Monday 17 January 2011

Simple Great tips for young Goblins


This post is part of the Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival of this month. From February the 11th you can check this page to look for other posts about great tips to begin doing some real gold.


This are the advices I value the most, and you should really do your best to follow them.


Buy from the middle
When you're buying what you need for your usual crafts you buy the cheapest mats on the AH? Well, sir, you're probably doing the wrong thing! 
Buy buying everything under a certain threshold you're not allowing the prices to go down further. If you leave some cheap mats the odds are that some other gatherer will undercut blindly the AH, lowering the prices even more. As I said in my post about at which prices you can buy Obsidium Ore being sure you'll gain gold, it sometimes happens that farmers (bot or not) start undercutting each other wildly. Even when [Obsidium Ore] goes to 44g a stack, you should leave 5 stacks in the AH so that they can be undercut, even if it means buying stacks that are selling for 1-2g more.
This is true for any kind of mat... And you now the coolest think of this trick? The more people knows about it, the more you'll gain from it! Because there will ever be someone trying to sell raw mats undercutting his competitors, so higher number of crafters that follow this simple rule = higher odds that someone will undercut the last farmer before his last stack of mats sells.


Pay attention to the bids!
Lots of people don't really consider the bid prices of items, since most of the time players are on a hurry and will buyout everything they need. But you should pay attention to two things about bids in the AH:

  • Profit opportunity

This is quite obvious: you should always check if you can see things with very low bids compared to their usual price... And remember that during the downtime in the maintenance day (Tuesday in US-servers, Wednesday in the EU ones) auctions still expire. So it's a great idea to do this on Tuesday night, since people will have less time (or none at all) to bid higher.

  • Risk of a loss
When undercutting you could tempted to check with more attention the buyout price than the minimum bid... This is a potential way to loose a lot of money if someone is doing what I just suggested to you and buys the item before you notice the error of your ways... So try to pay attention to everything.

Try Cross-Faction trading
This is great and very simple to do if you have two accounts, but a trusted friend is enough to make some big profits without much of an effort.
You should start just trading from one side to the other faction specific items (like the pets of the various races). While you're doing this, scan the AH of your opposing faction (and obviously your AH, but you should already be doing this) and go through it until you have a good amount of data and a clear idea of the differences between the two factions markets. Instead of using the neutral AH to transfer gold to your cross-faction alt, give him the pets specific of your faction.
You can sell this faction pets, each bought for just a few silvers, for several golds... 15g if you have a strong competition, but even 60g each if you're the only one posting them... So while your learning the opposite faction's AH, you'll make the gold you need to start buying from it selling these pets.

1 comment:

  1. Great post, thanks for these tips.

    My experience on the 'buy from the middle' tip is that you should be prepared to go back fairly quickly to see if other items are posted below that threshold. Other buyers will gobble up all the cheapest materials so you want to beat them there.

    Before maintenance day I run an Auctioneer search of everything for sale in the AH and then sort by 'time remaining' (all the 30 minutes are listed first) and then by '% of value' (best deals listed first) and look through that list.

    I have picked up Epics for cheap bids and lots of trade mats that way. The bids often expire during maintenance, especially the <2 hrs ones if timed right.

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