In An Age

The other day I noticed I was undercut on cut gems within approximately 30 seconds of posting. Could be a coincidence, right? At the time I was talking within guild about The Undermine Journal and the voyeuristic possibilities (“Hey, your sister posts auctions only between 7pm and 11pm Wed/Thur/Fri/Sat”), so I decided to go ahead and eyeball my competition:

Err… WTF?

I actually knew about this guy for a while, as he is “that guy” on my server who has 3+ different toons with slightly different spellings who runs a Glyph racket. This particular specimen is in the blood diamond gem market and appears to be ran by a bot – even if he was unemployed, there simply is no way that he would be posting ~40 auctions every hour on the hour, seven days a week.

The question becomes: short of acquiring the Sword of A Thousand Truths, how does one compete with this?

Answer: the only winning move is not to play.

More specifically, what you do not do is play the game on someone else’s terms, especially if they are bad terms. Is it possible to combat this seller? Sure. There is a lot of different things you can do to try and counteract addon automation and/or botting behavior. For example, most of these programs/addons have threshold limits you can probe with trial and error – other gold blogs have detailed this specific gambit, in divining a competitor’s threshold and then “tricking” him into posting a bunch of stock at that price, then buying him out and relisting.

My issue is that fighting someone with a competitive advantage is almost never worth it in the long-term. This does not mean you have to give up making any gold in a particular market, it just means you have to start thinking in shorter terms. This guy undercut my five auctions of 275g Timeless Demonseyes with his own three auctions at 274g 99s 90c within one minute of my posting them. I don’t believe this market is deep enough to sell four of them in a given day* so I am left with the dilemma of whether to just leave them up or cancel and repost. What I ended up doing was canceling and reposting them for 225g each. As I talked about in my Foundation article on undercutting, one of the (emotional) advantages of the savage undercut is the fact that even if your competition continues undercutting you, in very real terms you have taken gold out of their bags. In this case, if the bot cancels and reposts, he loses his own deposit fee (which matches mine) + 50g per gem. That 50g doesn’t go into my pocket of course, but by driving down the profit margin I potentially discourage the bot while also reducing my own desire to even be in this particular market.

There is a tendency to look at the Auction House game as being Player Vs Player. In some respects, it certainly can be. As the title of the blog suggests though, I consider it simply to be Player Vs Auction House. Part of that philosophy is to not shoot for Pyrrhic Victories when I am just here to make some gold. If someone wants to be an AH hero, the floor is all yours – I will quietly exit an overextended market and find the lower-hanging fruit elsewhere or start exploring un(der)developed ones.

I am curious as to what other peoples’ gut reactions are though. If you noticed someone like Harry Botter** muscling into a market like this, what would be your response, if any? Would you try to undermine him? Fight fire with fire? Mosey out of town? Go to the mattresses? Let me know in the comments below.

*The first question that should pop into your head after you read that is “Hey, if you don’t think the market is deep enough for 4 Timeless gem sales, why would you post 5 of them?” I wish I could respond with “It was a test to see if you were paying attention” but it was honestly more a combination of oversight and laziness. Or possibly optimism.

**It occurs to me that I might be reading TUJ’s “heat map” wrong and/or having an overly broad definition of botting. My guildie and I figured out that canceling auctions registers as “sold auctions” on TUJ, for example.

Did a bit of raiding the other day and ended up having to switch out of my usual MT role into Ret DPS for the Double Dragons. As it turns out, my Ret gear was pretty abysmal with some imminently embarrassing greens. After being shown why Theralion is his mother’s favorite child, I started going through AtlasLoot and Wowhead for possible upgrades. One particular weakness I wanted to stamp out was plate bracers – ilevel 318 greens seemed pretty bad. Doing some Wowhead database magic resulted in this list, which basically indicated I would be stuck in 318 greens unless I did Halls of Origination (yuck) or BRC on heroic. Or bought a pair of BoE bracers off the AH that dropped from a rare-spawn with a ~8-15 hour respawn timer.

Wait, what?

Terborus’s Rotating Bands is a BoE 346 blue wrist that drops off a rare spawn in Deepholm 100% of the time. It is more or less identical to another blue wrist that drops in heroic HoO, and the two of them are essentially pre-raid best-in-slot for both plate tanking and DPS. At the time I discovered this, there was one pair on the AH going for 3100g, but The Undermine Journal indicated that this was somewhat of a low-ball estimate across most other servers. Being the miserly auctioneer that I am though, I decided to finish up some Therazine quests on an alt while keeping an eye out of Terborus myself. About an hour later, the big yellow worm was dead and I looted the equivalent of several thousand gold.

As you know, I usually do not advocate straight up farming or camping rare spawns – in most cases you can leverage the Transitive Property to farm something worth more, and just buy what it was you needed to buy. That said, if you happen to be in the following areas, I recommend stopping by to case the place:

• Stonecore – Terborus – Terborus’s Rotating Bands
• Twilight Highlands – Tarvus the Vile – Tarvus’s Poison-Scarred Boots
• Twilight Highlands – Overlord Sunderfury – Sunderfury’s Sundries
• Vashj’ir – Shok’sharak – Sussurating Treads of Shok’sharak
• Hyjal – Blazewing – Blazewing’s Furious Kilt

Clicking on the mob name will take you to Wowhead’s maps with their exact location(s). There are some other rare spawns out there, but only the above ones drop 346 BoE gear. Anecdotally, any one of those items should fetch 2000g minimum.

Last time we talked about getting haggled. Now let’s look at doing some haggling.

Fundamentally, haggling is a tug-of-war battle between two people with imperfect information. As the seller, you do not know how much the buyer is willing to pay – as the buyer, you do not know how low the seller is willing to go. Even if the buyer/seller tells you exactly how much they are willing to accept, there is no real way for you to know if they are telling the truth or whether it is merely a gambit on their part. In fact, it’s entirely possible that the buyer/seller does not even know the truth of their own statement.

Within World of Warcraft however, there is one piece of information you do know when it comes to people selling items through Trade Chat: they are desperate.

“But… Azuriel! I/my friend/some dude sells things over Trade all the time and isn’t desperate at all!”
“You/your friend/that guy is merely a good haggler and/or enjoys it.”

Think about the market for your item, say, a Volcano deck. Who would buy it? You might have raiders, you might have PvPers, you might have alts with sugar-daddy mains, you might have just some random guy just hitting the level cap. Your market would include people specifically looking for that deck, and it could also potentially include people who were not specifically looking for the deck, but just happened to stumble upon it and thought it would be good for them. Depending on the price you ask for the deck, you might also create demand for it from goblins willing to assume the risk of flipping it.

Who is excluded from your market? People whom have been priced out of the demand curve of your deck. You also exclude people who never knew you were selling the deck to begin with.

All of the above assumes you listed the card in the AH. Why? Because by selling it solely in Trade chat, you exclude another group of potential buyers: everyone not currently in Trade chat. Think about that. You could have raiders and PvPers fawning over your item and willing to pay through the teeth… but they are currently in a raid/Arena, and not around to even know you are selling. Or, hell, they could merely be out doing dailies or questing on an alt. Or AFK.

So your entire market is solely the people currently in Trade chat. No reasonable person would pay more for an item from Trade that he/she could buy from the AH for less. In fact, everyone instinctively accepts that AH prices have a “premium” built-in for the convenience of being able to buy at one’s leisure, which means they instinctively know the opposite to be true, e.g. things are cheaper in Trade chat. Any seller that consciously chooses to handcuff themselves by selling in Trade, almost by definition, is either desperate or willing to limit their profits to push product now rather than later. I would call the latter “desperation” anyway.

I typed all the conceptual framework above as a preface to this otherwise simplistic suggestion: low-ball the hell out of them. Keep it in the realm of possibility, but low-ball it.

Let me give you a literally true example that occurred just two days after my Volcano hagglee experience, and is the height of irony. For one thing, I was on my Inscription toon reposting unsold Darkmoon decks when, lo and behold, someone came on Trade wanting to sell a Volcano deck for 16,000g. I whispered them with an offer for 12,000g. Why 12k? What I wanted to do was provide a tantalizing floor at which someone might end up going “screw it” and selling it at. If I had made a truly absurd offer like 8000g or less, they would dismiss it out of hand as a troll, just like anyone in Trade chat offering 1g for it. Personally, 12k is pretty ridiculous by itself for a Darkmoon deck worth 16,000g in Inferno Inks, but if someone wants to pay the reverse-premium of a guaranteed sale right now, let’em.

I did not actually get a response right away from the seller. I saw him barking it up a few more times, and I whispered “I’m still willing to buy at 12,000g.” He came back with a “Well, 12k is kind of low. I’m splitting it with another guy.” Remember when I said I was a big softie? Yeah, well, it comes and goes. There is no way for me to know whether he is serious or just cynically playing the heart-strings, so my default bargaining state of not believing anything they say kicked in. “I’ll buy at 12,000g if you end up changing your mind.” This is my signature haggling move, the Artful Disengage, in which I indicate “this is my deal, take it or leave it” without actually achieving that aggressive posture. Sure enough, the guy went back to Trade with “WTS Volcano deck, have 12k offer. If you want it, offer has to be 13k.” Interesting gambit on this guy’s part and it almost inclined me to offer 13k just to seal the deal.

Remember from last time when I mentioned that my internal bargaining position would be weaker if I was selling something I could not actually use/have a use for? It also works in reverse: I already had an unsold Volcano deck, so it was not as though I was emotionally invested in this transaction outside of the gold-making possibilities. I use the Artful Disengage no matter my level of personal involvement, but this time I actually meant the “take it or leave it.” After another 5-10 minutes of waiting, the seller took it. I met him outside the Dwarven District AH, traded the 12,000g, and then I immediately walked 15 yards to the auctioneer and listed the deck for 21,000g, the same price as my other Volcano deck.

After logging on the next day, I discovered someone had bought one of the decks for 21,000g. That is a profit margin of over 8,000g. You can be damn sure that the buyer was NOT someone in Trade chat the night before.

• When you see someone selling on Trade, try to establish a floor for them. The “floor” in this case is a bid high enough to make them think twice about *not* selling it to anyone, while low enough for you to have room to maneuver should they drive a harder bargain. If you read my Hagglee post, you should now see why I had you establish a floor for yourself, lest someone else try to do it for you.
• If you find yourself bad at haggling, you will ironically be more successful the less important the transaction actually is to you.
• Usually goes without saying, but being aware of the market price for the item in question is important, especially when the seller is giving away no information (other than their inherent desperation), such as when they just say “WTS X, pst” or “make an offer.” The seller is secretly hoping that you, the buyer, will make an offer higher than their expectations. If the seller wants 50g for the item, they hope you offer 60g and think you are getting a bargain.

That about sums it all up for haggling. I could possibly squeeze in another entry focusing on the Volcano deck, considering how much mileage I have gotten out of it already. I jest, I jest. The trinket just so happens to be a fairly interesting case-study given the profit potential of all the steps leading up to making it, and the (reproducible) profit from the discrete object itself. Not everyone deals with Darkmoon cards though, so I will try to find more generalized examples next time.

Last night, as I was collecting the spoils of sold Darkmoon cards, I noticed an established raider saying in Trade chat “WTB Darkmoon Card: Volcano.” The first thing I did was head to the AH to check if I had been undercut on my own Volcano deck. Seeing that I was the only seller up, I quickly canceled my current auction with it’s 18500g buyout and relisted for 22000g. Smiling to myself on a job well done, I prepared to check in on my other alts. Before I could log though, I got the whisper.

…the dreaded, dread whisper.

I am going to let you in on a dark secret: I am terrible at haggling. Brutal, cut-throat AH PvP? Does not phase me a bit. My exorbitant prices leave poverty and destitution in its wake? Don’t care. I mean, hell, I smelled blood in Trade chat waters and ate the 6g deposit fee to jack up my Volcano price by 3500g (nearly 20%) to capitalize on the potential desperation. Part of that comes from my over-arching philosophy that is summarized by the title of this blog, e.g. player versus auction house. I am playing against the AH, not the individuals that make up the AH. When I repost, undercut, or engage in social engineering for my personal benefit, I do so in Solipsism Mode – treating the game as single-player with AI bots that clearly (okay, mostly)  pass the Turing Test.

This is a self-defense mechanism as, generally speaking, I am a big softie that is receptive to social guilt. I don’t succumb to the “total chump” level of eating a loss, but I’ll feel bad about it later… and later still will be angry at myself for not drawing a harder line.

Lucky for me, the raider short-circuited any possible guilt mechanisms by going straight for the “Okay, bottom line, what’s the lowest you would be willing to go?” line. For future reference in any haggling you do, that is a bad opening gambit. Insulting, even. If you don’t want to haggle, buy it off the AH at the premium my time and your convenience demands. “Did you have any Waves cards to trade?” I asked the question because in Trade he specified he would be willing to swap decks. As it turns out, he only had the Hurricane deck, of which I had three unsold sitting up on the AH already. The Tsunami deck is a slam-dunk for every type of healer, but I was missing the A, 2, 6, 7, and 8 of the deck. “Which ones do you need?” I specify the five missing cards, having already looked at their prices on the AH and noting that the 6, 7, and 8 alone add up to ~15,000g (with obviously no competition). “If you don’t have Waves cards to trade, lowest price is 17,000g.” My prior Volcano posting was 18,500g which meant the bid was ~14,800g before I canceled it. At 22,000g buyout, the bid floor is now 17,600g. Selling at 17kg is 2125g per card; assuming 7g for Volatile Life, that means 191.5g per Inferno Ink, 19.15g for Blackfallow, and any stack of herbs below 153g that mills into three Blackfallow and half an Inferno would be profitable.

No, I did not actually calculate all that at the time.

Looking back, a successful 17,600g bid would end up giving me 16,720g assuming a 5% AH cut, so I could have offered less than 17kg and came out ahead. Then again, I would prefer the full 22,000g or, you know, as much as humanly possible. The haggling ended in a draw with no exchange taking place other than me telling him the name of my main in case he changed his mind. I anticipate him doing exactly that, insofar as saying “screw it” and buying my auction straight-up or finding a different seller altogether. Even in a nightmare scenario in which I never ever find a buyer at any price, the Volcano trinket is still extraordinarily powerful for Elemental shaman and warlocks generally (among others), both of which I have. Had this been an item I could not ever possibly have an interest in, say Crimson Deathcharger or epic spellcasting leather or something, my (internal) bargaining position would have been weaker.

You might wonder why I would bring up this topic at all given my lack of ability/confidence in this position. Well… obviously to get better at it. Everyone has to start somewhere, eh? If I were to distill all the above into bite-size, homework-esque bullet-points, it would look something like this:

• If you are bad/nervous/unconfident at haggling, acknowledge it. To yourself, not the other guy.
• You don’t actually have to haggle. The reason why you might want to is that theoretically the haggler is a guaranteed sale within a certain price range. It just comes down to finding the perimeter of their price range and seeing if it overlaps your selling range. Speaking of that…
• Figure out your selling range. Start at the top, which is the lowest price of any competing products. If there is no competition, the sky’s the limit, although you may want to cap it at the highest price you reasonably believe it could go for on the AH. The bottom level of your selling range should be whatever price you believe the item would sell for instantly on the AH. Alternatively, you could choose the current or historical price of materials, whichever is higher, plus 10%. You are not running a non-profit here, so unless you can repair your gear with the warm fuzzies you get from charity work, make sure to get paid for your time. Once you have both ranges, ignore the low one and offer AH price -10%. You figured out the low-end price just in case the haggler came back with a lower counter-offer.
• Information is everything. If the buyer is desperate, that gives you information, namely that he/she will probably go higher than normal. Same thing works in reverse. Have you seen people in Trade say “WTS X, 1000g or best offer, pst”? That’s dumb, no one is going to offer them 1000g straight-up after an opening like that. Why not? Because the seller gave away the information that they will accept less than their original target.

Next time, I will go over the other side of the coin: being the haggler.

MMO-Champion is reporting that 4.0.6 will be dropping on Tuesday, and I tend to believe them.

There have been a lot of posts around the blog world after each PTR build, but some of those have been weeks (or months) ago, and it becomes pretty easy to lose track of the changes that should pique your interest. What follows are the top three things I think are important to keep in mind in the days before the patch.

1. New BoE patterns. Three new JC metagem random world drop recipes, all of which are going to be unbelievably hot commodities for the rest of Cataclysm – Wowhead is showing that they are +54 Agility/Strength/Intellect with the +3% crit damage, making them strictly better than the Chaotic meta, in every possible way. So stop making Chaotic cuts immediately, and you may want to consider dumping your remaining stock as well. It may be a while before the new metas saturate the market, but you don’t want to be left holding bag either.

   Enchanters are getting three new +50 Agility/Strength/Intellect wrist enchanting patterns, which are also BoE world drops. The demand for the patterns themselves will probably be high, but since all three require two Maelstrom Crystals to enchant, I would not expect high demand until after 4.1 (when I expect the new 5m to drop epics on heroic).

 

2. Expect a surge in herb/Volatile Life prices. The number of herbs needed to make flasks will be reduced by approximately 33% across the board (8 of two kinds instead of 12). This reduction in mats should correspond in a surge of demand because now A) making flasks is closer to being profitable, but more importantly B) getting the guild achievement Mix Master is now within (easier) reach. To get some idea of the scope of the change, the herb reduction means a guild will go through 400 less stacks of herbs. Yes… four-hundred stacks. These aren’t 400 stacks of Cinderbloom either (for the most part). The Volatile Life demand will come as a consequence of the quantity of flasks being made, especially since each flask will take two more Volatile Life each, basically creating an extra 2,000 Life demand per guild.

   Also supporting the extra herb/life demand will be the new Alchemy trinkets, like the Vibrant Alchemist Stone, which are amazing. Whether the alchemist never made one before or if they made the +Stamina version, chances are good that every Alchemist on your server is going to spending 50 more Volatile Life and nearly two more stacks of herbs each. 

 

3. More people will be running heroics. Not only have almost all the heroics been targeted with some precision nerfs, the recently announced broad-spectrum, ICC-esque 10% buff to players using the LFD tool will mean more successful heroic runs are being made. More successes mean it’s more likely that individuals will queue again, which means more cloth, more enchanting materials, and ultimately more demand for enhancements like gems, flasks, and even enchants as players more quickly replace their old gear and perhaps move on into raiding.

Two more things to keep in mind that are not necessarily patch-related, but will impact us nevertheless. First, the Darkmoon Faire is rolling back into town on Sunday. I fully expect the competition on the Darkmoon trinkets to be particularly fierce this go-around, so just keep in mind that you don’t have to undercut everyone; if your competition is going for a scorched-earth, fire-sale strategy, just hold onto your trinket until next week. If you have extra cards laying around or the mats to make them, the opposite is true: sell those to desperate players trying to find that one missing card and willing to pay a premium to avoid sitting around for another month.

The second is that Love is in the Air holiday is also starting on Sunday. It remains to be seen whether or not there will be any explicit money-making schemes like there was last year (Lovely Charm Bracelet fiasco anyone?), but it has been “confirmed” on Wowhead that the holiday boss drops ilevel 346 necklaces this year, some of which are strict sidegrades to the crafted JC ones. So if you were prepared to put down the cash for one, you might want to slow down. And if you were planning of selling some, well, you still might, but I would not take any undue risks attempting to do so.

[Note: Other blogs have talked about this topic already, a fact I was only made aware of about 10 minutes ago. However, I think I’m bringing a bit more beef and original research to the table, so just hang with me till the end]

There is a general sense on the WoW forums – something I read regularly as a sort of barometer for AH behavior “in the wild” as it were – that the crafted JC rings and necklaces are terrible, a waste of time, “should be epic 359s” and so on. For the most part, such lamentations are besides the point. Whether something is objectively good or not has no bearing on its marketability, as any Mysterious Fortune Card or cigarette seller can tell you. These JC items being remarkably amazing would certainly help things along, of course, but it is not strictly necessary.

But are they actually any good?

The short answer: Sure.

The long answer: Ehh… some of them, yes.

When looking for advice or comparisons for items, Wowhead is the first place I go to. Not only is the website extremely elegant despite having a rather robust database of information, but it has a comment section for every item that is fairly well self-policed. Good posts generally get “greened” pretty quick and the garbage is thrown out. The problem when looking at the JC crafted item comments was that there weren’t any. Until I made some. For all of them. My handle over on Wowhead is redraven937, and if you end up finding any of the comparisons useful, feel free to rate them up over there.

Instead of rewriting everything or simply copy/pasting what I wrote from Wowhead over to here, I’m going to do a quick summary. I still very much recommend checking out the items themselves to see how/why I arrived at my conclusions vis-a-vis whether the items are objectively good. Clicking on the item link will take you straight to my comparison comment. Keep in mind you can (probably) sell any of them at a 500g profit margin or higher regardless of how good or bad they are.

Elementium Moebius Band (tanking ring)
Verdict: Not recommended.
Reason: You get an extra +15 Stamina from this ring compared to the Revered Therazane ring, but most peoples’ mains will hit Revered after questing in Deepholm + a few days worth of dailies, so at best it will be the Moebius and the Felsen. What I found was that I liked the ring from Revered with Ramkahen, the Red Rock Band, since it doubled up as both a tank and DPS ring. The Moebius ends up having 5-10 extra item levels over the Red Rock, but getting two tanking rings from two factions was too easy for me to recommend the pattern.

By the way, there are three JCs in the AH right now on my realm getting into an undercut war over these rings, which are the easiest the craft. Highest buyout right now is 2800g. There is still a margin in there, but it is looking pretty slim.

Elementium Guardian (tanking neck)
Verdict: Very Good
Reason: There is no reputation alternative for (plate) tanking, and this necklace stacks up pretty favorably against the necklace off the JP vendor. Easy way to save yourself 18 heroic boss kills and applying those JPs towards other upgrades.

Ring of Warring Elements (Intellect ring)
Verdict: Slightly Good
Reason: The crafted ring is technically better item-point-wise than the Therazane ring, but it comes down to Haste vs Mastery, with most spellcasters preferring the former over the latter. Using one of each is fine, but Lost City of Tol’vir has two chances of dropping sidegrades in a single (usually easy) run.

Eye of Many Deaths (Intellect neck)
Verdict: Garbage
Reason: This item is underbudget. Normally, a socket on an item of this level comes at the expense of 20 Intellect, but the Eye loses 40. Yes, the socket bonus grants 10 back, but that still puts it 10 Intellect down from where it should be. To get an idea of what this means, compared to the necklace off the JP vendor, the Eye has +112 Haste vs +20 Int, +92 Spirit, +3 Mastery – in other words, 112 vs 115, but 20 of those points are from Intellect (e.g. they are worth more) so it is even worse.

Two other issues are that A) Twilight Highland factions offer an epic caster necklace at Exalted, and B) the upcoming Love is in the Air holiday is most likely going to be dropping 100% sidegrades to this crafted necklace.


Elementium Destroyer’s Ring (Agility Ring)
Verdict: Amazing
Reason: Simply put, this ring is probably overbudget. The other Agility ring is a joke compared to this one, as you end up looking at +30 Agility vs +27 Crit and +3 Hit – even if primary stats had the same item point budget as secondary stats (they don’t), under no circumstances is that Agility gain not leaps and bounds better. The budgeting discrepancies continue when compared to the other 346 Agility rings, with the Destroyer consistently coming out 9 item points ahead despite being 346 like all the others. This ring is the closest you can get in WoW to a free lunch.

Band of Blades (Agility Ring)
Verdict: Mostly Garbage
Reason: Now we know where the Elementium Destroyer got all its extra lunch money… by stealing from its little brother. Essentially, Band of Blades does not compare well with the Destroyer nor does it compare very well with the Therazane reputation ring – it has 116 vs 107 from the Therazane ring, but 10 of that 107 is straight-up Agility. I am not aware of the exact formula of primary vs secondary, but when you have to bust out that particular design rubric just to figure out if a potentially 5000g ring comes up even with an easy reputation option, it is time to throw in the towel.

Obviously Hit rating can be important, which is the only reason why Band of Blades is “mostly” garbage. None of the rings are Unique-Equipped, so if you have a dearth of Hit rating on your otherwise amazing gear, you might get some benefit from dual-wielding (dual-knuckling?) these rings.

Brazen Elementium Medallion (Agility Neck)
Verdict: Not Recommended Actually BiS?

Reason: Everyone who finishes questing in Hyjal will be Revered with the Guardians of Hyjal, which means all those people will have access to a necklace at level ~82 that they cannot wear until 85, but is basically identical to this crafted one. The Medallion (once socketed) will have +112 Crit over the Acorn‘s +96 Mastery and +5 Haste. Yes, 112 > 111. Incidentally, 5000g > 21g. Your market for this necklace will be idiots and people who have sworn a blood oath against questing in Hyjal. So, idiots, basically.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, Shadowpanther is actually showing this to be BiS for rogues, 2nd only to an epic 372 heroic Valiona neck drop. This obviously changes things quite a bit.

Entwined Elementium Choker (Agility Neck)
Verdict: Garbage
Reason: Against its Brazen brother, the Choker is down 11 item points. The Chocker is down 1 item point against the JP necklace. Finally, against the Acorn (aka Revered with Hyjal neck), the Choker sits at +65 Crit and +21 Haste vs Acorn’s 86 Mastery, e.g. they’re even. Individual stat weights will probably push the Choker ahead in that particular case, but nothing approaching it being more worthwhile to not just buy the damn Acorn.

Hopefully you will have found the above useful, as I spent a tremendous amount of time writing it all. As I mentioned before, whether or not the JC items are objectively good has no real bearing on your ability to squeeze some profit out of crafting them. I have personally sold two Eyes of Death for an average of 5500g thus far, and that is by far the worst/most underbudget option out of any of them. If all the rest were on the same level as the Elementium Guardian and Elementium Destroyer, we would probably see a lot nicer demand across the board.

But let’s be honest here: we have all probably sold Ice Cold Milk, Enchanting Vellums, Vanishing Powder, and so on, at 1000% mark-ups. If we can sell items to people standing not even 20 yards away from the vendor we bought it from, we can sell rare BoE jewelry that looks/sounds cool for 4000g or more.

(This is my submission to Best of the month Blog Carnival, hosted by Not So Secret Society)

Being a highly successful auctioneer is a lot of work. It is all about risky venture capitalism, identifying nascent markets, tapping into hitherto untapped fonts of wealth, cultivating your own army of farmers, constant awareness of breaking-news patch notes, daily (or hourly) scanning of the AH, commercial espionage of your competition, and occasionally downright sabotaging of said competition.

Being a mildly successful auctioneer, by contrast, is pretty easy.

So you don’t have hours and hours to do dedicated research on potential markets and programming profit spreadsheets. What do you do? You do what the majority of the rational world does: you let other people do the heavy-lifting. Part of that is doing what you are doing right now, specifically reading gold blogs. There is a huge wealth of information out there that other people have obtained through grueling experience that you can simply read about and absorb vicariously. The break-point of Obsidium Ore, the various things you can do with it, pitfalls to avoid, and so on.

Of course, every server is different so it is not always profitable to just cut and paste. What does happen to be mostly profitable is to just cut and paste what your local competition is doing.

Remember when I was talking about owning the Defender’s Demonseye market? I had “discovered” that market after doing a lot of research on the Elitist Jerks website and basically had a monopoly for several weeks. Nowadays, I have at least four other JCs competing with me such that I would be lucky hitting a 10g profit margin per gem. While it is possible that these goons independently came to the same conclusion I did based on EJ research, I find it infinitely more likely they simply saw that I had 250g gems up on the AH and was making money hand over fist.

So, if you are strapped for time, be that goon.

My goon-making addon of choice is Auctionator. If you head over to the Buy tab, you can Shift-click an item in your inventory to search for the current prices of that item. If that item is a raw material whose name appears in the finished product, you can get some rather nice information. For example, when I went to my AH just now and Shift-clicked on Demonseye, the following appeared:

Err… yeah. So apparently there were a lot of Demonseyes up for 39g whereas the Defender’s cut was at 120g. I had basically moved on from that market, but in the course of writing this article, it appears to have been (temporarily) profitable again. Aaaaaaaand that really proves my point about surfing coattails. If they are making money, then I should be able to make money undercutting them. So I bought a bunch of uncut Demonseyes and tossed some Defender’s up on the AH.

Notice towards the bottom of that list there are Sovereign cuts going for 195g with 1 available and Timeless cuts at 350g with 3 available. With some leftover JC tokens, I went ahead and bought those patterns and tossed some more cut gems at 185g and 250g respectively. Did I have the time or inclination to research whether those cuts are valued and desirable? Nope. I’m simply assuming that whoever that guy is who listed them knows what he/she is doing. They shouldn’t get too mad since I won’t be moving into their market long-term, and even if they do get mad, what are they going to do? It is not as though they can sabotage a basically random coattail riding strategy.

If you also noticed, I did not buy the Guardian or Shifting Demonseye patterns despite them being listed at the top there with zero auctions up. I absolutely would have done that instead if I had the time to research the matter a bit more. I actually do have the literal time, but I’m writing in-character to prove a point. Namely that one should expect mild success from this strategy, not fantastic, mind-blowing, gold-capping success. It could entirely be the case that the Sovereign and Timeless cuts are garbage that only one dude is supplying because he is a highly successful auctioneer engaged in some AH R&D in squeezing blood from rocks… and failing. In which case I just blew six JC tokens and six Demonseyes on nothing.

On balance though, surfing coattails generally leads you to second-hand success more often than not. Or at least the general zip code of success.

I used the example of JC, but this really applies to every profession out there. In the purest form, what you are doing is what any Herbalist does when they go to the AH: look at what is currently the most expensive herb and then going out and farming that. You end up always chasing the market instead of leading it, but the price of the latter is blood, sweat, and tears. Many, many tears.

As I was browsing the prices of herbs and ore the other day, I was struck by the disparity in prices. Twilight Jasmine was tanking down below 100g a stack whereas Heartblossom was still going strong at 300g, seven weeks after the expansion hit. As most of us remember, Blizzard nerfed the spawn rate of herbs and ore pretty hardcore a week after release, but that apparently had no real effect on Twilight Jasmine and other select herbs, right? After all there were 100+ stacks up on the AH for way less than market price… all from the same seller… in 12 hour auctions… with a name like Hlakwjerna…

Ladies and gentlemen, we are dealing with a bot farmer.

More specifically, what we are dealing with is someone with an insurmountable competitive advantage when it comes to farming ore and herbs. Although WoW is played on Blizzard servers (as opposed to private servers), most of the terrain features are actually handled client-side, which means illegal 3rd-party hacks can cause your toon to zip around the map, farm inside terrain features, and otherwise eliminate the tedious flying time between nodes. Then the bots off-load their ill-gotten gains on the AH as a way of farming gold, which they turn around and sell to other players at a premium, which they recover later by the keyloggers they festoon their pages with. There is a sort of sick, predatory logic that probably sends marketing directors’ black little hearts aflutter.

The reason I bring all this up is because I never quite realized the role bot farmers played in the complex AH ecosystem until… they were gone. Perhaps it was a ban or perhaps the botter went on vacation, but most of last week saw the soaring of ore and herb prices on my realm as the cheap supply all dried up. My normal routine, like most auctioneers I imagine, is to log on, loot mailbox, relist unsold merchandise, and then eyeball the AH to see about replacing sold goods or exploring new markets. The problem was… I couldn’t. Or, rather, it did not make any sense to.

When Obsidium Ore is below 54g a stack, the sky is essentially the limit. You could prospect the ore, cut the gems, and sell them to a vendor. You could try selling the raw gems. You can take the gems and transmute them into Shadowspirit Diamonds. You could even turn the gems into Fire Prisms for kicks (and probably a loss) or just to see if you could squeeze a Chimera Eye out of the deal. Or, hey, how about smelting the Obsidium into bars and selling those. Or smelt the bars and then make gear/weapons via Blacksmithing. And so on and so forth. When ore is that cheap, not only do you profit, but generally other people further down the chain also benefit, perhaps by flipping your own goods or further processing your product.

When Obsidium Ore is north of 150g a stack however, things start to slow down. Prospecting the ore and vendoring cut gems is off the table. Selling uncut gems only makes sense if you can fetch more than 25g per gem on average. Even then, there really is not much of a reason for you to even attempt the endeavor since you are taking on huge risk (deposit fee of 3g per gem) for a slim-to-none profit margin. Getting 18 gems for a Shadowspirit transmute would take 450g worth of ore in a perfect world, but likely closer to 750g; selling uncut Shadowspirit Diamonds for 375g apiece sounds good, but only because we were getting them out of 54g Obsidium Ore stacks.

Expensive Obsidium Ore causes everything derived from Obsidium Ore to become more expensive to compensate. “Duh,” right? But expensive ore also causes aunctioneers like myself to withdraw from those markets as the profit margins similarly shrink, further constricting supply, driving prices higher. Buyers dry up as they are priced out of the market, further reducing demand pressure. The supply/demand logic would normally dictate that high Obsidium prices would mean more people farming it, but that only holds if that Obsidium is actually selling for 150g. If it is selling at all, it certainly wouldn’t be to me – while I am not egotistical enough to believe I represent even a signifigant portion of the Auchindoun AH market, I do believe I am a decent enough precursor to the behavior of other aunctioneers. Less demand, less supply, and that ineffable quality of less AH activity period, which further depresses the market as players start to decide “this realm’s AH sux” and either transfer or don’t bother using it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing stagflation in a videogame.

There is no question that bots (usually temporarily) ruin gathering profession markets. With Obsidium Ore at 54g, it makes almost zero sense at all to go out mining for the purpose of making a profit. Bots also sell gold to gold-selling sites who then gum up Trade with spam and force us all to type in 7-8 digit Authenticator numbers every time we log in for the rest of time.

That said… cheap materials light up the AH like a Christmas tree. People buy more, turn what they bought into more stuff, and everyone in the AH ocean rises together as the water rains down (though some of us are in bigger boats). Items which make no sense at all to make at the true market price of their mats (i.e. potions) sprout up like mushrooms. The volume of activity encourages more people to get in on a piece of the action, and everyone generally profits thereby.

Are bots strictly necessary for a healthy, functioning WoW economy? Ehh… right now, I would actually argue yes. The reason why you see a bot posting 100 stacks of ore/herbs for ridiculously cheap is because whatever gold he/she is losing by selling below the market price is more than made up by the competitive advantage the bot has in terms of time spent farming it. A human player may not farm for anything below 100g a stack because they probably will only collect X stacks in an hour, and they will want more than the Y gold they could have gotten by doing dailies for that same hour. A bot could probably farm X*5 stacks in comparison, so profit is being made even at 20g.

Blizzard cannot directly dictate farmed material prices, but what it absolutely has control over is how long it would take to farm various things like Obsidium or… Heartblossom. Indeed, Heartblossom is really the control group in my argument as its nodes were nerfed just like the others, but it is a market untouched by the botters (presumably because of the level requirement to zone in). Right now, Heartblossom is at 300g a stack, with there only being 2-3 stacks up at any given time. At 300g/stack, you would assume the market would be all over Deepholm farming the crap out of the herb, but that is precisely what you do not see. With how difficult it is to farm post-nerf, the price should actually be even higher, but no one really wants to buy any at 300g, let alone higher. The market has essentially given up on Heartblossom, to everyone’s detriment.

Things might be different on a larger server. The sheer, crushing number of warm bodies might be enough to sustain a non-bot-driven economy. All I know is that on my small pop server, when the bots unload their warez on the AH it feels like two tons of bottled water was air-dropped onto the deserted island that is Auchindoun. Twinks get geared, potions get brewed, fortunes are made. When they don’t show up? The AH turns into The Road v2.0.