Testing the Waters

As I have been slacking so horribly on my gold making lately, I decided to make sure to at least put in a little effort each day this week to see where I ended up. I'm mostly stocking profession crafted goods from both current and previous expansions. I have all of the professions covered at least once, but I am lacking many of the Legion recipes as forcing my alts through dungeons has been difficult at best.

OK, so how did I do on the auction house this week?

Well, I didn't seem to make much more gold per day than I had been while slacking off really, but 757,484g in auction house sales for the week isn't anything to be depressed with.

I have still been checking missions on each of my characters each day too and doing any gold missions I can (half of the characters are still not finished with argus missions or class halls though so their gold income from missions is a bit poor) and my total profit for the week is 826,466g after all the expenses and incoming gold from missions and quests is taken into account.

In total?

Show Me The Money!

14,991,389g



Hmmm...actually that doesn't include the 1 million I keep stored on the auction house character as it is on a different account. I totally forgot to include that last time too. So actually it is...

15,991,389g

Financial Update

There have been a lot of changes in the way that the Warcraft economy works since I absented myself from my blog. We've seen the arrival of missions boards first in garrisons and then order halls which provide a steady income of gold. Upgradeable crafting items have kept the crafting markets really competitive on the auction house for the entirety of an expansion. Tokens to buy gold or game time were introduced. The gold cap per character was raised to 10 million allowing for easier storage of gold and much larger bids on the Black Market Auction House. There were probably many other small changes that have slipped my mind at the moment, but in general, the situation is that it is much easier for players to acquire gold if they are actively trying to do so.

While I have been away from the blog, I have gone through phases of slacking at gold making and actively working on it (depending on my health at the time) as usual and my funds are significantly higher than when I last did a gold post. But let's be fair, it has been two expansions! My main account is still covered by a subscription, but I am running a second account for auction purposes that is paid for with tokens. With the ridiculous price of EU tokens, that isn't a small amount of money.

Over the past expansion, I have also indulged in a few of the silly gold sink items that were introduced in Legion. It won't surprise anyone that has been here before to know that I bought the Celestial Calf to add to the collection of Eriks as soon as it was available. He's not actually called Erik though, as I named him after the guildmate who regularly checked Dalaran for me to let me know when the merchant arrived. I love that the calf regularly casts Starfall as an idle animation, but it's really difficult to actually see any detail on the pet at all. I also caved and bought myself a spider mount. Then I felt bad at spending so much money on myself so I pushed myself to earn more in order to buy a mount for my two wonderful minions that do so much to help keep me sane and feel like a real human being.

So where am I currently?

Show Me The Money!
14,164,923g

For next time I'll finish sorting out my auction alt again and see how well I did while putting some reasonable effort in! 

Once again, a Millionaire!

Today I decided to do things a little differently to celebrate reaching the first of my financial goals for this expansion.

Still with the 100k on the second account.

BACK OVER 1 MILLION!!!!

Okay, maybe I'm a little excited to be back on track again. Grand total for this week is 1,046,175g. The good news is that I'm now all ready to start working on the next million. On the flip side, I owe a lovely lady a new mount!

General Update

Totally forgot to post yesterday!

As I have mentioned before, I raid with a group that tries hard to be as good as it can be without resorting to hours that break too much into our real lives. This suits me fine as obviously, I struggle to play for very long amounts of time. This week I needed to have a Holy spec ready for raiding although I haven't played Holy for several expansions. The resulting headache and endless reading involved just meant that I forgot a few things that I wanted to get done, one of them being my blog post. My first test of the new spec is tonight so hopefully, all that time and energy wasn't wasted.

I haven't had as much time online this week as I've been not sleeping very well and it tends to make my ME symptoms much worse. I've still been posting my auctions each day, but not as often as I usually would. On the plus side, I finally finished my Sky Golem and put it on AH. Despite my terrible pet addiction, I have a fair amount of restraint when it comes to mounts. The way I deal with craftable mounts is that I make one of each type and sell them on AH until I feel that it is no longer profitable to do so. At which point, I learn the leftover mounts so that I never have mounts left over unable to be sold. On my server, this plan works out well for me as there are many people aside from myself that sell them regularly.

Okay, I know what you are thinking...

Show Me The Money!

 

I remembered to grab a screenshot of the second account this time around, although as usual it still just holds the 100k that I keep for buying/selling. A grand total of 909,018g. Almost at the first milestone point I set myself! I have a dear friend who has been checking in on my totals and cheering me on every week while I give her and her brother tips on learning how to use the auction house. I promised her a coloured Panther mount when I got back to the first million gold, so if the little lemming clone is reading this, it looks like next week will have some nice mail for you!

Making order from chaos

Well, everything has been really messy since my enforced internet break. As suspected, the auction house profits have suffered. I missed the first possible sales of the Sky Golem mount (I'm still many days behind having the first one ready) and I'd been hoping to make a little profit there.

I'll keep today's update short and sweet as I'm really exhausted.

Show me the money!

As usual, this screenshot is just from the main account and doesn't include the 100k stored on the second account for purchases. That gives us 854,690g. That's only a 108k increase from the last total before the computer died, however, that doesn't include the 190k spent on a new pet to cheer me up.

Autumn is here!

Autumn leaves are falling

Yes, World of Warcraft now officially is in autumn (at least as far as pets are concerned). My lovely little Blossoming Ancient has shed his summer outfit and clothed himself all in the new seasons' colours. He looks rather cute!

I have been busy catching up on the new content that I had to put on hold last week because of my raiding schedule and general exhaustion. This week has been more painful than I expected but I did at least get to see some of the new features. I finally finished my noodle cart quest chain and found that the shorter WoW races get a lovely little bonus of a stack of books to stand on in order to operate the cart.

The chef's hat graphic when using the cart is rather oversized on a Dwarf.

At auction, I have been increasing my sales of gems and enchants mostly. These have been flying out of the auction house almost as fast as I can make and list them, even having raised my profit percentage. Primal Diamonds, in particular, seem in heavy demand, both cut and uncut. I have had a small success with new PvP items, but I didn't really expect those to sell very well with the huge influx of epic armour from the Timeless Isle. I am still selling plenty of cogwheels as well as some of the rare jewelcrafting jewellery such as Roguestone Shadowband. This does surprise me as I'd thought both of those markets would dry up with all the new epics. The new glyph recipes that I have managed to acquire (what a painful drop rate!) are also selling for nice prices. On the whole, I have seen a vast increase in sales this week now that the raid finder version of the new raid is open. How does this translate into numbers?

Show Me the Money!

746,588g

I'm not going to include a screenshot of the money this week as I already have several pictures in this post. That's an increase of 318k from last week's total and about 90k more profit than last week.  If this keeps up I'll be back to my old 2 million record in no time!

In the Wake of the Patch

Well, the patch has been here a week now and my auction sales have been good. I am still convinced that the main bulk of profit will not be in this first week but instead in the later weeks as more of the raids are opened and other traders start to run low on stock. The prices for most materials on my server have raised by a rather large margin. Sha Crystals have dropped, although how temporary that drop will be may well be determined by how many people want to farm chests on the new island. PvE armour items are still selling well, at least the item level 522 ones are. They still are a larger upgrade than most of the epic items on the new island so I expect this trend to continue as people gear up to enter instances.

I have a rather large stockpile of Sha Crystals currently, so I plan on not buying any until I can see which way the market is likely to settle, or if I run out. My gems, enchants, cogwheels etc are all selling very well, but I am not aggressively posting auctions at this time. I am listing them for sale only a few times each day, but not worrying too much about being undercut. That being said, I still seem to be making a lot of sales. I'm looking forward to seeing how much the profit on these items increases as the demand starts to exceed supply in a week or two!

Show Me the Money!

The 100k stored on second account not included

428,602g

That's an increase from last week of 228k. definitely not going to complain about that, but hope to see it going up!

Patch Imminent

Spectral Tiger Cub

If you made it to this post, then thank you for moving here with me! Once again, sorry for the inconvenience.

I displayed a total lack of willpower this week and treated myself to a Spectral Tiger Cub pet. My justification was that it was a lot cheaper than I'd seen them before and I'm a little unsure on how the prices or availability of TCG pets will change when Hearthstone is released and the WoW TCG stops being maintained. Of course, while these reasons are true, we all know I'm just a total sucker for a shiny new vanity pet.


Somwewhere within the next 24 hours (depending on your region) the 5.4 patch should be implemented. My little banks are full to bursting point with crafting materials that I have bought up over the past few weeks whenever they were at cheaper prices and I'm eager to get started on making more money!  My new raid team has called for an extra raid night on the first week to enable us to try to clear normal content as soon as possible and get working on heroics. This may hinder my plans a little as I can't do much else on a raid day. Hopefully I can still manage a little auctioning too after all this hard work!

Not including the 100k on second account

Show Me the Money!

200,184g

I don't have a convenient way of showing the totals from both accounts at once, so as the second account is always kept at exactly 100k balance its easier to do it this way. That's only down 15k or so from last week and includes the large pet purchase.
Roll on 5.4, I'm ready for ya!

Weekend Drama

This weekend was our first wedding anniversary. While we are rather limited in celebration options, I had arranged to have a raid night off and we planned on having a lovely day together just enjoying the company. Things never quite seem to work out as we plan.

Mr Wench managed to have an accident at work on Thursday, hitting his head and cutting a deep gouge along his scalp. He'd been advised by the first aid team to just leave it as they didn't think it would require stitching. On Friday morning, however, it was still bleeding so Mr Wench woke me up to get a second opinion on whether he needed to go to the hospital. I got up, took a quick look and confirmed that I thought a hospital visit would be necessary...and then collapsed on the floor.

I'm really not the sort of person that faints at the sight of blood or anything and I'd been checking on the progress of his head wound the day before. One of the symptoms I get with ME when under stress or particularly worn out is that my temperature can suddenly go up or down without warning. I also react badly to temperature rises (nothing to do with ME, just a bonus quirk) so after all the stress of keeping an eye on Mr Wench and just generally having been a little run down, I woke up, my temperature rose and I overheated. Annoyingly, I'd managed to collapse behind the bathroom door and while Mr Wench had seen the sudden colour drain from my face and checked my fall, I was now blocking the bathroom door shut and he couldn't get out. Mr Wench is not just my husband, he's also my carer. Having watched over me for so many years, he thankfully realised this was likely a temperature issue and covered me in cold damp towels and flannels until I started to be responsive again. After cooling down again, I was just exhausted and a bit bruised and he was able to head on to the hospital to get his head treated with medical glue.

Our anniversary celebrations were a little quieter and more subdued than we'd planned, but it reminded us that we have each other to lean on.

In World of Warcraft, I have done very little this week outside of raid time commitments. My auction sales and stockpiling are becoming more reserved as we approach patch day. I have stopped restocking PvP armours and am just selling off the stock I have left, as it will be mostly useless by patch day. Jewellery, enchants, gems and the like will still be useful so I am still keeping them stocked. The rest of the time has been used to stockpile more materials. I have been focussing more on Magnificent Hides, Exotic Leather and Windwool Cloth this week as my supplies in each are rather low and I feel it will be impossible to have too much! With the increased amounts of each used for new daily cooldowns, I suspect there may be an increase in demand leading to higher prices which would choke my supply line or force me to raise crafting prices.

Show Me The Money

215,118g

That's down by just over 110k from last week but the increase in stored materials and supplies is huge. As I've done this over the course of a few weeks, I have been able to buy just the low priced items rather than paying much more when demand is higher. One more week until I start to see my finances going in the right direction again!

Stockpiling Frenzy!

I will admit that this week I have gone perhaps a little over the top in my stockpiling efforts. My aim here was to store a large quantity of the crafting materials that I use regularly while they were a reasonable price so that if my speculation is correct and the prices on these items rise when the 5.4 patch is released on 10/11th September I would still be able to craft as much as I wanted at the current prices I use. It would also mean that with a large stockpile I would not be hindered by any lack of supply on the auction house due to increased demand.

This is a minimum risk strategy really. If my speculation is wrong or the prices drop instead of rising I won't really lose out. I already know I will use all these materials in crafting and as a new tier will be available the demand for enchants, gems etc will be high.

Pretty rainbows!

I have several bank tabs full of Ghost Iron Ore ready for smelting/prospecting as needed as well as a large amount of Trillium bars and Magnificent Hides ready for crafting cooldowns so that I don't get stuck with a day or two where I can't use CDs to learn new recipes and gain the new crafting materials. With the new Engineering mount requiring 30 each of Living Steel and the new engineering craftable (Jard's Peculiar Energy Source) both being on a daily cooldown, it could be a long time until these reach the auction house. I've also stocked up on Golden Lotus to make sure that I can keep myself stocked with raid flasks for personal use (or sale if the price goes up on my server to make them a viable selling option) as well as to be able to transmute gems if my stocks start to run low.

Show Me The Money!

328,675g

That's dropped from last week by about 63k but I'm not worried as I expect to make that back with interest once the patch arrives!

Choose Your Poison

There are many ways to make gold in World of Warcraft. You don't have to choose one and ignore the rest, you can dabble in as many markets and types of income as you like. My health restricts gameplay that requires me to concentrate to a couple of hours each day, which is usually reserved for raiding. This means that the methods I choose to use to make gold are ones that require no endless killing of monsters or running of instances. My income is primarily through making purchases on the auction house and then selling those items on the auction house either in the same form or crafted into new ones. To help me in this, I have every crafting profession at maximum level although the introduction of so many time-consuming factions in this expansion containing crafting recipes does mean that some of the newer recipes are not available to me.

My stable income is usually from the things that people need to continually buy each time they get new useable loot: enchants of all types (including inscription and tailoring) and gems. I also like to keep a good stock of PvP armour and Glyphs on the AH, as while these are one-off purchases they are quite popular.

It did occur to me just after I'd made the previous post that my gold funds would be dropping a lot before they go up as the new patch isn't very far away. The reason for this is that with a new patch some items often have a greater demand and go up in price, as well as with a new tier of PvP and PvE gear players tend to find themselves purchasing more enchants than usual. With this in mind, I tend to stockpile items that I use regularly that I am expecting to go up in price so that I am not forced to suddenly pay a lot more than I usually do to acquire them. This enables me to have a larger profit margin when the patch hits. The investment will hopefully pay off in a few weeks when the patch arrives, but as with all things, it is a bit of a gamble albeit a low risk one.





Show Me The Money!

391,696g

It surprised me to find that while stockpiling so much this week I still managed to make a small profit with my regular sales. I guess that mostly suggests I haven't been stockpiling enough!

Recovering Slowly

Over the past year, my health has been drastically worse whilst struggling to recover from my wedding. I'd hate to think how bad I might have been if I hadn't restricted everything to 20 guests and a tiny, tiny quiet celebration. In this time, I've still been playing WoW, trying to learn a new expansion, trying to keep my raid team going etc. Some of it has been successful and some not. My guild struggled a lot and eventually had to close down its raid team. Many of the more active members of the guild stopped playing WoW and I barely did anything on AH at all aside from buying things to make myself smile or upgrade armour to allow me to catch up with other raiding characters.

With the funds I had stored I didn't really need to worry about gold, so I just let it slip out of my mind and focused on finding somewhere new to raid and on getting back to a stable health pattern again. Suddenly this week I noticed that my little nest egg had dropped all the way to around 400k. I realise that this may still be more gold than many players have as most do not enjoy spending many hours engaging in "AH PvP" as a friend of mine has been known to call it.  For me though, this drop was horrific! The start of the expansion had seen me with over 2 million gold. My new raiding home had been sorted and I had caught up in item level with my new friends, but my gold balance was woefully lacking.

Time for a kick up the backside and some hard work!

It occurred to me that this would be a great time to document how I go about gaining gold in the game. Many friends and guildmates ask how I manage to make money, so I shall endeavour to give an update and record of what I have been doing every Tuesday when I reach the end of my WoW week.

To prepare for my hard climb back to millionaire status, I have spent the past week checking on my auction house addons. By fortuitous coincidence, the new version of Tradeskill Manager was released this week, so I have spent a lot of time this week learning how to use the reworked features and in setting up endless groups from scratch. For anyone wanting to have a look, it is now available for public download at Curse and the TSM team have put a LOT of very hard work into it. It's very special!

Show Me The Money!

Starting capital: 389,659g

A new milestone!

It seems strange to me that this post comes only 4 months after the last gold milestone post I made.  As you may well remember, most of my World of Warcraft time is spent playing with the auction house as its one of the few things that I can manage most days due to health.  Because of this, I've been working hard to create a gold fund for my characters as well as for Mr Wench's characters.  He doesn't have time to play often due to work schedule, so its nice to be able to return the favour he does me by paying for my WoW account, keeping a roof over my head, food on my plate and generally looking after me.  When he does have time to play, I buy anything he needs in-game as a thank you.

For me, it means I have the added safety net for the weeks where I'm too tired to do anything that requires concentration (raiding, dungeons, questing or even levelling in general).  Rather than worry about falling behind the curve with my raid gear because I can't run the looking for raid versions or do many dungeons, I can afford to spend on the crafted items or other BoE items in order to keep up.

So here it is; the magic screenshot of my new 2 million milestone!

Finally reaching the 2 Million gold milestone.

The main bulk of my income this time was different to the first million.  Over the past few months, I've found enchant scrolls to be particularly big sellers especially if you managed to stockpile enchanting materials before the 4.3 patch.  I stockpiled much more than I thought I would use, and ran out very quickly. I obviously totally underestimated how many people would be buying. Another big boost to my finds has been the PvP craftable items, especially the jewellery and leather items.  On my server the jewelcrafters are so busy fighting each other for the cut gems market that they totally over look the PvP jewellery.  Most days this leaves me with a niche market.  With the leather PvP armour, it's not so much that people forget that it gets upgraded each patch, more that they cannot acquire the leather at a good enough price as there are several of us that buy up all the leather under a certain price every day.  By the time 4.3 patch came in, I had two guild bank tabs full of Heavy Savage Leather, Blackened Dragonscale and Pristine Hides.

If you read this hoping for inspiration and advice in making more gold in World of Warcraft the best I can give you is to be patient and watch.  Every server is different.  The way to make money on your server is to watch what sells well and try to think what each new patch is going to make people want.  The big things introduced in the 4.3 patch for example were a new PvP season, new raid and a few new dungeons.  This means that people will be getting new items that they want to use (needing gems and enchants) and that they will want better PvP gear to compete, especially more casual players.  Even if you don't have the gold to invest in a large supply of crafting materials to make money with, you should always think about buying up the materials that you will need personally.  So many of my friends were not prepared and when they started collecting their new items in raids they suddenly realised that the price increases meant they couldn't afford to gem their new items.

Virtually a millionaire!

While I do spend a lot of time online playing World of Warcraft, most people by now realise that I play it mainly to socialise with other people. It gets a little lonely here at times and while I can't shimmy until I ache all over anymore (well no actually I can still do that, it just takes 5-10 seconds rather than 5-10 minutes!) I can in a virtual world fight monsters and cast spells. However these things quickly take their toll of my energy and while it is mostly mental exertion, it still leaves me exhausted. I've managed now to keep a balance of no more than a couple of hours doing questing and raiding with my friends. So what is it I do with all the rest of the time I have between resting breaks? Gold, my friend...gold.



I discovered many months ago that playing about with the in game Auction House doesn't drain my energy.  The actual mental input is minimal and as I'm not being forced to concentrate on flashing lights, audio alarms and little green bars - which is my usual focus when healing my little raid team - I find that I can happily keep myself entertained for ages.  Who knew how interesting it could be to watch the little piles of gold come rolling in?  At first I collected gold because there would often be weeks when I couldn't join in at all and in order to make sure I could keep up with my friends and not fall too far behind, I started to amass a "rainy day" fund to enable me to purchase equipment when I would lag behind.  This soon spread to being able to fund Mr Wench's occasional wishes in WoW too (as he does all the real life work that pays for our accounts) until my little nest egg had reached around 20,000 gold! A fortune!  Perhaps not...



Getting heavily into the swing of my new little addiction, I decided to try to get to the gold cap for a character in the game.  At that time it was around 250k gold, which seemed so far away.  The week before I managed it, Blizzard moved the goal posts and stretched the character gold cap to 1 million gold (well actually its one copper short, but I'm not fussy).  Not one to give up easily, especially now that I was so determined to reach that elusive gold cap, I continued planning, scheming and counting the coppers until finally last month...

I also seem to have developed a fascinatingly melodious and psychedelic sunflower pet.

You'd think that would be enough, wouldn't you? My menagerie of WoW vanity pets has grown to the point of no longer having pets that I can use gold to purchase.  I have caught up with all the equipment I wanted to buy for my main character, and while lacking the energy to play the other characters, there seems little point to buying things for them.



But no...the second million awaits...and it has cookies!