Gold Capped: Using the new armory auction house

By Basil Berntsen

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.

Once the feature goes live and they raise the limit to 200 actions per day, I'll probably use this to list my vellums too. In the interest of using my 25 moves in the most profitable manner, however, I'm going to avoid that for the beta.

Before we go any further: this product is currently in beta. Any money you lose due to bugs is probably gone forever. I posted a load of stacks of 10 Greater Cosmics, and they all ended up getting listed with a stack price of what I intended the unit price to be. This is a buggy beta test, so be very careful and validate your auctions by searching for them after you post.

I'm assuming that most people interested in this probably want to auction from work, and I personally detest any small devices trying to be real computers. If they ever make this available on the iPad and then give me an iPad for free, I'll consider using the app version. Otherwise, I'm all about the real computer version. On that note, Macs aren't real computers.

When you log into the armory's auction house interface, you see this:

The default character was set to my hunter; however, I clicked the top right icon and was able to promote my auction alts into the five available slots for auction house characters. Use the plus sign to the left in the list of characters they show you. First up, I want to empty my mail. This is how you collect your sales:
Clicking "Claim All Gold" is the fastest. Now let's try creating some auctions: click the "create auctions" tab, and then pick your product. You'll see this:
Awesomely, this has more functionality than the in-game selling tab. It will actually show you your competition's prices and let you undercut! Also, it lets you post from your expired auctions in mail, your bank and your inventory as a single source. This is, in fact, way better than the in-game version. I can only hope that they make these features available via the in-game interface.

When I create 10 auctions, this is what it looks like:

You can relist expired auctions as well, but I don't have any at the moment, so we're skipping to the buying interface. Click on "Browse Auctions," and you can search the AH for stuff you need.
The stuff you buy from this tab will appear in your mailbox and be immediately available for posting. This means that so long as you have transactions remaining, you are able to buy and relist undervalued items. You can equally do this at the neutral auction house, relisting items on your faction AH. You still can't bid on your own auctions, however, so you'll need a friend if you plan to do any cross-faction arbitrage.

I'd caution people about the downsides of camping as a business plan; however, the built-in limits on our daily activity will make this manageable. The best strategy in terms of gold per hour played is one that does not require you to cancel and re-undercut your auctions. If you're having to do this, you're not undercutting steeply enough. If you can't undercut steeply enough, then you're paying too much for your product, or your competitor isn't making any profits.

This feature is a premium service, so once it's out of beta, it'll be something like $3 a month. For the way I play, that's far better a deal than any of these stupid toys Blizzard keeps putting up in their store; however, it's frustrating that something that should be a base functionality has become a "value-added" service. Arena players didn't get higher monthly fees when the devs added enemy unit frames to the default UI. I'd stop complaining if the default in game UI were this functional and the $3 only bought me access to waste my time at work.

I'll pay for this, but grudgingly.

Being an auctioneer is like being able to print money (or gold, as it were). Wait, that doesn't make sense ... You can print on gold, but you can't print gold. That would be closer to transmutation? I can transmute titanium, but that's only worth it if the price of saronite is low enough to justify the time spent making it. I need some sort of analogy here. ... Whatever, I'll figure it out later. Making gold? Every week, Gold Capped will teach you the tricks of the trade, from setting up your auction addons and user interface, to cross-faction arbitrage, to learning how to use your trade skills.

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