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!!

Server Transferring - Don't do it! ...yet.

This post will be featured in Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival, now hosted by Selltacular.  Check out the other great posts, which will be live at the time of me posting this, as I'm a day late! 

If you haven't heard yet (and it's pretty hard not to), the 5.4 PTR Patch Notes have been released, and they're causing quite a stir.  Today I'm going to be focusing in on the most prolific one, at least for those of us who currently play on low-pop realms:

• Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests.

Source

Cross Realm AH
First of all I believe some apologies are in order.  I can't find the post where I ranted about how the rampant speculation about this type of change was premature, and although I still think it was to some extent, it was not as far off as I thought it would be honestly.  I truly did not believe that Blizzard would try to integrate this before dropping a new expansion, but it seems I was dead wrong.

That being said, if you didn't transfer your toons last week during the half off sale (and wasn't that just so perfectly timed to end 2 days before this announcement), then I'd suggest waiting to learn about how they'll implement this before you decide to transfer servers at all, especially if the economy is why you'll be moving.   What it seems like (at least right now) is that they're going to group a few servers together and combine them into one meta-server ("Virtual Realms").  Honestly, we don't know much yet about how they'll combine servers, I'm hoping they'll join multiple small realms together, but we'll see as they release more info.  This is a game changer though.  What they're doing is basically combining realms, without having to change the "home realm" you're on, which I think they did so that people did not have to change overlapping guild and player names.

This change, no matter how they implement it, will be a great and welcome change for small realms with struggling economies, and I look forward to having more sales and increased competition.  There are very few bad repercussions that could come from this, but the one I think Blizzard will struggle with most is the "smooth transition" phase.  They're just not good at that part of things, usually struggling when changes go live.  However, this change will give you more ability to sell, and less reliance on being the lowest auction out there.  I honestly feel like a kid on Christmas hearing these changes, small realmers rejoice!

Patch 5.4 Goldmaking
I'll probably be posting more about the changes, because these sorts of things get me excited, but there are 2 really good discussion threads you should check out on The Consortium forums in the mean time: Scaling Item Enhancements and Fused Realms, there's already a lot of good discussion going on about these changes there, with no doubt more to come as more info is released.

EDIT: 
Additional information!!   Blizzard said they will be releasing a blog post Soon™ on these changes:

We're working on an article currently that will explain more about Virtual Realms in detail. We're hoping to have it out to you all soon and will do our best to answer as many questions as you have as possible.

Keep in mind, we've only released the PTR notes at this point and still have testing, refining, more testing, gathering constructive feedback, testing, and then... when we think it's actually ready, releasing this live. While we have an idea of when we think we are going to have the patch go live, it's no guarantee that everything will go as expected (*crosses her fingers*). This isn't something that's going to be out in a week or anything.
Source

I'll post the link to the article when it goes live, but it will most likely be on the front page of the WoW website.  It will be interesting to see how Blizzard is currently planning on implementing these changes.  Also don't get your hopes up too high because all I keep seeing Blizzard employees saying is "anything can change before live, this is just PTR".  Grain of salt.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

Total Gold "Earned"

Today I wanted to tackle one of the more annoying parts of the gold making community that has been bugging me lately, the Total Gold Earned statistic.  A lot of gold makers (particularly streamers/youtubers) recently have been starting use this to show off their gold making gusto, or prove their 'legitimacy' as a gold maker, but is it really a statistic that reliably says anything about your gold making?

TGE Addon
Before I get into my rant, I just want to mention this addon.  I've posted about this addon before, but I think it's worth bringing up again.  Shiftywarloc (AKA j311yf1sh) put together this addon a while ago called Total Gold Earned, and it tracks the Total Gold Earned statistic (from Blizzard) across all your characters, and sums it up for you in a neat little package.  I think that TGE is a really interesting number to look at and consider for personal use, but to use it to prove how good you are at gold making to others is asinine.

My Numbers
Using Shifty's addon, my TGE is sitting at 10,291,500g.  To me this is an indicative number of the gold I've earned in the past, as I can verify my own gold making past.  I haven't sold any TCG items that I payed cash for, or manipulated the number in any way, so it's interesting for me to think about.  For your own numbers, it might provide something of the same.  It's great to look back on your legacy after achieving so much.  My qualm though comes from those who use this statistic to show "how good" they are at gold making.  This number can be easily manipulated, and is by far a terrible and misleading figure to go by, unless you are trying solely to increase your view counts.

Reality Check
Here's a chart I put together of what I personally could raise my Total Gold Earned to by moving my gold to a second account and buying my own auctions.  Of course each time I do this, the total amount of gold I have left to reinvest will be reduced by the 5% Auction House fee.  Below is a chart starting at where I am now, and going until I only have about 1 million gold left (rounded to 2 decimal places).



As you can see, I can roughly quadruple my current Total Gold Earned to over 40 million, and still have just under a million in liquid gold.  Did donating a large chunk of my gold to Blizzard make me a better gold maker?  No. Would I be able to use this number to impress people?  Without a doubt.  To put it into perspective, someone who made only 500k gold in their WoW lifetime could bankrupt themselves using this method, and their Total Gold Earned would be about 10 million gold.

What This Means
Now I'm not saying anyone in particular has fudged their data.  I just think that the general public should understand that this number can easily be manipulated, and is by no way a true indicator of knowledge of gold making.  I understand people want to draw in extra views to their blogs, videos, or livestreams, but I think this statistic should be taken with a grain of salt.

Fun Calculations
Wondering how much gold you could add to your TGE by using this method and bankrupting yourself (theoretically of course)?  Wonder no more!  Just multiply how much liquid gold you have right now by 19, and that's how much TGE you could add to your value.  Yes, 19 times whatever you have on hand.  I think even the most novice gold makers among us could come up with some misleading numbers!  

If you're interested in how , this ends up being an infinite geometric series, if you're unfamiliar with geometric series and want to learn more, you can read a quick intro here, and more on the calculations I did to obtain this here.  For a bare bones explanation, the first term you add will be .95 of your current total, which we'll call x, so your first term is .95x.  From there, you would have .95 of the .95x, or (.95)²x, the third term being (.95)³x.  From there, you can see that this is a geometric series with r = .95, and a = .95x.  If you read the second article, you would know that if we wanted a sum of all these terms, with -1 < r < 1 such as we have here, doing this method as many times as possible, what we have is roughly an Infinite Geometric Series, which sums to a/(1-r), which comes out to be .95x/.05 = 19x, 19 times your current gold total. 

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

Gear Flipping Advice (Transmog & Leveling)

One of the things I constantly see, especially after posting my transmog lists, is people saying "it just doesn't work" on their server, or that they bought 80+ items, and not one sold in their last posting, and they are about to give up.  The following is some advice/theories to pay attention to, to make sure your gear flipping is successful.

Law of Large Numbers
As a math major in college, this one is easy for me to see, but not necessarily easy for everyone else.  The Law of Large Numbers loosely says that the more times you repeat an experiment, the more likely you are to get to the actual average.  Let's look at an example.  Say on a specific server, about 5% of active level 90s are involved in hardcore raiding.  If you pick 5 level 90s at random, odds are none of them are hardcore raiders, say our average is 0%.  Now lets say we interviewed 20 total, 2 turned out to be raiders, 10%.  Later we have interviewed 100 players total, now having 6%, eventually if we interviewed the entire population of 90s on the server, we'd get that 5%, with each interview, getting relatively closer to the population average.

That's great Phat, but how does this apply to gear flipping?  Simple.  Say on any given day 1.5% of all transmog gear sells.  If you have only 47 pieces, odds are you're not going to sell one on any given day.  Now if you keep reposting you may, but one of the largest parts of selling transmog or leveling gear on a regular basis is increasing your stock.  It's simple, the more of the field you control, when someone actually decides to make a purchase in that market, the more likely it will be from your stock of goods rather than your competitors.  I have over 900 pieces of transmog and leveling gear in my inventory, and there are times I don't sell a thing, and other times when I log on to 20k+ in my mailbox (coincidentally, I just pulled in 24.5k  worth of transmog/leveing gear sales while writing this post, an all time high for me!).  It's a very variable market, and the only way to hedge against this is by increasing your stock.

General Strategy
The following is my general strategy, I go AFK a lot during transmog/leveling gear reposting, and do other things to not waste my time.  I'm sure it's not perfect but it works for me (use windowed fullscreen mode if you want to tab out).  This will work for reposting in general as well.

1. Collect mail (to repost) while afk (TSM_Mailing), until character starts yelling at me.
2. Walk to auctioneer, click TSM Post button, AFK
3. Wait for readycheck sound telling me I'm ready to post ( /tsm -> Auctioning Groups/Options -> Options -> Enable Sounds)
4. Tab into WoW and use scroll-wheel to post (set this up under /tsm -> Auctioning Groups/Options -> Options -> Macro Help)
5. Once I'm done scrolling, start running back to mailbox, click mailbox, click Open All button, then AFK (Auctions will still post while you're in the mailbox window, and mail will start opening once all auctions have been posted)
6. Repeat until done.

Hopefully nothing new there, but if you're new to the flipping game, hopefully it has shed some insight on the best way flip gear, while not staring at your character standing in one spot for minutes on end.  Also, if you're not using TSM to flip gear, you're wasting so much time, and are putting yourself at a disadvantage.  Learn it.  

Relevant Past Posts:

TSM Transmog Lists

Transmog Selling Part 1 - Purchasing

Transmog Selling Part 2 - Selling

80-84 Leveling Gear Market
Twink Gear Flipping Guide

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

Market Value Exponential Failure

As many of you have realized by now, I like to share my mishaps and failures in WoW gold making as much as I like to share my success.

Enchanting
This week I've learned a lesson that quite possibly only be learned from playing on a small server.  I don't think that this would remotely happen on a server such as Illidan - Horde, which is a good thing for those playing on larger servers.  This actually happened to many of my enchanting groups, but I'm going to highlight my group for Enchant Bracer - Critical Strike.  This particular enchant I crafted because TSM thought it was profitable to sell at 100g.  Great 100g, only 25g in mats, sure I'll craft it, why not!  Turns out though that I was the only one on my server crafting these, which is where the mishap came from.

Posting Setup
I was lazy when I set up my groups.  I put all my enchants in one group and set the Fallback as 175% of the market value, and the Threshold as 35% of the Market Value, then let TSM fix my groups into individual groups within a category.  Now this is a fine and dandy strategy if you are posting relevant items where you usually have competition, but for those items that you are the only one posting, it can become quite troublesome to someone (like me) who doesn't constantly pay attention at what prices he is posting at.

The Result
The end result was quite hilarious.  I didn't notice what was happening until about a month too late.  Since I was the only one posting this particular enchant, every time I posted it, the "Market Value" changed to whatever I posted at.  So each time I reposted this item, TSM increased the price by a multiplier of 1.75.  Now just to put this into perspective, if I reposted 15 times under these assumptions, the 15th time I'd be posting at a whopping 4421x the original price!  Below is the result of who knows how many days of not paying attention:

All for an enchant worth 100g!  So let a lesson be learned here boys and girls, TSM can do a LOT of thinking for you, but there's only so much it can do.  Beware using percents when dealing with rarely posted items, or an item worth 100g can end up being posted at 127k.  Hopefully everyone who reads this pays more attention when setting up groups than I did.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

On the Recent WoW Duping

Just wanted to write up a post about the most recent "duping scandals" from the past few days, and what I've seen so far about it.  Whenever these dupes come out, I always think it's interesting to read about them, and learn how they work(ed).  They're found by people who have much more patience than me, who are passionate about a different aspect of the game.  Just like I enjoy making gold, they enjoy finding loopholes in WoW's code, and exploiting them.

Heard it Through the Grapevine

I first heard about all of this from this thread on The Consortium.  Many members were having massive amounts of TCG items bought up all at once, and were posting about it on this thread.  Unfortunately my own TCG mounts I bought to flip months ago are still rotting away on the Auction House, guess they didn't like small servers.  After reading UtesDad's comment on that thread I was curious about the actual method, and headed over to Ownedcore to see what I could learn.

Unlimited Moneys!

From what I can tell there are possibly 2 dupes, although the info on this first one is less documented than the later one I'll cover.  From what they're saying with this one you were able to log in to the game and Remote AH at the same time (you previously couldn't so I'm not sure how they got around it), and if you purchased an item from the AH, it wouldn't subtract from your gold total, but you'd get the item, basically generating unlimited gold.  This would of course explain the Remote Auction House being down, but I can't verify this one.  If it's true, the implications are going to be interesting.  Here is the thread from Ownedcore with more details (slightly NSFW).

Bags of Money

The second one is a little different.  If you've opened a http://www.wowhead.com/item=89125/sack-of-pet-supplies, http://www.wowhead.com/item=94207, http://www.wowhead.com/item=98546, or any similar bag since 5.3 dropped, you'd notice that there's a new looting mechanism for these bags, where using the bags doesn't have a normal loot interface, but pops up as if you won something in raid finder.  Blizzard changed the mechanisms for these bags in 5.3, apparently because they now include protection for bad luck streaks in their algorithms (from patch notes):

"Protection for bad luck streaks have been added to Battle-Stones from pet supplies bags and wild battles.  Each bag or battle that does not provide a stone has a progressively better chance to award a stone to the player."

So apparently Blizzard didn't have the foresight to put a cooldown on these bags, and if you macroed it to your scroll wheel you could trick WoW into thinking you opened 30-50 bags, or more.  Since these bags all contain gold, it basically gave you a license to print money.  If you want to read some more about logistics, here's the thread from Ownedcore.  A very interesting set of exploits, check out the threads to learn more, it will be very interesting to see how Blizzard deals with this in the days to come.  

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

5.3 Gold Making

Instead of doing a Weekly Review today, I figured I'd go over some of my observations thus far from the patch, gold making mostly, but otherwise as well.  Not having played on the PTR, I'm enjoying the learning experience, and figuring out the new content.

Questline

For those of you who haven't done it yet, the quest lines were pretty cool (mostly scenarios), but the most notable thing for a gold makers is that there are ilvl 502 boots as a reward, which may put a damper on many boot sales, PvP or otherwise, so keep that in mind.  

Battlefield: Barrens

There's a lot of things to cover in this, wowhead has their own guide, and I'm going to assume basic knowledge of this guide below.  Mobs in this new area drop epic items, such as Kor'kron Leggings that are BoE and can be turned into ilvl 489 pieces once weekly (Total Slots Covered: Belt, Boots, Chest, Gloves, Head, Legs, Shoulders).   For the most part this will be negatively impacting sales, but since it can only be done weekly, alts might fill in gaps with PvP gear still, and trinkets as well.  Another question that arises from these items is "Since they're BoE can I sell them for a good amount?"  The answer to that is a resounding "No".  The reason being that they are really easy to come across.  In doing the weekly that you need to do to upgrade the items to gear, I got 3 of these pieces in a half hour.  Unless Blizzard decides to nerf the drop rate a bit, there's not going to be much demand for these unless certain pieces are much rarer than others.  They are also available from the quartermasters for ~200 resources

If you read the guide you'll probably note that the one only other thing that you can profit off of from the vendor will be the pet from the weekly, this guy.  For optimizing (if you do the weekly) I'd suggest using a Potion of Luck (although the droprate for me was dismal, but I'd suggest trying it, they do work on these mobs), as well as a few Rainstick for emergency heals if you're not a healing class.  One last thing to note for this area is that a unique equiped 24 slot bag, http://www.wowhead.com/item=98059, drops from these mobs as well, which may be useful to your alts with smaller bags.

All in all, the drop rate for greens and SoH is pretty nice in this area, a lot of humanoids so lots of cloth. There's potential for profit, but I'm sure that in the long run there will be much gained gold wise from doing these dailies.  Best to stick to the AH!

Sales

Since the patch, for me, everything has been selling, but some of my major sellers are PvP gems, enchants, and leg/shoulder enchants, but basically everything.  Also keep in mind if you're someone that likes to do old content that 3 BC raids had pets added to boss drop loot tables, so you may want to take a step inside.  Again, here's a relevant wowhead link.  Hope you guys are enjoying 5.3, and if you have any gold making suggestions I missed feel free to leave them in the comments.  

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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