Time Is Money Friend

9.07am

Thankfully I have a day off as I fear this will be another long post. This again is a post based around a comment made against yesterdays post

 Anonymous said...

Breevok - I guess the overriding question here is how much you value your time. Care to answer?

 Of course I care to answer. But this isnt an easy question to answer, not simply anyway


9.14am

I play World of Warcraft a lot. I've played since April 2008, which means for three years I have wandered around the fantasy world of Azeroth doing a variety of things - mostly leveling and raiding and killing stuff, but also a lot of time making gold. I actually dont want to think about how much time I've spent milling herbs, DEing items, making bags, scanning the AH, organising glyphs and so on.

I have 10 toons on Caelestrasz. I actively play three toons (Sardonica, Puraa and Funds), my DK gets to come out occasionally and my Rogue is very very slowly being levelled in between transmutes. Of the remaining five - three are used to sell glyphs and the last two (which includes Breevok herself) are sat in AHs selling a variety of wares.

My wealth as of this morning is a little over 680k.

Since I have been playing WoW, other pastimes have fallen by the wayside. I watch far less TV than I used to. In fact we disconnected SKY (satellite) TV about a year ago because we didnt feel we were getting bang for our buck. WoW is my hobby, its what I do in my free spare time between work, chores, and sleep. Some people play sport. Some people read. Some people collect stamps. I play World of Warcraft.

Therefore if the question we are addressing is how much is my time worth, we have to look at real life as well as WoW life to be able to answer that question.

9.26am - takes a break to roll a smoke, scan the AH and make a coffee

9.30am

That scan didnt run completely because of the Auctioneer issues, I will wait 15 minutes and run it again. Meanwhile I am manually running a snatch scan. All in all this will take around 10 mins. No doubt I will make some purchases - but the amount is unknown at this point. Perhaps someone just dumped a load of gems on the AH for cheap. Perhaps some just ran a dissenchant scan and purchased everything. Perhaps I'll get lucky and find a Haunted Memento for 100g or perhaps someone just bought it.

The thing here is that the scan will take the same amount of time - 10 minutes spent with the outcome unknown. But everyone screams that my time must have a value so I press on to find an answer

9.37am

The Puraa situation was the example that I used to demonstrate how Blackfallow Inks can be made for free.

To mill 10 stacks of whiptail takes time. 40 mills takes 40 seconds, 8 infernos take 16 seconds to make, 60 blackfallow take 120 seconds.It should take just under three minutes to do

But these are theorical times, it doesnt consider the time it takes to click yes with my auto mill request and so on. I need to know how long it actually takes if all I do is mill 10 stacks of whiptail. So this is what I will do...

9.42am - leaves to send 10 stacks of herbs to Puraa, and then time how long it takes to get from herb to ink

9.51am

OK I'm back. I ran the stopwatch the moment I started collecting the whiptail from the mail box and stopped it when the last blackfallow ink was made. I made 10 inferno inks and 56 blackfallow inks. The total time taken was 5 minutes and 2 seconds.

The longest part of those five minutes was the making the BFIs. That took 1 minute and 52 seconds. I actually left my keyboard and went to the loo during that time. I also rolled a smoke.

Oops one second please - one of my cats just threw up. I must clean it up before it stains the carpet.

9.55am - wanders off to clean up cat puke

9.59am

Sorry I am back. The carpet is clean. And after putting the cloth in the laundry I thought I might as well put some of the dishes in to soak. I didnt do the dishes last night so its a job I have to do today. But because the food on the plates has dried, its easier for me to let them soak for a while as this will make the job easier when I go back to it later.

Doing that with the dishes is like going afk when making inks. Of the 5 minutes I spent milling the 10 stacks of herbs, I spent a chunk of the time not actually doing anything. I waited for the next 'yes' confirmation to occur and so on. For nearly 40% of the time I was actually in the bathroom.

So what time are we actually talking about here what everyone wants me to give a value to? The five minutes it took to mill the herbs or the 3 minutes I was actually staring at the screen whilst milling those herbs?

10.05am

Now lets presume for a moment that I have to say it took 5 minutes to mill those herbs. I am comfortable with that. But I was damn efficient doing that session of milling. No guildies are on, no guild chat to distract me. I'm not on vent, I'm not bitchslapping the latest troll in trade.

I honestly dont think that 5 minutes is a fair estimate. That would suggest I could mill 120 stacks of herb an hour - the reality would be closer to 80 in my opinion. That would mean that 10 stacks of herbs would really take (in normal circumstances) about seven and a half minutes to mill. Thats 50% longer than the most efficient method of milling.

But what if I milled those herbs whilst scanning the AH? We already know that its taking me about the same amount of time to scan the AH successfully as it does to mill the herbs. Doing two things at once obviously means I am better using my time doesnt it?

But what about the 15 minute wait I had for a BoT trash run last night? I sat and waited by the summoning stone whilst the group organiser found another healer. I had a load of items to DE in Sardonicas bags, but alas he was saved to BoT so I was on my hunter. Puraa didnt have any herbs to mill so I spent the time jumping off BoT to see whether she could land in the fire pools and thus live.

The answer was that I failed 5 times - and incurred a 10% damage to my gear each time I died. That cost around 50g in repairs. But I did fish in the fire pools a couple of times and fished up 7 volatile fire. In 15 minutes I made about 20g. How inefficient of me!

Also how annoying - I wasted 15 minutes when I could have been DEing or milling or scanning!

10.15am

I have mentioned this over and over - glyphs are a massively time consuming business to be in. The time it takes to mill herbs and craft the glyphs is excessive. Add on this the time it takes to do stock control, to post the glyphs and so does mean its probably most time intensive business to be in.

But the 'shuffle' is also time consuming. Prospect ore, cut gems, make jewelry, DE, vendor, list mats/blues. It all takes time. When I bought out a player recently I ended up with over 5000 common cata gems I had to work through. That took a long time. 1000 blues to cut and vendor, 4000+ others to turn in items, the vast majority which had to be DEd. It took hours. Then there was the time it took to list the items for sale. The relisting times. And then I did send some to the horde side, so there was time spent to organise a couple of  Neutral AH exchanges

The outcome was profit. Probably about 30-40k profit for 50k invested. For the amount I've made I could estimate that I made about 2-3000g an hour from that venture.

But again I wasn't efficient. If I've been efficient I wouldnt have gone and run heroics or raids whilst there were gems to be used up. I'd have left trade, guildchat and all the other distractions. And I would have been scanning the AH at the same time. Or perhaps headed off into the wilds to lower my ping rate to speed up everything

10.25am - put this post aside for a while to gather my thoughts

10.47am

Linda Evangelista once said "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day". I fear the same sense of self importance is driving the comments that demand to know what I value my time at.

I don't actually know what kind of answer they want. Do they want a specific gold/hour value? Would they snicker if I said I made 200g/hour DEing items this morning?

I actually thought I covered the gold/hour argument yesterday. Oh hang on a moment...

10.51am - wanders off to DE 32 Jasper rings and start another making another 35

10.55am

When Cata had just been released I remember making 100 Mysterious Fortune cards for Wek, a friend of Foos. He supplied the inks and the parchment, I just set the job going and sat back.

If I remember rightly it took 5 minutes to make the cards. I was paid 200g for my trouble.

If I'd done it that for an hour I would have a income of 2400g/hour. If I'd done that all day I would have made over 57k. But I didnt - I did it for five minutes and made 200g.

I guess people are wondering whether I would have made the cards for less than 200g? Would I have made them for 100g? 50g? 5g?

Its a valid question, and one that I can't answer. For a guildie I'd have made them for free. For Wek, who knows - depends on my mood but I would have accepted less than 200g for the job. But from a different perspective I was in Stormwind at the time. If I'd been running an instance I wouldnt have left to make the cards - not for Wek nor for a guildie.And no doubt if I hadnt been available there and then Wek would have found someone else to make the cards for him, and I would have made nothing.

When I do something the entire circumstances must be considered. Where am I? What am I doing? Everything must be considered, not just the amount of gold involved.


11.03am - back to DEing Jasper Rings

11.07am

Last night I got the 'Alone in the Darkness' achievement. This was the last achievement I needed to get the "Glory of the Ulduar Raider" achievement and my rusty proto-drake. We also got the guild achievement for Yogg/Zero Keepers. I made no money during the time were did the run bar the loot from the bosses.

I didnt do the run for gold. I did it because I wanted to kill Yogg with no keepers. I wanted the achievements. I wanted the mount.

Whilst I was there a got a message that a Blood of the Mountain sold on the AH. I had picked it up from the AH about 10 days ago for 20g. After AH fees I received a little over 600g. 580g gold profit.

Now I struggle to work out how much my time is worth for this sale. It took 10 days to make 580g.

So thats 580g in 240 hours. Thats 2.4g/hour

Or am I getting this wrong? It took me 2 seconds to buy the Blood. I listed it 5 times, lets say it took 10 seconds each time to collect from mailbox and list it. All in 52 seconds. So 580g in 52 seconds! Thats over 40000g/hour! Awesome!

So which is the correct answer? 2.4g/hour or 40k/hour?

11.17am

I think I have said enough. I started this post at 9.07am this morning. 130 minutes later I am drawing this to a close. But actually the time I have sat here typing is far less. 77 minutes in fact. So how long has this post taken to write?

The blog is a case in point. I spend a lot of time writing these posts. Yesterdays post was close to 4000 words, then there is a time to make the graphs, find the pictures, proof read, remove whatever typos I make, remove the typos that Cat discoveres later in the day. It all adds up.

And I make no gold whilst I am writing posts. Generally I write them during my lunch break at work, but occasionally in the evenings and on the weekend. Its time I could be better using to make gold surely?

But thats my point - WoW is a hobby. Writing the blog is a hobby. I use my spare time to do it and rest assured I do a lot more in game than just make gold. I cannot give a gold value for how much my time is worth - and any reader that thinks they can probably needs to have a reality check.

I can not guarantee that if I sit down to make gold that I will make a specific amount in a specific time. I do not say to myself, "Breevok you only made 100g in that hour - you're a failure and need to delete your toons."

What I can say is that I check Auditor regularly. I aim to increase my wealth by at least 5000 gold a day. Some days I not meet this, other days I smash through and make thousands more. I try to remove the big purchases from my calculations - if I spend 10k on a epic but have still made 5k profit from my gold making ventures I am happy.

I play wow on average about 8 hours a day (more on weekends obviously) - so I guess if I must give a figure I expect to make around 600g/hour of playtime.

But this is very very different to making 600g/hour

11.37am

The post has been proof read and a couple of pics added to break up the text. I hope that people can accept I dont feel I can give my time a specific value. Its my time. Its recreational. Its time I spend relaxing. To me it is free time.

Of course I would not spend hours and hours on a gold making venture to purposely lose money. That would be stupid, and I am not a stupid person. But I will invest time in new ventures only to give them up when they don't feel like the returns will be worth the investment.

Glyphs are a good final example - Moonvengence returned and killed the market. He has now disappeared again. Glyphs are selling for 150+g again and I have returned to posting. There are still a couple of other players in the field, Ariob/t/s and Nevica - and it may be that one of those will crash the market as well. If they do I walk away until they've blown themselves out and then return again.

The thing with the glyphs is that I dont have much time invested in them on a current day to day basis. All the time investment was made over the past months and years. I have stocks of inks and glyphs. No milling is required for quite a while, and restocking glyphs (if I decide to) only takes an hour.

But a lot of time was invested. How I am meant to calculate a gold/hour figure when I have no idea what the future brings I cannot fathom. During glyphmas I made 20k an hour. During the glyphwarms of 2009 I made far far less. Which period of my glyph business did you want me to give an estimate for? Which part of my wow life did you want a gold/hour figure for?

11.50am - Posted