Material flipping used to be the best entry level goldmaking market in the game. The 8.3 AH changes removed the main approach I used to this market, but it can still work really well.
It still works
BilisOnyxia recently shared some impressive results on twitter from his experiments with material flipping in 8.3. He started with 100 000 gold and in 30 days he made it to where he now has 460 000 gold worth of materials and 62 000 gold liquid.
This shows it works, but let’s look at how we can do it.
Rehashing the AH changes
Before we can look into how we have to go over the changes to the AH in 8.3. The main thing as far as stackable items goes is the fact that they are no longer posted, sold and bought in specific stack sizes. Instead you post whatever quantity you want at a price point. Someone else can then buy the exact number they want. So if you have 100 for sale they can choose to just buy 10.
If multiple players post at the same price the most recently posted items will be sold first.
More items get posted on any particular price
How do prices behave now?
Prices behave differently now. Before 8.3 you would typically get more short term variation. Players would post different stack sizes at different undercuts leading to larger variations in supply at different price levels. So there would be quite a bit of short term price variation and lots of sales over the market value in larger stack sizes.
Now players almost always post at the current market price, as that is the default behaviour when posting. This means that the price has very little intra-day variation, until a price level is completely cleaned out.
In the screenshot below for instant the price would remain 49 gold until someone bought out all 714 voidfins at that price, and then it would bounce up to 56. It could then theoretically bounce further if you bought those as well and reposted them all at a higher price.
How do we make our gold?
To make gold we have to be more patient than before. We likely won’t get sales until the price bounces over some threshold, but it likely will. If we compare prices on voidfins in this patch and Osmenite ore in a random month of 8.2 we can see that there is still significant variation in prices on the new AH, indicating that there is still plenty of opportunity to flip.
Theorycrafting
The next part will theorycraft two approaches. I have not tested these on the new AH, so try this at your own risk. I won’t include TSM imports, but I will outline how you could implement the approach if you want to dive in. I’ll be running an experiment similar to what Bilis did to test my settings for the next 30 days and hopefully I have some good news to report back with working settings then!
Approach 1: Deep value
The first approach makes most sense for players with little gold available. Here we will look for severely underpriced item. This means you can sell at a lower price and likely get your gold back faster, which matters a lot here.
The main disadvantage is that you may find materials that are crashing in price for a reason and lose some gold. You’ll by nature be very concentrated as you are unlikely to find many such items.
A basic setup in TSM would use 60%dbmarket as the maximum shopping price and post at 80% dbmarket while ignoring auctions below your minimum price.
Approach 2: Volume
In this approach we want a large volume of different items. Here we will be happy paying more. This will require significantly more capital. We will look for markets where we can gap up, as in the aberrant voidfin screenshot I posted earlier. If you can buy out everything at one price tier and then repost it higher at a reasonable price, that’s the goal.
A starting point here would be my old material flipping settings with an 80% dbmarket maximum shopping price. We can set the minimum auctioning price to 115%avgbuy to ensure a profit. Make sure you check smart average and that you keep buying to ensure avgbuy doesn’t get out of whack!
Good luck!
I’ll be tweeting about my experience with the experiment and hopefully I’ll have some fine-tuned settings for you eventually. Bilis has proven that the market still can be a great source of value, so let’s go hunting for it!