Lotro Guide

The auction house in Warcraft is a place where a lot of gold can be gained and lost very quickly. The reason for this is that, like all real life markets, the individual prices for an item at the auction house fluctuates all the time. Borean leather is 1g a piece one day, and 2g a piece the next

It is these variations that give you the potential for profit, and of course for loss. The NPC vendors do not give you a variable price, the amount of Warcraft gold they pay per item is fixed. It's a fair price, but if you have uncommon or better items to sell, they will rarely give you the best value for them.

Playing the auction house properly is something you should not try and do until you have taken the time to understand the variations. Is 2G for Borean leather a good price or a bad price? Unless you track prices over a period of time you won't know.

To start with download the auctioneer add-on. Once installed, this tool will run a full scan of the auction house at the press of a button. Collecting the price for every item it finds and storing it. Early in the game just run the scan and get on with powerleveling, don't bother playing the market yet

Run the scan once a day, or perhaps once every two days to avoid double counting certain 48 hour auctions. It might be awhile until you have enough data to make a decent average.

Auctioneer will record all the asking prices and then put a percentage against every item you see in the auction house. This percentage is a ratio of the average asking price that auctioneer has found. So 90% means that the item is priced 10% below the average. Whereas 110% means it is priced 10% above.

With this information you can start to make judgements on what items are worth buying and selling at a later date (buy low sell high - just like the real world).

But I should mention some big shortcomings with Auctioneer.

As I mentioned above, it records the asking price. Not the selling price, it doesn't even know whether the item sold at all. People can ask whatever price they want at auction. If you've seen a piece of wool cloth or similar on for 10,000g (it happens all the time) then this figure will massively increase the average that Auctioneer thinks Wool cloth is worth. It won't have sold of course (at least not to someone who was keeping within the ToS and actually wanted it) People do this to either move vast amount of gold around, or in the hope that someone accidentally clicks on the item and buys it. The result is the same. Auctioneer's average asking price gets completely skewed with rogue data.

Secondly, and more importantly, Auctioneer doesn't follow the game dynamics. It doesn't know that certain items will soon have a massive drop in demand because an upcoming patch is going to make them obsolete. Or that new items will be added that make the ones you have now pretty much worthless.

Auctioneer is a great tool to start with, but it is just a start. It's not the holy grail of gold making in Warcraft. If you want to be a World of Warcraft Gold Generator then you will need auctioneer, but you will also need a lot more besides.

Lotro Guide

lotro leveling

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Lotro Guide: lotro leveling

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