Blow the bloody doors off!

In my time as an Adventurer in Azeroth and Outland, I've killed giants, dragons and gods, I've blown up bridges and buildings and boats. How come I can't march into Orgrimmar, blow the doors off the bank vaults and cart off the gold that Garrosh is using to finance his megalomaniac plans?

Twenty Days of Gold Making - Day 4. The bank alt.

Do you use a banker alt/guild? When did you start doing that & why?

Funny you should ask that, I use both.

I had a low level employee that got into PvP and started playing battlegrounds. Fuill is her name, and she's a mage. Her professions were skinning and herbalism, but once she got into level 19 battlegrounds, she had to drop these. Why? Well, in those days, you couldn't switch off XP gain. If you wanted to stay at level 19 for Warsong Gulch (in those days, you got no XP from battlegrounds), you couldn't go out into the world and kill things, or even explore. I had my own horrible experience of this once at level 49, when I, too, had decided to spend a little time in random battlegrounds. I stayed at level 49 for about two months. One particular day, I was queued for a random battleground as usual, and while waiting, I took a gryphon taxi from Stormwind to Loch Modan, where I had some business with Innkeeper Hearthstove. As I was flying over the Searing Gorge, I was called to the battleground. As I answered the call, I was unseated from my taxi mount to be put into the battleground, and as soon as that happened, the unexplored part of the Searing Gorge that I was over became explored. I picked up a few XP for it, which was enough to tip me over to level 50, and that battleground was my last for a long time!

Anyway, Fuill was well kitted out with level 19 gear (she had the spidersilk boots and cape I mentioned in my last article, as well as a Tree Bark Jacket¹, Keller's Girdle, and a host of other goodies). She couldn't work as a herbalist or a skinner for fear of picking up XP, so she decided to try her hand at crafting. First choice was to be an engineer, as it was her best source of head armour (Green Tinted Goggles). After reading Gevlon's blog in which he extolled the virtues of glyph production, she also decided to try inscription.

Inscription was a great profession for a gladiator. Once you join the queue for Warsong Gulch, you have to be ready to be teleported at any moment straight to the battleground, with only enough time to pick up a battle-bag if you're near a bank. So level 19 twinks had to spend a lot of time near the bank in Stormwind or Ironforge.  The proximity of these banks to the auction house was the reason that no other bank would do. In fact Auctioneer Jaxon in Stormwind was at that time positioned so that you didn't actually have to enter the auction house to target her! So Fuill spent a lot of time standing on a packing crate beside the mailbox outside, shouting orders to Jaxon through the wall, and picking up purchases without the need to move.

Time spent queueing could be whiled away in the AH, buying herbs, milling them, making inks, inscribing glyphs, and listing them for sale, all activities that could be put on hold for the call to Warsong Gulch.

As Fuill toiled away, she gradually learned more and more minor glyphs (which, it turned out, were the most profitable glyphs that a level 19 could learn), and started to run out of space in bags and bank. Inscription is like that: you need to stock hundreds of different glyphs and be prepared to see most of them in your mailbox again. That's what prompted Fuill to think of getting a guild. Somewhere to store gluts of herbs/inks/glyphs, in preparation for famines. Room to branch out into other markets. And so it was that she bought a moribund guild with a couple of tabs already paid for.

For a long time, Fuill was the only member of that guild. She named it BoI, which was short for Bank of Ireland (or Bank of Ironforge). Later she employed a minion in Booty Bay, for the Blackwater Auction house; but that eventually proved not worth the effort. Eventually when the Cataclysm arrived, she decided to try to build up the guild level to avail of guild perks. But how? By now she was XP-capped and fighting in twinks-only Warsong Gulch (though that was drying up). The only solution was inviting others to join the guild. And slowly, to her surprise, the guild became a real living guild, filled with interesting new people. I eventually joined her guild as well, and we started doing fun things together, looking forward to each other's company. May it go from strength to strength.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

¹You can imagine how annoyed she was one patch day when she woke up and found that her jacket no longer fitted her, and wouldn't fit again until she was level 20.

Chinese tanks have arrived

Release 8.3 of World of Tanks has arrived, and with it the Chinese tanks. Frankly, I don't give a damn about the Chinese tanks, but all the same, wargaming.net gave me a new "Chinese" Renault NC-31, the tier one tank introducing the range. I played it a few times and hated it. I'll play a few more to see if it or its successors are any fun once they're elite, but at the moment, I think the best thing about it is I've got an extra garage slot. I think I know what tank will be getting sold to make way for my StuG.

Twenty Days of Goldmaking - Day 3 - initial technique

What were the first techniques/tricks/tips you used when starting out?

When I started, like everyone else I was just selling stuff at auction that I'd found while questing and that I'd no room for in my bank. But I started reading of  warcraft economy blogs. It was on one such blog that I came upon a tip that revolutionised my gold-making. It was at a time when I had just enough money to buy a few netherweave bags for myself, and no more. The tip itself was not a huge moneyspinner, but it gave me an insight into buyers. It was simple, and suited me well as a low level character. I can't find a link to the tip now, but it was this:

The Green Hills of Stranglethorn was a now-defunct level 25 quest that required you to find several missing pages from Hemet Nesingwary's manuscript. They were scattered all over Stranglethorn Vale (the zone which is now Northern Stranglethorn and the Cape of Stranglethorn). People who could hand in all the missing pages would complete the quest. The tip was simply to collect a complete set and sell it as a bundle. The pages themselves could be had for a few silver each, and the collection could be sold for 30g, according to the tipster.

But the tip included an eye-opening discussion of who would buy 2g worth of pages for 30g, and it wasn't level 25 adventurers wanting to complete the quest! As a level 19 adventurer myself, I could hardly afford to buy the bag and the bank bag-slot to hold the pages (in fact for my first sale, I bought the pages I needed off the AH, but hadn't a bag to put them in). No. Level 25 adventurers couldn't afford this. The buyers were all level-capped achievement hunters, who only needed to complete the quest to complete achievement the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, which was part of a bigger achievement, Hemet Nesingwary: The Collected Quests.

This was my first insight: most prices are set by rich level-capped adventurers (level 80, back then), not by poor levellers. Rich people pay for the convenience of having the quest items delivered to their mailbox. Poor people will not pay for that, and will not even buy the pages at any price. They'll get them the hard way, by killing every mob in Stranglethorn Vale until they have them. This was an important lesson for me: sell the luxuries that rich people want, and ignore the essentials that only poor people need.

Which reminds me of another set of items that I sold for great money at the time, the Spidersilk Drape and Boots, which were bought by rich adventurers for their level 19 PvP twinks.

The second insight was the importance of "secret" knowledge. Most people doing this quest had no idea how many pages needed to be collected, and what they were. The quest text just said to collect missing pages from four chapters. You had to go to wowhead (which most people didn't) to find out what pages were missing from each chapter. In fact, many people didn't even read the quest text correctly, and thought they had to get all pages from these four chapters, and so were hunting high and low over Stranglethorn Vale for page 2, for instance, unaware that it would never drop. I quickly learned to accompany each sale (almost all my sales were by COD) with a letter explaining what pages were missing, and assuring the buyer that they now had the complete set. One mistrusting purchaser actually insisted that I accompany him to Nesingwary's camp while he handed the quest in! The important thing was that I wasn't selling pages, I was selling a solution to the problem of completing the Nesingwary achievements.

The third and last insight this tip gave me was that the auction house wasn't the only way to sell stuff. In fact, you couldn't sell this bundle on the AH at all, because most of the value lay in the secret knowledge of what constituted a complete collection, and selling the pages individually on the AH only netted a few silver each. So I barked in trade, shouting out that I had a complete set of all missing pages, for the price of 30g. I loved scrubs laughing at me in trade chat or telling me how the  pages could be bought for a few silver, and what a rip off it was to sell them for 30g. Every time they did this, it would give me the chance to talk about what I was selling without spamming trade-chat. This has later been absolutely invaluable in sales of really expensive, rare items such as Recipe: Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops. In fact I tailor my messages in trade to elicit the most incredulity, guffaws and ridicule from the trade scrubs as possible, and I do as much as I can to annoy them (such as telling them that if they don't understand why the price is so high, the item is not for them; or even that they should keep quiet so as to avoid exposing their ignorance) so that they keep on advertising on my behalf!

I'm sure I sold about 100 sets of STV pages until the quest was made obsolete and replaced by a simpler one.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 2. Goals

If you set yourself a goal, what was your goal & at what point did you set it?

As I mentioned in the last post, my initial goal was just to afford netherweave bags! I'll tell you what I did with them tomorrow.

My next goals were simply to afford mounts, dual spec, bigger bags, flying licences and so on. Much later I decided I'd try to reach the gold cap (which was only 214k at the time). I don't want to have gold just for its own sake, though. I'm not a gold hoarder or miser. I want to have enough so that I can buy whatever I want whenever it is for sale. Gold is just a tool, not an end in itself.

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 1. How I started

This article has been submitted to Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival for February.

Nev Jones over at Auction House Addict has an interesting idea: to get bloggers to answer twenty questions related to the WoW economy over the next twenty days. The first question is straightforward: When did you start gold making & what triggered it?

I started making gold right from the start of my time in Azeroth as a result of the quest to get more bags. At the time, I kept virtually everything, in case it might come in useful later - I didn't know that grey items would never come in useful (what a pity. Wouldn't it be great to think that some mage out in a gingerbread house in a dark forest somewhere wanted you to meet her at midnight with a basilisk heart, a poisoned spider fang and a dried scorpid eye). So I wanted to buy bigger bags. At 10g a pop, netherweave bags were a serious expense, so at first I thought, I'll be a tailor and make my own. When that looked to be a rather long-term goal, I next tried to sell stuff at auction to get the money together. That was when I started looking around for tools to help with the (still) poor auction-house interface. Markco was still running the Just My Two Copper website at the time, and a Google search brought me to an article he had written there on Auctioneer. Markco really was a trailblazer back then. Anyway I installed Auctioneer on the strength of that article.

The greatest thing about auctioneer was to build up a database, over time, of the price of items. If it did nothing other than this it would have been worth it, back in the day when I didn't know if a piece of woolen cloth was worth 1c or 1g or something in between. Once you can set sensible prices, the money will start to come in. I got the cash for my netherweave bags fairly fast after that.

I'll tell you what I put in them on day 3!

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

Gear Upgrade Vendor disappearing?

Green Armadilllo noticed that Blizzard is removing the Valor Point gear upgrade vendors on the PTR. Rohan isn't worried. He reckons that they'll be back in 5.3. Maybe they will and maybe they won't, but the sure thing is that you won't be able to upgrade any 5.2 gear, and 5.3 is when?, so if you're saving VP to upgrade your gear, now is as good a time as any to do it. Also bear in mind this blue comment:

we all know that even on live [servers] things can still change, so if a change is urgently needed, we do our best to apply it as fast as possible

Perhaps, having made the decision to get rid of the VP gear upgrades, Blizzard intends to remove them post-haste on live as well on the PTR. Perhaps in the next server reset? Probably not, but I'm not waiting around to find out, especially since there's no point in saving VPs to upgrade 5.2 gear. I'm upgrading my current gear tonight. Why not? We're bathing in Valor Points, thanks to Wrathion.