Phase 3: Profit !

Zekta is a brilliant programmer. He set up this blog beautifully, and I know that one of the reasons I wanted to write on this blog initially (beyond the excellent analysis) was actually the way the blog looks. Have you actually looked at the blog? See how he set it up- the narrow text area, the use of open space, the muted tones to contrast with the header. Stop, right now, and look at it, if you haven’t already done so. It’s easy to read and not distracting. The text? It’s right there, in a slightly larger and darker font than you need it to be so you can see it. The left-column? It’s open. The right? It displays what he wants it to, but you have to look at it, meaning it won’t drag your eye off the content of whatever article you’ve written. In short, it’s exactly what I like in a blog.

I, on the other hand, am decidedly not a computer programmer. In fact, if it was p3pbybigjimm.net, it’d probably look like this.

ANYWAY, this is my round-about way of saying that I now have an e-mail address, and I’m not sure how to display it properly. I think I’ve got it set, but in the interest of thoroughness, I’m putting it here:

Bigjimm@p3p.net

There you go. Now, please read this before you e-mail: you’re much better off putting a comment in an article I’ve written if you want me to see something. I don’t check this e-mail often, and I just generally prefer the open nature of comments. But if you’d like to e-mail me, please feel free. As this is new to me, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to answer all of them. (I probably will be able to- I’ll find time for all three of you, I swear!) But I’ll read them all, and thanks in advance for taking the time to comment and/or send an e-mail.

GL! /bow

After the success and attention that yesterday’s post brought, I am encouraged to keep posting. In fact, Markco dedicated a whole post to telling me and all other readers, in so many words, to keep writing. (Thanks for the feedback and encouragement Markco. It is very good advice.)

With that said, there is a specific market that simultaneously manages to fascinate me, frustrate me, and leave me totally confused. The market, of course, is the market for Netherweave Cloth. I am confused because netherweave market was supposed to die. It was one of the first things I predicted here. Before me, Zekta predicted it here. I’m sure I cribbed the idea from Gevlon, who wrote a post in August 2009. (A post that I now can’t find, but if I could, I’d link to it. My google-fu is weak today.) Zekta, in the comments to my first post, even backed up the logic when questioned by Dacheng. Rather than restate, allow me to just put their own words here.

Dacheng: “‘Netherweave is drying up because everyone in the Outland is flying’”, said BigJimm. I’m afraid I don’t see much evidence of this. There’s just no shortage of netherweave on my server, and the prices reported on http://www.wowecon.com don’t show any sign of inflation. Bigjimm also says “I mean, you all know that netherweave cloth is going to skyrocket, right?” Well, I would think that the future tense is wrong here. Either Netherweave cloth already has skyrocketed, or it isn’t going to. This is not news. On my server, this isn’t even history!”

Zekta: “The reason we(I) predict a short supply on August is that.: People is flying instead of walking on outland, the major supply of the Nether weave is not from farmer (You’ll make far more gold by farming other thing than Nether weave cloth), but from Leveling player.”

So, there’s the logic. It seemed totally sound at the time, and even now seems solid in retrospect: people leveling their alts will be able to fly, and therefore won’t kill as many mobs that drop cloth. Unfortunately for my theory,  the reports of netherweave’s death were greatly exaggerated. Here is some of my data for netherweave cloth:

And here is what it looks like on the bag market:

This is from today. I buy about 3-30 stacks of netherweave a day. I sell 6-25 bags a day. There’s a lot of fluctuation in this market in terms of volume, and I KILL it on the weekend. But… why?!?!?!?!

Why?!

WHY does this still work?!

This strategy has been beaten to death. It’s the first one that I heard of when I was a broke AH n00b. I clean up in this market and I don’t even have a tailor- a friend of mine makes bags for me in the morning when she’s drinking coffee. I send her 25g every time I have her make me bags (12-50 bags at a time, generally), but she’d do it for free if I needed her to. I also send her other things as thanks: and extra 200g here, the occasional toad, etc.

Yes, I understand that netherweave is a commodity. We’re not talking about a rare enchant mat that’s kept artificially high by a few niche AH marketers (yeah, I’m looking at you Euripides*). Anyone can go get netherweave, but who’s doing it? Where is the cloth coming from? Who is supplying it? And why are they selling it at 5g/stack in stead of making into bags and selling it for 9g-12g/stack (minus the 50s cost for Rune Thread, of course). Are people farming it? Are that many people leveling? Is it just people doing TBC content (ie: Isle Dailies, old heroics, etc.) for achievements? Is it just Adam Smith’s invisible hand, working the price down to the norm that the market remembers? I have no idea.

This market isn’t one that I care about- it’s a relatively small volume of money, and I’m personally more interested in Jewelcrafting. But I can’t believe that this still works. The predicted spikes in netherweave just never happened. Dacheng was right, and again, I was wrong. I would love it if anyone could explain why.

*And as a final note, I’d like to say that I was also particularly gratified personally to see that Euripides took the time to comment in the JMTC post. He, along with Markco and Faeghleis, makes up one third of the trio at the excellent Call to Aution podcast. He also writes Wow.com’s “Goldcapped” article and hosts the Hunting Party Podcast. I have gushed about Markco already, but Euripides is equally skilled, thoughtful, and entertaining. I consistently enjoy his work, to the extent that I, a warrior tank, actually started listening to the Hunting Party Podcast (mostly just to laugh at you silly hunters and your adorable ability to train warm fuzzies and inability to stay alive, but I digress…). I think the word he used in his comment, “tenacity,” is particularly appropriate. We’re not talking Wintergrasp tenacity, we’re talking about tenacity to keep posting after making a public gaffe. Tenacity is the best single word that I can think of to describe the success of JMTC and it’s related other content, and I’m flattered that Euripides too the time to type it out.

GL! /bow

Wait... there's another warrior who writes about gold?

There is a story I have heard more than once. In various versions of this story, Pete Townshend has been replaced with Duane Allman, Roger Waters, and any of the members of the Rolling Stones (including Charlie Watts, which doesn’t even make sense because he’s the drummer). Doubts of truthfulness thereby acknowledged, the story goes like this: Pete Townshend, the great guitarist for The Who, and Eric Clapton, arguably the greatest Rock n’ Roll guitarist ever, go to a club together in London in the mid-1960s to see some music. They wander into the club, and up on stage is none other than Jimi Hendrix. He’s American, at that point unknown, and absolutely amazing. After a few minutes watching Hendrix play, Clapton supposedly turns to Townshend and says, “Well, we’re all just playing for second place now.”

This is the story I thought of a week or so ago as I was browsing Markco’s great site, justmytwocopper.blogspot.com. I’m sure that anyone who has found P3P has also already discovered JMTC. JMTC is voluminous, thorough, and has new content every single day. The JMTC forums contain a staggering volume of crowd-sourced knowledge. And now Markco has teamed up to do two new podcasts, one specifically about making gold.

I was listening to his podcast, A Call to Auction (that’s the last Markco link, I swear), while I was browsing the JMTC forums, and I had that Markco-as-Hendrix-”We’re all just playing for second place” realization. Zekta and I have not written often. Zekta has explained his reasons; for me, Markco is a consistent reason that I don’t have anything to say. To put it simply, when I get an idea for a post, usually Markco has already written about it. The most recent example, I was going to write about the demise of the Saronite Shuffle in Jewelcrafting (because of the drop in Infinite Dust prices), and then talk about selling the prospected gems raw, uncut, specifically Chalcedony. I’ve been using this strategy since 3.1 (selling to saronite shufflers was very lucrative, fyi), and on my recent home AH the conditions for it were just perfect. I saw a rise in Chalcedony and Dark Jade prices (3g-7g each) and a bottoming out of Saronite Ore prices (I bought 1000 stacks at 12g/stack). “Yes!” I thought, “this is time for a post. I sell in stacks of 5 and 10, I post about 3-4 bunches on the AH at a time for 48 hours, and I sell out almost every stack. This is P3P Post material!” Why didn’t I post that article? What, you ask, happened? Markco happened. (Okay, so that other link wasn’t the last Markco link.)

I’d like to be clear: I’m not complaining about this. Rather, I’m saying that right now, Markco’s the juggernaut, and that he’s earned it. He writes and publishes more content than anyone else. He does it better. He does it more accurately. As a reader of blogs, I personally find it interesting that Markco  seems to have outlasted even the mighty goblin Gevlon. I always thought Gevlon and goblins would be the premiere gold blog, but Markco has worked harder and created a community. (Gevlon, it should be said, seems to have gotten bored with writing gold posts, and he doesn’t seem to do anything he doesn’t want to do.) When Gevlon publicly burned Markco, I actually said that it was Markco who came out worse for wear. Well, time has proven me wrong. Markco makes products that work, and Gevlon, well… he does what he wants I guess. I dunno- the whole idea of Goblinism is revolutionary, and that’s all Gevlon and his approach- it litererally changed the way I play and think about the game. However, if I want to know how to turn 100g into 1,000g or even 10,000g, I’m going to JMTC.

That’s just my two cents about just my two copper. (See what I did there? I tried to be witty, but now I’m not sure that it worked?) My blogroll dies a slow death every day- someone else stops writing. Even hitthecap and my beloved Tanklikeagirl have stopped writing recently. If it’s the dreaded blogfade or just a break I’m not sure. But Markco, he just keeps chugging along, telling you to buy frozen orb, sell titanium bars, cut resilience gems ahead of an arena season. He does it better than anyone else, and at this point, the rest of us gold bloggers are all playing for second place.

GL! /salute

Sorry for the extended maintenance time (for this blogger),

My excuse is that I am now in a new company, and trying to catch up with the new code base. I had been running around for training session.
(I had even cross border to another city for training)

But enough distraction, you come here for Wow’s article, not for my excuses.

As I am trying to fix myself up with my blogging habit, I’ll start writing something small first…

So here is a short post on Goblinism (Series  - Hopefully)

Goblinism : Vanity

Ideal Goblin immunes to vanity.
But for the rest of us, it’s hardly achievable.

However, We Goblins file them into the luxury account, while other just mix them with business account (If they had any).

Business Account is a keep-me-from-grinding fund, basically it generate enough profit to protect one from having to grind for their “decent living”. (Consumption/Enchant/Glyph/Talent for instance)  When this goes low, one had to grind their A$$ off. (Well, unless we got donation from M&S, which we always do, but anyway…)

What Goblin do is to keep a healthy business account, while non-Goblin just buy-and-grind for living.

I would like to direct everyone to Tim’s new post, if you are not subscribing to his blog already.

He summarized the Pandaren Monk pets event. Which happens on my leave, and have some outcry for blizzard’s micro-transaction changes.

http://timhowgego.com/animal-farm.html

http://timhowgego.com/animal-farm.html

Tim did a good work on analysis the game mechanic and the real work (similar to all other post in his blog). Personally I am not against RMT in game, not as paranoid as blizzard put it (or they act like, in Gevlon’s term)

There will be another post regarding RMT (Real Money Trade) where Gevlon already put down quite good point on and inflation etc. (Hope I can spare time on my last pre-work-again period)

Until Next Time…

Zekta Chan

P.s. I had added some 2D barcode for smart phone reader to snip the links, let me know if that’s annoying.
P.s.2 No, I don’t own a monk, even if they sell them in Taiwan.

Hi everyone, I am back. kind of…

My leave had been prolonged to the whole December and January. Trying to recover from the last dreadful project and reconsidering RL issue, I am still putting myself together.

I hadn’t been login to Wow for around two month, one of the reason is I take my time on looking into eve (I didn’t login there for a month as well), another reason is that raiding the normal content did not pose enough challenge (Doing the toc with M&S was not that hard after all) to me, and I don’t want to spend much time for the Hardcore challenge. I want to stay casual, while hard mode required much dedication, I don’t even want to reschedule my RL time for a game atm. (HC in Gevlon’s term)

Seeing lots of Wow-econ entry in my rss dim out kinda make me sad. Thanks Jimm for the updates we had when I am on leave. Or I may give up updating as well already. I understand why people stop writing, for one reason is that there aren’t much exciting things happen in Wow now, another is that there aren’t many topics left unexplored.

Since I am not directly involved in the world anymore, I won’t be able to give hot news regarding our beloved Azeroth. But for the coming post, I’ll summarize learning from wow-econ, other topic in virtual-econ (Things that shared in Wow, Eve, UO) and other topic I had come across.

BTW,  Happy New Year, and Happy Chinese New Year

Zekta