by Basil Berntsen

There’s a new tool in my kit. The Undermine Journal, whose alpha was just recently launched, is a site that lets you see data from your auction house live from the internet. My realm was recently added, and when I searched for Eternal Belt Buckles, it showed me a convenient Google Finance-style graph of the price and availability, as well as the mats needed for it, and a list of my competition!

Words fail me, so hop past the break for a screengrab.

My goodness, was I ever excited when I saw this! Combine this with the remote auction house, and you have a recipe for a disastrous amount of AH camping at work. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

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by Basil Berntsen

Auctioneers rely on farmers for raw materials for various businesses. In fact, we rely very heavily on them, and there are quite a few markets that are only more profitable than farming in terms of gold per hour if we can do them on a very large scale … much more than any one person can farm.

I’ve been flying circles around Sholazar Basin and boy, are my arms tired!

The interesting thing about the markets we work on is that it’s almost no more actual work to make, for example, 150 Titansteel Bars than it is to make 20. The only difference is in how annoying it is to find mats, and the number of Dr. Who episodes you get to watch while AFK crafting. The difficulty of finding lots of cheap mats is really the only barrier we worry about. And any experienced auctioneer will tell you that, historically in Wrath of the Lich King, it’s been no trouble at all.

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by Basil Berntsen

Like many of the best businesses, metas are purchased by all end game players and many leveling players. They provide a hefty bonus to PvE and PvP, come in a variety of flavors and (most importantly) get purchased every time someone upgrades their helm.

Since the majority of helm upgrades happen soon after lockout, this is one of those items that you’ll want to post on the most popular raid nights on your realm. Typically that means Tuesday through Thursday. Also, like every market in the game, your tenacity in the long run will determine your success. If you make a batch of 30 gems, sell them vigorously, and then move onto something else, you’re not going to make nearly as much profit as you can by making them regularly, listing them regularly, and potentially having a higher profit per unit by having stock available every single time there’s a demand surge.

Make and cut

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by Basil Berntsen

Selling glyphs can be very profitable. It requires a lot of addons to work, and the market reacts to competition differently than other markets. However, a lot of auctioneers got their start with it. I know I did!

Glyph toolbox

To successfully sell glyphs, you need to be able to manage 345 different products, each with their own mix of supply and demand. They also don’t share the same mats for creation, and there’s no really efficient way to pare down that list without costing yourself money. A lot of people will stick to the “core” glyphs (the proper ones for PvE and PvP for each class), hoping that the increased demand will yield higher profitability, however because there are people who do this, the supply for this subset of all the glyphs in the game is also higher.

Long story short, the default UI is not made for managing auctions in this volume. You absolutely need addons. Let’s break this down by task, and look at what the addons do for us.

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by Basil Berntsen

A very interesting form of raiding has been gaining popularity. GDKP stands, literally, for “gold dragon kill points.” It’s a badly named system, but essentially, it means that instead of some effort-based DKP system, people participating in the raid use real currency: gold.

So what is this GDKP thing, anyway?

In a GDKP raid, all items of value, whether they’re BoP gear, Primordial Saronite, BoE drops, Precious’s Ribbon or quest items, are auctioned off in an open bidding system to all participants. The person willing to pay the most for it will get the item in exchange for gold, and at the end of the night, all the gold that was collected is divided out among the raiders.

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?by Basil Berntsen

Basically, the goal is to watch prices for a few weeks, try to predict their next swing, and take advantage by buying low and selling high.

Watching prices

Easier said than done, like most things worth doing. You might get hundreds of items you’d like to watch, and short of a photographic memory or a manual spreadsheet, you’re going to need some help keeping track of it all. Enter Market Watcher. This is a nifty addon that, once configured, allows you to scan the auction house for just the things you’re interested in, and will show you a graph of their prices over time once you get a couple scans done.

It actually has a fair bit more functionality than just graphs, but it’s stuff like buying and selling, and I never bothered looking that far into it. I simply created a list, scan it daily, and use the data to determine value.

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by Basil Berntsen

Making money in game can seem complex. Well, it is. The real pros have addons and UI customizations most people would never bother developing, keen understanding of the chains of supply and demand in the in-game economy, as well as inordinate amounts of time to spend in the auction house. What if you’re just out to fund your epic flyer, though?

Let’s look at the characteristics of the kind of business that best suits the part-timer, or someone with limited interest:

• Low up-front investment: you want to be able to start without having to grind and do dailies to get start-up capital
• Minimal risk: you don’t want to lose money, you want to make it
• Low complexity: if it requires three addons and the need to write macros to be profitable, it’s not easy money

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by Basil Berntsen

Enchanting is like the auctioneer’s sonic screwdriver. Having a maxed-out enchanter is a major boost to many other professions, as their ability to disenchant is just amazing. It will help you recuperate money when leveling your professions, as well as open up business opportunities that may not have been profitable otherwise.

So how else can you make money with enchanting?

The wrong way to make money with enchanting

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by Basil Berntsen

Making money with jewelcrafting can be a challenge, but it’s a rewarding one. In fact, very few professions have as much earning potential as this one does. We’ll start with the easy part: if you have a jewelcrafter, where’s the low hanging fruit? I like to call this “reactive” profits. Anything where you can get a fixed income sort of profit for minimal effort, but you can’t grind falls into this category for me. Alchemy has daily epic gem transmutes, mining used to have a daily Titansteel cooldown, tailoring has a bag cooldown, etc. What does jewelcrafting have?

Low hanging fruit

each and every day, jewelcrafters can do the jewelcrafting daily quest. This will reward them with a Dalaran Jewelcrafter’s Token, which can be turned in for a variety of recipes or a Dragon’s Eye, which is importantly cut by jewelcrafters into their better than average epic gems. This means that, just like regular epic gems, Dragon’s Eyes are a raid consumable of sorts, and will be purchased every time a jewelcrafter upgrades certain pieces of gear.

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