The auction house in Warcraft is a place where a lot of gold can be gained and lost very quickly. The reason for this is that, like all real life markets, the individual prices for an item at the auction house fluctuates all the time. Borean leather is 1g a piece one day, and 2g a piece the next
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 auction house properly is something you should not try and do until you have taken the time to understand the variations. Is 2G for Borean leather a good price or a bad price? Unless you track prices over a period of time you won’t know.
The first step would be to download and install Auctioneer. An addon you can get from Curse.com. This has a scan function that records every asking price for every item at auction. Before you start your career as a floor trader, spend a few days running the scan once a day to collect good data. Carry on powerleveling until you have about ten scans worth of data.
Once you have run auctioneer once a day for about ten days it will give you some decent average averages that are being asked for 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.
However, before you rush off, there are a couple of very big potential pitfalls
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.
What should be of more concern though is that the value of items changes over time. New items cost more, and then lose value over time. Blizzard increase and decrease the drop rates of certain things with every patch. A rare expensive trinket you have suddenly becomes very common and its value can plummet. Blizzard also change the stat values and level requirements of ingredients, weapons, armour and recopies all the time. This has a pretty quick effect on the value. If you are holding stock you could be wiped out very quickly.
Auctioneer is a great tool to start with, but it is just a start. It’s not the holy grail of gold making in Warcraft. If you want to be a World of Warcraft Gold Generator then you will need auctioneer, but you will also need a lot more besides.
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