Monday, June 25, 2007

Good Information About Motes

Since the introduction of motes in the World of Warcraft expansion, selling Primals (1o motes = 1 primal) in the Auction House has been a huge gold-earner. Just check the prices for these things sometime. While Primal Earth and Primal Shadow are very easy to gather and sell for between 2 and 7 gold each, Primal Water and Mana go for up to and over 20 gold EACH. Primal Fire and Air, the hardest to gather, sell for up to and over 30 gold each! Check out my Complete Primal Farming Guide. Keep a weather eye out for similar guides for Primal Life, Shadow, Earth, Air, and Mana.

By the way, don't think that having low prices on Primal Earth is a bad thing. If you're an alchemist, or know one, you can make some easy gold by simply buying Primal Earths, transmuting them to Primal Waters, and selling them at a huge profit. The cooldown for the transmute is 24 hours, and an extra 20 gold a day never hurt anyone!

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Buy Small Stacks, Sell Big Stacks

I was at the Auction House today, looking at Primal Earths. They were available in stacks of 1, 2, and 20. The stacks of 20 were going for about 100 gold. On a hunch, I did some quick math, and discovered that I could make my OWN stack of 20 by buying all the smaller stacks, but it cost me 30 gold LESS to do it that way. I then turned around and undercut the other stacks of 20, and earned a 25 gold profit.

This is a good example of how the average World of Warcraft player makes mistakes, especially ones who haven't read and gold earning guides. ALWAYS be on the lookout for easy scores like this! It works with primals, enchanting items, cloth -- anything that can be stacked!

Of course, this can work in the opposite way even more effectively. Rather than rely on a stupid player paying more for a stack when they could save by buying separately, you can take advantage of the deal seakers! Just keep an eye out for big stacks of items - in order to make them sell, players tend to sell stacks of items for LESS money per item than the ones for sale individually. For example, a stack of 20 Adamantite Ore might be up for 20 gold (1 gold per ore), while individual listings will be up for 1.5 gold per. Just reverse engineer this by buying these discounted stacks, and breaking them into individual stacks to sell at a higher price!

PPP: Flask of Distilled Wisdom

Time for another PPP, that is, Particularly Profitable Pattern installment, a guide to buying and reselling vendor items for easy gold!

Here's a tip for anyone who is EXALTED with Cenarion Expidition. Fedryen Swiftspear, in Zangamarsh, sells Recipe: Flask of Distilled Wisdom (+65 int, 2 hours), and it isn't BoP, YET. So, go buy a few (4g each), and put them on the AH at a hugely inflated price. Be sure to only put ONE up at a time, to keep the price low!

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Use Patches to Judge Demand

When a new patch is going to come out, you can find the patch notes detailing the changes beforehand. This is a good chance to make some easy money. Look for items that are going to be changed (weakened or beefed up), or have their drop percentage decreased.

Let's say that the drop rate of Staff X is going to be decreased in the next patch. Go to the Auction House, and see if Staff X is up for sale. If it is, buy it! I don't care how high the price is. When they become rarer after the patch, that price will go up. This is especially true for Epic (purple) items. If Staff Y is Epic, and going for 500g, you can buy it, and probably sell it after the patch for 3 times that. This goes for any kind of item. Read those notes carefully!

On the other hand, if an item is going to be made more common through INCREASED drop rate, make sure you try to sell as many as you can before the patch comes out! Remember that blue weapon in your bank that you're holding on to until the price goes up? Uh-oh, it's being made more common in the next patch. Sell that thing now, even if you have to drop your price. Once more are on the market, the price will go down anyway, and probably by even more.

The Gray Gold

In World of Warcraft, "Vendor Trash" is kind of a disparaging name for something that can rake in so much gold. I'm talking about gray items - any of that junk like feathers, meat, claws, eyeballs, etc, that you have no other use for but to sell. If you think it's useless, think again!

As soon as you begin a character in WoW, deck them out with the biggest containers you can find. Why? So you aren't tempted to throw away gray items to make room for more "valuable" ones. You have to think small, here. Those gray items usually stack, and individually aren't worth squat, but when you sell a large amount of them, like you acquire ALL the time from simply questing and killing, you can make a lot of gold. Particularly valuable are gray weapons. In Outlands, these "trash" items can sell for up to 3 gold each!

Simple advice for simple gold. Don't throw anything away! SELL EVERYTHING, or you're losing out! I've yet to find a single gold-earning guide that doesn't point this out, because so many people don't understand it.

PPP: Double Feature

Time for another PPP, that is, Particularly Profitable Pattern installment, a guide to buying and reselling vendor items for easy gold!

Formula: Enchant Shield - Major Stamina is a new enchanting recipe with the Burning Crusade. It can be bought for the relatively low price of 4 gold from the lovely Madame Ruby, of Shattrath City. Prices on this enchant vary per server, but you're almost guaranteed to get at least double what you paid!

Formula: Enchant Weapon - Lifestealing has been, traditionally, one of the most expensive and difficult to find patterns in the game. And with it's cool purple glow and awesome benefit to twinks, one of the most sought-after. Thankfully, you can farm for this in total peace from other players, as it drops off of Spectral Researchers in Scholomance. Don't try this until you get to high level 60s or level 70! Unfortunately, with all the awesome new enchants around, this doesn't fetch nearly the price is once did.

Power Professions from 1-375

This site is more about making money than anything else, at least for now. Given that, instead of writing my own posts up on this, I'm going to direct you to some much more knowledgeable people's work! I will, however, be posting guides about how to use your professions for the most money. But for those of you who just want to raise them as quickly as possible, here are some great guides written by players much more knowledgeable than I!

Awesome Profession Leveling Guide

Highlander wrote up some very concise, easy-to-read guides for all the professions, posted in one location. For more detailed guides, continue reading.

1-300 Guides
Alchemy
Blacksmithing
Cooking
Enchanting
Engineering
First Aid
Fishing/Cooking
Herbalism
Jewelcrafting
Leatherworking
Mining
Skinning
Tailoring

300-375 Guides
Alchemy
Blacksmithing
Cooking
Enchanting
Engineering
First Aid
Fishing/Cooking
Herbalism
Jewelcrafting
Leatherworking
Mining
Skinning
Tailoring

Lockpicking 1-375

PPP: Deepdive Helmet

Time for another PPP, that is, Particularly Profitable Pattern installment, a guide to buying and reselling vendor items for easy gold!

If you read my post about Taking Advantage of Laziness, you know how easy it can be to earn money by selling things in the Auction House after buying them from vendors. Well, some are more profitable than others!

Schematic: Deepdive Helmet
A helmet that lets you breath underwater for however long you want. How cool is that! This would sell simply for "coolness" factor alone, but being able to breath underwater is incredible useful, especially for farming Motes of Water!

The pattern sells in Azshara. Go to Durotar, and swim up the northeast coast. Eventually, you'll see the observatory, a tiny mushroom-looking house on a ledge. Inside is Blimo Gadgetspring, who sells the schematic, and some other good patterns as well. This schematic has a quick respawn time (about 30 minutes I think) so keep a character there for a day or so to collect them, then go to the Auction House to sell them!

Honesty is Not Your Best Policy!

Here's a sneaky trick that sometimes works wonders.
The biggest risk in buying something from the Auction House is being unable to sell it again, right? So, don't buy it, I say!

Get on the Auction House and find an item being sold under value that you'd like to be able to resell. But don't buy it. Get into the /trade channel and advertise the item at the price you would sell it at. If someone makes an offer for it to you, THEN buy it from the Auction House and turn around and immediately resell it! 100% money guarantee!

This trick is hit and miss. Any smart player will check the Auction House for a better deal before paying someone directly. But if you've played WoW long enough, you know that way too many players are just not that smart!

Auctioneer Settings to Tweak

You can tweak the settings of Auctioneer with text-based commands. A complete list can be found at The Auctioneer Wiki, which is a guide to all the features of Auctioneer. I'm only going over the ones here that I feel are the best to tweak. Always remove the brackets <> when putting in the command in WoW.

/auctioneer pct-markup If you have an item you've never seen at auction before, this is how it is priced. It will take how much you could sell it to a vendor for, and mark it up by whatever is. The logic being that vendors in World of Warcraft generally buy items for 1/5 the gold that they'd sell it for. I'd set this to 300 or so. In time, with enough scans, you'll see less and less of this, and start seeing real data.

/auctioneer pct-bidmarkdown This controls the difference between the bid and buyout prices when Auctioneer prices an item for sale. Keep it between 15 and 20. That way, even if someone wins by bidding, you're not going to get ripped off, like if you set the bid very low. A key mistake many novices to World of Warcraft make in the Auction House is setting the bid low to encourage a bidding war. Unfortunately, each bid placed only barely outdoes the previous, so the result is often selling the item far under value.

/auctioneer pct-nocomp This controls how much ABOVE market value Auctioneer will set an item if there is no competition. It makes market sense - if there's no competition, supply is probably low, and prices can go up. Don't be shy here. Ratchet up the price, if the item is in demand. See, then you set the market. Even if someone underbids you, chances are they'll only do it a by a bit, because they want to secure a profit for themselves. Rarely will you get an honest player who will know your 100 gold blue is only worth 20 gold, and underbid you by 80g. It's in everyone's best interest to sell their item for as much as they can! Take advantage of human greed.

/auctioneer pct-underlow This controls how much you undercut someone by when Auctioneer does your pricing. The default is 5, but you can go down to 2 or 3. It's a negligible profit gain, but a buyer is going to go for the lowest-priced item, even if it is only a couple silver lower!

/auctioneer pct-maxless This is a handy one. It controls how low Auctioneer is willing to go to undercut someone before giving up because you'll lose too much gold. I wouldn't go below 70%, here. If someone wants to lose hard earned (or ill-gained!) gold by selling an item at only 70% of its worth, let them lose money.

So tweak your settings people! Only amateur install and go. YOU will actually understand Auctioneer, and soon you'll be sharking those other Auctioneer users as well!

Auctioneer Interface In Depth

Auctioneer is very user friendly, even to a World of Warcraft novice, but some explanation is always nice to have! Without further ado!


1.) Your Scan button. The most important tool in Auctioneer! It scans the WoW's Auction House and saves all pricing information in a nifty database.

2.) Search Auctions. Let's you filter through the data Auctioneer gathered, based on bid price, buyout price, profit margin, etc. In depth information further down in this post.

3.) Post Auctions. The tab that brings you to the area where you can post your own Auctions.

4.) Btmscan. Bottom Scanner, very a handy tool. More information further down in the post.

5.) Transactions. This keeps track of what you've bought and how much gold paid. It's a handy way to gauge how much gold you've earned (or, unfortunately, lost!)

1.) Search. This dropdown lets you search according to Bids, Buyouts, search the competition, search for particular items (nice for monopolizing purposes), and search according to seller. Set the Minimum Profit to whatever you'd like, and Auctioneer will only return profits of that amount or greater. I generally set mine to 1 or 1.5 gold.

2.) Min PCT Less. "PCT" stands for percent, and means "percent discount from highest sellable price". So an item listed with 80pct is going for 80% cheaper than what you can get for it on the Auction House, and so is 80% profit. I keep this at 30, because I like to see all my auctions, even the low profit ones. Sorting by PCT is a good way to search out good deals. The highest PCT auctions are usually bids set to 1 silver, with the seller wanting a bidding war to occur. Look for 100PCT items with a "short" time left and bid, and if you win you're making 100% profit!

3.) Minimum Bid Percent. This one is kind of confusing. It filters based on how many times you've seen an item at auction, and it has been bid on. So, if you set it for "1%", it will return any scanned auctions that have only been bid on 1% of the time, and so are very poor sellers. Setting it to, say, 80% will return only auctions that have been bid on 80% or more of the times they've been posted. I recommend leaving this at zero and judging the sale-worthiness on an item-specific scale. After all, many epic items, expensive items and new items in World of Warcraft will have been bid on very few times!

4.) Maximum Time Left. Just what it sounds like. It only returns auctions with the amount of time you set or less. I like to set mine for "very long" to return all auctions, then just sort the list according to time left (click the time left column in the main window) to organize into order of short, medium, long, very long.

5.) Item specifics. Here can you specify what KIND of item to search for (category restrictions), minimum quality (search only grays, greens, blues, purples, artifact, whatever), and search for a particular item, in the last window at the bottom.

For tips on how to buy smartly with Auctioneer, see my post Buying With Auctioneer.

I feel that the post auctions tab requires little explanation, so I will keep it brief. Starting price is the price the auction begins at, what the first bid will cost. Buyout price is how much someone can pay to buy it immediately. You can set the auction to 2, 8, or 24 hours in length before having it expire if no one bids on it. You can find some tips on selling in my Selling With Auctioneer post.

1.) Bottom Scanner is easy to use. Just hit "Play" and review the auctions it alerts you to. It searches the auction house every 20 seconds for the last 50 auctions posted and looks for undervalued items. Go here for more information about it.

And lastly, the transactions tab. I'm not going to put a screenshot up, because you won't need one. It simply logs the date of your transactions, if it was a buy or sell, what the item was, what you made/lost, and who bought it or sold it to you!