2022 Comes in With a Bang

Geeze Stargrace, it has been over two months since your last post, what the heck happened?!

Well. First of all, I’m OK. Now, at least. Back in January a bunch of drama happened that caused me to realize that friendships I thought were important actually meant nothing to those involved. I realized that I was working incredibly hard to foster these friendships and cultivate them but that I was in fact very easily forgotten about – which is fine when you expect it, but I actually thought these friendships had value and meaning, so it sent me into a sort of tailspin, emotionally. It hurt. I pulled back from twitter, I stopped blogging, and instead I focused on fostering healthy boundaries and relationships. Once I was done sulking, in any case.

I’m still posted at my isolated post in the North. We were due out in December but things happened beyond our control and we’re still here until around the end of May. We’ll be moving East to Nova Scotia eventually, but being here has been difficult. Add in the pandemic, global issues like the war in the Ukraine, and you have a high stressed Stargrace.

I am still gaming. I actually play World of Warcraft, and I started up a separate twitter account as well as blog depicting my gold making adventures. You can find my twitter account under: @girlgoblin1 and the blog is (gasp) girlgoblin.ca.

I am also still playing Wurm Online and just recently acquired a new deed that I can’t wait to talk about. BDO is still way up there on my games played, too. They’re releasing new content in April that I’m excited about.

I’ve also been reading some awesome books this year, and I am hoping to continue writing about them on my book blog. We’ll see how that goes.

I’m cautious about things. Consider this a return to blogging if nothing more. I don’t expect I’ll be back on twitter any time soon, but there are ways to reach me if required (discord, FB, steam, etc). I am hoping that I get to start streaming once we move to our new location, but since we haven’t even bought a house yet that is all up in the air.

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

[Unpopular Opinion] You don’t HAVE to make millions

One thing I’ve noticed when it comes to making gold (honestly this translates to anything anyone ever feels passionate about) is that there is a handful of people who consider their opinions elite – and they are not afraid to let you know it. They talk with confidence about things they may or may not actually know about, and if you’re making gold in some other ‘lesser’ way you feel shamed over it. Consider this the min/max conversation of the gold making realm. It’s no different than raiders discussing the best mechanics and gear to wear. There are plenty of great gold makers out there who are successful at what they do and don’t make you feel like a lesser being. Those are the ones I love listening to.

My unpopular opinion: You don’t have to make millions of gold to be a successful gold maker. You don’t have to min/max and optimize every second of every play session. Making gold is a frame of mind, and if it’s something you enjoy doing then guess what, that makes you a goblin (or whatever other phrase you want to use). Are there optimized methods of making gold out there? Yes, there are. If you don’t enjoy doing it the chances of you sticking with it are not going to be that great. Be open to learning new methods, trying new things, and taking in advice – but you shouldn’t feel pressured into it. This is, after all, a game. It is OK (and even expected) to make mistakes. Learn from them.

If you happen to be an amazing gold maker, try not talking down to the newer goblins who are still learning the ropes. Embrace their sales (yes, even those small ones), encourage their methods, and make suggestions that could help them out when requested. We don’t have to be condescending. This is an amazing community, with some fantastic people that I’ve gotten to know over the years – but it can still be an unwelcoming place if you’re not constantly playing by those unspoken ‘rules’.

Sniper vs. Shopping Lists in TSM

Disclaimer – this is NOT a post telling you what items you should snipe.

If you’re familiar with Tradeskillmaster in any form you probably remember the older version of the addon when you could constantly run ‘sniper’ to find deals on the auction house that people had miss priced (this still works if you’re playing classic) but at the end of BFA things changed. Using shopping lists in TSM will get you results faster than sniper will (depending on how many items you’re trying to search through sniper). Personally, I still think there’s room for both depending on the situation.

If you’re running a second account while you’re doing something else, sniper may still have its use. Instead of searching the last page of the auction house scanning for constant deals (this doesn’t work) you create a group in TSM with very specific items you’re looking for (remember, you CANNOT assign a sniper operation to the base group). The smaller the group, the faster the search. In my case, I still search for current tier reagents this way. My operations are simple, whatever the maximum amount is that I’m willing to pay for something is what I assign as an operation. It’s usually a static number rather than a big string. There might only be 10 items I’m looking for, so sniper can happily run searching for those items and nothing else. Simple, right?

Then there’s shopping lists. These are usually groups you’ve created with numerous items in them, categorized in some way like ‘transmog’ ‘recipes’ ‘mounts’. You’d assign a shopping operation to these groups and run a shopping scan on them. I usually just scan one group at a time so that things keep moving. They’ll slow down if you have too many items in the groups or you select too many groups at once, but they’re still much faster than sniper. I know there are other addons that reportedly do this function faster (Auctionator) but I personally have no experience with it. The very basic formula would be using dbregionmarketavg and buying something that is cheap and re-selling the item or using it. You don’t have to use that price source though, /tsm sources and check for what makes sense in your situation.

One last thing – in the screenshot above you’ll see that TSM includes a handy list of recent searches, as well as favourite searches. You can create strings of things to search for and then save them if they’re items that you search for frequently.

My suggestion to new goblins is to start small and don’t get complicated with your strings until you’re ready for it. Don’t randomly import other peoples strings until you understand what they do – that’s an easy way to lose gold. I know it looks impressive when you see an operation that includes ifgte and a billion custom sources but you can get there with time. You also absolutely can still make plenty of gold not using any of these addons or methods. The key point is finding something you enjoy doing that you’ll actually stick with. The rest will fall into place.

Avoiding The 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

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.