Spotlight: The New WoW Marketeer

   Well i'll be damn. A few days ago i made a post in the Spotlight section after months of not posting anything in The Spotlight section because i had nothing to share with you, and here i am today with another installment about a new site that i found that is worth mentioning.

   Some of you might have heard about WowMarketeer as he was and if i am right still is making videos about the WoW Economy, but this is not a post about that, no, this is because the original site was revamped and made into a information central hub. 

   From what i saw, their idea for the site is quite admirable. They want to make it a hub where you will be able to get all your information about WoW, be it PvP, PvE or Auction House Gold making. 

   Another thing worth mentioning is that you can find quite a bit of links to other sources about WoW as well, you can find links for different Blogs, different Videos and they even have a Live Stream corner. On top of all this they have their own section for guides ( kinda slim at the moment but hopefully it will get better with time ).

   The best thing about this is that they have an open policy for suggestions, so if you happen to know of a blog, or a site that covers WoW and they haven't put it up on their watch list drop them a mail and i am sure they will want to put it up there. Also if you happen to be the owner of a blog, or a podcast or even a Live Stream that you do about WoW holler at them and see if they would like to add you to their Syndication.

   So like i said they have an awesome idea to make a site that will cover all bases of WoW, and the best thing about sites like this is that if they play their cards straight and get some feedback from the community by telling them what they like, and what they would like to see, they can turn into a great informational site. Remember one thing, today's Mega popular MMO-Champion started out just like this and now it's very valuable resource for every WoW player. So give them a quick glance, and lets hope they play their cards well and make this site into everything it can be.

MoP Preparation Part 3

   As time passes without any new content it is more then obvious that the economy is slowing down. Well this was expected as it is the same cycle we see before every expansion, but one thing that is actually a positive about the expansion ending time is the amount of gold one can make with some smart investments. In the previous posts in the MoP preparation category we covered some of the things that will be profitable to stockpile on for the expansion, and today we are going to take a look at another profitable venture that we can take advantage of. 

   Raw Materials, yup that is going to be a great market to invest in for MoP. To clarify a bit, when i say invest into raw materials i mean scope out all those materials that people will want to powerlevel their professions. If you want a better idea as to what those items are check out a previous post i did that covers that particular area, or you can simply jump on over to WoW-Professions to see the list for each profession.

   The reason why this is going to be a great market to invest is due to it's potential for sales, and the increased demand for those materials for when the Pandas are unleashed in the world. 

   From what i have gathered from talking to different people is that they will make a Panda as soon as the expansion hits the live servers. Now when that happens you will see a bunch of people that will shoot past leveling professions because they will want a shot at the server first Panda achievement, well those people are not the market that we will be aiming for, rather we are going to take aim at the bigger portion of those people that will want to play their Monk as their main character and would like to level their profession while they are leveling their character.

   Weirdly enough from what i have gathered, the majority of the new people that were talking about starting a Monk told me that they would choose to level Jewelcrafting as their main profession due to the fact that the profession gives a major boost to their stats, has Awesome gold making potential and will be able to make mounts in MoP that you can turn around and sell for profit ( allegedly ), so i would take a closer look at the jewelcrafting leveling market.

   In another post i talked about whether MoP will bring inflation or deflation in the economy, but seeing as how the item level squish didn't happen we can only see inflation of the prices, which in return would mean that the worth of the gold would decrease, and by knowing this the worst case scenario would be to hold liquid gold as it will loose it's worth for about 20-30%. 

   So to sum it up, don't be afraid to invest your gold into materials that you will turn around and flip back on the auction house. When looking for items to sell, check items that have a higher price but stack in a higher number ( certain gems are the ideal candidate ), and i'll say it again as i can't stress how important this is, DON'T be afraid to invest, as anything you spend 10g on now is going to be worth 15g coming MoP.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Spotlight on Twizzcast

   A while back i had a monthly series of posts called The Spotlight where i used to post about interesting sites and podcasts that i had found out about that month. Well seeing as how i wasn't digging up many new sites to make it a monthly thing i kinda stopped, but today i want to make another post in that category.

   Today i would like to put the spotlight on Twizzcast which is a new podcast in the WoW podcasts scene, and for those of you that enjoy listening to podcasts you might recognize the the voice behind the microphone as one Twizzletank formally from Rep Grind Radio. 

   Well Twizz started this new podcast on his own, and if you would like to have something the keep you company for the long commute to work, or help you stay awake during a boring lecture this might be a good place go and download or stream the podcast.

   Oh and one more thing, last time i saw they had dubbed Twizz as a "clean" podcast that you can listen to work, or around your children, well that is actually wrong as Twizz can hardly go around and not drop F bombs so the podcast should be rated M for Mature because you will hear a lot of profanity there.

   I don't want to make this any longer then it has to be, so once again if you enjoy a good WoW Podcast just about anything WoW related then give TwizzCast a chance and you might find yourself pleasantly surprised. 

Arcane Crystal Profiting

   One of the most profitable ways of making profit in a  market is when you can find a niche market that no one , or very few people know about or are actively participating in it. Well today we'll take a look at one of those markets, and how you can obtain some quick profits by doing these.

   For this Niche Market you will need to have Alchemist that is at least leveled to where he can transmute Arcane Crystals and Thorium bars.

   First of all we need to define what is the item that we want to sell, and that is the Arcanite Bar. Now as any alchemist can tell you, you will need 1 Arcane Crystal and 1 Thorium Bar  to be able to transmute one Arcanite Bar. This isn't anything complex or confusing at any point that would require me to go into detail, it's simply check the price of the Arcanite Bar and compare it with the combined price of the Thorium Bar and the Arcane Crystal and you will see that in 90% of the time you will turn a hefty profit from doing this. Though if the price of the Arcanite Bar is lower then the price of the combined materials then buy them out and repost them to your liking and your profit margin.

   Another thing worth mentioning is that if you happen to come across some cheaper Arcane Crystals BUY them out, and the reason why i'm telling you to do this is simply because the Arcane Crystals are the only ones that you can't obtain through the conventional prospecting way, but you rather have to go and mine Thorium and hope that you get lucky.

   Before i head out i want to tell you one last thing, and that is who is going to be your buyer and why. Well your buyer is going to be either the fanatical transmogrification guy that wants to have all of his weapons as awesome looking and unique as possible, or the very smart crafting goblin that decided he wants to take the first guy's gold. What i mean by this is that the Arcanite Crystal is base material in a wide assortment of items that can reach very VERY high prices on the transmogrification market if you happen to be the only one crafting those items, and you don't do the wrong move and craft more then one item and annihilate the illusion that the item is rare and a justified purchase for 10-20k gold.

   So get on your AH, check the prices for the Arcane Crystals and the Arcanite Bars, and if you see that there is a room for profit there jump on that wagon and ride the Gold Train Express. But if you happen to have a crafter Blacksmith/Leatherworker you might want to check out what you can craft with the Arcanite Bars. Between the quick shuffle of the market and the very high payout of the Mogging market this can turn out to be a very good deal for some of you, so get to your Auction houses and start selling.

   And like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Transmogrification Casting A Wide Net

   There are many people out there that are enjoying the advantages and profits that the transmogrification market is offering. Even though it has been commented by many different bloggers on how to get the most of the market, there are many, many people that simply don't want to deal with the hassle on how to import lists into Auctionator and decide that is not a good market for them.

   Well if you happen to be one of these people then you need to change your opinion and get into this market even this late. If you watched the video at the beginning of this post you got the idea on what i mean when i say using the wide net approach, but in case you didn't have the 7 or so minutes of your time that you want to spend watching that video i will break it down in text as well.

   The whole idea is that you WANT to get in on the market, but you don't want to go after a particular item.  So the only logical step would be to go after ALL the items on the auction house that are in the affordable zone. What i mean by this is that you want to manually go through the auction house and scan it for deals.

   Now when you think about this, the first thing that comes into your mind is that you are going to have to scrolls through pages and pages of auctions and then sort out what is worth buying, and what is crap that you don't want to have. Well you would be wrong again, as that couldn't be further away from the truth. All it takes is about 5 minutes of your time and a character that is near an auction house.

   Once there open up the weapons category and go into the groups like 1h Swords and make the items sort by price from lowest to highest. Once you have done this simply pick up the cheap ones ( usually under 50g ) and go to the next group. After you have scanned the weapons category, go down to the armor category and do the same with the different armor groups. If you have done this you probably ended up with a few or quite a few items depending on your auction house and the competition, so all you need to do is make a new group in TSM and configure it so it posts the items at a high price and a low undercut. In my case i have them reposted at 1950g and a 1c undercut and a lowest price at 600g, but you can define your prices any way you like.

   So the whole idea behind this is to simply acquire as many cheap items from the auction house and repost them back at a very high profit margin and simply wait for a potential buyer to take the bait. The image on the right is sales from that same character that i took in like 10 minutes before i made the video so you can see that those items that i bought out for 5-30g price range sold for 100x their worth and netted in some nice profit. If you want to get a better idea on which items to look out for check out one of the older posts about it but that will only give you a outline, if you want to get a much more detailed look at the matter you might want to check out Faid's Clockwork Riot blog, and Jim Younkin from Power Word: Gold as they have both covered the transmogrification market in a more detailed extent. If you are a Twitter user you might want to check out The Mogfather and Farli from The Overcut. If i have forgotten anyone else that is a major contributor to the Mogging scene put it in the comments and i will add him as well.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Market Manipulation

   Today we are going to take a look at a very interesting way of making sure you profit from selling an actual item, while selling your services for prices that are so cheap that even Scrooge would yell out BARGAIN !

   This strategy that i will tell you about is an old yet VERY effective way to rack in some phat profits. Ok seeing as how i don't want to make this a very long post i will get down to the facts and explain how this works right away.

   What this strategy consists of is basically making people buy (item X) that is material for (item Y) that you can craft, and you offer your crafting skills for a very low price. But not to sound too mathematical with this i will get down and explain this with an actual example that should clear up any confusion there might be.

-- Content Removed --

   

   Now this is more or less the same with any item and the logic behind it is that you are advertising a finished product to promote your other auctions that are the materials for that item. This works just awesome when you use it on a rare craftable item, and if you happen to be able to craft an item that has a unique appearance to it you can take a cut from the Transmogrification market as well and make those appearance crazed people to get your item or materials for huge profits. 

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

The Darkmoon Faire Shuffle

   The Darkmoon faire got a revamp a while back, and it even got it's own island instead of wandering around like a bunch of homeless gypsies. Well as you have all seen it, (at least i hope you have seen it) it offers some new daily as well as monthly quests which is kinda neat as those quests offer some profession skill ups which can be quite useful at higher skill.

   But today we are not going to be looking at the dailies, or the monthly quests for that matter, no we are going to take a look at a little niche market that the Darkmoon Faire opened up with it's arrival.

   This niche market that i am talking about is the possibility to profit off from the people that are collectors in the game and want to own every single pet or mount in the game. Well just so it happens that the Darkmoon Faire offers quite a bit of pets as well as a Darkmoon Faire Dancing Bear mount for 180 prize tokens.

   So now that we know what the Faire offers, how can we profit from this? Well it is very easy and one might say it is even obvious but yet again very few and on some servers even no one is doing it. This thing that i am talking about is the resale of the prize token turn in items. When i say selling those items i mean selling the items that you will obtain from killing dungeon bosses or raid bosses while having a Darkmoon Adventurer's Guide in your bags that you can get from the Darkmoon Faire. 

   If you have one of these guides in your bags and you do your instances you might notice the following items dropping:

A Treatise On Strategy                          Adventurer's Journal

Banner Of The Fallen                            Captured Insignia 

Imbued Crystal                                     Monstrous Egg

Mysterious Grimoire                             Ornate Weapon

Soothsayer's Runes

    These are the items that award the prize tokens and the best thing about them is that they are BoE which means you can sell them and make a profit from them. Well the best deal you can get on these items is to buy them from the AH when the Darkmoon Faire is not in town as people tend to sell them at ridiculously low prices for as low as 10g, then when the Faire rolls in and you have a good stock of items to sell that you previously gathered from the AH you get down to some imaginative advertisement and sell those items back to the people that initially sold them to you.

   When i say you need to get imaginative what i mean is that you need to make a bark that you can hit trade with and with it you will tell people to buy your item from the AH. And to make them think that by buying your item they will be one step closer to obtaining a mount or a pet or whatever else you think would make them want to buy your item. As for pricing i have sold the lesser x5 rewarding ones for 450g and the x15 one for 950g but you can go ahead and tailor your own prices. Also if you see some of these items on the AH for a cheap price grab them, it's not like they can be farmed so they will not loose their worth.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

The Jasper Profit Ring

   Today i am going to point out one of the things that are supposed to be so simple that they are common knowledge but for some reason many, many people keep over looking it, and i will explain what i mean by this. We are going to take a look at the Ore Shuffle but from a different point of view, namely we are going to take a look at how we can profit from it without ever having to prospect hundreds of stacks of ore.

   As you can see on this poorly photoshopped image on the left, this thing i am talking about is the jewelery part of the Ore Shuffle. Even though this is the logical thing to do many people that have a Jewelcrafter but lack the enchanter to do their disenchanting decide to take the road of no profit and slap their Jaspers on the Auction House.

   Now this has been a thing that i have been doing since they did they first nerf to the Shuffle, and when people started putting their gems on the auction house instead vendoring them for the profit. In this time i have made a metric ton of gold from it and why people decided to basically throw away that profit is beyond my comprehension.

   Best thing about this is that you can get these gems off the AH for as low as 3-4g per jasper. One thing that is worth mentioning though, if you are going to do this do it the right way. What i mean with this is, make the rings from the Jaspers and DE the greens, but when it comes to the blue rings slap them on the AH with price tags that are as high as 350g or even higher if you have no competition. Now would be a good time to get into this market because there are people that are jumping in with the RAF ( recruit a friend ) that get a instant level 80 that really needs gear, and that is exactly what you are offering.

   While you are at the Auction House check the prices for Nightstones as well Hessonites as they too can be used into making the jewelery, but the reason why the Jasper is the superior choice is because you only need 1 to craft a ring opposed to the two you will need to make a Nightstone or Hessonite one.

   So i am not going to make a simple thing into a complex one just so it sounds more fancy, instead i leave you with a simple advice. Don't do things that will loose you gold in the end, that has as much sense to it as this (very well photoshopped) priest trying to heal the tank, he is simply doing it wrong.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

The Will To Play Restored

   First thing you think when you read the post name is ask yourself "What the hell is he talking about ?", well give me a few moments of your time and i will explain. First thing i want to clarify is that this is not going to be one of my usual gold tips, those will follow up much more frequently in the future i hope.

   Ok now to start from the beginning, i have been playing the game back from Vanilla and enjoyed it all the way, in that time i did PvP and PvE as well. In TBC and WOTLK i used to do some hard core raiding and BG running and i enjoyed every bit of it. Mid way through WOTLK i got pulled into the AH PvP and i started loving it. I hit the cap and pushed on making gold and had loads of fun while doing it. 

   As soon as Cataclysm hit i stopped with the PvE raiding and focused on the gold making, and made my first million, then pushed on and made my second million and even got a interview with wowecon  but i didn't stop there either. But then when i got up to like 2.4 million i kinda lost my interest into making gold, and seeing as how i wasn't playing almost any PvE or PvP the game started loosing it's appeal to me. So as this was happening i noticed one thing about the blog posts i was doing, namely they were starting to get more of a theoretical feel to them, as well as a more high level investment ideas opposed to gold making tips that you can continue to build upon yourself. So in order to get back into the game and have fun i decided to do something rather eccentric and borderline weird ... 

   ... as you can see the image on the left, i gave my gold away. A few posts ago i made a post about leveling and selling guilds as that was what i was doing at the given time because the gold went to some friends that happen to play on a different server. 

   Now to be perfectly honest, i still have 800k left which is still a huge amount for some but then again the reason why i didn't give that away is because it wasn't 1 million which is the cap you can put in a guild bank when you are transferring it, so it seemed like a waste of money. But i am really considering the idea as soon as i hit 1 million to give it away as well ( But i will keep some for me so i have some starting capital for MoP :) )

   Anyways now that is done i want to give my thanks to a few of my friends that helped me in my endeavor. As 

you can see on the image here, these are the guys that helped for for about a week in leveling up two guilds to level 2 so i could have used them to do the transfer. ( There are 4 characters on this screen, and in case you can't see the 4th, it's the shaman on the dragon in the background.

   Anyways these guys stuck it out with me for almost a week of grinding their ass off helping me out and i would like to send out my gratitude to them, and especially to one of them that i woke up early early in the mornings for a few days and then making him endure my voice on Skype for day after day. But on top of it all they even helped me out with the transfer thing, and they helped me by making a character on their accounts so i won't have to delete any of my characters ( have 10 ) when i wanted to make the actual guild transfer. 

   I won't name any of them so i keep their anonymity but they will know who they are, and all i want to say is I LOVE YOU GUYS as much as one man can love another, without it being gay. So having said all of this, in the future posts i will try my best to give you more quality gold making tips that will be more hands on instead of ideas on what to invest without having to care if you loose some gold while doing it.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Farming Infinite Dust

   It is a common knowledge that most of the professions in the game are made so that they can compliment each others, well to be honest Blizzard are kinda leaning away from that model as they are trying to make each profession as independent as possible but this is not the point here. Anyone that has leveled enchanting in the past, or is maybe leveling an enchanter now knows that it is a rather expensive profession to level and especially when you get to the Northrend level of materials and you get to be in very short supply of Infinite Dust.

   There are a few ways to go about the acquisition of Infinite Dust, but by far the most profitable way is by mixing up the two top end professions, Jewelcrafting and Enchanting.

   The way to actually farm Infinite Dust from Jewelcrafting is very simple, heck it's the predecessor of today's Obsidium/Elementium Ore Shuffle, but to be more precise you are going to be making rings and necklaces yet again. You will need 4 resources which happen to be very cheap, and the best part is you can buy them straight from the AH for almost next to nothing for most of the time.

   The resources that i am talking about are the common gems that you get when you prospect the Northrend equivalent ore, and those are the Chalcedony, Bloodstone, Sun Crystal and Huge Citrine. If you check your auction house you will notice that most of the time they are moving for abysmally low prices of some times being as low as 2g per gem. After you have obtained the gems you need to get some Eternal Earth that you can shatter so you end up with the Crystallyzed Earth that you will need as well.

   So now that you have purchased the said gems and Eternal Earth what do you do that will be worth calling it Infinite Dust Farming ? Well you take those and you make them into Bloodstone Bands, Crystal Chalcedony Amulet, Crystal Citrine Necklace and Sun Rock Ring. After making these you need to ship them off to your Enchanter to do his disenchanting and you end up with your cheap supply of Infinite Dust. And another thing is that when you are disenchanting these you might end up with Lesser Cosmic Essences that you can sell or use as well. 

   Just so you get the idea on how important your stock is going to be to anyone leveling enchanting, to level past the threshold you will need 600x Infinite Dust and 30x Greater Cosmic Essences that you will get by combining the Lesser Cosmic Essences, and this is for a single guy alone. So you can see that the demand for this is rather high and the supply is always low.

   In a future post i will give you an idea of how to further improve on the profit margin by investing some more time into the enchanting part of the whole deal, but for now i will leave it at this.

  So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

   P.S. If you do get in this market you might want to check the prices of the Abyss Crystals so you can shatter them and obtain some more Infinite Dust and Essences. ( Kudos for the last P.S. addition goes to @Yngvede for noticing it and posting it on Twitter )

WoW Guild Leveling And Selling

   In World of Warcraft there are many, many ways of making gold but in reality it all boils down to two basic things, What are you selling, and Who is your targeted group of buyers. Today we are going to take a look at a rather interesting market that if done right can net you some insane profits, and this market that i am talking about is Buying/Selling of level 2 Guilds.

   The guilds in WoW are basically like the houses we have in the real world, except we don't get extra XP, reputation and gold in the house when we kill things but that's not the point here. In before i start going on and on about how to obtain and sell the guilds let me give you the basic idea as to why it is profitable to get in on the guild trading market, and who your targeted group would be.

   First of all let me clarify the thing about the Level 2 Guild. The reason why i stated that you want a level 2 guild is fairly simply yet very few people actually know about it, and the thing that they don't know about it is that if you want to transfer a bigger sum of gold across servers you need to have at least a level 2 guild. 

   So now knowing this you can see what your targeted market group would be, it's the people that want to switch servers and have more then 50k gold to their name. Now if you take into account that MoP is in the Beta and can be seen going live in the foreseeable future, you can see new and returning players hopping back in the game, and the one thing they have in common is that they want to play with their friends that happen to play on a different server. Now their problem is that they can't transfer their gold with them, be it 100k or 1 million. So they come to a impasse as they don't want to part with their hard earned gold, but at the same time they want to play with their friends on that other server. So their choices of the matter boil down to either transfer the character and leave your gold behind or play alone and leave the game in less then a week.

    This is where you jump in and try to help them out by offering to solve their problem and give them the thing they want the most, their character with all their gold on that other server with their friends. So the way you do this is by selling them your level 2 guild that at that time to them would be like salvation.

   Now there are a few things you need to know about how the guild transfers work in case you want to do one yourself or give further information to your buyers.

There are four major things that you must know or explain to your potential buyers ( or don't tell them ) and those are:

• The guild master must have been the guild master for at least 7 days
• The guild master must be at least level 10
• The guild must be at least level 2 to be eligible for transfer
• The account that the guild master is on must have an authenticator active for at least 7 days

   So knowing this you can offer the information to your buyer and explain to him that if he decides to buy your guild he will have to wait 7 days no matter what.

   And before i head out i will leave you with the last bit of information about how to obtain the guilds, and how you should price them. The first, or obvious way would be to make a new guild from scratch and then level it to level 2 which even though it might sound like a lot of work it's not as you can do it while you are doing your random daily quests, but you will need 2-4 friends to help you out ( this means leaving the guild they are in and joining yours for the duration of the runs, so their rep with the initial guild would be wiped so this is best done with alts). For more information about which run gives how much experience you might want to check the post on the Blizzard forums about this particular thing. And the second way of getting a guild would be trade channel. 

    Now about the pricing, when you are hunting for a guild and you find someone that is willing to sell you their level 2 guild try and make it sound like they have something that is hardly worth anything and try to haggle it away from them for as low as 2-5k gold, but at the same time when you find someone that is willing to buy a guild from you then make it sound like you are giving them the key to the Playboy Mansion and sell it for as high as 20-50k. The reason why this would be an acceptable price to some is because they want to transfer 800k or 1 million gold and they simply don't want to wait any more so they are willing to pay any price to do so.

   So there it is in a bunch, the whole fuss about how to obtain and sell a level 2 guild or as i like to call it, sell hope to the people :)

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.