THIS IS MADNESS!

THIS IS MADNESS!

THIS. IS. MY. MARKET.

Alright, so maybe I'm going a little overboard, but this is a follow up on the blacksmith shenanigans from earlier. Here's the situation in case you missed it. One person had no idea what they were doing and posted every craft at zero profit. No goals competative meta goals in mind, just trying to make any gold they could, erroneously thinking that endercutting by 400g meant things would sell faster (Hint: it doesn't; a 1c undercut is the same as a 400g). Her presence had 2 of my BS guildies and 2-3 other competitors posting under 100g for current items that should be worth over 400-500g. Then, it spread. 

She had an alt.

I looked at leatherworking and the same was happening there. Then the presence of leather prices drove down cloth prices and then the whole AH started dropping. Not a lot mind you- 5%, maybe 10%. There's a lot going on in the marketplace, and I'm not sure if it was this girl's fault, but I'm personally vested and wasn't willing to take the chance. I also have a lot of inventory at stake. So, I took a big risk and made a play.

I reset the PvP market. All of it. It was awesome. Literally went through and bought/reposted at 150% global median price every single item on the AH that started with the word "Crafted." 500 pieces in total. But because prices were so ridiculously low, I was able to do this for only about 65k. Granted, that's a lot, and way more than I'm willing to afford right now. But luckily, even if they don't all sell, they're all good looking transmog stuff that will sell for more than 90g later.

Temporary results:

Two blacksmiths have dropped: the main undercutter, and one other that I didn't keep track of

One of my guildies stopped undercutting by as much. Not sure why. I should talk to him though, because he's killing his profit.


Now, I don't normally do talking points but let's throw this one out there:
Do you guys think this was a good idea or a bad one?
What else good could happen?
How could it backfire?

Storytime and Heroic Thunderforged

STORYTIME
Well, I took a little time off the heavy grind, as I alluded to in my last post. But I have two fun and quick stories to share with y'all that you can hopefully take with you on your WoW goldmaking journeys.

Hell yah! Storytime!

Situation 1: As I said on my Twitter, there were no Ghost Iron Bars up on the AH the other day. This never happens. So, while on my glyph poster, I decided to pull from my inventory and do a quick reset. Average prices for bars are about 7g each on my sever. Posted ten stacks of 10 at 18g each, ten stacks of 10 at 15g each. and five stacks of 20 at 13.5g each. (Low volume buyers are forced to buy the more expensive ones, and if someone needs a lot, you get the profit as they buy up the ladder). Anyways, within a minute or two, someone posted ten stacks at 7g each. Since he was online, I whispered him to suggest that he could earn a higher profit if he posted higher, somewhere in the range of 8g and my price of 13.5g. 

         Understand, I'm a nice guy, trained in communication and conflict resolution. I also try to follow a rule of never explicitly telling anyone how to play or exactly what to do. Also, while I understand econ, I'm not an expert, and the Auction House is ridiculously complex (no really, there's a reason I haven't linked my charts and graphs), so I don't have enough foundation to tell someone exactly what to do. Long story short, this guy goes ballistic on what was polite advice (*cough* that he later took *cough*) calling me names, cussing me out, letting me know he can post how he pleases, for some reason repeatedly pointing out that this is a "GAME," and flaming me in trade. 

        The punchline of the story is, that he was doing things against his guild's code of conduct. I know this because I happen to also be in that guild. I also happen to have been an officer in that guild since the launch of Cataclysm. Moral: be careful which anonymous bank toons you cuss out, or better yet, just be a nice person all the time. Otherwise, you might just get a shiny new /gkick.

Situation 2: This one is more of a throw-your-hands-up-in-defeat problem. Below is a picture of a competitors recent sales.

Blacksmiths will immediately know where this is going

There is a blacksmith on server named Kirien. Kirien thinks that 100g is a good price for blacksmith gear. Reckles likes higher prices. Kirien likes to post low. Kirien also posts a lot. Reckles does not like Kirien being in the market. But seriously, of the pieces listed in the picture above the CHEAPEST median price globally is 415g. Since I haven't been online as much, I can't keep her or him in check either. It's terrible because I see other people starting to undercut and post at 98g, and 97g. I've reset a few times, but other than building up a massive inventory of pvp gear I just don't know what to do. One thing this blacksmith is doing very well is crafting/posting daily, but she is just making very little profit. Please, everyone reading know that if you're the cheapest on the market, it doesn't matter if you're selling for 100g or 500g, people still buy happily as long as you're under the global average price. The difference is that if it took you 5 minutes to gather the ore and post the 11 pieces of gear in the picture above, then selling them them at Kirien's prices would earn you about 250g profit (her actual profit). If you sell them at the median price, you might not sell as many, but you don't need all of them to sell to compete with that profit; you just need to sell ONE, because selling ONE piece earns you 450g profit. 

      I'm almost frustrated enough to go on another binge.

RAIDING

In raiding news, we got the stupid turtle down after three days on the last pull of the week. As a Titan's Grip player, I'm sad, as a Fury Warrior, I'm ecstatic, because Shellsplitter Greataxe HTF and Shellsplitter Greataxe H both dropped. As my raid leader said as soon as they dropped "Welcome to SMF, Reckles!" Really though, it's kindof a WoW dream come true. There is legitemately no better weapon for a fury warrior in the entire game than what I have right now. It's so surreal. Like, if I work hard and practice and theory craft, I can now be one of the best dps in the world, because gear is no longer holding me back. That shiz is cray cray. Anyways, thanks for letting me brag a little about my weapons, guys!

Until next time remember that the best way to make gold in WoW is to 

Search. Craft. Post.

Every Day

Lesson Learned

So, I think I hit it too hard last week. I mean, didn't do too much out of the ordinary, but with the blog taking off, I guess I wanted to show off for you guys and show that I knew what I was talking about. You know, get my bankroll up and all that jazz. Granted, I did that, so my bank toon is happy, but honestly, I'm just whooped.

All that Bubbling Anima makes her sleepy.

      In the past week, I kept things pretty normal, but added an extra cancel/rescan during the day, which is against my whole "diversify" mantra. Rather than craft once every day or two, I crafted once or twice a day. While that's probably normal for some moguls out there, I'm not used to it. And honestly, it got me thinking about doing a mass crafting session of the pvp goods during the weekends. You know, "make 5 of each of the contenders sets." Something along those lines. So I can just "Set it and Forget it."

Don't you toy with me Ron Popeil!

      In other news, some friends over at Stormspire recommended some other blacksmith transmog craftables so I bought about 30k of mob drop recipes off the AH (Don't worry, they were all good deals! I checked!) So, hopefully that'll increase income in the near future. One problem I've run into though is finding a way to find and store the huge amount of new mats required for the transmog items. With current gear, crafting is simple; get GIB and Trillium, and find an anvil. With transmog crafting, once you load your queue, you're presented with 80 billion different mats. It's very profitable, and I've already broken even with a majority of the items still on the AH, but crafting has been a pain. It'll take a little doing and some time in Excel but a dealfinding list should do the trick. That way, any time I there are mats on the AH, I'll be able to snatch them up. Not 100% sure how best to prepare for future crafts though, but, experience will tell. I'll let you know as I go. Until then, keep up the routine and remember to

Search. Craft. Post.
Every Day.

Glypher to 65

Short post today, but made a big step in the glyph market. Finally had enough time to get my glyph maker to level 65. Which means, she can start learning and making Lick King/Northrend glyphs. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, but as far as I know, that's a huge majority of them. DK's don't have any higher than that, and a few other classes too. So while I won't be able to play in the entire market, once I spend the next 80 years doing Daily Northrend Research, I'll be able to at least see what the profit potential of the glyph market really is. The past two weeks have been beetween 3k and 4k. Hopefully we'll be able to improve on that pretty significantly, since today alone I learned 15 new recipes. For fellow inscriptionists, don't forget to regularly scan the AH for Books of Glyph Mastery under 300g or so. They only save you one daily cooldown though if you're considering profitability, so really, even 100g is too much in a competitive market.

Not sure if I'll power level this toon to 90 so she can do MoP inks and glyphs or not, but I'm just glad there's forward momentum in what has been a fairly stagnant section of my gold making strategy. 

 Well, I'm off to scrutinize some Horridon videos and see where I can improve.