Greedy Goblin

Monday, February 9, 2009

Welcome to Hell

On Saturday I've started my new character in Magtheridon-EU, ally side. A piece of information for the size of challenge: WowJutsu knows about 7000 players, 4% of them is ally. Of course WowJutsu tracks raiders, so there are lot of low level characters.

The first impression of the AH: 1700 auctions! Ten times smaller than I used to. Welcome to Hell!

The surprising thing is: low level materials (copper ore, peacebloom and such) are cheap as dirt. Outland materials are extremely expensive, or non-existent. The reason: PvP server. "World PvP" is an euphemism for ganking, on every server. But on Maghteridon it means "Horde ganks Ally bigtime". So the resources of Outland are very hard to get. Why Outland? In the old world the players are too scattered to provide enough fun for the gankers, while in Northrend the players are too high level to give the feeling of omnipotency to the ganker. So Outland remains. Result: casual players roll new character, play until Outland, get ganked to the dirt and either transfer away, stop playing or roll a new alt.

Northrend inscription research needs lvl 68 (weeks of corpserunning), and I saw no Outland herbs to produce DK glyphs. There goes my glyph industry. Something tells me that it won't be easy to make 20K/week. :-)

However I'm far from being hopeless. I already found an important thing: If you go to a new server for any purposes (reroller to other faction for example), no matter what class you want to play, roll a Death Knight. You can roll a DK on any server, any side, if you have a lvl55 characther on any realm. What do you get?
  • 25G quest rewards from the DK start chain
  • a lvl 58 char that can go to Outland, level any tradeskill to 375, providing your lvl1 main money.
  • all fly points. You can fly to Booty Bay to trade in the neutral AH
  • A full set of green and a full set of blue items from quest reward. You can sell either (or both) sets for gold. I could not try it but many people says you can't disenchant them
  • 100% speed ground mount, you can move fast in the cities
  • 4 12 slot bags
Alltogether: a DK is a perfect bank alt. I rolled a Night Elf, due to two racials: wisp form (faster corpserun) and shadowmeld. They already served me well on my way from the Dark Portal to Shattrath where I left my HS.

Auctioneer needs days to get the AH prices so I cannot buy low and sell high since I don't know how much is low and high. But I already started some business: bought first aid books and offered them on the alliance AH, bought different kind of cats and offered them on the neutral AH. They sold in a couple hours. To increase this business, I bought more cats, and also moths and owls. Found out that:
  • Neutral AH has 15% cut, instead of 5% like normal AH. Damn greedy goblins!
  • Booty bay is not the only place for neutral AH. The Everlook AH is much more convenient.

After another bunch of alliance-only pets were sold during the night (300G wealth), I scanned the AH again and found that there are some cloths available, but bag prices are off the charts (80G for a 16 slot bag???) so I decided to be tailor/[dis]enchanter. Bought some linen cloths and started leveling tailoring. Of course created lot of Brown linen robe for disenchanting.

My First aid books also sold in the Alliance AH, so I went for another, larger supply.

On Sunday I've created a bank alt, Tritona. She is draenei, so she can buy Moths for me. Visiting Exodar is the hardest since you have to take a boat to go there. She will save me from that and also provide storage space. The alliance-only pets sell like candy in the neutral AH, so I buy bigger stacks of them, therefore I'll need extra space. The Tritona-experience was shocking. In Silvermoon City there are always bank-alts. I meet them, I see them, I even know some of them. On Maghteridon-EU, Tritona was the only character in Exodar. I've never seen anyone else there. OK it's a bit out of everything, but isn't it the perfect spot for a bank alt?

I'm also selling 20 slot mining and enchanting bags that I buy in Hellfire Peninsula. I make 15-20G profit on each.

I managed to level my tailoring to slvl 160 until I ran out of cloth. I will continue it later.

Monday morning I had 220G. Not bad after half-leveling tradeskills on the "hell" server/side, with a 2 days old character.

18 comments:

Carra said...

1700 auctions, mmm. That's less then twice what I put on the AH on a good day.

I see you've got some good ideas though. Most gold at low leveles can be made by playing courier. Buying cats and putting them an the neutral AH.

One more suggestion: recipees. I always used to buy some recipees when I'm in a quest zone. People don't want to run half the world getting all their recipees. And some recipees are Alliance only too.

Anonymous said...

Nice idea at having a DK bank alt never really thought of that lol.

I have my gnome lvl 1 rogue and will keep him he has a guild bank and full slots as well as a tuxedo, monicle, antique silver cuff links and some ring i got.

hound said...

Seems that you just can't keep a "good" goblin down, eh?

Marc said...

This is a brilliant project, by the way. Starting from scratch is going to be a fascinating experience and will prove to your readers that you can make money on any server/faction if you just work smart.

Anonymous said...

Actually, starter DK gear cannot be disenchanted and vendors for coppers...

Anonymous said...

Interesting post

After reading your post, I started an orc DK on this server to scan the prices on the Horde AH; the horde here has 7k players, and I think the prices over there match overall 'normal' prices we will see on a balanced server in the future.
I think that on this server (horde) price variations are lesser than on a balanced server. (more people trading in one AH means a more balanced economy).
Maybe I'm gonna start also an alt on my friends account to trade in between horde and alliance (windowed mode, wow 2x launched); you just sell expensive stuff on the Goblin AH for 1 silver to get rid of the 15% cut and buy it immediatly out with your friends alt. However, I don't think there's huge potential on this server because the Allies just lack purchasing power due to a way too low gold supply.

Gevlon said...

@Smoky: I'm not high enough enchanter to check that, will do. If anyone actually tried to DE such items and failed, please write it down.

@Ganstra: I would hardly suggest not to trade for 1 s in the common AH. The 1 hour waiting was introduced exactly against such behavior. Your actions will be considered goldselling (as 1 of the accounts get valuable item from the other for silvers) and both accounts will be banned.

Anonymous said...

Ironforge is the Preferred Home of Alliance Bank Alts™, because of the extremely short travel path between bank, AH, and Mailbox, and because of the cities popularity with high level alliance toons as well (better for in person transactions!) Quick, no-FP access to Stormwind is just a tram away, and the forge/anvil is nearby if you ever need to commission some mining/smithing. Exodar is a sprawling mess, and nobody ever goes there to boot.

There's a vendor in Stormwind with tons of quest reward recipes - a few are alliance only iirc. Try sending those to the neutral.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon:

I think that trading resources between factions does not get you banned; when you sell stuff for 1silver, you just don't transfer gold between factions, just goods.

And this will benefit the economy (in a goblin way)

- A price difference between Horde and Alliance means a bussiness opportunity, but it is also a sign that the server economy is not working perfectly. By transferring goods, we can restore the balance in the economy a little bit.

Let's say that [arctic fur] is waaay expensive on the alliance side and normal priced on the horde side. This gives me a good opportunity to transfer this to the alliance side. Overall the economy benefits: Apparantly this stuff is more easilier farmed on the horde, so we should encourage them to farm it. By giving these farmers acces to a new market (Alliance); the price on the Horde increases (but not so much as it on the Alliance side the price decreases, because this is the supply side, and this gap will be filled in by higher supply)

You can end up with not selling stuff on the alliance side, because there is is no demand; that's your risk, so you've got to use your brains.
Probably there's lots of low level stuff much cheaper on the alliance side then on Horde, transferring this to horde will benefit low level ally players (giving them more gold) and horde (giving them cheaper acces to low level stuff).

Anonymous said...

Just currious... how much do you sell the pets to the opposite side for? I'm just curious because I never saw that as an effective strategy due to it's low returns...

Gevlon said...

@Gankstra: trading for profit is OK. Trading for 1s is not. But if you want to do it, who am I to stop you :-)

@Beastsoul: 15G each

Markco said...

The neutral ah take is quite nasty :) Not to mention if you don't sell your item then you lose like 75% of the vendor price. I did a short post on using the neutral AH if you wanna take a look:
http://justmytwocopper.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-sells-on-neutral-ah.html

Anonymous said...

"You can sell either (or both) sets for gold or disenchant them"

I pretty sure you can't disenchant the armor, nor sell for much at all.
Goodluck in your pursuits, I am trying something very similar as well.

Anonymous said...

Blizz has no problems with trading; Blue

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=1119152478&postId=11526915359&sid=1

The only catch is, if you sell an epic for 1 silver and someone else buys it out, blizzard won't give it back to you

Kinzlayer said...

Isn't there another neutral AH in Gadgetzan in Tanaris?

Mr. V said...

@ Kinzlayer:
Yes there is, It is 1 of 3 netural AH's I believe.

@Gev: My friend this is by far one of the most fascinating posts that I have read here yet. Truly amazing the way you find the real "gold crops" and work your magic. I did not think you would be able to turn a profit so quickly, your a true role model for the rest of us business men. (and women) Please keep us posted on your business, as I look forward to tracking your progression.

P.S. As a fellow Crylstallized Fire salesman could you tell me the running price on this new server, just curious. Thanks again and keep it up!

Anonymous said...

"I'm also selling 20 slot mining and enchanting bags that I buy in Hellfire Peninsula. I make 15-20G profit on each."

Where do you buy these in HP?

nonameform said...

It's interesting to see this post where you say about good points of a DK bank alt. I do have a DK bank alt myself and I actually do advise other people to roll one as a bank, if they don't want to level the character for actual gameplay.

I did roll a DK after my main reached level 80 as I was interested in DK quest line, but I didn't actually want to play the class, so I stopped at level 58 and didn't even go to Outland. However, several months later when I realized that it's easier to keep track of auctions when you post them from just one character and that I do want a bigger bank than the one I can get after spending lots of gold on extra slots and bags, I bought a guild and turned my DK into bank alt.

* Mount is actually a great thing to have in Thunder Bluff. With your own guild, you can always stay mounted in TB, as you can access AH, mailbox and GB without entering any buildings. Second best after TB is the Undercity in my opinion, since you can also access all of those (+personal bank) while mounted, but you will have to run slightly further. Third one is Silvermoon City, since to access any bank you will have to enter the building. Orgrimmar is obviously the worst, but most M&S will tell you that they don't care about those extra few seconds they will have to spend running to bank, to mailbox and to AH.

* Free 12 slot bags are nice. I still use those on my DK as you hardly need more than that as a bank character. At times I did run out of space, but that was only after buying lots of stuff from AH and getting all my expired auctions at the same time.

* Since DK has all (or almost all) FPs in vanilla content, rolling a profession and quickly leveling it is easy. Currently my DK bank is level 61, but has 350 skill in alchemy (around 400 in herbalism). Though I do need to get to level 68 to get a specialization to make the profession slightly more interesting, it's still quite useful to have a high skill on a bank to craft some items for sale or personal use.

All in all, death knights are slightly more interesting now to play than they used to be when WotLK just came out (you can still faceroll, but at least now there is a difference between good DK and just DK), so less people might be tempted to roll one as bank on a new realm.