KevTool Queue (KTQ)

When I got into the WoW auction house business, I found a community of other auctioneers. This community was willing to teach and share their ideas with others. I received lots of help and before I knew it, I was running a very large and successful auction house business.  I eventually started this blog and was very active in that community helping others.

As I started dealing with glyphs on a large scale, I found that the manual steps in my process became very tedious. I knew there had to be a better way. I think I spent 2-3 hours doing inventory and building the list of things I needed to make. I never wanted to do that again.  So I wrote a little script to do the work for me. Once I did that, I could do it daily and that's exactly what I did.

I used it for about 2 months and my business flourished. I started sharing it with other and eventually released it as KevTool Queue. This is something that I easily could have kept to myself but I wanted to give back to the community. It was a huge hit. Even though my competitors started using my tool, I know I made the right decision. I know I made a positive impact on a lot of players. Although I stopped playing wow years ago, my contribution continues to make a difference.

I stopped development on the tool when I left but I have been approached by other authors asking to contribute to my mod. I feel very honored that someone else wanted to contribute to the project that I started. AsaAyers was the first author to contribute to KTQ on Curse. Although KTQ was flagged as abandoned on Curse, I expect that others in the community kept it alive within the forums of the auction community. I want to thank those unknown authors for that work.

More recently, I was approached by another author that would like to pick up the project and continue the work I was doing. Alisonnic has picked up development and reactivated the project on Curse. Seeing that this mod is still important and making a positive impact to others means a lot.  Thank you Alisonnic for doing that. I would like to extend that thank you to anyone else that has contributed to this project.

Creature of habit

I am very much a creature of habit or I run on auto pilot sometimes. There are times when I am driving someplace and the destination takes the same path that I take to work. I will catch myself trying to finish the route to work and almost miss the path to my target destination. I eat at the same place almost every day. It's a fast food place 1/2 block from work. I also refill my drink as I leave every time.


Today I walked out the door and could not remember if I just filled up my drink or not. I look at the drink and it is full so I must have done that. Then I remember that I did the exact same thing the day before. So I let my mind wonder about other time I have done that or other things I do that with.

A few weeks ago, that was how I ran my glyphs. Total auto pilot. I ran a tight schedule for so long that it became part of my day. Next thing I knew every thing I did to make glyphs was mindless and just doing the motions. I am off that schedule now but I could easily fall back into it. That had a big part to play in how I could keep such a big glyph opperation going for so long.


I remember talking about it to my wife about what I was doing. I basicly said I was spending more time doing this than anyone else possibly could. A good deal of the time was 1/2 afk.

Getting back into things

I am getting back into making gold again. I am going to try and expand out from my usual tricks. I want to be one of those people that only works the ah for 30 min a day and still manages to make gold. I don't think I am near as efficient as I should be.


I'm going to step down as the guys that controls the glyph market. I put in my time and I made my gold. I am not walking away from it as much as cutting the amount of time I devote to it. One way is to not sell as many cheap glyphs. So I am going to raise my threshold a little bit. Everyone else can battle out at the bottom. But I will be there on the glyphs that can't be held down or when the prices bounce up or gets reset.

One of the big advantages I had with glyphs was time and patience. I had several things pop up the last 2 weeks that pulled me away from the AH when I would normally be posting and reposting. I just did not have the time. Now that I am getting some of that time back, I think I want to devote it to new areas of the AH. Try and make each chunk of time dedicated to something different, other than just relisting glyphs.

After a few weeks, I will know what is and is not working. I can make some adjustments from that. I am also going to change how much information I give about the things I am working. I love to share information but it also introduces those things to my competition. It makes it hard to tell you how well it worked when I spoiled my results by sharing the information too soon.

When I discover a new market, I will toss it into the queue about 3 weeks out. When I see it publish, I will follow it up with my results.

Does your gold per hour add up

We all know there are several way to make gold in wow. It is very easy for us to latch onto one thing and get stuck on it. It is also easy for us to over work that one thing. We do that because we are still making gold. We don't pay attention to how much extra time we spend to make that extra little bit of gold. Time that could be better spent making more gold doing other things.



I mad this quick little chart to illustrate my point.

Someone could be making a killing working the AH. The gold per hour is great at first but as the day goes on and you have picked all the easy profits, you have to work harder to make more gold. The real profits were made when you first started.

Another person could just farm constantly. The gold per hour is no place close to that person working the AH when they start. But as time goes on there is a point where the farmer is making more gold in the same time as the person camping the AH.

You can make the best out of this by starting with the items that make the most gold per hour and knowing when to switch to something else. You may feel like you are doing nothing and making gold while you camp the AH but if you went out and did something your profits would greatly increase.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.