I checked the Auction House again - no Strange Dust to be found so I listed my remaining 38 & wandered off while my banker made another 60 pairs of Brown Linen Pants. Total haul from disenchanting this time was 100 Strange Dust & 11 Lesser Magic Essence. I have been lucky to get into a level 25 guild though so the Bountiful Bags perk is helping here too.

I just checked again & another 20 Strange Dust have sold at 3g50s each as well as 5 of the Lesser Magic Essences so after AH fees, that's another 72 gold profit. I checked the Linen Cloth price too out of curiosity - not only do I have competition for Strange Dust now, the price of Linen Cloth is now over 1 gold a piece & only 2 stacks available.

Overall I spent around 20 gold on Linen Cloth & coarse thread. In the process of converting the Linen to gold, I also leveled my enchanting to 67 & my tailoring to 75 - not bad for a level 5 alt :)

Summary

Linen cloth & coarse thread cost to make 100 Brown Linen Pants - 20 gold
Strange Dust produced from disenchanting Pants - 168
Lesser Magic Essences produced by disenchanting - 20
Strange Dust already sold 50 = 165 gold
Lesser Magic Essence already sold 5 = 6 gold

Profit so far = 151 gold
118 Strange Dust still to sell
15 Lesser Magic Essence still to sell


Now obviously this isn't going to be a huge market & I would hazard a guess that it won't be a regular one either but keeping an eye on Linen Cloth & Strange Dust prices & jumping in when the prices are low, should give a nice little boost, especially as your lowbie bank alt can do it in town.

Project Shoofly - End of Week One

So I've been poodling along on my baby horde priest, just made level 15 last night - woo hoo! I have to admit I am finding it pretty slow going - a priest isn't the quickest class for leveling anyway but not knowing where anything is on Horde-side is also slowing me down. I am also missing my luxuries like heirlooms & my army of alts support system.

My banker Shoofly has been busy though - we're up to 161 gold so far from selling herbs & leather than my priest is picking up as well as meats, cloth & a few low level green items too. Somehow, I've managed to wipe out my MySales data again so this little screenshot is just my overnight sales

Now in my first post, I did say I wasn't going to do any real goldmaking stuff, well I may have to modify that a bit! I'm trying to think more like a novice goldmaker so when I stumbled across the Tradesman upstairs at the inn in Falconwing Square, I had to have a look. He sells the Recipe:Lynx Steak for a whole 40 copper - I've managed to sell 2 so far for 15g & 18g each - now that is the sort of mark up I like!

Many moons ago, my other half started playing this game & he quickly got lost & confused. It took me another 2 months or so to realise that resistance was futile so I signed up too. Around the time that I signed up, hubs purchased Zygor's Leveling Guide. Now I know a lot of people say they'd never pay for a guide etc but this one has saved me so much time. I used it extensively when I first started playing & I get regular updates for no extra charge. So now that I'm lost & all alone on Horde - it's in full use yet again!

Without wanting to sound too enthusiastic, it is a great guide. It always was but since they've updated & improved the whole thing to keep track of XP, the guide will jump steps to keep you on track. So that means that if you do a load of dungeons or battlegrounds & get ahead of the guide, it will jump to an appropriate place for you to restart questing! No more green or grey quests clogging up your quest log!

Regular readers will know that I finally finished my Loremaster achievement around Christmas time - another fantastic part to this guide - once you've been through part of a zone when leveling, it can be tough to find the quests when you come back to complete for your Loremaster. Zygor's Guide has that under control - it lets you choose your zone, it will flip & skip past quests that you've completed & then you just follow the steps until you're done. If you still haven't finished the zone when the guide finishes, there is then a little Loremaster section with all the other quests in the zone that are still available.

So why would there be quests still available? Well the main leveling section of the guide is designed to maximise XP gains & also time so some 'pain in the ass' quests are skipped to improve your leveling speed.

That all sounds super positive doesn't it? So do I have any negatives to talk about? Well, yeah, there are a few silly little bugs dotted here & there - the odd quest may have wrong text or it will skip a step near the end of a zone & leave you lost for a moment or two but that really is nit-picking with a microscope to be honest. Even better, right now they have a 25% discount on the World of Warcraft guide & if by any chance, you are one of the people champing at the bit for Diablo3 next week, they also have a 33% off their Diablo 3 guide if you've already got the WoW guide. How cool is that?

I, unfortunately, won't be able to play Diablo3 - my graphics card is too old & finances are pretty tight right now. I never had much interest either so I didn't sign up for the Annual Pass for my free copy of Diablo3 so that would be even more expense. I'll just have to live it vicariously through all my lovely Twitter friends who are posting vids on Youtube & livestreaming on Twitch.tv.

Project Shoofly - New Server Leveling Project

So I think I've worked out why I'm not playing much WoW right now - I have no direction! Too many alts still need gearing up that I don't know where to start & not sure I have enough time before Mists of Pandaria hits anyway & when I do pick one, guildies sidetrack me or Facebook, or Twitter or any number of other bits I have going on.

So I've started a new little side project away from the madding crowds, on my US account. I know there's always some sort of leveling project going on but for me, this will be a whole new game - no heirlooms, no other high level alts, no professions already leveled - oh and horde-side!

Why Horde? - well, I've never played a horde character beyond level 20 so it should feel almost like a new game & I've often wondered just how much an ordinary non-AH player can easily make whilst leveling so I thought I'd give it a go.

I have just about 2 weeks before I wander off on a trip so here's the rules I have set for myself:-

• 2 horde alts - 1 to level, 1 as banker (seperate from any other gold making activities)
• no help from anyone unless I go through trade but I think most new players wouldn't do that anyway.
• As I don't know where any of the vendors are, I've switched off my Recipe Mate add-on, again, I'm not sure totally new players would have many add-ons
• only Auctionator add-on (no TSM or Auctioneer) for the Auction House
• no playing the Auction House on my banker, she is just there to sell stuff I pick up whilst leveling
• no rushing - I will just play as & when I feel like, with no special emphasis on gold-making
• most advice to newbies is 2 gathering professions so I'm choosing herbing & skinning

In my last post, I told you about my baby Alliance Hunter, well I haven't played her much, did a few battlegrounds but my twinking partner has been kinda busy so she's on hold for now - I didn't want to get too far ahead! But I have still been popping in now & again to the banker on Alliance side. Just a bit of low level herbs flipping, the vendor bought herbs & a few of the cooking recipes later & I have a princely sum of 457 gold already!

I'll probably keep going on her as well - it only takes a few minutes for each visit & if ever we do continue our twinking, at least I will have a bit of cash behind me :)

It will be interesting to see how different it is horde side & I wonder how far I will get before Mists of Pandaria is released? Had a challenge on Squidoo the other day to write a product-based lens so as everyone says 'write what you know', I wrote about Mists of Pandaria! I'm quite enjoying myself over there, I must admit but the whole SEO thing has me baffled. It's keeping me busy, that's for sure & makes a nice change from World of Warcraft end of expansion blues!

Spring - Time For Fresh Starts

© Nev 2004, Spring Blossom

So, it's been a while again but I finally logged into game a few times this last week or so. The first few hours really wore me out - my eyes really had problems adjusting to the whole movement stuff after months of static websites but eventually they settled down & let me get on with trying to remember where I had left everything! I never intended to just stop playing like that, it was just the way it worked out but I lost everything in my mailboxes & I'm pretty sure I had a few big-ish items gone bye-bye but never mind, they would be out of date by now anyway! So my first few evenings back in game were taken up with emptying rubbish out of banks & bags, as well as catching up with my lovely guildies.

Just before I stopped playing, I also signed up for a US account which I played for about 2 hours & never went back! Bad timing all round except that it gave me a lapsed account when the new Scroll of Resurrection was announced so this week, thanks to Cold over at Cold's Gold Factory, I've restarted on that account. No heirlooms, no cash back up, nothing except 50 empty character slots & a few basic addons. Cold doesn't have to worry though, I'm Alliance so his Horde gold making empire is safe ... for now :P

So with a clean slate, I chose my usual human banker, levelled her to level 5 & ran to Stormwind. She had about 8silver to play with. I also started a human hunter to be my main questing alt & by the time she got to Goldshire, she had about 9 silver which I sent to my banker. So with 16 silvers, I bought 2 of the cheapest cooking recipes from the guy in SW Old Town, then ran to the florist on the canals to see if there were any herbs available. There were a few bits & pieces so I bought those up & ran to the Alchemy supplies shop in the mage Quarter, nabbed all the herbs I could there & off I went to the Auction House.

Off I went to the Auction House & started to list my haul of cheap herbs. Arrggggh, I'd forgotten the deposit/listing fee so I only managed to list the 5 auctions shown in the screenie above. Well that was a bust I thought so I logged back to my hunter & did a few more quests. You can tell I'm out of practise at this game too - look - I only listed them for 12 hrs - normally I would pop them up at 24hrs - it's the same deposit for most of them & I don't lose the deposit after just 12 hrs if they don't sell.

So I told myself to slow down & think this through - as I was running back to the alchemy supplies in the Mage Quarter, I passed the fishing trainer & a light bulb went off in my head! I quickly checked the cost of training & a fishing rod & decided to fish for vendor trash for 10 mins.

Here's my haul
8 x tangled fishing line @ 18c each
6 x tattered cloth @ 1s each
5 x weeds @ 18c each
3 x driftwood @ 18c each
1 x sickly fish @ 18c each
1 x old boot @ 18c each

So in about 10 minutes of fishing I gained a grand total of 9s 24c & 10 achievement points for catching 25 fish! Those 9 silvers let me post the rest of the herbs I'd managed to pick up and as of late this morning, I'm up to about 20gold now. More than enough to really get going again.

Not the biggest gold making revelation, I know but if I've missed this simple way to get some basic starter cash, how many others have too? I know to go get some cheap vendor items & list them but I've been gold making a while now & reading blogs & stuff for even longer. This brand new empty account is kinda reminding me of the basics so I thought I'd pop out a post so I don't forget in future & maybe help a complete newbie to make those first few silvers.

Getting Started At The Auction House

 

© Nev 2008, Picking the Right Tools

I can't believe it's already been a week since I posted the first part of my starter guide but I hope you have been doing your Auction House scans & selling everything you've been picking up whilst levelling. Today I thought I'd delve a little deeper into things that you can do with the Auctioneer addon from the very start of your WoW gold making career.

Along the bottom of your AH window, Auctioneer has added a few tabs, one of which is 'Searches', click that & you get a whole new menu of choices, some of which I use often & some I've never touched! First up for the very new AH player is the Vendor Search. When you have almost no gold & need to find those little deals that soon add up, this would be my suggestion.

This search runs through your scanned data looking for auction listings below the Vendor Price of the item so if you can get a few items from this search, you will be guaranteed a little profit. You'll be buying/bidding on items that you will immediately run to the vendor & sell = instant cha-ching!

You need to run your FastScan immediately before running these searches - it's not a real time search, it works from your scan data, so if you've just run your scan, the data should be all nice & fresh for you. In the menu on the left hand side, click Vendor & just accept the settings page as they are. I believe the default is 10copper for the minimum profit which is fine when you are just starting out. Next, click the search button at the bottom of the menu area & wait a few moments.

Vendor Sale Search

So what do you see in your results page - obviously the item name, profit, seller, left, buyout & bid columns are easy but what is PCT column showing you? That's the percentage column, the lower the figure the better as it's the percentage of the average price seen by your multiple scans. The reason column is telling you to bid or buy the item - usually for Vendor searches, it will say Bid but occasionally, you will see a Buy which will usually give you less profit but will guarantee you get the item for the calculated profit shown in the Profit column. 



I know when I start a new alt on a new server, I have maybe 8-10 silvers in my pocket by the time I get to level 5ish so from this scan, I could only bid on the Thick Spider's Silk for 5silver 25 copper but unfortunately it has 48hrs left to run so there's little point. It will tie up your money until someone bids higher or you win but for 2s25c profit, that's not very optimal for our purposes. If you have a little more cash available, I would go for the Dense Stone auctions for 2 reasons - a) 30silvers profit from 20silvers outlay - pretty good & 2) experience.

This is where older players win, even when starting fresh on a new server. Dense Stones are pretty useless most of the time unless you are levelling Blacksmithing but they also have one other use - for converting to Dense Grinding Stones to be handed in at the Darkmoon Faire each month. Check your in-game calender for when the Darkmoon Faire arrives & see if it is in Goldshire, Thunder Bluff or Shattrath. I find I make more money when it is my local one although it always brings opportunities.

The Darkmoon Faire is not something that many players understand or use but as a Gold Maker, there are several ways to profit from it. I'll cover this in a later post as I'm kinda wandering off track a little here :)

Okay, so today's Vendor Search hasn't brought anything very useful to us so now click the Resale search option in the left hand menu. This also runs from your most recent scan so occasionally, you'll try to buy something but it won't be found. Don't worry, that just means someone has bought it between you scanning & running this search.


Resale Search Results

The results window looks exactly the same & the profit figure is calculated from the bid or buy price as listed in the reason column. You can sort any of these columns by double clicking in the column title box. In this screenshot, I have sorted by Buyout Price as we have very little cash to play with at this stage & I want to see the items I can afford at the top of my search results.

Later, when you have a fair bit more gold to play with, I would suggest you sort by the Pct column to get the best bargains, remember, the lower the pct figure, the better.

The Resale search is a little riskier for new players as you don't yet know what all those items are or whether they sell or not. Looking at this page of results, the Scroll of Enchants for 10silvers, giving 17gold profit look very tempting & if I had 1 gold to play with, I may risk 10silvers on one of them. Unfortunately armour, weapons & Enchanting Scrolls can be minefields for the inexperienced goldmaker so I'd suggest you stay away from them for now.

The Spider's Silk however is always a good buy, especially at anything less than 1gold. It has a very low drop rate & is used for 2 Leatherworking items & 2 Tailoring items that are very popular with Twinks (Flux has built a Glossary for terms that you may find confusing) & therefore is always in high demand.

Other good items to start out with is cooking recipes (although don't buy the lower level ones at the AH, you can easily buy them cheaper from a handy vendor, more on that later), raw materials like copper/tin ore, mageroyal & other herbs, leathers & hides and enchanting materials. You may have to pick the best time to list these items though because prices fluctuate wildly, especially at the weekend so don't invest too much of your starting capital at any one time.

Lastly for today, we have the Posting window - just click the Post tab at the bottom of the window to get to it then click an item in your bag that you want to sell & drag it to the little box at the top left.



posting window

Once I have my item in the top left box, I ALWAYS click Refresh at the bottom right. This will do a quick miniscan of just this item on the AH & give you a list of current auctions, their sellers & the current prices. It will also automatically calculate a Starting Price (for bids) & a Buyout price. In the left hand side, you can change the duration of your auctions (less time=less deposit cost) & also the stack size & number of stacks.

You can override the auctions prices by clicking & overtyping in any of the prices boxes & in this case, I probably would. You can see that there is only 1 stack of 20 at 97s 50c (in the Buy/each column) & then the next one is a part stack of 3 leathers for 1g each. All the others are higher & I would suggest in this case, to list yours just below the 2g 20s stack.

I always look at the Buy/Each column not the Buyout column. If I have an odd number of items or I want to sell in singles or 5's for example, I don't have to try to calculate my stack price or compare it to others, I just decide the single item price & let Auctioneer do the maths for me :)

The other thing to check EVERY TIME you post something, is the Bid starting price. Some people think that having a bid price of 10coppers is like Ebay & people will bid the price higher. Unfortunately, people rarely get into a bidding war as there is usually plenty of stock for everyone.

I ALWAYS put a Buyout price too - again, this is not Ebay & when people go to the AH, they usually want something right now, not in 12 hrs or 48hrs. In fact, my bid price is usually only maybe 5% lower than my Buyout price & sometimes even the same value on things like Netherweave Bags which move so fast.

So that's just about it for now - sorry it went on so long but it seemed silly to break this down to more than 1 post. A few days of these searches should help you get a little more gold flowing & without realising it, you'll also start getting a feel for the various items & prices which is every auction house addicts' secret weapon! Call it instinct or gut feeling, it's actually your brain working stuff out before you even consciously think about it and the only way to develop this is time & a little effort.

Good luck & happy gold making

When I Was Just a Newbie Goldmaker


I've been jotting notes on low level/newbie goldmaking for a while with the intention of writing some starter type posts but earlier this week, I got chatting to Eiddor on Twitter. He's a brand new WoW player, so much of the blog content currently available is either out of his reach for now or full of terms/abbreviations/content that he is yet to discover. I suggested he send me an email with as many questions as he wanted answered and I would try & cover them in my planned starter posts. Bless him, he sent me a mini essay which has not only given me the impetus to actually write the posts properly (not just notes!) but also a target audience viewpoint that I can aim at.

The hardest part for me has been deciding where to start & knowing how much to include at this level. I'm not going to rewrite all the starter stuff I've found everywhere but rather try to pull a lot of it to one place as an easy reference post. So to other gold bloggers out there, if you have starter posts/lowbie gold making posts you'd like me to link to, let me know in comments or by email.

I'm planning a whole series of these posts over the next week or two so I'll just cover a few points today to help you get started & be making some gold while you're waiting for the more detailed stuff!

Okay, so you have 1 character started & maybe you've picked a couple of professions & you're happily questing away but you don't have much gold yet. What can I tell you to help straight away?

1) I know it seems fairly obvious but sell everything you can! If you run out of bag space, don't just destroy stuff, try to find a nearby vendor to sell it to or a mailbox to send it to your banker especially if you've picked up one of the gathering professions like herbalism/mining or skinning.

2) Make a second character to be your banker/auction house runner & extra bag space carrier! For Alliance, the easiest is to start a human & run them to Stormwind. For Horde, I think it's the Orcs & run to Orgrimmar or Blood Elf & run to Silvermoon but I'm not 100% certain on that! Your banker is going to sit in the city & run between the bank, the Auction House (AH) & mailbox.

As you are out & about questing, you'll pick up a lot of 'stuff'. Items with their names in gray can just be sold to the first vendor you find. Items with their name in white are most often trade goods & materials - these are the items you mail to your banker to list on the AH. Items with their names in green or blue (usually armour & weapons of a better quality) are also sent to the AH via your banker if you cannot use them or they are not better than those you are wearing already!

3) Get an Auction House addon - I like Auctioneer but there are others, including Auctionator which do pretty much the same thing but slightly differently. You can get all sorts of addons from Curse & eventually, I have no doubt, you will become very familiar with that site but for now, look for Auctioneer. It will add some extra tabs in the AH window for you including a Post tab. This will allow you to pop an item into a box in the top left hand corner, refresh to see what others are already listed & their prices and will suggest a sale & bid price.

tooltip data incl average price

The main benefit of these AH addons is the ability to scan the whole Auction House & build a database showing average prices when you mouseover an item even if you are not in the Auction House. At the top of the AH window, you can see what looks like a 'fast forward' icon - this is the fast scan & usually takes maybe 3-4 minutes. Do this once a day for at least a week before you start trusting the numbers it produces. It's like anything that works on historical or average data - the more data you have, the more reliable it will be.

Unfortunately you can't do anything else while it's scanning so I usually scan just as I'm popping off to make coffee or whatever :)


I think that's about it for now. I have posts coming soon covering professions, other addons, different strategies for gold making, getting organised, where to find information & anything else I happen to think of in the meantime! One link I will pop in here is Wowhead - it's a massive database of all things WoW & you can just pop an item name into the search box. Not only that but the comments tab on each item often has very useful tips & it's not only limited to items. If you're stuck on a quest, type the quest name into the search & read the comments.

Feel free to post your questions in comments or mail me anything you think I should cover and I hope this helps for now :)