Don't Get Caught Doing This At Work!

Cold’s Gold Blogging Carnival:  Don’t Get Caught Doing This at Work!

Wazzup?  With the WoW mobile armory now free for all, many people may find themselves on the moral grey line of trading while at work.  The mobile armory can be a great tool.  Read on past the jump to find out why and how you should be using this gadget on your coffee break.

Until this week, I haven’t used the mobile armory, mainly because I didn’t see the benefit of spending an extra three bucks a month to check my auctions and keep up with my guild while I was off my computer.  However, when I saw Blizzard release the mobile armory to subscription free, I couldn’t resist a test drive.  It’s no Goblin Hot Rod, but it’s still a nice ride.

The first thing I noticed is that it’s pretty easy for the casual user to cancel and relist auctions.  This can help keep you ahead of your competition unless you’re a mass trader with hundreds of auctions active at any given time.  The drawback is that it doesn’t incorporate addons like Trade Skill Master or Auctionator that make posting multiple items and undercutting competitors easy.  This means you’ll have to use an external site like Wowuction or The Undermine Journal to check on your competition and set competitive and profitable prices.

The second, and best part for Gold Goblins, is that the market is more active.  This means peak times are now extended because players don’t have to sit in front of their computers to stock up on tradeskill mats or transmog armor or that new item for their leveling character/twink.  It used to be that I placed most of my items for sale at 5:00 PM and posted them for 48 hours so that they had at least two cycles of peak visibility.  Last night I noticed that people bought a lot of my auctions during off peak times.  This is good for us Goblins because we can post shorter auction times and save money on our deposits, thereby increasing our profits.

Third and lastly, unfortunately by claiming your gold from the auction house on the mobile armory, addons like MySales, BeanCounter and Postal can’t track your sales and, as a result, your statistics become skewed.

What does it mean?  Well, Mr. Double Rainbow, it means that you might get fooled into thinking some items aren’t profitable or at least aren’t as profitable as they once were when, in fact, the profitability hasn’t changed.

The solution?  Well, there isn’t an elegant one.  Ideally, Blizzard would allow users to incorporate addons on their smart phones so that players had much of the same functionality that they have in game, but that would probably require Blizzard to recode the app.  Alternatively, some creative app publisher could write an app that would work symbiotically with the mobile armory.  The only problem with that is that it could contain malicious code.  Until an elegant solution does present itself, the best option players have is to do the research manually and click multiple times to post multiple auctions.

If you’d like to read more about the mobile armory, WoW Insider has a nice collection of posts on the Remote Auction House and Cold’s got a post on Remote Auction House Tips For New Users over at Cold’s Gold Factory.

And if you are using the mobile armory at work, please only use it on your coffee/smoke break.  I wouldn’t want you to blame WoW for your unemployment.