Sunday, March 26, 2006

The auction house in Orgrimmar

Stepping into the gates of Orgrimmar was an awesome sight. Huge buildings spanning several stories. Hundreds of players running around in an eclectic assortment of armor and weapons. Our computer slowed to a crawl for a few seconds loading all the graphics.

First stop - the auction house. It was time to see if we had been ripped off by Mall on the linen cloth and try to sell some more we had looted off monsters along the way. Arriving at the bustling auction house we quickly approached the auctioneer who was mobbed by at least 10 players. From the looks of things, most items were being sold for 5 to 10 times the price a typical vendor would buy for! We quickly listed 3 full stacks of linen cloth for an opening price of 5x vendor with a buyout of 10x.

After meandering around the town for an hour or so we went back to the auction house anxious to see the result. All 3 listings had sold! They must have been at the buyout price as the auction wasn't scheduled to end until hours later. We found out that the money would be delivered at the mailbox and had to ask a guard where to find it.

Shortly thereafter, we checked our mail and 30 silver was waiting for us. The promise of the auction house had not let us down. We made some good money off items dropped by easy to kill monsters, pushing us past the 1 gold piece level. Our first gold piece and what a way to get it. That one gold piece sells for roughly $0.10 at the World of Warcraft gold selling sites on the internet. We'll need a lot more of those before we can make serious cash, but it's a start.

After our first successful sale we started toying around with different auctioning strategies. Listing less than a full stack of an item seems less successful. Also, as we mentioned before, make the starting price significantly higher than what a vendor would buy for (3x - 5x) and make the buyout price high (10x). Certain items seem to go more quickly than others, but we are still trying to figure out the most popular ones. We'll talk more about successful auctioning strategies as we get a better feel for this seemingly lucrative money making method.

No comments: