Liquidate McMoneyBags, IV

This post is part of 20 Days of Gold-Making from Nev's gold blog. Be sure to check it out and read posts from the other participants as well to get lots of different angles of gold making thoughts.

Do you use a banker alt/guild? When did you start doing that & why?

As I discussed in the last post, when I started gold making I started in the most inventory-intensive market there was: Glyphs. I also happened to jump in right as we were preparing for Glyphmas meaning that I needed space for current inventory as well as a glyph stockpile to last through 4.0.1.

Liquidate has been my main bank toon for as long as I've been making gold. It's not the same Liquidate; she's probably been rerolled four or five times when I get sick of her race/class combo, but Liquidate's spirit continues through every reroll. :D

Over time I've added more guilds (Champion, is Totally Not Faid, Your Self Storage, Electronic Alchemists, Lackadaisical) and more characters (Tekelili, Croft, Kickback, Kickstart, Klockworks, Seasons) and they're pretty fluid. Each character has a job, for example Croft currently holds all the Glyphs while Tekelili's the guild master of Electronic Alchemists which holds all my Cataclysm materials. 

I know a lot of people who use bank alts for anonymity but it's never been a real concern for me. The only reason I roll bank alts and bank guilds is the all important reason: Organized storage.

Day 3 is totally not late at all.

Day 3 is only coming, what, a month and a half after Day 2? Excellent. Time is relative, and, uh, wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff right?

I haven't had much time to play WoW outside of gold-making yet; I've done a round or two of the new dailies on the island but I've mostly just been going through the gold making motions to keep on top of things. When it rains it pours for me and everything's sort of been going wrong at once for me in real life. I'm still in the middle of getting everything sorted out so my posts are sparse but I wanted to make sure you guys know I didn't say "I'm back!" just to vanish again. So let's keep going with the 20 Days of Gold-Making prompts!

What were the first techniques/tricks/tips you used when starting out?

I started making gold in one of the most dull fashions and it really shaped the way I made gold from there on out. I'd found out how much people were making with glyphs and I put my scribe to work. At the time, mostly due to my inexperience and less-efficient addons than we are now used to, it ended up being a lot of work for minimal payout. It was truly a grind.

I used QA3 (here's a guide video someone made back then for those curious about how it differed from what we use now) and just mass crafted every glyph and sold it if it would net me even 1g profit. It wasn't worth my time, in hindsight, but since I was new it was exciting to see gold coming in. 

I eventually branched out into other markets and using other professions but the foundation of my gold making is glyphs. I think it's because I've always been accustomed to this sometimes-grindy and monotonous profession that I enjoy such things; I enjoy having a crafting list, crafting it, selling it, and seeing the gold come in. I don't do big flips and I don't take big risks and I think it's because it was never really interesting to me. I love tried and true, low-risk gold-making. Maybe I'm just boring like that. 

5.2 - The Story Thus Far

I didn't intend to come back to WoW so soon and because of that I did absolutely zero preparation for 5.2. When I resubbed and patched my game up I found myself wondering where to go. I knew that the farm would now have work orders, allowing me to finish up some reps I'd been too lazy to grind out and I knew there were new PvP patterns and that's basically it!

Thanks to some folks on Twitter answering my one-off questions and Wowhead's Patch 5.2 Guide I was able to get most things taken care of. I unfortunately missed the ability to get a headstart on the Thunderforge so Blacksmithing and Engineering are taking a back seat until my server's unlocked them. As those are Faid's professions this patch has me in the strange situation of having lots for my alts and pretty much nothing for my main to do, at least at first.

I've been focusing on getting everything restocked; though I'd quit actively playing I had been selling off backstock over the past few months on the account that had some time left so when I came back I was sold out of most hot items and had very little materials to resupply.

The massive need for Prismatic Scales has come as a surprise to me; they were something I'd already always run low on and now I need even more just to do basic research, and there's a lot of that research to be done. 

All in all, other than having to keep tabs of who needs to do research each day and upping the price at which I'm willing to buy a few Pandaria materials, the patch hasn't changed much for me. I think that once I have more of the new patterns learned I'll have to serious rethink my alt selling set up, but for now my gold-making consists of lots of daily cooldowns, Sunsong Ranch farming, and my favorite practice: selling everything I can possibly craft.

Edit: Great news! Novitsh asked me on Twitter why I didn't just use leather instead of scales if I was that low on scales. I'd assumed that the cooldown using leather taught the leather patterns and the cooldown using scales taught the mail, but now that I decided to quit making random assumptions and look it up on Wowhead I've found they both teach both. Excellent! Thanks Novitsh!

Thank You So Much

Today I went to check my PayPal account to renew the blog's domain registration. I didn't have enough but I thought maybe if I did some sort of streaming event I could raise enough to keep the website up. I was surprised to see my balance was not what it was supposed to be.

After my last post about money being tight two awesome, generous readers had donated to help me out. I just discovered this today, so I'm sorry to those two donors that this was a late-coming thank you.  This was enough to renew the website domain and my WoW account. I'm still a bit "meh" about WoW but I'd be lying if I said I haven't missed it these past months. I've missed gold making more than anything else.

For as long as I am able to keep the website and my WoW accounts running I will do everything I can to keep producing content. I enjoy writing. People seem to enjoy reading it. Let's keep it up, shall we?  To that end you'll notice a new button in the right sidebar. If you ever want to say "Thanks Faid!" any donations made will go directly to keeping the content coming. No pressure if you can't/don't feel like donating though, I appreciate your reading all the same.

Look forward to a new LiteCast coming in the semi-near future. I've gotta spend some time getting back in the swing of gold-making! Thanks again for being awesome readers, you guys are amazing.