Gold Cap!

I finally did it!  This morning I hit the gold cap.  Actually I probably hit it last night but I had it in my head that the cap was 217K gold so did the usual thing of banking my surplus (I try to keep around 10,000 gold on my banker to work with and bank the rest as it comes in).  This morning as I unloaded my mail and banked the rest I realised that I had 207,000 gold in my guild bank which, with the 10,000 on my banker, should put me at the cap. Then I went and check exactly how much the cap was an realised that I had actually broken through it.  Of course my banker had to clear out the guild bank to pose for a photo.

I started my AH adventure with no intention of trying for the gold cap. With my 7,000 gold seed money it seemed such a huge amount of gold and way out of my reach. I think if I had started out with the gold cap as a goal I would probably given up in the early days. Instead I decided just to try my hand at selling and see where I ended up. My original intention was just to sell inks but I quickly got into selling glyphs as there wasn’t much of a market for inks. In the early days money seemed to dribble in.

Mine is a weird server to sell glyphs on. There is a seller who doesn’t actually sell anything but who posts 3-5 of every glyph every 48 hours. In the early days the prices varied between 9-15 gold per glyph but in the last couple of months they have had a 9g buyout price on all glyphs. In some ways this is discouraging; I know that glyphs will sell just as quickly for 25 gold, as indeed they have when this person has been late posting. On the other hand most would-be glyph entrepreneurs take a look at the glyph prices on my server and decide to do something else instead. Apart from myself there is only 1 other major seller in the glyph market and we came to an arrangement very early on. As I work shifts and am often on in the daytime I sell the bulk of my glyphs in the day and don’t bother posting at night. He sells most of his glyphs in the evenings and weekends. We let each other know when we’re not going to be around so that the other can stock up and take advantage having the whole market. To be honest, it would pretty much work this way without the agreement, but we save a lot of time and effort by not cross-posting, we’re both very happy with the income and it works well for us. When we had another competitor a few months back we were able to join forces and set a wall of 7 gold/glyph. To be honest I didn’t mind a 3rd seller on the scene, there was room for them to be selling in the day whilst I was working but they played havoc with the already low glyph prices by undercutting to the nearest gold and only seemed interested in all the market or none of it. So they ended up with none of it!

As my confidence and my bank balance grew I started to expand. All the time I was selling glyphs I had started watching other markets and now sell flasks, eternal belt buckles, leg armours and netherweave bags; I also dabble in epic gems. When 3.3 hit I had 40K in my guild bank. I had stockpiled my raw epics gems and, more by luck than judgement, had almost a full bank tab of flasks on hand. In a week I had banked another 80K and that was when I started to think about trying for the gold cap. As it turns out I haven’t really had to try, I have just carried on doing what I have been doing and it feels like it happened all on it’s own.

From here there aren’t really any other goals. I plan to carry on selling glyphs but will gradually wind down my other markets. I still have 1 character to get to level 80 (currently sitting at level 73) and I have at least 3 characters I need to finish questing in Northrend with. That should also bring in a fair bit of gold. I will also be looking towards the expansion and maybe stocking up on things I think will sell well when it’s finally released.