Why I don't play the AH, and you can, too.

When I was twenty-two, I took this big long road trip around the western two thirds of the country.  At one point, I had been hiking in the mountains in Utah and was trying to plot my route to get to San Francisco to visit a friend from college.  I had been back country for a while, and wanted to get a hotel room, so I ended up stopping in Reno, where I learned you can get a really nice hotel room for pretty cheap, because they expect you to give them all your money gambling.    I had never been to a casino before,  so I figured why not give it a try.  After cleaning myself up, I went down to the casino floor, and realized that there had been a zombie attack, or at least everyone in there looked undead: just pulling levers on the machines, over and over.  I tried it for about 2 minutes before I realized how insanely boring it was and moved on.

I even tried going to the card tables.  At the black jack tables people looked just as dead as the slot machines, so I moved on to poker.  Remember that Matt Damon poker movie, Rounders?  Well I thought it would be like that.  Instead, it was even worse than the slot machines.  No one seemed to be having much fun; except when occasionally someone would pretend to be a big shot, and place a slightly higher bet.

The point is,  I don't get gambling.  I don't see the fun.  It's boring.

That's how I feel about playing the auction house.  Sure, you could be gold capped in just a few weeks, but goodness gracious a million gold is not worth the monotony.  Especially when enough gold to get by is so easy to come by in the game just by playing.

To be clear, I do use the AH.  I'll sell crafted or gathered gear/materials on there.  That's not what I'm talking about though.  What I think is crazy, is searching through the AH (generally with an addon), and then buying things and re-listing them for higher prices.

Let's think about some ways to get gold easily that don't make me want to kill myself.

Looting kills while questing:  this should go without saying, but when I'm on my skinner, I can't believe the number of people who don't loot their kills.  Even if it'll just get you a couple gold each from vending white or grey trash, that'll add up eventually.

Old Raids:  Even if you're not the best soloer, you can probably handle BC content with no problem.   Run some of those on 25 player and you can vend plenty of gear and drops to grab around a thousand gold in one run.   If you have a geared hunter, it'll only take a few minutes to get through as well.   Pick one where you can focus on getting some gear you want for transmogrification or a rare mount drop, and you won't even notice how much gold you're making.

Timeless Isle: My newest 90 hunter that I boosted a couple weeks ago already has around 10k gold.   I was actually really surprised when I noticed, because I've really only played with him on a couple of flex runs, and on the TI.

Warbringers and the War God:  As I mentioned in my war-god guide,  those stolen insignias are worth plenty of cross-realm and cross-faction available gold.

Even when I was levelling my very first character, I remember hitting 60 at the same time as another guild member, and I paid for his flying,  just because I had the gold to do it (see looting kills) and I wanted to have a buddy to fly around outland with.  Now at max level, no, I don't have enough gold to buy that 500k spectral tiger mount;  but I do have enough for a reforge mount (though I wish I would have known that reforging was going away).

When there's all this fun to be had, why would anyone want to sit in a boring old city running back and forth between their mailbox and the AH?