Making Gold as a Raider and Responding to the Demand of Raiders

Months ago we received an email from Khaas of Srsbusiness.org that asked us some questions about the relationship between making gold and raiding. His original post shows us his thoughts on it. We thought our readers might benefit from our answer to this question:

How much attention do you pay to progression on your server? Does it have an impact on your business? How do you monitor that progression? Do you use specific websites or other tools to gauge what is likely to be the “big thing” for raiders? And how do you put all the information together in a way that is meaningful?

Hi there, interesting topic. I do actually have a lot to say about it. I’m a progression raider and I do have a rough idea about how progression works on my realm which affects my business. Things like rare gems, metas, and consumables, sell really well during weekdays around the evening when everyone raids. I do pick up mats over the weekend while they are cheap. Although I realize PvE affects business, I still list gems over the weekend and whenever I am on. I don’t wait around for the perfect time. I keep supplying my server with goods especially since I value my time and don’t camp the auction house or spend anymore time than I have to. For example, I am highly resistant to learning and keeping up with new addons. There is just too high of an opportunity cost given my gold per hour and how little time I spend at the auction house (I ended up taking the time to learn Trade Skill Master, it was worth my time).

For monitoring progression, there are sites like wowprogress.com to see if Alliance/Horde on your realm is more progressed, how many guilds on your faction is in the top 10, how many bosses have guilds downed, ect. For example my guild is ranked 8th on the realm, with 7/12 Cataclysm bosses down (12/12 now). You can tell that there is still normal mode progression and PvE items and mats are going to be strong up until heroics and near the end of this tier of content. Another good tool is Elitist Jerks, just by browsing some of the class guides and
jumping to the gems/enchants/consumable section, you will learn what each class will be buying or making. On a fairly progressed server like mine, you can expect that raiders to be reading EJ and keeping up with their class. They are the ones spending gold on best in slot food, gems, enchants and are willing to pay top dollar for items. For example, leg armors from leatherworking. There are few producers and if you are the only one listed at times, you can have a nice fall back price of 1500g and it will sell. This doesn’t mean anyone else will have the same success, but this goes back to the gold making basic principal of adapting to your economy. This is why I find writing generic gold making articles hard. You can have a great idea that brings in tons of gold, but it may not work for even 1% of your audience. This may be one reason why my blog has started to shift to big picture, economy, patch notes information instead of step by step tips (this might be changing soon, we want to appeal to a wide variety of players).

Overcutting people still gives you a good chance of a sale too. This is one of those things you learn over the years; you can gauge supply and demand very well. Warren Buffet (a famous investor) once said something like; “Don’t invest in businesses you do not understand.” This is why I choose to sell the things I sell. I understand who is buying them and what the supply looks like. Sure people tell me all the time that we don’t need anymore JC’s on a server, but there is lots of demand so there is a lot of room for new JC’s to enter into the market. This does depend on the population of your realm, which in my case, I have figured out is the perfect customer base for my gem and item enchantment sales.

As far as putting it all together, it is usually in my head. The Undermine Journal, reinforced my theories with fancy graphs and market data. However I don’t really organize any information on paper or spreadsheets. I believe that time is money, so the little results it may give, may be counterproductive if you are one of those people with a high gold per hour (5k+/hr in Cataclysm is pretty good I think). Although it may be good in the long run to understand how markets work if you are a beginner-intermediate gold maker.