(Sorry this is so late, works has been nuts the last few days!)
Forget arenas. Forget Tol Barad and rated battlegrounds. The best and fiercest PvP you’ll encounter on any server is the Auction House. The competition is cutthroat and the unwary and/or clueless can lose their shirts. It’s also where you’ll be making the vast majority of your gold, so you need to learn how to work it. Knowledge is your weapon to survive. You won’t reach the top of your season’s PvP ladder without resilience gear. You won’t reach your gold goals without understanding the auction house. Today’s lessons are the very basics. In the auction house, you’ll be doing several things: purchasing and re-selling undervalued items (called “flipping”), purchasing raw commodities for processing with your trade skills, and hawking your own wares. But… what is your stuff worth? How much should you list it for? Should you go cheapest or not? How long should I list things for sale?
First things first, no matter what site you get your tips from, no matter what your personal Scheme of the Moment is, your mileage is going to vary severely based on your server. On a low-population server, you may have one or two people who are the only providers for a particular niche market (say belt buckles or enchanter rods) or you may have several people vying for dominance of the very lucrative glyph market. Smaller servers may have less competition for suppliers, but demand for high-end raiding consumables may be much lower. On higher pop servers, you can certainly count on there being competition, no matter what your market is, but have the luxury of a much wider potential market for those goods and services.
The first site to become familiar with is The Undermine Journal. Select your server and faction and you can see what is being listed on your server, in what quantities, historically how much it is being sold for and overall trending data. Many goods have price ranges that cycle up and down over the course of a week. Learn when raw goods will be available in quantity for cheap (often the weekends) and resell them when the market supply dries up later in the week. See what consumables (for example, specific gem cuts) and enchantments go for historically. There will always be curve balls. For example, content patches will always upset the apple cart somewhat, but knowing what to expect can mean profiting during every step.
You’ll also want a UI add-on to help your cause. Typically people either install Auctionator or Auctioneer. I have never had success in running both at the same time and each gives a little different functionality. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I’m going to link several very good websites and free videos that show you how to set those up and give nice strategies you can use like:
1. Making snatch lists to grab things when they are cheap
2. Organizing shopping lists for common needs
3. Finding things that are being listed for less than the vendor price (it happens!). That’s just free money.
4. Finding things that are much cheaper than their disenchant value
5. Automate postings of your sales and do things like automatically undercut the cheapest competitor by a percentage or a copper
So, how long to list things? In most cases, 12 hours. Use this figure when posting overnight sales or for items with heavy competition (cut red gems, for example). Things that cost virtually noting to re-list, like glyphs and scrolls, 48-hours. The night before patches or planned extensive server maintenance set your auctions for 24 hours. You want to be the seller people see when the servers come back up!
The promised Links of good sites in general:
Nerf Faids
Kuja's Gold Mine
...and specifically on AH add-on set-up and use:
Alto's Goldish Advice
Ok, so for now, you'll be getting a little more familiar with your market. Next time, we'll just hit a few dozen quick and easy ways to make gold.
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