Thursday, March 27, 2014

Analyzing Overall Gold Making Trends in World of Warcraft

If you haven't already be sure to check out the latest episode of The Drunken Musings Podcast with GoblinRaset and myself over at The Drunken Mogul: Episode #11: Vanna White.

Looking Back
If you plan on playing during WoD, now is a particularly good time to look back on some of MoP's most wanted mats and products on The Undermine Journal to understand how life cycles work throughout a WoW expansion. One favorite of mine is one I like to call "The Batman". See if you can guess what this is a graph of without me telling you (global graph).
TUJ Graph
Click to Enlarge
So have you guess what this item is just by looking at the graph? Something that has Quantity available spikes during a certain part of the month (hint the 2 spikes are a week apart), and increases in value between spikes, while decreasing value overall.

While you might not have been able to pinpoint the exact trinket from this graph, this is the overall trend for none other than the Relic of Chi-Ji, here's the TUJ page if you want to play along at home.
The "Batman" looking spikes (particularly in the EU graph) show that the quantity (and hand ins) spike during the first and last day of the Darkmoon Faire. So what can we take away from looking at this? Well the trinkets are worth a LOT if you happened to get one completed by the first DMF. In this case the expansion was released roughly 2.5 weeks before the final day of a Darkmoon Faire, so unless RNG was friendly, you either needed a boatload of Scribes (as well as a boatload of then expensive herbs), or to pay an arm and a leg for the cards you were missing. If you got it done though, you were in an elite club, with only 1/3rd of the overall created by the next DMF, and almost all selling.

Anything else you notice? In the time between Faires, especially during the first ~8 months the supply decreased and prices went up. Let's take a look at Dec 2012 - Jan 2013:

So what do you notice here? During the Faire, prices decline linearly, but after the end of the Faire, prices rise until the next fair as supply dwindles down. In general I would start selling my trinkets about 1.5-2 weeks after the end of the faire, and I'm glad that there's graphical evidence to support my madness.

There's probably even more you can glean from this graph, but take the time and look back on markets that are going to have big impacts in WoD, and see how they develop and change throughout the expansion. I may do more analyses, but I highly suggest taking looks yourself and thinking about what you can do with that information. Drawing your own conclusions is essential to becoming a top level gold maker in WoW!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Cross Realm Normal/Heroic SoO Unlocked!

Big news today from Blizzard:

We’ve recently implemented an often requested feature to enable cross-realm raiding for Siege of Orgrimmar. Cross-realm BattleTag™ and Real ID friends can now raid together and take the fight to Garrosh on Normal or Heroic difficulty. Players will be able to earn greater rewards such as Reins of the Kor'kron War Wolf or the title of Conqueror/Liberator of Orgrimmar; both of which aren’t available to be earned within Flexible or Raid Finder difficulty.

This change is currently live. (Source)



This unannounced change is surely going to please quite a few PvEers out there, and hopefully line our pockets with a few more gold coins. This announcement was pretty unexpected, no prior notice until today, the day it went live, but I'd definitely expect an increase in gem/enchant sales once players start to notice that it's live. It's not clear to me why Blizzard chose this week to implement this feature, but none the less it is here, and hopefully you'll be able to take advantage of this big change!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Monday, March 17, 2014

Big Profession Changes in WoD

Hey everyone, long time no post! I've been really busy IRL, I won't bore you with the details but the TL;DR is I actually have a bit of time to write now, so I'm more or less back. Anyway this past weekend a few other gold bloggers and I put out a gold making magazine called The Golden Keg. It's a really great read, lots of great articles from some talented authors, and will be a monthly publication that's going to be coming out. It's available in .pdf form (for free) at the link above. Definitely check it out when you've got the time! I wrote an article in there and this is going to be a follow up to it, and while it's not necessary to read prior to this post, I suggest you read that before diving in!

Even since I wrote that article, a lot has changed in the landscape of what we know about professions moving into WoD. For example it has been announced that along with no Realm First! level 100 achievements, there will also be no Realm First! Profession achievements:

First of all, a shout out to Twitchie, who asked this insightful question and got (albeit minorly) a gold maker featured on the front page of MMO-Champion for all of 3 hours! Twitchie wrote a really great follow up post to this, and I highly suggest you check it out. Anyway, to me this is an interesting piece of information, but is even more interesting when coupled with the following from a tweet conversation with Utesdad, a Wind Trader over at The Consortium Forums:


To me these two tweets coupled together can mean only one thing, that we're going to be leveling professions a lot slower in WoD. This will be a very interesting thing to see on the beta, as they seem to be putting a lot of work into changing up professions for WoD, something that has not really been done since they added Inscription as a profession in the beginning of WotLK. Hwoo also mentioned how Much like the changes I made to Cooking in Mists, this is going to feel different." In this tweet she was referring to (I assume) how once you hit 525 you had to level 6 different specializations to learn everything. It will be interesting if this is the sort of branching that we see in WoD. I can't even imagine how they'd structure it, but I think that the more complex it is, the better it is for us crafters!

Honestly though if you want to be caught up on everything we know about professions in WoD go over to Hwoo's Twitter account and read everything that she's said so far. She's only had about 108 tweets so at most that's going to take you 10-15 minutes to read, maybe 30 if you're checking out different threads that lead to comments, but there's so much there that I can't even begin to touch on in my blog, and I highly suggest you read it (although I will be covering the highlights).

The last thing I want to go over, that I'm personally pretty excited about is this Tweet:
Now this was a question about whether or not they'll be using a SoH type system, or the old different elements type system, and to me this answer basically says "neither", but could be interpreted as the elemental system. This to me is excellent. SoH were the only thing that crafters were basically required to farm in MoP, and even if they were to go back to the elemental system (which were not soulbound), that would be a huge step in the right direction. Now they could be thinking of Orbs, but to me Orbs pre-BoE and SoH are identical entities. I'm really excited about them moving away from required BoP mats, which I think that everyone else will be as well.

Even though the game itself is indeed in a lull, there's a lot to keep up on, and learn about. Hopefully this gave you some insight into what's going on, and I plan on keeping up with this WoD news as it comes out as I get my blog back into full speed again.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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...