Friday, February 17, 2012

A little gold post, a way to make a break into the big game

With four DS capable and ready characters, it is easy to get burned out and bored with the instance, trying too hard to run all 4 in LFR and a regular raid every week just gets, well, it takes away the appeal of doing it in my main raid group...  With Valentine’s day this week, we had several missing people on Tue and decided to only raid on Thur.  We did last night and ran a full clear, one shotting almost everything... But those of us that were there on Tues. came up with a new distraction plan... Twink alts... No schedule, no expectations and no demands, just something to do with one or more other people, when you don't want to run DS, LFR, LFD, troll trade, do dailies, chase achievements or any number of other things...  And DS is reasonably fast these days... Last night's one night clear would have been about 2 hours, but was closer to 3 with breaks and allowing people to go get tier pieces and reforge... In my case 45 expertise is not optimal...

The twink plan... So with great vigor, I rolled up a monster little rogue to lay down the waste in the lvl 19 bracket... fast and easy to get to leveling, plenty of competition, no huge investment of time or gold, and lots of fun in doses.. like anything, variety is the spice of the game... I doubt I am the only one in this mindset... making now a better time to play at the twink market than it was when DS first came out.

Well, shopping around for some gear on the AH I was again surprised at the market...

On to the gold making part:
Low level leather gear... 45 gold... Probably about 3 gold in mats to make it... same with rings, chants, cloth and mail for any crafting profession.  Stamina is king in low level BGs... the next thing is STR/AGI/INT... If you can make crafted gear roughly in the level 8-19 range and it has both, you may really have a little gold mine... and something different to do... a second point, is that pants, boots, bracers, gloves and jewelry are the non heirloom pieces people need the most...  Check your markets, DS is getting boring for many players, especially the good ones that would know how to twink and have a enough gold to share with you...

2 factors may play into this...
1st is leveling/twinking players... bored players are looking to do something different than DS with their play time, achieves, alt raids, and making alts are some of the many options... Players are looking for the low level gear for 2 reasons, leveling in  BGs or dungeons... or twinking... At the lowest levels it represents IMO some of the greatest improvements your toon can obtain, and its fairly inexpensive...
2nd, These are largely overlooked markets... everyone is trying to sell epic gems cuts and epic raiding gear or... something for the end game, but the low level markets... though small and niche by comparison, can be very profitable with minimal time investment since the competition is less likely to be interested or stay interested if they find stiff competition...

How I would do it if I wanted to press into the market... first a bank alt would be needed to make my time investment minimal... big bags... armor pieces do not stack so it would take some room... play with the level 7-19 crafted gear, and find what actually sells.  Post one or 2 of each item and if it sells begin stocking 5-10 each of that item... if it does not sell, lower the price and take it out of the crafting queue... At the end of a market trial, if you watch you numbers you will find what sells and what volume it sells at roughly.  Next is develop the posting plan, 1/day, 2/day, 3/day... that determines in part how many you post... some things you may post 5 per posting daily, others only one or two, and others may be 7+...   With these details worked out, you do a mass crafting session and send 5-20+ of the items you will be selling to the bank alt... Store them in the mailbox... cancel/post on your schedule, and collect your gold... only once every couple days do you have to craft... and mats are almost always cheap and available, but some regular scanning will get you mats a bit cheaper...

Effectively this is what I did for 3+ months leading up to Cata... it is also how I have repeatedly developed many sales plans... with that kind of information and volume data, I knew which enchant scrolls could sell 5-7 between postings and 50+/week, and which would sell, sometimes 1/posting and maybe 3/week... it’s a great low risk way to practice for the big game... I had over 1000 scrolls pre crafted when 4.3 hit... some I missed the mark on by a bit, but for the most part, I had enough to get me through the first 5 days.. Some were only a stack of 10-20, some were 5 stacks of 20... In addition to that I had “liquid” chant mats to be able to react to what sold faster than I was prepared for... Again, I went from 10K to 1Mill in 10 days with this strategy and was at 1.4 million in 15 days...  I practiced the strategy and learned how to do market analysis with low level crafting on several classes with several profession.  I learned to increase efficiency with posting and crafting times... It was vendor pet sales that I came up with the inventory management I would use…

Example: I would take one toon out and buy 12 or 24 each of the vendor pets across the world... I would mail them to the posting bank alt… 12 per mail... I would cancel post the pets on the bank alt, and then just a quick run to the mail box to restock on sold items... and post again... this allowed me to make one weekly, roughly one hour farm run per week to buy vendor pets, and then post them for the next several days with stocks from the mail box... With the low level twink gear, you could do similarly. 

Get some more gold… Thanks for stopping in

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