Normally I don't post on the weekends, but I'm going to post what I had for Monday a day early since it's about such an odd occurrence.
Ok I had an entirely different post lined up for today, but because of a bizarre instance with the AH, it must be delayed. You'll be reading a bit about it in my business report tomorrow, but I'll be going a bit in depth with it today. Last week starting on Wednesday day, the epic gem market was absolutely FLOODED! I mean retarded amounts of raw gems being posted in droves by hundreds of different people. The price of a raw gem dropped by over 30g in a single night. Cardinal rubies was down to 140g when it's normally seen at 170 for god's sake. Then as you'd imagine over the next two-three days the prices of cut gems dropped accordingly.
However once the Sunday rolled around the prices of raw gems went back up, followed by cut, and then supply was all but dried up. Ok you're probably thinking so what, floods and spikes aren't exactly news worthy. Shit happens. You are absolutely correct my friend, this sort of thing does happen in every market. But here's the kicker. If you read Anaalius' blog (points over to yonder blog list) you'll see that they had the same thing happen on their server around the same time as it did on mine. And yes they are on a different server than me. I also spoke with a few people I know on other servers as well and the exact same thing happened with them at roughly the same damn time. An unprecedented flood of epic gems. Complete crash of the market. Two days later it's as if it never happened and it's back just business as usual. What gives?
Naturally my gut instinct was telling me not to buy because we all know the market is going to crash some what soon. However with a new raid coming and the next expansion still being a long ways off I resisted the urge to flee and kept gobbling up all the cheap as hell gems that I could. In fact you could probably even hear my mage yell "OM NOM NOM!" with each buy out. That's how I wound up with the gigantic stokpile of raw epics that I have now. It's a damned good thing I kept buying because prices are back to normal and I haven't seen any 90g gems being posted in the last few days. Not even a single "titanium farmer" has been selling them in /2 lately.
Now this just begs the painfully obvious question... wtf? How could this huge AH event happen on several servers in the same time frame without it being patch day or some otherwise common occurrence (generally with advance notice). Normally when somebody on my server comments on a price spike or price crash I usually reply with "yeah sorry about that" because with my massive buying and competitive style I almost always have a large hand in it. Now I might be good at the AH game, but I'm not THAT good. I can't effect an entirely different server with my antics, though that would be pretty damn bad ass if I did.
So what are the possible reasons for this? Aside from these three possible answers, I am completely clueless as to any other explanation. Do you have any ideas? Has this temporary crash of the epic gem market happened for you as well?
Here's my three guesses.
Coincidence.
You'll get your biggest supply of epic gems shortly after a WG battle ends because of all the honor that gets accumulated from so many people all at once. From HK's to quests to turning in SKS. What could have happened is that a ton of people did their full set of WG quests at the same time and went right to the AH. This is possible as sales have been rather slow during the week so maybe not many people were playing until Friday-ish and they all had their WG quests reset. Possible, but what are the chances of that happening on several unrelated servers? Who knows highlander!
It could easily be something as simple that this sort of coincidence happens all the time and this just so happened to be the first time that it effected me. Anything is possible I suppose.
Server glitch.
Again going with the WG theory. It's possible that something could have happened on Blizzard's end that caused all the WG quests to reset for everybody. Since you can get precious EoF and top of the line end of expansion gear, on my server there's always a massive amount of people trying to do WG. Lots of people going in every 3 hours and getting a handful of gems leads to this sort of market crash. But unless there's a big patch or server maintenance going on the WoW servers are pretty damned reliable. However this is still a possibility because bugs do come up and nobody is perfect so something could have easily gotten mucked up to cause it. I have no idea for sure as I haven't done WG in ages.
Anaalius says:
Direct rip from a comment blow.
"I guess it could be the time of the pvp season where most / a lot of people have completed gearing up in the gear they can buy with honour, yet they are still doing the daily battleground for arena points.
Nowadays when you win the first bg of the day you get normally at least 5k sometimes 8k honour points as well as the 25 arena points. this should mean after just 2 days everyone who does this daily should be able to buy a gem to sell, and this is after only one battleground a day. The poorer people who just need gold for repairs / flasks may just grind these bg's for the easy honour nowaday."
The obvious answer.
It was a wizard.
Thanks for stopping by!
ha i agree with it was a wizard.
ReplyDeleteI guess it could be the time of the pvp season where most / a lot of people have completed gearing up in the gear they can buy with honour, yet they are still doing the daily battleground for arena points.
Nowadays when you win the first bg of the day you get normally at least 5k sometimes 8k honour points as well as the 25 arena points. this should mean after just 2 days everyone who does this daily should be able to buy a gem to sell, and this is after only one battleground a day. The poorer people who just need gold for repairs / flasks may just grind these bg's for the easy honour nowaday.
ta for the plug too
xoxo anaalius
Ps. i would stock up on the cheap gems as long as you have a few cuts which can bring 30+ profit and sell kind of fast. I spent 7k today on cheap uncut gems. Dont think they will get much lower in uncut price until after ruby sanctum.
@ Liam
ReplyDeleteOh it was soooo totally a wizard! Heh, but I agree it could just be that time of the arena season. Just about anybody who's serious into areana has most of their wrathful sets already. I actually hadn't thought of that possibility so thanks for the idea.
/ninja edit
As for stoking up on cheap gems I'm just buying en masse, no holds barred so to speak. Since I have some ridiculous campers to deal with I have to sometimes accept a night of 5g profits per sale just to ensure that they don't get any profit. Yeah, I'm a spiteful bastard like that but it definitely gets them off my back every now and then for a few weeks at a time. Mwaahahahaa!
^^
ReplyDeletesadely it didn't happen on my server, the prices are still at 130g per raw gem and only the eye of zul ist at 100g
even the gems begin to rise in price again Ô.o I don't know why but they where cheaper once for a while
My server is kinda strange. The same happend with the gems but not just the gems. Alot of other mats and items have also dropped 30-40%.
ReplyDeleteSome of the raw gems are even down to 50-60g each and the prices are still low. It take long time before the prices get up again and have always been like this.
Some part of me want to buy ALOT of cheap gems and other mats. But the other part of me is scared the prices wont go much up again...
This crash happened on my server as well. I also ate up all those yummy raw gems and cut some of them up nice and purty-like for reposting.
ReplyDeleteOn the enchanting front, there's been a sudden flood of Abyss Crystal for 30g and under, and Greater Cosmic Essence for 15g and under. This comes after a drought of these mats over about a 2 week period (or at least a drought for the prices I prefer to pay for them). Unfortunately, there has also been a sudden increase in AH scroll campers. I swear there is this one banker that is on 24/7. A few hours this afternoon is the longest I've seen him offline in over a week, as I've got him on all of my characters' friends lists (even with his weird letters) and from talking to several other people on the server, this seems to be the case. Do people actually dual-box or bot the AH?? Anyway, I've still been able to sneak through a decent amount of sales, and I've suddenly got a massive stock of scrolls with all the mats I was able to acquire cheap. Although, many of the scrolls I want to post I won't until the campers stop posting below material cost. The no-lifers definitely make it more frustrating to make gold.
@ Charlie
ReplyDeleteOddly enough I've also been in a large flux of cheap cosmics and crystals, odd. And yes people do dual box to work the AH. It might save a lot of time having your banker on auto follow your crafter and just trading things to them, but it does cost an extra $15 a month for that option. Personally I never saw the point of dual boxing, I craft so much that the mail is just better.
As for the camper there's nothing you can do to force them to go away. You can just make it not worth their while, besides they can't post at a loss for ever. How long can you is the question.
@ BMK
ReplyDeleteSometimes you don't get much time to think and plan your AH game and ahve to gowith your gut instinct. Obviouslly I'd just buy up the super gems and see what I can do with them later. Even after prices drop there will always be drops in supply to make up anything you might have lost later on.
Once you have a huge stokpile you can lower your buying threshold or just stop buying more if you're worries about prices going down even more. Personally I'm taking a risk and continuing to buy every gem I find at my normal price. We'll see how it all works out.
/hopes
This happened on my server too. I'm just a casual seller so I sell gems once a week on Tuesdays. I think I have a fairly good finger on the pulse of that market but man, this week it was just crazy. Normally raws go for 100-120g on my server. I saw several down to 70g! And cut gems dropped in price accordingly. I'm not really confident enough to blow a big wad of my gold on a bunch of cheap gems since my bank account isn't THAT high (but its a lot higher from reading blogs like this, thanks!) but it did tell me that something was jacked and I should probably not try to sell what I have right now until the market stabilizes. I did pick up about 10 cheap raws though for next week so hopefully we'll see whats up.
ReplyDelete@ Prisoner
ReplyDeleteYou made a good move by not selling during the flood. I have a friend that just hates working the AH and sells me whatever gems they get with honor or xmutes at a good price and I told them about the flood and they decided also to wait for things to pick back up.
Granted gold is gold, but you never want to shoot yourself in the foot. I'm told it hurts. But I would recommend stocking up on a handful as the big name cuts like SP or strength will always fetch your a profit. You might b nervous with such a big investment but with gems the msot you'll lose is maybe 30g per gem if things get really bad and stay that way. Even for a casual seller such as yourself it's worth a small risk.
The same exact thing happened on my server (US-Sargeras). Gems bottomed out late last week at 80g with tons of each gem available, but by last night it had all dried up again and the markets reset at 110-130g. I was convinced the drop had to do with the honor increase and that the market would settle at this new low price. The reset makes no sense though.
ReplyDeleteIs it possible that the market really completely absorbed all these raw epics? That seems unlikely with the slowdown in raiding. The only real explanation that makes any sense is that there are enough big players to absorb the spike in supply on every server causing the market to dry up as the BG activity slowed down at the end of the weekend.
I think the market needs to come down closer to it's bottom levels again since the supply hasn't changed. There is just no explanation for how the additional supply is getting absorbed other than by big JC investors who can only absorb so much before they have to adjust their prices.
I predict the supply spikes will continue to pick up as the weekend approaches, and the big JC investors will be adjusting their prices as they realize there isn't enough demand for them to keep absorbing these spikes at the old price expectations. 80g-100g is the new epic gem value, mark my words ;)
I have a friend...we'll call her Sue to protect her identity. I met her a few years back when I [gasp!!!] bought gold in my stupidity. I was razzing her pretty good with the built in chat client and she was very nice. Well we became friends. Good friends. She writes me and I her...all the time; daily. She told me about an announcement that they were going to be losing their accounts because of a new law over in China that the government has enacted against farming gold in MMO's. They were ordered to liquidate all their stores of raw materials and try to get as much gold sold as possible. Well.... It turns out that this was a trick by a competing gold farming company and now they are replenishing their stocks. She said that their firm has over a thousand accounts across both US and EU servers. She is just a litigator but she witnessed the carnage that the rumor had on their hive.
ReplyDeleteI was very surprised to NOT see any mention of this on any other websites (MMO-Champ, WoWInsider, etc.). I never knew about it from the perspective that you guys have...I don't play the AH. I recently ran into a link to your site at Greedy Goblin and Google Reader loaded the last ten of your posts. When I got to this one the light bulb flashed brightly. Believe it or not a gold farming rivalry caused this epic flood of raw materials and it sounds like you guys are the benefactors...congrats! Crusard, AD-US
"Sue" is 28 and gorgeous BTW.
this crach happend on my server also (Shattered Hand - EU)
ReplyDeletethough they dropped from 170 to 100 in a matter of days, they have yet to increased in value.
:( this makes me a sad player
@Crusard
ReplyDeleteUnless you've met her IRL then she is probably not gorgeous, and possibly not even a she :)