Catching Up On Great Comments

Thanks for the well-wishes as I still wage my war against this crummy flu. In between sniffles I've been able to catch up on some great comments that have been left over the weekend. Especially the my post on why expired auctions are OK and how they shouldn't get you down.

I appreciate and will respond to all comments. It's also a good source of new topics. So feel free to jump into the conversation or plant a seed for a topic you'd like to see.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to feeling sorry for myself and being excessively whiney to Mrs. Og.

*Cough*....Sniffle...Blah

/grab Kleenex
/whine

The Not-So-Mighty Og has been leveled by a nasty bug these past few days. I'm a little backed up on responding to your comments from the weekend, but I will.

Ugh.

Expired Auctions Are OK

Inspired by some of the comments I received from yesterday's post on my failures in the WoW Auction House (AH), this post shines some additional perspective on my wins and losses in the AH.

Yesterday I mentioned my overall rate of failed vs. successful auctions. Those are average numbers. Averages smooths out all the rough spots. That means that on some days I feel like I'm King of the World. On others I feel like I'm King of the Chumps.

Looking back at the last 17 days, here's how my successes compared to my failures:



It's pretty obvious which days were the really, really good days and which had me guessing if I had any cheese left at all. This is normal. The AH is volatile.

But it's predictable over time...and that's the real secret.

Bottom line - you are going to have Good Days, Bad Days and days that make the bad days look like Freakin Awesome Days. But as long as you are sticking to the fundamentals, you'll keep growing your pile of gold through them all (even when it doesn't feel like it).

I'm A Failure...

...approximately 32.64659271% of the time.

It's a rough guess.

That percentage represents how many of my auctions failed when I was doing my latest Rags to Riches experiment. For whatever reason those items just didn't sell how I thought they would.

Taking a look at how I'm doing post-experiment I'm sitting pretty at about a 44.25% failure rate.

A 44.25% failure rate?!?!

You got it.

Does that bum me out? Nah. Do I go in the corner and crawl into a fetal position? Nope. In fact I'm pretty darn happy about it.

Why? Because you cannot succeed at flipping in the World of Warcraft Auction House (AH) without failure. Small failures. Spectacular failures. Noobish, /facepalm, I'll-never-speak-a-word-about-this-to-anyone failures.

It's how you learn. A failure is only a failure if you don't learn something from it. When an auction fails, ask these questions:

1. Was my price too high?
   
2. Was it a low volume day on the server?
   
3. How was my price set in comparison to the competition?
   
4. Was there A LOT of competition (saturated market)?
   
5. Did I post too many of the same item at once (saturated market)?
   
6. Is this item really as valuable as Auctioneer says it is?
   
7. Is there a very low demand for this item?
   

You should have a good sense of what the answers are to all these questions by the time you're done scrutinizing the expired item. Having these answers will position you better the next time you target/flip these items.

Now you may be thinking, "Whoa Og, let's back up a second. Your failure rate has jumped nearly 12% after the series. That's huge! What in the Hellfire Peninsula is up with that?!?!"

It means I'm taking more risks and pushing the Lucky Red Envelope of this getting-less-new-by-the-day AH. I'm buying more goods, seeing what the saturation point is and getting a feel for demand.

And I'm sprinkling in a few bonehead purchases that prove I still whip out the [Flashlight of the Noob] to sniff out bargains from time to time. Which means I'm not taking my advice, chasing profits that aren't there and not walking away as soon as I should.

It's OK to fail. Your successes will far exceed the failures and fund your "education." I'll leave you with a bit of baseball trivia...

When Babe Ruth was the home run king, he was also the strikeout leader.

/cast [Create Food For Thought]
/chew

Long Live The Gold Farmer!

I'd shout that from the rooftops of Orgrimmar if Blizzard would implement the same legit method of selling gold as Eve Online did. 1,000 gold in exchange for no subscription fees for the next six months? Heck yeah! Or whatever the going rate is.

I agree with Mystic's (so terribly sorry that I don't know the author's name.../kick myself) opinion that this kind of trading will not create raging inflation and wreck havoc on the economy. It might actually help the economies.

/step on soapbox

Though I do think it's a mistake to take this type of Real Money Trading (RMT) market and say that all RMT is OK. The reason this works is because companies can't apply Timecodes to EBITDA or pay employees with it. No profit = no go. The minute companies can get cold, hard cash for selling in-game gold that's when the problems start.

Profits grow companies. Companies grow competition. Competition drives prices down (for products whose only differentiation is price). When prices dive low enough where it doesn't make sense not to buy it - that's the problem.

/nod sagely
/cast [Appear Smarter Than I Actually Am]{Rank 4}
/trip stepping off soapbox

Armor Kits = Gold For You

In addition to strategy, examples and tool advice, I also want to be able to give you very specific items for your Auction House grocery list. These items are (or have been) on my personal shopping list and are favorites of mine because the bargains occur quite frequently, are a guaranteed sell and the profits are nothing to sneeze at.

I've done this a few times already on food, cloth and spider silk. Adding to this growing smorgasbord of gold making targets are armor kits.

/flashback

I never knew what these things were until I completed one of the quests in Redridge on my first toon (the mage with the twitch). I remember thinking "these things are great...I just hope I can find more quests that have these for rewards." My noobness shined like a beacon back then.

/flashforward

Now it's more like a flashlight.

Armor kits make great targets for your bargain hunting in the World of Warcraft Auction House (AH). Leather workers will churn out a bunch of these as they're leveling up and often post them cheaply. And they usually post bigger stacks than they should - more than 4 for most...the expensive ones should be posted in singles or doubles.

By now, you know that you find a good deal by keeping Auctioneer well fed. That'll give you the scoop on what kinds of profits you can expect to reap.

How well can you do with these things? Good question!

Looking back through all my deals over the last 2 months on just armor kits, here's the breakdown of which armor kits I've bought, the total profit for all my sales and the profit margin on average for each.

(UPDATE: I replaced the original HTML table with what's below. The way it as before looked like gah because, well, Blogger hates me.)

First, the kits I target...

Medium Armor Kit
Heavy Armor Kit
Rugged Armor Kit
Knothide Armor Kit
Heavy Knothide Armor Kit

Next, what I've made recently on them...



Profits Grand Total: 159.43g
Overall Profit Margin: 106%

I usually buy Medium kits in the early stages of building my bankroll and then taper off as I set my profit requirements higher once I crack 100g.

You'll also note that the higher up you go on the scale, starting at the Heavy kits, the profit margins get smaller. My theory is that leather workers have a better sense of what the market rate is for kits the more experience they get. The higher level the kit the more coin they can fetch and the more they cost to make (from what I understand). So they'll squeeze every copper they can out of the auction.

One final tip, when reposting kits, do them in 1's and 2's. While it is possible to use up to four kits on your armor (gloves, chest, bracer, boots), my thoughts are that people don't always want, or have the money, for stacks of 4. And not too many people want to buy these in bulk for the "armor-to-come" in future levels so don't post any stacks over 4.

Good luck and happy hunting.

PUG's Are Powered By This

This has nothing to do with gold or the Auction House. Or anything else in this blog. A random post that I had to right. Kinda like the power of suggestion that occurs when someone else yawns and before you know it your yawning right along with them.

Actually, this is more like word association. You know, someone says a word and you blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. That happened to me today.

I saw this and the first thing that popped into my head was "PUG."