20 Days of Gold Making (Day 10) - My Farming Theory

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  If you also blog, then be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days Of Gold Making - Day 10

Do You Farm Materials?  What, Where & Why?

Do I farm on my World of Warcraft characters?  Yes & No.  Do I spend time running around farming for raw materials alone?  Never.  Farming as a primary objective is almost never worth the time investment that is required.  I do however still collect raw materials while out and about in the World of Warcraft, but it's not farming in the true sense of the word.

Crafter / Gatherer Alt Combos

I still level each and every alternate character to unlock the ability to craft within every profession.  I do this in order to have greater diversity and flexibility within the auction house markets.  I still stick with the old-school way of thinking and have a gathering profession paired with each crafting profession.  Since none of my alternate characters are just "stand in town and do nothing but craft" type of characters, I don't have double crafting professions on any character except my Tailor / Enchanter.  Nowadays, Tailoring is also a gathering profession after the inclusion of the Northrend Scavenging bonus.
Since each of my characters are out in the world leveling up and doing dailies for reputation grinds to unlock recipes, I have a gathering profession on each and every one.  I don't go out of my way to farm materials, but I also hate running past materials that are right there free for the taking.  So each character of mine will be able to grab up the ore, herbs, or skins that present themselves within my already chosen path.  If I'm questing and leveling a character up, the nearby raw materials take hardly no extra time to grab and provide the leveling alt with experience as well.  So it's a win win in my book. 

How many materials have you flown over and ignored because you are a dual-crafter?  Wasted opportunities in my opinion.  This expansion it has been pretty easy to not even have to buy many raw materials off of the auction house for crafting because my army of leveling gatherers brings in a nice amount of ore and herbs.  And these are herbs and ores that are near what I'm already doing anyways!
Occasional Targeted Farming

Once in a blue moon, I may set time aside to go and farm something specific, but the desired item must meet specific criteria.

1. Is this item not available in sufficient supply on the auction house?
2. Is this item required in a crafted item that would make it worth my time to even farm to begin with?
3. Are these crafted items selling well on my server's auction house?
4. Must I farm extra resources just to keep up with the demand of the crafted item?

So on the rare occasion an item required in a recipe that I craft that is a nice profitable stable of my auction house business will run low or out of supply on the auction house.  In this rare instance, I may spend some time farming up that specific material in order to keep my crafted end products selling on the auction house.

The best example I can think of is during older expansions when I would commonly go out and spend 30 mins to an hour farming up my own Globes of Water (fishing them from pools in the old Azshara zone).  These are required as a crafting component of the Tranquil Mechanical Yeti companion pet and the auction house would often run dry.  This was during older expansions when the Engineering pet market was a very viable gold making market.  I wouldn't dare think of farming Globes of Water anymore because the market for damn near all pets is now shit, and the Yeti is no exception.



Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 9 - Favorite Niche Market

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  If you also blog, then be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

Day 9 - What Is Your Favorite Niche Market & Why?

Mysterious Fortune Card Mastery

I've always been a big fan of niche markets.  Niche markets are great markets because once you find a good niche, you may be the only seller in that market.  Some good examples of niche markets that I've held complete control over include:

• Arcanite Bars - I was the only one selling these for 2-3 years before others caught on (after my post on them).
• Rich Purple Silk Shirts - I was the only seller for at least 5 years on Horde side on my server.
• Twink Gear - Back in Vanilla WoW, twink item flipping was a goldmine, because non-twink players didn't understand the true value of what they were selling for way too cheap.

My Favorite Niche? 
Mysterious Fortune Cards, Of Course!

Above and beyond all other niche markets, my favorite is definately the Mysterious Fortune Cards market.  Even now in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, the Mysterious Fortune Cards are still a great seller.  Why?  Gambling will never be obsolete! 

Creating the system for barking MFCs was a lot of fun and I caused quite a stir on my server, as well as many others, as buyers of my Mysterious Fortune Card Mastery system brought these great gold making cards to the forefront of the trade chat channel on many servers.  I knew the MFCs had great potential to bring in great profits, but the system of barking them for more sales was and still is an amazing strategy.  I still remember the night I made 35k in a few hours from just Mysterious Fortune Cards. 

To this day, I can plop on a new server and fire up my barking macros and watch the sales role in as I sell out on stock within minutes.  Just proof that other servers are still untapped from using my MFC Barking strategies to make gold.  It really was a lot of fun for me to start into barking with my tested and proven MFC macros and just watch the yellow "A buyer has been found for your auction of Mysterious Fortune Card" messages start to fill my screen.  Nothing beats immediate gratification of your work.


Top Gifts For Gamers Articles:  Top Gaming Keyboards & Keypads | Zombie Lover's Gift Guide | T-Shirts of Sheldon Cooper | Top 10 Board Games | Gifts For Star Wars Fans

Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets

20 Days of Gold Making (Day 8) - Revisiting Goals

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  If you also blog, then be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days of Gold Making (Day 8) - Revisiting Goals

"Thinking Back To Day 2, Did You Reach Your Goal?  Did You Set A New Goal?"

Well, in the day 2 post I talked about my early goals of getting each of the various mounts and the required riding skills in order.  As I earned a regular mount, my next goal was to get the epic mount, then a flying mount, then the epic flyer.  As I completed each of the smaller goals, I set myself the goal of getting the next mount in the advancement order of ground and flying mounts. 

Once I had all of the mounts, my next major goal was to get gold capped, which I eventually reached during Wrath of the Lich King, when I had more play time available to dedicate to constant WoW gold making.

Once I hit the gold cap, I continued to make more gold, but I haven't set a new goal for myself.  Do I need more than a million gold?  Probably never, so I don't see much point in making more gold just to be making gold.  Obviously, not having a new goal to push towards has slowed my gold making, but I'm fine with that.

I already beat the game afterall.  ;)



Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets

20 Days of Gold Making (Day 7) - Starter Options

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  If you also blog, then be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days Of Gold Making (Day 7)

If just starting out or starting over on a new server, how would you start building some capital and what goal would you set for yourself?


How Would You Build Capital?
If switching servers:  Easy answer is to just raise capital by selling extra caged battle pets on the new server.

However, if I was starting from scratch I would first raise some capital by signing guild charters for signature fees and robbing guild banks.  Any fools dumb enough to invite me into their guild and have open access to their guild tabs are just asking to be pilfered.  Well, i guess it's technically not pilfering if you go looking for stuff to swipe. LOL.  Oh you booted me after I took a stack of items to sell?  Oh well, on to the next guild.  This is how I got started with my Alliance spies on the other side of my server.  You'd be amazed at the stuff people put into the guild bank slots that have open access for any member to swipe.  Makes it pretty easy to get starter cash without putting in much work at all.  Hey! Don't call me a thief!  I prefer Opportunist.

For the non-shady way of getting starter cash raised, I would just level as normal and collect items to sell on the auction house like greens, rare materials, meats, etc.

What Goal Would I Set?
Once I got to 200-300 gold, I would start flipping items on the auction house and slowly build some larger chunks of capital before starting in raising professions.  I'd start slow and target nice blue leveling gear, much the same as I did when I stockpiled low level blue leveling gear to sell at the start of Mists of Pandaria.  I'd choose this market to get started because there are always super great deals on low level blue gear put on the auction house by ignorant players.  It's very easy to grab something like one of my favorite flips, the Blackwater Cutlass, for under 10 gold and then turn around and sell it for 100 gold within days.  I'd start with this low level blue market again because the return on investment is just too good to pass up.



Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 6 - Most Prolific Market

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  If you also blog, then be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days Of Gold Making (Day 6)

Which Market Has Made You The Most Gold Over The Years?

Looking at sheer volume of  items sold the clear winner would be Mysterious Fortune Cards, but since we are looking at the biggest gold making market by profit, the answer is easily the Glyph Market.  We've only had Mysterious Fortune Cards through 1 and half expansions, but I'm sure they will end up on top over time.  Overall though the biggest gold maker has been the Glyph market, and for a number of specific reasons.

• Maxed Inscription within a few days of it's addition to WoW.
• Early Research discoveries were very kind as I unlocked big sellers earlier than competition.
• First Horde Scribe on my server to get all recipes from Books of Glyph Mastery & researches.
• I made a killing on Glyphs long before everyone jumped on the Glyph bandwagon.

When Inscription was first added to WoW, I identified it as a huge money maker and pushed to maximum as my main priority.  This was a huge payoff as I did my research every day and was able to rake in the gold every single day as I was one of the very early trend setters on my server.  I was able to list and maintain a lot of the research learned Glyphs at 200-300 gold per.  Once we got the Books of Glyph Mastery added into the game in Wrath of the Lich King, I was able to sell glyphs for upwards of 500-600 gold each as everyone was frantically buying the new Glyphs for their classes.  I was the first on the Horde side to learn every single Glyph recipe in the game and had the gold to bully my way around the Books of Glyph Mastery market.  Even after learning all of the Glyphs I could, I was still buying up and relisting all of the BoGM for crazy prices just to thwart my competition from finding regularly priced books to learn the Glyphs that would compete with my own.

I made a ton of gold selling Glyphs at crazy high prices deep into Wrath before the Glyph market became so popular with all of the wanna-be gold makers.  After the crazy influx of new competition into the Glyph market, it's now one of my most hated markets that I barely even dabble in anymore.  I've been working to unload existing stock without even crafting any new Glyphs for quite some time because I just am not willing to babysit and camp the auction house to make gold.  I've got better things to do with my time than to even worry about competing with unemployed all day walling idiotic undercutters that are willing to bleed their fingers to the bone milling and crafting for a few gold profits.  No thanks!

I preferred the early days of listing high priced glyphs with little to no competition and having 50-75% of the stock sell every single night.  Nowadays its a few gold profits per sale and 99% of the Glyphs get returned as unsold. 

I guess you could say I made out like a bandit while the market was fresh and now all of the copycats can fight over the scraps.  More power to you Kobolds fighting over the scraps.

Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets

20 Days Of Gold Making - Day 4 & 5 - To Bank Alt Or Not?

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  If you also blog, then be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days Of Gold Making (Days 4 & 5)

Do You Use A Banker Alt / Guild?  When Did You Start Using It & Why?

This is one major area where I differ from a lot of other World of Warcraft gold makers.  I don't use bank alts.  Sure, I have guilds that are just overflow & stockpile storage banks, but I definately do not have a dedicated banker. 

All of my characters are crafters, so they each are responsible for purchasing their own materials, crafting their products and listing them on the auction house themselves.  Why?

Why Each Alt Sells Their Own Items:

1. Inventory Management - It's much easier to see when you are low on stock when on the characters that creates and stores the items themselves instead of digging through add-on info that is only as accurate as the last time you logged every alt of yours and pulled every single item out of each mailbox.  How often is that?  Never.
2. WYSIWYG Purchasing - Everyone buys their own materials.  No need to worry about who has what, who needs what, and who to mail more stuff to.  They just buy their own supplies, use their own, and store their own.
3. Less Mailbox Jams - Each mailbox is much more manageable when broken down into 1-2 professions per character.  Glyphs are bad enough to relist alone, I wouldn't want hundreds of other items mixed into the expired auctions with them.
4. Easier Relisting On Remote AH - Much smaller expired lists per auctioneer means I have more relisting options from my multiple mailboxes, instead of everything locked behind the next 50 expired auction mails.
5. Time Saver - Less time mailing materials and finished products around, smaller mailbox back ups, and a quicker inventory assessment all speed up the time required to keep crafting and selling streamlined.

These are my own personal preferences, but many others go with a dedicated bank alt or two.  I don't see the benefit of cramming everything onto a couple of alts to do all of the ugly work.  In my opinion it's actually slower to send everything to one alt who gets stuck collecting, sorting, taking inventory, posting, and relisting all on his own. 

Day 5 Question Is:  Do You Keep The Same Banker Alt Or Do You Change Them Up & Why?

Since, I don't even use a banker alt, I'll be skipping this question.


Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 3 - My Early Strategies

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  If you also blog, then be sure to check out her gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days of Gold Making (Day 3)

What Were Your First Techniques, Tricks, Or Tips You Used When Starting Out?

Let's look all the way back to the middle to end of Vanilla WoW, when I started to make gold in World of Warcraft.  Once the light bulb came on and I was actively starting to make gold properly, as opposed to farming vendor trash and hoping for rare world drops, I quickly identified some areas that I knew could be profitable.  It turns out that early in my gold making career, I had targeted and was profiting from some select niche markets.  Early on in my gold making career I stayed away from flipping, heavy crafting, and shuffling and was big into specific niche markets that I had chosen to focus on.  I've always said, "Start with what you already know" when looking for your first auction markets to enter and my first markets followed suit.

When I first started in the auction house, I had 1 main character, my Rogue Skinning Leatherworker. I liked to quest and was questing all over Azeroth. How did this help me? One of my very first niche markets I entered (back in Vanilla WoW) was the "Quest Required Items" market. My love of questing had compiled me a nice long list of items that I found were needed for specific quests or subquests (remember Dire Maul-North Tribute Runs?). Because of all of the questing I had done, my personal experiences led me to sell items that I too at one point had to craft myself or purchase to complete those quests. A small sample of some of those items I sold within the "Quest Required Items" market were:

• Deadly Blunderbuss (Ashenvale Quest)
• Mithril Casing (Amy-E Ape Escort)
• Thorium Widgets (Frost Trap In DM-N)
• Darkmoon Faire Turn In Items (Old Darkmoon Faire)
• Weapons and Armor Specialty Quests (Blacksmithing Spec Quests)
• Advanced Target Dummy (Centaur Quest Chain)
• Strong Troll's Blood Elixir (Hillsbrad Quest Chain) 

These "Required Quest Item" markets where one of the very first niche markets that I used for making gold in WoW.  Often times, I was the only seller of these specialty items and had no competition.  It was from this understanding of niche markets that I expanded into other niche markets that I had a specialist's understanding of that included:

• Holiday Items
• Twink Gear & Enchants
• Blacksmithing Rods
• Arcanite Bars 

More 20 Days Of Gold Making

• Return to Day 1 - Beginnings
• Day 2 - Goals

Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 2 - Goal Setting

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  If you also blog, then be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days Of Gold Making (Day 2)

If You Set Yourself A Goal, What Was It & When Did You Set It?

I've written about setting goals for yourself to keep you focused and on the path towards success.  It is especially important for new gold makers or new characters to set goals in World of Warcraft.  As I stated in that early article, one of your very first goals should be to get your first ground mount and then to get your first flying mount.  Those were the first few goals I had set for myself back in Vanilla WoW and since I've set quite a few more, but the main goals of mine for making gold in WoW have been:

1. Get Ground Mount
2. Get Epic Ground Mount
3. Get Flying Mount & Training
4. Get Epic Flying Mount & Training
5. Get Gold Capped

As you can see, once I had taught myself profitable strategies for making gold, the practical goals came first and then the sky was the limit.  Along the way to gold capped, some players like to set incremental goals, like first 100k, then 200k, 300k, etc. but hell once you get over your first 100k, extra gold is just extra gold.  It's only been recently that we've even had a need to spend over 100k on a single purchase (with a few rare exceptions). 

I set my first goal of raising my mount money, when I got tired of falling behind everyone else who already had the mounts I couldn't afford.  I got sick of being broke and slow, so I got fed up and decided to change the way I played.  i then started focusing more on using my professions to make gold and everything changed from there on out.  And here I am today over 3 years into running my own WoW gold blog here at Cold's Gold Factory.


Read More 20 Days of Gold Making

• Start at Day One - Beginnings.
• Continue to Day 3 - My Early Gold Making Strategies

Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 1 - Beginnings

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  Be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days Of Gold Making (Day 1)
"When Did You Start Making Gold & What Triggered It?"

First off - Thanks to Nev for creating the 20 Days of Gold Making Meme and providing some fresh ideas and topics for us gold bloggers to write about.  It does get a bit tough to pull topics out of thin air, especially when you've been writing for over 3 years and are pushing close to 800 total live posts, like I am.  I hate writing about stuff I've already written about, even if it is buried in the posts from years ago, so this challenge is a nice spark of fresh ideas for blogging.  I won't be doing all 20 posts in 20 days, as I will be working them in between my other normal gold making posts, Gifts for Gamers articles (on Saturdays), Eviscerated Gaming Podcast show notes (Tuesdays), and monthly gold blogging carnivals.

When Did You Start Making Gold In WoW & What Triggered It?

For most of the time during Vanilla WoW, I was clueless about the gold making opportunities.  I had horrible strategies for making gold and was resorting to farming vendor trash off of mobs to sell to raise what seemed like an outrageous amount of gold required to get my very first mount.  After quickly growing bored of my role as a lowly gorilla hunter, I set my sites on larger profits and headed over to farm rare world drops of all things, not fully grasping the concept of what a world drop truly was.  I remember looking up an item online on wowhead and then taking note of the 1 or 2 listed mobs that had been recorded as dropping the world drop item and then headed out to grind those hoping for the same world drop.  Damn, was I a moron back then! 

After getting nothing to drop worth selling and banking all of the non-vendor trash raw materials (because I may need to use them some day), I headed over to farm some of the Enchanting recipes that I had seen people looking for in trade chat, like the Crusader Enchant.  I killed Scarlet Spellbinders (or whatever they were) for days and weeks on end until one day I finally got the Enchant Weapon - Crusader recipe to drop and had a brilliant notion.  Instead of a one shot sale to some Enchanter, why don't I level an Enchanter and start enchanting player weapons for tips (with their materials) or for a profitable fee if I have to buy the materials myself?  This was before the addition of enchanting scrolls to the game.  So from there, my first alt ever was born, my Enchanter.  She would disenchant the junk I would find and level her Enchanting skill up so that I could start making gold off of these Enchants that everyone was always asking for in trade chat. 

I then started to look into crafting other items with my main character, who was a Skinner / Leatherworking Rogue.  Of course with all of the gorillas I had been killing and skinning, I had a nice collection of hides, leather, and found some pearls as well, so I started crafting Barbaric Bracers for selling on the auction house for a nice profit.  I then dug in deeper with my Vanilla Leatherworker and expanded into Deviate Scale Belts, then into Spidersilk Boots as my Enchanter was an Enchanter / Tailor.  Of course the Netherweave Bag market sort of fell into place afterwards and I was on my way to starting my empire of crafters.  Seeing the ability to actually turn a profit via crafting got me longing for one of every crafter and so my journey to build a factory of gold making crafters started the long trek to complete my army of alts.

So what triggered my venture into gold making?

I found my motivation from being sick and tired of being broke, not having enough gold to pay for raid repairs, not getting my first ground mount until level 46 (a full 6 levels later than the minimum in Vanilla WoW) and never having any extra gold for anything.  I was sick of being broke and had started to hear bits and pieces of economic discussion over the guild's TeamSpeak channel.  So I knew other people were making gold and pulling it off, so something had to give.  I would listen quietly at the ideas and discussions these guild members where having about controlling markets, or buying out all of an item to relist it for much higher, or stockpiling certain items for the upcoming expansion's launch, and I would just sit back and take it all in.  Then I started to make my own gold and became a competitor of a few of these guys, without them knowing I got the ideas from them in the first place!

It only takes a bit of understanding to start to become eager and thirst for more knowledge.  From there, I found my first gold making blog ever, Greedy Goblin, and dug in to start learning and snicker at all the idiots featured in his weekly "Morons and Slackers" posts.  I do miss those posts as they were always great for a snicker.

Continue On Reading More 20 Days of Gold Making

• 20 Days Of Gold Making - Day 2 - Goals

Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets