Category: Gaming

Unpopular Opinion – Why Gold Making Guides Work

Time to share an unpopular opinion – and it’s one we’ve all heard discussed time and time again in the WoW Economy discord. Lots of people have some pretty strong ideas about clickbait videos, guides, and other methods that streamers use to boost their views and get people looking at their content. You know the ones, “make 1,000,000 gold by doing this ONE thing!” Or “I sold two pieces of transmog and hit gold cap!” One gold maker in specific, Studen Albatroz, comes up almost every conversation – and my unpopular take is that his methods work – but not for the reason you might think.

I am a firm believer in raising your fellow gold makers up and being encouraged by them and using them as motivation and inspiration rather than seeing them as competition. When Studen came out with his gold making book, I bought it. I also support goblins on Patreon, I donate to TSM, and I support addon developers. I understand that not everyone can do this – but I can, and I believe in it, so I do. Anyway. I purchased his gold making book curious about whether or not it worked – and it absolutely does. You might not find it especially useful if you’re already an established gold maker, and yes, the information is definitely already out there for free if you’re going to go looking for it, but Studen offers something that is almost essential to any gold maker, and that I find beginner goblins tend to struggle with.

His book tells you specific goals to aim towards, and how long to work towards them. It gives people with zero direction a specific and detailed list of items/places to go, along with videos. We (as humans) spend so much time just wondering what we should do and how to spend our time. This book is a neat and tidy ‘to do’ list. Will everything sell? Heck no, but if you pick 30 farms out of the ones listed, SOMETHING is going to stick. It would be almost impossible to make ZERO gold by doing the suggested farms. Doing SOMETHING is almost always going to net you more gold than doing nothing. Some times, I spend a lot of time doing nothing.

That’s all there is to it. It’s not some magical theory that gold makers haven’t heard of. It’s simple good habits and organization. That’s why things like doing your mission tables, halfhill farms, and garrisons are popular methods of passive gold. They are habits and rituals built over time that reward you. Maybe not millions all at once, but slowly.

Obviously take videos and farms posted with a grain of salt – the chances of you making millions from a publicly posted RNG type farm are not guaranteed and with Blizzard cracking down on raw gold farms and vendor tricks at the end of BFA, you’re going to have to put in the effort to make gold this way. That doesn’t mean you should instantly discount everything, though. Eventually, something sticks.

Deep Dive – Flipping Pets

An easy entry level market to get into when it comes to making gold (and by easy, I mean relatively hands off) is selling battle pets. These items have a few things going for them – low auction house fees (1s per pet), and the ability to swap them easily between servers. There are tons of ways to profit from this method but here’s the details on mine. Before we get into it I have to note that selling pets is a SLOW market. You need a large stock to see a few sales each day. Some pets also sell better than others. Learning what pets are desirable would be considered your homework.

First, I’ve set myself up on a high/full population server where pets are pretty cheap because there’s tons of players. I use this server to purchase pets. I then scribe them, and bring them over to the two low population servers that I actually play on. I use a handful of addons to help make things easier. I use:

  • BattlePetCageMatch (used to cage pets, you can create all sorts of profiles and conditions to caging)
  • Rematch (used for actual pet battles, I get strategies from xu-fu listed below)
  • Rematch – TSM Pet Values (not required, but lets me see pet values from the journal UI)
  • tdBattlePetScript (used for actual pet battles, it’s a script that will run a fight with human input for each stage)
  • TradeskillMaster (used to actually put my pets for sale on the AH)

I also use Xu-Fu for pet battle strategies and to learn which pets might be used in popular fights.

I created a new profile in TSM and simply called it pets. Under general options, I have ‘filter group item list based on the following price source’ set to DBRegionMarketAvg. You can type /tsm sources to see what other pricing you can use for TSM, but the reason I use this is because it’s fairly static and will help me make sure that I buy pets for one price on one server and that price will remain close to the same on another server without having to manually check every purchase.

In my case, I don’t really worry too much about the price of pets, because while some people are sniping/flipping/buying the most expensive and sought after ones, I am doing the opposite. I buy all pets that display as 20% dbregionmarketavg or lower by typing /battle pets into the ‘search the auction house’ filter.

Some are a few silver, some a few gold. I look for specifics that are used in pet battles (I am an avid pet collector myself, so I have a pretty lengthily list) and I keep some variables in mind like ‘where does this pet come from’ so that I’m not purchasing pets that are going to continue to plummet. I also keep the server I’m transferring TO in mind – is there a lack of M+ being run, do some of these pets come from there, that sort of thing.

I then take these pets over to my home servers, and I level them up to 25. I do this for a few reasons but the base reason is because I don’t particularly enjoy shadowlands, and this is a really easy way for me to level my alts. It’s not fast, but it is easy.

Back in TSM, I have groups set up – one group for level 1 pets, and 1 group for level 25 pets. You can do this a few ways, you can manually add the pets you’ve purchased that are in your bags, or you can import pet strings. If you don’t know how to make groups in TSM there are tons of videos and instructions out there. Since this is a post about pet flipping and not the functions of TSM, I’ll save that for another time.

In the TSM operations tab I create a new operation for level 25 pets – and you can set your numbers at whatever you want, but ideally, you want to be earning MORE than you’ve paid for the pets – mine is set to 500g + 50% DBRegionMarketAvg as my minimum price. That means the least amount of gold I’ll accept for a pet when someone else has one listed (ie: I’m undercutting) is 500g plus 50% of the dbregionmarketavg. Since I buy my pets at 20% that’s a profit, plus I slap on the 500g for the pet being level 25. I adjust these values for maximum and normal price. Remember, NORMAL price is the price you will use when there are NO OTHER PETS that match for sale.

While I do these pet battles I also tend to get those little tokens that change the rarity of a pet, and using them can increase the value. Let’s take ikky, for example, a very popular pet to sell. The base pet is uncommon, using one of these tokens and boosting it to rare will up the value and the stats.

Once I’ve got an operation set up and assigned to my groups, it’s time to cage pets and put them for sale. I recently started using BattlePetCageMatch for this – the addon is fantastic. You can set options for caging, like only caging between a specific level, if you have more than one, and other nifty options.

I don’t like to do cancel scans, so I put my pets up for 12h at a time. I check them twice a day and just leave them to do their thing. There is of course competition out there, that’s just the nature of the game.

This method is NOT one you want to use to make hundreds of millions in gold – but it is fairly easy to get into and will give you a handful of gold here and there for what I consider to be very little effort. You could certainly expand on your pet flipping empire by looking for amazing deals, transferring the most expensive pets, branching into TCG pets, and using trade chat to find potential buyers instead of relying solely on the auction house. Whatever method you choose, I hope I’ve helped give you a little bit of information towards starting. Go out there and make some gold!

Leveling up In BDO

I’ve continued to play BDO this month alternating between my two accounts every 30 days so that I can remain on the Olvia servers (no PvP happens there). My winter season character (a dark knight) is level 58 and just finished the chenga tome quest. Next I’ll work my way to 61 by using some of the very popular leveling guides, and I’ll attempt to finish off my season pass. When 30 days have passed, I’ll swap back over to my other account, and continue playing the season there. All in all I’m pretty happy with my progress, life skills are moving, though some certainly move faster than others. I still have not even touched hunting yet, mostly because I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it or be any good at it. I hear it’s pretty annoying. Still, it’s on ‘the list’.

I’ve done a lot of AFK fishing, afk combat, and cooking. Alchemy is something I’m really interested in, but getting components is annoying. I haven’t started doing too much trading on this second account, but I made up for that with bartering which levels VERY slowly. In fact after 23 barter trips, I’m still at beginner 2. Ouch.

I’m excited about the new winter zone being added, and while I can see how people would experience burnout and want to play different games, I’m still enjoying myself and trudging along. Maybe when I reach guru in all of my life skills I’ll want to take a break. Until then..

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

I’ll Packa my Alpaca

Even though the adorable alpaca mounts are temporary (we hope that they will release a permanent version once the new winter zone releases for good) of course I had to rush right out and do some ice fishing to collect one.

It was a quest I don’t ever want to do again.

You grab a fishing rod from Crio in Velia, and then you head SE a ways into the bush where you settle down to do some ice fishing. When you catch a fish you physically move your mouse around in circles, either clockwise or counter clockwise depending on which way the reel has to go. You’re supposed to keep the fish in the center of some marking and move both clockwise and counterclockwise as the fish moves – but it’s REALLY difficult and sore on the wrist. My only tip is to move from your shoulder to prolong the issues you’re going to encounter.

You have to catch two of each type of fish. There are three. It took me 30 attempts and then some. Each rod only has 30 attempts, so I had to run all of the way back, grab another rod, and continue trying to fish.

There was nothing fun about this quest.

That being said, my Shai does look absolutely adorable riding her Alpaca – and it’s also incredibly slow so the chances of me actually using it are pretty slim, besides the fact that this version of it will be vanishing in February, so I’m not even really sure what the point was.

Picture of course for cuteness.

Let’s Go Sailing

It was time. I bought myself a boat from the central market, and I wanted to teach myself how to barter. From the start, it’s pretty simple. Under the life tab of the UI you have a barter screen. On it you’ll see different objects listed, starting with one that comes from on land. It’s usually node obtained or harvested or something like that. I think my first one was some red stones. You take a number of those red stones (or 6x the amount listed, as you can typically complete 6 of those particular trades) and look to see who is accepting them. Then you sail out there and they give you another item in return for your trade. You take that item, look at the list again, and sail to the next location. In BDO there are 5 trades, and then you can either sell the final item for silver or you can exchange it for crow coins.

Coins can be spent on various things and you get the picture of how this works. After 21 trades I’m still at beginner 2 bartering, which is pretty low. I did a bunch of sailing quests and I’m at skilled four for that, at least. There are dailies (also known by players as sailies) to do that will help you get that sailing experience, and you earn some for riding around where the map doesn’t work.

I have a lot of work ahead of me. I dedicated storage space to a few islands so I can drop off excess barter items (you are limited by the weight your boat can carry, so you may not be able to perform every transaction that you have access to) and I unlocked a lot of trade nodes at least. It is one of my least favourite life skills so far, but it might get better in time, I’m not sure.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!