Diablo 3 Making Gold

   So it has almost been two weeks since the launch of Diablo 3 and the only thing i can tell you about the game if you are not playing it is to go and get it. Ok now that my persuasion has worked on you, and you have the game, it is time to tell you why this game is awesome and how you can be awesome in it by being a successful economy driven goblin. If you haven't heard anything about Diablo 3 you might want to check the three introduction posts i did before the launch of the game to get a general idea on what to expect.

   First place that i want to start would be the auction house. If you watched the video you get the general idea on what to expect, and how to navigate through the auction house. If by chance you are one of those people that doesn't like to watch videos i will try and sum it up for you as well. 

   When you go to the Auction House you need to know what you are looking for. Now even though this might sound like a stupid thing to say or even think because if you went to the auction house you wanted to get something anyways, it is not because the way the D3 auction house works unlike other games is that it will require a greater deal of information on what exactly you want to buy in order to give you a list of those items.

   First off, as you can see on the image is that you will need to chose a template of a sort on which class you want to look for. ( so it knows if you prefer INT,DEX or STR) Then after you have chosen the given class you need to choose an item you want to buy, be it armor or weapon.

   Now that you have chosen what you want to buy you want to define which affixes are found on that item. As you can see you can define an item with up to three affixes. Another important thing to help you with sorting out is to define a numerical value to your affix search ( adding a number in the little red square next to the name ) that will sort the items that have the minimum of that amount of that given affix. And last but not least, you want to put a price you are willing to pay for your item unless you want to get items that are all in the millions of gold range.

   So if you have done everything right you will find an item that has the affixes that you want, is within your price range and is generally a good upgrade to your character.

   After finishing up with reading about the auction house, lets take a quick look at how exactly we can use the auction house to make some gold without having to do much work.

   As you can see on the video here, one of the easiest way to get some profit is by doing the same exact thing that we have all done in WoW, where we sold vendor pets and vendor items. Well in D3 there really isn't much need for pets of any sort but vendor items are still a big YES.

   In general you can sell pretty much any piece of gear that you can find from the vendors that has decent stats, but the best luck i have had has been with selling the trinkets. When i say trinkets i mean rings and amulets that the vendors in each town sell.

   One thing you need to remember is that the vendors have a wide variety of items that they sell, and it is very rare to find him selling the same item twice, so if you see something that is worth it you better buy it and if you are pretty sure that it is a good item you better buy a nice stock of it as well.

   So after you have bought up a stock, next step would be to define a price and start selling all those rings/amulets that you bought up.

   The right way to defining a price for your items would be to start off with a lower price ( in my case i started off with 29950) and if you notice the items are selling and selling fast you gradually increase it up a notch ( got mine to around 45k). Now take into account that i bought all of these rings for around 7k and you will end up with profits that are in the 20-35k per ring sold.

   Ok since you are still reading i will give you one last tip on how to make gold, and mind you this one might be the BEST obvious thing out there that 90% of the people aren't doing, or simply haven't seen that it is there.

   This great little thing i am talking about is D3's very own trade channel. First things first, in order to get to the trade channel you need to press that cog like button in the corner of your chat screen and from there to access either the Trade or the General chat.

   I am still not sure as to how exactly it places people in channels, it might be by difficulty or localization, but that really isn't that important, what is important is that you have a place where you can advertise your items and hopefully get a sale done with someone that might be interested in buying a piece of gear that you would otherwise vendor or salvage.

   This little thing is almost one of the best things that you can use in your selling arsenal when your auction house slots are all filled up and you still have items that you want to sell. And on top of this you can mix it up with the vendor strategy and advertise vendor items for a price. As an example, if a vendor is selling an item for 8000g you advertise that item on trade or general for 40k and see if someone bites, if they do you just scored 32k profit as there will be no AH fee of 15% deducted from this transaction.

   One last thing you might want to know about D3 though. After you are finished with Hell and you step into Inferno, don't be mad if you get one shot by mobs as that is what the design of Inferno is. In order to progress you will have to deal with the gear check and kiting ability check in  order to progress with the game. There will be moments when you start freaking out, and even making up new cuss words and that will all be normal. Then just remember one thing, the auction house has what you need in order for you to be able to progress further in the game and all you need is gold. So if you thought that you were good in the economy in MMO's now would be a great opportunity to actually prove that and really rock the auction house and deck out your character.

   That is all for now, and i am hoping you people liked this post and that it gave you some ideas on how to work up the auction house, and how to make some gold even if you don't have the time to really sit down and go kill monsters and demons.

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

Making Gold With A Friend

   It's been a while since my last post, but in my defense it was Diablo 3 fault but non the less i am back again today with another post on how to monetize in WoW. Usually every time i cover a certain subject it revolves around the reader needing to have that particular profession, and hopefully have the patterns or materials needed to craft that item, well today we are going to take a look at how to use your friends/guildies to help you out when you don't have the aptitude for a certain profession.

   I will further explain as to how exactly does this work for the given market that is of interest for this particular post, and that is the WOTLK gems market.

   First of all why did i choose this market ? Well i did this on a different server then my own where i have millions to throw at the AH and not be afraid to loose them, so i needed something that i could control to a degree and something that i had experience with. The WOTLK gems are the bread and butter for all the twinks in the 62-80 bracket as well as the people that are leveling, and if you take into account that 80% of the people that have JC now didn't play in WOTLK or for some reason respeced and lost their WOTLK gems you end up on a market that is usually controlled by very few people or if you are lucky no one at all. 

   So now that you have chosen the market that you want to go into, it's time to get down to asking your friends or guild members to see if they have the ability to cut those gems. Don't be amazed if you find someone that has all the cuts of WOTLK and Cataclysm and claims that he can't make money from Jewelcrafting, those are the best kinds of people that you can encounter because they did the dailies not to make gold but simply because they were there.

   If you are unfamiliar with the WOTLK gem market you might want to check out one of my older posts that covered that particular theme, but if you are you will know that this market can be a bit of a volatile sort, so before you jump in head strong just scope out the competition, and the availability of the raw gems that is up on the auction house.

    So provided you have found a friend to help you out with the cutting of the gems, you checked out the prices and competition and they were in your comfort zone, the last thing you need to do is define the prices. In the previous post i explained that i i had priced my gems at 95g for the rare ones and 195g for the epic ones, but after i wrote that post i kinda changed my prices and added an extra 100 to those so the prices are 195/295g for the rare/epic cuts and they are still selling like hot cakes. So like the image here explains your server might be a lot different from the one i play on, but by following the simple supply/demand chart you can come up with a price that is just right for you.

   For this market you want to check out the prices of the red gems first, and when it comes to rare red gems you want to see if you can find someone to craft Brilliant Scarlet Ruby simply because crafting it would require one to be exalted with the Kirin Tor to obtain the pattern and that is kind of rare nowadays.

   Another thing before i go though, if you do decide to use a friend to do your cuts, or what ever it is that you want to sell, make sure that you give him some kind of a reward. In my case it was 10% of the profits that i made which was a pretty heft sum for him seeing as how he cut about 200 gems for me, and i managed to move half of them in the first 3 days. 

   I gave you this Jewelcrafting example because i have the most experience with this market but you can use your friend's help with pretty much any market that you want to jump into but don't have a character that can craft those items, and just to name a few PvP Armors ( Plate, Cloth, Leather, Mail ), Glyphs, Pots, Pets and pretty much everything you can think of that would sell, because remember WoW is a community game, and if you can't use the community to make gold then what good is the community.

   That's all for now and like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

   

The Black Market Auctions ... BRING IT ON !!!

   So it finally happen, Blizzard took the first step towards combating inflation that will come with MoP. Most of you have already read on MMO-Champion a bit about the coming new feature called Black Market Auctions.

    First thing  that we need to understand is how exactly this black market is going to work.

   From what we know so far, there will be a kind of an auction house that will offer limited supply items that are of worth. These items will include mounts, recipes, pets and pretty much anything that is rare and valuable. Now the catch here is that only NPC will "post" auctions on the black market, and there isn't going to be any buyout price so the only way to obtain an item would be through the bidding process.

   One of the most important things mentioned about the black market is the fact that it says that different servers will get different auctions posted on them. Now just imagine on your server you see the Spectral Tiger on auction starting at 10k, it would be a safe assumption that within an hour it's price will be driven to 200k and by the time Its time is up it will probably get to the "normal" moving price. That would be the usual scenario we can expect to see, but and this is a bit BUT, what if you are playing on a low population server that doesn't have all that many people with millions of gold to spend and you see a rare mount that is expiring at odd hours like 3am or 4am, well in that case with a ordinary alarm clock you might be able to pick up a very expensive mount or pet or anything else for that matter.

   Now the problem is that we still don't know enough about the Black Market to be sure on what to expect, but i know one thing for sure, if they put in BoE Mounts, or let you cage the pets you get from the Black Market and sell it as a caged pet then this Black Market might be one of the best playgrounds for any gold loving goblin out there.

   Another great thing about this market is that is going to be a great gold sink. A while back i made a post about gold makers and how we are a kind of a gold sink  but that was just half way true as even though we pile up large sums of gold and keep it out of circulation, in reality we do invest part of that gold back in the economy. Well the black market is going to be a True gold sink as anything that is spent there will be removed from the economy. What this means is that instead of people having 10-100k or much, much more then that like some they will want to obtain those shiny items from the Black Market and will pour their gold into it, and in return what this would mean is that the casual buyer will have a smaller pot of gold and the prices of goods will have to adapt to that, and ultimately we will see lower prices then what we were expecting with the increased inflation.

   As of now i will leave it at this, a simple introduction post, but as we get more information and hopefully get the information that BoE items are going to appear there we can then take a more detailed approach to the Black Market and how to use it to our advantage. Until then  keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Twinking Profits

   One of the most profitable market to dabble in has always been the twinking market. The reason behind this is fairly simple, it is a market that is selling the best possible items for a given level to a character that simply wants to be the best in PvP at that given bracket. Well for the duration of the last two expansions i have been silently racking up quite a bit of profit from selling a given item, and today i am spilling the beans.

   I won't get into making this a very long post as unlike the usual topic that i like to cover in my posts, today i will cover just a given item. This item that i am talking about is Hard Khorium Band and as you can see it is a ring that just happens to be BiS for Agi users.

   The reason why this is a very good market is that if you are able to craft the given item you can monopolize on it as it is a niche market that very few to none suppliers are looking at. There is a tricky part to this though, in order for one to be able to craft this item you would need to obtain two patterns, the first one is for the actual Hard Khorium Band and the second one would require a miner so you would be able to Smelt Hardened Khorium. 

   Now you know how to make the item and how to smelt the given materials, so the next step in selling the item would be to define the means on how to sell the item. There are two ways you can go about this, the first one is to put it up on the AH and wait for people that know what they are looking for to buy it, and the second way is to actively advertise it as a BiS item. The second way has a much higher selling chance but at the same time you will be opening up your niche market to the competition. I will leave it up to you to decide the course you want to take, but if you are going for the second option make sure that in your barking advertisement macro you put the spotlight on the fact that the ring is BiS for Twinks, and that if they want to be the best they need to get it. ( Just make sure your macro is catchy, informative and borderline cheesy )

   And last but not least, if no one is holding this market you will have the chance to set the price to your liking. The going price for this item has been moving from 1k in TBC, then 3-5k in WOTLK and nowadays it can be sold for up to 10k as people don't mind paying the price if you can make them think that they are paying for THE BEST item they can get for their character.

   So to sum it up before i finish up, you will need a character that has Jewelcrafting and Mining (ideally), you will need to have the two patterns that both drop in Sunwell and you need to know that you will be marketing your item to Rogues, Shamans and Hunters that are twinking in the 70's PvP bracket. So by knowing all this and hopefully having these patterns you can make a decent profit if you decide to hold that market.

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

Making Gold With Fishing

   We are at a interesting point in the natural course of WoW as a game. We are waiting for MoP to be ironed out so we can all jump in and take our dose of Panda lovin'. Well until that happens we have a choice, either play PvP, PvE or prepare for MoP by filling up your coffers with gold. I am one of those people that chose the last option, and today we are going to take a closer look at how to achieve that by using a secondary profession that everyone can use, namely fishing.

   Previously i have mentioned that you can make gold with fishing by fishing the savory delight fish, well today we are going to take another look but this time we are going to look at a different place to do so.

   Every month the Darkmoon Faire rolls in and makes it's quests, and island available for everyone to go to. Well quests and pets and mini games aside, the darkmoon faire offers one of the best opportunities to make gold by simply fishing it out.

   To make that more clear you will only need to have a fishing pole, and fishing skill to be able to use the fishing profession. Seeing as how you are going to be fishing in fish pools your skill in fishing wont be an issue as you will always be catching fish as long as you are tossing your floater in the fishing pond. 

   Now as we said you will be catching fish in pools, and the names of those pools is Shipwrecked Debris and the "fish" that you will be catching is Sealed Crate.    

   

   As you can see on the map, the place is swarming with spawning zones so finding the fishing spots wont be an issue. A word of advice though, if you are going for the most northern pools it would be wise to get some water walking pots to help expedite things.

   So now that you know where to find the crates let's take a look at what you can get from it, and why this is a good thing to do. The Crate is the same as the one you get from using the Treasure Finding Potion but the different thing is that you won't have to kill anything and you will always get 1-2 drops per fishing pool, and on top of that you have a chance to get Heavy Savage Leather and Darkmoon Firewater as well as a ample amount of Embersilk Cloth and every possible pot and volatile that is available in the game. 

   If you are interested in how much you can make by doing this i will give you my rough statistic for 1h session.

I got 23 stacks of Embersilk Cloth, 7 stacks of Heavy Savage Leather, 67 Darkmoon Firewater, 60 pots (different kinds), 8 stacks of Ore ( Elementium, Obsidium and Pyrite ) 9 stacks of herbs (different kind),  140 volatiles (mixed kind) and a bunch of "trash lower level food". Take these numbers compare them to your auction prices and you will see that the profit is a very sweet number.

   If you are still not sure if you want to do this let me tell you one last little detail. While fishing in all of these pools you have a chance to obtain a very rare mount, the Sea Turtle as well as a extremely rare companion the Sea Pony. So there you are, if you are not into fishing for profit maybe you will be interested into catching the rare pet as well as the rare mount.

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