Gold Capped: Gold-making resources for auctioneers

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The best resources for making gold are not a very well kept secret. These sites and utilities are used by most serious auctioneers, and anyone looking to start making gold, even if only casually, would do well to learn how to use these.

The Undermine Journal

The Undermine Journal is first on my list. It is a site that does a lot of things, but most importantly, it shows you the price for any item on any realm. You can look back at how the price and supply for sale changed over the last two weeks, and you can see all the auctions of any competitor by clicking on their name. You can also compare prices on your realm to prices on other realms or the other faction on your realm.

The potential for research here is limitless. Any time you're looking for a new market, the first question you have to ask is whether there's enough of a gap between cost and price to support your margins, and seeing the answer to this question over a period of time is way more valuable than seeing just what's on the Auction House when you decide to check into it.

Also, the post activity heat map can tell you when you're least likely to be undercut, as well as when your biggest competitor goes to bed.

All this would be worth a mention today on its own merit; however, the editor of the Undermine Journal also has an excellent selection of updated posts from the gold-making blogosphere. If a blog is syndicated on the UJ, it's going to be fairly well written and usually on the topic of gold making. The syndicated posts can be found on the home page for every realm.

The Consortium

Next on my list is The Consortium. The Undermine Journal is a one-player kind of site, but some of the best advice you'll be able to find about making gold in World of Warcraft is from other players. The Consortium is a "EULA-compliant, drama-free and friendly community" of auctioneers with a friendly and helpful forum. It is to gold making what Tankspot and Elitist Jerks are to raiding.

My first stop there is the Quality Guides section, which contains up-to-date guides written and hand-picked by veterans. The guides vary wildly, and you'll find everything between profitable vendor resale routes and a complete guide to TradeSkillMaster. Unless you're very unlucky, at least one of the businesses they describe in there will work on your realm. If you get through that and want more, the general forums are the most active gold making forums on the internet, and this is where you can find resources like the shuffling spreadsheet.

Additionally, the chat room is constantly active and is a good place to connect with other people who play the game the same way you do. I drop in once in a while, and a lot of the forum heavyweights park themselves there while they do their business.

TradeSkillMaster

The next tool every newbie to gold making should learn is TradeSkillMaster. There are no other addons that automate as many tasks involved in crafting and selling as TSM does. There are other Auction House addons and other crafting addons which aren't replaced by TSM; however, knowing this addon is a required skill. Learning it will take whatever you can do now and amplify it by a factor of 11.

TSM lets you walk up to an auctioneer, click one button, and then spin your mouse wheel for 10 seconds to automatically intelligently post every single item in your bags. You don't need to look up what your competition is selling for. If it's above your cost, you'll undercut them, and if it's under your cost, you won't -- all without any interaction on your part other than spinning your mouse wheel.

It also lets you open your trade skill window, click one button to populate a crafting list based on profitability, and then automatically pull the mats from your bank, guild bank, and the Auction House so you can craft everything without constantly running around looking for materials.

I know this seems like an odd thing to put in the list of tools for new gold makers. It's not an easy addon to learn, and while it's designed as simply as possible to do the job, it's not a simple job. That said, anyone who wants to make any serious amount of gold would save much more time by learning TSM and profiting from turbo-injected auctions to make up the time it took them to learn it.

PTR, blue posts, and patch notes

Every single patch is an opportunity to triple your gold. This patch, for example, we're getting epic gems, higher item-level blue crafted PvP gear, and tradable Chaos Orbs. This information can be acted on before the patch hits to make money with very little effort. One of the best things to do when you're getting into making gold in WoW is to start filtering all the information you read about a new patch through the economics center of your brain. Reading blue posts and patch notes with a gold-making eye will take some getting used to but can provide a significant advantage.

Another good thing to do if you have access to the PTR is to copy over a character with some professions or visit some profession trainers. Even if you can't train them, you can see if there are new recipes or upgraded items available.

Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped. Do you have questions about selling, reselling, and building your financial empire on the auction house? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.