Hall of Fame – 250K Gold Club: Kantha of Medivh-US

The Warcraft Econ Hall of Fame interviews the few elite players that have hit the World of Warcraft gold cap of 999,999 gold 99 silver 99 copper as well as ones who have obtain 500k and 250k. We have with us, Kantha of Medivh-US, who will be sharing their story with us today.

Please tell us a little about yourself and your gaming experience.

I’m Kantha from US Medivh, I’m 25 and I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since 2007.  I’ve been gaming since I was fairly young. I never got much into arcades but I and my Genesis had a lot of good times together. I must admit though, since World of Warcraft found me I haven’t played much of anything else.  I started working the Auction house towards the end of Wrath, and only recently started really trying to make large amounts of gold in the past few months, when I got bored leveling alts and needed something to occupy my time. Since I started I’ve effectively tripled my market exposure and diversified quite a bit. More and more I try to get a finger in every market I can find, and I’ve had a lot of success with that.

Do you raid or PvP most? Both? How do you enjoy the game?

I almost exclusively play PvE. Raiding is my first love in WoW! About six months ago our guild’s GM decided it was time to retire and after much deliberation left me with the reigns, and I’ve had my hands full trying to find our direction and determine where the guild was going. Luckily that’s pretty much all settled now, and we’ve been making a lot of progress in the current content. We’re nothing if not a casual raiding guild, but nonetheless we are 10/12 currently and expect to have Nef and Al’Akir down in the next week. I’m proud to be part of it, and I LOVE raiding with my guildies!

Why did you choose to collect this amount of gold?

I hit 100k a couple of times just working the glyph market, then would dip down by blowing huge wads of cash on shinies. The last time I got there I decided it was time to buckle down and prepare for 4.2, since I expect my expenditures are going to get pretty crazy around then.  After that, 250k just became a goal in its own right, as seems to always be the case in gold making.

How did you go about getting to this gold amount? Any creative or original ideas?

I don’t feel like I do anything especially clever to make gold; I just research my server/faction’s market and use my professions to make things that sell. The economy horde side on my server is usually pretty small since the population is quite low, so I don’t usually find myself with much competition. That makes it easy.

Glyphs are always a reliable source of income and I keep a full stock of just about all of them up all the time, mostly because I always have. I only have one serious competitor (since our server can only really support two glyph barons at best,) so the undercutting between us gets pretty fierce. I don’t really rely on it for my big money though since the days of zillions of glyphs sales an hour are effectively gone.

I have a potion master alchemist that I use to make (you guessed it) potions for sale. I try to keep 60 of any potion that’s profitable up. Almost all the buff potions sell like crazy, though mana and health potions are hit or miss. I only make three or four gold per potion but when I sell 45 of them to the same person it adds up pretty fast. I don’t really bother with transmutes these days because the price of truegold is often less than the cost of mats, which I simply don’t understand. But there it is. I use my xmute cooldowns to make volatiles for my tailor and that’s about it.  Occasionally I transmute rare gems if I have extra greens and herbs are cheap, but that’s not really part of my routine.

I tend to lump Tailoring, Enchanting and Leatherworking together in my mind since I use them all to craft item enhancements. I keep one or two of every Cata enchant up as long as they’re not cheaper than cost of mats, including most of the high end Maelstrom Crystal-dependent ones. Surprisingly, people will still pay 3500-4000 gold for weapon and bracer enchants, even though mat prices are way down. I expect the going price of those enchants to drop soon, but I’m making the extra gold while I can. Epic and rare leatherworking enchants both sell with regularity on my server, both at significant profit. I only sell rare tailoring leg enchants since the price epic spellthreads sell for doesn’t justify the use of a 7 day cooldown just for a couple hundred gold. I use my Dreamcloth to make gear for friends, mostly. These item enhancements probably make up the bulk of my major profits.

My Jewelcrafter only recently got her skill high enough to start doing the dailies (due to laziness) so I only have a couple of patterns for the more popular cuts. As she gets more patterns I expect to make a lot more money from the blues I get from the Elementium shuffle (which feeds my Enchanting business,) since I currently have to outsource the cutting to JC guildmembers to keep the cuts spread out.  I tried selling 20 at a time of my two or three cuts for a couple of days. It did not work. At all.

I worked the Darkmoon card market for a couple of cycles and made a lot of gold doing it but with the advent of 4.2 I decided that the absolutely gratuitous amount of work it required was no longer going to be worth it. I sold five Volcanoes, three Hurricanes, two Tsunami and a bunch of Earthquakes (the last at rock-bottom wholesale prices) in about a week and then got rid of all my extra individual cards. I’m glad to be out of that market since it gives me more time for other tasks. I must say, though, that it accounted for a good 100k of my recent income.

What is your master list?

Leg enchants move every single day; Power Torrent is a big seller, Enchant Chest Mighty Stats fly off the shelves. Glove enchants, especially Haste and Mastery, are reliable sellers at significant profits.  For some reason, potions of the Tol’vir sell more than any other potion. I’m talking 30-40 at a time! And of course glyphs. Lots and lots of glyphs.

What items are in your Snatch list?

I buy Whiptail whenever it’s cheap; the same goes for Cinderbloom. I buy a ton of Elementium ore these days even though the projected price drops from 4.1 haven’t seemed to catch up to my server yet. This pains me. And with my potion business being what it is I’m probably one of the biggest buyers of those accursed underwater Vashj’ir herbs on my server. The gold flows out quickly with those.

How did you learn to do it? Anyone or resource you would like to thank?

I learned just about everything by doing. Most times I will look around for untapped or underutilized markets, do some market research, then take the plunge. I’ll drop 10k to break into a new market if I have to, and I often do. I haven’t really gotten burned yet. I’m just lucky I guess.

I have to thank the folks over at Undermine Journal for keeping such a wonderful informational tool up and running; I couldn’t do my market research without it! It’s in my Firefox bookmarks toolbar. Everyone who contributes to JMTC and all the gold bloggers out there keep me up to date on changes and speculation, which I can then figure into my strategies (if you can call them that.)

What addons, if any, do you use to help you make gold and why are they needed?

I use TSM, Auctionator and Auctioneer for all of my goldmaking.

TSM should be pretty obvious; I have groups and categories and pricing guidelines galore. My entire process is automated at this point, which is amazing. Though setting up all those hundreds of groups was painstaking, it’s worth it now that I can just spam my scroll wheel to post everything.

Auctionator I use just because I like the buying interface better than TSM when I’m trying to buy bulk herbs and ore and such. TSM is great when I need five Maelstrom Crystals, but when I need 2,000 Obsidium it’s inadequate for the task.

I only run auctioneer on my bank alt because, well, I like the search interface.  That’s literally it. I haven’t used it for anything else since Cataclysm.

I also use Panda to disenchant, prospect and mill. It just streamlines the process a great deal, especially disenchanting. I’m using it less and less though, since I’m increasingly starting to outsource the raw material processing to friends and guildmembers (who are now employees of Kantha Incorporated!)

Are you still going for more gold?  If so, do you have a new goal? Are you close?

I don’t think I’ll be pushing as hard for a while, though I’d like to get to 300-400k before 4.2 goes live. As I mentioned earlier, I expect to spend a LOT of money in the not-too-distant future, so I want to have as much of a buffer as I can get to absorb that expenditure without winding up with six gold left in my pocket. If I can keep making 10k a day like I have been lately without spam undercutting, I’ll be quite happy.

Do many people know you have this amount of gold?

It’s a generally known fact in my guild that Kantha is stupid rich, and I take pride in the fact that money is no longer an obstacle for anything. New weapon that needs enchanting? Bam. I probably have one up for auction anyway. New gold sink repair mount just came out? Got it. Yesterday. It has its advantages, and I’m not shy about throwing my wallet around.

Did you spend your gold on fun things? What have you bought? What things would you like to buy?

I love the shinies! I have six Traveler’s Tundra Mammoths (one for every toon,) two Choppers, and a Vial of the Sands on my main. I spent about 50k gearing up my rogue one day, buying pretty much every BOE leather epic there is. The Scaleslicer was absolutely worth the 30k it cost alone.

My next gold sink, which is the reason I got so hardcore into making gold in the first place, is Dragonwrath. My main is a mage. Dragonwrath is ridiculously awesome. It requires 25 raid-drop items to even get started. I expect to spend at least 100k putting that thing together, and I solemnly vow the legendary shall be mine! Hell, I’ll buy a Ragnaros kill if I have to (though I highly doubt that will be necessary. We’re a casual raiding guild but we are quite capable.)

If you were the professor of a gold making 101 college class, what would be some things you would talk about?

Proper cost management, TSM manipulation and pricing guidelines would be what I consider the most important basics of gold-making.

You can’t craft anything for profit if you can’t control your costs. It’s not even about minimizing costs, in my opinion. That’s all well and good when it’s plausible but far more important is knowing what the costs really are. Sometimes it’s possible to make money even though some items are selling for less than cost of materials. I do this all the time in enchanting. Maintaining market presence often makes up for individual price fluctuations. Sometimes abandoning that presence, even for a day, is more of a loss than the 5 gold an individual sale cost you.

For a system like that to work, though, you need to maintain a huge number of auctions. I usually have 600-800 up at a time. Doing this without automation would be impossible, as would be managing the crafting necessary. Proper use of TSM and/or other similar addons is effectively obligatory for my methods to work. Without it the work just would be unmanageable.

One of the hardest parts of breaking into new markets for me is determining pricing guidelines, since said markets are almost always underutilized. I had an especially hard time with enchanting, since mat costs were all over the board on each individual enchant. Researching material costs, item prices and sales figures for new markets using the Undermine Journal, Auctioneer and TSM would be key concepts in my Gold 101 class.

How about an advanced gold making class?

I think the most important thing is market research. Where to go to do it, how you can interpret it, what the common pratfalls and fallacies are. The difference between successful research and an economic failure isn’t data; it’s how you use it.

The psychology of buyers, the methods of barking and advertisement, and even the minutia of stack sizing for maximum throughput are what I’d like to discuss to further refine the gold-making business once the main principles are in place.

Do you have good farming strategies or spots?

I don’t farm. The closest I ever come is when I go fishing in Tol Barad, but even that is just for the relaxation inherent in fishing. The gold you get from it (significant though it is,) is only a bonus for me. Farming is just never worth the effort once you have enough gold to buy anything you need.

What was the best deal you ever came across?

I got a pair of the cloth Valor Point boots for something like 3k when they were usually selling for upwards of 6 or 7k. My warlock was very pleased with that one.

Do you remember any of your worst deals?

On my first round of Darkmoon card postings, a mage sent me an in-game email asking if I was willing to negotiate on price. I was, so I did. 10 emails later I was tired of hearing him whine about how he only had such and such an amount or that it was going for cheaper Alliance side or whatever and so just to shut him up and end the nightmare I sold it to him for 10k. This is when they were going for 16k most of the time. 6k to get this guy to stop whining seemed like a good price at the time, though.

What are your future plans with WoW?

Firelands, leveling my Warrior so I can get into the belt buckle business, and DRAGONWRATH! After I get the legendary, I think I may head to the gold cap. We’ll see how things develop and how far behind I wind up.

What are you predictions for the future WoW economy?

I expect epic gems to come in the patch after 4.2, probably prospectable from pyrite. I’m not willing to gamble on that though, so I’ll leave the prospecting to someone else. Whiptail will drop to 15g a stack. The Glyph market will probably utterly crash at that point, then after a few months rebound as everyone runs for the hills, leaving only a few sellers again. Blizzard will add a repair vendor mount again, probably a dragon, for 100k. I will buy two.

Thank you for taking the time to do this interview for Warcraft Econ. Do you have any last words?

LOK’TAR OGAR!