Gold Making Invitational: My Competition's Strategy by Anddi

Today I've got a really exciting treat for you all, I asked Lakza, my main competition during the gold making invitational if he'd be willing to write up a post on his experiences, and he gladly obliged, so today I'm featuring a guest post by Lakza, otherwise known Anddi on his main server. I just want to give a big thank you to him for providing his perspective, I personally found it very interesting, and I hope you do too! Without further ado, his post:

Background
I only began playing WoW during early 4.3, starting off on a backwater RP server. In the last few months of Cata I got interested in gold making and built up some capital flipping items, eventually moving onto shuffling and more serious gold making with professions at the beginning of MoP. A year ago I transferred to a higher pop server, Proudmoore-US, which allowed me to greatly expand my gold making operations and to get into more serious raiding. I’m currently sitting at 5.6 million gold there, and am working towards a heroic Garrosh kill.

Strategy
Ironically given that I ended up winning the gold per hour portion of the competition, I decided early on that I’d be going for most gold overall and not really concerning myself with limiting my /played time. I was also curious to see what would happen if I used techniques I’d normally consider too boring or not worth the time investment on my main server, like farming and reselling cheap vendor mats.  As such, one of the first things I did after leaving the DK starting zone was farm enough Noblegarden Chocolates to buy a Swift Springstrider, which gave me a decent chunk of capital early on. I also decided to go with Mining and Skinning as my professions, since Vanilla leather prices looked good and I had no intention of leveling all the way to 80 in order to make a crafting profession worthwhile. I did initially level my toon to 60 to buy flying, but in the end I opted not to take the hit to what little gold I’d accumulated by that point and to just stick with flight paths.
For the first couple weeks I farmed Silk Cloth, Medium Leather, Heavy Leather, and Thick Leather. Initially I was earning 2000-3000 gold per hour farming these, and I looted some transmog pieces and rare recipes. When I could afford it I started to buy out the low end of the market to keep prices high. Although overall I made a profit on all of these items, the bottom did fall out of the markets towards the end of the month, and I ended up dumping some of my stock at or below my average buy price to get rid of it before the end of the competition.

I reinvested some of the gold I made farming by doing regular resale scans with Auctioneer (yet another practice I don’t bother with on my main server), as well TSM searches for transmog gear (thanks Phat Lewts!), and profession materials to flip, all of which I made decent profits on. I also resold a fair amount of vendor mats and recipes.

Successes and Failures
I think my biggest failure in this competition was not reinvesting my gold heavily enough in the first half of the month. This was partly due to my own conservatism as a gold maker, and partly because I was having trouble finding enough low-risk (given the time constraint) items to flip. As well, I could have certainly improved my gold per hour if I’d spent less time faffing about leveling. Phat Lewts' profession strategy was certainly the clear winner long term, but after 30 days we were close enough that I think farming/flipping could have gotten me a win if I’d been smarter with my gold early on.
I was quite pleased to see how profitable leather farming can be on this type of server, and I’m certain I could have earned much more on these markets if I hadn’t been forced to dump so much of my stock. Although I still find farming far too tedious to incorporate into my regular gold making routine, it does seem like a solid way to start out if you don’t have much gold to work with and you choose your markets well.

Overall I had a lot of fun with this competition and it was interesting to see how gold making methods I wouldn’t normally employ played out. Thanks to The Drunken Mogul for hosting, and congrats to Phat Lewts on his win/new mount!