Millionaire!

Last Sunday, at approximately 5:30 PM EST, I collected the last bit of gold from my mailbox to hit the elusive one million gold!

Here are some screens from my MS stats to show you more or less how I did it. I haven't cleared MS since I installed it mid-January, so this is basically all of what I've sold.

Sorted by Number Sold:

Sorted by Money Made:

Sorted by Money per Sale

So yeah! That's kinda it. I think what pushed me past the cap was a few days of really great glyph sales. The market had more or less reset after my little experiment, and the insane amount of cheap herbs meant my profits were huge. And having my main competitor who seemed to pretty much camp the AH go MIA meant I basically controlled glyphs for a few days. I kinda slowed down on gems, mostly because I had prospecting (but milling's alright for some reason...). But I've been getting more and more in to the twink scroll market. Charging about 1k per scroll for the BiS weapon chants, and they sell. Cheap Maelstrom Crystals means cheaper to produce Landslide enchants, so I've been messing with that a bit too. Other than what you see on these screen caps, I can't think of anything particularly important. 

Where do I go from here? Not really sure right now. I'm kinda done with the whole gold making stuff for now. I've more than I really know what to do with, and it's been getting more and more tedious to keep up with things. I'm thinking of slowly going through my stock, not buying anything more, just using what I have, and then retiring to a fancy island off of Azshara. Though I'm sure the goblin in me will bounce back around 4.2 to capitalize on new PvP gear.

The dilemma I'm facing now though, is whether or not to actually start spending all this gold! On the one hand, I'd like to get all the vendor mounts now, but on the other, I don't really want to go back below one million. Doesn't make much sense, that's for sure. What's the point in having all this gold if you don't spend it? I'm assuming once the initial novelty of being a WoW millionaire wears off I'll start dropping gold left and right. But for now I think I'll just revel in it.

Flipping Rare Weapons

Hiya friends! I'm using this study break to bring y'all a random tip that you might find useful. Something I've recently taken up on my odds'n'ends bank alt is flipping rare weapons. Pretty simple tactic to do, and tends to bring in a semi-decent amount of gold. A nice supplement for established goblins, and a great way to earn some extra coin if you're just starting out.

So what to do? Just go to your local AH, go to the default search UI, limit the search to "rare" quality weapons level 70 and below, hit search, and sort by lowest bid amount! I'll usually buy any weapon that's listed at 20g or below, and bid on anything with a 10g bid or lower (if it's not within my buying threshold, of course). I've set up a little TSM group for all the weapons I snatch too. 48hr post, 100g fallback, ~30g or something threshold (not sure on that, rarely matters anyway). As vendor prices on most sub-60 weapons are pretty low, you're not losing much in deposit costs. The 100g default is a pretty fair price too, as that's a pittance for most players right now, and you're mainly catering to people leveling alts who want some nice blue gear.

I was a bit skeptical that this would work when I first started it. After all, doesn't everyone have BoA weapons now? Well, apparently not! I'd say I sell ~5 weapons a week. Not a huge amount, but certainly worth the negligible time and effort it takes to do this! You'd be surprised at how many people sell world drop rares for next to nothing, or even better, don't understand how to price the bid (I often find weapons with a 50g+ buyout, and a 4g bid). You can also do this for epic weapons (I'll buy almost anything for 100g, post for 500g minimum), though they move a lot slower and the deposit costs are higher.

All Sorts of Goodies Datamined on Wowhead!

Short, but sweet, update for today. Exams start next week, no time for lengthy posts!

If you don't obsessively check Wowhead for the latest news, you might not have noticed nearly a thousand new additions to their PTR database. Mostly just a bunch of new armor sets, but there are some spectacular gold making opportunities buried within.

Most notable are the new entry level PvP armor sets. I'd expect great sales from these at the start of next season as new players try to catch up their gear. A very interesting new addition is the availability of crafted PvP rings, cloaks, necks, and relics. Oddly enough, these accessories are listed as BoP. I don't see the logic in this, so hopefully they'll become BoE by the time the patch rolls around (not like Scribes and JCs need MORE ways to make gold). Material costs for the new garb don't seem any different than the current gear, so plan accordingly. The costs for the new accessories are fairly low too (a few rare gems and some volatiles for the jewelry, for example).

There are also new BoE epics, though for the casual auctioneer they're likely to be out of reach. Each take eight Living Embers which presumably drop off 4.2 raid bosses and might be purchasable by VP (note that current VP are likely to become JP next patch, so hoarding them won't help). Though that doesn't seem too bad (just buy them off the AH or other players!), each piece requires 3 Chaos Orbs or 8 Dream Cloth for tailors, which still seem to be BoP.

And finally, we have new bags! Best of all, there's a 36 slot JC bag! Less exciting, a 36 slot Inscription bag and a 36 slot Mining bag. Tailors can make the JC and Scribe back for 3 Dreamcloth, so stockpiling a few will probably be worth it. The mining bag costs two Pristine Hides and twenty Volatile Earth. Personally, I don't think the mining bag will get much love, but I'd expect the JC bags to sell like crazy and the Scribe bags to be up there too.

Suspiciously absent is any indication of Epic Gems.

Warcraft Econ Hall of Fame!

My interview with WacraftEcon went up today, go check it out!

Nothing else really new and exciting going on as far as gold making is concerned. With exams coming up, I haven't been on as much lately, so I haven't been making as much as usual. Still up over 750k as of now, and hopefully I can rake in a lot of gold tonight. I will, of course, update as I find interesting things to write about.

Messing with Glyphs

About a week ago I finally followed through on my threats to crash the glyph market. It was something I had wanted to do for quite some time, but never really got around to doing. So after a few weeks of stockpiling cheap inks, I sat down to craft a boatload of glyphs.

I will admit, I got cold feet at first and started posting at normal undercuts for a few days. Interestingly enough, it was actually profitable. I stalked my competition through The Undermine Journal, saw that most of them didn't post early in the morning when I woke up for classes, and took advantage of that window of opportunity. I made a decent amount of sales for a few days, but quickly grew tired of it all. So I crashed the market.

My First Piece of Hatemail!

As some of you may know, I've always wanted my own in-game hatemail from an upset competitor. As the old goblin saying goes, "if you're pissing someone off, you're doing something right." Well by that logic, I've been doing everything wrong! Until this morning, apparently, when I got this great gem:

(Please excuse his french)

Now there's a bit of a funny back story to this. Yesterday, while going about my glyphing, I decided to throw up a couple of Inferno Inks just to see if people were buying. I have a decent amount (though not quite enough for cards) stocked up that I'm not sure what to do with just yet, but if I can sell them off at decent prices I'd be happy. After tossing up two of them, I get a whisper from some guy asking me if Inferno Inks actually sold. I reply that I'm not sure, but I have a bunch if he wants to buy. He says that he was curious since I had just undercut him, and he wanted to know if the market was active. I simply say, sorry, no idea, I'm testing out the market myself. Five minutes later I see "A buyer has been found for your auction of Inferno Ink" x2. So I immediately run and throw twenty up in singles. And as I do from time to time, I go to the auction window to see who bought my Inks. It's the guy who moments ago had asked me if people were buying. And this morning, I get the aforementioned lovely message from him for undercutting him more. (Funny thing is, fairly certain I did only undercut by a few silver...)

Moral of this story? Isn't one really, just felt like sharing an amusing anecdote!

Why I'm Not Worried About the Shuffle Change

Just about every blogger has wrote about the datamined change to cut uncommon Cata gems (going from 9g to 75s). And most of them seem to take a doomsday-the-sky-is-falling approach to this new. I'm not convinced that this change heralds the end of the shuffle. Will it affect the economy? Certainly. Will it crash the economy? Probably not. Shuffling will still be useful and profitable, it's just going to take more thought than the current lolshuffle. 

First off, I've never seen the 9g vendor value as anything more than a safety-net; If all goes wrong, you could always cut and vendor. But shuffling specifically to cut and vendor has never been a part of my plan. It's also a handy way to figure out what's profitable. With such a high vendor value, all our calculations have been based on whether or not it's more profitable to shuffle, or to cut and vendor. Even if it's more profitable to cut and vendor, that wasn't always the default option. Sometimes you could just wait it out. And rarely have I been put in a position where cutting and vendoring was my only option. Basically, that 54g floor price for Obsidium was just a comfort in the back of my mind. I knew that I could buy below that, and be guaranteed profit one way or another.

Well, if this change makes it live, that safety net will be abruptly removed. Think of it this way: you're a tightrope walker and that 54g floor is the net. You know that if you mess up, that net is there to catch you. Now, without that net, you're just going to have to be extra careful not to mess up. Now, we're going to need to do a little more market research before we go wantonly throwing gold after cheap ore. But I don't think the markets are going to come crashing down around us.

I think two scenarios are likely to occur if this change hits live servers. First, scared by the lack of a safety net, JCs stop snatching up cheap ore. Bots/people continue to farm, supply overwhelms demand and Ore prices crash. Meanwhile, because people aren't shuffling as much, mats that come from it start to dwindle. Less rare gems/dusts/essences are on the market, driving those prices back up. Suddenly, shuffling becomes profitable again! All that cheap ore can easily be shuffled in to profits. Demand for ore and supply reach a happy medium, dictated by the profits gained from the other markets. Scenario two pretty much ends up the same way. Bots get scared off, ore prices rise. Put off by high ore prices, JCs don't buy ore. No shuffling decreases mat supply, prices rise, they continue to rise until shuffling is profitable again. 

Think back to the beginning of Cata. Back then, the floor price seemed merely conceptual. Prices of ore were at around 100g a stack, and still we were profiting. Cutting to vendor seemed like a total waste in light of what else could be done. I know I never expected the floor price to be reached, or at the very least for JCs to snatch up anything below, keeping the prices constantly just above the floor. I also remember when people started reporting ore dropping below the floor, and how luck we thought those people were. And then it happened to everyone. And keeping up with that supply became impossible. And prices dropped further. With that influx of super cheap ore, we saw all the other markets crashing. All that elementium prospecting in to all those rares crated huge supply, further dropping the prices on cut and uncut rares. Dusts and essences dropped past the point where crafting jewelry to DE was profitable, and we would rather just cut and vendor. Huge supplies of gems even made selling on the dailys tricky, as so many people were posting that the prices quickly dropped to the vendor value anyway.

Right now, when buying ore our options are shuffle for profit, or cut and vendor for profit. Once cutting and vendoring for profit go out the window, our option is simply shuffle for profit. If shuffling isn't profitable, we don't do anything and just wait for it to be profitable. The thing is, enchanting mats and gems (the rare ones at least) will always be needed and there will always be a demand for them. Dropping the vendor price for uncommon gems will have absolutely zero effect on the demand for things like enchants and cut gems. How could it? Are people going to think, hey, uncommon gems vendor for less, so I should totally (not) gem/chant my gear now? No. When people get new gear, they're going to need new enchants and new gems. Demand for those is dictated by the rate at which people acquire gear, not at what price uncommon gems vendor for. As long as we can sell chants/cut gems for more than the mat prices, those markets will be profitable.

One of the reasons shuffling ore was so profitable and so alluring was because it allowed us to acquire mats for less than their AH prices, and thus increase our profit margins on things like scrolls and cut gems (or simply selling the raw mats back at profit). Again, I don't think people were drawn to prospecting simply to cut and vendor (though this may certainly have been the case for some). The reason we do it is because all the other markets were still profitable. As long as those other markets are profitable, I see no reason to stop shuffling.

I also don't see how this change in vendor value will make the related markets less profitable. Just because the "base" cost to craft a Jasper Ring becomes 1g95s (with exalted discount for the setting) does not mean the dust market will decrease accordingly. Why on earth should it? That market's prices depend on supply and demand, just like every other market. The only way prices would drop that low is if there is an overwhelming supply. But, from what I've been gathering, shuffling is something we should probably shy away from, meaning we'll see a decrease in the supply of related mats! If we stop shuffling, prices on the mats that come from it aren't going to magically decrease to reflect the changes to the vendor values. They will still be affected by supply and demand just like everything else.

The one way I could see this change dropping prices across the board would be from lack of other alternatives (i.e. vendoring). So now, if you get stacks of Obsidium at 40g each, you're almost forced to craft to DE in order to get profits. And if everyone's doing that, supply could very well overwhelm demand and drop prices on dusts/essences quite low. Alternatively, transmuting could be your only outlet, again dropping prices.

But I still don't think it will come to such drastic measures. The simplest way to put what the changes will do is this. Before, we thought, "is it more profitable to shuffle or to vendor?" Now, we'll think, "is it profitable to shuffle?"