Monday, September 29, 2008

More money? Yes, please

We all know that in order to get by in life it takes money, and that's true for living in WoW as well, even though you can get by with pretty little of it. However, being an altaholic and having to finance every new alt can be a little draining, especially when you don't have a 70 to do dailies with. This is where this post comes in - this is going to be about how I make money. Note the italicized "I". This is what works for me, doesn't take too much of my time and suits my playstyle. YMMV.

A Brave New World

So I've just rolled on a new realm. Maybe it's because there's a new one, maybe I want to try out a PvP realm again, or maybe I just ran out of room on the current one I'm playing. First order of business is to get enough money for some decent bags. There aren't too many options here - get to level 5, take 2 gathering professions, and start selling the mats on AH. And, you know what? Just doing this, and putting up greens/blues you come across as you level should be more than enough for learning skills and getting your mounts at 30/60.

But What About Having Fun?

So, yeah, that's enough but probably not enough to "live large". If you want to get yourself the occasional gear upgrade from the AH or have a crafting profession, you're going to need something extra. For me, that "something extra" is made up of 2 parts:
  1. Buy recipes/manuals from traders and sell them on AH - while this can be very lucrative, I don't want to spend too much time running around getting this stuff. When I get to a "new" place with a character I buy 1 or 2 of whatever I can find there and send them to my bank alt. It's not such a big profit, but it's something.
  2. Resell low-priced rare weapon/armor - there's a very large potential here, depending on how safe you want to play it. For me, I usually only buy things that Auctioneer thinks are priced at less than half of what they should be and whose average price across servers is high enough*. Usually, I can find 1 or 2 items worth buying a day, with the profit for each being anywhere between 10G and 200G.
As with any investment, you have to know the market. For recipes, it means knowing that Formula: Enchant Chest - Minor Mana isn't going to sell no matter how cheap you can get it. For armor and weapons it means knowing to avoid items that are easily craftable (especially JC rings), items that you can see multiple auction of despite being "Rare", and maybe most importantly - items that you got stuck with before and couldn't sell.

The Bottom Line

What's the bottom line? What can you get from this post? Well, nothing much, probably. Everything I talked about here today is fairly common techniques, and it is far from being an exhaustive list of how one can make money. It is, however, what works for me in the sense that I can make enough money for what I need and doesn't take too much time. Feel free to try it out (at your own risk) or make suggestions for improvement (also at your own risk. /grin) if you like, but don't expect any revelations here.


* This helps to avoid cases where Auctioneer prices are skewed, which happens a lot.

2 comments:

KC said...

When I was getting my level 40 mount for my main, I bought a couple of the faction-only pets every time I hit a capital and then dropped them on the neutral AH in Booty Bay. Paid for the whole thing, since I wasn't using either of my professions at that point. I was selling the dragonhawks and prairie dogs for 6-8g each, with a 45s investment.

I don't know why I quit with that. It was good money. Probably better once the expansion hits, since there are accomplishments around the mini-pets and they won't require bag space anymore.

Tal said...

Yeah, cross-faction pets can net some nice money. I just don't like all the running back and forth between the capital cities (or wherever else the pet vendors are) and the neutral AH. I suppose it could work with 2 bank alts, but I reach the character limit on most servers I play pretty quickly, so having 2 bank alts is a little problematic.

Come to think of it, it would be nice if characters could gain money instead of rest when logged out. I mean, seriously, my horde of alts who don't leave the inn much anymore could go and get a job and do something useful in life. :)