Preparing now for 5.0... Are you?

How do you plan for 5.0 and/or 5.1

IMO, 2 things need to be done

First thing, Have a Plan.

Second thing, Have a System.

and I guess if there was a 3rd it would be some market experience.

Plans could be:

1. FARM Ore/Herbs/Skins
2. Cater to the leveling market
3. Cater to the returning market
4. Level and cater to the big spending end gamers market
5. Spend big to power level profs and be one of the first to get the gear out on the street
6. Or just go with a combo of these or something totally different
7. The new Monk glyphs?

A System, by this I am refereing to having your inventory set up to move it, with the posting toons the crafting toons and enough backup data so that if addons do not work you can, still post and make sales based on DATA, not a guess... In a way this is the biggest thing to work out.  Addons and posting ques, groups and categories... inventory managed and prepositioned to in a way for easy acess to do large volume posts, without large volumes of time.  This comes down to having roles set up for your toons, who stores and posts, who crafts and how you manage the inventory to readily and easily find what you are looking for to post...

The 3rd thing would be to do some dabling in the markets you would play with later, watching daily and weekly cycle prices, knowing volume and speed that people on your server may undercut you...

These things combined will give you a sense of how much time invested is profitable break point compared to your tolerance toward playing the AH game.

For instance, say you have all 9 slots on your account filled w/ toons you plan to keep (gotta have room to make a pana/monk), lets say you have no guild banker bank alt w/ lots more storage, and each of the toons gets played, so has gear and food and such for both specs, and a couple have some PVP gear etc...

So looking at one server, this would be the cards stacked heavily against you by my estimation... no dedicated level one bank alt, no guild bank for storage, inventory space is partially used for active playing...

Well to start,

1. Get rid of all  your fishing poles that are not uncommon (have stats).  They take up a space that hundreds of gold in a single flip could buy you hundreds more replacement fishing poles. 
2. Put stuff in void storage
3. Get profession bags for more storage space of items if you plan to flip in those markets otherwise get rid of all your mats now
4. If you dont have an army knife, get one if it will save you space
5. Old  food, get rid of it, or put it in storage for flipping later
6. If there is not a strong possiblility, really strong possibility that you will be using the gear again, vendor/DE it
7. What toon will hold what items for selling on the AH... how and where will you store them?
8. Have you ever used your mailbox for nearly 60 days worth of storage? (mail it to a toon, ignore it, and in 30 days it gets mailed back and sits in your box for 30 more days)  This is how I managed vendor pet sales

Basically it comes down to this, When the goblins come out of their counting houses when 5.0 hits, some will be prepared and some will not... The one that are prepared, are ones that have tried and failed, tried and succeeded, and in most cases learned.... and refined and perfected the systems... the will do it smarter, faster, more efficiently, and have more time still to start leveling a second toon and they will just ride one wave after the other as those who are not are always trying to catch up..

Cold did his blogging Carnival on lookin back, and as I read everyones articles on what they would do different, the same things came up sort of in the post, efficiency.  Practice, addons, market analysis were in there a lot too, but making lots of gold is all about cancel/post/craft with as little time invested as possible.

Still working on the spreadsheet I mentioned the other day.. its a little bit bigger and more labor intensive than I orriginally figured, sill working on it though... and I am taking a few extra steps to show how complete data review can give you a lot of insight...   not sure at all how to post an attachement in the blog so that will be the trick... any help there would be great.  I will likely have the final version in Open Office... thanks for stopping in