Content Curves and Professions

If you are choosing professions for your characters you may want to consider what I like to call the content curve and how your profession will fit into the larger picture that Blizzard has in store for the game and it's economy.

Let look at Inscription:

glyphs - great long term items, as content winds down and players get bored with a lack of new raids they will level alts, and then naturally get glyphs for those alts. Blizzard helped us by resetting glyphs and making a lot of changes to existing glyphs.

shoulder inscriptions - great items for active content and for players main characters getting new upgrades, epic versions probably will taper off as most casuals will settle for sub quality economic choices especially for their alts during stale content.

you should pick out the items crafted by your professions and sort them between "made for active content and mains" vs "made for stale content and alts" Post the stale/alt items on the weekends and ramp up stock between raid releases (content is getting stale when pugs are clearing almost all raids and you see them forming often, this is a sign of alts and is a sign of profits to be made). Items that a for mains and active content should be posted and camped during raid nights. Camp them, sit in the AH, flip them and relay, if you drive out enough of your competition you can greatly increase your volume as long as the demand remains.

Autofill Web Auction House form and undercut the similar auction by 1g

So I was really tired of always filling out and tabbing the form to post my auctions at lunch. I decided to write a script that can be executed in the chrome console and will fill & undercut my competition. Below is the script, just open the chrome JavaScript console and paste it in after selecting your item, quantity and duration. If there is a similar auction in the house it will fill out your fields to be 1g cheaper.

what it does not do
set quantity, time length options, actually post the auctions

what it does do
fills out the 6 form fields so you don't have to set the gold silver and copper

to access the console you paste the code in:
while you have an item selected to sell with qty and time established, use the following to open the console in chrome:
[ctrl] + [shift] + i

Then past the following in and hit enter:

$('#form-buyoutGold').val($('.price')[0].firstChild.nextSibling.innerText-1);$('#form-startGold').val($('.price')[0].firstChild.nextSibling.innerText-1);$('#form-buyoutSilver').val($('.price')[0].firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.innerText);$('#form-startSilver').val($('.price')[0].firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.innerText);$('#form-buyoutCopper').val($('.price')[0].firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.innerText);$('#form-startCopper').val($('.price')[0].firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.innerText);

Short Tip: Opportunity Cost and Inscription, Reducing the mailbox relay

Are you dealing with a large amount of competition in the glyph market as more players join the lucrative dark moon card trade?

If you are you may find yourself playing a lot more of the mailbox relay as you try to maintain a market edge in the world of glyphs. I used to spend about 5 minutes flipping auctions 3 times a day. Recently there has been a lot more people joining my competition and flipping has increased to about 15 minutes more than 3 times a day just to maintain the same margin I was getting before the first fair's aftermath. After the first DMF people starting bragging about their profit and a lot of scribes have been showing up since then.

There are really 2 options you have here:

1.) start battling with glyph walls and undercuts. Reduce your margin and post above crafting cost making it really low for other scribes to make a decent amount of gold

2.) reduce your stock to only the highest value glyphs and hover over those auctions to make sure you are getting the sales.

Personally I like option 2 as it will reduce your crafting time and the amount of time you do the relay. Battling probably won't work well in Mists as the cooldown will maintain a value for the darkmoon decks and scribes probably will not leave the market during the fair.

Where did all the auctioneers go?

I'm back to writing my blog again. I took a break from WoW to play Rift and check out some console games I had been putting off. My blood started craving a good profit streak and I could not wait to get back into the swing of things.

I moved to a newer lower population server recently and my Glyphs don't sell as much as they used to but I was still able to pull ~150k within a few weeks by lowering my volume and micro managing the market (re-posting a lot)

It's nice to see that not a lot has changed since my break began, I wonder what happened to the podcast "Call to Auction", I really enjoyed that and elaborated a lot on some of their points in my writing. Those guys really inspired me to take more dedication in understanding Auctioning and I wish they were still making shows. :(

I'm still using TSM with inscription, but I hand post some items that fall into a special category for me. Ember cuts are very rare on this server and so is truegold so I post those by hand overcutting because I know the "Sweet Spot" of the market.

The Sweet Spot
This falls into understanding your server and the specific items that have a higher value and are less common. lets say you have noticed that truegold moves ~40 bars a night on your servers "busy" nights. You can shoot to be the 12-16th less expensive auction and still sell your stock. This can increase your profit a lot, for me sometimes 50% or more.

point: You don't always need to undercut if you believe your price is fair and the demand will consume your goods.

Have a good time and make some gold.

Volume Over Margin

I recently have been playing in the glyph market in addition to my usual gem areas of crafting. A principle that all craftsmen should take in to consideration when manufacturing goods from materials in the auction house is the volume of sales you expect to get on a set of items compared to the ROI you anticipate. (ROI == return on investment)

Within a 24 hour period I may sell 4 austere shadowspirit diamond and 1 Effulgent Shadowspirit Diamond

My ROI on the Austere is about 50g, my margin on the effulgent is 150g

Selling the 4 Austere's provides me with more profit then selling 1 Effulgent, likewise if I could sell two Effulgent SDs a day it would be like selling 6 Austere (I wish I could sell 2 eff's a day, they just don't appeal to my server)

Knowing the average of volume of a certain good per day is a great way to maximize your profits when deciding what to make and how much to make how often. Let me be clear that I do not choose to make one of these cuts over the other, I make them both. I use my knowledge of volume trends to know how much I am making, what I expect to get back and how many to list at a time to avoid over spending in deposits from returned auctions.

Everything's Better Down Where It's Wetter

Take if from me.

Okay so I started farming again. Even though I was making a pretty penny in the AH crafting gems (which I am still making great money at). I recently had a large amount of extra time to play, rather than level one of my many alt projects I decided to do a little farming since Azshara's Veil is running for about 7-9g a piece (140-180g per stack). I noticed that I had barely any competition when farming this at peak hours. Then a /who let me discover something I always knew. People hate water levels.

I think it may have started in Super Mario 2-2. Maybe even TMNT, the damn dam level. You know what I am talking about. Diffusing bombs, running out of air, reaching out and finding those first pre-middle school cuss words that dad says when he hurts himself in the garage.

So killing time waiting for my stock of meta gems to move I was able to farm about 3 stacks of Azshara in about 20-30 minutes. I also managed to farm obsidium ore at the same time (dual gathering rogue) and I netted about 1200g total with the stormvine.

1200g in 30 minutes isn't too bad for a boring evening. If herb prices are rocketing pre-raid days on your server get a beverage, some tunes and do a circuit. I also run windowed mode and stream netflix sometimes.

Watch Die Hard, make about 4800g for kicks at the same time. I also bind my water mount to "Z" since I think drawing weapons is a pretty stupid key binding.

Processing Elementium

There has not been a post here in quite some time. This has a lot to do with waiting for the cata tweaks and inflation to adjust. While waiting for the markets to normalize I have been busy making tons of gold in the meta market.

Why meta gems?

1.) I have 2 transmutation specialist alchemists so I can proc on making my meta gems (not that two matters since there is no cooldown on making meta gems).
2.) there is no cooldown on making meta gems.
3.) I have two jewelcrafters at my disposal  so we can double the rate at which we acquire recipes
4.) There are not a lot of people saturating the meta market so competition across many patterns is very low

So I purchase large amounts of elementium which on my server range from 2g to 5+g per peice (I am thresholding this at about 3.5-3.8g) prospect all this while playing internet poker and then load the ah every night.

I'm making a decent profit off of this and an additional amount when I add in the blue gems I am cutting and auctioning or auctioning raw depending on the current market position. I notice that Ocean sapphires are going well over their cut versions often.

I'll be posting more soon!