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  1. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by EasternKozak View Post
    I'm sure everyone already knows this but I'm just going to point this little obvious idea out. Get a lvl80 alt, get that alt to max in herbalism and mining, put everything on AH and you will be making money real fast.
    This varies server to server, I know on mine the time to gather vs. the profits is nil.

  2. #22
    I've started playing the AH very conservatively (and on a poor economy server), so I haven't turned a massive profit. But a trick I've learned is to keep an eye out for epics (particularly starter epics and bleeding-edge BoE's out of icc) that are notably underpriced. Though that's risky. I've been burned on rowan's rifle, but made a 700% profit on a pair of ilvl 200 epic boots. Go figure.

    Anyway, it's best to watch the 'hot' markets like flasks, frozen orbs, and gems, (esp if you have a JC). Keep an eye on these, learn them, and know when prices fluctuate and where they hover. Even small-scale stuff works well. Yesterday I bought a single Frozen orb because it was about 6g below normal sell price (around 24g). Reposted and pocketed an easy profit. You don't have to buy out and control an entire market to make money, though with 30k gold at your disposal, you could probably get away with it...

    Edit: enchanting mats are a decent market too, but except for abyss crystals, it's pretty flooded.

    Edit 2: Tarou has great guides for playing the AH and making some tidy profits. He'll surely enjoy a little plug:

    http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...check-this-out.
    Last edited by Domaplast; 2010-06-15 at 10:38 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Wafflesahhh View Post
    GC looks healthy and kipper in this interview. Look's like he's been taking his multivitamins. Good for him.

  3. #23
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    Saronite Shuffle is quite good
    Insert Signiture here.

  4. #24
    Skinning and mining has made me a truckload of gold on one of my alt servers. I don't have any mains, heirlooms or any help from anyone because it's a realm I didn't care to play at very often.

    I still manage to make hundreds of gold a day just by selling skins and ore. Sure, it's not playing the AH, but since I get them while leveling it's not any particular waste of time.

  5. #25
    I had 10k gold and lost in all trying to play the AH. Unless you are smarter than I am, (Which very well may be true, I am not that smart) then don't try it.

  6. #26
    On my realm a lot of people (try to) do this so the Auction House is quite a mess, many items have insane prices that no one with common sense will pay, mats cost a lot more than finished products and whatnot... Not to mention that no matter what you post, you will get undercut by at least 3-4 different people within 1 minute. /sigh

  7. #27
    Buy cheap materials. Make stuff. Profit.

    It's really that simple. You should do some calculations when you start though. Figure out what you want to buy the materials for and what you selling price will be at different material cost. "If I buy Frostweave at 0,X g and Infinite Dust at Y.z g then I can't sell Frostweave Bags for any less then ??".

    Undercut by 1 copper. Your not trying to make the item cheaper. You just want the coveted cheapest auction placement. Unless the item your trying to sell is overpriced if you have undercut the previous poster by 1c/1s or 1g isn't going to matter to the buyer.
    Also have a cheaper bid then buyout. When you sort auctions in the standard Auction interface you sort by cheapest BID not buyout.
    Don't get into undercutting wars at 4 in the morning. But you do want to undercut all your auctions at around 6 in the evening. I'd go so far as to say you are going to sell 80% of your auctions between six and midnight each day.

    Personally I prefer Quick Auction over Auctioneer when I post the stuff I post every day. Once you have set up the groups it's really quick just click post and off all my auctions go.

    Also always check for cheap Frozen Orbs. Frozo the Renowned want's all your Frozen Orbs. People still don't know about him it seems. Othervise why would anyone ever sell a Frozen Orb for less then a Eternal Life/Fire ?

    Keep an eye out for big stacks selling under market price because they are stacked, you have to know the market though. Simply buying a big stack and posting them 1 by 1 for market price can be fairly profitable. It might take a while to get rid of them but your in it for the long haul right.

    Always make the consumable you can make from your profession. Eternal Belt Buckle, Leg enchants from Tailoring and LW etc. The things people will always need. Gems is obviously very good. And watch the materials market. Once someone posts a lot of em cheap snatch them up.

    Be willing to wait markets out. Markets on my server crash regularly. If you can't sell something you have made for a profit.. Well then don't sell it until you can. If there are no cheap materials for the items you want to make. Well then you have to wait until there are.
    Or you can farm them yourself. Say you normally buy something for 15g and that with other mats makes an item you have a 100g profit on. Well if there simply aren't any of that item available all of a sudden farming it is worth 115g instead of the normal 15g.

  8. #28
    The best advice I can give for playing the AH is:

    1. Pick your markets. Don't just blindly run auctioneer scans and do whatever it says. Pick a few markets, learn them inside and out, and work with those.

    2. Have patience. Sometimes you'll notice certain items have gotten extremely cheap. It's usually because one or several people have flooded the market, or people are impatient, want their stuff to sell immediately, and undercut beyond a typical price to get their instant gold. When this happens, it's okay to buy them out, but be patient selling back. If the market has become flooded, don't go flooding it back yourself.

    3. Use your crafting professions. Mats can very often be cheaper than finished products. Make sure you're crafting items that have a reasonable demand. For example, the 245 BS bracers can sell pretty well on my server, but you wouldn't do well making the Holy Paladin bracers. Simply because the possible demand is limited to only.... Holy Paladins. The Titanium Spikeguards on the other hand are pure win.

    4. Plan ahead. If you know you'll need something in the future, don't wait until you need it to buy it. Look for the item ahead of time, buy when it's really cheap, and hold until you need it. Personally, I've found uncut gems to be very cheap over the weekends. I typically buy stacks of them, and sell them off slowly over the next week.

    TL;DR: Be focused on a few markets, be patient, and have enough capital to be able to do so.
    Last edited by Garil; 2010-06-17 at 06:54 AM.

  9. #29
    I have recently found a new way of making gold. I expect to cop some flaming but if you think about it. Its really not that bad.
    Now my server recently has had a lot of a hackings not sure if it is all servers but mine it seems to happen all the time.

    Gold sellers are picking up their game and are now advertising items in trade chat rather than just vendoring.

    What i do is buy everything that the gold seller is selling they usually ask for around 85% of the AH price, but if u put in about 50% they usually take it.
    After i have bought all these items off the unfortunate person being hacked i send the person some in game mail. Saying that i have bought their items and i offer to let them buy them back at the same price that i bought it i also say that if this PM isn't responded to in 10 days i will sell all the goods on the AH.
    OFC i do give them sometime to get the gold together after they have responded to me.

    Most of the time i get a response back that blizzard is restoring their items and that i can keep them =P PROFIT.
    Other times people ask for their items back (they are greedy no doubt blizzard is restoring them)but its fine being hacked is the worst so i dont really mind.

    Hackers are usually on around 4 server and im an aussie playin on a US server so its not like i have to wake up outside my normal hours.

    Now i know some of you are going to flame me but think about it. Its not like im just doing it and keeping it always i offer the items back to the owner. And if i can make a a few k gold a day from ripping off some hacked accounts which will get their items restored who is really getting hurt.

  10. #30
    I'll try to explain with my bad english my first day "playing" with the auction house.

    I bought 3 stacks of titan bars for 145g each. And then i tryed to buy them for 17g each. My price was the cheapest, and this morning when i check the auction house i see about 40? 60? bars for 15g each, then i think i lost 500g trying to play with the auction house...

    And thats my experience.

  11. #31
    Also beware of Deposit costs. It will affect how much profit margin you need.

    Fex Eternal's cost 9s to put up for 12 hours. So you'd only need to have a few g profit margin on them. However a epic gem cost 1g35s to put up for 12 hours. So you'd need 10g+ profit margin to make sure you actually make money off them.

  12. #32
    Enchanting scrolls are the best way to make money. I've figured out which ones are in high demand on my server and make them accordingly. Sometimes I have to sit on my scrolls due to market floods and sometimes I will buy scrolls that are below average cost. The nice thing about scrolls is that there is no deposit for scrolls, so even if the auction ends, you've lost no money.

    Also, having an enchanter is a great way to DE all the greens that you get. Disenchant them and make some easy gold. I will also do mass DE's for people and usually get between 50 to 100 gold for my service.

    Mongoose is one of the easiest BC patterns to get, and they always sell well.

    I'm leveling up a JC at the moment, I've heard good things about epic gems.... We shall see.

  13. #33
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    They're are alot of ways to 'play the ah', but you really need alot of time if you really really wanna 'own' it. There is only a handfull of players on each realm that actually are playing the ah. You want to scan the AH about 2 times a day, and just let it scan when you're tabbed out of wow. See what items have a good balance looking at their price, if the price drops every 1 day with -25 or +25 g its a big risk you take, so make sure you know what items have a stable price.

    I dont got alot of time so what i do is buy uncutted gems and cut them myself and sell them. usually 33% to 50% profit and I sell alot of primordial saronite. I raid 25man each week 11/12, so that gives me shitload of badges, also run icc10 on the same char and icc10 on 2 alt chars. Those sell for about 700G atm, and the prices are dropping every day with a couple of gold, but since they're more like a bonus, because i raid for fun/items, i dont waste any times farming them emblems which is a good profit tbh =)

    Another thing to look out for is stacked items, sometimes someone puts a stack on the ah of some kind of flask, food, ores, w/e you name it, for not to much gold, calculate how much it is per item and check the actual price per item on the ah Be quick tho, because there are many other people looking for those kind of 'deals' :P

    Nimryas - EU-Kazzak ~ My youtube channel

  14. #34
    All I do to make money from the AH is farm SM, Strat, and Alcatraz for their cloth. Turn that into belts which I then DE to enchanting mats which cost nothing to place on the AH
    You can then place 20 every evening around 7 server time and get around 500g a day. The cloth drop from those instances is high enough for you to establish a weeks stock from about 2 or 3 runs each.

    Then with the money I make from the AH I spend half on buying cheap ores that when prospected can make more money, main killer it iron ore and adamantine ore. This can bring back around 200-700g a day.

    Then you also sometimes get epic drops in the low level instances that are BoE which if sold patiently, can be sold for extortionate amounts. Such as a level 50 (ish) Skullflame Shield selling for 2k gold

    If you want to make even more money, you can charge ppl for boosts in these instances and reserve the cloth for yourself I have boosted a guy who was leveling a char to 60 to sell for 300g per run of strath and he didnt loot a single item!

  15. #35
    A few simple things I've done to make the AH useful for me, is selling all my white item crap there. Obviously you vendor your gray items (or get an addon to do it for you - Scrap), but I noticed that all my friends were vendoring their white items as well - potions, food, drinks, etc. One weekend, I played 4 alts from level 1-15 (this was back in the early stages of BC while I was waiting on more guildies to hit 70 so we could start raiding) and put all the white items they collected into the AH. This didn't include any ore, herbs, or leather. That one weekend I made a little over 500g, and if I had vendored the items I would have made less than 5g.

    You obviously aren't going to make a ton of money doing this, but almost all the items will sell and it's easy to put them up w/ Auctioneer. Now that I've got Auctioneer set up for it, vendoring the items is just throwing away money.

    Another way to make (really) small profits on the AH with absolutely no risk is to scan for items being sold for less than they vendor. It's been awhile since I've done it, but there's a setting on Auctioneer that will search for these items, and you can tell it what the minimum profit you want to make from the transaction is. The profits are really low, but the process is pretty quick and painless and something that I do when I just want to log in and chat w/ friends.


    Of course, if you really want to make money then you'll listen to everyone else here and either farm and sell ore / herbs, or you'll make yourself a JC, Inscriptor (Inscriptionist? Inscriptioner?) and Enchanter. Their wares are always in demand and have low deposit costs and overhead.
    Quote Originally Posted by nzall
    that is a moment where even /headdesk does not quite cut it. i promptly proceeded to /bodywall.

  16. #36
    I don`t care much about how much gold i can spare. As long as I have what i need to train, buy pots and supplies and travel, I`m happy. Besides, if you REALY need cahs, farming or doing all you`re daylies is a lot safer.

  17. #37
    Subscribe to and follow http://www.wow.com/category/gold-capped/.

    The very most basic of gold capping is buying something on a Friday, and crafting it into something people need on a Tuesday. Example: buy 8 cardinal rubies at 70g each on Friday. Sell them as Fractured Cardinal Rubies for 200g each on Tuesday.

    Don't go for big numbers. Look for small, constant streams of income. Try to connect with a gatherer (an herbalist or miner) and set up an arrangement to have them COD them whatever they get. You can secure a constant flow of goods at a low price, and they don't have to worry about waiting for herbs/ore to sell.

    That's basically it. The rest is just specific applications of that.

  18. #38
    Quote Originally Posted by Garil View Post
    The best advice I can give for playing the AH is:

    TL;DR: Be focused on a few markets, be patient, and have enough capital to be able to do so.
    This is the bulk of it right there. About all I have to add is:

    1) Know your tools. Quick Auctions is great when you've got categories of items that you sell for the same price range in the same quantities (I've got a QA category for all 6 colors of epic gems, for example). Auctioneer is more useful if you're not always handling the same inventory, or you've got a lot of different items that don't have any correlation in pricing. For example, I don't care which gem cuts sell for more if I've got a good supply of the uncut gems, I only care about which ones I can sell for a profit, and Quick Auctions handles that better.

    2) Know your markets, especially normal price variation cycles. Don't just blindly assume that Tuesday is the best time to sell, Friday the best to buy, there are exceptions. Even within the same category, I'll post some items on a short duration, because I expect to be undercut rapidly, and others for longer durations, because I don't expect to be undercut or I don't care if I am. Also have an idea of the volumes of the various markets. At least once every other month on my server, someone thinks that they can monopolize the northern spice market. The longest anyone has taken to give up on that was just over 24 hours, when he realized that in order to maintain his monopoly, in the first 24 hours, he had already bought more spice than he'd be able to sell in a month.

    2a) watch trends in the market. The profitable price you picked up cardinal rubies for two weeks ago may not be a good price any more. On my server, uncut gems do tend to trend downward, but they do so in cycles. It seems that a lot of people are picking one color uncut gem to trade in honor/emblems for for a week or two, glutting the market, then when they realize they've done so, they switch to a different gem. I buy weeks worth of gems during the gluts, and then coast for as long as I can.

    3) Keep up on patch notes/betas/PTRs and such, and know which changes will impact your market. I had a friend who was heavily invested in epic gems in BC that got wiped out when WotLK started because he didn't follow the expansion beta and didn't realize that the cheapest LK gems were going to be better than even BC epic ones. On the other hand, I've had friends that made quite a bit speculating on price changes because of changes in crafting mats, drop rates, etc.

    4) Don't expect to spend 5 minutes a day making your fortune at this point. If there's a profit to be made, you will get undercut, unless you've got a stranglehold on the supply, and the more the profit, the faster you'll be undercut. This may change when the expansion hits, as it will take time for people to get all the different JC cuts, which will reduce your competition if you chose which cuts to start with carefully.

    5) This all extends beyond the AH. When leveling, make sure you have the biggest available bags, pick up everything, and get an addon to automatically sell grey items. Half of my first epic flight training was paid for by vendoring the grey items I picked up leveling from 60 to 70 on that toon (yes, I had an addon that tracked that). I chew out friends that select DE on lvl 80 blue weapons, as I have yet to see one that doesn't vendor for twice what the shard will go for most days.

    6) Keep your net profit in mind. If you're blindly undercutting someone else, it's easy to lose money. And remember, the cost of what you paid for the mats isn't necessarily what you should base your net profit on. If you could have sold the materials to make a crafted item for more than the crafted item in the same timeframe, then selling the crafted item was a bad move, no matter how much you made. Though technically, the bad move was crafting the item.

    7) I'll disagree with the undercut by 1c rule mentioned, especially if there's a fair bit of competition. First, there's a small, but growing movement of people (on my server at least) that consider it a bogus move, and will deliberately buy the item that costs 1c more. As it was put to me, it's worth the 1c just to imagine the expression on their face when they try to figure out why the more expensive one sold. Second, you might just catch someone like me on a bad day. Had someone undercut several of my auctions by 1c all at the same time, and I was in a really bad mood that day for real life reasons. So I added that person to my friends list, and undercut him by 1c back on every auction he posted for the next week within minutes of him posting (no, I don't claim to be particularly sane). Finally, if you undercut by 1c, there's no reason at all for me not to undercut back, since I've already decided that I'm willing to sell for that price, and 1c might as well be the same price. Might not be an issue with people that don't check their auctions as frequently as I do. That said, while I disagree with it, I don't consider it stupid, it just has its risks, and those risks probably aren't worth worrying about.

  19. #39
    Not trying to spam but seriously why would anyone who actually plays the AH tell others how to do it?
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  20. #40
    I personally think its very easy to do. I have now made over 200k gold from the AH so I have no problem with it, just jump in and give it a go and learn from your mistakes.

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