Tag: Flipping

What am I doing for 9.2?

Since returning to the game just over a month ago, I’ve watched goblins on twitter, discord, and reddit, as they prepared for 9.2 and then followed the aftermath of sales (or potential sales) to see what everyone was up to. The reason my own posts about this have been sparse is for a few reasons, but the main one is that I am not doing much current tier content. I don’t have any legendaries leveled (I don’t even wear any on my characters), I don’t have the faction required to craft the marked gear, and I’m not a hardcore min/max goblin, so while I have been doing the new dailies in Zereth Mortis, I have not been farming rares and puzzles. I won’t be one of the first people with items for sale.

I am also a low risk goblin. I don’t often try to predict where the market will go or what blizzard will do. I applaud goblins that do but it’s just one more reason why I love gold making, there are MANY ways to make gold.

That being said, I did invest in one prediction. Since I am on a very low population server I spent three days buying out all of the progenitor essentia that was typically priced at 12-8k gold. In those days I scooped up 60 progenitor essentia for around 400,000 gold. Just to show how low population my server is, once I had bought all of those, it typically took half a day before a single essentia would be posted. I personally have no use for essentia (or pog, as everyone is calling it) since I won’t have the faction required for a while and I’m not planning on leveling up legendaries but since there was (before today) no use for these items, I banked on them being of low value. I figured that value would climb as people earned their faction and wanted to craft the newer items.

I put them on the market for 30k each, being the only player with any for sale, and – they all sold. They all sold to one person, who is probably either going to try to flip them themselves, or use them to craft the new stuff and then sell that for a premium. Personally, I am incredibly happy with my purchase and the timing of my sale.

  • One, I was concerned blizzard would change the drop rate on this item since it seems like there will be an enormous imbalance in supply / demand. Even farming for 6-8 hours players are reporting that they only found four pog. I personally have found zero after taking four characters through Zereth Mortis.
  • Two, my low population server tends to undercut until things have almost zero value, immediately. There are 210 legendaries for sale on the AH for 7 gold (I realize these items have almost zero value these days, but at 7 gold why even bother putting them for sale). Leveling up legendaries is quite literally just throwing gold into a void where you may not see returns for ages. I am not interested in playing that game.
  • Three, while there WILL be a demand, I personally feel that on my server, there won’t be AS MUCH of a demand due to the low population, a sever lack of raid guilds, and because blizzard changed the AH to display a warning if you try to buy more than 1 unique equip piece of gear. Previously people would buy a whole set and then only learn after that they could only wear one. That should happen far less frequently (if at all).

For me, this was a risk that paid off, and I got out immediately. I imagine that the pog will go up even more in value after everyone earns their faction (which should be today, for the first round of folks) – but again, I didn’t want to keep playing a risky game. Who knows how many others had pog stored up and saved just waiting.

Could I have made more gold? Of course, there is a min/max to this game, and I could have optimized things further. I could have crafted with the items, I could have waited to see where they settle after the downtime and when they have a functional use, etc. Again, I am much less interested in making the MOST gold I possibly can, and more interested in taking small steps to make gold that is comfortable to my play style. There’s no right or wrong. It’s all just different methods.

I will say it has been fascinating watching other goblins froth and foam at the mouth for pog. Some have moved servers and are clearing out pog to eventually transfer over to other places. Some have invested all of their savings into this. Other still asked and wondered about whether they should level up legendaries or if it was too late. I am content to watch from the sidelines, having already made what I consider to be plenty of profit for myself this week.

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Avoiding Some Pitfalls of Flipping

A thank you to Vahdis for actually starting this discussion with a fellow WoW Economy & TSM discord member, it’s what spurred on the motivation for this post.

Continuing this week with our discussion about battle pets – let’s take a look at one of the pitfalls that potential gold making goblins can fall into.

In the screenshot above, you’ll see a search for ‘Emerald whelpling’ – and there are two different items that show up, because they’re identified by two different ID in game. One, is the uncaged version of the battle pet (the first one), and the others below are the caged version. Collection wise there is nothing different about these pets unless you’re going after a specific breed because you can’t see the breed of the one that has never been caged before. It ‘looks’ like a better deal on paper, because there have been so few for sale. How to tell? When you mouse over a pet it will show stats like level and breed. When you mouse over an uncaged pet it will say use: teaches you how to summon this companion.

When you’re looking at deals on the auction house for potential flips, you have to keep things like this in mind. What might SEEM like a great deal, might not actually be one.

Another tool in deciding which items might be actual deals to flip and which ones may not is the addon AllTheThings (ATT). This addon will tell you where the item comes from and more importantly, it will tell you what items out there have the same look. If there’s a long list of similar looking items, chances are, you don’t want to take a chance on flipping it.

Take the replica armour above. You can see that it comes from the Darkmoon Faire, that there are four other items that have the same graphic – but – that red icon in the front of their names means those items have been removed from the game. Currently, nothing else shares the same graphic.

Finally, spend some time lurking around other goblins. I highly recommend joining the WoW Economy & TSM discord as well as the Reddit, and just observing for a while. See what others are selling, what people are avoiding, and learn to formulate your own lists on what you value and don’t for your own servers. If you have questions, try using the search function first to see if anyone else has already asked. Chances are, they have, and there’s a nice answer just waiting for you.

Remember that making gold isn’t filled with a lot of absolutes, so when you ask if ABC123 item will do well on your server, or what craft makes the most profit, or are looking for others to tell you specifics other gold makers are not trying to be elusive and coy. There are just a lot of variables to take into consideration, and what works and sells on one server may not work on another.