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).

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

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

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:

@twitchietgw @perculia @Seerax Realm First profession achievements are also gone. They don't integrate well w/profession changes.
— Owen Landgren (@olandgren) February 27, 2014

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:

@WoWUtesDad More seriously, though: I think profession skill is cooler as something that increases your yield, rather than gate you.
— Hwoo (@hwoome) February 11, 2014

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:

@machineman87 There were things we liked/didn't like about Spirits of Harmony. Plan atm is not to for 6.0.
— Hwoo (@hwoome) March 7, 2014

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

Phat's Weekly Lewt Review 2/28

It has been a busy week for me, have not had a heck of a lot of time to play the AH, but regardless I've seem to have made more gold this week than I have in the past 2 weeks combined.

"Mega" Gold Making
Now this week I ended (I end my weeks on Thursdays since the connection) with 3,551,226g. I'm pretty excited for a couple reasons, the first being that's a change of over 195k from last week just 1k short of 28,000g profit/day. This is a combination of a couple things, but it did help that I happened to sell a Dragon Kite I had purchased from the BMAH to flip for 25k 2 months ago. Are there other things that could have made me 100% interest in 2 months? Yes. Could I have possibly bought them all given the sheer amount of gold I have? Nope. Glad it finally sold, had been posting it along with all my xmog on a 48 hour auction. Regardless I was very surprised to see 60k in my Xmog seller's mailbox, because I had honestly forgotten I had it!

On top of that I'm at 3.55 million liquid, just 30k shy of my all time recorded high for liquid gold (right before I bought Al'ar then Mim's 3 days later), so it's nice to be back up now. Really need to find something to spend it on!

No Time for Playing = No Time for Buying
I haven't been able to log this week as much as I usually can which is fine, but it's actually presented me some issues as far as restocking goes, which is why I think I made so much profit this week (on top of the 50k from the Dragon Kite). Now, last week I only made ~70k but I spent 100k on mats, which to me is great. This week I made 147.5k ignoring the Kite, but I only spent 30k on mats, which to me is not that great. Now it is the time to start easing up on the current mats, but not that much. I'm really short on leather, and would love to purchase some, but AH prices don't justify so I don't. I have not touched glyphs in about 2-3 weeks, and really have no intention of doing so in the future.

One thing I'm considering doing is jumping into some old world markets for fun. I don't want to get too deep into these markets because I have a strong feeling that they will be introducing mechanisms to level most/all professions via the Mining/Herbalism/BS route they took this expansion, so I am a bit skeptical of future markets for those items.

Moving Enchanting
I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in an earlier post, but even if I didn't, I've moved Enchanting to my current main, dropping Alchemy to learn it (no I have not updated my professions page). I finally got the reps up that I needed (not one for grinding, even on my main), and Enchanting is set, and I need to drop it on my alt (ex-main). I suppose I'll be taking up Alchemy which I dropped, that toon already has Inscription. Considering holding out on this one until WoD beta, because I honestly am not going to make the Living Steel if I had the Alchemist anyway. Okay I've just convinced myself.

Anyway not much else to comment on this week, hopped into GoblinRaset's stream earlier this week and we tried soloing some content. With the help of J311f1sh we managed to 3 man To4W for my Cataclysm raiding achievement, that was entertaining. Raset and I tried to 2 man BoT and went 1/4 after wiping on trash 5+ times :-P. Hope your week was as lucrative or even more than mine was!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Scam'd Part 2: Proactively Getting Your Problem Solved in Warcraft

So earlier this week I did a post called Scam'd where I talked about a guy who tried to scam me by telling me he'd sell me an epic as part of a package deal for 1,700g and did not go through with it. A lot of people both in blog comments and on reddit were surprised with the response I got from the GM that I dealt with and that the problem was resolved in one message so I figured it'd be useful to share the ticket that I created in the first place and some reasons behind why I think it was successful on the first go.

So the ticket went as follows:

Hi, in whispers I agreed upon exchanging 1700g for a variety of items with [Redacted]. Everything we were to exchange is in chat logs through whispers about ~10 minutes ago. I gave him the 1700g, and he did not furnish all the goods, scamming me out of gold. He was doing this as a scam, including 3 epics in the whispers which he did not furnish at the time of the trade, followed by putting me on ignore, which is why I decided to report this, as I'd hate to see it happen again.

Drunken Musings #10

If you weren't able to make it to our live recording this past Saturday, Drunken Musings #10 is now posted for your listening pleasure. In this episode we covered our weeks in WoW, and I told some stories of things that happened to me in the past few weeks. Raset has been streaming a lot recently, and I hang out in his channel quite often, you can find him over at twitch.tv/goblinraset, which is the channel you want to follow if you want to know when our podcast recordings go live! Other than that we cover some WoD news as well as take note of  TSM Lead Developer Sapu's AMA (Ask Me Anything) that took place on reddit last Sunday (a week before yesterday). Definitely check that out as well, very interesting responses! New post up tomorrow, kind of summing up the ticket I had sent for my most recent Scam'd post and some ways to interface with Blizzard for quick and accurate results. Until then,

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Scam'd

This past week I was "victim" of a scam, and I figured I'd post about it, how I dealt with it, and the results.

How it Started
So I was going about my daily AH business collecting expired auctions from the mail to repost on my main, as I notice a guy selling "everything in his bags" for 1.7k. "Meh" I thought, "Probably a bunch of junk anyway." I keep emptying my mail, do a post scan, the daily to try to get my Love Rocket and he's still hawking the package in trade for 1.7k, so I bite. What's 1.7k anyway? I whisper him and ask what he's selling and he lists a couple Malevolent pieces, a stack of Infinite Dust, some Monk glyphs, and 3 epics, the notable one being a ilvl 502 Reborn weapon. Now there are going to be many points throughout this story that red flags should have popped up (and did), but keep in mind that 1.7k is 0.05% of my gold total.

So this is the first flag but honestly to spend 1.7k at a chance to get a Reborn weapon, even if I only thought I had a 10% chance of getting it, is fairly good.

The Exchange
Now this is where the second red flag should have popped up, and I probably should have requested the epics first, but nonetheless, he opened the trade window put in 6 of the items he listed, a couple Malevolent pieces and a stack of Infinite dust, all of which I could have recouped a good chunk of the 1.7k for so I put it in and hit trade. Feeling a bit weary at this point, I was surprised when he opened up the trade window and gave me even more of the items he promised, epics still not included. Unfortunately this was the end of our exchange. I whispered him about the epics and he had already put me on ignore. Perhaps what he did not know is that I had him dead to rights. Our entire exchange took place in whispers and according to Blizzard's Scam policy:

"A scam is the act of acquiring items or any other possession from another player through misinformation, confusion, or fraud. If you are unsure if your particular case fits the criteria of a scam, contact a GM in-game."

Which is basically a description of what this guy did. I first opened the ticket noting times and what I did not receive, then logged on an alt to converse with him.