OffGamers - WoW Gold - Your Gaming Alliance

[Continued from MMORPG Economics 101 - A Guide for the ‘Opportunistical’ Gamer, posted 20th July 2007]….

Cashing In
Trade Calling
Refers to the trades initiated through chat channels, one of the most used methods as you are able to reach a wide audience, and providing on the spot contact for your potential buyers.

Trade calling over channels are great for reaping in money by using bartering skills and as well as the way it affects impulse buyers, who obviously do not have the time to research on the item that they wish to purchase and end up getting it on the spot from you. This enables you to set high prices than what others are usually willing to pay.

There are a few types of Trade Calling:

* Trade Calling for Auctions : Using a notepad, call out your item into the channel mentioning its up for bids and record them one by one. When a buyer expresses interests, tell them a reasonable but profitable current bid. Works great with rare and hard to find items.
* Trade Calling for Single items with no price tag: Calling out an item over the channel without a price , not only offers more attention to the item in question(as the more items you post, your items will get skipped easily), it also offers ambiguity and does not allow others to undercut your price in anyway, making price negotiations much more simpler, giving ample room to for price negotiations.

Auctions
Most games do not come with Auctions Houses, but for games like Final Fantasy XI(FFXI), World of Warcraft(WoW), the auction house is widely used to sell various items, from armors to materials to reagents. There are also web based auction houses in various forums over the net, using the forum as the bidding grounds.

Auction Houses provide players a place to place their items for sale, without them being there, saving time and energy as one can go out questing and then wait for the item to be bought. The disadvantages, are of course the set price(minimum bid) and the deposit for each auction posted up.

Here a gew general auctioning tips:

* Get familiar with the auction system(i.e. point of delivery, deposit rate, can you check how many similair items are being aucitoned right now, can you cancel auction etc.)
* Check the auciton house for the item that you want to post, so that you can do a proper price-to-availability survey.
* if an item you desire is too expensive over the auction, contact the seller and negotiate a price.

Crafting
Most games come with a crafting profession, allowing players to use materials to create items. As most crafted items, they can only be acquired by crafting and not drops, thus making them quite valuable to a certain point that whoever has the ability/recipe to create a certain high demand item, he/she is able to get loads of money in no time.

Consider these factors before setting up sale for your crafted items:

* The current economy’s price and materiasl to create them
* Difficulty of obtaining the materials
* The current economy’s price of the item.
* The rarity of the item/recipe
* The current and future availability of the item

Crafting is not an easy route, but once you have excelled in it( at the cost of time, effort and money), you will be able to get higher profit margins due to your high crafting skills and recipes.

Get your guildmates to gather the materials for you at the same time when you plan to mass produce, but take note of the items value as the supply gets higher, the price will eventually drop, keep in control so you won’t end up losing out too much.

Offering to buy materials that you require will also help in your crafting profession, just spread the word around and soon you’ll have alot of ‘farmers’ getting the materials for you. Keep informed aobut the current economy’s value of the materials/items you have set your eyes on.

Be Informed
Keep yourself informed of the current changes, fluactuations and act fast. Be the pioneer, do not hesitate, if you perceive something that could bring in profit, go for it. Start of at a small scale to ensure that you do not lose too much(worst case scenario). As other players pick up the trend, the market will be flooded and there goes your cash.

Patches. Take note of patches, when there is a new item/recipe available, or drop rate increase/decrease, it will mean that the market trend will shift, and take that opportunity.

Raids. When it comes to raids, some raid venues might require certain buffs that are only available from items. Research on the most frequented raids and what would players require to get through it the best way and capitilize on those items.

To manipulate the economy is not an easy task, but with sufficient knowledge, one can manipulate the system to their favor, gaining more than what usual players would gain.

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