This post could be called "the slow but sure success via effective working". In the first times when the whole goldmaking scene was new, I made fortunes with flipping, selling vanity stuff and holiday nonsense. As more and more goblin-minded players took these easy opportunities to take the gold from the M&S, I turned to a sure method: craft what people need, do it cheaper than the competition. It's grindy, no doubt, but this grind has 2-3000G/hour income.
"grind" gained its infamy in the golden age, where everyone with more brain than a piece of rock could make 500-1000G with a 5 minutes scan. Back then it was extremely cost-ineffective to do anything but finding untaken niches where M&S lined up to be milked. Now we are much closer to the equilibrium where everyone's G/hour is equal. Of course this optimal case could only be achieved if everyone would be smart, but there are enough smart people that certain grinds are more profitable, and definitely more reliable than fishing for some moron who sells a 10K item for 5K or pays 100G for something that the vendor sells for 10s in the next building.
I have two such "grinds", the glyph and the bag industry. Both are based on stockpiles I collected before Cataclysm, but I also buy new materials. I still have lot of Ink of the Sea from before the great glyph harvest, luckily most of my glyps are made from this ink. The rest of my inks must be crafted from herbs. Trading Blackfallow ink for other inks would be a terrible waste as the material cost of the new ink is around 15G. Luckily the old world herbs are easily available below 1G, so I can craft inks below 5G material cost. I sell my glyphs for 25G threshold, 45G fallback. My income from this since Cataclysm hit was 64K (about 40K profit). The fears that inscription will die with Cataclysm were wrong. People are still buying glyphs. It is quite possible that the inbalances and bugfests of Cataclysm helped it: many people are rerolling to the overpowered class of the week. Also there is steady stream of returning players, worgens and such buying glyphs.
I have some competition, but little. The huge inventory management needed for inscription protects me from most wannabe newcomers. Also, crafting the glyphs, emptying mailbox, listing on the AH takes lot of time. I guess that the G/(hour of character) is somewhere around 1000G, which keep most competitors out, even if they had an industry. I keep my G/hour high by utilizing lot of AFK time. My morning routine is: go to the mailbox, clean up the ruins of the evening in the kitchen. Go to the AH, do the scan before posting, prepare breakfast. Do the posting, relog next banker, go to the mailbox, eat the breakfast. Go to the AH, start the scan, take a shower. Do the posting, log third banker, go to the mailbox, shave. Go to the AH, start the scan, dress up. The afternoon posting is usually embedded into cleaning the room. This way the Gold/(time spent by the computer doing the industry) of last week was 4700. Milling can be done with windowed WoW at the corner of the monitor, while reading blogs and news. The keyword is efficiency. By utilizing the "cheap work" of addons and the craft all button I can keep my costs very low.
Similar things can be told about my bag industry. It seems that the competition either dried out or got bored, since I'm often sell netherweave bags at fallback price: 25G. Frostweave bags also sell close to fallbacK 100G. I'm not planning to elevate fallback as I don't want the competition to come back. The netherweave cloth still available in the AH below 8G/stack. Since here I only craft two kind of items, I can easily "craft all" while AFK. The income since Cataclysm is 18K, 10K profit, and it's getting better.
Since I reached max level with tailoring, I can craft epics. I can transmute 5 cloths/week and about 1 more in 2 weeks from orbs. This means an epic every week. Last week I sold a leggings for 7500G, but now I believe I underpriced it. I try to sell for more this time, after all I can still drop prices if it doesn't sell.
Where did I spent my gold? Mostly on guild achievements. The dungeon achievements cost 900G each in average, and we did 60+the cataclysm ones (I obviously did not pay for those). That's 50K. Another 50K was rented to the guild bank for repairs to get that achievement, but I'll get this money back. 18K was spent on the guild bank tabs (that I will use as personal ink storage to get a little part of this waste back). So I spent pretty aggressively. Yet I'm still above 150K and more coming.
"grind" gained its infamy in the golden age, where everyone with more brain than a piece of rock could make 500-1000G with a 5 minutes scan. Back then it was extremely cost-ineffective to do anything but finding untaken niches where M&S lined up to be milked. Now we are much closer to the equilibrium where everyone's G/hour is equal. Of course this optimal case could only be achieved if everyone would be smart, but there are enough smart people that certain grinds are more profitable, and definitely more reliable than fishing for some moron who sells a 10K item for 5K or pays 100G for something that the vendor sells for 10s in the next building.
I have two such "grinds", the glyph and the bag industry. Both are based on stockpiles I collected before Cataclysm, but I also buy new materials. I still have lot of Ink of the Sea from before the great glyph harvest, luckily most of my glyps are made from this ink. The rest of my inks must be crafted from herbs. Trading Blackfallow ink for other inks would be a terrible waste as the material cost of the new ink is around 15G. Luckily the old world herbs are easily available below 1G, so I can craft inks below 5G material cost. I sell my glyphs for 25G threshold, 45G fallback. My income from this since Cataclysm hit was 64K (about 40K profit). The fears that inscription will die with Cataclysm were wrong. People are still buying glyphs. It is quite possible that the inbalances and bugfests of Cataclysm helped it: many people are rerolling to the overpowered class of the week. Also there is steady stream of returning players, worgens and such buying glyphs.
I have some competition, but little. The huge inventory management needed for inscription protects me from most wannabe newcomers. Also, crafting the glyphs, emptying mailbox, listing on the AH takes lot of time. I guess that the G/(hour of character) is somewhere around 1000G, which keep most competitors out, even if they had an industry. I keep my G/hour high by utilizing lot of AFK time. My morning routine is: go to the mailbox, clean up the ruins of the evening in the kitchen. Go to the AH, do the scan before posting, prepare breakfast. Do the posting, relog next banker, go to the mailbox, eat the breakfast. Go to the AH, start the scan, take a shower. Do the posting, log third banker, go to the mailbox, shave. Go to the AH, start the scan, dress up. The afternoon posting is usually embedded into cleaning the room. This way the Gold/(time spent by the computer doing the industry) of last week was 4700. Milling can be done with windowed WoW at the corner of the monitor, while reading blogs and news. The keyword is efficiency. By utilizing the "cheap work" of addons and the craft all button I can keep my costs very low.
Similar things can be told about my bag industry. It seems that the competition either dried out or got bored, since I'm often sell netherweave bags at fallback price: 25G. Frostweave bags also sell close to fallbacK 100G. I'm not planning to elevate fallback as I don't want the competition to come back. The netherweave cloth still available in the AH below 8G/stack. Since here I only craft two kind of items, I can easily "craft all" while AFK. The income since Cataclysm is 18K, 10K profit, and it's getting better.
Since I reached max level with tailoring, I can craft epics. I can transmute 5 cloths/week and about 1 more in 2 weeks from orbs. This means an epic every week. Last week I sold a leggings for 7500G, but now I believe I underpriced it. I try to sell for more this time, after all I can still drop prices if it doesn't sell.
Where did I spent my gold? Mostly on guild achievements. The dungeon achievements cost 900G each in average, and we did 60+the cataclysm ones (I obviously did not pay for those). That's 50K. Another 50K was rented to the guild bank for repairs to get that achievement, but I'll get this money back. 18K was spent on the guild bank tabs (that I will use as personal ink storage to get a little part of this waste back). So I spent pretty aggressively. Yet I'm still above 150K and more coming.
9 comments:
Ok selling the Leggins for 7500g is very under priced i think (unless you just have too many smart people on your server). I sell the Leggins at around 22 to 25k depending how rich Mr. Random is and how desperately he wants some epixlol. I found that especially such high priced Crafter Items are best sold via /2 trade, as there I can ask for a bid and drive the Price up.
Since I now have a good amount of Chaos Orbs I think I’ll try and sell the Package (Pants + Spellthread).
Ah yes what I meant to ask you. I recently had a discussion with a Guildmate about the Chaos Orbs. He stated that Dreamcloth through Chaos Orbs can’t be efficient as the time spent in heroics (in our case 5x45 Minutes) is not efficient in comparison to loging in, buying the Materials out of the AH, crafting Cloth+Epic and selling it for 15-19k Profit.
In my Opinion though, Chaos Orbs are at the Moment free (for me) as I am doing the daily hc anyway for the Points as well as I still have two Factions I grind Reputation for so I am grabbing every Guild Group that does fast grind runs.
Crafting Vial of the Sands continues to be very profitable for me, despite the people trying to farm for the recipe (with little success), and despite some idiot who offered to craft it for free on the realm forum.
Thankfully very few people read the realm forum, and the guy clearly hasn't noticed me advertising my crafting services in trade for the past few weeks.
I've also got a reputation as being the go-to guy for VoTS on the server now, which has meant several crafts with almost no effort on my part; other people have referred them to me.
Truegold transmutes continue to be very profitable, with the profit on a single bar being between 300-600G, and bars selling for about 1.1-1.2K, which obviously makes transmutation mastery extremely valuable.
Since the Cata launch I've made approximately 180K, bringing me to about 20K below the old gold cap.
Mid-WoTLK I stocked up on Argent Tournament pets, trading them to both my Alliance and Horde characters. Back then they were going for about 500-1000G. Since nobody can be bothered to head out to Northrend and farm Champion Seals I've rolled the price up to about 2500-3000.
They don't sell very fast but it's an easy business to only have to manage 20~ auctions at a time each with a high payout.
My glyph industry is also very profitable at the moment as I typically sell at prices way below my competitors.
I apply a different philosophy than you when selling glyphs. I list them at well below the next lowest price to accentuate the perception my glyphs are a bargain and thus increase the potential buyer's sense of urgency.
I don't clain this strategy is optimal but it does well for me.
You may want to explore the gem market as prospecting obsidian ore (and timing when to sell the uncommon gems) and cutting rare gems are very profitable at the moment.
My big push for gold won't occur for another month or two when I start selling all the difficult-to-get non-combat pets I have stockpiled in WotLK.
hugmenot,
Let's face it, any crafting profession you do, if you just calculate the math, can be very profitable. You are for sure selling glyphs successfully because you are the lowest priced seller. But to determine whether or not your method is superior to moderate undercutting, you need to run some kind of trial with a control. Otherwise, all you know is that you are making gold, but so what? Just about any method will net you gold.
Im up 60990g profit at the moment, and thats after spending 6.4k on the Dalaran teleport ring, 16k on the vendor mount and approximately 40k still not recovered from leveling leatherworking to cap. Everything I used to make said money was purchased off the AH and I usually don't even spend an hour a day on anything gold related.
All money made has been through ench and jc with the required research needed to come up with a profitable plan being about 5 minutes looking at the professions and another 5 minutes on the AH. I haven't been current on market rates since I took a break from my AH work shortly after the wrath epic gem surge ended either. I also haven't gotten around to getting any auction add-ons, so no special software is needed.
Basically, money is very easy to make. People are still idiots, you just have to not compete with the people who have a lot of free time and think they know how to make awesome money. Cutting rare quality gems for example; though I expect that market will pick up and be worth the time once mediocre players can start clearing raids.
Anyway, I'm not going to come right out and say exactly what I do for the M&S that may try to glean off this blog, but anyone with 1/2 a brain could probably figure out what I'm doing if they have said professions available.
>Now we are much closer to the equilibrium where everyone's G/hour is equal. Of course this optimal case could only be achieved if everyone would be smart,
Knowledge is not earned instantly. Even if it's freely available, there are differences in the linguistic classifications that mean that knowing what needs to be known takes a non-zero amount of effort, especially as production complexity grows. The optimal 'job' always depends on specific circumstances such as location and personal interest, or momentary supply and demand with different economies of scale; so when these change, altho the optimal 'job' changes, the knowledge of how to perform that job, and importantly (for an MMO at least, maybe with moar smart people less of a problem but see market crashes/risk/market warfare) accurate expectations for spatial and temporal variations in price, is not gained instantly, and the effort to avoid the inefficiency of knowledge duplication leads to oversupply of effort for obvious or more accessible jobs and lower individual profit. <= long sentence
Someone modeling the 28th orc foot at 3 a.m. isn't necessarily stupid. (But they might be :/)
At the same time, someone who wants to assume that bots do not affect the prices of materials and so spends their free time picking flowers instead of knowledge-intensive tasks that are more profitable might be stupid, but might not be.
170k profit in under a week from Darkmoon Cards.
Sheer profit.
Currently have enough suppliers to get about 500 stacks of herbs daily in my mail for about half AH price. Stacks of Whiptail for 100G each, and Darkmoon Decks selling for 15k+.
Do the math, it's fairly simple, really.
My average Whiptail stack gives me :
12 x Ashen Pigment (6 Blackfallow)
2.5 x Burning Ember (1.25 Inferno)
Assuming I were to turn the Blackfallow into Inferno Inks via the ink trader (which I do), that menas every stack = 1.85 Inferno Inks.
That comes up to a total of, to round it up, 5.5 stacks of Whiptail (110 Whiptail) for one card.
5.5 stacks cost me a grand total of 550G. Each made deck sells for 15k+ (Hurricane for 22k at the moment). Yes, there are duplicates, but the AH takes care of these. You can also find people to trade them with.
So, a deck being made of 8 cards, you can make/trade a total of 8 cards for roughly 4400G. The profit margin is incredibly huge, and the cards you get average out once the volume increases.
And it's all AFK-able, since a "keystroke" script for AutoIt isn't possibly detectable for milling, and making inks is most obviously a one-click matter.
Of course you could also Mill without Auto-It, but I'm not too interested in doing so. I'd probably pay a "poor" scribe to do the milling for me in that case, which is also a profitable move. They exist, believe it or not.
/hug
I have just leveled up Inscription, two weeks ago, and I've thus yet to learn all the glyphs, but I'm looking forward to it.
"I sell my glyphs for 25G threshold, 45G fallback."
@Revlon: I'm a glypher on Ally side, Vek'nilash a small-medium PvE, and the thing I have to say is: increase that fallback, mate!
My fellow competing glyphers here and I, we have all increased our fallbacks to the 90g-130g range. Especially on Ethereal ink glyphs, they go for 90g+ and are holding steady at the price -- maybe even increasing in price (!!) as the demand is higher than what Ethereals people can buy from the few BC herbers.
@FishyFishFish: I'm envious that you can find suppliers of Whiptail for 100g/stack. Here on the AH they go 250g/stack and I've mailed the major herb farmers and they are selling their stock fast enough that they have no interest in CoD arrangements.
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