The capital cities in Azeroth are where you can find the auction houses. It’s here that the most potential for profit and loss in Warcraft exists. The reason is the variability in price that you will find in here. One day Mageroyal is 5 silver apiece, the next it’s 10.
So it’s the variations that give you the player the opportunity to make and lose Warcraft gold. Selling to the NPC vendors that are dotted around the place does not offer variability. The prices they charge and buy for are fixed. SO if you have uncommon loot or decent crafting materials then these NPC vendors will not offer the best return for your efforts
Playing the market in the auction house requires that you first do some research, and collect some data. You need to know if a bargain is as good as it seems, or if you could get more profit for the items you are selling.
To start with download the auctioneer add-on. Once installed, this tool will run a full scan of the auction house at the press of a button. Collecting the price for every item it finds and storing it. Early in the game just run the scan and get on with powerleveling, don’t bother playing the market yet
If you run this scan once a day (or once every two days) until you have run it about 10 times, you will have a good idea of what people are asking for certain items.
Auctioneer will record all the asking prices and then put a percentage against every item you see in the auction house. This percentage is a ratio of the average asking price that auctioneer has found. So 90% means that the item is priced 10% below the average. Whereas 110% means it is priced 10% above.
Using this information, you can make decisions on which items to trade in. Following the simple real-world rule of buy low, sell high.
There are some huge shortcomings with auctioneer in the long run though.
As I mentioned above, it records the asking price. Not the selling price, it doesn’t even know whether the item sold at all. People can ask whatever price they want at auction. If you’ve seen a piece of wool cloth or similar on for 10,000g (it happens all the time) then this figure will massively increase the average that Auctioneer thinks Wool cloth is worth. It won’t have sold of course (at least not to someone who was keeping within the ToS and actually wanted it) People do this to either move vast amount of gold around, or in the hope that someone accidentally clicks on the item and buys it. The result is the same. Auctioneer’s average asking price gets completely skewed with rogue data.
Another issue is the fact that the game changes all the time. Items are useful, and then a patch is issued that makes them worthless. Perhaps they were part of a crafting recipe that is no longer the best available. Or the stats for an item have been changed. Blizzard increase and decrease drop rates for items all the time. In a matter of days rare items become common and worth far less, or the opposite can happen. Auctioneer will not tell you this. If you have invested heavily in one or two items, a patch can wipe out loads of your profit of you don’t know what’s coming up
However, to start with auctioneer is a great tool. Install it and run the scan. It certainly isn’t the be-all-and-end-all tool for making gold in Warcraft, but it is a tool that, used properly and knowing the pitfalls, can help you along the way to becoming a World of Warcraft Gold Generator.
Do you want to dominate the Warcraft Gold market? The download our free guide. Visit Free WoW Guide Blog to download it. If you just want to comment on this or any other post visit the Warcraft Information Exchange