First they came for the pet-collectors ...

I know it's a while since I posted about the price of WoW Tokens, but that's mainly because I'm dumbfounded by it.

Blizzard engineers continue to play with the algorithms governing the in-game price of  WoW Tokens. By now I'd come to doubt that the relationship between price, supply and demand is anything more than tenuous. I note that we have never seen any data on actual volume of transactions, and also that wowtoken.info has ceased to report the "time taken to sell", presumably because it was stuck at a fixed "4 hours" for so long. I think that in their effort to smooth price fluctuations, Blizzard's engineers have erred in reducing current supply and demand to a minor input in their equation.

I continue to buy the game-time tokens from time to time when I see them cheap on the auction house.

However, I have cancelled my subscription, and won't be renewing it when my gold runs out. To me, these tokens are the point of no return. In effect, Blizzard are now selling epics for cash (with the intermediate step that you must first exchange your cash for gold, then exchange the gold for epics). this is something many people (I include myself) have been warning about for many years, and it has inevitably happened. Take a trip down memory lane with my favourite mage blogger, Larísa of the Pink Pigtail Inn. The context of that article is that selling pets in-game for cash is the start of a slippery slope. It has proven to be so, and all the arguments people made that Blizzard might sell fluff for cash but never what matters (epics) have turned out to be wrong. Larísa, knew it, I knew it, you knew it, deep in your heart.

I know there is plenty of fun to be had in Azeroth that doesn't rely on earthly cash or Azerothean gold: I love exploring and finding little nooks and items not shown on the map. I love to stand, as Painter Mikkal does, and just gaze at the beauty of the world. I love finding routes up to "unreachable places", I love chatting to the many amazing people I have met, and I love killing orcs. But the group finder tool dealt a heavy blow to my sense of immersion in a virtual world; and now being able to buy epics like this has been the final straw for me.

I'm sure I'll keep some gold back so I can resubscribe for a while post-Draenor, and I've still plenty of game time tokens on my account, so I'm not going real soon; but my heart is no longer eager.

Tokens: A tangled web

Blizzard changed the algorithm they used to calculate bid and offer prices on the WoW Token, just four days ago. Previous to that, the prices steadily climbed, until suddenly they started steadily falling. And vice versa. A steady climb in price followed by a steady drop. The graph of the North American Gold (Game-Time) Token was almost a saw wave. Blizzard social engineers didn't like that, and around the 23rd or 24th of April, they tried a new algorithm. They tried to curve those straight lines, and I think they are pretty happy with the result, the price graph looks more fluid now.

I certainly loved it. It coincided with the  launch of the WoW Token in Europe, and it made it the most predictable price graph on the planet. I'm sharing this with you now so you can benefit as I have done. the prices are so predictable that I predict Blizzard will be tinkering with the formula pretty soon now.

The "secret" is in the rate of change of prices. They are too predictable, too like a sine wave. The price rises at a steady rate until it's near its peak, then the rate of change drops.

Do you want to buy a $teel (RMT) WoW Token to sell for gold? You want to get the most gold for your money. Don't sell that token until the positive rate of change drops. That signals that the price is near its peak (there are no sharp random behaviours here). That is the time to sell, to maximise your gold.

Do you want to buy a gold (game time) WoW Token? Easy. Just follow the prices downward until the negative rate of change  drops. That signals that the price is near its trough (there are no sharp random behaviours here). That is the time to buy. Don't spend your Azerothean gold until then.

Blizzard social engineers are tinkering with the exchange rate, like the USSR of old. They don't trust the free market. They want to control it so that there are no unexpected jolts to the system. That's what makes it predictable. I've been able to use this in the few days since EU launch to predict the best time for me to buy my tokens, and I hope you have, too.

What about Blizzard? Are they happy with the result? I don't know. They may be happy that both sides of the equation get the best deal possible, at their expense. It isn't a big expense. Smart buyers of the $teel token get a lot of gold for their euro, dollar or pound. Smart buyers of the gold (game time) token, get their 30 days for the cheapest gold price possible. Both sides are happy. The piggy in the middle, who absorbs the difference in gold, is Blizzard - who can print gold coins for free. It's win-win-win (except for the inflation, of course. But these are the sort of economic sins that are paid for by the next government - or development team -  not this one).

Blizzard are experimenting. Blizzard will change this again. I don't think they meant to make their prices so predictable. Expect them to tinker with the algorithm again. Meantime, make use of this actionable information while it is still current. I have.

[Edit: I just noticed that WoWToken.info is now including rates of change in their graphs, which makes timing your purchases a snap. When the rate-of-change curve crosses the zero-point, you are at a price max or min. It won't recross that line for several hours. The rate-of-change curve is too predictable.]

Tokenomics

With further details of the WoW token released by Blizzard yesterday, it's time to review what will happen when it is released, which should happen in the Americas first. It will be rolled out there "in the weeks following Patch 6.1.2’s release". I imagine Blizzard will want to get Noblegarden over before the launch, so they can start collecting data in a "normal" period, rather than one where prices might be driven by a seasonal event. So let's say the Tuesday after Noblegarden, Tuesday 14 April. [Edit: it actually appeared the previous Tuesday, 7 April]

Blizzard have also firmed up the earthly price ($20 or the equivalent in your currency). What they haven't yet done is firmed up the Azerothean price. Gold is still selling on various "illegal" websites for about 1500g/$, so I think that 30 000g is a reasonable place to start. I imagine, though, that Blizzard will want to make this attractive to gold buyers, and put pressure on third-party gold sellers. That makes me think the initial price will be 40 000g for a token. [Edit: the initial price was 30 000g]

Let me first distinguish two tokens here. There is a WoW Token that Blizzard sells for $20. It has only one use: you can sell it in the Auction House for an Azerothian price set by Blizzard. When it appears in the Auction House, it is transformed into a WoW Token that can be bought at a price fixed by Blizzard, and it too has only one use: to add 30-days of game time to your account. As their icons are different (one looks like it's made of steel, the other is golden), I'm going to refer to them as the $teel WoW token (costs $ to buy) and the Gold WoW Token (costs gold to buy).

So let's look at the buyers of the $teel WoW token. Firstly, these are our avatars on earth (the 'players') rather than ourselves in Azeroth (the 'adventurers' or 'characters'). Players buy these tokens for $20, and presumably assign them to a particular adventurer who then lists them on the AH. Why would players do this? Because their adventurers are poorer than the players - they have less gold than they want, while the players have more dollars than they want.

The wants of the adventurers can be split into one-time wants and ongoing needs. Take the typical raider: she may want some pets, mounts and toys. These are one-time wants in the sense that once she has the item, she doesn't need another. To stimulate this want, Blizzard will have to release more pets mounts and toys that she can buy for gold (expect expensive flying licences for Draenor later this year).

Her ongoing needs are mainly for flasks, potions, food and repairs. She also needs gems and enchantments as she gets some gear. Up to now, she has been struggling to meet her repair bill, eats other people's food and skimps on flasks and potions. On a typical raid night, her bill should be about 250g for repairs, and another 250g on the other stuff, but she struggles just to scrape together the money for repairs. If she raids twice a week and does LFR/dungeons another night, she could easily want 1500g/week, though in reality she keeps the bill to 500g by skimping on consumables and not repairing damaged gear before and during LFR. Selling one $teel WoW token will initially cover these ongoing costs for about 26 weeks (if the initial price is 40 000g). Or fewer weeks, but leaving spare gold for one-time wants - mounts, pets and toys. For the sake of argument, let's say the gold lasts the average buyer 20 weeks, and then they will want to buy another.

Who are the buyers of the equivalent Gold WoW Token? They are players with a stockpile of gold, with nothing else worth spending it on. They will be wanting to buy 30 days' game time. If the cost of the token is 40 000g, they need to be earning 1333g/day to keep up. Otherwise, they will run down their stockpile and eventually will have to spend dollars again.

If the price is to remain in equilibrium at 40 000g, then the number of Gold token buyers, who want to buy a gold token every month, must be about the same as the number of buyers of Iron tokens at any time. But we've seen that they need only buy once every 20 weeks or so, while the buyers of Gold tokens want to buy every 4 weeks or so. So the pool of Iron token buyers must be about five times as large as the pool of Gold token buyers for this to be possible.

Now lets look at week 1. The prices will be around 40 000g/20$ that week. Almost every $teel token buyer will spend their $20 that week to get the gold they want. Every Gold Token buyer will be spending their 40 000g to get their free game time. All $teel token buyers will receive the gold they want. Blizzard will see to that. Even if it means printing gold, I very much doubt that Blizzard will return a token unsold to a player. If the pool of $teel token buyers is indeed five times the size of the pool of gold token buyers, all gold token buyers will be satisfied.

What will happen in week 2? Nothing much. Buyers and sellers of both currencies will have dried up, as everyone did what they needed to do on week one.

Week 5? Any $teel token buyer [who as you recall is a gold token seller] bought and sold in the first few weeks. They have their gold. It'll last most of them 20 weeks or so. But gold token buyers, who want free game time, need to use a new token; and unless they stocked up on week 1, they are going to have to buy one. While sellers are still thin on the ground, buyers will be turning up in their droves, camping the AH to snap up any that might appear. Prices will rocket.

So. Whatever the initial price is, be clear that it will rise steeply in week 5 if not before, and continue to climb until $teel token buyers run out of gold again, or see the gold value of a token as too mouth-watering to ignore.

Recommendation: buy Gold WoW tokens on day 1. Buy all you can afford. There will never again be such a concentrated glut of sellers. The price will never drop to 40 000g again. Don't buy $teel WoW tokens before week 5, once the upward price momentum of gold tokens is obvious.


Addendum: I expect Blizzard to be a little surprised by this. Once they see the inexorable rise of the gold WoW token, they'll be scrambling to find things for people to spend their cash on - expect expensive new mounts, new toys, new pets, soon. Also expect repair bills to rise and gold sources (such as quest rewards and mission rewards) to dry up. See also Plexing Warcraft for the social effects of this move.

Controlling the Market

Blizzard have announced their long-awaited PLEX scheme, the WoW Token. I wrote about it back in December: first about the idea itself, and then about the price. True to form, Blizzard have found a way to do this that minimizes player agency, and maximizes Blizzard's stranglehold on the world.

Of course Blizzard sets the dollar price, as it is the only manufacturer of WoW Tokens on Earth. But Blizzard has also decided that it alone will set the Azerothean gold exchange price, and once bought, the token cannot be resold. You can't decide what price you want to sell it to other players for, or what offer you will make to other players to buy it. You can't undercut other players, in order to make your sale happen earlier. You can't buy when there is a glut for resale when there is a famine. You can't bargain with other players at all. Your choice is this: sell at Blizzard's price or don't sell at all. Buy at Blizzard's price or don't buy at all.

Blizzard say that at any given moment, they calculate the gold sale price of a token dynamically, and that all tokens on sale will be at that price, but the price the seller receives is fixed at the moment of offering it for sale. How is that going to work? How can the price the seller receives be calculated dynamically when she puts it on sale, but the price of all tokens on sale be the same at any moment? There are a couple of possibilities.

1. There is a disparity between sale price and buy price. Blizzard takes a variable commission depending on the dynamically calculated price. For instance, let's say there are 10 WoW tokens for sale at 25k gold each. If I offer a WoW Token for sale, Blizzard might tell me that I will get 24k gold for it, and then Blizzard will list it at 25k, making a 1k commission. Or (as a variant of this):

2. Blizzard keeps it's price promise, and makes up the difference from its own gold mint. For instance, let's say there are 10 WoW tokens for sale at 25k gold each. If I offer a WoW Token for sale, Blizzard might tell me that I will get 20k gold for it, and then Blizzard will list it and all the others at 24k, losing 1k on the earlier, more expensive tokens. They might also take a fixed commission from the transaction to mitigate having to mint more gold.

3. In effect, there is only one token ever on sale. It is the oldest token in the queue. It cannot be undercut and will never return unsold from the AH. The dynamic price offered to new sellers is calculated depending on the size of the queue, but the price offered to buyers is the price of the oldest token.

4. A combination of 2 and 3.  The token on sale is always the oldest token, but it is on sale at the current dynamically calculated price (i.e. the price calculated for the newest token), while its seller gets the price that was dynamically calculated at the time she offered it for sale, less some AH fees. For instance, let's say there are 10 WoW tokens for sale at 25k each (and the sellers were promised 25k less commission). I offer mine for sale, and Blizzard calculates a new dynamic price of 24k for mine, less commission. The price of the other 10 are now set at 24k, and mine joins the back of the queue. When someone buys the oldest token for 24k, its seller still gets 25k less commission.

This is all just guesswork. Update: Blizzard have confirmed that it is option 4, and that there is no commision.

I don't understand why Blizzard doesn't trust its players to buy and sell these tokens normally*, nor why these tokens cannot be resold. If they are afraid of dupe bugs, they should first fix their game so that such bugs cannot occur.


* The reason stated on their blog made me laugh. They wanted to do it "without making players feel like they’re playing a game with their hard-earned money". That's exactly what we're doing when we pay our subscription.

How much is a WoWPLEX worth?

Yesterday, I expressed my misgivings on Blizzard's plan to plex WoW. Today, to practical matters. How much will a WoWPLEX* cost? Let me first assume that it will be the equivalent of a 60-day game time card, which currently sells at $30 [Edit: Updated March 2015: after Blizzard announced it will be a 30-day game-time token, so I'll assume a WoW token will cost $15]. I checked a couple of gold selling sites, to get a feel for how much gold I could buy for that. It seems I can get around 40k-50k of gold for $30. Let's say, to make the sums easy. $1=1500 gold.

That price sort of puts a bottom on the gold market for WoWPLEXes. At that price, a potential gold buyer can get the same amount of gold by selling a WoWPLEX as he could for buying the gold illegally**. Let's say the gold price of the WoWPLEX drops below the illegal exchange rate. Some potential WoWPLEX sellers will go back to buying gold illegally, at a better rate, and the supply of WoWPLEX will reduce. That should bring its gold price back up.

So, 1500 gold / dollar, or 22500 gold /WoWPLEX  30-day token is the floor price. What is the ceiling price? To answer that, let's look at WoWPLEX  buyers in Azeroth: the people who pay gold to acquire a WoWPLEX. Apart from speculators, their purpose is to swap the WoWPLEX for 30 days of game time. This group can be broken into two: people for whom this is sustainable, because they earn more than 22500g per 30 days (or 750g/day), and people for whom this is (currently) unsustainable. They earn less than this, but they have build up a stash of gold that allows them to afford several WoWPLEX purchases before the well runs dry. Some of this latter group will step up their AH and farming activities so that they can be sustainable, and some will buy a few WoWPLEXes and then stop. So initially the demand will be higher than it will be later. That means that the initial price will be higher, too (Belghast is predicting 100k initially).

It is the fact of having to earn in gold a thirtieth of a WoWPLEX per day that tends to put an upper limit on its price; but I don't know what that upper limit might be. I certainly have less taste for farming and AH playing than I formerly did, but that might be because I have more gold than I need. Perhaps this new mechanism might encourage me to improve my earnings. I'm sure the same is true of everyone. It will also reduce the demand for 'fluff' items, in order to conserve gold for buying WoWPLEXes.

What will the effect of this be on gold sellers and bot farming? I doubt any bot will stop running unless caught. After all, they can pay for their own accounts, now. The demand for their services will be greatly reduced. That in turn will lead to them reducing their prices. That'll feed back to affect the floor that I calculated earlier. If the dollar price of gold halves, then the gold price of the WoWPLEX must inevitably double (or else some gold buyers will revert to buying the gold illegally, instead of through WoWPLEX, reducing the supply of WoWPLEX and hence raising its value).

So those are the tensions that will govern the gold price of WoWPLEX. Illegal goldsellers set the floor price and to an extent determine the supply, and the determination of players to farm and trade in-game to improve their wealth governs the demand and the ceiling.

Edit: March 2015: Blizzard have finalized their plans, which are reasonably different to Eve's PLEX. My take on it is here: Controlling the Market. And how will the gold price move? My predictions are in Tokenomics.

* I believe Wilhelm Arcturus originally coined the term way back in 2011, in a comment on Syncaine's  blog.

** I.e. breaking Blizzard's terms and conditions. This isn't really illegal on Earth in the sense that a court can send you to jail for it. But it does put your position in Azeroth in jeopardy. You might end up in the stockades for several months. You might even be executed.

Plexing Warcraft

Blizzard announced that they are now considering a version of Plex for the World of Warcraft: a game-time token that is exchangeable for gold in-game. In other words, I can buy with earthly euros a token that I can then sell for Azeroth gold. Or in my case, the other way round. I have to let that sink in. This would be immediately advantageous for me, since I am as rich as Croesus in Azeroth gold. I have already bought whatever useful BoE epics I can get. But I did this through in-game means. World of Warcraft, essentially, is a collector's world. Even those who are only interested in collecting boss kills must do so by first collecting gear. If that gear will soon be purchasable for euros, the point of most in-game activity ceases. Why bother skinning, mining, inscribing and so on to make gold, when its available on your credit card?

Then we need to look at the remaining activities, and ask if they are interesting on their own. Raiding with my guild is fun. We are not very hardcore and we raid once a week, sometimes twice. I spend the rest of my week preparing for those raids: collecting apexis crystals in order to buy better gear, gathering, crafting and selling stuff at auction to buy food and flasks, running heroic dungeons and LFR and killing world bosses in the hope of better gear drops.  There is a sense of being in a living world with all of these activities (except the random dungeons and LFR). Will that be enough to sustain in me a desire to continue with those activities? Knowing that I can buy whatever I need with my credit card probably renders them pointless. And what is the value of a living world in which your activities therein are pointless? Will I continue to remain in an Azeroth where I can buy the Sword of a Thousand Truths with my credit card? Of course, soulbound gear isn't purchasable like that. But the precursors will be: the crafted BoE gear that you need to even stand a chance of killing a boss and acquiring that better soulbound gear; all the buff food, potions and flasks that all make the difference between a kill and a wipe. They can all go on your credit card. So will I continue to be interested in an Azeroth in which I only need log on for raid night?

Edit: Alex tweeted "This article should have drawn more examples from Eve Online". That's probably true. Eve, which I don't play, has quite a different economy, based on constant destruction of ships through warfare. The replacement of these ships is what drives economic activity in Eve, and all economic activity is bought and sold in a currency called ISK, which an Eve PLEX can be sold for. In contrast, WoW's economic activity comes in waves, as each new patch makes obsolete the equipment of the previous patch, driving adventurers to to re-quip with the better gear. Sometimes that gear is valued in gold, and is freely tradable. Much of the time the new gear is not tradable (this in itself is a major drain on immersion), but upgrades to the gear (in the form of enchantments, gems and other enhancements) are. Eve players seem to have no problem accepting PLEX, as many feel that buying ships with ISK doesn't make you more powerful: it's personal skill that matters. I have my doubts. A pilot with lots of skill and no ship is not a match for a poorly skilled pilot who actually has a ship to pilot.

Many EVE veterans will say that far from paying to win, inexperienced players who buy top of the range ships with PLEX-bought ISK are simply paying to lose, as they lack the skill to use the ships effectively. That's a good point: buying better gear in WoW generally does improve your damage or healing output, or survivability, no matter how bad the buyer is.

Anyway, if it has worked for Eve, perhaps it will work for WoW. Perhaps an EVE player might put the case for PLEX in Eve? I'm willing to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt, for now. Let's see if it actually gets implemented, and how.

Tomorrow, I'll look at how much a WoWPLEX would be worth.

Sources and sinks

How do you make your money in Azeroth? Farming (harvesting herbs, skinning beasts, fishing, mining) or crafting (tailoring, leatherworking, smithing, engineering, jewelcrafting, inscribing and so on). Or maybe you are a trader on the Auction House, buying low and selling high. Or perhaps you make your money by questing. Most likely it's a bit of all of these. However you get your gold, it might surprise you to know where the gold comes from. The short answer is: new gold comes from NPCs only.

You might think that when you're mining copper ore you're basically digging money out of the ground. But you aren't creating any money at this point. Eventually you sell the ore (perhaps after processing it into another form): if you sell it to another player, you still haven't created any new money - you've only transferred money from another player to yourself. You only create new money if you sell the ore to an NPC.

Think about that.

Farming, crafting and trading in general don't create any new wealth. They simply transfer wealth from the buyer to the seller. NPCs are the only source of new money in the economy. They generate this money spontaneously only as a result of a player interaction with them. So the real source of new wealth in the economy is mostly players who make their money through questing (especially dailies), running instances, killing mobs and sell questing rewards and mob-drops to vendors*.

Where does the money go? What takes it out of circulation? Again, NPCs take gold out of circulation. For instance NPCs take money when you buy something from them for gold, or when you repair your armour. Probably the most effective sink is the least noticed: the auctioneers, who take fees on listed items and sold items.

Blizzard tries to control the amount of money in circulation through these sources and sinks. Without effective sinks, the amount of money in circulation would climb rapidly, bringing inflation. So Blizzard has been aggressive in adding gold sinks: mounts such as the Mekgineer's Chopper, the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth, the Grand Expedition Yak; services such as armour repair, bank tabs, transmogrification and void storage; pets like the Hyjal Bear Cub (strangely, no expensive vendor pets were added in Pandaria). These all act as a way to suck gold out of the economy.

Without gold sinks, the Azerothian economy would fill with gold, and the the cost of stuff we buy from other players would inflate very rapidly, since we could all afford to pay more for everything, since we would have more money.


* "Vendor" is the biggest misnomer in the whole of Azeroth. These guys sell virtually nothing. They are really "vendees".
Two other misnomers are "fear" and "equip". How often do we hear players complain that they were feared? The opposite is usually true! When "Fear" is cast on somebody, they feel so afraid that they run about like headless chickens, losing all muscle control. Nobody fears them! 
And when I put a piece of gear on, I do not equip it; I equip myself.

20 days of gold making - day 20 - must-read blogs

Nev asks: Lets spread some blog love - which are your 'must read' or 'go to' gold blogs or even other places you go for information & reading matter?

Do you know, I'm no longer a big reader of gold blogs now. I think the original Just My Two Copper site, while Markco was running it, was excellent. I really learned a lot from Markco. Monmar isn't doing too bad a job there, now. I still read Markco, on his GW2 site Guild Wars 2 Trading Post, where he carries on his amazing work.

My favourite place for economic information now is eu.theUndermineJournal.com. I especially love the fact that you can get feeds of the data to import into spreadsheets or other software. In fact, I reorganized all my crafting spreadsheets to make use of it.

I also read http://stormspire.net/forum.php from time to time. It's full of solid info.

Apart from that, as I said, I don't read a lot of gold blogs lately, so it has been a pleasure to be introduced to so many that I didn't know about in the 20 days series.

Finally, I'd like to thank Nev for starting the series in the first place!

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

20 days of gold making - day 19 - rewards

Nev asks Have you bought yourself anything really expensive as a reward for earning all that gold? Or do you have a self-present in mind for when you reach your goal?

I've treated myself liberally! I started making gold in order to have the money to buy anything I wanted, and as a result, I bought anything I wanted! And what do I want? Well, I like raiding, so I've bought myself things that help with raiding: mostly expensive gear or tailoring patterns. Each patch, I'll buy myself whatever crafted gear will help me. Also, gems, enchants (or enchanting recipes and mats), flasks, potions, food; whatever will give me an edge. I'll also buy whatever will make my life easier: the Traveller's Tundra Mammoth.

But I've also bought plenty of fun items: I buy virtually every mount I come across (including Mekgineer's Chopper and the Vial of the Sands), and various potions and items of transformation, just for the crack.

I sometimes buy gifts for guildies, but rarely gifts that are useful for raiding. Pets or mounts, usually (I did once buy a dear friend a Relic of Xuen).

In short, I spend my gold liberally. that's why I got it.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series.

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 18 - Advice

Nev asks: What is the most important bit of advice you could give to a new gold maker? (not a game newbie though, just a newbie gold maker)

"Buy low, sell normal" was always Markco's favourite slogan. That's a good one, but I've something more basic.

It may seem obvious, but the best advice I can give is enjoy yourself. If you aren't having fun in and around your gold making, you won't keep it up. Of course that doesn't mean that every second has to be fun: nobody ever enjoyed milling herbs to make inks to make glyphs. But if you can be doing these things in an enjoyable setting, it will make it easier. For instance, your milling might take place in the few minutes between queueing for an instance and getting in; or while waiting for your raid group to assemble; a time when you've nothing better to do,anyway, and you get to feel you aren't wasting your time during these waits. Or you might be gathering your herbs or ores or leather or fish or meats while running daily quests you'd already be doing (rather than setting out specifically to gather stuff).

Or you might have a pleasurable goal in mind that lessens the pain of the dull bits of gold-making. Enjoying yourself might be as simple as being able to point to the progress you made towards some goal, whether it's a long-term one like "hit the gold cap" or a short-term one like "make enough flasks so that I've plenty to post on raid day".

Some people camp the Auction House. You might enjoy that for a few weeks or even a few month, but believe me, in the long-term, you need to be adventuring in Azeroth, or you'll tire of it. Get out and have fun.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series.

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 17 - Pets

Nev asks: Pets - Did you used to do the Vendor pet sales? How have pet battles changed things for you?

There was a time when vendor pets were a big source of income. I even had an employee in Booty Bay whose job it was to buy horde pets  and sell alliance pets on the Blackwater Auction House. I also used to take a trip out to Stormspire to buy shedloads of pets there to mail to my banker, Fuill. And Fuill, herself, as an engineer, made some dough selling mechanical squirrels and the like. Those days are long gone. There was a time when you might sell 10 pets to an adventurer and his entourage of family and friends. Now, they are happy to share one between them, and when pets became heirloom-style items suddenly there was a rush of newly unwanted pets in everyone's pet journal. And since they could now be boxed and sold, that's exactly what happened to them.

Pet battles have changed the kind of pets that people want. Rare-quality 'blue' pets are important, common-quality 'white' pets are not. Does anyone collect pets just to have them now? I'm not sure. I think even collectors want to replace white pets with blues when they buy, though uncommon pets will always sell. I know there is a market for trained pets, and for blue pets, but white vendor pets just aren't in the same demand as they used to be. I didn't bother learning the new market for pets. I just pulled out.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series.

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 16 - Flipping

Nev asks: Flipping! Do you flip stuff regularly or sometimes? Big ticket items or smaller high volume stuff?

I quite often flip stuff, both big ticket items and smaller items. For the big-ticket items, I have a snatch list that I use to find unusual items whose value I know, but the seller doesn't. But Fuill, my banker, also has a snatch list for herbs that she uses for inscription, and she constantly buys up cheap herbs. She doesn't mill them all, and keeps some of them for sale when the price is higher, or when there are none of that particular herb for sale. She even buys cheap inks and pigments for later resale. 

Some cheap items I have to resist filling my bank with. When you see woolen cloth at 10% of normal price, it's tempting to weigh in and buy it all up; but the effort of selling it again later better spent on richer pickings. Well, I've learnt that now. All the same the urge for a bargain is strong!

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series.

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 15 - Professions

Nev asks: Professions - do you have all of them, some or none? Which is your favorite for goldmaking?

I think if you're serious about goldmaking it would be quite important to have all of them. I'm not serious, though, and I and my relatives don't have all of them. I have maxed tailoring and enchanting, a common combination for mages; Fuill has inscription (for making gold) and engineering (for PvP); and I've a few other relatives that  have between them that have blacksmithing, alchemy and jewelcrafting, none of them maxed out (and therefore not very useful).  I did want to get them maxed out, but there always seems to be something better to do. Between us we also have all the gathering professions, and I have cooking and fishing at max level. Fishing seems to be valuable, but cooking is a net drain. the raw materials usually seem to sell for more than the finished dishes.

For goldmaking, Fuill used to make a lot of money with glyphs, but now that's a dead market. Engineering pets were also quite good to her, but that's another dead market now. It seems few people collect pets just to have them, now. It's all about the pet battles.

Tailoring is still fine. Entry-level PvP cloth gear still sells reasonably well, especially the level 90 ilvl 450 stuff (Contender's Silk set and Contender's satin set), as does pretty or unusual stuff, for instance shirts, wedding gowns, tuxedos, stuff like that. I've not really made much money, though, with ilvl 476 gear, though, and I've no ilvl 496 patterns. Frankly, I don't want to spend a lot of money on a pattern that I might not make back on sales of the finished article!

Enchanting isn't too bad, either, though it's not as good as it once was. I think LFR is the reason. Here's my tinfoil hat theory on this: back in the day, a lot of people wanted to raid, but couldn't easily raid because they were not in a raid team. Breaking into a raid team is tough. You need to impress a raid leader that you are capable, at just the point where they were looking for a new member of their team. Fortunately, it was not impossible. The usual way in was to win friends and influence people. You would get yourself invited to a PuG and hope that the alt of a raider was present, and noticed you, and added you to their friends list.Then when their raid was short a body, the raiders would search their friends list to see who was around who could help. Or simply the raid leader might be calling out in trade that their team had a free spot, and was seeking a suitably qualified mage to fill it. Anyway, you had to make sure to impress at least one person that you knew what you were doing, and that included being properly geared (including belt buckle), gemmed and enchanted. You would be inspected. Questions would be asked.

In the new world of raid-finder, though, all that matters is your ilvl and you're in. Doesn't matter if you're a warrior wearing cloth or a mage in spirit gear. Gems? Enchants? Belt buckles? Don't waste my time!

Now a lot of people who wanted to raid were frustrated by the previous scheme, and would be lucky to get into one raid a week pugging. Usually when that PuG finished for the night, there was no further progress that week. So many people who would in the previous scheme have tried to join a PuG to get noticed decided that they'd prefer to use LFR instead, to avoid the hassle and frustration. It isn't the full raid experience, but you can see all the bosses that way. Several times a week, if you like. Such people would not need to buy enchantments. Only the people still trying to impress future raid leaders need those.

So, at the moment tailoring is my favourite profession; and farming and fishing seem to be the most lucrative.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

20 Days of Gold Making - day 14 how much time

Nev asks: How much of your playtime is devoted to gold making? Do you raid/pvp/pet battle too or is the AH your main playtime?

My gold-making is done in the time between doing other things. During Wrath, I got bitten by the raiding bug, and so I spent a lot of time trying to get into raids: my guild at the time raided once a week, and I always had a place there (because I would lead that raid), and I would try to get into other people's raids as well. Also, running heroic instances was important for gear drops and emblem drops. So that took up a good deal of time. My banker, as I mentioned earlier, enjoyed level 19 PvP, and would spend a lot of time in Warsong Gulch, so that pretty much absorbed most of my time and hers. Most of our gold-making was done while she was waiting to be called to battle.

The guild I'd been in during Wrath fell apart at the end of Wrath, just before the Cataclysm. I joined a new guild that was one of the top raiding guilds on the realm, and spent the first few months of Cataclysm raiding with them; but mages were not doing good damage in Cata, and I struggled to keep my raid place. It didn't much matter, though. That guild was torn apart by the change from 25-man to 10-man raiding, and by egotism. That was a bit depressing, and I stopped raiding seriously for the most of Cataclysm. I joined my banker's guild and had a little fun making gold instead, so most of my time in Azeroth at that point was devoted to making gold, and building up the guild.

With the discovery of Pandaria, I've re-discovered my love of raiding (though getting into a raiding team without changing guild is a challenge), so my gold-making time has reduced. That's as it should be. I've enough gold to be getting on with.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 13 - Yay!

Nev asked:

What was your biggest 'Yay!' moment?

Probably my biggest 'Yay!' moment was the very first sale I made of the complete set of missing pages of Nesingwary's Journal for 30g, at a time when I didn't even have enough gold to buy a bag to put them in! But I already covered that on day 3, so let me tell you of another important moment for me.

It was still early in my goldmaking career when I saw some guy on the trade channel asking 1000g for a pet I'd never seen before: a digusting oozeling. Not only had I never seen it before, I'd never seen a pet on sale for such a price before. He didn't have any luck selling it, and he was barking all day. Next day he was still trying to sell it. By now I was intrigued and had looked it up on wowhead. I didn't know how to price it: there was no data on it in my Auctioneer database, there was, of course, no undermine journal, and wowhead, allakazzam and so on didn't in those days have auction house prices. All that was available was anectdotal posts by people who had bought or sold it. I reckoned that it was one of those items you might sell at a good price if an interested, rich pet-collector passed by, or you might have it in your bags for months without a sale.

I started talking to the guy. He was tired of trying to sell it, and I easily talked him down to 800g, and bought it. 800g was over half of my money at the time, so I couldn't afford to not sell it, but I thought I'd got it at a good price.

Now, you're probably looking it up on wowhead and TUJ now, and thinking I got a real bargain, since it's listed at 8385g buyout price on wowhead, and 9263g alliance-EU market price on TUJ. The thing is, list prices are not sales prices, and on rare items such as this one (only 185 currently on sale throughout the EU),   there is always a large discrepancy. In my experience selling rare items, you can add a large pinch of salt to any published prices. Moreover, back when I bought it from the guy on trade, there was a lot less money sloshing about Azeroth than there is today.

Anyway, back then I didn't have any experience selling rare items, and few price-points to help me gauge the right price. So I simply made a wild guess and decided to sell it at double what I'd paid for it: 1600g. But first I set about nobbling Auctioneer.

Since I had no data about digusting oozelings in my Auctioneer database. I reckoned there was little data in anybody else's, and I had a sort of prime-mover advantage in setting prices. So I listed it for around 3000g on the AH for a week, each sale for 12 hours, and each price slightly different to the others (and that's also why I don't trust sales prices on rare items - I know from first-hand experience how easily they are manipulated).

Once I'd done that, I then chose a Friday to list it at 2000g on the AH, and started barking this price in trade. Once trade scrubs started laughing at my price, I was able to tell them what a bargain it was compared to the average price of those oozelings!

I love trade scrubs - the guys who hang out on the trade channel and have an opinion on everything. They are invaluable to somebody trying to make a market, because they can be guaranteed to laugh at attempts to sell something they've not come across before, and this allows you to expose their ignorance, all the while talking up your product. For instance "who would waste 2000g on a pet!", they assert (it's a rhetorical question). This is not the time to become defensive and just respond that pet-collectors would, for that just allows the scrubs to ridicule your potential customers. No. Now is the time to make your potential customers feel good about themselves. the correct answer is something like "This item isn't for you. You could never afford it. My customers are rich, and this is pocket change for them. If they want something, they can go out and buy it, whatever it is. Unlike you, they didn't waste their lives chatting in trade."

Now you might have been talking to the top raider in the realm, but it doesn't matter! The important thing here is that you've made your potential customers feel better than that person, and you've hinted that conspicuous consumption is one way of differentiating themselves from the crowd. Also, you've got the data to prove that your price is a bargain!

Anyway the result is that a pet collector contacted me that weekend, and haggled the price down to 1600g. I got the price I wanted, he felt good about getting a bargain and a very rare pet, and everybody went away happy!


Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

20 Days of Goldmaking - day 12 - oops!

Nev asks, apropos gold-making,
What was your biggest 'oops' moment?

It was back in the early days of the campaign against the Lich King. Frozen Orbs were a expensive back then, the way Sha crystals are now. They were looted from heroic dungeon bosses in Northrend, and were in high demand for making ilvl 200 gear, back when ilvl 200 gear was a big deal; and also some ilvl 213 gear with +frost resistance. These were a very big deal indeed. Back in that time, frost resistance was important in both Naxxramas (the first raid in Northrend) and Ulduar (the finest raid instance ever). Without frost resistance, you took frost damage from various bosses, and this just wore the healers down.  So to reduce the strain on healers' mana pools, adventurers would stack bits of frost resistance.

Can you imagine any LFR raid nowadays where something like that could happen? Where damage dealers or tanks would spend their own money on gear to make healing them easier? This was also a time when tanks didn't automatically create massive threat just by clicking "tank" on entering the dungeon, and healers and damage dealers would actually get enchantments that would reduce their threat - rather than increase their HPS or DPS - to help the tanks keep aggro. Such co-operation was more common then, because your fellow dungeoneers weren't random strangers. Good times.

Anyway. The price of these orbs was fairly steady for a long time. Oh, yes, there were the occasional troughs and peaks, but they always came back to their steady price, over 100g each on my server. I made a lot of money just buying them when they dropped into a price trough, say 80g, and reselling them when they climbed again. But a time came when I bought them at 80g, and they dropped even further. I bought more at 70g, and again at 60g. But the price kept dropping. And dropping. There'd be the odd rally, and I kept buying them, expecting we'd seen the bottom. I realized that they were never going back to 100g, but at 30g, when you see a bounce, you figure that they've finally turned the corner. I bought them again at 20g, and 15g until I had filled a whole bank tab with stacks of Frozen Orbs. But they just kept tanking until they reached their vendor price of 5g each. Lesson learned: never try to catch a falling knife.

There was no big shock reason for this. It was just a chain of consequences that I didn't figure out until it was too late: the demand for frost resistance gear was drying up: raiders who needed frost resistance gear bought it early on, and didn't need more once they had it. Also, healers were getting better geared enough to be able to handle the demands of the raid-wide frost damage. And finally as more and more bosses died, higher ilvl gear was appearing, both from boss drops and newer crafting recipes that didn't require frozen orbs. At the same time, though,  the supply of orbs was dramatically increasing: thanks to the newly introduced dungeon finder, many more people were completing heroic dungeons and looting a frozen orb.

The addendum to that story is that one day some guy was calling in trade, offering to buy the orbs for 10g each. I'd whittled down my stocks by slowly crafting them into spellthreads or items for disenchanting, but I still had about a quarter of my stock left. He bought them all. The next day, I saw in the new patch notes that a new vendor (Frozo the renowned) would convert these orbs into more up-to-date materials. The price of frozen orbs was back at 25g. Double whammy!

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

Twenty Days of Gold Making - Collected Works

This post is just to direct people to the twenty days series started by Nev over at AH addict:

• Nev's original post is here
• Her summary of participants is here

And here are my posts:

1. Day 1 - How I started
2. Day 2 - Goals
3. Day 3 - initial technique
4. Day 4 - The bank alt
5. Day 5 - Different bankers
6. Day 6 - Best Market ever!
7. Day 7- Beginning again
8. Day 8 - reaching your goal
9. Day 9 - niches
10. Day 10 - farming
11. Day 11 - Addons
12. Day 12 - oops!
13. Day 13 - Yay!
14. Day 14 - Time
15. Day 15 - Professions
16. Day 16 - Flipping
17. Day 17 - Pets
18. day 18 - Advice
19. Day 19 - Rewards
20. Day 20 - Must-read blogs

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 11 - Addons

Nev's question today is
Most of us use TSM, Auctionator and/or Auctioneer in combo with Postal - are there any other lesser known gold making addons you use?

I'm glad you ask! I love the addon Ackis Recipe List. Whenever I'm out and about, it's great to know about vendors in unexpected locations. I don't often go out 'farming' recipes, but I always like to pick a few up if I'm in the neightbourhood, and Ackis Recipe List is great for that. One caveat, though: they aren't fast at getting rid of recipes and vendors that don't exist any more.

But my favourite gold-making addon is Lil Sparky's Workshop. I like TSM Crafting and all, but I just trust the numbers I see in Lil Sparky's Workshop better, and I like the interface. In case you haven't used it, it's an addon the integrates into your crafting window, and adds the price the item costs to make, and the value of the finished item (either at auction, at the vendor, or disenchanted). I prefer it to TSM crafting because it integrates into my existing crafting window, rather than presenting a new one. This is important, because it provides a context to the recipe/pattern/blueprint. I can remember when I learnt it from seeing it in relation to the recipes around it. So it helps me determine if it's really gonna sell, or languish in my back-pack for months.

That's the thing about prices in gold-making add-ons. they usually show list prices rather than actual sales prices. Imagine I were to look at Merlin's Robe. The average buyout price on this is north of 2000g, and the mats are around a half to three-quarters of that. But nobody buys it, because it's an out-of-date WotLK item. I used to love it, but it's all over now. Here's how I imagine the auction history of that item goes:
list at 4000g; unsold.
list at 4000g; unsold
list at 3000g; unsold

list at 3000g; unsold

list at 2000g; unsold

list at 2000g; unsold

list at 2000g; unsold

list at 2000g; unsold
list at 1000g; below cost price to get rid of the damn thing. Unsold

list at 1000g; unsold
list at 1000g; unsold
list at 1000g; unsold
list at 100g; maybe bought for novelty value, or returned and finally disenchanted.
From that series of auctions, most addons will tell you the average price for the item is 1864g, but in fact it's worth sweet Fanny Adams.

Well, I wouldn't make that mistake with Merlin's Robe because I know it so well. I wore it for a long time myself. But say some random robe shows up as profitable, or some random enchantment, or some random flask or potion. You look at the AH, and there are items for sale. Now I could pop out to the Undermine Journal and log in and see who sold what recently, but the first thing I'm going to do will be to look at the recipes around it. One of the is bound to remind me of the context of the item. "Ah, yeah", I say to myself, "that's a BC enchant. I doubt anyone bothers with it now, even twinks". Or "Ah, people are making this to disenchant it for the mats". That initial context tells me whether it's worth taking a further look at the item or just ignoring it, and that's why I like Lil Sparky's Workshop.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

20 Days of Gold Making - day 10 - farming

Do you farm materials? Why? Why not? & which ones, where?

That's Nev's question for day 10. On the whole, the answer is no, I don't farm materials. There are a couple of riders I need to add to that.

I prefer to buy my materials from the auction house rather than going out specifically to farm them. But I often do collect materials while doing something else. For instance, I might be running an instance, and pick up cloth; or I might disenchant drops. I'm sure you don't count that as farming. Neither do I. By farming, I think we mean an activity where the main purpose is to collect materials.

Second rider: I actually do farm on my farm. Or rather, on Farmer Yoon's farm. I'm doing this specifically to level cooking. A useful side-effect of this is that I have plenty of raid food (though it would be cheaper to sell the raw ingredients and buy the finished product, if I didn't need to make the finished product to level cooking). But actually, Farmer Yoon's farm is a terrible time sink, and I avoid it as much as I can. He should get off his fat ass and do some work, himself.

I have actually farmed stuff in the past, and I will again. I usually set aside two days a year for farming small eggs, which are needed for two festivals; These things sell for amazing sums. I also went farming for wool cloth in Duskwood just before Winterveil. I got lots of cloth, but it didn't sell as well as I'd hoped. I won't be doing that again! I've also farmed herbs in the past, for levelling alchemy, because the herbs I needed weren't on the Auction House. I've never done that for inscription though. The materials I need are more predictable (or more unchanging) and I usually have stockpiles of ink, made when the herbs needed for them were cheap.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 9 - niches

Nev's question today is:
What's your favorite niche market & why

There are so many niche markets to dabble in. For a long time, a blacksmith comrade of mine sold rods. They were needed only by mages, to enchant to create the next level of enchantments. A mage needed seven or eight over their whole career. Very niche, so most blacksmiths didn't bother making them. Copper rods, then silver rods, ..., then eternium rods, then ...., and then Blizzard removed them.

My banker's minion used to buy horde snakes and other pets from the Blackwater Auction House for resale on the Alliance AH, and in return sold Exodar moths. Now they're shared across your family and half the world has 9 of each to sell.

I always keep a few spellthreads for lower levels. Sapphire Spellthread, for instance, sells in small numbers, but at 200g. I always keep a few low-level spellthreads on the AH. Often I've no competition. Various low level enchantments are also good sellers. I suppose most of these are twink items for PvP at various levels.

If there is just one niche market for me, it would be cooking recipes, I suppose. I know where to find them, I know what they're worth, and I enjoy selling them. The ones that are awkward to attain (such as most Outland recipes) sell well, because of the hassle of getting hem from their vendor. The buyer is paying for the convenience, just as you might buy a ready-prepared meal rather than buying the ingredients and making it yourself. It takes a little bit of showmanship to sell the really rare ones, recipes that have been removed from the game. Here, bored trade scrubs really help without realizing it. If you can troll them, they'll be talking  for half an hour about how stupid it would be to buy your recipe, and how stupid you are for trying to sell it at that outrageous price, all the while allowing you to advertise it and make the case for why it is expensive.

 A challenge at the moment is to know whether to sell or keep the Desolace recipes from Gizelton's caravan. Are they coming back or not? Everyone seems sure that they are. I'm not so sure. They were deliberately rare in order to introduce a bit of a challenge to collectors and achievers. Maybe the recipes won't return until the caravan can be returned. And maybe that will take a bit of time. Maybe Blizzard will decide to move them to other vendors. Will they be easier to find? Maybe Blizzard will just quietly drop them. Who can tell? The fun is in trying to read the tea-leaves to set the correct price. And to be in on it in the first place. One thing is certain. Their current price is wrong. Either the few remaining recipes are the last we will ever see, in which case 50000g is not a bad price, or they will appear on an existing vendor, in which case 100g will be the best price for them. In my opinion Blizzard is not going to bring back the caravan just for three recipes. They've more important things to do. Look, they already deliberately got rid of the Recipe: Sporeling Snack. They won't mind losing these ones. But the opposite opinion is just as valid!

Rare items, such as the rare cooking recipes, are best sold through trade chat. Buyers need to be educated into seeing the value of rarity. An rud is annamh is iontach - what is rare is wonderful, as the saying goes in Gaelic. Education is a long-term project, and it took me a while to appreciate why people bought rare recipes. A common reason put forward by the trade scrubs was to complete an achievement  and whenever I'd list a rare recipe, for instance my favourite,the rarest Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops, scrubs would first be laughing at why anybody would want a meal that only gave +25 stamina, and then they'd be telling everyone how you could get the Iron Chef achievement without it. But the real reason collectors want it has nothing to do with achievements. It is simply to possess a rare recipe. Just like nobody buys a Penny Black or a Treskilling Yellow just to post a letter, or to complete their 10,000-stamp collection. They buy them to have something rare. Something that only they have.

There are other very rare items in the game. I'd love to get an education and move beyond cooking recipes. But they've been such fun!

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series