Friday, February 28, 2014

Phat's Weekly Lewt Review 2/28

It has been a busy week for me, have not had a heck of a lot of time to play the AH, but regardless I've seem to have made more gold this week than I have in the past 2 weeks combined.

"Mega" Gold Making
Now this week I ended (I end my weeks on Thursdays since the connection) with 3,551,226g. I'm pretty excited for a couple reasons, the first being that's a change of over 195k from last week just 1k short of 28,000g profit/day. This is a combination of a couple things, but it did help that I happened to sell a Dragon Kite I had purchased from the BMAH to flip for 25k 2 months ago. Are there other things that could have made me 100% interest in 2 months? Yes. Could I have possibly bought them all given the sheer amount of gold I have? Nope. Glad it finally sold, had been posting it along with all my xmog on a 48 hour auction. Regardless I was very surprised to see 60k in my Xmog seller's mailbox, because I had honestly forgotten I had it!

On top of that I'm at 3.55 million liquid, just 30k shy of my all time recorded high for liquid gold (right before I bought Al'ar then Mim's 3 days later), so it's nice to be back up now. Really need to find something to spend it on!

No Time for Playing = No Time for Buying
I haven't been able to log this week as much as I usually can which is fine, but it's actually presented me some issues as far as restocking goes, which is why I think I made so much profit this week (on top of the 50k from the Dragon Kite). Now, last week I only made ~70k but I spent 100k on mats, which to me is great. This week I made 147.5k ignoring the Kite, but I only spent 30k on mats, which to me is not that great. Now it is the time to start easing up on the current mats, but not that much. I'm really short on leather, and would love to purchase some, but AH prices don't justify so I don't. I have not touched glyphs in about 2-3 weeks, and really have no intention of doing so in the future.

One thing I'm considering doing is jumping into some old world markets for fun. I don't want to get too deep into these markets because I have a strong feeling that they will be introducing mechanisms to level most/all professions via the Mining/Herbalism/BS route they took this expansion, so I am a bit skeptical of future markets for those items.

Moving Enchanting
I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in an earlier post, but even if I didn't, I've moved Enchanting to my current main, dropping Alchemy to learn it (no I have not updated my professions page). I finally got the reps up that I needed (not one for grinding, even on my main), and Enchanting is set, and I need to drop it on my alt (ex-main). I suppose I'll be taking up Alchemy which I dropped, that toon already has Inscription. Considering holding out on this one until WoD beta, because I honestly am not going to make the Living Steel if I had the Alchemist anyway. Okay I've just convinced myself.

Anyway not much else to comment on this week, hopped into GoblinRaset's stream earlier this week and we tried soloing some content. With the help of J311f1sh we managed to 3 man To4W for my Cataclysm raiding achievement, that was entertaining. Raset and I tried to 2 man BoT and went 1/4 after wiping on trash 5+ times :-P. Hope your week was as lucrative or even more than mine was!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Scam'd Part 2: Proactively Getting Your Problem Solved in Warcraft

So earlier this week I did a post called Scam'd where I talked about a guy who tried to scam me by telling me he'd sell me an epic as part of a package deal for 1,700g and did not go through with it. A lot of people both in blog comments and on reddit were surprised with the response I got from the GM that I dealt with and that the problem was resolved in one message so I figured it'd be useful to share the ticket that I created in the first place and some reasons behind why I think it was successful on the first go.

So the ticket went as follows:
Hi, in whispers I agreed upon exchanging 1700g for a variety of items with [Redacted]. Everything we were to exchange is in chat logs through whispers about ~10 minutes ago. I gave him the 1700g, and he did not furnish all the goods, scamming me out of gold. He was doing this as a scam, including 3 epics in the whispers which he did not furnish at the time of the trade, followed by putting me on ignore, which is why I decided to report this, as I'd hate to see it happen again.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Drunken Musings #10

If you weren't able to make it to our live recording this past Saturday, Drunken Musings #10 is now posted for your listening pleasure. In this episode we covered our weeks in WoW, and I told some stories of things that happened to me in the past few weeks. Raset has been streaming a lot recently, and I hang out in his channel quite often, you can find him over at twitch.tv/goblinraset, which is the channel you want to follow if you want to know when our podcast recordings go live! Other than that we cover some WoD news as well as take note of  TSM Lead Developer Sapu's AMA (Ask Me Anything) that took place on reddit last Sunday (a week before yesterday). Definitely check that out as well, very interesting responses! New post up tomorrow, kind of summing up the ticket I had sent for my most recent Scam'd post and some ways to interface with Blizzard for quick and accurate results. Until then,

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Scam'd

This past week I was "victim" of a scam, and I figured I'd post about it, how I dealt with it, and the results.

How it Started
So I was going about my daily AH business collecting expired auctions from the mail to repost on my main, as I notice a guy selling "everything in his bags" for 1.7k. "Meh" I thought, "Probably a bunch of junk anyway." I keep emptying my mail, do a post scan, the daily to try to get my Love Rocket and he's still hawking the package in trade for 1.7k, so I bite. What's 1.7k anyway? I whisper him and ask what he's selling and he lists a couple Malevolent pieces, a stack of Infinite Dust, some Monk glyphs, and 3 epics, the notable one being a ilvl 502 Reborn weapon. Now there are going to be many points throughout this story that red flags should have popped up (and did), but keep in mind that 1.7k is 0.05% of my gold total.

So this is the first flag but honestly to spend 1.7k at a chance to get a Reborn weapon, even if I only thought I had a 10% chance of getting it, is fairly good.

The Exchange
Now this is where the second red flag should have popped up, and I probably should have requested the epics first, but nonetheless, he opened the trade window put in 6 of the items he listed, a couple Malevolent pieces and a stack of Infinite dust, all of which I could have recouped a good chunk of the 1.7k for so I put it in and hit trade. Feeling a bit weary at this point, I was surprised when he opened up the trade window and gave me even more of the items he promised, epics still not included. Unfortunately this was the end of our exchange. I whispered him about the epics and he had already put me on ignore. Perhaps what he did not know is that I had him dead to rights. Our entire exchange took place in whispers and according to Blizzard's Scam policy:

"A scam is the act of acquiring items or any other possession from another player through misinformation, confusion, or fraud. If you are unsure if your particular case fits the criteria of a scam, contact a GM in-game."

Which is basically a description of what this guy did. I first opened the ticket noting times and what I did not receive, then logged on an alt to converse with him.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Phat's Weekly Lewt Review 2/21

For the first time in a while, I spent this week more than I made in profits, which IMO is excellent.

Spending
As I've mentioned in the past, spending is where I make my gold. I buy cheap, and use my mats to make expensive things. Okay that's a bit of a simplification, but this isn't the post! Anyway I ended up spending just over 100k gold this week in mats. Among my notable purchases is 50 stacks of Golden Lotus, which should last me at least a couple weeks, and many Ores (current and old world) at below market value). I ended up making ~177k in revenue, so I am indeed up ~77k for the week, or roughly 11k/day, which is not bad all things conisdered. Was honestly hoping for better with this connected realm but what I've found is that, of course as expected, that I need to keep up with my crafting a bit more to rake in the big profits, and of course I don't do such things regularly.

Transmog
I of course have to mention that I'm doing really well with my new transmog list. This is the third week I've been doing it and sales are going great. For each 48 hour posting period I've made 15-20k gold, which IMO is great. It costs me ~2000g to post my entire inventory, and even if I spend an hour posting a day (technically it should take about half this), I'd make 13-18k GPH, which is IMO very legit profits.
One particularly good 24 hours of Xmog Sales
Second Profile
In the past I've been using one profile for my current server. This is great and keeps things consistent across toons, but recently I've been accruing some items I want to just sell in the AH on my posting toon, for something generic (say 1.5 market value) or what have you an just dump it. Now most of these items are mats for professions, some are already grouped and don't have an Auctioning operation. Instead of making 1000 subgroups to assign Auctioning operations to these items, I decided to make a 2nd profile on my transmog posting toon that would deal with Xmog, Leveling Gear, and the random other items I have in my bag. I literally just implemented this yesterday so I'm going to see how it works, but to me it's the easiest way to do this, the only shortfall may be that it will cause an issue or two with TSM_Accounting, but Accounting already has issues sorting things by groups (gear with random enchants), so to me it's almost a non-issue. We shall see if that mentality continues!

So that was my week in gold making, I hope you all were as prosperous (if not more) this week!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Monday, February 17, 2014

Thinking Like a Gold Maker Part 2 - Flipping Mentality

In this multiple part series, I'm going to go over my thought processes and how I think about concepts in gold making in World of Warcraft, and why I do things the way I do. Today I'm going to spotlight flipping. In the previous post I covered shopping for mats, if you'd like to start from the beginning that post can be found here.

Buy Low, Sell High
This is the phrase you'll see regurgitated again and again throughout the WoW goldmaking universe, and I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of this concept. Yes buying something for cheap and selling it at a high price is a great way to make gold, but how do you define what's cheap? How do you identify if there's a market for it? How do you tell what's a good purchase to flip and what's not?

To me, this can easily vary from person to person, and server to server, which complicates things further. Again, like shopping for mats, when I purchase items to flip, I look for the profit in the purchase. This requires that you know your markets a bit, or have tools to help you. For example, Sterling's Sniper Guide can set you up some really great groups of amazing items to flip, and give you suggested prices to sell at. Or you could use my transmog method and see what I'd suggest you sell things for. The problem with both these methods is that they are good in their own right, but they are not directly catered to your server. You're going to have to do some leg work!

Experimentation
Flipping isn't just one of those markets you can master overnight, read a guide on, or spreadsheet your way through. You really need to learn the markets that you're selling to, and do some research as to what an item will sell for on your server. This involves a great deal of experimentation on your part as well.

Let's look at a Copper Rod. Used by all Enchanters, required to create any enchants whatsoever, obtainable from a vendor for 1s24c. The market value on it's tooltip may suggest it'll sell for 20g normally, but you notice that you are the only one posting the item right now. Why not try it at 50g? Even if you get half the sales at this price, you'll still make 25% more gold! For flipping you want to test out markets to find where these points are, and once you find them, you'll be set.

Where to Start Off
Jumping into a new flipping market as I have done recently with cloth on Earthen Ring, I looked at a few things. What is the market for this? I'm going to use the example of Frostweave Cloth. The market for these comes primarily from 2 sources, leveling Tailors and Frostweave Bags. Knowing your markets is key. For example it takes (according to wow-professions) ~1,200 Frostweave Cloth to level Tailoring, and 60 cloth for each Bag. That's a lot of damn cloth, so even if the demand is spread out, it's over 60 stacks of cloth which may or may not be your entire AH depending on the size of your server.

Profession choke points are great markets to get involved in, but with something like patterns, what's nice is that with TSM we have access to global data prices. Now are these prices necessarily indicative of what you can get on your server? Not exactly. Are they great gauges for pricing? Absolutely. Now depending on the size of your server you may be able to get more (or less) of these global prices. And of course, they aren't the end all be all of pricing, but they do a really good job of estimating demand.

Research
A quick practical example. Last week I was using my transmog list to do a search, and I came across an item that was under my purchasing threshold, but was selling for 3,000g. Now to me that is a LOT to sink into one transmog item, even buying and selling as much volume as I do. Based on in game tooltips I knew the market price was 13,000g - 16,000g, but I wanted to be sure this item was not some weird anomaly and I would not see one on the AH any time soon. The item was Vanguard Breastplate, it has a very low drop rate, and is one of the few BoE platekini's in game. Armed with knowledge, I easily made the decision to purchase this piece to flip. The more you know.

Larger Markets
Now for larger markets like transmog, leveling greens, or uber blues, you're going to want to attack them as a whole. Just as an example I've found 2,500g to be an excellent threshold for the 80-84 leveling blues on my server, and post them all at this threshold. On a server that has over twice the population as my main, I know that this price is unrealistic due to competition, and that my returns will be smaller, but on my main server, that 2,500g is almost guaranteed (over time). In this way I prefer to override some sort of pricing setup for a static "I know it'll sell for x" setup. For transmog you could try different percentages of Region Market Value, or try pricing by hand.

What you need to know though that these larger markets primarily rely on selling a small portion of your inventory for gains, while reposting large amounts of items at a time. Your inventory as a whole is what you're selling. A single item within your many may cost you more to repost than you end up making by the time you sell it, but as long as your inventory as a whole is making you profits, there's no need to focus in on one item in particular.

You're Providing a Service
This is the part that I think the people who may whisper you or send you angry mails do not understand. You're providing a service to them. For example I'll use the Bloodscale set, a very popular xmog set. That's something I flip for hundreds of gold per piece, and I probably bought most of it for under 75g. How is this providing a service? If it were in the cheaper prices, levelers would buy it for leveling, vendor it in 4-5 levels, and it would not be available on the AH to moggers when they came along looking for a piece to complete their set. By raising the prices I'm ensuring that the gear (most likely) is not purchased by levelers, and instead those who have more gold (xmoggers). It ensures the gear is more likely to be on the AH when they search for it. Same goes for the leveling greens, I'm keeping it up on the AH for those willing and able to pay. Others don't necessarily see it this way, but it's exactly what you're doing and why you can sell this stuff for a markup.

That about wraps up what I have to say about flipping. If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section below, and if you have anything you'd like to see me discuss in future installments of this series, let me know there as well!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Friday, February 14, 2014

Phat's Weekly Lewt Review: First Week on a Connected Realm

First of all let me give a plug for The Consortium, specifically Sterling who just released to the public his Enchanting Mastery Guide. Check this bad boy out. It's everything you could have ever wished for about enchanting and much much more!

Second of all let me start by giving a plug for The Drunken Musings #9 where I discussed in part my experience as of that Saturday of my connected realm, in the few days following connection. As always it was a great podcast and we were accompanied by the always lovely 8BitBruce, who has interviewed both GoblinRaset and I on his own podcast, so be sure to check that out as well!

The Beginnings
So after getting connected, trade chat was pretty crazy. People were all chatting with their new servermates, and of course "calmly" and "empirically" determining which server of the 3 was the best. It was the merger of Kalecgos, Executus and Shattered Halls. People started calling it KESh, but I think we should take the extra step and just call it KESha. This will be the first and hopefully last Ke$ha reference in my blog.

Anyway, the only thing that ended up being crazier than seeing trade chat actually active was the prices.
Previously GIO was in the 60-65g range, and I bought from farmers for 40g/stack. So I decided to take the plunge:
Pretty much cleared the AH of anything remotely cheap. After buying the 204 stacks in particular I figured what's buying a few of the lower 3's to increase prices for everyone else? I'm a real nice guy. Found similar deals on herbs and enchanting mats, but even after going on a spending spree by the end of my first day I was in the black:

Pretty cool IMO, made a great deal of sales!

Still Low Pop!
Now my server is noticeably larger, and it's getting the feel of some of the larger economies that I've played on, but believe it or not, my new tri-server is still Low Pop (barring weekends maybe).

Now the economy in my opinion is much more like a healthy server's economy. In the first week since connection I made ~97,000g profit, which is actually only slightly higher than I was pulling before connections, but I've been doing a lot of buying during my inital week, as my stockpiles were pretty dismal. Anyway, have to spend gold to make gold!

Glyphs
So getting connected, I got a lot more glyph competitors, along with much more reasonable prices. Glyphs were dismal on my server pre-connection with glyphs going for ~500g, but if I pulled in 1k/day it'd be great. Now there's actually nothing terrible about this I suppose compared to selling 8 glyphs and pulling in 1k, but glyphs have never been a friend of mine. Anyway, I kinda said screw it on glyphs and haven't even bothered with the market. I know there's gold to be made, but my glyph strategy was not made for this size of a server, and the profit potential of changing it is not appealing to me at all. I will probably start reading up on what Stede and Selltacular have been writing recently about glyphs. They know far much more than I do about optimizing glyphs, and I will have to defer to their wisdom.

This actually makes me want a TSM module, or perhaps just part of the TSM addon itself that can sort things by Sale Rate. I would imagine doing something like If(SaleRate=0) Then(Remove from Group) would be such an amazing and fun tool to use! I digress.

Jewelcrafting/Item Enhancements
So gem prices took a major dive, but my floor on rares is still around 24g uncut, so there's always profit to be made here. Sales are crazy in this market, at least compared to what I'm used to. Other than my main competitor from my original server, there's maybe one other big fish that posts with TSM out there, so there's very little legitimate competition, and I often find that only half my auctions will get undercut in this market if he's not on.

Item Enhancements such as shoulder and leg enchants are doing okay, but Enchanting Scrolls are pretty damn ridiculous right now. I have to take some time and evaluate my new price points on this tri-server, getting accustomed to this change has been no easy task. When I rolled on a new server I started fresh with TSM and no professions, so it was easy to look at it as a separate entity. Now I've got all my professions and gold resources and have been thrown into a new environment where I already have a setup that's worked fine previously, but I'm starting to find flaws when I'm working on a larger scale. Now I'm not going to rework my groups the way Raset did recently, but I'm going to need to rework and reevaluate a lot of my operations for them.

Summary
So my server is noticably larger. As I predicted going into this, I think my experience was quite different from what I have heard others have, and that all server connections will be different. Some general trends will hold true across connections. In general a lot of my markets remained intact, and I will just need to refine my strategies and pricings to make sure my well oiled machine remains well oiled and in proper working function. It's holding for now, but just waiting to break! Will be updating as I progress as well, maybe with some of the logic behind how I changed my groups!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Lovely Charms: Throne of Tides Hotfixed

So after 1 full day of being able to farm Lovely Charms in Throne of Tides, it's already been hotfixed! I was really surprised that they actually hotfixed it, but released a video on two other easily soloable spots to check out since this one is nerfed to the damn ground!


TL;DR: Farming sucks, buy the mount from the AH.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Scroll of Resurrection Retiring

Quick post today, just wanted to let everyone know that Blizzard has announced they're retiring the Scroll of Resurrection on February 18th, just one week from today. This is kind of big news for gold makers. I know I personally have an inactive account I've been toying around with the idea of Rezing, but honestly I'm probably not going to at this point. Keep in mind that you have 30 days to accept the Scroll, so if you send it now you won't have to accept it until March, and the last scroll will expire on March 20th. Anyway, just something to think about if you've got that second account laying around that you've been toying with the idea of bringing back for AH funtimes.


Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Monday, February 10, 2014

By the Numbers: Lovely Charm Farming During Love is in the Air 2014

So an often talked about topic this time of year is lovely charm farming, and I'm no exception. I made a video to go along with this one (been a little video-happy lately, not a bad thing), if you want to watch it, check it out, if not the explanation will follow:



So I farmed in both Throne of Tides and Stormstout Brewery. I actually found a vast difference in Charm rates in the 2 locations:

Throne of Tides: 1080 Lovely Charms per Hour
Stormstout Brewery: 780 Lovely Charms per Hour

In both locations I farmed for 10 minutes and extrapolated my dataz to a full hour. This is quite a significant difference. I actually expected Stormstout to have a better rate if anything and was surprised when it didn't.

Anyway, I ended up getting 1080 Lovely Charms per hour, which equates to 108 Charm Bracelets per hour, which would require exactly 2.5 hours of farming to get 270, which would yield 1 mount. Assuming I sell the mount for 10,000g it'd be 4,000 Gold Per Hour, which to me is terrible.

Alternatively if I used these charms that I farmed for daily quest turn ins to the faction leaders, assuming only 5 minutes to turn in to 4 different faction leaders in 4 different cities (which is low IMO), you only save under 1 hour worth of time to get the mount, roughly 1.5 hours, which again assuming the mount will sell for 10k, is 6,667 Gold Per Hour. If you can make just 10g back from every gem you cut, and cut gems for 1 hour, you will make 12,000 Gold Per Hour. Just saying!

I hope you all enjoy the Love is in the Air holiday, and I wish you many Big Love Rockets!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Today's Epic Gold Making Events


This Saturday there's going to be a lot going on in terms of gold making funzies. Something new that should be a lot of fun is the Gold Raid 2014. Basically a bunch of your favorite gold bloggers are going to get together and run Flex SoO, and bullshit in Mumble. It's going to be a good time for one and all, and it's going to be livestreamed over at twitch.tv/WTBGold . This is going down at 9pm EST and the list of bloggers involved is quite extensive! I've personally got a 90 Alli that I just hit 90 with just to go to this raid, so it will be interesting to say the least (and they're letting me heal).


Prior to kickoff GoblinRaset and I will be recording Episode #9 of The Drunken Musings Podcast with special guest 8BitBruce . We will be starting to record @ 7PM EST so plenty of time to pre-game for the Gold Raid, and listen to our rantings and ravings about dat gold (and my new recently connected server). Anyway you can find us over at Raset's Twitch Channel starting at ~6:50pm EST for the pre-show, which should be a little more reasonable for you EU viewers.

If you have any questions about the Gold Raid or a topic/question you'd love to hear me and Raset discuss on our podcast feel free to post it in the comment section! As always I'll post a link to the podcast when it's live!


Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Phat Lewts' TradeSkillMaster Transmog Guide (with Subgroupings)

Yes, that long awaited moment is here! I'm officially releasing my new (and improved) TSM shopping lists for transmog gear. You can find the list with subgroupings at this linkand in my tool bar above. Below is a video guide to using my Transmog list, as well as an overview of my strategies. If you prefer a TL;DR, my pricing will be below.



Global Operations
Once you import the list, I use %s the following base pricing, if there's a source you do not have, click below to learn how to get it, or remove it from the expression all together.
avg(WowuctionRegionMarket, DBGlobalMarketAvg)
Alternatively I have import strings for the shopping and auctioning operations below:

Don't Call it a Comeback

Okay. You can probably call it a comeback in this case. I've been gone a long time. So if you follow my Twitter you'll know I recent...