Greedy Goblin

Monday, May 23, 2011

Make up to 200K with minutes of work

I usually don't have guests posts. I never had one before. I'm not seeking guest contributors. But Aurèle (twitter) was kept bugging me with his post and it's pretty good, so I publish it.


The ultimate goblin trick: how to make 200.000 gold every year in 10 minutes of work

Back in the days, I remember being broke. I was searching for a quick solution to make gold in WoW, and I stumbled upon Gevlon’s blog. After reading about the glyph industry, I dropped my professions, learned mining and herbalism, and spent the next 6 hours collecting plants and minerals to sell them at the Auction House. Once I had enough money I dropped mining and learned Inscription. Two weeks later I was making more than 10k gold per week for less than 2 hours of work. Needless to say, I became a loyal reader of this blog. The gold obsession had begun.

Recently I found what I think is the most efficient way to make gold in World of Warcraft. I’ve always wanted to set gold production on autopilot, and when Cataclysm came out I took advantage of the [cash flow] guild perk to do exactly that. My initial goal was to attain the momentum point where the guild experience cap was reached every day, and people continually invited their friends, so that the guild stayed alive and grew over time. The result?


Let me guide you through the process. First you have to create a guild. Delete all the ranks except Member. Then give your members the right to invite other members: you might think that it will cause trouble because of kiddies spamming /g with nonsense, but in my experience it doesn’t happen. Set the guild message of the day to something along the lines of “Welcome! Everybody can invite new members (press J, then “info” tab). Feel free to invite your friends! Have fun!”. The more social and you make it, the more people will be inclined to stay and invite their friends. You can also setup the Guild Search to get more members. Remember, keep it social!



Secondly, you have to invite members to your new guild. A very effective way to do this is to use this addon called Ninja Invite. It automatically invite unguilded people from your server to your guild. It also saves their name so that you don’t invite them twice. You won’t get banned using this addon. In fact Blizzard even allows players to block guild invites in the interface/controls.

I tuned the addon to invite people from level 10 to 84, which is the most effective in regard of guild experience. Once it’s up and running (don’t forget to check “Load out of date AddOns” in the selection menu), simply type “/ni start” and it will start inviting people to your guild. You can bind this command to a macro like I did, so you just have to press a button. Even better, if you’re leveling an alt or if you have a character that you play regularly that is in the guild, just press the button every 20 to 30 minutes and your guild will be growing at a crazy rate.
Now remember, your goal is not to fill the guild. Your goal is to reach momentum so that you don’t have to work anymore. It can be really fast and easy if you’re on a highly populated server, or it could be a hassle if you don’t have much time. Here are the most effective time and dates to invite in a guild:
  • When an expansion pack comes out
  • After a new patch, as people get back into the game
  • On the weekends afternoon and evenings
  • In the week days evening between 6pm and 9pm
I invited my first members the day cataclysm came out, and I probably created momentum on that first invite round, as everybody was 80 and questing. That’s how I can honestly say that I created 200k gold value in 10 minutes this year.

The guild requires maintenance, mainly because there’s a maximum number of members a guild can have: 1000. Now, you might think you would never reach that limit. But once your guild grows and people start inviting their friends, you’ll have a lot of inactive members.

One solution to clean up the mess is to use an addon that kick inactive members every now and then. I use Guild Kicker. Type “/gk” and the menu will appear, letting you kick inactive and/or low level members. An alternative solution, if you don’t play wow all year round, is to promote officers and ask them to kick people that reach an inactivity threshold. It’s less reliable, but it’s still better than nothing. In my guild we kick player that are inactive for 15 days and the guild is always filled with more than 800 members.

If you don’t want to manage the guild, or if you think you could need the cash to invest into a more profitable business (as I know some readers here can), sell it. Think about it: even if your guild generates only 2k gold per week on autopilot. That’s 100k gold per year without doing anything! You can easily sell it for year or less of profit. You’ll have to wait a couple of months before selling it, as the guild doesn’t generate cash at the creation. But remember, it’s just afk time!

Aurèle final note: I’ve found shortcuts in many things in life, from World of Warcraft to real life feats. I’m all about effectiveness and measurable results. You can follow me on twitter for my latest tips and tricks.


Gevlon's note: I did not test the addons myself so can't guarantee them being bug free (imagine what a bug can do in a guildkicker addon). But the idea itself and the methods to reach them are pretty good.

15 comments:

Otter said...

Great idea and it can certainly work with huge rewards as you say, but I think the time to do this has all but passed and you need to take the following into account:

- With so many guilds now lvl 25 there is less incentive to join a newly started guild

- Players that do join are likely to leave at lvl 85 to join a guild that has additional rewards such as the mount from raiding

- Guilds can currently be sold for a lot of gold but this will change once the 'guild transfer' ability is introduced

- Low pop realms obviously have a lot less new players to recruit

That all said, it is certainly an idea worth pursuing. I have a guild as an investment too and while mine so far has nowhere near the kind of income that yours does, I do have a twist in mind down the road.

Anonymous said...

Exactly what someone else did:
http://www.plusheal.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=9348

Anonymous said...

A slight improvement and a question:

I find that many of my employees value titles more than salary and tites are free. So the single guild rank for everyone-but-you should be as appealing as possible. Not "member" but something like
"Senior Member", "Raider", "Senior Veteran", "Officier" ...

Would it just be easier/quicker to just buy the guild? All you have to do is catch a single minute when a level 25 GM is feeling drunk or abused or underappreciated or evil and you can buy it from them

Aurele said...

@Otter

It's harder than before, but it's still doable. If you're on a low population server, be ready to spend some time before it makes you money. On a high population server ? It's a joke, trust me.

@Second Anonymous

People hardly pay attention to their guild rank. The idea is good, but you better apply it to the guild name ;)

If you want to transform your gold into low maintenance income, then yes buying an established guild is the way to go. Buying an empty level 25 guild for peanuts from a drunk GM is also a good strategy.

manvs said...

My guild is making 7-8k per week now, and thats not counting the guildchallenges, its amazing :) I have too kick people after 4days of inactivity.
Im also kicking retards that spam swedish etc (usually that) just to keep other people happy, you have to put them in a macro tho since they will just join again when u log out :)

Yaggle said...

Well, you get all the money, and the guild members get the perks. I guess it's a fair deal, and it fills a void for players who don't have big goals to at least get some of the guild welfare that more serious guilds will get.

Anonymous said...

Great idea. Doing this with my banker alt right now.

Anonymous said...

down the track you could charge peope for promotions.

then when your memberships are getting too high kick the lowest level members as well as inactives.

give incentive for members to buy promotion

hound said...

I checked out your ninja invite link and it took me to something called ilivid...a download manager of some sort.

Kuja said...

My guild master charges about 2-4k for invites these days, to a social guild! :) Even though there are plenty of level capped guilds around.

Anonymous said...

This is actually a pretty profound post, if you think about it from a certain angle. Consider how gold is *made* in WoW—not just traded back and forth between players on the AH. The actual creation of gold is fairly limited: you either create it by getting gold from quests, looting mobs, or from selling things to vendors. If thousands of players do those activities daily for years, the amount of gold on a server adds up to the levels we see today.

This guild perk is a new way to “create” gold in the game. This mechanism is probably why they put the kibosh on the vendor price for green-level gems—too much gold was being created from vendoring gems, and was starting to create serious inflation such that unless you played the AH game to a degree, you would never be able to have enough gold to do anything in end game. So if you can, take advantage of this! It not only benefits the guildmaster, it continues to inject gold into the economy, which clever goblins can then concentrate into their own coffers.

Somegnome said...

Good idea in theory but I do think it's a little late in the party now.
I've been running NI on a low pop and a high pop realm. I believe it's too flooded on the high pop realms to get anywhere (lucky if 1 - 2 accept) compared to low pop where I get a bunch of people usually accepting it.

Any advice on growing the guild? I have just round 200 somewhat active members but I invite from 2 toons. Also any examples of successful /gmsg's ?

Thanks for the great post, it is in effect, what kept me going on it..

Anonymous said...

Small fix for NI:
Edit the NinjaInvite.lua in a Texteditor

> local msgInvite = ""

Automatic Whisper to each invite (write something to lure Socials"

and change all "50" in the file to "49", makes it more efficient on crowded servers

hound said...

Well, I figured out how to get the addon and made it work. It's a holiday weekend so I don't think the numbers will be great even though I'm on a populated Day One server. However, I just ran it and have 18 members already, so the theory certainly has potential.

The one problem I'm having is that I'm not the most social guy so when some of these members ask a question in chat or message me I don't really know what to say. However, I think that if the numbers keep growing I won't have to worry about pleasing anyone.

Anonymous said...

Done, but now I have a guild bank with lots of gold, and members saying they should get free repairs and help with gems/gear.. Now what?