Saturday, July 14, 2012

Two Character Glyph Operation


When moving items to and from guild banks started to break addons, and when those addons adjusted, it was still horribly slow, I decided I needed to change the way I ran my glyph operation. Storing my glyph stockpile in a guild bank, when I needed them every day for my posting cycle was slowing me down and causing me some frustration. As I thought about moving glyphs across to extra characters, I came across Stede's Guide: Optimizing Glyph Operations on a Single Toon over at the consortium forums, and went to work applying those principles to a full service glyph operation.

Go read it now.

By full service glyph operation, I mean I offer every available glyph to my server through the auction house (well I can say that now). I really like the idea of crafting not just for profit, but as a service to my server. In return for a reasonable mark up, and a lucrative income over time, I keep the auction house stocked with glyphs. ALL the glyphs. I'm not kidding myself that I do it alone. I get a lot of help from my competitors. However, if for some reason, [Glyph of Void Walker] actually manages to sell out or be absent from the auction house, I want to automatically post some the next time I post glyphs. On Dath'remar(A) everyone should be able to lob up to the auction house and get the glyphs they need, day or night.

Since my operation is a full service operation, I post my glyphs for 48 hours and never cancel (well only when I'm doing a reset, but I post back straight after). That way as I get undercut, I layer the market with glyphs, providing enough glyphs in cooperation with my competitors to meet demand.

Hopefully that is a reasonable rationale for avoiding trimming the fat for efficiency and instead attempting to make the most efficient operation across the minimum number of characters.

So I took my glyph performance analysis from my own sales, and set up two separate TSM auctioning groups, one for Twitchie and one for a posting alt.

Twitchie reserves 252 slots in his bank (7x [Royal Scribe's Satchel]) and performs two separate posts. I use BankStack over Dumpster purely because it was what I was already using. I first grab the bottom 4 glyph bags worth of glyphs and post. Then I run back to the bank and swap them for the top 3 bags worth and post again. Sometimes, just for fun I use my warlock summoning portal and Soulburn to make the trip faster and more exciting (this is going to rock in MoP).

One of the many beauties of TSM is that you can auto mail based on auctioning groups. My glyph posting alt reserves 108 bag slots (3 x [Royal Scribe's Satchel]) for glyphs and was able to grab the initial influx of glyphs out of the mail as fast as Twitchie could send them.



Having a character just dedicated to posting glyphs, means the character can stand right on top of the auctioneer and perform a posting cycle as fast as it takes to log in, post and log out again. With my alt having the worst performing glyphs, I lose little business if I decide I don't have the time or energy to log on to her each day.

So that describes the posting side of the operation, with thanks to some inspiration from Stede and a whole crap ton of [Royal Scribe's Satchel]s from Moordenar, my favourite rogue.

For the supply side, Twtichie does most of the heavy lifting. I purchase herbs as fast as my price threshold allows, and mail them over to Twitchie. Twitchie then 'sponsors' our television and movie viewing as subtly as possible while milling herbs and crafting inks. Sometimes, if he is too intrusive, Twitchie Enterprises resorts to bribery in addition to sponsorship and might take a back seat when we watch something romantic.

I use 3 guild bank tabs in Twitchie's exclusive guild that is home to some of our 'quiet time' alts. One tab is for darkmoon cards, volatile life, inferno ink and anything else BoE that is handy to have on hand. The other two guild bank tabs are reserved for herbs, pigments and inks as I work through processing them, mostly afk. I have 3 regular bags in my backpack that I exchange for 3 inscription bags to store batches of herbs for milling. When I have a full guild bank tab of blackfallow ink, I'll have a bulk crafting session for glyphs and add them to the stockpile across two toons for posting. For bulk crafting glyphs I use TSM crafting with the following settings:
  • Minimum Profit Method: Gold Amount
  • Min Restock Quantity: 4
  • Max Restock Quantity: 17
  • Minimum Profit (in gold): 12g
Once I have traded my inks and start to hit the 'Craft Next' macro I've keybound, I manually scan the list to add any extra glyphs to the queue, and the rest can be done while sipping coffee and browsing the interwebz.

Spreading my glyph operation across two characters has allowed me to craft and post efficiently, while avoiding the guild bank for my glyph stockpile that I post regularly.

1 comment:

  1. I have two accounts, two pc's.
    I craft horde side and do ok.
    But most of my glyph sales are alliance side, second account second computer.
    What is your favorite way to find out that you need to craft more glyphs on an account without an inscriptionist on the whole acccount and hence the whole computer.
    I have been using AuctionDB on TSM but it is not as good as quick auctions/zeroauctions was because TSM you must have a crafter to analyze what glyphs to make.

    There is more gold in incription then all other professions combined,,but also the same amount of work comparable to the profits :\

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