Friday, March 2, 2012

Making gold durring the Patch cycle slumps...

I have said many things and I am not really saying anything new here, just a reminder to those that are grinding for gold in what many would consider a depressed economy...

Clearly, players are playing less, they are logging to raid and thats it.. The rep grinds are done, the dailies and vendors available in the Molten front are done if they are going to do it...  They are leveling alts and professions and, if players are even still in game, they chase some pursuit other than the grinds that traditionally follow a patch release, "gear my main for that new raid zone"

So, how to maximize the gold making now, in the later patch phase when lots of things are sorta in the slumps, like economies and markets…  Or even get into a profitable market... How to approach this without regard for your servers size or other variables...

Simple answer, with complex subtleties to take advantage of based on the specifics and particulars of your server economy... small servers that have an over all casual nature, you will really have a hard time with things, but ask yourself this: Why are people not spending gold??? IMO the answer is: Because they don’t have “enough.” Now ask why don’t they have enough? IMO because they spent it or plan to spend on SOMETHING… Now I ask myself what is/are those things… (excepting of course the completely lazy scrubs that have no ambition for anything that would require any “work” or “effort”)

However here is what I can suggest, take people's gold for being lazy (and often naive)...  Turn time into gold...  Here is a list of activities that take time, and you may find profit in... though, I recommend you start slow and make sure you have some idea of how much the market will bear before you commit large amounts of resources to the cause...  The list is just a group of suggestions, though are other things to do that are similar...
  • Prospecting Ore
  • Milling herbs
  • Crafting ore to bars
  • Crafting pigments to inks
  • Gathering anything
  • Flying around to various vendors for pets and other items...
  • Crafting other intermediate materials
  • Buying frozen orbs and converting them to trade good
  • Crafting leather scraps to leather and heavy leather and turning in to pristine hides or arctic fur
  • Disenchanting
  • Niche markets, like twink gear and chants
  • Flipping things like motes -> primals, Crystallized -> Eternals
  • Buying out things that have scarcity on the AH when they are cheap and relisting at normal prices, like Heavy Hides, Spiders Silk are some low level ones...
  • Catering your crafting to low level toons, like crafted gear for level 10-14, for the BG leveling toons, and 15-19 for the LFD leveling toons and the BG guys...
  • Farming Transmog gear
Your experience will have a large factor into this, unfortunately, each server and faction has variables that affect which ones will work from week to week, however, I made a lot of gold based on the fact that I had the lowest priced item in the AH NOW!!! Not when their friend logs on, not after farming stuff or gathering mats for a friend to craft etc... NOW... their impatience made their gold, mine...

It boils down to two things...  Answer these questions correctly for your server and faction and you have a profitable business model in concept.
  1. What are people too lazy to do (uninformed/naive can be substituted for lazy)
  2. What on that list are few or no other players doing...
And I guess #3 would be: "Are you willing to do those tedious, boring, time consuming things?"

My reasoning why this is largely universal:

I cut gems and craft chants for all  the raiders in my group... it is frequent... like once a week that in my small circle I am telling someone to LOOK UP PROFESSIONS IN THE GUILD INTERFACE after they ask me to link my book... and that’s when I AM online with the toon... People often forget and over look this newer feature, and just go the AH for the final product...

Are people playing the glyph game and making gold at it?

It requires AH farming, Milling, crafting inks, stocking paper, and inks, inventory management, posting routines, posting alts, add-on management, add-on use, learning add-ons, market research, market analysis, massive inventory, buying routines, vicious under cutters, unprofitable market sectors, wildly fluctuating market prices, players that come and players that go, and the worst are the players that stay...

Yes, lots of people have figured out how to make gold at it with wildly varying strategies for the finite points of maximizing potential, but yes it can be profitable..

There are people that are making gold at the glyph market.. and by reviewing the list you can see why there are often few competitors... lazy and naive players are very intimidated or quickly bored with the management of a business in this market...

Ore Shuffle? Same question, similar demands and a similar answer about Ore shuffling and associated markets...

Enchanting scrolls?  about the same, though some unique challenges...

Leg armors and spell threads and belt buckles... Not all the same.. but just as effective potentially for a different set of reasons... The BSs, LWs, and Tailors feel that is all they have to make gold with and its too much work for too little profit to invest the time... Or its too monopolized by other players...

The entry cost to the big markets is a high threshold... For my enchanting business... I had an enchanter with a guild bank that had 5 tabs committed to his enterprise, and all seven of his bags in the personal bank were the 36 slot chanting materials bags... I maintained inventories of materials in the thousands... 2K+ in volatiles, 5K Dust, 1-2K essences, and even at my peak over 1K pre-crafted scrolls of enchant everything/anything... I had over 350 belt buckles, and around 100 pristine hides to make whatever leg armor I wanted, though I already had 40-80 of each crafted when 4.3 hit...  The belt buckles were managed on another toon and just shipped over to my posting toon, and the LW business was another guild bank tab dedicated to that part of the business...

I did it, and now have a few more gold pixels in my windows displaying a bigger number than most reflecting my current gold totals... it took me a over a year... and it was far more often than not.. anything but fun.... The fun moments were going to the mailbox, and pulling out 20-40... 100K in sales... Collecting the gold from sales took 2-3 minutes of the hours I committed daily to the gold works...

Take the last comments with a grain of salt, I ran a big business and made a lot of gold.  You can easily scale it down and run a smaller business with much less over head and make the gold you need for your in game pursuits.  And if you do it right, you will make more gold at the AH in a given time than you would by doing dailies... again! You’re just trading grinding dailies for grinding the AH...

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