Qyune recently posted to reddit on his 30 days to a token challenge. He used a completely different approach to mine, but in some ways it was much more successful.
What did he do?
Simply put he farmed. He spent 2 hours a day farming using mining and herbalism, with a good mix of current expansion and old world content. In addition to the 2 hours he spent farming he had to spend some amount of time reposting his auctions which would run to at least 10-15 minutes per day depending on his volume.
He ended up with more than 1.2 million liquid gold after 29 days, so obviously this worked out to a tremendous degree.
The main takeaway
What really stood out to me was his very simple criteria for choosing what to farm. He farmed items from several expansions, as soon as something sells he knew it had demand on his realm and would go farm up replacements for what he sold.
Farm items in different categories, post them to the auction house. Then you just farm up more of whichever category sells. It’s extremely simple and will yield great results.
Highlighting the weaknesses in my approach
Obviously this shows that farming works. He managed to get MUCH more gold than I did by focusing on gathering professions only. I did not use any gathering professions when I did my 30 days to a token challenge, and I think I would use them much more actively when I repeat the challenge.
Ultimately focusing on crafting and flipping will be slow, but as I showed it can still be done.
Time spent
The amount of time needed to reach these results is of course incredibly important.
Qyune limited himself to 2 hours farming time, but he did not track the time spent on posting auctions, traveling around and any other things. Ultimately this means he spent more than 2 hours, and I would have really liked to see the data on how much time he spent managing auctions and how often he reposted.
When I did the 30 days to a token challenge I only spent 44 hours in game at all, which clocks in at least 25% lower. This includes a TON of time spent on stuff that isn’t strictly speaking gold related like doing Emissary caches and other quests around town. My approach would probably have generated the second token faster, but it’s uncertain how long I would take to break-even with 1.2 million gold a month in profits.
If Qyune had spent the same time as me we would be looking at about 75% of the profits so coming in at around 900k, or potentially even lower if we want to go by pure /played.
What would I do next time?
I am planning to repeat the 30 days to a token challenge, and I will most likely start it some time in August. This time I would use gathering professions and material flipping only for most of the challenge to see how this stacks up. I expect gathering professions are significantly more effective than 2×4 farming for a single character, so this should be faster even with my limited play time.
Capital is a massive limiter
For flipping and crafting is a heavy limit. If you just need a token asap gathering professions will be the best way. If Qyune spent 62 hours of farming for 1.2 million that’s going to be about 7 hours of farming for one token on NA or about 10 hours on EU.
Farming 10-15 hours for one token and a little extra and then transitioning to adding flipping markets and crafting with the leftover capital should be a much smoother transition into pure AH based goldmaking. The one issue is of course that you have to choose between gathering or crafting.