Bash My Face In

In response to a comment I received awhile back, I’ve been trying to really keep up with which items are flipping well for me on the Auction House.  I have to say, so far the best item I’ve gotten to flip has been the Flurry Axe.  Since I’ve started flipping items on the AH, I’ve purchased 5 of these between 100-150 gold.  I’ve been able to sell all of them within 3-4 days for 350-450 gold a piece. That’s quite a return on investment.

Has anyone else noticed Flurry Axes being an especially successful flipping item? What items are other people flipping out there?

There’s a lot of talk about the gold cap in World of Warcraft. Currently, you can not have more than 214,748g 36s 47c. Since making gold is like a mini-game within the game, hitting the gold cap is a good way to measure “beating” this mini-game.

I’ve heard the reason there’s a gold cap is a “programming thing”. Yes, it is, but why? Let me explain that to you.

When you’re creating a program, each variable you have has a data type. In this case, the amount of gold you have, is an integer. An integer is limited to numbers between -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. It’s limited to these numbers because an integer is stored as 4 bytes. Since each byte has 8 bits each, you’re limited to 2^(8×4)-1. We have to subtract 1 here because 1 bit is used to determine the sign of the number (whether it’s positive of negative).

One way Blizzard could raise the gold cap, would be to use an unsigned integer, since it’s impossible to have a negative amount of gold, the extra bit to determine the sign of the number is simply a waste.  Utilizing this extra bit would raise the gold cap to 429,496g 72s 95c.  While this is still limiting, it would be the easiest change for Blizzard to make without having to increase the size of their databases.

For the majority of my time playing World of Warcraft I’ve been dirt poor. I don’t have an epic flying mount on any character, I struggled to get any of the best enchants and gems, and never really had any “spare” gold.

Recently I’ve been playing the Auction House and I’ve been doing fairly well to say the least. I started with about 150 gold on my bank character and after a few of months I’m now up to about 7,000 gold. In addition to this gold, I’ve also been gemming and enchanting any new gear as I get it, which isn’t taken into account in these numbers.

Once I reach 10,000 gold I think I’m going to finally buy epic flying on my warrior.  I think I’m the last person in World of Warcraft to not have this.

I’ve been doing this, mainly by just flipping things on the Auction House.  I use auctioneer to find something priced very cheap compared to the market value, and if I think I’ll be able to sell it for the market value, I’ll purchase it and try to make some quick gold.

I don’t consider myself to be a “master” at auction house, however I think this is something that I would like to talk about on a regular basis, so I’m going to start a series of posts dedicated to discussing making gold in World of Warcraft.  They won’t all come out in a row, and I don’t know how many of them there will be.  I know there are plenty of sites, guides (free/paid), etc about this topic, so I don’t want to dedicate this site to only that, but it is something that I’d like to talk about.

What do you guys think?  Has this horse already been beaten enough or does it actually sound interesting?