Nearly every blogger has talked about the data-mined gem vendor changes (including myself), but there have been a few people questioning the potential veracity of the change itself. This is from Stede over at Venture LLT:

Is this bad news?  Not really.  Blizzard gets about 2-3 weeks to test a patch build on the PTR.  To understand how a drop in the vendor price would work its way through the WoW economy over a much longer span of time, they have to take it to the extreme.  The good news is that 75s won’t make it ever make it onto live servers.  The not so good news is that Blizzard is seems to be openly considering dropping the vendor price of cut uncommon gems.  My best guess, the vendor price will likely be about half of what it is now – that’s ~4.5 gold.

Other people have pointed out, repeatedly, that this is data-mined information, and “remember epic gem cooldowns in Wrath?!” Well, of course. The issue is that this vendor price change was long overdue:

It never made any sense that the uncommon gem cut and vendored for more than the rare gem, let alone how uncommon gems vendored for the same as the epic gems of the previous expansion. While this high vendor price provided a fairly stable floor price in ore despite the flooding of bots, an unintended consequence is that it never made any sense to sell cut/perfect uncommon gems on the AH (e.g. Bold Carnelian, Perfect Solid Zephyrite). As Wrath frequently demonstrated, there was a fairly stable, low-volume market of parsimonious gemmers that were okay saving 5-10g by putting +12 Strength into an empty slot instead of +16 Strength.

This market has undoubtedly been underserved by this artificially high price in Cataclysm, so I would not necessarily despair when it comes to ore prices. It makes prospecting riskier from an absolute standpoint, but there will be people making gold out there by selling cut uncommon gems competitively without having to worry about the rather obscene deposit cost (which is a function of an item’s vendor cost).

Let me begin with an example written by an Anonymous poster way back on Cold’s blog on Opportunity Cost:

Let’s try a thought experiment. Say hypnotic dust currently sells for 100g per stack on the AH. Your friend decides to quit WoW and gifts you 1000 stacks of dust before he deletes his account. Did you just gain 100kg? Can you sell all of that dust at 100g per stack before the price depreciates? Let’s assume that every crafted item you can make using dust values dust at less than 100g per stack, and the demand is such that I can only sell 10 stacks a day at the 100g price point. It’s going to take me 100 days to sell that entire stockpile. Is a stack of dust going to retain its 100g value by the end of those 100 days (fwiw, on my server, dust is selling for roughly 50% of what it was 1.5 months ago)? If I can sell 30 stacks a day at 95g (either through undercutting or crafting or some combination of the two) is there value in paying that 5g per stack so that I can move everything in 1/3rd of the time?

Now instead of a friend gifting you the dust, let’s say you can generate 10 stacks a day, every day, for the cost of 50g in raw mats from the AH. Hypnotic dust sells for 100g a stack, but due to the supply and demand in your market, you could sell 1 stack a day at 100g, or 10 stacks a day at 90g (again, either through undercutting or crafting). At the lower price point, I can make 400g a day everyday (at a 100g “paper” loss). Or, I could stick to the 100g price point and make 50g a day and bank 9 stacks a day for later sales and hope that those stacks will sell at 100g eventually. Only there’s another 9 stacks coming in tomorrow, and another 9 the day after that, and the day after that. Or maybe I should just make the 1 stack a day, because 50g profit a day is much better than the 100g loss I was making selling 10 stacks at 90g. Right?

The defining characteristic of paper losses (or paper gains) is the unrealized part. Namely, they have not happened yet. In the real world, you can realize paper losses/gains rather easily considering IRL market prices are prices at which you have a ready buyer, by definition – if a stock price is $10 a share, that means someone (or a computer) will buy your stock at $10 right now with cash in hand. If no one would, the market price would be lower. As we all know in-game however, “market price” is really short-hand for average price for X period of time, or expected price given Y profit margin, or (as is often the case) simply wishful thinking.

It is in this context that I consider paper losses in WoW as a paper tiger, e.g. something that seems threatening but really isn’t. In the example scenario posted earlier, there is really no circumstance under which “undercutting” the market price is a loss because there is no way to know what the market price even is. In the WoW economy, there is either a sale or there isn’t one. Any other analysis is ispo facto navel gazing.

On Friday, as I was semi-AFK in Stormwind, someone was advertising in Trade for Heaving Plates of Protection and Kilt of Trollish Dreams “9k obo.” In case you did not know, “obo” technically means “Or Best Offer,” but in practice it means “I’m terrible at haggling, please gouge me.” As I said in my two–part Haggling post, information is power, so why would you ever want to lead off with an admission that you would be willing to go lower? Who is going to ever offer 9k? Anyway, I whisper him with a 7,000g offer for the Heaving Plates which he accepts immediately. After paying him, I run 20 feet to the AH and list them for 21,000g.

A sale of something of that magnitude within two hours could be a fluke (the one person on the realm that would have spent that amount just happened to be browsing at that exact moment), or it could be an indication that whatever you just listed could have been listed for more. A lot more. If that was the case then, did I not experience a paper loss? And since the dude accepted my 7,000g offer instantly, does that not indicate I could have gotten it for less, perhaps 6000g? Another paper loss! And hell, what about the guy in Trade? What about his paper losses?

My first instinct is to say that my own successful sale “realized” the paper loss for the Trade guy; there was a chance to sell it for 21k (or whatever) vs guarenteed sale at 7k… at least until I guarenteed the 21k sale. But… what if the Trade guy doesn’t read this blog? What if my buyer turned and sold the shoulders for 28k and I never know? What sense does a concept of paper loss make unless there is concrete, non-subjective market price?

Ultimately, I do not believe paper losses make any sense in WoW. The scenario which it attempts to describe is legitimate, e.g. being on the lookout for times when you could have sold something for more (or perhaps what will happen to Pyrite stockpiles if epic gems come from elsewhere), but in practice there is no such thing as paper losses. Return on investments? Recouping costs? Fire sales? Sure… but those only exist because the successful sale existed first.

I did one of the hardest things for me in the game last Friday… I bought something.

Specifically, I bought something for myself that I had no intention of trying to get a return out of it, e.g. for pleasure. *shudder*

The price tag was 28,500g bid with 30,000g buyout, and I assuaged some of my trepidation by winning it via bid. My main is Azuriel, a Prot paladin that I spec as Ret when I want to punish myself in PvP, so it was not even for my main. Who was it for? My level 83 (at the time) Warrior, or potentially my level 84 Death Knight. In other words, a total twink item for an alt I am not even 100% sure will get 30,000g worth of enjoyment out of it.

I do not bat an eye at investing 13,000g in, say, Chelley’s Staff of Dark Mending and reselling for 21,000g. I am still bullish on the Strength version of Hurricane and Tsunami decks. I will (and indeed have) poured thousands of gold into power-leveling professions on my alts, including the now level 84 Blacksmith, buying all the Chaos Orb patterns even though the BS cannot acquire any just yet. To me, these are business expenses to be written off at tax time, so to speak. The cost of doing business, just like gold for repairs or the buying of mats for flasks and such.

Fury of Angerforge though? It was not particularly cheap. Even if I did resell it, the margin would probably not be that great. You do not see very many BoE trinkets on Auchindoun though, which is a point in its favor. And my mortal weakness in WoW are things that change your character model and/or debris you can set up in the game world, as opposed to pets or mounts that other people fawn over.

Why bring this up at all? Tell me… is it easy for you to spend gold in WoW?

One of the hooks of gold blogs is getting you enough gold so that “you never have to worry about gold ever again!” While it is true that I never really glance at how much repairs are after a night of wipes, I feel every individual gold piece evaporate any time I spend it on buying flasks instead of making them, or essentially anytime I am trading money for time. Do you have any expectation that your accumulated gold meter will reach 0g by the time you hang up your WoW hat? Or is gold really what it objectively is: play money in a finite, virtual game? Am I alone in feeling miserly despite not needing to be? Is there not some point at which a person cannot rationally justify making more gold without gold becoming its own game (e.g. you have to spend a significant effort to even give it all away)?

Let me know in the comments below. I’m especially curious to hear from other gold bloggers and/or people with 250k+ about this one.

The following is a portion of the comments replying to the New Crafting Paradigm article.

[…] The constituent parts of a combo sell at a higher a la carte price than the combined cost of the combo. This is done to move more product than they otherwise would.

And your loss leader explanation is exactly my point. For example, let’s say embersilk bags sell for 300g per unit. Let’s say that the current AH price of embersilk cloth is 3g per cloth, but there is so much cloth on the market, and I know my competitors have so much stockpiled, that to move any amount of cloth in quantity, I’ll have to keep on undercutting and so will only average about 2.5g per cloth. Let’s also say that hypnotic dust is 6g per dust. A naive person might say “The raw mat cost of the bag is 75*3 + 15*6 = 225 + 90 = 315g, therefore I shouldn’t craft it”. A more wily person might say “In order to extract 3g per cloth, I will sell some of it raw on the AH, and I will package some of it in groups of 75 with 15 hypnotic dust @5g per dust (acting as my loss leader) by crafting embersilk bags and selling it for 300g”.

This was a good example… had the topic been solely focused on why people make/sell flasks (etc) below the market price of mats. As I noted in the article though, there could be any number of reasons why people do that, and it is not entirely relevant anyway since we can never really know what price our competition is getting mats at. But that is not really the point of the article – the point is that depending on the volatility of the raw materials, it may never make sense to make any finished goods compared to simply warehousing them.

Let’s look at the given Embersilk Bag example, since that is more tangible.

First, it was established that Embersilk Cloth is 3g/each, but will probably need to sell at 2.5g/each to push our supply; Hypnotic Dust at 6g/each, but 5g/each to push. The market price of the final product, Embersilk Bags, is 300g.

Market Price (Buying Mats) = 75*3 + 15*6 = 225 + 90 = 315g
Market Price (Selling Mats) = 75*2.5 + 15*5 = 187.5 + 75 = 262.5g
Market Price (Selling Bag) = 75*3 + 15*5 = 225 + 75 = 300g

So… is this a 37.5g profit or a 15g loss?*

It was never specified what it cost to get the Embersilk Cloth/Dust to begin with, so calculating profit is impossible. It is also debatable how much sense it makes to call something a “market price” when you cannot realistically sell items at that price, but nevermind that for now. My point to you is that if Embersilk is 3g today but 5g tomorrow, that Embersilk Bag better be getting crafted at a 150g profit margin or you were better off holding onto the cloth. Or even if it goes from 3g –> Xg such that you can push your supply at 3g.

Meanwhile, the Embersilk Bag market isn’t likely to move from 300g even if it suddenly costs 1000g to make one. We cannot even say “no one would make any new bags at that price” because we don’t know how much mats someone may have squirrelled away (and not chosen to sell at the higher prices), or if perhaps the bags have already been created months ago, etc etc. 

The Anonymous commenter is absolutely correct that “locking in” Embersilk at 3g each via making bags > selling Embersilk at 2.5g. He is also correct in that selling mats in a package (e.g. any crafted item) allows you to conceivably move more product than individual listings – it is difficult to move Hypnotic Dust at any price on Auchindoun some days, so having the opportunity to “sneak” some into Embersilk is better than not selling any. The issue I wanted to highlight yesterday is this: “locking in” cheap mats into a finished product does not save you gold, it saves you bank space. If crafting something makes economic sense, craft and sell it. Do not craft more than you (believe you) can sell today though, unless you know that the price of your mats will not increase (beyond X% of the profit margin of the crafted good) tomorrow.

There is exactly one scenario in which it might make sense to turn all your mats into crafted items today, rather than crafting only when necessary: Alchemy specializations. It costs 150g to change between Potions, Elixirs/Flasks, and Transmute specs, and it typically is not profitable to, say, make flasks without being Elixir-spec’d – competiters having a 15% competitive advantage over you is massive, and the market itself is generally priced in such a way that the 15% proc bonus is assumed. So, if I wanted to crank out some Mythical Mana potions, it makes the most sense to go ahead and make as many potions as possible after switching specs if I plan on going back to Elixirs afterwards. Transmuting via daily cooldowns is generally profitable enough in of itself that you do not need to be specialized, but… transmuting a bunch of rare gems and/or metagems? You definitely will want to switch.

Incidentally, transmuting rare gems is an example of where locking in prices actually works out most of the time. Uncommon gems typically have extremely low margins compared to their rather massive listing fees such that being able to lock-in a price that works out to be higher than 9g/each has no real downside… provided the rare gem itself doesn’t plummet to 15g or something ridiculous.

Hopefully the topic makes a bit more sense now.

*Exploring the concept of paper profit vs paper loss and the realization of both will be the subject of a seperate post.

I have been thinking a lot on various comments made both here and over at Cold’s blog (specifically his Opportunity Cost Part 2 posting), all related to the variance between the market price of mats and of the market price of finished products. It seems like a no-brainer to say the market price of finished products moves independently of the price of mats – even beginning auctioneers can pick up on the fact that, say, cut gems generally go for more than uncut gems, or that profit can be made on making flasks at certain herb prices, and so on. It makes intuitive sense that by adding work to an object, i.e. turning apples into applesause or herbs into flasks, you increase the value of the object.

But… how do we thus explain when the finished product ends up being valued below the cost of materials? We already answered that question: the market price of finished products moves independently of the price of mats. The only real connection we could have is that when, say, flasks go “underwater” (e.g. become worth less than the mats needed to craft them), it becomes less likely that more flasks would be created. I say “less likely” because there is no real way of knowing what price points other Alchemists bought their herbs at, or if they are the type of people who overestimate the 15% Elixir Master bonus, or perhaps the people that sell whatever they have at whatever the current going rate is regardless of “paper profit.”

What this is leading me to do is codify a new crafting paradigm for myself, putting numbers and words to a concept I was subconsciously doing anyway.

Twilight Jasmine = 4.32 – 10.5 | (x8) 34.56 – 84 (avg 59.28)
Azshara’s Veil = 4.4 – 10.65 | (x8) 35.2 – 85.2 (avg 60.2)
Volatile Life = 8.07 – 12.5 | (x8) 64.56 – 100 (avg 82.28)

Draconic Mind = 132.54 – 241.55 (avg 187.04)

Highest End Mats = 269.2
Lowest End Mats = 134.32
Avg Mats = 201.76

60 flasks = 12,905.76 flasks (60 + 15%) – 12,105.6 mats (60) = 800.16 = 11.6 per flask

To put it into words, on average, you only ever make ~11.6g in profit making a Flask of Draconic Mind as an Elixir Master alchemist based on the last two weeks of TUJ numbers. Profit is increased when you buy mats below average and sell flasks above average, obviously. However, in comparison, the profit you would make buying 60 flasks’ worth of Azhara’s Veil at it’s lowest price of 4.4g/each (2112g) and selling at it’s average price of 7.5g/each (3600g) is immense: 1488g profit before the AH cut. Buying Azshara’s Veil at 88g/stack and selling it at 150g/stack is on average more profitable than making flasks, without even considering the price of the other herbs.

Almost a “duh” moment, right? Flipping a 88g item into 150g is a 62g return that no one would miss, let alone the opportunity to do that with a bunch of stacks of herbs. As I mentioned though, this is a new crafting paradigm for me, or way of looking at things. Alchemy is one of my go-to professions, and thus I have an unconscious bias towards making things even when it appears to make no economic sense. Why even bother having professions if you are not going to use them, right?

In other words, in this paradigm it is not enough that a profit could be had by purchasing mats at X price and crafting something to sell at Y. The price at which I can sell Y has to be higher than the highest price of X, or I was probably better off just warehousing the mats until their market value swung higher.

I say I have been doing is subconsciously, and the reason is basically my Foundation article on Finding the Margin. By keeping my personal margin relatively high, I was inadvertently keeping myself from jumping into “profitable” albeit volatile markets which were prone to going underwater. With a personal margin of 30g, I would avoid making flasks at 11.6g average profit and thus expose myself to less risk. When mats are really cheap and flasks are really expensive, that margin increases up to 100g per flask – an obvious market signal that I should move in and set up shop… for a while at least.

One thing I wish I could do is be able to present this data in a graph or picture form, but I have no idea how to do so.

One of my first posts in PVSAH dealt largely with throwing a wet blanket over the long-term investment craze in Wrath commodities like Saronite Ore and Abyss Crystals and such. As I went to collect my proceeds from selling stacks of Cobalt Bars for 300g today, it occurred to me that I should perhaps revisit the advice.

 

I have been slow to get on the The Undermine Journal “bandwagon” for several reasons.

First, I’m just edgy like that. You know, fighting the system, railing against the establishment by shopping at Hot Topic, and so on. Totally a counter-culture warrior.

The second, more serious reason? I had no idea, no idea, that it is as absurdly useful as it is. Other bloggers have done posts about notifications and such, but that sort of thing does not appeal to me. What appeals to me is basically a single website giving targeted, pin-point data on what is profitable and what is not based on practically real-time price captures of my specific faction’s AH. I would not believe this without pictures, so here are a few:

So what you are looking at is the Auchindoun-Alliance page on TUJ. Before you go further, I highly recommend you find your own Realm on TUJ’s main page, clicking the correct faction, and then bookmarking the website, preferably in your Firefox Bookmark Toolbar (assuming you use Firefox). Now, what you should look at next is Enhancements and Consumables dynamic “tabs” which break down like follows when you mouse-over:

As you can see, it breaks all of the professions down. When you click on, say, Alchemy, you get a page that theoretically puts all of us gold bloggers out of business.

The screen that appears has a lot more information on it than what I have shown above, but I want to specifically show you the Flask section. Namely… look at it. The Undermine Journal automatically tabulates the current market price of mats AND shows you the current market price of the resulting product, all tailored to your realm’s faction AH. Are you still sitting down? Haven’t fallen out of your chair? I highlighted the Flask of Steelskin as an example of a market in which I can probably net a profit rather easily by purchasing AH mats and turning around and selling the flasks at a mark-up. We can see that there are only 2 Steelskin flasks up currently, but that actually works in my favor for the most part. Meanwhile, I could probably make more profit selling Draconic Mind mats than the actual flasks at the moment.

Outside of some philosophical posts or patch speculation, what could any gold blogger actually tell you that TUJ could not? That is an open question.