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
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
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