If you’re someone that takes gold making very seriously you’ve probably engaged in some form of auction house pvp. It’s when you see a number of your auctions constantly being undercut by the same players day after day and you say to yourself “I’ll show them!” right before you undercut them back by 1 copper.
It has come to a point where the undercutting game, canceling and reposting auctions, has become almost essential to get sales in competitive markets
How To Know You Are AH PVPing
- You have competitors on your friends list.
- You get an urge to leave a raid or BG because a competitor just logged on and you must rush to repost everything and not allow them one sale.
- You’ve received hate mail from this person, along the lines of Gevlon’s Morons of the week.
- When you’d pay gold to find out what the main character is of the level 1 bank alt that keeps undercutting you.
- You get a thrill from deep undercutting your competition to slash their profits, even at the expense of your own.
While AH PvP can be very enjoyable you must be aware of what your real goal is, and that is to make gold.
Purpose of AH PvP
It is always inevitable for AH PvP to occur when two serious players focus their attention on one section of the market, it becomes very severe when both parties are utilizing the addon Quick Auctions 2 with smart canceling.
The point is to ensure that your auctions are always the lowest price so that you get all of the sales, while denying your competitor any sales. You hope that eventually this will discourage them and they will move onto another market, believing that it isn’t worth the hassle or that it simply isn’t a profitable market.
Beware of your Ego
While you must stay competitive and undercut auctions to remain profitable, there comes a point where auction pvp turns from trying to get the most sales, to just trying to “beat” the other player so that you can get the feeling that you are the better player.
However this can come at a cost, you’ll constantly see some AH pvpers who are AH Campers. They sit at the auction house during their entire play time, just waiting to cancel their auctions if anyone dares undercut them. While this will usually guarantee them all the sales they are most likely earning a very low gold/hour ratio because of all the time they had to spend crafting the items and now spending hours just reposting and canceling their auctions when they could be crafting in another profession or doing another gold making activity.
Another thing to watch out for is trying too hard to muscle out competitiors. I believe in the AH strategy of setting up a wall (setting prices so low across a whole market that the price = material costs) which forces competitors to either buy out your auctions or list under you causing them to post at a loss.
This strategy should be used temporarily when players have entered your market and you want to see how serious they are, but I’ve seen players who’ve done this for months and say it is just to get back market share, but you have to look at how much time you are wasting at forcing competition out when you could just be doing other crafting or gold making activities until the competition dies down. A better strategy is to just cap their profits with your own auctions while you spend the majority of your time with higher gold/hour activities.
Some people just don’t like to “lose” and will stick it out, stuck in constant AH PvP for no profit or a loss. You should put a value on your time and remind yourself that the true winner is the one that ends up with the most gold in their pockets at the end of the month, not the one who converts the most sales at 0% profit.
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well I have the 5 points right. Though I do know the nr 1 rule of AH pvp: never ever slash in your own profits. I am a deep undercutter by nature but I never work without a profit.
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Back to Basics: Chapter 3 -10 essential Addons =-.
Exactly Seth, you definitely know the right strategy for AH PvP. I don’t understand why others can’t see this as clearly when we get in a debate about it…