A glance at an empty AH window

So you just learned how to craft a new epic shoulder piece. All giddy and excited at the potential to profit you stroll over to the auction house to see what they can be sold for before you craft it. After doing a scan you find that there are zero up for sale and begin to wonder if you found a gold mine or are about to waste your time and money.

When you find something new to sell and are in a situation where there are none up on the auction house there is a good deal that can be interpreted from that. Sometimes it’s a recipe that you have just gotten and thus new to you or it could be a recipe/item that is new to the game entirely. But whichever the case is, the potential scenarios are always the same.

When you find yourself in a situation such as this you need to ask yourself a few questions before moving forward. First is the obvious question, can you afford to take a complete loss in this investment? If so then you can move on with the fun parts. Is there a market for this new epic item? Are there alternatives that are close to the same level for half the price? How many people tend to spend the extra coin to upgrade this specific item?

When you find a rare item or recipe with none on the market this can mean one of several things and you will need to figure out which is the case to the best of your ability. The first possibility is that you are the only person on the server interested in selling it regularly. This could be because it’s a new recipe added in a recent patch so not many people are able to sell it. This is the thing you want to look for first in patch notes as there is always a big craze over new recipes from material spikes and drops in similar current crafted items.

If it’s not a new recipe or a new item then there are a few more situations that are much more likely. One such possibility is that there simply is no market for it. If you aren’t already rolling in money then this is something that you always have to assume to be the case for safety’s sake. If you can’t afford to throw away the investment in crafting it (time, money, materials) then you shouldn’t take the risk as a rule of thumb.

Another situation is that you caught the market at an odd time where the people that tend to list this new item regularly don’t have any up. This is actually two potential situations in one. You need to ask yourself “why are there none up?” There might not be any for sale because they simply expired because there was no current demand or because they have all been sold before you looked. You can apply this thought process every time you see a hole in a certain market. These are the kinds of things that any AH player worth their coin purse considers right away.

If you find a blank page for consumables then it is rather likely that they have all been sold since, as the term implies, they have all been consumed. However if it’s a piece of gear or similar type of item (mount, vanity pet, costume, etc.) then it’s more likely that there is just nobody selling it currently. However each of those possibilities comes with the chance that there is no demand for it at all.

So when you see a blank page after a scan of the AH, here’s what you need to be wondering. There are none up because…

- There is no demand for it due to price or cheaper/better alternatives.

- Nobody sells it regularly.

- There’s enough of a demand that it has sold out.

- All of them happened to expire before you looked by coincidence

At the end of the day the wise man will hold all of this in mind before making the choice to craft and attempt to sell. As always you want to be careful before diving into something head first as you always stand to take a complete loss. And of course the flip side is true and you may have the limited opportunity to make thousands of coin hand over fist. Which case it’s going to be all depends on the new shiny you just found and what you can do with it.

Thanks for stopping by!