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Gold Capped: Buy low, sell high
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Everyone who gets into the auction house to make tons of gold immediately assumes that it's done by buying low and selling high. Seems simple enough, and it's one of those chestnuts that we've all heard Wall Street types talking about. Brokerage takes no trade skills, no addons, and it feels like making money from nothing. A lot of what I've written about for this column has focused on how to use trade skills for profit, but the truth is that brokerage really can be a profitable use of your time. It's not as easy as it sounds, but assuming you have a solid understanding of what you're doing, you can use it to good effect.
Gold Capped: Earning gold for absolute beginners
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Aaron wrote in the other day to say: Despite having played WoW for years I'm a complete gold-making newbie and my characters are all dirt-poor because of it. I decided it was time to start playing the gold-making meta game so I've been reading through issues of your Gold Capped column, and while I've really enjoyed what I've read I'm afraid I'm still at a loss as to where to get started. Obviously I don't have a lot of upfront capital to jump-start my endeavor, either. I was wondering if you've ever written or would consider writing an article for complete, absolute beginners such as myself. Unless you started the game with rich friends, this is something that everyone has to go through. People getting into earning gold from scratch often don't have any clue where to start, and they often have a bunch of incorrect ideas about what they need to get going.
Blizzard adds WoW guild chat to iPhone Mobile Armory app
If you're hopelessly addicted to guild chat -- and you've got an iPhone or iPod Touch -- Blizzard has a new app designed to make sure you never miss another moment of drama. A new remote guild chat feature has been added to the World of Warcraft Mobile Armory app, and players are now able to chat and send whispers via their Apple mobile device. You'll pay $2.99 per month for the privilege, and the WoW remote subscription also grants you access to the game's auction house functionality while you're on the move. Blizzard is demoing the service -- and waiving fees -- for a limited time, during which the guild chat feature will be enabled on select servers (currently Fizzcrank and Lightbringer). More details are available at the official announcement page. There's no official word on an Android version, though ZAM reports that it "should be released soon."
Gold Capped: 5 addons for profitable buying, selling and crafting
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! You can make gold in World of Warcraft without addons. You can also PvP and raid without addons; however, for the vast majority of people, that would result in lower performance. Unlike PvP and raiding, however, there is absolutely no way to use the default UI to be as productive in the auction house as you would be with addons. The default Blizzard UI for professions and the AH was not built for making money. I divide gold addon users into two groups: the people who want everything to be as efficient and streamlined as possible, and the people who simply want to be able to do basic tasks without as much hassle as the default UI imposes on us. Let's call them "power auctioneers" and "retail auctioneers." What addons are available now, and how can you use them to accomplish your goals?
Gold Capped: Profiting with tailoring
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Tailoring is a profession often accused of being a profitless pursuit. While any profession can be unprofitable if you try hard enough, let's talk about some of the things you can do with tailoring. I'm going to start with the market that's newest for this expansion: PvP gear.
Gold Capped: Competition in tailoring
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! This week's community post is the most recent recording of the weekly JMTC's meeting. I was invited to attend this one and answer a couple of questions. I got an email from Aralo on Altar of Storms recently that I wanted to share. I know cloth is not what a person would call a high profit market. It's cut more often then gems, skinned more than leather, melted down more than ore, and well you know where all these puns go. In Wrath on my sever, I was able to (haphazardly at least) able to maintain a steady hold on the more demanded markets. In Cataclysm, though, I'm struggling to stay afloat. Embersilk is particularly rough. I bring this up because never have I seen you really talk cloth that was not a cooldown. Do you have any ideas on how to stay afloat on threads or maybe some add-ons other than auctioneer to help build and maintain my market? Admittedly, part of the reason I want to share this is all the awesome puns. Secondly, I do have a few answers. I'll be writing up a proper tailoring guide next, I promise, but in the meantime, I want to talk about that "steady hold" on the market.
Behind the Mask: Being resourceful with resources
Most of the time, we look at MMORPGs and talk about features, gameplay, community, content, and other things like that. We rarely look at an MMO's economy unless we're actually hardcore players, and almost invariably players think the economy is messed up in one way or the other. Champions Online is really no different. People complain about overinflated auction house prices all the time, about how transaction fees and auction limits ruin the economy, and how the value of certain super-rare items has plummeted. Overall, I'm very happy with CO's economy. Even though the AH interface is horribly broken (and I'm sure the devs are aware), many people use the AH and most goods are available for sale (even the elusive buttcape). Because the cash-shop items can be traded and sold, there's a certain strangeness in the market, but this is largely a good thing.
Gold Capped: Can you ever have too many alchemists?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! I got an email from Kaefera that got me thinking: I have recently been leveling 9x level 75 characters on my server, to completely abuse professions and make some serious cash. I'm currently giving each of them alchemy, I have 4 transmute specced alchemists so far, currently growing at a rate of an alchemist a week. My question to you is more of a suggestion, what would you suggest to grab as a secondary profession on each of them? I would like something similar to my Truegold, where I can log on once a day on each character, craft/do whatever in 5 minutes, then move to the next. So this is something I've heard before, but more in Wrath of the Lich King, when alchemist cooldowns represented a very serious amount of gold per day. The reasoning was (and is) that if you level a bunch of alchemists, you can log in once a day to each character to use their cooldowns and make disgusting amounts of gold with virtually no effort. The question is, does this still work well enough to justify the investment?
Gold Capped: How much should you undercut?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! This week's community post is the most recent recording of the weekly JMTC's meeting, and I'll be there next week answering questions. This isn't the first time I've written about undercutting, and it won't be the last. The burning question of how much to undercut is something that just keeps coming up, not unlike the question of which pet is the best for the DPS. If you ask people who don't sell on the AH, they'll give you a blank stare and make some comment about having a guildie craft it. If you ask an auctioneer with less than 100k, they'll say to never undercut more than a copper. To properly answer this question, we need to try and understand the effect that undercutting has on the market you're in.
Gold Capped: Milling and prospecting changes ahead?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! This week's community post is the Auction House Junkies podcast's most recent episode. The recent UI developer Q&A contained a little nugget that I found interesting: Quote: Milling and Prospecting are incredibly dull and very manual tasks at present, especially when you do them in bulk. Speaking as a scribe, the entire manufacturing process from herb to pigment to ink to glyph is both time-consuming, boring and sending me well on my way to repetitive stress wrist and index finger injuries. Yes, we totally understand why this is a problem. The reason we can't make it work just like other trade skills, is that we don't know which herbs and ore you want to use. If you have some cheap ore and some very expensive ore, we don't want to accidentally use the expensive ore. There are a few ways to fix this. One is we just redesign Milling and Prospecting. If they were recipe-based, then we would know exactly which material to use. It would also add a huge list of repetitive recipes to your Professions pages. We could also make some kind of new UI (think of something simple, like the Reforging UI) to let you drag and drop the materials you want to use. The advantage of the "box" solution is we could also use it for Disenchanting. source I was thrilled to hear Blizzard's considering changing the way this works. I had always just assumed that the clunky design of milling and prospecting was on purpose to put a limit on how much ore or herbs one player could process.
The Road to Mordor: Fashion show! Fashion show! Fashion show at lunch!
Major patch weeks are always a great deal of fun in Lord of the Rings Online as everyone digs into the new content, looks for hidden gems, and goes on grand new adventures. As much as I appreciate most everything in this week's Echoes of the Dead update, I have to say that, hands-down, the additional outfit slots made me the happiest. Yes, I'm weird, but I can't be the only one who had an inner squeal of joy when Turbine announced that it was going to expand (via the store) the number of outfit spots from two to five. I've always, always loved the outfit system in this game as a way to give my characters a unique and aesthetically pleasing look versus having to stare at the mismatched armor they seem to pick up along the way. In celebration of the additional outfit slots, I wanted to finally dig into the outfit system and look at the basics of Middle-earth fashion: where you get these pieces, how colors come into play, and where you might go for inspiration. So let's put on our finest frippery and strut the catwalk, ladies and gentlemen! (I promise, next week I'll be much more manly. Probably.)
Gold Capped: Improving the default auction house interface
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The default interface for the auction house could use some loving. It's an essential part of players' gaming experience, and whether they use it or not, its design has an effect on them. We've seen many examples of Blizzard designing parts of their UI to include features provided by addons that had become so prevalent that everyone had to run them. For example, threat didn't always show up on the default frames -- back in my day, we had to run Omen to avoid pulling aggro from the tank. It's important to recognize that not every valuable interface tweak belongs in the basic WoW UI, though. If it's a feature that's only used by a small segment of players or is unnecessarily complex, it's probably best off in an addon. You won't see me advocating that the base AH UI keep historic pricing numbers, for example. It is, though, a travesty that you have to page through hundreds of pages of single auctions to get to the lower priced stacks.
ARGO Online kicks off third closed beta phase
Yesterday marked the successful completion of ARGO Online's second closed beta phase. Today, the sci-fi, steampunk, and fantasy-flavored free-to-play MMO kicks off phase three, which is slated to run through March 30th. If you've participated in any of the earlier phases, you're already registered and will be able to access the new beta using your pre-existing account credentials. Phase three adds a guild system and an auction house to ARGO's post-apocalyptic world, and players will be able to continue testing all of the previously implemented systems. burda:ic has also released a few statistics from phase two of the beta, including the most popular Noblian class (the Explorer), the most popular Floresslah class (the Druid), and the distribution of Noblian vs. Floresslah players (51 percent to 49 percent). Check out the official ARGO Online website for more information or to sign up for beta.
Gold Capped: How to do the jewelcrafting shuffle
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! You've bought your ore at a discount, you've prospected it all, and now you're trying to decide how to make your money back. Like in Wrath of the Lich King, we have the ability to process all of these raw gems in some way in order to make more money. This is usually called a "shuffle"; it amounts to common sense and knowing what the gems can be used for. Let's start with the basics. Each of the three modern ores prospects slightly differently. Obsidium Ore prospects into six green-quality gems per stack and a residual number of blue-quality gems. Elementium Ore prospects four green-quality gems per stack and one blue-quality gem. Pyrite Ore prospects into four green-quality gems, one and a half blue-quality gems, and an average of eight Volatile Earths per stack.
Gold Capped: Monopolizing the market
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! I got an email that got me thinking about monopolies. I play on a medium to small pop server that is decidedly near the bottom of progression, and there is one individual on our server who has a monopoly on epics. He seems to play all day, regularly buying up underpriced epics from clueless people in trade, as well as the reasonable and even overpriced epics from the AH. He then jacks the prices up 10-15K. Based on what I can tell from popular WoW economy websites, our server's epic prices are consistently 10-20K gold more than the average. Kudos to this guy, but it's annoying me in some way I can't quite put my finger on. It doesn't effect me personally: I don't buy much BoE gear and I'm fine with my AH income. It's the idea of the monopoly that bothers me. I feel like it's hurting the server in some way. My question is: there must be a few economic theory type solutions to busting a monopoly of this nature, but what are they?
Gold Capped: Ore-splosion
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The auction house is starting to have to stack all the ore they're listing for sale out back of the warehouse. Elementium Ore and Obsidium Ore have, in the last few days, been listed in quantities most people would consider unimaginable at prices that make auctioneers cackle. Until they realize that everyone has gotten this amount of stock. Level ones have been cropping up like mushrooms and listing hundreds of stacks of ore per night on every server I've checked into. I'm not the only one who has written about this. Everyone loves cheap Cataclysm ore. It means cheap blacksmithing goods, cheap gems, cheap enchanting mats, and cheap engineering items. It also has the unique benefit of having the highest price floor of any ore ever introduced to the game. Obsidium prospects into 6 green quality raw gems and an average of 0.3 rare gems per stack, and elementium into 4 green and 1 blue. This means that if you do nothing but cut and vendor the greens for 9g, the "floor" for obsidium is 54g, and elementium is 36g. Then you have the rares. This floor is the bare minimum of what the ore is worth, but it's used for so many things. What else can we do with all of it?
Gold Capped: WoW Prospector for profitable prospecting
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, hate mail, or guild applications! Prospecting is something jewelcrafters can do to turn ore into raw gems. It takes 8 seconds of pure casting time to prospect a stack of ore, as well as whatever time it takes you to look all the gems out of the four loot windows that entails. It can't be legally automated, so that makes prospecting the semi-porous membrane between the ore and raw gem markets. Without this barrier, the relationship between the prices of ore and raw gems would be more like the ore and bars in which unless you have a small market with no active miner auctioneers, the price of bars isn't usually much more than the ore that went into making it. As it is, you may often find the price of ore is much lower than the gems you get from prospecting it are worth, even if you just sell them raw on the auction house. The reason for this is that mining ore is hard enough, and many times, miners will just throw their wares into the AH and rely on the market to snap up any ore below the price where prospecting is profitable. Also, unless these miners happen to be (or have) jewelcrafters, they may not exactly know what their ore represents in terms of raw gem money. Enter Wow Prospector, which allows you to input the price per ore and for the raw gems, then output whether it's worth prospecting.
Gold Capped: TradeSkillMaster, the last trade skill and finances addon you'll ever need
Every week (since Feb. 14, 2010), WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, hate mail, or guild applications! edit: This post introduces the addon and concepts, but for a hands on setup guide, check out the basic and advanced posts. I have been playing around with a new addon, TradeSkillMaster. I've talked about a whole slew of other tools players can use to make money before, but none of them are anywhere near as awesome as TSM. Before I jump in, though, you should all probably know that this addon is still in beta. There are a few little bugs I've encountered (and reported), but the addon works very well in its current state. Please note that when you download the addon, you will need to download each module separately, as the entirety of the addon's functionality is accessed through the modules. They are linked in the description section of the TSM main page, but if you have a Curse Premium account, you can get them all at once. TSM is now my main tool for every single one of the markets I'm active in. That said, Sapu, the creator of the addon, needs help. He's done 95% of the code on the project so far, so if any of you are looking for an opportunity to work on an exciting and popular World of Warcraft addon project, I'd be just thrilled if it was this one. Down to business: what does TradeSkillMaster do, and why am I so excited that I wrote a post about it before it's done?
The Undermine Journal reboots with AH sales profiles
I reported when it went offline, and it looks like The Undermine Journal is back. It's added a bunch of realms, to boot. Additionally, the development blog post linked above has a few tidbits about some features coming down the pipes, including Twitter direct messages as a potential vehicle for market notifications. Also exciting is the possibility of a raw auction house feed being made available (for free), so other sites could make AH mashups of their own without having to redesign the armory crawler. This site is an amazing tool for stalking the auction house efficiently when you can't be directly in front of an AH. Combined with the Remote Auction House, this allows people to keep a semi-persistent presence on the market without needing to be in game all day. It's also invaluable for researching new markets and strategizing against your serious competitors. In fact, the only feature people have really voiced a lot of concern about is the seller activity page. The heat map can tell people when it's worth logging in to undercut, which can lead to people feeling like they're being unfairly targeted. The current items section tells interested players what other markets they could target someone in. The standard response to concerns is that this is all just data, and what people do with it is not the fault of site that makes the data accessible. There is no privacy in an open market, and just like you can hardly be upset if someone puts a photo of a sale sign in your storefront window on the internet, you can't get upset if a site like the UJ makes everything you have for sale available through a public interface. Personally, I like being able to stalk my competition more than I'm afraid of what they might do by stalking me. After all, there's only one of me and at least 50 of them. Additionally, I like to practice what I preach about market agility, and I like to think that every time a competitor closes a door on me, I can find a new door. Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped, plus the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is taking your questions at basil@wowinsider.com.
Gold Capped: How to farm Maelstrom Crystals
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. Email Basil (new address is basil@wowinsider.com; old one no longer works) with your comments, questions or hate mail! The Maelstrom Crystal used to be disenchantable from an easily crafted epic. This was hotfixed, and the prices have unsurprisingly shot through the roof. People still want their gear enchanted, however, and for some reason these things keep appearing on the auction house. Where are they coming from? How can you get them? This article will discuss the current cheapest methods for getting them.
