End Indentured Servitude Now!

Just reading up on the latest blue notes regarding Patch 5.2.

 I think it’ll be interesting to see how the “buy the farm” system works in the new Patch.  For those of you already working your farm, it may be a good time to start stockpiling your wares.  If you’re not working the farm yet, I highly suggest that you at least start the questline to get your farm started.

 I’m excited to see which factions you can get work orders from.  The money possibilities are here if there are issuing factions that also sell BoE items and rare pets.  Anyone on PTR seen this yet?  Maybe this is a good reason for me to start checking out the PTR.

 Another exciting addition is Battle-Stones dropping from PvP Pet Battles.  I’ve seen these going for as much as 10k on my server and I can’t wait to have more opportunities to pick these up and make some bank.  Also, the possibility of picking up a Lesser Charm of Good Fortune from pet battles is another opportunity for more gold.  So, train up your best team now to start racking those babies up.

 Unfortunately for those of you who use the “flee ‘til it’s rare” method of pet gathering, this will now inflict damage to your pet team.  I can’t say that I’m stoked about that, but it’s a minor inconvenience for my pet battle strategy and doesn’t impact my gold making at all.

 For those of you in the Transmog market- I gave this up because I got tired of the endless reposts and felt it was costing more to post than I was making- you’ll have a bigger market as now Two-Handers can be Transmog’d to each other, same for One-Handers and Staves to Polearms.

 This brings me to crafting.  Blacksmiths listen up!  There are some pretty cool looking weapons available for the Lightning Forge.  Ghost Iron Bars (for Lightning Steel Ingot) and Living Steel is a major component for almost everything.  So stock up now!  Oh by the way, some of these are BoE & ilvl 463+.  For you Engineers out there, there’s finally a legit item to sell.  Meet Pierre!  Pierre is a pet that resembles a pot-bellied stove and functions as a campfire.  Since he functions as a campfire, there’s reason to believe that he will give the campfire’s standard Spirit buff which will make him a high demand pet for casters.  The only uncertainty is whether he’ll be cageable since he’s currently BoP.  Lastly, for you Scribes in the audience, there’s another opportunity to increase your ever expanding purse of jingling coins with the new glyphs being introduced in this patch (too many to name here and now).

 If you’ve been playing on the PTR and have something to contribute regarding these new money-makers, I’d love to have your input.  Until then, I guess I’ll have to split my gameplay to get the inside scoop on 5.2.  Expect an edit/update when I have further info.

 When in doubt, C4…

Chasing Unicorns

If you set yourself a goal, what was your goal & at what point did you set it?

When I started out, I set my goal to hit the gold cap.  It seems, however, that I’ve hit a brick wall rather than thet gold cap.  That’s probably because I haven’t had the discipline to not spend the money I’m earning.

About every week to two weeks, I end up hitting up the auction house for any rare pets that I don’t already have.  I’m excusing this as a long term investment.  What I mean by that is that after I reach the pet achievements, I can resell these and (hopefully) make a profit on them- especially if they’re trained up to level 25.

With that, I’ll go ahead and address day 8’s question, no, I haven’t reached my goal yet and I am still working towards it.

My strategy at this point is to train my battle pets up to level 25 so that I can make the pet market viable again.  Pre-MoP, it was working well for me and when pets went account wide it crashed just as I expected.  The difficult part of the pet market now is grinding the extremely rare pets or at least finding them cheap enough on the AH to flip them.

In addition to that, I’m focusing on flipping high level items where I can make a few thousand gold at a time.  I figure it’s better to make a lot of money off as few auctions as possible rather than handling a ton of auctions for very little profit.

I think there is something to be said for selling in bulk, though.  It works for Sam’s Club and Costco, why wouldn’t it work for WoW?  I just choose not to make my money this way.  I think of myself more like Nordstrom’s than Wal-Mart.  I’d rather deal in low volume with high profits.

The main reason I work this way is because I am a heavy remote auction house user.  If I’m away from the game (watching TV at home, waiting for a table at a restaurant, waiting on my wife to get back from the restroom, waiting on another pointless business meeting to start, etc), I’m usually buying and flipping on the RAH.  Since the RAH is limited in the number of transactions you can conduct everyday and it’s tedious to repost enough auctions to reach the limit as it is, I’d rather do business my way.  This could also be part of the reason I’ve hit a wall.

So, my goal remains to get to the fabled gold-cap if one truly exists.  I may be just chasing a unicorn though.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 1

When did you start gold making & what triggered it?

Well, you could say I kinda started gold making back in vanilla but that was on illegit private servers and their mechanics weren’t the same as the real thing. I went legit when the Wrath of the Lich King came out. Basically, my good friend, Jamo, held an intervention and said that I was destroying the core of the Earth and supporting Martian terrorists by playing on private servers and convinced me to go legit. I’m glad he did because legit WoW is so much more fun than those busted private servers.

Anyway, when I crossed over to the light, Jamo had a ton of money and I didn’t really have anything. I tried the mechanics I had learned in private servers and the Kobolds in Echo Ridge Mine laughed at me. I asked Jamo’s advice and he told me to concentrate on leveling and then do my dailies for money. That may have been decent advice for a casual player in WotLK, but I wasn’t happy with it.

Then, in end game PvP, I learned that there was a bigger need for gold than I thought in order to get higher level non-raid PvP gear. I think this was what really triggered my gold making craze. So much so that I basically abandoned anything not related to gold making, including PvP which was the main reason I started gold making.

At first, I just started out by reading anything I could related to gold making. Sites like Cold’s Gold Factory, Just My Two Copper, and Power Word: Gold became my CTRL+D sites. By the end of Cataclysm, I thought I had my feet under me well enough to start my own blog and when Mists of Pandaria released, Candlefly’s Gold Adventures opened its doors.

Unlike other gold making sites, Candlefly’s Gold Adventures is geared towards showing what works AS WELL AS what doesn’t work (for me at least). Unfortunately, I’ve been remiss in posting for the past few months because I’ve been pretty much out of ideas. I’d like to throw out a HUGE shout out to Nev from Auction House Addict for posting this meme and giving the gold making community something to write about again.