Especially wool. Wool is in a really weird little value class all by itself. It’s relatively low-level, but the level range of humanoids it drops from is very small, so it’s relatively rare. My personal priority lineup for wool is:
tailoring (if I have a tailor toon)
first aid until I pass wool bandages giving skill-ups
subfaction rep turn-in (the first faction rep cloth turn-in is 60 stacks of wool, one-time)
AH
I’ll do the subfaction rep turn-in (you can only turn in wool once each faction) with all the subfactions in Horde or Alliance (depending on my toon), then go on to AH. The subfaction rep is important if you want to buy mounts from the other races. You need to be Exalted with a particular race to buy their mount, and the cloth turn-ins help.
Really? Perhaps it’s because I spend a lot of time in the levels between 15 and 30, but I’ve probably picked up more wool than any other kind of cloth. Especially if you’re Alliance, both the Deadmines and the Stockades will suffocate you in wool. I’m freaking amazed I’m finally seeing Silk and Mageweave more often than Wool these days, frankly.
It takes a while, Quasimodem. I still have to look acronyms up way more than I should for someone who signed up in 2006. I often refer to Google to find places that I can’t otherwise find or rely on the QuestHelper addon to get me there. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is if you enjoy yourself!
Bags and the bank: There are the upper slots in the bank, where you can put stuff (and I assume you’ve put your bags in them). Then there are a row of slots along the bottom. You have to buy them, and they get progressively more expensive. If you put bags in these slots, then they act like bags in your inventory slots and you can store stuff in them, expanding your bank space.
Don’t feel too bad about the acronyms. I’ve been playing for three years, and I still get screwed up by the acronyms. Someone will say, “Who wants to do BFD?” and I’ll volunteer before I remember that Black Fathom Deep is about thirty levels too low for me, and it’s Black Rock Depths that I need to do. And then I have to go and run a bunch of mid-twenties through Black Fathom Deep, because I’m too much of a softy to tell them no after getting them all excited about having a 60+ character run them through the dungeon.
And all the PVP and end-content raid acronyms? I don’t even pretend to know what that’s all about.
Ye gods! I can’t imagine playing without the auction house! It’s where all the real money and good gear is! (Outside of special drops in instances, that is … .)
Here are a few guidelines for selling on the AH:
Only auction green equipment or better. If it’s white or gray, sell it to a vendor.
Don’t sell in odd lots. If something stacks in groups of 10, accumulate 10 before you auction it. Or sell it one at a time.
Green weapons often don’t sell well. If it doesn’t sell the first time you put it up, consider vendoring it instead.
Items you’ve crafted don’t sell well because everyone is crafting them too. You tyically won’t make back the cost of your materials.
Stick to basic goods at first: Raw materials you’ve gathered with your gathering profession and green gear that you’ve picked up. There are a few unusual drops that sell well (spider silk, for example) but you have to learn these over time. If you just auction every bit of crap you find, most of it won’t sell.
Recipes for crafting professions usually sell well. And they’re cheap to put up on the AH so you can keep put them up for a long time until the right buyer comes along.
Look at auctions of other similar items to see what your price should be. If there are 10 stacks of copper bars selling for 2g50s, price your stack at 2g45s.
Always post a buyout price. That’s how most things sell. Set the starting bid at about 80% of the buyout.
This last point is important. The auction house doesn’t really work like a real auction most of the time, with people competing with each other and bidding back and forth. Instead, most things get bought out directly if they sell at all. Think of the buyout price as the REAL PRICE and the starting bid as a SALE PRICE that automatically triggers if the good hasn’t been sold by the end of the auction period.
There are a couple of interface add-ons that you might find useful. **Auctioneer **is the Rolls Royce of auction house management. It regularly scans the auction house and builds a database of the pricing history for every item in the game. You can use this data to determine what your price should be, but more importantly it lets you spot items that are underpriced so you can resell them at a profit. With Auctioneer it’s possible to make 100’s of gold pieces just sitting around in the AH buying and selling.
The only problem with Auctioneer is that it’s got a zillion bells and whistles for people who are really serious about playing the AH. The latest version is too complicated even for me. So I recently switched to using an add-on called Auctionator. It doesn’t maintain a database. All it does is look at the current prices for similar goods and suggest a price that undercuts them. You can’t use it to spot underpriced goods, but it has a nice streamlined interface for posting stuff you find while adventuring.
Almost always excellent advice! I did have an exception to that rule recently though; I was in Badlands killing the Scalding Whelps around Lethlor Ravine for a quest and one of them dropped a Dark Whelpling. I couldn’t find one in the AH to base the price on so I listed it for 1g without a buyout price. It sold for 500g! Lesson learned: pets sell high.
the AH is great for making gold, if you are saving up money for a monut on lvl 30 start early in using it. If you have mining as a skill, its not too hard to get that amount by 30.
I have a problem w/ pvp. I’ll admit i suck at it. I got totally pwned by a lvl 41 mage and a lvl 41 rogue tonight and i was a lvl 50 hunter. I could take one of them but together they were too much. the rogue specifically. Even with “track unseen” on i couldn’t detect him before he got to me. Sadly when i asked for help on general chat i was met with more disgust than help. (though a lvl 80 druid came to my aid and killed them when they were camping me)
My new goal is to get better at pvp. I refuse to be beaten by anyone lower in levels than me again. I really really hated that. My only excuse is it was 2 against one, but thats not much of an excuse considering the lvl difference. * I really stink at this. :(*
Whelps are fairly rare, so yes, they do sell high.
It needs to be noted (again) that different servers have different economies. The economy is created by the server population and all servers have different populations. Gathered items sell fairly high on older servers, where people have higher level toons that they want to try a crafting skill with but don’t want to go through the tedium of gathering their materials themselves. Newer servers don’t have that population of high-level, relatively wealthy toons, and AH prices for ANYTHING are going to be lower than the prices for the same item on an older server.
I may have to try that. I have a Green-Winged Macaw that drops in the Deadmines that I’ve been trying to sell on the goblin auction house, but nobody bought it when the buyout was 200, nobody bought it when it was 150, and nobody’s buying it when it’s 125. I’m holding out for 100-125, although I put the bid price at 75 in case someone wants to try going that way. Just…terrible little interest for something that I’m selling the only one of.
Well, we really haven’t needed it until now. The individual who invited us into this game, and then his guild, is a very dear friend with about 4 accounts of his own and 15 or so toons at 80. He gave us a whole pile of gold to start out, then we’ve just been whittling away at it as we needed it.
So, I went and listed some of the herbs I had gathered. We’ll see how it works out.
The goblin auction houses are always much lower volume. It might be worthwhile creating a Horde toon so you could buy it yourself and sell it in the real Horde auction house. For a while I was running a small business importing cockroaches to the Alliance through the goblin AHs.
You’re right, though, pets sell well.
Another good AH seller is books like cooking and first aid manuals. For example I was in Ashenvale a few nights ago and I stopped by at Silverwing Refuge. There’s a vendor there who sells the first cooking manual for 1g each. So I bought six and put 'em up on the AH for 2g50s apiece and most of them sold over 24 hours.
I’ve noted that copper ore sells very well, at least horde side on archimonde. It sells better than tin or iron which are higher on the “food chain” as far as mining goes. If I auction copper it usually sells within an hour.
After a quest I’ll hearth to Orgrimmar, run outside and mine all of the copper near the city. Its reliably there and respawns fairly quickly. Then I’ll sell it, go about my business and come back and do it again. You can easily make 30 to 70 gold in a few hours doing that.
Its odd…I’ve seen things on auction for like 99 silver but the buyout is 100 gold. Why would anyone pay that much if you can get it for 99 silver? I haven’t noticed a lot of haggling and things like ore or herbalism stuff is not hard to find cheaper than that.
The auction house in Gadgetzan pretty much sucks though. I can barely find anything I can use in it, and I don’t think many players look at the items for sale there, scarce as they are.
Son of a B****! i forgot it was server maintenance day! Its snowing here in NC, only a few inches expected, but because they don’t get a lot of snpow everything is closed including Fort Bragg! So I got a snow day! the platoon leader called me at 0530 and told me to stand by, it might not be a work day…at 0800 she said the post was closed…at 0830 I had informed all of my troops that they had the day off…then had breakfast…then got ready to play…and the servers are down! RATS!
Well, at least I can watch the inaugaration but I’d rather be in Un’ Goro Crater fighting monsters.
Well, it’s not like the haggling gets advertised, since the AH isn’t updated in real-time. There may be plenty of bidding that you just don’t notice. There’s been a couple of times where I’ve seen a really low bid price and decided to go for it, only to be outbid 15 minutes later. The buyout price is used for the vast majority of transactions, but that doesn’t mean nobody pays attention to the bid price. Frankly, I’d call that player an idiot, because unless someone is lazy enough to drop the entire 100 gold or the bidding gets up to 100 gold anyway, he’s probably going to lose out on quite a bit of money from people choosing to bid rather than buy.
That said, I really hate the bidding mechanism. Proxy bidding is the only way to go online, where auctions may end in the middle of the night or day when you’re not online to keep bidding. But no, it doesn’t do that. It just takes your bid, then kicks it back to you when someone bids higher. You need to stay at the auction house and pay attention if you want to engage in a bidding war. It’s not real surprising most people just go with buyout these days.
Thing is the bid price is often irrelevant, most of the time when people search for something on the ah they want it now and not in two days, so the seller don’t always bother changing the default bid price. Keep in mind that the seller can always cancel the auction even if someone has placed a bid.
If the buyout is way above the normal price it’s probably a ‘scam’ attempt however, it used to be more common when auctions where sorted by bid price, but the idea is that the overpriced item ends up in the middle of the normally priced ones and someone who isn’t paying attention buys it. If someone places a bid you simply cancel the auction.
Completely out-of-proportion bid prices and buyouts are also a sign of gold-buying. The gold-seller will tell the client to put something like a single Refreshing Spring Water on the AH at 100g starting bid or buyout. The gold-seller will then go to the AH and spring the buyout, basically depositing 100g in the mail to the client, in a way that doesn’t generally alert the GMs and adds a layer of obscurance to the transaction (the GMs have to dig into the AH records to find out who did what instead of just noticing that someone sent someone else 100g, both names of which will be on the alert report they get).
The best thing about Auctioneer, for all its complicated functions, is that it’ll sort items by price per unit. A stack of 20 copper ore selling for 5 gold will be listed higher than a stack of 17 copper ore selling for 4g50s. Vastly reduces the chance you’ll screw yourself on something like that.
