Interesting Statistics
Total gold earned: 10,560,78g
Total weeks: 59
Gold Per hour: 34,288g
Gold per week: 178,996g
Gold per hour in Legion: 56,090g
Gold per hour in BfA: 27,178g
Total sales BfA: 32,170,064g
Total sales Legion: 19,729,100g
Total sales: 51,899,146g
A quick note on the stats. Since I spend a lot of time logged into both accounts at the same time it’s a bit hard to figure out exactly how much time I spent just from /played. For gold per hour and other per hour calculations I will use the average value of my /played for the two accounts. I spent 279 hours logged in on A1 and 337 hours on A2 for an average of 308 hours.
As we can see my numbers were actually better in Legion than in BfA. This is caused by several factors, including the fact that the Legion numbers include an auction house that was in full swing in terms of having markets in stock. Deflation may also be a factor, but I think the major piece was all the stocking up I did in the beginning of BfA.
My sales in BfA have been much higher, but with a lower overall profit margin, probably because the BfA numbers include the full cost of all my BoEs, whereas I already entered the challenge in Legion with a decent stock in BoEs. My sales per hour /played (measured in gold) are actually quite similar for both expansions, with a higher amount of /played since BfA launched.
If we compare my Auction House value to my total liquid gold as above we see that large decreases in AH value typically coincided with large increases in my total gold. We can also see that after spending a lot of gold my AH value increased by a lot. More stuff on the AH means more sales.
Sales
Next up we can compare my weekly sales to my auction house value. Once again we see that the two seem correlated. If we calculate the correlation it is 0.49 which is significant. Larger auction houses lead to larger sales, but the relationship is weaker than for gold spent. Some of this may be mispriced items, and some of it is the fact that single markets can be saturated. By this I mean that I may have posted more items than anyone will buy in a single posting cycle. Posting 100,000 herbs on the AH will probably not give you more sales than posting 10,000 herbs.
I exported my accounting data from the TSM app to look at which items brought in the most gold. What I could find easily is a sorted list of the items I have sold based on sales.
As you can see the list is topped by “?” which includes a lot of the Legion BoEs (most if not all of the 101 BoEs), as well as some items I have no idea what are. I’m assuming the switch from TSM3 to 4 screwed up some of the name to item ID logic. After that we can see I made 3.5 million gold selling
Baralho de Negraluna: Profundezas. Then we have a mix of BfA BoEs,
Baralho de Negraluna: Marés. Then in fifth we have a Legion BoE, the
Perneiras dos Espreitadores Zibelinos. Some other interesting items include three versions of the JC Panthers, as well as battle potions and
Obliterum further down the list.
High volume items can definitely bring in a lot of gold. Some cool items here include Masterful Argulites, which I’ve sold 382k worth of. The material I’ve sold most of is the Redtail Loach, and I’ve managed to sell Loaches worth a total off 263k gold since BfA launched.
Spreadsheet Update
Lazy Goldmaker is also known for putting together the famous profession spreadsheet that helps identify profits and markets to participate in on your server, with accurate pricing information and rank 3 considerations. He's recently updated it to version 1.2 to account for item variations and the new 8.1 Raid.
I just updated my BfA spreadsheet to version 1.2. This includes full support for the horde and alliance variations of the BfA items that have differences on both sides.
For those of you unfamiliar with the spreadsheet it will help you calculate the profitability of all BfA crafted items to make better gold making decisions. It utilizes the TSM API to get data automatically and you can input your recipe ranks to get the correct crafting cost. There's an excel version and a google sheets version. Keep in mind that you have to make a copy to edit the google sheets version as the master version is locked for editing by anyone other than me for obvious reasons.
You can always find the links to the latest versions on my blog at:
https://thelazygoldmaker.com/battle-for-azeroth-spreadsheet