Toe wrote:You can for sure bet if I put them up on the AH for a reasonable price, 20 auction house player's mods would have detected the massive price difference and they would have been snatched up instantly and relisted for insane prices before I could hearth out. There really is no way to win other than not playing or just focusing on your enjoyment of the game.
I love giving things away that are being gouged.
Note that I didn't say to list them at reasonable prices. If they're listing at 1000% normal, you list at 250% normal. If you have a few stacks you can keep it up all day, rake in a fortune in the gougers's money, and eventually someone will come along and undercut him in such a way that it is above his auto-buy limit, but below his buyout (meaning that he will never make another sale until he drops his prices, at which the undercutter will do it again.) Those silly markups never last long. They hope to corner the market on something for a few days while there's no competition, but they always draw in the competition.
So, while the gouger is manipulating the system, you manipulate the gouger. It makes it a hell of a lot less profitable for them, makes you money, and makes the whole process less appealing for them in the future.
Another thing the manipulators used to do to try and scam people was to get a common item that you never saw on the auction house - a five-copper cooking ingredient available from every vendor, for instance. They would then list them for a ridiculous sum - say 5,000 gold each, and a dozen of them for sale. After a few weeks of this, they'd list a few of the five copper items for 200 gold. Automated bargain hunters would see that they were at 2% of the normal value, and the saps would buy them up like crazy. Most of the auction addons account for this now, either eliminating stuff that is way outside the historical average, or warning about vendor prices on items.
I also remember those who would plan in advance for special ingredients needed for the holidays. One year the holiday achievements required cooking certain recipes, and one of the ingredients was the Small Egg. Someone had them up on the auction house for 50 gold each, and made a fortune at it. Nobody else was selling the things, because they were useless the rest of the time. What nobody realized was that every single bird in every newbie and under-20 zone dropped the things. You could gather a dozen in minutes. They guy made a fortune (this was in the BC days when 50 gold was a lot of money.)