Today I thought I would talk a little bit about why I generally suggest material flipping as a great market to start out with for newer gold makers. Obviously there are some structural reasons, but also some deeper ones.
Structural considerations
When I say structure I mean that the market is suitable for newe gold makers. This means it needs to be accessible with fairly small amounts of gold, and it needs to sell quickly. When you are new, your gold is the most limiting resource, so you need to be able to utilize small amounts effectively, and have a quick turn around so you can reinvest.
The case against farming
In some ways this post will be my case against doing a large amount of farming while starting out. Obviously farming has its place in helping you get capital to really get going. The issue with spending too much time farming is of course that it will not help you learn the pure auction house based method. This isn’t necessarily bad, if you love farming you should of course just farm. I’m trying to teach you about the auction house based methods however, and optimizing farming routes is very different to optimizing tradeskillmaster settings.
Learning is by doing
You learn something by doing it. Then you get feedback to do it better, either from a coach or teacher or just from your results. I strongly believe that you can’t learn the auction house without actually spending time playing the AH.
This is the main factor for why I suggest material flipping. It is the best gateway market that takes you into the realm of flipping. It also familiarizes you with material prices on your realm, which is great if you want to do crafting.
The downside
Obviously there is a downside here. Material flipping is significantly riskier than farming. Patches can and will change demand or supply in ways that leave your inventory much less valuable than when you bought it. You can also easily overcommit when a multiboxer drops a huge inventory of stuff.
Taking some losses is likely. This is also part of the learning. Without mistakes there really isn’t anything to learn from. This exposes you to some level of psychological risk as well, as you may just get discouraged and quit. Longer term you want to be able to take some losses and shrug them off. I’ve made 300k losses on a single item, but that doesn’t really faze me as long as my methods work.
Summing it up
I suggest material flipping as the starting point as it is the only pure AH method that works with a low amount of gold. This gets you into the meat of the kind of goldmaking I engage in and try to teach you. Farming is great if you love farming, but if you want to get good at flipping, you want to do as much flipping as possible as early as possible.