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.
Good post, and I’m glad to see you took that angle on the carnival…
As an example of how ‘deviousness’ can hurt you: I used to follow Mageshadow and Markco on Twitter, visited JMTC every weekday, visited the 20kleveling forums, and was considering buying the guide just to say thanks for the useful tips over the years (I’d already become a premium member on the forum, for the same reason). Then Markco suggested scamming people, and I do none of the above – they won’t get any more traffic, much less money, from me. It didn’t help that the tips had been for a different kind of player after Mageshadow took over (a player who likes farming, for one thing), but suggesting scamming was the last straw. There are several other gold blogs I’ve stopped reading for similar reasons – including some that straight up endorse exploits.
In fact, I found this site when I went looking for new blogs to read that didn’t resort to underhanded / against the rules methods.
Anyway, all that said – I guess my cleverest gold-making strategy would be cross-faction trading. Not the basics of it, or even so much what I sell, but (mostly) being able to profit in both directions, and without losing 15% of my money to the neutral AH. Historically, my cleverest strategy would be disregarding all the people saying inscription would be horrible after 4.0, and instead stockpiling as many glyphs as I could.
Hi, I haven’t seen anything about Markco suggesting scamming people, but bear in mind “your mileage may vary” especially considering where you choose to stand on the business ethics see-saw. Some of the things that I do (such as buying the white kitten and reselling it for a lot of gold as I said above) are things that shocked me a few years ago, but seem to be standard now.
When you buy a gold guide, buy the one that you think you will ENJOY and that will help you. I’m not a member of Markco’s guide, but all the testimonials, formal and informal, show that its a good solid foundation for starting your gold making. So if you were thinking of buying it to help yourself, don’t count it out just because you currently don’t like the guy right now.
I also find Mageshadow much more intelligent that some of his posts might appear. I absolutely loved his post on farming the Hatchling pets! He knows a huge number of little things like that.
I can see how exploits or bending the law slightly can be very tempting at times, so I’m asking you to hold me accountable if I ever stray in that direction! No need for spankings, just give me a funny look if I’m straying into the wrong side of the tracks. deal?
As for cross faction arbitrage you might have noticed that I haven’t posted about it at all on my site, which is because my main server has so few opposite-faction players that there is no point in ever sending things to them to buy. They don’t exist. However, you’re right that it is an absolute STONKER of a gold making opportunity! Now if only I can find a nice writer to do a guest post on it …
I’d say my most clever way of making gold is knowing the markets I play in. Just this week twice I’ve had someone try and undercut one of the main items I sell (notched jawbone) for hundreds less than it’s worth. I quickly bought their item and picked it up from my mailbox later on. I didn’t have to go get them right away when I bought them because I had a couple already on me and I only sell them 1 at a time. I sell on average 1 a day now at 1000g each… both times a person had come on and posted it for less than 500g – one of them was for 201g!! I couldn’t click ‘buy’ fast enough… lol
This past week was my best ever – according to MySales, I grossed over 40k in sales in the last week… (I keep it at a 1 week window). My biggest seller was the notched jawbone followed by silver inlaid leafs (leaves… lol) and not far behind fortune cookies… I still only have a bit over 15k in the family guild bank though cause my fiance and I have been leveling professions of other toons to help out in the long run.
Hope everyone else had a great week too!
Matt
Very good points, you don’t have to resort to underhanded tactics to make gold and have fun
If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.
The Gold Queen June 10, 2011 at 00:04
“If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.”
So true! Love your angle on the whole devious thing btw.