Making Money in World of Warcraft

This is the first of several articles that will enable you, Joe Q WoWplayer, to increase the amount of gold you can make in World of Warcraft. The guides should be useful to both casual and hardcore players. Before I get too far into this, let me say immediately: There are no guaranteed ways to make money. What follows is merely advice and suggestions which I have found works for me. Prices and methods can vary wildly from server to server and faction to faction. Use common sense, study how the prices on your server ebb and flow, and they should work for you too. Above all, don't blame me if you end up broke.

To begin with, there are various addons I would recommend for anyone wanting to maximise their profits, or simply make some actions easier to perform. All addons are available from www.curse.com, and probably any other addon site you prefer to visit.

First, the essentials:

• Auctioneer - Tracks and records the prices of everything on the auction house, and recommends prices for you to list your own items, usually automatically undercutting the competition up at the time by a few percent. Absolutely required for using the AH with any degree of success. I'll be covering much more on Auctioneer in a later article, but for now, install it, and use one of your characters to do a full scan of the items on both your faction AH and the neutral AH. These scans (in my experience) take about ten to fifteen minutes on the faction listings, and perhaps five on the neutral ones, and should ideally be done at least once a week to keep everything current. Auctioneer also provides all this gathered information whenever you mouse over an item it's already seen on the auction house, and makes recommendations as to whether you should auction, vendor, and/or disenchant it based on those prices.

• Gatherer - By the same people as Auctioneer, this addon is only immediately essential if you're planning to have a gathering profession, usually either herbalism or mining. If you install this, it will track the positions of any herb or ore nodes on both your map and minimap. Nodes always come back after a period of time, and marking the position of them will make it much faster and easier to run through profitable gathering areas later.

• Little Sparky's Workshop - This addon works with Auctioneer to show the costs to make any items you can make with your profession, and the price you could potentially sell that finished item for on the AH. If the cost of making it is lessthan the price you'll get for the item, it'll be highlighted. Comes into its own when you have multiple items you can make with the materials you have.

• Altoholic - Designed for those of us who like to play tons of multiple characters, this addon is also extremely useful even if you just play a single char. Altoholic will keep track of everything in your inventory, as well as everything in both your personal and guild bank, and items your other characters have. This means you can search by name for an item you may have stashed away without having to drag your ass back to town and look in the bank manually.

It also has various options to track your professions, both primary and secondary, and will offer suggestions as to what/where to go to work on gettting them higher. If you're in a guild or have friends, it will also display their professions and recipes.

There are also a couple of addons which I can't in all honesty say are 'essential', but I find them very convenient:

• Postal - An addon for managing your mail. Essentially, it allows you to open every mail in your mailbox and gather the contents with a single click. Optional settings allow this to only open, say, successful auctions, items you won, or expired items, or any combination thereof. There's a certain satisfaction to opening your mail manually, but when you start getting large volumes of gold and goods through the AH, you'll be glad of this addon.

• Crapaway! - No, really. Great name, isn't it? What this addon does is sell every grey item you have in your bags when you visit any vendor. There's really no reason to not have this, as there's maybe one grey item in the game with any vendable worth, and you'll never see it. Grey items tend to build up while you're questing and farming; unless you're carefully obsessive-compulsive with cleaning your bags out, you will miss some. Greys sitting in your bags are wasted space and unclaimed revenue.

Once you've installed the addons, your character(s) will be ready to start making money. And the best place to start making money is the auction house, which will be covered in detail in the next article.