Just a heads up!
Now with World of Draenor launched, and garrisons and whatnot – I’ve decided to breathe some life into this blog again.
Will start by updating the TSM-guide, and move on to current business.
-Lunchmoney
TSM 2 Disenchant search shuffle polish
After some weeks of 90% disenchant search shuffling i was turning a very nice profit, but I started choking on strange and dream dust. Some fine-tuning was needed, as I couldn’t liquidate them fast enough.
Not being able to liquidate something is inherently worse than liquidating it @ a fraction of its value, since it clogs up your banks. With price sources heavily influenced by average selling price, the prices of these items doesn’t really drop that fast. This means I will keep buying items that disenchants into these dusts, and value them highly. I need to fix that.
Previously I stated that you couldn’t use a custom price as disenchant search value, but you can actually use Crafting Material Cost.
Like this
This links the price of the mats you get from disenchanting to this formula:
Hey, I know this guy
Which is kind of awesome, because that formula can be overridden in:
This also looks like familiar landscape
So we can now individually adjust the value for single items. I put 1% before the default formula in both Strange Dust and Dream Dust to stop TSM from making me buy items that disenchant into these mats.
What will this do to my auctioning-prices, you say? It’s like this, I reply:
The auctioning operation for liquidating old world enchanting mats
My auctioning operation tolerates 50% selling as the lowest price. I do this because the market for old world mats is not too big, and pretty volatile. If you insist on keeping Illusion dust at 25g a piece forever, you will burn in with thousands of them. And the point here is to liquidate quickly and move on. The 50% selling makes me able to liquidate in downturns in that particular market.
Zero value, but normal price
This tooltip illustrates pretty much everything. Mat cost is displayed at 1s70c, which is the value that TSM disenchant search will attribute to each dream dust potentially aquired through disenchanting. That basically means that items that DEs into dream dust will not make many appearances in my scans in the future.
But, the Auctioning Prices tell a different tale. Even though I value them at almost zero, I am still following the going market price when I’m selling them.
All in all, the strategy is working. I am not picking up anymore dream and strange dust from my DE searches, and I’m slowly but steady liquidating the stock I already got – at market price-ish.
I’ve also adjusted the value limit down from 90% to 60%, but now I am quickly running out of stuff to post – so I think I went a bit to far with 60%. I will try 80% for a while – to see how that goes.
Last week, new rules for 4 days if this week
Weekly roundup: Week 3 – 2014
Week 2 disappeared for me due to busy IRL, nothing to do with that. So, time to focus on week 3. I’ve been posting and crafting through week 2 as well, so I shouldn’t have lost any momentum.
Week 3 totals
Not so impressive profit this week. Sales are down to 170k, which may be a bit related to me not being as active as I was during christmas holidays. Still, I’ve done some massive purchases this week of both Sha Crystals and Ghost Iron ore – so even seeing a profit is kind of good news.
Top selling items – drums are still hot
Drums are still a hot seller, even though the average price has gone down a bit. Still, crafting costs around 6g it’s still turning over 100% profit. People are obviously still raiding, since potions sells well – and look at those prices! 8g+ for every jade serpent, that’s around 6g profit pr. pot.
Profession breakdown:
Jewelcrafting, bearing the costs of all Ghost Iron Ore – so it reports negative profits this week.
Inscription
Engineering
Enchanting
Blacksmithing
Alchemy
Leatherworking
Disenchant shuffle
Disenchant shuffle still going strong, allthough I choked a bit on some strange dust and dream dust for a while – but I’ve made some modifications to the whole scheme to work around that.
I also had to deposit 100.000g in my guild bank to keep the repair option functionable, so that’s 100k that doesn’t show up on my graph from this point on.
Liquidity Lunchmoney Enterprises January 19th
Accounting for the 100.000g in the guild bank, liquidity pr. Jan 19th 2014:
3,829 million gold.
Weekly roundup: Week 1 – 2014
After an expensive December, 2014 is all about making gold. This requires steady upkeep, market diversity, and proper analysis. Let’s see how Lunchmoney Enterprises did the first week of January.
General notes: Finally got back my lost stock of wares thanks to a GM. He had to delete some of my characters to restore stuff, send it on, then undelete them etc. Was quite a mess. Anyway, that was in influx of 42000g + a full stock of gems and enchants.
First, let’s look at some sales in the different departments:
Cooking sales: 5298g
Alchemy sales: 8619g
Blacksmithing sales: 38990g
Enchanting sales: 88736g
Engineering sales: 7084g
Inscription sales: 8892g
Jewelcrafting sales: 57043g
Leatherworking sales: 46095g
Tailoring sales: 1446g (this does not look good)
The cooking sales is just me dumping my raiding consumable stock, so I will not pay any attention to that.
Note: this is sales, not profits. I have a few markets I will analyze a bit closer – I suspect they are starting to become a waste of bagspace.
Now I want to take a closer look at Tier 1 PVP gear for all armor types:
Blacksmith PVP: 1632g
Blacksmith Masterwork tank gear: 1867g
Leatherworker PVP (leather + mail): 11442g
Tailoring: 0g
These numbers speak for themselves, the market for tailoring tier 1 PVP gear is completely dead. I’m closing that down and converting current stock to Ethereal shards. The LW market is very strong, BS I’m not so sure, but not ready to give it up quite yet.
Shutting down a market is really easy, I just locate the group – kill the auctioning and crafting operations, and swap mailing operation to send it to my disenchanter.
Kill auctioning
Kill crafting, and change mail-operation
Let’s look at tier 2 PVP gear. For tailoring and leatherworking I don’t have all these recipes yet, since I’ve been moving some professions around, so I need to keep that in mind.
Blacksmith tier 2 PVP: 4227g
Leatherworking tier 2 PVP: 10723g
Tailoring tier 2 PVP: 581g
Starting to see a trend here. Tailoring PVP gear is really not in demand. I will be shutting it down to not keep wasting bagspace and time on this market.
How about tier 3 PVP gear? None of my crafters has all of these recipes.
Blasmithing tier 3 PVP: 3066g
Leatherworking tier 3 PVP: 4139g
Tailoring tier 3 PVP: 815g
Further investigating this reveals that all tier 3 PVP tailoring sales are cloaks. I will just shut down the armor-portion of this, and try to sell the 5 different cloaks for a bit.
Old world enchanting mats
Disenchant shuffle turned 9392g profit last week, + 10 scrolls of Mongoose and Executioner yet to be sold. I like this niche-market very much.
A weekly profit of 126.648g, or 18092g/day
All in all pretty satisfied with the week. Also got back 42.000g, but they don’t show in this window as I don’t record money transfers. Tailoring PVP gear is out, but I will keep a few tier 3 cloaks to see if they can be sold.
Had to spend 164.000g on materials this week since my stock took a detour, but now that I got it back i probably can relax a bit on restocking JC and Enchanting for a while.
Lunchmoney Enterprises liquidity January 5th, 2014
3,741 million gold
Still some way to go to 5 million!
New scheme: the TSM 2 Disenchant search shuffle
TSM_Shopping comes with a function called ‘Disenchant search’. What is it, and does it have any potential?
About a week before christmas i was fiddling around with TSM 2, basically concluded that I had learned enough to completely reset the addon to get rid of any possible remnant non-optimized settings of my early days. Upon completion, I realized I’ve never seen the ‘Disenchant search‘ before. I remember trying it in Auctioneer, but with no particular success. I decided to give it a go in TSM.
The Disenchant search in TSM 2
The first thought I had was about the valuation of these hits. What decides the value of the potential outcome of this? I assume it’s linked to my price setting strings somehow, but I neither sell nor buy old enchantingmats in any significant volume – so I have no idea how easy these things are to get sold, let alone dumped!
What price Disenchant search should use – is up to you. You can change this in tooltip options, first page:
Select DE price source
The downer here is that TSM doesn’t let you use one of your own custom price settings as disenchant valuation, but you do get to choose from all the built-in ones. While this lets you choose the source, it doesn’t let you set a cap. That is done in operations -> shopping, like this:
Set a cap for disenchant search
It’s not very streamlined, this process, with the options spread around a bit. I have now set my disenchant search cap to 90% of the DE value, but I had it on 100% the first two weeks just to get more items and get more data.
The first week I regularly did 2 searches and bought all the hits. I did a search with AuctionDB – Market Value, and one with AuctionDB – Minimum Buyout as valuation sources. This gave me hits that could give me instant profits, and profits over time as price trends back to its market value. That was the thought anyway. Now that I have been doing this a few weeks I exclusively use the Average Sell Price as my data point, since the important part is to get rid of this stuff quickly – or it will clog you up pretty fast.
So, with all that taken care of, a DE search looks something like this:
Disenchant search results
You can mouseover the items to look at their tooltips to see how the disenchant value is calculated. You will notice a pattern;
- Usually the blue outcome (some shard) is worthless, but it has a very low proc %. This is the reason for almost exclusively green items in the list.
- Either the dust or the essence of that tier of enchantingmats holds a strong price. This makes a lot of the items a bit of a lottery. 75% chance for dusts, which are valuable – 25% chance for essences, which are close to worthless, or vice versa.
- The calculation does not account for the Bountiful Bags guild perk – which adds a 20% profit potential to the whole process.
As this was a project, I just bought all hits uncritically – and proceeded to disenchant them. Now how would I keep all this bundled up nice and tidy accounting-wise? The setup looks pretty much like this.
The whole operation
I’ve made a root group called ‘Shit for Disenchanting‘, or actually I had that group forever – but it’s not very much activity in it (I rarely craft greenies on anyone, except JC shuffle). When I loot the mailbox, i add all the trash greens i bought from AH to this group. Very important to check the ‘Ignore random enchants on ungrouped items‘ when doing this, to keep micromanaging to a minimum.
When they are added to the group, I proceed to disenchant them. I use TSM_Destroying for this, as you can see top right in the picture. You get all kinds of stuff from this. I sort all the different materials in sub-groups.
- All current-expansion materials is in a completely different group up in ‘Profs‘, so they will not affect the profits and losses of this project. And, since JC shuffle-jewellery is in this group – but they are never bought and has no expense (accounting-wise), they do not affect it either.
- All lesser essences in one group without auctioning operations. I don’t want to sell lessers, I just want to hold on to them on my janitor until i can combine and sell as greater. There is sometime profit to be made on the Greater/Lesser arbitrage – but I am not ready to tackle that level of micromanagement yet.
- All dusts are placed in one group. This is one of my later additions, but I need to have 20×20 auctioning operations on them first – as opposed to 5×1, 5×2, 5×3, 20×1, and then 20×20, as I have on essences. The amount of expired mails after you accumulated a few thousand dusts were not sustainable – so I post dusts in 20×20 stacks first. This helped dramatically.
- Mats for old enchants contains some particular mats that I may choose to keep and make scrolls from instead. I currently use this for TBC mats to make Mongoose and Executioner.
- Since the mats for those scrolls comes from this DE shuffle, I included the group ‘Oldschool Enchants‘ to get Mongoose and Executioner-sales to show up as profit from THIS activity.
- Lastly, a group called worthless. This contains all the blue shards that sell for 7 silver etc. Those are not worth the time it takes to collect expired mail, so they got no operations other then a warehouse-operation to dump then in my bank. From there they get deleted when they exceed 1 stack (they don’t even have a vendor sell value!)
This setup keeps the entire operation under 1 roof for auditing. The character in charge of liquidating these materials is of course the Janitor.
I have now been doing this actively for about 14 days. Let’s look at the results:
The Disenchant search shuffle audit
Looking as this last week, where the process definately were more streamlined than the first week, there is sales for 26k, and purchases for 13k. I can’t really look at the 30 day column and get any useful data – since I’ve only been doing this for 2 weeks.
In addition to this, I’ve accumulated enough TBC mats to create:
Expensive, but not exactly a hot seller
1 sale of 733g looks good, but still a little slow
I have no idea how easy these are to sell, so maybe this is a dead end. Greater Planar Essences and Arcane Dust sells really well – so I will not be making more of these if they prove to be unsellabe. I peaked at 2400g/day when I sold these as materials as opposed to scrolls.
Conclusion:
The beauty of this operation is that once set up, it’s something you can do with whatever spare minutes you have. Waiting for a raid that’s almost full? Do a DE search. In LFR-queue on an alt and can’t relog? Do a DE search. Quick cup of coffee before leaving for work? Read the online newspaper AND do a DE search.
The disenchanting itself isn’t nescessary quick, but those items will wait for you in the mailbox. It’s the shopping part that’s most important to try to do regularly – so you can shave off those cheap items.
The Bountiful Bags guild perk has the potential of boosting this scheme up to 20%. Buying an item for 2g, and disenchant–proccing 4x Greater Eternal Essences worth 50g a piece is a strong return.
I will be using this as a filler activity, getting 1900g/day for something this braindead is totally ok. I now only shop with the Average Sell Value as my value – since it reflects what I am actually able to liquidate it for.
Auditing week 52 + a few days of 53..ish
Weekly audits will be every Saturday (bad move to have them on wednesdays), and will be performed by analyzing TSM_Accounting with a 7 day filter. We will look at top sellers, and other interesting anomalies and outliers.
In the spirit of new year and blog-launch, let’s take a look at week 52 + the last few days.
Mental notes for week 52:
- New scheme discovered and implemented, the disenchant search shuffle.
- Christmas-time, increased farming and casual activities result in lower price on raw materials. I have done some heavy stockpiling. Not much raiding going on.
- Spent loads of time and gold restructuring the business to its new expanded size of 11 functionable lvl 80+ characters.
- Misplaced 37 mails with a full stock of enchant scrolls and gems to the nether vortex – along with approx. 42.000 gold. A GM is trying to fix the issue, but no luck yet.
Top 3 sellers
Top 3 sellers in week 52, filtered by professions only. If I didn’t filter by profession, the various low lvl dusts would win the race every week.
Top sellers last 7 days, filtered by professions
1st place: Potion of Mogu power
Strength potions always in demand
Always a strong seller, 422 potions sold in week 52 for a total of 2524g. Not bad for a single product in a slow raiding week. With a 5g98s average price it yields good returns, since it’s about 2g to craft one. I keep 400 in stock.
2nd place: Drums of Rage
My new favorite
Haven’t sold these prior to last week, and right up on 2nd place they go. With a crafting cost around 9g and an average selling price of 26g the profit margins of these are pretty good. 227 heroism-drums in a slow raiding-week is pretty good. I started by keeping 100 in stock, but upped it to 200 after a few days. These things are hot sellers.
3rd place: Virmen’s Bite
Also a strong seller, agility potions
While techincally it was Mogu Fish Stew, that is just me dumping all my personal consumables since progress is over. It is probably selling at a loss as well, since I bought them quite some time ago.
Next runner up is Virmen’s bite, the agility potions. Always in demand, I try to keep 400 of these in stock.
Summary
Turning the trend back around
Cliiiiiiiiimb
With a few weeks behind me where I was spending like the US Government, I have now fallen back into the routine of business. I still have a huge stockpile somewhere in outer space, which hopefully a GM will return to me. With 300k in sales, 200k in purchases, last week saw 106k in profits, or around 15k/day. With holidays soon to be over, I expect sales to fall into their regular routine – peaking before and after raid-time, with increased activity on wednesdays.
About Lunchmoney Enterprises
There are countless strategies to make gold in World of Warcraft. This is mine.
There was a time where I had to consider every purchase I did on the auction house, if it was an investment I could afford or not. At some point I raided so much that I had to fly around in weekends picking terocone to fuel myself with elixirs. It was around this time I encountered my first money-making scheme; selling ZA-bears to randoms.
I had an extremely strong Sunwell-geared resto druid that could easily soloheal ZA. I had a friend who multiboxed 5 elemental shamans, and we had 3 other friends with us. 5 people, 10 characters, 1 buyer, 30 minute run – twice/week. This made me so much gold that I didn’t think about it before Lich King died.
Then i was broke again, and I decided that this is the last time.
I sold 30 something saronite thingys from ICC for a starter capital of approx 20.000g and started reading on interwebs for tips and tricks. I have never bought one of those stupid guides, they are just outright scam, or just common sense written down in PDF for you. Pointless either way.
I quickly learned that professions are the key to steady income, storage space and stockpiling increase the power of your punch, flipping is casino, farming is a big no-no, and competition can not be exterminated.
And addons. They are important.
The most important addon of all
Long story shortened: Lunchmoney Enterprises has now grown to a business spanning 11 characters with 22 professions, fielding an 8-tab guild bank for shared storage. Current working capital pr. 1.1.2014 is about 3.6 million.
Lunchmoney Enterprises
All 11 characters have their own important role in Lunchmoney Enterprises, and some of them actually play the game as well (raid). Those characters should not be hampered by being in the business, but with a little planning that can be worked around. This is how my workforce looks like:
Workforce:
90 Priest (Enchanting/Engineering) – My raiding main
90 Death Knight (Blacksmithing/Alchemy transmute)
90 Shaman (Leatherworking/Alchemy transmute)
90 Druid (Jewelcrafting/Alchemy transmute)
90 Mage (Tailoring/Alchemy potions)
90 Paladin (Inscription/Alchemy elixirs)
85 Warrior (Mining/Alchemy transmute)
85 Hunter (Alchemy transmute) – My janitor
81 Warlock (Alchemy transmute) – Main bank #3
81 Monk (Alchemy transmute) – Main bank #2
81 Rogue (Alchemy transmute) – Primary bank
I want to have all professions covered, and professions with recipes requiring raids/rep etc should be on characters that will be more likely to be leveled and played. The goal is also to have as many alchemy transmutes as possible.
So, my priest is my raiding main – and alchemy sucks for raiding, so I use engineering because it rocks, and enchanting because I like to be able to DE stuff on the character i play the most – and the profession bonuses here are as good as the others. My priest also has maxed cooking and fishing, if there are some recipes to profit from in that department.
For the others, there is really no reason to have 2 non-alchemy professions on the same character, so all of them learn alchemy for transmute. I keep 1 potion and 1 elixir master for completeness – and one of those two is also given Inscription, to keep the distribution of herbs to a minimum. Preferably the potion master, but in my case it’s the elixir master.
Blacksmithing on the plate death knight, leatherworking on the leather shaman, and tailoring on the cloth mage – because it makes sense. Jewelcrafting is left for my druid for no particular reason other than him having had it for some years.
Smelting is left to one of the lesser alts, as is Inscription. Prior to 5.4, an 85 scribe was as good as a 90 if you discount the aquisition of Spirits of Harmony, and post-5.4 I still don’t plan to sell glyphs due to the operational hassle vs. reward it gives.
With all professions covered, the rest are irrelevant. Herbalism and skinning has no practical value for me – since I don’t farm due to large working capital. Archaeology … well. Maybe later.
Logistics (Alliance view)
The 3 bankers are parked in Darnassus, due to the short distance between the mailbox and AH. Since they get mailed all the stuff they need, they don’t need daily access to bank and gbank. Darnassus is also deserted, lag-free, horde-free, and generally an awesome place to hang out.
The Janitor needs a bit more flex, so it should be stationed in Ironforge or Stormwind. I prefer Ironforge, but I think Stormwind is a bit shorter distance-wise.
The tailor needs his hearthstone set close to Imperial Silk hangout, so a mage is perfect for this due to the teleporting-abilties.
The smelter should be in Stormwind due to the short distance from mailbox to the forge. Forget Thermal Anvils, 5 minute duration does not cut it when smelting 1500 bars at a time.
The Guild Bank, 8 tabs x 7 rows x 14 columns = 784 itemslots.
I use this for some long-term storage of more valuable stuff (mounts, lightbringer tabards), and as a general buffer for professions that sometimes bloat a bit. While shuffling the guild bank is nice to have to offload rare gems etc, or temporary storage for common ones before you proceed making jewellery of them.
Whatever way you look at it, 784 slots accessable by all your characters is pretty awesome. I once bought this guild for 250.000g, primarily because it had the Stay Classy guild achievement, which is the major roadblock to getting the 8th tab. Even raiding guilds have a hard time with that one.
Some JC buffering of a gbank-tab around christmas time
I used to keep 1 million gold in the guild bank for repairs and stuff, but after TSM_Accounting I had to withdraw it to make it show up on the graph.
Profession-spesific materials I try to keep in the respective characters banks. Some have less available, and some need more than others – so it’s nice to have the guild bank to offset this.
Market strategy
Different markets may have different strategies, but generally – as a business – Lunchmoney Enterprises follows a few general guidlines:
- Efficiency. Streamline everything to require the least amount of upkeep. TSM 2 is the biggest contributor here.
- Stockpile huge. Do you think Wal-Mart buy stuff by the hundreds? No, think bigger. LE can blow 2-300.000g on shopping in a single sitting if its required. Don’t run out of stuff, that’s for amateurs.
- Diversify. Focus primarily on professions, as that’s generally easiest to streamline and gives steady returns. Try to aquire recipes that you could profit from.
- Accept losses and close doors. Some items eventually stops selling. It’s bad being stuck with a large stockpile, but its even worse if that stockpile clogs up your bankers for months to come. Write off the losses and move on. Have the janitor take the trash out.
- Audit yourself. Don’t think you can keep up with your operation when it grows past a certain point. Use the tools available to discover new markets and discard old ones.
- Money doesn’t grow on trees, but it grows on money! Same goes for gold. Put that capital to use, don’t keep it in your bank just to look at. There are no interest rates on WoW savings.
- Prioritize. Certain activities yields far greater gold/effort than others, and they should get focus first. Farting around with flipping, shuffling, and discovering new markets is done after proper upkeep is done.
- Timing. Try to post at least before and after raid-time every day. My own raids start 19, so I usually have posted once or twice by then. Then I do one after, before bed-time. I’m @ work during daytime, so I am not posting then.
- Size is king. I accept low or even negative margins in a market for a while if it makes competition demotivated. If someone tries to buy me out, I feed them until they chicken out.
Competition
You can’t get rid of competition, but you can outgrow them. My goal is never to antagonize or make other people angry, because someone focusing all their efforts causing mischief on the AH can actually hurt you for as long as they choose to dedicate their lives to doing so. Short-term, of course.
No, I try to demotivate them. I show them that I just don’t give a flying fart if they think my pandaren’s step is 30g lower than it should be.
Try to buy me out? Get your wallet out, an endless supply is coming your way.
Demotivation works best, crush the little guys. Ignore the big guys, the laws of the marketplace applies anyway.
A millionaires guide to TradeSkillMaster 2
After TradeSkillMaster 2 launched, I was one of many who waited to see the guides created by the great mind of the goblin community to harness the power of this addon. While guides did appear, they were fragmented and of varying quality.
TSM 2
With progress being over, I got more game-time to spend on other things than a few months ago, and since I’ve given myself the challenge of hitting 5 million gold before next expansion – I figured I could try to write one of my own. TSM is constantly evolving, and so is my business – so this guide will never actually be complete.
Consider it work in progress. If there is some part you feels deserve more coverage or disagree with something, I would love the feedback in comments.
Enjoy.
TSM 2 – The ultimate guide
January 1st – 2014 – Launch day
Happy new year!
Being a WoW raider and goblin, I need something to make the game challenging now that progress is over.
I think we did good this tier
Raiding-wise, i think Mists of Pandaria was a pretty good expansion, with lots of different bosses across the tiers. Goblin-wise, it’s been pretty good aswell – and we’ve also been given new markets to explore (battle pets).
This blog is a testament to a challenge I’ve given myself – to reach 5 million gold in World of Warcraft before Warlords of Draenor goes live. Current liquidity sits about 3.6 million, so that’s 1.4 million short.
I will of course not be selling or buying gold, as that is not how I roll.
Lunchmoney Enterprises liquidity since the birth of TSM_Accountant
Liquidity January 1st, 2014
I will be doing this with my in-game business-team, which will be presented in their own post.
I will focus on the tools for the job, the different markets that exists, trends and patterns, I will be analyzing professions and their different products, potential, and profits. There will also be auditing regularly.
This is no ‘from zero to hero’-stuff, since I got a pretty heavy platform already – it will instead be a journal about managing a business this size – and overcoming the challenges it faces.
There will also be focus on efficiency, since I do have a full-time job and like the occiational farm-raid- and don’t want to spend more time than nescessary on maintenance. I realize the above pictures paints a picture of someone living inside wow, but the account is a product of 9 years of gaming.
I feel that every noteworthy blog needs to have something of interest, so to celebrate the launch of this one – I will post my very own TSM 2 Guide, which I have been seeking myself – but never found.
Lunchmoney Enterprises 