Warcraft Elite Guides

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The Warcraft Elite Guide is about to celebrate its first birthday. So in a bit of a switcheroo, we are going to be giving things away.

Most of the site is now back, and looking nice and shiny (we think) Click the links below. Levelling guides up in the next 72 hours 

The Warcraft Primer – A great beginners guide to Warcraft

The Gold Primer – A simple gold making guide, to get you started

1-80 Alliance Levelling guide – Yup, it’s back. All factions – all races

1-80 Horde Levelling guide – Well you can’t have one without the other

The Warcraft Advanced Gold Guide – Serialized

1-450 Professions Guide – PDF and on site

Warcraft Race Guide Updated – Worgen and Goblin added WITH VIDEO

Scritty

Selling.

Following this system with materials, reagents and consumables you can build up cheap stock and make killing after killing without ever farming anything yourself. This is a very effective method of making money in one market. It does however take time.

Selling is an art in itself however. For example, you have 50 stacks of iron bar. The average price you paid was 1 Gold 25 Silver per stack, they are now showing on the AH at 4 Gold each. An easy undercut.

Wait. Firstly put a couple of stacks on, 5 maximum, see how fast they sell, and more importantly WHO TO ! You will be told who bought it by mail.

If they sell fast, and to the same person, open up your “Social” tab, and “Whisper” that person directly.

“Hi, I’m [your name] you just bought a load of iron bar off me, do you want more at the same price”

Then set up a direct trade with them. Cutting out any auction tax.

Also if you flood the market, you risk being left with unsold stock, and you might get someone so desperate to sell that they undercut everything you have. You will then be faced with taking them all off auction and re-auctioning them (and losing your deposit), or sitting back and waiting  and hoping that yours sell.

Of course if someone undercuts you with say 10 stacks at a much lower price, consider buying them out. Which brings us nicely to the buyout prices.

Always set a buyout ! Many people come to the Auction House to buy something they need now.

They would rather pay more and not wait than wait for your bargain with a buyout to finish its 12, 24 or 48 hour auction. Perhaps people think they will spark a bidding frenzy if they don’t set a buyout. Nope that won’t happen, and if there are a couple of bids then 99 times out of a 100 they will increase the bid by 1 copper piece.

It’s simple

Not setting a buyout will lose you customers, possibly lose you a sale, and over time lose you gold.

The level of buyout to minimum is something that you will learn. As a starting point, try this formula;

If we have an optimum price in mind, set the minimum to that, or 10% lower, and the buyout to 10% above.

Have a look at the Saronite auction above.

Do not flood the market. Many of these items here won’t sell. So the Auction levy will be wasted, as will your time and effort. If the market is full wait or check the other factions market. Also consider going to the trade channel and undercutting the best price very slightly – you will save the Auction Tax, so this should cover your undercut.

This saronite ore costs a lot to auction, and at the time we took this shot there were 7 pages of the stuff on this server. Why add more?

Also, this guy is selling for barely more than you can sell to a vendor for.

Can We at this point recommend the free addon at  http://www.wowecon.com/

This site could help you get the very best data for your marketing strategy. And the most accurate. It gives the price items actually SOLD for, as opposed to the price that was ASKED. A very important difference..

By using this addon (even the free version) for some time you will have a far greater data set, and that set will contain only the data you are interested. The averages will be the REAL selling averages, not an assumed one from a rough calculation.

Look at our chapter on Material Master for instructions on how to manage the data from your own portfolio. Although you don’t need to use our method, it does provide a pretty good template from which to work on.
Wowecon will give you the best data for your server. We definitely recommend it.

The premium version weighs in at $3.33 per month at the moment. Check out the free version, then consider upgrading.

We have nothing to do with WoWecon, but have used the software when setting up our guide, and found it very useful.

 

If you want to know how profit can be made more quickly, and are prepared to put in the effort to set up your  “Sales and Order Processing team” – the four ‘toons positioned at the various Auction Houses as we described earlier. Then you can look into the multi market solutions within this guide.

There is software that will get sales information for you, giving you the actual sale prices. It is called “Wowecon” and , although manually collecting this information is fine. Wowecon will collect from all auctions from people with it installed. It will collect only the actual auctions that SELL.

While we are on this, you will note we are not making a special section for looted weapons and armor.

The reason for this is because you are unable to plan for these items, they take up a full inventory space for each item, and as time goes on, all but the very best items have only gone one way in value …down!

The very best items being (generally)

Well those prefixed “Champion’s” are always reasonable, as are the very highest level items.

Look at the stats. Plate with high Str and Stam will often sell because Warriors are the most equipment reliant class to level with and therefore need to upgrade more often.

Having said that – weapons and armour are still not a good investment – overall the value of these items is still generally down.

The reason being that a very large number of the lower level ’toons you see running around are alt’s of high level characters, and while the high level character “could” afford to equip them with the best greens all the time from the AH..they generally don’t because;

a) It’s not very cost efficient. Leveling at an appropriate level is pretty easy and does not require up to date equipment.

b) The higher level character will provide the stuff themselves, either with a quick solo instance run (always fun) or by using their trade skill to make decent kit for the lower level ‘toon.

 

This is an graph of the average price of several green ”Champion’s” items and blue weapons and armor we tracked over a period of 18 months across several servers.

The overall trend is down, and continues to be down, we see no reason for this trend to change. By all means sell for the best you can, but these items are not a good investment option.

Storage

Later we show you how to set up your own guild for your auction house alt’s, you might think that with a guild bank you have loads of storage.

Well, for a single market approach, you really don’t. Of course it’s a lot more than most people, but it really isn’t enough.

Early on, if you have say 5 ‘toons on the go, consider setting up the rest. (you have a maximum of 50 altogether though only 10 per server) Set up the other 5 for your main server, level them until they can safely reach the major local town and get to the bank.

All characters come with a basic bank facility where you can store more items. Consider posting the stuff you want storing long term to these ‘toons and banking them in the initial free accounts they have (as you will need to log on as them , to get to them)

You do not want to fill your available storage space with slow moving low profit items. This costs you profit in the long run.

With a single market approach, keep the quicker moving stuff in your local bank or guild bank so you can get to it quickly. The slower moving stuff put in your lower level “storage mule” banks, and make a note of what you have !

If you are REALLY desperate for space there is one more short term thing you can do…

Post it to a ‘toon

The postal system will keep it for 28 days. It is VERY risky. We have “forgotten” about items like this in the past, after 28 days the server deletes them.

But if you are desperate,  make a note of what went to which ‘toon, assure yourself it is only a short term measure then do it. One advantage is it is very cheap.

Now, without buying a single extra bag space, you can store a lot more than most people would ever think.

Unless you track the prices of an item over time, you cannot really tell if you are getting a bargain or not.

So it’s a five stage process.

•   Decide which items have the largest price variance
•   Decide which subset of these items are within your effective price range
•   Track these items over a period of time to establish trends
•   When confident that the price is low – buy a mix of items (mix to minimize risk)
•   Store in the most effective manner possible.
•   When the price is high – sell

Most of that is common sense. However, actually achieving this in practice can take a long time
If you don’t approach the tasks in the right way and with the right tools.

An easy (but slightly inaccurate) way of doing this is to check each item from your portfolio on your server every day. List them in price order (“Auctioneer” allows you to do this)  then record the highest asking price, and the lowest asking price, taking a mean average of the two as that days figure.

Do this over a period of time. A bare minimum of 8 readings. (include weekends) to check the variance.
However, there is more to it than this. You see Warcraft prices are also very seasonal.
The seasons Warcraft follow do not correspond to “real “seasons.
Here are a list of Warcraft “seasonal” factors

• Weekends
• School holidays
• Real Winter
• Warcraft holiday seasons
• Major patch time (leading up to and immediately after)
• Expansions (leading up to and immediately after)

 

Some might quibble at the word “seasonal” in this context, but this phrase allows us to relate these events to the real world, because our responses need to be the same as the real world.

Our subset of items is the list of items that you can afford to speculate in. As mentioned before the Material Master has over 150 items. Unless you have a remarkable memory, and a lot of time on your hands, you are not going to master the seasonal subtleties of all these items. Nor should you.

Early on in your game some are going to be far too high a value for you.

 

Even if you can afford a couple of pieces of Titansteel at level 22. You really shouldn’t. Don’t over-reach yourself. Look at the list in the previous chapter and the tips on how to specialize in a portfolio.

Likewise when you are level 80 and have a couple of thousand gold, then dabbling in Ruined Leather Scraps is probably a waste of time .

We will come to “Return on Investment” later. Your time is a major investment, we don’t want you to waste it.

Pick a subset of items appropriate to your level (oh and include the appropriate cloth items)
Tracking items over time.
With a single market approach tracking the average cost over time is vital.
Have a look at this graph for Felweed prices over a two week period.

 

Above is a graph showing the price of 20 Felweed, from Terrokar in February /March 2010.

The time period shown on this graph range here is 28 days

The issue you can see with a single market approach is that, although Felweed has a decent price variation, you would really need to buy, then hold on to your stock for several days before reselling. This means you need to store it, and profit cannot be made straight away. A cross market approach, properly researched, gives you profit much more quickly

 

Buying.

In general, school and work holidays in the real world seem to trigger a “feeding frenzy” .. but not straight away. A few other people seem to sense the tide, and look to offload straight away (within 6 hours of getting home from school or work). These characters have been getting a nice stash of stock together, they are vaguely aware that it’s now a good time to sell..then they generally mess the whole process up by flooding the market, and pricing too high at first..then too low.

Why does this happen?

This seemed odd to us, until we realized that it was caused by FEAR!

People understood the seasonality, had managed to gather loads of stock, went to the Auction House on the day the “real” holiday started, saw a couple of others doing the same, and panicked.

Within that first couple of hours, you might even be able to get items CHEAPER than they have been all along. But a weekend is longer than that. If you have the gold – and the confidence BUY
Judge the best time to re-market your new items – probably late Friday night or early Saturday morning.
Look to use the 12 hour auction option (it is cheaper if it fails)

Overall we wouldn’t try and “buy out” the market until you have a feel for it. Other guides prompt you to do this, our evidence suggests it should only be done when you are supremely confident, but it is worth bearing in mind now and again.

Patch 3.4 seemed to shake things up a bit. We will keep this guide updated for Gold consortium members and try and predict the effect that upcoming major patches and updates may bring.

For now, it is key to understand that markets are primarily driven by emotion. In the real world AND in Warcraft. Whether that emotion is greed, fear or apathy, the prices charged and accepted are, to a larger degree than most would realize, a product of how people feel. You want an example ?

Imagine Gromdor has just been farming for Titanium ore – he has managed to get 12 pieces. He is only 75 gold short of the 5000 he really wants for his Epic training. He wants to train NOW.  He looks on the auction house and sees Titanium is 9 gold per ore – but he wants 80 REALLY quick.

What’s the betting he puts all 12 on for 75 gold – because he is simply impatient ? It’s that certain I wouldn’t even give odds. You buy it. You are sensible and patient  – you make (after AH cut) almost 30 for just stepping to the post box and reselling.