Easy buying on high population servers

Over the past days I've spend a lot of time buying herbs, milling them for pigments and create inks to resell the Starlight Ink. On the high population server I'm curently playing on I've noticed one major difference compared to my previous server; browsing the Auction House is slowww. So slow in fact that it's a lot more efficient to use Blizzard's Remote Auction House instead of TradeSkillMaster (TSM).

Buying loads
The process which enabled me to purchase the needed herbs quickly was a combination of scanning the Auction House with TSM and buy the cheapest auctions through the Remote Auction House. I'm not online 24x7 so for me it's no big deal to scan for the herbs from in-game, logout and buy from the Remote Auction House. I'm assuming most know their way around TSM so I'll focus on Remote Auction House in this post.

The required steps to quickly buy herbs are:

1. Open the Remote Auction House app on your phone or tablet and go to the Auction House and choose 'Browse':
   -
   
2. Tap 'Search' and select 'Trade Goods' and 'Herb' as 'Categories', if you want to you can limit the search to specific herbs I never bother:
   
   
3. Scroll down untill you've found the herb you want to purchase, tap the herb (I choose Green Tea Leaf in this example:
   
   
4. If there are a lot of Auctions at the same price the Remote Auction House will stack them. By tapping those stacks you enter the buying screen:
    
   
5. In the following screen you can select the amount of stacks you'd like to buy, you can select any amount up to the total amount of stacks and the Remote Auction House will purchase them in seconds:
    

This little trick enabled me to buy way faster than I'd be able to with TSM due to many timeouts and long time spend 'searching for auction'. Just remember you can only buy 200 auctions per day through the Remote Auction House so choose wisely :)

Resource dependancy

How to become less dependant on a single resource and it's availability on the Auction House? As you might have noticed, my main source of income is the Obsidium Shuffle. This means of course I need quite a lot of Obsidium Ore. Usually I can get those without too much of a hassle but there will always be times when the much needed ores are too expensive. Little over a week ago the price for a single stack suddenly spiked to 180 gold on my server, it took about 5 days before dropping to normal levels.

If you're not prepared for these price spikes you're going to lose either potential profit from not being able to craft and sell or you're going to sell with a much smaller profit margin. So what can we do to get a little bit close to a Goblin's utopia, reaching our maximum profit every day?

Stock
Before I'm even going to mention any other options it's important to realize how the market works in WoW. Disregarding the presence of farmers (the evil kind) for now, a typical farmable item like Obsidium Ore will have significantly lower prices during the weekends. Many casual gamers will do less Auction House related activities during the week compared to the weekends, resulting in higher volumes of items sold but generally at lower prices.
Farmers (again the evil kind) mess up this pattern. Whenever a couple of farmers hit a server and reduce prices to rediculously low levels the motivation for regular farmers (the good kind) will drop. If the farmers leave after a couple of days, it takes a while before regular farmers have noticed they're gone and prices, and thus their profit, are back to normal. Occassionally this leads to prices as shown below where farmers reduced the price well below average (90g-100g), disappeared for a while and came back for another price reduction.

Obsidium Ore prices

If you know what price to expect, or more importantly know what price not to expect. I personally have a purchase price of 65g a stack. I know prices will fall below that mark on a regular basis and usually can purchase enough to keep me supplied during the days where prices are well above this 65g mark.
Doing a little bit of research and not being afraid to invest several thousands of gold will eventually pay off.

Diversify
The second option is of course to include other materials in your daily gold making cycle. Increased prices for Obsidium or Elementium Ore do not mean leathers and herbs are expensive as well. In fact there's a good chance the farmers (the evil kind) aren't gone but have simply moved to another material. Following their activities and buying when they're selling is an excellent strategy to buy low and sell normal / high.

In order to properly diversify the markets you're currently active in it's important to realize which tradeskills each resource is being used in.

Tradeskill	Main material
Alchemy	Herbs
Black Smithing	Ores
Enchanting	Ores *
Engineering	Ores
Inscription	Herbs
Jewelcrafting	Ores
Leatherworking	Leather
Tailoring	Cloth

* Even though Enchanting uses dusts and essences as main materials, the prices for those are set by Jewelcrafters disenchanting rings and necklaces created by the Obsidium Shuffle.

Three tips for a starting goblin

This post has been specifically written for the February edition of Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival. Cold asks us "What 3 Pieces Of Advise Would You Give A Little Goblin? (3 Top Tips For New Auctioneers?)". Well, I've got three tips which I'm hoping are useful for starting auctioneers.

I am however going to start with a requirement instead of a tip, consider this a small bonus on top of the three tips ;)
If you want to start making serious gold in World of Warcraft it's going to cost you a lot of time, time you're not going to be able to spend on other activities like running heroics, pvp'ing, raiding or whatever else you can imagine. You can of course still do those things but it's going to cost you more time. If you're not willing to spend the time needed to start making serious gold, these tips might still be worth reading (I hope they are) but please don't expect major profit for minor effort.


Tip 1: Research
In order to start selling and start making a profit you need to identify the markets you can be successful in on your server. Spend some time doing research into what these markets could be while keeping in mind whatever limitations you have.
For example when I started out two and a half month ago I had two max level characters with both professions maxed out. I had a Jewelcrafter / Enchanter and a Herbalist / Alchemist, one of my characters also had Fishing and Cooking maxed. I started doing research on how to make gold with just those four professions and the small start capital I had available. I listed all available markets I could enter with just these two characters, which were:
 - Twink / alt Enchants
 - Flasks and Elixirs
 - Herbalism
 - Supplying raiders with Fish Feasts
 - High level Enchants
 - Transmutes
 - Rare and Epic gems

I quickly decided Herbalism was too time consuming for my liking, Flasks and Elixirs or Fish Feasts wouldn't be worth the effort at the end of the expansion. I had just returned from a several months long break so cutting Rare and Epic gems wouldn't be feasible since I had just a few cuts and no Jewelcrafting tokens. This left Enchanting and Transmutes so I started doing a more thorough research into those markets.

A spreadsheet listing the costs of the materials and calculation potential profit based on current Auction House prices is an excellent resource for this. I'd recommend creating one yourself since you'll get a better understanding of what you're actually going to sell. If you don't know how or don't want to create one there usually are good spreadsheets available at gold making forums like The Consortium or The JMTC forums.

After you have researched each potential market pick just a single one to start selling in, make sure you really understand this particular market before moving on to the second tip.


Advanced tip 2: Expand
You've succesfully started selling in your first market and making some profit on a daily basis, now is the time to start expanding. Re-use the research you've done before and enter the second best market. After you've succesfully entered the second market and are making some profit on that market as well it probably time to move on to the third step.

The idea behind this tip is quantity beats quality. You're also going to become more resilient, being active in a lot of different markets means you're less vulnerable to short-term changes to the economy.

This tip remains valid no matter how many markets you're currently managing, always keep on the lookout for new markets to enter. After having entered some or all markets identified during Tip 1 you can start expanding your horizon. Research the markets you currently cannot enter, with the gold you've already made leveling a new tradeskill just to make more gold might be a viable strategy. You won't know unless you've researched and by doing your research properly you're minimizing the risks of investing in an already lost cause.

Advanced tip 3: Automate
Listing a couple of items can easily be done manually, checking for undercutting, cancelling and relisting isn't too much of a hassle either. Now imagine doing this for dozens of items, you're going to spend more time at the Auctions House or the mailbox than anywhere else. Fortunately there are some excellent addons which take care of the most time consuming aspects of making gold. I'll give a short description of the addons I'm using and why I use them.

Auction Profit Master
Auction Profit Master is the addon I use to automatically create auctions, check for undercutting and cancel if needed. This is all based on previously defined groups.
For a small introduction to configuring APM see this Inside Trader article by Basil Berntsen.

EasyMail
I use this addon to collect all mails with just a couple of clicks, not having to worry about opening hundreds of mails and collecting hundreds attachments a day is pure bliss.

Auctioneer
Auctioneer I use for the occasional full scan of the entire Auction House and regular scans of the items on my Snatch List. Auctioneer is a very extensive addon, take the time to understand it's functions and then decide which of those functions you would like to use.

Price resets

It's time for a well known trick used by auctioneers to increase their profits. Resetting the price of an item to be able to sell your own supply for a larger profit margin. I've been sitting on a decent amount of Greater Celestial Essence from disenchanting Carnelian Spikes. Which I'm still expecting to be fixed soon btw, an Item Level 317 weapon which disenchants reliably in 2-3 Greater Celestials doesn't seem to be right.

The supply I had however had been created during the weekend when Obsidium Ore was quite cheap. Unfortunately during the weekend the Greater Celestials were also at about 60% of normal market value with loads of them posted. I figured I just had to wait untill Monday or Tuesday for them to rise to their normal price again. On Monday the lowest buyout was 60g and Tuesday prices had risen to 68g. This morning there were still a couple of them listed for 70g buyouts, but only about 15 of them.
Since there was a large gap between the 70g ones and the rest, which were a little above market price, I decided to buy out all 70g buyouts and re-list those and my own for 85g.

If all of them sell, which they will over the coming days, I didn't make 225g (15 x 15g) from relisting the 70g buyouts but 1.125g from relisting them and increasing the price of the 60 I had in my bank.

This applies to every item for which the price fluctuates during the week. If you want to sell them for the normal marketprice you can choose to not wait for the cheaper ones to automatically drop off the Auction House. Buy them out and reset the price to increase profits.

Disclaimer: I could have bought out as many Greater Celestials as possible during the weekend and re-sell them once the price had risen again. Once the market has settled a bit after Cataclysm I will do that but right now I'm being very careful with buying to re-list. Prices are all over the place, it only takes one or two other Jewelcrafter / Enchanters to start doing what I'm doing and prices will drop significantly. I'm not going to risk having a stack of Greater Celestials which I'm going to have to sell for a loss.

Take a break once in a while

I knew about the change to Jessica Sellers, being on a EU server I had the advantage of having the change confirmed by American players before my server went down for patch maintenance. A big thank you to the kind folks from the Just My Two Copper forums! Of course I traded as many Ink of the Sea as I possibly could but I also bought all resonably priced herbs from the Auction House and quickly pulled all of my glyphs.

I couldn't be 100% sure, but I predicted most scribes wouldn't be aware of this change so I hoped prices would rise quickly. As far as I knew it wasn't a well know fact and it most definately wasn't in the patchnotes. If my competition did not prepare properly and didn't sit on a high supply of already crafted glyphs I'd have a good chance of controlling at least a part of the glyph market. If they did prepare or did have a large supply I'd miss a couple of days of selling so there was no risk involved.

The first few days not much happened, there was no noticible change in glyph prices or amount of glyphes posted. I did enjoy a couple of days downtime though, not having to mill, craft, post, check for undercuts and repost but instead prepared my scribe for Cataclysm by levelling her to level 80.

After four days or so I did start to notice a change in glyph prices, mainly in the glyphs made from Ethereal Ink. These where all 20g-50g before the patch and are currently between 45g and 125g.

On a normal weekday I used to make about 1000 to 1500 gold on glyphs, after I started selling again I noticed quite the increase in income:

This is from Tuesday morning 8AM to Tuesday evening 10PM, almost 2900 gold from two posting sessions.

I could have continued to sell glyphs during the couple of days after the patch, but by keeping my glyphs of the Auction House I managed to get a much better profit margin and learned a bit about my competition (they're not sitting on large supplies and don't check the JMTC forums :)). Sometimes it's best to wait out what happens after a high impact change and collect the profit later on.