Millions of gold worth of items but can't sell anything on Auction House

[Shaetha]

Yeah I mean I'm already undercutting things by significant margins. What more can I do?

Sell things people want to buy.


Seriously, the people with money are busy with Shadowlands. Also, 0.01 sell rate could mean it's sold once in the region ever. Almost no one is going to want an item model from 15 years ago that isn't BoP.

[caervek]

I've got all sorts of rare and or unobtainable items that I literally cannot sell.

You're problem isn't that you can't sell them, it's that you can't sell them for the prices you want for them.

I undercut regional prices. I undercut server prices. Substantially even. And still, nothing sells.

That's because you're undercutting inflated prices that items aren't selling at, and not by enough to make the prices appealing to potential buyers.

[Niwes]

I've got all sorts of rare and or unobtainable items that I literally cannot sell.


I undercut regional prices. I undercut server prices. Substantially even. And still, nothing sells.


Is anyone else experiencing this? Where are all the collectors and wealthy players at? How is an entire region all selling these items for similar prices if it never sells?

i exp the same.

first, before my pesimistic conclusion:

the underbitted price you set, have nothing to do with the price ppl are willing to pay. a theoretically and extreme example, to show the point of view i am coming from: some guy, not playing the AH or even the game often, have some rare items. he looks at the AH for that item. no item found. so he sets ANY price, he thinks he can get (greed for gold will play a little role here) and he thinks it could be worth that. next day another guy will put the same item in the AH. as this guy also has no clue, he set the price a tiny bit lower than our first guy. without any clue how much the item really is worth or how much ppl are willing to pay. this game repeats 1-2-3 days with guy 3, 4 and ... YOU.

so, here is your answer. you insert the item into AH, underbit, and no one buys it. because the price you set is going back on a way earler adjusted price, set with clue, no one is willing to pay.

so, number one thing what i would do: use addons or look into „The undermine journal“ first.

all that said, here comes my more pesimistic reason, why ppl do not buy a lot from the AH: as much as ppl, press, steamers and everyones grandma say, i am not sure if really that much ppl „really actively“ play SL. with the term „really actively“ i mean 2 things:

1) i believe a lot of ppl just jump into SL and play a bit here and there. lets call them super casuals or just „the curious ones“. they are more curious whats going on in SL than really playing it deeply. these ppl do not buy expensive stuuf from AH. these ppl not even have much gold.

2) also i think Legion and BfA set their marks and a lot of ppl normally really deep into MMOs have left WoW already. hardcore MMO players, the hunters and collectors, the guys buying mount nr. 279, just because they need to get them all, became more and more rare in WoW imo. since the game became more and more „single player gamy, just sharing a single player game online with others“, more and more „hop in, hop out“ friendly, more and more „do your weekly treadmill and logout“ and so on... since that, the type of ppl buying (expensive) type of stuff, became more and more rare.

so, imo, its either you have the „wrong“ price (first part above), but i do not believe that, because i exp the same and i have the „right“ prices. or the market (the ppl that buy this type of stuff) getting smaller and smaller, because the game is full of super casual playing ppl, that give a fuck about collecting stuff or investing 90k for 1% more attributes on some myth BoE item etc.

in general i believe SL have not that much players as ppl think. and the most of them are in no sense interessted in any AH pets or mounts, nor willing to pay much gold.

but maybe thats just me...

[TheWorkingTitle]

i exp the same.

first, before my pesimistic conclusion:

the underbitted price you set, have nothing to do with the price ppl are willing to pay. a theoretically and extreme example, to show the point of view i am coming from: some guy, not playing the AH or even the game often, have some rare items. he looks at the AH for that item. no item found. so he sets ANY price, he thinks he can get (greed for gold will play a little role here) and he thinks it could be worth that. next day another guy will put the same item in the AH. as this guy also has no clue, he set the price a tiny bit lower than our first guy. without any clue how much the item really is worth or how much ppl are willing to pay. this game repeats 1-2-3 days with guy 3, 4 and ... YOU.

so, here is your answer. you insert the item into AH, underbit, and no one buys it. because the price you set is going back on a way earler adjusted price, set with clue, no one is willing to pay.

so, number one thing what i would do: use addons or look into „The undermine journal“ first.

all that said, here comes my more pesimistic reason, why ppl do not buy a lot from the AH: as much as ppl, press, steamers and everyones grandma say, i am not sure if really that much ppl „really actively“ play SL. with the term „really actively“ i mean 2 things:

1) i believe a lot of ppl just jump into SL and play a bit here and there. lets call them super casuals or just „the curious ones“. these ppl do not buy expensive stuuf from AH. these ppl not even have much gold.

2) also i think Legion and BfA set their marks and a lot of ppl normally really deep into MMOs have left WoW already. hardcore MMO players, the hunters and collectors, the guys buying mount nr. 279, just because they need to get them all, became more and more rare in WoW imo. since the game became more and more „single player gamy, just sharing a single player game online with others“, more and more „hop in, hop out“ friendly, more and more „do your weekly treadmill and logout“ and so on... since that, the type of ppl buying (expensive) type of stuff, became more and more rare.

so, imo, its either you have the „wrong“ price (first part above), but i do not believe that, because i exp the same and i have the „right“ prices. or the market (the ppl that buy this type of stuff) getting smaller and smaller, because the game is full of super casual playing ppl, that give a fuck about collecting stuff or investing 90k for 1% more attributes on some myth BoE item etc.

in general i believe SL have not that much ppl as ppl think. and the most of them are in no sense interessted in any AH pets or mounts, nor willing to pay much gold.

but maybe thats just me...

I think you're spot on. The market has dried up. Maybe I'll just give some stuff away, sell the remaining big ticket items for whatever I can, and vendor the rest. It's unfortunate because the lot of it is part of the game's history. Newer players definitely don't seem to give it the same respect, and there must not be that many collectors like us out there.

- - - Updated - - -

You're problem isn't that you can't sell them, it's that you can't sell them for the prices you want for them.



That's because you're undercutting inflated prices that items aren't selling at, and not by enough to make the prices appealing to potential buyers.

Well I'd be interested to hear what sort of prices you think they should be sold at then.

- - - Updated - - -

Sell things people want to buy.


Seriously, the people with money are busy with Shadowlands. Also, 0.01 sell rate could mean it's sold once in the region ever. Almost no one is going to want an item model from 15 years ago that isn't BoP.

Yeah, the market seems dried up.

[blankfaced]

I'm not in the exact same boat. But i've got a couple of BoE epics from SL content (190 ILvl to 207 ILvl) neither have sold, even just going with what's on the AH and just selling it for the same.

SL's boe's are either too common are just not viewed as useful due to covenant gear coming in at just under 200 ilvl (no one cares about 10 stat points unless it's across multiple items (not the 2 or so boe's you can buy.)
So unless you're finding 210+ ilvl gear it's probably not going to sell for more than 40-50k if that.

It's blizzards new "Let gear be gear" mantra they've adapted from the vocal minority player base.... let us see how well this turns out shall we?

[rogoth]

Were the items actually moving at the higher prices or were they just listed at those prices? Because it makes a huge difference in the end. Had some "colorful" in-game whispers thrown my way after I undercut a decent chunk on some items I was trying to move, because there wasn't a market for the items at the inflated price everyone else was posting them at. You may occasionally get that one person that just buys a bunch of WoW tokens to buy the stuff at obviously inflated prices, but it's become increasingly common that people put potential/desired profit margins over actually making a profit.

Rare items/pets/mounts is generally a slow market already, and eventually you'll hit a market saturation point to where either everyone who wants what you're offering has it, or the price is higher than what anyone left would buy it for. At that point, you're banking on people buying stuff to keep it rare (which does happen). If anything, I'd say the changes to making input broadcasting software a bannable offense made "getting rich quick" a lot more daunting of a task for casual multibox farmers, which may make the population of WoW players with millions of gold stagnate. If you can't get fresh blood into that high gold population bracket, high priced items that are purely vanity in nature will not move much at all.

before i quit playing retail around when classic launched, i had on my character my last 5-6 frozen runes, the avg price per rune at the time was around 200k gold, but the only people buying them would be people who wanted one for collection purposes or transmog collectors who knew someone that had a crafter old enough to have the old icebane gear and could make them, listed those things for over 2 years and only sold a single one of them, same goes for some of the rarest unobtainable items i had in my bank, like the item level 1 white sword that was the lowest numbered item in the entire wow database back when it was given as a starter sword for rogues back in 'original classic', that got removed and replaced with a newer updated version not long after, i had different types of arrows that used to be crafted for hunters that are obviously unobtainable, i have piles of the old teleportation runes and arcane powder for buffs etc, and never sold any of them, had 3 of the 'gurubashi mojo madness' crafted before blizz removed the blood of heroes from the game in cata, each one of those according to the market was 300k each for collection purposes.

point of this, nothing really sold and if i did get any interest people were always haggling for a much lower price than the market said was 'right' so yeah sadly you're right with your analysis and it probably won't change any time soon, although judging from the OP and some other comments in the last year at least it seems to have gotten worse as a result of changes made to the game by blizz.

[Count Zero]

Well, I commented earlier about sharks in the market. And I got burned. Someone undercut me so I tried to buy out their supply, but they kept posting more and I just went back to matching their price. Well, they kept undercutting, and now the items are selling for basically production cost, and I'm still sitting on a few of their initial items I bought for much higher than that.

Fortunately for me it's gold I can afford to lose as I've made a lot selling these recently. Feel like I learned a valuable lesson to AH with my head and not let myself get emotional. I was definitely acting with my emotions ... should have just waited.

[Tiwack]

Real world auctions usually start the bidding at half the estimated valuation exactly because of this. Consider dropping the buyout altogether and just leave the bid at what you want for it at minimum. Sure it's nice if you could get double the amount for it but if you have to repost the auction every other day for months it comes down to how highly you value your own time spent in this pursuit. Is it really worth it? Same goes for the item. If it doesn't sell, the simple answer is no.

[gaymer77]

Well they are historical prices. Underminejournal and such shows its trends, growth, declines, etc. I've sold items in the past for similar prices, but the market seems completely supersaturated

Which means the VALUE of those items have dropped significantly because the DEMAND for the SUPPLY is lower. When there's a lot of an item on the market the value of it goes down substantially. You can either drop your price down by 1/4 or 1/2 of what you're currently selling it for (which would make your item much more desirable to potential buyers who may be on the fence about if they really want that item now or if it can wait for another day) or you can continue to repost it undercutting people by small chunks while fronting the AH posting fee every time you do it (which could end up costing you more gold in the long run than slashing the price now) which you don't ever get back.

[Azerate]

There's a critical difference between the price people tend to be selling something for, and the price people are willing to buy it for. Lots of those AH addons/scanners only check what the items have historically been listed for on the AH. Not what they were bought for. If you look at that statistic for those rare items, you're gonna have a bad time. Just because something is being listed for a given price, doesn't mean it's gonna sell for that.

Especially with those rare / discontinued items, the market for them is not very vast. People often list them for months for those ridiculous prices. Do they ever sell? Dunno, probably not.

[crazyman2]

The rare item market is a giant crank. Market price is normally a function of supply and demand, but both supply and demand on some of these items are nearly zero. Nobody has any idea what items will move for, but the price never stabilizes since so few are available.

See - Foror's Compendium on Dragon Slaying. Used to give a quest for an epic sword (Quel'Serrar), was quite popular in wrath.
Hasn't dropped in over a decade.
There are three left on US servers per undermine journal at the time of this post - 9.5 million, 1.8 million, and 150k.

The quest it provided is no longer functional. You can no longer get the weapon under any circumstances short of GM shenanigans, which might get you a permaban anyway (Martin Fury anyone?). You're basically paying a ton of gold for something to take up bag space.

Who's supposed to buy this item? Some person who's interested in wow history that hasn't been playing long enough to already get it?

That person doesn't exist.
The only people buying items like this are doing so with the intent to resell, i.e, the resellers selling to resellers.

The trick is not being the sucker at the end of the line who massively overpaid and can't find an even bigger sucker that thinks they can get even more. They'll be stuck for months, maybe years. They might liquidate and eat massive losses just to get away from it, especially with transmog and large AH fees, at which point some other idiot thinks they'll be able to resell for a moderate amount.

Your "millions of gold worth of items" might not even be "thousands of gold worth of items". Hope it's stuff you've held onto since back in the day and not stuff you bought...

[RemasteredClassic]

Who wants to buy something if they're quitting the game?

Exactly, WoW is no longer the cultural icon it used to be. Corporate greed and the subpar team that took over after WotLK messed it all up that it is too difficult to fix at this point given people have so many other choices besides WoW. They really need to bring up TBC then a year after WotLk servers soon without messing up the current classic servers by upgrading them to TBC, but instead, they should make a separate copy of them and upgrade that instead.

[TheWorkingTitle]

The rare item market is a giant crank. Market price is normally a function of supply and demand, but both supply and demand on some of these items are nearly zero. Nobody has any idea what items will move for, but the price never stabilizes since so few are available.

See - Foror's Compendium on Dragon Slaying. Used to give a quest for an epic sword (Quel'Serrar), was quite popular in wrath.
Hasn't dropped in over a decade.
There are three left on US servers per undermine journal at the time of this post - 9.5 million, 1.8 million, and 150k.

The quest it provided is no longer functional. You can no longer get the weapon under any circumstances short of GM shenanigans, which might get you a permaban anyway (Martin Fury anyone?). You're basically paying a ton of gold for something to take up bag space.

Who's supposed to buy this item? Some person who's interested in wow history that hasn't been playing long enough to already get it?

That person doesn't exist.
The only people buying items like this are doing so with the intent to resell, i.e, the resellers selling to resellers.

The trick is not being the sucker at the end of the line who massively overpaid and can't find an even bigger sucker that thinks they can get even more. They'll be stuck for months, maybe years. They might liquidate and eat massive losses just to get away from it, especially with transmog and large AH fees, at which point some other idiot thinks they'll be able to resell for a moderate amount.

Your "millions of gold worth of items" might not even be "thousands of gold worth of items". Hope it's stuff you've held onto since back in the day and not stuff you bought...

I'd change the title to "Millions" if I could lol. And it's all stuff I've hoarded, rarely if ever did I buy anything with the intent to sell later.

I'll just keep dropping the prices, and if it gets to be offensively low, I'll just vendor it.

[des1235]

You are selling at the wrong time. People who have money right now are buying new gear, leveling profs, buying stuff for raids & buying various timed runs etc to get ahead of the curve (even in a literal sense). The collectors items sell better later in the xpac.

[TheWorkingTitle]

You are selling at the wrong time. People who have money right now are buying new gear, leveling profs, buying stuff for raids & buying various timed runs etc to get ahead of the curve (even in a literal sense). The collectors items sell better later in the xpac.

It's nearly ground to a halt the past two expansion lulls as well though in Legion and BFA.

[Farora]

Does retail even have rare items people care about anymore? There are so many flashy mounts, pets, toys etc. I think the average player doesn't care much anymore.

[Elkfingers]

I think you're spot on. The market has dried up. Maybe I'll just give some stuff away, sell the remaining big ticket items for whatever I can, and vendor the rest. It's unfortunate because the lot of it is part of the game's history. Newer players definitely don't seem to give it the same respect, and there must not be that many collectors like us out there.

Literally what everyone's been trying to tell you. These collectibles have value to you, so you assume they have the same value to other people. Either they don't, or your potential buyers are unicorns.

WoW history collectors willing to pay exorbitant prices for rare items is obviously going to be a very niche market. Maybe there are buyers out there, but you'll be hard pressed to find them, and there lies the core issue with your strategy.

Expensive products typically have long sales cycles and low volume. Not much you can do about that.

[Count Zero]

It's interesting how you start out the story this way, and you're claiming that they are the shark.

Fair point. I wound up selling a lot of my supply at a major loss because I didn't like what I was doing, and just wanted it to be over with.

[Highlord Hanibuhl]

If nobody buys them they aren't worth milions then?

This!
It's supply and demand.. you may think the item is worth a lot, but if everyone is selling it at a lower price, it's worth less

[kamuimac]

That's the problem with items that have an incredibly narrow target audience - they may be very rare and therefore valuable, but until you find a buyer that actually WANTS the item that doesn't help you at all. It's a very different thing from items that are in high and constant demand, like e.g. raid consumables or the new legendary base crafts.

Your super special mount or pet or whatever might be "worth" 500,000g to the person who ends up buying it, but it might well take you 12 months to find that person because there's only a handful of them on the server, or they might not actually want it now but might in the future, or whatever. That's the nature of the type of commodity you're dealing with here, and you have to be aware of that going into it.

or .... maybe peopel should stop listening to streamers and realise that its worthless junk that maaaybe sometimes sell if you find naive idiot to pay for it.