Saturday, March 26, 2011

Why You Can't Afford NOT to Stockpile Pyrite

So I feel like I may be stepping on Alto's toes, or just being unoriginal, posting about the "Pyrite Stockpile" right after he did a rather excellent write up (see, Epic Gems in Cataclysm), but I believe I have a unique view on the whole debate that I would like to share in the hope I can bring people over to the stockpiling side.

The gold making community is divided between those of us who think epics will come from Pyrite ore, and those who think Blizz will take a unique route. There are excellent points on both sides of the debate; some argue Blizz will go with the tried and true method of prospecting for epics, as that ensures JCs will be able to get them, others say that there's no real precedence for prospecting as you couldn't do so in BC, so Blizz might decide to go with a third, wholly unique option on how to get the gems. Honestly, I think these arguments are irrelevant.

Monday, March 14, 2011

500k!



So just a few minutes ago I broke the half-million barrier!

Here are a few follow up screens of my MySales stats if anyone's curious as to what I've been selling. Note that this is overall data since I installed MS probably around two months ago, because I can't get the "weekly / daily" feature to work for some reason, despite setting it to that constantly...

Most Sales

Most Gold per Sale


Biggest Earners




And just for fun, here's how much gold I've actually earned since installing MS:


Almost 1mill! But I only have 500k?! So where'd it all go? Well, aside from the very true saying, "you have to spend gold to earn gold," I have splurged on mounts and gear for my toons and my friends, so that definitely took out a large chunk of my capital. But still, pretty sweet to know I've actually "made" that much, even if I don't "have" that much.

Since I just finished writing a 16 page appellate brief, that's going to be all for now. Look for a much more lengthy post on the WoW Econ Hall of Fame in the next few days, once I muster the brain power to write again.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Is the Obsidium Shuffle Still Worth It?

Fluxdada has a great post up over at his blog, PowerWord:Gold, on the classic Obsidium Shuffle and whether it's "Heating up, or Winding Down?" First off, if you my read blog, but not his, shame on you. Go read it now, he's got some really great stuff up there.

His post on the shuffle really got me thinking, so I wanted to do a bit of an "extended commentary" with my thoughts on the matter. On most servers, bots are back in full force and are driving the prices down on ore like never before. It used to be that seeing a stack of Obsidium below the 54g "floor price" was cause for celebration, and I'd snatch it up without hesitating. Now, it's getting hard to find Obsidium above the floor price! You'd think this would be even better, but as Fluxdada points out, the regular shuffle isn't as profitable as it once was. Dust prices are dropping like a rock too, meaning disenchanting Jasper Rings or Alicite Pendants will actually lose you money compared to what you'd get just vendoring the cuts. Transmuting isn't always worth it either, as many Rare quality gems can be bought on the AH for less than 27g (what you'd make cutting and vendoring three of the Green quality gems, and that's not including the varying price of herbs). Even the daily doesn't seem to bring solace (for me at least), as so many people have caught on to this strategy and there's so many of the gems that the competition is absurd. I used to be able to go through stacks on the dailies for absurd mark-ups, but now I'm lucky to sell ten at seemingly normal posts. Just for a quick comparison, go read my post I linked above (the Obsidium Shuffle one) that I wrote when the shuffle was at it's heyday, and compare that to what's going on on your server right now. If you're lucky, that post is still relevant. But I'm willing to bet that it's completely off the mark now.

So what option do we have now, if shuffling just isn't worth it? Well, there's always the fall-back of vendoring! But, is that really such a great option? To quote Fluxdada, "while this may bring in SOME profit it is an incredibly laborious process and I may have to start evaluating if the time spent is worth the profit gained." And he's quite right. Last night, I saw about 240 stacks of obsidium ore at 40g a stack. Some quick math puts me at about 3, 360g profit if I just prospect, cut and vendor (54g "floor" - 40g/stack = 14g profit/stack X 240 stacks, ignoring Rare quality gems). 3k profit is nothing to shrug off, but will the time commitment really be worth it? Prospecting has a 2 second cast time, so adding in an extra second for "looting" and reaction time I'd say it takes about 3s to do one full prospect. Since you can prospect four times per stack, that comes out to 12s to prospect an entire stack. That doesn't seem too bad, but let's do that for 240 stacks. Now that's going to take 2,880 seconds, or FOURTY-EIGHT MINUTES! Ok, well, 48min for over 3k gold doesn't seem too bad, does it? Well, we still haven't cut or vendored anything! Cutting a gem takes 3s and you can AFK this, only returning when your bags are full. But, after all that prospecting you now have 6 X 240 gems, for a grand total of 1,440 gems that still need to be cut and vendored. How long is this going to take? 1,440 gems X 3s per cut / 60s in a minute, or an additional 72 minutes! Though a decent amount of this can be done AFK, you still have to baby it and come back when your bags are full. And this doesn't include the time it takes to actually vendor everything! I use an auto-vendor addon for this, and even then it can take it a few seconds to vendor a bag full of cut gems. So right now we're looking at 112 minutes purely devoted to prospecting and cutting. I'd say adding an extra 8min for miscellaneous time-sinks (retrieving the ore, storing the gems, actually selling them, etc.) is reasonable, so we're now looking at 2 whole hours devoted to this process.

Although that still comes out to a respectable 1,680g / hr, at this point what we're doing isn't that much different from farming! The whole point of playing the AH game (at least to me), is that we can make this much gold with just a fraction of the time and effort invested! Just as it is with farming, the problem is if you're doing this one thing, you're not doing something else! The harshness is somewhat mitigated by the semi-AFK factor (I'll usually blindly mash my prospecting macro while reading cases for class), but this is still a rather substantial amount of time sunk in to the shuffle.

So is it worth it? For me, not so much in all honestly. Even if I can read while doing this, or listen to podcasts or whatnot, it's beginning to seem a little too much like farming for my comfort.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Blacksmithing!

Last weekend, partially in anticipation of the Darkmoon Faire Dense Stone turn in (see Mageshadow's and Cold's posts for more details, and be sure to check out the awesome Consortium Forums thread on the subject), and partially because I wanted to get in to the Ebonsteel Belt Buckle market, I power-leveled blacksmithing on my rogue. Thankfully I had almost all of the mats required to get to about 425 stockpiled from when I leveled mining on my pally in anticipation of Cata, so it only ended up costing me a few thousand to level. But I highly doubt anyone came here to read about the grueling process of power-levling a profession from scratch. Rather, I'd like to share a few little insights on how to make gold with blacksmithing!

Thursday, March 3, 2011

From Rags to Riches: My Adventures In Auctioneering

Today's post is an entry for Cold's Gold Factory Blogging Carnival. This month's prompt is, when and what was that "light bulb" moment that made you into the greedy goblin you are today?

First off, I'd like to say how awesome I think this topic is. Sometimes, amid our piles and piles of gold, it's easy to forget our humble beginnings, when scraping together enough gold for riding training, a mount, or even the repair bill was a grueling process. Though I shudder to think of those days, reflecting on your roots can be quite enlightening. I hope that this carnival will inspire any would-be goblins that may be discouraged by seemingly futile efforts to earn gold when compared to those of us who blog about it. I have heard many times that some think we're just preaching to the choir, that our advice only works if you're already established, have capital to work with, and an army of alts at your service. Well, we were there too at one point, struggling with gold, and hopefully insight into our journeys will prove useful to anyone in a similar position.

Without further ado, I present to the tale of Slyvaliss, the undead female rogue, who started with naught but some tattered rags and a lone dagger...