January 2018

Sales Round-Up

Not every day starts off with opening the mailbox to a nice number in sales, but some days do, and it’s lovely. I’m 10k short of buying my 3rd WoW token for the week. I’d normally be able to afford it now, but the price really shot up over night. I’m hoping I can make 10k today so I can buy it before it goes up any further, but I don’t always have the best of luck. I know some of you (all of you?) are probably already bored of these posts where I just go on about making coin in world of warcraft, but I’ve been writing about it just because I find the whole idea of it so fascinating. The fact that I’ve made more gold in this single week than I have in the entire time I’ve played WoW (10+ years off and on) honestly surprises me.

Of course I also get a bit bored of it after some time. Making money is great, and it will be wonderful to purchase Overwatch and BfA and maybe a server or faction change or two with coin that I’ve earned instead of having to pay out of pocket for it, but it’s a lot of repeating the same actions over and over, hoping for a good day, and patience. Lots and LOTS of patience.

I have no patience. Well, OK, I have a BIT of patience, a little more than I started out with before I had my son, but I’m still lacking. I (like many others) like instant gratification in my video games, and playing the market in WoW is NOT about instant gratification. At all. So I find that I’m a bit at odds with myself.

Anyway. Sales over the weekend were slow, and spread out. More people playing on a weekend means more competition, and less people shopping (from what I’ve seen, YMMV). I’m hoping sales pick up a bit more over the upcoming week, but since I’ll be moving I will have to step back from making gold for a bit until we’re settled. I made just shy of 600k in the last 7 days, and it’s a really nice feeling. Even if it is just virtual currency in a video game.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

 

Earning Gold with Little Gameplay

I think one thing I like most about earning gold in WoW the method I’ve been using is that it is a very passive way for me to earn coin. I have a bank character parked at the AH, I scan for items that are under priced, I buy them if I think I can make a profit, and re-post them later in the day with the new price. I log in my bank alts twice a day and check their earnings, rinse and repeat. This means I don’t do a whole lot of actual gaming per say, which I know sounds weird, but my schedule just doesn’t allow for it right now as a solo parent getting ready for our big move this week.

Playing the market this way lets me feel productive and also scratches my gaming itch. Sure, if I was more proactive I could earn more gold, but I’ve found a method that works with my schedule, and that’s not always easy. As I’ve mentioned before, this method of gameplay is also fascinating and fun for me. I’m still new, still learning, but it’s a start.

As you can see by the screenshot above, yesterday I bought an item for 1200g and sold it for 24119g – nice big profit. When I logged in this morning I had a few smaller sales across all of my AH characters, around 25k worth across three servers. It’s not going to be a big win every single day, but it’s a little coin here and there when I normally wouldn’t have earned anything at all because I don’t have the time to sit down and play for an hour (unless llama bean is napping his one nap a day, and then I’m usually napping too). It feels odd to say, but this is some of the most fun I’ve had playing WoW. The goal is of course to make more than I spend, even if that means losing out on some items only to recoup my loss on another. Sure, I won’t be super rich like some of the goblins I see in discord who make hundreds of thousands of gold a day, sometimes even millions a day, but for me, this is a really good comfortable start.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Learning TradeSkillMaster

I’ve been trying to make more gold in WoW for some time, unsuccessfully. I don’t have a lot of time to play, so farming is something that I have to make quick work of, with a lot of direction in order to turn a profit. My class hall rewards some coin, but only a few thousand or so a day, IF the money reward missions are up. It’s not always guaranteed.

There’s a popular addon called TradeSkillMaster that optimizes how you go about earning coin in World of Warcraft, but this addon is not for the faint of heart. It’s complicated, there are a ton of settings, and you can’t just jump right into it (as I discovered). That being said, if you’re willing to dedicate a little bit of time to watching some YouTube videos and hanging out in their discord channel, you can learn a LOT.

That’s how I went from having about 60k to my name, to making 400k this week, and buying two WoW tokens. I’m trying to either buy Overwatch, or pre-order Battle For Azeroth using just WoW tokens. I LOVE that we can convert tokens into a type of blizzard currency. I can either get 30 days of game time, or $19 CAD. I probably need at least one more token before I can afford the basic version of BfA, and I certainly need one to get OW unless it goes on sale again (kicking myself for not picking it up over Christmas) but I’m confident that I can earn the coin without too much issue.

What have I been doing? Well, I watched some videos on YouTube first, and set up groups in TSM to do specific operations like undercut based on a %, or price at a % depending on what the market value is. The blizzard api has been down since 7.3.5 so prices are skewed right now and are not working optimally, but it’s still teaching me and it’s not too bad.

Once I had my groups optimized to do the pricing I wanted, I started watching the market. I bought a few items for a couple of hundred gold that I flipped for a few thousand. Fists of Thane Kray-Tan I found for 350g, and sold for 14250g which is still well below market, so it was a quick sale. A few recipes were going for well beneath their value, so I picked those up. Flipping is a slow way to make gold, it’s hit or miss depending on the market, and you’re subject to the whims of players. You need patience but it can pay off.

I also started selling BattlePets. Now these are different than selling most items because you can sell and buy them account wide, on any server. High population servers tend to have cheaper pets (more competition). The hardcore ‘goblins’ as the gold earners are called in discord, buy and sell on multiple servers, depending on which ones are high / low in price. Me, I’m not quite that dedicated yet. I do play on a handful of different servers, and different factions, but for now I’ve just been trying to focus on learning what I can about the main server I play on.

Alts also help you make gold, but I don’t have any that I’m actively playing right now. There’s even a discord channel for the farmers, multiboxers, and all the rest. There are so many different ways to make gold in game depending on how much time and resources you have available to you.

Honestly, I find it absolutely fascinating and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I don’t know whether it was just luck that got me the two tokens or if I can keep up earning that sort of gold, but I feel like I’m learning about how the market works, how volatile it can be, and improving my money making capabilities. You need to take the time to learn your market, what sells, what doesn’t, what are quick sales, what requires a little more patience. With new races coming up it means people will soon be dusting off those newly created alts and leveling up, meaning some things may have more of a market than others. You need to pay attention – and I love it.

I’m enjoying my time in WoW. I don’t care what anyone says about the game, how easy it is or how I should be playing XYZ instead. It’s relaxing, fun, and just really comfortable. Plus my husband should be joining me in game VERY soon, and I am just absolutely tickled about that.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Gaming Round Up

Alright, since I haven’t been doing too much exciting in game but I still want to make a post, lets see what we have.

First, Rift announced that they’ll be opening a special subscription only server that works a lot like the EQ/EQ2 progression servers if you’re familiar with those, but has some sort of conclusion that no one is really sure about. Will characters be deleted, will we get to merge them onto live servers, is this a one time deal, those sorts of questions pop up and prevent me from getting really excited about things. I played Rift for a good while, got to max level, did some dungeons, did some open world raids, but stopped playing when there were some major class changes that took place (cleric changes in specific). Will I play on the subscription only server? Highly unlikely. While I am drawn into progression servers for EQ/EQ2 due to a heavy nostalgia factor, I don’t get those same warm fuzzy feelings about Rift.

World of Warcraft released their latest update which included world wide level scaling. There was a massive outcry from transmog and mount farmers that Warlords and Mists of Pandaria were too difficult and people could no longer solo the raids. Blizzard heard these cries and Friday rolled in some changes to allow people to farm again. There are still quite a few glitches that I’ve seen people talking about, quests where rewards don’t line up or don’t actually scale, quests that are just completely broken to begin with, but I think Blizzard has their heart in the right place. Their game has been around quite a while now, and the pull of nostalgia is deep. Why not make money off of it.

Nintendo, doing what Nintendo does, announced NintendoLabo where you pay for a program, get some cardboard, and build things like fishing rods and robots that actually work. Intended for a younger user (think of building these things with your kids) I’ve seen my friends react with every spectrum of emotion available. Personally, the price point is way too high for cardboard when my kid is just going to goober all over it and it’s going to need replacing. The idea itself is pretty neat, and of course I want to see them succeed because why not.

Lots of announcements, including a visual novel FINALLY being released for the Switch (and tons of other great indie games, something I have been so excited to see). What’s your favourite announcement from the week? Let me know in comments!

Posts may be rare in the upcoming weeks as my family and I prepare for our move from British Columbia Canada, to Saskatchewan. In just over a week we’ll be packed up and driving to our new home. Posts should continue after we get settled though, so stay tuned and happy gaming!

Rematch (PetBattles)

I haven’t done a lot of pet collecting in Legion, I haven’t been through the zones to see what I’m missing, and I haven’t seen where I get the pets I’m lacking. Lately the mod I’ve been using the most, is Rematch. It lets me make teams which a few other mods let me do, but in this case I’m able to create it based on the NPC that I’m targeting. As you can see by the far right hand side I’ve got 4 Legion NPCs listed there, the ‘eternal strider’ one is just a leveling team that I threw together. Some of the battles are more difficult than others and I still need to look up the method that I defeated them the last time, but in most cases it’s pretty straight forward. Attack until the NPC pets are dead.

I’d like to get back to collecting. I’m missing almost everything you can catch in the wild in Legion, plus whatever specialty pets there are. There are only a handful on the AH that I don’t own, and I haven’t done the new pet battle dungeon yet, either.

It’s a great way for alts to level up and a relaxing way for me to spend a little time.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!