Bad AH Tactics, What I Hate
When I put my daughter down for her morning nap, I come to my computer, grab my breakfast, jump on World of Warcraft, and log on to my Auction House toon. I spend 10 to 15 minutes each morning setting up my AH sales, and finding items to re-sell.
This morning however, I just snapped. Some people trying to corner a certain market in the AH just piss me the hell off. It’s stupid, stupid AH tactics, and I wonder at how they make money.
Let me explain.
I looked at the level 25-29 Cloth Head slot items. This is the first chance most people get to wear helms, so they are usually in high demand. This is a good area to make some gold in.
However, this is what I saw this morning:
Let me give a rundown on Cloth Helms for levels 25-29.
- They are the easiest helms to come by, and have viable craftable helms to compete with lootable BoE’s. Mail is 2nd easiest, and leather is the hardest to come by.
- Cloth wearing toons are the LEAST created, behind leather wearing and mail wearing. So there will more than likely always be more cloth helms available than the others.
- The above sellers are pricing these at nearly 800% what they probably should be going for.
My logic on pricing level 25-29 items is as follows:
- First, consider what I myself would pay for a cloth helm. Maybe 5g to 10g.
- Second, if it is a non- ‘of the Eagle’ helm, then I price it for around 200% of what I would pay. This is still within reasonable cost, because I am assuming most buyers will be NEEDING this item.
- List the helm for 10g. If I bought it for 5g, then that’s a 100% profit.
But people get way too f*ing greedy. Some of these helms are what I would consider marked up at 800%. If I am selling 4 helms at 10g each, and they are trying to sell 15 at 42g each, who will make more money at the end of the day?
Now, if it is a prized ‘of the Eagle’ helm, which is PvP twink goodness, then I might price it at 400%. For a 5g helm, I might try to sell it at 25g to 30g. These idgits are listing for 140g.
Am I the idiot?
Well, some of you might be saying 25-30g is way too friggin’ much for a helm like that. Keep in mind most people making twinks or alts won’t mind dropping 20-30g for a top of the line helm that is fairly uncommon in rarity.
Did you know a leather helm ‘of the monkey’ and ‘of agility’ can net up to 100g by my counts, and sometimes more for those trying to clean you out? With no craftable leather helms in that range, tons of twinks and alts wearing leather, those types of helms are very rare to come across in WoW these days.
Everything is a calculation. No matter what you are selling in the AH, be smart. Will people laugh at your price and joke about it in /trade, or will it be tempting enough for them to consider clicking that buyout option?
So, what’s my point? Don’t be a complete prick on the AH with your prices. You can be a normal prick and make money 
Just don’t go off trying to make a gazillion gold in 24 hours. It won’t work. I will beat you in the AH with that game every day.
I totally agree.
I think some of the problem these days is people not using addon’s properly (as well as greed). Take Auctioneer for example, if you scanned the auction and it stored all them prices shown in your pic, when you post your item it will list them at 1 silver less than the ridiculous price. This then becomes a never ending cycle of stupidity.
I totally agree with you on this. Many a time have i logged onto the AH and found that someone has tried to corner the market by buying up all the items and then jacking up the price. The problem isnt just short term, it has a detrimental effect on the economy as well. These people usually log in and do this pretty early in the day, so when normal folk log in, they see the prices that the idiots have made, and assume thats the normal price, and so eventually, this blown up price becomes the norm.
I forgot to mention. I never buy anything from any alt that has “bank” in its name, or any alt that is unreadable (i.e the sort of names gold sellers use), several reasons for this.
Firstly it means that this person is either a gold seller, or a bank alt who has already bough up a load of this item and jacked the price up.
I don’t want to support gold sellers in any way, shape or form, so if i have to wait for an item, to avoid funding their little regime then so be it.
I also dont want to encourage the decline of the in game economy by letting people who buy items and jack up prices get away with it.
many people at this point will say “Well if you don’t do it someone else will”, but in my opinion its THAT attitude that causes the problem.
People who don’t spam report gold spammers, saying that someone else will do it.
Funnily enough its those same people who scream bloody murder when they get hacked by those same gold sellers.
I suspect that most people reading this now will be thinking “Lighten up dude its just a game”, and they would be right to an extent. But I’ve heard people try to defend gold sellers, saying “C’mon they have to make a living somehow, and their job is really hard”, which is a bunch of pink and fluffy BS. They steal other peoples accounts, sell absolutely everything that they can get hold of from the account, delete an alt so they can roll a spammer, then spam trade until they get themselves reported. The aftermath of this being that the poor soul who ad their account stolen, loses an alt, has to wait days possibly even a couple of weeks while blizz “investigate” (i.e drink lots of coffee, and eventually get round to looking at the account activity over the reported period.
I agree. The toons that have Bankof….. in their names are the worst. There is one on my realm who if you just say his name in trade will start an hour long cussing marathon. He regularly posts stuff 500% or more above what every one else is posting. I think that he is trying to drive the average up on auctioneer. I am almost positive that he has another AH toon tat he makes his real money on. The only problem is that he has all the stuff that every one wants. You want that shiny new epic piece of armor, he has it. You want that really hard to find recipe, he has it. I dont know how he does it. As for gold farmers and Gold spammers. I totally agree, even before I got my account hacked I reported every gold spammer in the game. My best piece of advice for that is to get the Authenticator. That and changing your password regularly. The $6.50 it costs and the 5 minutes used regularly is really cheap piece of mind.
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