Thread: Qruz's diary: How to turn ten gold into two thousand

I have taken part in this competition on the EU realm Vashj, horde side.

I have written this competition entry in a diary based style, while I have also added comments, tips and general semi-offtopic remarks in italics.

Disclaimer: My entry to this competition did not follow the instructions to 100%, this being only because I am blind, but having already spent so much time on the arrangement of screens and writing I decided to post this anyways and will simply leave it up to the competition’s handlers to either disqualify or allow the entry.



14th of April 2011:

Already having envisioned my idea of how to do this, I ported my warrior to Gadgetzan ([Ultrasafe Transporter: Gadgetzan]) and tabbed out to start writing, not smart…



Anyhow, after resurrecting I off the bat invested in 10 [Recipe: Philosopher's Stone], as a goblin these cost me 64 silver each, meaning I had just spent 6.4 out of my available 10g.

I then proceeded to create a new character in order to more easily track my gold making progress, and in order to be able to provide “proof” of my future success.

Halfway to Orgrimmar I realize I won’t be able to access the achievement tab, therefore nor the statistics and economy related pages /wrist.



So instead I sent the 10 recipes and the leftover 3.6g to an already run-to-Orgrimmar character.

I log in straight away and post two [Recipe: Philosopher's Stone] on the AH @ 31g each for 24 hours, this cost me a total of 12s in deposit fees. Left in my pocket is 3g 48s.



Now I’m logging off this poor, poor little banker with the hopes of having sold something next time I log back on.



15th of April:
No sale yet, but my competitor is gone, and I don’t have to undercut him anymore, but I will still keep the price at a (very) reasonable 35g / recipe.

What price would you use?



16th of April:

Didn’t get my first recipe sold until today, amazingly enough I seem to have pressed the wrong goddamn key, thusly I don’t have a screenshot to prove it. Either way, after two times two listings of recipes and one sale at 35g I’m now sitting at 36.67g and it’s time to get busy.

I bought three [Frozen Orb]s for a total of 26g, with the intent of flipping these as [Eternal Fire]s.

Making good use of the NPC in Dalaran which enables this type of flipping - Frozo the Renowned – is key to making gold off many WotLK crafts.




After buying and listing all three [Eternal Fire]s this character is sitting at 10g 27s 70c and it is once again time to log off this slightly less poor banker, with the hopes that the weekend will bring about quick sales so that I can get more work done today!

Weekends do matter in gold making, in fact, they matter a lot, in various ways for different markets of course, learning these weekend trends can be very profitable!

Inventory: 9 [Recipe: Philosopher's Stone] (2 on the AH @ 35g a piece) and 3 [Eternal Fire]s (all on the AH @ 120g a piece)

Making gold is BOORING when you have this little capital and aren’t allowed to use professions; you spend most of your time offline hoping someone will buy your shit. So I would like to suggest a more hands on approach for the really poor people in establishing a healthy amount of funds, doing dailies really is underrated, especially the Argent Tournament ones; use the tokens to buy pets, sell the pets (cross faction if possible), profit!



16th of April second update:

A picture says more than 360 gold;



After AH cuts I received 342g, out of which 316g was pure profit.

I can’t really claim that I expected to sell the Eternals at this price, but the Auction House was empty so I, by tradition, went for an outrageous price – this pays off more often than one might think.

Here’s where I really feel that I can get to work with really diversifying my gold making.

I’m taking a short break from this, but on my to do list once I get back will be investing in Outland & Undercity recipes as well as Stormspire pets.

Why those things? Experience. I have had good experiences with these goods in the past, and as such I am fairly confident they will sell reasonably fast and at a decent profit.


Alright… same day, another login:

Following my shopping list quite precisely I went and purchased a couple of the limited supplies recipes from Outland, I stuck with fairly few of them, namely the ones I know from experience sell the best. I also bought 2 of each of the Stormspire pets.

All in all my purchases cost me (a goblin, cheats I know) 136 gold. To be more specific (damn you Sinshroud for dangling the details super bonus mega special awesome price in front of me, damn you to death!) these were the items that I purchased:

[Plans: Adamantite Rod]
[Plans: Adamantite Rapier]
[Plans: Adamantite Dagger]
[Plans: Adamantite Maul]
[Plans: Adamantite Cleaver]
[Recipe: Spicy Crawdad]
[Recipe: Golden Fish Sticks]
2x[Mana Wyrmling]
2x[Blue Dragonhawk Hatchling]
2x[Red Moth Egg]
2x[Cockroach]
2x[Crimson Snake]
2x[Parrot Cage (Senegal)]
2x[Cat Carrier (Siamese)]
2x[Brown Rabbit Crate]

The recipes are almost all sold by my favorite Outlands recipe vendor ever – Aaron Hollman



After posting all these goodies my banker is now sitting at 209g 60s 8c (I have wasted a couple of copper here and there by sending a couple of mails too many, but I couldn’t be arsed to correct it).



20th of April 18:23:

Quick note before my weekly Wednesday farm raid, I just reread the guidelines for the competition and have been smacking myself over the head countless of times after realizing that after the first 200g have been earned, professions ARE allowed to be used, a fact I had somehow overlooked due to the ban on professions in the 10-200g phase. I also haven’t written anything in here in a few days but it was merely because of being too busy, I will make time later tonight to edit the countless of screenshots of sales I’ve taken the last couple of days together into something that provides a simpler overview and make an extensive (relatively) list of my purchases since then.




20th of April 23:20:

As promised, I will make an extensive update to cover the last couple of days’ back and forth to the Auction House and (primarily) Shattrath.

I’ve sold all of my initial stock from the 16th with the exception of a few pets, but I have been restocking up on more of the Shattrath blacksmithing patterns from my all-time favorite Outlands vendor! These tend to sell all at once to the same buyer(s) and make for great and relatively steady income.

I dare say I’ve made more sales of those particular recipes in these last couple of days than in a comparable timeframe ever before.

A few screenshots with a peek at my sales, prices and the buyer diversity:







While Limited Supply recipes in Outland are incredibly effective at turning little gold into (a lot) more, it is important not to forget the limitless recipes either, especially not the cooking recipes.





Ordinarily, I’d make one trip here a month and buy anywhere between twelve and thirty-six of each of these recipes, mainly because I can rarely be arsed to make the journey more often than that, but remember, novice gold makers cannot and should not be lazy! (or in the case of this competition, buying in bulk would put far too much of a strain on my economy and more significantly prevent me from investing in a more diverse format, less gold equals less investment capital which in turn equals less gold).

Anyways, I digress; following the sales of all these splendid recipes and pets, I turned towards restocking, but also expanding to all of the Limited supplies recipes I normally sell from Outlands, I had made these purchases just before today’s earlier update, for a rough estimate of what you should purchased see this guide but note that my stock of recipes was far less extensive than the full amount featured in the guide, some recipes were not available, and some NPCs I skip.

In addition to the recipes I bought I also restocked on the Stormspire pets I had sold off. In total my bill came to 163 gold, after which I had a grand total of 381 liquid gold left.

It is doubtful that I would have spent that gold on recipes had I realized sooner that using professions was allowed in this phase of the competition, recipes are by no means a bad way of making gold, but it is not necessarily the fastest way of doing so.

Having posted my new wares just before raid time, 18:30ish I have already made several sales, and my gold has shot up a bit, next on my to do list is to turn all of my gold into the fastest selling, safest investment item I know of right now – the [Ebonsteel Belt Buckle].

Before today, my initial investment in Philosopher’s Stone recipes had not turned out too well. While it had more than paid for itself with the sale of a single recipe I had not made many sales. Then tonight I got rid of two right off the bat – do not miss out on investing in this recipe folks, it is absolutely amazing!



Now by all means, do not let my ‘fair’ pricing deter you from listing these for anything upwards of 2-300 gold if that is what you want, I am sure you would be able to sell them for that, eventually.

The sales I made while I was not raiding, as the raid was cancelled, but sleeping, brought my banker up to a grand total of 743 gold after reposting auctions for a second time.



Note the buyers’ names, it is more often than not one buyer buying many of your pets / specific profession recipes at once in order to add to their collection.



April 21st 06:32:

Following up on the intention of crafting [Ebonsteel Belt Buckle]s I spent 644g on the materials for a total of 7 Buckles at 92g / craft.

Pyrite Ore = 120g / stack.
Elementium Ore = 40g / stack.
Volatile Earth = 7g / stack.

Note that even though I could afford to craft 8 Buckles with my 743 gold, I realize that a opening in any market requires liquid gold (at least 99% of the time) to profit from, thusly I save myself 99 gold. While 99 gold, in reality, won’t be enough to profit from most opportunities it signifies an important principle in gold making – never invest all that you have in any one thing.

After the first sale of one of my newly crafted Buckles I had planned to buy two [Deathwing Scale Fragment]s, as they (along with their more expensive siblings) have been selling really well for me, but after checking the AH I was turned off from this idea. While these Inscription ingredients are no longer limited supplies, they sell rather well at a decent markup (at least 100% profit) in my experience. The more expensive ones tend to turn people off from flipping them but remember that that is a good thing – less competition for us!

What turned me off from the idea of investing in these inscription supplies was that other posters were listing their auctions not only very cheap (less than half of what I sell them for), but they were listing many of them at 24+ hours duration. While many servers allows the posting of several items of one kind at the same time, I feel rather confident in saying that 99% of the servers do not offer the opportunity to post items for more than 12 hours; I can count the items I post at 24 hours on one hand, and I post a lot of items. So for all you new kids on the block, post at 12 hour durations and you will not only save yourselves AH fees, but you will also offer the market a chance to reset itself, which is very important in the long run.

Signing off for now, let’s hope I can come up with an additional investment ideas for later today.



April 21st 19:20:

Yet another cancelled raid, #/”/!”%(!”( Easter, but at least it gives me time to update this as the evening unfolds!

I made several additional recipe and pet sales today, but most importantly two Belt Buckles sold today with only one listing (I list two at a time).



Tip when posting items: Get a feel for the competition on your server, can you get away with listing two, three, four or even more of the same item at once? If so then do it, you don’t want to miss sales because all your items sold while you were offline.

With 789 gold in my bags and still all out of ideas of what to do next (don’t get me wrong, there’s a billion of different things I could make gold off at this point, but they are all rather boring and semi-annoying to set up with such a low amount of liquid gold).

Okay so, as I don’t want my liquid gold to go to waste (wasting gold in this case is not making use of it, invest, invest, invest!) I will prematurely (as I still have 5 of them) restock on [Ebonsteel Belt Buckle]s; another 7 will do.

At the same crafting cost of 92g / Buckle this means another 644 gold investment into this item. This puts me at 145 gold.

But! I am also going to make use of another couple of vendor items, the not-so-famous Dalaran Wine glasses!

Even though I have had some success selling these in the past, they sell rather seldom. As such I will only buy one of each to start off with.

As a long term investment I would typically buy 12 of these at once, just because my large amount of liquid gold allows it – the gold I have so far accumulated in this competition, however, does not.
Once again making use of my goblin for these vendor items puts the combined price at 12g.


Don’t have a goblin? Leveling an alt? GO GREEN! (but not orc… and, well, not troll either). The goblin discount adds up amazingly well over time, especially if you are already making use of vendor bought items.



April 21st 23:43:

After a brief chat with Sinshroud over the specifics in the instructions (read: rules) for this competition, a conversation that went somewhat like this:

Originally Posted by Qruz

Ey Sinshroud, am I blind and/or stupid?

Originally Posted by Sinshroud

Yes sir, yes you are.

I realized not only does my entry to the competition not follow the rules, but I also wasted a significant amount of my time, however, for this not to have been a giant waste of my time, I’ll be submitting it anyways and will from here on out be adhering to the ‘one niche’ policy of the second phase of the competition, as such no additional investments will be made outside of Buckle-territory.

For the people who are curious as to what I would do differently in phase two had I actually known of and played by the rules it’s rather simple; I would have, with the initial 200g crafted two Ebonsteel Belt Buckles and gone from there. Now this sounds really boring, and it is. I had always planned to do something more inventive and original (more so at least), or at the very least extensively diversified into several markets, as I think that would have been far more interesting to read, not to mention far more useful to all the novice gold makers out there, but with the ‘one niche’ restriction, everything becomes a bit more stale.

But this situation allows me to address one really important topic in gold making. I’ve seen countless upon countless upon countless of players who limit themselves in their gold making; there is absolutely no reason to only do the ore shuffles, no reason to only do Belt Buckles, no reason to only do Leg Armors, etc etc – diversify! Expand! Profit!

During the evening I have sold another couple of [Ebonsteel Belt Buckle], they really are the cupcakes of the World of Warcraft universe;



But I also made a Red Wine Glass sale!



Vendor items aren’t too shabby eh?



April 24th 01:29:

Having been busy and therefore reposted auctions very infrequently since the 21st I hadn’t sold many Buckles until today, but during the evening I made another 4 sales, which, along with sales of a few remaining recipes and Stormspire pets, brought me across the 2000 gold mark.





Still remaining in my inventory are another 5 [Recipe: Philosopher's Stone] and 6 [Ebonsteel Belt Buckle]s.






Post-2000g entry:

After selling the final six Belt Buckles and the few recipes/pets I had left I ended up at 3653g 14s 95c.






Hope you enjoyed reading my entry for the Consortium competition, over and out.