Monday, August 31, 2009

Loaning Gold

I have a few close friend that I give gold to and a few others that I would loan it to if they asked. Everyone else I just put to work instead. My guild knows I make way too much gold and I have shared ideas with lots of them. It is not very often that someone asks me for gold. This weekend someone broke down and asked me for 200g for repairs and something else that I forget.

I didn't say no. I didn't even talk about his request. What I did was ask him what his professions are. He was a miner and a black smith. I went to the AH and checked some prices on things. I offered to buy all the eternal earth he had for 7.5G each. He had 17 of them for me. I took a look at the Eternal Belt Buckle market and the mark up was huge. I got some shadows from him, waters off the AH, and smelted several stacks of saronite that I had.

I then tossed him the mats to make 17 Eternal Belt Buckles and tipped him 25G for doing it. I then tossed them all on the AH and sold them for a 5 gold profit each over the weekend. I told him was I was doing and suggested that he do that to make gold.

He didn't think he had the time to go mine or the gold to buy the mats. I guess its a good thing I never loaned him anything and put him to work instead.

The way of the Goblin

If you are reading my blog you already know of the Greedy Goblin. If you like him or not, he does have some insight on some markets and how to work them. The key is you have to know when to use them, when not to use them, and when to walk away.

When I moved into the netherweave bag market, I was able to use several of his ideas. The supply of netherweave is very strong. It will dry up from time to time, but never for that long. When netherweave is in high supply, then I can produce bags in high supply.

When I check the market, I see a few people with bags up for double the cost of mats. Why, because people pay it. How often is a different story but yes I think they do sell bags for that much. My supply is almost unlimited so I want to sell more faster. So I post at 60-75% of market and that's exactly what happens. If I see someone post 5-10 bags under me, the I know my price is too high. So I go down another 10-20% and post 10 more.

Those bags sell faster then I ever thought they would. At lower prices, people are buying 4 at a time. Instead of getting one bag to get by for a while, they get all 4 at once. I am still playing with that price point and number to post. But I feel like I am narrowing in on it. I would like to turn this into a 48 hour auction item. I already baby sit several markets more then I should.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Glyphs: Phase 4

At this point you have 2-3 chars that post your glyphs for you. It became too much work to move them into and out of the bank. A few classes of glyphs are dedicated to each alt. You know by color what glyph goes to what character.

Your operation is huge at this points. You feel like you control the herb prices on the AH. They never drop below your buyout price. Your stockpile of ink would last a week without restocking. You craft your glyphs to a full stack when you craft.

Snowfall is a dead item. You produce so much of it that you will never be able to unload it. You do what you can with it but now consider it worthless for your calculations. This brings your cost per ink up and even with a minor adjustment in your threshold you are sill making a profit on the glyphs.

This is the point where you realize that you spend way too much time working inscription. The gold is great and comes in fast, but the time commitment is killing you. You mill it all yourself because nobody can supply you with all the ink you need. You control the market and you know there is no possibly way that your competition can spend as much time as you on it. You outproduce him and you know he cannot keep up.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Glyphs: Phase 3

At this point you are a master of the posting automation and the cancel/post cycle is second nature. You find yourself doing this every chance you get. The profits are starting to flow in and its more then you expected you could make.

You are working directly with suppliers. You have a few farmers either whispering you when you log in or sending you stuff COD. Negotiations have begun with people that make cards. You either buying ink from them or selling snowfall to them.

You primary herbs are adder/lichbloom/icethorn because of the snowfall and you are starting to get a over stock of it. As your production gets bigger at this point you are making more snowfall then you can sell. So you have to start adjusting your ink costs to account, but its no big deal at this point. Glyphs are selling well even with the competition.

You have all of the other posters on your friends list. You find yourself hopping on to post when they log off. You know they just undercut all your auctions. So you have to go correct that.

All those glyphs are starting to be a problem. You have way more then your bags will hold. You have several inscription bags in the bank now and you have to make 2 trips to the AH to post every thing. Your bags fill up often when clearing the mailbox now so you have to shift glyphs to and from the bank bags.

You are a top seller on your server. You sit with 20% of the glyphs on the AH and are building a huge bank roll. More gold is coming in then you know what to do with it.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Glyphs: Phase 2

To make the jump to phase 2, you probably already had it in your mind that it was a profitable professions. Some guide or blog gave you the idea and you had to try it for your self. At this point you are focusing on buying all the books of glyph mastery. Research is something else you are doing daily.

You know the leveling glyphs don't sell well, but you see potential in the book glyphs. The research glyphs really shine. They are not all that great but the competition is lighter. You make a little bit of everything that you see sells over a set value. You find yourself with all inscription bags to hold all the glyphs you are working. Most of your glyphs get reposted whenever they land in your bags.

Finding herbs at a discount is now a focus. You are making and selling a lot more gyphs then before. If you were buying ink off the ah, you have moved to milling herbs. This is the point where you look at selling snowfall to offset the cost of your ink. You do the math and see that the snowfall makes your ink dirt cheap. You may even shift your focus to the higher quality herbs when you discover this.

If you have any competition, this is where you start to play the undercut game. Every time you hit the AH, you cancel any undercut auctions and repost at a few silver undercut. Posting automation is just starting to work into it for you. Your first night of using an auto poster tippled your profits for the day.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

My Glyph Operation in Review

I think I got myself lost in the process as I grew my inscription into the monster that it is now. The system is as automated as I can make it and it take a lot of time. I even wrote a small mod to help out (I'll have more info on this later). Sweetiebird recently reminded me that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your work. So I need to review what 20% is making me the most gold. Lets see what I can look at.

1) Posting schedule: I repost 4-6 times a day. I need to go back and look at what times of the day I make the most gold. Some of those posts I do are fairly close together. How much more is that 2nd posting going to make me than if I would have just let them sit where they were. Or how much more did that posting make me if I know I will post again soon. One or the other could be doubling my efforts with little return. A few of my postings are at key times of the day. All the others that I slip in when I can are the ones I need to look at.

2) Threshold price: If I increase my threshold then I will not be selling glyphs that fall below that. I will be posting less glyphs but the ones I do sell will have a higher profit margin. The more glyphs I sell the more gold I make. I also have to mill more herbs, sell more snowfall, make more glyphs, and gather more items from the mailbox. So selling the dirt cheap glyphs adds time to the process for each one. My total sales would go down. So would my time spent and it would increase my gold per hour.

3) What glyphs to post: I have been of the school of thought that you post every glyph that you can make. It is a numbers game. The more numbers you have up, the better the numbers work for you. What this does is causes me to use more chars to try and post every glyph. If it does not sell, then it does not add time to the rest of my process. I have several glyphs that I will sell 5-13 of in a day. I also have 120 each day that never sell. At the moment I have glyphs grouped by class when I should group them by how many they sell. Then I could selectively post the ones that sell more often then the ones that don't.

4) Skip the singles: I recraft every glyph that sells. While I am crafting, I have to shift and move then around as my bag fills up. Once I am done, I have to filter out the ones that go to my alts and dump them in the guild bank. I think I could skip over items that only sold a few. I have stacks of 14 so going into the next day a few short on the ones that don't sell often will not hurt much. When I do have to craft them, I will be doing more at a time. The detail here is they stack. So if skipping the singles frees up enough bag space to prevent me from running out of bag space while crafting, it would make things go smoother.

5) Craft more at once and less often. The last time I scaled up I just ended up selling more glyphs. What I thought would be a weekly crafting session stayed a nightly one with more to craft. I guess I need to scale up larger and produce more at a time. If I do this, I will produce more of the better sellers. Before I scaled everything up to the same stack size. If I just craft more of the hot items when I do it, I could slip to a every other day crafting sessions at a minimum.

It looks like I have several options in cutting down the amount of work and time I put into it. A few of those have a breaking point where they don't save much time until I hit that point.

Glyphs: Phase 1

You have just power leveled inscription. Probably ended up farming old world herbs to help or paying way to much for those same herbs on the AH. The cheap ones were in short supply but you managed.

You found several glyphs selling for almost nothing. You almost feel like it's not worth posting them and are almost temped to vendor them. You did find the DK glyphs to sell fairly well and possibly one or two that sold for 10g-30g. You probably kept up on recrafting the DK glyphs and those special high sellers.

In a matter of days those good glyphs crashed like a rock on you. Every time you post them, someone else undercuts you. Odds are if it was a trainer glyphs, someone dumped 6-10 on the market and it crashes. You curse at them under your breath a little bit but work the glyphs that sell.

You are just getting started. Getting a feel for the market here. If you were doing this on your own, this would probably be the extent of your glyph selling. You may look around and find other good sellers only to see them fall in price as you try to keep them up. If you stay on top of your research, you will find a handful that feel like very few people have and you can turn a profit.

You don't really know what to do with the snowfall at this point. You probably drop them on the AH and don't think much about it if you are milling your own herbs. If you didn't do the math behind it yet, you are trying to buy the cheap herbs or ink off the AH.

If someone is working your market hard, they will probably frustrate you. Many people leave the game at this point claiming there is no gold in inscription. If they only knew how close they were.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Snatch List: Netherweave Cloth

I decided to start a series covering my snatchlists. I covered Borean Leather yesterday and decided to keep with the idea. Netherweave Cloth should be on every tailors snatch list. It is such a simple flip to make to turn it into a Netherweave Bag. The math is so simple too. 1 stack of cloth is one bag. Check the prices of those 2 items and if there is a profit jump in.

I snatch it at 7g a stack and sometimes buy more at 7.5G. Add a rune thread and I sell it from 10-11G. I can list several bags at that price and they sell. My competition like to post at 15G but I don't expect that to last long. My bigest issue is running out of cloth to make bags with. They sell much faster then I can buy the cloth for them.

I know tailoring prabably has some other good markets and I plan to dig into them to see if there are other areas I should be taking advantage of. But this is such a simple flip that I cannot pass it up.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Snatch List: Borean Leather

I love to watch Borean Leather on my server. The market floods from time to time and you can catch stacks and stacks of it way under value.

First lets define vender value for Borean Leather. I never vender it, but if my markets crash I can still turn a profit by vendering it. Frostscale Leggings take 12 pieces and vender for 5g35s64c. That works out to 44.6 silver a leather or 8.93g a stack. I see it sell for as low as 30 silver on my server. So daily I purchase all leather under 41 silver. But lets look at the other ways to make gold off of it.

First is to check the conversion to Heavy Borean Leather. That takes 6 leather a piece. At 41 silver anything I sell over 2.58G is profit. I sold several stacks at 4.3G each last night. Thats higher then the norm. 3.5G is more commonly what I sell it at. But thats still a good profit.

Heavy Borean Armor Kit is another item that sells well for me. It takes 4 heavy leather (24 borean leather) at a cost of 9.8G and sells for 15G or more.

And an item I mentioned previously is Dark Iceborne Leggings. It takes 4 heavy leather (24 borean leather) and 1/2 an eternal shadow at a cost of 11.3G and sells for 15G or more as a Dream Shard.

With these three options I can buy every piece of borean leather that I see and know that I have several channels to push it onto the market. If I keep buying up all the supply, then it also prevents anyone from moving into those markets. This is one item on my daily snatch list.

Inventory: This is what I have

So I decided to do an inventory of what I have. I bet 80-90% of my gold is from inscription, so its no surprise that 80-90% of my inventory is dedicated to that. I have 4-5 bank tabs of random stuff, most things I should vendor. I used those for overflow before but have let them fill up with garbage.


I do have 3 bank tabs of mostly ink, 1 tab 1/2 full of herbs to mill, and 1 tab of random inscription stuff. I have another tab just for bulk herb purchases. Its empty at the moment so I use it to move glyphs from alt to alt for posting. That's 6150 ink of the sea.


I have 3 chars for posting glyphs now. Those I stack up to 14 most of the time. They are either in my bags or listed on the AH.


I just spend a huge chunk of gold on some gear. So my gold pile is much lower then it was before the weekend. I have around 8,500 gold on my various characters and 46,000 gold in the bank. Here are some screenshots to show you the size of my operation.






























Monday, August 24, 2009

Big Spender

I broke down and made my first big purchase. People that know me, know that I don't do anything small. So when I say big purchase what I'm talking about is a shocking purchase. First let me show you what I got.

[Royal Moonshroud Robe]
[Royal Moonshroud Bracers]

I think its a server fist to have 2 pieces of that crafted gear. The people that crafted my gear told me that I was the first person they crafted it for. But someone else could have those patterns.

What makes that purchase so shocking is the mats required to make them. 32 moonshroud is nothing to sneeze at. I picked up half a stack several weeks ago from someone selling it too cheap. A good deal is hard to pass up. The rest was on the AH. I may have over paid a little bit, but when looking at the other mats a few hundreds gold here and there isn't much.

It is the Crusader Orb purchase that shocks people. We don't see many on the AH yet and the ones we do see are fairly high. This weekend I did see a few listed and decided I could get one item crafted. The AH listed them 4.7-5.5K gold each. So I started out in trade offering 4.5K gold each to save on AH cut. People started lining up to give them to me. A few canceled auctions to sell direct. At the end of the evening I cleared the AH and was siting on 11 Crusader orbs.

In my hunt for that last orb the next morning, the person that had it also had the pattern for my robe. I gave him 450G for making the robe. Later that night I got the bracers crafted too. Full epic gems and enchanted.

When it was all said and done, I bet I spent close to 60k gold on 2 items. I had the gold to spend and didn't have any thing better to spend it on. I feel good knowing its probably a server first and it does let me show off my gold just a little bit. While my robe wasn't all that bad but my bracers were in dire need of an upgrade. Now if I could only buy a weapon.

Teach a man to fish

Now that word has gotten out in my guild about how much gold I have, I am getting a lot of questions. They either ask for a chopper mount, how I do it, or mention that they need to find a way to make gold. So far I have not had any serious requests for a gold loan. For the people that need gold, I try to give them tips.

One guild member was mining and something else. So I told him to look at converting ore to bars. Just check the AH for ore that's selling for less then then the bars of the same type. If there is a profit, buy it and bar it. I also told him to sell single bars for a little more then the stacks and to consider the different stack sizes as different markets. If a market is flooded in singles or full stacks, offer them as 5 or 10 bars.

At the end of the weekend, he told me he made 200G from doing that.

I had another conversation this weekend that put a smile on my face.

Someone yells someone please give me 4 gold.
Someone yells someone please give me 4 gold.

Someone level 18 Undead Warrior
*Achievements say 7g is the most he ever had.
to [Someone] what are your professions?
[Someone] mining and blacksmith
to [Someone] How much gold are you making on selling your ore
[Someone] none
to [Someone] What are you selling it for?
[Someone] I don't sell it, I use it to skill up blacksmithing
to [Someone] that's your problem
[Someone] lol
[Someone] All I can mine is copper and tin
to [Someone] Go check the price of copper ore on the AH
[Someone] OMG I see some selling for 12G a stack
to [Someone] you see where I am going with this
[Someone] Yeh, I'm off to go mine

Save for a rainy day

I have decided to start stashing some of my gold in case something happened to my account. I have contaced a few real life friends and aranged for them to hold a little bit on a low level alt they have. Not much, but enought that if I need quick access to some gold that they will have it.

I also have a 2nd account that is not active at the moment. My next idea is to send a little gold evey day to a char on that account. It will sit in his mailbox and get returned in 30 days. If I break it up and send 1k gold every day, after 30 days it will hit that point where I will be receiving 1k gold every day back in the mail.

I have never been hacked but there is a first time for everything. I have more visibility online and hand out on more and more gold making websites/forums. If someone was going to target a group to hack, it would be those groups. And it costs me nothing to save away for a rainy day.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

How much time do you have?

Inscription has been a great market for me but it also takes more time than any other market I have worked with. I use ink of the sea usage as my metric of how much I am selling. I just know how much ink I use in a day so it is easy to track. On average it is 850 ink of the sea.

Lets do the math to see how much time inscription takes up. To get 850 ink, I have to mill 142 stacks of herbs. At 4 mills a stack at 3.8 sec a mill, that puts me at 35 min of milling. After I mill it, I then have to ink it. If each ink takes 2 sec to make, i'm at 29 minutes to ink 850 ink of the sea. I also have to ink the snowfalls for another 5 min. Lets just say its a hour of work a day to get the mats needed to craft what I need. 7 hours a week.

If I use 850 ink of the sea, I would have to guess that I make 500 glyphs. At 3 sec each that's 25 min of crafting. That feels very low from personal experience but I can work with that. At 25 min a day that's another 3 hours a week for crafting.

I have 1400 auctions listed at any one time. They either sell or expire and end up in my mailbox. I can only open 50 messages every 60 sec. So 1400 auctions is 28 pages of mailbox auctions. That is 29 minutes of mailbox time. I use the /reload trick to refill it quicker and I expect that cuts my time in half. So 15 min a night is 1 hour 45 min a week just opening mail.

I post auctions 5 times a day. If that only takes 10 minutes each time that's 50 min a day and 5.8 hours a week.

If I add all that up, I am sitting at 17.5 hours a week that I put into inscription. That is almost a part time job. I started small and just kept going and building and before I knew it I had a ton of time wrapped up into it. I would guess that I spend more time then that. These numbers were the optimal times based off the math of my ink of the sea usage.

With that said, some things I can start and walk away from. Like inking for example. Fill my bags with pigment and start the queue. When I return I have a bag full of ink.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Diversity

Glyphs are my go to maket at the moment. It makes more gold for me than anything else I do. But I don't count on that as my only way to make gold. If something happens to one market, I am not left high and dry. You never know when another market will explode.

I have several alts and several professions. Each profession has 1 or 2 good things that make gold. They also have several side markets that could be profitable at the right time. If I see the right mats at to low of a price, I go back to my professions to see where to take advantage it.

Skilling up a profession is a great way to find new gold markets. Everyone skilling up has to look at the same mats your are looking at. If you can find a way to produce those mats cheaper someone will buy them.

When I was skilling up JC, I discovered that I could prospect for a lot of the mats I needed cheaper then buying them raw. Thorium Ore is a new market I just started working. I can buy it, prospect it, and resell the mats at a fairly good profit. Thats one of those things that will differ from server to server and is also the type of tip that you don't see posted everywhere. It is those types of exclusive discoveries of a market that lets you dominate it.

While eveyone has access to all the websites that talk about how to make gold and offer tips, not everyone reads them. So don't overlook a method becuase you saw it on a high trafic website, but be prepared that you will not be the only one to figure it out. You may find your self in control of a market for a long time, but once it gets enough visibility it could be all over as lots of people flock to it.

Friday, August 21, 2009

The Armageddon that never was

I set out with huge plans to drive my competition away. The market was going to crash and burn with me in control. The first day of my plan my main competition worked the AH the entire day. So I was able to drive the prices down fairly quickly. I normaly let him hang out under my threshold but I lowered it to keep him on his feet for the entire market.

Once I saw he was working it that hard and I already drove the low prices even lower, I actualy kind of steped back and let him do his thing. He realy was not my target here. It was everyone else. I knew this guy would be key in doing that. Going head to head with him, puts everyone else out in the cold. I expect they all moved a lot of glyphs over the weekend at dirt cheap prices.

Over that same window, I was able to hold the herb prices up. I almost gave up on this a few times. The flood of herbs onto the AH made me rethink it a few times but I kept it up. The result I was looking for was to dry up the supply as they sold whatever stock they had at low prices.

I wroked the hardest the first half of the first day. I just kind of moniroted the market the next few. When I saw my main competitor ease off, I went back to normal to hold prices. Then my main competition all but backed out. I think he either left town, is watchig the market, or ran out of ink. If he was watching the market, he would have have already started to move back in as the prices move back up.

I would like to think he ran out of ink or re did the math on what it was costing him. I saw him try to unload snowfall a few days ago. I played some games with it. He wold post a few stacks, so I would undercut 1-2G and post a few. We walked the price down to 9-10g. The whole market followed us. When nothing was listed over 13G and more to that 9-10g price, I purchased it all before my buyer logged in. I sent it all to him for 12G each as a bulk discount.

I do expect him to return before long. If he is anything like me, there is no way he can just leave the market. Carpet bombing in general is down to mostly me. People that are still with it are working it like any other market. Crafting what sells and passing on the rest. Those are the high movers because I prabably rob them of any sales on the other glyphs.

I could have taken the market very low for a long time if I wanted to. I still sell a good deal of glyphs. That would prabably hurt me more then help me. I know I cannot control the market forever. It is too big of a market and the process is too simple. I just want to delay the next big player from taking my spot at the top.

How does inscription work

Glyphs can be mass produced with high markup and low costs. The cost to list them in the AH is nothing. When you mill a stack of herbs you get 2 different types of ink from it. One ink (Ink of the Sea) goes into the glyphs or can be converted 10 at a time into that other ink (Snowfall Ink). The other ink is used to make darkmoon decks.

Lets get some numbers to work with:
20x[Adder's Tongue] => 1x[Snowfall Ink] + 6x[Ink of the Sea]
10x[Ink of the Sea] => 1x[Snowfall Ink]

Here is the math behind [Snowfall Ink]. If the cost of your snowfall is too close to your adder's cost then you can alreay make a profit by milling. I am going to scale up the example to make the math simpler.

200x[Adder's Tongue] =>10x[Snowfall Ink] + 60x[Ink of the Sea]

We can convert that 60 ink of the sea into 6 more snowfall ink. If 10 stacks of adders costs less then 16 snowfall ink, you could make a fair amount of gold just buying/milling/inking. That's one way JC makes gold. Buying/prospecting/crafting/DEing everything for a profit.

Lest move on to glyphs. Ink of the Sea can be exchanged for any ink needed to make a glyph. The most your glyph will ever cost is 2x[Ink of the Sea] + .50 silver parchment.

(20x[Adder's Tongue] - 1x[Snowfall Ink] ) / 6 = cost of 1x[Ink of the Sea]

You can see that Ink of the sea can be produced for dirt cheap. Most of the cost is the time spent milling it. If you move to a large scale, make sure you have the market for that much snowfall. The larger numbers I produced, the harder it was for me to unload snowfall and the price keeps falling.

Someone making 100 glyphs a day only has to sell one stack of snowfall a day. Someone making 300-400 a day has to sell 3-4 stacks a day.

That brings us to Darkmoon Cards.

I don't like to deal with them but here is what I know. When making darkmoon cards you have a random chance to make one of 4 types of cards that can be numbred from ace to eight. I did say random. The math says that on average for every 32 cards you make, you should have enough cards to make 4 decks. You will have lots of duplicates but should have enough of the cards of the type you need for a deck, but you may have to do some trading.

6x[Snowfall Ink] + 3x[Eternal Life] + 3x[Ink of the Sea] => 1x[Random Darkmoon Card]
192x[Snowfall Ink] + 96x[Eternal Life] + 96x[Ink of the Sea] => 32x[Random Darkmoon Card] => 4x[Different Darkmoon Decks]

You may do the math and figure out that making cards with the extra snowfall is better then selling it. If you have no market for snowfalls, this is your only option to unload them

Cards and Glyphs work well together. They use different parts of the same plant. If you don't want to get into the other market, try to team up with someone that does work it.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Armageddon

I was getting a little too comfortable with what I was doing and have a good deal of competition moving in. For the most part, most of them have focused on a small area but are now growing in to other glyphs. I see so many names that I don't know now joining the market. One guy that just joined is using QA correctly and looks like he has a very flexible schedule.

It it time for Armageddon. I can share the market with a few scribes, but we had 6,000 glyphs on the AH today. We don't have room for everyone that is posting. So it is time to shake things up.

Here is my plan. I am going to walk every glyph down to the bottom. The market is already headed there, so I am going to push it over the edge when I am ready for it.

I set undercuts to 60 silver and I post with 48 hour auctions. I do not cancel auctions when I repost so prices can only go down. I normally post 5 times a day and can handle more over the weekend. This will drop the price of glyphs +3G a day. The key to this is everyone else is undercutting too and walking the market down with me. The market will saturate with glyphs at low prices making a reset impossible.

I am then going to pull my threshold back up and let them fight it out at the bottom. I will bounce in and out to keep that price where I want it.

I just crashed the snowfall market. I found the person that was buying it all and worked it out where I can send to them directly. That one person kept the market price high buy purchasing it all. I gave them a 2G discount and sent 6-9 stacks a day to them for the last several days. They are no longer buying off the AH and with me walking the AH price down too, they are down 30% from middle of last week. I see one competitor trying to unload, so I keep undercutting him with my stockpile.

Someone else was talking about taking over a market and I asked him several questions for him to track each week. So here I am asking myself the same questions.

What is the current condition of your server?

6000 glyphs posted and 2/3rds of the ones I have listed are under 6G each with about 1/3 of them closer to 4g. Demand is very high and prices have already crashed.

How many big players and small players do you have?

I think I have 4 big players. 3 of them focus on just a few high demand glyphs, the other coveres just about everything.I have so many small players now that I cannot keep track. So many new names in the last 2 weeks.

How many glyphs do you sell a day/week and how much are you currently making?

I have no idea how many glyphs I sell. I did have 32k in sales this last week but that included the patch sales.

How many glyphs do you post and how often?

I post 2 or 4 at a time and do it 5 times a day.

what is your cost per ink of the sea?
I pay under 20G for herbs and sell snowfall for 13G. That puts my cost at 2.67G each.


Nutral AH Update

I decided it is too much work to maintain that other AH. The other side of our server is dead. I was posting 700 glyphs to sell 20ish. After the work of getting glyphs to someone over there, posting them, tracking them, and collecting them from themailbox. I decided it was too much.

I list around 722 glyphs last time. When those all expire, they fill my mailbox. If I did not use the /reload trick to refresh the mail box, it would take 17 minutes to collect it all. That is inventory that I could be moving on our AH.

Now that we can have chars on both sides, if they need a glyph that bad then they can run someone over to get it. I think this has more potential where the other side is more active.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

What will you do with all that gold

I have way more gold then I plan on spending. I should have stoped at 20,000 gold. I think that's all I really needed. I have about 115,000 gold at the time of writing this. My goal was 30,000 and I hit that way to quickly.

I have no desire to just burn it on a mount or pets or achievements. I do see some new craftable items I could blow it on, but I'm in a raiding guild and will get gear that's close enough in due time. So that brings me back to what to do with it.

A close personal friend was rolling in the gold a year ago. By rolling, I mean he had 8-10k gold. For us, that's more then we really ever had. I was working hard to get my epic flyer and when I was within 1,000 gold of getting it, he gave it to me. Not a loan, but a gift. To him he was making it faster then he needed it. Fast forward a year and now I am in that situation. I sent him 10,000 gold last night. I reminded him of when he gave that gold to me and I was just returning the favor. I didn't give it to him because he gave me gold before. I did it for the same reason he did. To help out a friend.

I also sent 10,000 gold to another close friend. I think they will find more value in that 10,000 gold then I will in my remaining 95,000 gold. Now I am at the point where I ask myself, at what point do I stop. The gold cap is my soft goal. I think it would be cool to say I hit the gold cap in 4 months. But my feelings will not be hurt if I back out of that one.

One goal I am working on is to reduce the amount of game time I devote to making gold. In a way, I am cheating because I spend so much time doing it. Did I really make that much if I do hit the gold cap in 8 months but it took 2 weeks /played to do it?

Reflecting on the patch for glyphs

In the first 48 hours after the patch, I had 15,000G in glyph sales. Demand was high and it pushed prices up. Several glyphs sold out and when I relisted them over 50G, they still sold. I could have been more prepared, but I was not in bad shape for it.

As you now I keep a good stock of ink. Its getting smaller every day because herb prices are still up but its lasting me exactly how I needed it to. During prime time, I posted glyphs every hour to stay on top of the market. I even pulled 2 crafting sessions each day to stay ahead of it.

My competition was wearing thin from the high herb prices just before the patch. When they sold out, they had nothing to restock with. That left me with a lot of market control. I ran some glyph prices up to 50G and they still sold. I normaly don't sell that high and got a few people yelling at me. I offered them that glyph for 15G and they took it. I know that same glyph was 5-9G a week ago. Give it a week and it will be back down there.

Next patch I will precraft more glyphs so I am instantly ready for market demand. I was on top of it this time because I saw what was happening and took the time to craft more between postings. I prefer to do that all at once to better manage my time. I think I will also work to reset as many glyphs as possible in the days before the patch. Patch day reset a ton of glyphs for me, but if I would have done that a head of time my glyph sales would have been that much higher.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Running on low

Just a few days ago I had soo much ink that I thought I would never run dry. Now I'm cutting deep into those reserves. Having a 8 day supply feels like a lot when I was buying more herbs in a day then I was using.

Herb prices are way up so I have not made any purchases in a few days. That insane stock of ink has saved me. But at the rate I use ink, it looks like I need to make some major purchases this weekend. Next time prices are down, I think I am going to over stock like mad. I had 3 bank tabs of ink of the sea and I realize now that is not enough.

I think I am going to move it to the mailbox instead of storing it in tabs. Every day I will mail off 500 ink to an alt and just leave it in his mailbox. After 30 days of this it will start to get returned on its own if I don't use it. I can at any time hop on that char and return it too. I will leave one tab in my bank as a buffer from the mailbox.

I'll give you an update later if I even try this and how well it works if it does.

Keeping the competition away

I got into the glyph market because I saw a lot of gold in it after I saw the system that most people used. When I started leveling inscription, I was making instant profits. it just kept multiplying how much gold I made by how much I put into it.

I start to think what would have happened if my profits were not that large. What if I didn't make any gold while leveling it up? If it would have cost me gold, I would have looked at inscription as a dead profession for making gold. If I was never shown how good it could be, then I would have little incentive to try and work that market.

Now that I control the market, I am thinking about keeping the prices low even when I don't have anyone in my market. If I use a large markup it will drive people to look for scribes in trade and turn them onto the profitable market. If I was to keep glyphs cheap, it would be easier for them to just buy them on the AH.

When I do get competition the control I keep on the market prevents them from seeing just how good it is. I expect they still make good gold and I hope they think that is as good as it will get. If they knew it would support more, I would have a real fight on my hands. They are getting smarter about some of my tricks, they cannot match my production.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Nutral AH Week 2

My first attempt at the nutral AH was a bust at first. I logged into a trial account and found things double the price on our side. So I thought I was listings things at a large discount for them and a high markup for me. In the end, either nobody bothered to even look or they felt the prices were too high. I figured it was a good deal for someone to flip.

That weekend I only posted glyphs. I listed them for 19.99G and had a few sell. I think it was 6-8 of them. I don't exactly remember. This weekend I was headed out of town on friday so I posted 10 of every thing on the normal AH and then posted whatever I had left on the nutral AH for 9.99G. When I got back Sunday I could see several sales in the nutral AH. If I had to guess, 6% of my sales for the weekend were on the nutral AH. It looked like 20-25 of them sold.

If this is a trend, I will post again next weekend. If I keep getting sales, then I will keep posting. It took me 30 min to travel 2 chars to BB and post all my glyphs and I made 200-250G. That is not all that great, but it is not all that bad either. If I am consistant, then people will know they can look there to find glyphs. And at 9.99g it is a steal compared to their prices.

I even posted all my expensive glyphs at 9.99G to promote it. Even the ones I have listed higher in my faction AH.

Unloading Snowfall

I have a ton of snowfall ink and just need to unload it. I listed a lot of it for 14.99G and posted a message in trade that snowfall ink was in the AH for under 15G. I immediately get yelled at by someone in a whisper.

You bastard

I am a friendly guy so my reply was "lol, what?". Turns out he just put a lot up for 18G before I did that. I told him I had a large stock I had to move and we got chatting. I was hesitant to tell him too much just because of how good this market is. It sounded like he made a good deal of gold in other markets and we left on a good note.

I bet a lot of people hate me from how they see me play the AH. If they ever take the time to say hello (and im not afk), I would gladly talk with them for a bit. That the kind of guy I am. I don't know anyone that hates me that knows me. I am also very tolerant and patient so I don't have anyone I know on ignore. The spammers are one thing but I never get into a scuffle with anyone that gets either of us ignored.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Competition

I jumped in and took control of the glyph market in very short time. I have one other player that I watch closely. I am not sure if he was at war with me or not. The prices did tank but the sales did go up in numbers. The prices are getting very low on some things. But today I think I saw the market break back my way.

Looking at the glyphs on the AH, about 1/2 were in the 3.8-4.8G range. But 1/4 were up close to my fallback price. I wish i had an eye on this before so I could tell what normal is. I think he is getting out of the market. I do not think he is crafting new glyphs to list.

Part of this can be the jump in herb prices this week with darkmoon so close. I did make some heavy purchases at the start of the week to push them in the right direction. I never see him sell any inks or cards. Not sure how he is moving it if he is.

It has been 2 weeks. So he could also be scaling back to fit a more casual time frame. If he was less organised, then it would be sucking up a lot of time to compete with me. I pushed to streamline as much as possible and that is what I am good at. I also have a great schedule for posting. Now I just need to keep him from making gold if he truly is bowing out. I don't want any last minute profits give him hope.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Nobles

I sold my first nobles deck today. I must have sold it too low. I mentioned it in trade once and instantly had an offer. It was higher then what I projected my mats cost to be. I pushed him for 100G more and it was sold that quick. I hate working cards.

I dealt with that market at 60. That was more because of patch notes indicating they were changing. At that time, the ace was the key card. It would sell for 400-600G and the other cards from 2-12G. I picked up that they were going balance it out so that the other cards were going to be harder to get.

I purchased them like mad. I had been working hard for my epic riding mount back when 1000G took forever to get. I had 600G that I dumped into cards 2-12G at a time. I made several decks and got a lot of gold after that patch from them. Then I had all those left over cards. I tried to work them back into the AH but did a poor job at it. I was trying to make each sale a big sale. in the end I vendered a lot of them.

I was not looking forward to doing that again. This time I will price my cards to sell. I think getting stuck on a inventory of cards is about as bad as sitting on the snowfall. I had to do something and I guess this was it. If I can do some good trading with the nobles cards, I can get another 2 decks out of what I have. I am 2 cards away from my 2nd deck and 4 away from a 3rd deck. The fun with random.

The race to the bottom.

It looks like I am in a race to the bottom now on my server.

How do you tell if someone is trying to push you out or liquidating inventory?

Someone came in 2 weeks ago and set the price of every glyph at 8G (that is his fallback). Not bad, some averaged a bit above that. It has been on a stead down hill from there. Today, I had to set my threshold at 3G73s to post for a lot of glyphs.

Tonight I plan on sepperating my 1 ink and 2 ink glyphs into different price groups to handle this better.

I think I was crowding him out and now he is fighting back. I see him using some of my posting methods. We will see how low he is willing to go.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Ten questions to ask yourself, on a pile of gold

I saw these questions over at Phase 3: Profit!


How long did you spend on making gold every week?
Way too long. I have an hour of milling/inking and 2 hours a day of other crafting. I would guess an hour for relisting. So 4 hours a day sounds high but I can be away from the computer for some of it. Thats 28 hours a week spend making gold.

How much you earn a week ?
I have about 5-6k in sales and I would guess 2-3k in mats a day. That puts me at 12-15k a week.

Do you really need that much ?
No, not at all. I am way past all the gold I will ever need.

Where are you going to spend your extras ?
I am going to donate a large chunk to a few friends and sit on the rest. I don't have any idea what to do with it.

Is there anyway can increase the amount you can get?
I am about to look at some new markets. Just added a JC to my professions this week and looking into profitable items to craft and DE for other professions.

Is there anyway can decrease the time you need ?
The only way I can cut back the time I need is to cut back my profits. Inventory space and high volume turn over is why I do daily crafting. I tried to do a Sunday is crafting day type of thing and craft enough for the week. So much of that sold that I had to recraft again on Monday. So I still craft daily, just a lot more.

Will the method you are currently gather gold be obsolete soon ?
It all depends on my competition. I could be bumped out of my primary market, but it would take a lot of work. I have soo much inventory that I would never truly leave that market. The big thing that could break my method would be blizzard making changes because of people like me. Patches are the big thing for me to watch. This patch killed my dream shard market as an example.

What’s the last time you got a new method for profiting ?
Just this weekend I added JC to my list and I am looking at some things to craft for DE. I spend a lot of time looking and hunter for more tricks to flip gold. Spend a lot of time on forums and blogs looking for new ways.

Is it fun at all ?
I have had a ton of fun. I may be about to burn out though. I put a huge time investment into it and I don't think I can keep that up.

Planning to share what you have learned?
I do share a lot of my ideas. Sometimes when I am fishing for something new, I toss it out and see what people say. Some of my ideas are out there. I think others are crasy enough to work if I would try them. I do have a few things I keep to my self. My fear is that if they slip out it would kill my market. Either by giving the info to too many people or blizzard thinking that it realy is broken and make changes.

Panic Attack

I started to freak out a little bit knowing how soon I would run out of ink if my supply dried up. Looking at the herb prices headed into darkmoon it easily will. I missed my farmer the day before and did not see him online last night for a long while.

I took a look at the herb prices and I saw low quantities of them with the market average already shifting up. I see this market that is about rest and I need to get stocked up. If my farmer is gone I would be looking at a huge hit to my profits.

I did the one think I knew I had to and cleaned out all the reasonable priced herbs. I bet 5 min after that my farmer logs in and unloads a bunch of herbs on me. I did have to pay closer to the new market price I just set. But if that price was a good deal 10 min ago, it is still a good deal.
Someone decided to try and reset the price of snowfall ink. I would like to thank him for it. He purchased 5 stacks of it from me on the AH. Iwould love to join him at that price he set, I need to get it moving. I relisted just as many at the same price I had.

I am tempted to slash my prices on snowafll to clear out my inventory. If I take a 2G hit for each one, I think I can move everything I have. I think I need to do that to keep that inventory turning over. If it sits in my bag it can only drop in value.

I cannot decide if I want the snowfall market to crash or not. I have the inventory to crash it. It would crash for every one trying to sell it. The cost per glypyh goes up for my competition. The price of nobles will drop. Adder's should crash in value. I take a huge hit on any inventory I cannot sell, but my mats should be cheaper in the long run with adder's tongue not having any value. Ink of the sea will also drop and I may set up more buyers.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Skilling up JC

I finaly broke down and started skilling up a JC. I have wanted one for a long time but never got started. There are a few cheap things that can be DE'd that had my eye for a long time.

First thing I did was go mine some copper ore. I have a lot of gold, but there was no way I was going to pay 6G a stack for copper ore. This was the only ore that I gathered. I got the rest from the AH for fairly cheap. I took my time looking at the cheapest way to get some thing.

I have a minner, so when it called for bars of something, I was able to look at the price of ore instead. That saved me a good deal in some places. Having the option was the big thing. Some places I picked up half ore and half bars. Whatever was cheapest.

Prospecting ore is key to doing it cheap. There were several things needed by JC that was in limited supply (or over priced) listed in the AH where the ore was cheap enough to prospect to get those items. The one big mistake I made was prospecting fel iron ore for gems to cut. That was fine, but just after that I had to prospect several stacks of adamantite ore for the powder and got a better gem drop rate. I was done with those gems at that point so that turned out to be some expensive powder.

I sent off all the gear to be DE'd to get a little return on my investment. I am now 400 JC and can prospect saronite ore. I need to do the math again, but it looks like the price of saronite is getting so low that I may be able to turn a profit by prospecting it and vendering/DE everything.

It looks like I may be getting into the prospecting business.

You ink will run dry in ..

My glyph production is insane. I started tracking it by the ink I use every day. Here is how much I used in the last several days by day: 1200,1100,500,600,1240,620. On average that is 876 Ink every day.

To keep up with that, I need to mill 146 stacks of herbs a day. I was about ready to start cutting my farmers off. It looks like I need to rethink that. I am milling daily to keep that space free. I hade 3600 ink before I made ink today. I forgot to check what it was after. But at the rate that I use up ink, I would run dry in 4 days.

I should have purchased a lot more herbs this weekend. I could easily run out of ink before friday. My farmers like to do the trade in person and I missed one of mine last night that is usualy good for 100 stacks.

I can throttle that if I need to. I let my glyphs sell for very low markup if that is where the glyph is selling. I can easily jump my threshold up from 3.5G to 4.25 (or even 5g). I will sell less so I preserve my ink supply and my profit is higher. If I saw the dry spot before it got to me, bumping my profits up the days before would allow me to pay more if I had to. My daily sales will go down because I am posting less. But if I am going to run out and can make a 4.25G glyph the next day instead of a 3.5G today, I am getting more for it.

If I think my ink cost will jump way up to 2G each, I can adjust ahead of time and soften the impact it will have on me.

I also have a 14 stack inventory of every glyph. I top those stacks off every night. I may be able to last 2 days for the majority of my glyphs before I run out. Some of my good sellers would go quickly. But that is expected.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

bulk2mail trick

I use this mod called bulk2mail. It lets me set up send lists so that all cloth gets sent to my tailor and all leather gets sent to my leatherworker. It is very slick. It pulls those items from your bags for you.

I have a large snatch list. I could easily buy a fewhundred items at once. Those purchases fill my mailbox and over flow my bag. With builk2mail, you can send and receive at the same time. I start to open all of the mail (with potal) and as stuff is flowing in, I flip over to the send and buil2mail already has the first message ready to go. I click send and off it goes while the mailbox is still getting cleared out. If I flip back from the inbox to the send box, it will have the current items ready to go again.

I started sending slower and it feels faster. I flip over to send, but I pause for 10-20 sec before I click the send button. When that stuff sends, it rechecks inventory and build a new message with the stuff that there now (the things that showed up in that 10-20 sec pause). It realy feel very slick now that I am using it.

Resiliant Parchment and other over priced things

I was in such a rush to get stuff posted before raid time that my inscriptionist ran to the bank with the crafting bags instead of the glyph bags. I didn't know untill I check him after the raid and I see several sells of Resiliant Parchment for 4.3G in my mailbox. I look in my bags and yep, full of ink and parchment. Not a single glyph got posted. I did just post an hour before that so all was not lost.

Did you catch what I just said. Resilaint Parchement sold for 4.3G that cost me 50 silver. I was going to work ink and parchment so I set up QA rules for it. Only 3 got posted and every one of them sold. Thats a higher profit margin then some of the glyphs I sell. I will have add that to my things to post daily.

After I posted my glyphs, I decided to check on Dream Shards to see what they were doing. They have been falling fast with the patch so I have moved out of that market for now. Someone had reset the market and listed them all for 30G each. A go-to pattern for me to make dream shards is Dark Iceborne Leggings (I talk about them here). It cost me under 10 gold each to make about 21 of them. Listed them all for 17G in various stack sizes and they all sold.

I already talked about the prospecting luck with my new JC. When I logged in today he already had some profit with several things still listed. If I see eternal earth drop down just a little, he can crank out several infinite dust. I picked up some eternal air to make meta gems with. The mats for 12 turned into 18 gems with my alchemist.

All in all it was a good night.

Milling Machine

I sat down today and decided I had too many herbs. I made about 240 flasks and milled/inked the rest of it. That does pack things very nicely.

I get 12-14 pigments from each full stack of herbs. Those pigments are used 2 at a time to make ink. That ink stacks to 20. That is a great deal of compression. I then sent a good chunk of that ink off to my wearhouse bank. I was storing herbs there but I have to do a lot of shuffling around to mill that way.

I plan on keeping up on my milling/inking as I get new herbs. So my local suppy of herbs should be fairly consistant. It also gives me quick access to that space when I make mass trades like I do.

When it was all said an done, I had 4050 ink of the sea. A new record for me.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

My New JC

So I powered up Jc over the weekend. I figured that was one more tool that I should have had a long time ago. I made a lot of gold without it already. But its never to late.

I missed the big gold that JC made with this patch. Or so I thought. I can now prospect saronite ore. That and the cheap DE mats was my goal. So lets see how my first day went.

I paid 15G a stack for 4 stacks of saronite. Total cost was 60G. I got one scarlet that sold for 55G as soon as I posted it (a solid 10G undercut so that was expected). I picked up an eternal earth for 8G and made some rings to DE. 7 infinite dust that sold for 3.4G each. Chalcedony is selling for 9G each at the moment for meta gems. I had 6 of those to list that all sold. After it was all said and done, I had 147G in sales from that 60G investment.

I turned and purchased 160G worth at just under 15G a stack and I am in the process now of posting that. 2 scarlets already sold for 110G total and 4 blue gems for 8.5G each while I was writting this. I have 9 Chalcedony up at 11.8G each.

I messed up and made 11 earth shadow rings (soulbound). Ouch that hurts. I also didn't look close at the mats either. It used a whole eternal earth for each one. After all my other crafted items got DE'd, I ended up with 29 inf dust and 5 essencs.

So it looks like there is a profit in prospecting while scarlets are still up and Chalcedony is over priced. This looks like an easy market to work. I can see why so many people made so much gold from it. I was thinking that saronite was getting so cheap that it was under vender values is why I decided to pick up JC.

Glyph Balance Sheet

I never thought I would be turning over this much inventory. I am moving a lot of glyphs. From the people I talk with, my numbers are very high. Do not expect to get these numbers on your realm.

I use a lot of ink. I was watching it just dissapear from my bags. I counted it the last 3 times and here is how much I used in the last 3 days: 1200, 1100, 500. That is 2800 ink in 3 days of crafting. Now given I was building over stock the first 2 days of that, but still that is a lot. I will monitor it over the next week.

Now look at sales. I have 2 chars that post glyphs. They do buy a lot of herbs so any out going gold is for that reason.

Over the last 7 days the first char had sold 18,417G worth and spent 7,058G. 2000G in sales for that period is snowfall ink in the AH. My 2nd guy sold 10,244G and spent 491G. So that is 29,000G in the last 7 days in sales. Looks like 1/3 of that went back into it. I also did a lot of sales via trade but that managed to balance out. 7000 in sales and 7300 in expense.

That 7000 in sales is snowfalls that I unloaded to one person. Now that we have a good look at my cash flow, we need to take a look at my inventory. I have 2160 ink of the sea, 813 Azure Pigment, 11 snowfall (I just liquidated 440 of it), 497 Icy Pigment, 6946 herbs (adders/lich/icethorn). Wow thats a lot of bank space.

Macros

I have started to use a lot of simple macros to help me manage my glyphs. Here are my macros as they are on my action bar.

1) Mill
2) Move glyphs to bank (from bags)
3) Move glyphs to bag (from bank)
4) Sort bags
5) Cancel auctions 12 hours or shorter
6) Craft next item
7) Continue QA posting ( a workaround for the 0/0 bug)
8) Open skillet (my craft window)
9) Empty Mailbox (and refresh)
10) Reload wow
11) Move herbs to bag


Milling
That is a common macro that most sribes use (or some other smart milling addon). Just click it and it will mill the herbs in your bag one time. In the macro you list the herbs for it to look at.

/cast Milling
/use adder's tongue
/use icethorn
/use lichbloom

Move glyphs from bags to bank
I use bank stack to manage my bags and made a macro for my groups. "glyphs" are my first 4 char bags and "bglyphs" are my first 5 bank bags. All of those are inscription bags.

/fill glyphs bglyphs

Move glyphs from bank to bags
Just lis the other one but reversed.

/fill bglyphs glyphs

Sort
That same mod quickly sorts your inventory. I like it looking sharp. I click this sort macro all the time. After posting, before crafting, after crafting, and after I get the mail.

/sort bags

Cancel auctions 12 hours or shorter
I use this any time I don't think I will make the next posting time or if I think it will expire before I post again. This macro checks very listed auction (not just glyphs to watch it) and if its is going to expire within 12 hours it will cancel it. I run that before I do my smart undercut cancel.

/script local o="owner" p=GetNumAuctionItems(o) i=p while (i>0) do local _,_,c,_,_,_,_,_,_,b,_,_=GetAuctionItemInfo(o,i) t=GetAuctionItemTimeLeft(o,i) if((c>0)and(b==0)and(t<4))then CancelAuction(i) end i=i-1 end

Craft Next Item
I put this into a button so I could keybind it instead of click with the mouse every time. Skillet lets you queue thins up but you still have to click the button to craft. Now you can put it a macro like this one.

/click SkilletStartQueueButton

Continue QA posting
I have this strange bug that I cannot fix where it posts 1/2 the auctions and calls it quits. It looks like it posted them but it actualy skips every other one. Each time I repost it, the count is in half. This continues the posting without it doing a rescan of the AH first. I think this is the common 0/0 bug. Sometimes it says 0/0 and others it says complete.

/script QA:PostItems()

Open Skillet
Not a macro as much as where I put this button. Next to all the other important ones. Mount is another button on that bar.

Empty Mailbox
I use portal to manage my mail box. This macro refreshes the window and takes all the items using that mod. I have to click it twice if it does refresh.

/script CheckInbox(1)
/click PostalOpenAllButton

Reload
If you type /reload it resets your ui and it refreshes the mailbox faster then waiting on it. I made it a macro because I was typeing it so much

/reload

Move herbs to bag
Just like with my glyphs, I have one set up for herbs from the guild bank. I edit it when needed if the herbs are in different tabs. I use this during my mass milling sessions.

/fill guild4 bags

The only other thing that I click on is sprint. My scribe is a rogue and I use that sprint often.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Auction House Automation Part 5

Putting it all together makes it realy powerfull. I start at the mailbox.
I clear out all the mail. I will have a page or two of auctions I am out bid on with all my AH sales. I will prabably have a few things that I won bids on and I will have any goods I crafted on my other chars. I send off any mats to alts that need them because its quick and gets it out of my bags.
I do a full scan of the AH and run my snatch list one to 3 times a day. I then flip over and hand post a few things before I start my batch posting.

I then return to the mail box and send off any new mats I picked up from the snatch list. If I have a good chunk of gold, I go to the guild bank and make a large deposit. Before I added the snatch list, I never kept more then 100G on the bankier. Now I keep it under 2500G and the rest in the guild bank.

When I stop seeing a crafted item I make in the list of auctions (or 1-2 times a week) I log onto that character and craft the stuff sitting in the mailbox.

Looking at it this way, every item you add to the system generates a new flow of gold. Once an item is set up, the only extra time added is the craft time. If you craft 20-50 at a time, you can read my blog while its doing its thing.

1.5 hours of craft time again

I am starting to think I am moving a lot of glyphs. I did a major crafting session the day before to get everything up to 12 in stock. I just burned up 1100 ink and an hour and a half to restock from yesterday.

I hope one of my mods was off on the stack counts. Tonight I will cancel everything and get it into my bag before I do my inventory check. I had a lot of glyphs up on the AH (and a few in the nutral AH). I am out producing my competition at this point. I saw places the other day where they had ran out.

I hope I intimidate them a little bit. I see they still cancel every time they repost and I just repost from inventory. If they undercut me a lot then I will have a lot of stock listed. Every day I do 4 sessions of posting. The first 2 I start with 4 glyphs each then slip down to 2 for listings after that. So I could have up to 12 glyphs up of every glyph that I post in.

I would like to think my show of force puts them off from challenging me. So far I have not gone on the offensive. They may think that I have but thats just the way I work the AH. I am doing great, but I am not in a place to fight it out. A lot of my buying power is me banking on snowfall ink sales. My stock is growing much faster then I can unload it so I need to rethink that. With good sales of snowfall my ink is under a gold each. With out them selling, each ink sits at 4G each. So sales under 8.5 gold could be costing me more then I can buy the mats for.

I need to get the math settled so I know how many herbs and how often I need them. I need to get consistant suppliers set up. This splurge every 4 days and fill my banks up is hurting me in the long run. When I fill my bank up I have to tell my farmers no. I need to get them on a COD plan. I think I will also go back to buying ink of the sea off the AH. It keeps it out of the hands of my competition and its not that high. It saves me the hastle of storage,milling, inking, and managing snowfalls. It may be a better deal for me.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Auction House Automation Part 4

The last step in the automation is the batch posting. I have some items set up to undercut the competition nomater what if the price is over a set value. I have some items set up to post a set amount at a set value every time. A few items are left for me to hand craft a posting of.

Inscription ink for all levels is one that I post as an undercut. The value of them is the lowest few sell and the others don't. I make sure it is mine that sell as long as it is for a profit.

Netherweave bags I sell for a set amount and post the same number up every time. That market will move them if they are listed too high and will just eat them up if listed too low compared to everything else. I expect most of the time people buy my bag to relist for more.

Dream Shards I hand craft every time. I like to post different stack sizes and values. I love a stack of 6 with these but the doubles and singles also work for me. Because I tweak them a lot and i adjust to market prices, I just do them by hand.

If I do post stuff by hand, I use auctioneer's apraiser tab to do it. It remembers my settings from the last time, shows how many I have up, and lets me post stacks at a time. It works well for me. Everything else gets blindly posted to the AH with the rules I gave them. If I start to get items returned, I will adjust some things.

Im now a big player

I think I am having a real impact on our glyph market.

This last week I have purchsed massive amounts of herbs. I am adicted to buying in bulk. I drove the prices up on lichbloom and icethorn by taking up all the supply. With the normal demand alchemy has on herbs, the cleaned out the rest. It was not that bad buying mid week last week, but its a huge loss doing it this week becuase of the new prices. I was set because of my stock, but a less organised inscriptionist that is used to buying mid week got shut out.

So the more casual inscriptionsist this week decided not to play. I saw my glyph prices rise a bit. Most 8-9G glyphs went up a gold. And today I cornered several markets. My mod tells me when I am posting a glyph that was not listed and I had 7-8 today when it almost never happens. End of the week now and nobody was rebuilding that inventory.
Total number of glyphs listed went way down. A week ago I was 7-8% of all glyphs posted. Today I was over 20%. So I am one of the major players now.

I have been agressive in working the market. I new I was starving people out that didn't work it as hard as me. I was able to just jump in and start making good gold. It was not because people were buying more glyphs because more were listed. I took that gold from someone else that would have made it.

The number of people I see listing glyphs has droped to just a few. I don't see many people listing the same glyph as I did before. I need to try and figure out what names are the same person so I can see how big they are. Both of my characters have almost the same name, so they know its me.

It will be interesting if I start a war with the other inscriptionists. I am not looking to push them out yet. Thats not my goal. I am making a good gold as it is. I am prabably too invested with my gold (all tied up in other things) to afford a fight.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Auction House Automation Part 3

The true advantage automation is how I can add more profit items to the system with out adding much time. Add it to the snatch, set up the bulk mail, and remmeber to log in and craft it every few days.

On the crafting side of it I can just empty my mail box into my bags. Then only show craftable items in my professions window. Craft away and then return to the mailbox. The mail box is set up with that same bulk2mail option to send the crafted items to the next stage. Most of the time it is my banker. If I have a set item that I DE all the time, I set that up to get sent to my enchanter. My enchanter will DE it with a macro and use bulk2mail to send the dust to my banker.

Full Production

That ink supply moves fast. I am still over stocking a little bit. After last night, I hope I am done with that. I sat down to craft and 3 of my 4 inscription bags were full of ink and parchment. I was crafting for an hour and a half. Thas is a lot of glyphs.

It is my goal to have 12 of every glyph going into the next day. This lets me repost several time and only cancel auctions once. It saves me round tips mid day and lets me unload the bank when I have time. At the moment I start fresh at night. Any auction under 24 hours or that is undercut gets canceled. I then post 4 glyphs late at night before I go to bed. Just before I go to work, I post 4 more. Then after work and again before raids I post 2 more. That is 12 glyphs in total to make sure I have full coverage from just my inventory.

At the end of the day I recraft my stock. The last few times exteras were made to puch the stock up to 4-5 the to 10 then to 12. by looking at my stock, I can get a feel for what sells.

I thought I was swimming in ink before. After 3 crafting sessions I had used up 1/2 that ink I had. I kept buying lots of herbs so I have lots of milling/inking to do. I took a screen shot of my last craft session before I started. I'll count it up to see how much ink it took.

I hope my over production is done. I need to track how much ink I use in a week/day. I may get a better deal If I knew that and have a reasonable stock of mats. Not this monster that I have now.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Auction House Automation Part 2

I combine my snatch list with a bulk2mail mod that lets me set up mail targets and the items they get. I added my tailor to the list and all my netherweave is set to be sent to him. So I mass empty my mail box, then flip over to send a mail and its all set up to send all that cloth to my tailor. It will manage it if there are more stacks then can fit on one message. It will send it all.

Leather goes to my leather worker, adders go to my scribe, lichbloom and icethorn to my alchemist, and cloth to my tailor. It adds a lot of automation to the process.

Nutral AH Experiment

I saw a post on our realm forums asking for some life to be put into the nutral AH from the other side. Our server is way out of ballance. I never see an alliance out side of a major city.

They have nothing for an auction house. 2300 items listed when I checked on them (trial account, can look but not sell/buy). Stuff that is listed almost double the price on our side and they have very little supply. I was 4 stacks of adder's tongue where we have 3-4 pages of it.

One thing they asked for was glyphs. I looked at there glyphs prices and they were all 30-40G, even the leveling ones. Several glyphs were not even listed. I can see why they want them. The good news is that glyphs have such a low deposit that the nutral AH fee was still small. Today I posted 2 of every glyph that I have. If I can move just a hand full a day at 20-30G, it will pay for my efforts.

I looked at a few other things that I tend to trade in. With the deposit so high, I need just about everything to sell. I listed it a good 15% under the prices I saw in the other AH and it was still a good 30-40% markup on my end. I want someone buying my stuff to relist it. It gets me a sale and them a bank roll. The more they buy and sell, the more they can buy and sell.

I just hope someone with enough capital sees all the stuff I listed and buys it out. Its a great sale for me and a good buy for them. If this works, I will have to be carefull not to over supply the demand. Did I mention they don't have many alliance? I will be back later with my results.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Too long of a queue

I am going to work on pulling my queue closer to when I make posts. I started with a lot of ideas and updates. So I made a long queue of them to keep the info showing up.

Some things its ok to queue. I am getting a better feel for that. Things like how to use a mod or ways to do something.

Other things I need to keep more current and post almost daily. Like the status of my opperation or things I am dealing with.

I had a lot I could have said about my inscription with the recent patch. Some important details of my operation were in later posts. I am also showing how my operation chagned over time. So if I said I made 15,000G in the 2 days after the patch the important deails of why it worked that well would also have to be mentioned. Then I would have to review all my posts in the queue to see if it conflicted with that or was from an earlier time.

I want to show you how I learned to walk before I show you the full speed sprint. I guess I need to do it faster. Once the current queue runs dry, I will be posting current stuff more current. It will also help when people post comments. Some people give solid advice. If they saw those thing when I was struggling with them, that advice would have been very helpfull. Now I find myself giving them advice on what they said with information that is a few days into the queue.

Things moved faster then I expected them to.

Auction House Automation Part 1

When I find something I can produce for a profit I add the mats to my snatch list. It is a feature that is provided with auctioneer. You add an item to the list and how much you are willing to pay for it.

After you run a scan, go check your snatch list for good deals. You can either buy from that window or press the buy all button at the bottom. I think you have to press ctrl + shift + alt then click it. It will place a bid or buy out every item in that list for you.

I have added one time things to the list to buy lots of a item at a set price. Like when someone puts up a ton of infinite dust as singles at a low price. Add the item to the snatch list and let it do the work of buying all of those.

Netherweave cloth is something that I have in my snatch list. I can convert it to bags and it sells very quickly. If I am getting too much of it, I lower the price I will pay just a little bit. If I don't get enough, I bump it up or I just manualy check on that item.

My snatch list is my "buy it all" list nomatter how much there is at that price. If I have that too close to market price, I could easily buy more of something then I can sell.

My Setup

I have lots of characters that I am putting to work.



80 Priest minning/alchemy that I raid with

80 Palidan leatherworking/enchanting that I PvP with

72 Warlock tailor/herbalist that I make bags and cloth with

65 rogue inscription that is the heart of my business with glyphs (4 tab guild bank)

61 hunter that post 1/2 of the glyphs the rogue makes (shares guild bank with rogue)

60 mage for bulk storage (1 tab guild bank)

63 warlock for nutral AH

1 mage for storage and manages most general auctions (3 tab guild bank)



At the moment inscription is my big thing. Trying to work that has hard as possible but also trying to break into new markets. I do have minning/herbalisim but don't farm with them anymore. I plan on adding JC to my inscriptionist but I am in no rush.

I do have 8 total bank tabs over 3 guilds. I know I need to clean 2 of them out. Here is what I think I have in them at the moment.


Tab 1: 1/2 of cut gems and stacks of uncut meta gems
Tab 2: uncut gems, titanium ore, arctic fur, stacks of green gems, spare enchant mats
Tab 3: pots, scrolls, leather kits, motes, odd enchant mats, junk that dont sell for much or very often ( I need to vender most of this tab)


Tab 1: partial stacks of all types of flowers, parchements, odd inks, and odd pigments
Tab 2: Full of Ink of the Sea
Tab 3: Full of adder's tongues
Tab 4: 1/3 snowfall and 1/3 ink of the sea with a few pigments to make those in there too


Tab 1: 1/4 lichbloom and 1/4 icethorn

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Accounting Time

I am going to start tracking how I spend my time and what the return on it it. I have used this before to my advantage but didn't think to apply it to my gold making.

I never do anything small. When Blizzard released Recruit A Friend program, I jumed on it big. I picked up a 2nd account and talked 2 friends into joining me. I Grabed another lvl 70 mage (it was BC at the time) and powered up 4 chars at a time to 61. I did the multiboxing thing and at tripple XP, it was so fast that I had to do more.

I did it again and again. It became a game about XP per hour. Before I was done, I had 11 characters on my 2 accounts and my friends had a few on theirs. I learned a few things along the way.

I found it faster to lvl to 10 with quests and head to sfk then it was to level to 8 and head to rfc. The mobs where just so spread out in rfc and at tripple xp you could just do the easy quests.

I found that 12 min is the magic number for instance power leveling (due to the instance lockout of 5 per hour). In the lower level instances it was a race to finish in 12 min. When doing SM armory and cath that would usualy be by skipping the bosses. The extra 1-2 min it took to gain that little xp wasnt worth it, even with skipping the loot. I would pull the boss in cath to kill stuff but ran out before getting sleept.

Other instances it was kill as much as you could in 12 min and reset. If there were good groups of high xp mobs keep going, if slowed down you were better of to reset. One the last set of alts we leveled from 1 to 46 in one long Saturday session.

I am thinking back to that now as I head into the gold business. There are lots of things I can do to make gold. Each has a optimal time that can be spent. Like that 12 min window for leveling. If I can cut my time spent and produce the same thing or produce more in the same time I will make more with less effot or make it faster.

This weekend I spent a lot of time making bags (New market I was checking out). I would check the AH every few hours to see how many of my bags had sold, I would then search for mats and buy them, then craft them, and post. All those steps are needed, I can't cut them out. But I can find faster ways to do it or do more less often.

For searching I could add those to my snatch list of my normal banker. So each time he snatches stuff, all the cloth I need also gets snatched.

I can craft in bulk. I can build a good supply of mats and craft it all at once. Something like that you can be afk and just return to your computer every so often to click the next batch. This weekend I was making snowfall ink in batches of 400. I could watch tv and every 2nd or 3rd set of comercials I would start it on the next batch.

I can post in bulk. I already have one alt that manages most of my listings. Now that I plan on batching the crafting, I can forward it to my banker. If I set it up in my mod correctly, it will just post like any other item.

So when it is all said and done I have cut my time back to just the craft time. The other steps were things I was already doing. Now if I can find more things to craft I will be making more gold and diversifying where my gold is.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Crafting Bags

I never realized how much volume bags moved in. I decided to give it a try.

I started with netherweave cloth. One stack is one 16 slot bag. I almost double my money every 16 slot bag I sell. I would post 7 at a time and they would be sold the next time I checked.

Once those started to turn into real gold, I added the frostweave bags to the craft list. Mats ran me 63G and sold for 71-85G each. They sold fairly steady.

I'm going to take a look at the other bags and see what they can do. I had this guy as an alt not doing a thing. Now its a quick 150G a day with little work.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Swimming in Ink

It takes a lot of herbs to keep up glyph production. During the week it didn't feel like the prices were too much. I can pick from adder's tongue, icethorn, or lichbloom. I found my self quicky buying off all the cheap stock and stuck not wanting to buy the more expensive stuff.

One day I had a good solid stock of herbs. A whole bank tab full of them for close to 2.5k gold. I had it milled, inked, and spent in 2-3 days. I was still working on my stockpile a little bit, but that went a lot faster then I expected.

The timming was good though. I was headed into the weekend and I knew I could stock up on weekend prices. I started to buy and just kept on buying. I paid just under weekday prices and was spending a thousand gold at a time. The snatch list in Auctioneer is great for that. I was spending gold as quick as I could click the button.

When I was not buying herbs, I was milling and inking it all as fast as I could. I had more herbs then I had room for. Inking it took less space. I filled that bank tab with all Ink of the Sea. I then almost filled a 2nd with the rest of it and snowfall ink. I left a 3rd tab full of just my adder's tonge. My new bank was left 1/3 full of icethorn and lichbloom. I still have a lot of milling to do.

I had a farmer contact me and let me purchase his inventory. We also set it up where he now sends me 12 stacks a day of lichbloom COD. I think I have enough to last for a while, its not a bad deal and its consistant so far (3rd day in a row he has sent it).

Monday morning I realized I may had killed the flask market for this week. Not only did I eat most of the supply, the prices on those herbs was way up. I listed a few stacks at 5-6G over what I was paying and it was selling before I left to work. I should have purchased cheap frost lotus and did flasks too. Anyone getting a late start on making flasks this week will be paying a lot for the herbs.

I have soo much Snowfall Ink now. 750 of it at one point. I did unload a bit on the AH. stacks of 6 and 18 for those makeing cards. I had them at 19.23G each and was suprised they sold so fast. My next batch was still listed when I checked today. Now I have to decide to jump on the cards or unload the inks.

All of the gold I put into these herbs were just from the sales I was making with my glyphs. I spent 13K gold before the weekend was over. I spend my glyph bank down to 2k gold and decided to stop. Now that I dont have to buy mats for a while (10-15 days) it should feel like the gold is just rolling in.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

The Alt Dance

After spending a lot of time shifting glyphs in and out of banks to post every time I have started to use alts to do it. Now that I am using 2 chars to post everything, I am very happy with it.

Reposting is very quick. I park both of them at the AH. If I need to be quick, I hop in post and log out. Does not take very long at all. I still tend to run to the mailbox and collect the gold every time.

I use the guild bank to move glyphs that I have to recraft. It works great unless I have it full of herbs. Even when it is full, all the ink I take out of the bank t craft with gives me enough room to transfer stuff.