I have been thinking a lot about Zero Sum today. It started with reading a quote in a book:
“When faced with a choice between abundance and scarcity, choose abundance. … Scarcity involves hoarding, and abundance involves sharing … the choice for abundance typically involves a refusal to view the world as a zero-sum competition. No one else has to lose for you to win.” Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Conformity, Penguin, 2010
In World of Warcraft, PvP is zero sum. In order for you to win, you must kill your opponent.  Wiki: “a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which a participant’s gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s)”
The AH and WoW Economy at first appears to be Zero Sum. Someone pays for an item and you gain their gold. But that’s not all there is to the game.
In world of warcraft economics we have the extra factor “U” In my post How Much Gold are You Worth? I argued that Item + U (ie What You Do) = More Valuable Item . In other words, what you do in the game, increases your WoW Virtual Economy. Â Your realm’s GDP, gross domestic product, if we’re taking the economy metaphor further, can only increase, depending on the value of U.
Now let’s factor in abundance. Unlike the real world, farming in world of warcraft involves only bending down to pick up loot from a dead mob, or harvesting herbs or ore. Quests award gold. Â Quest rewards are vendorable for gold. The average amount of gold per player is increasing.
In short, the only thing you can do to LOSE gold is to spend too much on gold sinks. Gold is typically added by in-game action, such as completion of a quest. These events are the major contributing factor to economic mudflation. Gold sinks are designed to permanently remove some of this money from the game to combat this effect. (paraphrased from wiki)
Ideas for Gold Sinks:
1) hurl yourself off a cliff so many times that your repair costs (known in virtual economics as a dynamic gold sink* ) becomes more than your income
2) purposefully destroy your items and sit around naked in Orgrimmar doing nothing
3) waste gold on buying items then vendoring them. Alternately, buy some dalaran cheese and feed it to the Stormwind rats.
What happens to your gold when you spend it, instead of saving it?
It is given to the person from whom your bought the item. Although the AH takes a cut, the gold is still in circulation. And that player then has the ability to buy something from you. If you had not bought the item from the player, he would not have the gold to buy from you. This is a win-win situation, not a win-lose situation.
World of Warcraft economics is not zero sum. It is abundant.
You can achieve your dreams of gold riches in world of warcraft without taking away the enjoyment or the riches of other players.
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.
What is your most devious gold making strategy?
The title of Mageshadow’s JMTC Blog Carnival calls for bloggers to reveal their most devious gold making strategy. I rub my hands with glee because it would be a perfect time for me to preach my own “be nice!” strategy in contrast.
Devious adj not straightforward, shifty or crooked, subtle, cunning, crafty, artful, sly, not sincere or candid, deceitful, underhand, “a devious scheme to acquire wealth”.
When you use a method of trading, acquiring gold, mats, items, or benefits for yourself, that is insincere, you challenge yourself personally as to your business ethics. How devious is ‘devious’? How close to against the Terms of end user agreement do you want to work? On the other hand, how open are you willing to be? ÂWould your white kitten actually sell for 200g if you advertise that you bought it for 60s earlier in the day? I discussed business ethics in this post.
When you try to pull the wool over the eyes of your buyer, this is what you say to potential customers:
Its not an image I want to give my own customers, so I have to challenge myself constantly: am I doing the right thing? I’m sure I probably mess up sometimes but at least I try and remember that my reputation is golden.
I hope Mageshadow will forgive me then, for changing the question of the blog carnival.
What is your most clever strategy for making world of warcraft gold?
- Could it be flipping vendor-bought items and patterns for a higher price in the Auction House?
- Could it be shuffling items from one character to another, adding value constantly until the finished, saleable item is worth many times the value of the original materials?
- Could it be scanning the Auction House constantly looking for new ways to improve my gold making?
- Maybe I’m very clever at using Trade Skill Master? Or do I have a special method for combining TSM with Auctioneer, Lil Sparky’s and Auctionator to make wicked fast undercuts and arbitrage snipes?
- Diversification, is that it? Not putting all my eggs in one basket?
Clever though it is, I want to submit this cheesy one liner as my cleverest insight into making world of warcraft gold:
Enjoy yourself
I had a private conversation with another player, complete stranger, during the JMTC podcasted meeting on Friday. He was asking for ways to make money and gave me all his statistics, professions, and the more I asked him, the more I got the impression that he just was not enjoying himself.
For goodness sake, people, you PAY to play this game. It’s not a job! Don’t look at the other guys with loads of gold and think that you’re a failure in comparison and that you MUST do this that and the other to be taken seriously as a gold maker.
Do what you love, the rest will fit in somehow, somewhere.
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.
Darkmoon Faire Guide
The Darkmoon Faire has hit Elwynn Forest. Â My dark moon fair guide is still working, here is part one.
Hello June 2011
I’m hitting 3 1/2 months of “serious” blogging, and still enjoying myself. Â June will see me continuing to offer whatever posts I can think might tickle your fancy (!) and hopefully some useful tips for you along the way.
Posts to Read
http://nerffaids.blogspot.com/2011/06/thats-what-750k-liquid-in-my-guild-bank.html
Faid’s description of different types of gold making players was absolutely spot on, and also entertaining.
If you are brand new to making gold in World of Warcraft, then try Goldgrubs Academy, which is a blog with basic, essential foundations of making gold. My posts there aren’t exactly earth-shattering, but I know there are players out there who still need the information that can be overlooked in blogger’s bids to add flavour or sophistication to their daily gold posts, guides and articles.
http://www.bbwog.org/2011/06/bangkok-bills-world-of-goldcraft-gold.html
Mr B Bill has released the first sight of his own gold guide. He kindly offered me a sneak preview in exchange for a proofread/opinion and I can report that he has put a lot of work into the guide. It’s on sale now for $19.99, after which the price will double. You can find out about it here. [This is not an affiliate link or a paid-for review.] Yes, I know his pitch page isn’t as glossy as the other gold guides out there, but that’s because Bangkok Bill isn’t a copywriter, he’s a gold maker. And he can teach you how to do the same.
Tip of the day
Copper Bars + Jewelcrafter +Essences of Fire = Fused Wiring Sells nice alone, or you can use it in crafting pets / jumper cables.
Zygors Guide Half Price
Zygor’s Leveling Guide is half price for the next 24 hours, now is a good time to buy if you are looking for that sort of thing.
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.
Dear Gold Queen
I have a question that you could possibly talk about to all your followers. Is it or is it not important to have a buyout price attached to your auctions? would i not attract more traffic without the buyout price? would i be excluding the quick buyer, or the impulse buyer? just your thoughts on the matter. thank you. David Jones
Hi David, thanks for asking. I restrained myself from answering your comment so that I could post the answer for everyone.
A background for newcomers to selling on the Auction House:
When you post an item to sell on the AH, you have the choice of setting a bid price, or setting the bid price and the buyout price.
A bid price is the lowest amount that a seller would accept to purchase the item. When you set your bidding price you need to check 1) that you would be willing to accept that price for the item, and 2) check that the amount is now lower than the vendor price. You may laugh at the second advice, but it is possible to make a very decent gold with an Auctioneer addon scan and search for items to resell to a vendor for profit! Some guys just do not realise that merrily undercutting the other sellers leaves them open to exploitation. Don’t be one of them. Check your prices before you click!
You might laugh at Blizzard’s own outdated advice: “You should set the item’s minimum bid at a similar or cheaper price. If you set the item at a more expensive price, it will not sell” Forgetting to tell us that you might waste your gold if you could have soll it to a vendor instead? naughty naughty!
Auction House History
Back in WoW Vanilla, when the Auction House was a novelty, and the biggest news in World of Warcraft gold making was “let’s team up and grind the elites at Tyr’s Hand for cash!” then Auction times were set to 2, 8 or 24 hours. If you look closely at thescreenshot for today you can see the old auction times.
If special loot dropped, like a BoE epic, then you could advertise in the trade channel that you were running an auction for 2 hours, with a starting bid.
Because they were likely to hang around for the auction duration, players could place bids and actively bid against each other, similar to ebay. There was no 1 hour waiting time for receiving your gold in your mailbox, so both parties were happy.
Unfortunately, the gold sellers loved and abused the system. Blizzard changed the auction duration. They are now 12h 24h 48h.
Player bidding
Even though playtimes are now longer than 6 years ago, I doubt any of your potential buyers are willing to stand around bidding against each other for 48 hours!
Blizzard cautioned at the time: “Check out how long the auction is running. If it’s running an extremely long time, you may wish to avoid bidding on that item. Otherwise you’ll have to wait that long to get the item”
No Buyout – No Sale!
Today: if you do not set a buyout price, then you risk your auction being ignored by players. Auctionator addon buyout screen virtually ignores items without a buyout price.
If a player wants an item now, then he wants it NOW. He doesn’t want to haggle. Items bought today are more likely to be for immediate use, such as mats for crafting, flasks for raiding, updated gear. Tell today’s player that he can’t have the item until the end of the auction duration, minimum 12 hours, and he’ll either throw a tantrum or just buy something else.
I want it now
Today’s bidding Wars
If a player is willing to haggle, then negotiating is now normally done through chat whispers. Occasionally I have set up parties where interested bidders could fight it out between themselves.
When to sell bid-only items
The only time I can think you would not post a buyout price on your AH item would be if you are selling something horrendously expensive (swift spectral tiger etc) and are willing to accept any price over that large amount. Or if you want to tease and get amusement from frustrated players who want a very rare item. I’ve also offered items in the AH with a very low starting bid and no buyout when I want to use this as an advertisement to whip up some hype in the trade channel.
/2 WTS [Bold Inferno Ruby] for 1c in the AH now. No buyout price, so your bid could win! Whisper me for prices for other gem cuts.
When to buy bid-only items
The classic time to put in a bid for an item without a buyout price, or even for an item with an ending-soon buyout is the night before the weekly maintenance. Monday or Tuesday night, you can place a low bid on items that you want to buy. During overnight maintenance, auction duration continues to countdown. With no players online to bid more than your offer, the auction might close without any other bids.
Although this is a strategy known to quite a lot of players, you might be surprised at the low numbers who actually remember to do this on your realm server, so it is worth checking this week.
Talking point: Do you remember the old auction times on the AH? Â We had quite a discussion on twitter about the old AH durations. Mageshadow and myself have vague memories of a 30m duration, but no reminder screenshots.
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.
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p.s. Would you like to chat to me? You can email my personal address using the contact form, you can chat to me on twitter @thegoldqueen, or you can reply to a comment here. I get all of them on my desktop pc and my little smartphone which sleeps under my pillow with me. (Who needs a Gold King, when you have a smart phone, eh?)
Seafood Magnifique is the Cataclysm’s equivalent of the old Fish Feast raid buff food. A buffet that a player places which can be eaten by every member of the raid to gain a buff. However, unlike in wrath of the lich king expansion, the Seafood Magnifique is bind on pickup, which means that you won’t find it for sale on any auction house. Instead, the raw fish sell on the auction house for a good profit. This post examines some of those ingredients, plus the other most expensive fish available on my own home server. As always, don’t forget to check your own server supply, demand, and current prices, before you invest time in fishing for these gold makers.
Before I continue, I want to thank El’s Angling website, and Wowhead for some of the data on the fish.
Seafood Magnifique ingredients
- Fathom eel
- Highland guppy
- Lavascale catfish.
Top 8 Fish in the AH
1. Highland Guppy is the most expensive fish, mostly because of its difficulty to fish. You can find it in schools along the river in Twilight Highlands, which needs a very high fishing skill. I found a nasty looking bot fishing here last time I went fishing and promptly reported him.
2. Fathom Eel Although El’s Angling suggests you fish the Uldum coastal schools for Fathom Eel, I personally recommend fishing from the Tol Barad schools. That’s because it’s faster to get to Tol Barad through the portal, and you can do your TB dailies at the same time, multitasking the amount of gold you can make. If your fishing character is a herbalist, you might prefer to try the Uldum schools, because you can pick up Whiptail on the Uldum riverbanks as you fly south. Fathom eel is also a favourite fish of agility-buff users, like my own feral druid.
3. Lavascale Catfish Lavascale Catfish Best found along the Uldum river, possibly as you head south to pick up those Fathom Eels. The Lavascale Minestrone gives a +90 Mastery buff. These seem to be in more plentiful supply than the other ingredients for the Magnifique.
4. Blackbelly Mudfish are actually the second most expensive fish in my AH at the time of writing. They cook into +dodge and +parry buff food, making them the tank’s food of choice. Anyone remember Spicy Crawdads back in The Burning Crusade?
5. Albino Cavefish These are an odd fish, because they make Deepstone Oil, kind of a super-upgraded version of the blackmouth fish of vanilla, which made the blackmouth oil for alchemists. Deepstone oil makes mysterious potions for alchemists, but more importantly 8 of them are used in the recipe for the Vial of the Sands epic mount. You won’t be surprised to hear that the oils therefore sell best in stacks of 8.
6. Deepsea Sagefish These are the clothies’ fish: they make Delicious Sagefish Tail and Severed Sagefish Head, which give Spirit and Intellect buffs. Grab them from Tol Barad Coastline whilst you’re doing your dailies.
7. Blood shrimp. I was surprised by the price of Blood Shrimp on my AH. They’re pretty standard early-cataclysm fish, obtained from Abyssal Clams. They never used to cost this much gold, but if I had to make a guess I would say that the price is currently high due to their use in the Whitecrest Gumbo cooking recipe. This is a recommended cooking recipe for leveling cooking from 450-500. If the majority of players have the cooking profession, and want to level it up, it’s likely they will at least consider buying some of these shrimp. “Catch” yours by opening clams which drop from mobs in Vashj’ir.
8. Dragonfin Angelfish The 8th most popular fish on the Auction House is a wrath of the lich king staple. I was surprised to see that these were still selling, however with low competition in Northrend, these fish can provide a “welfare” agility buff to players who can’t afford the fathom eels.
Biggest Surprise from scanning the fish available in my auction house?
Low numbers of Deviate Fish and the cooked Savory Deviate Delight. I looked back at the Auction House later and found more savory deviate delight for sale at about 10g per fish. That’s a nice profit. If you have reset your hearthstone to Dalaran like me, then you can do the Northrend fishing daily quest for the chance to get some free raw deviate fish in the reward bag. I’m not sure I would entirely trust the ones in the AH posted by someone with a facerolled-name. Smells like a fishing bot to me. Something a bit fishy there (badum, tsh!)
image: (C) www.trophiesandmedals.com
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 the Queen of making World of Warcrft gold! Steal my cheatfree razorsharp strategies for your first million.”
I’m not 100% happy with my Elevator Pitch. Let me tell you about the process of writing it:
I started listing all the descriptions of the blog that I could think of.
strategy, how to, simple, easy, cheat-free, queen, gold, warcraft, polite, hard, business, advice, royal…
Checking the Thesaurus for ‘majestic’ I found “an English Lady”, Ladylike, elegant, glorious, luxuries, plush, stately, opulent, civil, dignified, courteous.
Ladylike was far too dainty. I needed to add a word that had the idea of courtly or considerate manners without being dainty. I wanted to capture the essence of riches and opulence, together with a female “King” or millionaire leader, but ‘Queen’ was the only word that really described it, so I went back to plan A. Queen it is.
I’m also not entirely happy with ‘razorsharp’. It sounds hyped up, when the word I really want to use is “correct”. Which wouldn’t be right at all (geddit? right? .. uh nevermind then). The strategies work, they’re real, and I can’t bear cheats.
“Your first million” is a new addition to the quote. I wanted to give the idea that you can get a million gold, and that I could help you on the way to your first, and after that you would know what to do all by yourself.
I have a feeling that any elevator pitch that I came up with wouldn’t be adequate for my perfectionism. Here are some trial and error out-takes along the way that didn’t make the grade:
The queen of all World of Warcraft gold blogs (too arrogant)
Should a World of Warcraft Millionaire be allowed to share all her strategies? (too hyped)
Ladylike, legal, cheat-free World of Warcraft riches (load of crap)
Its like a World of Warcraft gold guide, except free. (not specific enough)
Talking points: Am I missing any descriptions of my blog that make it different from the others? Could I change the hype factor without changing the energy level of the statement?
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.