A lot of people tend to have very complex views of goldmaking and goldmaking strategy. This is not particularly necessary, as the basics will take you really far.
Goldmaking can seem mythical
A lot of newbie goldmakers have these sort of mythical views about goldmaking. We are some all-knowing savants who know every way the market will turn and can camp the AH constantly. The sum of every hardcore goblin on a realm might approach something resembling that image, but individually we probably don’t stack up.
The majority of goldmakers focus on putting in the work, buying materials, crafting items and reposting them, or buying and reposting directly (we’ll exclude multibox farming from the discussion today).
Find items other players want, get them for less than they can sell, repeat.
Scale is the difference
The biggest difference between me and someone starting out is really just the gold I have. It means I can just buy whatever materials I need in bulk, or even attempt to flip BoEs. Outside of that I don’t do anything particularly special or hard to copy. I don’t play insane hours, I don’t camp the AH, I do not try to predict what will rise in price.
I do try to get out of markets I think will collapse though, which is generally easier to predict than what will go up in value. An item usually collapses in value if it will no longer be useful past some point.
The most “exotic” methods are never necessary
Market resets, sniping, sniper baiting, predicting future price changes. None of these things are necessary to make gold.
If you can craft something useful and sell it for 20% more than you spent you will consistently get richer, or if you can consistently find something below market value when running shopping scans.
My approach and TSM Settings are always extremely simple, and even if I’m far from the richest player in WoW I do have about 20 million gold and two accounts I pay for with tokens.
Don’t think, ACT
Start working the markets. There is no substitute for experience. Don’t overanalyze or agonize over a TSM approach, just get something that is going to at least profitable and start executing. Then you can learn as you go and fine tune your approach, this is what we all do!