I’m Turning Into A Goblin

I'm a WoW Goblin

I think “Goblin” is the correct term, anyway. Isn’t that what the people addicted to the WoW economy call themselves? The people who want to make lots of gold? Yeah, I’m becoming one of those. I recently decided that I was tired of being poor. I’ve played WoW on and off since it launched, and I have never had anything close to an excess of gold. I had to work my butt off to buy a mount, and I slaved away at the grind to afford an epic mount. Even in modern WoW I’ve never had luck with making cash… until recently.

I discovered something calling “TSM” or “TradeSkillMaster.” It’s an addon which essentially does all of the work for you — once you can configure the thing. Configuring it all takes an undergraduate degree in economics, but it’s worth it. Now I practically feel like I’m cheating.

TSM has a program that runs in the background and automatically syncs told prices to my WoW client. I know what every item on the auction house goes for and my program will automatically post items based on routines I program in. When I open the auction house, I can automatically buy low and sell high at the click of a button. If someone puts up a valuable transmog, my program finds it, buys it, and reposts it at a higher price. See why I feel like I’m cheating?

I thought I had nothing on my characters worth anything. Then I used TSM and now I have 10,000 gold in one day. So the addon takes care of the knowing what to sell, and finding stuff on the AH to resell, but that’ll only last for so long. The real money game here is in getting the items and posting them. I’m going to start farming pets and running old raids (for gold and pets) to sell. I’m also going to farm lowbie tier dungeons to get the valuable transmog items and sell those too.

Why am I doing this? Simple. I don’t want to pay for my sub. I joined the garrison party too late to farm gold like so many others — they’re rich already. Garrisons are being patched out of existence here soon [Translation: You can’t make gold anymore] so I figure now’s better than later for getting my economy set.

This has breathed new life into the game for me. Sure, I’m still leveling from 94-100 right now on my new server, but that boredom has been mitigated by the obsession and lust for gold. If you’re a goblin, I’d love to get some tips on how to make gold in WoW.

  • Good work. I DID get on the Garrison party early enough. As a result, since WoW Tokens launched, my sub has been active without spending a cent, plus I have ten more tokens in my bag, plus my gold balance is about 400,000 higher than it was then. All without doing any gold-generating activity beyond passive exploitation of my characters’ garrisons. But if you missed that gravy train, gotta make that cash however you can. 🙂

  • I did the garrison thing for a while and made like 400k. Enough to keep my sub going for a while. I ran old raids and such, too. Ultimately, it got to be terribly tedious. I realized that I spend $10 – 15 on lunch and it just wasn’t worth the time doing something that really wasn’t all that enjoyable just to find a reason to keep playing the game. If I really want to play the $15/month it really isn’t an impediment. There’s a lot of other things I can do that would be far more valuable use of my time than paying for my sub with in-game tedium.

    If it’s fun for you and keeps you playing though more power to you. It kept me going for a couple months.

  • Yeah I also use TSM and have lots of gold. Plan was the same in that I would want to pay for my subscription with tokens. Unfortunately being in Europe and playing on US servers I am not allowed to buy the tokens on AH 🙁
    Pretty lame if you ask me….

  • A program that automates parts of your gameplay, sound terribly grey area (at best) as far as TOS goes…

  • I’m shocked that Blizzard does not consider this cheating. An outside program doing all the work for you? Definition of a bot.

  • @Carson: I wish I had that kind of cash! That would let me buy all the neat things I want to buy in-game, and pay for my sub. Maybe I’ll still be able to get there doing it the hard way.

    @Misaligned: I’m trying to find the balance. It’s certainly not about the money as far as not wanting to pay the sub. I can afford $15 for a month full of entertainment. That’s justifiable for me instantly with zero hesitation. But when presented with the challenge of being able to not have to… I feel compelled to beat the system.

    @Pitlord: Aww, that sucks. Government regulations against buying virtual items or something?

    @Proximo: It’s an addon that automates the use of the auction house. The program running in the background syncs the addon files with the ones on a cloud. It’s basically the same as “scanning” the auction house like all the other mods do, except someone is doing it for everyone and we’re just getting their data every 15-30 minutes.

    @Topauz: It’s been around since 2013, and such a huge segment of the population is using auction mods now. It’s almost like you have to get on the train or be left behind.

  • Stuff like this works in an MMO because unlike in the real world, a lot of people can’t be bothered to do the boring stuff while playing a game, so they don’t fret over money, and those that do the more simple/boring stuff (ditch digging, basically) can profit. It just comes down to what you value more; the gaming time it takes to do this, or the $15 or so its saving you.

    In the real world, with everyone needing to work, digging ditches isn’t overly rewarded. In a world where everyone but a small few aren’t ‘working’, easy profit is there to be made.

  • It’s not completely automatic, still have to hit a button for every buying and posting action. That’s the sole reason it doesn’t break the TOS. I’m sure there are people that use bots to sit at the AH all day and snipe/repost stuff but then its the bot breaking the TOS, not TSM.

    I use TSM to quickly sell stuff at a very small undercut. It binds a macro to control + mouse wheel so posting 40 things takes a flick of the finger.

    I’ve found the transmog business is pretty slow right now, or at least it is on Emerald Dream. I get a ton of green items from salvage boxes and use another addon to vendor everything that’s worth less than 500g on the AH, but even those things don’t move very fast. I’m not putting enough time into the game right now to continually repost those everyday so I just vendor unless its a particularly lucrative item. My 10 garrisons make more than enough 🙂

  • Hey Krig can you post the string that sells stuff worth less than 500g and auctions it if its worth more? I guess my issue right now is figuring out those operations and also building the list.

  • There was a very basic macro program back in The Realm days. It allowed me to go to sleep on the seraph and ogre squares and wake up in the morning a higher level. To some extent I did that on Allods Online too, but not by macroing, I just paid real life cash to get me sorta invulnerable. I think in EQ I bought a FBSS and a Yak on eBay. My ranger character still pretty much sucked after that but still…

    In hindsight I may be a cheater.

  • Hah, we used to do that kind of thing back in DAoC, Sanz! The boxes in Malmo on Midgard side, you could set a warlock up there with a bunch of lowbies and have him hit 2 buttons all night (a powerless cast precursor and then a pbaoe) and just wake up in the morning and be close to 50.

    We also used to take large groups of really really low level characters into Passage of Conflict (open PvP dungeon), go way down deep inside, and then lag jump them (hit jump and then grab the windowed DAoC screen on your PC desktop and spin it around really fast) up onto these tiny shelves high up on the wall so the mobs couldn’t reach them. Have a PBAE caster up there as well, and a cleric bot for healing/buffs, and then just have a paladin permasprint through the entire dungeon grabbing mobs and bringing them back.

    Ah man, so many good memories in that game.