To get long term success as a gold maker you need to create some sort of habits or systems. Today we will dive more in depth into what activities you want to perform and at which time scales they make sense.
Consistency is the key to gold making as we have seen before. Today we will build on the More is more post to get into a higher level of detail.
The point: Increasing time efficiency
The point is to become more time efficient. We want to make as much gold as possible. This is equivalent to making gold in the least amount of time possible, as we can then allocate more time to gold making ( or other activities).
The logistics of gold making
On a generic level gold making will have the steps below>
1. Buying items
2. Crafting items (if applicable)
3. Posting auctions
4. Cancelling auctions
5. Collecting expired auctions
6. Re-posting auctions
We’ll go through these steps and point out ways you can improve your efficiency or improve your habits to get more consistency.
Buying items
Restocking can take a while. If you are in a lot of different markets you will likely spend a decent amount of time shopping. Regularly shopping for deals is VERY important. The AH can quickly change and spending your time doing shopping scans is well worth it. For materials it is very important to avoid scanning for more materials than you need. It takes time that you do not want to waste. Making the right group structure is paramount. This depends completely on which markets you are in, but making some customized groups to get your shopping scan times down is great.
The most important factor is always to actually run scans. You can almost always spend more time looking for deals in markets like BoEs, battle pets etc. You should at least do this can daily if you can, preferably more. Although theres little point in scanning twice with 30 minutes in between.
Crafting items
The main factor here is to utilize crafting oeprations in TSM to save time when restocking. Just click the restock button and then craft next until you have all your items. It is highly beneficial to have fairly large material stockpiles so that you do not need to shop for materials every time you craft.
The other aspect to crafting is that you want to do as much as possible at the time. Logging in and out will take a significant amount of time. It is better to do all your crafting for the month on one day than crafting 4 times a week. Obviously the size of you rivnentory is limited, so you will have to find your balance here. For markets like enchants and flasks it is best to keep a decent amount of finished goods at all times so you don’t run out before you have time to restock.
I generally restock my markets between once every two weeks and once a month depending on the market. If you find that you regularily run out of an item you should craft more of it every time you craft. If you end up with items clogging your inventory you can safely wait longer to craft.
Posting auctions
This is almost self explanatory. Just post all your items. TSM is obviously the way to do this to save time. If you can I suggest getting a second account so you can run the scans in the background, this is really the only way to save time here.
Cancelling Auctions
Cancel-scanning can be profitable. I don’t do it much myself, but that’s because I can barely keep my stuff posted. This makes particular sense for markets where an undercut means your item will not sell this repost cycle.
If you have the time you can make a lot of gold doing consistent cancel scans. The only downside is that it takes a lot of time to run the scans, collect the auctions and re-post them all. It is typically best to do this once or twice a day unless you really like AH camping. If you have a longer session you could do this once at the beginning of the session and once again just before you leave the game.
Once again you will be a lot more efficient if you can do this on a second account.
Collecting expired auctions
This will take a lot of time. Make sure your inventory is as large and clean as possible. Get max size bags and go bank stuff you don’t need to speed up the process.
Remember that you can click open all mail in TSM and it will continue until your inventory is full or your mailbox is empty.
The main way to scale this is to get a second account as usual.
I would generally advocate doing this at least once a day. If you are in faster moving markets you may want to do it twice a day and if you only post slow moving items at 48 hours duartion you don’t need to collect more than every other day.
Re-posting auctions
No rocket science here either. This will mostly be after your auctions have expired. In some high demand markets it makes sense to run auctioning scans quite often even without canceling.
Enchants on raid days sell so quickly you can run a post scan once every 15 minutes the entire night and get a ton of sales. Cancel scan as needed to refill your inventory and you can make a TON of sales on a single day.
For slower markets you should get in the habit of having one collection and repost day every other day.
Conclusion
Always look for ways to optimize your habits based on how you play the game. You can save a ton of time, which will make you a lot of gold long term!
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