I was debating with other officers of my guild about proposing to sell BoP epics from AQ40 and BWL. Our turnover rate is fairly good and we have a majority of items rot in these instances. Our guild bank is getting low from supplying flasks and shadow potions, etc.

I've seen several guilds selling BWL drops and tier2 armor, however I've yet to see anyone sell suits, or individual pieces of tier 2.5 from AQ40. If anyone could provide some insight, the good, the bad, things to avoid or anything on this matter it would be appreciated.

The problem with selling AQ40 items is primarily rep. On one hand you have a guaranteed drop which is easily queued for buyers, on the other hand your market is smaller because a lot of people can't get large quantities of Brood rep on their own. We've had one guild try to sell 2.5 pieces, but to my knowledge they haven't been too successful.

bwl items are easy to sell, because anyone can just pony up some cash and buy them. AQ40 items are more of a challenge, because they require the person buying them to have the required rep with BoN. we've had a lot of success with selling bwl items (which also gives us an excuse to keep running the zone to get people the last few items they never got when we still did official runs), but never quite got around to selling stuff in AQ, though we have tentative plans to use the instance ID of a guild who can't kill c'thun tonight to sell one of their members the chest piece off c'thun :-P

edit: we're actually considering selling tier 3 set pieces nowadays, since we've gotten to the point that we trash a number of quest pieces. actually, i collect all the pieces and put them in my bank so i can open trade windows with people and mock them, but selling them seems more practical, even if it is less fun

Fura mentioned in the Curse interview on WoW radio that they'd been selling full AQ40 sets. Perhaps one of the Curse members that posts on here could comment on how successful it was, and how they handled the rep issues.

We just started trying to sell BWL items last week. Thus far, finding buyers has been pretty easy. Just try to post well in advance, be clear about prices/scheduling, etc.

Hardest part is convincing your members that they and their alts don't need to loot a bunch of miscellaneous crap from obsolete instances for no reason.

Pretty much, yeah. Basically what we did about this issue was just tell people that if they want stuff for their alts, they can only loot a limited number of items, they play their mains for every boss they don't want items from, and they still have to pay full price.

From our experience with it, selling BWL loot has been pretty easy. You just have to get a feel for how much people are willing to pay for what items, get some logical rules put into place, and the items sell themselves.

Wouldn't that be an issue with the person buying tier 3 having to do that quest first? Also, when you sale stuff, what do you tell the buyer to do during boss fights/trash clearing?

If you're at the point to selling tier 3, it's trival to get the quest completed for any prospective buyers.

As for boss fights/trash clearing, you have them go jerk off in a corner in somewhere. 39 vs 40 doesn't matter for farm content.

I'd assume just tell them to stand there.

It's a real nice way to make money. We've sold Onyxia epics for 200-300g a pop, MC epics, and now BWL. Fantastic way to fund the guild bank

What we've been doing is bringing 10 or so buyers and 30 or so mains.

We pretty much just have one individual collect the gold and split it; half to the guild bank half divided up to the mains that went to the run. Last friday I made 87g(not counting gold from bosses) from that run, it was a good night.

We run PUG Bwl on an off day and offer 1 random spot whenever we clear AQ40 to buy sets and anything else that may drop that noone wants; both have proven very nice for guild bank cash. The rep is upto the individual to sort out but the majority of interest comes from people who have at one point been in an AQ40 running guild or members of guilds which haven't killed C'thun yet looking for their chest piece.

Currently we sell blackwing items for 400g each (sets/regular epics) normal weapons 600g, and really rare weapons are often not sold (but we did sell a cts for 1500, and are going to sell ashkandi for 5k)

Biggest problem in selling aq40 loot is the instance, you can't take a ton of alts, people despise the instance.

If alot of guilds are doing this (and seems that they are) out of necessity to fund their guild banks, and Blizzard is set on the fact that raiding is going to cost so much via repairs and consumables, you have to wonder why they dont just up the number of items that are BoE right from the start?

I mean does the game gain anything from having this mechanic where guilds sell stuff from the middle of their raid vs just selling it in trade or in the Auciton House? To me it just seems like a lot of extra hassle to get people to be on at the right time, get lucky to have the item they want drop, etc.

Obviously, the intent on Tier 1 was that you would have 2 items that you could buy (maybe to get you a head start on some decent gear to beat the instance itself) but for some reason they ended that practice with the later sets and pretty much all the non-set drops. Stuff like Ashkandi, end boss drops, or very rare epics should probably never become BoE, but each instance should probably have a set of maybe a dozen BoE epics that guilds can make money off of. The market will set itself. When a instance is new and only a few have beat it most wont be able to afford the first couple posts of an item because it will be 5000 gold or more. But this is a nice little reward for beating a place first as a guild, much like when new enchants are first looted. (I.e. spell power enchant used to be crafted for 40+ gold when only a few people had it).

Because if Blizzard's intention was to not allow people to simply Ebay their way to the best equipment in the game from buying gold, this practice pretty much negates their strategy. They might even consider re itemizing a previous instance, when a new one comes out to make some of the gear in it become BoE when something harder is released. This not only keeps the gear gap relatively sane but also helps the raiding guilds just below the cutting edge who might want to buy a few items to push their power level up a bit to clear whatever it is they are stuck and falling behind on.

Right now, it seems blizzard has no idea how to foster a symbiotic relationship for hardcore raiders and the rest of the community so they have taken it upon themselves to create one, but probably not in a way Blizzard imagined.

we sell aq40 items, made 7.5k last night just from items from visc, ouro and c'thun. 2 chest pieces, 1 legs, a bindings and eye of C'thun I think. We take them on the trash clear to C'thun to help with the rep also.

You have no one who still wants those items? We still need a few more and we've been farming AQ40 forever, expansion grinding sets :)
Especially the Eye of C'thun, always a hot item.

Would someone be willing to explain how you do this (take all the gold off of a boss for the guild bank)?

My guild is proposing taking Ony's gold for our guild bank to fund Flasks, but is there a way other than waiting for others to zone out? What do those who take non-guildies through MC for BoP epic buys do to keep them from getting gold off multiple bosses?

Thank you.

Hopefully Blizzard takes note of these problems and designs the BC raid content in such a manner that we're providing something to the non-raiders so both the economy is stimulated and the raids can pay their own bills. When we began working on MC we were able to sell Cores, Core Leather, Essences of Fire / Earth, Blood of the Mountain, BoE epics and other random drops in the AH which helped everyone in the end. But since MC they've abandoned that practice for the most part which is a shame. Here's to hoping.

The problem is the levels of consumables required in Naxx. If Loatheb didn't cost insane amounts of shadow pots and fights didn't require flasks of all kinds for various reasons, guilds wouldn't have to sell items in this way. Sure, some might anyway to pay repair costs or distribute among members, whatever, but it wouldn't be so necessary and widespread.

Our guild is very alt friendly, and it's a good thing, too. We've done several Patchwerks with alt healers in BWL gear, and it keeps people (especially healers with alts who want to pvp...gg resto specs) from getting burned out on the game. We all wish we could just keep these items in the guild and on alts for backup raid use and fun, but we can't anymore. Our guild bank got hacked and we lost all our shadow pots we were saving, so that hurts too. Without that we could probably survive on donations from members alone and just a few sales.

Hopefully consumable use in TBC isn't as ridiculously heavy as it is in Naxx, and if it is, I echo the sentiments here by hoping blizz recognizes that and puts some mechanism in to allow raids to fund themselves for the most part without selling BoPs

Have one person drop out of the raid, loot the gold, and then get re-invited. They'll get all of the gold, so just have them keep a tally of how much they pick up over the night.

Drop from the raid, then loot the gold.

*edit* oops, opened this tab a while ago it seems, beaten.

Make sure buyers give the raid leader or GM some gold up front, otherwise you end up discovering they came along without any money when something they can use actually drops.