Flooding the Auction House - How to Use/Avoid

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

Time for some quick economics for you wow auction house nuts.

Flooding is when you post too many items in any one market and cause the supply to rise above the demand for a commodity.

Just like in the real world, in world of warcraft when you flood the market the end result will always be a sharp decrease in price as supply surpasses demand. Forcing a flood on the market can be used as a tool to get your fellow auctioneers to dump items on the auction house for less gold than they normally would.

For instance, you put up thirty items for ten gold each when the normal price is six gold each and usually there are 4-8 of the item on the auction house at any one time. Many players see what you are doing and dump their items onto the AH for cheaper than you. Eventually, these players will get into an undercutting frenzy and you will have the same commodity which normally goes for six gold selling at a rate maybe as low as three gold in this example. You could then buy out the under cutters and sell again at a more normal price.

Flooding is never a good idea when you see the opportunity to sell items.

Remember that the fewer items you post, the better price you can demand for your items (supply vs demand). There’s nothing wrong with selling items over the course of several days in short, controlled bursts vs. dumping stockpiled goods and flooding the market.

The perfect market to practice flooding is greater cosmic essence. They are free to post and in low supply on most servers. I would advise testing flooding with this first.

There are other uses for flooding such as effecting other players' addons (Auctioneer for instance). I'll get into this subject more in a future post.