Hall of Fame – 1 Million Gold Cap Club: Chocotaco of Shadowsong-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 obtained 500k and 250k. We have with us, Chocotaco of Shadowsong-US, who will be sharing their story with us today.

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

I’m Chocotaco of Shadowsong-US, or at least that’s my bank alt’s name.  In the last few weeks that’s what everyone’s known me as on my server and faction, since I tend to keep my main fairly anonymous.  I started playing World of Warcraft a couple of months after release, and have been playing off and on since then.  It’s definitely one of my favorite games to date, and the only online game I’ve played at length.  Prior to WoW I’d only really been into console RPGs.

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

I raid!  I love raiding because to me it epitomizes the best that WoW (and MMOs in general) have to offer—comraderie and group effort.  Making gold is largely a solo venture, and even though it’s personally fulfilling to reach a milestone on your own, end game PvE content is what has kept me playing for six and a half years.

Why did you choose to collect this amount of gold?

It was the lull between patches 4.1 and 4.2 when I started running out of things to do in-game.  My main was overgeared for the Zandalar dungeons, had passed the 9k achievement point, is skill capped on all secondary professions, and had 119 mounts and 129 vanity pets.  I was running out of things to do in-game and I started paying more attention to how much gold I did (or rather didn’t) have.  At the beginning of June I had just under 200k gold and I thought to myself, I wonder how quickly I can get to gold cap.  Turns out, the answer was 6 weeks.  Knowing now what I didn’t know when I started, it could have taken less time than that.

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

Even though some people might think that 800,000 gold in 6 weeks is fast, the truth is that in my experience there is no simple way to get really rich really quick.  It does take effort and time, and sometimes creativity.

My main sources of income were inscription, jewelcrafting, enchanting, and alchemy.  Having started this venture with the benefit of 3 toons with capped professions gave me a lot of options in ways to make gold, and the key to high volume sales is diversification.  I would check the AH frequently for raw mats and consistently maintain a high stockpile of cata level ore and herbs purchased at low cost, which I would shuffle through my professions on an as-needed basis.  Keeping the vast majority of my inventory in the form of raw mats gave me more flexibility, and by micromanaging my daily stock of crafted goods I had better control of the margin I was getting on my mats.

Inscription:  Glyphs were a big source of income for me, despite the fact that the market is volatile, highly competitive, and sales are slightly suppressed at this point compared to what I’ve heard it has been in the past.  I tried to maintain relatively low inventory (4 of every glyph I know) in the AH at any given time, and would simply track my sales and craft during slow hours to replace sold inventory.  More than any of my other crafting professions, inscription is incredibly tedious in its manufacturing, posting, and tracking process.  In order for it to really be a worthwhile monetary and time investment for you, you really have to work out a system.  At the end of the day this market is still a huge moneymaker if you can be more consistent and cost/time efficient than your competitor.

One thing that I would take the extra time and gold to do is utilize TSM’s shopping feature to buy herbs for low level inks at prices far below the cost of blackfallow ink.  I know that a lot of people find it easier to trade down inks milled from cata herbs—and yes, the cost of doing this is definitely offset by the cost of crafting decks (not sure if this will stand the test of time as the tiers progress).  However, in the short term you will have a lot more wiggle room when it comes to walling your competition if your cost is consistently lower.

Another scribe item that I made an awful lot of gold on is mysterious fortune cards.  I know that this has been done to death, but at least on my server it definitely accounted for a great deal of sales.  There were literally NO barkers on my server, and for the entire month and a half that I was selling them, I saw no one else making any serious effort to do so.  By using macros, being vocal and personable in trade chat, and marketing it as a fun game (rather than as a surefire way to make gold), people took to them very well.  The funny thing about it is after about a week, I stopped crafting them entirely, and my whole stock of cards was simply from clearing the market of <10g/ea cards and relisting them for 15g/ea in various stack sizes.  It was steady income with no associated crafting time.  My server’s AH was being consistently stocked with reasonably priced cards that weren’t moving on their own, and it was a fantastic recipe for creative flipping.  I’ve since moved out of the market, and poking my nose back in, it’s obvious that I was the single person propping it up.  Casual scribes are now back to listing them at a staggeringly low <7g/ea.

Jewelcrafting:  Of all my professions, I would say Jewelcrafting is the no-brainer de-facto moneymaking profession.  By simply creating a prospecting macro, loading up on ore, and button mashing, you can turn a profit.  Where the big money lies is in knowing what to do with all the skittles in your bags when you’re done.  If you also have either a high level enchanter or alchemist, you’re golden.  If you have a jewelcrafter, an enchanter, AND a (transmute) alchemist—the sky’s the limit.

The rough part about jewelcrafting on its own is that the cut gem market is a lot like glyphs now—saturated with competition who camp the AH like they’re waiting in line for a new iPad.  My only advice on how to beat a camper is that you have to be more efficient than them.  Sometimes it means using the same or better mods to automate your posting.  Sometimes the most efficient way around a camper is simply posting when they’re not on.  Unlike glyphs, the gem market is a lot less flexible, and a crashed market can take much longer to recover.  My personal method is to pick my battles, and while some people cancel and relist their gems, I simply maintain a healthy inventory of every gem, and during peak hours I’ll go through and post two gems at a time over and over at a small incremental undercut.  At worst I’ll get half of the sales, and if my posting is more efficient than theirs I’ll have better uptime as the cheapest listed.

The other side of jewelcrafting that I love is its ability to feed mats to my enchanter.  All of my jaspers are crafted into jewelry and sent for disenchantment.  Your mileage may vary depending on your server, but on my server uncommon gem transmutes to rare are still very profitable, so I mostly rely on jasper for enchanting mats.

Enchanting:  I treat enchants a lot like I treat glyphs by canceling and relisting my auctions.  But unlike glyphs, I only craft select scrolls when they’re profitable.  I’m very careful about only crafting on an as-needed basis to keep profitable scrolls in the AH, because for some reason an enchant can suddenly tank in price, and then the next day it can go for 10x its cost in mats.  The moment an enchant hits the cost of mats I stop replacing it in the AH, but as soon as it becomes profitable again I’ll craft four and throw them up.

What is your master list?

Mysterious Fortune Cards, Brilliant/Bold/Delicate Inferno Rubies, Dusts of Disappearance (@5g/ea), Miscellaneous glyphs/gems/enchants

What items are in your Snatch list? (In other words, a list of reagents/materials you buy consistently)

Obsidium & Elementium Ore, and all the cata level herbs.

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

My first exposure to gold blogs was really from The Undermine Journal’s blog feed.  I used to just use TUJ to see which cuts of gems were profitable (at this point I only really use TUJ for historical sales data or creepin’ on my competition), and started paying attention to what was on the feed.  Honestly I wish there was a particular resource I could point to and say “I learned everything from them, thanks!” but that’s not really the case.  The majority of what I’ve learned oddly enough just came from looking at mats in game and trying to figure out what to do with them that would be profitable.  This took up enough time and effort that I couldn’t be bothered to do more gimmicky things to make spare gold.  I do want to say though that reading people’s interviews on Warcraft Econ is incredibly insightful because it’s devoid of a lot of the filler you find elsewhere.

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

Auctionator – The streamlined buying and shopping list functions make this a must-have for anyone serious about making gold.

Postal – I don’t even know what the game is like without this mod, I’ve been using it for so long.

TradeSkillMaster – I use this primarily to streamline and automate canceling and reposting, but I also use it to buy mats.  I’ve personally never used it to automate crafting.

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

Funny enough, shortly after I started, I explicitly made the proclamation that after a million gold I would set no further goals.  When I had no gold I used to think, well when I have 100,000g I’ll be filthy rich and I’ll never want for more gold.  When I hit 100k I would get paranoid about the idea of dropping under 100k and thought, ok well then obviously I just need to get 200k and then that’ll be the end of that.  It wasn’t until I hit 200k that I even found out that the gold cap was a million.  And as soon as I set out to a million I realized that if I didn’t set a boundary it would never end.  So no more goals or it’ll be the death of me!

Do many people know you have this amount of gold?

Not really, but having been very vocal in trade marketing slower-selling items (potions of illusion, deepstone oils, dust of disappearance, chocolate cookies, mysterious fortune cards, etc), I constantly get asked how much gold I have.  Usually I just answer “not enough!” and dodge the question, but occasionally I’ll have frank conversations with other AH barons and divulge how much gold I have.

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

I don’t think there’s much I could spend my gold on even if I wanted to.  My main is in a fairly successful raiding guild, so I don’t need BOEs.  I’m going to buy a bunch of people vials of the sands, though.  I would absolutely love some ridiculously expensive hot air balloon mount!

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

I would probably start off with the principle that your time is directly related to profit.  One old saying that quickly became very apparent to me is that “time is money”.  It naturally follows how important it is to create systems to optimize your efficiency, buy mats instead of farming them yourself, use mods to streamline your processes, diversify your products to increase your sales per day, etc.

How about an advanced gold making class?

To me, the nuts and bolts of buying, crafting, selling, and inventory are all basic gold making 101 things.  The more advanced topics would be things like identifying new, unique/niche markets.  Understanding the consumer—why and how they buy.  The difference that marketing makes.  And the topic that everyone wants to know about: Competition and how to deal with them.

Do you have any good farming strategies or spots?

By and large I don’t farm.  It’s usually a waste of time—time that could be better spent working the AH or processing mats I already have.  My one exception is farming for embersilk during very slow hours because I make a lot of embersilk bags as a way to move hypnotic dust.  The BEST spot I’ve found for this is Needlerock Slag in Deepholm, in conjunction with a potion of treasure finding.  As an arcane mage with a potion I usually end up with at least 120 bolts per hour, plus gold, volatiles, and ore.

What was the best deal you ever came across?

I bought a Haunted Memento for 80g for an alt (I already have one on my main) then decided to sell it in the AH instead for 4k.

Do you remember any of your worst deals?

Everyone has their embarrassing AH flubs where they forgot a zero or something.  I sold two Windwalk scrolls for 250g each.  My face still burns when I think about it.

What are your future plans with WoW?

My guild is tearing through Firelands, so I look forward every week to doing that!  I’m easing up on gold making since I hit my goal.  I tend to be an all-or-nothing type where I’m either all in or totally out, but I doubt I’ll ever really shake my penchant for making gold.

What are you predictions for the future WoW economy?

Of course every patch is going to have its opportunities for making gold.  4.2 was my first real foray into patch profits, and I bought into the whole notion of “stock up on x because you’ll make bajillions”.  It didn’t pan out, but I was careful.  I never overextended myself or sunk gold/mats into things like truegold or volatiles.  A week or two before the patch hit I simply scaled back on using things like gems and enchanting mats, but went heavy on vanity items and glyphs.  My sales predictably slumped because I was being conservative with my mats (and continuing to stock up on the same things) but on patch day I knew it paid off and cashed in big time on gems and enchants.  I was making 50-70k a day in sales for a full week and a half.

What I took away from that is that it’s more important to keep your thumb on the pulse of the market than it is to try to make predictions.  Everyone who reacted to what was selling on the day-of made out like bandits.  Everyone who sunk thousands of gold into mats that immediately crashed felt like chumps.  Versatility wins every time.

I feel like there’s a good chance that the AH is going to become more and more saturated with fly by night AH barons, because the tools and resources are becoming more widely available.  The people who are going to stand the test of time are the ones who are versatile and find real joy in the means rather than the end.

Please tell us a little bit about how you handle your real life finances. What are the differences and similarities with how you do things in WoW?

One thing that’s the same in and out of game is that I don’t actually place a high intrinsic value in money.  I’m just not a money oriented or entrepreneurial person in real life.  The big difference is that in real life my money collects dust in the bank, but in game I put gold to good use to make more gold.

But one thing that I learned is that your attitude towards gold can hold you back.  If you like to have gold and your entire mission is to just fill a swimming pool full of gold so you can swim around in it a la Scrooge McDuck, you probably won’t get very far.  If you love the process of making gold, you will make more gold than you’ll know what to do with.