2018

My Road to 4 Million Gold

stargrace June 26, 2018 No Comments

I started off tracking my gold May 16th and I had a total of 176,000. Not a very impressive number by any means. Now, June 26th, I’m at 2,174,000 and I’ve crossed over into the 2 million gold mark. I’m still quite far away from my desired goal of 4 million, but I have been keeping above where I need to be just slightly. Again this will probably take a nosedive in a few short weeks because I’m due with my second baby, but it has still been a fun adventure so far.

Where does the gold come from?

By far my biggest sellers have been flips that I picked up off of the auction house. I bought a Guardian Cub for 75,000 and I re-sold it for 400,000 gold. The person who bought it from me relisted it for 550,000 but I think I’m still the winner in that deal. I have had a few smaller deals like that but as you can see by my chart growth is not steady or rapid. There was a period of almost two weeks where I barely made anything and sales all but dried up.

I have only 1 character doing order hall missions and I tend to hoard my crafting supplies instead of selling them. I found an amazing deal where a player was selling 100 spirits of harmony for 35g each, so I picked them up and I’ve been making living steel on my alchemist that I hope to use towards a sky golem. Of course the other part of that is my engineer needs to create a daily for 30 days and there’s no way to bypass that. I do have two engineers, so I’m contemplating making two sky golems a month, but creating mounts is a market I’ve never really gotten into.

I have been doing a few monk farms, mostly for BC recipes and I’ve gotten a few lucky drops that way but nothing astounding. I am still playing on three servers total but I’m contemplating downgrading to just two, a horde and an alliance server. I don’t want to spread myself out just to try to obtain gold when I honestly have plenty for my needs. Gold is just a fun challenge for me, a new way to “play” the game when I don’t actually have a lot of time to game. It’s mostly passive (at least the way that I’m doing it) and doesn’t require a lot of hands on time. Sure I might be sitting in game, but IRL I’m typically tending to my little, doing chores, or just trying to beat the heat while I deal with this 9th month of pregnancy (it has been rough). It gives me a way to feel connected to the game when I would otherwise want to quit.

I’ve been doing the Midsummer Festival quests on some of my baby alts, farming blossoms so I can pick up pets and toys that I don’t currently have. I know fellow goblins are stockpiling them for when the festival is gone and people want the pets again, but I want them for myself and my collection, first. Spares can certainly go towards the market.

I’ve almost got one of every alliance created now on my main server, and I have been contemplating doing the same for horde on my backup server. There’s also rumors of server merges and I wonder how that will affect gold making, more competition and more goblins crammed into the same places. I don’t tend to run cancel scans because I find them a waste of time, I know sales would increase if I tried to undercut every time a player undercut me. To each their own, there’s no one “right” way to make gold.

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

Kindness (and Pets, of course Pets)

stargrace June 18, 2018 No Comments

After my last post here on Nomadic Gamers an incredibly kind person reached out offering to trade me some duplicate pets in order to help ease the issue I was having of trying to replenish those pets in my collection that I had foolishly sold off in order to acquire more liquid gold. I was stunned, not only because I was not expecting the offer, but because of the immense generosity the player displayed. In the end I think I ended up with close to 50 battle pets that I didn’t already own. They happen to play on my server, so I vowed to look over their own collection and try to figure out if I could help fill in any gaps and of course I said I would pass on the kindness should the situation arise. Paying it forward is a theme that I am only too familiar with, and one I fully embrace.

This kindness set the tone for my entire day, and it came at a time that I really needed it.

Later on that same day I managed to find a guardian cub for sale for 75,000 gold. These pets used to be sold in the blizzard store but have been removed for 4+ years now and can no longer be obtained. They normally go for 150,000-500,000 gold, and I decided that there was no better time to splurge, so I picked it up and eagerly added it to my collection. I’m still looking for deals on most of the trading card game pets but I’m hoping that over time I can get my battle pet collection back to the gloriousness it once was. I’m very glad that I’ve learned my lesson regarding selling off my own items / supplies (don’t do it!) and I am eternally grateful for the kindness of (virtual) strangers who can sometimes take a very poor week and turn it into something I won’t forget any time soon. Something so simple can leave a lasting impression and create waves that spread to other players, too.

Be kind to one another, folks. You just never know.

(Many) Mistakes Were Made

stargrace June 15, 2018 2 Comments

When I talk about my adventures into making gold in World of Warcraft, it’s only too easy for me to highlight the good sale days, or days when I managed to catch a fantastic item priced for cheap that I flip for a large profit. If I only talked about those sorts of days, that would be pretty misleading.

This week, as an example, I’ve barely made 50k total. Compared to the previous week where I easily pulled in 600k, this one has been a bit of a downer. That’s OK though, patience is key. You just keep hoping and waiting it out and maybe expand your markets and try a few new things and see if you can get those numbers rising again.

One of the biggest mistakes I made happened early on when I was first learning how TSM worked and how to make gold on my specific server. I had a pretty hefty pet collection, almost 700 pets, including four TCG (trading card game) pets. I had very little liquid (remember, money in gold form on hand) to invest in anything, and I had no idea how sales worked or what I was doing. In order to make some liquid so I could begin my empire I decided I would sell off my own pets.

This was a HUGE mistake. Not only because I sold them all for well below their value, but because I LOVE pet battles! I leveled them up, completed quests, hunted for ones I didn’t own, and invested money over time into my collection that I absolutely loved. Now, a few months later, I regret it deeply. ESPECIALLY selling off my TCG pets. I’ve been trying to recoup my losses by making smarter decisions and buying pets I don’t currently own when they are 50% lower than market value, but since I play on a low population server, pets are always quite pricey. If you want to buy pets, the best places are high population servers because there is more competition and in MOST cases the pets will be cheaper. Pets are account bound, so it doesn’t matter WHERE you buy them from, you can use them on y0ur server.

My collection isn’t nearly as impressive as it used to be, and I still debate with myself every day if I want to drop the 300-400k (each pet) gold to pick up the TCG pets that I so foolishly sold. I have been slowly working the collection back up and giving some much needed love to my pet battles, but it is a slow painful process.

At least I learned something.

Do NOT sell off your personal belongings (this goes for transmog, pets, crafting materials, recipes, whatever) just to boost your gold count. You need to take some enjoyment in playing the game, too, however you find it.