Friday, June 14, 2013

Phat's Review 6/14 - New Project!

I haven't done a weekly review in a while now, and I stopped because I felt they were getting a bit repetitive, but I have new/hopefully interesting things to talk about that I've been doing, so I'm going to write about them.

DMF Failure
I know it may not be a great market for most servers at this point, but on my small server, there's still a great markup on the DMF Trinkets, especially relatively to the price I pay for herbs from my supplier.  So I had 8 decks ready, and was waiting until the last day of the Faire to see if I could get that last CD card I needed, and wouldn't you know it, I messed up.  Of course, although the event "ends" on Sunday, it ends in the wee hours of the morning, which was an overlook by me.  Now I'm left with this for the next few weeks:
Might try to sell them as decks, but I've had no luck with that in the past.  Worth trying at least though, because I'm going to have a fresh set of decks for the next DMF, where I'll turn in the decks as I have them!!

Gold Making Progress
So since I last updated I'm up 200k in the last month, which is pretty low for me.  For a while I was hitting a million every 3 months, now based on these numbers it'd be a million every 5, but if I got to sell those DMF decks as trinks, perhaps I would have hit right on my numbers.  At least that's the excuse I tell myself.

I'm currently short an ore supplier, my latest one has gone belly up so I've been reaching out to some of the major AH sellers with no luck unfortunately.  I really need could use the ore, eating up a lot of my supply.  Not super worried about it yet, especially with all this realm combining news going on.  I'm probably going to  play on the PTR at some point after they update it a couple times, and transfer a bunch of characters with gold cap and throw money at everyone.  Mostly I want to check out the changes, but also throw money.

New Project
I'm also in the planning stages of a new project, which I have been toying around with for a while, but I want to make a reality.  There are a lot of gold making resources and blogs out there, and for someone new, or someone who's been into gold making for a short time (or even those who have been in it a long time), it's pretty hard to tell what blogs or websites contain the best information, which ones are just out there to make a quick buck off you, or which are just some random dude who started a blog, and has as little experience as you do.  There are blog and podcast lists out there, Jim Younkin maintains the most complete list that I can think of, but even he excludes people for personal differences, and hosts some poor content on his list, and I don't think that's overly useful.

I plan on rating the gold making sources based on a variety of factors that end up totaling to a 100 point score.  The ratings will be posted in the form of a blog post, and given a page on my blog, where they will be sorted by score.  The scores will be broken down into categories, and rated on my personal opinions alone (although I have been throwing around the idea of having a panel and averaging the votes).  Hopefully this will at least provide a sort of guideline as to quality and overall helpfulness of the site.  Again this project is still in the planning phases, but I'd love to hear from you.  What are some aspects that you think a gold blog or website should be judged on?  What are aspects from some of your favorite sites that you really enjoy that should be part of the ratings?


Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you like my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!!

17 comments:

  1. "What are some aspects that you think a gold blog or website should be judged on?"

    A blog that doesn't filter comments that might not 100% align with the poster's views. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There is no way to judge that since only the blog owner knows what gets approved and what gets censored. In this day and age it's easier to leave comments on moderation to fight spammers, so just bc comments are moderated doesn't mean the blog owner is censoring regular comments of opposing viewpoints. But I understand a lot of ppl do not publish when they are criticized on their tactics.

      Delete
    2. Don't have an approval process then, just remove posts that are trolling/racist/hateful and so on.

      Sure it's easier to moderate, but for me it isn't better, it doesn't foster discussion of any kind if the moderator blows away anything he doesn't agree with.

      Delete
    3. While I agree, CENSORING kills discussion. MODERATING does not.

      Sure it may be easy to manually moderate your comments when you are just starting out or only have a handful of posts to watch over, but when you have a ton of posts it's near impossible to catch all of the spammers who try to stick BS comments and links in posts.

      Some days my moderation catches 20 or more spam comments in a single sleep cycle. If you don't auto moderate that garbage with links to gold sellers, hack sites, and penis pills will sit up there until you do catch it, and many spammers go back and stuff links into your old popular posts where you are more likely to miss it if you rely only on manual catches and removals.

      Not moderating runs the site down for you own blog as well as the experience of your readers. Moderating keeps your site clean and free of these scumbags to the benefit of the readers and the site owner.

      Like I said before moderating isn't the problem.

      It's people who censor relevant and accurate information to save face.

      Delete
    4. My blog, my rules. I did not feel your comment contributed to the discussion at all (quite like this comment actually), being almost completely off topic:

      "Easier to just fudge the numbers by plain out lying or "proving" them with photoshopped screenshot. No need to get fancy if you really wanted to manipulate the numbers"

      Also, I rarely don't approve comments unless they're spam.

      Delete
    5. ^ Phat, that's a pretty terrible attitude to have, considering what you're trying to accomplish here.

      Delete
  2. I'd like to see a grade on Originality. Does this site provide new ideas & concepts (or a new take on an old concept) or does it just rehash the tips of others?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I look forward to seeing your progress in this new project. Definitely something needed!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lol - i check other sites when they get listed here - but haven't found much of any use any where tbh.

    I get the feeling that there are no new ideas around at the moment. And unless Phat is having success with it I'm not bothering.

    Gosh I'm such a fanboi - I'm on 979k and should pop the 1m this week =)

    Bones

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All I can say about this is that Bones has good taste.

      Delete
  5. Hit the 1 mill today - thanks Phat for all the tips!!!

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/97556241@N02/9058144020/

    Bones

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Gratz, what's your new goal going to be?

      Delete
    2. lol - I've no idea

      I started making money to buy pets - so i may go back to that. But I'll keep going - I may try plowing all the money i make now into assets to sell and be a bit riskier with my profit making.

      Bones

      Delete
    3. (Different Anon)

      As a general suggestion, what I did after I hit 1M was make a goal of 2M, enough to buy a gold cap mount and still have 1M left over. Anything over 2M is fun money that can be used for anything... pets, mounts, crafted gear, swapping professions, etc.

      Currently sitting at 2.3M, haven't had any interesting pets or mounts on the BMAH on that server for a while. Might swap over a profession or two this weekend if I can't find something better to do with the surplus, it won't make much of a dent but at least it'll feel like the gold is doing something.

      Delete
  6. Seeing some kind of peer review of the sites would be great - although I'm not sure how easy places like the consortium might be to rate; then again they're not specifically blogs.

    http://xsinthis.net/2011/11/report-world-of-warcraft-wealth-survey/
    contains correlations (voluntary reponses) of which sites people use and liquid gold wealth.

    One thing I'd like to see as a Negative rating is the use of "come here and win a ...." blogs.
    My "objection" to these is two fold.

    If the content isn't enough to bring in interested readers or the author lacks enough knowledge and skill to keep going with a blog that they need to resort to getting post content this way then perhaps they need to rethink their plan. Loads of the entries they publish are - go to the ah and flip items (the entire post replicated)


    The better written blogs with good content are sequestered. Either to Executive areas or for later site posts under the site authors name.

    (It's a different thing if you're seeing all entries/encouraging new bloggers to start out)

    Generally speaking some of the tips on these pages are great, and if people want to charge for their time or have "executive areas" that is their choice, but some part of me yearns for the days when the concept of a written composition competition was you could see all the entries - at least for some period of time.

    You have already mentioned repetition of other ideas. Some blogs (and I won't name them specifically) actually rewrite and reuse some of the major blogs each week - ie publish on Thursday what was published on Tuesday. The complete lack of originality bordering on plagarism is somethng I'd like to see pages down marked for. Not just the repetiton of an idea that may be years old, or being presented in a new way, but doing just rewriting the text with no referencing of the "original" source/author.

    Hopefully this idea will take off!
    P.S. Don't forget you can turn your decks in on any character - might as well grind that rep on an alt who doesn't have it yet...

    Altysa

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I really enjoyed reading your perspective, it's really well thought out, and I like the way you look at things. Adding individual blogs to xsin's survey would indeed be a cool perspective to see if there's a correlation between reading certain blogs and making more gold, and a quantitative method for determining it like that interests me a lot.

      Anyway thanks for all the ideas and if you'd like to give any further input, feel free to email me at phatlewtsgold@gmail.com. In my head I was having trouble figuring out how to break down the ratings alone, but now that you've mentioned some additional factors it's probably even worse. For example how do you compare someone who has been writing about gold making for 2+ years to someone who has just started out? I like the quantified thing the best now, but will have to give it some thought.

      Cheers

      Delete

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