Well, i have something like 18k gold.

The secret? It's not only one secret. It's several smart habits like, for example:

1) Fishing (60% of my gold): I just sit near garadar and nearest the city guards and fish!!! This is the time when I spend lots of fun dialogues on /g; watch tv.... And mudfin fish, nightfin bluefish turn into real big amounts of money. Mudfish sold by 15g/stack, bluefish 25 on my server. Its like 15 mudfish, 20 barbet trout and 12 bluefish per 10 minuts. Some motes of water too

2) Running old instances that I can solo. I am warlock, and old instances pre-bc STILL drop significant items, patterns, cash, trashjs... A full scholomance run takes me off 45 minuts and can give 180-300 gold, depending of the drops. For example, dark rune sells for 20-30g on my server.

3) Playing with fire. I check AH everyday. You should learn the best time to check. There are some items wich prices can oscilate hightly during the day. Considering I am alchemist, i essencialy work with herbs and potions/receips/flasks/gems.
Check if you can buy input items lower than the output ones (this is basic) but, more important, get the habit to check and work with prices. Learn the market, learn your concorrents, feel on the air demands and supplies, work like a walmart!

4) create some "daily" craft item. Tailors with their special cloths, aclhemists with meta gems. Never sell the coldown, use it by yourself and use it every time it turn avaible. Plus, add value to your item. For example, find a JC to cut your skyfire diamond into a chaotic one, so you will add some gold to your final output.

5) for me, dailys is just a waste. Too many pvp, low money, too many time spend doing the tasks. On AH you will find more oportunities to gain much more money than killing ravagers, fleshs or colecting relics.

I hope this help you guys and sorry for my english that is so bad.

This brings up a good question, which is: "when will Season 4 come out?" I think, not for a really long time.

Tier 6 came out when 2.1 hit, but Season 4 didn't come out till a week after 2.3, something like 5 months later. That was different of course, because people didn't step inside Hyjal on the first day like they will with SW25, and obviously 2.2 delayed their development cycle. But still, I can easily see it being 3 months before enough people have SW25 gear for Blizzard to feel that it's time to implement S4. That's a pretty long time frame, and would suggest that it's nice wise to base your speculating off of selling items for S4.

For me, it's the Nether-crafted gear and blue PvP gear, then the new Heroic Badge rewards in a few weeks.


Oh, and the gear leap that happened when 2.4 hit was people being able to buy Purples with their honor, while now it's just going from S1 to S2 gear. I don't think this leap is as big, and I don't expect nearly so many casuals will be saving 70k honor and buying all the purples they see when S4 is released.

I believe that commodity deflation will exceed cash inflation, at least in the short term. Cash puts me in the best position to take advantage of market changes.

One of the reasons I really like this thread (not just for WoW, but in a grand theoretical way) is because you are wrong. We are not all on the same server, and so advice I give here is read by people who can use it without competing with me. In fact, I'm pretty sure only one person from my server-faction is reading this, and I know most of the tricks mentioned here aren't done. So people can make observations without it causing them competition, or at least with much less chance in the real world. And so we get a lot more interesting discussion than you usually get about trading markets.

Heh, probably one of the best ways to make gold right now would be to: collect all the server names on this thread, make a list of all servers and remove the ones posted here, sort by population, and transfer an alt with 5000g to the 10 lowest population servers on your list. There you'll find the virgin markets where a lot of these tools can still be used.

Also, 3000g a week doesn't say much. How much playtime is that? If it's 15 hours a week or more, it's not actually an improvement over a good farming system. And yes "just sitting in Stormwind" can easily be 15 hours a week or more.


Anyway, a note about Primals. When 2.4 is released not only will more items be crafted, not only will there be a larger gold supply, but also keep in mind: most of the people currently farming primals will stop doing so for a few weeks. Almost all casuals and raiders will be hitting the Sunwell Terrace, whether to just enjoy the new daily's (for the casual) or to grind those exalted items ASAP (for the raider). There still will be some primal farmers, but in general I expect the primal market to contract. So definitely a reason to buy now. In particular, if ore goes down due to gems being less valuable, then I expect much less ore farming to happen, causing the price of Primal Earth to rise. In fact, with all these effects, I wouldn't be surprised if we see Earth triple in price, all the way from 2g to 6g.


Lastly, I will reiterate and add: invest in Arcane Tomes and Fel Armanents. Not only do these have a 0g deposit price making them safe to list at a high price, but they go well with all the new shoulders people will soon be acquiring, and unlike gems and enchants, there's nothing coming that's likely to depress their price.

Mmm, although maybe 10000 people running a 5 man of demons and blood elves will. Does anyone know what the drop rate of Tomes and Armanents in MT5 is?

Also there are some new dailies involving bloodelves and demons. I don't think we will see that much variation in this branch and on the long run prices will decline. On the other hand: sniping cheap tomes/armaments in order to sell them at peak times is a good practice I guess. Simply because any profit you make comes without AH tax.

Mind providing the due diligence backing this belief up then? I don't mean to come off as dismissive of your opinion, but you don't provide a compelling argument for either of your claims.

The fact is that primals have dropped in price across the board (except for fire), enchanting mats are dropping, blue gems are dropping, greens are pretty static, and epic gems have tanked probably 60% of their value (I'm selling runed spinels for 400-500g instead of 1k-1.1k). We're looking at a market that has finally recovered from the positive demand shock that was 2.3/S3. Prices for everything aside from ultra-high-supply items are dropping (Ore being the exception) as inventory gluts hit the market.

People are scared of what 2.4 may and may not bring and so are simultaneously hoarding (people like us) and unloading (people who think cash is safe). The problem with being overly liquid in your assets come 2.4, is that once the badge vendor is unlocked, everyone who does not subscribe to this thread (a LOT of people) will have all of their assets in cash, and be more than happy to spend it on enchanting materials, new gems, etc. to deck themselves out. So instead of being able to take advantage of temporary price spikes from the positive demand shock, you'll find yourself with only overpriced items to buy.

By going all-cash you run the opposite risk of over-leveraging. Remember that in the end-run, this thread is about opportunity costs, so if you're over-leveraged, you're likely unable to take advantage of great deals that occasionally crop up on the AH/trade chat. Whereas if you're under-leveraged, you won't be able to take advantage of demand and supply shifts that someone with an inventory can. So in both situations, you give up situational flexibility and lose money (yes lose money) from the deals that you DID NOT MAKE.

@Bismar: Expect to see s4 at the end of April/sometime in May, it really makes the most sense considering the length of seasons 1 and 2 and the tentative release date of WoTLK. S1 was shortish (3-4 months?) and S2 was longish (~6 months?), so a trend towards a 6 month length for s3 (and consequently s4) is a good bet. I also agree that you won't see the same sort of massive market response to s4 that you did for s3/2.3, mainly for the reason you provided, but also because it will come as an "aftershock" to the earthquake that is 2.4. Since s3 was so close on the heels of 2.3 (+the honor gear release) the market reaction was an amplification of what was already happening, but I don't see that happening with 2.4 and S4.

@Cagadabr: Great post, good tips on the fishing, it's one of the things I do while waiting for 2v2 queues to pop in nagrand as well as doing mining rounds.

An Aside: More and more I feel that the lesson learned from the movie L4yer Cake (aside from dressing snappily and avoiding London Room-Service) is that phrase uttered by Eddie Temple: "Always remember Young Man, the art of good business is being a good middle-man" is completely true. I'm finding that playing middle-man and doing combines/crafts/resales is ultimately more fun, time neutral(compared to farming), and passes the time far more quickly than farming primals or materials to craft items. Being the guy in the middle is the least risky (assuming you know your market well), and while the per-item accounting profit may be less than your other options, you can work more quickly and in far larger volume than the farmer or the farming crafter. The price-disparity between crafted items and their base materials is by far the best indicator that this is true. Blue clefthide and cobrahide leg kits sell at almost 40% markup over their base materials on most servers, with the epic versions demanding a 60 and 50% markup respectively. Spellthreads of all colors, cut gems, meta gems large prismatics from JC/tailoring combines, all of these provide significant 'added value*' profits for the reseller with little time or energy investment.

(*thanks Cagadabr for this great vocab word)

As a point of reference, we all know that farming 150g worth in an hour is pretty good (some would say good would be 200-300 and less than this would be low). However, there are certain people boasting of 1k gold in a day and others of 3k gold in a week without indicating how much time they spend. I personally spend about 30-45min a day DEing greens and blues from the AH and maybe net 2-300g in a day (I don't keep careful track with my inventory always moving and having to move between several characters). What other gold / hr are people seeing that are highly successful?

And to try to add something to the discussion, I have to agree that listing the enchanting mats in quantities other than 20x or 1x tends to add a good markup per listing. I list my arcane dust about 20% above the lowest price as a 4x stack and still regularly sell 10-20 stacks in a day which is fine for my inventory levels.

Edit: After reading the post following this, I thought I would clarify. I'm curious about the time people invest into their gold producing strategies. Yes, there may be a 50% return on certain AH purchases, but is this a result of just one 10 minute session every day or periodic sessions throughout the day?

As I said in my post on the previous page, as a tier5-tier6 geared shadow priest with hand of guldan to myself I was able to farm 10 primal fires per hour + vendor trash and greens to d/e came out at a little over 300g per hour, which in my opinion is pretty good.

I am also buying up mercurial adamantite from the AH as recently alot of jewel crafters have been posting auctions of it at silly cheap prices 2-3g per 1. Buying at anything upto 3.5g per 1 and crafting braided eternium necks for lps equals and 50% gain.

There is a pretty large supply of ore on my server, and no one seems to have a use for it.

So, blacksmithing vendor fun:

Fel Iron Greatsword profit @ (7g 95s 83c)/(24 ore) = 33s 16c per ore
Adamantite Cleaver profit @ (8g 51s 43c)/(16 ore) = 53s 21c per ore

Buy Fel Iron ore if it's cheaper than 6g 64s/stack
Buy Adamantite ore if it's cheaper than 10g 65s/stack

Obviously add in whatever you think your time is worth to run to an anvil and craft it.

Enjoy

I am pretty sure that the Cleaver you listed would be worth more if you disenchanted it and sold the Greater Planer essences. I think dienchanting the Cleaver would get you 2-3 greater planer essences which sell for 6 gold each on my server and that is the very low price. So effectively you missing out on 3.5 to 9.5 gold per craft?

But there's always the chance you'll just get dust or 1 essence, which would cut things a little too close. If you're trying to turn fel steel or adamantite directly into enchanting mats, there are cheaper options (and netherweave cloth is probably still the cheapest way to mass produce enchanting mats anyway).

That said, I am a lazy profiteer in general, I was just throwing this out there as a small "free gold" tip similar to how you can turn a vendor profit on netherweave bandages if people sell it below average.

10.6 a stack and it goes on my server for 20-25g. I've been seeing a bunch of ridiculous prices (low and high) on a multitude of servers, and the more I think about it loading up an alt with 5-10 thousand gold and transferring once a month, the more I become intrigued. And as someone mentioned before it is spending real money ($25) for virtual currency.

It doesn't happen all the time. Fel iron does get listed for 4g pretty often, but I've probably only bought maybe 20 stacks of adamantite for under 10 ever.

Outside of playing the AH, what is a good way to make money with little game interaction? Not necessarily less time, but less buttons so that alt tabbing to read EJ isnt so much of an issue.
The DW mobs outside BT are an example of this for people that can block, pull the whole terrace and make a sandwich. But are there other places like this as everyone knows it? I suppose AOE spots are similar.

I would tend to agree that 300g / hour is not just "pretty good" but obscenely good. In fact, I'd take it a step farther. Anyone doing much better than that either has a secret too good to share or is a probably deluding themselves and failing at the actual math : time invested ratio.

With regard to the primal equation, there is no doubt that most servers don't have a gigantic supply of banked primals waiting to fill the auction house. I mean there are banked primals. I have them, many of you have them. And the rate of primal farming is certainly going to crater of mature mid and high pop servers when the patch is released. Some of said primals are certain to rise rapidly in price as a result and offer opportunities to those holding primals.

But I'm not sure enough of the second-order effects to over-bet on this. Let me give an example, albeit small. When the Netherwing quests came out, they were all the rage and sure enough, generic farming went down in a major way. In fact, the Ogri'la quest hub and demon camps destroyed my personal favorite primal fire farming spot in BEM. Once I started mining on Netherwing Ledge, however, I found I never hearthed back to Shattrath without a primal fire. And I didn't do any work to get it. I'm not sure at all what's going to be happening with the Sunwell/Shattered Sun dailies that might yield similar surprises, but it's something to be aware of -- even when one works with the almost certainly correct assumption that primal farming will fall upon 2.4's release.

The robots you have to kill/take over for one of the new dailies have a chance to drop motes of mana. Thats the only "new" mob that will introduce more motes/primals into the economy. There are also the fire elementals up by Kazzak, where you are sent to do a couple dailies. In both cases you can go about doing your dailies and walk away with at least a few motes (in the case of the robots, you only need to kill 5).

I've been pretty much doing this for the last couple weeks. I had been doing dailies... daily, and found the money to not be very profitable given repairs for raiding, gemming new gear, new enchants/etc. I've used auctioneer for a while to find cheap gems/ores/etc for my own personal use, and recently I started letting it check for armor and weapons. At first, I thought I was losing money, but after a couple days of not doing dailies (outside of BG/Heroic) I realized I was making a large amount of cash, it's just I was relisting and buying so much I didn't notice. At the moment I have about 700g+ on my person, and probably 1k-1.5k worth of stuff on the AH. It's addictive though, but not overly time consuming. One thing I noticed as darkmoon faire cards; they go for pretty cheap right after the fair, but the week before the prices skyrocket. I've stocked up on some cards I found for really cheap (mostly I just bid and let it run instead of buying out) and plan on trying to unload them a few days before the faire hits. Lucky enough for me it's going to be outside of TB and I'm horde, so I see it being even more profitable than when it's in Goldshire.

I probably spend about an hour a day playing the AH, and I run scans on it 2-3 times a day outside of playing with bottomfeeder and checking commonly bought/sold items like mats manually.

My big question for those of you with more experience playing the AH: Do I stop for a few days and let all my money build up so I can get some big ticket items to relist, or should I just continue playing the small and short game of greens/mats? I've gotten burned before on big ticket items that would net me a substantial profit but never ended up selling or sold for very little profit after relisting fees, so I'm leery of them, but I don't know if there are some things worth the investment. I'm sort of leaning towards keeping up my current strategy, since it seems to be working for me and also allows me to have multiple investments working at the same time.

Much like real life: diversify and always have your money working for you.

So by your own math you are pulling in around 1000g an hour and 30,000g per month. In 3 months, you clear ~100,000g. Out of curiosity, what's your gold balance?

I do a fair amount of business selling adamantite arrows and shells. My listed price is usually the lowest by a pretty wide margin.... more expensive sellers have approached me in the past about setting up price fixing schemes but I've always believed pretty strongly in selling things for the price that I myself would pay for them. This has gone very well; people appreciate my low price (often half of anything else listed) and the result is that I now deliver dozens of stacks every day via mail COD. My profit margins aren't amazing, but the volume is huge and I get to make my "customers" happy, so I'm happy.

I have noticed one thing. Occasionally someone will use something like Auctioneer to post several hundred listings of shells or arrows with a stack size of 1 (instead of 200) at a price slightly lower than mine--both bid and buyout. Often, hundreds will be posted like this... pages and pages. It's almost always the same person--sometimes he does it on his main character, sometimes on little alts (it's not hard to see that they are the same). When he's not doing that, he's listing the same things I am (in normal stacks of 200) but at prices 10x or sometimes even higher than mine and sometimes dozens of listings here too, almost as though he is trying to reset Auctioneer's valuation.

I sort of regard all this as scummy--it's not the kind of trader I want to be and to be honest several of my customers whom I send stacks to daily mentioned this person by name as their reason to buy items through mail instead of the AH. So I guess the tactics have actually been profitable for me. But, I'm trying to make sense of what he does. Is this just scheming to try to get people to misclick and buy 1 arrow at 90s? Something more strategic to scare me off by making my listings impossibly hard for buyers to find unless they scroll through many, many pages? Some auctioneer or other mod mechanic I'm not aware of? Is there anything I can do about this sort of thing, or should I continue to do what I've been doing: continue maintaining my 15-20 listings at my standard low price day after day, occasionally tweaking the "bid" price to ensure that my items show up earlier rather than later when sorting by price.

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I'm the sort that gets skeptical when I hear people post about the thousands of gold they make each day for minutes of work--except that they can't mention how. But, that sort of thing exists in any industry. The adamantite projectile market is no secret and it's served me well but to be honest it's not a huge amount of gold. Due to the sheer volume and amount of COD shipments I do, it's about on par with the 10 daily quests I used to do (maybe better) but it's taken a while to get there. And ultimately the market for projectiles just isn't big enough to offer up much gold to people.

One huge profitmaker I've found is that everyone should try to have a level 35-40 alt with 275 enchanting. This is enough to disenchant just about anything BOE that you'll encounter in your travels. As someome who played for 2 years without disenchanting abilities (I usually just vendored greens) I've made a huge amount of gold just by having that alt to mail greens to. Sometimes I have her pick up cheap BOE level 65+ blues to turn into LPS. Sometimes she'll scan using enchantrix to pick up good buys for DE, though this doesn't happen very often. (Seems that everyone does this on my server.) But just having the character to mail greens to from questing, raiding etc. has been profitable and useful.

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Last comment relates to the first--about setting prices and undercutting. There is a lot of very upscale Econ Major-sounding talk on this board about the fiscal horror of undercutting by too much, how it hurts everyone, how people who undercut by a lot are the scum of the universe. These people often talk about supply and demand but don't really acknowledge how demand is variable and inversely proportional to price! Almost everything sold in the AH or trade channel is a "want" item, not a "need" item, and it's easier to justify sating a want when the cost is lower. The market for Runecloth at 2g a stack is waaay bigger than the market for Runecloth at 3g a stack. Does that mean that people won't spend 3g for the stack? No--some people will. Many, perhaps. But for every person who does, there may be another who'd jump in at 2g. Those drastic undercutters are doing more than pissing off the established sellers for that item. They're also widening the market--enticing a much wider pool of players to bid and buy. This is what I did with shells and arrows: when I first began listing at 1g50s/stack and less, all the people who'd been listing for 3g and up for months began sending me ingame mails attesting to how they had been able to sell 10 stacks every day at 3g each and I should too because people will buy. And I thought, "well some people might, but I'd never buy it.... I'd buy it for 1g50s each though, and it appears that I can craft and sell it for that and still make some profit so why not try to target someone like ME rather than a fictional well-heeled buyer whose existence my competitors were attesting to?" It's worked out very well for me in my one small niche, and I'd like to throw this out as a consideration to others that sometimes undercutting does more than irritate the incumbents. Sometimes it doubles or triples the size of the market.

It is possible to "average" close to 400g per hour with "TBC cleared since autumn"-gear hunter using a heavy MM build and wind serpent if you are alone at Legion Hold. With two crits the mobs die within auto, steady, auto. I often park my brothers paladin somewhere near and buff BoM on myself and pet which is a huge boost. Usually I kill about 50 mobs and then loot them all, rince and repeat. If pet could loot the mobs I would imagine +500g per hour to be very realistic.

The following worked well for me so maybe some others will benefit from this little scheme too. It will very likely only work on the Horde side of the AH, it needs a couple weeks of preparation time (or farming) and can be significantly improved by being able to reliably trade via the neutral AH.

Blood elf paladins need certain mats for their epic mount quests, namely Pristine Black Diamonds and Dark Runes. Both of these are old world materials, the Dark Runes drop only in Scholomance while the diamonds can be found on various elites. There's quite a demand for these, it seems people are often too lazy to go and farm for runes or diamonds. The interesting part is that both diamonds and runes are not in demand at all anymore on the Alliance faction, so if they appear on the AH they'll be very affordable. Take a couple weeks of preparation time, buy cheap runes and diamonds on the AH, then relist them. Establish a cross faction trading channel and eventually take over the market for these items on the Horde side. The time investment is fairly small, it's basically a relisting game. Granted, you won't be able to make huge money, but over the last four weeks I earned about 3k gold just on diamonds and runes, which is nothing to scoff at.

The only drawback is that it's a somewhat finite scheme, eventually your supply will run out and can only be replenished by farming or the aforementioned cross faction trading. Depending on your class, farming in Scholomance might not be an option.

Finally, I can make a contribution to this thread. We just killed the fishable boss in ZG and he dropped the polymorph book. This takes maybe 30 mins top (travel + kill) and you can gain a lot of gold from it. The last book they got sold for 1,8k in the Alliance AH.

We did this with a 3 man group, so if it sells around that, it's a nice 500-600g profit for a little work.