Once he goes too high in his pricing, the profit margin for his competition will become soo great that he will encourage more competition than he can buy up and the price will slowly creep back to something close to what ti was originally.

I’ve seen it happen, damn near every week. The key is to recognize the pattern and try to profit from it.

If it bothers you that ONE person has a bunch of something then go get some of it and bust up his little game. I’m sorry if it makes you feel like a “little guy,” but the solution is to get bigger.

One person having a brief corner on a market segment does NOT equal a monopoly. A monopoly would be if one toon had ALL the auctions on the entire auction house. Even if you stretched the definition of monopolistic practice a long way you still would not have a monopoly with one person controlling every single auction for every type of metal in the game.

In order to have a monopoly someone has to have complete control of a product. That would mean that he is the only toon able to mine, buy or sell that stuff. So it’s silly to even use the word monopoly in WoW. It really cannot exist.

If this guy is driving up prices on a market niche ti is in your best interest to get in on it while it is hot. Instead of complaining that he is hurting you, either take some satisfaction in messing up his deal, or enjoy making a profit off of what he has set up. Get some of what he is selling and undercut him in a small way. You will sell every single one, he will sell next to nothing. You will make a profit, and he will be forced to lower his prices to compete.

By being lazy and not doing anything about it you are contributing to the problem. When you identify a problem, and it is in your power to fix it but you do nothing then you can’t complain about it any longer. Prices too high? Bust them up. Tired of getting sand kicked in your virtual avatar? Fight back.

Might does not make right. But in this game especially you are experiencing a competitive environment. It’s the whole essence of the thing. But instead of getting annoyed when people succeed, why don’t you go to work and get really good at competing with them? You can still compete and have good spirit and sportsmanship. There is a satisfaction in just the competition, in whatever arena is meaningful to you.

What we are REALLY doing here is trying to help you D – and everyone else like you who get frustrated with being on the shorter end of the gold stick in WoW. It is our goal to give people the information, knowledge and tools to go bust up those guys using relatively unfair business practices on the AH. You don’t ahve to just live with it, go show him that you can make a bunch of gold WITHOUT being a creep about it.

People seem to think we actually work the AH like that. Buy up huge bundles of stuff and then jack the price through the roof. I can count 3 times I’ve done that. The rest of the time Moneybaggins is the lowest price on the AH for hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of items. Moneybaggins is a lot of toons best friend. I don’t get angry tells. I don’t get flaming mail. But I still get bags and bags of gold. All in all, Moneybaggins is the biggest reason a whole lot of lower level toons have high availability and price stability for almost anything they need without having to live with pound of flesh prices.

As for monopolies not being possible in game. When I see 50 stacks of something on the AH and they’re all from the same person and I watch that same item for three weeks and NO ONE else ever has that item listed for sale then there’s a consortium of some sort that’s buying out every single copy of an item that falls below a certain price. A price which keeps going up each week btw.

Now, it is accurate that there is a set amount of gold you can transfer per toon if you are flipping a toon to a new realm.

# Level 10-30: 300 gold limit
# Level 31-50: 1000 gold limit
# Level 51-69: 5000 gold limit
# Level 70-80: 20000 gold limit

So you can’t transfer more than 20,000 gold to a new server on a level 70+ toon, but the cap on how much you can have on a single toon is much higher than you say.

First off this site is a great resource, and I appreciate all the hard work and insight that goes into the articles here.

Secondly, no one should fault you for mentioning your gold guide. The information given FREELY on this site often eclipses what is often sold on other sites. I’ve been picking up various gold and leveling guides, including the gold guide from this site, and I have to say it was worth the investment. Not only does the contribution help to mantain this site, but the insights I gleamed fromt he guide concerning the inns and outs of AADV have been very usefull. There is nothing magical about the gold guide, but it does map out a pretty solid routine to gaining wealth and explains the tools and techniques needed to accomplish it.

I do wish you would refrain from trying to convince people to stop farming and use the auction house. We need somebody to farm all that stuff, otherwise we wouldn’t have anything to sell in the AH