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.

So what's so bad about inflation anyway?

I've recently started reading some WoW "economic" blogs (how come I haven't heard of them before? Well, expect an update to my blogroll soonish), and while there's quite a lot of useful information there, there are also inevitably some things I don't quite agree with. One of these things is that inflation is usually considered a bad thing. Now, I suppose in the real world it is, but we aren't talking about the real world - we're talking about a game where despite many similarities, the economy is very different from a real one.

The general argument behind the "inflation is bad" opinion is that assuming you have a certain amount of gold and prices are inflated, you will be able to afford less on the AH. While it is a valid argument, it assumes that the amount of gold you have doesn't inflate along with prices. But, unless you only have the money you take off of dead mobs and from things sold to a vendor*, that assumption just doesn't hold. Whether you grind for items to sell on the AH, sell your trades, or just play the AH, inflation means you can get moar gold. Theoretically, your own capitol should increase at roughly the same rate as the inflation rate.

On the other hand, vedor prices are constant - no inflation there. That means that with inflation essentially making gold cheaper, anything purchased from an NPC essentially becomes cheaper. That means training, mounts, 42-slot bags and even the "everyday stuff" like food and drinks.

I also believe it's a good thing for "newbies"**. True, they won't be able to afford things on the AH, but I think there isn't actually anything they'd need there. And if they are buying things on the AH (I'm talking about buying things to use, not playing the AH), they don't stand much chance to have enough money anyway, so the inflation won't hurt them. If they're smart, however, and get gathering professions, inflation means they can make more gold for selling Silverleaf, making it that much easier when it comes time to fork over the big bucks for their mount.

I'll tell you who inflation does hurt, though - people who have bought their gold. They paid for 10,000g hoping it'll cover the epic mount for their power-leveled 70 and still be enough to maintain their raiding for a while, and now they're finding that their money is quickly disappearing. But you know what? I can't say I feel too badly for them... They can just buy some more.

* And let's face it, that population is pretty small. Not only that, but those people probably don't buy anything on the AH either, so any inflation of AH prices won't effect them in the least.

** Not necessarily actual newbies, rather chars starting out on a new realm without a level 70 who has mountains of gold.

Numbers... Sneaky bastards, they are

Everything in WoW, at some point or another, boils down to numbers. Well, OK, except RP, but that's not really playing WoW*. And usually they don't lie. As complicated as some of the formulas in WoW are (What's the difference between Defense and Defense Rating, again?), they're usually "right".

And then you get to the Auction House. Whether you're going in there to get better gear, get trade skill items, selling off whatever you come across, or just playing the buy-low-sell-high game, it's all about numbers - namely, income and expenses. But, much like economics in the virtual world we pretend to play while we're sitting down for a beer at the inn in Camp Taurajo, if you go into it with your eyes closed you'll end up broke. So what do you do? Simple, get Auctioneer. But now what?

Well, first, you now have another chore in the game - scanning the AH. Auctioneer is a great tool, but without sufficient data it's worthless. Its guess is no better than yours. Unfortunately, until Blizzard decide to give us web access to the Auction House (yeah, like that'll happen) or Auctioneer goes in a completely different direction from what it is right now.

More importantly, you now have a lot more numbers to deal with. Averages, means, standard deviations... Feels like I have to retake my undergraduate probability class. But even after I managed to dig up all these long repressed memories, it's still far from being simple because the number (the same ones your math professor told you are the essence of truth) are lying straight to your face. It's not their fault - they're doing the best they can with what precious little information they have and sometimes people even deceive them on purpose, but you're still the one stuck paying the bill.

What Auctioneer does (or rather tries to do) is find the market value for commodities. As almost everyone knows, market value is determined by supply and demand, so Auctioneer has to estimate those first. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a crystal ball, so it has to go by the information it has readily available at the AH. So let's do that ourselves... Start by looking for Wool Cloth - OK, we have 20 auctions, with varying bid/buy-out prices. Is it really any help? Well, it might help estimate supply (even that isn't accurate, since you can't see the auctions that were bought-out), but demand? Who knows? Without knowing how much wool cloth is actually sold every day, you just can't tell. So already, Auctioneer is basing it's estimate on half of the information it actually needs, but wait, it gets worse...

Once you think about it, the data Auctioneer gets from the AH is skewed. Let's say I have 2 Assassin's Blades, I put one of them up with a 10g buy-out and one with a 500g buy-out. And let's assume, for a moment that I'm the only one dumb enough to waste so much time grinding SFK for it so no one else is selling them. What do you think Auctioneer will see as the average price for most people? 255g? Nope. In fact, it'll show that average to exactly one person. As soon as he sees that (rather, as soon as his BottomScanner see it), he'll press the buyout button. Everyone else looking for it in the next 48 hours? 500g average buyout price - Kinda steep even for a twink item, don't you think?**

Is there any solution to this? Well, these come to mind:

1. Eliminate buy-outs. Not gonna happen. Neither is keeping the auction visible in the AH after it's been bought-out.
2. Use WoWecon instead. It has its problems, though. First, in order to actually sync with the server, it requires an external updater, which could theoretically hide a keylogger***. Second, it doesn't give as much information as Auctioneer (it could have more information in the "premium" version, I don't know). Third, and the biggest problem IMO, is that it just doesn't have enough data, at least for the servers I play on.
   
3. Make Auctioneer upload the BeanCounter data to some centralized server, and sync with it. Could happen, but I'm not too optimistic about it. Even if it does, there're no guarantees it wouldn't have the same problems as WoWecon does (although Auctioneer already has a fairly large user base, so it might be easier).
   

None of those are very practical, definitely not in the short-term, though. For now, what works best for me is using both Auctioneer and WoWecon, and excercising common sense. *sigh* Sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? Ahh, well...


* I love RP, in and out of WoW, and my most memorable and enjoyable WoW memories involve RPing. But I don't consider it actually playing the game. It's doing something else, using WoW as the medium. Hmm.. There's an idea for a post.

** According to WoWhead, at the time of writing the average buyout price for an Assassin's Blade is 250g, so that's what I based this example on. On your server 500g might be a reasonable price, I don't know. Also, this is obviously a very contrived example - it's intended to make a point. That point is true whatever you look at, since auctions that are not bought out are on the market longer, and are therefor more likely to be "up" when you decide to scan the AH.

*** Granted, it's not very likely, but you never know. I went over the code once to see if it was OK, and even built it myself to make sure it actually runs that code, and not something else. But it updates itself automatically... There's no practical way of checking that.