What every scribe asks Part 3

NOTE: Patch notes for 4.1 are starting to come in. The most notable one so far is that two new heroics are being added in that drop i353 epic lewts. That means that crystals are going to be flooding in pretty soon. Once more is released I'll be giving my take on it. Time to pick up them bracer enchant recipes!


Finishing off my series on what every scribe asks about campers we'll be going over an intermediate situation. Campers are a huge problem for every scribe out there and the come in different levels. Sometimes they're seemingly on every hour of the day with varying levels of aggression and intelligence while sometimes they're only camping certain times/days. I've covered the best and worst case scenarios so today we'll look at a much more realistic situation.

The tips for today will mostly be a combination of others that I have mentioned previously, but will be presented in a specific order. The order that I mention things in is so that you'll lose as little money as possible and spend as little time as necessary. But be advised when dealing with a goblin as with any camper you are going to lose time and money. If you don't lose money directly you'll lose a lot of potential profit, this is something inescapable that you'll just have to muscle through.

Today we'll assume the following about your competition:

- Has a schedule
- Threshold of 1g
- Undercuts by 5g
- Large stokpile of inks
- Ink supply only comes from the AH
- Fall back price of 300g
- Glyphs cost 30g to make
- Buys your glyphs when prices drop

If you look at the assumed information, you can probably guess that we're looking at your typical goblin. They're readily willing to take a loss to force you out and do not farm anything but the AH. They're on a set schedule, have a good degree of know how, and are adept at flipping the glyphs of their competition. As always, you won't get rid of them easily but it's far from impossible.

Before anything else you'll want to shift your schedule around so that you pop in about an hour after they finish up their normally scheduled auctions. This will buy you some time to set up your preferred course of action. Or if they happen to be the less observant type it'll take a while for them to catch on giving you temporary control of the market sales.

The first thing you'll want to do is simply put a price cap on every glyph. If their fall back price is 300g, drop it by half down to 150. If it's 150, drop it down to about 80. You want to lower the prices so that the allure of easy money isn't so prevalent. This is the main thing that will attract a goblin to a particular market so by removing that you are a step closer to removing the goblin. But do do this you have to lower the prices on every glyph you sell and not just the popular ones.

However if it costs you 30g to make a glyph then the 80g price cap probably won't be worth the time and effort to continue working glyphs when they drop to 31. So to avoid this instead of setting your bottom threshold to 1g over materials set it to 65. That way you'll keep getting a somewhat acceptable profit while still being able to drop the max price for your competition. This is the first step in making the market no longer viable for them while still trying to keep your profits up. While you're still making an acceptable profit, they'll either be making very little profit or none at all.

The only way for them to get around this is to buy up your mid range priced glyphs, which is never going to be a great idea. The difference here is that you won't be having a price war and forcing them to buy up your low priced glyphs. With a smart player on the other end they'll be able to buy and move them when you're not around and make up their losses. But with this method the only place they'll have to go is where you're not.

The next step is to once again stokpile every herb that you can and cut off their supply. You'll want to cut off as much of their supply as possible so that the lower prices will be more of an impact. When supply is low and so are prices it won't seem such a great idea to work in a market. It's sort of like seeing silver rods on the AH for 5g and never see more than 3 silver bars up for 3g, it's just not worth it. By doing this you'll give the impression that glyphs are just not good for your server. Most people won't be sticking around if this goes on for a while.

Keep this up for about two weeks and see if they're still around. What some people will do are let you lower the prices and give you the market to trick you that they're getting out of it. Then once you raise prices back up they come back in at full force. If this is the case (which is very common) once they take a break you want to check to see if they're really gone. Start to raise the prices slowly. By slowly I mean add about 10g to your max sale price no sooner than every two days. Once things have gone back up to around the previous high prices is when they'll come back. You'll want to have a set of two or three of every glyph that you don't post for if/when this happens.

If they're taking a break this is when they'll come back. When they do you'll want to list all of the "reserve glyphs" that you have in storage on top of what you already have in the AH at your former reduced price cap. You do this as a sort of "hah, I gotcha!" so show that you haven't gotten lazy and are still paying close attention and aren't going to give up the fight so easily. It's another small way to push their buttons and annoy them further into frustration.

If they back out again then you basically have driven them out but only so long as you keep prices in a middle range instead of the 300g per glyph range. Low profits with high sales is better than high profits with low sales. You always have to look at the bottom lines and not just look for big numbers in the mailbox. Be smart, be aggressive, but don't get greedy. If glyphs are only about the money and not about achieving a goal then you're going to get stressed and annoyed far too easy for it to be worthwhile. Keep all of this up and it should do the trick in most average situations.


Ok these three entries should pretty much cover the bases of dealing with campers in the glyph business. So far we have looked at dealing with the worst type of campers, shrewd goblins, and semi-casual businessmen. I hope you've learned a few new tricks to add to your arsenal of dealing with competitors and are able to get rid of a camper or two. If you feel that there's something important that I've missed by all means make a comment and I'll look into writing another entry to cover it.


Thanks for stopping by!