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

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

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

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

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

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

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 link, and 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: