Lets talk competition

My competition to be exact. Almost immediately I noticed the main competitor in the rune market and have since noticed another. The second one only works the high end stuff while the first sells almost everything in game. And just about all of it is selling under materials. They're obviously in the "farmed it for free" group of idiots. This is apparent in the fact that they're continuously selling things and continuously online. Far far more than me and this is truly frightening.

How do you kill that which has no life?

Well I already know how. Today I ask a better question: how do you kill somebody that has a lot of cash and places absolutely zero value on their time? That's an important question indeed and unfortunately is one that I have no answer to. The second one is obviously a businessman, a goblin. I can understand them and therefore am able to handle them eventually. A legitimate, honest to god no-lifer is something you don't come across every day and is a little depressing if you ask me.

Suffice to say this is a serious problem, one that I don't expect to solve any time soon. In the mean time though I have to learn to deal with it. The first thing I'm doing is trying to find out when it is that they post what on the AH. As far as I know there is no macro or script that you can use to make the cancel/post cycle any faster or easier. Trust me I've looked, oh dear how I have looked.

This means that they're doing all of this by hand for hours at a time. That leads me to believe that they only do a single cycle when they go to do one, they would have to truely be inhuman to camp the AH with as much crap as they're listing. If that's the case I'm going to have to REALLY work hard to take them apart.

The name of the game here is adaptation.

I'm going to have to adapt to how they play and change my methods around to suit this unique situation. Obviously I've had to deal with campers and the like before, but NEVER one this insane. And it figures that they're the first one that I come across on a brand new game where I barely have a leg to stand on financially. It seems to me that they flush the AH at least 3 times a day and as many as 5. I haven't managed to pin down any sort of schedule that they have, but I do know that they're not camping me specifically. So I've added them to my friends list and am doing the tried and true "list when they're done" method. It seems to be working so far.

In addition to that I'm doing exactly what anybody should do with a camper; make their AH life miserable. I've decided that 70g is as low as I will sell any rune which is a 100% profit. While that might seem good, that's only a 50g profit margin off the mats. 50g is almost nothing.

The main thing I have to do is find a pattern. If they have a pattern it will tell a lot about how often they camp and what they sell when. If I can figure this out then I can easily work myself around them and make a nice profit. But until then I'll let them buy up my cheap runes when they reset the price only to be undercut. They're starting to sound a little blue..


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