Flipping Guardian Cubs

Guardian Cubs flatline on Dath'Remar Alliance

I just realised I completely romanticised my adventures in flipping [Guardian Cub]s. According to my MySales data, I only sold the one, but it was a fantastic deal.

The cubs went on sale at the start of November, and as I previously reported dived from 25k down to under 6k inside a week. I immediately wanted to see if I could flip the little beastie, even though it was an inevitably declining market (down to the flat line at 4k we see on Dath'Remar today). There is just something exciting about someone laying down cold hard cash ($10 US), popping it on the auction house to make some in game coin, and then flipping it for a profit with nothing but a couple of mouse clicks.

So I waited (as promised) until the first cubs dipped under 5k, and pounced. I managed to relist and sell for 7742g on 15th November, for a cool 2.5k profit. Awesome.

Now here's the romanticising... I had planned to write a post about flipping the cubs, but as milestones crumbled, patches came and went, the event of transmog and gold making on a new server... it got lost. So finally, I came back to it and went into research mode to accurately boast about my exploits. One sale. One $#@%ing sale. I had to laugh.

So I still have a couple of cubs tucked away that I bought at bargain prices from the auction house. Borgthor learned one, which just could not beat the satisfaction of my Hyacinth Macaw for my 750k milestone later on. Now that the price has flatlined, I might even have a go at flipping one or two, over on the less populated horde side.

What was your experience with the Cub? Were you tempted to flip one? Did you buy one from the AH as a status symbol of your in game gold making prowess? Have you even learned one?

January 2012 Glyph Sales - Lightbringer

Here is my glyph sales graph for my brand new character on a new server, Lightbringer-US after joining the <Power Word Guild>.

The most important thing to note, is this is a graph of a glypher starting from scratch! Plonked down in Gilneas, fighting his way to Darnassus to start up his inscription business, with only a trusty puppy for a pet and a bag of freshly picked herbs he picked himself.

Stats:

• Total Glyph Sales: 18,733g
• Total Glyphs Sold: 489
• Average Price: 38g31s

One of the highlights was the second day of sales, and while you think I might have gotten lucky with a big ticket glyph (presumably from my first minor research) there's 43 sales on that day. That was just massive for a glypher just starting out, and allowed me to invest so much coin back into herbs and inks.

I made an effort to get to level 20 very quickly (I got there on the first day my glyph sales started rolling in) in order to have the largest selection of glyphs in the shortest possible time. Leveling from 1 to 20 is much, much quicker than from 20 to 35, which is the next milestone for leveling a profession. To this day (a month later) my hutner is still only level 28.

As the month progressed, I collected more recipes through research and had enough gold to make every profitable glyph that I knew and list it on the AH. For a low level character, low level glyphing is a lucrative and steady income. The number of sales varied quite a lot depending on the competition. Lightbringer-US is a large server and the glyph market is generally quite saturated.

The giant spike towarsd the end of the month coincides with the release of a new version of Tradeskill Master (or TSM as we lovinly know it). The new feature, Reset Auctions, allows you to scan your auctioning groups for opportunities to reset the price for under priced items. The paramaters you can set are sophisticated enough to really target bargains and reduce the risk. Here's how I set mine up for glyphs.

• Max reset cost: 100g
• Min reset profit: 50g
• Max price per item: 20g
• Max quantity to buy: 10

What this means is I'll pay at most 100g total to buy out ALL the glyphs required to reset the price, and the reset profit of 50g ensures that at worst case, I need to sell two of those glyphs to break even. In practise, the reset profit I'm usually targeting is between 100 and 200g so as long as I get a sale, I'm profiting even if the price immediately plummets back down.

I won't pay more than 20g for a glyph to reset it, as that is close enough to the cost price of making the glyph in the first place, with a little extra thrown in since I'm saving time not making the glyph (or milling the herbs and making the inks). The 20g/100g options mean that I effectively won't buy more than 5 glyphs at my maximum price.

The "Max quantity to buy" option is set at 10 to reduce the likelihood I'll buy leveling glyphs that are constantly dumped on the auction house for dirt cheap prices. The other thing I check manually (well it's in the tooltip, so it's very quick) is how many of that glyph I have on hand. I don't like to have more than a stack of any particular glyph, since it is usually those leveling glyphs that are available in large quantities. I've considered that it might be profitable to keep buying the super cheap glyphs  and destroying them to keep the price high, but that feels like destroying surplus oranges while people are starving, just to turn a buck.

So for example, there are [Glyph of Warlock Awesomeness] on the AH for 7g, 8g, 10g, 10g, 15g and 99g. Reset Auctions will find it and allow me to quickly buy out the first 5 glyphs for a total of 50g, and when I repost after collecting them from my mail box, I sell one for 98g. I just made 48g on my initial investment and have 4 more glyphs to sell.

In short the Reset Auctions function allowed me to greatly expand my selection of glyphs far wider than I can hope to make as a level 28 scribe.

I had a little oopsie with the reset function that I'll talk more about later, and I'm currently getting stuck into the new improved options for dealing with posting (randomly enchanted) transmogrification items in TSM as well. If you are reading this post, use the auction house to sell things and don't have TSM, grab it now! It requires a little setup, but there are fantastic resources available to help you on your way, like Faid's TSM Videos - A Beginner's Guide.

10k on a New Server

Previously I wrote about my first 10 days on a new server, amassing 3,000 gold starting a worgen from scratch and working the low level glyph market. I had a couple of nice transmog sales, which helped while I was reinvesting all my coin back into herbs and inks.

For the 10k graph, since I wasn't reinvesting every last copper into materials or BoEs, I've just expressed my capital as a result of my glyph and transmog sales. The first thing that will jump out at people is day 18, where I made a 2,500+g transmog sale. Thanks to a pair of [Saltstone Leggings], I hit 25% of my 10k target in only one sale.

I hit 10k on day 19, and already transmog sales had contributed 40% of my capital. I was very happy with how the glyph market turned out, as almost 7.5k gold profit in 3 weeks starting from scratch is a great result.

I finally bit the bullet and invested in a bank alt, making the gnomish run all the way into Ironforge to pick up bags and bank space. It allowed me to concentrate more on the growing number of glyphs I was stocking and getting ready for the new Reset Auctions function in TSM.

Next time, I'll show everyone how they can lose 10k gold in an instant and learn some good lessons while playing with new addon features.

January 2012 Glyph Sales

Stats:

• Total Glyph Sales: 98,174g
• Total Glyphs Sold: 1988
• Average Price: 49g38s

Another great month, with a good average price. Very happy with how I've got my glyphing set up, and it will be business as usual like this for a while.

I have absolutely no idea what happened on the 10th of January. I have a theory though, and it is the result of crafting in bulk and storing the glyphs in a couple of banks. Having many of each type of glyph in storage completely removes the dependency of actually getting my expired glyphs out of the mailbox to repost. So, if I'm running short on time (like between Christmas and well... now) the most important thing is getting the glyphs to auction, not collecting the coin, making more glyphs or even retrieving expired auctions. I can duck on, post glyphs and log off. When I look at my inbox and realise I have 1k+ mail to retrive, I'll just afk and empty it one bag full (160 slots) at a time.

Lots more posts on the way, including a couple of stories about my adventures on Lightbringer-US.