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http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/for ... 9005910931

Very interesting writeup on controlling MMORPG markets.

I'm hoping to do this on my server, but it's a big server so I'll have plenty of competition.

I'm looking for markets to start attacking (once I get enough gold to make it happen of course). Also, if anyone else wants to discuss their tactics and methods, that'd be interesting as well.

So basically, has anyone tried this? If so, how did it go and are you still doing it successfully?

I usually mess around with peoples auctioneer addon, put something up for idk.. 50% of the normal price, peoples auctioneer automatically goes lower, if its set to go lower that is, and if no one buys your item then buy off the other person's stuff and sell it for its normal price, takes a while... That's just one example.

Or for example enchant materials / Eternal\Crystallized whatever, the ones that can turn into lower classed ones etc. check both versions, one of them is bound to be cheaper, change them and sell.

There's always competition in that area though

My main source of gold is from buying stuff from the AH and disenchanting it, pretty simple I guess

I'm not really talking about, oh buy low sell high. I'm talking about completely owning a market such that if you stop selling your stuff, no one can buy it basically. Making the market depend on you (and thus you can set ridiculous prices).

Well for that you'd have to stay away from the stuff I do I guess, because those mats are renewed really fast, so you'd have to be buying them nonstop to actually have any chance of owning that market, since people would undercut you constantly, that's the only problem with it imo. The fact that everything on the market is renewable

Or you could undercut yourself, but ye

i heard somewhere that someone got banned for controlling the market...don;t know if theres any truth to it...

As long as you're not selling currency or scamming people, there's nothing in the ToS against it. You do have to be careful about pissing people off and stay clear of infractions like swearing in general chat, but as long as you're not doing anything against the ToS, there's nothing a GM can do to you.

I tried to control the frostweave market early on but it was really hard.
You need shitloads of money and there's so many undercutters.

I think you should aim for a market with few sellers. I have had great success in TBC with controlling the 250-300 zone in jewelcrafting.
It requires a lot of seemingly crappy stuff that players will sell for low amounts.

The market is small and if you want to level jewelcrafting there is no other way than to buy those gems. Go check the recipes for that range. I sold them for 15g ea and bought them usually for 3-5g ea. It wasn't really that much money that I made though. Just enough for everything what I needed.

I just spent a good 3 hours reading every single word in that topic.

First off, this is really something I would do.

However... look at the last , unanswered post.

That's the real deal, look at the reality, think of the reality.

Like he said, items are used for items above them, especially in wow.

You're gonna have to spend 10k on a daily basis to even begin this, simply because people will put prices to a normal level any hour a day...

This just won't work, simple. People will 24/7 undercut you, this is a retarded idea in all honesty.


I mean think about it, people will actually list items in the AH every hour of the day, when you sleep, on your day with friends, or even when you're not gone. They will do it so often that you're not gonna be making any profit AT all...

You need alot more than 10k to start this ;d. I'd say have everythign you need .. and have an extra 20k on the side. That way it's a lose investment. 29k should allow you to dominate an area for a bit .. till either you turn out to be too stupid .. or your server is. I know of 2 people on Shadowsong that are nearly up to the 500k mark and they don't do this at al ltho ;o. They just combine 8 professions between the 2 of them and spam AH with their stuff .. making a cool 5-10k gold a day without having to piss peopel off or make 'fake' relationshipe with people.


All tho for the average gamer .. 20k is more than enough. You don't need to buy items at all .. ass everything will eventually drop. So that would leave 'fun' items. 16k for mammoth ... what else ? Rest can be farmed .. mats ofcourse or emblems. Anyone who does actually have over 100k .. will never spend it what so ever.

after typing and deleting my post a couple of times, the thought of you playing wow for what, 4 months? really makes me wanna go deeper into this, but i wont (no offense..)

in all honesty, i think this might well be a source of income for the guy, i think he was hoping people would post their servers, why is he not posting there anymore otherwise?
Surely with a guide as deep as this one, which in theory sounds good, but in reality just WILL NOT work, he'd wanna keep his eye on it after so much effort, no way he'd abandon it like that.

Even on a dead-empty server, you wont have time to "control and manipulate" a market.
people will CONSTANTLY put the same item up for <maybe a little above average price> grabs and this just cant work... leaving you with no actual TIME to have your shit up for grabs because there will be a constant flow of money as you can't monitor 24/7 to grab the items that are listed an average, or high price.

And seriously.. people CoDing to you on a daily basis, do you see it happen?
the Ah is there so you dont have to spend time, people go in it before they even think of having to wait for a CoD.


meh, sry if im being a bit harsh or anything, i'd love to see some1 work on this and make HONEST and full reports.

? Concerned about where my money is coming from ?

WotLK is piss easy. I have a full epic'd lvl 70 alt that I do TBC raids with .. and have to say with a full guild of lvl 70 epic's is god damn hard to down stuff like BT or SWP. Takes so much coordination, unlike naxx 25 which is so easy to pug now it makes me cringe. Anyways besides the point.

Thing is .. within 3 weeks I was 80 with epics starting from 0 with no experience what so ever. Since .. Jan 10th orso I've been raiding .. doing 5 mans .. now for the pst 3 weeks I've been 'stuck' only need 2/3 items to become a full BiS since then just been mining .. teaming up with m8's to gain money. Making 3-4k a day is NOT hard .. if you think is you're doing it wrong. Tundra mammoth is only 16k when exalted with the Kirin Tor ... 16k is piss easy. Should take you 2 weeks MAX of daily's / proffessions to fullfill .. but guess what .. 90% of WoW cba too. As for my other big expense .. My Nobles Deck costed me about 4k as I had herbed to get eternals and herbs to mill. Made a few nobles .. got tired of not being able to complete a deck as I kept getting undeath =/ .. so I sold all my nobles and jsut bought a deck.

Spend a day herbing a milling = insta 5k if you get lucky lol.


Personally .. by mining + jc + jc dailys for tokens to buy recipes I have made almost 10k in 3 days. Mine for 4 hours = shit load of saronite and a few gems. + about 2 stacks of tita ore. Tita ore x20 sells for 90G on SS. In those 4 hours I get about 700 saronite ore. Prospect all of them and I usually get like 10 scarlet ruby's + alot of other shit. 10 scarlet ruby's .. when cut into let's say 16 agi .. sell for about 110G each .. easy 1100G there. Not to mention the extra 180G from tita ores .. extra 400G from eternals I picked up and extra 500G from the others gems I got. 4 hours = 2k G for me. Combine that with my dk alt who is Herbing + Alchemy ... usually wednesdays and fridays are the ker-ching day for me on it. Usually when I get home I'll hop onto him and go herb for an hour or 2. Use those herbs to create flasks for raiding ( Stoneblood / endless rage / frostwyrm etc etc ) and put them on the ah at around 19:30 SS server time .. 15 mins before most guilds start to raid. In 2 hours herbign I gatehr the mats for approx 10 of these flasks. Each flask can go for 100G if I get lucky ... easy extra 1k a day. All adds up m8 .. can easily get as muc has you wanted .. time helps too ;d

Atm sitting comfortably at 11k gold ( 7.8k actual as I invested some into a QQ'ing womanz :< ) and won't be making gold for abit .. new commitments make me only able to play till approx 19:00 .. so there goes most of my money making .. + not to obothered .. have done everythign in game now except Sarth 3d .. but confident we will pull it off when we get rid of the fuckers who /hug lava walls. As I said I basically have all the items I need .. well geared .. have my mounts .. exalted with factions I need to be have extra dps set for dual spec .. it's ust so boring now =/ .. maybe I rushed it a little .. but meh. It's not hard to be good at the game if you stop oto think.

Twysta, I see where you're coming from, but think about it some more. Yes, it's impossible to be the ONLY person selling something, but over time, you can effect the prices of items where you have massive stockpiles. If you're listing shit for really, really expensive prices when people are used to the "usual" prices, sure, but if you can build up a stockpile of cheap items while you slowly creep the price up since you ALWAYS have auctions up if you have enough of the item, you can affect the price. Also, if you're selling 1000 items at a profit of 1g a sale, you're making more consistent money than selling 2 items at 500g profit. Like the guy reiterated, it's not about making a ton of money fast, it's about making a little money a lot of times. Also, as far as the COD thing, the way I look at it is this: I use auctioneer to post my auctions and keep track of the current market prices. In my auctioneer history is every item I've sold and every item I've bought. If I look through that and see that week and and week out, I'm buying from the same person, I can go to that person and say "Hey, I've noticed I buy a lot of your stuff on the AH, how bout you just COD it to me for xxx price* and save yourself the time of selling on AH and you don't lose 5% to fees." If the person is just interested in making sure his stuff sells, he's very likely to accept the "I can COD it to this guy and he will buy it guaranteed." Versus "Well, I can toss it up on the AH and see if it sells." If he's got a lot of stuff to sell, it'll save him time as well, plus he can empty his bags midfarming, just stop off at a mailbox instead of hearthing, going to town, listing items on AH (which can take awhile if you're using the default AH frame) and then waiting on hearth or paying for port to go back out and farm.

What ends up happening, is the person just sends you all his shit and doesn't pay as much attention to the price of what he's selling. As the price of say Saronite Ore creeps up to 25g/stack, you might still be getting it for 20g/stack on a consistent basis from your farmer friend. This in turns, means you can afford to sell at a lower price than your competitors (say you're prospecting it for gems), can't sell at that low of a price without losing gold. Meanwhile, you're still turning a tiny profit. If you can keep this up long enough, your competitors will give up. Once you have little competition, you can jack up prices a bunch and since no one else was bothering to produce it, you make a killing. Naturally people will see these prices and want to get in on it. However, the jacked up prices on the gems you get will in turn jack up the price on Saronite Ore and you begin the process of undercutting your competitors again. If you do this in cycles, you can make a killing. Start out by cornering the market (even for a short amount of time), jack prices way up and make huge profits. Once the boom is over, let prices come back down, restock cheaply and drive out new competitors and repeat.

*which is at the bottom of market price, but still competitive

Wow, this post is long, anyway, as you can tell I've been thinking about this for awhile.

Crumpets, "? Concerned about where my money is coming from ?"
I knew from your first post that it was going this way.
You talk as if you know it all, which i just really cant stand.. sorry. it's in my personality.
You think your ways of making cash are so awesome, do you think people whom have played for 3 years+ can't make this amount?? and then you talk about raiding and how it was/is, do you think we don't know this? you talk as if you're the god of making money, and then you state "4k in 2hours", this is average mate, theres people who make way more. ofcourse its easy to farm a shitload of cash, all you need is patience, and a strong will and belief in the fact that it takes you a few days to farm whatever amount for something you want to buy. just like you stated, indeed. im not gonna state what i make or anything like that, beacuse i dont want to make this a competition or anything, but dont forget that there are some long term players on this board, and not just the board, but also out there, whom have been playing for 3 years, you think they dont know the things you state?

just saying that i feel like you're talking as if you understand things better or something, and quite clearly everything you state is true, yes, but first off, it wasn't the point and secondly , i said "10k on a daily basis" , and you just grabbed that up and thought lol he doesnt know. ofcourse you're gonna need more, it was an example of how much this is gonna cost you, not just in time, but also in patience and personality.


anyway, back on topic. :p

the whole theory sounds like it's possible. the way you typed it there and the way the guy over at the other forums wrote it all, it sounds very possible.

what you're saying makes sense, maybe you could indeed get someone - or multiple - people to feed you the items for a nice price, and yea you could probably stockpile this.

personally i think this is a matter of theory and reality. the theory can work, but in reality it won't. I just dont see it happening that you buy EVERY SINGLE undercut/normal priced item from a certain type every single day BEFORE people buy them/put more in AH/do it when you're asleep/work/college etc, you know? not to mention that for example, saronite bars, its not a market on its own as you now ofcourse, but say you would target this market, you would have influence on every single crafted item from there on (somewhat), on the other northrend ores, and dozens of other recipes that require the ore. these prices will allll go up and you need to work with these as well if you want to make this thing work 100% completely.

like i said, i think this is defenitely possible, but imagine what you need for htis.

you need not only a HUGE amount of patience and discipline, you also need a stunning amount of gold to start having influence if you want to do it the right way. you need to log on every 15 mins orso just to grab the undercutters off the market, and maybe see if you can make a nasty deal with these people and throw in the social tactics (which i do believe in).

i dont know .. possible, but not in reality imo. i'd like to discuss it some more though. ;d

lol, stop being an idiot. WoW isn't a hard game.

see wut i did tharr? you saying you're not talking like you know it all, yet you're stating multiple times that you're awesome, and im clueless, yet i have never stated your way of making cash is shit, yet i have never stated that im oh so awesome, yet i have never even HINTED at how much cash that I have in MY pocket, and that im jealous?
yea im clueless

edit: nice edit crump.
ive not really stated anyhwere that wow is hard have i?

Multiple times I stated I am awesome, please tell me where you find them. Ok thnx.

I was referring to the way you commented to my earlier post. Raging at the way I articulated myself. You seem'd quite annoyed I was doing so well so fast .. just seems you have some kind of problem with it. Also .. reason why I said WoW isn't a hard games .. is because you don't need these market strategies .. so for ofg,- jm9u9hg-uq03tmjg-,bni meh no point .. it's like talking to a damn brick wall.

wotlk is easy
your way of making gold is awesome
you learned fast and you're amazing atm
im jealous
you're not stating the obvious
you didnt say you were awesome
im concerned about where your money is coming from

Nom nom, too easy. Seems you're quite childish. Possibly the reason why you QQ. Awwwwwww,

im glad it made you happy bud

on topic, ive been thinking for a while now to try something different but still on the same subject, Frost Lotus. they are now 19-22g on my server, and flasks are 55g for SP, and 60g for rage. when ulduar hits, ALL the pve guilds on my server (which is already Horde 85%-15% alliance)there are craaapload of high end pve guilds, all going to be buying flasks when ulduar hits.

I'm as of now gonna nuke it, buy all of them. farm a load of herbs every day and buy some off the AH. prices will go up when ulduar hits and ill be selling my cheap mats with a high price in the form of a flask (SP).

edit: just bought 5k worth of mats, lichbloom, icethorn, and lotuses.
made a word document and keeping track of everything i do.

i've decided to spend a lot of time on this, and a lot of money.

I'm exstatic.

What are you trolling for crumpets, go do something useful, like bind your keys?

lol, because I have 0 bound buttons right ? lol.

Stop your pittyfull attempts to flame and keep it on-topic. k?

i dont know why you need a guide to control the market its not that hard, called supply and demand tbh i took wool cloth from 10g to now a near constant 20g when i first come on the server i spent a week buying the lower priced cloth and marking it up, managed to hit 30g per stack. thats controlling the market

can do it with anything gems where the best sellers by far prospect thorium buyer the gems already in the market and up the price to what ever you want you will find it hard to get to 300 skill without those gems so its a demand and i had the supply, since then the thorium market has gone to high to make a reasonable profit so i dropped it, but i made least 5k casually doing this i didnt go over the top with it.

but nothing to say you cant dominate more then one market and keep it that way

Twysta, you seem to think that you have to be on at all times to get the undercutters, once you have a market cornered, you don't have to worry about them too much unless they are seriously attempted to get control from you.

The bottom line is this: You cannot 100% stop undercutters. You can't prevent people from selling in trade channel. However, it doesn't matter if people are undercutting if 90% of the auctions up are your. The undercutters get bought up quickly and then people are back to having to buy your stuff. It's not about preventing people from buying anything but your item, it's about making it so the amount of items you have available greatly dwarfs anyone elses such that at any given time, the odds of your item being the only one available in good numbers is as high as possible.

As for theory v. reality. No theory rarely matches up 100% with reality, but it approximates it (by making wise assumptions that simplify the problem) well enough that it applies most of the time.

also wanna add best way to do it is gradually not jump right up to the high numbers if you bring it up slowly you have more chance of the price sticking at your higher value

Yup. My plan is to gradually bring up the price of dust and essences until Uldaur hits, then they'll jump even higher.

As it stands right now, I'm sitting at over 50% profit with the method I'm using atm and that's without even really bothering to mess with prices. I'm thinking by the time Uldaur hits, I could easily have 10k gold and a few thousand dust and essences to sell on AH and make a killing. Not to mention I'll prolly have some more gems stockpiled as well.

It does somewhat make sense, I have to admit.

I think when you gradually bring it up, and make it "THE new price" in the eyes of normal people (whilst you're really controlling it), it might work.
Seems to me that it requires sooo incredibly much time and effort/patience though to get everything working so well and so deeply for this to have effect.

I'd love to see you work on it, keep it updated

Anyway, I'm trying something similar as I said above.
I just bought another 3k worth of icethorn/lichbloom/frost lotuses and currently have 241 flasks of the frost wyrm. My plan is to just leave the market as it is, and actually work a counter- tactic, which is undercutting by quite a big amount with around 5 items as much as i can, so people will undercut that and then i can snag those off the AH.

This way, i can buy them even cheaper and it will be even MORE profit when ulduar hits.
imagine all the flasks that will be bought on wednesday... christ :p

i'll hopefully have around 1k flasks if everything goes fine, bought at prices ranging from 50-55g (avg price) to 40 g when i've undercut the market and people followed.
Wednesday , on release, my plan is to buy every single last material needed to make the flasks (lichbloom/icethorn/frost lotuses) and just put dozens of pages at almost double the price.
given the status on my realm i think this is gonna be major success D:

not to mention ofcourse i'm elixir master, so ALL procs are extra 70g+ each.

what do you guys think?

good idea, i may jump ahead of my game and buy some of this shit as your right its gona be in high demand espesh stuff for enchants

yea enchants, very good idea. however i chose not to go for this market for 2 specific reasons;

first off, this market is waaaay bigger so there will be things bugging you from all directions.
more people undercutting, more people in /2 looking for enchanters, and more people everywhere.

secondly, does your guild use random enchanters snagged from /2 often?
i think most dont, they have plenty in the guild, and good guilds have a shitload of mats ready in the bank for people to use. especially now when naxx is piss easy and has been on farm since basically every1 had their items ready within 2 weeks and content on farm.

i guess theres still a shitload of money to be made when done right, especially considering enchants are way more expensive then mats for flasks in general.

gl