The WoW Manhattan Project

Secret WoW Project

I logged off of StarCraft II, and logged onto WoW for the first time in… 8 weeks? I can’t remember… I’ve been to bored with WoW and to engrossed into StarCraft to care.

Anyways, I started reading up on patch notes and what not for Cata and 4.0.1. I’m not going to spoil this for anyone, but there are some MAJOR changes coming to inscription. I expect anyone who prepares enough for these changes should have no problems joining the ranks of the WoW millionaires on jmtc forums.

This blog is going to be brief intentionally, but I will say this… just stocking up on herbs and inks won’t be of much help come 4.0.

Let the Manhattan project begin!

ps I will keep the guild bank total up to date DAILY starting with 4.0.1 patch day. I plan on doing a full breakdown of my work the Tuesday following patch day.

How to sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman with white gloves...

Tommy Boy, one of my favorite movies of all time. The line from the title though holds very true to the glyph industry.

Lets break apart the sentence... selling a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves. Pretty much your selling something that is discussing, not useful to someone that will probably make a mess on themselves and end up looking retarded.

Practical real world (of warcraft) application... your most profitable glyphs are going to be the most useless peices of crap that people should not buy. You are not going to sell many of these glyphs however... maybe 1 or 2 of each type every week - but they WILL sell and they WILL give you more profit than any others, simply because there will be less competition to sell these glyphs.

With 3.3 getting ready to release in the next week or two I'd recommend stocking up on herbs/inks and pulling your glyph supplies up to +2 or +3 of your normal amount. Be ready camp the AH for the first day or two after the patch, as this is when you'll make the majority of your 3.3 profit.

35,000 Gold from Buying Weed?

That’s right interwebz. I’ve passed the 35k mark from my glyph business all from buying weeds, milling, inking, glyphing and selling. Although not so much in the last week.

I promised I’d keep my personal life to a minimum on this but I’ve had a rather eventful last two weeks. I got the keys to my new home Nov 23rd and I started moving in! that with all the family thanksgiving obligations and not having internet at my new home for almost two weeks made it hard to play WoW… no WoW, no blog.

But I’m back and heading twards the gold cap.


Recent developments one of my farmers sent me an in game mail to let me know he has too much gold and won’t be farming for now. That’s it for the last two weeks though.

Start stocking up glyphs and mats for 3.3!

Printing Gold – Part 2

Today’s post is brought to you by people who eat greasy food when they are typing blogs….

In the last post, I went over Auctioneer, KTQ, Altoholic, Skillet, Postal and MailOpener. Today I’ll cover Keyclone, QA2 and a secret add-on.

Firstly, the most anticipated Keyclone. I want to start off by saying Keyclone IS NOT an add-on. It’s a 3rd party, pay for, application that was designed to send key presses to more than one program at a time. It has many other features besides the key press function however I don’t use these. I use Keyclone for two things mainly:

1) Multiboxing – I have two accounts and when I level my toons together I needed something so I could hit keys on both toons at the same time
2) Milling – On my herbalist account, I set up every key to a milling macro. I then will play on my other account and hit my macro over and over and over – thus milling all of my herbs without cutting into my play time!

Keyclone is not against the TOS for Warcraft as there is no automation involved – you press a key and the program receives the key press – that simple. If you search on www.dual-boxing.com you should be able to find where a blue said it was okay.

Next, QA2. This is what I use to post all of my auctions. It’s been debated which is better, QA or Auctioneer for posting, I personally like QA more because it is more user friendly to set up and configure, and it posts much faster. Finally it has a cancel function that cancels only auctions that have been undercut. This is very useful for people who like to post more than once a day.

Finally the surprise add-on! I consider organization my biggest time saver, especially when I have so many add-ons controlling my markets. I use BankStack to automagicly organize all of my bags. You may think “well that’s dumb I don’t need that, what difference could it make?” well let me tell you… When I pull 1000 glyphs out of the mail I have more than my 11 glyph bags with 32 slots can handle. Rather than posting some of the glyphs up, then pulling the rest of my glyphs from my mailbox, I click “auto stack” and boom… all of the glyphs get stacked up and only take up about 10 glyph bags. Saves me time, saves me headaches. VERY, VERY worth it IMO.

Question of the day: What do you find to be your most important or most used add-on and why? Doesn’t have to be gold-making related.


List of add-on downloads not found on curse.com:
Keyclone – http://www.solidice.com/keyclone/
MailOpener - http://20kleveling.com/JMTCforum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1403 (thanks Zerotorescue)

Have a great day everyone!

Printing Gold – Part 1

After several requests from my last post, I am going to make a two part series on add-ons and Keyclone that I use to “print my own gold”. This will not be a step by step in how I set things up, however it will break down what I use and its purpose.

Firstly I use Auctioneer. Auctioneer is very, very mediocre in its functionality. For every function that auctioneer has, there is another addon that will do it faster and better, with one acceptation – Snatch. That is the ONLY reason I use Auctioneer. I do a quick scan (if you don’t know what the quick scan function is you need to learn it, it’s a very powerful tool) and hit snatch, and buy up everything I want that is under my predetermined threshold.

Next, the most powerful tool I have, KTQ. I want to give props to Kevmar of “My Auction House Banker” (I'm linked to his blog in the side window) as he wrote this and literally saved hours and hours of work for me. KTQ works with two other add-ons, Skillet and Altoholic, to determine what glyphs you need to create and it queues them up inside of Skillet. You can then go to vendors and click the buy reagents button and you will purchase every item you need to produce all your glyphs.

Finally for today, I use Postal and MailOpener to check my hundreds of mails every day.

Printing Gold – Part 2 will be posted most likely on Thursday and will cover Keyclone, QA2 and what I consider the most important add-on I have (this is going to stay a surprise till then)

Gold Ca… I mean, Herb Cap?

The last few days during my push to hit 30,000g, prices suddenly dropped on herbs on the AH AND my farmer suddenly sent me TONS of herbs…. Needless to say it was a perfect storm and when all was said and done I only had 19k gold left and found myself with a full guild bank with nothing but herbs.

I had somewhere around 500 – 700 stacks of herbs… now how the freak am I going to mill all these without dying of boredom?

I fired up KeyClone and macroed my mill macro onto every key on the keyboard. I then loaded up my other wow account and worked on leveling my death knight. He is my new project I’ve been working on for JC and Enchanting.

When all was said and done, I now have 3 bank tabs of inks… not too shabby.

Stay tuned, now that I don’t need to buy much I should break through the 20k wall this week.

Why Gevlon is Wrong, and Right

After reading Gevlons post today, I stopped to think about why on my server his methods wouldn’t work so well.

When I first started down my glyph making adventures, I figured out exactly what Gevlon was doing and followed it to the T. I noticed I made a TON of gold during the first 2-6 hours… and during the remaining 40-42 hours or so of my 48 hour auction I made next to nothing.

After spending some time I learned I have about 6 to 8 people on my server that I’m fairly certain use QA2. I’ve monitored their habits and notice they get on and on regular intervals undercut each other, and when the prices get low enough they quit posting that glyph and leave a hole in the glyph market.

Like any other sensible goblin, I reacted to my new found information. I installed and configured QA2 and started posting twice a day… right after the competition posted early in the day, and about 90 min before they posted later that night. Suddenly I noticed my profits dropped slightly during the first few hours… however I was now selling glyphs at a constant rate and I normalized my income at a higher average.

Obviously what Gevlon does on his server works for him, it also works for me on my server, but just not as well as QA. I guess the moral of today’s post is QA is better if you have a large number of scribes in your market, and Auctioneer is better with little competition.

Step 1 Buy Vendor Mats, Step 2 ???, Step 3 Profit.

Copper rod costs 1s 24c from vendors without any discount. I sold one for 39g99s99c last night. Got to love idiots.


I think my next business move will be to roll a DK on my 2nd account and lvl him to 60. I need to have an account for JCing and Enchanting, and I’d like to be able to prospect/de during raid downtime


I’m worried that doing this is going to cost too much to quick, however price of saronite is still around 17g on my server and the herbs have jumped from 17 to 40 and show little sign of returning.


I did buy a 5th bank tab today as I needed more room for herbs and inks I’m trying to store up. I’m back up to 1 full bank tab of inks w00t! Guild bank is down to 19k.


I’ve decided there is nothing “special” you have to do to make money in warcraft, you just have to want to get money. Hopefully over time my blog will help someone else get rich.


Tip of the day: list several copper rods or coal or something on the AH for 100g. do this every day for a week or so. Then start listing the same items on your main for 40g, idiots think they are underpriced and buy ‘em.

The Gold Farmer

So the other day when I was spamming /2 looking for someone to sell herbs directly to me and lo and behold a gold farmer sent a pst that went something like this…

Him: “do you have your epic flying?”
Me: “yes”
Him: “do you want to buy gold? 10000g for $99”
Me: “no, but do you sell icethorn? I’ll buy all you have for 22g a stack?”
Him: “yes we sell that, come meet me in the dwarf start zone”

Meet him in the dwarf start zone should have been my first clue. The next 45 min. was wasted with me going out to Dun Mourogh (spelling?) and trying to talk to this guy who honestly didn’t understand me, but was replying all in macros. /sigh I should have went with my instinct.

I’m still sitting at 22,000g in the guild bank, and I’m just trying to sell off all my glyphs as I slowly stockpile herbs. The price is back up to 42g a stack, but I manage to get some every now and again for less.

I’m thinking about getting into jewel crafting, but I’m not sure yet. I kind of want to hit the 25k mark before I branch off and spend money to power level something.

Question of the day (if anyone cares to comment) What market should I try to branch into next, and why?

Lower Herb Prices and Free Help

I, unfortunately, spent most of my weekend away from warcraft. My guild raided ToGC Friday night and first thing Saturday I gathered up 12 or 13 friends to help me paint my new home that is still currently under construction.

Out of these 12 or 13 friends, only 1 of them was being paid (she paints houses as a side job) everyone else was free labor. Everyone knew this said person was being paid, but no one complained, and everyone put in the same amount of hours… I thought to myself why? The answer, my friends know me well and like me and know that if they need help I’ll be there for them. But this brings up a great discussion about warcraft…

My guild mates and friends who craft things for me for free and spend time helping me on my side projects can’t know me to well as they have never met me. They know me as a lvl 80 dwarf warrior who has a red beard. They assume I will help them out when they need me (and I always try) but if I decide not to help them, it’s not like they are going to show up at my door or call me on the phone to make me feel bad about it. I’m not sure that I understand how trust is formed like this inside of a virtual game.

In other news I’ve been noticing herb prices falling back from their 44g/stack peak and they are back to about 25g/stack. I’ve spent the last 5 or 6 days re-stocking my ink and herb supplies and selling out of the glyphs I currently have made. My goal is to fill up all 6 tabs of my guild bank without touching my current gold reserve of 22k. We’ll see how this goes.

I hate MMO-Champion!!!

So we all know of the now infamous post by MMO Champion that turned every market on every server upside down. Let me describe how this has screwed up my server…

First Icethorn and Adders Tongue prices shot up from 16-18g a stack, to about 35-42g a stack! I was hoping this would be enough to stop the extra competition from moving into the market, but I guess I was wrong.

My farmer was banned some time ago, so I’ve been just buying herbs from the AH to make my inks. The day that MMO made the post, I had 2 guild bank tabs FULL with stacks of ink of the sea (or about 3920 inks). I thought I had enough to last about 2 weeks.

But this is where odd things started happening… glyphs actually rose in price… but this was short lived they came crashing down within the first 48 hours. I’ve watched as my average sale went from 12g to 9.8g…

This is the killer… glyph prices fell about 20%, as the cost of the materials went up about 110%.

I currently have enough ink to last me till Tuesday… MAYBE Wednesday…. I may have to do something very un-goblin like and bow out for a week or two till the dust settles from MMO and their stupid post.

First post!

I've been wanting to start a blog about my WoW experiances for some time now, and I finally got around to it!

Today I'd like to talk about my gold making. A few months back I stumbled across a post by chance from Gevlon and thought to myself "Hey, I could probably do that!" and so I leveled my 60 alts tailoring up enough to start making netherweave bags.

Before to long, I was reading more and more blogs and forums about scribes who were making tens and hundreds of thousands of gold. I took another one of my alts and power leveled inscription.

So here I am today, making my own first post about my Warcraft life. I've gone from the person who mindlessly did dailys non stop to buy my first epic flyer, to the person who has epic flying on 3 alts, a chopper and 25k cold hard cash in my bank.

I'll will try to post at least 3 to 5 times a week, so check back often!