Week 1 Roundup

Highlights this week (actually 4 weeks, but for bloggingpurposes):

• Made the blog
• Tailoring 450
• Blacksmithing 450
• Engineering 450

Ended the evenings session by doing a semi-large purchase, someone was dumping stock on AH.

Got lots of Eternal Earths, cloth, some Saronite Ore, and 20-30 Abyss for way below my threshold.

Darkmoon faire is over, which means the market for Snowfall inks will take a snooze for a while, and hopefully the prices of herbs will come back down. I would like to maintain a stock of 5000 Ink of the Sea for both Ruby Sanctum and Cataclysm launch, currently at ~1800 due to steep herb-prices this week.

17652 Gold at the end of first week. Considering the amount of stockpiling I've been doing + leveling 3 professions I think it's pretty good.

Revisiting the snatch list

One of the first tools you get to know when AH-whoring is the snatch list, the built-in bulk purchase interface of Auctioneer. Set that threshold for that Abyss Crystal to 30g, and you will never miss a shard below it, with mass-purchasing made easy aswell.

The perfect tool. Or is it?

When supply is high, i.e. during the weekends when team China is dumping their Saronite Ore on the AH - it does exactly what you want it to do. It lists up all the stacks below your threshold, sorts them by the category you choose (stack size, bid, buyout, profit, or my favorite - percentage of threshold).

It would look something like this.

Red arrow tells me my list is sorted by percentage of threshold (my highest price), in ascending order - making sure I grab the best deals first. I used to sort by profit until I realized that profit in conjunction with stack size will sometimes skew the list so you will be late for an awesome deal.

That means that the profit of buying a whole stack with something @ 80% of my price is greater than the profit from a single 50%-item, and 50%-items disappears from the AH a hell of a lot quicker than 80%s.

First snatch list lesson: Always start your snatching with an ascending order of percentage, so you can quickly grab the super best deals before moving on to sort by profit and make bulk purchases.

Anyway, inevitably supply dries up in one submarket or the other, and none of the items you want shows up. In this scenario, the only info your snatch-list provides you with is the fact that there exists no items below your purchase-threshold. That's it.

So, where are my precious Eternal Lifes now? When prices go above my threshold I have no overwiev of the market, I don't know if it's 1 gold above it, or some serious server-wide starvation-crisis. At this point I have two options. Either raise my threshold temporarily and re-search, or go do a manual search. Both options are inconvenient at best, and as your list expands you may not even notice that there is a few items missing. So, how do you fix this?

Double your threshold.
I went through my list, double the values for all the items, and did a new search.

Now I get 50% as my new threshold for buying, all the items listed for >50% in my list now are those above my original threshold. Here I can see that the prices of Eternal Life this weekend is up to 20g a piece, 5g above my 15g threshold.

This is information my old snatch-configuration did not give me access to.

I need to adjust my brain to only purchase below the 50-mark, but in return i should get a much better overview of the sub-markets just by snatching. I'll try this out for a week and see if I can find any downsides to doing it this way.

Scoop of the day: I cleared out like 6-7 Golden Pearls for 130g each last night, leaving none left on the AH.

This obviously confused some poor leveling hunter who posted his recently aquired Golden Pearl for 3g in the morning. Thanks!

Expanding the business - Tailoring

I figured I needed a tailor aswell, first and foremost to check out the markets of bags (Frostweave and Netherweave), and spellthreads.


This was to be my DKs seconds profession, and powerleveling tailoring with an enchanter to DE the crap you make was rather unproblematic. After selling off all the mats afterwards, be it in scrolls or raw mats - i probably spent about 1k to reach 450 tailoring.

I had stockpiled alot of cloth, so I made 50 of each bag, and started experimenting with the QA3-groups for each bag, respectively.

In summary:

• It takes 1 stack of Netherweave to make a bag + 1 Rune Thread (50s) 
• It takes 3 stacks of Frostweave to mage a bag + 12 infinite dust + 2 Eternium Threads (5g) 
• Making bags take truckloads of time, especially Frostweave bags with its 3 steps. Frostweave cloth - > Frostweave bolt -> Imbued Frostweave Bolt -> Frostweave bag. 
• The demand for bags is huge, especially the cheap ones. 
• Competition is high. 
• Deposit costs are pretty high, especially for Frostweave bags, so I use a 12h listing.

On an average day, i can usually get about 10g profit pr. Netherweave bag, and if I post 10 bags they all usually sell. With Frostweave bags it's not that simple. Both the competition and demand spikes alot, and often the profit margin is pretty slim. It costs me about 50g to make a Frostweave bag, and with the time-consuming process mentioned above I don't really want to sell them below 63g, ensuring a 13g profit.
I turn off auto-fallback on items with high deposit costs, in this case Frostweave bags.
If the AH is flooded with them at around 50g, I just don't bother.

 This has made me favor Netherweave bags a bit, but it's too early to pass judgement just yet:

  

That spellthread is about 140g profit with the prices on my server. I will be paying attention to this market to polish my posting routines.

Expanding the business - Blacksmithing

With around 10k gold in liquid capital, it was about time to powerlevel a new profession.
After all the praise I've seen blacksmithing get in these blogs, I wanted to give it a try.
My 80DK was chosen for this task.

Powerleveling blacksmithing was a mixed experience, it was somewhat reasonable until I got to the TBC-mats, namely Fel Iron. The prices were so ridicolous that I actually had to wait for a few days to move on - and ended up having a friend offering to farm the 180 bars needed.

During this period i was preparing for belt buckle dominance, and bought in total 5000 saronite bars, none higher than 40g/stack, and most of them around 34-35g/stack.
Got around 1k Eternal Earth around the 3g-mark, 1k Eternal Water around the 2g-mark, and 1k shadow rounded up to about 5g.

That gives my average buckle a productioncost of 18g, and boy do they sell. On my server a buckle is torn off the AH every 6-7 minutes during the hours when most people play. There is some varying competition, but it's not often you see a buckle below 30g.

Since I don't have any TOC-recipes, not to mention ICC-recipes, I have to get what I can out what the trainer provides. Enchantingrods are recommended several places, and not without reason.

• Fel Iron Rod
• Adamantite Rod
• Arcanite Rod
• Eternium Rod

These are the rods I'm currently selling, and they all sell at a price from 50-130g with close to no competition. My particular favorite is the Arcanite Rod - there is zero competition, and it's so cheap. I sell several a day for 100g, and 3 arcane crystals + 3 thorium bars is like 12-13g on my server.
In addition, I've respecced my Alchemist from elixir mastery to transmute (1 week ago), and it procs off the arcanite-transmute, and I also had a gem-proc the second day. Nice!

Decided to focus on expanding further into other professions rather than spending alot of time grinding BS-recipes for now, but I allready see a nice profit from buckles and rods.

Initial thoughts on blacksmithing:

• Stockpile! It's amazing how many saronite bars and eternals you can burn through, buy everything you can get your hands on when prices are low. Team china + team casual is often dumping stocks during the weekends, so make sure to snatch a truckload. If storage is an issue you can always store some of it as premade buckles (1 stack buckles = 7 stack of mats), they are going to sell anyway.
• Belt buckles are awesome, even more so because they stack to 20
• Very little time required for upkeep, allthough afk-crafting of buckles will take some time.

Definately an interesting profession, looking forward to explore its potential further.

Next: Expanding the business - Tailoring

Expanding the business - Enchanting

With 2 bankers going on autopilot posting glyphs, my main banker constantly buying cheap herbs which gets milled and stored, the time spent for Inscription upkeep drasticly went down - so it's time to explore a new market.

At the time, I had 2 professions up to speed - my mains Enchanting, and my abandoned warriors Alchemy. She was an Elixir Master from her TBC glorydays, but the elixir/flask market is a bitch with high deposit costs - so I decided upon Enchanting.

Since I'm all into the scribe-activities, it was easy to produce 200 Weapon Vellums and 200 Armor Vellums for starters.

My main has had Enchanting since early TBC, so I got alot of the good recipes, but none of the BOA-enchants, save for Crusader.
I had to start somewhere, so I used auctioneers data + a few manual searches to get a feel of the pricing on enchantingmats.
I decided to add to snatch:

• Abyss Crystal - 35g
• Greater Cosmic Essence - 20g
• Infinite Dust - 1g10s
• Dream Shard - 4g
• Arcane Dust - 2g50s
• Void Crystal - 2g
• Righteous orb - 35g
• Large Brilliant Shard - 2g
• Greater Eternal Essence - 10g

The TBC-mats is for Mongoose, which is still very popular. Arcane dust being the bottleneck here, with void crystals being dirt cheap, large prismatics made from splitting voids, and greater planars are accumulated in large quantities using the Halaa Trick. 40g for at best 12 planars, and at worst 6-7 planars + some arcane dust is a good deal either way.
Using this list + a couple of days + most importantly a weekend (lots of noobs dumping stuff below market price in weekends), I built up a really nice stockpile of shards and dust.
With those values set, I checked out the competition on my server - look at what they are selling, and what they are selling it for. Since some players get some enchantingmats "for free", you often see certain scrolls below material cost.
I used my own formula: Sum worst case reagent cost (those listed above) + price of vellum + 20g for a little leeway as my threshold, with a fallback price at 200-250%, depending on the enchant. I try to focus on enchants I know is high in demand, not using the glyph-philosophy here as the money bound up in the scrolls can quickly accumulate, lots of useless enchants = lots of useless bagspace wasted, and no deposit fees attracts campers.

• Blade Ward
• Black Magic
• Berserking
• 63 SP Weapon
• 81 SP Staff
• 10 stats chest
• Crusader
• Tuskarr's Vitality
• 28 SP gloves
• + some more I can't remember off the top of my head

I made a ton of all scrolls, made some nice QA3-groups which would ensure that I didn't sell for less than I wanted, and dedicated my Paladin to whore the AH with these scrolls.
I learned my first lesson in Enchanting very fast. Even though I got the most insane camper on my server I sold lots and lots of the most expensive enchants really quick - Berserking, 63 SP, 10 stats chest etc - and for a nice profit.
The problem arose with the draught of Abyss Crystals in my price range. I invested about 6k in abysses alone before starting this project, and they were quickly all gone. I kept it up for a day or two until AH really dried up of sub 35g Abyss crystals, so I was left with two choices:

1. Raise my threshold, and raise my prices to compensate.
2. Raise my prices alot, without raising the threshold.

I chose option 2 because me getting all those sales was due to going below the campers threshold, and the price I would end up with with option one would cause me to get camped - slowing down my sales, and binding waaaay too much of my total capital up in enchanting. Besides, there is so much money in the BOA-enchants anyway - but more on that later.
I wanted to expand further, so I aimed for a nice balance - and so far it's working great.
Next up: Expanding into Blacksmithing

The birth - Inscription

When I decided to start this little pet-project I did a shitload of research as mentioned, and I didn't have alot of starting money. I had about 8000 gold.

Luckily, I had alot of Emblems of Frost with nothing to spend on at the time - so I bought 22 Primordial Saronites, sold them over night along with banktabs full of random crap, and ended up with almost 30k.
Alot of the things I sold I ended up needing later in my expanding of the business, so first lesson learned pretty early.
You have to have a very good reason to sell of raw materials.

I am so late to the business-train of WOTLK, so late that I don't think I will catch up properly before Cata (Daily jewelcrafting etc.), but I got no choice other than view it as a challenge rather than an obstacle.

Anyways, I decided to base my entire business around Inscription, as my research indicated that even though it's the most time-consuming to set up- and you need a pretty heavy front-up investment to get going- it's a reliable income which as good as guaranteed profit.
The profit will of course reflect your competition, but from a personal view it will also reflect how well you handle the organization/time-aspect.
This particular profession also benefits from a good connection and a powerful computer, of which I have both.

Since I wanted Jewelcrafting on my main (the druid), i chose to lvl Inscription on my "second main", my lovely disc priest. The shoulder-enchant couldn't hurt after all.
I was amazed over how painless leveling Inscription from 1-450 was, I spent about 2k on herbs, and got a guild scribe to mill a crapton of Northrend-herbs for me so I could just downtrade inks.

At 450, I bought all the books of glyph mastery off AH, and started stockpiling inks. I never stopped underestimating the amount of herbs I would need to get me started. The guides I read suggested making 3 of the popular glyphs for starters, gradually expanding first the amount of available glyphs, and when you had made them all - increase stack size. Alot of the recommendations are stacks of 5 glyphs.

I decided to do it a little differently, since I'm also planning for the long run - namely cataclysm, it will be a surge in the demand for glyphs. Not just the new ones, but also the old ones - as alot of them and their correspending spells gets changed. It's all about bagspace management.

So, it's like 470 glyphs ingame total. If you make some of one kind of glyph, they will 1 slot of bagspace, regardless if it's 1 or 20.
The need for stockpiling inks for Cataclysm is obvious, but the guild bank can only hold so much. So, where is the easiest place to stockpile inks in the long run? In the glyph-stacks.
Making 20 of every kind effectively gives you the ability to carry 470x15 more inks without requiring more space.

Anyways, that means I had to make around 7000 glyphs before I even started posting, and being new to the addons I actually had to redesign my system around them several times, consuming massive amounts of time.
The system I ended up with was as follows:
In QA3 itemgroups, I've currently made groups Glyph1 through 8. Each group handles 32 glyphs, and they are not sorted in any particular order.
I got 2 bankers with 4xInscription bags a 32 slots + their backback = 144 slots.

One of my first systems had different toons handling the glyphs for different classes, which took me a day or two to realize only created unnescessary timesinks for myself as I discovered new ones. It's not which glyphs that's important, it's how many.

So, after I've set groups 1-4 to be automailed to my first banker I know a couple of things:

• He's got 4 groups a 32 glyphs, and he's got 4 bags a 32 slots for glyphs. Leaving him with a free backpack. (16 slots)
• All glyphs made in the future in this group will be automailed to the correct banker, completely removing micromanagement on that end.

The reason for leaving 16 slots free is because at some point I will need a third banker for glyphs, and that will provide them with pretty equal share. The need for free spots on a glyphbanker arise during mail-sessions, as sometimes glyphs don't stack correctly. You can have 16+2 glyphs in your bags for no apparent reason, and restacking them manually is not an option.

In addition, those 16 slots are utilized on both bankers to house some extra goodies from Inscription, namely offhands, runescrolls, and vellums.

All my bankers are in Stormwind, using the SW AH trick to have access to the auctioneer and mailbox at the same time.

When I was finally done organizing and ready to do some posting, I've already made a few notes on Inscription:

• Absolutely massively time-consuming during startup
• Going for the whole market requires an insane amount of bagspace
• Without a proper system for handling your production, storing, and selling for glyphs you are not going anywhere
• Buying and milling all those herbs gives you alot of time to calculate the actual cost pr glyph. Many people expects income from Snowfall Inks to cover the expenses for herbs alone and operate with glyph @ parchment-cost. I don't.
• You amass insane amounts of Snowfall Ink, which makes you anxious to dump it. I've later learned that this will not be a problem.

Now my 2 glyphers are rotating about 128 glyphs each through the AH, still experimenting with thresholds, number to post, durations, fallbacks, posting times, frequency of posting, etc. and the competition is pretty aggressive.

The glyph-market is fortunately a massive beast, way too big for one person to control alone - and at this time of writing I'm making a pretty decent profit on a day to day basis. I also tried to be over-aggressive the other day, slamming prices down close to production-cost, but the subsequent production of a zillion new glyphs every night gave me the aids, so I'm shooting for something a little more middle ground - at least in the beginning.

I don't mind loads of sales, but dollar/time has to improve. Spending 2 hours crafting glyphs for 5s profit a pops is not a viable strategy long-term.

Next: The Expansion - Enchanting scrolls

Introducing General Goods Vendor

The introduction:
As all the other 9000 wow business blogs out there, the purpose of this blog is mainly a diary of sorts - to let me ramble down my experiences in this previously unchartered area of World of Warcraft. No advertisement will ever be made on my end.

The only reason I'm adressing you - the potential reader - is because if you accidentaly stumbled in here via google search or another one of those amazing next-millenia tools, I like to keep up appearances.

The business:
My business is now 3 weeks old. Some of the infrastructure is in place - after quite a bit of trial and error on numerous fields that may or may not be included in this blog before they are forgotten.
My bankers guildname is General Goods Vendor, which I made back in TBC - so it was only natural to let the name live on, but if I wanted to change the name I probably wouldn't bother to due to the hassle of grabbing 9 guildless low-lvls and making them stay long enough to turn in the charter.

The experience:
Like most players, my experience with the auction house is very limited. Been playing wow since vanilla, and from the first months of being max level my interest and dedication has been on the raiding scene.
In TBC stuff got more expensive, and I had to generate some sort of income. My main being a resto druid with Enchanting/Herbalism at the time - a time before Inscription and the massive turnover of herbs in the gameworld - being a Swift Flight herb-picking chinese farmer-wannabe druid generated some decent income. I got by.

I've bought gold several times, and if it actually was legal I would probably never started doing what I now am, because the time/reward pretty heavily favors working IRL and send those chinese kids to college.

I've never owned more than 10k gold.

I've never used a profession for anything else but enhance my characters in PVE (except the herb-picking).

The location:
Since Lady Vashj was considered cutting edge progression my home has been on the mother of all shitholes of a server, Ravencrest EU.
The reason for it being a shithole is mainly due to the hardware. This server crashes alot. If you check the technical eu forum there are like 50 locked Ravencrest-whine topics locked by mods, who through years of technical issues still haven't fixed its most dire issues.
Most recently, we've had server crashes / hours of downtime in prime time in half of may, and now on 9 out of 11 days in June.
It happend a couple of hours ago aswell, which is actually the reason for me starting this.

Secondary reason is overpopulation. There has always been, currently is, and I believe always will be alot of good guilds on this server. From Sunwell -> TOC it was actually ridiculous, with new posts on the forums every day about raiding guilds coming to RC to get some real competition since their servers consists of scrubs.

What basically happened was that you got a shitload of awesome guilds, all their fanbois following behind, cross-server recruits hoping for a spot in [INSERT GOOD GUILD] - with the inevtiable invasion of chinese farmers to supply the insane amount of raiders with herbs, ore, and bad grammar.

The outcome was unsurprising and inevitable, the server has been unplayable for over a year during raid-hours. We had months with 2000+ queues to log on around dinnertime (that's 2-3 hours waiting to get on), insane lag in raids, unplayable game world, and of course blizzards token remedy; Free character migration to random realms (FCM was up non-stop for like 2 years, and still is).
All the guilds who made decent progress in this period raided at night.

Before ICC, quite a few of the migrating guilds gave up - and moved on. After that, the lag has been a bit better, but now we seem to suffer even more with the hardware itself.

Shithole server.

The tools:
Auctioneer:
Primary function:

• Record price history to get a general feel of the servers economy.
• The snatch-list. A nescessity for any business of mentionable size.
• Protect AH-window. Prevents you from accidentaly closing the AH-window, which happens surprisingly often when you actually start AHing alot.

Secondary functions:

• The appraiser-tool. Great to get rid of stuff that's in markets you don't constantly follow (glyphs, gems, enchants), leftovers from profession-lvling, etc.
• The resale-list. There is a lot of afk-crafting that has to be done, and doing it inside the AH working the resale-list can be great fun.

Quick Auctions 3:

Primary function:

• Post a crapton of glyphs/gems/enchants in a very, very short time - with predefined price ranges, undercut values, fallback prices, and quite a few other posting-variables that will make your life easier.

Secondary function:

• Item groups in conjunction with auto-mailer. The configuration-possibilities for this is endless, but the general ease of having items auto-mailed to the character who can use them - or the banker who is selling them cuts down greatly on micromanaging.

Altoholic:

Primary function:

• Adds a section to your tooltip which gives you a total of items owned throughout your account, even guild banks. Like [Cardinal Ruby] 3 Bags, 3 Bank, 2 Mail, 5 Guild Bank - Total owned: 13.

Secondary function:

• This addon reaches it's full potential together with the KTQ addon.

Skillet:

Primary function:

• Replaces your profession-UI with a somewhat intelligent interface with a little better control over your materials, and the ability to make a production-queue with several items in it. However, after some patch way back when, the queue needs manual human input between each different item - so some of the benefit is lost. The organizatorial benefit is still huge, but the time-component to it is now worthless (you can't go afk while you craft).
• I'm more of a ATSW-fan myselv, Skillet has alot of bugs and quirks, as do ATSW - but as with Altoholic - this addon reaches its potential through synergy with the next addon:

KTQ:

Primary function:

• Glyphs. What a wonderful tool this is. It's more of a script than an addon, but the results are unbelievable for scribes who are serious about their business. With a simple command like /ktq queue 5 glyph this addon will check all your chars, banks, and guildbanks for glyphs - subtract them from a total of 5 pr. glyph, and insert the deficit in your Skillet production-queue. If your glyph-banker has 2 Wild Growth-glyphs left, 1 on AH and 1 in his guildbank - KTQ will queue up 3 new ones in your scribes skillet. Awesomesauce.

Onebag3 & Onebank3:

Primary function:

• Slaps your bags/bankbags together to one, nice looking big one. All the other bloggers I've come across use Bagnon and I have no idea why.

Accountant:

Primary function:

• The moment your business expands to a couple of bankers, the money gets harder and harder to track. Did you make money today? Did you lose money? This addon tracks the session, day, week, and lifetime for all characters separately, and with a total for all of them. Easy, simple, fantastic.

The players:

My business has 8 employees.
First, I've got 3 lvl 80s that I actually play - so I have them in my raiding-guild.

80 Druid - Enchanting/Jewelcrafting - 450/450
80 Priest - Engineering/Inscription - 450/450
80 DK - Blacksmithing/Tailoring - 450/450

Then I got my 5 minions who are in General Goods Vendor. They handle all the dollar.
80 Warrior - Alchemy/Enchanting - 450/375
1 Warrior - My main banker. Handles random merchandise, and does 99% of the shopping
70 Hunter - Glypher 1
6 Warlock - Glypher 2
70 Shaman - Currently stationed in Netherstorm at the pet vendor, but is wanted for the Glypher 3 position when the need arises (still 100 glyphs undiscovered)
80 Paladin - Enchanting-banker, sells scrolls to the scrubs.

The philosophy:

It's late expansion, my guild is in zzz-mode, the last boss is dead long ago - got my Glory of the Icecrown 10 on March 31st, generally PVE is on pause until Cataclysm - or at least until Ruby Sanctum. What is one supposed to do?
I love this game, I really do - I'm not afraid to admit it. Time you enjoy wasting is not time wasted.
However, running pugs with the countless scrubs running loose on RC-EU, mouthbreathing hard enough to actually fog up my LCD over the web is not my favorite activity.
So, this plan to amass decent amounts of gold was born. With the ICC-buff rolling on 20% now, and steady increasing - the scrubs are finally seeing some 'progress', and they got money to spend.
I'm going to see just how much of that money i can aquire before Cataclysm.

The goal:
Gold cap. Not nescessarily before Cataclysm, but the goal remains.

The strategy:
As I said, my business i 3 weeks old. The profession-list above looked entirely different, with only Enchanting and Alchemy as 450-skills, no scribe, no bs, no tailor, no engineer.
When I get my mind into something, I'm addicted to one thing - gather information about the subject made available by other individuals in more or less the same position with more or less the same goal.
WOW gold blogs.
I must have read them all, all the posts, and I have picked up a lot of things. This got my business through it's birth pretty quickly. Keep in mind that most of the blogs are boring and uninspiring, but there is a gem here and there, especially one of them stands out like a beacon of light and he will get credit when it is due.

The mastermind:
Me. I'm 27 years old, but more on that later.


Next up: The birth