Networking Your Way to More Gold

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And now, back to your regularly scheduled guide:

Intro

Networking, in this case, refers to your own personal network of characters. Each character is placed in strategic areas t make your buying life a little easier. The main idea is that is saves a ton of time over having a main charcter fly from place to place to grab items.

You are going to be aquiring limited items and other sellables with these characters and then shippng them off to your bank alt. This frees your primary characters from a life of farming.

The Gold Network

Here's an example network which will get you started and is pretty much the same for Horde and Alliance.

If you have gold on your main charcter then go to step 2, this step is if you are starting fresh on your server. This character will be your gatherer. Start up a new class that can kill fast. I'd recommend a rogue since you won't necessarily be leveling past 10 or so. Nothing wrong with it if you do go past 10, though. My gatherer is now 85 (a Rogue, naturally.)

As soon as you can (as soon as you have some cash) head off to the nearest city and get two of the gathering skills. I suggest skinning and either mining or herbalism. If you're a Night Elf then skip mining, since there is no ore in your starting areas, though you'll find plenty if you level up enough to hit Auberdine (in Darkshore.)

Once you have your skills then start some mad gathering and mail all stacks of stuff off to your...
Bank Alt Character: This will be the main buying/selling character of your network. Everything that is gathered by any of your characters is sent to this character to sell on the Auction House.

I like Silvermoon and Stormwind for these characters since the AH, Bank, and mailbox are all pretty close together. Any city will do, though my characters complain about Darnassus, since everything there is so far apart that their legs get tired.
Buyers: All of the big cities have limited items which you can buy and then resell. Put a buyer in any of the cities you choose and then buy and send stuff to your bank alt for resale.

Example: If Ironforge is your base then park an buyer in Stormwind. Grab the limited items, recipes, etc. that are available there and camp the vendors at the Darkmoon Faire when it comes to town.

As an example, at the Inn on the East side of Stormwind is a Master of Recipes. Grab a few of those cooking recipes and send them to your alt, if he isn't in Stormwind.

Enchanter suppliers sometimes have interesting recipes. Tailoring suppliers as well.

If you find a vendor in an out of the way place, say.. .somewhere in the Outlands, just park a character there.

Cross Faction Trading

This really works best with two accounts since you can post and grab almost immediately. You can do it with one account, but in the time that it takes you to log out of one character and in with another you might find that some wag had grabbed your stuff.

You're going to make a charcter, on each side, that will be parked at the Booty Bay neutral auction house. You'll have four alts total, at least. One banker for each side, and one Booty Bay alt for each side.

The idea is that you will be buying and selling cross faction. If your Horde character aquires stuff that sells for more on the Alliance AH than the Horde AH then you ship it to the Alliance side. Or if something in one side's AH sell for a little, but is selling for a lot on the other side, then you buy it, ship sit off, and resell it to the other side.

For example - Some farmer dumps a pile of Sunfury Signets on the Horde AH for 5sp each (I wish.) You buy all of them and ship them to your Horde Booty Bay character. The items are placed on the neutral AH there and then you log into (or switch to) your Alliance Booty Bay character, buy the items, and ship them to your Alliance banker where they sell for around a gold each.

Or perhaps primals or eternals are selling cheap on one side and for a high price on the other. Buy the one, ship it over to the other side, via the neutral AH, and sell it for a nice markup.

Since you cannot mail items directly from Horde to Alliance, or Visa Versa, you will be making a bridge to get stuff back and forth. You will need a bank alt for the other side and each side will need to get a character to the neutral Auction House. This means that you will need to get two characters to the neutral AH in Booty Bay... It can be done with level 1s, but it's a long swim.

If you have a couple of mid level characters collecting dust you can either run them down the road through Stranglethorn vale to BB or, if you have the fly point, just fly down.
Note that some people will camp the neutral AH, looking for deals. Some are rumored to have bots doing just that. If this is the case then the faster you can switch alts the more likely your are to get your stuff.

Or, if you're good at dodging irate Goblin guards, and you're on a PvP server, you can try to find and kill the other player(s) or bot(s.)
Basically, just make a shopping list of the stuff you normally buy and sell, then compare the prices on the other side and act accordingly.