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Introduction to the Auction House and the Classic Economy
来自 TheLazyGoldmaker
[Last Updated]:
2021/07/14
变更日志
补丁:1.12.0
目录
评分:
Introduction
Welcome to this guide on the auction house system in Classic World of Warcraft. In this guide, I will teach you the basics of the Auction house, and it's mechanics and share some of my tips for utilizing the auction house to generate gold so you can hopefully buy your epic mount!
If you are familiar with retail or with Classic, some of this will no doubt be well known as this guide will cover everything that needs to be known. Feel free to skip ahead if that is the case. The current screenshots are taken from the live BfA version of the game and will be updated to the correct classic versions as soon as WoW Classic launches.
What is the Auction House?
The Auction House (usually abbreviated the AH by players) is a system that allows you to trade items for gold with other players. You can post your items for sale and others will be able to search them up and purchase them from you. Once you've posted your items they will remain on the AH until the auction duration is over, or someone has bought the item for the buyout price.
The AH plays a vital role, particularly concerning professions. It will allow you to get rarer items that are harder to farm, as well as items that you may not be able to acquire yourself such as materials from gathering professions you do not have.
It is also the main avenue to earn gold, either by selling materials you've farmed, items you've crafted or by buying low and selling high.
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Where can you find Auction Houses?
Each faction has three auction house locations. The locations are linked (they were connected in patch 1.9 and Classic will begin with patch 1.12) which means you will access the same list of items for sale regardless of which of your factions auction house you go. The Auction Houses are faction-specific though, so you will only be able to trade with other alliance players on the alliance AH.
In addition to the factioned Auction Houses, there is a set of Neutral Auction Houses that both factions can access. These auction houses have a much higher cut, and they are quite a bit more annoying to get to, which means they are not used particularly much. They represent the only way to move items or gold across factions, however, so they do fill a niche.
The Auction house maps are currently sourced from the main game and will be updated as soon as Classic launches.
Horde Auction House Locations
The Auction House in Orgrimmar is located just inside the city from the Durotar entrance. You will find it on the right of the Valley of honor.
You can see the location marked on the map to the right.
In Thunder Bluff, the Auctioneers hang around on the Lower Rise in the two tents marked on the map below, just below the flight tower. The map to the right shows you the position.
The Uncercity has a series of auctioneers on the middle ring of the city. They are hanging around on raised platforms along the inside of the ring. The map to the right shows the location and the screenshot shows the view from the arrow to the actual auctioneer as the positioning is not super obvious from the map.
Alliance Auction House Locations
In Darnassus you can find the Auction House in the North-West end of the Tradesnmen's Terrace in the building marked on the map to the right.
The Ironforge Auction House is located in the commons one the outer ring of Ironforge just between the two tunnels that come in from the gates of Ironforge and Dun Morogh.
The Auction House in Stormwind can be found in the aptly named Trade District. It is in one of the buildings directly ahead of you as you enter the city as marked on the map here.
Neutral Auction House Locations
There are three Auctioneers spread around Booty Bay. One is in the house closest to the inn on the lowest level, and one is just by the bank on some crates, the last one is on the north end on some crates.
The positions are all marked on the screenshot below.
In Tanaris you can find
Auctioneer Beardo
in Gadgetzan in the first building on the right if you enter the city from the south.
Auctioneer Grizzlin
is in the building with the telescope on top of it in Everlook. This building also houses the bank here, which makes it convenient.
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Basic Auction House Mechanics
So let's take a look at how the AH works.
The basic building block of the auction house is an item listing (or an auction). This is an item or a stack of items listed for sale. Each auction has several characteristics:
The name of the item: you need to know which item is for sale so you can search for it.
The quantity for sale: You can sell more than one item at the time, but only for items that stack and only up to the maximum stack size. In Classic this will be capped at 20 items.
The Seller: The name of the character offering the item for sale
The Time Left: the time left until the auction expires. The indication can be either short, medium, long or very long.
The required level of the item
The Bid Price: the current highest Bid
The Buyout Price: The price to buy the item instantly.
In the following, we will take a slightly closer look at these characteristics of an auction.
Bid Price
As the name Auction House implies the basic way to sell an item is through an auction where you set a minimum bid price and players can increase the bid. When the auction expires, the highest bidder gets the item for the bid price they paid.
Buyout Price
In addition to the bid price, you can set a buyout price. This is a price someone can pay to buy the item immediately. In practice, the buyout price is almost always used as the main price as most players do not want to wait for hours to get their items.
Duration
When you make an auction, you can choose one of three different durations: 2 hours, 8 hours and 24 hours. The main reason to choose a lower duration would be to decrease your deposit costs, which mostly matters for items that have a very high competition where you will either sell the item within 12 hours or be undercut (Undercut means to post your items at a lowerprice than the current cheapest auction) by someone else.
The Time Left column when you search for an auction has 3 potential states, corresponding to different time intervals as shown in the table below.
Interval name
Interval
Short
1 minute - 2 hours
Medium
2 Hours - 8 Hours
Long
8 Hours - 24 Hours
Deposit Cost
The deposit cost is the price you need to pay to post an auction to the auction house. The deposit cost is based on the price at which you can sell the item to a vendor, and it is higher for the higher durations. The price scales linearly though, so if you want to post it for 48 hours it will cost you the same amount to post two 24 hour auctions as one 48 hour auction.
The deposit cost is different for the faction-based auction houses and the neutral auction houses, with the neutral auction houses having significantly higher deposit costs. The table below shows the deposit costs for the various durations.
AH Type
Duration
Deposit Cost
Faction
2 Hours
5 % Vendor Sell Price
Faction
8 Hours
20 % Vendor Sell Price
Faction
24 Hours
60 % Vendor Sell Price
Neutral
2 Hours
75 % Vendor Sell Price
Neutral
8 Hours
150 % Vendor Sell Price
Neutral
24 Hours
300 % Vendor Sell Price
The Auction House cut
When you successfully sell an item the auction house takes a cut of the purchase price. The buyer always pays the full bid or buyout price, but you will get less than that. This ensures that the AH continuously leeches gold away from the economy.
The AH cut is 5% for the faction auction houses and 15% for the neutral AH, which is one of the reasons why the neutral AH is not particularly widely used.
When you successfully sell an auction you get the gold that was paid minus the AH cut plus the deposit cost you paid to post the auction.
This also means that you can save some gold if you trade directly with players through the trading system, but it does require that you are both online at the same time to execute the trade, which makes it less enticing.
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The Auction House UI
The AH UI will show you everything you need to both buy and sell items. When you open it it will show you the shopping UI by default. You can pick other tabs along the bottom to look at your auctions or your bids.
Shopping
When you are looking to buy items the AH search UI is where you want to be. The base UI has quite a few filters to choose from, which is very useful. You can filter by item type for the various armors and items and by required level, item rarity etc.
You also have a free text search area that will search for items by their name. You can combine these filters as well. For armor and weapons, you will probably rely a lot on the filters, particularly for upgrading gear while leveling. If you are looking for tradeskill materials, you are usually better off searching for the item by name as that will return a full list for that specific item. Below you can see an example of the search UI when filtering for uncommon mail shoulders between level 19 and 25.
If you search for tradeskill materials or other items that you can sell in stacks the results will also show a small item on the item icon that shows you the number of items that are in the stack. The price displayed on the right is for the entire stack. To compare the price on a per item basis, you will have to divide the total cost by the number of items.
When you want to buy an item you can choose between putting in a bid or paying the full buyout price assuming the person posting the auction has set it. If you put in a bid, you immediately pay the bid cost. Once the auction reaches the end of its duration the highest bid gets the item. The item will be delivered to you through the in-game mail system, and you will get a mail notification on the minimap to tell you that you have mail waiting. The mail shows you the item you bought, the stack size, the total gold you paid and the name of the seller.
If someone bids a higher price than you did or pays the buyout price, you get the gold you spent on the bid mailed back to you.
Posting Auctions
You post auctions through the Auctions part of the UI. To post an item, you simply drag it from your bags onto the empty item slot on the left side of the auctioning UI. Then you choose the stack size, duration, starting price for the bid and the Buyout price if needed.
You want to make sure that the buyout price is set correctly. If you set it too low, someone might buy the auction before you notice the mistake, and this will cost you quite a bit of gold.
When you click
post auction
, you will have to pay the deposit cost for the auction. The deposit cost is displayed at the bottom left of the auction house UI as you can see from the screenshot.
If your item sells, you will receive the gold that was paid through the in-game mail system. The sales mail includes the gold paid minus the auction house cut. You also get your deposit back. All of this is presented alongside the seller, the item name and the quantity of items sold in the body of the mail you get as shown below.
Cancelling Auctions
From the Auctions pane, you can also cancel any auctions you have. You do this by clicking the auction and then the cancel auction button. This will return the item to you through an in-game mail, but you will forfeit the deposit cost you paid when you posted the auction. Canceling makes sense if other players have posted auctions at prices below your auction (also known as undercutting) and it is essentially no longer any chance that your auction will sell. At this point you are probably better of canceling it, forfeiting your deposit cost and posting it back to the auction house at a lower price point.
Expired Auctions
When an Auction reaches the end of its duration, it will expire. If there is a bid the highest bidder will get the item, and you will get the gold that was bid, minus the auction house cut.
If no one bid on the auction you will get your item back through the in-game mail system. You will not get your deposit cost back, however. You obviously want to minimize the number of expired auctions, particularly if the item has significant deposit costs as deposit costs can stack up quickly.
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Auctioning Addons
Auctioning addons have been an important part of utilizing the Auction House effectively since the dawn of vanilla. We don't yet know exactly what sort of APIs addons will be able to communicate with or what sort of addons people will make for vanilla.
Back in vanilla, most people used Auctioneer, and the primary value of this addon was building a price database so you could see an approximate value for any items you found in the tooltip, rather than having to search the AH to get a good idea of what it's worth.
In the live game there are tons of very powerful AH tools including addons like
TradeSkillMaster
,
Auctionator
and of course
Auctioneer
.
I'll update this part of the game once Classic is live and we see what sort of addons emerge.
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Ways to Make Gold with the Auction House
The main purpose of the Auction house is, of course, to trade with other players. You want to buy the items you need and sell any items you don't need to acquire gold.
Generally speaking, there are three main ways to use the auction house to make gold. I'll list them below alongside some short tips to get more value out of these methods.
Materials
This is one of the most obvious ones, and it is something I expect a lot of people will do. Some materials will be scarce, especially in the beginning. Leveling professions and crafting all of the various cool items, consumables, etc. will lead to reasonably high demand for materials. There are in general more things to use materials for. As an example cloth is extremely useful for bandages and most people will want to carry stacks of those on them at any point in time to reduce downtime.
To maximize the gold, you make from materials you should do the following:
Post your items in even stacks
Post materials in different stack sizes so someone can buy just the amount they need
Advertise in trade chat
Crafted Items
Finished crafted items of various sorts will always be in demand. This includes crafted armor and weapons for a wide variety of levels as players will want to buy gear upgrades both to help them level faster as well as to improve the power of their character once they reach level 60. Some highlight items include the infamous
Arcanite Reaper
and the
Onyxia Scale Cloak
.
Another significant group of crafted items that typically sell well are consumable items that increase the power of your character for a shorter time. The most important class of items like this is of course the various potions and elixirs that can be crafted by
alchemists
as well as good that is crafted through the secondary crafting profession
cooking
.
For items with hard to obtain recipes or that are particularly useful you will usually be able to obtain a higher profit margin. A well-known example of this in classic is the
Devilsaur Leather
set
that is Best in slot for several classes and is thus very high in demand.
Flipping - The Art of Buying Low and Selling High
Flipping is one of the most lucrative ways to make gold in the live game. You rely on having a decent amount of capital and utilizing it to buy items when they are cheap and then reselling them for a higher value. In Vanilla we can expect prices to fluctuate a lot and it will take a long while until we reach any sort of stable equilibrium.
It will generally be quite hard to accurately value your items, which provides a massive opportunity for players looking to flip as well as a risk. Below is a list of potential items and markets where flipping may make sense based on my experience from the live game and what items are likely to be in demand in Classic.
Materials, particularly materials used in consumables
Bind on Equip world drops / Dungeon drops / Raid drops
Rare recipes
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Tips and Tricks
Below are some tips to help you save gold when purchasing and make gold when you want to sell items that did not fit into any of the other parts of the guide.
Bid on items with a low bid price, even if the Time left is Very long. The worst case is just that you get outbid.
Post items in the stack size that players want them
Craft and sell items that are needed for quests, such as the
Gyrochronatom
Always set a buyout price for your auctions
Always check the prices of similar items to get an idea of the price level for the item you want to sell
Always check if any of the items you obtain while playing the game are valuable. Look them up on the Auction House and post them for sale if they are valuable
Making significant amounts of gold from the Auction House is a volume game, and you will have to post a large number of items for sale if you want to get there
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The Economy in a New Game
This next part will dive into a bit of speculation on how the economy might look at the beginning of WoW classic.
The main factor here is, of course, the fact that we will all start from zero gold on day one. So it will take quite a bit of time for people to get gold to spend. Gold is generated from players looting gold from mobs or from selling items to vendors. Obviously, you will generally be slowly creating surplus gold from just killing mobs. The fact that gold will be so limited in the beginning will mean that it may take a while before trading on the Auction House starts picking up. Ultimately this isn't something we can predict ahead of time.
Generally, we can expect that prices will be increasing for quite a while as the total gold available for trade will be increasing for a long while. It will also take a long time for demand to hit its peak, mainly for stuff like end-game consumables which requires a significant portion of the playerbase actually to make it to the endgame.
In the early parts, the deposit costs will also be a significant limiting factor in terms of using the Auction House to trade with other players. When players do not have too much currency, the deposit cost will be a significantly higher percentage compared to the bid and buyout prices and expired auctions will cost you much more than it will later in the game.
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About the Author
I am a blogger,
streamer
and
podcaster
that focuses on how you can make gold in World of Warcraft with as little effort as possible. I've been blogging about gold making since 2016 at
thelazygoldmaker.com
I've played World of Warcraft since Classic. I learned my first goldmaking methods in the Burning Crusade and has been focusing on the economic side of the game since Wrath of the Lich King. In retail, I have reached gold cap on the live servers twice.
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评论
评论来自
Malestryx
Nice overview write up on the AH. Glad someone took the time to explain basic knowledge on it. This should be helpful.
评论来自
Furydeath
Classic has the time's as 2/8/24 hours :\
评论来自
Strokelock
In Classic, please don't be that person who posts 200 Silverleaf or Copper Ore etc... as 200 stacks of ONE!
I know it's part of an AH Strategy, but it is really irritating to see 50 Pages of Goldthorn and out of those 50 are perhaps 2-3 pages not posted by the same person that you have to click through.
Some new players don't know that you can sort and it's just generally irritating. Plus, you will almost always get out bid, even if it's a higher price, for a stack of 10 or 20 vs clicking Buy 10 or 20 times.
My 2 cents as an AH junkie aka 'Goblin' myself.
评论来自
darkblad00
Just a small edit is needed. The deposit fees are in multiple of 2 hours, with the starting one being 5% vendor value for 2 hours, and scaling upwards from there linearly. This brings the proper deposit fees in classic to be:
2 Hours:
5%
Vendor Sell Price
8 Hours:
20%
Vendor Sell Price
24 Hours:
60%
Vendor Sell Price
Source: Default Auction UI on Classic Server comparing deposit costs of various trade goods and recipes.
Whether this is a bug or not I do not know, since I did not play in Vanilla, but that is how the Auction House deposit costs are working as of right now.
评论来自
Luckys66
The Cut for the neutral AH is 15% not 30 !
评论来自
ZhaunRong
I just dropped back in to the classic realm for a bit of nostalgia and in the process put some goods up for auction. When I got around to returning there had been no sales (no funds or returned goods at mailbox) and there was nothing showing at the AH. So Question: How long after an auction expires are items held in the mailbox before permeant deletion?
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