The adage "You need to spend money to make money" holds true in World of Warcraft as well. As we'll discuss in detail in Chapter 3, Exploring Your Major Income Sources, a lot of your income will come from manufacturing processes: taking raw materials (or mats) and turning them into finished goods for the end user. To expedite this process, we will be mostly buying the materials from the Auction House, and so you will need a sizeable supply of gold when you're starting out and building inventory.
Unlike in the real world, where you can get investors or loans to start up a business, in World of Warcraft you will need to collect every bit of copper yourself. It's not until you have built up this starting capital that you can truly start making significant amounts of gold. There are a few ways to go about this and some players may be able to build capital while playing as they usually do, but most players will have to work at building this capital. All the...