Sunday, November 18, 2007

From Rags to Riches in WOW - Day 2

It's Day 2 of my quest to make 100 gold as fast as possible in World of Warcraft (WOW) by starting from scratch. We left off at the end of Day 1 with my hunter at level 6 and poor. The good news is that I've learned two good coin making professions (mining and skinning) and have made a full scan of the Auction House (AH) .

My top priorities for today is mine and skin enough materials to post on the AH to generate my seed money to start flipping. Because it does take a little money to post auctions in the AH, I'm going to need to complete some silver making quests. And it doesn't take long to complete both.
In less than an hour I've almost completed a few quests. Along the way I have mined 7 Copper Ore, have a stack of 9 light leather and a Tiger's Eye. Along the way to completing the quests I pick up a few more light leather, a couple more Copper Ore and some Malachite. After selling all the non-auctionable items (like rough stone, leather scraps and rabbit feet) I have a little over 5 silver to work with. I'm off to Ironforge.

WooHoo!


Whenever I price my auctions my goal is to always have it bought at the buyout price. But I always try to squeeze out as much coin as I can while being competitive. So after some browsing for what the going rate is for what I'm posting I decide to split the copper into three stacks: 2 x4 and 1x2. The reason is because I can charge slightly more on the cost per each while still be attractive. Pricing is a mix of what the market price is, a little art and a pinch of gut feel.

When I price the Malachite I have a bit of luck on my side - there's a short in supply and people are charging way more than it's worth. So I'm able to price that at more than double what I'd expect to post it for.

Once I get everything posted I head out for a bit of questing, but before I make it out of the city I'm starting to get buyers. It's a good feeling to see that little envelope up by the minimap. It will take some time for the money to clear so I head out to level up.

I check my mailbox after I ding and I've got silver from my leather with coin already coming from my copper. I've got a few silver from all the mobs and selling greys, so with 30s in my pocket it's time to start looking for bargains.

First place I look is the Consumables and find a stack of 20 Elixir of Minor Defense for 15s. Even though I have a feeling it will take time to sell the whole stack I can't resist it. I'll price it at a little over 6s to make about 1 gold from it. Next I find a stack of Linen Cloth for 10s that I can turn for a 30s profit. This sucks all my silver, but by the time I'm done searching and browsing my copper sales come through.

Time for another scan and quite a few deals pop up! You can check the screenshot of what I found and bought (those greyed out were my purchases).

Later in the day I buy/post these. The first number is the buyout price, the second is the expected profit...


Wintersbite: 5s/21.24s
13 Strangedust: 79s/77s
Wool Cloth: 5s/15s
Superior Healing Potion: 10s/42s
10 Elemental Water: 20s/1.23g


Now through all this I'm not buying myself in terms of greens because at this low a level you don't need it (level 8 at the end of the day). But I did buy a green level 6 one handed axe that increases my DPS nearly 5x. That will make my battles a lot more fun.

See what happens in Day 3.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Found this series tonight and am reading the whole bunch.

One question though: does the "raw" ore sell better than the smelted bars? Because on the realm I play it's the opposite: I can get considerably more for a copper bar than for a copper ore (don't remember the prices, but remember it's a considerable difference, like 30% or more...)

Og said...

That depends on the realm. If you have a server with a lot of twinks power leveling Engineering you'll sell a lot of Copper and Bronze bars.

It seems like it would make sense that the bars would sell higher because it's in a much more useable form.

This is a great question because I know I didn't bother checking whether I could get better prices in bars vs. ore. Good catch!

Anonymous said...

I seem to do OK selling ore in stacks of 5, which I chose because jewelcrafters can prospect 5 ore to get gems.

I haven't analyzed just how much more profit I might be making by selling this way, though -- it's a gut feeling that it's the right thing to do.

Og said...

I tend to price my stacks at the market price Auctioneer Advanced recommends regardless of stack size. That means the profit remains the same no matter what.

When using plain, old Auctioneer it was more a gut feel because I found the recommended price was more off than on.

The nice thing about smaller stacks is that opens your auctions to more buyers because the out of pocket expense is much less, some people only need a partial stack and your auctions float to the top of the list when sorted by price.

In the end it's always a gut feel for how well something will sell. If your gut is wrong you'll find out when your auctions come back in droves :)