Pages

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Make hundreds of gold with Shadowgem

I will now reveal one of my biggest gold making secrets. Well, it's not that big. In fact, if taken by itself it is insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

However, I do believe strongly in diversification. What this means, in a nutshell, is that one should try to cover as many niches of the gold-making market as possible. Yes, you can certainly concentrate on the big money makers such as glyphs or gems but there's strong competition in those quarters and the stronger the competition, the lower your profits.

Thus, it's a good idea to spread your business to all reaches of the gold-making trade.

Playing the auction house is one of the big ways in which players make gold in World of Warcraft. Well, this technique is taken for granted by many, yet some still have trouble understanding how it works. One of the most obvious ways to play the auction house is to buy low and sell high. How does this apply to Shadowgem?

Many months ago I noticed that very often there were very cheap Shadowgem posted on the AH. On other occasions, the prices would be much higher by orders of magnitude. This disparity is what prompted me to keep a watchful eye on the Shadowgem market. From then on, I added this technique to my gold-making portfolio.

My technique is simple: I will buy any amount of Shadowgem under 1 gold and sell it for much more. I usually sell for 1.5 gold and up. Often I sell for over 2 gold and sometimes for upward of 4 gold. Each. Sometimes people are selling these for a few silver a piece and I cackle madly when I buy them. It's insane!

Over time I made hundreds of gold by selling Shadowgem. Sometimes there's a lot of supply and not much demand so the prices stay low for many days. Eventually they always jump up again. I've found that often I can safely create 48 hour auctions at a price of around 1.5 gold a piece because the deposit is extremely low and usually they sell in that period.

So why the hell do people need so much Shadowgem? It's a very low level item that should be very cheap, yet it isn't. I've puzzled over this for some time but I didn't bother to figure it out because I was too lazy and I didn't care a lot. One day I decided to check and it is as I suspected. The biggest use for Shadowgem is for leveling Jewelcrafting. People need about 40 of them to craft Gloom Band and another 20 to craft Ring of Twilight Shadows. That's at least 3 stacks of Shadowgem for every leveling jewelcrafter.

I'm selling these as singles but after realizing what they are used for, I am going to try to sell them in stacks of 10 and 20. Here's the trick though. Someone might buy a cheaper stack of 20 because they know they need 20 for leveling. After they use them, they might find out that they still need a few singles so they will generally pay any amount for those singles since they don't want to spend all the cash for another stack of 20. So generally you can get away with selling singles at a higher price than stacks of 10 or 20.

I'm predicting that in Cataclysm there will be high demand for Shadowgem, at least in the first few weeks, as people try to level their Jewelcrafting. You might want to stock up on a few stacks yourself. I've got plenty.

12 comments:

Echo said...

I am currently make insane gold with Zul'grub instance: coins, bijoux, pet (3x so far... and they go for 15-20K each on ah). A full trash/bosses run is quite fast to solo, if you're properly geared, making the gold-per-hour ratio *amazing*.

Think about it, if you have a good toon for that (I use my hunter MM specced with a cat).

Darth Solo said...

Sadly it's hard for me to form a raid group because I would. I don't have anyone I know in WoW and I'd feel a bit silly begging people for help.

The coins and bijoux on my server are worthless. I have a bunch that I'm trying to sell for a long time and it's ridiculous what I can get for them, which is pretty much nothing.

Greygamer said...

If you farm Gnomer for Grime Encrusted Objects using the polishing machines at 3sp a go you will get a lot of Shadowgems as well. Nice tip though.

Darth Solo said...

@Zandathor oh boy those G.E.O.s are so annoying. That stupid machine takes so long to do its thing.

Echo said...

@ Darth

> Sadly it's hard for me to form a raid
> group because I would. I don't have
> anyone I know in WoW and I'd feel a bit
> silly begging people for help.

Well, it's not that hard to be honest. You reach Zul'grub and then type "/who", sorting by level. Just send a whisper to any lowbie asking for a fast raid group that will take 10 seconds. I always need like few seconds and peopel are happy to help.

As soon as you group and enter the raid... you can remove the friend and go all alone. You wont be kicked out, because you was the raid leader. And if you quit... the next day you will still be inside the instance.

Bijoux on my server go for 15-25G each, depending on day. But you can farm more:

- pet (hatchling)
- epic/rare BOEs for lowbies/twinks
- Pristine Black Diamond (200-600g each?)
- *TONS* of Runecloth
- *TONS* of greens to DE for low-level mats

I'd suggest to give it a try. If not for the pure gold you can make from it... at least for the pleasure to challenge and old-school 20man raid all alone and get your achievement.

When Cata comes... Zul will be history :)

Darth Solo said...

Thanks Echo, that's actually a very good tip. I should give it a try, hopefully soon. Heh if I could get that pet to drop... not that I need it because I have it on my main, but just to sell.

Anonymous said...

I find that people with bots farm in a way that costs them nothing (time-wise) so it devalues everything in the game Auction House to 1 Gold per unit racing to the bottom. If you don't very nearly live for Auction House PVP, the AH is useless to you. The remote AH is the worst thing ever for the more casual players, gold-wise.

Here's my tip: quest, level skills and farm for yourself and your own alts. Maybe, maybe, maybe...you can put something in the AH and make some gold before it is utterly devalued by the gold farming bots and their bank alts.

At level 70+ you make more by playing/questing than in the AH unless you spend very significant time haunting the AH or have bots that farm for you.

Blizz obviously doesn't care about bots, gold-farmers and other cheaters because they all exist on every server as far as I can tell.

Darth Solo said...

Well, I would argue that I've made most of my fortune on the AH one way or another. But it's also true that from level 60 onwards you will make lots of gold just questing and leveling. Gathering professions also help a lot.

Greygamer said...

@ Darth Solo
You can run between the machines (two are only a short way apart) while they are on cooldown to speed things up. Good way to make gold at low 40's. I seemed to get a lot of Shadowgems while doing this.

Darth Solo said...

True dat. But I've been in a group once where other people had the same idea :D So we had to wait after each other.

Anonymous said...

Just admit that one toon has to camp the auction house and that you have to log in about once every hour to reprice everything because you have been undercut.

The other option is to price control via AH PvP tactics. But again, you have to camp the AH either with a toon or the remote utility.

I personally think that your supposed vast wealth comes from bots. You blog about spending the kind of gold that would tend to inhibit the average player from making huge sums. Now maybe you made the huge sum of gold first - wealth is a kind of attractor to wealth in that it seems to have some point where it just keeps snowballing into a bigger and bigger thing. Be clear, I'm not calling you a liar per se. I am saying that someone reading your advice may be unaware of the kind of time it takes to do some of what you recommend doing for gold creation.

Professions (e.g. inscription) are dead unless you camp AH or spam the trade channels constantly. You said it yourself before. And while there was a small, very short patch bump - now it's all dead again and undercutting bots rule the day.

I have been looking at the trends on my server for the Shadowgem movements. I think you wanted to sell a bunch so "leaked" this tips for the newbs that were naive enough to fall for a sales pitch. Shadowgems regularly sell for under 75 silver so why would anyone - ANYONE - pay more? No one would. If you buy them up and try to establish a higher price you will get undercut until you have lost large sums of time - most importantly - and ultimately lots of game gold too. Yes, you can price fix for a while but its temporary at best.

There is a cost to rule the AH like that for a while. I did that with gold and black pearls for a while and now even after making some gold I have to admit the following: it took a lot of time to stake out that particular AH territory, and while I did make some gold I am not sure it was worth the effort in time. And now I am still sitting on 3 stacks of black pearls and 1 stack of golden ones. When I try to sell one I get undercut savagely until there is no point in even trying because I refuse to spend my time watching the AH action. So I am now saving those pearls for other profession needs in the game for my various alts.

I'd rather play. I mean, you know...

The most important commodity to a semi-casual solo player is time. The only way to compete is with a bot because you cannot out-farm, out-fish, or out produce a program designed to make stuff that requires real game time commitment with only a few hours a day of playtime at best.

It's not gold-sinks that are a problem, it's that the game is designed for huge time-sinks because that's how you hook a subscriber month after month. Likewise, cheaters are enabled to gold-farm because it actually keeps some AH prices down and also creates related time-sinks in the game in case you even try to compete.

Time is gold, but not vice versa.

One is real, one is virtual.

Choose wisely.

Darth Solo said...

@Anonymous you got me bro! That was my plan all along. I had 6 guild bank tabs chock full of Shadowgem that I had collected with my army of bots and I wrote this article just so I could get some suckers to buy my stock.

The best thing? My plan worked. Now I'm a WoW billionaire!

Muahahahaha!