Are you are looking to make gold in Warcraft? Have you ever thought of speculating in the markets? If you've thought about it then here are a few pointers to get you started. Firstly, your Warcraft server, no matter which one you are on, USA, EU, PvE, PvP, Role Play..it is unique. The value of anything sold at the auction house is unique to your server. Supply and demand plays a massive part. There is one RP server for instance that has almost three times the average number of players who choose the herbalism profession, coupled with alchemy kocuce. The value of even high end herbs is next to nothing. The market is full of them. Statements on forums or WoWhead, Thotbott etc. talk about the "average price" for items. What would be more revealing is the standard deviation from that average. In my experience it's massive.

If you log onto these sites you can see the conversations of people on different servers arguing that this or that item is over or under priced. They are wasting their time. The characters they play are living in different universes. Universes where the laws of supply and demand are shaped by it's inhabitants in unique ways.

If you want to know how to make gold in your own Warcraft world, then you need to understand the way your server works. Here are a few hints to get you started. They are very general, but hopefully will give you an idea of the complexity that you can go to if you are serious about making gold quickly and easily.

Server Type - In general crafting ingredients cost more gold on PvP servers. Players spend less time at low levels farming and grinding materials. Some of the most valuable materials are (deliberately) in contested areas. The prospect of being ganked is ever present. People tend to get the materials they need then zone out. You will find level 80's in these areas. This can make the whole process fun to watch, but hard to compete in if you are just trying to gather some materials to level your profession.

Profession Mix - The mix of professions on servers is staggering. To take one example. One particular US server has almost 18% of all characters with the mining profession. You can understand here that metals are going to be both plentiful and cheap on this server. Characters compete to sell their wares in the market driving the price down. The very same server has less than 4% with the skinning profession yet 6.5% with leatherwork. That should tell you that a lot of leather workers are always looking for materials that they can't gather themselves. So if making gold is your aim - then on this server - be a skinner, not a miner.

Class Mix - Here established census sites can help you (just use a search engine for "Warcraft Census") the differences between one server and the next is huge. Class matters because the materials used to make armour is entirely dependent on the class of character the armour is for. Likewise the weapons used can generally be classified by class (swords for Warriors, maces for Paladins, etc.) Realms with a large Mage population will require a lot of cloth armour. It's that simple. So taking tailoring as a profession would be a good choice in this case. Check out the server you plan to roll a new character on and see what the class mix is. This information is easily and freely available.

There are many more factors involved, but hopefully you get a feel for how the real world economic principles of supply and demand work in Warcraft. So know your server kocuce. If you are keen to make gold check the server stats carefully before rolling a new character. There is normally leverage in some areas on every realm, but if making gold is a major aim, then take five minutes to check out the stats before deciding on your professions.