World of Warcraft Guides

One of the things that even experienced WoW players often have trouble with is Gold. The economy is pretty well designed so that whilst its possible to become rich, for the average player it takes a fair bit of work. Yes, short of buying gold (which risks your account being closed by Blizzard) there’s only one real way to generate money , and that’s by working for it.

Auction Houses

The main method of generating cash is the Auction House. There are auction houses in all the major faction capitals across the world, though these are linked together for each faction. What this means is that all the Horde auction houses are one, as are the Alliance and neutral Goblin auction houses.

To sell an item at the auction house costs a small bit of money, increasing as you put an item up for a longer auction. This deposit is non-refundable, but if your item is bought buy someone you will always make more than it cost. Auctions will list their time remaining as Short, Medium, Long, or Very Long. These only roughly correspond to a time period, ie Short can be from 1 minute to 30 minutes.

Normal Bidding

- Longer Sales but Higher Prices

The auctions in WoW must have a set minimum bid. If a player has placed a bid and the auction ends, then the item is his and the auction house uses the in-game mail to deliver it. The seller also receives cash for the item via in-game mail. Each time someone bids on an item, the minimum bid increases AND the time the auction has left increases slightly. This means that it’s impossible to ’snipe’ an auction since you can only even know roughly when it will end.

This method of selling an item will generate the most cash for it, provided the item is in demand by many players.

Buyout Auctions

- Faster Cash

Each auction can also have a Buyout price set. This allows the seller to sell the item instantly should a player be willing to pay the amount. This method tends to work well for items that are in demand for trade skills, such as cloths, leathers and ores.

The disadvantage of this method is that if other people post the same items as you with a lower buyout, these will get bought before yours in most cases, which can mean that if prices for the item type drop suddenly, your auction will not sell.
By combing a low normal bid price with an overly high buyout price you can make an auction which may force players to bid repeatedly for it, since it seems cheaper to them to use this method. This is often dependant on how in demand in item is.

Pricing -

How much to ask for items.

How do you know what to sell an item for ? You want to make the most profit you can, but checking out the competition can take a long time. Thankfully, there is an easy solution, in the form of the Auctioneer Addon

This addon lets you ’scan’ the auction house for items and saves a database of their prices - thus helping you too get the best prices for your goods. However, you must must must scan several times over a week or so at first to get good average prices. If you do not do this, then people who under/overprice their items will throw the addon off and it will recommend crazy prices for items that either no-one will pay, or will make you very little money.

Goods

- Where to get them.

There are 2 types of things you can generally sell at the AH.

• Vendor Recipes
• Enemy Drops

The first you can travel around the world buying fairly cheaply from vendors. These can then be sold at the AH to lazy players who don’t wish to walk around. Good examples are the first aid and cooking skill books which many players need to advance their skills. On my server you can make 4-5g per book selling these at the moment. This can even be done with potions, some magic scrolls, herbalism and engineering supplies.

The main way you’ll be getting goods is through enemy loot. Cloth drops from most humanoids and usually sells pretty well at the AH (since both first aid and tailoring need it), although prices tend to be fairly low. There are coloured items as well of course, but these are less common.

Professions such as Mining, Skinning and Herbalism also let you harvest resources from the game world. Mining now gives items (excluding gems) that can be used for 2-3 professions, and so ores tend to sell pretty well. Skinning tends to be similar to cloth, lots of it around and low prices as a result. It’s still possible to make money and the advantage of skinning is that it allows you to keep a tracking type (for finding resources), since takin herb/min means you have to constantly switch between tracking and thus makes it harder to find the resources. Herbalism items are somewhat inbetween i’ve found, they can sometimes sell well, but particularly at the lower levels, there seems to be something of a flood of supply.

Another addon is useful here - Gatherer

This addon records where you found Ore, Herbs, Treasure, and other things so that you can make gathering them again much easier if you want to get them again. This means it’s a lot faster to gather, and as a result you make a lot more money.

Goods

- What to sell.

There are many things you can sell in WoW. Some have more demand than others. It’s important to understand the difference between a players urge for an item and their need for it.

Items that fuel professions (ores, cloths, leather, jewels) tend to have a fairly constant demand, so auctions of these will sell well. However they also tend to have many sellers so it’s easy to get into a pricing war which forces the prices of these items down further and further, though this depends on the supply levels. These items are ones which most players with a profession need but they will wait for good prices OR go get the items from enemies themselves if prices are too high or supply is too low. The exception to this is enchanting supplies. Since these can only come from an enchanting disenchanting green or above items, they tend to be rarer and more expensive than most other profession supplies.

Equipment items tend to be bought by the urge of players. They see a nice item at the Auction House and immediately want it. This means that you can generally get away with pretty high prices (depending on the level and rarity of the item) compared to the profession items, but these items tend to have a much lower supply and depending on the server the demand can be focused at higher end items.

One other thing that is important here is to know the key statistics for the main classes. This is so that when you find a STR and STA shield, you know it will sell pretty easily (since there are lots of warriors and paladins that use these stats) , but if it has INT (most int based classes can’t use shields) then there are likely to be less buyers for it. There is always a chance that an enchanter might buy up green or above items to disenchant also.

Know your server

- final point

Out of all this advice I think that this one final point is the most important. Each Realm in WoW has its own age, its own mix of players and so on. These factors combine to create unique and different economies, and the key is to know your realm. For example, the realm i’m on has many level 60-70 players. This means that prices for green and above items are higher than normal, since they buy these at high-prices for their alternate characters. However this tends to mean that low-level supplies for professions dont sell for very much money since there’s not very much demand.

On a new realm the economy will tend to have lower prices to start with - people need money to spend money and they won’t have it for a while just yet. Money can still be made on these realms but it requires some learning of what goods are in demand and so on.

As a last example, i’ve seen Copper Ore sell in stacks of 20 at prices from 15s to 8g, all depending on the server’s economy. In the last case i made a heck of a lot of money from it, since gathering 200 copper ore in a low-level area can be done fairly quickly.