4M Gold Milestone

Today marks a new milestone for Twitchie Enterprises: 4 million gold.

What I am most excited about isn't the milestone itself, but the graph. It marks the end of recording my liquid gold level in a spreadsheet, and moving it to directly recording it in the Twitchie Enterprises Command Centre (my ruby on rails application dubbed lovingly by my wife as 'Twitchie's Knickers' (being able to peruse the details of every sale I've ever made is a little revealing)).

The last few mornings I've been very excited to wake up and drain my mailboxes of their gold so I can record new totals. It handles the connected realm very nicely, gives me a running list of gold movements over the last fortnight, and most importantly the graph is front and center.

I've fallen a little behind in frivolous gold spent, which is sitting at around 3.5M since I first hit the 1M mark. I plan to give that graph the same treatment, but would like to make sure I categorise my spending carefully. For example, this time last expansion (in that enormous void between expansions) I was spending a huge amount of gold on BoEs for alts as they hit 85 and geared up for some raiding. In mists, with the relative ease of 'free' catch up gear, limited craftables and raiding trash drops being BoP (I severely dislike this on many levels) I have coin overflowing from overburdened coffers and no gear to spend it on.

The graphs don't stop here, I've already got my transition month glyph seller pie chart ready to go, and will release an interactive set of charts for my Ironpaw shuffle markets when I hit my major milestone there!

For the Record: 2M Gold

Hot on the heels of spending 2M gold since I hit gold cap, I've built my reserves to 2M gold, liquid! Even after I hit 1M gold and started tracking my major expenses, I still hadn't started tracking my gold balance on a day to day basis. Finally, just before Mists of Pandaria landed, I started tracking my gold across both factions, and the results are above.

You can see where Pandaria hit, and I picked up some mounts, realm first blacksmithing and invested in some gear. The only other major divets are for [Mimiron's Head] and [Reins of the Onyxian Drake]. Generally outside of those major investments, I make gold faster than I can spend it. Where things go flat, I'm investing heavily in materials for professions. Above the 1M mark, it shouldn't a big deal to invest more than 20k in a single material in a single sitting, steadly mashing the BUY button until you've bought up all the ore / herbs under your threshold.

Recently I've slowed down on the flask market, with the volatility of lotus and the strange, twisted minds of some of my fellow alchemists leaving only small windows of profitability. So much so that I've actually reset flasks a couple of times just to see how quickly they squish their own profits. I'm still having trouble finding 'cheap' ore, but since I'm almost sold out of eyes, I should probably stop being so cheap. I have been selling plenty of PvP gear too and I'm looking forward to see how that compares to my other markets.

A little while ago, I helped out a friend who wanted to move a lot more gold across to the Alliance side. So one of my challenges is how to move that gold back at a profit. The Horde AH on my server is generally a lot lower volume and a lot more expensive, particularly now that our last top 500 guild has left. I've moved some general bargains, even some mats for my Jeeves enterprise, but it is slow going. If anyone has suggestions for cross faction trading, going uphill, let me know. My wife suggested that my next BoA (mount / pet etc) purchase from the BMAH is bought on the horde side, which could provide a large correction the gold balance across the two factions.

Lastly, I've almost got a full month of data for my glyph posting, so I'm pretty excited to share those results in the next week or so. I'm looking forward to another spending spree, rounding out my mount collection and stubbornly trying to sell a [Jeweled Onxy Panther] at a tiny markup in the presence of those $#@%ing dupes. It will be a futile, small protest, but it will be mine.

2M Gold spent since gold cap

So it's milestone time. Just over a year ago, I hit the gold cap. I had assumed that once I had enough capital to pretty much do anything I wanted, that I'd ease up on the gold making or at least find some thing to purchase. One of the reasons that it took so long to cap was that as I accumulated more gold, items in game just seemed cheaper and cheaper, so my spending went up. In the end however, the joy of the Warcraft economy won out and I had 1M gold. Unfortunately I didn't have a good record of my spending up to that point, but I vowed it should change... and it did.

I started tracking what I call 'frivolous' spending. Big ticket items that I can do without. So my graph doesn't count gems (aside from two ridiculously priced sprees in early Dragon Soul), flasks, food or repairs. It doesn't count transmog costs, bags (even the big ones (even fridges)), bank tabs or enchants. All those things are the cost of living for my main and an army of alts, and can probably be paid for (with a few exceptions) by dailies and incidental coin loot.

What my graph does track is BoEs, presents, mounts, pets, major guild contributions, rare recipes and cost of flight training.

I'm pretty excited to hit the 2M mark inside a year since I hit gold cap, and I'd like to share some of my highlights:

1. To celebrate hitting the gold cap, I made myself another [Mekgineer's Chopper]. All this time my main had been riding around in a chopper, yet the Overlord of Twitchie Enterprises used pretty standard transportation. I put a stop to that! Fortunately, about the same time, my wife had been putting in the extra time and effort, grinding out [Canopic Jar]s to be finally rewarded with the recipe after the expansion had been out for over a year. So it was time, and she made me a  [Vial of the Sands] and we flew across Uldum together, like never before.
2. My wife makes her own, well deserved [Vial of the Sands] and a matching [Loop of the Kirin Tor] to whisk her away to romantic evenings in Dalaran. Guys, you can never go wrong with jewellery!
3. In amongst BoEs for my main, I spent 42.5k on my Paladin Tank alt so I could gear up and cruise through Dragon Soul.
4. I took my shadow priest to a 25 man Dragon Soul GDKP run and picked up [Experiment 12-B] for 155k. It was just after the announcement of account wide mounts, so the bidding was fierce!
5. [Vial of the Sands] for a friend's birthday.
6. Mists of Pandaria launches and I'm going to buy all the things!
1. My wife reluctantly accepts a [Mekgineer's Chopper]. 
2. Realm First Blacksmithing at 46k,
3. [Reins of the Grand Expedition Yak] and friends at 113,400g
4. [Serrated Wasp Bracers] heroic tanking bracers from the Black Market Auction House for 45k (which I'm still wearing).
5. Pandaren Flying for 2500g (which will end up at 27,500g after all my alts are leveled).
7. [Sapphire Panther] and [Relic of Niuzao]. The trinket was pretty cheap, and I picked it up just after the buff was announced.
8. I got together with a goblin engineer friend to have my [Depleted-Kyparium Rocket] crafted. I supplied some blacksmithing gear with my [Spirit of Harmony] in exchange for the spirits in the rocket. 
9. [Mimiron's Head] for 750k. I wrote about my experience with the BMAH bidding process, and to this day don't regret a copper I dropped on that mount!
10. [Reins of the Onyxian Drake] got me over the 1M in mounts through the BMAH, and is a fine looking drake. In hindsight it also put me over the 2M mark in major spending since hitting the gold cap.
11. Mad Money. I realised that I was pretty close to the 2M mark, and when I looked at the date of my gold capped milestone I decided I'd better get to spending. So I bought a whole bunch of pets, organised some BoEs for alts and couldn't decide what to buy next. Then when I went back to check my expenses I realised that I'd forgotten an extra zero on the price tag of my Yaks! Bam! 2M spent since hitting the gold cap.

Looking back over my spending I decided to add up my gift giving and was surprised so see it came up to 154k gold. Then I quickly remembered that it's 154k out of 2M, which puts it in a little context. Moar presents! I'm interested to see just how much coin my alts have siphoned from The Enterprise, and just how trivial the cost of all my flight training is (all my characters have ultra fast flying) is.

1 million gold

I hit 1 million gold today, and celebrated with a tried and true measure of decadence - a chopper for an alt. Only in the context, it's not really an alt. Twitchie the Gnome Warlock has earned his chopper.

The second order of business was to give [Bracers of Destructive Strength] to my main Borgthor for his DPS set, since they were very slow selling the second time around, and essences are only getting cheaper.

I still have 100k auctions that aren't glyphs up on the AH. So hopefully this will turn into a fun competition to see if I can spend coin as fast as I make it.

In my Warcraft Econ interview, I mentioned that 1 million gold would happen naturally, but not any time soon. However a few factors conspired to get me over the line a lot quicker than I had anticipated. Shortly after hitting 500k, my real life work started ramping up. Firstly, I had very little time to play alts, so my expenses plumetted. Secondly, the easiest WoW activity that I could squeeze into my schedule became gold making, so my regular routine kept the coin rolling in.

On the subject of alts and lack of time, the raid finder feature has almost killed off my enthusiasm for alts raiding. I enjoy the challenge of raiding, and whilst it is novel to do raid finder once for each alt, the mechanics are so detuned the place is like a series of test dummies. I appreciate that you can queue, come and go as you please and are rewarded with loot and valor, but to me it isn't an improvement on grinding for valor in heroics.

I've got plenty more to write about when I have the time, and I'm looking forward to sharing my adventures in <Power Word Guild> on Lightbringer-US where I'm enjoying starting all over again in the low level inscription market. I've also found the savior of my JC market in epic gems, where the profit of each cut often exceeds the market value of an cut inferno ruby, no prospecting required.

Aside from stacks of [Tol'vir Hieroglyphic] for my wife, how should I spend my incoming coin?

500k Gold Milestone and Interview

I finally submitted my interview for the Warcraft Econ Hall of Fame, so head on over and check it out! In the mean time, I've been flipping cubs and managed to move another 100k across to horde while maintaning my 500k balance on Alliance.

I've also given my glyph operation a major overhaul, since the guild bank interface has gone from clumsy to unruly... a great feature for guild masters would be to allow turning off logging of transactions from guild bank tabs. It's not like the armory can provide an out of game interface for that anymore, and the amount of data kept for display in game isn't worth the hassle.

The picture above is from when I first introduced Twitchie the Gnome Warlock, but because he was a glypher, I couldn't show you his face.

20,000 / 25,000 Glyphs

A full 2,500 glyphs ahead of schedule comes the 20,000 milestone on the road to 25,000 glyphs in a year since Cataclysm launched.


One of the pleasant surprises from milling sooo many herbs is just how long the Darkmoon Cards are remaining profitable. I have just ticked over 400,000 gold in Darkmoon Card sales since the launch of Cataclysm, and on average I'm still able to get at least 100% markup on the cost of creating decks. [Darkmoon Card: Volcano] is still BiS for most casters in the game, and [Darkmoon Card: Tsunami] is a delightfull healing trinket and sells for even more coin. I generally just aim to offload the, "only useful for grabbing an extra hit in Chimaeron" [Darkmoon Card: Earthquake] at cost. The hurricane cards aren't particularly good sellers, with quite variable prices but still a money maker. The cards do make good presents too, and I'm up to over a dozen used for alts, friends and guildies.

10,000 / 25,000 Glyphs

10,057 Glyphs done... and 7,807 to burn in order to satisfy the first guild glyph making achievement come 4.1. Now that Blizzard has decided to reduce the achievement from 25,000 to 2,500 glyphs I'm hoping they have a progressive list of achievements so I can continue on my way to 25,000 glyphs in a year since Cata launched.

I'm pretty happy with my new system, and how easy it is to churn out the glyphs. I have 6 [Bag of Endless Pockets] in my bank, which leaves enough space for a few BoP items and PvP gear (although doubtful I'll ever commit to that grind on a second (let alone third) toon). I have 4 inscribing bags on my toon, one of which stores inks and parchment ready for glyph production. That leaves at least 3 huge bags and the backpack for processing glyphs from the mail box. I also have two guild bank tabs reserved for glyph stock as well.

The beauty of all this storage is that it allows me to produce glyphs very efficiently. Regardless of what I have on the AH, or in storage I can create an entire batch of all the profitable glyphs and get complete coverage of the glyph market. Since I cover the entire market, even after the first few rounds of undercutting (which is pretty brutal with glyphs) I still have a reasonable coverage at the lowest price.

When I re-list glyphs, I just set a maximum number of glyphs to post at the lowest price and anything over that I just whack back in my glyph storage. I will often do a 'top up', and create the extra high demand glyphs that have sold out at this point, and save the mass production for later.

Creating glyphs faster than I can sell them is great for high demand periods. On weekends, I take three trips to the AH, each time taking 3 inscribing bags worth of glyphs, 2 from my bank and one from the guild bank. I can take advantage of the increased demand and post more glyphs without having to make them at the time. At my peak, I've had almost 2000 glyphs listed for a total of over 100,000g worth of glyphs for sale at one time.

The next question is... what to do if there isn't a 25,000 glyph achievement to shoot for? Do I complete the goal I set for myself, or do I scale back production for absolute maximum gold per hour and get reacquainted with some other markets?

250k

Another gold milestone crept up on me the other day; 250k on the server. I had originally intended to get all the gold on alliance, but I have started to get into cross-faction arbitrage, with a fantastic avenue to pursue it. As soon as I had hit 250k, another Darkmoon card sold, and Twitchie finally got to equip a well deserved [Darkmoon Card: Volcano] of his own. I still have a deck up my sleeve for Zenborg in about a weeks time.

Now that I'm at 250k gold, I'm not sure more coin is any more useful. Since I'm not likely to spend more than 50k gold on a single item, as long as I'm over 200k I'll be on the lookout for the most attractive of money sinks.

Image by: tao_zhyn

Last Minute Wrath: 150k gold

After I posted that I had reached 100k gold on the server, the coin just kept flowing. The nice thing about automating many of the steps in coin generation, it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep things ticking along. Sure if you have a burning desire to have a ton of gold you can expand to new markets, and find new niches... but if you are comfy with where you're at, you can focus on your highest profit for time markets and participate in the others when you grab those bulk bargains from the AH.

A month or so ago I had 160k at my peak, and then between getting involved and another "Last Minute Wrath" project and transferring 10k horde side.... I was down to 125k.

Fortunately after the doom and gloom about the post Glyphmas slump prediction for Inscription when patch 4.0.1 hit... I found precisely the opposite. Increased materials for glyphs meant a larger mark up for each glyph, and even after the massive demand subsided... demand has been steady and the market humming along nicely.

I was completely caught out by patch 4.0.3a, and had not traded nearly enough Ink of the Sea for alternate inks before the ink trader was 'upgraded'. However, there most be a whole bunch of people leveling alts prior to Cataclysm hitting, since I've found the lower to mid level Herb markets far more accessible in the last couple of weeks. I'm still constantly short of Eternal Ink, but I make hay when the sun is shining.

The picture above has my most recent takings from selling glyphs in a single session, which at 3.8k is a new record for me. With the last taking coming in at 1.8k, hitting 5.6k worth of glyphs sold in 12 hours was a nice present just before Cataclysm.

100,000 gold

 

While I haven’t blogged a lot recently, that day has finally come! I was astounded when I sold [Ikfirus’ Sack of Wonder] on behalf of the guild for 25k, more than I had ever owned between all my toons soon after ICC was released. I had heard about players with over 100k, and after some googling... players who were “gold capped” (214748g36s47c is the maximum gold on a single toon (since gold is stored as an unsigned 32 bit integer)) and even bloggers that have marched onto 1 million gold.

So I started to set my sights a little higher. The first thing I did was to expand my craftables spreadsheet with the usual high volume markets. Leg patches, drums, meta gems, spellthread, vellums and fort scrolls. I also resurrected my inscription trade, thanks to a fantastic addon Quick Auctions 3 which deals with the glyph market very well.

The next job was identifying toons that could cover the professions that I hadn’t leveled yet. Jondayla has a leatherworker, so I immediately put her to work. The volume of regular borean leather she has schmunched into heavy leather over the last few months is epic. Thanks to Moonspirit for her Moonshroud specialty and Therepoman for his Spellweave (Zenborg gets double Ebonweave). Other than that I had all the crafting professions covered (now with a Gnomish AND a Goblin Engineer).

I almost forgot! A special mention to Jondayla for transmuting gems and titanium for me for ages! I forgot about it until I sent the mats for 60 meta gems (edit: which came back as 66 meta gems) just now.

Then I got to work. I had already set up thresholds to watch for flask, potion and belt buckle materials for the guild bank. So it wasn’t a lot extra to add to my morning AH scan to grab the rest. I was already used to spending between 20 - 30k per month for the guild, so I relished the opportunity to start buying in larger volumes for myself as well. I did need to grab a couple of quick macros so that I could buy 4k gold worth  of leather in a single sitting without boring myself too much.

Then the coin came rolling in. The high volume items (including bullets) have just kept on trucking, with the ICC craftables providing some excitement [like when cloth pants sell for 2.5k profit even while prices are deteriorating].

I think my attraction to coin generation is primarily that it is something that I can do on my own. While I have a fantastic group of crafters who help out, I can mail them mats and have stuff crafted whenever it suits them... you can’t mail a raid ID and have someone’s return combo DPS / fire avoidance returned to you later on. I’m not a big quester, I only like to level in bursts... and rep grinds are mostly painful at best. While farming I can’t keep from keeping muttering the mantra, “Time is money, friend”. So while coin making is one of those necessities, it’s the most fun solo aspect of the game for me. The other bonus is that it can be done in small time slices, and I can queue up smelting 10 minutes worth of saronite and just go AFK. Having a spreadsheet to track profitability great fun too!

So now I’m all cashed up for Cataclysm, but I haven’t quite decided on a coin strategy yet. I could blow it all trying for a realm first profession, but if people in the US get to log in hours in advance it might be a no go. The summer months are very busy real life months for me, so Wrath might repeat itself and the coin dwindles away as outside of raiding and the odd daily there isn’t a lot of time for much else.

To celebrate I made Borgelmir a pair of [Boots of Kingly Upheaval] since he is generally tanking these days and ArP on all the T10 Death Knight makes a unholy DK want to cry.