Cross Realm Auction House

This post is for consideration as part of Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival for November 2012.

It relates to a blue post from Blizz talking about the possibly of introducing a Cross Realm Auction House (CRAH) and the effect on the economy this feature would have.

 

 

By combining the action houses, there would be greater Supply of items but there’d be greater demand too.

Demand drives prices, when there is an oversupply of something; Sellers are forced to reduce prices to sell their items. The price falls till enough Buyers enter the market to purchase the items.

Under a CRAH environment there would be a constant influx of items for sale. A Buyer could almost be guaranteed to find an item they were looking for on the AH.  The Raw materials for all professions would be undercut constantly in an attempt to be the cheapest. This is great for Buyers but Sellers would be in constant competition. Margins would be cut to the point that the average wow player would be selling at cost.

My main reservations to the introduction of a CRAH would be as follows.

 

Gold Sellers 

One of the tricks gold sellers use to distribute gold is to have the buyer (once they’ve paid for the gold) put 5 stacks of Linen Cloth for example on the AH for a ridiculous price, then the gold supplier buys it out, and 30 mins later you have your gold. The Gold Seller wears the AH fee so let’s say you purchased 5000 gold, you would put up 5x items at 1050 gold (5x1000g + 5% AH fee). You receive 5000g in the mail.

A CRAH would mean that Gold Sellers would no longer have to be on multiple realms. They could distribute huge amount of gold from one Server.
Remember the duping of Queen’s Garnet in Cata, when the next exploit is found by the Gold Sellers, the CRAH would be a license to make gold for re-distribution.
In the meantime all those Low population servers can expect a growth of Bots to supply the CRAH with mats.

PvE & PvP Realms
I hate being ganked that’s why I play on a PvE Realm. It provides the added benefit of being able to explore Horde dominated areas to gather materials without interruption.  There would be a distinct advantage of being on a PvE realm for Gatherers to make gold, if a CRAH were introduced.

Volume & UI
I’m sure we’ve all experience the person who puts up 1000 pieces of Cloth in single units on the AH. I always find this slows down the Auction house considerably, which is probably the primary motivation of the seller. I use an addon called Auctionator to search for items on the AH and when the above occurs, I find that Auctionator  grinds to a halt. The main reason I use Auctionator is because I dislike the way the Blizzard UI shows what’s on the AH. If a Cross Realm Auction House were introduced unless something is done to the UI, I believe the AH wouldn’t cope with the quantity of Auctions.
Trying to use the Blizzard UI to buy items off the AH, is an exercise in frustration. Selling items is even more of an ordeal. In 10 years, Blizz have made no effort to make the UI any more user friendly, but have incorporated a No. of other Addons into the game, as features.
I say, fix the current AH UI before you go experimenting with Cross Realm AH's.
 
Competition
My biggest competition are the no-lifer’s (could be Gold Sellers) who sit on the Auction House 24/7, (Some would say I’m one). These people undercut constantly and dominate an area of the AH. A CRAH would only promote this sort of behaviour, especially by gold sellers. I've got enough competition on 1 server let alone Cross realms.

 

My opinion of the CRAH is that it would be a huge mistake on Blizzards behalf to try and facilitate this feature. Don't fix what isn't broken.

Gathering (Gold per Hour)

Gathering Professions can be very lucrative for gold making especially at the beginning of the expansion. If you’re going to be spending any serious time gathering (Minig or Herbing), then I suggest you hit up your local Engineer for some Mist-Piercing Goggles . They increase the number of nodes you see by about 10%.  These Goggles do not need to be equipped, just put them in your bags and carry on Gathering normally. The extra nodes appear with a sort of mist around them.

The other item that will be in high demand is the ForagersGloves which drop off a rare spawn Korda Torras in Kun-Lai Summit. These gloves increase the speed which you  Mine/Herb  nodes in Pandaria. They reduce the gathering time by up to 1.5 seconds, down to a minimum of .5 seconds. These gloves will need to be equipped unlike the above. My Alliance Druid (Herbalist) & Worgan Hunter (Mining) both want these bad……time to camp Toras me thinks.

One of my goals for MoP was to keep track of the Gold per Hour (GpH) that Gatherers could achieve.

When I first entered Jade Forest and saw all the Mining Nodes and Green Tea Leaf that abounds, I thought I would have to look no further that this area. 

Now Ghost Iron Ore nodes stick out because they are white, but I find Green Tea Leaf to be a pain to find, the nodes being green and all. I end up flying around trees looking for the sparkle of the node which slows my farming.

Fortunately Fool’s Cap is a better choice currently, as I can get almost double the price of Green Tea Leaf on the AH, and I can see the herbs easily.

Mining - Ghost Iron ore - Jade Forest

 

I spent 30 mins following this path around Jade Forest. In that time I collected 20 stacks of Ghost Iron Ore

Ghost Iron Ore is selling for 3g50s each currently

GPH 2,800

 

 

Herbalism - Fool's Cap - Dread Wastes

 

I spent 30 Mins flying around Dread Wastes collecting Fool’s Cap. I collected 20.5 Stacks. This area is so small that if there are any more than 2 people farming this area at the same time, then your GpH will drop significantly.

Fool’s Cap is selling for 5g75s each.

GPH 4,715

 

Skinning - Valley of the Four Winds

 

I don’t have a Skinner so Humph and I farmed WyrmhornTurtles in Valley of the Four Winds on our Hunters.

We did this twice, the first time I was paying attention to drop quantities however the last time the spawn rate of the Turtles had dropped significantly. Confirmed by wowhead comments, thanks Blizz.

I want to have another crack at this area this weekend, to revise my data.

Despite the nerf, what I liked about this area is that it gave Exotic Leather, Motes of Harmony, Prismatic Scales, uncommon items, and Raw Turtle Meat which is used for Feasts.

 

 

 

 

Darkmoon Faire Fail

I was going to submit this post to Cold as part of his previous Blogging Carnival but too little too late I guess. I’ve been sick for the last 2 weeks and didn’t quite get around to it.

The Consortiums Projects intention was to make a killing on the first Darkmoon Fair, but Blizzard had other ideas. There are a number of major drawbacks to DM trinkets currently.

1.The Ink vendor was not exchanging Ink of Dreams for Starlight Ink, this meant that Humph and I did a huge amount of Herb farming at the release of MoP, so we could create DM cards each day. We have 3 Scribes (4 if you count my Scribe Horde side) that can make DM cards, and each card required 10 Starlight Ink. This was a huge time sink to create these items.

2. Each card requires a Scroll of Wisdom with a cooldown that resets at midnight. Only I card can be made per day. This was never the case in previous expansions.

3.The Relic of Niuzao had no bonus on equip, Blizz has stuffed up, No Tank in their right mind would want this trinket as it stood then. Fortunately half way through the Faire Blizz made a change and added Stamina but the price had fallen so far by this time.

4. Blizz made the Trinkets Ilvl 376, unlike the last few expansions, these Trinkets won’t last through the first Tier of gear. Raid Finder will have better.

The Darkmoon Faire arrives and we’ve been able to make 3 Decks, (Relic of Chi Ji, Relic of Niuzao,& Relic of Xuen). The only Decks we end up selling are to ourselves and another member of our raid team. There just isn’t the demand for these trinkets at current prices.

I decided to buy our Relic of Niuzao now as the price has dropped significantly from 100k to 35k due to not having a bonus on equip previously. Humph decides to purchase the Relic of Chi Ji for 100k.

Soon after the DM faire ends Blizzard change the Ink vendors(Mithrildar in the comments informed me this occured during the Faire) so you can exchange Ink of Dreams for Starlight Ink. Humphs trinket is now selling for 35k. Well done Blizz you have totally screwed all the scribes that put in a huge amount of effort to make cards. The Ink vendor should have changed when MoP released.

We offer our Monk offtank a deal on the last DM card, he has a scribe also but isn’t using his Scroll of Wisdom.Our offer is to make us 21 cards and we’ll give him the trinket, he accepts. This offer was made after the Vendor changed, so it's not like we were being excessively greedy.

Hindsight is always 100%, if I knew then what I know now, I would have just sold all the herbs and waited for the Ink trader to change.

On a positive note I belive our crafting cost to make a deck to be around the 7k gold mark, if we use the Alchemy CD as a guide to what a Scroll of Wisdom is worth. (Living steel less cost of mats to make 6x Trillium Bar) puts the Scroll around 300 gold in value.

What did we do wrong?
We asked too much and followed the market as to valueing Trinkets. At the time Starlight Ink was selling for 300g+ each, if we allowed 1000g for the Scroll of Wisdom for each card then a deck would cost 38k to make. Trying to sell them for 85-100k was over the top.

The Golden Lotus Bottleneck

The Golden Lotus Bottleneck

Today I want to share my thoughts on Golden Lotus (GL) and the impact to the economy this herb will have. Golden Lotus is used by Alchemists to make Flasks & Transmute Gems. Every Flask/Transmute requires 1 of these items.

There are 3 sources of GL. Herbalism, Spirit of Harmony exchange, and planting seeds to grow a mote of harmony or a random herb (Farmville).

Having farmed Green Tea Leaf, Fool’s Cap, and Snow Lily on my Druid quite regularly since hitting 90 last week, I have 10 GL to my name. The spawn rate of these is terribly low. The best place I found was Dread Wastes where I farmed about 4 of these in an hour.

They are currently going for 255g each on Caelestrasz Alliance, and I expect that price to rise significantly now that Raids have been released and LFR to begin this week also. The demand for this item will definitely outstrip supply for 2 reasons.

There are no Cauldrons of Battle from Alchemy currently, meaning that every raider will either have to supply/use a Flask which lasts 1 hour (Unless you’re an Alchemist) or (use an Elixir after every death). Most guild raids last 2.5 hours so 3 Flasks will be required every raid night. We therefore have a choice, either fork out for 3 Flasks per raid night from the AH, or go farm GL on you Herbalist, or farm Motes of Harmony and when you can make a enough Spirit of Harmony, exchange them for GL. If you don’t have an Alchemist, then your friendly Guild (Flask Master) Alchemist will be more than happy to take your GL and exchange them for Flasks (to later hope for a proc when they make replacement flasks).

The other reason that prices will go through the roof is that Ghost Iron Ore and Kyparite share the same approximate prospect yield for Rare Gems (4%ish chance) - pretty low. I should also mention that Jewelcrafters can also cut their Uncommon gems in a hope to get a perfect cut with has the same stats as a Rare gem. I believe there’s a 20% chance of getting a perfect cut so there is a potential source for alternate gems but I'll be doing the enchant shuffle.

The only way to get gems transmuted colour specific, is by an Alchemist. Again for every transmute a GL is required. So we’re back to farming GL either by Herbalism, Motes of Harmony or Farmville. I should also note that Jewelcrafters can also cut their Uncommon gems in a hope to get a perfect cut with has the same stats as a Rare gem. I believe there’s a 20% chance of getting a perfect cut so there is a potential source for alternate gems.

Farming motes of Harmony from Mobs again takes a while, there’s a cave just up from One Keg that has an acceptable drop rate of these approx. 1 Spirit an Hour.

The last way to acquire GL is via Farming (Tilers Rep), this involves planting Enigma Seed seeds and cultivating your crop the next day. There is a random chance that you will receive a GL. I believe you can have a maximum of 16 farms if you want to play Farmville. You can also plant Songbell seeds and harvest Motes of Harmony which is probably the better choice.

After discussing this issue with a few people in game I am of the opinion that the general gaming community do not like how the system is working presently. As a raider (Goblin view below), I didn’t sign up to spending an hour a night doing Dailys for Rep gear, to then have to go out after the raid to farm mats for consumables. The general wow community want to log in, raid, run a few dungeons then log out. They aren’t looking for the time sinks that Blizz are imposing on us. For these type of raiders that are time limited, they have one option, buy off the AH.

At last count there were approximately 200 GL on the AH ranging in price from 255g to 489g. As a Goblin I’m going to make hay while the sun shines. Buyout all the GL on the AH to 300g and make Flasks for re-sale. Keep buying out GL and play the Flask market until Blizz realise the errors of their ways and either increase the drop rate of GL or make Mote/Spirit of Harmony BoE.

After trying this out, the demand for Flasks and low price of Gems ,make buying out Golden Lotus unprofitable.  Do not attempt this until the price of Golden Lotus and demand for Flasks/Gems increase.

Consortium Project September Update

Consortium Project Update September 2012

As I predicted, September has been a quiet month, we made 450,000 gold. Glyphs have gone crazy, they alone brought in 260,000 gold profit.

The way we have structured the guild bank is that there is always 100,000 gold at the beginning of every month. When we need to buy stock e.g. Whiptail we do it from those funds, that way at the end of month we just put all the sales back into the Guild bank and deduct the initial 100,000 to determine profit.

 

 

I spent a lot of gold this month buying out items I thought would be in high demand in the near future. Items like Maelstrom Crystals and Greater Celestial essences, we also made Netherweave bags, Embersilk bags. We will reap the rewards for these items soon I believe. We also prepared for the Glyph rush in advance buying out all the Whiptail under 25g a stack and converting it too inks.

Even Goblins have Nub moments, in my haste at midnight one night after milling Whiptail and turning it into 60x stacks of Blackfellow Inks, I went to the Dalaran Ink vendor to turn into Ink of the sea.

I have macros setup to make this process very fast, the only problem is that I also included a line item in Dumpster /din Blackfellow Ink to move Ink to the Guild Bank, you guessed it, I was clicking on the Dumpster macro by mistake and woosh there went 50x stacks down the drain. I bought back what I could and submitted a ticket to Blizz to try and get the balance back, but to no avail. I received some bullshit email saying basically, this item wasn’t on the list of items a GM can refund and I could request it be included for the future blah, blah, blah… I estimate that was approx. 3,300 gold lost.

 

Since MoP launch the Consortium Project has levelled the following character and professions.

DK to 90 Inscription/Enchanting 600/600

Druid to 90 Inscription/Herbalism 600/600

Hunter to 90 Mining & JC 600/600

Druid to 90 Enchanting/Herbalism 600/600

Hunter to 89 Skinning/Letherworking 596/600

Warrior at 85 Herbalism/Alchemy 525/600

Paladin at 85 Mining/Blacksmithing 525/575

Warlock at 85 Alchemy/Inscription 595/600

We are currently making Glyphs, DMC Cards, Staffs, mining and prospecting gems, JC rings, Primordial Diamonds, Herbalism for Starlight Ink (Blizz have totally stuffed up Inscription with regards to Inks, more on that later), Enchants and Living Steel.

Not a bad effort for 1 week into MoP.

Back to Basics : What to Sell

Back to Basics : What to sell

Determining what to sell for someone new to the Auction House can be quite daunting. Crafting something that never gets sold can be demoralizing. I tried my hand in the Mogging market for a while with mixed results, and can vouch for the fact that it’s a feast one week, and a famine the next, not really my preference.

The Consortium Project focuses on items that sell fast and regularly, this blog will primarily be from that perspective. There is nothing better than going to the mail box and finding 50-100 sales. When I had a holiday recently, Humph (one of the partners whose focus is glyphs) took over my part of the business temporarily. He couldn’t believe the amount of money we took from non glyph items. The secret is that we’re diversified, and sell the most profitable items from a range of professions. By combining our professions we get economies of scale which reduce our crafting costs, thus maximising profit.

 I’m going to assume that you have Jewelcrafting (JC) at max level but this process works for most other professions too.

What Gem cuts are popular? There are so many different cuts, what sells, what are lemons?

Even though I play a variety of Toons, I still don’t know the secondary stat preference, for most classes. i.e. Enhanced Shammy they want Agi as their prime stat, but what’s the best secondary stat?, Haste, Mastery or Crit?  In MoP hunters now need Expertise, do Enhanced Shammys need that too?

I gave up trying to memorize all the different combinations and requirements of each class/spec.

There are 2 Methods to determining what to sell.

Method 1

I turn to WoW Popular which is updated after each Patch.

What we want here is to make a list of what’s in vogue for each Class/Spec. Pick Gems from the top menu then select the Class/Spec you want to review. In the below case I’ve selected DK -> Blood

 

Anything with less than a Popularity of 2 stars I would ignore, but make sure you note the Meta Gem just in case it’s got less than 2 stars. Now you can cut n paste this into Excel/Open Office or use a pencil n paper to make a list. We do the same for each Class/Spec. When you have finished this click PVP under Playstyle on the left panel and for each Class/Spec repeat the above process and add their PVP preference to our list.

What you’ll find is that a lot of Gem cuts appear twice or more, sometimes with Popularity of 5 stars other times with 4,3 or 2.

In Excel sort the list by Name then Popularity so you have all the cuts in Alphabetical Order with most popular cuts at the top, then descending in order. Now all you need do is delete the duplicates with less popularity.

If you’re not familiar with Excel then you can look forward to a long process of coming up with a single list via pencil n paper.

One thing to remember is that WoW Popular is a data mining site which means it will take a bit of time to update come MoP, as players level at different speeds. One could surmise that the most hardcode players will be the first to level to 90, and gear their toons, ready for raiding, therefore the data will be accurate from the start, but that is purely speculation.

Method 2

This method focuses on Wowuction

The Gold Queen did a great video guide to this site and I see no reason to reproduce her work.

Suffice to say goto Professions -> Jewelcrafting then sort by Sold per Day and you have a list of popular cuts. Nowhere near as exhaustive as method 1, but an accurate list none the less.

In the next thrilling instalment of Back to basics we’ll go through how to setup TSM.

 

 

 

 

Wow-Pro MoP Ready

Wow-Pro MoP Ready

I’ve had beta access to Mist of Pandaria for some time but have only dabbled in it from time to time. My son has played the beta far more than me and is really looking forward to Poki-wow, but that’s a whole other story, today I want to share my love for a particular addon.

When I first logged into the beta Macros didn’t work, so for me that made the whole experience a bit tedious. Addons at that time weren’t enabled either, so I was reliant on the ingame quest helper, which even with an upgrade, left a bad taste in my mouth.

Since my first dabble in MoP beta, Blizz have enabled the use of addons and macros ingame, thus permitting Authors of Addons to make the necessary changes to make them MoP ready.

 Last week I tried installing wow-pro on the beta with no joy, Sunday 16th I think, they made a version available with MoP quests enabled (v2.3.1A). I installed it and took it for a test drive on the beta last night.

The other addon that’s necessary to make this addon work is TomTom which provides a directional arrow to the relevant quest ingame. I usually drag the arrow to the top of my screen so it’s out of the way but still easily visable.

I completed about 60 quests in the beta with no dramas on my DK. The great thing about this addon is that it auto accepts and hands in quests when you have selected the correct quest giver.

It also gives you a summary box of what you have to do to complete the current quest and tracks how many “Boars hearts” for example, that you have in your inventory towards the total required.

BTW Blizz you really need to do something about the number of heartless boars running around Azeroth! I remember killing 20 Boars to collect 8 Hearts once……

I’m a happy camper now that I know this addon is MoP ready and will use it to great advantage when levelling the “Consortium Project” toons to bring hell and cause disdain in my fellow AH Goblins. Big shoutouts to all the contributors at wow-pro for all your hard work.