Inkobah
OG
Inkobah’s Guide to Auctioning
A Twinkinfo Exclusive
A Twinkinfo Exclusive
Who is Inkobah and why is he writing a Guide to Auctioning?
I have played WoW for over 4 years and have learned the ins and outs of the WoW economy. I have made hundreds of thousands of gold (starting with 300g) and have manipulated and controlled whole segments of the server economy (on 4 different servers: Lightninghoof, Medivh, Stonemaul, and Jaedenar).
I’m making a guide because I’m hoping that my tips (though many of which are probably not original) will be of help to fellow twinks and players. These secrets have kept me rich and successful in the world of Azeroth and allowed me to buy whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Many have tried to buy my secrets but now I offer it to you for free.
Below are 3 strategies that I have used to make my gold. They are written in the order of difficulty to pull off.
I don’t care if you think my guide sucks. I don’t care if you knew all the information already contained in this guide. This is for those who are struggling to keep more than a few hundred gold on them at a time. There are many ways of making gold in this game and it’s not hard (it’s way easier now than it used to be in vanilla WoW too). I’m just one guy that has been able to make a crap ton of gold and wants to help other people replicate it.
Strategy 101
Add-ons Needed:
• Auctioneer
• Igor’s Mass Auction
• Postal
Capital Needed:
The more the better but you can start with around 100g. I started with 300g.
Strategy:
Once you get the above add-ons begin scanning the auction house on a regular basis (at least once a day). Scanning the auction house will allow you to get a handle on the going rates for items. The longer and more consistent you scan, the more accurate your auctioneer will be on pricing for your server. Remember, every server is different so don’t put much weight into the pricing on one server. It could be completely different on another.
After about a week of scanning the auction house you are ready to start making some gold. Scan the auction house and look for items that are priced below what auctioneer says they are worth. Start buying the ones that are underpriced. I would steer clear from items that are gray (obviously), white, and green (at least until you figure out which ones are worthwhile). I also would suggest you not put all your eggs in one basket, but diversify your gold. That way if you lose your ass on an item you at least have a portfolio that will hopefully make a combined profit. If you’re not familiar with Auctioneer, I recommend checking out the official site for more info (auctioneeraddon.com).
Once you buy an item (or items), pull it out of the mail and immediately repost it using Igor’s Mass Auction. You can use the regular auction interface, but once you get rolling you’re going to want to save time and Igor’s will save you a ton of time. The nice thing about Igor’s is that it’s compatible with Auctioneer so you’ll be able to Alt-Click an item and it’ll automatically set the price of the item at the Auctioneer suggested price. And the price you’ll want to post it up at every time is the Auctioneer suggested price (unless you get more advanced and learn the price is way low). Various people will tell you different lengths of time to post your items. I suggest 48 hours since it means you’ll have to repost less frequent. Obviously, you’ll run the risk of being undercut but that’s not always a bad thing (since a lot of times you get undercut, someone buys the undercut item, and then someone else comes and buys your item).
Once you repost the items, just wait for the auctions to sell or expire. Rinse and repeat. One strategy that I always stuck by (and it seemed few other people practiced) was I never dropped the price on an item just to get rid of it. It’s better to keep posting it at the Auctioneer price than to lose your ass just to get rid of it. After a while people will notice you and your items and will know that they’re better to buy it immediately rather than holding out to see if you’ll drop the price.
Soon you’ll have a sizable collection of items you’ll be selling and a ton of gold lining your pockets. That’s where the Postal mod comes in. Since you’ll have a descent amount of auctions you’ll want Postal to help you pull all the gold and items out of your mailbox quickly. Clicking every piece of mail takes too much time and you’ll be glad you saved some time.
Overall this process will take somewhere between 10 minutes and 1 hour per day depending on the amount of items you have. I recently was posting upwards of 800 auctions every 48 hours so that took some time. But financially it sure beat doing dailies or farming.
Strategy 201
Add-ons Needed:
• Auctionator
• Igor’s Mass Auction (optional)
• Auctioneer (optional)
• Postal
Capital Needed:
Again, the more the better. I suggest several thousand gold.
Strategy:
The big flaw in Strategy 101 is that Auctioneer can be exploited, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do in Strategy 201. Too many people place so much weight into the Auctioneer price that as long as an item is priced at or below the Auctioneer they’ll buy it.
This strategy involves more work than the previous method so it’s probably not for everyone. First, you’ll want to pick your niche. Various people pick different niche markets. Some say to go for consumables, others say trade goods, others say level 80 epics. I say pick a niche market that has a high to moderately high demand and a low to moderately low supply.
Once you pick your niche market, it’s time to learn. Learn what’s good, learn what’s not, learn what the going rate is on those items (it’s good to use Auctioneer to figure out the general pricing, but it’s not necessary), learn what the drop rates are, learn where the items come from, etc.
For me, I picked twink items and low level blues and epics. The nice thing about this niche market is that several items are rare to extremely rare and there’s usually not a lot of people that know this. If you’re diligent you’ll find these items from time to time for cheap and be able to turn around and make a killing off them. You may think that the changes made to twinking (putting them in separate BGs) may have killed this market but it hasn’t. There’s still a lot of people that think that gear is very important for leveling and will spend a ton of gold to make sure they’re leveling with the best of the best. And there’s also a descent amount of items that people will transfer to you to buy.
Once you’ve picked your niche and you’ve studied up, you’re ready to roll. Begin scanning the auction house (I’d do this manually – searching 14-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49) and buy items that are underpriced. Also, pinpoint items that are best-in-slot or hot selling items and buy them even at the going rate.
What you’re going to do in this case is set the market price (as opposed to playing within the “market price”). Since so many people put too much weight into what Auctioneer tells them, you can manipulate what it says to your benefit. You can do this in a couple of different ways: (1) greatly inflate the price and then later set the price of the item(s) lower than the inflated price (ex: buy an item for 100g, inflate price to 500g, then sell at 300g). (2) set price at the price you want to sell an item (ex: buy an item for 100g, inflate and sell at 300g). The second way takes a bit more time to change the Auctioneer price, but I personally found it was better to spend more time in exploiting the price than trying to keep track of an inflated price and a desired price.
Once you figure out what you want to get out of an item keep posting the item(s) for that price. You gotta stick to your guns if you want to make money this way. If you start dropping the price on items every time an item doesn’t sell you’re losing out on a lot of profit. I literally carried some items for months (or longer) because I was never going to give items away for less than I wanted. It may seem like you’d lose money, but I made a crap ton more doing it this way as opposed to steadily dropping prices until an item sold.
I found Auctionator to be a must have with this strategy since it saved me a lot of time posting my auctions. Igor’s also is helpful but won’t save you much time with this strat. Always use Postal though. The name of the game is picking add-ons that save time and have good interfaces. If it has neither, it’s not worth your time.
Over time, expect to get noticed. Some people will catch onto what you’re doing and not be very happy about it. But ultimately you’re just trying to take your little share of the pie. And as long as people buy your items (and they will), who cares. Others will become fanboys because they think what you’re doing is genius. And still others will think you’re some gold farmer, Chinaman, or someone that dupes/exploits items. Since you’ll likely get noticed I recommend you use a character that is not a main character that you play.
In the end, you’ll end up with a lot of items and a lot of gold as well. As of a month ago, my Total Gold Acquired was over 400,000g (and that’s only since they began tracking that with the achievement system), had hundreds of items on the AH, had people transferring regularly to buy items from me, and had 6 Gbanks full of items. I’m certainly not the richest person but I always had more than enough gold lying around for whatever I needed/wanted.
You may think that it’s pointless to have all those items just sitting around, but if you choose the right kind of item, the item will always be worth more than the gold. Think about it: gold always inflates. If you have 1000g and put it away in your Gbank for a year you end up having 1000g once the year is up and you’ll be able to buy less with 1000g than you could’ve a year ago. But if you pick the right kind of item to bank away it’ll only increase in value. For example, you can pick up an item for 1000g and in a year it’ll be worth 4000g. What you’re basically doing is investing your gold in items and either staying up with inflation or beating it. You can always sell the item if you get hard up for gold, but if you do things right you’ll still have plenty of gold to go and buy whatever you need. You may still think it’s pointless to have all those items when you can have gold. But it depends on your end game. For me, my end game was making money off my account and I knew I’d get more for the items than the gold.
Strategy 301
Add-ons Needed:
• Auctioneer
• Igor’s Mass Auction
• Postal
Capital Needed:
You’re going to need a lot of capital to make this work effectively.
Strategy:
For this strategy you will be creating a real life monopoly (which is perfectly legal within the confines of WoW). What you’ll want to do is find major events within WoW that allow you to make a killing off a monopoly. This usually happens with a major patch or when an expansion is released. You can create a monopoly at any time within WoW, but I’ve found it to be a lot of work for very little profit (not to mention it’s very risky).
I picked two occasions to pull off very successful monopolies in the life of WoW: the releases of BC and WotLK. Both of those expansions introduced new professions that required raw materials to level up (Jewelcrafting and Inscriptions, respectively). And there’s always a ton of people that want to level those new professions up as fast as they can, looking to make a profit as one of the only people that can make [blank]. So I decided to pinpoint mining mats for the release of BC and herbs for the release of WotLK. I know anyone can do this and there’s been many guides that recommend this kinda thing. But what separates my strat is the fact that you’ll be creating a monopoly and as a result be making a lot more gold. When you have a lot of people agreeing not to undercut each other it’ll only mean more profit for all.
Once you’ve picked the event you want to pinpoint you’ll want to buy and bank as many of those soon-to-be in super high demand items and also begin talking with other people that have lots of gold and/or sell a ton of items on the auction house. Pitch your monopoly to them and sign them up. From my experience they’ll be really interested and things will go smoothly. But even if you tell them the whole idea and they try to screw you, you’ll be fine. The fact is the demand will be so high it won’t matter if they try to undercut your monopoly.
As you get close to D-day distribute the agreed price that everyone in on the monopoly agrees to sell the item(s) for. The agreed price should be about 5x what the going rate is prior to D-day.
Once D-day hits, everyone posts their auctions at the agreed prices and sits back and waits for the gold to roll in. At the release of BC I made about 3000g profit in one day doing this (which was a ton back then for those who weren’t around then) and at the release of WotLK I made about 28,000g profit in one day doing this (which was a ton for then too).
Thanks
Thanks for reading my guide. Hope it will help you to make a ton of gold. Feel free to point as many people as you want to this guide, but I ask that you not distribute it nor try to sell it for profit without my written consent. I can be contacted by PM at Twinkinfo.com if you need to get a hold of me for any reason.
-Inkobah
