Best way to make gold?

[cloudstrife007]

Regardless of what your methods are.. rather it be AH farming, dank celler, ponies, or something else.

What do you see as the best method to farm gold? And how much can you make per hour?

[xLesz]

I use the AH. If you know what you're doing and what I'm talking about...
On average I make around ~8 mil a day. (Prob an hr of personal time devoted to it).

[cloudstrife007]

What tips do you have with the AH? I know its possible to make money off of it, but how do you know what items are good to buy and resell? I would hate to overspend on something and not get a profit off of it.

[ninjabreadman]

buy sht u know will sell for more then what its listed for. im a barb so i buyout all the 800-1k 2handers for under100k gold with strength vitality and socket then resell them all for 300-800k

[cloudstrife007]

Too bad highest one isn't even 700 on ah atm, who knows how often those show up. I could be sitting here hitting search for the next 30 mins not finding anything lol

[xLesz]

I tend to stay away from weapons because dps is harder to search. Focus on certain item choices. Be really niche in what you specialize. I have a price ceiling of like 100k. I can buy roughly ~30 of them in an hour. Resell value ranges from 150k to 7 mil. I just sold two of them for 6 mil. People have no idea how much things are worth sometimes or are just outright lazy. Use that to your advantage.

[Linolis]

It's quite easy to make gold reselling on the AH, but you do need a little bit of patience, gold (if you have >1mil you are just fine), and luck. The way I began, was searching for items MY main class would love to have. If you see a bunch of items going for 6 million, then one selling for 2 million with 1d10-11h left, it's probably a safe bet to buy it and make a quick million, unless you completely searched for the wrong items. For me, I am at the point where I use all three of my search inputs, and set them to search for high-end times. Most of the items I search for sell on average for 8 million, yet I see people sell them for 1-3 million multiple times a day. That's a minimum of a million gold profit, even after AH cut, for me every time that happens. I usually just do a round of searches during commercials when watching TV. Sometimes I find 3 items and hour, sometimes I don't find one in 3 hours, just have to be patient. If I find a really good item, I just throw it on RMAH for 'cheap' (15-20% less than the next comparable item), and usually make $30-50.

[who knows]

• Buy low/sell high on AH
• Farm Act 3's Arreat Crater with gold find, or other good places. (Act 1 inferno with good gear is pretty good too)
• Just grind on things and hope for drops
• Farm goblins in Act 2
• Farm resplendent chests in Act 3

[Mortox]

You guys talking about making 8mil on flips all nonchalantly are giving him the wrong idea.

I do well on the AH flipping, can make 10-20M+ per day, but not on a whim. The D3 market is very volatile even when you know what to look for, staying on top of trendy items can be difficult because the trends can change hour by hour. 5-10M is chump change to some of us, but not to most. Buying items for 500k and reposting them to sell at 8-10M is very possible, but you can never expect those items to be auto-sales in any sort of reasonable time frame. Sometimes you get lucky and they move quickly, other times you have them expire, not because someone undercut you but simply because there's no one in the market for ~10M items that day. The customers are NOT plentiful when you get to that range.

Going for those monster flips can be enticing but I'd suggest staying with mid-range stuff, it moves much more easily and is a better place to start for someone without enormous working capital. You probably don't want a large percentage of your money to be tied up in an item that may or may not sell for several days. Good starter flips will generate you 100-500k at a time and are more likely to sell within minutes to a few hours.

I have a few items I currently search for that are frequently underpriced (I'm talking about finding several every hour) where I can make small fortunes on each resale - find these sorts of items and work them as much as possible, they only last so long before others discover your secrets and the competition broadens, resulting in more undercutting and ultimately a lost market due to it no longer being worth your time - hopefully you'll have found the next market by then.

Arbitrage is also a great way to make money; having what are essentially two separate economies, the Gold auction house, and the Real Money auction house, you're able to buy items from one, and resell on another for a sizable profit in either currency. I've bought items for 500k gold that I've sold for $40 on the RMAH, and if you set yourself a value on that $USD to gold (I personally just say $5=1M*) then I essentially got $80/M on my sale. Conversely I have paid $20USD for an item (4M at my conversion) and resold it for 35M in the gold AH (I've done this far less, this happened to be with a dex/crit dmg/crit chance/as% ring that was insanely underpriced at $20)

There's tons of money and gold to be made but no matter the method you chose, there will be work involved. Personally I prefer following financial/market trends more than farming monsters in Act 3 Inferno, but only you can be the master of your own destiny.

*I will add that the conversion you give yourself from $USD to Gold isn't really relevant as long as you KEEP the SAME conversion for yourself going back and forth, and as long as you aren't dealing with any third-party organizations. Basically it's just a placeholder. I could say $1USD = 100M gold if I want as long as I keep that standard going from Gold to $ and back from $ to Gold, it's basically just a functional way to operate your arbitrage. If you however plan to sell to 3rd parties then it would be wise to keep that conversion on par with actual market values (somewhere around $2.5-4/M I believe? Don't really follow it.)

[Farylon]

Awesome and informative post, Mortox!

[sweetgnome99]

Basic but important: Taking into account the 15% fee in a non-intuitive way.
Make a 'cheat sheet' that you can glance at for what you'd need to break even for reselling due to the 15%fee.
Bought for 100k? Just over 117k sell price will let you break even.
Listing it at 115k would lose you 2k.1million? need to sell for 1,176,000 to break even. Not as some might intuitively think '1,150,000 which would lose you 26k.

Take whatever the price of the item is to start with and divide by 0.85 to get a number that will give you back exactly the start price after fees.
Don't make the mistake of multiplying the initial number by 1.15. Divide it by 0.85 to get your break even point.
100x1.15 = 115 --> 115x0.85 (-15% fee) = 97.75 a loss, but looks close enough that a few players might not realize.
What looks like it can be flipped for a quick 100k, might lose you 50k if you're dealing with high priced items.

I also look at what people have been bidding for, check if the auction has interesting number and see if there's a difference between that number and what you need to bid to be in the lead. (Obvious, but covering all bases doesn't hurt when we've got a lot of things to remember/keep track of)

If you want to search for a particular legendary with 90+ dex, you can do this by finding it with the filters instead of by name.

[cloudstrife007]

You guys talking about making 8mil on flips all nonchalantly are giving him the wrong idea.

I do well on the AH flipping, can make 10-20M+ per day, but not on a whim. The D3 market is very volatile even when you know what to look for, staying on top of trendy items can be difficult because the trends can change hour by hour. 5-10M is chump change to some of us, but not to most. Buying items for 500k and reposting them to sell at 8-10M is very possible, but you can never expect those items to be auto-sales in any sort of reasonable time frame. Sometimes you get lucky and they move quickly, other times you have them expire, not because someone undercut you but simply because there's no one in the market for ~10M items that day. The customers are NOT plentiful when you get to that range.

Going for those monster flips can be enticing but I'd suggest staying with mid-range stuff, it moves much more easily and is a better place to start for someone without enormous working capital. You probably don't want a large percentage of your money to be tied up in an item that may or may not sell for several days. Good starter flips will generate you 100-500k at a time and are more likely to sell within minutes to a few hours.

I have a few items I currently search for that are frequently underpriced (I'm talking about finding several every hour) where I can make small fortunes on each resale - find these sorts of items and work them as much as possible, they only last so long before others discover your secrets and the competition broadens, resulting in more undercutting and ultimately a lost market due to it no longer being worth your time - hopefully you'll have found the next market by then.

Arbitrage is also a great way to make money; having what are essentially two separate economies, the Gold auction house, and the Real Money auction house, you're able to buy items from one, and resell on another for a sizable profit in either currency. I've bought items for 500k gold that I've sold for $40 on the RMAH, and if you set yourself a value on that $USD to gold (I personally just say $5=1M*) then I essentially got $80/M on my sale. Conversely I have paid $20USD for an item (4M at my conversion) and resold it for 35M in the gold AH (I've done this far less, this happened to be with a dex/crit dmg/crit chance/as% ring that was insanely underpriced at $20)

There's tons of money and gold to be made but no matter the method you chose, there will be work involved. Personally I prefer following financial/market trends more than farming monsters in Act 3 Inferno, but only you can be the master of your own destiny.

*I will add that the conversion you give yourself from $USD to Gold isn't really relevant as long as you KEEP the SAME conversion for yourself going back and forth, and as long as you aren't dealing with any third-party organizations. Basically it's just a placeholder. I could say $1USD = 100M gold if I want as long as I keep that standard going from Gold to $ and back from $ to Gold, it's basically just a functional way to operate your arbitrage. If you however plan to sell to 3rd parties then it would be wise to keep that conversion on par with actual market values (somewhere around $2.5-4/M I believe? Don't really follow it.)

Well now that just adds more questions. How am I going to follow these market trends if I can't actually "see" them. It is almost like a guessing game. IAS items are still selling, but not as much as others like crit dmg and chance. Also what type of stats did the item you sold on rmah for $40 have on it?

I currently have about 400k gold to work with, and so far the only real way to bring in money is get decent jewelery from npc and resell higher, or farm certain areas over and over.
I get the general Idea on certain items to buy and resell.. but when I see most of those items being only 50k to 100k a piece, and not much higher.. it doesn't really help. I've actually bought a few 850(ish) 1hand dps weapons for around 20k per, and there were about 30 around 870 - 890 at the time for 90k per. So that isn't much profit. Maybe I'm supposed to hold onto these items and wait for others ones higher to sell before I place my item on the market?

Spotting items to flip is very difficult (if you aren't smart with financial type stuff) because the item you want to flip could be worth less value than what you bought it for. By the time you search similar items on price range to what you seen pop up on front page of AH, it would probably be too late because someone else had bought it. Thats my biggest problem. I've sat on the AH for a few hrs once.. kept refreshing every 2 seconds to see low price item appear to snag it.. but nothing showed up. I see a lot of 1k 1handers being sold around 10m, and some around 6m, now not saying 10m is worth it, but would buying the 6m and flipping it for say 8m be a smart idea, or would it just sit there like the 10m and not sell? Its things like these that make me hesitant from spending heaps of gold on the AH and see it not get anything in return.

[Nubar]

Well very good guide there for auction house farming. But cant make it work here .I have been like seaching Ah for 3-4 hours but cant see any items to buy for 500k and sell for 15-20$. Or buy an item for 500k or 1m and sell it to 8-9m nearly searched every thing that can be used by decent people. What are we doing wrong? Is this thing a luck or really good reseach? Cause i am sure i seach anything that can be usefull to everyone but only tanking gear.

[cloudstrife007]

Well very good guide there for auction house farming. But cant make it work here .I have been like seaching Ah for 3-4 hours but cant see any items to buy for 500k and sell for 15-20$. Or buy an item for 500k or 1m and sell it to 8-9m nearly searched every thing that can be used by decent people. What are we doing wrong? Is this thing a luck or really good reseach? Cause i am sure i seach anything that can be usefull to everyone but only tanking gear.

Running into that same problem.

[JonnyJa]

kinda sad "my" mf market died with 1,03
noone seems to want goldfind gear either...

back to armor flipping

@the guys above me, you will not find a multi-million-profit item every hour or mayb not even day. Start slow with armor for YOUR class (which you know YOU would buy) and keep searching, make small profilts to start off with 50k buyout max (< 100k profit or slight above that). You'll see after a day or two you get a feel for whats "in" and what items are worth. you learn to control the buyot filter correctly (which is reeeeealy important to sort out shit) and so on. Noone starts as a (multi)millionaire and dont expect to get rich in 5min work per day