Hall of Fame: Sovash of Korgath-US
Please tell us a little about yourself and your gaming experience.
I’m Sovash of Korgath-US, on the Alliance side. I’ve played a LOT of Red Alert 2, Supreme Commander, Counterstrike, Team Fortress 2 and Final Fantasy games. I’ve competed in 1v1 / 2v2 Red Alert 2 (and Yuri’s Revenge) tournaments in Toronto back in the day, but never quite got past the semi-finals.
World of Warcraft is my first ever MMO game, and I’ve been playing it since December of 2007. I started going for the gold cap seriously at some point in July of 2009, and achieved it about a week before Halloween of the same year. Wasn’t trying to do it in record time or anything, just wanted to do it.
Do you raid or PvP most? Both? How do you enjoy the game?
I generally raid a couple of nights a week, but nothing serious these days. Since I started playing WoW I’ve usually been in pretty serious raiding guilds, generally as the main tank. After 2 years of pushing progression raids, and obsessing over minute stat increases, I just lost interest in raiding, and the associated BS that goes with it around the time that Ulduar came out.
My idea of PVP is sapping level 30′s, chucking snowballs at them and vanishing when the sap wears off on my rogue, or putting a DOT and a stun on a lowbie just to see if he can figure out how to get out of it before he dies. I suggest that everyone try it at least once, it’s absolutely diabolical.
Why did you choose to collect this amount of gold?
WoW isn’t the kind of game you can “beat”, in the same sense that you can “beat” a traditional RPG like The Elder Scrolls or whatever. You can’t progress through it, down the last boss and you’re done. The best you can possibly hope for is to down the CURRENT last boss (Illidan, Yogg-Saron, etc) and have yourself geared out in all Best in Slot items before the next content patch comes out. It’s an endless cycle of repetition that, by design, will never end.
So I was thinking about the Sid Mieyer’s Civilization games, and remembered that you had like 7 different conditions to achieve victory. You could go for the Conquest Victory by conquering all the other nations, the Diplomatic Victory by negotiation world peace, or the Economic Victory by hording enough cash. I figured that if I could get gold capped, that would be a personal economic victory in WoW, that was something I could actually pull off by myself, without having to worry about someone I had no control over ‘standing in the fire’ and ruining it for me.
How did you go about getting to the 214k? Did you use professions? Auction House arbitrage? Any creative ideas?
I mostly used Jewelcrafting and Inscription. Dabbled in Blacksmithing, Alchemy to reduce the cost of my supplies for my JC market, Enchanting, and a little Engineering.
For Jewelcrafting, the strategy I used was as simple as it is effective.
1) Buy raw gems for a price at least 5 gold cheaper then the cheapest cut gem on the AH. AND / OR buy out all the saronite / titanium ore that’s below your comfort zone.
2) Craft
3) If theres a ton of JC competition logged in, then wait for a while (on an alt) and see if they log out, if it looks clear then post away.
4) Log in a few hours later, collect profit, and repeat the process.
I started in JC by going out of my way to buy / farm the blue quality gem patterns that I personally would use as a Paladin / Death Knight tank. I figured that if I was using them, then there’s bound to be other people that would also use them. I didn’t know what a PVP warlock or priest would use, so I researched them before I went into that niche market. And of course identifying the heavy weights that were already in JC market, and adding them to my friends list.
If something sold, I’d make 2 more of it, and repost. Got to the point where I had 5 of every blue quality gem in the game listed, and 3 of all the ‘good’ epic gems listed. I know it sounds simple, but it works on a long enough timeline. The real trick was actually getting my hands on all the patterns, and learning about what classes and specs that are completely alien to me would buy. That’s about it. Jewelcrafting is a licence to print money if you pay attention.
For Inscription, I used the same general tactics as I did for JC, only much more aggressively. In JC you can post a gem for like 50 gold more then your competition, and if it’s a good gem, it’ll PROBABLY sell on a raid night. For Inscription, you absolutely MUST be the lowest price if you want to make any sales.
I started inscription when I was about 1/2 way to the gold cap, purely from Jewelcrafting and I wanted to take over the glyph market the day I started seriously posting. I didn’t actually start seriously posting glyphs until I had:
- Around 4000 Inks of the Sea, that cost me less then 1 gold 50 silver a piece.
- around 75% of all the glyph designs in my skill book. If I could do it all over again, I’d wait it out till 100%
- 5 of each glyph ready to post
Getting this kind of stock pile ready to go took about a month or so buying cheap herbs in /trade from farmers, and finding deals in the AH, posted by people who obviously have no idea how much their herbs were actually worth.
I wasn’t in a hurry to jump into a new market, I’d post 1 of each glyph every day, just to test the waters. See who undercut me, and add them to my friends list, so I could keep an eye on their habits. I’d log into other alts and follow them around in Ironforge, see how they ran their business, get an idea what mods they were using from how long it took them to cancel and repost their warez, and learn when the best time to post would be when I made my move.
My inscription strategies were mainly to deny the competition of getting cheap herbs (I’d dry out the AH herbs, and steal their farmers), and to make sure that no matter how hard they tried, they would never make a serious profit off their hard work. I’d carpet bomb the market without warning, and for weeks on end posting 5-10 of every glyph in the game for about 50 silver more then it cost me to make. The customers loved it, and bought their favorite glyphs off me faster then I could repost on raid nights, the competition bought me out to pad their own inventories, thinking this was a one time deal, and prices would shoot back up tomorrow, which of course they didn’t. Once people started to give up, I’d crank the prices back up to 100g a glyph, and repeat the process when the rabble came back in.
If you’ve ever heard of the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your profits come from 20% of your effort, it’s totally true. I made around 80% my gold from JC, but I spent 80% of my effort on Inscription.
How did you learn to do it?
From my time competing in Command and Conquer tournaments, I used the strategy of denying my opponent resources, and winning without prolonged fighting. The most important thing to me, was to destroy their Ore Trucks as fast as possible, and to send my own well defended Ore Trucks into their territory to further deny them access to their own resources immediately afterwards. Without ore trucks, they couldn’t generate any funds, and without and funds, they couldn’t fight back when my tanks came rolling in. Not the BEST or imaginative strategy ever, but dangerously effective, and almost always ensured a quick win.
It kinda translated into WoW. If I can deny the competition from getting cheap mats in the AH, and convince their farmers to sell to me, instead of them, AND deny them from making any profit for long enough, then they’ll give up eventually. It just wouldn’t be worth their time to run their industry for a loss / break even / minimal profit per day.
I’ve read all gold making blogs out there, and found that most of the strategies they talked about only really worked if you had a very specific set of circumstances in your favor. Like a lot of Inscription blogs for example, the main theme is:
1) find a farmer to sell you 100 stacks of herbs twice a day, for 1/10th of the going price in your servers auction house
2) mill them and make inks
3) sell glyphs at AH a low enough price that your competition can’t afford to compete with you.
4) Profit!
If you actually pull that off, then wow, that’s awesome. I sure couldn’t! At least not indefinitely.
So I took a lot of what I found out in the blogosphere and modified, and refined it to the point where it was my own method that would work on my server, with my resources and play style. A pinch of Gelvon, a tablespoon of Markco, stir into a liter of Boiling Sovash, serves 4.
What addons, if any, do you use to help you make gold?
- Altoholic – to keep track of my inventory at any given time.
- Skillit – (the lil’ sparky release, not the official one you’d find on curse)
- Quick Auctions 2 – for super fast posting and canceling
- Auctionator – for when I get stuff that I want to manually set a price for, and for buying out auctions in bulk
- Kev’s Queue Tool – for fast restocking
- Postal – for opening all my mail
- Auditor – to keep track of profits and expenses
- Lil’ Sparky’s Workshop – So I can get an idea how much profit I can expect from bulk crafting per item.
- A few macros for prospecting, milling, and reloading my UI.
Are you still going for more gold? If so, do you have a new goal? Are you close?
I’m going to finally make some gear for my toons that I play on, and probably try to collect some more of the epic JC patterns before they become irrelevant, and finish off my meta gem collection.
My goal was to get gold capped, and I’m happy leaving it at that for the moment. I have the screenshot to prove it, and an interview on a high profile WoW Economics website, I’m completely satisfied where I am now. This is more gold then I can ever see myself, or any rational person ever spending. I’ll probably re-enter the AH from time to time to top the funds off to stay gold capped as I’m buying things, but I don’t have any plans to shoot for 500,000 gold or a million gold any time soon.
I’m still active in the Auction house with my gem market, just to keep a steady low-hassle income, but I’ve abandoned inscription and the other markets.
Do many people know you have this amount of gold?
All of my old guild (Grown Ups) knows, and most of the people that I currently raid / goof around with with know. In my own mind, I’m assuming that every one of those people who I have told has told a few people, and they told a few other people, so by now all of Korgath must know.
The day I got gold capped, I broke my own rule of not talking to the competition, and sent a whisper to them all telling them that I achieved my goal, and they didn’t have to worry about me any more, and to wish them well in game, and outside of the game. Turns out that the people I’ve been fighting against tooth and nail for the past few months are all really good and friendly people, I actually felt a little bad about the whole thing afterwards.
Did you spend your gold on fun things? What have you bought? What things would you like to buy?
Not really. On my way to the gold cap, I bought all of the Ulduar and Crusader Coliseum blacksmithing patterns for myself (although crafting the actual items for my toons was always an expense that I could never quite justify). I’m not the kind of guy that wants to spam the trade channel with “BS LFW – Have all patterns in the game” or anything, so instead of a business investment (which is how I justified the purchases at the time) it really turned out to be a vanity thing for my own sense of trade skill completion.
I have a real-life friend on the server that I “Epic’d out” the day he hit 80 (in exchange for a night of beer and chicken wings at the pub), and I got him his epic flying training, but that’s about it, really.
I think a large part of what makes people who are gold capped who they are, is self restraint and not wasting money on things they can do themselves. Take a look at Donald Trump for example, the guy has more money then anyone, and he cuts his own hair for crying out loud.
Just because you have enough gold to buy a chopper and all sorts of vanity items, does not mean that you can AFFORD it. If I were to buy all the expensive vanity items in the game as soon as I had enough gold to enable me to do so, I wouldn’t be anywhere near gold capped now. Friends ask me all the time how I got gold capped, and my usual answer is “I don’t waste my gold on things I don’t need. I don’t have a thousand mounts or vanity pets because I don’t need them.”.
Do you have any special tips that you would like to share?
- Always take whatever gold making advice you get from blogs or word of mouth with a grain of salt. It’s mostly anecdotal evidence that their system works. Farming titanium ore isn’t always gonna be the best way to make gold, neither is Jewelcrafting or inscripting. Fads come and go. I’ve given a few details on how my industry works in this interview so far, and the reader might be be thinking “this Sov guy is full of it” at some points. And the reader is right, this system works for me, under my exact set of conditions, not theirs. My method might sound completely insane to anyone else. Best I can say is “Hey, worked for me”, and dare the reader to modify my system to work in his/her conditions, or better yet, devise their own, and do it their way.
- Keep up with the latest patch notes! For example, miners that knew that Titanium ore was going to be prospectable in the last content patch held on to their stocks of the ore, and sold it for 1000% the going rate the day the patch came out.
- Always be mindful of the truths that have always been around, and will always be around. Like holding on to enchanting mats for the new arena season, or selling your flasks / gems / enchants around the same time people are getting ready for a raid. Timing is literally everything. You’re always going to sell more flasks at around 8-9pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays before the guilds zone into a raid then you are at Sunday morning at 6 am.
- If you’re just entering a new market, try your best to stay under the “Market Kingpin’s” radar until you’re prepared for a fight. People that have been in their market for a while, and are there to make gold don’t keep their friends on their friends list, they keep people that they see as threats to their business on their friends list. If someone undercuts me by a couple of silver on like 5 auctions, I’m not going to waste a friends slot on them, odds are I’m probably not even going to notice it. But if they undercut me by a few copper, on a few hundred auctions, then they’ve got my attention, and I’m going to keep an eye on them, and post my next batch after they log out.
- Never reply to any mails, or whispers you may get from your competition, and restrain any urge you may feel to contact them for any reason. Once you start talking to them, you’re more likely to emphasize with them, and compromise. That’s the first step on the road of failure.
- Do your homework before you buy a new pattern, if your crafting things. Everyone knows that Red gems sell for the most gold per sale, but not everyone knows that the purple and orange gems sell in the highest volume, and aren’t generally as flooded as the red gem market. Start by crafting and selling the items that you would personally use. If you’re a tank, and a jewelcrafter, then start out by crafting and selling the gems that you already have in your gem sockets on your own gear, for example. If YOU’RE using them, then theres a very good chance that someone else would want them too – at a price, of course!
- If you have a dedicated farmer, then treat them like your best friend. Don’t give them any reason to go over and work for the enemy. “Accidentally” over pay them sometimes, send them some class / spec appropriate BOE gear, gems or enchants every now and then (if their not Chinese gold farming bots) with a thank you note. If they go away one day, to help the enemy, then you’re in a position of disadvantage. Don’t let that happen.
- A really fun tactic I used in Inscription was changing my goal from making profit, to breaking even. Glyphs that were 20 gold yesterday, would be posted by me for 2 gold tomorrow and for days at a time, then I’d put the prices back up. This had a devastating psychological effect of making my competition (and my actual friends, until I told them in a burst of laughter) think that I must have some kind of overwhelming advantage for getting my materials. I didn’t, I never did. I was just changing the rules of the game, without telling anyone. People will usually come to the natural logical conclusion when theres a big shift in pricing in their markets, they will generally not, however assume that someone is just plain f***ing around.
Do you have any fun stories from when you were grinding?
I didn’t really grind much. I’d do the occasional “Two Pull Stratholme” or “One Pull Stockades” on my protection paladin every now and then for fun / to show off.
There was this one time though, I was leveling tailoring on my alt, for the purpose of making cloth items, then disenchanting them, and some level 5 sent me a pm saying that he thought the pants my toon was wearing looked really cool, and he wanted to buy them off me for 10 gold. I forget what the pants exactly were, but I remember that they were cloth or leather pants that I bought from some vendor in Stormwind for like 4 copper, definitely not the kind that were bind on pickup/equip. So I sold them the 4 copper pants for 10 gold, sure beats my previous record of a 20000% mark up (http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/10/morons-of-week-2_25.html)
What was the best deal you ever came across?
About a month or so after the epic gems came out in WotLK, I guess someone forgot to update their auctioneer database or something, and I got 25 stacks of titanium ore for 15 gold a STACK.
I also found an Orb of Deception on the AH for 150 gold, I snapped it up, and resold it for 2000 about 5 minutes later.
Do you remember any of your worst deals?
Yeah, it just happened pretty recently, and it really contrasts the previous question. I checked my Auditor data and saw that I was 3000 away from the gold cap, so I went into profiteering overdrive, and sold out my entire inventory for break-neck prices. I had an “addon malfunction”, and ended up selling 4 Tankards o’ Terror for 25 gold each, instead of the going price of 800ish each. I added them to the wrong Quick Auction category that I made because I was in a rush and wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing at the time. Someone bought them all out immediately after I posted them, and I sent him a congratulatory PM laughing about my mistake.
What are your future plans with WoW?
I really don’t know. I quit hardcore raiding to get into hardcore profiteering in the AH, and I don’t really feel like raiding ‘full time’ anymore. PVP is out of the question as I really can’t stand it.
Thank you for taking the time to do this interview for Warcraft Econ. Do you have any last words?
- Never compromise. For any reason.
- Don’t waste your gold on things that you don’t need. I’m gold capped, and I still don’t see any reason why I’d want to collect pets, or mounts or whatever it is that people spend their gold on. I just don’t think about them.
- Patience, restraint, and intelligence (in the military sense of the word) are the three biggest factors of making your own fortune.
- Read The Art of War, and The Rules of Acquisition (Yes, the Ferengi bible from Star Trek Deep Space 9), and you’ll never lose in the AH.
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I approve of this guy.
If you keep giving away all the secrets your profits will go away!
j/k
Some good points.
Best HoF post yet.
You are the man, Sovash! Love your Hall of Fame post!
This guy is a beast, I’ve seen his work and been devastated by it, grats homie.
This guy is awesome! Reminds me of the greedy goblin, minus the jerky-ness. Any chance we can get this guy to submit some articles?