A Dying Art Called Bidding

   Today we are going to be looking at one of the great ways to obtain items at awesomely low prices, and as you might guess from the title i am talking about bidding on the auction house. 

   The reason why i called this a dying art is because it is kind of a thing that stuck around from Vanilla and to a degree from TBC where gold was much more valuable, what i mean by this is that back then everyone was trying to get more gold ( higher buyout price ) but were happy to get a normal price for it as well even if it meant waiting a bit for it ( normal bid price ).

    As you might see on the image above, the price that we see in green is the bid price and the one in red is the buyout price. The difference between those two is about 50% and that is where this gets to be a sweet deal. When i saw this pricing it had the same pricing structure as a normal auction has where the bid price is normal and the buyout price is above the normal price range ( as you can see at 142% price ), but unlike this guy you will find countless others that don't know what the bid system is for, and those are the people that will make you thousands of gold in easy profits. 

   As i said there are many people out there that don't realize how the bid system is supposed to work so you will see auctions with a buyout price at 5000g, and then the most ridiculous 100g bid price next to it. It is auctions like this one that will put a smile on your face every time you see them. But like all good things there has to be a drawback at using this strategy and in this case it is the wait time that for some reason the majority of the people choose to go with the 48h post time.

    Now even though 48h is a long time you don't have to wait for it because you can simple browse the auctions by time left. This is actually the core of the strategy because all you need to do is go to the AH and check for prices that are posted with a low bid and a short time remaining on them and simply put your bid down. The best thing you could do is to bid on multiple items due to the fact that there will be other people doing this same thing as well and you might get overbid on some auctions, that is why it is best to look at this as a fishing net, the bigger the area is that you threw the net in ( the more items you bid on ) the higher the chances are that you will actually win.

   One of the best deals that you can find with the bidding system is in the Transmogrification market where many of the people do the mistake of posting their high value items for 10g bid prices and 8k buyout prices. And when you buy an item for 10g and then flip it for 5k, that is when you feel awesome.

   One last thing, after you are finished reading this and you might think "Meh i already knew this" do yourself a favor and check your auction house and i am sure that you will find deals that are staggering.  

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

The Auction House Bait

   Have you ever been in a place where you wanted to buy a certain gem or a glyph on the AH after getting that shiny new piece of gear but when you got to the AH you saw that the price of that item be it a gem or enchanting scroll or even a glyph is so high that made you puke a little bit inside your mouth.

   Well it doesn't even have to be that you need that item for yourself, it just might be that you are selling that particular item as well but you want to drive down the competition a bit and make them basically give you the item for a dirt cheap price where afterwards you go back repost it back on the AH and get all the profits, well this process is what i like to call AH Baiting and i will explain why the name.

   You see the image here i kinda stumbled upon it by accident but i'll be damn it depicts exactly what this strategy is all about, you will Bait and then Tackle the opposition down from the market.

   First thing you need to understand before you start is that 90% of the people that are posting and reposting all those auctions use some kind of a addon to post their auctions be it Auctioneer or TSM but what they don't really do is they almost never check for the lowest post and they simply click away and post their load and this is where you jump in and i will go in details about this as to how it looks like.

   One thing worth mentioning would probably be that this strategy works best for items that are in high demand like gems, flasks, pots, beltbuckles and even glyphs, and the best times for doing this is during peek hours like between 7pm - 1am, and the reason as to why this is the case is because there's most people that are buying and selling their auctions that period of the day, hence your best time to try and catch those big fish.

      As the example for this i have taken the screen shot from the TSM addon where its showing the information about the purple Retaliating Demonseye. If you take a quick peek at the information there you'll see that everything under that red line is prices around 175g per gem with give or take a few silver pieces, now with the introduction of the actual bait which in this instance is a single gem posted at 45g (this is a price that you can set to be as low as you feel like you want to go) you can see that there have already been someone that has undercut my bait with 4 gems with the standard undercut.

   As it is in this example you would probably go like, pff it's just a stupid Demonseye gem, nothing exotic. Well i'll try and get a screenshot of the new big undercut i do with the Red Inferno Rubies. For an example few nights ago i did this same thing like with the Demonseye but instead of it i went for the Brilliant Inferno Rubies, and on my server their moving price is somewhere between 80-250g depending on the day, well that night their current price was hovering at 120g and i was kinda running low on the red raw gems so i decided to try out my angling skills and try and bait out some cheap gems, and boy did it work. I posted 3 Brilliant gems at 35g each and like 3 minutes later i had 3 guys undercut me where one was undercutting me with 10 gems the other one with 7 and the third one had 25 gems up there, and all of them were at less then 35g. Needless to say i bought them all out and then cleaned house on the remaining 10ish gems on the AH and reset the price back to 250g. That night i sold them all at prices ranging 220-250g (the guys i undercut didn't stay away totally so they came back for round two so i had to battle it out with them on the AH but they lost their 250g worth gems for 30g previously). So there i was i got 40ish gems with them being pure profit ranging from 100-200g by not doing anything special, hell you dont even have to be a jewelcrafter to take advantage of this strategy.

   This doesn't stop at gems but like i said you can do this with beltbuckets, pots, flasks hell with all the high demand items to be honest, and pretty much anything that anyone would put in their posting addon.

   Just so you are aware, once you put down your baits know there's a good chance that someone might simply buy out your item be it a legit buyer or even a camper that knows his stuff (but those are not something you see alot) so it's pretty much like fishing, you need to throw a small fish to catch the big fish, or if you throw the big fish you might catch Moby Freaking Dick but if you get too greedy you might end up with just Moby's last name, if you catch my drift.

   So there we are, if you fancy yourself a good AH angler or simply want to try out the baiting then get your fishing pole and get to it, and like always keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

The Way Of The Leatherworker

   So you've chosen leather working to be your choice of a weapon to take on the AH PvP with and now you want to know how to use it properly to make a "killing" and let me give you a few pointers of what you should shoot for, well actually now that i see this it sounds like i'm about to give you tips on how to kill people in Quake Arena or Unreal Tournament so i'll stop with the comparing it to killing and get down to the gold facts.

   The tools you will be using will be tactics and particular items you will have to keep an eye out, but even like the image on the left that portraits all the tools that a leatherworker uses (even though you never see your character hammering, or snipping the leather, he still uses them) you will use knowledge of the items and their value to help you make some good amount of gold.

   Before i continue on with telling you ways to cash out by using leather working i would like to let you know that i will try and cover the basics on how to make gold with the profession even at lower levels as well as what you can do when you have maxed you your skill.

   Long time ago, in the pre BoA heirlooms leather working low level items used to be very lucrative seeing as how they were very good choice for people leveling but since the release of the BoA items they are worthless, or so i though for quite some time. What i mean by this is that with the upcoming feature added in the game in Patch 4.3, Transmogrification, some people are actually tapping back in the old leveling crafting sets to look for models for their epic looking gear. Just so you know i wont go into details about which sets to go for because to be honest this is a market that i am just starting out with and i have seen some positive gold income but simply check your crafting option your leather worker has and see how they look like, and if you think it's cool then do try and sell it on the AH, but make sure you put a little ad on the trade channel, something in the line of, [X Item] on the AH, this is your chance to get this epic looking [item] and make everyone turn yellow in envy. Get yours now!

   As a guide line try and do some looking around at the Nightscape armor set, usually there aren't any on the AH and so i managed to sell 5 full sets for 70g for each item in the set and seeing as how there are 5 items that's easy 350g by selling a low level item, so if you have some other full sets check the price on their materials and don't be afraid to experiment.

   Ok one of the basic thing every leather worker can do is take scraps and turn them into leather, well as your skill in leather working increases your profession will allow you to craft a higher level leather by using a smaller number of a lesser level leather. Now the reason why this is important is the fact that leveling leather working requires a lot of  leathers from different level and while people would sell lets say Light Leather is selling at 1g per item while Medium leather is in low supply and it's selling at 10g per item, what this means is that you can buy all the stacks out from the light leather then use your skill and turn them into Medium Leather and get bunch of expensive leathers that usually sell within few days. (The numbers i took were random and do not mean they need to be taken for granted, always check your AH before doing the conversion)

   Now i would like to get down to a more direct approach on what's been a good seller for me particularly and in return to give you a heads up on what to keep your eyes peeled for.

     Bags, bags, bags, these are the best selling items in Cataclysm, Wrath of the Lich King, The Burning Crusade and pretty much Vanilla any why is that, well simple everyone wants a bigger bag so they can fill it with more goodies so they don't have to take that trip to the AH or the vendor every 10 minutes.  

   As a leather worker this can mean only one thing, you have the access to creating an item that is in a high demand by almost all profession driven people because creating the regular bags that we can fill with anything we want is left to the tailors we get to make the bags that are used by leather workers, miners and scribes. If you give it a little bit of a though you will actually think that it's not a good market but if you try it out and see for yourself you will love it, in the continuation i'll post the 3 most profitable bags to craft.

Mammoth Mining Bag - This is the bag that every miner would love to get. This bag has probably made me hundreds of thousands of gold and for a very long time i wondered why people were buying it because i could never understand the need for big bags for mining because i would get bored after 30 minutes but then it hit me. There are people out there that don't mind farming, or they see farming ore as their only way of making gold, but even that wasn't enough until i saw that one of the names of the guy that bought the bag from me had a generic name like qrrsffas and weirdly enough there were 500 stacks of ore posted by someone with the same exact name so that got me thinking that people that bot or even hackers buy those and the fact that the costs for that bag is 8 Heavy Borean Leather which would on a normal day cost about 80g to make i would turn around and sell it for 900g and they would sell and all this due to the very low competition on the servers due to people either not having played the Sons of Hodir quests in WOTLK and acquired the pattern or simply don't want to try out that market thinking that no one would buy it. So if you have a leather worker that's able to craft that bag get to it and start seeing some good profits, if you dont have the pattern then get down to the Sons Of Hodir and do the initial quests just so you can open the vendor from them and get access to the pattern.

Trapper's Traveling Pack - This is the same item like the Mammoth bag but instead of the miners as a pool for your costumers you will be tapping into the leather working guys, and do know that these bags sell quite well and you shouldn't be afraid to give them quite a hefty price as i've sold them anywhere from 500-900g price range and they have sold.

Pack Of Endless Pockets - And last but not least is the bag for all those scribes out there that want to have more glyphs in their bags, and this like the other two bags sell quite well and at the same price.

   So those three little bags should be sold by you at any given time and as for the mats keep an eye out on the AH and when you see that cheap Borean Leather or Heavy Borean Leather on there snag it and use it for your profits.

   Now that we've passed the bags i'd like to tell you about the next items on the list that i've made a killing on, and they are not a big secret or anything but still i rarely see anyone posting them on the AH, like maybe one or two guys that refresh their auctions every 12 hours or so, and the items i'm talking about are the PvP sets. With the patch 4.2 there was an upgrade to the crafted items and their item level was raised to 358 which is enough to give you entrance level resilience so you don't end up feeling like a glass figurine. There are five sets available from which two are actually more profitable then the other two basically because one is sold to Rogues and Feral Druids while the other one is sold to Enhancement Shamans and Hunters, while the other three sets are meant for Elemental Shamans and the other for Boomkins and  Resto Druids  which is a smaller market but still not something to be thrown away. Just as a clarification i'll post the sets with their respectable items so you can see them.

Bloodthirsty Leather This is the one that you end up selling to Rogues and Feral Druids
Bloodthirsty Dragonscale This one is the bread and butter for the hunters and Enc Shamans
Bloodthirsty Charscale This is the one for the Elemental Shamans
Bloodthirsty Wyrmhide And this one is for the resto druids

   Like all the other items don't be afraid to price them quite high, as i've sold them for anywhere from 900-1450g and they have sold, and are still selling on a daily basis.

   So there you have it in a bunch, using your leatherworker to make gold by turning lesser quality leather into higher one for profit, using the AH to get cheap leather that craft it into bags for huge profits or even get into the PvP supplying scene and give the people their PvP gear so they can be well on their way to seed destruction and pain to the enemy, whatever you choose to do know one thing, gold will be coming your way so start planning on what you are gonna spend it.

Trolling for Gold

   Ok this little bit of info i'm willing to share has been one of my dubious, low punches i have used in the past to tailor the prices of a given item to my suiting by using a tactic that's not quite honorable thing, but hey it's cool non the less :).
 

   I'll try to elaborate a bit as to how this whole thing works. Trolling, yup you heard it right trolling, you know those awful people that dwell in the trade channel and pounce at every chance to turn a perfectly    good working trading channel into a anal, chuck norris, dirge spamming you know the a-holes of every MMO game. I'm guessing right about now you are wondering what do forum trolls have to do with making gold, well read on and you will see.

   Ok to get down to business, i have 10 characters on my server and even though i am always about being creative with names for some reason i decided to make 9 of them start with Vile which kinda blows but then again i had half the wits to name my mailing character something different and that kinda made it all possible to use the following tactic. So what is involved into this tactic is you logging on your character A ( lets call him Ace ), here for instance we are trying to control the price of Pyrite Ore, so you log on with Ace and go on the trade channel, now the following part takes a bit of a imagination as to you'll need to think how to make the people that have the item you need sell it for under price and don't feel cheated.

   What i like to do when i want to achieve this effect is play the troll card, and by that i mean i get on trade and start barking things like. ROFL @ U n00bs for stocking Pyrite Ore now that there's no Epic gems your gold has evaporated and your profit gone. L00$eR$!!!  after a post like this expect some flaming and then some people starting to call you idiot, troll or something in that order, but what we are interested is what in fact is happening on the AH in the Pyrite Ore section. So while half the server is busy calling you an idiot you have the people that have been stockpiling on Pyrite Ore hoping to score big on the gems and didn't get the memo that the epic gems are coming from the new raid are sweating and contrary to the common rule of DON'T FEED THE TROLL they are doing just that but without even knowing by doing exactly what the troll wants them to do. So what you will see is, prior to your trolling prices holding at 70g then 10 min into your trolling you see someone offloading 30 or more stacks of pyrite ore for 50g, 20 min into it you'll see that now there are 4 people posting amongst them selves and undercutting themselves and soon the price goes down to 35g, mind you that 50% decrease in less then half an hour. So what you can do at this point is buy them out or continue on to phase two.

   Phase two is still a bit of a gamble but still very profitable if played right and it requires a bit of some extra trolling. What i have done is post something like. KEK you suckers posting Pyrite Ore for that price? pff coming next week their price is gonna be 10g LOL, good luck selling that crap. Now this is where people either see through the bull crap or ( the majority don't see through it ) they start dropping their price even more and that is where the honey pot is located. I'll take as an example what happened with my server, the prices started at 70g (when i logged in at around 4pm) then i did some trolling by 6pm prices went to 40ish, at around 7pm i decided to go on to phase two, and at that time there were 5 guys posting their ores and undercutting each other, after my phase two, two of them saw through the scam and simply decided to take their ores from the AH while the other three continued going even lower. Needless to say by 11pm the prices plummeted to 19g per stack and that's when i jumped in and bought out about 200 stacks or the ore and the stacks where between 19-21g and emptied out the AH.

   After i got all those stacks i sat on them till about 1:30am (i've found out that the best time to post things for it to be low competition but still a high amount of people is about this time because most of the raiders are gone to sleep but there are many more that are awake) and then i had one of my mates post 20 of the stacks of ore i gave him at 120g per stack, and i undercut him with my 20 stacks on my Ace character for 119g 95s. So right there i've set in stone the price of Pyrite Ore to be normal at 120g for the next guy to comes to the AH and check out the price. So what i do about this time is i log on one of my other characters and start barking in trade something like WTS Pyrite Ore, much cheaper then the AH. More or less in the next 5 min i get 5 whispers asking me about price which i set at 90g, 3 out of 5 will laugh at me and simply tell me too high but those other 2 will be buyers. Last time i had a guy asking me if he buys large quantity will i give him a discount, i said ok for 80g and he bought 200 stacks.

   So right there is the whole essence of the thing, i spent some minimal time trolling the trade channel got the price to go down then bought out about 200 stacks for 20g each and sold them later on that night for 80g which on par means i've made a 60g profit on each stack  so 200 x 60 = 12 000 so there we are basic math says that some good 'ol trolling netted 12k profit without me crafting, or undercutting with anyone about anything, and my only two weapons of choice were the trade channel and the Auction house.

  ( IF YOU CHOOSE TO TAKE UP TROLLING AS A PART OF YOUR ARSENAL MAKE SURE THAT YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING BECAUSE EXTENSIVE TROLLING CAN HAVE WAYS OF BACK FIRING - 24h BANS AND 72h BANS ARE A POSSIBILITY IF YOU GO OVERBOARD WITH THE TROLLING SO USE WITH CARE AND CHOOSE YOUR WORDS WISELY )

Being this guy, a tricky little annoying bugger will make you gold but if you choose to be the guy below ....

.. yeah this guy. Then my good friend you will not fare well in the WoW universe unless you like time away from WoW in to form of 24h and 72h bans.

Late Night Gold Shuffle

   WoW is a world that works pretty much the same as the real world, and what i mean by this is the fact that it never sleeps, not even when you are sleeping. Well if you take this into account, then you can see a profit somewhere in there, and i will further elaborate on this.

   When you are selling an item (that's in high demand like gems, glyphs, flasks), then you are more then aware that your ability to sell is reduced down to that brief window of opportunity of a few minutes before you are undercut by the competition, and put down the queue of successful sales. Now knowing that you either need to be brushing elbows with the competition and get your piece of the sales pie, or if you are not a big fan of the endless posting and re posting then try and out maneuver the competition. Going about this the right way could be a tricky thing, but if done right very profitable, i'll take as an example the gem market.

   Ok, so on my server i have seen 4 other major gem suppliers other then me. After doing some of the scoping out of the competition, i noticed that most of them go to sleep around 1-2am and get up at around 6-7am which can be seen in the statistics below.

   As a clarification, these are the posting times of 3 of the guys that are usually posting against me and with the rose color i marked up the times of the day that they simply dont post anything and that is the time between 1 or 2 am till 6 or 7 am which leaves about 5 hours of up time opposed to the ten or so minutes you get if you post during the day.

  

   So, what this means is that i usually do my last posting for the day at around 2am and i know that the following day when i log in i will see 50-100 sold auctions which depending on the prices of the gems it can net somewhere ranging from 5-15K from that single post alone.

   The same strategy that i used for the gems can be used for pots, flasks, (glyphs to some extent) and the best thing is that it's guaranteed to work and be quite effective. One thing that might make you wonder how this would work is the fact that it's only logical to think since the suppliers go to bed it's only logical that the other people do it also and that is the cast for most of the people but not all because every server have people that are playing from different time zones and if it's 2am at your place it might be 10pm at some other guy's place that's playing on your server and he is your potential buyer.

   So there you have it in a bundle The Late Night Shuffle is basically playing a game of last man standing, and if you are the last one to post your wares you are sure to see some great profits the following day.