More Gold Per Hour
Posted on February 4th, 2009 by Lawbringer under Auction House, Efficiency Tips, General Tips, Gold Building, Gold Farming, Low Level, Trade Skills, World of Warcraft, WotLK
Are You Calculating Your Gold per Hour?
We’ve mentioned a time or two (or twenty) that farming is not the way to make massive amounts of gold in WoW. There is simply no way to make the kind of gold you need to buy all the things you are going to want in this expansion and roll in truly dominating style if you are out hitting mines and picking flowers.
the only way to generate true wealth in world of warcraft is by working the auction house. And there is a very good way to track just how well you are doing in the achievements panel. Once you know exactly how much gold you are earning every day, you can easily convert that number into an even more useful benchmark for measuring your gold-making domination.
Now don’t tell us that making gold and tracking it is too complicated. That’s hogwash. You guys are figuring your poison hit cap down to the last point. You study up on defense rating,expertise points and as of yesterday, spell penetration. You won’t even have to spreadsheet this one. All you have to do is divide.
In order to really show you what we mean here We’re going to introduce you to the idea of a benchmark for gold per hour. But that starts with gold earned per day which you can see in your statistics tab of your achievements panel. What you want to shoot for is 500 gold per day – EVERY DAY. That’s a good round number that would garner you an epic flying mount in less than two weeks, or a Tundra Mammoth in a bit more than a month.
Here’s what this looks like on Moneybaggins (Fenris, Horde side). These are totals starting from the day after WotLK was installed. I know it’s depressing. We spent way too much time leveling the first two weeks, and missed a lot of auction time, which is why the total looks so low. But that’s ok, you can still see that we’re operating above the benchmark for Gold per day. A pretty good clip above the benchmark, and that’s even without really concentrating on working the AH all the time.
You see it right, that’s 73,888 gold since the middle of November. It will be pretty dissapointing if that’s not 100,000 before Valentines day. One hundred grand every 90 days is pretty much what I’m shooting for. That would be almost half a million gold in a year.
In Contrast, if you have a pretty clear farming spot that you can run without competition it’s not that hard even for a total rookie to farm enough mats to make 100 gold an hour in Sholazar Basin. Let’s call 100 gold an hour the benchmark for farming. It’s sort of the understood minimum for good farming spots. Of course, there is so much traffic with all the other farmers in Sholazar that you’ll probably have to give up some sleep to run here at 3am to get a clean run at it for more than an hour. I was doing some fishing on the coast after a raid the other night at 2am server time and three people ran through me – and I was almost outside of the zone!
Compare that to the 500 gold per day benchmark for working the AH exclusively. In order to hit the same level of earning you would have to spend 5 hours farming alone. Past that you would still have some administrative duties to do putting all that stuff you farmed up for auction. If you are not a total dunce and use AADV and LilSparky’s to help you with that you still need to scan, check for profitable crafted items, manage your mailbox and a half dozen other things that have nothing to do with farming. Let’s call that 30 minutes.
Some of you may be thinking something like this: “If I can match the benchmark per day of 500 gold and just farm it (which sounds easy) then why is that worse than 500 a day working the AH?” The answer is gold per hour. You see, I don’t spend 7 hours making 701g 41s 85c a day. I spend about 2 hours in an entire WEEK making that much gold. When you divide your gold per week by the number of hours you spent, that’s when you get your gold per hour spent working on making gold.
In this case it’s:
(Gold per Day*7)/Time Spent per Week = 2,681g 42s per hour
701*7 = 4,907 gold per week
110 minutes = 1.83 hours
4,907/1.83 = 2,681 gold per hour spent
You can see that I keep close track of how much time I spend. So while you were out farming, my toon Sherpaman did the entire Lunar Festival achievement run, a full clear of Naxx 10, some Naxx 25, Vault and OS both 10 and 25 man versions, and leveled a druid from 73 to 76 and STILL made 5,000 gold – and never picked a single flower, or mined a single node.
Get in your achievement panel right this second and look at your gold earned per day and then plug it into the formula above to find your gold per hour played. If it’s not over 1,000 then you are not doing something right. It’s like going into a 25 man Naxx raid and doing 800 dps – lame. And it doesn’t matter what level your toon is. The screenshot above is from a level 2 toon. All you have to do is apply the principles we’ve been talking about for the last two years and you can hit 1,000 gold per day in your sleep.
Do we still farm some mats? Sure, the guild needs a lot of flasks and crafted items. So we all go out and dominate a zone for about half an hour and make a couple dozen things. Go ahead and farm a little while you are out working on stuff, or if you get bored. But use those mats in your professions, use professions to make gold, and make the majority of your gold at the AH.
The view from the top of the gold heap is nice – so get out of the farming runs and join us at the pinnacle of gold-making prowess and Dominate!
How much gold do you need before this starts becoming viable? I want to get more gold but do I have enough purchasing power to make it work at 700 or so gold? Besides that, I dinged 70 maybe a week ago and I still have yet to buy my flyer. Considering that I don’t have Wrath (so I am actually going to be able to use said flyer), when would be a good time to try to jump into this. ATM I’m doing mostly dailies/normal quests, and trying to get a decent set of gear for tanking. You seem knowledgeable, what should I do first? I play roughly 2-3 hours a day, and more on weekends.
What is Lil’ Sparky?
Lil’Sparky’s is a trade skill mod that pulls data from AADV to show you which things you can make for vendor, AH or DE based off of purchasing mats at market value from the AH and still make a profit. It’s a must-have mod for anyone who is serious about making the most gold in the shortest period of time.
You can check out our post about LS here:
http://dominateyourserver.com/2008/08/04/big-gold-making-secret-revealed/
Using the method you suggest for tracking AH income could lead someone to believe that they’re making hundreds or thousands of gold per day, yet that may not be the case.
This method works fine for farming. You simply subtract the gold you had before you started from the gold you have after and divide by the number of hours it took. Done.
The AH is a different beast. It involves upfront costs that farming does not.
Imagine starting with 100g in the bank. You buy 100 stacks of leather for 1g each. If you then sell the 100 stacks for 50s each, you would have “earned” 50g according to the achievement panel. However, it’s obvious you actually just lost at least 50g…probably to someone who reads this blog.
I’ve been tracking my earnings in a slightly different, but still somewhat imperfect way:
(Gold Today) – (Gold From 1 Week Ago) = Gold/Week
(/played today) – (/played 1 Week Ago) = Hours/Week
(Gold/Week)/(Hours/Week) = Gold/Hour
I can do this for any time-period, as long as I periodically take note of my total gold and /played on the same day. The only reason this system works is that my bank character is basically a “closed” system. I rarely spend any gold from that character on anything other than making more gold on auctions. If gold was flowing out from my bank character to fund my main, for instance, this method would be invalid as well.
While I can see where you are coming from, there is, as you point out, no perfect system for measuring this outside of the extensive tools in Bean Counter – and even those leave something to be desired.
Here’s the deal with what I’m trying to point out: farming is not the way to make big gold.
If you ARE losing money at the AH, you’ll never hit 500 gold per day because you’ll run out of investment capital in less than a week. If you ARE pulling at least 500 gold per day, then you can tweak what you are doing to inch that higher and higher.
If you don’t know how to use AADV and LilSparky’s, you’ll probably never hit 500 gold per day anyway, so it doesn’t matter. If you use our auction house mastery guide, it’s a walk in the park. But I did refrain from a shameless plug in the article.
The system we outline in the guide takes all the guesswork out of working the AH down to the point where you can just left click over and over again and make tons of gold – easiest thing you’ll ever do in the game.
lol, of course it’s always “buy our auction guide” in the comments. To actually include it in the article would make the article nothing more than a shill to sell the guide. At least this way you can still seem impartial and helpful.
Biggest problem with your ideas is that as an individual seller it’s impossible to compete with conglomerates of users that band together to drive the individual users out of the market. When you guys and others do that it completely SCREWS the rest of us just trying to get by.
If it’s our site, and our guide, how can any article be a shill? And we don’t SEEM impartial and helpful. We are NOT impartial, but very helpful. This is not a newspaper bud, we don’t even make pretense at journalism in any sense of the word. We talk about what we want, and cast it in any light we want. We have no responsibility to please everyone or uphold some stupid subjective ideal of public responsibility.
To your second point, you are dead wrong that people using our system hurts you. If you are a weakling get strong. No sympathy here. Blizz doesn’t cry for you either. We’ve never heard of anyone getting a GM to give them a full T 7.5 set of gear because their guild couldn’t do the 25 man raid – it’s silly. If you can’t compete either buff up and get better or quit. This is Dominate Your Server. Not be nice to everyone on your server and send them all the gold you can since they are too lame to earn it like you do.
If you can’t swim you will drown, but the reality is that everyone who uses our guide makes your auction house stronger for everyone. As a matter of fact my next article will be about that very issue to end all this nonsense about competition being ‘bad’ for markets. Sigh, no one even cares about economic theory as a whole and generally assume that monopolies are even possible in this game. But they are not, and always complaining about big brother and big business leaves you in the soup line.
you pwned him Lawbringer you absolutely dominated him
Actually all I saw was one of the people responsible for screwing the little guy playing the might makes right card.
As for monopolies not being possible in game. When I see 50 stacks of something on the AH and they’re all from the same person and I watch that same item for three weeks and NO ONE else ever has that item listed for sale then there’s a consortium of some sort that’s buying out every single copy of an item that falls below a certain price. A price which keeps going up each week btw.
I think you are assigning way too much intelligence and coordination to a bunch of gamers. I have never put together or seen evidence of a consortium or cartel in the AH. That’s way too sophisticated for a bunch of 18 year-olds with school going on.
If it bothers you that ONE person has a bunch of something then go get some of it and bust up his little game. I’m sorry if it makes you feel like a “little guy,” but the solution is to get bigger.
One person having a brief corner on a market segment does NOT equal a monopoly. A monopoly would be if one toon had ALL the auctions on the entire auction house. Even if you stretched the definition of monopolistic practice a long way you still would not have a monopoly with one person controlling every single auction for every type of metal in the game.
In order to have a monopoly someone has to have complete control of a product. That would mean that he is the only toon able to mine, buy or sell that stuff. So it’s silly to even use the word monopoly in WoW. It really cannot exist.
If this guy is driving up prices on a market niche ti is in your best interest to get in on it while it is hot. Instead of complaining that he is hurting you, either take some satisfaction in messing up his deal, or enjoy making a profit off of what he has set up. Get some of what he is selling and undercut him in a small way. You will sell every single one, he will sell next to nothing. You will make a profit, and he will be forced to lower his prices to compete.
By being lazy and not doing anything about it you are contributing to the problem. When you identify a problem, and it is in your power to fix it but you do nothing then you can’t complain about it any longer. Prices too high? Bust them up. Tired of getting sand kicked in your virtual avatar? Fight back.
Might does not make right. But in this game especially you are experiencing a competitive environment. It’s the whole essence of the thing. But instead of getting annoyed when people succeed, why don’t you go to work and get really good at competing with them? You can still compete and have good spirit and sportsmanship. There is a satisfaction in just the competition, in whatever arena is meaningful to you.
What we are REALLY doing here is trying to help you D – and everyone else like you who get frustrated with being on the shorter end of the gold stick in WoW. It is our goal to give people the information, knowledge and tools to go bust up those guys using relatively unfair business practices on the AH. You don’t ahve to just live with it, go show him that you can make a bunch of gold WITHOUT being a creep about it.
People seem to think we actually work the AH like that. Buy up huge bundles of stuff and then jack the price through the roof. I can count 3 times I’ve done that. The rest of the time Moneybaggins is the lowest price on the AH for hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of items. Moneybaggins is a lot of toons best friend. I don’t get angry tells. I don’t get flaming mail. But I still get bags and bags of gold. All in all, Moneybaggins is the biggest reason a whole lot of lower level toons have high availability and price stability for almost anything they need without having to live with pound of flesh prices.
In your example, the person buying up all of the item and relisting them is making it more profitable for EVERYONE selling that item. Which will encourage more people to farm said item, and profit from his action as well.
Once he goes too high in his pricing, the profit margin for his competition will become soo great that he will encourage more competition than he can buy up and the price will slowly creep back to something close to what ti was originally.
I’ve seen it happen, damn near every week. The key is to recognize the pattern and try to profit from it.
Just want to say love the AH Guide bought it the day it came out made 32000 since than. not sure if ia ma doing something wrong but it takes me 30 min/day just to do an AH scan. It probaly is comp to slow or the fact that there is 500 pages in the AH. But u guys talk about half hour/day and i think i am doing something wrong.
Btw love all the work u guys put into this and love the guide. I miss podcasts but some people being wankers ruin it for all. You guys rock thanks for all your time.
I bought the Dominate AH guide and I must say it was worth it just to get all the various tweaks for AADV. These guys did a good job putting it together.
Having said that, I still rarely use the settings because even after reading the whole guide … I can’t seem to get a grasp on what to buy. It’s pretty clear that buying is what makes you the gold.
So what I do to make roughly 100g a day on a good day…is manually scroll through the AH tradeskill section and look for “blue” things and bid on them. It’s not as automated as perhaps it could be. Maybe I just don’t get it but if I try to use the tactics in the guide, I end up with a ton of things that I can’t offload ever.
All this leads me to lots of time and thus less gold-per-hour. I wish I really could drop it down to 15-20 minutes. I only get 3 or so hours a day to play anyway and spending half an hour eats into that quite a bit..
What are the links for AADV and lil sparky
Scroll up….(in the comments…)
You guys are waAAYY to patient sometimes. To have people complaining that u might report favorably toward your product is beyond innane ontheir part, (IMO). I have enjoyed your letters and FREEly given information for months. I have not availed myself of your gold guide, I do have and average of 50-55k gold at all times and I buy whatever suits me, whenever it suits me. My only problem as far as AH competition is the #$%^& golds buyers. THEY ruin the values of a given item. And thanks in part to your hints again FREEly given I continue to make tons of gold, help guildies and friends as I wish and just enjoy the GAME…:) Thanks For your help.
I feel i’m in a similar situation as the poster above, Stitt. My server have between 600-700 pages in the AH, and it easially takes me 30+ minutes to do the scan. At that point, I serch using the DE sercher, but am worried that the dropping price of enchanting mats will off-set the profit. For example, one time it told me to buy a green for 25g, so I serched for dust prices. 50g a stack.
Basicly two questions.
-How do you spend so little time per week, while you still have to scan daily, serch for deals, craft items, DE items, post items, and collect mail?
-Could there be a post or guide addition that would help with analyzing the ‘good buys’ from the ‘bad buys’ after you complete serches.
I’ve seen similar behaviour to this with my own auctioneer data. Sometimes it tell me that some stupid level 75 green is worth 4995g profit. Clearly this is not possible so I’ve had to put many of these items (atleast 30 or more) into the ignore list for my searches. While this is frustrating and eliminates several items which could potentially make me gold on future scans I do it anyway. Efficiency and I don’t really want to nuke my auctioneer data just for the sake of 30 items.
While I’m on that topic however. Is it advisable to nuke my data from time to time. For example… the recent patch took the price of Pygmy Suckerfish on Feathermoon from 50g a stack to 5g a stack. Now the data for that item is completely worthless and every time auctioneer sees a stack of Suckerfish it recommends that I should buy because it is at 10% market value. Should I nuke my data and spend a week gathering new, more accurate data? This would be acceptable to me as I sort of looted all my gold off my auction mule anyway for another epic flyer (I know.. terrible idea).
Two things about these last two posts:
1. There is a new faster “getall” scan on the main window. It looks like the fast forward button on your other media players. If you use that scan, and your connection is fast, scans should take no more than 5 minutes. Personally, I scan the AH at least once per day on both horde and alliance sides on two different accounts. The whole process doesn’t even take 30 minutes, so I’m guessing computer speed or connection speed – got no suggestions for you in that case.
2. If you do have the guide and your settings are right, just concentrate on the SearchUI section. When you use search UI, every single item you see is a good buy. If you’re still browse buying, that’s not good. The overall scan loads SearchUI with the right stuff. So all you have to do is spend your time in that module and you’ll be fine. Always start with vendor and DE parts of searchUI until you get comfortable and move on to resale or ultimately arbitration.
I have been using the tricks i have learned here for about 6 weeks. To date, i have started with a 62 rogue and 1400 gold, i have since bought a travelers tundra mammoth for my 80 druid, leveled a new DK to 72, my warrior to 72 and a Loc to 66 from 58 and only used my gathering to level my tradeskills! These tricks work once you get the system down. Only thing i notice on my home server is that market bottoms on weekends due to the weekend warriors dumping items. I buy on weekends and sell during the week to the hard core players. I also only deal with DE items except loot that AA says to sell. Great work Guys!
Hey law you should do an in-vent thing on this or something
but do it when i get back so i can benefit too xD
I just wanted to put my 2 cents in.
First off this site is a great resource, and I appreciate all the hard work and insight that goes into the articles here.
Secondly, no one should fault you for mentioning your gold guide. The information given FREELY on this site often eclipses what is often sold on other sites. I’ve been picking up various gold and leveling guides, including the gold guide from this site, and I have to say it was worth the investment. Not only does the contribution help to mantain this site, but the insights I gleamed fromt he guide concerning the inns and outs of AADV have been very usefull. There is nothing magical about the gold guide, but it does map out a pretty solid routine to gaining wealth and explains the tools and techniques needed to accomplish it.
I do wish you would refrain from trying to convince people to stop farming and use the auction house. We need somebody to farm all that stuff, otherwise we wouldn’t have anything to sell in the AH
well i dunno if thats reall considering apparently yhe top amount of money u can have on any char is somewher between 34`999-37`000G per char so unless usplit it between chars or spent loads of g thats un probable
That is not accurate Bob. the most money one character can hold is 215,000. We confirmed this during Beta testing for WotLK as seen in this article on DYS: http://dominateyourserver.com/2008/10/02/making-gold-grow-on-trees
Now, it is accurate that there is a set amount of gold you can transfer per toon if you are flipping a toon to a new realm.
# Level 10-30: 300 gold limit
# Level 31-50: 1000 gold limit
# Level 51-69: 5000 gold limit
# Level 70-80: 20000 gold limit
So you can’t transfer more than 20,000 gold to a new server on a level 70+ toon, but the cap on how much you can have on a single toon is much higher than you say.
on my server there is a person named Aluren (Hydraxis Horde) whos gold per day is over 5k… his/her total gold made is shown in the negatives it is such a high number. if you ever want to look at this your self go to Hydraxis Horde side and go to TB and wait for Aluren to show up. then inspect. it is an amazing sight…
wow i must say this shined a lot of light on my wrongings farming gold
i would spend a lot of time looking for things that people find usefull then farm them and sell them. but this method… wow! I have just started doing this and im still rusty at it but when all things are said and done im making around 500gpd ( i know thats not great but hey im just starting) ill eventually get better and make more but right now im on a clean streak to mister epic flight form 
so all im really trying to say is thank u for this!