#0 - March 18, 2008, 4:26 a.m.
Greetings.
The following guide is a walkthrough to how you make money in the world of warcraft (focusing almost entirely on the auction house) - and it's probably the best one too if you ask me. I've read through a lot of gold-making guides, and tbh they are all @#@!. Even Derek's Gold Making Guide is @#@! - and that one costs real money. The reason they all suck is because they basicly say: buy low, sell high on the AH, grind some @#@! till you fall asleep and then you will become rich, without being specific. Ofc the commercial guides are written to make the authors earn even more money - real-life money - and not to actually help you. That is the main reason I wrote this guide! So that someone (you) can have a practical, down-to-earth, easily assimilated, step-by-step no-nonsense guide to moneymaking. But I also wrote it to prove my own superiority over the author's of the guides out there that are outdated and/or DUMB. Anyway, this guide will go through everything you need to know to make some decent cash on the AH and your professions. The guide will go through things like investments, the trade channel, undercutting, monopolies, profit, market fluctuations and fake competitions, but the best of all is that no previous "knowledge" is needed - everything will be explained. Grinding all money is for suckers. Sure, grinders can make a lot of money too, but one has to consider the effort-to-gold -ratio imo. And playing the AH has the highest effort-to-gold -ratio in this game if you ask me. I spend 20-30 minutes on the AH every day, and that is enough to give me enough money so I can raid as much as I want, twink a char now and then, and still see my fortune go up for every week/month that I play this game unless I do some heavy spending.
I have always known a lot about the AH and the market, but never really cared to utilize it to the maximum in order to make a profit. So what made me change my mind? Well I had 300g last summer and I needed more money because I couldn't afford @#@!. No mongoose enchants, no respeccs, no raid items, nothing. So I took these 300g, used my "mad AH-skills" and invested them in various items - just as an experiment, and then I waited, for weeks. At first I thought I must have done something wrong, but after 2-3 weeks I had 1200g in cash and 4400g+ worth of items - so I know I wasn't wrong. So what is the point of all this? Well lesson number one is: It can and WILL take time. Nothing changes over one night. Lesson number two: Stop spending, right now: today. Only buy things that you cant play without (elixirs, pots if you are raiding etc). Don't try out some new spec, dont do anything. If you are spending money, you wont notice your AH progression. To help you out with this I recommend that you download Accountant. Accountant is an addon that monitors your own personal money flow. You will see where you get money from, and wth they go - simple as that. Accountant can be downloaded here: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/6259/
Last: If you read everything here, and most importantly: learn it and stick to it every day and stop wasting gold on stupid things, and if you do this for weeks, you WILL make money. I promise that.
Anyway, here is a screenshot to encourage you to follow my guide:
http://img239.imageshack.us/my.php?image=encouragingjd0.jpg
http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii78/firefrog_2008/1encouraging.jpg (MIRROR)
I know it is not the highest amount of gold you've seen. You are probably thinking "but hey, playerX on my realm got 13k gold" or something along those lines. While that might be true, playerX is probably one of the most active gamers on the entire realm of yours, and all (s)he does is grinding, grinding and grinding for several hours a day. Unlike that person, I don't spend half my awake time trying to make money, but maybe 20-30 minutes on the AH each day (tops). So if you want a laidback method of earning easy cash then this guide is definetly for you, but you need patience.
.:: Money - starting out ::.
First of all, you need to have something to start out. If you have 0 gold and 0 items in your bank, you are gonna have a hard time earning money. You need starting money in order to get the most out of the auction house, your professions and even grinding. Sure you might say that you could always grind those money, but what if you cannot buy water, food and repair your gear? How are you going to get money then? Well the best way to "free money" is by doing quests. 75% of the 5000g required to buy a flymount, I got from doing quests. Doing quests at lvl70 is highly profitable. You can get as much as 25g for every 5man group quest. And now that Blizzard implemented even more daily quests - its even easier. So the first thing you have to do in order to "start out" is to make sure you have money to spend. Money controls everything in WoW. You need money for pretty much everything: Investments, Repairs, Profession materials, Raid items (pots, elixirs, flasks) and much more. So before you go any further: Make sure you have about 200-300g to spare at least. 400g or more is preferable. I will explain why later under the "investmenets" section.
.:: Auctioneer ::.
Auctioneer is a package containing several different addons/modifications for this game. It is a VERY, VERY important tool that you MUST have. Why? Because Auctioneer monitors market values of every item you spot on the auction house, and builds up a database based upon your observations - automaticly ofc.
Auctioneer can be downloaded here: http://auctioneeraddon.com/
.:: Understanding auctioneer ::.
- Setup -
After installing auctioneer, you have to write the following slash commands for all your toons that will be using it:
/auctioneer on
/auctioneer show-suggest off
/bottomscanner load never
The first command starts the data display for auctioneer. The second tells auctioneer to not display suggestions (completely useless information tbh). The bottomscanner one (another addon in this package) tells bottomscanner to not load. Bottomscanner is very, VERY unreliable - and you will end up wasting all your money into thin air unless you have flawless settings for that addon. I haven't bothered to learn bottomscanner, since it only gave me stupid suggestions (buy this, buy that) that didnt make sense. Also, if you use an older version of auctioneer (older than 5.0) you need to run this for every toon:
/auctioneer load always
- Scans -
Now, the most important thing about the auctioneer addon is the database. Without a database containing these market values, auctioneer is of no use. So the first thing you need to do is get yourself a database. The best way to do this is by doing daily scans. Go to an auction house, open up the AH screen and take a look. You will see that all the trade categories now have a checkbox next to them. Make sure only the following is checked: Weapons, Armor, Trade Goods, Recipe and Gem. Then press the new button labeled "Scan". This will take some time (a couple of minutes), so go make yourself a cup of coffee or a sandwich while you wait. One scan is not enough though, so you have to be patient. I advice you to do about 2 scans per day for about 12-14 days (do them with a couple of hours in between, like one time mid-day and one time in the evening), but Im sure you cannot be that patient so I guess one scan per day for the next 7-10 days will have to be enough. DO NOT start your investments before you have a database like this. So do these scans and then continue with this guide. The more scans, you have of the AH, the more information you'll have to make the right decisions.
.:: Profit - Supply and demand ::.
People always ask: How do I get rich on the AH? And the simple answer is buy low and sell high - really. What people fail to explain though (especially in gold guides) is how you learn to buy low and sell high, and exactly what items you should buy. Supply and Demand are the two major forces in economics. The other always interact with the other to determine the price. High demand plus a low supply equals to a higher price on the wares, and the market price goes up. A low demand and a high supply equals lower prices on the wares, and the market price goes down. So what you want to do is to buy items when there is a low demand and a big supply for them, and you want to sell when there is a low supply and high demand.
I will get more into buying/selling under the sections "buying", "selling" and "market fluctuations". So don't go ahead and buy stuff right now, wait a little longer. If you absolutely have to start now, buy something that doesn't cost too much, like netherweave. For example: Netherweave has been ranging between 3g to 5g a stack on Frostwhisper for quite some time. So buying when its down to 3-3,5g and selling it at 6g is a smart move. But BEFORE you buy anything, it is time for lesson number 3: Always, ALWAYS calculate the auction fee and the auction deposit into the price. If you buy netherweave cloth at 4g, and sell it for 5g - you hardly get any profit. That 1g you earn per stack will easily be consumed by the AH fee and the AH deposit price, and for every time the stacks wont sell, you will lose even more.
