Take the Ego out of the Auction House

A great writer once said a very blunt, but very pertinent one liner about how to write a great story and that is “stop getting your balls in the way of your writing! You keep trying to put your nuts in the middle of everything just tell the story!” Pretty in your face sort of visual isn’t it? But it’s a very important point and applies to virtually everything you will ever do, including the AH game.

First let me explain where they’re coming from and the point they’re trying to make with such a quote. The idea is that when you’re trying to do something well, your ego is going to hold you back. It’s as simple as that. Like I’ve said many times when it comes to the AH or writing a blog in general, do it for the sake of doing it. If you write for the sole reason of popularity you’re probably going to fail. If you make money on an MMO just to show off you are going to have the opposite of fun. Sure it’s nice to brag and to have 2,345,567 readers but if that’s your goal you’re obviously going to fall short.

If you get stuck in the mind set of “zomg must make profit! must have more tomorrow than today” then you can easily fall short as well. The reason that you’ll fall short is that you’ll lose out on a ton of opportunities that you would have gone for if you weren’t letting your e-peen get in the way. I write my weekly reports to keep myself on track and to make an official-ish note of my progress. I do that so I know if I’m doing well or not and I don’t care how well, only that I am. If I wrote the reports and started to freak out at not turning a profit I wouldn’t be nearly as well off as I am right now.

In wow I could buy anything I wanted, including an escort for 2 through the final raid tier. In rift I can kit out every one of my alts in purples. I’m refraining from doing that so that I can continue to invest my money.

When you’re worried about going under a certain threshold of total funding is when you’re shooting yourself in the foot. You can’t make money without spending first and that’s an inescapable fact. So by not spending money on new recipes and high end materials you’re preventing yourself from making more. Why? So that you can wave your digital penis around in everyone’s face. Well guess what? I can wave my e-peen just as much, if not more, and still have more money. That’s because I’m not desperate to hold onto what I’ve made. I know that when I buy a new recipe it’s nothing more than another opportunity to make more of the mmo moneys.

Your ego will say to you that if you spend more than you made this week then you’re a failure. You’re not as good as you think you are. Everyone that reads your blog will stop reading because they all know that you’re a fraud and everything that you say means nothing and is totally worthless. Not the case. As false as that may be, a lot of people still buy into it weather they know it or not. If you’ve ever said “oh I have 50,000 but I don’t want to invest 500 into a new market” you’ve just let your e-peen get in the way.

Not long ago I spent 80 platinum on a recipe of my 280 total. That’s about 30% of my entire life savings spent on a recipe that won’t make up it’s value for at least a month. Well so far I’ve sold a good number of them and have just about made it all back. That means the next one I sell and everything after that is all profit. All of that is because I wasn’t afraid to have less now then I did last week.

The other way that ego gets in the way of progress is that you don’t want to think that you’re not getting anywhere. To amateur AH player the only way to see that they’re making progress is by how much cash they have in the bank. Wrong! You have to look at everything and not just how much your penis has grown. Yes total cash is important, but how many materials do you have stashed away in a neat and tidy stokpile? How many rare and/or expensive recipes do you have access to? How many shiny toys have you bought? Everything should be taken into consideration when judging your own progress and ability.

When writing my wow weekly reports you may remember that my normal profit in a week was around 100k gold, sometimes it was only 10k. I’m not worried to stokpile and neither should you be. The day you miss a chance to make money because of something like this is the day you miss out on twice as much. So keep the e-peen out of your bank!

Thanks for stopping by!