Needing help with a few things

Hey all this is an odd Friday entry, but there's a number of random annoyances that I'm dealing with and was hoping to get some input over the weekend. I'm sure that I'm not the only person that has these issues so this can be useful for a handful of others. As you'll see they're nothing major, just small problems here and there that add up to one big annoyance.


Solved.
1. I'm having some major issues with long load times when I change toons. It use to take me about 20 seconds at the most to log out and into another one or to just reload my ui. Now it is taking well over a minute. It might not seem like a lot, but when you bounce around different toons as much as I do it adds up fast. Any thoughts on how to fix it would be great.

Keep in mind that I have very few addOns installed aside from the basic AH essentials. In addition to your standard AH set of tools I'm using recount, bagnon, carbonite, DDR (DK rune mod), mySales, auditor, omen, DBM.

Also, is it more likely that it's on my end with my connection or could it just be on blizzard's side?

- General concensus seems to be either A) blame the cataclusm, or B) upgrade to a solid state drive. Thanks to Jim and Snakeoil


Solved
2. First check out this screen shot right quick.



Notice the random things colored green? I have no idea what button I hit on accident to cause that, but I'm certain that it's auctioneer. It's always the first so many of listed auctions for any item. Annoying as hell, halp!

- It seems that it's a glitch between Atkis recipe list and auctioneer. Reloading or disable/enable shuffles seems to do the trick. Thanks to Kammler and a Anon.

Solved
3. I'm needing globe of water to craft the yeti pets but there's never any on the AH, not even at a crazy mark up. I'm looking for suggestions on where to farm them, with or without fishing. I've been using the suggestion of the wowhead comments and killing steaming fury's in Un'Goro crater but the drops are pretty low as you'd expect.

- General consensus is either eastern plague lands or ungoro crater. Thanks to everyone that replied.


On going important research... for science!
4. What's your favorite color?


Solved
5. How can I get rid of new player tool tips? Are they all that you get now? I'm talking about the ones that say "this attack does a lot of damage!" or "use this damage over time effect at the start of combat to get the full effect of the spell" and that silliness. I already know these things and I want to know how much damage something does in a tool tip aside from just saying "holy crap dude it's a lot!"

- Thanks to prancer and others that mentioned this. Interface, help, beginner tips. Never even thought to look there. /fail

On going
6. Anybody care to give me a quick once over on flasks now that the materials needed have changed? In wrath it was a god awful market to work in with the worst "profits" I've ever seen. I'm wondering if it's worthwhile now so any info would be fantastic.

- So far it seems that only one response was in the positive. Not looking good.

On going
7. I just found out the other day that large brilliant shards are no longer easy mode farmed from strat and that's why the prices have gone way up lately. Does anybody know of an easy-ish way to acquire these? It doesn't seem like DE is an option and the black rock instances are just plain hellish if you haven't done them a million times.

- So far it seems that UBRS is the way to go, but it can be very time consuming if you don't know your way around like me.

On going
8. I need a macro that cancels all of my auctions when I hit it. I used to have one that worked during wrath but now when I hit it, I get an error saying an addOn is preventing it. Well I'm not changing my addOns any time soon, so hopefully there's a different macro out that I can use instead.

- I know there are addOns that cancel what you're undercut on but what I'm wanting is any and all of them, even if I have to mush dah bootonz to sez ja it do are ok in words like makings now! LOUD NOISE!


Solved
9. I've taken to farming up rep from TBC to get the enchanting recipes from the various factions there. I do the heroics and a few on normal but that's when I get the "you've entered too many instances" error. I remember fro ma while ago when I was farming SM back at 70 that it was something like 5 instance resets per hour then you get locked out for a while. So what I'm wanting to know is how many is the limit? How long is the lock out for them? Does this include heroics as well as normals or are they on separate lock out timers?

- Thanks to Prancer again for the detailed answer and thanks to everyone else that confirmed it as correct.


Thanks for stopping by!

How much to Stokpile

One of the things that I get asked fairly often is how much I recommend to stokpile of certain things. I get asked for every market out there from enchanting mats to metal bars, to raw gems. So today I'll at least attempt to answer this question for many different markets. As always keep in mind that YMMV so what works for me may not work for you.

If you're not sure if it is right for you, here's what you need to consider. How much of that particular market to you have a take in? Are you the only one seriously working in it? How often does a good supply come in? And most importantly, how much can you afford to lose if it all turned to dust?

The reason that I chose these certain amounts is because it's the best balance that I can find between rate of sales and supply on my server. By the time that I'm running out of something a new large supply generally comes in. For the things I list as stokpiling as many as I can get, that's because either the supply is terribly low or the rate of sales are incredibly high. I'll make a note of which case it happens to be.

Now that that's covered, here's how much I (try to) stokpile in the many different markets that I work with.


Gems:
I try to keep 3 stacks of each color raw with 6 of each cut that I have made. For meta gems I try to keep as many as I can xmute due to the rate of sales. The patch sort of inflated the demand for them, but once things settle back down again I'll go back to 2 stacks of raw metas and 4 of each cut.


Inks and herbs:
Simply put there is never too much. Like any scribe will tell you a full bank tab of herbs can last you all of a week and then be gone. Especially needed are outland and NR level herbs as all of the good and high demand glyphs require them. So if you want to know how many herbs you should be milling, the answer is all of them.


Enchanting mats:
This is where the numbers get really big. I am not happy and comfortable unless I have 600 infinite and hypnotic dust hanging around. Yes 600 or 30 full stacks. That's because, you guessed it, so many are needed for all of the enchants and they tend to sell rather well for me. For essences I try and have around 200 greater and 30 lesser. As for heavenly shards I typically just buy them as I need them, but dream shards and abyss crystals I buy as many as possible. This is because I only buy when people are clearing out their banks and sell 9 stacks at 4g per stack.


Black smithing:
The main thing that I stokpile here is the mats for buckles. I try to have 2 full stacks crafted along with enough pyrium bars to make another two stacks. As for the elementium bars and volt earth, I stokpile as many as possible due to the scarcity of them and ore being prospected so much. But I'm usually happy when I have two full stacks of VE and 400 elementium bars hanging around. I try to have that many around because for one, buckles do sell that often, and for two I use them a lot for hard ele bars. The hard bars take 10 normal ones so that can suck up the supply extremely quick and I like to have two stacks of those around as well.


Enggy pets:
Due to the complexity of the materials and the annoyance of figuring them out, I keep a ton of them. I like to have 10 of each crafted and at least a full stack of everything that goes into them. I also keep around 50 fused wires to use and to sell. As for the mini fel reavers, I need a ton of the materials for other professions so I basically keep 4 crafted and only craft more as I need to. So I don't technically stokpile mats specifically for them.


Tailoring:
I try and keep 250 of every volatile around so that when the cloth CD comes up I won't be scraping them together and have plenty to use on all of my other markets as well. As for the netherweave bags and cloth... everything. I keep a full bank tab loaded up with pre crafted bags and my tailor has their bank loaded with plain cloth and bolts, whichever I happen to have the time to craft while afk. As for the imbued bags and cloth, I haven't come up with a number yet but it's around a stack of the cloth and 8 of the bags.

The main concern here is that the materials overlap with mongoose scrolls which are still one of my best items. As for the spell threads, I keep around 7 of the rare quality ones and the epics just sell in two days then I have to wait until the CD is back up.


Leatherworking:
I keep 6 of each profession bag and 6 of each rare leg armor. For the epic leg armors I have 4 around along with 4 spare hides to use or sell. Then once that's suited up I pile up as much savage and borean leather as humanly possible. This is due to both rate of sales and scarcity of materials.


Miscellaneous:
Vendor pets I keep a set of 4 on me at all times so that I only have to check their respective vendors once a week or so. All of the volatiles I want to have 250 around for the many things that use them.


One last thing to keep in mind that is very important. I probably have a lot more gold than you do. This isn't me bragging at all, it is just probably the case with most readers. Because of this I can afford to buy a lot more and sit on it longer without worry than you can. Gold is exponential in that the more you have the more you are capable of making. This is partially due to the amount of markets you can branch out into and partially because of how much you can stokpile to stay in them. So please be aware that if you only have 20k it's probably not a great idea to buy up 900 infinite dust and 600 celestial essences.

I hope that gives you a good idea of how much stuff I try and keep hanging around the guild bank for when it's needed. Again try and apply this to your markets as it is absolutely paramount to stokpile things that you work with daily. And don't be afraid to raise your buying price either. Remember, some profit is better than zero profit.


Thanks for stopping by!

The List: Updated

If you've been checking out The List lately you've probably noticed that I've been messing around with it a lot recently. Suffice to say it's changed enough that I wanted to make a full post about what's being changed with it. I'll be keeping it simple and only mentioning things that have been added or removed. One other nifty little change that I'm making is on what I sell, I'll be making a note of how many I keep in stock at all times. In addition I'll be doing the reverse and making a note of how much I stokpile on the Everything I Buy page.

The reason why things were removed should be obvious, they're not making money anymore or do it so slowly they're not worth looking into. Though there are a number of things that I've removed that are still great markets, but I no longer have the time and/or supply to keep up with them. Here's the changes that I've made so far.

REMOVED

Truesilver Rod
Enchanted Thorium Blades
Fel Iron Rod
Arcanite Rod

Transmute: Primal Might
Transmute: Arcanite

Alicite Pendant*
Beaming Earthsiege Diamond
Swift Skyflare Diamond
Eternal Earthsiege Diamond
Carnellian spikes*


Runescroll of Fortitude 2*
Mysterious fortune card*
Inferno Ink*
ALL GLYPHS

Frostweave Bag

Cloak - Greater Resistance

ADDITIONS

Beer-Basted Crocolisk

Savage Armor Kit*
Heavy Savage Armor Kit*
Dragonscale Leg Armor*
Charscale Leg Armor*
Icescale Leg Armor
Earthen Leg Armor
Frosthide Leg Armor

Regal Dream Emerald*
Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond*
Burning Shadowspirit Diamond*
Agile Shadowspirit Diamond*

Imbued Netherweave Bag

Tranquil Mechanical Yeti
De-Weaponized Mechanical Companion*

Enchant Gloves - Armsman
Cloak - Stealth
Enchant 2H Weapon - Mighty Agility

Pyrium Weapon Chain*
Bloodied Pyrium Boots
Bloodied Pyrium Shoulders*
Bloodied Pyrium Helm
Bloodied Pyrium Breastplate
Bloodied Pyrium Gauntlets
Bloodied Pyrium Legguards
Bloodied Pyrium Belt
Bloodied Pyrium Bracers
Pyrium Shield Spike
Elementium Deathplate*

Transmute: Inferno Ruby*
Transmute: Ember Topaz*


And that as they say is that. Is there anything that you used to sell that you've found isn't worth it anymore?


Thanks for stopping by!

Report: 3-1

Yes it's that time again. Today's the day of resets, updates, and weekly collections. Here's my weekly report of what I've been selling and in what markets. I also give a few notes on them with up to date market observations in addition to the weekly profit from everything combined. As always, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Previous week gold total: 982,000g
Total sales: 279,000
Weekly spending: BROKEN ADDON! Probably a lot.
Weekly profit: 3,000 (after vial of the sands)
Current gold total: 985,000




Profits from MySales:

Gems, LW, & misc:


Tailoring & vendor pets:


Enchanting & smithing:


Engineering & mining:




As you can guess from yesterday, it's been a good week for your favorite goblin. Good for selling and great for buying, teehee!

Detailed Recap:
--------------------
Finally! I picked up the recipe for the intellect meta gem for 12k and now have access to all three of them. So far I've made back my investment and am starting to profit on the strength version with agility not being too far behind. At a 12k price tag I should make my money back on the new one in about two weeks at most. I also grabbed the agility bracer enchant for 7k and am hoping to find the strength version for around the same price. I'm really hoping that Blizz makes crystals a little bit more available and does another gear reset and rains down the purples in the next tier of content.

I also want to thank everybody that suggested the plate pvp boe gear. If I didn't hear so many people claiming it was a great market I wouldn't have gotten into it. So far I've sold 5 sets of shoulders and towards the end of the week I got another fist full of sales for assorted other pieces at a great (100%) profit on the materials. It's been doing so well that I've picked up the recipes for all of the other pieces and they started selling that very night. The only down side is that my BS/ench banker main read head chica is at ZERO bag space. Dear god this can be a pain sometimes.


Since I got into the market fool, that's when!

With large brilliant shards being hard to come by my twink scrolls have been lagging very far behind. But the good part is that when I can get a half way decent price on them they sell hours later. Healing power and mighty int are the ones that are selling the most currently with 4 stats not even being looked at. I wonder why that is.

But I managed to catch a bunch of people dumping enchanting materials throughout the week from eternal essences (thank god!) to abyss crystals. So much so that I'm over a thousand infinite/hypnotic dust, 200 cosmics and abyss crystals. So yeah, I now have a bank tab and half a personal bank filled to the brim with mats. I think I'm good for a while.

The sales on gem bags and imbued nether bags have picked up as well which has put a huge damper on my arcane dust supply. I think I'm down to about 4 stacks left with goose scrolls still going fast. Also the LW profession bags have sold out and I've completely cleaned to AH of borean leather so I'm having to scanage again. Though I'll be honest and say that's my own fault. I completely forgot almost all week to look for more to stokpile. But this has made me realize that I can raise the price on the bags by another 50g up to 200 total.

And thank god I took the time to level up my mining on my shaman. Pyrium bars have gone up to over triple the cost of the ore which makes zero sense. So I've taken to selling any spare bars that I might have in addition to the buckles. This has been saving me a ton of money just like in wrath so I highly suggest that you have access to a miner either personally or through a friend that doesn't mind helping from time to time.

Also on the JC front I've had to start buying up raw gems again, even the flood of blue and yellows believe it or not. Things have just been selling that fast so thank god I've been stokpiling all of the gems I get from prospecting and not just dumping them. In fact I'm cutting and selling so many that I'm really considering turning my warrior scribe into a secondary gem banker.

If epic gems are on the horizon I'm going to be SOL it seems. I keep selling out of pyrium bars with buckle sales and there's just no room on Stokpile to hold the new influx of gems. Add into that the fact that there's still a ton of rare gem cuts that I don't have I'm going to be way behind. So if/when they come out I'll definitely need to make one of my crafters into another banker just to handle the inventory. I'm just hoping that it's still a very very long way off.

I've also been experimenting with other enchanting scrolls that need maelstrom crystals and they too seem to be a loss. I've made one lava walker and one assassin's step scroll with the cheapest crystals I can feasibly find and neither have sold. Ah well, it seems that anything using crystals is a long way off from being profitable.

Randomly pointing out that goblin barbecue's are actually selling very well. You have to be careful on the price of the food though because they're known to spike up to 8g each when their normal price range is under half that. I've also been having great sales on the mini squirrel pets from engineering. You can usually buy the recipe for like 5g on the AH any given day as it's a very common world drop from low level mobs. It takes a fist full of copper bars and some malachite to make which totals maybe 10g at the worst. So far this week I've managed to sell 8 of them for as high as 50g each.

This is definitely my week for trying new things. I was browsing the AH and noticed another low level enchant going for a decent amount which is +3 stats to chest. Unfortunately I couldn't find any materials handily available so I went down to ZF using my easy access kirin tor ring on the DK and farmed up a few shards. They're listed at 75g on the AH so I'll be pricing accordingly. I imagine they're selling well because 4 stats scrolls are never up there since I can't find cheap LBS anymore.

I've also had to increase the amount of red gems that I list again. Now instead of listing them 3 at a time I'm putting up 6 when originally I was only posting 3 at a time. They're simply selling that fast. I managed to sell an entire stack of intellect gems in a single day, it's just unreal. On that note, I've finally decided to set all of my scrolls to auto fall back so I can have a full set of bag space on my main once again. I thought I could deal with it but even with max enchanting and normal bags it just isn't enough. The downside is that now working the AH in that market takes at least another 10-15 minutes since I have to cancel and post twice as much.

Towards the end of the week I picked up another huge supply of elementium ore which I could turn into bars. I finally maxed out my gems tab in the bank with a few stacks of rares and a ton of commons. With the excess ore I turned it into bars which were used on another set of pvp boe plate. I've now sold two full sets of it and a few extra chest and bracer pieces.

I think the bots have finally made their way over to my server...


Another thing to add to the list of things that I'm trying out this week are blade ward and blood draining scrolls. Not many people can afford the "proper" tank weapon enchant and there's no other obvious choices to your average "agility are for bear" tank out there. So I'll give them something that they remember being expensive ans shiny... for a price.

Towards the end of the week the miners came out as they usually do and I got myself another massive stokpile of common gems, metas, and ele bars. Hopefully I can stop buying raw gems for a while. On an unrelated note, I'm considering crafting some of the leather pvp gear since I'm doing so well with the plate. That and I finally managed to get a decent sized stokpile together of leather and crafted leg armors and hides. Any suggestions?




Thanks for stopping by!

A Warcraft Millionaire...again

As of 7:30 early Sunday morning I've done it again, I have broken the million gold marker. The sale that pushed me over this important milestone was a Tranquil Mechanical Yeti which sold for 362 gold. I have submitted an interview to warcraftecon.com for hitting the new gold cap so look for it to pop up soon.



(Click to see the full bank screen)

I started my account back up about two months ago. When I logged on I had about 450k left in the Lunch Money guild bank. And as of today I once again have over 1,000,000 gold. How do I do it? I'm territorial. I'm observant. I'm clever. And I'm aware that there's more to the AH than finding something that's rare and profiting. I also understand the fact that making gold is exponential in that the more you have the more you can make.

I diversify my markets as much as possible so when I'm dealing with low profits on meta gems, enchanting scrolls are doing well to help make up for it. I try and work as many markets as I can squeeze into my 60ish minutes of AH time and no matter how much profit X market is making me I'll drop it if the time isn't worth it. All hail the 80/20 rule, 80% of your profits must come from 20% of your effort or things will be far more work than they could be. In short I work smart, not hard. I have a set undercut of 4g which I change according to the current market situation. If something like nether bags sell very fast I'll drop it down to only 1g, but if it's a high ticket item like boe epics I'll go up to 50.

I'd like to thank Blizzard for making common gems vendor for 9g and giving me so many ways to cut costs on materials. I thank the farmers of course that supplied my unquenchable thirst for more inventory, I wouldn't be where I am without them. Hi Bombardment! Of course I thank my girl who helped keep things fun and interesting when she carved out her own niche markets and clobbered anybody that even looked her way.

Now how did I manage to do it so fast this time? Well the answer should be obvious, I already had the infrastructure in place. I had all of the professions at 450, a large amount of capital to fund skill ups, and I already had my methods and routines down. If you're just starting out of course you can't expect to make 200k in a week. The most important thing you can actually have to work the AH up to the gold cap is a process, a method, and near maxed professions. You shouldn't be after excess, but access. I worked very hard to become 100% self sufficient and that is one of the greatest factors of my success.

On an entirely unrelated note. If you're have an ego the size of Un'Goro crater like I do you can turn up the damnedest things when you google yourself. For example if you google Stokpile, my blog and several of my posts come up right in line. I also found a link to another wow/mmo blog type site that's pretty nifty called mmomeltingpot. And apparently they wrote an article about this blog O.o

As for what's next for me, well I don't know of anybody that has hit TWO million gold yet so that's a reasonable goal. I bought my girl a vial of the sands which she spent the whole day tickled about and bought myself the recipe for strength to bracers enchant. We spent the next hour or two flying all around outlands and Mt. Hyjal taking screen shots with me in my "lookin' good" gear set and her on the drake. Here's a few of the screens I took.





For the time being though, I plan on picking up the missing world drop enchanting recipes if/when they pop up on the AH and start putting a raid together to get the ones from ulduar, but that's a ways off.

Little by little and step by step you can get here too. Stop by this blog each and every day and you'll learn new ways to improve yourself and increase your profits. Tell your friends, tell your guilds, tell everyone. You can be rich as well whether you have 2k to start out with or 200,000. It doesn't matter, you can do it.


Now what to buy...maybe a raid guild?

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!

What every scribe asks: Part 2

Continuing on from yesterday, we'll look at another potential situation in the glyph market that you might run into and how to handle it. Yesterday I went over what things you need to know about your competition and the market itself in order to decide on a course of action and covered what to do in a best case scenario. Today I'll go over the worst case situation which everyone seems to feel that they're in.

For today we'll assume the following about your competition:

- They do not have a schedule
- Camps the auction house and not you specifically
- Buys your glyphs when they're at bottom prices to resell
- Camps the AH most of the day/week
- Has a large stokpile of inks and/or a non-bot private farmer
- Always lists 8 of each glyph at a time
- Threshold price of 30g
- Undercuts by 1c

Before I go on, I suggest that you look into potentially using the tips I gave yesterday for your situation. Some may work for your AH conditions while some may not. Always keep your eyes open. I also suggest that you read my entry on silly tricks for more ideas on head games to play with your competition. This is a war of the minds, not the AH.

The real issue here is that with no competition glyphs will take a lot of time to work and some people just have nothing but time. Here is a situation where more time = "better" player. This is unlike raiding or pvp in that you only need to spend an hour or two per day/week to be good. In this situation the winner is decided by who has the most money, more willing to take a larger loss, and who can waste more time camping.

ARE YOU PREPARED?

For this situation, buying out their cheap glyphs is not a great option because with them listing 8 at once they obviously have a huge amount. Doing so will only lose you a ton of gold. Though if oyu have the money to spend and/or lose and really want them gone this is still a solid direction to go in. Also trying to control the supply via the AH won't do you as much good as other times because they have a private farmer. They obviously aren't farming it themselves because then they wouldn't be able to camp you 24/7 now would they? And unless you're on an odd server where there's a constant supply of old world stuff this is a necessity to have that king of stokpile.

First thing's first, take a break from glyphs. Stop posting for 2-3 days and come back later just to see if anything has changed. See if they're still on at all times and actively posting by watching your undercuts for a bit or stand in the town they bank from and watch them. It could be a bot or it could be some basement dweller that has nothing better to do with their time. Find out for sure which it is before you go on. If you're mostly certain it's a bot, report them and move on with your life.

However if it's not a bot and they haven't gone away after a short break from working glyphs, here's a few things you should think about.

1. First you need to be prepared to go at it with this person for a considerable length of time. I'm sure most of you that are in this situation have been in it for a while already.

2. You really need to consider your position and gold/hour here. With somebody camping the AH glyphs at all hours almost your profits from them are probably abysmal. If they're not, read on, but if they are still terribad you need to really consider getting out of the market. Glyphs take a lot of time to work and if you've been in this situation for a long time (like several weeks or months) backing out is a serious consideration.

3. If you haven't been going at this for a long time and this is a new competitor then you have some options that are more appealing than leaving entirely.


Quick tip right off the bat. If you have a decent supply and/or stokpile of inks and they're buying up your cheap ones here's something fun you can do. Every time you go to craft glyphs and notice that you've sold out of a certain one make double your usually amount. So if you always craft and list 5 glyphs at a time and they buy out a set of them, craft and list 10 at a steep undercut. This is psychological warfare at it's finest on the AH. This works best when you have a good amount of ink in stock but if you're semi limited it's still a very viable tactic and is sometimes enough all by itself to get rid of somebody that buys out your glyphs to resell.

This works because when they buy you out they do it to reset the prices on that glyph to something much higher. But you can craft a heck of a lot faster than they can sell. When you re list at your steep undercut amount you're completely ruining their goal of a price reset and saving time crafting glyphs. This can also give you an almost guaranteed sale on all of your glyphs making inscription infinitely easier for you to get rich with. With this strategy, you'll be keeping glyphs a a mid range price because when they get low your competitor will foolishly buy them all up and relist at a high price which you cut in half with a low maximum sale price. By using this method I was able to succeed in getting 50k gold and full epic gear/gems in two months from character creation in my "From the ground up" project.

Now my first suggestion is to come up with a price threshold that is enough profit for you to continue with the glyphs and still as low as you can go. If it costs you say 20g to craft any given glyph I'd say to list them at 35. That way you can at least double your investment while still keeping the camper from making a significant profit. The idea here is to keep their profits as low as possible while still making it worth your while if/when they buy you out and reset the prices. The most important thing you can do is keep the pressure on them. Don't give them even a hint that you're going to give up. If you're in this, you must be in it for the long haul because they won't give up easily. As far as they're concerned this is a great use of time and 1k gold per day is amazing.

It's not.

The variance here is if they're willing to go under the material costs for all of their glyphs. If the cost of XYZ glyphs are 20g per and they go down to 15g I'd recommend buying them all up. They might have a large supply, but it isn't infinite. The problem is that you might not have the bank roll to buy out their entire inventory. The other issue is that since they're not too bright they won't notice (or care for that matter) that they're losing a lot of money. If they're smart enough to buy out your cheap glyphs they're either smart enough to not want to lose money or a spiteful goblin and are ready to take a loss just to get rid of you. If they're willing to do that consistently you have to be as well or you won't be able to compete in that market.

The goal being to make their many hours spent at the AH staring and spamming the cancel button not worth it to them. This usually does the trick for more people after some time. The operative word here being "most." I've come across campers that wouldn't leave until a couple months of next to zero profit, I met two in glyphs and one in flasks. Each of them clung onto the market like an Alabama tick for at least two months. However this was when glyphs could be 10k per day and was definitely worth fighting that long. Sadly some people just don't seem to value their time what so ever and will undercut down to 3g per glyph all hours of the day. That's who most people ask me about so moving on.

So your camper doesn't mind at all going down to 1g per glyph and will buy up yours once the price goes down and will try to reset them and you've been keeping prices as low as possible for a month or two with no sign of them letting up yet. Then they definitely have a personal supplier so that means that you need to get one too and it becomes a war of the farmers and not the goblins.

It's the equivalent of you working the AH with the default AH interface and your competitor using TSM or ZA. You just won't win because they have a large advantage over you. In other words, you absolutely must get on an even playing field in every way that you can. There is simply no way that they can list tons of glyphs at a loss every hour of the day without one of their own while you're controlling the AH supply and buying their cheap glyphs.

So now you have a personal farmer as well, controlling the AH supply and buying their glyphs when they're at they're 30g threshold and they're still not letting up. Now you have to take a good look at the prices of cata level herbs and the associated inks. How fast can you move inferno ink and does that ink pay for a stack of herbs? If so then this is what you'll have to resort to. The only way to get rid of a camper is to make it no longer worth their while and 5g glyphs is a surefire way to do so. The problem is that not many people are willing to put in the time that glyphs require for such low income.

Regardless it is a viable option.

If inferno ink or the pigments can pay fro a stack of herbs you'll have to start trading down blackfallow ink and using the inferno ink to cover the price of the herbs. This will make all of your glyphs "free." I put that in quotes because it is still going to be a loss of profit in almost every case. 3x black fallow ink is far more expensive than 3x midnight ink. But if you're at this point it's no longer about the money. It's territory. It's personal.

Selling all of your glyphs at a threshold of 2g with stacks upon stacks is guaranteed to get rid of them eventually, especially with you being able to craft and list more than they can keep up with. The key point to this method is that you must be able to move the inferno inks at an equal or greater cost than the stack of herbs it came from. However if they're on most of the day and you're not, they'll be buying up your glyphs once they get cheap enough which will be fueling their business and giving you miserably low profits.

Though on that note it still a proven method to get rid of campers by annoying them. I removed a few campers and got rich off of another by doing just this. The plan is to completely flood their inventory while slowly draining at their bank account be it a few hundred thousand or just a few hundred. You craft a ton of glyphs and undercut with them down to nothing with inferno inks recouping 99% of your losses. They get filled up with a few full stacks of your glyphs (which is profit to you) and they go to relist them. You in turn list another dozen of your own. they buy those as well and you do this dance a few times.

What you're doing here is using human desire for instant gratification and their huge stokpile against them.

Then their farmer comes to them and says "lol hai! i gots a lot moar herbs stack for you!" They now have several bank tabs of herbs that they aren't going to mill. They don't have to mill them because they have all of these cheap glyphs they bought from you. What if they tell their farmer that they don't need herbs right now you ask? Then their farmer will almost always go elsewhere. Because farmers want to sell their crap now and as soon as you say that you don't need any now and to come back later they'll look at their full bags and go to the AH or trade chat. Be very careful that you don't end up inadvertently using this tactic against yourself and being stuck with a giant stokpile of nothing.

Your camping buddy will now look at a bank full of unmilled herbs, piles and piles of glyphs, and very low sales. If this doesn't get them to back off, nothing will.


Thanks for stopping by!