auctioneering
Latest
Gold Capped: The Undermine Journal may have to close down
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! The Undermine Journal is an invaluable site that a lot of auctioneers have been making great use of. I wrote about it when it was in alpha, as well as how to use its market alert to watch for cheap deals. Unfortunately, the days of having a convenient graph showing you the price history for your realm are numbered. There's a very real possibility that this service will be killed by Blizzard's new auction house interface, and we'd be back to each keeping our own spreadsheets.
Gold Capped: Manage your crafting with a queuing addon
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! If you are a crafter and you sell your items on the AH, chances are you've realized exactly how much time crafting can take. Obviously, a portion of the total crafting time is going to be spent actually crafting; however, not all of it is. A large portion of your time might be spend poring over the AH searching for prices on your finished goods and taking notes, as well as buying materials from the AH and vendors. There are addon solutions to this, and we're going to talk about a way to address the biggest time sinks involved in crafting: queuing and price management.
Insider Trader: Market alerts from The Undermine Journal
Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped. This week, we're discussing something near and dear to every trade skill user's heart: prices -- specifically, how to get better prices. You remember The Undermine Journal, right? Here's what I wrote when I discovered the alpha. The creators have been busy managing the growth of the site, adding servers and realms, as well as periodically adding new functionality. It's in beta now, and they just added the most interesting feature: market alerts. You can now set up the site to email you every time stuff you're looking for hits a certain price. For example, if you are buying Saronite Ore to prospect so you can take advantage of the removal of the epic gem transmute cooldown removal in patch 4.0, you can go to your realm on The Undermine Journal and set it up so it will email you whenever the price goes down to your target.
Gold Capped: Making money in the time remaining before Cataclysm
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! I got an email recently asking about something that's been on my mind lately: What ways of making gold are there when Cataclysm is just around the corner? Graham writes: I just recently had my first successful foray into the world of being an auctioneer. I am [now] sitting very happily with 28k gold earned [through selling crafted epics]. My goal is to purchase a Bane of the Fallen King title and ICC-10 full meta clear, which on Mal'ganis Horde sell for 50k and 75k respectively. At the time I am writing this, I have sold all of my inventory of epics and all of the materials that I was stockpiling to make more because my perception is the market has almost completely evaporated with the rumored release date of Nov. 2 for Cataclysm. What other methods of accumulating a sizeable sum of gold over the next six weeks are available that should continue to be profitable clear up until the expansion hits? I have access to max-level enchanting, blacksmithing, mining, alchemy and jewelcrafting. If the glyph market is your preferred answer, I could level a scribe. Unfortunately, my observation is that all crafted items (raid consumables, 264 epics, etc.) are selling at or below their material cost to create. I have looked into the Saronite shuffle and its various methods of earning income, and as near as I can determine, it's a zero-sum market as well (cost of ore = expected sale of any of the options).
Gold Capped: Quick Auctions Poster does the undercutting for you
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! Quick Auctions Poster is here, and it's going to change your life. It was written by one of the auctioneers who inhabit the Just My Two Copper forums, and here's the description of what it does, straight from the download page: This addon is a plugin for Quick Auctions that adds a checkbox to the auction house posting frame with which you can toggle continuous scanning and posting of Quick Auctions. It saves you the effort of hitting the post button whenever a scan has finished. Sadly, because this Quick Auctions button doesn't have a name and its function is private, this action can't be macroed, but this addon manages to obtain the correct button and simulates a click on it. In essence, you can fill your bags up with stock, and instead of using QA3 to post a single batch, it will keep refreshing your scan for you while you wander off to do something else. It will keep automatically undercutting everyone until you run out of stock.
Insider Trader: Making gold with titansteel
Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also the writer for the Gold Capped column. If you're looking for general auction house advice, you'll find it in Gold Capped, whereas Insider Trader will be focusing on specific profitable markets. Basil quickly realized that if he kept writing large comprehensive trade skill posts, he'd quickly run out of ideas for this column, so he decided to start deep diving into specific markets instead of trying to cram all the options into a single post. I mentioned this briefly in my mining post, but Titansteel Bars are one of those products that seems to be used for just about everything. Check out the Wowhead "Reagent for" tab, and you'll see what I mean. It is also used in very large quantities by the more popular items, like the iLvl 264 BoE crafted items. One way or another, titansteel is one of those things that seems to have bottomless demand and is therefore an excellent product to sell. High demand means high profit? OK, so it's not perfect. Titansteel may always sell quickly, but that just means you'll have more competition. Also, every buyer has a fairly good idea of what market price is, so when the supply dries up, you can't make too much of a premium. Let's look at your costs.
Gold Capped: Ask an auctioneer -- time is money
This week's Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) is brought to you by the letter "s." Shortly followed by the letters "t," "e," "a" and "k." I'm in Texas on day job business, and nobody -- I'll tell you what, nobody -- does steak as well as Texas. The barbeque here is also pretty darn good. Mmm, meat. Oh yeah, and it's like a bajillion degrees out all the time. It's so hot that the wind doesn't cool you down; it makes you hotter! Want to make money on the auction house? For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! I swear on everything that's good and just in the world that I will eventually dig myself out from under these emails. If you ever stop sending them, that is. So if I don't get back to you in a few weeks or so, try emailing me on my podcast email and see if you have better luck there. Luca asks: Thanks to a misapplication of the snatch tool, I recently found myself the unhappy owner of a ridiculously large stock of bronze bars, purchased at around 100 percent of their regular value (which seems only ever to go down since). I'd like to try to recover my profits as best I can, having learned my lesson -- any ideas? Should I simply wait it out and leak them back into the economy slowly or try something more daring?
Gold Capped: The pinch
Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil "Euripides" Berntsen takes a short break from trying to build a raiding guild on Drenden (US-A) to write up a guide that will help you achieve the goal of acquiring 214,748 gold, 36 silver and 48 copper. Well, technically that's just a symbolic milestone. The goal is making gold, no matter how much you have or how much you want. Got feedback, questions or hate mail? Email Basil! I've spent the last few months describing different ways to make money. I've also touched on auction house "PvP" a bit but haven't talked about it in depth. The reality is that when you post something for sale, every sale you make is a sale your competitors don't make. The reason I got involved with the AH and in-game economy at the beginning was that I needed money and hated farming. The reason I stayed? My competition. You know that feeling you get when you are in a battleground and everything just lines up, and you win? That feeling is what I get when I empty my mailboxes every morning. Playing the AH would be much less rewarding if there were no competition.
Gold Capped: Using the new armory auction house
Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil Berntsen takes a short break from trying to build a raiding guild on US Drenden-A to write up a guide that will help you achieve the goal of acquiring 214,748 gold, 36 silver and 48 copper. Well, technically that's just a symbolic milestone. The goal is making gold, no matter how much you have or how much you want. Got feedback, questions or hate mail? Email Basil! This game is constantly changing. Every new patch, Blizzard delivers new content, new rules and new interfaces. We've seen some major quality of life improvements in the auction house of late, and these are continuing. The latest one (which is still in beta) is that the mobile armory now lets you trade on the AH from anywhere using either an app on an iPhone/iPod touch or your browser. Right now, for testing purposes, we're limited to 25 actions a day (purchases, bids, auctions), but we can clear out our mail! To be honest, that's the killer feature for me. I spend an inordinate amount of time clearing out my mail. The majority of my profits in, say, vellums will come from sales of singles. I list stacks of all sizes, but the singles are what sell best. On my mid-range population server, I can easily sell 200 of these a day, and that adds up to a lot of time watching my mailbox empty.
Gold Capped: Engineering isn't so useless after all
Gold doesn't matter, right? It's just gold, and you get more than enough for your needs through dailies and the occasional mining spree. Why even bother getting Gold Capped? It's not like you'll ever be able to spend it all! Wait a sec, how does that bank alt have a single Ulduar clear and have Mimiron's head? Every week, check in with Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast and the Call to Auction podcast, as he attempts to mold all the random information jostling for cerebral space into a coherent, readable post about how to make gold in the World of Warcraft. In real life, engineers are brilliant and dedicated individuals who work together with tradespeople to accomplish some of the technological marvels of the modern world. Historically, these are the people who built the pyramids, the boats that brought Europeans to the new world, and the spaceships that took mankind to the moon and back. In World of Warcraft, engineers are a bunch of goofy characters who speak in childishly high voices and have a tendency to blow themselves up by accident in humorous ways. Anyone else sense that whoever did the concept art at Blizzard for gnomish and goblin engineers flunked out of engineering? Anyways, while engineering is an amazing profession for certain parts of the game, it's dead last when it comes to making money. There are only really a few things engineers can do to make cash. Wryxian In general, we want Engineering to remain a tradeskill mainly focused on creating fun or useful gadgets for the engineer, but we are exploring options for items that can be sold to other players for profit. source This quote was from the Cataclysm profession preview we posted about earlier. Engineering is currently barely ahead of farming in terms of income potential, and it's nice to see that Blizzard acknowledges this and might fix it. Not all hope is lost, though. A savvy player can eak out a living if they focus on the right markets. First off, the elephant in the room: selling epic ammo.
Dubious practices #1: Auctioneering
It's sometimes hard to work out what sort of behaviour and practices are acceptable ingame, and the "grey area" of slightly dubious practices is filled with dodgy dealings that some players applaud and others despise. One of these is auctioneering--the well-established practice of playing the auction houses to maximise one's profit.One of the most common tricks players use is to have an alt sitting in the AH, and to mail goods for sale to that character. You can then log on as that character--also called a mule--and do your AH trading without the bother of having to transport your main character to and from the auction house. More advanced strategies involve the use of tradeskills along with the mule, such as learning Enchanting so that you can disenchant any rare items: enchanting components often sell for more than the original item. You can also give your main character gathering skills (mining, herbalism or skinning) and your mule corresponding crafting skills (blacksmithing, alchemy or leatherworking), even setting up strings of mules for the most efficient use of your loot.
