Buying Gold

During your travels through Azeroth you will often come across the topic of gold buying, meaning buying WoW gold for real money.

What you really need to know is that there is no way to buy gold for real money that will not get you banned. So don't or if you already did and thoght it's legal, stop and don't tell anyone you ever did.

Gold buying is considered not only by Blizzard but by many WoW players to be highly unfair and destructive for the game. Also, there is absolutely now reason to buy gold because

• you can make gold in-game with relative ease once you understand how
• making gold on your own will make you feel much better than spending money for it

That being said if you want more gold, you can look into more ways to make it on your own as it is very possible. First you will need to make some seed capital by questing and selling off the proceeds of your adventures at the AH. Then you can move on to more advanced strategies involving the AH alone, such as flipping items (buying low, selling high on the AH).

A very good site to look into for learning how to make more gold with the gold you already have, while spending very little time is Gevlon's Greedy Goblin. Go check it out.

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Understanding Item Colours (Greens, Blues and Epics)

Items in World of Warcraft are colour-coded, their title is either gray, green, blue, purple, gold or orange. These are indications of the quality of the item, quality meaning rarity. The developers were smart to put these in but the notice of what these colours actually mean didn't make it in to the game in a very prominent place.

So.. for weapons and armour:

• a [Gray Item] is called "vendor trash" and its only purpose is to be sold to vendors for gold. There are very few exceptions that you can safely ignore
• A [Green Item] is something you or someone else can use. And by "can" I mean without being utterly stupid or poor. They are relatively rare, but not that rare. If you adventure for a day, you'll gather at least 2-3 if not 10-20 of these, depending on what type of mobs you kill. If you're pressed by bag space or have enough money you can vendor these too.
  
• A [Blue Item] is rare. Only harder quests or those at the end of longer chains reward blue items. Also, in a full day of adventuring you may not see any blue dropping from the hundreds of monsters you kill. Or you may see 1-2 if you're lucky. Never vendor.
  
• A [Purple Item] is very rare. It's so rare in fact that its called 'epic'. These are pretty much the most expensive items you can buy or the most valuable a monster can drop. Absolutely never vendor, these usually cost hundreds of gold. It's worth to make a trip to the AH just to list one such item. If you can equip it, do it and you will see the improvement even from only one epic.
• A [Legendary Item] is well, beyond 'rare'. The chance of getting one of these through any means is equal to that of finding $100 lying on the street or less. You cannot buy these, they only drop from the most dangerous creatures in WoW, and only very rarely even from them. On any given realm, there are maybe a few people who have one such item.
• A [Legacy Item], colour coded with a 'gold' colour is an item that you veteran players can buy for their alts. They are comparable although slightly inferior in quality to epics, but have the advantage that you can send them to your lower level alts to use. When you get one of these you will be way past the total-noob stage this guide is designed for.

For items that are not weapons or armour, it's a bit more complicated. The colour of such items indicates a similar rarity, but their value is not always in line with rarity. There are many items in WoW which, for various reasons, are completely worthless on the market despite being rare or very rare. There are also non-combat items such as recipes that are colour coded green, despite them being very valuable and hard to obtain. You will need to make judgements without relying on the colour code.

The whole point of understading item classification is so that you know what to do with items you don't personally need. To put it simply: sell trash and auction everything else.

The price you auction items for must be thought out carefully: first notice the prices others ask for the same item as you have. Try to sell lower than them, but not much lower (2-5% is fine). For items that are truly valuable and you want to make sure you are not selling way below market price, have a look at WoW Econ to check the average price the item solls for on your realm (bearing in mind it usually undervalues items slightly).

As a last remark: if you hear someone talking about a player as 'fully epic' or just 'epic' it means their armor and weapon are all purple/epic quality. It's a status-symbol you may try to achieve at some point.

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Money 101 (or how to make gold)

In World of Warcraft, like in real life, you need money. In WoW, money is not quite as necessary, but still required to enjoy yourself.. and it is called 'gold'. If you are at your first character, you need to have gold in mind or you will be almost stuck at some point, like not being able to afford training at the class trainer or not being able to buy yourself a cool horse of flying mount.

So... 1 gold is 100 silver and 1 silver is 100 copper. WoW translation is "1g=100s, 1s=100c". You initially earn gold (more like copper actually) by:

• completing quests that award money as reward
  
• killing certain mobs (humanoids are better)
• selling off items you do not need to vendors
• selling off items you don't need to other players

You don't need to be told to complete quests as that is how you advance in level anyway.

You also kill mobs in the process, and the only thing you need to is to remember to pick up the money off them. To do that most efficiently look into your interface options and select auto-loot to pick up all loot from a mob when you right-click its corpse.

Selling off items you do not need to vendors is more complicated. You first need to remember to do that. Then you need to know which items to sell to vendors and which to sell to other players. Generally you will want to sell items who's names are written in gray to the vendor as no player will buy those (they are called 'vendor trash').

Secondly, you will notice you need bags to pick up all the trash you can so that you can sell it for gold. And you do not initially have that many bags and they have a limited number of slots. If you are at a first character on a realm: your first priority, over anything else, is to get more bags. You will not have money to buy bags with many slots, so at first, buy many bags with few slots (you can have up to 5). Pick up everything and sell regularly so that you can pick more. Invest your money to upgrade your bags to more slots until you have 5 bags with at least 10 slots each. After that point it's no longer an issue and you should focus on other things as well.

If you don't want to make your money 1copper at at time, you will want to trade some of the stuff you get from monsters to other players, who will be infinitely richer than you and afford to pay sums that will seem obscene (much more than the vendor, sometimes thousands of times more). For that you will need to make a 'bank alt' and post it in front of the Auction House (AH).

A last tip: do not buy yourself anything except water and food (if you need them) for the first 20 levels at least, if you are not already flowing in gold from other characters you may have. Getting copper-less can be a very unpleasant experience.

If you do however find yourself with no money, quest for it or make it on your own in some other way. Do not beg and do not ask for loans (except from close real-life friends who may be in the game with you). Begging and asking for loans is so frowned upon that you will most likely regret doing it for a long time. So don't.

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