subject: Making Warcraft Gold – Using The Auction House [print this page] Author: Paul Rone-Clarke Author: Paul Rone-Clarke
Sometimes you will be looking to buy items from the Warcraft auction house. Spending your hard earned gold on a shiny new weapon is a great feeling. But do you spend more gold than you should? Read on and make sure you get a bargain, not a barf bin. In this guide, we will assume you are selling for the first time, my follow up guide will be for the process of buying. First what are your requirements. If it's weapons or armour then you need to scan the market for suitable items. Assuming no addons. then the first thing to do is right click on the auctioneer. The standard auction house gui will open. If you want to avoid embarrassing and costly errors the first thing to do is to tick the "usable items" box at the top centre of the auction GUI. This will mean that you will only be shown items your character is the right level and has the correct skills to use. The only risk here is you will be shown items at any level below your own including those that - although you could use them - are far too weak to be a worthwhile investment. So the next thing is to select the level range. There are two boxes. These are the "to" and "from" level range requirements you want to focus on. So (for example) if you are level 20 type "20" in the right hand box. If you want all items up to level 20 leave the the left hand box empty. If you want only level 20 items put "20" in the left hand box as well. I find it useful to have a range of one or two levels to look at. So at level 20 I might put 19 in the left box and 20 in the right. This would return results of all items usable by my character that have a level 19 or 20 requirement. Likewise putting 16 in the left box would give all items from levels 16, 17,18,19 and 20. OK next select the item type you are interested in in the drop boxes to the left. Weapon is top of the list, Armour second etc. Clicking weapons will show the list of all weapon types available. Clicking on one of these will return a list of all items that meet the criteria you have set above within that item type. If nothing comes up, there is a good chance you are looking at an item type you do not have the skills to use (remember you ticked the "usable items" button) Assuming you get a list of items they will be shown in the main area to the right of the list. Moving your mouse pointer over these items will give you information. The icon of the item will give you a tooltip giving you the stats for it, The colour of the item text gives the general quality. Pressing the labels at the top of the list will sort by that criteria. So for example pressing "lvl" will sort by the items by the level requirement - starting with the highest level first. Repressing will sort the list in the reverse order. Next look at the price. There will normally be two prices. The "bid" price and the "buyout" price. In this short article I won't go into the pro's and con's of bidding and buyout, but you need to know that if you press bid, you will then be given a text box to enter the amount you wish to bid for the item. It must of course be higher than the current bid (or the low bid level as set by the vendor). You will then have to wait for the end of the auction to see if your bid is successful. The time you will wait varies, Auctions can be 12, 24 or 48 hours long, and the approximate time left is always shown in the "time left" column. You may be outbid by another player, in which case you will need to come back to the auction house and bid again. Or perhaps decide the item is not worth the extra cost (or the time taken to re-visit to the auction house) and give it up. Any monies you have bid (which are deducted immediately upon bidding) will be returned to you via the post system. More often than not you may want to use the "buy out" option. In this case you pay the full amount of the "buyout" price, it is deducted from your character account immediately, and the item will be in the post box within a few seconds. To do this you just need to click the buyout button, then confirm, and the deal is done. If you want some advice on how to use this system in a way to make some gold follow the links below. My next article will be on selling. Good luckAbout the Author:
There are a range of free levelling, gold making and profession guides available from Paul Clarke at.
