While some may feel the title is a bit misleading, the core of this post isn’t very far off. It will give you enough ammunition to take you from selling barely any farm drops, to selling thousands of golds in BOE’s every single day.
It addresses the biggest issues in the farming community, and aims to take players from one end of the gold making spectrum to the other- with practical actionable advice. If you skim through it, you may come up with a few hidden gems, however if read from start to finish (with intent to implement) I can just about guarantee you, that you’ll make far more gold than the rest of the farming population.
As it’s what I teach when I consult & write gold guides for players who are willing to pay for them.
This Gigantic Post Will Teach You:
- How to sell your farmed BOE items for what players call the “inflated tooltip price”
- Why Splitting your time 50/50 between the AH and your farming spot(s) is far superior than the Traditional 80/20 Farm to AH split. (And how to go about doing this yourself)
- Why adding diversity to your farm profile will make you more gold, even if there’s a current farm that “trumps them all”
- How you can post your auctions up to 10x faster. Far faster than the general population who only seem to know of auctioneer & auctionator as the only auction house add-ons available.
- Why players claim a farm is “10,000g per Hour when in reality most people only make 1,000g or so. If not much less.
And Most Importantly..
- The underlying thinking process that separates two types of farming players: “The Casual Farmer The Dedicated Auctioneer.” The mystery behind why one type of player seems sell farm drops for insane prices while the others collects scraps…
So What Happens When I Understand This?
It’ll take you from just “praying” that your farm drops sell into “knowing” without a doubt that they’ll all eventually go (and make huge profits for you), so that the time you spent farming, is never spent in vain.
We’ll go over how you can get your greens to sell for the tooltip prices, WHY it seems that only some players can sell them for that much, and what you can do right now to get the same results.
As a bonus, we’ll go over the two farming archetypes that all players fall into. As I explain them, you’ll probably be able to identify yourself with one or the other. Of course there are many shades of gray, but for the most part, players usually fall on the extreme of both terms. But enough speculation, lets get into it!
Casual Farmer or Dedicated Auctioneer
Right now ill state that the dedicated auctioneers makes much more gold than the casual farmer by nature.
Most of you reading this will no doubt relate with the casual farmer. Hopefully by the end of this post, you’d made the decision to change that.
Casual Farmers: As their name implies, tend to be more casual players. Regardless of the ill associations with the word, being “casual” isn’t the reason why they make less gold with farm drops. The lack of understanding the auction house is. Casual Farmers usually have enough time to make thousands of gold pretty easily, in the same amount of time their already spending on WoW. For them the real problem is knowing how, and actually believing it’s possible.
Which is difficult for them, since casual farmers usually have habits that sabotage their gold making.. such as:
- Sticking to a single farm until the nerf hammer hits it.
- Farming a spot to the point of over-saturation.
- Having cynical views towards various AH based tooltips in defense that they’re “inflated.” (Because Of course, green drops can never sell for that high, especially not on their server)
And the most important 2:
- Selling items far below their actual value. The biggest gold making mistake ever
- And posting too few times to make any sales. The second biggest gold making mistake ever.
Players with these habits make up the majority of the farming population. Which means, most, if not all the general farming population could be making tons more gold, in the same amount of time, if they took a couple of days out to get up-to-date on the latest auction house technology.
But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, lets discuss their extreme opposites..
Dedicated Auctioneers: are very similar to casual farmers, with one exception – They’re auction house saavy. Dedicated auctioneers are more times than not, convinced 100% that whatevers on their tooltips, is the price an item will sell for in the auction house.
And with good reason.
Those same item sales continue to fund pretty much everything in Warcraft, from mounts, to repairs and more. I am one of them.
To be clear, here are the main characteristics that a dedicated auctioneer usually has:
- We usually know about, and farm many different spots. We do this to diversify our profile and expand our loot to reach more customers. (It also prevents over-saturation).
- we are never worried about a spot getting nerfed, and actually welcome it, knowing it willdecrease competition dramatically. Which is good news, since we have a surplus of items from before the farm was nerfed.
- Usually upload auctions consistently. Times do vary. But at the very least, 3 times a week as the minimum
- When we obtain a larger stock (800+) we do eventually scale back and post less– as gold is no longer an issue, and making it seems pointless (Unless we like the feeling of having more than everyone else, or it’s a hobby of some sort)
- Often have an abundance of 200+ items being uploaded at a time, for their full AH price (As displayed on the tooltips).
Eventually we start to spend more time in the AH as they realize that it’s where the real gold is made. (And the funny thing is – sometimes when casual farmers insist on lowering their prices – dedicated auctioneers may buy them out and sell them for the tooltip suggested price)
But still, with all of that said, it still doesn’t answer the question of WHY.
Why do dedicated auctioneers make more gold then casual farmers when they have access to the same stock?
The real answer is, Dedicated auctioneers upload their auctions everyday. Short and simple.
Casual Farmers don’t. It’s not because casual farmers are lazy, it’s because they think posting auctions is a inefficient use of their time. Past experience has taught casual farmers that farmed BOE’s simply won’t sell right away – so posting them is boring and yields no rewards.
What casual farmers cant see is that once you have a nice sum of auctions constantly being uploaded(say 150 or more) then they’ll start to sell a very small portion every single day.
It’s the most important thing to you’ll ever learn about gold making. The thing is, it’s not that the farming greens don’t sell, it’s that the time in which they do sell is 100% random.
Seriously.
That green sword you found yesterday during your ZF farm may take 3 months or more to sell. But it will sell. Someone who’s uploading auctions consistently knows this, and just adds it to their auctioning pool, then waits for a sale. Very much like fishing.
It’s a completely different mindset than the casual farmer, who watches their auctions with a hawks-eye praying that today is the lucky day someone swoops it up. And its a shame, because if they knew how easily amassing hundreds of greens actually is… to a point where you can get drip-feed sales everyday, they’d never send any of the greens to the vendor again.
So bluntly speaking, the more auctions you are consistently uploading, the more gold you will make and the more you can charge. (Because you really don’t care if the auction sells today or even next Christmas) Your making gold everyday and you love’ it. Period.
Which means: You won’t lower prices to supplicate to buyers. Ever. If they want it, they will pay for it. Full price.
Actually I kinda have a rule for giving an estimate at how much of my auctions will sell.. and even though It’s not 100% completely accurate, it holds some truth to it.
Here it is: Out of any given day, given that you have 100+ items to upload to the auction house, 7% of your auctions WILL sale. (Given that you’ve priced them correctly) Most folks will say “just 7%?”.. but they don’t know how great 7% actually is. Especially since you can post 1000 auctions or more in under 30 minutes with today’s auctioning technology.
(This will imply that with 1000 auctions 70 will sell. Which is not true, it’s actually a random mix.) With 1,000 auctions I may sell about 55 of them and make anywhere between 9,000g-20,000g) everyday just by posting for 30-45 minutes.))
It really is no sweat, almost auto-pilot profits. All you have to do is farm and post. There are times when I can come out with 50k+ a week and not do any farming. Just uploading the drops from old farms / the things I found on the AH for cheap. So before you continue you need to get this down:
- You can sell “Pioneers legplates of the monkey” for 145g, the inflated tooltip price
- You can upload hundreds of auctions everyday without spending hours doing so.
- You can cut your farming time in half (to invest in auctioning) and make 10x more profits
Learn this and you are more than half way there.
This is where it gets practical, so first let me lay the tools all out on the table. The following are the current tools I use to get the full job done. From identifying item prices, to posting 1,000+ items in under an hour, and even collecting what seems to be pages of sold auctions.
Some of these you may have seen before, others will most definitely be new. Here they are:
Price Identification: The Undermine Journal For Auctioneer Plugin / TUJ Server Data Add-on / The base undermine journal add-on. (3 Auctioneer Add-ons To Download)
(We'll discuss the difference between the undermine journals in a bit)
Auctioning: Auctioneer / Tradeskill Master, Tradeskill Master Auctioning,Tradeskill Master Mailing,
Miscellanous: Moggit
There are other, and more complicated combinations. However, this is what I’ve found to be the most simple and straight forward way to go about it.
For the means of explaining what they are, I urge you to visit each add-ons download pages to get an overview.
For the lazy types, I’ve put together a massive infographic for explaining the most important of the 3 and how they correlate the the “dedicated auctioneer” and “Casual Farmer” concepts.
You can see that on this website.
Explaining The Undermine Journal Plugins.
Now to clear things up, ill explain the 3 plugins above.
The first "The undermine journal for auctioneer plugin" allows the undermine journal (now abbreviated: TUJ) to work with auctioneer. It will let you display TUJ data in your tooltips and sort by TUJ market prices instead of auctioneers.
The second "The Undermine Journal GE". This add-on contains server data from across all realms, and is what TSM will base your prices off. (not initially though, we'll set TSM to do that in a later step).
The third TUJ add-on is gotten from their website. It provides accurate data for your specific server / faction. Unlike the second add-on it's updated every day. You have to go to the underminejournal.com to get it.
Once there you’ll have to create an account with them first or sign in with your G+, Yahoo, or AOL account.
From there, you just pick your server and faction… and boom.
You get the last 2 weeks of updated fully accurate auction house data. Just put that data in your World of Warcraft > Interface > Addons folder and your good. No need to scan for 2 weeks before trying anything.
This is how the setup looks
Download these: The Undermine Journal For Auctioneer Plugin / TUJ General Edition / and finally TUJ Server data (must create an account)
Then the rest:
Auctioneer / Tradeskill Master, Tradeskill Master Auctioning, Tradeskill Master Mailing, / Moggit
And thats it. Everything should be set-up.
But, that doesn’t mean it’ll come working right out of the box. Lets get over to configuring them.
Hot Tip: To see if you installed everything right, upon login type /tsm sources. This will display all the data TSM can work with. If you see "TUJ / the undermine journal." You got it working. Good stuff.
When you log in, the first thing you’ll notice is how beastly looking your tooltips are. They should be overweight and bloated, but with the right trimming, you can slim them down.
On this page Auctioneer Tooltips Sections shows what parts of auctioneer you can disable to cut portions off your tooltips
Here’s all the portions I disabled to get a tooltip that looks like this:
Histogram, Item Level, STD Deviation, Simple, Enchantrix, and Enchantrix Barker are all disabled. (And just for reference, you must enable slidebar, stubby, and swatter to get auctioneer to work at all)
As for TSM, you can enable the whole suite. However, I usually just stick to Auctioning, Mailing, Additions, & Acounting
For the most part, the rest of the suite will be out of your way and have no effect on your gameplay whatsoever.
Setting Up TSM To Sell Your Auctions FAST:
If you read that infographic, then you should know that TSM is what allows you to post auctions at insane speeds. You will need it when you start to gather your arsenal of farm drops. While it may seem intimidating at first, using it is actually really easy. And much more efficient than posting manually.
Actually if it we’re not for TSM the whole “dedicated auctioneer” concept would be dead anyway. The point is to post your auctions without taking up too much time. If you spend loads of time just posting auctions, then your are missing the point entirely.
Essentially, by the end of this section, we’ll turn TSM into our personal auction house posting machine… And profit immensely because of it.
So to get TSM to sell things for us, we really only have to do 3 things:
- Tell it which items to sell for us (Create a group in TSM)
- Tell it for what prices to sell them for (Create an operation in TSM)
- Go to the auction house and sell them. (Post With TSM)
Once that’s done, your only real worry is to get more items and make sure your stock never runs out.
Step 1: Telling TSM which items to sell for us (Creating A Group)
A group is a huge list of items. Simply it’s a big list that tells TSM which items to sell for you (Basically A List of all our farming drops) This step is by far the most simple, and probably the most productive. Since once you tell TSM what drops to sell, it remembers it forever and you no longer have to tell it again. Simply Open TSM with /TSM. Then on the upper left hand side click groups.
This screen should pop-up asking you to give your first group a name.
Lets call it “All auction house wares”. Type that in and hit enter. TSM will then ask you to create an operation. An operation is just a command string that tells TSM how to post your auctions. You can set the duration, fallback prices, contingency plans, min/maximum prices and more! And don’t worry, if “command string” sounds complicated – it’s not. Actually it’s really easy to set up.
Here’s how it will look on your screen after you enter your group name:
Right under where it says “auctioning”, click “Create Auctioning Operation” The screen will change to this:
It will ask you to name your operation first. Lets call it “Sell all farmed greens”. Hit enter and your good. TSM will ask you “if you want to apply this operation to the group you just created”. You don’t have to understand what this means right now. For the moment just Hit yes / okay.
After hitting yes, you’ll be taken to the operation main menu. You’ll see a bunch of tabs here called “general” “post” “cancel” “reset” “relationships” “management” – Click “Post” And boom. Just like that, your taken to the instruction manual behind your item posting system. Whatever values you enter here will determine how all your stock gets posted. So this step is very important.
Pay close attention.
The way we’ll configure this page will allow the Undermine Journal and TSM to communicate so that we can effectively post our auctions without setting any prices ourselves.
How?
First off, we’re going to tell TSM to post all of our items using the undermine journal prices. Which is a big win for us because:
- The undermine journal data reflects the real value of an item (eliminating the guess work)
- We’ll never have to manually price our auctions again. Ever.
- Time saved is astronomical. (AS-TRO-NOM-ICAL)
To do this’ we’ll have to enter the following values in the specified fields. To avoid confusion, ill lay them out for you and explain what each one means. Ill also provide a screenshot of my settings for the more visual folks out there.
Enjoy.
Auction Settings:
- Duration: 24 Hours (Leave as is)
- Post Cap: 1 (Change to 500)
- Stack Size: 1 (Leave as is)
- Keep Quantity: 1 (Leave as it)
Auction Price Settings:
- Bid Percent: 100% (Leave as is)
- Undercut Amount: 1c (Change to 1g) Optional
Now it’s time for the post price settings.
These settings use a code that allow TSM to read your Undermine Journal data. Which is epic all the way. Your add-ons will start to work together to create fully oiled profit system. The following code we’ll input, -“TUJGEmedian” is just telling TSM to sell your items for the global market median price. Which is based on your undermine journal data. (Which we gotten from the Undermine Journal website earlier, remember?)
Here’s the settings: (Copy what in quotation marks into the specified fields)
- Minimum Price: "30% TUJGEmedian"
- Normal Price: "95% TUJGEmedian"
- Maximum Price: "150% TUJGEmedian"
- When Below Minimum: “Don’t Post Items”
- When Above Maximum: “Post For Maximum Price”
And your done! With that set up you just saved yourself dozens of hours of auctioning time. And possibly just set-up the most important gold making system ever invented.
But lets explain what we accomplished here.
“TUJGEmedian” looks scary and complicated right? Well don’t worry, all it means is “The Undermine Journal global market median”. Which is the median price across all servers (A very accurate metric for determining an items value).
We gave TSM instructions to post based on this value. That’s all.
So now when we post an item using TSM will make 1 of many happen! (you don’t have to read this section. It explains what TSM will do, it might be confusing to newbies – so if you are new to this just skip it and go ahead and start posting. You’ll learn what it does with practice) TSM will:
1) Check if someone has your item in the auction house. If not it will post for 95% of the global market median price. (That’s what we told it to do in our Normal Price Setting)
2) If someone does have it, TSM will undercut them by 1g (That’s what we told it to do in our Undercut Amount Setting)
3) If someone has our item in for WAY Overpriced, TSM will post it at our maximum price of 150% Global Market Median (That’s what we told it to do in our Above Maximum Price Setting).
4) If someone has the item in for WAY too low, TSM wont post the item at all (That’s what we told it to do in our Below Minimum Price setting)
Simple.
Now all that’s left is adding our farm items to our group and we’re ready to start posting.
Adding Our Farm Items To Our Groups
This step is telling TSM what exactly to sell. Like I said before, we only need to do this once. Once done TSM will remember to sell it forever.
First you want to click “Groups” represented by the big blue shiny crystal in the upper left hand corner.
The group we created earlier should show up. We named it “All auction house wares”.
Click that, then click the tab called items. Ill show it to ya in this small screenie. Now a huge smorgasbord of items will pop up. These are the items in your inventory. Click all the greens / farm drops you want to sell in the auction house and click add.
Your done.
After you add your items to the group, mail to a bank alt. It will make retrieving the items easier for the next step.
Quick tip: Check the box “Ignore random enchants on ungrouped items” You’ll thank me later.
The last step: Posting our farm drops.
So we got everything set up. It’s time for the gold to start pouring in.
In this step we post all our items at lightning speeds using TSM. Take as much greens as you can to the auction house. It’s better if you mail them to an alt. It’s cleaner and allows you to stay organized. The biggest benefit to this is that all your items will sit in the mailbox into your ready to post them. Now head on over to the auction house. And talk to the auctioneer.
You will see these new tabs there. Click on the blue “auctioning” one. A screen should then pop up with the group we created. If you see it, then so far so good. Now, just hit start post scan and thats it. TSM will start scanning the auction house so it can post all your goods correctly.
And another good thing is as TSM scans, auctioneer will start to update it’s own data. After it’s done you’ll see a screen that looks something like this.
The only thing left is to SPAM that post button. Spam it. Now. The large majority of your auctions will be posted right away. The rest won’t. Why? Because some items are too underpriced to undercut. We told TSM that when items are below our minimum price (30%) below the global market median, to not post those items.
You can still post them however. All you have to do, is move on over to the auctioneer tab called “post”, then drag n drop. Easy. Which is very viable since auctioneer also updates it’s data as TSM scans.
Meaning it will also have the most recent prices. So for the items that won’t sell.. Just post them quickly using auctioneer under the “post” tab. Alternatively, if you don’t mind selling for a bit less, you can make your minimum price lower in the auctioning operation section.
Something like 10% TUJGEmedian will make it so that you almost always post everything. To show you how this entire posting process looks, of course, here is a video.
That should be more than enough for you to digest, but to make it simple, lets recap everything in a FAQ:
Q: Whats the most helpful thing I can do to make more gold from farms:
A: Getting down a system to sell your drops is by farm the best thing you can do. It organizes everything so you can just post and forget. I believe just learning TSM alone will do more for than any guide when it comes to gold making.
Q: So if it is possible to sell items for the global market median price, how come It never get any sells?
A: Most likely because your aren’t posting consistently & you don’t have enough auctions. The game of selling auctions get better with he more stock you have. Yes it will seem random at times, but it much like playing a local lottery or “number hole” the more tickets you have, the more likely you’ll get a hit.
Q: So I can just sell any farm drop I get?
A: Yeah. What you do is send the items to an alt. Don’t even think about it until your ready to auction. Don’t sell any of the greens right away. Let them mass up on an alt, and when your ready start posting them. Then log in the next day and collect the sales.
Q: What if I don’t get any sales and you just waste my time?
A: Most likely that won’t happen. I have shown many players the same system and the majority of them always send me good news. Yes there are servers that are REALLY bad on the auction house, ill admit – but those servers have such a low population, that the players still there are better off moving than trying to make gold.
Q: So this will work on any realm except low pops?
A: Yes and no. Don’t use the above answer as an excuse. I’ve actually cleaned up selling goods on low pop realms like tortheldrin and onyxia. This can work on low pops as long as you have an active auction house. Thats usually the case if your on a low pop, but the majority of players are on a single faction.
Q: Are There any other methods? What about TSM snatch lists, Warehousing & more?
A: This was a basic guide intended for teaching the anti-auctioning farm crowd. Those are for a different topic.
Q: Can I use auctionator or any other auctioning system?
A: Yes you can. I don’t know if auctionator or other systems can use TUJ for a pricing mechanism, but the real meat and potatoes it done with TSM and TUJ.
Q: How much greens should I collect before I start auctioning?
A: I’d say at least 200 or so. 200 being the least. And make sure you mix those greens up from everywhere. DO NOT try to auction 200 greens from the same farm. It won’t work.
Q: Just farming? Can I acquire greens from other means?
A: Yes. The auction house. Once you start to categorize items by the pricing points on the tooltips, you no longer have to farm to collect greens. You can just stay in the auction house. Actually, you basically go 80% auctioneer full time. It’s less “fun work” but yields more profits. The endgame here is to get to a point where your so comfortable with selling items by price that you can just use the AH entirely. And only go farm when people are posting anything good.
Q: It sounds like alot of work, does it really take less time?
A: In the beginning yes, it will be alot of work and confusion. I don’t know a soul who understood how TSM and auctioneer worked on their very first try. You will mess up and probably screw up a thing a two but its all worth it. Especially since you’ll get to point where you literally don’t have to do anything and wake up to 5k or more gold everyday.
Q: Whats number of item should I aim for:
A: With my current stock I’m comfortable at just 500 auctions. Anything less than that and I farm or auction hunt for a little bit. With 500 auctions It’s like 3,000g guaranteed (minimum) and 8,000g on the high side. When I’m at 800 (when I play more) it’s like 5,000g minimum and 20,000g on the high side. I don’t see much 20k days, but they do happen. (I should get screenshots of that)
Q: I’m on the fence about giving this a shot.. should I take a chance on it?
A: Hell yes.
Action Steps For The Bold
If you want to try this out for yourself, just go and farm. Farm some BC instances, then some Pre TBC instances, mix up some, and then go wrath instances and finally hit cata.
Collect all the greens you find doing dailies, instances, and leveling as well.. load them into your TSM and go HAM.
The more you got the better off you are.
I can’t make any promises to anyone about how much gold they will make, but I assure you, if your not doing this or aren’t using TSM / Auctioneer already, you will come out making more gold.
As for the auctioning side.. I do teach this in my other gold guides.
And I’m pretty sure the rest of the forum knows where to get them.
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