Guest Post: The Green Hills of Stranglethorn Vale

Posted by admin on 04 2nd, 2009

Categories: Featured Articles | no responses

Author: Jacob Perhaps you’re a low level character with only a few gold in your bags? You don’t have a high level character to do dailies, farm, craft those high-end objects? Most gold-making ideas are aimed at high-end players, but there are plenty of ways to make gold even at the lower levels, and even without a ton of starting capital. The well-known methods involve buying and reselling first aid manuals or vanity pets. Today I want to talk about a new idea that has worked very well for me recently, and will likely work well for you. The Green Hills of Stranglethorn Vale If you’ve played the game long enough, you know this topic already. If not, let me explain: there is a region called Stranglethorn Vale, a vast area in the south of the Eastern Kingdoms. The zone is for mid-level players from about level 30 to about level 44. One quest there requires you obtain 15 pages of a book called “The Green Hills of Stranglethorn Vale” and turn them in. Most players hate this quest with a passion because the pages are random drops, you never get the ones you need, and they take up a ton of bag space. So players often skip this quest. Those who don’t skip it, spend way too much time trying to find the missing pages. In order to complete the quest, you need pages 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27. Fifteen of them, and they aren’t numbered sequentially. What a pain! Players will often try to find the pages they need in zone-wide chat, or they will go to the AH and look there. Many players will have tons of duplicate pages they don’t need, and will put these up for auction at anywhere from a few silver to 1g. Here’s where you come in. You may be too low to even go to Stranglethorn Vale, but you can still get involved in the market. The Idea Start collecting pages. Pages of the same number DO stack, so buy them for some low price (25 silver is a good target) and start making collections. Once you have a full collection, start selling them as a full set, and you will make a huge profit. Who are your buyers? If you answered “people working on this quest” you got it wrong. Those people don’t have much money. Your buyers, ironically, are rich level 80s who can’t even benefit from the XP or the quest reward from turning in the collected pages. There are two reasons they will buy your collections: (1) They have an alt who can get instant XP from the turn in, or (2) They want the achievement. Those Crazy Achievement Hounds The achievement system, introduced in patch 3.0.2, was a stroke of brilliance (although stolen from another MMO, but I digress). It created a vast array of new objectives for bored players. Some players ignored them, but many many players have made it a priority to try and amass achievement points. One achievement is called Hemet Nessingwary: The Collected Quests (http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=941) and it requires that you have three other achievements done. Two of these are likely to have been completed by most level 80s, but the last one requires they have collected those pages. So that’s your market. How to Cash In Once you get a complete set of pages, spam trade with a macro that links the achievement: /script CreateMacro(”STV”, 6, “/2 Need to finish up [Hemet Nessingwary: The Collected Quests]? Selling complete set of STV pages, 25g; pst”, 1, 0); In the above, you need to link the achievement; you can find it under your achievements tab. Make sure you put the link in your ad for maximum attention-grabbing potential. Also, you can play with the selling price… maybe start higher and go down if you’re not getting any bites. My Experience I decided to test my idea. I collected 20 full sets of pages with an average cost of 4g per set. I spammed the above macro 3 times in 5 minutes, then logged out for an hour. Each time I advertised, I sold between 1 and 3 sets. Every time I sold a set, it was to a level 80 player, and about 30% requested CoD, which I did. Many were amazed that I was selling for only 25g, so you could probably get more. 25g is very little money to most level 80s, and they would rather earn 25g in 10 minutes doing 2 dailies than farm for those pages for an hour. Scanning the AH for pages, and staying organized was probably less than an hour of time in total. Selling was probably another hour. So in all, I made 400g in about two hours without ever leaving a city, and this was on a level 1 who had less than 100g to begin with.

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