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So, how do you "play the auction house"?
nemonus
Member Posts: 102
Been hearing fairly consistently that the only way to be a suitable amount of AD (besides simply spending money), is to "play the auction house". Would anyone mind explaining this any further, because so far my experience has been dumping blue items into the thing for the default (extremely low) price, and waiting four days until they've told me I've sold nothing. A bit confused. I've only sold two things.
Is this only viable at level 60?
Is this only viable at level 60?
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Its rather simple, but it does take time especially if you dont know in game prices yet. Time that could be spent playing the game instead. And before you know it, you could end up playing AH instead of the game :P
That's cool, but other MMOs had subscriptions. I'm only trying to figure the AH thing out, because without AD, my character just feels inferior to everyone else I see walking around. Not much fun.
The gateway AH makes it lot easier to look things up, as the level ranges work (just don't use the rarity selector).
The younger a game is, the easier it is to make money because the less people know about the value of items. For example dragon eggs were something that wasn't really understood by most players for several weeks, they got them from the profession quest in neverdeath graveyard and when they heard they could get 20 or 30k ad for it a lot of them sold no questions asked.
If you knew the purpose of dragon eggs and their relative rarity you would have known that once that certain quest wasn't farmable via sharing, the value of dragon eggs would rise, you would also know that because very few players were even close to level 20 crafting, demand would be much lower than it would be in the future, so buying dragon eggs early was smart because supply was high, sellers weren't knowledgeable, and demand was very low. Dragon eggs sold for as low as 20k for about a week and a half, now they sell for 100k each... You could have made 80k per dragon egg you bought or 400% of your investment.
These types of trades are the easy ways to make money on the AH, and they're the kind of opportunities that exist less and less as the game gets older. When the game gets older to make money on the AH you have to manipulate prices which is harder and margins are way lower with higher risk. An example would be say there are 200 dragon eggs on the AH, 150 of them are priced between 100 and 120k, 10 are between 120k and 150k, and 40 are between 150k and 200k. You can buyout all the auctions between 100 and 150k giving you 160 eggs with 40 remaining at 150k or higher and hope to sell the 150 you bought at 150k or at least higher than what you bought them for. The downside is that this takes a large investment, the payoff is pretty low, and it takes a lot of time to even sell of the full 150 eggs. The market will probably return to around where it was as more people post their eggs so you're really only likely to make money on maybe 25% of the 150 you bought and you will probably sell the rest for around the price you bought them for...
Long story short... making a lot of money early on basically involves taking advantage of people who know less about the game or have less foresight.
Another example is with AD and zen. Zen used to sell for 500 AD at launch but if you thought about the market you would easily realize the AD price of zen would go down hugely very quickly because at launch players had tons of AD via founders packs and really didn't think about how valuable that AD was. A player only makes 24k AD maximum per day yet players had 2 mil or more on day one and were happy to spend it on zen. Also 500 is the maximum exchange rate so if you bought zen and sold it for AD you coudl not possibly lose money on your inveestment. If you sold zen for 2 mil AD and bought zen with that 2 mil today you would probably have around 1.5x the zen you initially bought.
You don't need to be level 60 to do any of this, but it helps to be 60 because selling rare dungeon gear has been a great way to get a good chunk of AD so you can really make a lot of money with good trades.
Sort by time remaining works on the Gateway AH.
**** I wish I had known this earlier hah.
Too bad some auctions go negative in time.
Playing MMO's or trolling MMO forums for 15+ years? There's a difference!
In other words you had to knowingly exploit a bug or profit because other people exploited it? This is why I love betas without wipes. *sigh*