First, if you PvP at all, honor gear gets you to instant 558.
Then you have Timewalking, Normals, then Heroics.
And now you can go straight to Siren Isle for 584s (even for fresh 80s).
There is only a reason for that, maybe, in the first month of .0 if you’re really lazy.
The real use of 70-79 greens is in PvP twinking for the later levels (77-79).
using the ah to transfer gold wouldn’t be valid since we can transfer gold thru mail or warband bank to any of your toons
Sometimes you want to switch to a spec that uses a different weapon set up, and don’t want to have to farm those weapons before using the spec.
Tried to buy a level 70-72 polearm for my guardian so I could tank and didn’t see a single one under 20k gold.
I tanked with my int staff 
Those are usually like 70-71 greens that are used to buy for fresh toons leveling, unless its a rare vanilla drop those can go for 30-50k
Correct, they are not being purchased at those prices.
Those items you see for 10K - 30K are from people that are able to buy those items for a low price as soon as they are posted and try and flip them for that astronomical price.
I constantly sell green and blue items for practically their gold value, and they are almost instantly purchased. And I know what you might be thinking, well how do you know they are being resold? I did a quick count of how many of that item is up on the auction house, and within a minute of being purchased, the quantity is the same, but my price is been replaced with one 10K+ just like the rest.
They are trying to force players pay them practically ransom amounts of gold for a trivial item.
Money is so easy to get that there’s enough people willing to pay silly amounts for greens.
If you are going to make that claim. How quick can you make 10K.
Log in to tank, blast through a heroic dungeon for Faerin’s weekly. 1500g for a very minimal time investment. Repeat on alts a couple times and it’s done.
More to the point though, a LOT of gold just comes in passively.
I doubt if someone that can do that would be needing to buy a green level 70-71 piece of gear from the AH.
What I’ve been doing is running DF and TWW world quests for gear at 70, it gets you enough that it’s passable
Not a thing anymore.
And people absolutely will pay that much, especially for some of the older rarer green items.
This ^ Heirlooms don’t go to 80 yet, so anyone with garbage geared 70 alts is in the market for those early-70’s boes. Typically the price goes down as the level goes up from 70. Side note they still haven’t fixed lvl 80 boes as showing up as usable for characters in their 70s.
What others have said, it’s because the gearing options for level 70s who didn’t do Dragonflight endgame content are very poor. Crafted TWW pieces only cover a few slots and require level 71. Your other options are:
-spend several days doing DF WQs as they populate for mediocre gear
-spend precious timewarped badges on limited gear instead of the hundreds of new cosmetics just added to those vendors
-slog through TWW quests taking forever to kill every mob.
-queue for timewalking and hope to get carried. Good luck if you’re a 74+ tank in ilvl 200-300 gear.
None of those options are very good. That’s why the BoEs are so expensive.
That is why we hoarded lots of Dalaran defender gear in our warband bank… Prepatch gear is ALWAYS better than any quest gear youʻll get for the first few levels in a new expansion
Faction gold and even server gold isn’t really a thing anymore thanks to warbanks.
Not sure why anyone on either side of that would risk getting banned when tokens exist. But if they were, selling greens would be a drop in the bucket.
theer is always people putting things so overpriced things hoping some buy them by accident or just because they dont know, it is sad but i guess it happends, that is why there is people keep doing that
Up-selling and overpricing leveling gear on the AH has been a thing for a while now.
The issue would be a lot less of a problem if crafting allowed lower level gear to be made.
In tailoring, for example, there are only 3 pieces - robe, slippers and bracers - available to be made at level 71. From there it jumps to 80. So you can’t make gear to sell from 72 on until 80, at which point that blue gear is basically useless.
Yeah I think that’s crazy. There’s almost no reason to spend gold on gear that is worse than what you can get for free.