Playing the Auction House

There are a plethora of well written blogs that deal with just this subject (some of which are shown here on my blogroll. I have read each of them and tried to incorporate some of their wisdom into my own quest to pad my coffers. I have found it is a rather addictive thing to do! When I got back into the game a few weeks ago after a 4 or 5 month break (to rest, then play Star Trek Online - more on that in another posting), I had roughly 3,000 gold saved up. After upgrading my Dalaran ring and doing some other odds and ends, I had basically about 1.5k to begin this experiment.

All in all, I've been doing modestly well, but nowhere near the amazing returns that others are experiencing. Part of this is due to my own reluctance to go "all in" when playing the AH. Then, there is the bad business decisions that I make from time to time. Case in point - I saw a LOT of Lichbloom for what I thought was an absurdly low price. So, I bought it all up, to the tune of over 1,000g. I had not dabbled in herbs before, and didn't think I would be undercut so fiercely as I was. Within minutes of posting all the materials I'd bought, I was undercut by several people. Misha seems to have several people that post in bulk, and are trying to do the same as I in dealing with buying and selling. Thankfully, after more undercutting episodes, I have finally offloaded most of it, but I am out 500-600g because of it.

Most of what I have been successful at is when I flip items, which can be lucrative when I buy low enough and resell at a modest rate. I'm still new to this, though, so I haven't quite gotten a good feel for the market yet. But, I'm getting there - I am just short of 10k as of this writing. It goes without saying that you need to use add-ons such as Auctioneer to help you with this, if only for the scanning and semi-automated posting features. I also picked up Postal (thanks to Hit the Cap!) and was amazed that I no longer needed to spend wasted minutes manually opening each piece of mail that came in.

I'll keep you all updated how it goes, and will share any helpful tips that I come across. Of course, my exact experience on Misha will be different from yours, but the general ideas should translate well.