The auction house in Warcraft is a place where a lot of gold can be gained and lost very quickly. The reason for this is that, like all real life markets, the individual prices for an item at the auction house fluctuates all the time. Borean leather is 1g a piece one day, and 2g a piece the next

So it’s the variations that give you the player the opportunity to make and lose Warcraft gold. Selling to the NPC vendors that are dotted around the place does not offer variability. The prices they charge and buy for are fixed. SO if you have uncommon loot or decent crafting materials then these NPC vendors will not offer the best return for your efforts

Playing the market in the auction house requires that you first do some research, and collect some data. You need to know if a bargain is as good as it seems, or if you could get more profit for the items you are selling.

The first step would be to download and install Auctioneer. An addon you can get from Curse.com. This has a scan function that records every asking price for every item at auction. Before you start your career as a floor trader, spend a few days running the scan once a day to collect good data. Carry on powerleveling until you have about ten scans worth of data.

If you run this scan once a day (or once every two days) until you have run it about 10 times, you will have a good idea of what people are asking for certain items.

Auctioneer will record all the asking prices and then put a percentage against every item you see in the auction house. This percentage is a ratio of the average asking price that auctioneer has found. So 90% means that the item is priced 10% below the average. Whereas 110% means it is priced 10% above.

Using this information, you can make decisions on which items to trade in. Following the simple real-world rule of buy low, sell high.

But I should mention some big shortcomings with Auctioneer.

Auctioneer records the asking price, and not the selling price. There can be a huge difference. Auctioneer does not know if an item sold. People put on extremely high prices for junk items (10,000g for 1 leather scrap for example) this happens quite a bit. It is a way of moving large amounts of gold around. Gold sellers use this method to give gold to the character who buys off them. Also some do it just in the hope that someone accidentally clicks on it and buys the item. Auctions are instant and none refundable remember. These huge prices can skew the average price. An item that should be 20 copper selling for 10,000g will ruin the average price that Auctioneer has taken.

Another issue is the fact that the game changes all the time. Items are useful, and then a patch is issued that makes them worthless. Perhaps they were part of a crafting recipe that is no longer the best available. Or the stats for an item have been changed. Blizzard increase and decrease drop rates for items all the time. In a matter of days rare items become common and worth far less, or the opposite can happen. Auctioneer will not tell you this. If you have invested heavily in one or two items, a patch can wipe out loads of your profit of you don’t know what’s coming up

Auctioneer is a great tool to start with, but it is just a start. It’s not the holy grail of gold making in Warcraft. If you want to be a World of Warcraft Gold Generator then you will need auctioneer, but you will also need a lot more besides.

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