The WoW economy is dominated by herd behaviour. In the era of reddit and youtube most easily accessible goldmaking strategies will be spread fast and players will flock towards them. Usually this means that they stop doing something else, and a new opportunity opens somewhere, so let’s talk about how we can find these new opportunities.
Material flipping has been down
This post was inspired by the fact that material flipping in classic has been MUCH worse for me lately compared to how it was just before I wrote my post on the topic. In fact my post probably contributed to this issue by bringing more attention to the market. The amount of reasonably priced materials I have been able to find has gone down significantly. I think the most likely culprit is just the fact that players are shifting to crafting professions and going into large scale crafting.
Materials are selling quickly
Players need loads of materials, and the quantities available are still way too low. The shift is in from materials to finished items, particularly with the approach of Phase 2 and world PvP. Material flipping is much harder as the cheapest materials sell almost instantly. If you find good deals, then you will make your gold back fairly quickly, but finding the deals is much harder.
Take it a step further
Materials are selling quickly, so there are fewer cheap materials available. Of course this means that crafted items will be more expensive to craft. The price for these items will likely go up too of course, but with materials being hard to find other peoples ability to compete with you is fairly limited.
I’ve made a ton of gold posting potions 10% above the cheapest ones lately as the demand is so high.
Go down stream or up stream from the contested market
When material flipping is too full you can try to make gold in either end. Crafting is a good choice as the material price will be more static so you can easily compute your profits.
On the other end you can go farming. All the crafters and flippers will need stock, so getting their items is a great way to get gold.
There are always profit opportunities as no one can be everywhere, you just have to consider the question: What were they doing before?
Think about what players are doing less of than before and if it’s still needed then you can make gold with it.
Good luck!