I was hanging out with Jim of Power Word: Gold the other day on his gold making live stream and one of the questions one of the views posed was how to get the initial starting capital to begin your goblin empire. We of course answered the question on the stream (at least I think I managed to say something useful) but I wanted to delve into the subject a bit more in detail and in a medium a bit easier for people to find.

Starting Your Empire

First I wanted to touch lightly on the act of getting your empire assembled. You’ll want to start out slowly, pick one or two professions to get your feet wet and get used to running your business, might I suggest Jewelcrafting and Enchanting? The idea here is to start with one or two things, and then branch out from there once you’ve gotten comfortable with your current markets. Don’t bite off more than you can chew is what I’m saying here, take it slow.

Gold Farming

One way to get capital is going out into the world and farming for gold, e.g. spending hour upon hour killing and looting mobs. I do not suggest this, there is a terrible gold/hr and there is much better options out there.

Farming for Materials

This involves going out with a farmer, preferably a herbalist and miner combo, and collecting the materials from the world. This is a very good method for two reasons. First, it leaves you with a dual gathering character that can become very handy when materials are tight or during an expansion launch when the best gold making comes from gathering.

Second, it allows you to make a choice of either selling mats on the AH for gold for starting capital, or using the mats directly in your ventures. For example, if you decided to go with my suggestions, a Jewelcrafting/Enchanting combo and a Mining/Herbalism combo, you could use the Ore gathered directly to go about your Jewelcrafting and Enchanting (there’s a plethora of information about how the synergy of these two professions work – Google is your friend) and decide either to hold the herbs to use later when you expand, or sell them for capital. I suggest selling the herbs until you expand into a market that requires it, the starting capital will serve you better, and chances are prices are only going down, so hoarding them won’t do you any good.

One thing to stress here is just because you farmed it doesn’t mean it is free. I can not stress that enough, and everyone in the gold making community will back this up. Even when you are using your own farmed mats you should treat them as if you bought them off the Auction House, not only is this good business sense it gets you into practice with relatively low risk (no capital is technically on the line).

Selling Vendor Items

You would be surprised how many players out there will buy items off the Auction House that could be found from a vendor, either from ignorance or from laziness, and you can make a pretty penny off these people. I’m personally a fan of vendor pets, but there are all sorts of items out there people will buy ranging from recipes to armour (for transmog, twinking etc.). They key here is to get a route going, take your biggest bags, make a few stops at mailboxes, and hit every vendor possible while you’re out there to maximize the gold/hr of this and to minimize the tedious aspect of this method.

Summary

If you play your cards right you won’t be in this stage for very long and will soon outgrow these relative small gold sources. Remember to start out slowly, if you run along at break neck speed you might do just that – break your neck.

I feel like a terrible Beta tester, here I am with “exclusive” access to the new Mists of Pandaria Beta, and I have no urge to do any real testing. This past week I finally got around to tinkering a bit with the Beta, mostly just played a Pandaran until we got to Stormwind. I’ll hopefully get around to playing with the higher end content eventually but I figured I’d just get down what I thought of the Beta so far.

My first impression of Pandaran wasn’t stellar, in fact I didn’t like them the first time I played. They grew on me however and now I think they are pretty cool, still not as cool as Worgen though. I chose to play as a monk and although it bears striking resemblance to a rogue what with the energy and combo points basically, it felt different enough that it shouldn’t really matter, and the monk on the whole felt fun to play, nice and fast paced for the most part. If I was a hunter I’d probably snatch one of the Corsac Fox roaming around the starting area, they look pretty cool.

The AoE looting feature is a nice quality of life addition, but it isn’t really ground breaking or game changing, just a nice touch that’ll save a few seconds here and there. The Auction House interface has improved a little bit but not by enough to render any of your gold related add-ons obsolete, so we’ll still be add-on heavy going into Mists of Pandaria.

I was disappointed that despite all the new ores and herbs being in the files already they appear not to be available in the beta as of yet which is unfortunate since I was looking forward to doing some mass prospecting and number crunching. Come to think of it, I don’t even know if we’ll get access to the ore and herbs before live, I wasn’t in the Cataclysm beta so I have no idea if we had access to ore in the beta then. But, if we do get access to the ore and herbs in the beta, you can be sure I’m going to be prospecting the hell out of it.

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I assume by now everyone and their donkey has heard already, but MMO-Champion has revealed information on a new Black Market Auction House. Go ahead and check it out if you haven’t already, I’ll wait here. Read it through? Good. Pretty wicked eh? Some important details about the new Black Market Auction House:

• Auctions are “run” by NPCs
• Auctions include a variety of rare big ticket items such as mounts, pets, plans, transmog armour etc.
• The gold used to purchase the items disappears much as it would if you bought from a regular vendor, i.e. it doesn’t go into another player’s pocket
• There is no buyout

What all this means is that we’re going to have a daily draining of gold from the servers. Many of the items on here are of sufficient value and rarity that many big spenders will be emptying their wallets to buy them, and the first time (at least) really big items like Invincible’s Reins (assuming they will be available) come up you can be sure there will be million gold bids within minutes. The killer prices won’t be able to last forever though, even us goblins have our limits, and we’ll soon see the prices for many of these items coming down in the months following the release of the expansion.

Effects on the Economy

This is going to have a huge, and scaling, effect on server economies. What you have here is repeatable gold dumps that scale to a server’s economy, keeping inflation in check like we’ve never seen before. On the regular auctions house all the gold from big ticket items go to another player, the gold is basically being recycled minus the 5% AH cut. With the BMAH 100% of the gold spent on the purchase is being removed from the economy, potentially removing millions of gold every day in large chunks from the Daddy Big Bucks of the server, and not just nickle and diming every player like most of the other sinks like repairs and AH cuts. It’s going to be very interesting to see what how the economy reacts to this.

Effects on Gold Sellers

Gold Sellers aren’t magicians, they can’t just magic gold into the game so the gold they sell has to come from somewhere, be it hack, farmers, sales of dupes etc. all the gold they sell has to be in the economy already. I admit I don’t really know too much about the gold selling process, but one can only assume that they have a finite supply of gold on hand at any one time, and I’m seriously pondering exactly how big these reserves are. Are they big enough to supply a server when the first big ticket item like Invincible goes up? Or will the gold sellers run out of gold?

Either way the BMAH will send gold sellers through some serious twists and turns, because while multiple people might buy gold to buy a certain item off the BMAH, only one can win it so the rest are left with large sums of gold sitting about. This means gold sellers will experience astronomical spikes in demand probably followed by a relative dry spell. If I were a gold seller I’d seriously consider stepping up production right about now.

Conclusions

Unfortunately this hasn’t actually been activated on the Beta servers as of this writing but as soon as it goes on the server you can be assured it will be the first thing I check out (I’m still exploring the beta, expect a post about my initial thoughts soon). I must say this has probably been one of the smartest things Blizzard has done to combat inflation, and yet I don’t think that was their intention at all. Funny how these things work.

Yes, yes I know I haven’t written anything gold related, or WoW related for that matter, in way too long. To be honest I’ve still been a bit apathetic towards the game, honestly if it wasn’t for the fact I succumbed to the annual pass, I would have probably dropped WoW by now. But I did agree to the annual pass, as so I couldn’t drop it, and so here I am!

Why I Haven’t Been Blogging

Honestly, I still do like blogging, it’s just been hard coming up with topics lately, there hasn’t exactly been any news gold related since the last patch dropped, so I’ve been sitting here sort of fiddling my thumbs. I should break out my writing ideas notebook and see what I have scribbled in it, but I foresee either all the topics being out of date, used, or some random sentence, quote, or song that I no longer know what I was going to write about. When you’re not playing the game you blog about, it becomes really hard to write about, and my thoughts about expanding the scope of this blog hasn’t been really turning out, because I’m honestly not confident in myself to write about anything “off topic” that people would find interesting.

But I Intend To Fix That!

I made use of the new Scroll of Resurrection offer by Blizzard to create myself a brand spanking new level 80 Priest, and I’m hoping this enough to get me back into the game, shiny new toy and all. So far it’s been working, it’s already at level 83, and once I got over the initial apprehension of learning a new class, I’ve been playing it fairly steadily.

As a side note: I see why Blizzard has never given levelled character’s this high before, this is seriously overwhelming basically being thrown head first into a new class. That levelling I did as a priest up to about level 40? Completely out the window, this should certainly be an interesting experience.

Barrier to (Re)Entry

I didn’t take an official hiatus this time, I just sort of drifted away from the game, so while I didn’t shut anything down, I lost touch of the markets and fell out of routine (not to mention I’m pretty sure I lost a lot of inventory in the mailbox). One of the biggest issue I have right now getting back into gold making is reworking my buying prices, posting prices etc., and once I do that I should be golden.

Mists of Pandaria NDA Being Lifted

A lot of bloggers were excited to hear what was being released in the press…event? I think that’s what it was, an event. Any who, I really wasn’t too excited about it, and too be honest I’m still not to concerned. Once I get my Beta invite however (I signed up for the Annual Pass fairly soon after it’s release) I plan on poking around and seeing what changes Mists of Pandaria will bring for the gold making community. Oh, and Pandas, definitely going to spend a lot of time rolling around as a Panda.

Yea my family got a new puppy named Charley. It’s a Bichon/Poodle (Miniature or Toy, I  forget now) mix and is currently 7 weeks old:

D’awwwwww

And here’s Miska (our Golden Doodle) meeting the new arrival for the first time:

I once just missed the last chance to get gold and items off my second account, a kindly GM gave me a free 24 hrs of game time to collect the last of my items

I once just missed the last chance to get gold and items off my second account, a kindly GM gave me a free 24 hrs of game time to collect the last of my items

Funny you should mention that about lost mail when you drifted away. I almost had that happen to me when I unsubbed a few weeks ago. The day before my time ended I remembered that I had one or two hundred glyphs in the mail and a few thousand gold. Had to make sure I logged in to catch that.;)

Funny you should mention that about lost mail when you drifted away. I almost had that happen to me when I unsubbed a few weeks ago. The day before my time ended I remembered that I had one or two hundred glyphs in the mail and a few thousand gold. Had to make sure I logged in to catch that.;)