WoW

[kenada]

No, there are no easy ways to make gold in WoW. There are easy but time consuming ways, easy but intelligent and time consuming ways, and hard but fast ways.

AT dailies yield about 170–200 gold/day and take about 20–30 minutes to complete.

There are no easy ways to make gold that does not require hours of your time.

Not true. I spend about 5–10 minutes per day on my gold making activities and make at least as much as you if not more per day. Glyphs are by far the most time consuming way of making money on the AH compared to alchemy or jewelcrafting.

I make 1000+ gold every two days, just from processing my glyphs and selling excess drops from instances. But doing that processing takes two hours - have to collect mail one at a time (automated mail getters can bug easily and destroy the mail, and are borderline violations)

I have never had Postal destroy mail, and there is no reason to believe that mail mods like it are a ToS violation given that they only use Blizzard-provided APIs.

I have to scan the AH to get prices, hearth to dalaran, make any new glyphs, and post them (again, one at a time, though I can queue them). It takes at least an hour and a half. That's a PuG VoA run or 3-4 instances.

It sounds like you need to use a better auction mod. I believe QuickAuction2 has more powerful batch posting options than AuctionLite or Auctioneer.

[BobChuck]

I am working on getting jewelrycrafting to the level cap, but it's a massive money sink to level.

[kenada]

The thing that really lets me print money is epic gem transmutes. Between my two alchs, I can gross between 300–400g/day depending on the state of epic gem prices.

[Measure Zero]

But with GDKP, you can just get gold from playing the game, instead of grinding stuff up.  Or you can grind gold, and get gear faster.  Everyone wins, except the people who want to get gear faster without gold grinding.  Even then, you get gold every time someone buys an item, so you will eventually get items (which is much better than random rolling).  And unlike the DKP system my guild used when I played, you can't get forced so deeply in debt that your only chance for getting new items within the next year is to switch to a new guild.

[kenada]

And unlike the DKP system my guild used when I played, you can't get forced so deeply in debt that your only chance for getting new items within the next year is to switch to a new guild.

Traditional DKP systems really suck. Newer ones, like EPGP do not have the problems that those do.

[Measure Zero]

That system is almost the same as the one my guild used, except that we subtracted instead of dividing.  There was also a sort of decay to prevent hoarding, because the gear in each new dungeon was always worth more points than the gear in the last.  It wasn't a matter of hoarding points, either.

What ended up happening was that I would pay for gear that would have gotten sharded otherwise, and then I would be basically ineligible for gear that anyone else wanted for that many more days because I got a lot of gear that was 1-2 tiers down from current content.  If someone was playing an alt, they only had to pay 1/4 of the DKP price at the cost of being lower priority for someone playing a main character.  The guild leadership seemed to understand that gear should cost less when it was lower tier, but that never applied to someone who was upgrading from blues for the first time.  And effort wasn't an issue until I quit raiding entirely.

Making gold was extremely difficult for me when playing a healing priest.  It was punishing, actually, and merely being able to get gold for not getting gear would have drastically improved the game.  Priest gear cost as much DKP as rogue gear, but fewer people were after it.  I would have come out ahead, letting the rogues do some of my farming for me since my toon couldn't do it, and still gotten decent gear because my class was less played.  Actually being rewarded for playing a class no one wanted to play would have been nice, instead of getting punished.

Even with the spec switch you have now, and with easier gold grinding, I still think that grinds are unpleasant.  When I say unpleasant, I mean that I am no longer willing to play a game that feels like a grind.  If I feel like a grind, I can go to the gym or go for a run, and have more fun doing it than I would grinding on a computer game and get much more out of it.  Giving people an option to get significant gold by running raids is a huge improvement because it lets people get out of grinding.  Not just "lazy" people, either.

[BobChuck]

This is very much how I am feeling.

And kenada, I like how your "easy" method of making gold involves a specific (and duplicated) set of maxed professions. I submit that it took a great deal of planning, time, effort, and gold to get to the point where you are now, thus it is either "easy" nor "fast". It works with a minimum of effort now because you've already  "paid" for it.

[kenada]

That system is almost the same as the one my guild used, except that we subtracted instead of dividing.  There was also a sort of decay to prevent hoarding, because the gear in each new dungeon was always worth more points than the gear in the last.  It wasn't a matter of hoarding points, either.

Using a ratio means that no one can ever go negative. Someone who is knew the the raid group can easily get something within his first few raids (assuming that something he wants actually drops).

What ended up happening was that I would pay for gear that would have gotten sharded otherwise, and then I would be basically ineligible for gear that anyone else wanted for that many more days because I got a lot of gear that was 1-2 tiers down from current content.  If someone was playing an alt, they only had to pay 1/4 of the DKP price at the cost of being lower priority for someone playing a main character.  The guild leadership seemed to understand that gear should cost less when it was lower tier, but that never applied to someone who was upgrading from blues for the first time.  And effort wasn't an issue until I quit raiding entirely.

Charging for previous tiers (and offspec loot) makes things ugly. We don’t really do the former, but we do the latter (and I think we’re worse for it).

Making gold was extremely difficult for me when playing a healing priest.  It was punishing, actually, and merely being able to get gold for not getting gear would have drastically improved the game.  Priest gear cost as much DKP as rogue gear, but fewer people were after it.  I would have come out ahead, letting the rogues do some of my farming for me since my toon couldn't do it, and still gotten decent gear because my class was less played.  Actually being rewarded for playing a class no one wanted to play would have been nice, instead of getting punished.

I played a tank, and grinding shit sucked for me too. It’s pretty much why I stopped playing my warrior in TBC. As much as it sucked then, the game is different now. The Random Dungeon Finder rewards gold and emblems just for running a dungeon.

Even with the spec switch you have now, and with easier gold grinding, I still think that grinds are unpleasant.  When I say unpleasant, I mean that I am no longer willing to play a game that feels like a grind.  If I feel like a grind, I can go to the gym or go for a run, and have more fun doing it than I would grinding on a computer game and get much more out of it.  Giving people an option to get significant gold by running raids is a huge improvement because it lets people get out of grinding.  Not just "lazy" people, either.

I’ll concede this point. I mostly dislike GDKP because of some of the negative impacts the GDKP PUGs have had on ABS because people are less willing now to save their lockout for the guild’s Sunday raids. I’m pretty certain that raid leaders prioritize those who run GDKP (making themselves unavailable) behind other raiders, so it ends up being a vicious cycle.

And kenada, I like how your "easy" method of making gold involves a specific (and duplicated) set of maxed professions. I submit that it took a great deal of planning, time, effort, and gold to get to the point where you are now, thus it is either "easy" nor "fast".

Do you know how I did it? I typed “leveling alchemy” into Google and followed the first guide that popped up. It took me an afternoon and a few thousand gold (for each one). Given that you have said that you have several thousand gold, there is no reason why you can’t use some of that gold and a JC leveling guide to max out your JC. Once you have access to epic gem cuts, all you need to do is buy a few recipes (e.g., the ones the class(es) you play use), buy some raws, and cut and sell them.

It works with a minimum of effort now because you've already  "paid" for it.

That’s the point. I made an initial investment, and I’m now reaping the rewards.

[Measure Zero]

Here's my position: I don't want to spend an afternoon doing something boring so that I can do something boring 15 minutes every day so that I can eventually make my flying mount move slightly faster to partially avoid the time sink of traveling from one area to another.  If I get a game, I want to play the game when I want to, and not have to run around grinding for when I want to play the game for real.  Money from dungeons is the way it should be.  Progress toward items through gold acquisition (an in-game quantity) is superior to progress through DKP by virtue of being translatable to out-of-guild groups.  I think friendliness to new players wins out over guild cohesion, especially if you ever have so many people lining up for a raid that people are stuck on reserve.

[kenada]

Here's my position: I don't want to spend an afternoon doing something boring so that I can do something boring 15 minutes every day so that I can eventually make my flying mount move slightly faster to partially avoid the time sink of traveling from one area to another.

Then don’t? You don’t need epic flying. I rolled up my alchs explicitly to increase my gold making capability, which has let me collect a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

Progress toward items through gold acquisition (an in-game quantity) is superior to progress through DKP by virtue of being translatable to out-of-guild groups.  I think friendliness to new players wins out over guild cohesion, especially if you ever have so many people lining up for a raid that people are stuck on reserve.

The thing with GDKP is that it works like zero-sum DKP. The net worth of the raid at the end of the night is the same as it was at the start of the night (plus any gold that drops off mobs minus any gold spent on repair bills). It’s more of a wealth redistribution mechanism than a way to make gold. While those who do grind bring more gold to the pot, they also have more buying power when loot drops. That may not be a desirable property for a raid that’s supposed to serve as an introduction to raiding.

⁂

For reference, I talked to some guildies who do our server’s GDKP PUGs. Some of this would be applicable to a (hypothetical) TW GDKP run, but not all of it (especially the stuff at the end). They told me the following:

• GDK runs tend to last between three and four hours (but may go longer). TW runs last three hours.
• At the end of the run, they tend to receive between 2,500 and 3,500 gold. Those who leave (or are kicked) receive nothing and do not get any gold they spent back.
• You are expected to bid on upgrades. The minimum bid is 500g. Trinkets and weapons tend to go for 6,000–12,000 gold while armor pieces tend to go for 2,000–6,000 gold. They have heard of extremely desirable items going for up to 40,000 gold on other servers.
• Being expected to bid on upgrades means that the only people who can use GDKP as an income source are the ones who are already (over)geared for the content. Undergeared toons that do not spend money are not asked to come back.
• You generally need to supplement your income with gold from outside of the GDKP runs to gain gear at any meaningful rate. Ideally, the raid is composed of rich undergeared toons and (over)geared toons looking to make money.

In comparison, the 15m per day that I spend doing ‘stuff’ includes managing my auctions, doing a couple of profession daily quests (purely because I want the tokens to collect recipes), and chatting with guildies. During a slow week, I might gross ~3,500 gold. During a good week (e.g., shortly after a big patch lands), I can gross over 10,000 gold. Yeah, it’s not ‘exciting’, but using a traditional system in our progression raids means that acquiring gear doesn’t interfere with my trying to acquire vanity pets and mounts.

Oh, and if one does not completely waste his gold, then it’s possible to buy epic flying just from the money you make doing quests and leveling up to 80. If you’re using the RDF to run dungeons, then you’ll have a bunch of emblems (PvE currency like honor is for PvP) to buy gear with as well.

[Measure Zero]

So: if you can't easily get into a good guild, you can do regular dungeons and get gold, then use that to get raiding experience.  Once you have enough gear, then you can hire yourself out as a mercenary doing lower tier raids.  Gold grinding is then not needed for you to continue getting gold.  I'm not seeing the issue here.

[kenada]

I suppose that works (assuming you could find a GDKP raid that ran previous tiers of content), but how is grinding older raids for gold all that different from grinding anything else for gold?

Edit: I think we’re looking at this differently, which is why we keep going round and round.

For example, the previous tier GDKP run takes about 1.5hr to clear the instance and pays about 1,000 gold at the end of the run. I look at that and conclude that it gives me ~670 gold per hour of work. My auction activities net about 1,500 gold per hour of work, so I conclude that the latter is preferable to the the former.

You want to do fun things and do not want to do unfun things in order to do fun things, so arguments that ‘X unfun thing has a trivial amount of time commitment while yielding huge payouts’ aren’t persuasive because unfun things are not acceptable at all. Hopefully, I’ve got that straight.

I know of at least one person in our guild who only logs on to raid and does not do any serious grinding. He did eventually level a tradeskill and now sells some stuff on the AH, but before that I think he mostly sustained himself on the gold that mobs dropped and maybe the occasional dungeon run.

There are no more hard consumable requirements, so the main reason for grinding in classic is gone. If your RL does want you to flask, flasks are pretty cheap (200–400g/stack) and can be sustained with the occasional random dungeon run.

Everything else is pretty much optional.

Edit 2: There’s the issue of enchants/gems, but gems can be purchased with emblems and honor while enchanting materials are pretty much given out like candy in dungeons.

[BobChuck]

And kenada, I like how your "easy" method of making gold involves a specific (and duplicated) set of maxed professions. I submit that it took a great deal of planning, time, effort, and gold to get to the point where you are now, thus it is either "easy" nor "fast".

Do you know how I did it? I typed “leveling alchemy” into Google and followed the first guide that popped up. It took me an afternoon and a few thousand gold (for each one). Given that you have said that you have several thousand gold, there is no reason why you can’t use some of that gold and a JC leveling guide to max out your JC. Once you have access to epic gem cuts, all you need to do is buy a few recipes (e.g., the ones the class(es) you play use), buy some raws, and cut and sell them.

It works with a minimum of effort now because you've already  "paid" for it.

That’s the point. I made an initial investment, and I’m now reaping the rewards.

Okay, I tell you what: I have my Main, a level 80 mage (with enchanting and tailoring), I have my farmbot, a level 80 paladin (with skinning and mining, plans on maybe getting engineering), and I have my bank alt, a level 65 DK (with inscription maxxed and a 'free' slot - leatherworking at 120-something).

Dump leather-working, obviously. Dump skinning. Turn both of those into alchemists, and go transmute. Dump either tailoring (which I like having but is really a waste of a slot compared to JC) or mining (no big loss there, assuming fishing is still a worthwhile time->money action in cataclysm), and pick up Jewelrycrafting. Or dump tailoring on my mage for a third alchemist slot and go JC/alch on the pally.

Blow 9,000 out of the 14,000 gold I've built up to get all three/four leveled within a week.

Then what? Transmute three rare gems into 3+ epic gems, cut them for Str or Sp, and post? and That's it?

[kenada]

Dump leather-working, obviously. Dump skinning. Turn both of those into alchemists, and go transmute. Dump either tailoring (which I like having but is really a waste of a slot compared to JC) or mining (no big loss there, assuming fishing is still a worthwhile time->money action in cataclysm), and pick up Jewelrycrafting. Or dump tailoring on my mage for a third alchemist slot and go JC/alch on the pally.

You don’t have a JC? When you said you were working on capping it, I thought you actually had one. I don’t think I’d drop tailoring. The cloak enchant it provides is supposed to be really nice for casters.

Blow 9,000 out of the 14,000 gold I've built up to get all three/four leveled within a week.

If you do that, keep in mind it will take a month or so to recoup the costs of powerleveling those professions (assuming that you net at least 100g/gem from your transmutes). A less aggressive approach would be to powerlevel just JC, buy raws (off the AH or with honor/emblems), cut, and sell those. I believe that’s the method Bruski used to hit the gold cap.

Then what? Transmute three rare gems into 3+ epic gems, cut them for Str or Sp, and post? and That's it?

Pretty much. If you have transmute-speced alchs, you may want to also check out the metagem market as well, though the prices have been really down lately.

[Measure Zero]

I suppose that works (assuming you could find a GDKP raid that ran previous tiers of content), but how is grinding older raids for gold all that different from grinding anything else for gold?

Because fighting raid bosses is probably more fun than searching the auction house for stuff, then sitting around for 10 minutes while timers go down, then posting the results back on the AH.  And it's certainly better than leveling trade skills or farming resources.