Michaleo
I recently noticed that my scholar had accumulated over 1,000g!
How I started
My scholar is on a separate f2p account (technically, no longer f2p because of the free trial of VIP a year ago, but in the 2-1/2 years I've had her, I haven't spent any real world money on her). Quite a while ago, she used TP to eliminate the (2g!) currency cap and buy some auction slots. Besides the TP she got levelling to the mid 20s, I did a one-day grind of a disposable alt for around 300 TP, and got 250 TP before HD launched for following @LOTROSupport! (I can afford to buy TP for my f2p accounts, but I like seeing what I can do without it).
Getting serious about selling
She had sold dye, bow chants, books, scrolls, excess recipes, etc. on occasion for a while. Initially, she had only 5 auction slots, then 10, and didn't do it every day. Black Dye is usually in demand. It is a crit result from the rust dye recipe, but can also be made using a guild recipe to make 5 per day from a single Pile of Ancient Iron Oxides.
When Update 13 launched, there was a new Steel Blue Dye. It could be made from a guild recipe, but needed Bluebell Bulbs, which were crit results from growing Bluebell Fields, and that recipe was a barter recipe from Fangorn. (It can now be bought for silver from an Expert Farmer NPC). Because few people wanted to spend their Fangorn Leaves in order to make dye, there was high demand for it. I decided to try making and selling it and Black Dye every day.
Initially, I sold dyes in stacks of 1, 2, and 4, and looked at what prices other people were selling at to set my price. This required more thinking than I wanted to do every day, so I settled on selling single dyes at the same price every day. I would adjust the price only occasionally.
My normal practice for selling things is to list them for 2 days at a reasonable buyout price, and to set the minimum to half that, like having a 50% off sale toward the end of the period. If things often don't sell or sell below the buyout price, I'll look at lowering the price. If there are other people that are actually selling (not just listing) items at a much higher price, I'll look at raising the price. I prefer to sell to people who want the items, not to people who will buy mine and resell them at a higher price. The goal is to sell things as fast as I make them on average, not to make a specific profit.
Since this is a separate account, I want to be able to login once a day, pick up the earnings and things that didn't sell, make whatever the guild recipes allow, and reload the auction house as quickly as possible.
Keeping track
By the time I decided to track what my scholar was earning, she already had about 50g. My VIP alts generally provide all the mats needed, although she keeps an eye out for the dye ingredients at reasonable prices on AH. Sometimes they are very expensive or not available, but often enough they are available for fair prices. Since the guild recipes only need one of the ingredient to make 5 dyes, they are very efficient. So the expenses for my scholar have been modest, just the vendor ingredients and the dye ingedients I need to buy if I don't get enough from my alts.
I haven't transferred any game gold to or from the scholar for over a year, so for about 8 months, it has just been growing. When I decided to just sell individual dyes, I spent TP on auction slots to bring the total to 20. For the past several months, I generally list 5 each of Black, White, Steel Blue and Walnut Brown dyes every day for 150s/300s. Most days most of them sell. If I see that there are a lot of a particular dye below my usual price, I list more of something else. The net result is that on many days I sell all 20, and most days I sell over a dozen.
[When I hear the gloom and doom about LOTRO dying, I'm reassured by how much dye-ing is going on! The thousands of dyes I've sold (and there are other sellers and other colours) over the past 8 months suggest that someone is still interested in the game!]
Expanding the market
I have sold a few other things on occasion. The only things besides dyes that have sold consistently are the top level Eorlingas Scrolls of Battle Lore and Warding Lore. The guild recipes let me make 10 of one or the other every three days. If Michaleo and Nodread don't need them and they don't sell on the kin auction, I'll sell them for 2.5g/5g for a stack of 10.
Slow and steady wins the race
The auction house doesn't exactly work like a store, but that's the way I've been treating it. I wanted a scheme that could produce reasonable rewards for minimal sustained effort, and that's what I think I have achieved. Not as exciting as selling a Blemished Symbol of the Elder King for 300g, but none of them have fallen into my lap. By selling a few golds' worth of dye every day, I can today afford to buy several of them!
by Michaleo on 2015-01-03 05:07:22