WoW Economist Vol. I, No. 3

Welcome to another issue of The Wow Economist. The feedback so far has been great. This week's issue is double-sized, and focuses entirely on the Auction House.

I. Tools of the Trade
If you read last week's issue, all three of these mods should be familiar. So should the concept of having a mule, but

Auctioneer - The best tool for buying and selling on the AH. It stores historical prices, makes creating auctions easier, finds deals, adds a great bag viewer ... the list goes on. You need it.

SETUP NOTE: Auctioneer does not automatically load, even if you've checked it in the Addons menu. If you're having a problem with Auctioneer not working, when you load a character, it should say something to the effect of "Auctioneer is not loaded" in red text. If this is the case, type "/auctioneer load always," minus the comma and the quotation marks. You should now see green text telling you Auctioneer is loaded. FYI - a couple of Norganna's other mods (Enchantrix, Gatherer) work this same way.

AuctionFilterPlus - Even if you downloaded this because of the last issue, go back to Curse and get the latest version, released 2/22/06. AFP makes finding deals on the Auction House easier. I use it to quickly spot which stack of items has the best price per item, but AFP does a lot more than that. It's great if you're just learning what things sell for on your realm-faction, especially if you haven't had Auctioneer long enough to create a good database of prices.

CT_MailMod - Makes sending and managing mail easier. Its most important features for AHing are the abilities to automatically unload your mailbox (either en masse or selectively) and to send up to 21 items to a single recipient.

Your AH Mule - This guy is optional, but a time saver. Some people create AH mules for the sake of anonymity, and if you plan on getting in to manipulating the market, anonymity may be a practical necessity. Time is costly no matter what, so designate one character to sit in a capital city and do all of your auctioning. If you have a central place to send every item worth AHing, your main characters can unload their bags at any mailbox and they won't need to head to a capital city every time they gather an item worth selling.

Also, your mule should have most of your money. This is the character who will be doing most of your buying and selling, so your mule needs money to cover deposits and to buy stuff.

Mail Tip: Mailing things to your mule costs only 30c and takes 1 hour, but returning an item is free and instantaneous. I send everything I might sell on the AH to my AH mule. 30 copper is nothing, especially relative to the time savings you get from more bag space. More bag space lowers the need to destroy items when your bags are full, and also means less frequent trips to a mailbox. Don't be afraid to mail anything (not soulbound) you don't need right now to your AH mule.

Because of instantaneous returns, your AH mule's mailbox is also a great place to store unused mats and consumables. As long as the mule leaves the item in the mailbox, you can just click return on the mail in your mule's inbox, and the item will be waiting in your main character's inbox as soon as you switch back.

What Auctioneer and AuctioneFiltersPlus give you is an information advantage. If you can use these tools effectively, you will have better pricing information than the great majority of players. Prices can vary greatly from faction to faction and server to server, so being able to spot a deal quickly and knowing what price an item can fetch is vital to being succesful seller on the AH.



Current vs. Historic Prices

Auctioneer and AFP compliment each other well because they give you two different sets of prices for any item. Auctioneer gives you the historic price range of an item, so you can know what it typically sells for on your server and faction.



AFP lets you see the current per-unit price of any item. Obviously, when an item is not stackable or stacked, the unit price can be seen by anyone. But AFP allows you to toggle the display of item prices between the price of the stack (what you see without the mod) and the price of each unit. So you can know the real difference in price between 15 auctions of Small Radiant Shards, and see that the buyout on the 7 stack with a buyout @ 2g50s each is the best deal around.



To switch the per unit/full stack toggle, click the Filters button in the top right of your AH window (you won't see this without AFP). This opens the Filters tab. Check the box "Show Price Per Item." I recommend clicking on the "Show Best Deals" checkbox while you're at it. As you'll see, AFP has a few more filter options, like the ability to hide recipes you already know or to make searches only show exact matches (don't let bolts of linen cloth clutter your "linen cloth" search). Definitely play around with it, as AFP is useful for things besides just profiteering.

Scan, Scan Scan: Creating Your Historic Price Database
This one is simple, but sometimes overlooked by even those who use Auctioneer. Auctioneer adds a Scan button to the bottom left of your AH search window, and checkboxes next to each item category. Click scan, and it will grab all the important data about each item currently in the AH, and store it in a file. Uncheck a checkbox, and the scan will skip that item category.

Scans can take a long time, especially if your AH has 200+ pages of items. It's a good idea to start your scan and go do something else. I like to scan just before dinner or while getting ready to go to work in the morning.

Improve Your Tooltip
By default, auctioneer adds the price data to every items tooltip based on your realm-faction. If you have better data on a different server or play on a PVE server and scan both sides, you can add some price info from those places to your tooltip.

To add data from the opposite faction, type the command "/auctioneer also opposite" in.

To add data from another realm, type the command "auctioneer also [Realm-Faction]" in. Replace Realm with the name of the realm you want data from, and Faction with ... the faction. This command is case sensitive, so "Bonechewer-horde" will fail, but "Bonechewer-Horde" will add your data from Bonechewer's Horde AH.



This functionality isn't perfect as of the most recent release of Auctioneer. The "also" setting is always the same for every character on every realm-faction. If you switch between PVE and PVP servers, this can be a bit of a pain. But if you just play both AH's on the same PVE server, the also opposite command will adjust to show your current faction's data on top, and the opposite faction's data below.

Find Deals Quickly: Auctioneer's Bidbroker, Broker & Percentless Commands
Once you've done a few scans just to build your database, now you can use auctioneer to quickly find great deals. Each of these commands are done from the command line, and should be done immediately after you do a complete scan:

/auctioneer bidbroker - Looks through every auction with a short-medium timer, and lists every auction you can make a profit on by bidding on it. It displays the name of the item, its HSP (Highest Sellable Price), its current bid, the profit, and timer. Keep in mind that many other people use bidbroker, so expect to get outbid on anything found here.

/auctioneer broker 100 - Searches for auctions found in the most recent scan which you could buyout and make a profit on. The 100 is optional, but it means auctioneer should search only for items you can make a 1g or better profit on.

/auctioneer percentless 50 - I love this command. If you add the 50, this command shows you a list of every auction you could buyout for a 50% or greater profit. So simple. You'll be amazed at what you find with this, and I'm convinced you could make money a lot of money on the AH just by using this command.

A word of warning about using these commands - some tricky players try to poison Auctioneer's data about an item by putting up auctions for exorbitant prices, pushing up Auctioneer's HSP, which then makes average deals seem like great bargains. It helps to focus on buying and selling items you know well. The more popular tools like Auctioneer become, the more people will take advantage of their shortcomings.

Creating Your Own Auctions
One of the best things Auctioneer does is automatically price an item you put up for sale. You can drag in an item (or alt-click it) and Auctioneer populates the bid and buyout price based on the item's suggested price range. If you don't have price data on an item, it just marks up the vendor sell price 300%.

Without this tool, I try to price my auctions to keep the bid and buyout price as close to one another as is possible, and for the buyout to be one of the lowest for that item currently on the AH. If you adopt this strategy, you won't get a lot of bidding on your items, but most auctions that sell go on buyouts, and you will generally be the first auction of a given item to be bought out.

Also, Auctioneer adds a nice little checkbox so that it remembers you set for an item. If I'm selling a ton of an item at once, I set my price, check the box, and alt-click like crazy. You can create 50 auctions in a few seconds this way.


III. What to Buy and Sell on the Auction House
You've got your mods, you've got your mule, and you know how to use them both. Now what should you be selling?

The best items to sell on the Auction House have some combination of the following properties:



Low Deposit Price

Unless you're completely unfamiliar with selling items on the AH, you know that every item has a different deposit price. If an auction sells, you get your complete deposit back. But if an auction does not sell or you need to cancel it for any reason, the AH keeps the deposit.



An item's deposit price is the most important factor in how risky it is to sell that item. If an item with no deposit price fails to sell, the only you costs you face are the time it takes to put the item back up, and the inventory space it takes up in your bags or mailbox. Focusing on selling items with low deposit prices allows you to handle other negative factors better, such as high competition and low demand.



Items with no deposits:

Shards, Crystals, and Dust: The deposit price on an Epic Nexus Crystal is exactly the same as the deposit price on the Strange Dust you get from disenchanting level 5 green armor. Zippo.

Trinket Quest Books: These rare books are classified as Miscellaneous in the AH. Most auction houses are flooded with these guys, but because the trinkets they grant are generally fairly good and the deposit is free, demand on them is high and the cost of reselling them is low.
Zul Gurrub Coins:These include the Bijous and the Coins dropped in Zul Gurrub. Considering that Bijous sell for anywhere from 30-60g, and the standard Coins go for 8-20g, ZG coins are nice AH fodder. Assuming you can get your hands on them.

Items with high deposit prices:

Weapons: The arms trade is risky business, everywhere from Stormwind to The Sudan. In some cases, it can be more efficient to vendor a green weapon than it is to AH it because posting that item on the AH multiple times can erode any profit you could potentially make. When it costs 1g+ to create a 24 hour auction for mid-level and higher rare weapons, your auction needs to sell quickly.
Cloth: Linen and Wool Cloth are both fantastic things to sell, because demand is high and because their sellable prices are typically high enough that you'd need to re-list them many times before it would be cheaper to vendor the item. Mageweave is a bit riskier, though Runecloth and Felcloth fetch a solid enough price and have high enough demand to overcome their somewhat high deposit price. But one of the worst items to sell on the AH is Silk Cloth. The price it fetches varies from server to server, and demand is generally good, but with a deposit price of 15 silver for a stack of 20 on a 24 hour auction, you need to be aggressive in your pricing to profit off it.

Metal Bars and Ore: Almost all metals have a bad ratio of deposit price to per unit sellable price. Don't get me wrong - selling bars and ore on the AH is a great way to make money. Unfortunately, most servers have a healthy population of miners, and dedicated farmers are often miners, so there is a lot of competition on any given metal. Competition pushes down price, a problem for metal because their deposit price is already high. Be aggressive in pricing your metal, because every time it fails to sell, you take a healthy chunk out of your profit.

High Demand
Demand is an important factor in whether or not an item is worth selling. Even if an item is free to put on the AH in terms of its deposit price, it is costing you space while giving you no utility gain until it sells. The examples below are generally in high demand, but you can make a lot of gold by knowing what's wanted right now on your server-faction. If your server recently opened the gates to Ahn'Qiraj, think about selling Scarabs and Idols if you can afford them. The high level players on your server are after these, either to build rep or to get l33t items, so they are great items to sell.

High Demand Items:

Wool Cloth: No matter the server or the faction, everyone buys wool cloth. It's a key item for skilling up First Aid and Tailoring, and every character SHOULD skill up his First Aid. It's also relatively scarce, so it is perfectly normal to find Wool Cloth selling for as much or more per stack than higher level cloths such as Silk and Mageweave.
Level 15-29 Rare Weapons High level players have money to spend, and often they spend it on twinking out their alts, especially for 10-19 & 20-29 Battlegrounds. It gets easier for a player to run istances for good BoP rare weapons once that character gets to levels 25+, but until then, even the most BWL-hardened raider will rely on BOE, AH bought weapons for his alts.
Copper Bars:Even though Copper is abundant, it sells quickly and fetches a pretty penny. Depending on the server, it can go for 40s-1g per stack, and it rarely goes unsold when set at a competitive price.

Low Demand Items:

35-45 Green Weapons: These are the levels where pick up group instance runs become quite common, making a level 35+ character without a rare weapon increasingly odd. The ease of doing an instance such as the Scarlet Monastery, combined with the number of blacksmiths crafting weapons in order to become Weaponsmiths, explains why 35-45 Rare Weapons are often relatively inexpensive, and 35-45 Uncommon Weapons are hard to sell.
Rough Stone & Ruined Leather Scraps: AKA vendor trash. The markets for these is limited, due in part to their abundance, but mostly because they have limited utility. Blacksmiths and Engineers don't buy rough stone to skill up, and the same goes for leatherworkers and RLS.

Scarcity/Weak Competition
If an item is hard to find on the AH, or just hard to find period, it is a good item to sell. Scarce, high demand items allow the seller a lot of price flexibility

Scarce Items:

Fiery & Lava Cores: On many servers, these guys are hard to impossible to find, and can fetch upwards of 400g. On servers with guilds who have MC on farm, the price can hover around 100g per. Items farmed by Raids are unique in this manner
Righteous Orbs: Crusader. The Crusader weapon enchant is one of the best in the game, and it requires 2 Righteous Orbs. The Orbs fetch 60g-90g easily, partly because Crusader is so desirable, but mostly because it's at best a 3% drop off of certain elite mobs in Scholomance, Stratholme and the Plaguelands.

White Kitten (Horde) & Pattern: Deviate Scale Belt (Alliance): The White Kitten can only be bought from a kid in Stormwind who is himself a Rare spawn, and he only carries one Kitten per spawn. The Kitten can fetch up to 5g on the Alliance side. But on a Horde AH, expect to buyers to pay 15-25g. The Deviate Scale Belt is a level 18 Rare leather waist item, coveted by Rogues and Hunters. But the pattern can only be found in a hard to reach nook above the entrance to the Wailing Caverns in The Barrens, and is a limited supply item. On the Horde side, you can sell these for 75s-1g50s. But on the Alliance side, the pattern sells for 7-12g, even on PVE servers.


IV. Closing Thoughts
I'm impressed, you made it to the end of the article. Thanks.

Players who resell items on the AH inspire a wide range of opinions, and they aren't always positive. A lot of the negative opinions are the result of the perception that resellers drive up prices on the AH. In reality, that's a line of thinking which is too broad, or put simply, incorrect.

Every server has that player who buys every rare weapon he can afford, and throws them up on the AH at a 50g markup. You'll see his The Butcher auction up for weeks on end, and wonder when he's going to give up. But if you're a level 26 Rogue in need of a butt-kicking main hand sword, it's infuriating to think you can't get the item at a reasonable price.

But every person's idea of a "reasonable price" varies. Some people base it off of what they feel like what an item should sell for, or how easily obtainable a similar competitive BoP item is. In the end, these factors help dictate what an item will ultimately sell for, but they clearly don't determine it.

In the end, a fair price is the price people are willing to pay for that item. If Joe Reseller buys out The Butcher for 25g, puts it up for 75g, and someone buys it out in 5 hours, Joe's price is reasonable and fair. If Jane Reseller also has The Butcher, but has to relist the item every day for two weeks she's being unreasonable, because the market has dictated her price to be unfair. If Jane had just bothered to get Auctioneer and scan the AH a few times, she could have listed her Butcher auction at a price someone was willing to pay.

Some people also believe that resellers drive up the price of items. What resellers really do is normalize prices, with some exception. On one hand, resellers make it harder to find discounts because they know what an item sells for, and buy up everything priced cheaply enough to make a profit off of. As more resellers exist in a market, the harder they have to hunt for deals, narrowing the profit they can get. When competition amongst resellers increases, so does their need to be more aggressive in pricing their own auctions. Effective resellers stay in business by auctions to be bought quickly.

In other words, resellers raise the floor and lower the ceiling. They make it easier to find an item at a reasonable price because they are focused on making a sale quickly. They make it harder to find an item at a fantastic price because they will often find it before the non-reseller does, because they use tools like Auctioneer or AFP, and use them well.

The exception I mentioned above is the monopolizing reseller. If a reseller can manage to monopolize a market, he can dictate the price of an item by limiting its availability. The fewer close subsitutes there are for an item, the more power the monopolizing reseller has to dictate price. Monopolizing resellers can keep the price ceiling and the price floor of an item high. Put it one way, AQ Idols and Scarabs are to MS Windows and Word as grinding Cenarion Circle rep is to Linux and Word Perfect.

Thanks again for reading The WoW Economist, I hope you found it informative. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me at jeremygamer@gmail.com.