Blizzard released a new ‘feature’ for Warcraft – Battle Royale. If you’ve ever played Fortnite before you’ll know what I’m talking about and you’ll probably also wonder how many Warcraft players were hoping for a battle royale in their MMORPG – let me tell you, that number is low.
I dislike PVP. I dislike the us versus them mentality. If you look at statistic tracking sites, PVP achievements are the LOWEST earned by players. I do not have quick reflexes, I struggle with my hands and vision. I do like collecting things and low pressure events. This is not that. I feel jaded that 10.2.6 actually gave very little to Dragonflight in any sense of story, quests, etc, and instead offers a new game all together where you can level up renown and earn items for Warcraft (both classic and retail). There are pets, transmog, and mounts as well as the tenders currency. There is also zero items a gold making goblin can make use of. These items are purely for collectors.
“If you don’t like it, then don’t play!” – sure, this is something I’ve already heard but then I miss out (as a collector) on pets and mounts. Instead I am forcing myself to gain at least 1 renown a day, which (for me) on average takes between 1-1.5 hours. What this means is that I’m doing VERY little else in game, because that eats up almost all of the free time I have to play. I also dislike how this new feature removes players from the world, and so things are looking empty. I imagine when they earn their rewards and when Season 4 releases it will get busy again but it’s really not fun to see a once active server reduced so much because everyone is out there grinding for their 40 renown. It’s not fun. I do not enjoy it. I realize lots of people DO enjoy this style of game play, and that’s fantastic for those people, but that doesn’t disqualify how I feel about it.
Another week, more sales. I was seeing things in the normal range once again, and it looks like the TSM ledger site has fixed itself too after the hiccup that came with leap year.
Sales this week came mainly in the form of recipes, a handful of pets, and some NLA transmog (we’re talking shirts). I also decided to change up how I had been posting my auctions, just to see if it made any difference. I have about 5,000 items in stock, across 28 servers. It takes me approximately 2 hours to post everything, using two accounts posting. I normally do it first thing in the morning in between doing my RL chores (getting the minions some breakfast, etc) and I normally just post everything for 24h and check once a day, never doing cancel scans. Sometimes RL gets in the way, or I have other obligations, or I simply don’t feel like spending 2h posting auctions so I’ve been trying to think of ways to split things up a bit and ease the time it takes me to post. I’ve been doing this daily since December 2022, with very few breaks between. It has been fantastic for making gold but let’s face it, sometimes we all need a bit of a change.
10.2.6 releases tomorrow – I’m not overly excited, but I think it’s because we really know very little about the event that has been hyped up above and beyond what we’ve seen in the past. I’m excited for TWW, but that’s because I know what we’re getting into. I’m even excited about Season 4 (though I’m feeling pretty cautious about the season changes they’re making). 10.2.6 is a beast of a different nature though, Blizzard having decided to go with no testing (this worries me) and no data leaks. We’ll just have to see what it brings for the gold making community, if anything.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
This year marks the 6th year that I’ve had a solid focus on making gold in World of Warcraft. I’ve gone from cautiously working towards my Brutosaur mount (which I did get in time) to now having over 100,000,000 gold strewn across various characters and servers. If there was only one piece of advice I could give to people who are interested in making gold, it would be the following:
Make good habits.
This covers a broad range of ‘things’ that you would ideally ‘do’ – but that’s what it comes down to. I would focus on things you actually enjoy doing in game, and then turning those things into habits that you can profit from. Here are a few examples:
I have 24 characters set up at the moment to do tables in SL. These are characters who don’t do anything else, there’s no travel time, they’re just parked at the tables. If I need anima, I use my main and then ship it to whatever alt needs it. I do have 50 level 70 characters, so I could expand this much further if I wanted, but 24 is a nice neat number (it’s two servers worth, minus Dracthyr). I’ve had this going for two years now, and I earn a LOT of pet charms.
I do everything crafting related on 8 characters. You could use 4, but I have both horde / alliance crafters (4 on a high population server, and 4 on a low population server). When they were working on knowledge, I’d focus on one character each day, and do all of their crafting quests. I would also do the weekly world quest on them, and now I do superbloom. That means I now have 8 characters with max DF factions just by slowly completing things over time. I didn’t grind, which meant I didn’t burn out. I complete a LOT of crafting orders on my high population server (which is where I spend most of my time), and I don’t fuss too hard about the alliance team (they’re mostly there to collect alliance specific recipes). I restock crafted goods once a week, using SimCraft & TSM.
I do all of the pet battle quests on 4 characters once a week. This isn’t ideal, but I love pet battles, and that means I’m slowly chipping away at achievements, family familiar, and other goals. I only do this one day a week so that I don’t get completely burnt out. I’m still making progress.
I do all of my dungeon / raid runs on one day a week, with however many characters I’m feeling at the time. I usually multibox these, and I just take a day to knock it out. Over time, the items I earn (gold, recipes, pets, etc) add up, and while it doesn’t LOOK like a lot, initially, over time it builds.
If there’s a legion trainer up I’ll typically spend one day a week grinding out alts / leveling pets. I have hundreds of pets at any given time to work towards 25. I’ve gotten every single one of my alts to 70 with this method. It’s NOT ideal, but because I’m so consistent with it (I LOVE pet battles) I’ve got a nice army of characters now.
I don’t bother with things I don’t enjoy. I do not like to gather and harvest, so I don’t do it. The only time I’ve done it in the last 5 years was to get some achievements for professions, and I still don’t have legion mining finished yet, that’s how much I hate gathering. Doing things I do not enjoy is a sure way for me to avoid the game and NOT make any gold.
Find what you like to do in game, make it into a habit, and grow your gold from it. Figuring out what you enjoy doing is going to be the hardest part. If sticking with it is difficult then you may need to reassess. That doesn’t mean you can’t take breaks! I take them all of the time, especially during lulls in content – but I always find my way back.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
I sort of forgot that I never finished this series, so here’s the last 10 runs of Sunwell Plateau, finally! This run only gave a handful of desired items, one was a purple helmet, and a low value recipe. Keep in mind that I’m doing this on a high population server, so your gold values and experience may differ from mine. I’m using a level 61 speed geared druid, and a handful of addons like TSM, LootAppraiser, MonkeySpeed, Dejunk, and FasterLoot.
Total approx gold earned (runs 1-100): 1,197,120g
Actual amount of gold earned to date: 200,250g
Actual amount of GPH: 40,050g
Value of items still listed on the AH: 15,522g
You can also read through the rest of the series to see what I earned on each run, but all in all, I’m pretty happy with the results. It’s not the best GPH, but it was a nice way to spend a little time, and maybe RNG will favour you more than it did me.
I haven’t done a lot of sniping since Dragonflight came out, but sometimes I get bored and want to explore ‘new’ methods of making gold, so when Indopan started talking about Azeroth Auction Assassin(Also called Azeroth Auction Ace, so they don’t show too much ass when the name shortens), I was absolutely interested.
Before we get too far, one thing to note is that this stand alone API sniper is currently behind a Patreon paywall. This isn’t completely unheard of, there are services like Zygor (publishing guides) & goblins like BilisOnyxia & Studden who put their gold making guides for sale and I certainly don’t begrudge them for it, after all, they’ve put in the work. I also realize sniping is not for everyone – and that’s OK. The best part of making gold is that there are lots of different ways to go about it, and if one method isn’t to your liking, I have no doubt that you’ll find another.
There are two common methods of sniping (if you’re not familiar with the term ‘snipe’ it just means buying something from the AH for cheap, typically before someone else can snag the deal, in this version at least). One way is by using an in-game AH addon like point blank sniper that scans your current server in live-time (TSM also has a sniper built in but I’ve found it quite slow since the release of DF, so for the purpose of this article I won’t be talking about it), and the other method uses a program outside of the game, and Blizzard’s public AH API which publishes data once an hour for all servers. You might remember when I started using Mega Alerts, I had to install Docker and follow a lengthy tutorial to get all of that up and running – Azeroth Auction Assassin works the same way, using Blizzard’s public API but it also has an entire GUI built in making it MUCH more user friendly. You create a list of items you want to purchase, with price points (you can also import your list from auctionator), and then once an hour when Blizzard publishes the AH data, it pings you on discord if anything matches the item/price you’ve set. In the screenshot above you can see I went after +speed gear. I set a price of 300g for any 421 (and higher) gear that had +speed on it (that’s what the screenshot below is showing, too). While the more common use for an API sniper is to purchase items on one server for a low price, and then sell them on another server for a higher price, for me it was a nice way to find some recipes I was missing, and some gear.
There are tutorials for everything you might need, an active discord, and a friendly community. The one question I know frequently comes up is “what should I snipe” – and honestly, this is something every goblin out there who wants to snipe has to learn for themselves. What you want to purchase, and what price point you want to purchase it at, is part of the learning process.
When you’re trying to decide what to snipe, look at the big picture. Let’s say you want to snipe pets. Look for ones that are used in teams / popular (use TSM sales rate for this) / or rare. There’s tons of sites out there that list these pets. TCG (trading card game) pets have taken a hit since they’ve been amazon prime / twitch rewards, but they’re still popular. No Longer Available (NLA) items can be popular – but Blizzard also has a history of bringing those back, so do your research. Looking to flip some raid gear? Check out the BiS gear guides over on Wowhead & Icyveins, and add those items to your list. It’s going to be trial and error. It’s still going to require time to sell the items you purchase – and a lot can happen in between there. Maybe the price will suddenly tank, or the drop rate will suddenly increase. Figuring all of that out is a big part of being a goblin, and learning what risks to take when is just a part of it. As I’ve said many times before, even just lurking in the WoW Economy Discord is a great way to pick up some tips and tricks on what to buy – and don’t be afraid to ask questions.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
stargrace 
