Saturday, November 20, 2010

World of Warcraft Gold Challenge: Alpha Competition - Hour 14

Ironforge, Auction House - Found a Combustion Bracers on the AH for 65 gold.  It was promptly relisted for 400 gold.  I had success with the inventory of Mark of Kil'jaeden and Unidentified Plant Parts, so I picked up a bunch of Sunfury Signets at 50s a piece with the intent to sell at 1g a piece.  The great thing about the faction items are being able to stack 200 of them.  I almost wish that 200 was the standard stack size on everything, though I certainly understand why it isn't.  20 is a solid and simple standardizing number.  For the players who choose not to use an add-on like Auctioneer, it is a lot easier to compare prices when there are relatively uniformed quantities.

I've found myself dallying a lot recently in the AH.  I prod slowly through markets I shouldn't prod, and I log in too frequently to see if items have sold.  In the end, it is costing me /played time, which is unfortunate.  I really wanted to beat this challenge by coming in under 30 hours of /played time, but at nearly the halfway point time-wise, I just don't think it is going to happen.  I do believe that it is a reasonable bet that I will have 10,000 gold worth of assets at that point, I just won't have them liquidated.  Right now I'm projecting about hour 38 as my arrival at the 10k point.  And while 263 gold per hour is nothing to sneeze at, I really think an enterprising individual who knows the market backwards, forwards, and sideways ought to be able to trade in excess of 500 gold per hour during this challenge.  Some of that depends on the population size of the realm and some of it depends on how cutthroat the competition is, but there really is a lot of gold to be made if you know what you are doing.  I feel like I'm relying on Auctioneer to make most of my money for me without really understanding the where/why/how and when of it all.

It's really a shame I haven't been dabbling in the Eternal market, but this realm seems to have weird pricing for Eternals.  Eternal Fire is consistently below 20g and Frozen Orb (which can be traded for eternals) are consistently at or below 15g.  On my old realm, Eternal Fire was usually around 30g and Orbs rarely dropped below 20g.  It's possible that a botter or heavy-duty farmer has crashed he Eternal Fire market on their own, or, it may just be the end-of-expansion dip and prices were actually higher a few weeks before I arrived. 

Some other successes from this hour include a Book of Glyph Mastery that I flipped from 20g to 120g.  Doesn't take a rocket surgeon to make that deal, but I never said this was brain science either.  Heck, half the items in the auction house could be flipped for profit at any given time.  You push hard enough, maybe one day you buy out the entire auction house.  Which, of course, sounds like a devilishly amazing new challenge.  I wonder if anyone has some statistics on how much it would cost to buy out the auction house.

Let's see, there are usually about 20,000-25,000 items listed.  For argument's sake, let's say the average price of a listing is 20g.  I have no idea if that's accurate.  So, would 400,000 gold be all that it would take to completely buy out the Auction House? Seems like it *should* take a lot more.

Total Assets at the end of 14 hours:  About  4400 gold

Go to Hour 15 of the Alpha Competition

No comments:

Post a Comment