Using the Professions of your Guild Mates
Yoni illustrated the Obsidium and Elementium shuffle at Just My Two Copper with a nice graphic that shows how you move your ore from raw, to gem, to jewellery, disenchanted to make mats for enchants, etc. However, I think that the majority of players do not have every single profession maxed out on an alt, and this is where your guild mates can help. Not everyone has their own mini guild of alts.
I didn’t have so many alts with maxed professions either, until Wrath of the Lich King. Back in The Burning Crusade, I would ask my guild members “please can you disenchant this for me?” or “sweet armor, can you make me some too? I have the mats!”
Nothing wrong with getting professional help from your guildies, and it’s a legitimate strategy to work together to get gold. If you have a bag full of green armor that you picked up whilst grinding or farming, for example, then ask one of your guild mates to disenchant the pieces you think you can’t sell. If you’re a miner, you could either sell the ore on the auction house, or again ask a guild friend to prospect it for you.
Offer your guild friend some money or a share of the mats in thanks for his work. Don’t take advantage of him. Then he’ll be happy to help you out again next time.
Don’t forget your lockboxes. Â Have you got a rogue friend who always helps you unlock your lockboxes?
TIP Keep your eyes open to guild chat, and see which patterns your guild have acquired recently, and which they can help you with.
Your guildies can be your eyes, ears, and nose
Extra hands
If you need any mats farmed, ask your guild mates first. Â They may be happy to take your gold! Â Just speak in guild chat and let your friends know that you are looking to buy, and would prefer to give the gold in payment to a guildie than to another player.
Extra Eyes and Ears
Check your guild roster, and there will often be another player in a capital city. They may be happy to check the Auction House for you, to check the prices of items you want to sell, or to see if there are many competitors. There’s an addon that can show you trade chat whilst you are out of the city (can someone tell me the name please?) but there’s nothing like the eyes and ears network of your guildmates. For example, your guild mate might have a friend in another guild who has a rare BoE Epic armor to sell, and would prefer to sell it to a friend or friend-of-a-friend instead of through the impersonal auction house.
Extra Nose
Admit it, do you read every line of every patch notes and every blue that’s posted on the forum? Unless you’re a hard core raider, more obsessed with WoW than me, or are working for MMO-Champion or Curse, I think you’ll have to join me in admitting I haven’t read everything. Here is where your guild mates can be your nose for you. When you read in guild chat “how much pyrite ore have you stockpiled for 4.3?” that would be your cue to pop your nose over the parapet and enquire why they’re stockpiling pyrite, and at what price, and why, and find out their sources. Lovely guildies.
An Entire Extra Body!
Your guild mates can be of mutual assistance to you. Offer to tank or heal an instance for them with your alt or offspec, and for them to give you the same favour in return. Could you even fit in twice the number of heroic dungeon instances in the time you would normally take queuing and dpsing for one? That’s double gold, double loot, double shards and crystals.
About the Author
Warcraft’s longest running Gold Making blog, The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande since 2010. Working on her 14th level 110, she has 9 years expertise in making gold, 19,000+ achievements, 1593 days played, over 39 million gold earned, and now playing World of Warcraft Legion live on www.twitch.tv/thegoldqueen The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling, snatch lists, and farming gold making. Want more updates on Warcraft Battle for Azeroth? Support our Patreon for exclusive pre-release Gold Guides.
Like this? Please tell a guild mate!
Gold With Your Guild Part 1 Perks and Pitfalls | Part 3: Land Army
Guild Perks
UPDATE: THESE WERE DEPRECIATED
Your army of supporters are a guild perk without including the guild achievement system, but here’s the summary of which of Blizzard’s Guild Perks can help you make gold in World of Warcraft.
Guild Perks that can make gold in world of warcraft
Level 3 Mount Up Increases speed while mounted by 10%.
Level 5 Cash Flow 1 and Level 16 Cash Flow 2 Each time you loot money from an enemy, an extra 5% (10%) gold is generated and deposited directly into your guild bank.
Level 8 Hasty Hearth Reduces the cooldown on your Hearthstone by 15 minutes.
Level 9 Reinforce Items take 20% less durability loss when you die.
Level 11 Mobile Banking Summons your guild bank. Instant, 1 hr cooldown
Level 14 Working Overtime Increases the chance to gain a skill increase on tradeskills by 10%.
Level 23 Bountiful Bags Increases the quantity of materials gained from Mining, Skinning, Herbalism, and Disenchanting by 15%.
Level 24 Bartering Reduces the price of items from all vendors by 10%.
The best of these are the bountiful bags perk, and the bartering perk at levels 23 and 24. Â Bountiful bags works with gathering, and also with things like “looting” herbs from dead mobs bodies, and it’s a good reason to move all your alts into a guild with level 23+ perks. Bartering reduces prices from vendors, which of course we love.
Guild Advancement and You – From Blizzard
The reason I included the guild bank Cash Flow is because it’s still entirely possible to create your own level 1 guild, and invite guild-less players, giving them the opportunity to benefit from the other perks, whilst gathering the Cash Flow perk either for yourself, or shared between the guild, or offered as a ‘free repairs’ perk. Whichever you decide, its “free gold” from Blizzard rather than from player’s pockets, so enjoy it and take advantage of them if you can.
Guild Pitfalls
Beware of new guildies asking for expensive crafts very obviously for resale. Similarly if you are a newcomer to a guild, with some rare recipes or recipes that cost a lot of time to get or gold to buy. Don’t be afraid to appeal to a guild officer if a guild member is rudely demanding that you provide free services that would normally cost them an arm and a leg.
I’d also say beware of members demanding free crafts needing chaos orbs or other BoP crafting items. My policy is if it costs a Chaos Orb to craft, then offer a percentage of the retail markup for that chaos orb (or living ember or dreamcloth). Â You should pay your crafter at least a percentage of what he could have made by selling the bop item that he worked for. Alternatively, lets go to a heroic together and we’ll pick up a chaos orb just for you. Â (note, chaos orbs will become unbound in a future patch but not in 4.2)
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 10 garrisons, 16k achievements, 1505 days played, and over 18m gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making.
Like this? Please tell a guild mate!
Gold With Your Guild Part 2: Call in the Pros
Gold with World of Warcraft Guilds
Introducing a small series about making gold in world of warcraft in a guild.
Guild membership is something that WoW players take for granted, until they have to change guild! This short series is split into subtopics with ideas about how you can make use of your guild to help you make gold in world of warcraft. The series begins with Perks and Pitfalls, looking at the guild perks features and some guildies to beware of!
5 GMs and Giving Back June 25
(June 26th is a day off for me – it’s my birthday!)
About the Author
Warcraft’s longest running Gold Making blog, The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande since 2010. Working on her 14th level 110, she has 9 years expertise in making gold, 19,000+ achievements, 1593 days played, over 39 million gold earned, and now playing World of Warcraft Legion live on www.twitch.tv/thegoldqueen The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling, snatch lists, and farming gold making. Want more updates on Warcraft Battle for Azeroth? Support our Patreon for exclusive pre-release Gold Guides.
Are the guides helping you? Please tell a guild mate! They’ll be glad you did.
The Darkmoon Faire isn’t on at the moment, but the set of four posts about the ways to make gold there every month remains a popular read. Part 1, the basics | Part 2, Darkmoon Faire Decks | Part 3, Vendors at Darkmoon Faire | Part 4, Fun and Surprises
Members Forum Did you know that The Gold Queen website has a free members forum? Posts are private, which means your ideas won’t be spread across the internet courtesy of google, and you also get the chance to gossip in peace with friends. We have friendly moderators, and everyone is made to feel welcome wherever they are in their gold-making, and everyone has something useful to share. We recently added a ‘no swearing’ policy after a vote.
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New to making gold? Here are 10 Easy Gold Tips for Beginners
Want to make gold more efficiently? Master all the ideas in my compendium of TSM guides
Tomorrow: I’m starting a new series of 5 posts about guilds
Gold Farming in For the Win
The book For the Win was mentioned in the comments to an article on the Guardian’s website “China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work”
It is estimated that 80% of all gold farmers are in China and with the largest internet population in the world there are thought to be 100,000* full-time gold farmers in the country. The Guardian
Written by an editor of Boingboing.net , the story of For the Win swings from character to character across the world, all involved in making money from online gaming. (* 100,000 gold farmers seems a very conservative number compared to the 400,000-500,000 farmers proposed by Barry Atkins et al in Videogame, Player, Text
In the twenty-first century, it’s not just capital that’s globalized: labour is too. Workers in special economic zones are trapped in lives of poverty with no trade unions to represent their rights. But a group of teenagers from across the world are set to fight this injustice using the most surprising of tools – their online video games.
In Industrial South China Matthew and his friends labour day and night as gold-farmers, amassing virtual wealth that’s sold on to rich Western players, while in the slums of Mumbai ‘General Robotwallah’ Mala marshalls her team of online thugs on behalf of the local gang-boss, who in turn works for the game-owners. They’re all being exploited, as their friend Wei-Dong, all the way over in LA, knows, but can do little about.
Until they begin to realize that their similarities outweigh their differences, and agree to work together to claim their rights to fair working conditions. Under the noses of the ruling elites in China and the rest of Asia, they fight their bosses, the owners of the games and rich speculators, outsmarting them all with their gaming skills. But soon the battle will spill over from the virtual world to the real one, leaving Mala, Matthew and even Wei-Dong fighting not just for their rights, but for their lives…
Imagine a world where illegally obtained money, say drugs money, could be smurfed or broken into smaller amounts, used to purchase World of Warcraft gold, the gold resold to a different farmer, and the dirty money is laundered in a place (WoW) with little legal supervision. Or is that world already here, and old news?
If world politics, economics or ethics of gold farming is your thing, grab a copy of the book from my Amazon affiliate link. In Matthew’s words “Okay, it is a game. but it’s also real life. It has consequences.” p276
Intermittent Reinforcement
One alarming idea proposed by one of For the Win’s characters is about intermittent reinforcement, the link between action (killing a boss) and reward (loot), and how adding RNG into the equation creates an addiction.
There’s also some thought-provoking ideas about intermittent reinforcement that are alarming.
Imagine you have a rat who gets some food every time he pushes a lever. How often to you think he pushes the lever? Â As often as he’s hungry I suppose. Now what about a level that gives food out at random? Sometimes one press, sometimes one hundred presses? They press it like crazy all day and all night. … One day you manage to kill a …npc … it drops some epic item and you have to keep going back to that spot, looking for a monster like it, thinking it’ll happen again. Â But it’s random, right? I’m not sure … I sometimes think that the game company deliberately messes up the odds so that when you’re just about to quit, you get another jackpot.”
Variable Ratio Schedule (refered to as VR in this wiki link) is the reason why people lose a lot of money playing lotteries or slot machines.
Do Blizzard mess with the alleged RNG of loot, drops and rewards? Yes. They did it in WOTLK (“Blizzard Details Secret World of Warcraft ‘Progressive Percentage’ Item Drop Mechanic“) and they alluded to it again in undocumented changes to Alchemy Transmute PROCs
Talking points: How many gold farmers are there? Should Blizzard be doing more to help or hinder the gold farmers? What money laundering policies would you implement? Do you think that Blizzard have added their own special sauce to RNG in order to cause addiction?
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 10 garrisons, 16k achievements, 1505 days played, and over 18m gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making.
I’m proud of you
I’m proud of you H, a member officer in my guild who made friends with me and who I helped with tips and tricks with starting to make gold, mostly in the AH, in world of warcraft. With just some more hugs and encouragement, he upped his game, taught himself more strategies and ideas, and really started to enjoy making gold. He didn’t need my help anymore.
A few days ago he whispered me “I made the gold cap”. Congratulations H, you’ve come a long way, and I’m proud of you.
I’m humbled by you
I’m humbled by you, the reader, because last night I was randomly browsing my google stats and discovered I had 10,000 views. It’s a huge leap from the number I expected to ever read this blog (think 6-10 readers!) Thank you so very much.
I’m cranky with you
I’m cranky with you, mr anonymous buyer on my server. You see, after some encouragement from my twitter friends, I decided to take the plunge and buy the swift spectral tiger for 600,000g in my AH. I told my guild, took a deep breath and clicked buyout. “Are you sure?” asked the AH. “Yes,” I replied. “Tough luck,” said the AH, “Someone else just bought it”.
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 10 garrisons, 16k achievements, 1505 days played, and over 18m gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making.