WoW Gold Rush - Inscription without Glyphs

Hi folks! For today's WoW Gold Rush I focused on making gold with Inscription without using glyphs, I hope you enjoy it.

On another note I just want to inform everyone that Steam is having an awesome Halloween Sale with many great games at amazing prices. You can get Amnesia and all of the Penumbra games, some of the best and scariest games I've played, for ten dollars. That's not ten dollars each. That's Amnesia, Penumbra Overture, Penumbra Black Plague, and Penumbra Requiem all for ten dollars. An amazing deal, I highly recommend you take advantage of it.  (Check out my full Let's Play for Penumbra: Black Plague here.)

Also snag Dead Space and Dead Space 2 in a pack for 15 bucks; either of them is easily worth twice that.  Other great deals include five dollars for Bioshock or Bioshock 2, ten dollars for Resident Evil 5, etc. Check it out!

Guild Bank Sorting and Blog Roll Updates

Those who use their guild bank for inventory management may have been having some real headaches over the past two weeks or so.  It seems that ever since a Tuesday maintenance most addons that deal with guild bank dumping/sorting (BankStack, Dumpster, Mr. Plow, etc.) have all been behaving oddly. They would take a bit out from weird areas of the guild bank and then just stall out.

Blizzard hasn't addressed the issue or said what they did to break guild banks. At Blizzcon they said they'd be rolling out the new guild services (name changing, guild server transfers, etc.) in less than two weeks and I imagine preparing for that somehow broke guild bank management.

There is hope, however!  I'm not sure if the other addons have updated as BankStack has always been my preferred. BankStack released an update the other day with some "advanced features" which is basically a throttling for the guild bank.  The dumping and sorting is slower but it's reliable and less annoying than doing it by hand or reloading the addon's sort/dump commands every few seconds.

I hope that the guild banks get officially fixed by Blizzard but until then I've found this to be a decent fix.  These are the addon settings I have set up that seem to work well, click to enlarge:

In other news a post by Foo has got me thinking about my blogroll again. I'd moved it to the bottom of the page a while back because I wanted to have the blogroll but was tired of seeing a bunch of drama from a few months back every time I came to Nerf Faids.  Now that that's all blown over I'm moving the blogroll back up to the right sidebar. Yay.  I also set it to only show the 10 most recently updated blogs so this should effectively auto-hide the inactive blogs while still having them available by clicking Show All.

While doing blogroll maintenance I want to be sure I didn't miss any worthwhile blogs.  I've added Critical Goblin because, agree with him or not, he's really fun to read.  I'm adding JMTC and Cold back on for as long as they can behave themselves. :3

If your gold blog is not on the list and you'd like it to be please let me know. (Gold blogs only please, Righteous Defense only gets to be there because protection paladins are the best.)

Not Your Regular Glyph Post

No, not more 30GGC.  Currently on that front I'm just keepin' on keepin' on and posting a few times a day at a 1c undercut with a 18g threshold.

Anyways, I'm still watching the Blizzcon livestream and there's tons of new information. Tons! I got my annual pass and I'm actually really psyched for the new expansion; I don't know how I feel about Pandaren or Monks but I like the revamp of the talent system a lot.

Here's the gold thought though:  With the massive change to how a player builds their character and how that character is played I imagine we may see some new glyph demand. For example, one of the end talents Paladins can choose makes Hammer of Wrath have no cooldown.  Well, this actually makes the Glyph of Hammer of Wrath possibly useful while before I don't believe any PvE paladins used it.

I think we may see a shift of in-demand glyphs, and of course we'll want to be getting ready to learn Monk glyphs.

Adventures in Glyphs: Unsure How to Proceed

The past few days I've been allowing prices to rise on glyphs while also selling a fair amount. My intent was just to ride the decent prices for a while, not too high but definitely high enough to feel I was rolling in cash after the 30GGC.

Unfortunately there are a few pretty dedicated AH campers at work right now. When you can outcamp me you truly have no life, as I sit here and play video games almost all my waking hours. (Fall break from the University! Yay!) Granted, at least one of them is pretty obviously account sharing and I've reported him and will continue to do so until something's done.  The others seem to legitimately sell and just happen to overlap one another in such a way that there's no open time slot to sell glyphs.

Once the account sharer is out of the picture there will probably be a late night window available but until then one would have to be online literally 24/7 to avoid being undercut within 5 minutes of posting. 

Most all of them have 1c undercuts and a very very low threshold. I could profit, but is it worth the frustration?  That's what I've been contemplating this evening.

For now I have a tentative plan, but it's likely to evolve and change over time.  This plan, the most excellent of plans, was the same one I carried out flawlessly for months at the beginning of Cataclysm.  The master plan? 

Do nothing!  Bowing out of the glyph market for several months in early Cataclysm benefit me greatly.  I still made hundreds of thousands of gold with other professions and I got to sit back while Jaav drove out all the competitors then left and/or got banned himself.  With the tenacity of the current posters I think this may happen again.  If it doesn't then oh well, I still get a few frustration free weeks or months.

So for now I intend to sit on my admirable stock of glyphs and bide my time, watching the market though likely not participating. For now.

As an alternative, if anyone on Argent Dawn Alliance is reading this and interested in giving the glyph business a go, despite all I've said, I'll sell my entire stock for 20g/glyph.

Image credit: Futurama

The End of an (Incredibly Short) Era

I knew that the weak point of the three glyphs posting strategy for the 30GGC was the ease at which people could buy out a single glyph and raise the rate.  This didn't bother me so much since I knew that any higher price they were able to cultivate would only last until I logged on again, so 8 hours at an absolute max.

As expected, a few glyphs were bought out. No one took on the monumental task of buying all of my 30g glyphs, but a few glyphs were bought to raise prices.  I've reposted a few times, they bought me out again. I didn't mind, I was making gold either way. 

Today, as I reposted, I realized I felt pretty fulfilled in my experiment.  I've had the experience of being "that douche who ruins the market for others."  I've been able to watch herb prices gradually lessen as scribes threw their hands up and said it wasn't worth their time. (Interestingly enough, this made it more worth my time since I now had a higher profit margin on my cheap glyphs.)  I've been able to foster a passionate discussion here, and also I've sparked interest elsewhere.

The main thing I've learned, and what above all makes this experiment a success, is stock management.

This was my "routine" before the 30GGC:

• Use TSM to scan for any glyph selling for over 40g.
• Make three of each.
• Mail these to a posting toon, post and undercut and post and undercut, regardless of threshold.
• Pay no attention what sells.
• Every few days do the same, this way it can restock things that may have sold or recapture items that previously were cheap that are now above my threshold.

The pro for this situation is it required very little headache.  I didn't carry a lot of stock at a time and most of what I had was posted on the AH, so space wasn't an issue.  I didn't even attempt to have everything, or to always have the most profitable glyphs, and so time investment wasn't high either.  Also, since I wasn't keeping constant pressure on glyphs it gave the low glyphs time to rise, assuming others weren't pushing it low as well.

The con, of course, was that a lot fell through the cracks.  When prices raised on a glyph it could go unnoticed by me for days until my next restock opportunity.  When I sold out of a valuable glyph I didn't even notice until I restocked a few days later.

With the 30GGC I was faced with a dire need for better glyph management. Suddenly it wasn't 3 of the most valuable glyphs, it was 13+ of every glyph in the game and it mattered that they were always up and didn't rot in my mailbox.

Necessity caused me to streamline my glyph management into something I think is a bit more on par with serious glyph sellers.  I feel that, if I decide to stay in the market once my stock runs out, I now hold a much stronger position.

Thus the 30GGC is being put on the shelf. I may pull it back down and dust it off every once and a while for fun, but for now it's being put aside.

Exit Strategy

I sat here for a while trying to come up with a good plan of reentry into a non-gimmick glyph market.  Some have accused me of intending to reset prices to record highs when I was done with the 30GGC.  I was completely honest in that that wasn't my intent.  I had no price point to hit.

Finally it was at this point I felt a moral obligation to the market. (Yes, finally, now that it's all over.)  I didn't want to be seen as someone who had destroyed the market for my personal gains, as that really wasn't the intent, though I'm sure people will still see it that way.

I needed a price that I considered a "healthy" rate to charge but that wasn't particularly high. My personal fallback was always at 125g and I was tempted to hit that, but instead decided to go lower.  The folks who had been buying me out to cultivate a higher price were posting at around 90g.  I decided my best bet was to fade back into the crowd (Get it? Fade?) and put my fallback at 90g as well.

So that's where I am now.  While writing all this up I've sold two of my 90g glyphs, but likely it will take a while before I see real sales.  People were undercutting me with a fervor and so there are actually still many sub-30g glyphs that the consumers will need to eat through before the prices return to a higher norm.

For a while I  thought "Dammit, now they're going to be right, I didn't last very long and I did return glyphs to a higher price and blah blah blah . . ."  Then I remembered that I don't care. =D

All in all, I've learned a decent amount about the glyph market, and even more about the logistics of selling glyphs, and that was my goal. 

Mission Accomplished

The Matter of Logistics

This past week I was pleased to be a guest on the Power Word Gold podcast. I spent some time on the podcast going over the basic concepts of the 30g Glyph Ceiling plan.  I think I'll start referring to it as the 30GGC. It makes it look like a car or something. But yes, that's the new abbreviation.

My issue with the 30GGC, as I mentioned in the podcast, is the time investment.  As gold-making isn't a primary concern of the experiment I can't factor in how much gold I'm making off the time investment, so it sort of becomes a question of "Is the time spent managing the 30GGC so much that it's no longer worth what I'm getting out of it?"

For a few days I seriously doubted my resolve.  While I like the idea behind the Ceiling I would find myself spending 2-3 hours every other day just dealing with the glyph hoard. It was not my idea of a good time, to say the least.

So I set about trying to figure out a better way to manage the hoard. With that, I introduce the newest member of my army and my newest guild bank:

The main problem though isn't a bag space issue, it's about pulling literally 3,600 mail out of the mailbox every other day. It would just take too damn long.  Easiest way for me to cut that down? Post fewer.  Ideally I wanted to be posting 3 of each glyph.  This might create a problem though since three is easily bought out.  However, it occurred to me I can check back fairly often throughout the day and restock the AH, so if I have the glyphs premade I can maintain an ever-present ceiling without walling the AH.

So now there is three of each glyph on the AH along with 10 of every glyph in my guild bank.  My goal is to slowly bump that up to twenty of each in the guild bank which should keep me from having to spend time each day crafting replacements.

But how will only three glyphs keep a presence when they can so easily be bought out?

Since starting the 30GGC scribes seem mostly unfazed and undercut with the same frenzy as in the past, most glyphs are actually far cheaper than 30GGC.  As my goal isn't to sell lots of glyphs but is instead to create that ceiling I am happy with their actions; the more glyphs posted below me the less likely my ceiling will disappear.

To maintain the ceiling with a reduced stock I've stopped undercutting altogether.  In the past I would never cancel, but when I posted I would undercut down to a threshold of 22g.  This meant that many of my glyphs would pop up as the lowest price, sell, and I would have to restock and repost to maintain my ceiling for that glyph.  Now that I've quit undercutting altogether and posting at 30g period-end-of-story-no-questions-asked I expect to keep my stock up without having to vomit thousands of glyphs upon the AH.

Basically I've moved from the "This is new and exciting and I shall attack it with a fervor" phase into the "Let's settle down and focus on maintaining this in a non-flashy, reasonable way" phase.  Seems to be working so far!

Comment Moderation

Someone's been spamming my comments with WoW gold buying sites, so I just turned on comment moderation. Any relevant comment is still welcome, only trying to limit the amount of BUY WOW GOLD NOW crap I have to go back and delete.

While doing so I noticed an area with auto-screened spam posts which contained some actual relevant, non-spam posts so if you've posted something that got screened out in the past it wasn't intentional, my apologies.

So yeah, just wanted to explain the change to comment submission. :)

Vendor Recipes and Pets: Redux

Early in my Faidian Slip series I made three videos about vendor recipes and pets.  I've often cringed when linking them as a guide, however, as the narration doesn't fit the video (par for the course for Faidian Slips) and it required the viewer to watch three separate videos.

I have, for the past week or so, been selling Golden Dragonhawk Hatchlings for 430g a piece.  I took this as a sign that it was time to revamp my vendor recipe and pet guide.  This list of vendors is far from exhaustive, there are many great vendor items worth selling on the AH. These just happen to be my favorites.