CJ posted a comment on my blog about his (her?) problems with making gold:
I must say that my biggest problem with goldmaking thus far has been my complete inability to post and sell during prime raid times on my server. I play on a large, raiding-population heavy server, but Im also a raider myself. So every Tuesday-Thursday, I have to be told numerous times to hurry up and log on to my main healer so our 10man group can get going. And every Tuesday-Thursday, I can only sigh as thousands in gem and enchant sales just slip through my fingers. (The few times I manage to sit from raid I see HUGE profits.)
Though Ive gotten used to having gems precut and posted seconds before we have to start, I still havent found a way to ditch those pesky heroic modes to repost
First of all, I empathise with you here. I had to ditch raiding myself this year (5 months cold turkey and I still miss it) in order to spend time on this blog and to care for my children more often. My youngest son was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome yesterday and he takes a lot of time to care for. By the time the weekend comes, I’m desperate for a lie in. This then turns into a lie in/late lunch / housework session, and before I know it, it’s 5pm and I’ve completely missed the entire Saturday or Sunday rush, and my family are still asking for more attention.
So when I’m writing my reply to your worries, CJ, I’m also writing to myself, maybe typing it up will help it sink in better for me too, heh.
Time Managing
This week I’ve been away from the blog quite a lot. One of the things I was doing was writing my next mini guide, and one of the sections there is about Time Management. Sounds heavy, huh, but really its just time-organizing, or controlling what stuff you spend your time doing. It’s about making time your servant, rather than being a slave to time yourself.
When we don’t have the amount of time that we want, unfortunately many World of Warcraft players respond by taking time away from their other interests and activities. Do you remember your old hobbies that you don’t do any more? I used to paint watercolours (watercolor) and play bass guitar, and do neither of these now! Blizzard itself warns “remember to take all things in moderation, even World of Warcraft” on their loading screen tips. So I will join readers in feeling suitably chastised for playing too much world of warcraft. I better try and remember this one every day 🙂
The answer isn’t to play even more World of Warcraft. There is not much we can do to be able to play the AH whilst doing something else, like raiding. You could try accessing the remote AH over your mobile or website during the raid, but I think we both know that will not help you focus on your raid. And you don’t want someone else topping Recount! Trying to shove and fit everything in to a small time slot like this will just stress you out.
Our answer must be to make more efficient and effective use of what little time we do have, instead of yearning for that which we can’t have.
Practical Advice
Can you set a reminder to yourself to post the scrolls, gems, or whatever sells highest before raid time? That way, they are sat on the AH, working for you, whilst you are raiding. Â Set an alarm on your mobile cell phone if you are forgetful like me.
Use your down time to the best advantage. When sales are slow, use that time for the prospecting, gathering, or non-selling work. Did you do your dailies yet? Remembered to get your limited supply items this week? When was the last time you picked up your free gems from consortium in Nagrand (golden draenites are on my snatch list for selling to tailors making flying carpets), have you been to Tol Barad today? Did you mail everything across to the right alt? Is everything READY to sell once the hot-sales-time hits?
Keep looking on the bright side. You missed the raid time selling times, but you maybe got a load of points you can turn into BoE Boots that still sell for a lot of gold. And because you’re a raider, you have the knowledge about which gems (enchants/glyphs etc) sell to which classes, and which are the most sought after. Players don’t realise that this knowledge is valuable, until they start to forget it. I realised this when I dragged my warlock to 85 and discovered I had forgotten which stats were suitable for her spec … doh!
You still have all weekend to profit, and the other non raiding days, so join me in my attempt to take gold making in moderation, and more effectively.
Talking Points: Can you think of some more bonus points of raiding rather than working AH? Do you want to add any of your ideas for being more effective or efficient in your gold making, for CJ?
Image courtesy of DailyClipArt.net
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.
Its ‘her’ 🙂
Thanks for featuring my comment! There’s a lot of good ideas here on time management, as well as on setting priorities. I don’t think the time investment of another account is worth it for me (I’m a college student here, I don’t really have the extra $150 lying around unless I don’t want food for the month), but I think I could probably benefit from letting some less profitable things go. I hadn’t thought of setting an alarm for myself either… something that will yell at me to get caught up on my scrolls before I start raid (I always forget!).
As a side comment regarding your talking point, I do have another bonus from raiding, albeit a small one. Since I’m the only alchemist in my raiding group, I’m the one providing cauldrons every week. I receive gold for the base cost of making them, but my main is also an Elixir Master. Guess who keeps all the flasks procs? ^^
If you value your time more than cash, think about getting a second account.
If you have multiboxing software (I use pwnboxer), you don’t even have to pay any attention at all to the second account. I use Enchantrix, have a keybound macro that clicks ‘yes’ on the mill/prospect/DE window, and then have a profile set up in pwnboxer where every key I press on my main account goes to the other account as the key combo to hit that macro. So I don’t even have to look at the second account – I just do whatever I’m doing on my main, and whenever I use an ability it mills. I do sometimes have to take out more stuff from the mail, and then obviously start making inks, but that can wait for when flying back from a death, or what have you.
And doing all this mindless stuff on a second account means you have that much more time to do fun stuff with your main account. I have an extra half hour a day just from glyphs (plus multi-hour milling sessions occasionally).
It is, admittedly, kind of expensive. $100 all told for the game itself (including expansions, since I have some ‘real’ characters on it) for the second account, I think $40 for pwnboxer, and of course the extra monthly fee (and in my case, an extra $3/mo for the remote AH). But WoW’s such an extremely cheap hobby, considering the time I spend on it, that I had no problem spending that money so more of my time could be spent on the parts of the hobby that I like…
You’re more hardcore than me Uriul 🙂 Using one account at a time is confusing enough for me! 🙂
Hey GQ,
Just came to give you a hug as I saw the news on your lil’ one. Hope he’s okay and I know you’ll be the Awesomest Best Mom Ever regardless what happens.
Thanks, he’s a great kid, except when I’m too tired to give him the 100% he deserves 🙂
Does he use things like TSM? That’ll speed posting along nicely. Another option is to just post a huge batch of whatever it is you’re selling shortly before raid time. You won’t be able to cancel/relist during the raid, but hopefully you won’t sell out of stock either. If you’re super hardcore, you could just get a second account, and use that to post during the downtime between pulls/attempts.
Glyphs and scrolls are ok to dump large amounts (1,000 different items) using TSM, but I try and avoid it with gems due to the high AH costs of each post =S
Posting for 12hrs mitigates a lot of the posting fees. And sheer volume of sales will more than make up for the fees. I find the ease of posting gems with TSM is well worth the fees. Of course, if you post a ton, but can’t be there to cancel/relist and they don’t sell, that will certainly be a problem.
In think the most important thing is to have a plan of your activities. Write down all things related to AH you want to do and time when you want to do it. Calculate time needed to do it all. Do you have that much time? No problems.
You don’t? Eliminate less profitable and much time-consuming things. Do it untill your plan takes time you can spend on AH.
It’s very important to have a clear plan of all things you do. It saves much time. Optimize you time, automate your “routine activities”.
Thanks for your advice. Sometimes it hard to eliminate those less profitable things, and taking a step back can help refocus on the goal.