Getting Started - Don't Give Up!

0169 Nev 2006 - Keep Your Head On

Hello there!
Khalior here from Khalior's Tentacular Junkpile to help out with Nev's "Getting Started" series. Today, we do a quick and simple once-over of the issue of the most grieving thing that every gold-maker will encounter : items that do not sell.

So you have everything set up.
You've got your items, you know the prices, you know the right times when to post.
You get down to business.
And then you play the Waiting Game(TM).
When you come back to your mailbox to reap your rewards, you collect the gold and... the items that did not sell.
Frustration may hit you at some point, especially when you've listed items for days and days and they keep coming back to you.
Breathe in, breathe out, you can work this out.

What you need to do is focus on each item and find out why no one is buying it. Here are reasons why your item may not find its' buyer.

a) The market is flooded
Take a look at The Undermine Journal for your item on your realm.
Maybe there's tons of auctions there - so it's normal that it may take time before someone buys your auction. In certain markets, it can get really crowded. That's when you have to be clever and find the right time to post your auction. Also, check again on your auctions once in a while, because the situation may be that...

b) Someone has undercut you
The most likely reason why your item has not been bought. If the market is crowded, it's very likely to happen. You can try to cancel your auction and undercut that person back. But that game can go on and on and you have to know when's the right time to stop.

The ill effects of undercutting are that you are losing your auction deposit, you might possibly be lowering the price of the item and there's also the possibility that other players join in your undercutting wars, making the whole process very complicated. "Spying" on the potential undercutters by looking at their Posting Times on The Undermine Journal is a way to counter undercutting. Logging onto your auction toon and babysitting the Auction House is another option. (Although don't forget to play the game, at some point!)

c) You've overpriced the item
This is partly subjective to the people's buying power on your server. If no one is willing to buy your item for the price that you are asking for, you may be stuck there for a long while. Prices of servers differ between each other, and people are used to see certain prices on the AH. If they are used to see double digits for an item, why would they go for your triple digit item ?

Knowing the market of your items is a bit of a science, mixing people's buying power with item rarity and demand. Checking for average pricing on TUJ, browsing the comments section of your item on Wowhead, knowing how the item is obtained, are all helpful hints of how your item should be priced.
You can always experiment and go against all odds - sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised!

d) There is no current demand for the item
Sadly, it happens. Sometimes if you continue reposting again and again, one day you will find a buyer. But that can take some time. Sometimes it's best to stockpile the item in your bank and try the market again on a rainy day.

You can also set yourself some Undermine Journal notifications for your item and wait until the market picks up again to consider posting your items. It's also common knowledge that a greater variety of buyers is online during the weekends, so consider posting your item on Friday evening and see if you get lucky.

As you can see, there's tricks to help you out of the situation. It's the tinkering and the research for every auction that makes casual auctioneers lose patience and a lot of gold because they don't take the time to find a solution to their problem.

It is problem-solving at its' best : focus, find the issue, find all different possibilities of addressing the issue, choose the optimal one, apply it.

The people who are offering coaching and counseling for gold-makers live by a similar system. With time and practice, this can be applied to a problematic auction in a matter of 2-3 minutes and you can move on to the next issue.

The motto is : don't give up!

Khalior

I'd like to thank Khalior for writing the first ever guest post here at Auction House Addict & I think it's a great post to give encouragement to budding auctioneers. One thing I will add for my lovely & local EU readers is - do not despair - there is a new site recently launched that will, over time, come to be as important & useful to us as the Undermine Journal is to the US players.

This is where EU readers can help Acy get his site moving, go to Wowtrader, log in & upload the data from your auction house scans. The more data uploaded, the more useful it will be. For more information, Alto interviewed Acy recently & I hope we can all pitch in & help Acy get this new site off the ground.

What's Been Selling This Week?

© Nev 2004, Taking It Easy

It's been a slow money making week for me this week, I've been kicking back & taking it easy at the AH mainly because I finally got my warrior to level 75 & maxed her Blacksmithing. I've also been achievement hunting, raising alts & planning a new experiment so although I've made money, I definitely can see the difference that easing off has made in my glyph market.

Having said all that, the maths is still good - I've seperated out my Blacksmith from the overall numbers but combined income per MySales is 52k, gold increase over the week is 49.5k so expenses come to about 2.5k. Last week, a reader queried how low my expenses are - well, I've said before that I don't tend to stockpile stuff but I do horde all sorts of things, including a fair few rare gems.

Looking at my list below, I finally sold my Crusader Enchant Formula (no gold outlay), Primal Mights (stuff from alt bank account), chocolate cookies (time outlay, very low mat costs) & all the gems were from my guild bank stash. The only real costs I have are herbs on a weekly basis & periodically I blow a few thousand on cheap Elementium or Obsidium Ores which I then process as & when I feel like it so they don't show in this weeks' expenses even if I process them this week & make gold from them. 

The only things in the above list of items that I spent gold to produce are the Greater Eternal Essences (mat cost of about 12-15g per) & the Hurricane Enchant scroll - I actually bought 3 at 300g each because I knew they would sell at 600g or more. Obviously I bought herbs for the glyphs too but I've been a bit lazy on glyphing this week so not that much on herbs to be honest!

Having maxed my Blacksmith this week (Wednesday evening) I thought I'd seperate out her sales & auctions so I could see which items I made for levelling were actually selling. I already had all the ores I needed as I've been lazy on shuffling recently & I knew I needed some for this girlie when she finally got to 75!

I also bought a few extra plans to fill out the Bloodied Pyrium PvP set. Interestingly enough, whilst my server may be great for glyphs, plate pvp stuff sells for below material costs! Volatile fires sell for an average of 12-15g each so even with Elementium ore at 2g each, the minimum cost for the cheapest Bloodied Pyrium piece (bracers) should be 160g-ish & it's currently listed at 110g. The Bloodied Pyrium Belts are down to 30-50g - needless to say, I bought those to disenchant! Heavenly Shards are still 50g and upwards so if I can't reset the price to a more sensible level, at least I can still get back a hefty chunk of cost from disenchanting them.

I'm going to continue keeping my Blacksmithing sales seperate for a while to get a clearer picture of the market. It adds a little extra work to the daily gold summary I do as my PC is very slow when changing alts but I think it's worth it. I'm also going to have a look at some of the lower level items to see if there's anything worth crafting on a regular basis.

Just as a footnote, I get asked regularly what addon I use for the sales screenshots - it's called MySales & it's really easy to use.

Happy goldmaking peeps :)

Getting Started - Profession Addons



© Nev 2009 Going Round in Circles

Getting started with professions can leave you going round in circles. Some professions (especially Engineering) have numerous crafted components that you need to make before you can craft the final item you wanted in the first place! The standard craft UI (User Interface) is very simple to use but it doesn't have a crafting queue or any way of making life easier.

That's where the following two addons come in handy. The first one I use on all my alts for every craft is Advanced Trade Skill Window, ATSW for short(screenie below). I've purposely picked my Engineering alt to show you this nifty addon & how it simplifies things for multi component items. Below, you can see I've decided to make 5 Mechanical Squirrel Boxes which needs 4 components - 2 of which are also crafted by engineers. ATSW has automatically added the basic crafted components to the craft queue so I don't have to manually work out how many copper bars I need to make the copper modulator, the handful of copper bolts & the mechanical squirrel box.

 
My next move would be to close this window down, go to my bank & use this addon to get all the basic materials out of the bank for me (this setting is in the Options tab, top right of the window). No more hunting various bags for all the bits, just 1 or 2 clicks & it gets them for you. Next move to the anvil & start crafting. How easy is that?

You can sort the various items by categories (default), by name (very handy when you know the name but not the category) or by difficulty level (more on that in a minute). There's a manual search bar & a drop down menu for the various categories which I use mostly on my enchanter when looking for, say glove enchants.

The second addon I want to tell you about today is Lil' Sparkeys Workshop. This addon works with ATSW & basically uses your Auctioneer scans (you have been doing them regularly, haven't you?) to calculate costs & profits for each craftable item. You can see an extra column of figures in the screenshot below - that's the Lil Sparkey's results and if you hover over one of the results figures, you get the little pop out window shown at the bottom right, which gives you the breakdowns.

You can also see that I have sorted the craftables by difficulty for this screen shot. When I first started playing, I took skinning & leatherworking & levelled both gradually as I was questing & levelling my character. I wish I had known about these 2 addons then! I would have made the most profitable items that could give skill ups rather than the item which used the least mats.

These days when I level a profession, I use the Lil Sparkeys profit figures as a guide to which of the skill up recipes to make. In the above screenie, you can see there is a huge profit to be made on the Gnomish Net-O-Matic Projector but if you look at the item details, Auctioneer has only seen 2 of them & this item is only useable by Engineers so I wouldn't be counting my chickens on this one. (screen shot of Item data given by Auctioneer, not for the Net-O-Matic but you get the idea!)

Whilst the Unstable Trigger is only showing as 4g 81s profit & it's a green skill up (less chance of a skill point), if my aim is to maximise profits whilst levelling then that is the obvious choice. Sometimes it's lots of little profits to get to the same place in the end. Don't be blinded by those big numbers, engage your brain & think about what your addons are showing you.

Another addon I will talk about at a later date is Trade Skill Master (TSM) - it is a much more complicated addon to set up but it is worth its' weight in gold & has revolutionised the way I play my glyph & gem markets. I don't think it's really a starter addon though which is why I've left it out of todays post.

Hope this helps :) Have fun, get rich :)

PS You can click on the screenshots to get larger, easily readable versions.

What's Been Selling This Week?

© Nev 2006, Looking Thoughtful

So my sales for the week have gone back up to normal with a liquid gold increase of 55k. Now I'm not sure if I've messed up my maths somewhere, but I reckon that means I only spent 4.5k gold on mats this week! I suppose with the number of gems I've been selling from my guildbank, that is feasible & when I checked my glyph stocks yesterday morning, I found my answer to why my glyph sales felt like they were dropping! Guess who's been so busy with alts that she forgot to stock up on glyphs? Yup - me!

Gem sales have been pretty good this week & even with my alchemy transmutes, I can't keep up with the demand for Inferno Rubies. I've almost sold out of Ember Topaz too which is a nice surprise although I still have shedloads of Amberjewels to get rid of. Shadowspirit diamond cuts have been selling too although the prices seem to be dropping again, down to 70g for a few cuts although my newest cut - the Austere, is selling nicely.

I also did a bit of crafting & disenchanting this week - I just love the Enchanted Thorium Blades - in my screenshot above, that price is for singles! Material costs are around the 8-10g mark & each one is selling between 63-78g although there are slow days when I get them returned. The Infinite Dust is from the Wrath gems that I disenchanted & the mat cost for those is maybe 2-3g whereas the dust is selling for 5-8g each.

Chocolate cookies are still selling too - my cooking skills are increasing nicely on 2 or 3 of my alts & to be honest, I'm very tempted to start the other alts on the cooking dailies too, just to get the cocoa beans!

I managed to pick up some nice cheap Borean Leather so I made up a few Mammoth Mining Bags & my stocks of Embersilk are threatening to overflow my bank space so I made a few Embersilk Bags to make some room & test the market. I've not been making the most of my Tailoring so that's on my to-do list as well.

So that's about it for last weeks' sales - nothing majorly different so just poodling along nicely for now. This morning when I logged in & collected my overnight sales, I let out a happy little Woop Woop! I hit 800k liquid gold almost spot on so here's the screenie just for posterity & proof :D

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

What's Been Selling This Week?

© Nev 2009 - Yuck Face

Last post I gave you an image of a cheeky face, this post, you get the Yuck Face. Yup it's been that sort of week! Regular readers will know that I keep a daily note of my liquid gold totals so I already had an idea that this had not been a good week but until I sit & write this post each week, I don't really take it in. Total sales of 50k is bad enough but with my usual bit of maths, my actual increase in liquid gold was only 23000g. To be fair though, that wasn't all spending on materials, I did splash out & buy the Dragonwreck Throwing Axe for my newly subtlety specced pvp rogue which cost me 10000g - a good deal on my server as they are usually 12-15k!

Another contributing factor was lag/latency issues. It seems my ISP or Blizzard have changed something somewhere in the system so my latency was registering at 7-10k ms, making the game totally unplayable from Thursday afternoon through to Saturday morning. So I lost 2 evenings & a whole day of auction house activity & sales which I think would have been income of around 10-15k.

Anyway, enough moaning from me, what did I manage to sell this week? Well, cut rare gems continue to rush out of the Auction House & to help a guildie or two out, I also invested a few JC Tokens to buy some new gem cuts which are selling fairly well too.

Glyphs seem to be slowing down a little but it could be that the glyph sales are just being buried in the gems sales. I'll have to have a closer look to confirm that but to be honest, I'm kinda glad. My husband & at least 2 guildies have taken up inscription recently & are starting to make their way to the Ink of the Sea & Ethereal Ink glyphs, so it's only a matter of time before I end up competing with them. I already have so much more gold than I could possibly use so I hope I can hand over my bit of the glyph market to them & not cause any problems in guild chat.

Chocolate cookies are still selling! As long as I do my cooking daily on a few alts, the supply of Cocoa Beans is good & they don't take long to make either. I have slowed down on the other cataclysm cooked foods - there is a fair bit of competition & some really weird pricing going on. Some days the cooked food is really high priced, the next it's low but the raw mats are high - I just can't be bothered to fight market surges like that.

Infinite dust is also selling well & at prices that would have scared me 6 months ago! I'm still using cheap Wrath gems as I explained in my Old School Jewels post a week or two ago but it's one of those 'when I think about it' things rather than a regular activity. I already prospect/craft & disenchant enough Cataclysm items to make disenchanting Wrath ones just a bit tedious!

Having said that, disenchanting Enchanted Thorium Blades for Greater Eternal Essences is even more profitable now than when I wrote about them a while ago. Current prices are currently in the 55g-70g range so even though it's still a bit tedious, this one gets done more often than the Infinite Dust one :)

I keep saying I must get my Enchanter moving on making scrolls but I get distracted easily - this week I've managed to grind Honor Hold reputation on my Paladin main & respecced my much loved but abandoned Rogue. One thing I will be doing this week is converting my Spare Inks to cards for the Darkmoon Faire next weekend. I've managed to pick up some more cheap Primal Life so at last, I can use up some more of my Darkflame Ink.

Have a good week & happy goldmaking everyone :-D

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 :)

What's Been Selling This Week?

© Nev 2009 WW2 Spitfire Aerial Display

It's been a pretty good week for me, this week. I've dipped a bit further into the cut rare gems market & it's showing up nicely in my weekly sales list. Even better from a liquid gold point of view, comparing the sales income with my increase in liquid gold figure & I've only spent 2580g this week! That gives me a beautiful profit figure of 66800g-ish so I'm flying high & on a roll!

So you may be wondering how come I've spent so little this week? Well, I was doing a lot of shuffling for enchanting materials at the start of the year but the prices for rares, either cut or uncut were so low, I decided to hang on to them. Now the prices have risen, almost all those cut gems have come from my various banks!

Also this week, I was asked to join some guildies in 5v5 arena for a laugh. They want me to bring my rogue who has been sitting around since she hit 85. Off I went to various gear optimiser websites to see what I needed & then came back & made her the Brazen Elementium Medallion. Unfortunately I forgot to check what she was already wearing! It seems she hadn't been sitting around the whole time since 85, she must have sneaked out & done a dungeon or two somewhere along the line because the neck piece she had was better.

Glyphs have continued to be a strong seller even if the gem sales are pushing them off the first page of my sales figures. I've also sold a few more pieces of the Bloodied Leather pvp set although competition has set in so I may leave them to fight it out for a while now.

Some of the lower level leatherworking items have been selling too - 3 sets of Barbaric Bracers, 2 Gem-Studded Leather Belts & a Black Dragonscale Breastplate have all sold as has the masses of Chocolate Cookies I baked up earlier in the week.

Going forward, I'm almost out of Inferno Rubies & Carnelians so I guess it's time to start prospecting again. Luckily I picked up 200 stacks of Elementium Ore at 25g a stack yesterday (muhahahaha!). I'll carry on glyphing too especially as I have Jewelcrafting & Inscription on the same character.

I'm not sure I could face cancel/reposting gems & glyphs if they weren't on the same character so if you haven't got your professions set yet, that might be something to think about although it isn't the optimal combination, to be fair.

Most bloggers suggest jewelcrafting & enchanting on the same character so you can disenchant the jewellery you make without using the mailbox. The only reason I didn't do that is timing & space - I already had inscription on this alt & enchanting maxed on another. When I needed to add jewelcrafting to my profession list, the only spot was on my scribe so that's where it went! I like happy accidents :-D

OT-ish...A Little Help From A Friend, A Little Help For A Friend

© Nev 2006, Baby Hermit Crab Getting Some Help



I've been making some new friends over the last week or two via Twitter and various blogs. It always amazes me how quickly I can feel comfortable with someone once that initial skype call happens but that's what happened when I first spoke to Flux & Jokinee from the Power Word:Gold podcast. After I stopped being starstruck (hey, I've been listening to Flux for weeks, it was like meeting my favourite radio DJ, ok? lol) we sorted out the stuff that had got us talking in the first place & 2 hours later, we were still talking!

Roll forward a couple of weeks (& several more long skype calls) & the guys decided I was to be their next podcast guest so if you haven't listened to their excellent podcast before or if you're curious as to what a British AH Addict sounds like, click the link to Episode 9 NOW! lol

As a result of the podcast, I've gained a few new followers on Google friends & on Twitter (so, hello to you guys) & I just hope you like what you're reading. I asked a similar question at the end of the last post & received positive comments so a big thank you to you guys too.

As a bit of a thank you to Flux (come on, give this a go) & because he posted The Treasure Potion Trash Dash challenge (which I can't resist!) I spent an hour yesterday, stealthing round mobs in Deepholm on my rogue with a potion of treasure finding active & empty bags to start. I headed to the well-known rogue pickpocketing area of Stonehearth (or The Fractured Front, adjoining it) and after picking every pocket in a bunch, I then killed them to get the loot!

The basic idea is to keep a note of all the vendor values of everything you loot in that hour. It's a nonsense figure because let's face it, we're here to make money but it is a great way to take the server differences out of the equation.

I have to say, I thought picking pockets would be more lucrative although I always hope for the Krol Decapitator or Spinerender to drop from the Flame Scarred Junkboxes. I popped my initial results into an excel spreadsheet which you can see below.

I think what struck me most about this little experiment/challenge is just how low the vendor prices are on items that we, as AH peeps, sell for such high values. Almost 40g & a shedload of Embersilk Cloth was a nice find from the Tiny Treasure Chests so that more than covered the initial cost of the potion but overall, I was a little disappointed with my haul. Having said that, my rogue is not my strongest girlie & I probably spent way too long picking pockets so I'm planning on doing another couple of runs in the next day or two - I'm thinking a skinner Paladin & a non-gathering DK. Just gotta work out where to send my girls on their missions.

What's Been Selling This Week?

© Nev 2008, Thames Barge on the Blackwater



I've been sailing along on a sea of glyphs again but this week, I've added a lot more jewelcrafting/cut rare gems to my routine as well as the Leather Agility PVP sets. Cash received is up slightly and although my usual bit of maths tells me I spent 15000g to make 47000g profit, I happen to know that I've spent at least 6000g on gear upgrades for my Rogue & my Priest as well as a few extra pets to get my 75 pet achievement for my Paladin main.

I revisited the Mysterious Fortune Card market, as I do periodically & found it unattended for an afternoon. Usually I see people barking in trade & when I check prices, they are down around the 8-10g mark but on this particular afternoon, there were only about 20 listed in singles at 18g. I popped 20 singles & a few 3 & 5 stacks up for 17.50g & barked just once as I started my cancel/repost cycle. Normally this would have triggered a wave of other people listing their cards or trying to out-bark me but not on this day for some reason.

So I ramped up production & had the market almost to myself for maybe 2 hours. There were 2 other toons posting but only maybe 5 cards at a time just below mine so they obviously just wanted a little slice of the action :) Eventually the usual card players arrived on the scene & took the market straight back down to the 8g range. I could have toyed with them but I was getting bored anyway so I left them to it!

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in my Cooking for Gold post, I've been selling the chocolate cookies for the new achievement You'll Feel Right As Rain. They are down to around 50g a stack but the profit margin is huge so I now have maybe 4 or 5 alts doing the Stormwind cooking daily to get the bag of Imported Goods.

I'm still selling various enchanting rods, low-mid level leatherworking items, some enchanting scrolls & the low-ish level engineering pets but they are fairly slow to move & although the profits are fantastic on them, they don't make huge numbers so they don't make it to my top page.

I've had several comments & mails asking which addon I use to show my sales each week so I thought I'd pop it here to answer everyone at the same time :) It's a simple addon called MySales which you can download from curse.com. It's really easy to set up & you can track individual alts, all alts per server/faction, by different time spans or for all time. the two commands I use are /ms config & /ms window & I click on the column header to change the sort order & that's pretty much it.

Hope you find these posts interesting - I often wonder if they make good reading for you guys but as I enjoy them on other blogs, I hope you guys like them too.

Old School Jewels & Infinite Dust

I've been trying to get my head around the enchanting scrolls market over the last week or so. I'd decided to let TSM do the initial work for me & to pick out the most viable scrolls from the materials I had on hand. Now I'm a self confessed pack rat in game & in real life (although, tbh, my husband beats me hands down in RL!) so I thought building a craft list wouldn't be a problem.

It turns out, a lot of Wrath enchants are still going strong on my server so I need a lot more infinite dust than I expected. Cue Flux (from Power Word:Gold) with a timely tweet about the Crystal Citrine Necklace which disenchants to infinite dust or lesser cosmic essences and only costs 1 crystallized earth & 1 huge citrine.

Off I run to my JC & take her to the auction house where I find that huge citrines are selling for under 2g each. Good little gold maker/packrat that I am, I already had about 30 Eternal Earths in my bank & when I checked the price of Infinite Dust it was around 7g per dust. I rapidly snagged all 27 of the Huge Citrines at 2g or less & grabbed the Earths from my bank. Off I snuck to a quiet corner to craft all these wonderful necklaces where to my happy disbelief I found 3 other patterns in my JC craft list that would serve the same purpose!

The Bloodstone Band, the Crystal Chalcedony Amulet & the Sun Rock Ring all take just 1 gem & 2 crystallized earths so back to the AH where I was pleased to find that the bloodstones & sun crystals were also less than 2g each - I snagged them as fast as possible too. The Chalcedony were a little more expensive so I left them for now. These disenchant to 2.5 infinite dusts on average with the occasional lesser cosmic essence so at a mat cost of less than 4g, this is a good combination.

Back in my crafting corner, I set my craft queue to run while I perused my blog list. In total I spent 110g to buy a mixed bag of 67 gems. They disenchanted to 120 Infinite Dusts & 20 lesser cosmic essences which I stashed in the bank. I couldn't resist the immediate gold opportunity though so I put some 10 stacks of Infinite Dust on the AH at 7g per dust, just to see if people were in fact buying it. Needless to say, yes, people do buy dusts at that price!

Over the next few days, I continued to buy the cheap gems where & when I could, crafting & disenchanting as I went along. I now have a nice little stockpile of infinite dust & cosmic essences for when I eventually get my head around enchanting scrolls!

Keep your eyes on the AH for these items selling cheap as well. I remember making these when I levelled my JC so you may find them listed at silly low prices whilst people are levelling.

Tuesday & yesterday though, it was a different picture. One guy has listed all these gems at 8g each and there are no other sellers in the market. In the meantime, Infinite Dust is now at 2-3g per dust, also from the same guy. I either caught the market when he wasn't paying attention or someone twigged this market almost at the same time I did but has completely different approach to it.

I'll add it to my list of AH corners to visit periodically, along with enchanting rods & toughened leather armour. I'm ok with taking a little profit here & there when someones' attention wanders :)

What's Been Selling This Week?

It's been another steady week, only 42k up overall but I did blow 8k on the woundsplicer handwraps for my Priest as the guild really needs another healer. My usual bit of maths tells me I spent 18.5k to make that profit but I have about 5k of cheap ore & herbs in my mailbox waiting for processing so that should make a nice dent in next weeks' spending! Just after I bought the epic, I was finishing off Twilight Highlands on my Pally & they dropped off a random mob so I also have them on the AH at 12k (only ones listed & that's the Auctioneer average, so fingers crossed!) so if they sell at that price, I'll be well pleased!

The Darkmoon Faire has left for another month & I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with how this month's Faire went for me. I managed to snag a Hurricane Deck for 9k with the intention of equipping my Pally but when I look on the AH & saw the trinkets selling for about 15k, I just had to try my luck. I'm glad I did but my Pally still needs that trinket! Oh Well, maybe next month hey?

As I mentioned in my Spare Inks, Faire Inks post, I was selling the low level decks as well this month - almost 1300g just from the rogues & swords decks. The mage & demon decks sold as well but I only had a few of those so they didn't make the first page of my results. I also managed to snag a few of the Wood Frog pets from Flik & some more of the White Kittens from Lil Timmy (also in a previous post).

I'm also pleased to see the Greater Eternal Essences make it to my 1st page. That average price of 46g is per Essence not per multiples so it's sort of proof that the Enchanted Thorium Blades post works for gold making too :)

And of course, the Chocolate Cookies have been selling like, well, hot cakes! My Cooking post a few days ago mentioned them & was featured on Wow Insider's Daily Quest section just this morning. If you haven't found WoW Insider yet, go have a look. They have regular sections for each class, for RP, for Q&A, for Podcasts etc & multiple posts each day. Huge amounts of good info all in one place.

I've tried very hard to back off on the glyph front but for now, it seems the habit is too ingrained & besides, I haven't yet found another market to dive into with such profits. Consequently, I am overflowing with Inferno Inks & with the current sales prices, it's just so much easier for me to sell them as is. The thing that caught my eye is the number of DK glyphs in that list so you can be sure I'll be keeping an eye on the DK glyph market for a week or two now.

Lastly for this week, I thought I'd show you my latest version of my progress graph. I've marked a few of the major events including Cataclysm launch, the week I powerlevelled my JC & the week they nerfed the Maelstrom Crystal/Alchemy thing. Since then, it's been a pretty steady & surprisingly consistent upward climb. At this rate, I should be able to predict when I'll hit 1 million gold - I'd guess 1st week of July so it will be interesting to see if I can accelerate that date.

Cooking for Gold, Patch 4.1 Style

With the introduction of several new food & drink related achievements in patch 4.1, I have seen a rise in the prices of almost all the cataclysm buff foods & drinks craftable by my maxed cook. Most notably, chocolate cookies have been flying off the shelves especially when I add a little bark linking the cookie to the new 'You'll feeel Right as Rain' achievement.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know that my DK sat in SW at lvl 75 for ages. I had no need to level her to 85 for either JC or Inscription recipes but I did do the fishing & cooking dailies on her for the guild rep. However, her cooking skill is maybe 150 so she couldn't really make use of the Chef's Awards until patch 4.1 hit! Yay for Bario Matalli & his bag of Imported Supplies which costs just 1 Chef's Award token & contains 2 stacks of Cocoa Beans (although I have had bags with 51 cocoa beans so there's obviously a proc type thing in there too).

Off I went to buy my cocoa beans, 20 bags later I had 46 stacks of the darned things! Sent them all to my cook , ran to the cooking supplies guy in SW Old Town & started a massive cookie baking marathon. Luckily I have the Chef's Hat (from the Dalaran cooking dailies - I was 80 for a long time before Cata hit!) which vastly increases cooking speed so it wasn't too long.

I posted 200 of them on the AH in stacks of 20 at 75g a stack although the achievement only really needs 91 - I just wanted to keep to nice round numbers but actually, I realised afterwards, I was making people buy 9 extras! Then I barked in trade 'get your 'You'll Feel Right As Rain' achieve, Chocolate Cookies in AH now!' and sat back to wait a few minutes before barking again. I didn't have to wait that long, I'd say within 2 minutes they had all gone so I listed some more (but at 80g this time) & repeated. Same thing happened. In less than 20 minutes, I'd made & sold 400 cookies for over 1500g & I still had enough left for hubby & I to get the achieve too!

 

Fast forward a couple of days & I realised that I'd lost my top spot in the guild for achievements so I had a quick look to see which achieves I could knock out quickly. Apart from the three /love critters, the next quickest would be the Cataclysmically Delicious & Drown Your Sorrows ones so off I went to the AH to see if any of the foods were available cheaply (especially the ones I can't cook yet or didn't have mats for).

The prices were ridiculous! Some of the vendor bought items were listed for 30-50g each although some were still under 5g each. I smelt an opportunity so as of today, I have had a cook up of all the cataclysm foods I can & have them listed at reasonable (around 10g per) prices for singles. When I logged off last night, they were selling fairly well but with the login servers down this morning, I've been unable to find out just how well :)

So if you have a high level cooking skill & spare chef's awards, what's stopping you? I think this will be one of those markets I jump in & out of 'ninja style'. I'll be keeping an eye on the cookies in particular but where I've been selling the odd ones & twos of cooking mats, I'll cook them up now & sell the food instead. The bonus to that is the Guild achievement Set the Oven to 'Cataclysmic' which, in a small guild like ours, is a long way off for now.