by Basil Berntsen

Sometimes, the cheapest way to acquire the quantity of farmed mats you need is to buy them direct from a farmer. Buying them on the auction house is probably more convenient; however, your farmer has to pay the AH cut, and you have to beat your competitors to it. Having a farmer send everything they farm cash on delivery every day is a much more efficient way and has some serious benefits for both sides of the deal. How can you find farmers and convince them to send you goods instead of listing them on the AH?

This is not a one-way deal. You need to make it better for a farmer to ship directly to you than it would be for them to go and post their items for sale. To do that, let’s look at the annoying parts of selling farmed goods.

• Unsold inventory If you list 20 stacks of herbs on the AH, it’s possible that you’ll get undercut and the demand will never outweigh the additional supply, meaning you won’t sell your stock. This costs you your deposit fee (which goes up as you make longer auctions).
• Delayed reward Even when your items sell, they don’t always sell right away.
• Uncertain prices Prices can vary wildly, and you never know how low you’ll have to post stock at to make it move.
• Auction house cut You make 5 percent less than your clients were willing to pay, every time you make a sale.

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by Steve Zamboni

Imagine a typical glyph market on a busy realm: dozens of goblins sitting hunched over their steam calculators surrounding the trading pit, each figuring their costs and profits down to the last copper trying to gain an advantage over the others. Thousands of glyphs are posted every hour, most to be canceled and reposted an hour later at even lower prices. Eventually, one of the goblins has a flash of brilliance (or cracks under the strain; the records aren’t clear) and posts all of his glyphs at a loss. The calculation engines grind to a stop, leaving the goblins to stare up at the big board in silence, then at each other. “Now what?”

We call it the wall. One scribe picks a price and tries to hold the entire market to that price. If it holds, the market stops at the wall, and everyone on the other side watches helplessly as sales drop to zero. Sometimes it’s done to drive off competitors; sometimes it’s done to dissuade new competitors from entering the market, or just to burn up excess ink supplies … or even just out of boredom to cause pointless drama, goblin style.

Like all good goblin inventions, the wall appears simple on the outside, but remains complicated (and somewhat explosive) when put into practice. One complication is that there is more actually more than one type of wall.

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by Steve Zamboni

With its myriad of materials and finished items, inscription can be one of the more complicated professions for a crafter who’s trying to track his expenses and profits (or even to know if he’s made a profit at all). Herb prices have changed dramatically over the past several months, dropping to record lows as farming bots proliferate and climbing just as dramatically during the ban wave that followed. After months of being spoiled by a market overflowing with cheap herbs, many players stopped paying attention to what they were paying to make each item. Now that herb prices are climbing, it’s left a number of sellers scrambling to reprice their items and to take a closer look at what they’re paying for their supplies.

Glyphs and Ink of the Sea

Everything that inscription makes can be traced back to a stack of herbs, so all item prices can be calculated from the price of the herb. Each stack of the “good” Northrend herbs — Adder’s Tongue, Icethorn and Lichbloom — will produce one bottle of Snowfall Ink and six Ink of the Sea (IotS). Each stack of the lower-quality herbs — Goldclover, Deadnettle and Tiger Lily — will produce five Ink of the Sea and half of a Snowfall. While seeming the inferior choice, these lesser herbs will often sell at a substantial discount and may be more efficient if found in large quantities; two stacks of Tiger Lily will produce 10 IotS and a Snowfall, a much higher yield than a single stack of the more expensive varieties. Lichbloom and Goldclover will usually sell for higher prices to flask makers, so they are seldom milled for ink. Given the large number of Adder’s Tongue nodes in Sholazar Basin (256), it is the most common herb used for milling.

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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

This game is constantly changing. Every new patch, Blizzard delivers new content, new rules and new interfaces. We’ve seen some major quality of life improvements in the auction house of late, and these are continuing. The latest one (which is still in beta) is that the mobile armory now lets you trade on the AH from anywhere using either an app on an iPhone/iPod touch or your browser.

Right now, for testing purposes, we’re limited to 25 actions a day (purchases, bids, auctions), but we can clear out our mail! To be honest, that’s the killer feature for me. I spend an inordinate amount of time clearing out my mail. The majority of my profits in, say, vellums will come from sales of singles. I list stacks of all sizes, but the singles are what sell best. On my mid-range population server, I can easily sell 200 of these a day, and that adds up to a lot of time watching my mailbox empty.

Once the feature goes live and they raise the limit to 200 actions per day, I’ll probably use this to list my vellums too. In the interest of using my 25 moves in the most profitable manner, however, I’m going to avoid that for the beta.

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