30 Minutes a Day Project - Day 28 Wrap Up

Well, I finally made it to the end of the project with only 4 days missed. Now for me, that's actually pretty darn good and I only missed those days due to being in hospital so I'm quite pleased with myself for that. However, I am also not so pleased with myself about how much I didn't make this month!

I listed the last lot of stuff at the end of Day 27 without really caring or watching how much I was listing for. And wouldn't you know it? As soon as I stop trying so hard, I have my best day of the whole month! When I emptied the mailbox this evening, I picked up almost 570 gold. I still have a bunch of stuff left to sell but only enough to fill my backpack so really, I think I timed that pretty well too.

Just for information, I thought I'd include the My Sales addon summary screen for the month so you can see where I made the most sales this month. Now obviously, this doesn't show profit but I was really lucky through the month and I'm not sure I made many losses all the way through the project.

I have to say, I think I really lucked out with doing this in December! I didn't even consider the Winter Veil festival when I had this idea but of course, Strange Dust is top of my sales list and I'd hazard a guess that it was almost all profit too! The Rugged Leather and Wool Cloth sales were bonus markets from Winter Veil too but I quickly fell into a habit of checking the herb market first and with the time limit, I mainly stayed with flipping herbs.

I did occasionally venture into other markets but too late in the month to show up on the top sellers list. The few recipes I picked up early on didn't sell very well although they did sell eventually. I wonder if I should have gone to get more and keep trying with those. 

So in the end, 28 days for 15 minutes a day should have resulted in  7 hours played time. As I found out very quickly, 15 minutes to do all the AH stuff is ok but it didn't give me time to record all the transactions so my actual played time is shown above at almost 14 hours. That means I spent about 30 minutes a day logged in but that was not just recording & making transactions. I also have some very chatty realID friends so a bit of that time was chat time too!

I did enjoy this project but I also found it very frustrating. I started it because I needed some kind of impetus to log in & do something productive but once in game, my natural inclination is to hang out in the Auction House for hours, just scanning for deals and absorbing price information so the time limit drove me crazy!

I hope you've found a bit of useful info somewhere in this diary of a newbie banker and just in case you're wondering, the closing balance of gold in her bag was 1713 gold. Not very good at all by my expectations but still not too bad given the restrictions.

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30 Minutes a Day Project - Days 22 - 24

OK, time to play catch-up! I'm a few days late writing this up so it may be a bit sketchy on the details! Had a lovely quiet Christmas Day with just Mum and Bro and then Boxing Day there too (that's the day after Christmas for my US friends), so I didn't get much time online.

Day 22
Basically I just emptied the mail box and had a quick skim - saw a whole bunch of cheap Mageweave Cloth, grabbed it, relisted and dashed off to Mum's for lunch! It was nice to see such high prices for the Bolts of Linen Cloth and Silk Cloth though. I find it really hard to understand why the Bolts sell for so much more than the cloth - it's the same with the Bars of ore versus the ore prices - you can almost always guarantee that Bars/Bolts prices will be higher than the simple material cost.

Yes, I understand that one more process and therefore a bit of additional time has gone into making them but to buy cloth at 10 silvers and sell the bolts for almost 1 gold is crazy mark-up! I'm not complaining though - it's a great way to make some starting capital as you only need the most very basic training in Tailoring or Mining to craft them both and you can easily make a lot of gold if you have the time.

Day 23
So the holidays are over and it's time to get back to the Auction House. Not many sales but a nice chunk of change in the mailbox today. The 3 stacks of Silkweed netted me almost double the amount of gold I paid for them and the Mageweave all sold too.

I spent almost all of my 15 minutes today snatching up the cheapest items from a variety of categories. Herbs have proved to be a good source of profit so of course, I look there first. Today though, I also checked out the Mists cooking materials, the cloth and the Ores/Bars markets. There were loads of listings for herbs at silly low prices - Terocone and Talandra's Rose had really large gaps to the next priced auction so I nabbed those. I just hope they sell for that crazy high price!

I am having real problems spending large amounts of gold though - I'm so risk averse and very aware of my time limits so I'm going for the obvious bargains. I think perhaps if I had given myself more time, I'd be taking a bit more of a risk with the level 83/84 green armor market. I don't want to be left with a bunch of stock at the end of this project so I'm playing it safe I guess.

If this was going to be my new playing server, I think I'd be more inclined to just go for it, knowing that the stuff would sell eventually. I'd also be leveling alts, picking up stuff to sell or use and having professions leveling too. I'd be gathering on the first couple of alts just to provide materials for professions and then to sell excess stuff. Add in copious quantities of vendor trash and my gold stash would be building quite nicely I think!


Day 24
Yet another lazy day but what a great haul out of the mailbox! I listed fairly late last night and this was late morning so only a few auctions had expired. I planned to come back later in the day to relist any other expired auctions and to grab some bargains but time kind of got away from me and I didn't make it back into game to complete my 15 minutes!

At least I've stopped making silly mistakes from rushing to much now but that doesn't make me feel any better about my poor performance in this project! It does show me how important it is to keep up with the markets though and how much time is needed to really make this work.

I'm definitely going to do this again soon but with a different set of rules for myself. I think the time constraint was a good idea and it was designed to make me log in and do something productive in a short amount of time rather than to log in and faff about for hours. Knowing you have a whole evening ahead can sometimes put you off logging in when you're in a bit of a slump. You need to give yourself goals or a mini project rather than wandering aimlessly which is what I've been doing for a while now.

I have my to-do list on my other blog and I have a baby Shaman and Warlock fighting for my attention but I have this nagging main Pally that just won't let me rest! I'm trying hard to ignore her for the time being but I still find myself logging her and then getting disheartened when she's still rubbish! I think I'm going to have to turn my music up loud and drown her out for a while - I've got stuff to get done you know! lol

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30 Minutes a Day Project - Days 1-3

I went to wowrealmpop to chose my new server - I wanted a high-ish population server and when I saw that Thunderhorn has just been merged with Wildhammer, I thought I'd have a peek at how the new connected realms are working out. I have a friend playing on Thunderhorn already although he's on the other side (Hi Scummy!) so I'm not cheating on that bit!

Today is day 3 already and my Shaman (Lyss) is just level 4 - she does have a tiny bit of cash and some new bits of gear from the initial quests but 15 minutes for questing really isn't much time at all! I'm pretty sure I can do this bit of the project ok.

Day 1

My banker is a human rogue, Kala for short and I had a bit of a backfire on my plans for this young lady. On Day 1, I ran her straight to Stormwind and once there, straight to the Fishing Trainer. I'll leave the next bit to your imagination but fishing training costs 95 copper! I'm pretty sure I went through my whole swear word vocabulary as I hearthed back to Northshire to do a few quests and promptly ran out of time!

Day 2

Day 2 went a little better but not much. Having done just 2 or 3 of the start zone quests, I once again ran all the way to Stormwind with my hard earned coppers in my hand and promptly started swearing again as I found out that not only is fishing training 95 coppers, you also need to be level 5- arrrgghh! I was level 4.5 so I just ran to the area outside Stormwind gates & killed a few wolves. Once I dinged 5, I went back to the fishing trainer for the 3rd time & finally got my training!

That left me with maybe 2 minutes left to do a bit of fishing & to run to the Alchemy shop to buy any cheap herbs from the Alchemy supplies lady there. I managed to pick up 2 silverleaf & 3 peaceblooms - all for 38 copper each (1s 90c total).

Day 3

Day 3 started off much better! I did a bit more fishing and listed the herbs on the Auction House for 59silver each with a 1 silver listing fee. I did a full scan of the Auction House using TSM (Trade Skill Master) and then did a vendor search - only 2 items turned up - both costing over a gold each so that wasn't much use for me with only 6 silver in my bags.

I had a look at all the usual items at the bottom end of the price scale - copper ore, linen cloth, peacebloom & silverleaf - looking for a few that were cheaper than most of the others so I could flip them. Wow! Even linen was at 60-80silver a piece so that was a bit of a shock to my system! I wasn't going to put a profession on my Shaman but I think I may have to in order to get some gold flowing! When I find the profession trainer, I'll pick up herbalism & mining or skinning & just send it all to my banker.

Twitter Question

Bill asked if I'd be listing addons, sites & spreadsheets used - I'm not sure how much use it will be but I think I will create a spreadsheet to keep track of sales/purchases etc. As for addons - I use a combination of TSM & Auctionator in the Auction House. I like the vendor search function of TSM & the full scan too but I really like the way Auctionator shows search results. Until I get much higher up the gold ladder, I'm not likely to use TSM groups for auction listing either so I'll most likely be doing most of my flipping manually using Auctionator to list my items.

For questing, I use Carbonite - I like the extra mini map as I can resize it to how I want it & I can zoom in/out using my mouse scroll wheel. The ingame minimap is just too small for me to get my bearings when I'm out questing too. Cold gives me a lot of stick about my reliance on Carbonite but I love it!

Other addons in regular use are Postal (slowly being superceded by TSM Mailing though), My Sales (for the simple screenshots for my weekly sales reporting) and Bartender to change my toolbars to how I like them. I have DBM (Deadly Boss Mods) and Skada installed but I'm not likely to use them much for now!

Another tip from Twitter

@NevAHAddict don't forget to hope for a blingtron during your 15 mins per alt. Make a macro that asks for one in trade. #freegold
— Copper to Gold (@Selltacular) December 4, 2013

So there we go - not much gold flowing yet! I should be ashamed of myself but it's been a long while since I started fresh & I have never played on a high pop server either. If you have any tips or suggestions like Selltacular's tweet, feel free to pop them in the comments or tweet me. If you feel like trying this little side project yourself, keep notes and maybe write up a guest post for me if you don't have your own blog. We all do things differently so it would be interesting to see how you get started fresh.

Til next time, have fun :)

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Back To Basics - A Reader Inspired Post

Today we have a post from Robert H, a reader who emailed me some feedback & a question. We got chatting and this was one of his replies. I thought he made some very good points so I asked if I could publish it here. I hope you enjoy reading a different perspective on gold making and one that I really should try to remember myself when I'm writing!

Robert's Story

Many gold makers focus on a massive stock of mats, max level gear or enchants, and "big ticket" items like mounts or transmogs. I'm no where near that level and don't have the time or resources to be a competitive gold maker. What I prefer to do is get the most out of the AH while leveling my toons. Perhaps my experiences can help others do the same. 

I began with a few basic assumptions. I needed an engineer for the new 5.4 changes, so chose that and mining as professions. I also decided that I would level at a leisurely pace, somewhere between "speed leveling" and going for Loremaster. I would level mining and engineering in one shot, i.e., as soon as I reached 350 and level 50 I would make all the items to reach the next limit right away (or visit DMF when in town). This motivated me to gather mats while questing. I play on a medium population server with an average economy, so my cash goal was between 2,000-5,000 gold per week.

With these guidelines in mind, I built up a steady supply of ores by making one or two extra trips around key zones while questing, not to mention earn XP and get occasional mob drops. I always had my DMF Adventurer's Journal in dungeons (almost no one carries those any more, so I had nearly a 100% greed success rate on those).

The results were great. While questing in Vanilla zones, I was able to earn about 1,500g a week just from ores, especially gold, iron, and occasionally tin. Truesilver was hit-or-miss. I used the daily price feature on the Undermine Journal to determine if ore or bars sold best and smelted accordingly (that also helped level my mining skill). 

Green drops sold modestly well, but only those with great stats or good for twinking. Cloth was variable. Outlands ores were very successful, as Fel Iron and Adamantite always sold for 100-150g per stack. Two laps a day around Zangarmarsh really paid off. DMF items from dungeons did well at ~250g apiece, and I averaged 3-5 sales a week.

At higher levels the results were even better. In less than an hour I sold 2 stacks of obsidium bars and 4 stacks of cobalt ore and pocketed 1200g. 

Not bad at all. In a little under 3 weeks I had accrued 19,000 gold from the AH after starting at level 1, well above my expectations. 

Your mileage may vary, especially if your server economy is vital or moribund. If you're new to gold making this might be a good way to learn the ropes with relatively low risk. Skills like knowing what to look for, when to post, how to undercut, and when to just vendor stuff that doesn't sell will get you ready for prime time.

I usually write about what I'm doing or planning in game but of course, it's been a long while since I was semi-broke & very inexperienced. Much of what Robert says is what I did to get started, long before I considered myself a gold maker.

As a gold making blogger, I tend to focus on specific things or tips you can do to make gold. Robert's story is a more general 'lifestyle' way of making gold than my current gametime so I'd be really interested to hear your early days stories too so feel free to drop me an email or maybe leave a comment below.

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 7 Tips for Starting Fresh

So far, many of my 20 Days of Gold Making questions have been reminisce type questions but Day 7's question is "If you were starting over again (maybe on a new server perhaps), how would you start building some capital & what goal would you set yourself?" so this should be a useful post for anyone just starting their gold making career! Be sure to check out some of the answers from other blogs that have joined in with my 20 Days challenge which you can find in my Participants post.

The problem I have with answering this question, is that I actually do this regularly. I started this whole blog thing because of a new alt/new server experiment, I have Project Shoofly on hold on my US account & I'm sure I wrote about my lowbie glypher too! So what to write that I haven't already written & with the advent of Mists of Pandaria, would my old ways still work?

For me, the tried & tested way is to use the herb vendors in Stormwind as well as some really low level fishing - all that junk you fish to start with adds up to a few silvers to get your Auction House activities underway! I used to head straight for the recipe guy in Stormwind too but I haven't tried selling those since Mists of Pandaria arrived. I'd guess there is still a small market there even if you can level cooking to max in Halfhill - not all players have high level alts after all.

After I have a few gold to my name, I start looking for underpriced materials to flip - it used to be volatiles & cloth in Cataclysm, now I would head for herbs & cooking materials (but still looking at cloth, ores, enchanting mats etc too). Ideally I look for fairly fast moving, high volume markets to start with, just looking for deals. I don't care if it's a single or a small stack, if it's underpriced, I'll try to flip it.

Once I have say 500 gold to my name, I'll start looking at armor - ilevel 364-377 (for level 83 & 84 but MoP gear stats) can often be found for 50g or less & I've had quite some luck turning these over for 199g-299g. Always check the stats on each piece though - you don't want to be buying lemons with such a limited amount of capital behind you.

My goal previously has always been to see how much I can make in say 30 days but that's as a side project. If I was starting over properly, leaving my main server behind then I think my goal would be to just keep building my stash at a steady rate whilst keeping my leveling alts nicely geared & professions leveling up too. I think 100k gold would be a nice round target to aim for but I don't believe in rushing & stressing out so I wouldn't put a timescale on it!

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Reader Question - Need Help, Been Away A While

I received a question from a reader this morning which echoes many of the questions I see over at reddit/r/woweconomy so I thought I'd post my answer here in the hope that it may help other readers too. I'm always happy to receive questions - either by email or in comments so if you have one you think I could help with, start typing! lol

Here's the email

Hi I just came back to WoW after a long break and truly remember nothing about the game. I have pretty much every crafter to 525 and thats it and I have never been one to have money. I do not know how to make money in wow and well with all the new content I am missing out and I hate that feeling. I am on the xxx server my main is frost mage level 89 as of this morning with tailoring and JC as his professions. I have a paladin lvl 85 with BS and mining I do not wanna buy gold but I have 1k gold to my name and everything is so expensive what can I do? Also i have so many ridiculous add-ons I do not know what they do or how to work them what do you suggest? I can delete them all and only put in the ones you suggest.

Please help me

Mike

And here's how I answered Mike - I may have got a little carried away & drowned the poor guy in information but as it's written, I'm sure he can re-read it if necessary. It's also a little disorganised as I just wrote it as the ideas came to me

Thanks for getting in touch, I hope I can help a bit at least :)
First thing is not to panic or stress yourself out - that's when bad decisions get made. You say your main is lvl 89 with tailoring & JC, so I guess you have picked up a fair bit of Windwool Cloth? Start leveling your tailoring a bit - most of the stuff you make for points will sell although it may not make you as much as selling the cloth will. You can start making your Imperial silk too (on the daily Cooldown) http://www.wowhead.com/item=86378 - you'll need it to make epics later or spellthreads. The most important thing here is to get to 600 if you can. Save up your motes/spirits of harmony & only buy 1 of the pvp tailoring patterns at first, just to get you to 600. Then you can start to increase your recipe collection & look for the really profitable stuff.

Unfortunately Blizzard has decided to gate many recipes behind reputation grinds so for Tailoring, once you hit level 90, you will need to start the Golden Lotus dailies. I haven't moved my tailor on yet but my Leatherworker bought the Golden Lotus reputation epic armor recipes & I have been able to sell them for pretty decent money, I am assuming Tailoring will be similar for you.

The other thing to help with this is to get your Tillers farm started on as many alts as you can - you can't expand your farm until you hit level 90 but even those 4 starter plots can be growing vegetable & making you some cash for just a few minutes work each day & you only need to be 85 to start your farm. Once you get your Tiller reputation to Revered, you can start using the 'special' seeds to either farm motes of harmony or if you need extra cloth, you can plant the seed that gives you cloth. Personally I'd go with the Songbell Seeds for Motes of Harmony.

In the immediate future though, you could take any of your alts back to Deepholm & try farming the troggs at the Fractured Front - if you drink a Potion of Treasure Finding before you start, you will pick up the extra treasure chests which usually have loads of Embersilk cloth in. That is still selling well on my server but you can also make Embersilk bags for even more profit.

Your paladin at 85 has Blacksmith & mining so you could also start leveling that one by mining - you will get xp from the mining & can either save the ore to level your Jewelcrafting or your Blacksmithing. Luckily JC doesn't have any major recipes locked behind reputation (except the mounts but they are luxury items for later on) so you can start to level your JC straightaway too. I have found that raw gems are stupid cheap on my server so I didn't even bother prospecting to cut gems. I just bought raw gems to cut for points & hoped for the 'blue' procs on the cuts.

Something you can do straightaway on your Paladin too is to look at the price of tin ore - yup - tin! Check out the price of Moss Agates too. If tin ore is around 15g a stack or less, you should be able to prospect it & get Moss Agates which are selling for 10-25g each at the moment. ( thanks to @elvinelol for this tip)

Another thing you can do soon is to go fishing the junk pools at the Darkmoon Faire - you only need a skill level of 1 to fish the pools & you will get all sorts of MoP raw materials out of the 'junk' boxes. Can be very profitable & will provide you with even more Windwool Cloth too.

So there's a whole long list of bits & pieces you can do in game which I hope will help but the biggest thing you can do right now is some reading! My blogroll is pretty good, Cold's Gold Factory has some great posts and many of the others have too. There's also Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/woweconomy/ where quite a few gold bloggers hang out to answer questions, some of which you may find useful.

One thing I did almost forget though - netherweave bags! 1 bag=1 stack of netherweave cloth - check out the AH price per stack & per bag & see if there's profit there. They still sell like hotcakes on most servers & if the cloth isn't cheap, if you have the patience (or a lowbie alt) you can easily run through some of the Outland dungeons to get the cloth :)

You mention addons - do you just mean AH addons or in general? For AH I use Auctionator & TSM(Trade Skill Master) but I wouldn't recommend TSM until you have a bit more gold to play with & a bit more confidence in your knowledge - it's a pretty big beast function wise & easy to mess up settings that will cost you gold.

I use a little addon called MySales to easily see what's sold over the last week/month etc & I use Altoholic so I can check profession details on other alts without having to log out.

Postal is a mailbox addon to get your mail out of the mailbox more easily. Once you get going, your mailbox will be full of all sorts of stuff (hopefully!).

Oooh and as a last item - I leveled my Paladin (LW/Skinner) from 85-90 without selling any leather, just vendor trash & meats etc I picked up - between quest rewards, vendor trash & a few bits of material sales, I made over 5000g. Once I calculated the leather sales price (I used it not sold it tho) I had a theoretical gold income of almost 10k from just questing 85-90. Maybe just questing on some of your alts will boost your current gold balance a bit too :) or there's dailies of course, once your main hits 90.

So that was my answer - long & lots of bits but without asking loads of questions to get more details, it can be tough to describe a really great course of action. I'm sure I missed loads of tips so that's where you guys come in - what did I miss? What would have been your first suggestion to Mike? Leave a comment if you'd like, I'd love to know too.

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20 Days of Goldmaking - Day 4 Bank Alts

The question for today in my 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge is "Do you use a banker alt/guild? When did you start doing that & why?"

To be honest, I really can't remember when I set up my banker guild but I do remember nominating one of my earliest alts to be my auction/bank runner very early on. In my Day 1 post, I included a picture of one of my old notebooks where I was keeping tally across my alts. I hadn't even found addons by that point so I was logging each alt & noting the gold totals! Nowadays I use Altoholic to keep track which is great because I now have alts on about 6 different servers!

In that picture, Pinkie was my banker at that time - & I had only been playing for maybe 2 months at that point. I was mighty pleased with those gold totals too - how things have changed huh? As for why I nominated her - I wasn't playing her very much & I didn't want to have my main questing alt popping back & fore to Stormwind. I also used the mailbox a lot to empty my bags so rather than have stuff flying all through the mail system, I'd send everything that might sell to Pinkie & then logged her at the end of each play session to 'do my auctions'. It was a familiar cry in my house at the time. Any response to 'come on, it's late, time for bed' was along the lines of 'but I still gotta do my auctions!' so that was another half hour gone.

In the end, I set my in-game alarm for a sensible time then would do my auctions. Later on in my WoW career, I ended up doing my auctions at the start, in the middle & at the end of my playtime!

I can't remember when I set up my bank guild but I bought the guild crest in February 2011 according to WoW Armory. I'm pretty sure I'd had the guild for a while by then - probably the summer before when I left my main guild. I know I definitely had my bank guild before Cataclysm arrived, purely because I did start to stockpile some stuff & my alts banks were full already!

That was my main reason for creating a bank guild - the extra storage space especially as I was getting more into the glyph market & had herbs & glyphs overflowing everywhere. It was also a small escape from guild life. I joined 2 other guilds after I left my original guild & although they were great people, I didn't feel as comfortable with them as I had in my old guild. I really missed my old guild & if I'm honest, I still do, even 2.5 years later.

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 3

Today is Day 3 of my 20 Days of Gold Making & the question is  "What were the first techniques/tips/tricks you used when starting out?"

This sounded like such a good question when I made the list but now that I sit down & try to write about it, it's kinda tough! It was a fair while ago now after all. 

Sell Everything

I think I was selling everything almost from the very start of my WoW time - grey stuff to vendors & everything else to the Auction House. I was lucky that I had a friend or two already playing for a few months so they had told me about the Auction House. I didn't have any Auction House addons to start with though - every green piece of gear I picked up, I would manually look to see what range of prices equivalent items were selling for & price my item in the same range. I don't remember how successful this was but I did it for a fair while so it can't have been too bad.

Learn a Profession

I have no idea how profitable this would be these days but my first character had skinning & leatherworking. I used to craft stuff to get skill points but instead of disenchanting it as so many do these days, I put all my crafted stuff on the AH. Yes, even those level 10-15 basic green items. I used to have a notebook with my calculations in & I remember pushing the prices up by 10-20 silver each time I had to replenish my crafted stock!

Alliance Cooking Recipe Vendor

I found this guy in Stormwind during the Pilgrims Bounty holiday within the first few months of starting to play. I left my rogue in Stormwind specifically to buy the recipes & put them on the Auction House. Up until Mists of Pandaria arrived, I would still periodically buy a bunch & sell them easily for 20g or more each. I haven't tried in Mists as you can now level cooking in Halfhill so easily. It was also a great way to boost cash on a new server too.

Read, Listen, Talk to Other Goldmakers

This was the big one for me - finding gold blogs like Cold's Gold Factory & JMTC really opened my eyes to the wider WoW world. I had no idea there were so many blogs out there about WoW, let alone specific gold making ones. Needless to say, I read everything - I even went back right to the beginning of both CGF & JMTC and read all their old posts too.

I found Twitter & started following a few well known people & from there I found out about these things called podcasts. JMTC had it's Friday night chat thing, Auction House Junkies was just starting around that time, as was Power Word: Gold & these days there's Eviscerated Gaming Podcast too.

Now I'm one of those gold makers & people talk to me via Twitter, comments here & emails - I love it although looking back, I never thought it would turn out like this!

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Set Up A Shopping List in Auctionator

Auctionator Shopping Lists

One or two comments I've received lately made me wonder whether people are using Auctionator easily so I thought I'd put together a basic guide to setting up a shopping list, just in case anyone needs it. I'm using Cooking Materials for this example so it links nicely with my earlier Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffling post. If you'd like help with any other Auction House addons, just let me know & I'll see if I can help.

OK, so you've installed Auctionator from Curse.com & opened your Auction House window for the first time - what do you see? You should see just 3 extra tabs at the bottom of your window - ignore the beancounter & TSM tabs in my screenshots - I really should get around to removing Beancounter as TSM-Accounting now has all the data I used to use in there. I only really use the Buy & Sell tabs - to be honest, I'm not sure I could even tell you what's in the More tab off the top of my head!

A basic search is easy - just type your item into the search box & hit enter (red dot at top in screenshot). Your most recent searches will then be stored in the window on the left - as you can see in the image. You can also search a range of items by clicking the + button (red circle in image).

You can search for a named item within a category or you can search for a subset of a category. In this second screenshot, you can see I've chosen Trade Goods from the drop down category list & then I'm about to choose Cooking in the sub category. If I was searching for level 77-80 green armor for example, I'd also add 77 & 80 in the level range boxes. If you do want to search armor - I like to pick the armor type too (in the sub category section) so I only get a small range of items to glimpse through. It just makes it easier to look through 20 Cloth pieces then say 25 Mail pieces rather than trying to look through every green 77-80 piece in one long list! 

For Cooking Materials however, we are only really interested in the Mists of Pandaria items at the moment but this list includes every cooking material in the Auction House. When the search results first pop up, they are automatically sorted by highest price first so naturally in this third screenshot, you can only see Pandaren cooking materials, however when I scrolled down, some of the cheapest Pandaren items were mixed in with earlier, lower level materials.

You can easily re-sort the search results list by just clicking on 'Lowest Price' marked with a red cross in the screenshot. This is a little misleading at first - it's not sorted by Lowest Price, it's showing the Lowest Price for that item. You have to click the individual item to get the details of available auctions but it's quick & easy & there's a Back button to get you back to this main list.

This is a great way to look for cheap herbs too - once it's sorted by lowest price first, if you see a herb like Goldthorn on the first page of results, you should probably snatch it up quickly! Currently the Cataclysm herbs are showing up on my first page which is great because I'm still making Mysterious Fortune Cards.

So to exclude materials I am not interested in, I created a shopping list specifically for Pandaren cooking materials. To create a new shopping list, click the New Shopping List button at the bottom left - it will ask you to give your new list a name so pick something easy like 'Cooking Mats' and start entering the items you want to add. I don't know if there's a quick way of doing this but I just type the item name in the Search box then click the Add Item button!

Now I have an easy way to look at individual cooking materials or I can use the 'Search for all items' button (bottom left, red button) to get an overview of the category. I use this list to get the prices for my spreadsheet so I can easily see which items are the best for IronPaw Token shuffling.

I also have shopping lists for hard to find items that I want to pick up cheaply whenever I can, lists for level 77-80 armor, lists for MoP green armour, list for each profession (not all mats, just the ones I use most often) & generally a list for everything I find I look for regularly!

So there you go - a quick & easy way to make Auction House searching so much easier - be careful though - making lists can be addictive! I have to periodically go through & check my list of lists & delete any that are no longer used but then I have been using Auctionator for a long while now. I hope this reads as clearly as I wanted it to - if there are any points you think need further explanation or if you've found an even easier way then please, do let me know in the comments.

Have fun peeps 

Shopping List image © Erica Schoonmaker under Creative Commons licence

Vendor Herb Supplies for Making Starter Gold in WoW

Herbs in Boots

So I've mentioned before about buying some herbs from various vendors to sell on the Auction House for starter cash but whilst I was farming recently, I stumbled over Vi'el in Winterspring & found that he sells Gromsblood. I was there for a little while so I managed to raid his limited supply 3 times & ended up with 8 Gromsblood. When I went to the Auction House with them, they were listed at around 15 gold each!

That got me thinking about what other herbs might be available from vendors so I spent a little while on Wowhead having a look & decided to summarise them here. As I expected, there aren't many higher level herbs available from vendors but the ones that are available are usually expensive on the Auction House so may be worth picking up if you're in the relevant areas.

Starter Cash - Alliance

Stormwind, Maria Lumere, Alchemy Supplies, Mage Quarter
The Exodar, Altaa, Alchemy Supplies, Vaults of Lights
- sells peacebloom, silverleaf, earthroot, mageroyal, bruiseweed, wild steelbloom, kingsblood and liferoot (40 copper to 1silver 20copper)

Stormwind, Bernard Gump, Florist, outer edge of Trade District, Old Town side
Elwynn Forest to Redridge, Antonio Perelli, travelling salesman
Wetlands, Kixxle, by a cart at junction of main road & the road to Dun Modr in the North
 - sells earthroot, mageroyal, bruiseweed, wild steelbloom, kingsblood and liferoot (80 copper to 3silver)

Starter Cash - Horde

Silvermoon City, Melaris, Alchemy Supplies, nr Court of the Sun
- sells peacebloom, silverleaf, earthroot, mageroyal, bruiseweed, wild steelbloom, kingsblood & liferoot (40 copper to 1 silver 20 copper)

Northern Barrens, Hula'mahi, The Crossroads
Ghostlands, Rathis Tomber, near Tranquillien
Tirisfal Glades, Selina Weston, Brill
- sells peacebloom, silverleaf, earthroot, mageroyal, bruiseweed (40 copper to 1 silver )

Higher Level Areas

Winterspring, Vi'el, Exotic Goods, Frostwhisper Gorge - sells Gromsblood 10silver

Netherstorm, Dealer Sadaqat, Stormspire
Isle of Quel'Danas, Mar'nah
- sells icecap, felweed, dreaming glory, netherbloom & mana thistle (10-60 silvers)

My New Server Start Up Process

When I start on a new server, I usually level a banker alt to level 5 before running them to Stormwind (my bankers are nearly always human!). On average, my alt leaves Northshire with around 9 silvers & I run her straight to Maria Lumere, the alchemy supplies girl in the Mage Quarter. Watching my pennies, I buy whatever herbs she has available, making sure I still have 1 silver left for each type of herb I buy so the Auction House listing fee is covered. So if I can get 3 types of herb from her, I must keep back at least 3 silvers to be able to list them!

Then I go and create my new character that I'm going to play & level her for a while. Once she has done a little questing, she will start to pick up linen & other bits that I can sell - I post them to my bank alt & often add a little cash too - after all, she doesn't have anything left until those initial auctions sell.

Depending on what time of day I am playing, I will often log in & out of both alts quite a bit at first - getting the questing going & sending stuff across to sell then logging banker to get all these goodies listed. This way, I also see when the initial herbs sell & pick up that extra cash quickly.Then it's back to the alchemy supplies & off to the florist to pick up whatever herbs I can & get them listed too.

Rinse & repeat until you have a nice little stash of gold then I hit the cooking recipes guy in Stormwind Old Town - approx 1 gold will get you about 10 recipes - all of which sell for anywhere between 2 - 30 gold each although they don't sell as quickly as they used to.

So there you go, an easy & fairly painless way to get those first dribbles of cash into your pockets on a new character. To my more experienced readers - Is this what you do or do you have another method of getting that initial cash?

Turning Linen Cloth into Gold

Girls Gone Shopping?

Linen cloth turned up on my Project Shoofly server at 3 - 5 silvers a piece! I just couldn't resist so I logged my other banker on that server (I have a normal, everyday banker for this kind of thing & my project banker, just to keep things seperate) & bought all the super cheap linen. I ran my little level 5 over to the enchanting trainer, made my copper rod then ran to the tailoring trainer. By the time I had converted the linen into bolts of linen, I had enough skill points to learn the Brown Linen Pants pattern. For just 2 bolts of linen & one coarse thread or about 15silvers, I then disenchanted them & got 3 Strange Dust.

Now of course, being the good goldmaker that I am, I didn't just make 1 pair of pants - oh no! I made 40, using up 8 stacks of Linen Cloth in the process. I ended up with 68 Strange Dust & 11 Lesser Magic Essences, most of which I promptly listed on the Auction House for good prices.

I listed some of the Strange Dust as 3 stacks of 10 initially - at around 3g50 per item, I guessed smaller stack size might be more affordable if a buyer was watching their gold. When I logged in earlier today, all 3 stacks of 10 had sold, netting me a nice 99 gold. I'm averaging the cost at 1 gold per stack of Linen Cloth used so with 8 gold spent, I made profit already on just 30 Strange Dusts & I still had 38 dusts to sell.

Next I checked the Auction House again - no Strange Dust to be found so I listed my remaining 38 & wandered off while my banker made another 60 pairs of Brown Linen Pants. Total haul from disenchanting this time was 100 Strange Dust & 11 Lesser Magic Essence. I have been lucky to get into a level 25 guild though so the Bountiful Bags perk is helping here too.

I just checked again & another 20 Strange Dust have sold at 3g50s each as well as 5 of the Lesser Magic Essences so after AH fees, that's another 72 gold profit. I checked the Linen Cloth price too out of curiosity - not only do I have competition for Strange Dust now, the price of Linen Cloth is now over 1 gold a piece & only 2 stacks available.

Overall I spent around 20 gold on Linen Cloth & coarse thread. In the process of converting the Linen to gold, I also leveled my enchanting to 67 & my tailoring to 75 - not bad for a level 5 alt :)

Summary

Linen cloth & coarse thread cost to make 100 Brown Linen Pants - 20 gold
Strange Dust produced from disenchanting Pants - 168
Lesser Magic Essences produced by disenchanting - 20
Strange Dust already sold 50 = 165 gold
Lesser Magic Essence already sold 5 = 6 gold

Profit so far = 151 gold
118 Strange Dust still to sell
15 Lesser Magic Essence still to sell


Now obviously this isn't going to be a huge market & I would hazard a guess that it won't be a regular one either but keeping an eye on Linen Cloth & Strange Dust prices & jumping in when the prices are low, should give a nice little boost, especially as your lowbie bank alt can do it in town.

Where to Farm Large Fangs

Arathi Highlands

As part of my new series on farming for hard to find on Auction House items, I went back to the same old Lowbie Leatherworking post. One of my best lowbie selling items was the Barbaric Bracers & when I can find Large Fangs on the Auction House, they still sell pretty well even now.

As with Spider's Silk, these were always hard to find but since so many zones & beasts levels have changed with the reworking of the Vanilla zones, it looks like there is only one type of beastie that drops these now. Off I went to the Arathi Highlands, just over the bridge from the Wetlands. The Highland Fleshstalkers (level 28/29) are pretty close together but there aren't a huge number of them. I easily cleared the whole lot in about 5 minutes on my level 81 hunter & I was having to wait for respawns. With such a low drop rate, after 30 minutes of killing & waiting, I had only 2 Large Fangs but my bags were almost full with Raptor Hide, Raptor Eggs & Raptor Meat.

The other downside is that my Hunter is not a skinner - I'm sure the medium leather would have been a great gold boost for my 30 minutes farm time & perhaps they would have respawned just a smidge faster too.

Overall, I was fairly disappointed and I certainly wouldn't recommend farming these for any gold making activity. However, if you are questing in this area or leveling your skinning then perhaps concentrating on the Highland Fleshstalkers for a little while will give you a small gold boost in the process.

Having said that, farming Large Fangs to make a set of Barbaric Bracers for your own character is perhaps not as bad a you might have feared. Waiting for them to turn up on the Auction House is going to take a long while & your baby alt will have leveled way past the need for Barbaric Bracers while you get the materials together.

Project Shoofly - End of Week Two

It's almost end of week two of my lowbie horde leveling project & I'm off on some travels for a few days tomorrow so I thought I'd leave you with an update. I finally made it to level 30 somewhere in the wilds of Arathi Highlands. My herbing & skinning are coming along nicely, both up around the 160 skill points without too much extra effort now.

I'm still struggling with being horde - flight paths & safe havens are all in the wrong places! I almost ran into Refuge Point earlier - luckily I woke up fast enough to realise that was not a good idea! I've been sending all my herbs & leather to my little banker as well as anything else that is for the Auction House. Most stuff is selling really well even though everything is very quiet since Diablo 3 went live.

I've picked up a few recipes on my travels but in keeping with the 'think like a novice' idea of this project, I've only bought 1 or 2 of each recipe if I had the gold available. You can see from my list below, herbs at this level like mageroyal & briarthorn are selling almost as fast as I can list them but even peacebloom is selling well & I often find that I am the only one listing it!

So at level 30, I have 807g on my banker with 35g on my leveling alt after buying a few netherweave bags for them both. I'm interested in seeing how far this will go - I remember having about 6000g on my main by about level 60 & I knew very little about the whole auction house thing at that point but I was making a bit of effort in that direction.

I'll resume leveling in June when I return - will be interesting to see how much more gold I can accumulate in this way. I'm guessing a lot of newer players probably play in this way. Sometimes as keen goldmakers, we forget that not everyone plays like we do so when we put stuff up for high prices, we may be seriously limiting our markets to other players who play the Auction House & therefore know our tricks!

Project Shoofly - Mid week 2

I've been barrelling along, leveling my herbalism & skinning as well as questing. I decided to brave the random dungeon finder last night - ugh! Have I ever mentioned how much I hate pugs? Well, I do - a shaman healer decided to roll need on a cloth intellect waist even though he was full on heirlooms & I had only crap quest gear. For once I stood up for myself & queried it but I did pretend to be a bit noobish just in case he got nasty! lol

After the tank spent the next 10 minutes reposting recount scores after each fight, I think the shammy took pity on me because he traded me the belt! Yes, my DPS was that bad! But I did get a pretty new dress after I left the dungeon, I just finished a quest chain so that made a huge difference and it kind of matches her hair too :) Shame about the gloves & boots though.

One thing I have found out is that keeping my herbing & skinning leveled to the zone I'm questing in, is a bit of a pain! I spent about 2 hours questing & dungeon last night but over an hour or more, trying to get my skinning up to a level where I could skin the beasties I was killing! Having said that - skinning on a priest? Seriously, WTF was I thinking??? lol

But on the other hand, I did end up with several full bags of herbs & leather as well as a few green items which mostly all sold overnight. I've just pulled almost 200 gold out of my mailbox this evening, giving me a nice current total of 359 gold. Out of that, I've bought 3 netherweave bags & a couple of items for my priest to wear as well as paid for my riding skill & sent 30 gold to my priest for pocket money. So at a rough reckoning, I think I'm upto about 440 gold overall if I hadn't spent anything.

Now I know that may not seem much but remember, this is my non-goldmaking experiment :) I'm trying to think like a new-ish player - just selling everything I pick up from questing & the odd recipe here & there when I find them.

I'm going to try to get to level 30 tonight & dual spec into Holy - I have an 85 Holy Priest but I never did lowbie dungeons as a healer so I thought I'd give it a try this time through. Wish me luck - I think I'm going to need it!

Spring - Time For Fresh Starts

© Nev 2004, Spring Blossom

So, it's been a while again but I finally logged into game a few times this last week or so. The first few hours really wore me out - my eyes really had problems adjusting to the whole movement stuff after months of static websites but eventually they settled down & let me get on with trying to remember where I had left everything! I never intended to just stop playing like that, it was just the way it worked out but I lost everything in my mailboxes & I'm pretty sure I had a few big-ish items gone bye-bye but never mind, they would be out of date by now anyway! So my first few evenings back in game were taken up with emptying rubbish out of banks & bags, as well as catching up with my lovely guildies.

Just before I stopped playing, I also signed up for a US account which I played for about 2 hours & never went back! Bad timing all round except that it gave me a lapsed account when the new Scroll of Resurrection was announced so this week, thanks to Cold over at Cold's Gold Factory, I've restarted on that account. No heirlooms, no cash back up, nothing except 50 empty character slots & a few basic addons. Cold doesn't have to worry though, I'm Alliance so his Horde gold making empire is safe ... for now :P

So with a clean slate, I chose my usual human banker, levelled her to level 5 & ran to Stormwind. She had about 8silver to play with. I also started a human hunter to be my main questing alt & by the time she got to Goldshire, she had about 9 silver which I sent to my banker. So with 16 silvers, I bought 2 of the cheapest cooking recipes from the guy in SW Old Town, then ran to the florist on the canals to see if there were any herbs available. There were a few bits & pieces so I bought those up & ran to the Alchemy supplies shop in the mage Quarter, nabbed all the herbs I could there & off I went to the Auction House.

Off I went to the Auction House & started to list my haul of cheap herbs. Arrggggh, I'd forgotten the deposit/listing fee so I only managed to list the 5 auctions shown in the screenie above. Well that was a bust I thought so I logged back to my hunter & did a few more quests. You can tell I'm out of practise at this game too - look - I only listed them for 12 hrs - normally I would pop them up at 24hrs - it's the same deposit for most of them & I don't lose the deposit after just 12 hrs if they don't sell.

So I told myself to slow down & think this through - as I was running back to the alchemy supplies in the Mage Quarter, I passed the fishing trainer & a light bulb went off in my head! I quickly checked the cost of training & a fishing rod & decided to fish for vendor trash for 10 mins.

Here's my haul
8 x tangled fishing line @ 18c each
6 x tattered cloth @ 1s each
5 x weeds @ 18c each
3 x driftwood @ 18c each
1 x sickly fish @ 18c each
1 x old boot @ 18c each

So in about 10 minutes of fishing I gained a grand total of 9s 24c & 10 achievement points for catching 25 fish! Those 9 silvers let me post the rest of the herbs I'd managed to pick up and as of late this morning, I'm up to about 20gold now. More than enough to really get going again.

Not the biggest gold making revelation, I know but if I've missed this simple way to get some basic starter cash, how many others have too? I know to go get some cheap vendor items & list them but I've been gold making a while now & reading blogs & stuff for even longer. This brand new empty account is kinda reminding me of the basics so I thought I'd pop out a post so I don't forget in future & maybe help a complete newbie to make those first few silvers.

Getting Started - Don't Give Up!

0169 Nev 2006 - Keep Your Head On

Hello there!
Khalior here from Khalior's Tentacular Junkpile to help out with Nev's "Getting Started" series. Today, we do a quick and simple once-over of the issue of the most grieving thing that every gold-maker will encounter : items that do not sell.

So you have everything set up.
You've got your items, you know the prices, you know the right times when to post.
You get down to business.
And then you play the Waiting Game(TM).
When you come back to your mailbox to reap your rewards, you collect the gold and... the items that did not sell.
Frustration may hit you at some point, especially when you've listed items for days and days and they keep coming back to you.
Breathe in, breathe out, you can work this out.

What you need to do is focus on each item and find out why no one is buying it. Here are reasons why your item may not find its' buyer.

a) The market is flooded
Take a look at The Undermine Journal for your item on your realm.
Maybe there's tons of auctions there - so it's normal that it may take time before someone buys your auction. In certain markets, it can get really crowded. That's when you have to be clever and find the right time to post your auction. Also, check again on your auctions once in a while, because the situation may be that...

b) Someone has undercut you
The most likely reason why your item has not been bought. If the market is crowded, it's very likely to happen. You can try to cancel your auction and undercut that person back. But that game can go on and on and you have to know when's the right time to stop.

The ill effects of undercutting are that you are losing your auction deposit, you might possibly be lowering the price of the item and there's also the possibility that other players join in your undercutting wars, making the whole process very complicated. "Spying" on the potential undercutters by looking at their Posting Times on The Undermine Journal is a way to counter undercutting. Logging onto your auction toon and babysitting the Auction House is another option. (Although don't forget to play the game, at some point!)

c) You've overpriced the item
This is partly subjective to the people's buying power on your server. If no one is willing to buy your item for the price that you are asking for, you may be stuck there for a long while. Prices of servers differ between each other, and people are used to see certain prices on the AH. If they are used to see double digits for an item, why would they go for your triple digit item ?

Knowing the market of your items is a bit of a science, mixing people's buying power with item rarity and demand. Checking for average pricing on TUJ, browsing the comments section of your item on Wowhead, knowing how the item is obtained, are all helpful hints of how your item should be priced.
You can always experiment and go against all odds - sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised!

d) There is no current demand for the item
Sadly, it happens. Sometimes if you continue reposting again and again, one day you will find a buyer. But that can take some time. Sometimes it's best to stockpile the item in your bank and try the market again on a rainy day.

You can also set yourself some Undermine Journal notifications for your item and wait until the market picks up again to consider posting your items. It's also common knowledge that a greater variety of buyers is online during the weekends, so consider posting your item on Friday evening and see if you get lucky.

As you can see, there's tricks to help you out of the situation. It's the tinkering and the research for every auction that makes casual auctioneers lose patience and a lot of gold because they don't take the time to find a solution to their problem.

It is problem-solving at its' best : focus, find the issue, find all different possibilities of addressing the issue, choose the optimal one, apply it.

The people who are offering coaching and counseling for gold-makers live by a similar system. With time and practice, this can be applied to a problematic auction in a matter of 2-3 minutes and you can move on to the next issue.

The motto is : don't give up!

Khalior

I'd like to thank Khalior for writing the first ever guest post here at Auction House Addict & I think it's a great post to give encouragement to budding auctioneers. One thing I will add for my lovely & local EU readers is - do not despair - there is a new site recently launched that will, over time, come to be as important & useful to us as the Undermine Journal is to the US players.

This is where EU readers can help Acy get his site moving, go to Wowtrader, log in & upload the data from your auction house scans. The more data uploaded, the more useful it will be. For more information, Alto interviewed Acy recently & I hope we can all pitch in & help Acy get this new site off the ground.

Getting Started - Profession Addons



© Nev 2009 Going Round in Circles

Getting started with professions can leave you going round in circles. Some professions (especially Engineering) have numerous crafted components that you need to make before you can craft the final item you wanted in the first place! The standard craft UI (User Interface) is very simple to use but it doesn't have a crafting queue or any way of making life easier.

That's where the following two addons come in handy. The first one I use on all my alts for every craft is Advanced Trade Skill Window, ATSW for short(screenie below). I've purposely picked my Engineering alt to show you this nifty addon & how it simplifies things for multi component items. Below, you can see I've decided to make 5 Mechanical Squirrel Boxes which needs 4 components - 2 of which are also crafted by engineers. ATSW has automatically added the basic crafted components to the craft queue so I don't have to manually work out how many copper bars I need to make the copper modulator, the handful of copper bolts & the mechanical squirrel box.

 
My next move would be to close this window down, go to my bank & use this addon to get all the basic materials out of the bank for me (this setting is in the Options tab, top right of the window). No more hunting various bags for all the bits, just 1 or 2 clicks & it gets them for you. Next move to the anvil & start crafting. How easy is that?

You can sort the various items by categories (default), by name (very handy when you know the name but not the category) or by difficulty level (more on that in a minute). There's a manual search bar & a drop down menu for the various categories which I use mostly on my enchanter when looking for, say glove enchants.

The second addon I want to tell you about today is Lil' Sparkeys Workshop. This addon works with ATSW & basically uses your Auctioneer scans (you have been doing them regularly, haven't you?) to calculate costs & profits for each craftable item. You can see an extra column of figures in the screenshot below - that's the Lil Sparkey's results and if you hover over one of the results figures, you get the little pop out window shown at the bottom right, which gives you the breakdowns.

You can also see that I have sorted the craftables by difficulty for this screen shot. When I first started playing, I took skinning & leatherworking & levelled both gradually as I was questing & levelling my character. I wish I had known about these 2 addons then! I would have made the most profitable items that could give skill ups rather than the item which used the least mats.

These days when I level a profession, I use the Lil Sparkeys profit figures as a guide to which of the skill up recipes to make. In the above screenie, you can see there is a huge profit to be made on the Gnomish Net-O-Matic Projector but if you look at the item details, Auctioneer has only seen 2 of them & this item is only useable by Engineers so I wouldn't be counting my chickens on this one. (screen shot of Item data given by Auctioneer, not for the Net-O-Matic but you get the idea!)

Whilst the Unstable Trigger is only showing as 4g 81s profit & it's a green skill up (less chance of a skill point), if my aim is to maximise profits whilst levelling then that is the obvious choice. Sometimes it's lots of little profits to get to the same place in the end. Don't be blinded by those big numbers, engage your brain & think about what your addons are showing you.

Another addon I will talk about at a later date is Trade Skill Master (TSM) - it is a much more complicated addon to set up but it is worth its' weight in gold & has revolutionised the way I play my glyph & gem markets. I don't think it's really a starter addon though which is why I've left it out of todays post.

Hope this helps :) Have fun, get rich :)

PS You can click on the screenshots to get larger, easily readable versions.