Many World of Warcraft players will tell you that the easiest way to make gold is to gather raw materials and sell them in the auction house. I used to believe that too...before WoW Auctioneer. Don't get me wrong, raw material wholesaling isn't a bad way to make a little gold but mining, skinning, and herb gathering can only take you so far. The amount of gold you can make is limited by how much time you can afford to spend hunting down resources. If you're trying to level, do things with your guild, or just relax while you play then you really don't have the time or will to spend hours a day competing with everyone else for the rare resources that sell well in the auction house.
Enter WoW Auctioneer. Auctioneer is a free user interface add on that tracks items and auctions for WoW. It's completely legal, well within Blizzard's terms of service, and is literally a gold minting machine! In a nutshell, Auctioneer does a complete scan of the auction house when you visit and stores bid and buyout prices for every item being auctioned. After an item has been seen enough times at auction, WoW Auctioneer can give you a very accurate average price that the item sells for.
The powerful thing about this is that very few people pay attention to the historical prices for what they put up at auction. They'll look at how much other players are selling the item for and price it the same, price it a few times vendor rate, or just take a wild guess. They have no idea what the item's real value is but, with WoW Auctioneer you do! You can tell that some item at auction for 40 silver typically sells for 15 gold, buyout the auction, then put the item right back up at auction and make several gold than a minute's work!
Another cool feature is that WoW Auctioneer lets you search auctions to get a list of items that have buyouts below their historical average selling price. You can set a minimum profit level (I typically use 1 gold) then hit "Search" and you'll get a list of items you can buyout immediately and put back up for auction at a higher price. Granted, you're not guaranteed to get that higher price but if Auctioneer shows 100 historical auctions where an item sold at 6 gold and you can buy it for 40 silver you have a lot of profit potential even if you don't get the full 6 gold.
Finally, WoW Auctioneer helps you price items you're going to auction so you don't end up selling an item for much less than it's worth. Nothing used to burn me more than auctioning something for a few gold then returning later that day and seeing it up for 20 or 30 gold. Auctioneer provides a tooltip for each item that gives you an auction history for that item and even gives you pricing recommendations based on that data.
All in all, WoW Auctioneer is well worth downloading - but be warned, you may end up spending more time in the auction house wheeling and dealing than you do out in World of Warcraft adventuring!
Take a look at WoW Auctioneer part 2 where I give a quick tutorial on how I use Auctioneer to make gold.
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