A Businessman's Toolkit

There are tons of guides to essential addons on the web, but many of those don’t address the needs of the business people. I don’t need bar mods or threat meters. I need to get my mail faster and keep track of all my dough. I wanted to put together a list of what I use, because maybe there are one or two gems in there that you guys aren’t using.

First off, I use wowmatrix to download and update all of my mods. Back when you had to install them and update them yourself, I didn’t use mods that often because it was a pain, but now it doesn’t have to be.

Obviously auctioneer suite. I was pretty bitter about having to move to auctioneer advance because there is no more real support for igor’s mass auction that I know of. I’m sure that there are people smarter than me out there that know of a quicker way to put up a lot of different auctions up other than appraiser, and maybe you’ll comment here and let me know. Appraiser is great when you are putting up a lot of the same auctions, but when I have 50 different pieces of armor, I’d rather have good old Igor. I would spend more time buying and selling armor, which has been pretty lucrative in the past, but it takes too long for me to post them all.

Next you need a good mail mod. I use postal because it seems to get the mail the quickest for me and you have a contact list. You have to remember to change the speed in the options to make it grab the items quicker though.

I also use Fubar money fu. It keeps track of all of your gold by character, by session, by the day and the week. It screws up when I use different computers for wow since the information it gathers is saved to the computer. I get around this limitation by using different toons for different tasks. I have a toon that receives money simply to buy things to disenchant, so I can keep track of disenchanting costs. Then I have a toon that only sells DE mats to keep track of revenue. All my other buying and selling goes on with a third toon.

Another really useful mod to keep track of items you routinely search for in the AH is AHsearch and AHsearchnext. The menu system for saving searches is a little complicated, but once you figure it out you can save a lot of time typing searches. I look up all the eternals and crystallized elements everyday for example. Instead of having to type everything in, once it is set up you can just click on it from a dropdown menu. It also makes sure I don’t overlook an item I usually check prices for.

I also used to use wowecon. I upgraded a few weeks ago to the premium version and I haven’t had a good experience with it. It very well could be user error, but I find that for whatever reason it only tracks a very small number of my sales, which was the entire reason I upgraded. The module uses a good deal of memory as well, which is fine for my desktop, but it prohibitively expensive in terms of performance with my laptop.

Finally, if you are in a guild with your AH toon, you might want to use a chat mod like prat to filter all of your AH activity so you can keep track of whispers and guild chat. A few people have felt snubbed by me because I didn’t respond because I never saw what they typed. With a chat mod you can keep track of everything easier.

Opportunity Costs

There is poor Cuthbert, sitting at the bar at level 72. For a guy that attended a midnight launch I sure haven't leveled very fast. There are just too many underpriced pieces of Northrend armor/weapons. What a lot of people don't realize is that not all level 68 armor is created equal. On my server green 68 outland armor is worth about 8g or so for disenchanting purposes. Level 68 Northrend armor is worth nearly twice that. You can easily check where the armor comes from by it's ilvl, since anything ilvl130 and up is from Northrend.

Since there are so many underpriced items for sale, I haven't had time to do anything other than buy them and send them to the disenchanting queue. I always leave a substantial differential between the price that I'll buy an item and what enchantrix says it is worth, both to keep my profit margins high and to insulate myself against a big decrease in the price I can move my now significant inventory. The items I am buying now to disenchant may not be put on the market for over a week or two, which can be an eternity in wow.

The good news for the disenchanting business is that once the auctions are posted, your work is done for a couple days. Do you guys remember when auctions only lasted 24 hours? I didn't realize how brutal that was until I didn't have to worry about what part of the day I posted auctions anymore.

I am still keeping track of revenue and cost on the different parts of my business for what hopefully turns out to be at least a term paper. I'll have weekly summaries posted on Mondays if anyone is interested in checking them out.

The northrend shards aren't selling well, but I still think that is because people aren't using many high level enchants yet. The dusts and essences are flying off the shelf though. Sales on the rest of my inventory is pretty constant, although arcane dust and greater planar essence prices are spiking a bit, 22g a stack and 11g a piece respectively.

Hopefully during this holiday weekend I'll be able to take care of the business, actually level my character, and avoid girlfriend aggro all at once.

Wish me luck and happy Thanksgiving!

A Little History

I am a WoW player and also an economics student. There is a good chance that I'll be able to use the WoW economic data that I am collecting in a future academic project. Since I have to do all of that work, I figured I would post some of my findings on a blog.

I don't farm or mine or actually produce much of anything. I take advantage of what the Greedy Goblin calls "dumb people," and what economists call information asymmetry. All that means is that one party in a transaction knows more than another. There are two basic things that I do in the game to make gold. It still hurts me a little bit to share these things, even if nearly no one ever actually reads this blog. Since if even one other business man on my server starts taking the advice I give, it could have a big effect on profits. But alas, here it goes.

While not exactly revolutionary, disenchanting is my primary source for gold in the game. I am a big fan of the Greedy Goblin. He has some wonderful tips and some real insight into the WoW economy and economics in general, but I thought he missed the boat a little bit on his post about tradeskills. This is what he has to say about enchanting:

"Enchanting: The only moneymaking is disenchanting your soulbound stuff. Quest rewards and obsolate items. More than nothing but only a little. Otherwise you are just one in the million, every other enchanter knows what you know."

That would be right if you didn't take into account the auction house. I made my first 20k in WoW from simple arbitrage, which is another way of saying buy low and sell high in the auction house. I used auctioneer to find the best deals on items and then repost them at the market price. I spent most of that while leveling on all of those epics that would end up being worthless in 5 or 6 levels anyway. After a while a got a bunch of spirit gear that wouldn't sell, because at the time I was a noob and I didn't know that spirit was worthless to most classes in the game. So I disenchanted them and sold them as mats, which ended up being worth more than the armor itself.

Fast forward a year or so to the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. There is new dust and new shards now, and new items to disenchant. The value of these ilvl 130 green armor and weapons after disenchanting them is from 13g to 19g a piece on my server and I can sometimes pick them up for 3 to 5g a piece. Right now the shards aren't selling all that well, but I think that has to do with people still leveling enchanting. I think that maybe they just aren't high enough yet to use the shards all that much, although those that do sell are going for 50g for the dream shards and 18 to 20g for the small dream shards. The infinite dust though is going from 140 to 160g a stack.

Another one of the advantages of going into the enchanting mats business is that there aren't any deposit costs in the auction house, which can add up. I post around 400 auctions a day, so not having to pay deposits saves a good amount of gold. A failed auction with the mats doesn't have any real penalty like when I dealt with armor primarily. Every time an armor auction fails you lose money so there wasn't a lot of room for price experimentation. With these mats I can try to squeeze every copper of consumer surplus out of the poor saps with the only consequence being that I might have to post the auction again in a couple days.

All of that was a longwinded way to say that there is a good deal of money to be made from disenchanting. So far I have spent nearly 10k on ilvl 130 weapons and armor from the new starting zones in Wrath. I expect around a 50% return on my investment, and I really think that is a low ball estimate. I'll have specific numbers in my next post.