Back For MoP, Back For Gold

   So here we are back after quite a while with a new post, and hopefully the first in many posts to come. First of all i would like to say that i stopped with writing new articles on the blog for one reason and that reason was simply the fact that i didn't think there was anything new worth writing about, and i didn't want to make "new" posts that would be simply same as the old ones but from a different points of view. 

   Well all of that is about to change with the release of MoP. What this means is simply that all the markets are going to explode and be alive and ripe for the picking, and all you will have to know is how to make the optimal profit from those markets, and that is exactly where i will try to give you all a hand.

   Just like any market, or deal that transpires in the real world where the research and preparation are the key to being a success, the same goes for World Of Warcraft expansions. Knowing what to expect, and more importantly preparing for the upcoming expansion is 50% of the profit already in your pocket. I won't go into details on what you should have bought so far, simply because i made a post in two parts that was more or less a spot on about which items you should have stocked up on, the first part and the second part covered a wide market so you might want to check them out.

   Ok i am done with the words of wisdom, but now lets take a quick look at a tip that will actually make you a very hefty sum of gold in the longer haul, and it will make you go "Daaaaamn that was profitable"

   If you read up on these previous two posts back when i posted them, and you did some preparation and stocking up you should have a nice stock of soon to be older tier of materials, but if you haven't it's not all over as there are still almost two days left for you to pick up some bargains of the year. I will tell you exactly what to look for and what i stocked up and the reason behind it.

   First up i followed up on my own tips about the inscription and the inks in particular, i bought up all the cheap herbs that i could find up on the AH. The reason for this is that when MoP ships the only way to get the older inks would be either mill the old herbs (which are always rare to find) or exchange them for the newest inks (which will be expensive as hell), so this is why by buying inks now and then either reselling them or making glyphs with them in MoP is going to score you some awesome profits. While at the Inscription profession, you might want to take some Moonglow Ink, and Snowfall Ink and put them on the AH in stacks of 1, and the reason for this is because you want to cover the market for all the new Monk Scribes that will pickup Inscription and will want to do their Minor and Northrend inscription research.

  If you have a Jewelcrafter that has been a good boy/girl and has done his dailies and picked up on the epic cut gems then now would be a good idea to pick up the epic raw gems that are up on the Auction House for ridiculously low prices. Just for reference i picked up raw epic gems for 30-80g each, and i am well aware that in a few months i will sell those gems cut to twinks/alts for 1500-3000g easy. The reason behind this thinking is that the supply for these gems is finite and unless they introduce a way to get those gems by transmutes (which i doubt they will) you will end up with a VERY valuable piece of commodity.

   Lastly if you have an Enchanter you might want to pick up on some of the very under priced Maelstrom Crystals, or any of the other enchanting materials that you are low on stock. Just know that the price of the Maelstroms is going to crash in the next few days while anyone and everyone that has an Enchanter is going to be DEing their old gear and trying to sell the Maelstroms on the AH. The reason for stockpiling on these materials is simple, you will want to keep the Cata market covered for twinks that are always there, but the down side is that this is actually a longer term investment but a very lucrative one for that matter. Right now you will be able to pickup the Maelstroms for like dirt cheap prices of like 10-20g and after the dust settles they will be worth at around 100-140g (the vendor price for the ones that know how)

   So i leave you with this for now, but i will continue with new posts and more importantly posts about things that are profitable and things that will help you make a lot of gold. 

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

   

Protecting Your WoW Account

   Lately i have been away from WoW as well as Diablo, but that doesn't mean that i have lost interest in the games. Well to be honest i kinda lost my interest in Diablo as the feeling i am getting while playing it is simply like i am playing a beta game. But that put aside i still have my interest in WoW, and the economy part in particular, even though we have hit a rough patch of boring as it is.

   As a gold making oriented individuals we love to play the game for it's virtual currency making aspect, where if you play it right you can influence and shape a whole economy. Well today we are going to take a look at the ULTIMATE way to influence the shaping of an economy by doing the most important thing that you can do, protect yourself from hackers and keeping your hard earned gold in your account and away from the black market.

   First of all lets clear one HUGE misunderstanding, whenever someone says that the Chinese farmers are the people that are responsible for the economy going to the gutter, you are dead wrong, it is in reality your own fault. Now let me explain the reasoning as to why i am saying this.

   Let us begin by defining the usual suspects: 

Chinese "farmer" this is basically some guy or a girl that sits in front of the computer and makes gold by actually playing the game, be it by actually farming or playing our beloved AH PvP. ( In many occasions these individuals aren't Chinese, but still the term is the term )
 
Botter this is a guy that doesn't like to sit and spend his time at the keyboard , so instead he is using bots (automated programs) to do all his work for him.
 

Gold Selling Sites well pretty much everyone that has ever gotten up to a major city without turning off his trade channel has had a run in with these guys. They don't actually farm anything as they are more or less a "middle guy" in a otherwise simple transaction. They connect the buyer of the gold with a seller and take a piece of the profit for them selves.

Hacker this is the highest threat to the economy of any game. These are the guys that steal your account information and then log in and pick clean your entire account in a matter of minutes.

   Like i previously said the hackers are the biggest problem by far. The reason why this is so is simply because of the gravity of the impact they have on the economy. When they steal your gold they transfer it away somewhere where they will be able to store it until they find a buyer that they can offload to and get their money. Well the issue arises because when you file a report saying that you were hacked you always get your inventory and gold back, but rarely is your original gold found before it ends up to a buyer. The reason why this is an issue is simple, lets say for an instance that you had 500k on your account. Now if you were hacked, the hacker got away with a 500k worth of loot for a 5 min work he did, that same 500k is now into circulation because it will end up on your same server to some other guy that paid money for it.

Now comparing the 500k a hacker for a 5 min work, to a botter is like comparing your local grocery store to a fortune 500 company. They will both make money but the difference in cash/hour is going to be huge. Don't get me wrong though, botters do have an impact on the economy, but they are dependent on the community to buy their farmed goods and are more or less a factor in the every day economy in WoW.

   So how do we protect ourselves, do we take up a bulwark and try that way, or magic or stealth ? Well the answer to that would be ... don't be ridiculous this it the real world. But still there are ways to protect yourself, and i will give you a few hints as well as the kryptonite of the hackers.

• GET AN AUTHENTICATOR !!
  This is the the one thing that you MUST get if you are serious about keeping your account safe. They are cheap to get on the market, but if you have a smart phone you can get one for free.
  
• GET A SOLID ANTI VIRUS !
  This shouldn't really require a description as to why as it is always nice to have something that will stand in the way of malicious software trying to steal your information ( keyloggers in our case)
  
• DON'T BUY GOLD OR POWERLEVELING SERVICE FROM SITES !
  Really there is no need for you to spend your hard earned cash to get some quick gold, or even worse for someone to play or bot the game that YOU bought, and YOU are paying a monthly price. If you need gold simply read up some of the articles that are on the blog, or some of the other FREE blogs out there and you can get your gold fast and FREE and you will have some fun making it. And not to mention the fact that giving your account information, or even worse your credit card information to a individual or a site that you don't know is not the smartest thing to do.
  
• !!! CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS !!! DON'T GET HACKED !!!
  This is that kryptonite that i was talking about. This is where more then 90% of the black market gold comes from. But to make it more clear, NEVER EVER use the same password you have on your account and your email that is attached to that account. On top of that, NEVER EVER use the same password on community sites that require you to put in a e-mail. The reason for this is that many, many people do that mistake where they would make an email and put in a password like (qwerty or 123456) and then use that same password for their WoW account and pretty much any other account they make on any forum or community site ( MMO-Champion and similar).
  The reason for telling you this is because many people do this mistake and then they wonder how they got hacked. YOU didn't get hacked, but the community site that you are a part of got hacked and their info was used to feel your account up and see if the passwords match, if they do then you are screwed. So i say it again, NEVER use the same password for your e-mail and community sites that require your password.
  And another thing you might want to do if you want some extra security would be to change your passwords on a monthly basis.
  
  P.S. If you are by chance actually using a password such as QWERTY or 123456 then you do deserve to get hacked !

   So i hope you had a nice time reading this, and i really hope that you didn't find out anything new ( it means that you already did everything right and you are protected) but if you did read something that you didn't know, then apply that to better the safety for your account, and stay safe and protected, and keep those hacking SOBs away from your hard earned gold.

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.

Inflation Or Deflation In MoP

   What will happen in MoP with the economy? I have had this on my mind for quite some time and i finally got down to making a post in which i would actually like to ask you, the readers to comment and share your point of views. 

Case 1: Inflation

   This is what usually happens with WoW on every expansion releases. Cold had a post about making gold from the inflation up on his blog, and he was actually on the mark. But to break it down to bare basics and it would be very simple. Prices will soar high, the currency in circulation would go up exponentially but at the same time the worth of the gold would go way down.

   What this would mean is that we end up with a economy where it will be normal to pay for a lets say for instance a gem, to pay up to 5k gold. As it is now  it might sound insane, but if everything goes as it has been in the past that might be the grim case. 

   If this happens then i am afraid Blizzard will break their own game's economy, and the player group that Blizzard will be aiming for the most ( the new players ) will have a negative experience as they will hardly be able to afford anything.

   So if Blizzard decides to go on with this strategy and we see inflation, then it would be wise to try and invest our gold into trade goods that we can sell down the road. Best example for these investments would be things that are used to craft exotic things Titansteel ( for the Mechano-Hog ), raw gems, even epic ones as they will become the twink gems for the Cata tier, as well as enchanting materials. The thing is that if you decide to get into liquidating your gold you will have to wait a while until the supply dries up and the prices start going up.

Case 2: Deflation

      This is actually what i think, and hope that it will happen, deflation. Let me explain as to why i think so.

   There was a talk previously about the item level shrinking of items in Cata. For all of you that didn't read about that, it is basically a shrinking in the item level and stats of items from TBC to Cata, and that would be done so we don't end up with abilities hitting for 500k damage, and health to go up in the million range.

   As this was a option that Blizzard favored, there is another aspect of it that is going to follow, and that is the prices. With lower item levels their vendor price will be lower as well, and also with the lower item level of items the quest gold would be lower as well. 

   So if this is the case, then we will see a decrease in the flow of gold into the economy and in return see the prices of items go down to a more manageable level. So just like Blizzard is trying to get away from the 500k damage hits and Millions HP, i am sure they are trying to move away from the case where their gold becomes nearly worthless and we see the same thing that happen to Diablo 2 where the only worth in the economy in time was trading 1 item for another as gold was worthless.

   So if this is the route that we see Blizzard takes, then the best thing would be to have liquid gold as it will be worth much more.

   So what do you folks think will happen? Will we see a case of inflation, or a case of deflation or something else. I would like to hear your opinions as well, to either agree or disagree with me, and how are you going to approach the release of MoP .  

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

Cheating Yourself Out Of Profit

   Here i am back with one of my rants. Today i am going to try and cover one of the most important things that i have noticed that people do that are basically robbing themselves out of profit. The thing i am referring to is under pricing, or inadequate pricing.

   To try and explain this phenomena i will use two examples. The first one is how the real life economy disparity between countries is. For instance lets say that a person living in country A has pay check of 2000$, another person living in country B has a pay check of 1000$ and a third person living in a country C has a pay check of 300$.

   Now what all these people have in common is the need to buy a TV. Lets say that a nice new TV on the market would be 500$, now that would be an OK price for person A, an affordable for person B and damn expensive for the person C.

   One of the things i have been actually doing for quite a long time in WoW is asking all the people that i ever traded a single question, and that question is "How much gold do you have?" The reason behind this is not because i wanted to sell it for higher if they could afford it, but i wanted to get a general idea of what's the most common gold circulation among the normal/causal WoW player. The answers i got actually did give me a fairly good idea because i came down with numbers that implied that about 60% of the player base are all under 20k gold mark, then you have some 30ish percent that are 20-100k another 5% with 100-500K and about that same number with people over 500k. For similar numbers you might check some blogs or forums, but the problem with those is that the audit is pretty much from people that are on that site exactly for that reason, to make gold, and in return those are the people that fall into the last 10%.

  Well this same example can be seen in WoW as well. The way this happens in WoW is not with a TV but pretty much everything else you are selling. For instance i have seen on way too many instances where a person that has a certain item that he wants to sell it, ends up selling it for a fraction of it's worth and loosing out on the profits that he could have been making. The most common example with this is how people price their crafted items and to a certain degree the transmogrification market.

   The way people usually price their commodities is by the group of gold owners they are in (lets say you have 20K). Just put yourself in their shoes, you have an item that could be worth 10k to a person that is in a higher gold owner class then you , but you deem it too expensive because you doubt anyone would pay 50% of your total gold stash and you price it for 4k which seems like a 20% increase of your gold sum. 

   Now here comes another buyer that has a bit more gold in the sack, and takes your 4k item on the AH and re list it back for 10k. A few days pass but he eventually sells it to someone and makes a 6k profit over doing nothing but buying your item and re listing it back, and there you are happy with 4k profit while you should be pissed for missing out on the extra 6k you should have netted in. 

   But let us take a look at a more direct market with a more direct approach to prices. Let us take a look at the PvP gear and how people usually price their commodities and how they should be pricing it.

   The way this usually plays out is almost always the same. The person that is making the gear deems it a great deal if he spends 100g on the materials to sell it for 200g as in reality that is 100% profit margin, but the problem arises when you take that same item and sell it for 1000g. Then what happens is your 100% profit margin you made is basically still a 100% profit but at the same time a 900% loss as well.

   This same thing can be seen the most with the Transmogrification market. Yes, granted some people sell their items for 5,10,15 gold that you buy and flip, but those are not the people missing out, those are the misinformed, the actual people that are missing out on the profits are the people that are re listing the auctions. A perfect example of those would be a forum post i saw where a guy was asking the same question "am i cheating myself out of my profits" and he explains that he prices the items in 3 tiers a 200g, 400g and 600g and the reason? Well he is probably in the first gold owner class where his total gold sum is lower then 20k and a 600g is a good profit for him, and if you tell him that he could have flipped that for 10k he would laugh, or cry if you show him a printscreen of the actual sale.

   Anyways not to make this post any longer than it has to be i will leave you with a few last words. If you happen to be selling gear, or pretty much anything on the auction house never limit yourself with setting a low price. For instance like i said with the PvP gear, if the materials are worth 100g then set your high price at 1000g and your lowest price at 200g, that way if no one else is nuking your sales you will end up making a 100% in your worst case scenario, and up to 1000% profit in your best case scenario. Just remember there is no going price, the worth of anything is as high as a buyer is willing to pay for it. So one last time, don't be afraid to set high prices for the things you are selling and i am sure you will find your profits to be much higher then you are accustomed to.

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

Six Months Milestone

   15th of February, it's has been six months since i started this blog. In the time it has been up and running i had so much fun writing the articles, making the images for it and meeting new people. In this period i got to meet some of the people that are writing the other articles as well as the readers that are reading them. When i started writing this blog i knew nothing of the authors of the other blogs that are covering the same topic as me, but in these months i got to "meet" with many of them be it through mail or twitter and have grown to really respect them.

   Now here are a few of the things that i have had on this blog in this time, and then i will tell you about the things that i hope that i will get done in the coming period.

   First off here are the TOP 5 posts that i had viewers wise.

1. Outland Dungeon Runner/Farmer Part 3
2. The Ore Shuffle
3. Profession Grabbing Profits
4. Farming The Old To Get The Gold
5. Hour Of Twilight Aftermath

   After those posts the next thing i am really proud of was making the first video on YouTube for my blog

   And then making my first voiced video, i will link it even though it happen recently

   Now after posting the things that i have done, i would like to send some love to the people that i met here, and the people that are making posts of the same topic.

   First of all i would like to thank Alto from altosgoldishadvise.blogspot.com as he was the first one that made a link to my blog that helped me get the first leg up and show up on the radar.

   I would like to give a shout out to Oligopoly www.warcraftecon.net for publishing My Interview for the 2 million gold club which was a pleasure doing.

   Also i would like to mention all the bloggers out there, but i won't link them here because you can see them all in the blogroll on the right side of the blog.

   Well after saying this the only thing left for me is to tell you about the plans i have for the future:

• Finishing up the design for the blog and then transferring it on a domain that i will have more control of
• Finish the WoW Gold Guide that i had started working a while back and put it up 
• Be a guest on a podcast about WoW
• Get some more interactivity on the blog and make it more interesting to browse 

 

   As for my plans for the short term i am thinking of taking up the 20 Days Of .. WoW Blogging Challenge but then again mix it up with some gold related posts as well.

   Anyways that would be all for today, and hopefully the next six months are going to be even more fun and more interesting. But until then, keep your eyes open for good opportunities out there.

The Gold Makers, Who Are We ?

   So all the gold making bloggers, all the hardy goblins hard at work making gold, heck even all the farmers out there, who are we and what is our role in the economy of World of Warcraft? The answer to this question is a very simple answer, yet so complicated as well. We are the life lines of the whole economy.

    What was the reason behind this that made me think about this you might ask, well it's one of the whispers i got when i was trying to help a guy make some gold. The given whisper was that the guy/girl asked me what's the point of hoarding gold. 

   This made me think, and i came up with a rather weird conclusion. The reason why i, and many others like me were "hoarding" gold is simply because that is what we enjoyed in the game. Some people enjoy PvP, others enjoy raiding while we enjoy raiding the Auction House. But this was already known, so i gave it a further thought as in what effect do we have in the economy, and that is when it actually got interesting. The economy if left unchecked simply dwindles down and goes into a kind of recession. To clarify this i will use a few examples:

   As a first example i will use the gathering markets. These markets will have their prices totally decimated to the point of getting to be at 5-10g per stack of herbs or ore, and even then there will be almost no demand because 95% of the raw materials are bought out by people that are gold hoarders, or auction house junkies. Another market that i noticed that requires a constant looking after is the jewelcrafting market. This was the market that i used to make all my gold in, and i was very much into maintaining it  and keeping it at a decent level. Well lately i decided to get out of it and see what is going to happen with it. The findings were quite interesting as well. In a matter of a week the prices of the gems went from a 150-195g sales down to 10-20g sales. Now i though that this might be the case due to many people switching over to using epic gems, and that they weren't buying the rares as much, and boy was i wrong. True, the epics have taken a piece of the market for rare gems, but still people use the epics only for their best gear possible and not everyone takes the step to improve to the epic ones, so they look back to the rares. What i do is nothing complicated and everyone can do it, heck i have even posted it here how i keep the prices of gems up and my favorite late night shuffle tactic. 

   So in a matter of a day i managed to take the prices of gems from 10-20g back up to 195g and sell quite a bit of them. Here's a hint if you choose to do this. Red, Purple and Orange gems have the biggest sale rate while the greens have really went into a deep recession so you can prioritize which gems you want to reset first.

    Behold this is what you are! And no, you are not a faucet, but more of a gold sink. What this means is that if it weren't for us hoarders the amount of gold that would be in circulation would totally ruin the economy to the point where gold is worthless. Just stop and think for a second. everyone reading this has anywhere from 50k to a few million gold, because let's face it if you are reading gold making blogs that means that you are interested in making gold, and if you are doing any of the things that are mentioned here you are already in possession of quite a good amount of gold. Now with the amounts of gold that we have gathered, we have effectively taken it out of circulation, of a better part of it because we still use a small amount to fund our raw material purchases. I for one have had a few discussions on the MMO-Champion and Blizzard forums about what needs to be done to make the economy better, in terms of introducing more gold sinks. The reason why the gold sinks are important is because they make it so the players actually need to have gold to be able to buy something, or pay for their repairs or anything else for that matter, and if you loose that you will end up with a crippled economy like Diablo 2 had in it's case where gold was so abundant that it was worthless. 

   So as a bottom line one could come up with a conclusion that we, as gold makers and hoarders are the life line of the economy, we are the life line of the professions and last we are the life line of the game because we make is so that the economy doesn't crash and drive people away, and in return break apart guilds, PvP groups and the community in general. 

   So when next time someone asks you what is the point of you having all that gold, you can freely go ahead and tell him that you are doing it just so he can continue to play the game, and enjoy it with his friends.

   That is all for today, and like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.