by Anne Stickney

I rolled an alt a few weeks ago, I had a moment where I wanted to level a character from 1 to 85 on another realm just for the heck of it. So I picked a random realm, medium population, and rolled a worgen. Why a worgen? Well, it had been a while since I’d played through the worgen starting zone, and since I’d recently seen just about everything the Horde had to offer on the 1-to-60 front, I wanted to replay the Alliance experience again.

So I rolled a worgen — no heirlooms, no gold from outside sources, just me and the quests, like the old days of vanilla WoW. The most important part to me was that I was going to forgo buying any upgrade gear from the Auction House, instead using only what dropped from quests or instances. Call it a moment of vanilla nostalgia if you will, but that’s exactly what I had to do on my first character back in 2004, so I was going to do it again. I expected it to be tough; I expected it to take a while before I could even afford a mount at level 20.

I was so, so wrong. By the time I hit level 30, I had a little over 3k gold on my random alt, with little to no effort on my part. And I’m going to tell you exactly how I did it.
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by Fox Van Allen

In the game world, just as in the real world, prices of even the most basic of materials fluctuates based on your location. A hamburger in Beverly Hills costs more than a hamburger in Milwaukee. Heck, just about everything costs more in Beverly Hills — that’s just the way it goes. Your dollar is simply worth less there.

But what if we were going to move from Milwaukee to Beverly Hills? We could just brace ourselves and accept that we’re going to have to pay more for hamburgers. Or, we could load up our car with hamburgers and resell them for a profit when we arrive.

That concept is probably a bit disgusting — I wouldn’t recommend a cross-country trip with a car filled to the brim with ground meat. But when it comes to realm transfers, the idea’s right on the money. On some realms, gold is worth more. On other realms, the stuff you buy with gold is worth more. Making the most out of a server transfer (or indeed, making a realm transfer with the goal of making in-game money from it) is a skill that could make you rich overnight — literally.
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by Allison Robert

By their very nature, most achievements either directly or indirectly cost you gold or are at least associated with some extremely unpleasant trips to the Auction House. But there are always exceptions, and there’s a set of achievements in the game that will earn you a healthy nest egg if you care to go looking for them.

From my perspective, stuff like Got My Mind On My Money doesn’t count, as it’s just a reflection of how much gold you’re looting in the game and not in itself a means of earning income. I’m after the stuff from which you almost can’t help but make gold.

Concerning general achievements: Perhaps not surprisingly, you’re going to have a tough time finding a way to make money here. Most general achievements either cost you something (e.g., Into the Wild Blue Yonder) or are otherwise divorced from the game’s financial side (e.g., Friend or Fowl?). I actually can’t find a single achievement here that doesn’t meet one of those two conditions. Look elsewhere, folks. You will not be making money from the general achievements slot.
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by Fox Van Allen

With a little bit of creativity, you can actually turn the problems of a smaller realm into avenues for profit.

Before we try to craft a game plan, let’s talk for a second about the two major problems of playing on a smaller realm.

• Small realms have fewer buyers. This is perhaps the most obvious, hard-to-cope-with problem. There just aren’t enough people around to buy what you’re selling. On some items, sales are slow. On others, sales are non-existent.
• Small realms have fewer sellers. This appears to be a good thing — it obviously means less competition. But it also means that sellers of raw materials are few and far between as well. How the heck are you going to make money selling potions, for example, if you can’t get the raw materials to make them?

To be a success on a small realm, you’ll need a strategy for dealing with both these issues. Thankfully, there are some tactics that should help give you an advantage.
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by Basil Berntsen

As you start spending more time making money, you start to realize how much time you waste. Have you ever had to mail every single item in your bag to another of your characters? It’s a lot of right-clicking. There are a bunch of tasks like this, including selling to vendors, buying from vendors, prospecting, posting for sale, and crafting.

First, know that only some things can be really automated. If there’s a cast time, for example, the best you can do with a macro is shorten multiple clicks into a single macro that can be clicked or hotkeyed. Luckily, there’s no cast time on vendor and mailbox interactions!
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by Basil Berntsen

Making gold with heavy competition is hard. I get comments on my articles all the time about how my ideas don’t work on some high-population, high-competition realm. There’s an implicit (and sometimes outright stated) disclaimer that any advice you’ll find here is general and may not apply to your realm.

It’s time to talk about what to do when you’re always being redirected back to these weasel words. If your server really is so competitive that you can’t make any normal strategies work, what can you do?
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by Basil Berntsen

Gold making is one of those games you can play without much cooperative interaction with other players. If I hadn’t been set straight about how to raid by cooperative guildies when I started, I’d still be as bad as I was when I started, minus any progress I’d have made myself. This type of environment is a breeding ground for less-than-optimal gold making strategies, so here are five myths about gold making that continue to require banishment.
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by Basil Berntsen

All enchanters know that Maelstrom Crystals can be expensive, especially now that more players than ever have access to pretty good epic gear through the Raid Finder. This increase in demand has touched all professions that make things that improve gear, including enchanting. I know I went from paying under 90g for a Maelstrom Crystal to paying over 250g at one point soon after the launch of patch 4.3 and the Raid Finder, and that was after stockpiling (and subsequently blowing through) more than 75 stacks. If I knew then that I could have been making them in unlimited supply at 146g each, I’d have made a lot more.

The bare minimum you need to make maelstroms is an enchanter with access to Firelandswho is at least friendly with the Avengers of Hyjal. At the entrance to the instance, Naresir Stormfury the quartermaster (edit: or his counterpart outside the instance), will sell you a couple of epic cloaks for 250g. These can be disenchanted into Maelstrom Crystals.

This is not a stupendous price unless you’re unable to get enough maelstroms to complete a batch of scrolls at a fair price from the Auction House. It’s a decent way to put a cap on your unit price, though. So how do we bring this down to 146g?
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by Fox Van Allen

One of my favorite topics is World of Warcraft’s problem with inflation. If affects just about everyone in a very negative way, regardless of whether they’re an Auction House maven or a casual player. Inflation makes any gold your character is holding worth less and less by the second, making work you do now far less valuable than work you do later. It even affects the way developers approach the economy, from the amount of gold you get for finishing a daily to the creation of new gold sinks.

By most anecdotal measures, in-game inflation is wildly out of control. And that’s one of my problems as WoW Insider’s other market follower; the only evidence of inflation we have is ancedotal. There’s no real solid way for us to measure inflation in the game and understand what’s working to control it and what’s not.

The question got my mental gears turning. In the real world, inflation is measured using something called the Consumer Price Index. Creating an in-game version of the CPI intrigues me, but to figure out the best way to construct it, we need to first figure out the answer to another difficult question: What do people buy the most of in-game?
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