Last week’s discussion was about why we play the auction house. The results were slightly mixed, yet there was an overwhelming thought of ‘freedom’.

Firstly freedom of time. The auction house is something you can dive in and out of at your own leisure, and use it at your own pace. You are not tied to raid schedules, nor do you have to rely on other people to be about.

There is also the freedom of being able to buy what you like, when you like. It is fair to say that the majority of players live with a constant battle, where they try to earn money at an equal or slightly greater rate than they spend it. Yet if you have far more gold than you are spending, there is no more battle. You are also able to splurge on things that might be large expenses to other players, such as epic flying skill on all of your alts.

Some disagreed however, Dàchéng even went so far to say that gold is a fairly useless currency and the only thing that matters in the end is raid emblems. Not sure I agree on that one – gold is the only currency that doesn’t go out of date.

He mentioned not being able to convert gold in to Emblems as their weakness, yet Emblems can not be exchanged ‘upward’, only down – so the old Emblems become unnecessary whereas the gold is still used for enchants/gems/glyphs and the like. Still a very interesting take on gold, and I can understand where he is coming from in some regards.

There also seemed to be a challenge aspect to it for a lot of people. They pushed themselves to reach a certain amount, either a small amount which they keep raising or something more fixed like 50k, 100k or the goldcap.

Overall it is fair to say that while there is not any single reason for people to use the auction house, it is a means to an end: The enjoyment of doing so, the fun of a challenge, the freedom from being poor, the freedom of doing what they want when they want or simply to leverage themselves in other areas such as raiding or arenas.

Thank you to each and every person that commented, this week’s discussion post will go up later today for you to all muse over!

So this is the first ever Saturday’s for Sharing and today I would like to tell you about a couple of things brought to my attention recently.

First of all is the JMTC IRC chat. For those of you who have no idea what that even means, worry not! JMTC, or Just My Two Copper, is one of the ‘big’ WoW Economy blogs out there, which has a great forum.

As for IRC, Internet Relay Chat, are basically ‘chatrooms’.

For those of you who are in the know, you can find the channel at irc.quakenet.org #JMTC

For the rest of us, just visit it in your browser!

Then there is Rags to Riches, a Blogger blog recently created by neroli. Really loving the layout, and it is nice to be able to comment as name/url (Curse you Blogger people who don’t allow it!) Send some comments neroli’s way and help it take off – we can’t have too many WoW Economy blogs!

Next we have Green Guts Goblin Emporium, by Green Guts. Another Blogger blog, and with a nice dark on light theme, and a custom header. Can’t help but think the Blood Elf in the header should be a goblin though! Unfortunately Green Guts doesn’t allow name/url comments, so curses to you it seems ;) In saying that, there is some real quality content here, well worth the read.

In other news Blackwolf, of Too Greedy fame, is back in the blogging business. For anyone that hasn’t heard of Too Greedy you need to take a look – it is one of the better WoW Economy blogs out there and he has some fantastic content in his archives, or check out his MVP section for a highlight of his great content.

That is all for this week. Again if you know of a something that deserves to be highlighted then let me know.

This week’s discussion post is about why we as ‘AH players’ try and make more gold than we need.

There are a lot of people out there who simply use the auction house to make gold that they need for ‘essentials’ like repairs, gems, enchants and the like.

Then there are others who simply want gold for vanity items, like the Chopper.

But then there are a few people who simply want more gold for no real reason at all – at least, not an obvious reason. The majority of ‘us’ are in this group, the people reading my blog, and other WoW Economy bloggers… but why do we do it? Obviously the above two reasons can factor in, especially at the start – yet is there more of a reason?

I’ll start the ball rolling by telling you my reasons, and it would be great if as many of you as possible could say why you do it, and expand on you reasoning if you want to.

For me, it’s not about raiding essentials as we currently aren’t raiding. It’s not about vanity items, as they don’t interest me at all any more.

Now it is simply for fun. I haven’t killed a mob in weeks – this game is now *all* about the AH and nothing else for me. Not sure how long this will be the case (maybe 3.3 will change it) but I’ve not even seen the new VoA boss or Onyxia on one of my own characters.

Nope, for now the Auction House is my ‘WoW’!

I’d love to hear all of your reasons, so…

Why do you make gold?

Bank alts are one of the oldest forms of inventory management, being used long before WoW even existed. There are other names used for this form of inventory management, the most common of which – especially outside of WoW – is ‘mule’.

The idea is simple; if the inventory of one character is not enough…make another! Each additional character increases your maximum total of inventory space in a linear fashion.

These characters are often unleveled and are used solely for storing goods, although there are exceptions.

What are the Advantages to Bank Alts?

Cost

Bank alts offer an incredibly cheap form of inventory management, although the cost soon starts to mount up should you try and buy all possible bank tabs. Full costs will be detailed below.

How much storage?
Every new character gets a 16 slot ‘backpack’ bag for free.
You also get an additional 4 spaces, which can be filled with a bag each.

Finally you have your bank, which has a free 28 inventory slots.
You can then purchase an additional 7 bag spaces, which can be filled with a bag each.

How many inventory spaces, and for how much?
Obviously the amount of slots available depends on what size bags you use, and how many additional bag spaces you purchase.

Netherweave bags are the cheapest option, and not just because they sell for the least amount of money! You see, a good way to ‘price’ extra inventory slots is to work out their ‘Cost per Slot’. If you price Netherweave Bags at 10g each, and Frostweave Bags at 80g each, then each slot of a Netherweave is 62s50c, whereas the Frostweave is 4g a slot.

This becomes a considerable amount of money when you are buying all 11 bags (4 normal + 7 bank).

Assuming;

All bank bags purchased, and all bags of the same type.

Netherweave Bags = 10g
Frostweave Bags = 80g
Glacial Bags = 650g
Crafting Bags = 100g

As you can see, even with 32 slot crafting bags, Netherweave Bags are cheaper per slot gained. This means that if you have the character spaces and don’t mind the extra work then you are always better off making a new bank alt rather than buying bags bigger than Netherweave for your existing bankers.

Remarkably this is true even if you can get 32 slot crafting bags for 25g each! They would have to be 22g or less to be more worthwhile. The only crafting bags seen under 22g each commonly are Inscription Bags. Just remember, if you can get the crafting bags for under 22g each then they are definitely worth using instead of neatherweave.

Wrapping Up

Bank alts are definitely a great way to store items, and to let you in on a secret sneak peak of the future post… they are always cheaper per slot than every Guild Bank tabs, if you use Netherweave Bags at 10g or less each!

In conclusion – always use Netherweave Bags, and always create more bank alts rather than increase to larger size bags.

Any review I make will be…

• My own opinion
• Unbiased – no favouritism
• Commenting on the good AND the bad points
• Showing why the review is being done, along with any transactions or services that were done with the reviewed party (such as freebies/blog posts/advertising etc.)

With that out of the way, I present to you my review of Bobreazes WoW Gold Tips!

Bobreazes WoW Gold Tips - by Bobreaze

This blog review is being done due to Bobreazes posting about my Crafting Spreadsheet last week, where anyone who did so got a free blog review this week.

Bobreazes WoW Gold Tips is a really new blog, hosted under the Blogger platform. He started just over a week ago, and is already doing pretty well!

One of the biggest hurdles for a new blog is getting past the first week – so many bloggers just lose interest once that’s up. They check their analytics, see fairly ‘low’ results (“What! Not even a thousand visitors in my first week!?”) and think they are wasting their time. Yet they aren’t! You just need patience and dedication.

And it seems Bobreazes has both of those in equal measure. He is posting pretty much daily, if not multiple times a day, and each post actually has substance and opens a point of discussion – or at least tells you a nifty trick!

Like with most new blogs however, he is suffering from “No comments = no comments = no comments”, whereby his blog receives only a small amount of comments, because nobody else has commented – and because of that, he continues to get low comments. This isn’t a dig at him or his blog in the slightest, it is simply a step that all new blogs, including mine, must continue to push past.

Because of this I am now going to try and make a conscious effort to comment on his blog as is appropriate. That’s not to say every post for the next month you’ll see a redundant comment from me, but I hope to add something to the points he raises from now on if at all possible! You should head over to Bobreazes WoW Gold Tips and do the same!

As for the site itself, it pains me to say it yet the theme is slightly garish to me. It’s mainly the mustardy yellow background that does it for me. Maybe it is just my monitors but it seems too dark compared to the text, and as such Bobreazes blog is added to my list of “Blogs that I only read in Google Reader”. It is nowhere near as bad as light on dark themes though!

I was glad to see his post on ‘Auctioneer bid low sell normal step by step guide‘ as not only is it some really helpful information to new Auction House players, it also injected some much needed colour and vibrancy in to his blog.

Prior to that post there were no other images or videos, and the site itself is all in muted tones, and with no header image. This is purely an aesthetic issue, and one that Bobreazes may not care about at all!

As for the actual content, it seems to focus almost exclusively on what Bobreazes himself is focusing on at the time. Combined with the ‘current status’ aspects of his posts this gives the blog a good feeling of progression and direction. You can clearly see what he is working on, and how it is all working out.

The blog packs important information in to small easily read chunks, something which is very opposite from the way I blog! This partly makes me like reading it even more, as it is a good way to still read even if you only have a few minutes spare.

Finally I would like to see Bobreazes maybe develop one idea further, in one market. He is obviously very spread out (for better or worse!) and the posts can tend to jump around a lot without too much focus from day to day. It would be nice to see results of one of his ideas over period of a few days or possibly a week.

All in all Bobreazes WoW Gold Tips makes for an excellent read when you aren’t too worried about reading masses of text and just want to catch up on some ideas that are working right now.

Again his biggest ‘problem’ at the moment is a lack of visitors commenting – something which you can all fix by visiting his blog and leaving comments!

Shouting in /1 that I was looking for people to sign my guild charter for 10g – and a level 55 hunter PAID ME 10g to sign MY guild charter.

That’s right, rather than me paying him 10g, he gave the money to me and then signed it.

Wow, I really don’t know what to say here. I was in so much shock that I didn’t screenshot the thing!

A shame the rest didn’t do the same, or that would be a free 90g for creating a guild bank ;)

Current Gold Total : 3,000g
Working On : Inscription Sales (450/450 skill now) and Netherweave Bags

Current Status
Well, bags are selling much more frequently then I had ever imagined – even more so than my previous post on them. Yesterday alone I sold 80, and had actually run out of listed auctions over night so potentially could have sold more. As such today I’m keeping 60 of them on the Auction House overnight!

I also got Inscription to 450 on my DK, and then using some addons (Which I will discuss next week) I made 5 of every glyph I could and am in the process of ‘goblining’ the market of them all.

This did cause a massive hit to my gold (about 4-5k) but at least I’m in the market now, and all of that and more will be made up when these glyphs all sell. Snowfall Ink is selling so well that glyphs are ‘essentially free’, as I am making up more than the cost of the herbs from the Snowfall Ink alone.

Unfortunately I don’t have time now to do today’s post on MMO-Champion’s guides. In saying that, they have been talked about to death already and are old news. Maybe in the future the post can be taken from a different angle, such as talking about us WoW Economy bloggers posting our ‘guides’, thoughts and ideas.

There’s also some site modifications under way, so you might notice a few changes!

This is my first blog review, so it is worth laying down some ground rules for them.

Any review I make will be…

• My own opinion
• Unbiased – no favouritism
• Commenting on the good AND the bad points
• Showing why the review is being done, along with any transactions or services that were done with the reviewed party (such as freebies/blog posts/advertising etc.)

With that out of the way, I present to you my first ever blog review!

One Copper - by Seth

This blog review is being done due to Seth posting about my Crafting Spreadsheet last week, where anyone who did so got a free blog review this week.

One Copper is a fairly well established blog, first created back at the end of April of this year (2009). It covers all aspects of the WoW economy, with tips for pretty much every profession there is going to be something for everyone!

The biggest attraction of Seth’s blog right now is his upcoming podcast – which if the poll on his website is anything to go by it will be primarily about making gold – Go vote now however!

There really is a shortage of WoW economy podcasts, and it would be great to have another :)

Seth is a ‘Goblin’, no doubt about it, in fact he shamelessly admits it and advocates it. This does occasionally stir up some controversy, especially from the dreaded ‘Anonymous’ posters who see it as  good flame fodder!

His Goblin ways also cause him to be compared to Gevlon of Greedy Goblin from time to time – some posters even saying he is “just copying him”. However anyone that spends time reading Seth’s posts will see that while there are some common traits and attitudes they each have their own distinct flavour and variances on the idea. Of course they will have some parallels they are both goblins after all.

The site itself is very easy to read, and is ‘dark on light’ – this makes it great to read, and I have somewhat of a personal dislike against ‘light on dark’ themes anyway!  The site is elegant in it’s simplicity. There are no flashing images, adverts or things like that and any semi-redundant information, such as Google Followers, is placed low in the sidebar. This leaves you free and easy access to the content itself.

There are some minor problems with the site however in my opinion. Nothing major, and in fact most blogs suffer from the same issues, even mine currently!

The first of which is while the site has a great backlog of posts, some just as relevant today as the day they were posted, it is annoyingly difficult to find the important posts that matter. In Seth’s defence the sidebar does have links to labels (Categories) so that you can narrow down what you are looking at – but still some of them are actually empty and never posted to, and others haven’t been posted to for months. It is a very good idea, it just needs to be executed better!

The list is also below the fold, so you have to scroll down to see it. This could be addressed by moving some of the contact information to a dedicated Contact page.

One Copper also allows for Anonymous and Name/URL comments, which is a real plus for me. Quite a few Blogger blogs have Name/URL turned off meaning I can’t actually link to my site if I comment, instead you have to link to your Blogger profile or something similar.

Seth is also looking for a fellow blogger to post 2-3 times a week. As far as I know nobody else currently is so this is a great way to test your feet and see if you can manage a blog of your own later. Or if the whole issue of creating and maintaining a blog seems like far too much hard work, but you want to post then this is a great way to do it!

Overall One Copper is a fantastic blog with great insight in to the goblin way of AH Whoring. As a semi-goblin myself I can’t help but relate to Seth and his posts, but even if you aren’t a goblin his blog is a good view of the other side of things.

Personally I feel like the podcast will be a major boon to One Copper and hope that it stays frequent, regular and packed full of good content. From what we have seen in the past, Seth is certainly going to deliver!

Again check out One Copper by Seth – Vote on his poll, leave him some wonderful comments and let him know if you want to guest post for him.

For most ‘normal’ players, the 16 slot backpack, 4 additional bags and 28 bank slots up to 7 extra bank bags is more than they could ever need. Even if they are only using 16 slot bags, that is 264 slots. Those using the biggest 22 slot bags will have 286.

Yet for anyone seriously crafting and AH Whoring, even 286 slots sroon might not be enough. So what can you do about it?

Well there are three possible ways of handling this ‘Item Overload’

• Bank Alts
• Mailbox Bouncing
• Guild Banks

Each has it’s own distinct advantages and disadvantages, and this post will quickly touch on these points, as well as giving a brief explanation of each method – Each one will have its own blog post in the coming week however.

Bank Alts

Bank alts are probably the oldest form of item management. The idea is simple, you simply create a new character and use them for storage – giving you another 44-286 inventory slots.

Advantages

• Cheap
• Easy to manage (with addons)
• Gives you more characters to buy and sell from
• Potential for more professions, depending on their level

Disadvantages

• Sometimes more expensive than small guild banks
• Trouble of having to keep logging in and out of different characters
• Limited in number due to 10 characters per server limit

Mailbox Bouncing

Mailbox Bouncing is where you send items to a different character, but don’t go and pick up the mail. Instead you leave the mail sitting there until you need it. When you do need the mail, you simply return it back to your character.

If you don’t pick up the mail after 30 days, it gets sent back to the sender, who can just return it all over again.

Advantages

• Free to setup
• Very cheap to use

Disadvantages

• Prevents the ‘storage’ character from using their mailbox
• Very hard if not impossible to properly keep track of items

Guild Banks

Guild Banks are the new kids on the block when it comes to Item Overload. Having been out since Novermber of 2008, they provide an easy alternative to having a multitude of bank alts, or the troubles of mailbox bouncing – but at what costs?

Advantages

• Can be cheaper than bank alts, in certain circumstances
• Very easy to maintain and keep track of items
• Shared access across multiple bank alts, less logging in and out required
• Available for viewing via the Armory online – from anywhere

Disadvantages

• Requires more setting up than the other methods
• Can quickly become expensive
• Prevents joining real guilds on crafters/bank alts
• ‘Reveals’ your bank alts names

So there you have it, the advantages and disadvantages to each of the three methods, with a brief explanation of what they each are.

These are the topics I will be really going in to on each post – if you feel I am missing an advantage or disadvantage, or want me to talk about something not mentioned, then please leave a comment!

Current Gold Total : 5,000g
Working on : Netherweave Bags

Well as promised, anyone that linked to my Crafting Spreadsheet this week will get a free blog review next week!

Here is the final list of people who linked to it, in order -

Seth from One Copper
Bobreaze from Bobreazes’ WoW Gold Tips
Veliaf from der Hexenmeister
Jederus from WoWenomics
Hellreject from Enchant Yourself

Tomorrow is going to be a crazy day between working and releasing version 0.1.3 of the spreadsheet – as such I will post the reviews on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.