Another thing about playing the auction house is fake listing uncommon items.
Its a pretty long haul plan but it can pay off by catching other users of auctioneer out. What you need:
- A supply of a White item thats easily farmable and never or rarely on the ah.
Over the next week or two you want to place the item on the AH, one or two each day, at a high price. Engineering components work well for this, as a few of the unneeded ones are never on at all. So lets say we stick on a Felsteel Stabilizer (this is a subbed in item, i've no idea how much felsteel stabilizers sell for but I want to protect my current investment). Its relatively cheap to make and requires two felsteel bars.
So for the next two weeks you put this item on each day at a price of around 90-95g each. Don't put too many on, just one and occasionaly two (at a different price).
The item in my experience doesn't appear on the ah much. Almost all the items it is used to create are Bop or require engineering. The main one that doesn't is the gyobalance destroyer, but as you need an engi to craft this anyway, people in my experience just hand over 2 felsteel and get the crafter to do it then.
So we've put these items on stupidly overpriced for a few weeks now. Everybodys Auction House scans have started getting a baseline for this item at around that price. We put it on for so long for two reasons, one is that it looks better in auctioneer if its been on 14 times at slightly fluctuating prices, it makes them think its selling often and at similar prices.
Secondly it helps erase any previous data the player might ahve on the product. If they've got the odd 10g sale for it then the average price is going to be raised tons by having it on very high for that long.
So now we relist it on the 15th day. But today we put the price at around 35-40g or whatever you feel is cheap enough. Try not to list too many of them, I stick to two or possibly three at a time depending on the activity/time of day.
So Johnny McScrub comes along with his auctioneer and does his percent less thing to check for anything really underpriced on the AH. Whats this? he exclaims. Felsteel Stabilizers at 40% of their normal selling price!!! He grabs the two for 40g and reslists them at 90g each, not knowning no one is ever going to pay that much for them. This helps your cause too as once they are gone and back on the AH you can relist yours below them. More auctioneer people come along and spot them, and relist them at 85g to undercut Johnny, all the while you're making cash off them as they buy overpriced goods to relist at even higher price.
Obviously many won't fall for this. Any engineer for a start is going to know its a cheap item he can make and realise the hustle. The more money cautious auctionhouse players too will often do a lot of research on an item.
But thankfully the players who have fully configurated Auctionner and know how it works fully are a lot rarer than those who just use it out of the box and spam percenless and silverless every morning.
Unless you run this with a lot of products, which could be hard to do before people start to cotton on, it can't really support you as the whole auctioneer only part, you still have to play the AH yourself (and ignore your own fake data

) but I've sold a lot of a few items (not stabalizer, was using it as example) that are quite rare and never on ah for high prices due ot this trick, and as long as you don't abuse it by listing too many (and lowering the price) it can work for a while. Eventually some guy will try break into the market by listing them at near mats price by with time the game is up and its time to find a different item.
Also for those wtih a lot of money, just like in real life, its much easier to make even more. If you find a suitably rare item, that its not on the AH much or demand is insane, you can do a good job of totally dominating the market. At 60 I pulled a similar stunt with Ghost Mushroom. Sure Ghost Mushroom. It wasn't the best product to do it with because of it being relatively easy to get if you know what you're doing, but I managed to raise the price of this quite high by buying out anything cheaper than mine, relisting and selling them at my high price. The same went for Ragesteel Shoulders and Scroll of Strength. In the few weeks coming up to it I bought out any scroll of Strength for around 1-3g each. On patch day and the few days after it I was flogging them in pairs for around 30-50g and they were flying off the AH, made close to a thousand on that venture alone.
I'm loathe to say this for fear of it ruining my scheme on Eu vashj but:
Next patch (wed for us) I'm doing the same with Starwood. Many peoples first instinct when makign the 225 flying machine will be to type Starwood into the auction house. They'll see my nice bundles of 8 there for 20g a piece and buy them. A little research could find that I bought it from a vendor for less than 4 gold a stack and am making a 500%+ profit from each sale. This is playing on peoples laziness, both in not researching the material and not bothering to find who sells it. The beauty of this particular hustle is that I can buy as much as I need right there in Org so whilst playing the AH normally, every time I sell starwood I can just run grab some more. I'm not going to get egg in my face if I don't sell any at all, because my loss will only be like the 9g I paid for a stack of 20.
As someone already mentioned patch 2.3 also brings a few more opportunities for exploting the lazy:
- Ragveil, needed 2 a pot for the new alch potion. I didn't invest into this because I feel most alchemsits liike me already have enormous stock piles of this stupid herb.
- Flying machines are gonna be much needed but most of the mats are engineering mats anyway. Starwood was the only place I thought I may be able to make profit.
- Cooking dailys. Lots of dailys require some current food to complete. Farming both raw stacks of that current food, and cooking stacks of them, then placing them on AH will turn a nice profit.
- Elixir of Major Strength is another one I'm hoping to make money on, though I expect the market to be a bit flooded on this. Either way the new Executioner enchant requires 3 of these and I'll try keep stacks of 3 on at all times, though competition is already harsh because many use it to level on. Also used in 3 bs recipies atm.
-Light Feathers - 99 needed for the new LW Arrow Quiver, won't make a ton on these but a tidy profit from buying out very cheap stacks for last week or two.
- Aside from teh cooking dailys there are new food recipies that use existing food reagents. The talbuk meat which previously was only 20stam food, can now be created into +20 hit raiting food too.
The biggest AH coup as it were has already been mentioned here. I missed out on it a lot but still made some profit. Over the course of perhaps 3 weeks the price of a primal shadow on my server went from 1g to 25g per one. Had I realised how drastic the nerf had been to their drop rate I'd have stockpiled the literally hundreds that were on the AH. 24g profit per one sold, your talking 2-3k profit there. When I realised the drop rate change was so bad I started buying them but by that time they were already reaching 15g so my profits were small.