Goblin Mindset: Chasing the thrills of large sales

Today I want to talk about how you can increase your risk tolerance, and why you may want to do so. Ultimately you can make more gold if you are more aggressive in your auction house activities. Pulling the trigger on items that seem like good deals will help you and going all-in when the opportunity presents itself can be great.

Disclaimer

Ultimately this post will be about increasing your risk, this will naturally include the possibility of larger losses. If you don’t want to be more risk seeking, feel free to continue as you do, you can make plenty of gold with lower risk as well.

The advantages of risk-seeking

The way I see it there are two advantages to being looser with your gold. The first one is of course that you will learn quicker, and if you are making good decisions on average you will be making gold much quicker. As long as it is possible to post everything you have it is generally better to spend as much gold as possible on good deals. The data from my gold cap challenge clearly indicates that there is a strong correlation between the amount spent and the amount earned using my setups.

The other advantage is mental. Larger spending sprees and larger sales are more exciting. Gold making will feel more exciting and more fun if you are spending and making large amounts. There’s nothing quite like spending half your gold in a session. And then watching half of that come back the very next day.

Approaches to increase your risk tolerance

So let’s look at some practical ways you can increase your risk tolerance if you want to.

Gradual escalation

This is the boiling frogs approach. Make a conscious decision to spend more gold. You can do this by setting a maximum limit at what you are currently comfortable spending a day on items, then increase that every day. This is the slower approach, but it can help you gradually build your tolerance to watching large fluctuations in your gold amount.

It’s just a game

I like to say that gold is just pixels. Although they do have some economic value as tokens, there is little truly consequential at risk. This might not work for everyone though, but try to think of it as less important than it is. It will also help to consider the fact that you can just repeat what you did to get to your current amount of gold again if you lose it. It will even most likely take less time.

The all-in

This is for those of you with fairly little gold and a desire to learn quickly. If you have less than 100k it should be fairly easy to spend all your gold on materials that are reasonably priced. Try to spend all your gold. If you go down this road you have to make sure you are spending your gold on actually good deals though.

Out of sight out of mind

You can try to hide the amount of gold you are spending. This can be done by splitting your markets across several characters and removing any addons that show your total gold across characters. Keeping track of your gold will be harder, and you will not notice the fluctuations as much, which would lessen the psychologic impact of large spending sprees.

Summary

I think that there are some very real advantages to being able and willing to spend a lot of gold when the opportunity presents itself. It is essentially always optimal to spend all your gold if possible, so training your tolerance to large swings in your gold will help you pull the trigger when the opportunity presents itself.

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