I really, really hate goldmaking blogs (WoW)

[thistlechaser]

Like WoW RP, WoW goldmaking blogs suffer from the lack of quality control: Anyone can RP anything on WoW. There are no applications to fill out, no staff to make sure everyone is staying on theme. If you want to RP Dr. Who as a dragon from LotR, there's nothing to stop you from doing so. Same with writing goldmaking blogs. Anyone can do it. Too many people do it. Too many damned stupid people who have no idea what they're doing.

"They're all idiots" is hardly enough fodder for a post though, at least until this morning. One of these stupid people posted a tip on a weapon to sell for transmogging. "The Best Mogging Item You Never Knew Existed!" was the subject line.

1) This is NOT new. I sold the damned weapon from day one of transmogging coming out. This is so not new that it's not worth doing anymore, because so many other people sell it.
2) This line from his post:

Selling Advice

My personal advice for anyone trying to sell the [weapon] is to keep it quiet."

So the advice he's giving, in his public blog, is to not tell anyone about it. ARRRGGG

These people. These stupid, stupid, stupid people. Fight Club jokes aside, the first rule of making gold is to shut your damned mouth. Know a great thing to sell? Tell one person, now you'll make half the sales. And of course that one person will tell others too, further reducing your sales. Loose lips sink ships!

If you're serious about making gold, you will NOT be writing a goldmaking blog. Most of these blogs are so full of bad/wrong ideas and suggestions that I'd think they were trying to mislead new sellers (but I doubt they're clever enough for that).

It's getting to the point where I think this is my life:

These people. Sigh.

Edit: Arg! And a different blog had a similar post this morning:
Like all speculative posts, if everyone jumps onto the bandwagon, then we may end up with oversupply and a price crash.
SO WHY THE HELL ARE YOU WRITING ABOUT IT?

Comments

[tersa.livejournal.com]

SO WHY THE HELL ARE YOU WRITING ABOUT IT?

Honestly? So they can advertise how clever/smart/awesome they are.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Yeah. To be popular, and in some cases, to try to turn this into a RL moneymaking thing. (Selling special guides and such.) Blah.

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

I really disagree, Thistle. I tell people how I make gold all the time. No one I talk to about it ever does anything but occasionally throw a couple netherweave bags up on the AH. I found out yesterday that a guildie just vendors everything he ever picks up because he doesn't want to go to the bother of selling it, so I convinced him to send me stuff like greens. When people are too lazy to even put a couple of things on the AH, do you really think the majority are going to do anything that takes actual work? And that there will be that many on the same server that will do that amount of work? Moon Guard is one of the biggest servers out there and there aren't that many power sellers. The vast majority are not interested, they'd rather just whine about having no gold.

I rarely glance at gold making blogs, but those who follow them tend to be trend followers from what I can tell. They do what the bloggers talk about for a few days or weeks until they lose interest, then they're gone. They're a blip on the market and once they get bored because they didn't instantly make 1,000,000,000,000 gold, they stop and those of us that actually do things can get back to business as usual.

Obviously you can keep quiet if you choose, but I seriously doubt it would make any difference at all if you didn't, especially since you're not running a well known gold making blog. Your personal LJ is kind of obscure, not exactly what people would run into in the first few pages of a Google search. ;)

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Moon Guard may be a bigger server, but based on our previous conversations, your markets are very different than ours. Yours are "nice", for lack of a better word. You lack cutthroat sellers, you said? Everyone just posts once and then lets it sit, no one relisting as soon as they're undercut?

It takes only one person to ruin something like that. Yes, the vast majority of WoW folks are lazy and won't stick with it, but when you hit upon someone who does? One extra seller, one person who is online more than you are, one person who is more willing or able to put more time/effort into it than you are, and your whole market can go to hell.

I have personal experience with that: Our server has a gem seller with a broken addon (or he's an asshole with too much money, I don't know which). If a cut is selling at 59, he'll list 5 barely undercutting that, then 5 at 49, 5 at 39, 5 at 29, and lastly 5 at 19. All at once. He undercuts himself in one posting, all the way down into the dirt. He kills the entire gem market, this one single person. All cuts, all colors. Been going on for weeks. (I whispered him politely once that he might want to check his addon, he put me on /ignore without a reply, so I suspect he might be doing this on purpose.)

So yes, telling people your secrets might not hurt... until it does.

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

People undercut, but it's not constantly. Yeah, there are those assholes who do that kind of bizarre stuff that you're describing with your gem market, but they always go away eventually, in any of the markets that I've ever seen. People like us are in it for the long term. Eventually they get bored and stop.

And really? With stuff like the Undermine Journal, claiming to have secrets is a little silly. There /are/ no secrets. Anyone can figure out what you're doing if they want to take the time. They just won't. They're too lazy. And the others either shape up eventually so they can actually make money too or they go away.

Honestly, I'm not so sure anymore that my server is "nice" so much as I take the long view. I sell my stuff, and if a particular gem or glyph goes too low, I stop selling it for a while until things go back up. Same with other stuff. While there are a few outliers (I'm never going to make another glyph of imp or voidwalker again, those are always well under a gold each for some reason), everything else ebbs and flows, at least partly based on how successful bots are at the moment (gems and enchanting mats are super low right now due to whatever new botting program got working a month or so ago).

ETA: You make a lot of talk about the cutthroat sellers and how someone being online more than you can completely ruin things, and yet...you're still able to sell things. It's clearly not as big of a deal as you make it out to be, because as you've noted before when getting upset about being undercut, you work full time. Yet you're still able to sell things. I could relist constantly, and quite frankly I doubt anyone could beat me as far as online time goes if I really cared (not a whole lot more I can do than sit around most of the time), but you know, relisting once or twice a day still nets me plenty. Hell, when I was really pouring time into SWTOR and only putting auctions up every two or three days, I was still usually bringing in 5-10k when I finally emptied my mailbox.

I know the AH pvp is your thing in the game and you get some sort of enjoyment out of being the best you can. Just seems like you bring up secrecy and all that a fair amount of the time, and it seems really pointless, because of people's laziness and the fact that there is no secrecy in pretty much anything online.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

People undercut, but it's not constantly.

In all the markets I'm in, there's constant undercutting. Often times, before I'm done relisting all the undercut things I pulled down, the first items are undercut again. (This is one reason why I won't deal in things with high AH fees. Relisting things seven or eight times a night would mean all the profit is gone.)

Yeah, there are those assholes who do that kind of bizarre stuff that you're describing with your gem market, but they always go away eventually,

Unfortunately that gem seller has been in the market since Cata dropped (or earlier, Cata is when I poked my toe into the gem market). He was an asshole early on, but at least his addons had been working right then (or he was less of an asshole).

I strongly suspect he's just trying to drive everyone out, but I don't understand why he's doing it this way. If you want to keep all gem cuts under 20, just list them under 20. Why waste all the AH fees by listing 59, 49, 39, 29, etc?

And really? With stuff like the Undermine Journal, claiming to have secrets is a little silly. There /are/ no secrets. Anyone can figure out what you're doing if they want to take the time

Yeah, which is good and bad. I hate that others can see what I'm doing, but I love being able to see what others are selling. :P Makes no sense, I know. We had a site like that on FFXI, but it permitted you to opt out of having your own info displayed. That was handy.

ETA: You make a lot of talk about the cutthroat sellers and how someone being online more than you can completely ruin things, and yet...you're still able to sell things. It's clearly not as big of a deal as you make it out to be, because as you've noted before when getting upset about being undercut, you work full time.

I work 10 minutes from home. That makes a big difference. I deal with the AH last thing before I go to work in the morning, first thing when I get home for lunch, last thing before I return after lunch, and first thing when I get home in the evening. So yeah, there's a window of 3-4 hours on either side of lunch when I'm not there (plus sadly when I'm asleep), but during the daytime hours? I have it pretty well controlled. Do I like having to put that much time/energy/thought/dedication into it? Not really, no. But if I don't, I lose out.

I'm glad you had success with still making money while basically ignoring the AH, but that's far, far, far from the experience I've had with the markets. I think it goes back to our servers being different. If you posted glyphs on WRA and walked away for a day, nothing would move. (I have sad experience with this, the few times I've dabbled in that market. Even all of my online time cannot keep me successful in the glyph market.)

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

We have people that do the sit in the AH constantly sometimes and undercut, but they always go away eventually. And I'm still able to make money even when they're doing it, because if you're constantly undercutting, you can't be stopping to make stuff that restocks sold items, and if you stop to restock, there's my stuff sitting there for a time at the lowest price. At least, I assume that's how I'm still able to sell when people do it, because while I can see that my profits go down, I do make money. I mean, I get undercut all the time, but there's always stuff that sells.

3-4 hours is a huge amount of time if things are getting undercut constantly. ;)

It's very possible a significant part of my success with glyphs is due to making sure I learned everything from the books of glyph mastery at the end of Wrath when they were going for 20-50g each. But I think a lot of it is also my willingness to just stick to it and put up mass quantities of different things. In my experience stuff will sell eventually if you're just patient. Hell, even those hated glyphs of imp and voidwalker will sell eventually, just not for very much. ;)