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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Finding an Upside to Downtime.

Tuesday night usually means a shutdown of the WoW servers. Sure enough, they are down tonight for about 6 hours or so. I only managed to get on for about 45 minutes before they went down, so I spent that time scouring the Auction House for bargains on VeCo.

Tonight's findings were a mixed bag of stuff. I listed most of my existing stock just to clear my bags. A generic search for bargains via Auctioneer turned up the usual selection of buyouts and short term bids, most of which I have left in my mailbox for now. Several tasty items were snapped up and mailed to my hunter for disenchanting. The other items should likely at least triple the money invested but there wasn't really anything especially exciting amongst it. I had a small win with some linen cloth, in that several stacks that I snapped up cheaply were resold more or less instantly - always a nice bonus.

After the basic scan was completed, I spent about 20 minutes pouring over the weapons and armor sections looking for low-priced items. Mostly these will be disenchanted and any materials not needed for levelling up will be re-listed. Enchanting materials are handy for investments, since they do not cost anything to list on the AH. Not all materials sell particularly well, but since there's no list cost you can just re-list until a buyer is found.

The advantage to doing auction scanning immediately before the shutdown is that I am guaranteed of being high bidder on almost all of the shorter-duration auctions. My mailbox should be fairly bloated next time I log in.

This is only the second time I've logged in to VeCo since my trip. Before I left I basically shut down my auction house activity and its taking me some time to ramp back up on all three servers. It's not uncommon for me to be running 200+ auctions on a server when concentrating on questing. If I focus on trade, that number can be around 1000 active auctions. A lot of money can be made in small value high volume stuff... like the linen cloth earlier. At this stage on VeCo, my bank balance isn't large enough to look into rare or epic item trades - and quite frankly I'm not online often enough to really take advantage anyway. The time difference is also a problem, since I'm usually only on in the early hours of the morning. It's not bad for snapping up late - night bargains but customers are few and far between!

Anyway, sniping the auctions should net me about 150 or so items that can be resold. Probably 80% of them will sell at first listing, all for nice profits. That money will be re-invested in more stock. If I get time this week I may repeat this process twice more before the weekend and have a nice supply of gear to sell during the weekend peak.

What little actual playtime I've had recently has been spent with my guild on Dath. We had a guild run into Zul'Gurub on Monday. We roped in a few PUGgers but the majority were guildies - something that's quite rare for us. ZG is an old-school 20-man raid instance aimed at level 60's . Well skilled and well geared level 70's can do it in groups of 5 or so. My guildies are generally neither well geared nor experienced raiders so we had a number of casualties along the way. It was hardly the neatest run ever, but Hakkar the soulflayer and his minions died messily on our swords and good fun was had by all.

I am keen to hit up all the old-school instances and raids before they become even more irrelevant with the release of Wrath.

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