Today we will go into two major stylistic differences in how you can play the Auction house game. Focusing heavily on a smaller subset of activities or spreading out as much as possible.

The trade-off

The trade-off I want to go into today is between specializing or focusing your efforts versus spreading your efforts out.

When should you focus?

There are several different axises where this trade-off can be seen. The main axises are:

• One realm versus many realms
• One or two markets versus many markets
• Few tactics versus many tactics (crafting, flipping, farming)

As you can see these can also be combined into a ton of different combinations. Figuring out what works best for you is obviously more of an art than a science.

We will go through the three axises as well as some examples to help you

One realm versus many realms

The most obvious way you fan focus is to be very active on one realm to dominate the markets. My opinion is that focusing on more than one realm is optimal for the long term regardless of how much time you have available.

I might be a bit biased here however as I do not have the time to control or dominate a market on a single realm. So I don’t actually know the peak level of that strategy.

I’ve already laid out my reasons for preferring multiple realms in a post last week, so I won’t elaborate more here.

Choosing the number of realms is very much a continuum that depends on your time commitment, how many markets you are in and what tactics you use. Farming on more than one realm is completely pointless for instance.

Few markets versus many markets

This is perhaps the most interesting trade-off. For a lot of markets you can extract much higher profits if you focus on them with consistent cancel scans and shopping scans.

It is very hard to completely control a market unless you are on a very low pop realm.  That being said, there is a lot of gold to be made by dominating a market.

Few tactics versus many tactics

By tactics I mean the three main gold making methods: Crafting, flipping and farming. I don’t think spending time on all three makes sense unless you have a ton of time. My personal preference is to focus on crafting and flipping as they can easily be combined.

Farming is only really good if you enjoy it or have a lot of time available.

If you are spread out on multiple realms you should focus your tactics to only flipping on your other realms as anything else is likely to spread you too thin.

Some examples of setups

Me

The first and most obvious example is of course myself. As you will most likely know I am active across 7 different realms. On two of my realms I have level 110 characters and on those two realms I dabble in as many markets as possible. On these two I do both crafting and flipping.

The other 5 realms I do pure flipping. I stick to two markets on these realms currently: BoEs and battle pets. On these realms I want the markets with the highest potential profits per re-post. Both battle pets and BoEs can give very high returns with an extremely low time investment.

In general my setup is primarily based on decreasing my time spent per gold. It’s not feasible for me to try to dominate a market or realm. That’s why my strategy focuses on spreading out across as many markets and realms as I can to maximize my total auctions at any given time.

Aada

Aada is likely one of the richest players in the world. He focuses solely on flipping high-end BoEs across a wide variety of realms. He is laser focused on one market and spends a lot of time making sure he finds all the best deals.

Single realm domination

I don’t have any actual gold makers here but this is the way to go if you enjoy “Auction House PvP”. The goal would be to focus solely on one realm. If you go this way I would suggest narrowing down your number of markets as well.

Focus on the most profitable ones and try to dominate them as much as you can. This requires a hefty time commitment, but it can be extremely lucrative.

 

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