i don't believe there is anything written in stone about that. i don't think its a violation of anything. but it does in fact take alot of time and money to do properly. you have to keep a close eye on the ah (at least every hour ) and buy out all the items that are posted less then your and then be able to resell them all for a profit. in my opinion it is way too time and money expensive to be worth it. but hey each to there own.

Purely from a strategy standpoint, I would caution against trying to lift a price way over the natural market unless you have a *lot* of time and money. If you play like I do (one or two ah play sessions a day), there is plenty of opportunity for people to wait you out.

That said, pushing the price up 10-20% is often doable, and sometimes a new market equilibrium forms, from which you can push again a couple weeks later.

It's a risky strategy, you get a lot of inventory and sometimes the high price draws enough farmers that you end up having to drop your price to sell anything. Basically you're betting that the current market price is an artifact of temporary conditions, and not a real market equilibrium. If you've watched a market for a while, and the price is often 8, but currently is 6, the strategy is likely to work well. If the price range is normally 4-6, and you want to get 8, unless it is a very rare item that's difficult to farm, you will not likely be successful.

On my server, a lot of items, the range is wide enough that I just wait for them to go low, buy everything and reset it high. Sell all the way down and then buy everything up again when you sell out or the price goes back down. I probably make more money doing this in certain key markets than with any other strategy.

A lot of people have tried my strategy and failed though. You need deep pockets and a willingness to hold on to stacks and stacks of things if the market goes against you, plus a good sense of what direction the market "wants to go".

That said, everything blizzard has ever said about the economy publically suggests that this is 100% legal.

I would be concerned if you intended to be on 12+hrs a day buying out, they might treat that as equivalent to botting, and it would much more legitimate to say that you were making the auction house unusable.

As it is, people sometimes complain about me and a few others who do the same making auction house prices high, but prices went *up* on more things than not while I was away. I don't believe I have the ability to completely change the market, only to take advantage of the lag between farming and buying and normal "business cycles".

A good strategy for market manipulation is called banked stacking, stack the market up as much as you like, but have an out, have a 'use' for the product that you're purchasing.

For instance, if you're buying up every single sungrass in the market (which could be 20 or more stacks) with the intention of increasing the price 50%, then you should have an alchemist waiting to use those sungrass in the event that people get fed up with you and either choose to wait you out, or choose to just farm their own grass.

If you didn't have a use for the grass, it will wilt in your bank waiting to be sold, but if you have an alchemist, you can slowly start to drop potions into the market, your deliberate destruction of the sungrass market has a side effect, it -also- destroys the potions market for potions that require sungrass. At this point the normal people who would be consuming sungrass can no longer continue tradeskilling at nearly the same level (because they have to farm their stock rather than buy it), and you suddenly take their place at the front of the line in the potions market.

This works with DE mats as well, if you're buying leather or cloth or metal, you can do well by having a character that can use the spare resources to turn it into saleable product or into disenchantable product, because your abuse of the tradeskill markets will slowly push the price of enchanting mats upwards as people's tradeskilling slows down because of the price shift, less final product = less disenchantable product = increases in the market for enchanting materials.

Once upon a time I devastated the market in Mageweave, my low level tailor alt (over a period of six months) would buy every single piece of it valued at under 5G a stack, reselling it @ 6.5G a stack, and when people cut under me, I blew the mats into equipment (which wasn't saleable because there was so much of it that it would overflow the markets) and DE'ed it all, then did the very same thing to the market in enchanting mats, buying up an entire tier of dusts and essences and adding 30% to the prices. Over time, my abuse of the commodities markets caused a permanent shift in the price paradigms, now the average sale price for mageweave is 7G on my server, and the mats that used to sell for 6G a stack sell for -15G- a stack. These seem like small changes, until you consider that I used to list 30-40 stacks of mats every day (And at the time, they sold smoothly)