I have an alt flying just above the vendor in halaa and use a kitchen timer to swoop down every 40 min. The only problem is if it is in the oppositions hands, bleh. But otherwise my record is I think 10-12 times one day, with about a minute spent each time. It helps if you can log in regularily during the day of course.

As for the AH it depends on how many others are doing the same thing, might just be that my server has someone doing it very actively already. The only thing I regularily buy and DE are level 51-60 weapons that disenchant into Greater Eternals. I've tried to sell Illusion Dust for a while now but not takers yet, GE:s however sell out pretty fast at 12-13g each.

A great example of the impatience tax. My roommate found a Noble Topaz and for grins through it up for 100 gold. It promptly sold. I usually buy them for 40 and resell the cut gem for profit. People will buy something they want RIGHT NOW at stupid prices sometimes. Most people don't know the market value of the item they are looking for.

Has adamantite ore gone up on everybody else's servers? Before S3 the price was 22-25gp a stack. Now its 30-40gp a stack. Its killing my gem business.

I got back into the DEing for profit game again a few days ago and Enchantrix is telling me the "good" level range to get Greater Planars out of armor is actually 64-70. Hope the slightly larger window widens your margins a little.

I usually do weapons with lvl 51-55 and weapons/armor lvl 64-70. Lvl 56-60 greens get a little muddied by the old world/Outland items having different DE tables so I usually only look for weapons there. Like you said though, its a great way to make money if your playtime suddenly becomes erratic or limited. I have neglected alts on other servers that had 1000g before level 40 using only a couple 5 minute sessions each day.

On a related note, if someone has the name of a mod to automate auctions faster (without the horrible memory requirements of Auctioneer) I'd be eternally grateful. Right now I'm using Fence/Igor'sMassAuction to do my splitting and mass posting.

Adamantite Ore has thankfully only risen on average 3-4g on my server, but I can definitely feel that S3 made a few people realize just how much money there is in Enchanting and Jewelcrafting especially. Competition has become worse, though not unbearable.

If Adamantite Ore is upwards of 40g on your server, have you tried Fel Iron Ore? If you can get 3 stacks for the same price as 1 stack of Adamantite Ore, it should yield about the same amount of rare gems. If Fel Iron Ore is only like 8-10g like it is on mine, it might be worth looking into.

The price of ore going up is a supply and demand thing too. The demand is higher, the supply is the same, if not lower, since some casual miners can make their money via dailies instead.

I kind of figured that other JC's had the same idea as I did, to buy up adamantite and take advantage of 1.5x-2x gem prices. Though the S3 frenzy is dying down now on Ravencrest, so adamantite's back down to 25 and gems are hanging out close to their normal prices (from 20/talasite to 50/ruby).

Having bored alchemist friends and the Chaotic Skyfire recipe has served me well this last week, though, that's for sure.

Has anyone had any luck with prospecting fel iron ore? I can buy at around 7g a stack and even if I get no blues I can sell the cut green gems for about 1.5g each.

Fel Iron is my fallback. Adamantite too pricey? Fel Iron. No adamantite to be had at any price? Fel Iron.

That said, a week of constant adamantite prospecting has given me about 50 of each green gem, uncut. If I were to try to compete in that gem market, I'd depress prices further. I'm still trying to make friends with a transmute alchie for making metas. Primals are easy enough to farm, and I have enough gems to keep an alchie transmuting for a couple of weeks. My plan is not to flood the meta market, but to trickle out the cut ones one at a time. Have one of every meta I can cut up at competitive prices. Since I'm farming the mats, and the gems pay for themselves through sales of cut blues, It's pretty much all profit from there on out.

Auctioneer takes a while to get rolling. I have been only buying for DE recently with a minprofit of 1.5g. I typically spend about 2k per scan, morning and evening. The new auctioneer scans in about 12 minutes on my server and I spend about the same DE'ing and relisting. Total time spent is about an hour a day and my ROI is usually 20-25%. Which is just enough to keep my wife and I in raid consumables .

I think it bears stating that the people who are making thousands of gold on the AH aren't doing overnight just by downloading a few mods and hitting "go". I have started working the AH myself (as a result of reading this thread) and while I'm not making thousands of gold a night, I can easily see how it can be done.

"Playing the AH" covers a pretty wide spectrum of practices, and I think, for people who are successful, that's about as much detail as you're going to get, indeed about as much as is useful. Partly because It's not one strategy, more of an accumulation of lots of small tricks, and also partly because those who are successful have a vested interest in protecting their methods.

First and foremost is to learn your market. Every server is different and you need the flexibility to adapt to your market. A good example (and one that I am most familiar with) is disenchanting and enchanting mats. I am on a very old and quite stable server, so prices are generally prices are depressed and pretty stable. It's unreasonable to expect to control the market by relisting simply because of the volume of stock on my server. While other people report making profit from DE-ing lvl 64-70 greens, I've found a niche in items that yield Vision Dust, Nether Essence and Dream Dust. This is not to say that the same strategy will work for you, but to make the point that you should find these niches yourself.

Secondly, patience is a virtue. Dealing in enchanting mats is a bonus here, because there is no list price, and thus no penalty if your auction doesn't sell. For items like herbs and ores, you're subject to the whims of a capricious market. I'm lazy, so I generally only use the median prices accumulated by auctioneer and use the tool tip it generates to tell me if an item has no competition/above competition/undercuttable/below market. For enchanting mats, I feel you have that luxury, but for items with deposit costs you may have to be more judicious and learn that market yourself.

Finally, investing is much easier with deep pockets. The larger your capital base, the more risk you can afford, and the more of the market you can afford to play. Unfortunately, if you're trying to make money, odds are it is because you don't have much in the first place. I started with about 50g I had on my AH mule. Within a week, I had managed to bring that up to about 200 by spending a half hour each morning and night buying cheap greens, DE-ing them and selling the mats. A week later, I was up to about 600, a week after that, about 1100. The point here is that while I had a small capital base, I used the information I gathered from my AH research to target farming on my main towards more profitable activities. While Large Brilliant Shards were up, I spent time in BRD. When Planars were up, I camped Halaa. when GEE's were up, I was in Silithus summoning elementals. Those resources were then funnelled back to my AH mule.

Personally, I doubt I even begun to scratch the surface of AH manipulation for profit gains. As I said, at the moment, I'm simply targeting cheap greens that I can DE, stockpile and sell on when the price is good (bottom scanner is an immense help here). as your capital base increases, you can start tightening your margins, undercut by 2% (or even zero if you want) and pick up smaller profit items.

A few people have expressed dismay that they're not getting "free money" by playing the AH. It's certainly not entirely free. If there is a method of "click button, get money" that people are expecting, I haven't seen it (the Halaa vendor not withstanding); there is no free lunch. But if you make a game out of playing the AH, and enjoy playing the market, it becomes far more palatable that doing the same daily quests over and over again, at least for me anyway. And takes little more that an hour a day.

"Playing" the Auction House is akin to commodities brokering in real life, find something people need, buy it cheap, sell it high, reinvest and diversify to increase profit margins and decrease risk. Certain items will always function similarly to the way (Real life bullion)Gold does, for most servers, this is Primal Air, it's not as easy to farm as other primals, is used in TONS of recipes, and generally its price goes up when the market is in a slump (i.e. not many people buying your stuff? Invest in Primal airs and you're safe, it will ALWAYS goes back up). Maybe this is a bad analogy, those who are actually financial professionals can probably make a better one, but the idea of a diversified portfolio and 'safe' commodities holds for the WoW economy as in the real world.

For people playing on PvE realms (or on PvP realms with a friend on "the other side"), it might be worth it to ship goods across the faction border. This somewhat depends a bit on the faction-balance (both in numbers as well as in PvE progression) on your realm. For example, on my realm (EU-Hellscream), there's a large alliance majority, making the alliance AH alot more active, resulting in generally lower prices for many often-traded items. With proper timing, and a bit of luck, I can get uncut gems for 50-60% of the price they go for on my side.

Obviously, this method takes more time than limiting yourself to your own factions AH, as you need a character at the other factions AH, a character at a neutral AH and a character on a different account at a neutral AH. Additionally, the neutral AH takes 15% of all sales, so transferring gold to the other faction to buy your goods with comes at a price.

But despite the limitations, in some cases cross-faction trading can be very profitable.

Fishing for deviate fishes in the barrens is the best way to start earning money if you're new on a server. If you don't have a high level character to farm with, I suggest leveling up to level 10 or so and start fishing there. There's a spot on the north side of the pool northwest of the crossroads where you can actually start at level 5 without getting aggro, but a bit higher level is what I recommend so you can more easily roam around a bit and get the deviate fish nodes, it's faster that way.

When I went on the Venture Co., having no cash at all, this is what I did and I earned an easy 100g in some hours, my stacks sold for 15-20g. This was my base for 'playing the AH'. At that time, there was a real nice niche for nether essences and twink items. I bought assassin's blades for around 75-125g and sold them for 399 eventually, same with Shadowfangs. Real good profit, eventhough it took long to sell them. But I just ripped any others from the AH when I saw them, I almost always had 2 sets in my bank to sell. The twink item prices got a major boost over time and alot more people discovered the nether essence niche, albeit a bit slow. By the time I was reaching level 40 (which did take some months, as alt) I accumulated near 2000 gold. By then about everyone accused me of gold buying because I had epics like Don Santos' on the AH etc.

One simple tip I can give is to study the content the higher tier raiding guilds are doing/going to be doing and figure out if they need any special resources for it. This goes as far back as Elemental Fires for Ragnaros and right up till big primal investments for encounters like Mother Shahraz. Now that the middle segment of raiding guilds has beaten Kael and is now advancing in T6, we're seeing increases in Primal Shadow for example.

Getting a bearing on this generally doesn't entail more than simply reading WoWwiki about the encounters and checking out the raid progress thread on yours server's forums.

I've been doing the "buy for disenchant" AH shopping. There is one pretty large problem with this that hasn't been brought up (to my knowledge). You can very easily saturate the market for a given dust/shard/essence. For example, if I buy every green that will make me at least 2g profit and that disenchants into illusion dust for a couple days, it might take 2 weeks to sell all that dust. I'm talking about competitive pricing here too. I'll make money no doubt, but it's definitely not a get rich quick scheme. What you're forced to do is just buy the greens that have really good margins. That's fine (more gold per green), but in the end, it's just not that much gold.

Adamantite Ore dropped as low as 24g while it fluctuated 28-33 for months on my server. Still makes far more money as a Holy Paladin than any farming spot I've tried.

You have to make sure your DE values are up to date. Meaning, if you run auctioneer, you check the current prices of all the DE mats themselves first to update Auctioneer's valuation of the green items when DEd.

I understand the issue you are noting regarding dust, specifically Arcane Dust. Illusion dust actually sells for more than Arcane Dust on my server, quite regularly. The supply is much lower, whereas there's always at least 20 stacks of Arcane on my server. However, auctioneer takes the average price of Arcane dust into consideration when factoring the DE value of an item.

If a lvl 65 green has a 75% chance to DE into 2.5 arcane dust, 20% chance to DE into 1.5 Greater Planar Essences and 5% chance for 1 Large Prismatic shard, and Auctioneer says the DE value is 9g, then you can buy those items up to 6-7g in price and still average a profit of 2-3g per item. You may have a streak where you only got dusts for 10 items, and have to list the dust at below market value to ever sell it, but then you'll get a streak where you get 4 shards out of those 10 items and make a lot more than 3g per item. Bought for 5g, DEd into shard, sold shard for 30g, 27g profit.

Yes, you may take a small loss on the arcane dust itself sometimes, but that's averaged out by the larger profit on the essences and shards, especially since it's easier to corner the market for either of those when the opportunity arises. I just see the dust as allowing me to be more 'liquid' and have more money to reinvest at any given time. I generally list any extra dust as stacks of 1, for just under the price that the next cheapest single stacks are going for, and then a few stacks of 20 at the same price as the cheapest 20 stacks unless the market is drastically low that day. In that case, I hold onto them for a day or until I have upwards of 10 stacks of dust sitting in my bank, at which point I take the loss and unload to keep my "Goldflow" (cashflow) going.

Though I know it's been touched on in regards to people powerleveling their crafting on weekends, have people noticed during the week that it can be quite hard to find some crafting items?

For example: I've been trying to level Jewelcrafting on my wife's character, but we've unfortunately run into a problem of a lack of things such as Silver Bars or lower level gems on the AH. We were following one of the "powerleveling" guides that had been listed on the WoW forums, and while it's worked fairly well for leveling up quickly, we've found it hard to find some of the items needed for those designs on the AH.

My question ends up being this. Have people been watching the powerleveling market specifically for the items listed on those powerleveling guides? I know I would have paid a bit of a premium during the week if I'd seen those items. I would imagine that the entire spectrum of each profession has a lot of people focusing on those specific components and could make a killing selling only those items. I'm honestly not sure if it would be as profitable during the week, but I'd noticed a lack of those items available when I come home from work and want to put 20-30 levels of JC under her belt. It's very much because I'm too lazy to go farm lower level areas for things like Silver Ore or having to prospect ore for gems that I would need. I know that I can easily farm more money AE'ing crap in Outlands over going out and farming those nodes myself.

For the people who do a lot of the daytrading, it might be a great idea to keep an eye on those needed items for powerleveling professions and just watch for a high/low and watch over a couple weeks to find out when the best time to buy and sell is.

I apologize if this was mentioned somewhere earlier. I've been following this topic since the start and know that I've missed a few things here or there.

Anyone using any clever systems for representing AH prices over time graphically?

I've been using Auctioneer for a good while, but it doesn't have any graphical displays of price data that I'm aware of. Started looking into Wowecon, but not sure how much data they have when you go down on a realm-to-realm view (I never get any data for my realm on the graphs at least) and I'm not a fan of starting to use the upload program that was discussed earlier in this thread.

Ideally someone could make an addon or web parser (like WWS), to present data from your Auctioneer database. You could have it represented graphically showing prices rising/falling, volume sold at different prices etc, much like stock exchange trading data, and the way Wowecon presents their data on the web. I suppose you could use some of the same methods Recount use for their DPS graphs to do this in game. Would be great to be able to go back and view the price for an item over a week, and see what days offered the best buy/sell options so that you could easily identify patterns for your server.. After all people are sitting on a lot of price data for their realm after doing daily scans over a period of time.

Anyone know if features like this has been planned for Auctioneer or other addons? Or maybe someone made something able to read Auctioneer log files and present data from them. Maybe you could do something like a WWS parse of Auctioneer's files and browse/search all available items.. I guess what I'm describing is just Wowecon's way of presenting data, but using your own logs.

Also, I guess a basic flaw of presenting auction data from the in game AH is always that what you are seeing is auctions people are TRYING to sell. Those are the ones being recorded, and you have no way to differentiate between an expired auction and one that sold at that price.

The issue with representing "attempted sale price" graphing is that it isn't actual sale-price graphing. That's probably the #1 issue with creating an "index"-like tool for WoW Auction Houses. When what you really want to know is "What is the highest average price that this item consistently sells at" knowing what is listed doesn't help as it does not reflect this sort of data.

Has anyone here fully explored the vertical-monopoly trick?

I'm interested because I managed to make it work one night with Fel Lotus and Flask of Pure Death. I bought all of the Fel Lotus and all of the cheap Flasks, and relisted the Flasks at crazy prices. After a few hours of that (and Fel Lotus buying) I put up the Fel Lotus for 5-10g more than I had paid for it. I managed to sell all but one Lotus and one Flask. It was something I'd done out of pure frustration (what?! Only 3 Fel Lotus up when I need to craft?) but it proved fairly lucrative.

As my server's pretty old and there's a lot of stockpiling, it's not something that can be done all the time, but I find it useful from time to time when I'm dealing with items that I know I'm going to use anyway.

My little engineer managed to pay for herself up till 300; past that I'm now into her about 200g. I have about 150g worth of Cogspinner Goggles on another character, and it's back to mining Copper till she's back to break-even. I don't understand how people spent thousands of gold on their professions.

This is very true. I started working on the Winterspring mount, figuring it would give me a timesink over the holidays, and I'm selling the Thorium I stop and pick up for more per stack than I would be getting for comparable amounts of Adamantite.

With the constant number of players leveling professions (new characters, or new profession choices on old characters), keeping a healthy supply of lowbie items can turn a healthy profit, especially on a smaller server with a limited market.