Starting With One Gold
This post originally appeared in my newsletter. Subscribe now to get these Auction House tips before they are published on the blog. I’m going to kick this whole thing off with a series about earning gold from the Auction House by starting with basically no resources. The goal is to not only see how much gold I can make on my own but to show you some ideas and practices you can use on your characters to start making some decent gold inside the World of Warcraft.
Getting Started
For this challenge, so to speak, I decided to start a Level 1 Undead Rogue named Hickson. I sent him one gold piece and then began the slow, long walk from the Undead starting zone all the way to Thunder Bluff. Along the way I made a pit stop inside Orgrimmar to pick up the flight path there. By the time I reached Thunder Bluff, Hickson had reached Level 2 just from the experience he gained exploring the world map.
Why Thunder Bluff? The first reason is that, as you’ll see in a moment, there’s a specific low-cost item inside Thunder Bluff that was key to me beginning to accumulate gold quickly. And secondly, the Auction House in Thunder Bluff is located very close to the Mailbox. I’m going to be running back and forth a lot during this experiment and the shorter that route can be the better.
Making My First Sale
Once I was safely inside Thunder Bluff I began to put into action my plan to start building up my gold reserves. With only one gold to my name there are limited opportunities to get started. Thankfully, with the rising interest in companion pets and the hard to find vendors that sell them there is an opportunity for enterprising players to make some money quickly with little gold to get started.
Inside Thunder Bluff, hidden away in the corner of the middle level, is a vendor named Halpa that sells the key to our start: Prairie Dog Whistles. A single Prairie Dog Whistle only costs 50 silver so I had more than enough to buy one. Your gut instinct probably says to you, “How can you make gold selling what anyone can buy themselves for cheap?” That’s a fair question. The answer is that not everyone knows where to find Halpa and, even if they do, not everyone is willing to make the trip to Thunder Bluff when they can just as easily buy it on the Auction House.
So by using people’s laziness or lack of knowledge about this part of the game I was able to buy and quickly sell my first Prairie Dog Whistle in a matter of hours. I listed the Whistle with a 6 gold minimum bid and a 8 gold buyout. I’ll be referring to this pricing setup for the rest of this newsletter in this format to make things easier: 6/8g.
Rinse And Repeat
With one sale under my belt I could then take the earnings and buy even more Whistles to sell. In addition to the Prairie Dogs, I branched out and took a quick trip to Orgrimmar to find Xan’tish the Snake Vendor. He sells three different snake pets that also sell for 50 silver. I sold these for an average of 3/3.5g on the Horde’s Auction House and, after taking a short trip to Booty Bay, for about 5/5.5g at the Neutral Auction House.
Once it was all said and done, over the course of about 24 hours, I had taken my initial one gold and turned it into 50 gold even. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot but as a percentage of my initial investment it’s nothing to laugh at.
The Lesson
Even though this issue was Horde-centric, the technique of buying companion pets from vendors and selling them right back on the Auction House at a premium applies to the Alliance side of things as well.
The great thing about this technique is that it really only costs you a bit of your time. The pets are sold by the vendor at such a low price that everyone, regardless of level, can buy a few and try selling them at the Auction House themselves.
Subscribe
To subscribe to the newsletter, simply fill out the form below and then confirm your subscription via the email you’ll receive afterwards in your inbox.
Related posts:
- Starting Your Own Bank Alt Guild
- Wrath Item Prices Starting to Settle Down
- How Much Gold Is Enough?
- Making Gold With Cooking Dailies
- Auction House Example: Eternal Belt Buckle
3 Comments
Feight on July 17th, 2009
Should have bought the cockroach pet from UC before departing to TB
Nance on July 17th, 2009
The cockroach pet barely goes for anything on my server or I would have.
Stupid Mage on May 6th, 2009
Every tried selling Herb Pouches from the Herbalist Supplies Vendor?
Sometimes getting that 1g seed is hard. Finding 10s is easy.
I’ve also found Coarse and Fine Thread to sell at a decent rate.