Playing the Wow auction house

[Low Key]

Very true..

I really wanted to stockpile loads of ore before the expansion came out, cuz I heard the jewelcrafting prof was going to need it for prospecting. I had a bunch saved up, but my friend wanted to learn mining, so I went ahead and let him smelt it all. STUPID!! I heard stacks of ore were going for like 20-80g. And that's just copper.

If the new expansion has a new profession, I'd try to think about what would be needed for it, and stockpile that. If not, yeah, I agree, stockpiling CR stuff isn't going to help, since most of the gear out there will probably be a heck of a lot better than the gear that exists now.

[Xhad]

[ QUOTE ]
If the new expansion has a new profession, I'd try to think about what would be needed for it, and stockpile that.

[/ QUOTE ]

http://www.wowwiki.com/Inscription

As to what to stockpile, I have no idea.

[Low Key]

Oh right, I do remember reading about that now.. Dalaran, in Northrend? I thought it was SW of UC? In the purple bubble?

[TheRempel]

One of the best ways to make [censored] of money in wow without having to start from a huge base amount is to use auctioneer over a couple of weeks to find out the average prices for various items on your server and manipulate the fairly lax AH rules to your advantage. There are tons of items in WoW (especially reagents) that can be combined into bigger items or broken down into smaller. Most of the stuff you get from disenchanting is like this. Greater Essences are made up of three Lesser Essences. The critical part is that the prices of the greater ones are generally not in parity with the smaller ones. Depending on their use, the smaller ones are usually 30-40% more expensive than the larger ones by volume, so I buy a lot of the bigger ones and break them down into smaller ones to resell. The same thing can be done in reverse with motes and primals, since people will often put motes of fire and such on the AH for 30s buyout when the actual value (when incorporated into a primal) can be 8x as much.

The benefit of selling stuff enchanters use is that none of the enchanting mats have AH fees so you can relist them over and over with no penalty if they don't sell.

About 50% of the gold I got for my epic flying training and mount for my main was buying Adamantite bars off the AH for 15-20g per stack, changing them into hardened Adamantite and reselling for 25-30g. All engineers require like 20 of the hardened bars to level up their engineering past 365 so there is always demand and they always sell within an hour of listing them.

Prior to the expansion I spent a lot of buying and reselling gear and such but the market went crazy for several months and I never went back to it. It seems like there's a lot more people willing to run outland instances over and over to get the gear they want so BOE stuff isn't nearly as valued as it was pre-expansion.

If you're willing to invest the time and have a level 70 character, fishing is a hugely under appreciated moneymaker. I don't remember how long exactly it took to get to 300 fishing pre-expansion but I think I spent about eight hours total to get from 300 to 375 fishing. I spend a lot of time fishing in Nagrand since the food you can make from the various fishes there sell for 20g+ per stack plus I'll usually fish up 8-10 primal waters (20g each) in an hour.

When I actively play WoW (I'm on an extended break right now) I usually spend 4-5 hours a week getting gold and have more than enough for everything I need. It took me two weeks total of grinding two hours a day to get the 5200g for my epic flyer back in May.

[Low Key]

Dude, that's hot! If I get this paladin I'm trying to buy, you gotta tell me where and how. That's some serious bling!

As for fishing, you can make a boatload selling the crawdads, if you have a bunch of people on your server who just have to have their skill in cooking maxed. (Unless those added vendor recipes can max them) Plus the Golden Vendor Fish drops are always fun.. Just don't accidentally delete one. I wanted to cry. I know it's just 6g, but I was still very sad.

Earlier, I may have been thinking of Dolanaar?

[TheRempel]

No you were right, it's Dalaran.

is to move from its previous location in the Alterac Mountains to levitate at great height in the air north of the Dragonblight in Northrend. It will act as the neutral sanctuary city for the continent, similar to Shattrath City in Outland, under the guidance of Rhonin and the Kirin Tor. The Kirin Tor are responsible for the move, but the exact method is unknown - it is likely to be either by teleportation or transportation. It can be accessed by either foot or flying mount.[8] However, as with Shattrath, there will be no class trainers or auction houses.[9] The effect on the current location of Dalaran is unknown.

The crawdads are great but the last few months they've been massively overfished on my server, and since I already got three Mr.Pinchy's, I've moved on to Nagrand since it's almost always empty and the pools spawn more frequently. The only thing unique to the crawdad pools are the crawdads themselves. The vendorfish drop out of any outland pool. A few weeks ago I got three of them out of one pool!

Basically in Nagrand there's a large lake right above the Horde stronghold. Around this lake spawn about 15 different pools of bluefish or mudfish. Either of these I sell for 20g per stack cooked and I usually get four stacks an hour in total. On top of that, as long as you are continually fishing the pools they will eventually turn into pure water pools, each of which will give you 3-5 motes of water.
The rivers on the other side of the Horde town leading away from the lake also have pools. Once you get a flying mount you can also fly north of the lake up onto the elemental plateau. It's a place that has small areas filled with various types of elementals, all of which drop the appropriate motes for their type at about a 48% drop rate. This area is farmed 100% of the time by gold farmers, and my main is a prot warrior, so I've never bothered with killing the elementals much. The main reason I go up there is there are 6 pools of pure water that spawn something like every forty-five minutes. No one else fishes them and when they are all up it usually means I get 2 or 3 primal waters (60-75g) in 10 minutes.

Usually when I decide to go fishing for a few hours I'll fly up to the elemental plateau first, check for pure water spawns, fish those all out, fly back down to the lake, grab any pure water spawns that are there then fish every other pool. Once that's all done I fly down the rivers, fishing all the pools as I go. A full circuit takes maybe forty five minutes total, and by the time I'm done on the river the pools in the elemental plateau have spawned or respawned and some of the pools on the lake will have turned into pure water. Other than sitting at the AH for hours buying greens and de'ing them endlessly, there's no easier way to make gold in WoW IMO.

[Blarg]

I enjoy playing the market in MMORPG's as much as the game itself. This thread got me nostalgic.

[Stellastarr]

I miss WoW.. =(

[Sykes]

A quick guide to making gold on WoW's AH:

First, like all things, to make money you must need to spend money. So you need a capital. I would start with ~1k gold (you can do 500 but you will make less).

While it is true that you can no longer send items to a "mule" to DE them, don't worry about it that much. There are plenty of enchanters that are willing to DE your items at a small fee. Also another point is, if you play on a heavily populated server, enchant materials are plentiful and cheap.

The new green items DE into two things: Arcane dust and Planar essence (sometimes lesser planar and sometimes greater planar (3x lesser = 1x greater)). Arcane dust usually sells around 1.5-2g (server may very). The only bad thing about this is that since there is so much arcane dust going around, it might be hard to unload for this price. Greater planar essence usually sell around for 4-5g (again server may very). These are always needed and usually are only found in DE'ed weapons, so there are less of these than arcane dust.

The blues DE into 2 different things based on the level on the blue. 60-64 level blues DE into small prismatic shards and 65-70 level blues DE into large prismatic shards. Again, 3 small prismatic shards = 1 large prismatic shard. These fluctuate wildly in value depending on how many there are on the AH. I have bought SPS for 4g and sold for 7-8g (and with no AH cost to put up, a nice profit). Avg price for SPS is usually 6g. LPS are plentiful since they are what you get whenever you DE a lvl 70 blue, and if you remember running instances with enchanters, they are free to shard them for you. Like SPS, LPS fluctuate in price widly as well depending on how many there are in AH. I have seen swings from 15-25g. This would be your #1 moneymaker in my opinion.

Another thing that sells really well with low auction house fees are primals. There are 6 of these primal. Primal Air, Primal Earth, Primal Fire, Primal Mana, Primal Life, Primal Shadow, and Primal Water. They are made from 10 motes of the primal that drop off mobs.

It's worth noting that Primal Earth is basically worthless to buy/sell since they are plentiful because a miner basically has half a primal whenever he mines a node.

Primal Shadow used to be worth nothing at all, since they dropped off demons, and if you ever leveled to 70, you'd know there a ton of demons in Outland. When I leveled to 70, I got 11 of these things in the process and all I was doing was quests. But times have changed. A few months ago, blizzard implemented a patch saying that mote of shadows will no longer drop off demons. That means they only drop off voidwalkers. So because of this, supply/demand when into stock and a 40silver item became a 15gold item. Also it's worth to note how progressed your server is, because guilds in black temple will need a lot of Primal Shadows because they need to have 25 people with ~300 Shadow resist gear for Mother Shiraz fight and you need a lot of primal shadows for the gear.

Primal life will go for a little less than the other primals since herbalism can get them off mobs/nodes, but since it's used in so many healing enchants it's needed by a lot of healers. These can go anywhere from 8-13g.

Primal water goes for around 15-18g. Needed by warlocks/shadow priests for Frozen Shadowweave gear. Also needed for many enchants.

Primal mana go for around 12-15g. Used in spell damage enchants.

Primal fire go for anywhere from 15-25g, needed in the Spellfire set for mages/destrolocks.

Primal Air will be the most expensive primal. They go from 20-25g (sometimes even 30). The reason is that the mobs they drop from are sparse and heavily farmed.

Primals have an 24silver to put up on AH for 24 hours..

[Dazarath]

Here's what I've learned in my short time trading on the AH. Just a warning, I've only been doing this for the last week or two, but I've probably spent as much time trading as I did grinding. Also, I'm including trading in the trade channel along with trading on the AH. It's all the same to me.

First of all, get the add-on Auctioneer. Learn how to use it. Also, you can use Allakhazam.com and look up median AH prices on that site. Between those two tools, you should be able to get a good feel for what an item is worth. Auctioneer has a built in tool to scan for auctions below the market value. Of course, you don't want to just scan and then buy every item on the list. You need to eyeball the options and make good picks.

I try to pay attention to the trade volume of different items. This will determine how easily you are able to unload items after you buy them. It's just not worth it if you pick up an item for 1g but it takes you a week of "WTS xyz item" to unload it for 5g. I will categorize things below.

Green weapons/armor (tradability: low)
I personally think these are terrible. (These can be good to disenchant if you can get them low, but I'm just talking about straight trading here.) If you post them on the AH, it's so unlikely that someone is going to be looking for your specific item, so that basically means you have to sell it in the trade channel. I personally think this is a huge pain and I don't deal with these. Tried a few times, got stuck with [censored] items.

Blue weapons/armor (tradability: medium)
These are a little better, but you need to have some idea of which ones are good/bad. As an example, casters use cloth, so stats like intellect, and to a lesser degree spirit and stamina, are useful. I haven't played any of the fighting classes so I don't have that great idea of what amount of which stats are good. In general, I try to avoid these unless I can get an amazing deal, like < 25% market price, or if I know it's a high demand blue.

Purple weapons/armor (tradability: high)
These are the easiest to trade out of these 3. People want epics, and it's so much more likely that someone will do a scan of the AH for new purple gear, than blue, and moreso for blue than green.

Green recipes/books (tradability: low)
Don't bother.

Blue recipes/books (tradability: medium)
Some of the recipes are really high in demand (ie. fiery enchant, mongoose). I find that recipes < blue are not worthwhile, and even a lot of the blues are crap. The prices for the books (to teach spells) seem to fluctuate a lot and I've found that sometimes I can pick up something like Book: Gift of the Wild for 1g. But then it ends up taking me awhile to unload it, because 24h in the AH isn't always long enough, even if I'm listing it at 75% market price.

Purple recipes (tradability: low)
I've had a couple experiences with buying epic recipes for 500g that were supposedly worth 600-700g. My theory is that these are pretty rare, so if someone wants what you're selling, it's not going to matter to a rich 70 if it's 600g or 650g. You might not want to jump into these right away, as you'll find you can be stuck with them sometime. And it's hard to get a good estimate on the price. If you make one bad buy on a recipe that Allakhazam lists as 600g but it turns out you're server values it at 400g, you could be out a good amount of gold in the process, wiping all of your small 5-10g trades.

Goods used in crafting (tradability: high)
These include ore, cloth, dusts, essences, etc. In general, I'm not searching these for deals too much. It should be obvious that items with higher trade volume also tend to be more efficiently priced. I think if you get into this stuff, you'll find yourself nickel and diming for 1-2g at a time.

Cards (tradability: varies)
If you're going to buy/sell the cards (you know, the furies, blessings, warlords, etc cards), make sure you know which ones are good. I picked up the 2/3/4 of warlords (3 of each) at ~1g each, and I found myself having trouble unloading them for even a low price. On the other hand, the blessings cards are really in demand. I think these can be worthwhile if you're smart about it.

There are other items too, but I'm getting too lazy to list them all out. Basically, I look at the tradability of items. The higher it is, the lower profit margin I need to make it worth my time. If I see someone selling a stack of arcane dust for 12g, and I know I can immediately turn around and sell it on AH for 15g and it will be bought, then sure, I'll do it. On the other hand, if I can buy a lower traded item for 12g and eventually sell it for 15g after WTSing in the trade channel everyday for a week, forget it. You should look at your profit margins in nominal values rather than relative values. Making 50g on 200g purchase is obviously better than making 2g on a 2s purchase.

Items that you know people will search for, like dusts, ores, etc. Basically the high volume items. It's better to list these in AH. Much simpler on your part and you can dedicate your time elsewhere. Items with low trade volume should be sold in the trade channel.

Also, understand the idea of undercutting. Sorry, it's just a stupid joke I'll make because the kids who play WoW are sometimes way too young and stupid to understand the idea of basic supply and demand. I see people do this all the time: "Undercutting prices blah blah blah" and then I go take a look and I see 10 singles of item xyz for 10g and that guy's 5x stack for 60g. I was initially skeptical that an MMO which has been around for awhile would have such an inefficient market, but I was proven wrong very quickly after spending some time in the AH. In general, if I buy an item for 10g and I can sell it immediately for 17g or spend some time and squeeze 20g out of it, I will take the first option. You only have so much time/chat resources to spread among trading your different items, that instead of focusing on an extra 3g for this one, you could be focusing on acquiring a new item for 7g.

I'll post more if I think of anything, but I'm hoping that someone else will contribute their little tips/tricks that they've picked up during their playtime.