Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Get someone to snatch for you

I have some friends and guildies that also work the AH. We focus on different markets and work the AH at different times. I have one set up to snatch a few items for me because he is on a totally different schedule than I am. He just sends it COD to me at a set price.

Any time that item dips lower than my price he will make a profit on selling it to me. These are items that I buy like mad so having a 2nd person buying for me can only help. It also keeps it out of everyone elses hands.

Inscription bags

Telburn just dropped a hot tip as a comment to one of my posts.

Inscription bags are a hot item at the moment. If you have some leather sitting on your leatherworker make up a batch of these. Normally inscription bags sell for less than the mats (the 2-3 times I ever looked at them) because they are a skill up item.

With the new guide posted on MMO-Champions, people are picking these up to jump start inscription. Remember the names of these people that buy 2-4 at a time from you. Add them to your friends list now. They are either the main or alt of one of the new players on your server.

The rush of new players

It looks like we should be expecting a rush of new players to the glyph market soon. The Greedy Goblin gave some step by step screen shots that produced a few. Not it looks like mmo-champion just released a guide. This new guide will reach a much larger group of people that will understand it less.

The think this new group of people are going to focus on are how much they made the first day and how fast they sold glyphs. If you can poison those things from the start they will not last long at all.

If someone jumps into the market and has a huge day the first day, it will stick with them for a long time. That is what drives them to stick it out when the market turns down. Looking at the results I had before, I would last weeks on break even profits and not think twice about it.

If they shoot for full coverage of all glyphs, they will get several sales that first hour. That is so exciting. The higher the buy out the more the excitement. Nothing better than looking at big sales before you even log out.

How do you poison those experiences? Help the good glyphs crash and deep undercut them when you see a new name post on them. Then reset the crappy glyphs that you can.

First impressions matter. What they see in the market this first time will last. If you crash the good glyphs, they will think they are worthless. If you reset the crap ones, they will be so excited to list some so high and they will curse the market when they fall back down.

I had a few leveling glyphs sell at fall back prices when I first got started and I got very attached to them. It took me a while to break out of thinking they were some how worth more than the others.

I am sitting good on my server. Competition is already fierce so it is a great time for them to come and play. My ideas are all theory craft and I don't plan on trying any of them. But it was interesting to think about.

Update: I wrote this before the guide was out but now that I see its up I have a few comments.

That threshold is way to high for my server. Even the lower one to drive out competition is not low enough to drive out competition on my server. I'm going to treat these guys just like all the other noobs that get QA for the first time.

I expect the market to dip a little for a few days and then back to normal for me. Good luck on your server.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Strange thing today

For the first time in a long time there were only 2471 glyphs on the AH after I finished posting. This was hovering in the 5000 range for a long time. I have 995 of them on the AH. So that puts 40% of them as my glyphs. Whats even stranger is that I raised my threshold up a gold this week so I posted less than I usually do.

I started buying herbs again because my stock of ink is getting low. The market felt a little dry but I was still able to pick up enough herbs at the prices I like.

No maintanance?

Normally I don't even log into wow the morning of server maintenance. They even told us it was more than a server reset. So I did a full posting of glyphs. I am writing this post as I check things. Because the server is still up my sales for glyphs are still rolling in. From midnight last night to now I have 669G in glyph sales.

Looking at my usual buys found me 27 stacks of herbs under market value. A new farmer (I hope) sent me 24 stacks of herbs COD. Tankard of terror almost fall off the AH. All the auctions that were up had expired during the night. So I flooded the market with what I had. I did over price them but just having a large number on the ah is what I was going for.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Buy: Tankard O' Terror

Thanks for the hot tip over at JMTC. These things are a limited time item thats BOE and ilvl 226. At the moment the market is flooded with these things. I am able to pick them up very cheap in trade.

This is my next big investment. I'll give an update on how many I have once I end my buying spree.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Keyword: crash glyph market

To crash the glyph market is to drive the price down so low that nobody wants to work the market. There are 2 ways to normaly do this. Post everything at a set price or deep undercutting. The lower you can go the better your results will be. But is its important that you must be getting your mats cheaper then your competition.

If your set price is dirt cheap and most glyphs sell for huge mark up, you will find your competition buying out to relist. I never do it this way. You would need to camp the AH and quickly replace any that got sold. This way only realy works if they undercut you or you have 100% uptime and prevent them from getting sales. I find that hard to do for any normal player.

The other way is deep undercuts. If your competition reposts several times a day, this will work wonders. If you undercut 1G every time you post, then the harder the two of you work then the faster the prices fall. If you post 5 times a day at 1G undercut, after 10 days even the most profitable glyph is dirt cheap.

If you are willing to crash the market, you need to be willing to survive of minimal profits. I would not post at a loss but I can go very low. This is why you need dirt cheap mats. If you move the market down to where profit is minimal, then the lower you can drive your costs the better. So be very careful if you go after someone that already controls the market.

Most of the time I do not crash the market. Someone else does that for me and I have more reserves and cheaper ink than any of them. I do run with a high undercut so when competition pickes up, it naturaly lowers the price for me.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Stash that gold

One thing I used to do was stash all my gold in my bank alts guild bank. Every time I would pass a mail box on any one of my characters, I would send all but 100G to my bank alt. Every time I was on my bank alt, I would put all but 100G of his in the guild bank.

I was making gold at a fairly good rate like most people and like most people I was spending it just as fast. Getting that gold out of sight and out of mind slowed down how fast I spent it. It also limited how much I would spend at a time. Any major purchase would require me to relog onto my banker and withdraw the gold.

Once I started saving it away I also put goals on that gold. If I knew I was saving for a Nobles deck and needed 7,000G (at the time), I would have to think about that when I pulled the gold from that account. In the long run I spent less and reached my goal faster.

Now that I move lots of gold I do keep more gold on a few of my characters. I need quick gold to make bulk purchases some times. Those chars that buy stuff have about 2k gold on them. My main now keeps about 10K on him incase I want to buy loot from someone in a raid. Everyone else sits under 300-400G when I log them off.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Skillet over buying ink/parchment

Sometimes Skillet will not refresh the buy list when you visit a vendor. So it will re buy all the same mats it picked up the first time. Most of the time it is stuff you need, but you still have to manage it in your inventory.

If you mouse over the vendor buy button, it will pop up with the items it will buy. You should have a good idea if its close or way off. If you just purchased all but 10% of your items and you have to make a second trip. Pay close attention to that tool tip. If the full mat list is still there, it will buy the stuff you already got. It will do it in the same order as it did before.

So if you run out of gold, bag space, or what ever else and it does not finish. Take a second look at that tool tip for the next purchase.

Here is what I do to refresh it. Open up the skillet shopping list then mouse over it. If that window is open then the tool tip will refresh for me and the purchase will be correct.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

I am not perfect

I do appreciate all the readers I have picked up from the start of the blog. I just wanted to remind everyone that this is my view of the market and ideas that I have tried. The way I work glyphs is my way. It may not be the best way or the perfect way, but it is how I do it. I do know I do some things different.

I am getting to that point where I may be reaching out to other markets. Markets where I don't have much experience. I am confident in my glyphs because I have solid results. When I started this blog, I talked about the ideas that worked and the ones that failed as I got into glyphs. I expect that I will make the same noob mistakes that many other people make in those new markets. In the end I will figure it out or walk away.

I mention that now because I may have some great ideas coming up on paper that sound very solid but are doomed to fail. So don't mistake the number of visitors that I have to indicate I know what I am talking about. Use your own judgement.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Picking new cuts

I am fairly new and inexperienced at the JC market. So remember that when you read anything I say about it. These are the things I do with it. They may be a huge mistake or I could be on the right track. One of the first things I had to deal with was picking a new cut.

You first need to know what your goal is. Are these cuts for yourself/friends or to make gold? One does not rule out the other but you usually end up giving on something. If its for you or your friend the choice is easier. Just pick the cuts you use the most and off you go.

If you are looking to make gold, different things need to be looked at. I started by looking at the cut gems that listed for the most. The mark up is higher to the profit is greater. How many sellers are listed? The more sellers, the more competition. So for my first few gems, I also looked at how many sellers and gems each had listed.

Now rule out any that look questionable to you. Is it a gem that someone would want. If you see one Tense Eye of Zul (10 hit/13 spell pen) for 250G its probably not going to sell. Who would buy that? This could turn out to be a very profitable gem. I have no idea. But for my first few gems, I want something that feels a little more useful.

As you start to pick up more and more cuts, try to get a few of the other colors. If you focus in one color of cuts too much its possible you will drive the cost up on them (from buying so many to cut and re-list). You will be set up much better if you give yourself that flexibility. If you end up prospecting later, you will end up with gems of all colors.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Reflections: Dream Shards

If you speculate on patch notes you will remember dream shards looked like a good investment. At the time the only thing they were used for were to learn new enchants. The upcoming patch notes said the existing enchants were going to be changed to use more of them. I bought them like mad and I advised my friends do to the same.

8.5-11G is what I paid for each one and I ended up with well over 300 shards. I think lots of people picked up on this and I know several blogs covered the idea. So after a huge spike on patch day the market crashed. The price settled at 13G. Not much of a profit. I decided that everyone had a huge stockpile and was watching the market.

I walked away for a few weeks. The new price was 15-16G each at this time so I would sell a few here and there. for the most part, I held onto my inventory.

The next patch came and it also should have increased shard prices with Ulduar release, Again people were thinking about shards and the prices stayed low. So gain I held onto most of my shards.

By now I was getting a little more aggressive in selling the shards. I would post them in stacks of 3 and 6 a little over market value. I could also catch the market when it would shift up. This didn't happen often and when it did, the market would crash by the end of the day.

About 3-4 weeks after the patch, the value of shards started to clime. Once they got up to 25-30G I started to liquidate what I had left. I still had 200 shards at this point and they ended up creating that huge profit I was looking for. It was just a few months later than I expected.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Thunderdome: 2 scribes enter, only one will leave

One common tactic in working the auction house is to drive your competition out. If they leave, you have it all to your self. The rewards can be huge if you do that and eventually become the major player. Sometime you have to drive off a major player and it could be more work than you think. People try to move into my glyphs all the time. It is a big market and no way can I control it all. Sometimes the market will crash and I wonder if someone is trying to drive me out or not.

So would it take to drive a player like me out of glyphs?

This can be harder than you think. Not all people play the glyph market like I do. When I moved in to the market someone was top dog and I don't see them any more. I see people that could have the potential to take the market, but I am already established. They would have made a lot of gold with out me here.

I have a stack of every glyph. That is a ton of inventory. If for some reason my competition won and I decided to leave the market, I am not going to let that inventory sit. All that would have to be sold. If I am exiting the market, the threshold is no longer an issue and the market could easily fall. My competition would have to wait that out.

I run the lowest threshold. well, almost. I see leveling glyphs way below cost and flooded all the time. In general my threshold is lower then everyone else's. It is still above what I think they pay for mats. Lats thing I want to do is post for less than it takes for them to make the glyphs. They would just crash the market and buy up my glyphs. It is still a profit for me but it adds time to myself and gives them a break.

I have the largest market coverage. I use 3 alts to post with and while I still need about 10-12 research glyphs, most people posting have not been doing it as long. Not many people track every glyph. If you were looking to drive me out, you need to cover all the glyphs I sell. Also be careful that I don't cover all the glyphs they sell.

I drive the prices down constantly. If you think driving the prices down is going to tick me off, think again. I run a 20-60 silver undercut. That pushes glyphs down fairly fast. The harder my competition works to undercut me, the faster the prices fall. The result is usually some part time players leave the market opening up the research glyphs to just me. Fewer people means more sales for me.

The thing with the lowest threshold is that my mats are cheaper. Sometime I have a farmer that sells to me direct. When I tell them I will take all you have, they are happy to give it to me. I can often get all 3 of the high yield herbs for the same price. I love buying lichbloom for the farmer price of adder's tongue. It is not very often that I resell it, but its extra profit when I do. I also check the AH several times a day for herb markets to crash or other farmers unloading under market price. I am probably a major factor keeping our herb prices stable.

I have a large stock of reserve herbs and ink. I have a 5 tab bank to hold my reserves when needed. It isn't full all the time but it is not uncommon for me to fill it with herbs when I catch 2-3 farmer dumps within a few days. I try hard to mill/ink it as quick as I can, but a few 120 stack purchases can take a while to melt. I also have a 2nd guild bank that holds reserve ink of the sea. On any given day I have 3000-6000 ink of the sea in the bank. This helps when herb prices are high or glyph demand spikes.

I have gold in reserve and fingers in other markets. If I ran out of all my inventory of glyphs and herbs and ink, and if my farmers disappeared, and if the herbs on the ah were way over priced, I would still have the gold to go toe to toe with anyone in the market. I have a 3 months head start on any new player to the market. Look at the advantage that gives me.

I am not saying that I cannot be beaten or that it is impossible. The odds are just in my favor. I have the time and the patience to go along with it. I read all the same sites and have access to all the same mods. I have access to all the same tricks. Its possible they learned everything from me. I am just saying that I will not be an easy target so they need to be prepared.

Welcome to the Thunderdome.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

A day of Silence

Please take a moment to think about the people that are important to you and remember those that have passed away.

I will be out of town for several days. I do have posts in the queue, but I will not be around for comments.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

KTQ: on the fly flexibility

One thing I like my KTQ script for is the ability to make adjustments to what I need. If I build a queue and for whatever reason its not what I want, I can clear it and start over.

what if you only have 30 min of crafting time but enough items in your queue to last an hour. You could easily just make the the first 1/2 of the list and do the other 1/2 next time. There is nothing wrong with that. I just do it a little different.

I usually craft either the top valued glyphs or the ones that sold the most. With KTQ I can set a threshold high and do a crafting pass. This catches the ones with the highest profit. Then I drop the threshold and try to craft a half stack. This will pick up any that almost sold out. When I run each one, I can play with the threshold and stack size to get the queue size that I want.

No need to only craft 10 glyphs if that's all it adds to the queue. Just clear it, adjust the numbers, and do it again. I still do a full crafting session when I have time. This will catch anything else.

This helps me keep the ones in stock that matter most.

Friday, September 18, 2009

KTQ: Thank you to my users

I do want to thank everyone for the thanks I have received for my KTQ mod. I know if it saved you as much work as it saved me then its a godsend. I wrote it because I saw one area of the system that took way too much manual work.

Many people are getting it to work with out any issues. But there are a good number of people that are having problems. My goal is to get it working with the common version of skillet that people already have (if that's possible). In the short term I will upload the exact version that I used to develop it for people that are dying to try it out.

With that said, I have not gotten much time to get back to this mod to work out the issues. Between work, the family, the dog, the raids, the guild drama, and camping the AH it is hard to find time to work on it. I have some real world issues that I am dealing with on top of it all.

This was a tool I could have kept to myself. But it has been very rewarding to see all the thank yous and stories about how it (and my blog) has helped you.

Update: Thanks Carbon. Yes I do have a copy of old versions of those mods that work http://badanatomy.wowstead.com/files/mods/othermods.zip

Keyword: Bulk2Mail

Bulk2Mail is actualy BulkMail2. I was just calling it the wrong thing for about a month. I don't know why I thought that was the name. That is an interesting way to mess it up. I knew I gave some details on this before but I'll take a moment to give the hilights.

The main reason I use this mod is that it allows me to auto mail stuff to alts. It lets you configure types of items to send to a character. You can either do item types like cloth/ore/enchant mats or set items like netherweave cloth. When you visit the mailbox, it will check your bags for stuff to send. One button allows you to just send it all. No mater how many items you have or how many targets you have, it is very quick.

This is great if you use one character to buy or snatch everything and send it off to various alts to craft it. You can even put the finished items into it so it gets sent to your main AH character.

So Bulk2Mail is the wrong name for it. Here is a link to get it downloaded: BulkMail2

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Wait, don't mill that yet!

I unloaded 20 stacks of lichbloom today. I buy adder/lich/icethorn when it dips under 20g a stack. Because lichbloom is normaly priced higher then that I try to save 1/2 a bank tab of it. I mill enough other herbs that I can let a little lichbloom collect dust. When the market price spikes I unload a little bit. I saw someone in trade dying to get some. I offered to sell at 35G a stack. He was shocked I had so much and asked how long it took me to farm it. I gladly told him I got it from a farmer.

So I made 300G profit on the deal by paying attention to trade. I also knew when the mats I had often jump in value. Most of the time I store my mats in either the most compact or final form as possible. Herbs get milled, leather gets made into heavy leather, and netherweave gets made into bolts. I also leave a little bit in raw form for situations like this. If I need them I will use them but most of the time you can only convert stuff one way.

If I do the math then 20 stacks of lichbloom will prabably make me over 800G as glyphs and snowfalls. But I have a large supply of ink, herbs and glyphs. The sell of those 20 stacks did not interupt my production so selling them gave me 700G I did not have. 700G that can buy me 35 stacks of herbs.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Discovering the epic gem market

I have to admit that I was very slow to jump onto epic gems. I had my hands full with inscription. I did level a JC a while back but have not done much with him. I have been slacking on doing my daily JC quests.

I had to take his tux off and get his gear back out of the bank. I just got my 4th token so it was time to pick a pattern. I went to the AH and did a QA summary scan. I saw a smooth kings amber listed at 230G with only 2 up. Raw I see this gem at 150G. So I buy one, go get the pattern, and cut it. Next morning its already sold for 225G.

I guess it has started. I am slowly discovering the epic gem market. I am going to take my profits and put them back into JC and see if I can get a large bankroll going with little investment. I hope I can take what I learned with inscription and apply it to epic gems.

Reflections: Things I tried before

At the moment I am working with lots of good ideas and big gold makers. I have focused on all the things that worked and have not taken many big risks. Before I found my grove, I would work on one big idea at a time. Some of them worked well and others not so well. Yet others I had the right idea but my timing was off.

So I am going to add a new occasional series called Reflections. These will be about past ideas and how they did or did not work out for me. A good deal of them are from interpreting patch notes. So the exact opportunity I was working on is not available but the ideas do repeat.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

KevTool NoobDetector now on curse

I just moved KTND to curse. Curse gives me better statistics on how often it gets downloaded. It had a few small changed that the previous download did not have. Thunderfury is now in the word list. I also fixed a bug where it would report an extra time on some other player. And I changed the color of the text to yellow.

I am about to rework the word list. If you have any suggested word to add that are work safe, feel free to leave them in a comment. I am reviewing my original list and taking out stuff that is just to common. "lol" for example. I use that enough that it was inflating my noob percent so it has to go.

I did change the way noob counts are recorded. Before it just recorded if once if anything in the message was noob. Now it counts how many unique items there is in the list. So someone that is spewing garbage gets a much larger noob score.

My logic could be flawed, but here is how I calculate the noob percent. I take all messages and subtract all CAPSLOCK and repeating messages to get my valid messages count. I then divide my noob count by the valid messages and that's the result. If the valid messages are 0 I do something different. So people that spam noob in CAPSLOCK over and over will greatly inflate the noob score.

Will the good sellers please stand up?

I hate to micro manage things. If I can think up a process or method to do something for me, I will do it. I removed myself from the details of my glyphs a while ago. I have configured 2 groups for posting glyphs. A single and a double ink group so I can manage the threshold differently. When I have to think about my costs then I just lump them all into the 2 ink + 50 silver group. That's simple.

I have QA to post everything at whatever price it wants to. I have KTQ to craft how ever much of anything it wants. I have auctioneer snatch to buy as many herbs as it wants. The only time I have to think is when I decide what alt gets what glyph. I know I could automate that too but I recently decided to make that a little more fluid.

My previous method was the light colored ones go to one alt, the red and pink to another, and everything else stays on the crafter. Its click by colors. Not much thinking but that's how I did it. I am looking to get out of the camper game and into the undercutting game, but while I am still camping I wanted to move my most profitable glyphs to a new alt with out much work.

I could mouse over every one to see the tooltip but I want to do something simpler. That's where my mod gets to save me yet again. I let it craft the better ones first and then move those to that alt. Then I return and craft everything else. I have 2 types of glyphs to move.

1) 10G or more glyphs. The glyphs with the high markup. Anything over 10G gets crafted first. All of those get moved over to that alt. I can adjust this value to give him more or less of my market. This sell with a huge profit so I want to stay on top of them

2) The sell-outs. The glyphs that just sell like mad. After my 2nd craft session, I move every new stack that has 10 or more glyphs to that alt. These move in high volume so I want to stay on top of them.

After a few nights of this the good glyphs all end up on that new alt. There are 2 advantages of this. First is the new name. All my other guys are on everyone else's friend lists. That is the camping game. This only works so long but it can catch them off guard. The other is all my best selling and high profit glyphs are on one char. I can work those glyphs harder and its OK if I let the others slide a little bit. I still keep coverage of them all, but the new guy will never miss a posting time.

Now if I have 5 min to slip in and post, I hit this one char and he took care of all the glyphs that matter. It is also more exciting to check his mailbox. The gold just flows in.

I was able to take the process of crafting glyphs with my KTQ mod and by playing with the threshold, I saved myself a ton of micro managing. I know eventually that char will get bloated with glyphs. But this process is simple enough that I can move everything off of him back to the other guys and start the process over the next day.

I spend more time camping the glyphs that make me the most gold but also have the ability to cover the rest of the market.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Contracting people to work markets (results)

A week ago I saw someone wanting about 1000g in trade. I got his professions from him and ended up sugesting that he makes Eternal Belt Buckles. I made him agree to pay me 10% of his proffits after a week.

A week later he made about 3000g so I made 300G. My next tip was to install LilSparky's Workshop. I did have him link black smithing to me and it looked like lilsparky showed several things that would turn a profit. I started to name off several things and decided to give him a real tip. Thats when I had him install that mod.


KTQ: Kev Tool Queue Tips

Like any command line mod, you can put commands in macros.

I have a group in place for gems. Several people manage the different colors differently. I would use a macro like this:

/ktq queue 5 solid sky saphire
/ktq queue 2 forest emerald
/ktq queue 3 monarch topaz
/ktq queue 6 scarlet ruby

Now looking at this, you can do the same thing for other professions.
/ktq queue 20 netherweave bag
/ktq queue 5 frostweave bag


Another feature it provides is adding bonus items for those that sell out. Its a simple feature and here is another way to do that.

/ktq queue 3 glyphs
/ktq queue 14 glyphs

It will queue up for items that you have less then 3 of and then it will do the same for a stack of 14. So the result is if something sells out, it will queue up 17 of them. If you have 1 it will queue up 15 for you.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

You never know

Sometimes you make a sale that just shocks you. Then is shocks you even more that people do it over and over again. Abyss Crystals was a hot item for me before they started to crash. What I would do is post them in stacks of 6 with a 30% mark up and they would sell. Thats not a small purchase and I thought the exceptionaly high price on that would give people some pause.

This stuff does not happen every night. It could go weeks and I was not in a rush to sell them. One weekend I sold 3 stacks like that. It would be one thing if the stack of 6 was the only thing up, but that was not the case. Most of the time I see lots of single stacks still up when I go to collect my gold. It worked because I was the only one that ever posted a stack of 6.

A more recent one is parchment. It's not a big seller. I'm just more shocked that it sells at all. 4 times in the last 2 weeks I have sold a 50 silver parchment for 9G. This is like thread that you buy from a vender. I got a few screen shots of it.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Keyword: carpet bomb auction house

To carpet bomb auction house is to post a wide spread of items. This is commonly used with glyphs and jems. The way it works is to take just a few of every glyph or every gem you can cut and post all of them on the AH.

I carpet bomb glyphs. I take 2 of every glyph I can make and post them all on the AH. I under cut every glyph by a set amount. Someone like me that carpet bombs are playing the numbers. We expect so may people to buy our item but with so many categories and options, you never know what ones will sell that day. So by posting a glyph of each type, I know I will get the next sell no mater what glyph is purchased. I will keep getting sells until someone undercuts me.

In a market where you are the only one carpet bombing, you will have huge rewards with a small time investment. If everyone else does the same thing, you will have to post more often. I carpet bomb around 5 times a day at key times.

Sometimes I will have 1200+ glyphs on the AH from carpet bombing it. The people that are the best at this use Auctioneer's batch posting or Quick Auction 2 to do it. I bet other mods can do it, these two are the ones I have used. I prefer QA for glyphs.

Friday, September 11, 2009

Buying Herbs for ink

Graylo posted a comment looking for a mod to help decide the cheapest way to get the inks off the AH at the current market price. I take a different look at this. I feel that if you are buying herbs of the AH on the spot to make your glyphs you are over paying for them. It would be best to get a farmer to send them to you or just buy the herbs when they are low.

I am a firm believer in having a large stock of ink of the sea. Keep 7 days worth of ink in stock when you can. It is a buffer between you and high prices. It also gives you the supply you need when demand spikes.

I only buy the northrend herbs and use the ink trader for the other ink. Snowfall ink can be an issue for many scribes. You need to decide on the bulk value of it. Just because I see it on the AH for 18G does not mean that I can sell 6 stacks of it for 18G. The market value is around 15G so I supply it to my buyer for 13G each. I know at that price he will buy every stack I send him. Even when the ah dips down to 12G (from me driving it down), he will still pick it up. I send him 3 stacks a day so he does not even have to look at the AH.

Because I can sell my snowfall ink, I prefer the high yield herbs like lichbloom/icethorn/adder's tongue (but at the right price, I will buy the others too). When I had a farmer I made it clear to him that all I wanted was the adders at a set price. I would take the other two herbs only if it was for the same price. As long as I took his entire inventory, he was happy to give it all to me for that price. I do the same on the AH. Lichbloom will usually sell for 50-100% more then the other two. But when it matches the others, I will buy it just as fast.

Instead of deciding how much my ink will cost me on the fly at current AH prices, I set how cheap I will get it a long time ago. I look at my inventory to decide if I am paying too much or not enough for it. Sometimes I will buy out the entire auction house because of a undercutting war or farmer flooding it. It can be intimidating to buy that much at once, but after you do it several times you get use to it.

I can easily go a week without buying herbs off the AH. I only do this when prices are too high and in that case, I do let my stock run low. That is exactly why I have it. I don't build that stockpile of ink so that I don't have to buy it but once a week. I am constantly buying it and it gives me the ability to only buy it when it is cheap.

I do use 30 stacks of ink a day on average (100 stacks of herbs). I have to have a huge stockpile. Even if you are small time, you can use that 7 day metric as how much you should have in stock. You would be able to use a much lower threshold then I do (unless someone like me buys it as much as I do). I would like to say I pay less than market price, but I'm one of the major players that holds market price for herbs where it is.

Featured Mod: Kev Tool Queue Features

The main feature of this mod is that it quickly queues up lots of items in a generic way for you to craft with skillet.

So the main command is "/KTQ QUEUE [NUMBER] [KEYWORD]"

So any item that partially matches that keyword will be added to the queue. I did start with 3 groups of items but later opened it up to any keyword search. The build in groups are GLYPHS, EPICGEMS, RAREGEMS. I know its silly to have a group called glyphs when the work glyph will work as a keyword and get them all. I already had that group in place before the keyword thing so I left it.

Because its a keyword match, it does a live check of your craft list. If you don't know it, it does not try to queue it. If blizzard adds something new, this should still work and pick up the new thing.

I do have other features built in to target the different ways people make glyphs. It can be set up to craft extra items when you run out. If you have 0 in stock, it can add 2 extra to the queue. It has a threshold feature that will allow it to check your recent Auctioneer scan and only craft items you find to be profitable. This works best with glyphs and gems where the mats for everything is basically a set cost.

It will also skip singles if you want. When I was making 14 at a time by hand, I would often just skip of the ones I needed to craft only one of. I craft them all now that its automated but it was an easy feature to add.

This should get you up to speed on what it can do. I'll give you power users some advanced tips later.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Armor Penetration Nerf in 3.2.2

This is something to watch. At the moment some classes are gearing armor penetration like mad. After that patch be ready for people to pull out that "just in case" gear they collected and get it enchanted. The real thing to watch here are the people that will re-gem.

I don't know the gem market but I can tell this will have an impact on it. Both cut and uncut gems will shoot up in demand the first days after the change.

Featured Mod: Kev Tool Queue

If you have tried to recreate some of the processes I do in my glyph factory I am sure you have ran into some of the same issues that I have. Building my queue of glyphs to make was one of the most repetitive and time consuming parts of the system. This mod made that step instant for me.

Kev Tool Queue (KTQ) will auto queue items that match a keyword into skillet. You tell it how many you want to have and it will check with altaholic to see how many you already have. It will then only craft the ones you need. It also has optional support for auctioneer to check prices and have it skip any item listed too low. You can use any keyword, but it has a few built in.

The beauty of this mod is its simplicity. It does have a few simple features that give it a lot of power. Here is a quick sample of the commands. I will be covering more features over the next few days and show you how to get more out of it.

Open up your tradeskill window in skillet and for inscription type this command:
/KTQ QUEUE 2 GLYPH

So the syntax is like this:
/KTQ QUEUE [number to queue] [keywork to match]

Here is a download link: KevToolQueue (Altaholic and Skillet are required, so is auctioneer if you use the threshold)
/KTQ HELP for more info

Give me a few days to get several posts up about it. They should answer most of the questions you will have. Feel free to play with it.

UPDATE3: Curse has approved it so I took down the direct link.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Gold Report

A quick review for the newer readers. I hit Professional Grand Master Inscription on 6-28-09. That was the point I took inscription seriously on the Auction House (I started working other markets shortly after that). That was about 10 weeks ago. The progress I made was huge. I would like to thank Greedy Goblin and Just My Two Copper Forums for showing me this market.

Today I had 95,000g in the guild vault. I tend to keep most my gold there. My main holds on to 12k gold in case I am ever in a raid and want to purchase a drop. There is about 6-7k gold combined on the other characters. They are each dedicated to different markets so have the gold to buy the stuff they usually buy in bulk.

I would love to count some of the gold I spent in my total but that would be cheating. I dropped 60k gold on the ToC crafted robe and bracers when I was told nobody could get them. I handed 20k as a gift to some friends and I sent 5k to my inactive 2nd account to keep it safe. That's 85k gold missing from my total.

So after 10 weeks of mostly inscription and a few other markets I have 113,500g to put me at 11.35k gold a week in savings. If I was to include the splurging of gold that number would be 198,500g (19.85G weekly income). If only I would have held onto that gold, I would have hit the gold cap in the next 2 weeks (3 months total).

I know I need to move from camping the AH to just undercutting it for 2 days but I look at that income and hate to mess with something that is working so well. I would bet that I would make more gold because I would spend just as much time. The big difference is how many more markets I could work. I have some very profitable ones just collecting mats because my scribe spends all his time milling/inking/glyphing.

Crafting Glyphs: Anything thats worth 10G method

The full stack method was one where every single glyph gets created and stashed in your inventory. A variation on that is to only craft stuff worth more then 10G (or whatever price you pick). This is a better choice when ink is in short supply. You need every sale to count and have little room for waste in your budget.


This is also a great system if you keep all your inventory on the AH. If you keep cycling it onto the ah, this will help you only craft the stuff you plan on posting. If you do the cancel/repost cycle on one char, you will probably use this method.


If you are lucky and on a server without a lot of undercutting going on. One where you can post once for 48 hours. This will shine for you. You would still use altaholic for the counts. To check prices with out having to search each one by hand, use the QA summary page or the little sparky workshop. Both will give you the price of every glyph in a list.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Featured Mod: Skillet_IStat

I know you guys are eager to see my new mod but here is another small mod that I picked up that should be released first. Skillet_IStat from TekNoir. He is retiring from the AH market so he thought it was time to share this. He has no plans to support it and that is where I come in.

The main feature I am looking at is the ability for it to query altaholic and put your item count into the name of the skill. So now you can just look at your skillet window and see how much you have of every item in stock. I hacked skillet to do that a while ago and didn't know how to make it a different mod like TekNoir did. He has some interfaces with other mods too, but the item count is huge for the way many inscriptioinists work with skillet.

I wanted to get this out first because it complements what my mod is intended to do. There are some people where I think my mod would be over kill and this mod would serve the needs they have.

Here is a direct link to the download: Skillet_IStats

Crafting Glyphs: Full Stack Method

I have seen many different ways that people use to decide what glyphs to craft. I plan to talk about the details of all the ones I can think of in later posts. I am going to start with the one I use and the one that is related the mod I wrote. I am posting about this before I talk about the mod so you understand the power of the mod a little better.

The full stack method is fairly simple. You don't have to make full stacks, any set number will work and it will depend on your market. I use a stack of 14. Some do 2-3 and others will do the full 20. The idea is you make a full stack and the next time you craft you fill that stack back up.

This way you are restocking inventory. It is very easy to see how many of an item you have and knowing how many you need to restock with. Altaholic is the mod I use to see item count. It is great to use even if you don't have any alts. After you crafted that next batch, every time you restock, you are making a glyph that sold. It is the backwards way to track sales but it works.

When you sit down to do your crafting, anything that has a full stack in your inventory is something that does not sell well. The number you craft shows you how well it did. All the single and double glyphs that you craft show you how many you sell by having a wide spread. Those are the strange spec or worthless glyphs that nobody buys very often. The more different glyphs you post then the more of these sells you will get.

The glyphs that you have to craft several of are your popular ones. If you ever have to craft a full stack, you know that you ran out of that item. This would be a good item to craft extras for. The more glyphs I craft, the more extra glyphs I craft. I bet I make 20% more of the item I sell out of. Let the stack size tell you whats going on.

If I craft every single glyph in my craft list. I can mindlessly just check the count on each one. Some glyphs sell for nothing and other for a bit more. There are also those few glyphs that you never know what price it will go for today. Those are the glyphs that get misses when you only craft the good sellers. When a glyph like that hits a dry spell, it falls out of sight and you are not there to get sales when it recovers. If you use the stack sizes, you are ready for any glyph to bounce back.

This system is very mindless. I don't care what sells or for how much. I don't care how often something sells. I don't care what the popular thing to do is. I don't care whats a raid or pvp glyph. I don't care if its a good or bad one. All I care about is getting my stack full every time I craft.

Pro Tip: Instead of crafting the glyphs that sell for nothing, buy them off the AH if you can get them for less then the cost of mats.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Featured Mod: KevTool NoobDetector

This mod watches all your chat channels and tracks stupid things people say. You can shift click the name to see a percentage that will tell how much of a noob they are. The word list is a work in prorgess and the formula could use some work but it is tracking and reporting noobness.

Install this mod and it will track in the background. Let it gather some data and later shift click the names in chat. It watches key words, use of caps, and repeating the same thing over and over. I spent some time in the barrens while testing it and picked up a lot of key phrases to use. And yes, I do know that it will report more then 100% noob. Watch out for those guys.

Here is a direct link to download my initial release: KevTool NoobDetector

This mod was inspired by this post over at the Greedy Goblin and is a shameless attempt to drive trafic to my site. It has nothing to do with working the auction house or making gold. But have fun with it. Once I get a good set of sample data (more than today) I will see if I can make it more accurate.

Contracting people to work markets.

I see a few markets I need to get into but I do not have the patterns/professions to work them in bulk. I know I can get others to make that stuff, but I'm behind on my own crafting. Then I saw someone asking for gold in trade.

He was asking nice enough and was max level. I asked him what his professions were. One of them he linked was one that I did not have and covered a market that I was not in. I know I could have set him up to make what I needed but I didn't want to bother with that. What I did instead was offer him a deal.

I told him I could show him a good way to make gold if he agreed to pay me 10% of his profits for the first week. Told him we would use the honor system. He was a bit confused at first what I was talking about. So I explained it again. He only had to pay me if he made gold so if it did not work, he did not have to pay me anything. I also expected the odds of getting any gold to be slim.

The next day I log in on that character I was talking with him on and he whispered me. He was so excited that it was working. It worked exactly like I said it would and he was pumped. He told me gold was coming my way at the end of the week. I told him to go make me a lot of gold.

After the week is up, I'll let you know if he got any gold to me.

Are you ready?

I talked about the different phases of selling glyphs. I don't know how true they hold, but that's how I progressed from one to another. I would get settled in how I was doing things then something small clicked and I took it to a new level.

One important detail in my process is how I decide what glyphs to craft. The system is so very simple. I start with a stack of every glyph I can possibly make. Then I go sell a many of them as I can. It is a great system when you are moving in bulk. The details of what gets sold are managed for you just by managing your stack size.

The mod I am working on fits into that system. I saw when I opened it up to some beta users that several people jumped onto this system of doing things. They all mentioned how much ink it would take and how much they needed. If you read my early posts you know that one thing that is important to my process is the back stock of ink that I keep. So when they start to mention how much more ink they need a few warning bells went of.

I make a lot of gold by catching the market when my competition is unprepared. I can tell when they run out of ink. I can tell when the herbs are too high for them to buy. They leave the market to me. Prices go up and more and more stuff list at fall back prices. I keep over a weeks supply of ink ready to go.

The last thing you want to do is invest you stock of ink into glyphs that will not sell when you need it to turn a profit on other glyphs. This system has an investment cost. I make glyphs that I do not expect to sell. The cost of gold is worth the time it will save but I never cut into important stock I needed.

If you are ready to make that jump then go for it. Do not let me stop you. It a great method if your operation is in place to support it.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Farming Crystallized Fires

Just my two copper featured this spot to farm eternal fires in storm peaks. Its in the little cave in the north east end of the map. You see 2 caves. One has eternal air and the other eternal fire. That is the best place in the game to farm eternal fire.

If you take the right class its almost insane. As a ret pally you can mow them down non stop. even pulling 2-3 at a time. The do a little stun but your probably waiting for a cooldown anyway. You can kill them almost at a fast pace as you race up and down that cave. The faster you can kill them, the faster they spawn. My record farming session got me an eternal every 4 minutes.

There is a camp close by so you can go vendor,repair, send mail and get back to it. Even when when you have to share the cave, the rate you get eternals is very fast. If you can do a zone coverage, you will both make out better then racing from mob to mob.

I used to make this my afk spot. After raids or while waiting on groups to get started, I would just work that cave. The greys alone turn a good deal of gold.

I tried that same thing on my priest because I was in the area and needed 2 eternals. It turned out to be very frustrating. The stuns and constant adds were just to annoying. So if you struggle there, try an alt instead. The drop rate is still good, just have to be killing them fast.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Understanding bulk purchases

Whenever I see someone trying to buy in bulk it makes me wonder what they are up to. They want that item for a reason. When they are asking near market value it makes me wonder even more. In the markets I work, its easy to spot what they plan to do with it. Some supplemental items tip you off.

If I see someone asking for adders/lichbloom/icethorn I think inscription. If they add eternal life I know its for darkmoon cards. If the request has frost lotus, he is an alchemist. If they are working the darkmoon cards, I can offer them snowfall ink. If he is an alchemist and is looking more for icethorn and lichbloom at the right price, I will offer him some of mine.

Next time you see someone asking for something in bulk, try to figure out why. Either he has a market he is working or its for personal reasons. Your competition could be tipping you off to a big market that you don't know about yet.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Keyword: auction house banker

This site is dedicated to the things I experience while working the auction house on my banker. I do pay attention to the web stats to see what is driving people to my blog. One such stat is search keywords. Searching for my auction house banker brings up my blog on google.

Sometimes I see other key words that bring people here. I am going to start a new series dedicated to the keywords that drive people to this site. At the moment it is a small list but expect it to be a re-occurring topic.

If people are searching for something and ending up on my site indicate that people would be interested in more details on that subject. This should also improve my ranking on those search terms.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Breaking New Ground

The way I am making gold with inscription is not new. Many people before me did the same thing and shared the results. The process has changed over time as new people try it out and discover different ways of doing things. I saw myself as one of those people. I jumped into the system and took a good hard look at it. I picked at the details and tried different things. I also took a step back and looked at the big picture.

Early on I was struggling with a part of the process that just took too much time. What do I craft? I tried a few ways on my own and I tried the ways others were doing it.

My first method was to recraft anything that sold. When I collected gold from my mailbox, I would queue up each sale in skillet and craft it later. It was simple but it was easy to miss things. If I let something sell out, I never knew to recraft it.

Several people use altaholic to show how many of something you have in the tooltip. Works great even if you don't use alts. I would then walk the list of glyphs and make a few of those that listed over 5g. I did that every few days and I was still crafting from my sales.

A method I saw the big players suggest over and over is set stack sizes. The idea here is you have a set number of every glyph. When you go to recraft, you fill those stacks back up. You are only crafting the ones that sold at that point without tracking sales. I started small and worked up but I quickly saw how much time it took to check each stack and queue up the amount needed. As I looked at that process, the pieces of it were very simple.

Select a glyph, mouse over it in the skill window, get the total count, subtract that value from your desired stack size, queue that many items. Then repeat. This required no judgement or thinking. It was a process. A very exact set of steps. I knew this could be automated.

After hunting for someone else to automate this I broke down and did it myself. I interfaced directly with the mods that I was using. The result was a very small script that would do exactly what I did manually. It did in a matter of second something that took a large chunk of my time to do. Over the last few weeks I have used it and shared it with one or 2 people that were grateful for the script.

This is my chance to give back to all those that provided me with the great information that got me to where I am in the glyph market. I am working on cleaning this script up and releasing it as a mod. Consider it in early beta now with a full release down the road. I will give more details on it later.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The Power of Quick Auctions 2

This is the mod that makes you a rock star at posting glyphs. I talked about QA before, but a update has been released for it a while ago. It has moved from the command line to a gui to manage your items.

You do have to make a group for your glyphs and add them all to it. I did not like that idea at first but the author made it easy to add everything at once. When you first start out put everything in the same group. More experienced glyphers will create a group for single and double ink glyphs and manage the threshold differently.

One thing that QA2 does better then QA is posting faster. It had a multi threaded posting ability that allow it to post several auctions at the same time. The speed is very fast. If you leave it a good deal of bag space, it is even faster. I think it uses all your empty bag slots to split different stacks at the same time now.

The power behind this mod is how easily it lets you post all your glyphs at once. You run up to the AH and click the post button. It does a quick scan of the glyphs on the AH then it post yours faster than any other mod I know. If your competition is using anything else or doing it by hand, they will not be able to keep up with you.

Do not overlook its ability to cancel auctions you are undercut on too. If you keep your inventory on the AH, this is a life saver. It will check each glyph for you to see if its had been undercut. If it is undercut and it can post a lower priced one, it will auto cancel the auction for you. If someone undercut lower then your min price, it will just leave it there. and if you are the only person up, it will cancel it so you can repost at a high price.

This is a powerful weapon that in one person hand can easily give them the market. At the same time, if too many people use it too aggressive the market will crash by the constant undercutting. My next post I will give info about the weaknesses of QA.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Profit from free enchants

If you keep your eyes on the trade channel you can find some realy good deals. One of my favorite that a lot of people do not pick up on are the people giving away good enchants. It is very common for people power leveling encahnting to just give enchants away. Any enchant those people can not give away gets burned up over and over on some item in their bag.

Sometimes they offer a good encahnt for free. If you are quick to spot this you can grab several scrolls for them to enchant. I can usualy get 5 at a time when I spot this deal. Then sell them in the next few days for 60-90G each.

A lot of people still don't know how to enchant a scroll or that it still gives a skill up. Even if you have to buy the blank off of the AH it is still easy gold when you spot it. I bet I made 1.5k gold off this in the last year.