Enchanting Doomsday Prophecy: On hold

Prices are slowly picking up again, the 50% dip is up at 75%, which evens out by the fact you get more mats from each DE now. The only difference is you have to spend more time crafting / DEing, which is the most boring part of the business in my opinion. Another downside is the increased competition: many enchanters were probably waiting for the hotfix and those mats are now flooding the AH at a pace the demand cannot meet. Hopefully the prices will pick up more tomorrow when the reset arrives.

However, if the 3.3 automatic dungeon DE change still goes live we will see much lower prices. Enchanting Doomsday is currently on hold.

//Nim

How to smack the camper in the eye

OK, not physically, but today’s frustration over that guy who just won’t log off and keeps undercutting your auctions with 1 copper 2 seconds after you push the POST button made me think of a different approach. I had crafted a load of scrolls last week, and with the mats market coming down on us I wanted to unload some of these before they become useless.

I logged on in the morning, only one serious competitor: Mr Camper (didn’t know he was at this point though) and cut him off with 50 silver on all my scrolls. Note that scrolls have no deposit, so other tactics to scare the guy off is not working: the one who can get his hands on the cheapest mats wins. 30 seconds later he was top listed again cutting all scrolls except one with 5 silver. I run QA and repost. 30 seconds pass again before I’m undercut. I try the patience game and we keep doing this for 20 minutes or so before I log off to help my girlfriend with some stuff. I know I should have stopped after 5, but I don’t give up easily.

I’m back two hours later and have an idea: I’m gonna test his thresholds. I post all my scrolls to 60% of the market price, we’re down here to just below (the old) mats price. The guy follows, but he’s getting careful and only posts 1 or 2. I wait until 5 in the afternoon and repost my scrolls at 100% again. It now looks something like this:

Camper: 100 gold 60%
Camper: 100 gold 60%
Me: 190 gold 100%
Me: 190 gold 100%
Me: 190 gold 100%
Guy from this morning: 192 gold 101%

This was a longshot but my idea was that the camper would blindly look at QA and keep his auctions there making him believe he had “won” our little war. So what happened? Peak time came, people did their heroics and raids, and went to AH after to pick up some stuff to enchant their new gear. The campers’ stuff sold, but so did most of mine. The moral of the story is: being top listed isn’t always the most profitable thing. If I would have kept undercutting the guy down to 40% or lower I would have lost alot of profit, and more important: time.

Campers are annoying, but there are other ways to still sell stuff than carpet bombing, at least in the scrolls market.

//Nim

Enchant material prices in free fall

As expected, the enchants material prices are now in free fall. This is most probably due to the change I posted about in the weekend. I have checked 3 different EU servers, and dust is currently at 50% of ‘regular’ market price, with double as many listings. I have decided to step down from the market for now until things stabilize, and trying to get rid of the few dusts I still have left. We will probably see Eternal Earth, ore, leather and uncut gems following the enchant material prices. I guess I will have to eat my losses from the 100ish scrolls I crafted last week, or at least hold on until patch day and try to ride on the first wave of demand.

It’s now interesting what will happen when patch hits. With the dungeon disenchanting upcoming I doubt there will be much gold to be made in the future from this market. Infinite dust below 1 gold? Goldcap for me seems far away at the moment.

Vendor items people buy for 1000% the price

Inspired from Gevlon and Kevin I started my own experiment a week ago.

The real big seller is Copper Rod, which you can pick up from the vendor for about 2 silver. Put these up for 20 gold and watch the money roll. I’ve sold 10 of these in a week. Not a stunning amount, but still a nice markup. Other things selling, but not as good as the rods include:

*Blacksmith hammer
*Inscription parchments
*Weak Flux
*Mining Pick
*Coal (awesome markup selling these for 5 gold each)

I’ve gone so far to put these items into my QA, netting around 50-100 gold profit everyday. If you got bagspace over – try it out.
I don’t know if it’s stupidity or laziness making people do this. Probably a bit of both.

Hotfix changes disenchanting

This was hotfixed yesterday I believe.

Disenchanting and shattering has been slightly altered to provide more Infinite Dust than before.

For Jewelcrafters this means Sun Rock Rings, Bloodstone Bands and Huge Citrine Necklages now provide more mats from disenchanting.

I crafted and DEd 40 of these items and got the following:
*1-3 dusts
*1-3 lesser essences

Time to update your snatch lists. In a few days this will be normalized, so expect higher prices on Bloodstone, Sun Crystals, Huge Citrines and Eternal Earth. Something to consider while prospecting ore as well (saronite ore has already gone up 5 gold on my server).

The effect of this will be lowered disenchant mats, which only makes my previous post stronger. This is relative though, but if you have been sitting on lots of mats consider that gold gone.

Edit: Forgot to add, thank you Kevin for this information.

Patch 3.3: The end of the enchanting profits?

We don’t know yet when the patch will hit. My guess is in 2-4 weeks, with the raid instance released around x-mas.

Let’s take a look at the interesting parts of the patch notes:

*Group Disenchanting Option: In addition to rolling “Need” or “Greed” on items, players now have the option to elect for an item to be disenchanted. “Disenchant” works exactly like “Greed” except if a player wins the “Greed” roll, they will receive the disenchanted materials instead. Players who choose “Need” will always win the item and will always beat those that choose “Greed” or “Disenchant.”

According to players on the PTR you don’t need an enchanter in group. What impact will this has on the enchant materials market? I can bet half of my gold this will have a huge impact. Average Joe will get mats in his bags automatically (not just dream shards, but dust and essences) that he will go and deep undercut on the AH before he logs off. Add to that that there will be ALOT of groups doing dungeons after the patch, because of this change:

* The current plan is to make Emblems of Triumph the “base” of emblems so everything that drops Emblems of Conquest would be changed to Triumph and then the new raid content would drop the new highest emblem along with things like the heroic daily and such.

This means everyone and his mother will run heroics to get the Triumph loot they still need. I do realize the materials needed to enchant all this gear, but it won’t be nearly enough to suck up the surplus mats that will float around. It’s tough luck for us traders who deal with enchant mats if this change goes live. Sitting on loads of mats? Sell it now! With the mats the general cost of scrolls will also sink. Needless to say, this also goes for Crusader Orbs, which will drop around 2-300%.

The next change does not concern enchanting directly, but is an interesting side-note. I have been unable to find an official source for this, but it’s generally accepted on many blogs:

In patch 3.3, Braeg Stoutbeard is going to sell Arctic Furs for 60 Borean Leather (10 Heavy).

This will of course be normalized after a few days so that the value will be 60 Borean Leather = 1 Arctic Fur, but we can speculate abit and make an extra buck from this change.

//Nim

JMTC Forums

Friday and time to do other stuff than WoW. Just gonna make a quick post here about Just My Two Copper Forums, which is a really active and friendly community for auction housers worldwide. Make sure you check it out!

In-game Inflation

I read somewhere that “gold is the only thing that won’t become outdated”. This is true in a short time perspective. This argument was related to a discussion about what things we will sell before Catclysm hits. This is however only partially true. I claim that the 1000 gold value is far less than the value of 1000 gold two years ago, and definetly far less than 1000 gold was in Vanilla. Looking ahead the 1000 gold value will be even lower in 1-2 years.

The reason for this is inflation. At the moment we have the following things adding gold to the game:
*Quests and dailies
*Monster drops
*NPC Vendors buying stuff from players

The following things remove gold from the game:
*Repairs
*NPC Vendors selling stuff to players / trainers
*AH cuts / deposits from failed auctions
*People quitting / freezing accounts to never come back

Simple mathematics: if X > Y you get a surplus, and that’s what’s happening every hour, every day in World of Warcraft.

Since the implementation of gold from quests instead of XP and dailies the inflation started for real. I don’t believe the devs in vanilla WoW could ever imagine someone hitting the gold cap, 200k+ gold in vanilla was a huge amount of cash. I would say that 100 gold today is what 1 gold was 5 years ago. To state an example: swift ground mount at 60 was a whopping 900 gold, and that took alot of effort (even more effort than getting gold for today’s epic flyer). Today 900 gold is something even a newly dinged 80 can farm in a couple of hours.

What effect will this have on us long term auction house players? Probably very little at the moment. The question is what will happen in Cataclysm? Will we see stacks of end game herbs going for 100 gold / stack? Will we see repair costs in the 300 gold region? X will still be higher than Y though, and the inflation will continue.

How can we avoid inflation? There is little we can do about it really. To invest for a really long time would be to invest that gold into items that won’t become outdated, and hence sell those items at the future gold value. Rare pets, vanity items that are not attainable anymore and similar stuff comes to mind.

Sitting on 200k gold and gonna take a break? Invest it.

//Nim

Flipping: Part I

Going to start out on the easy stuff in my first real post. Many other bloggers and guides have already touched this, so if you are a veteran blog crawler / AH trader this is nothing new to you. I started out with doing minor flipping business already back in 2005 (before any fancy AH addons were released). I remember back then 1 gold was a pretty big chunk of money, and flipping helped me getting my swift ride at 60.

Flipping is another word for “buy low, sell high”. This is what I often hear about the AH money making topic:
– Hey my friend’s brother’s cousin’s schoolmate made 40 000 gold on AH
-How?
-He was buying stuff low from AH and selling it high!

The average WoW-player who’s not interested in auction house adventures think that flipping is what the big AH sharks are doing all day long. This is not true. Flipping is an income, but usually it’s something you do as a side business. The risks are high if you don’t have 100% knowledge about the server market. You won’t hit the cap in a reasonable period of time from flipping alone but it can help you get there.

Still, as an extra income, what stuff should we flip?

Epics
Epic weapons and armour have a pretty nice markup when succesfully done.

Beware of the welfare epics though: most of the early WOTLK crafted stuff is really outdated. 400 gold for an iLvL 200 piece is usually not a good price. I’ve bought stuff for as low as 90 gold per piece, and still have problems flipping those for 200. Not that I made a bad deal, but the gold income is really slow.

Low level epics can net you a couple of hundreds when rich mains equip their alts. The heirlooms removed a great deal of this market though, the people who can afford to spoil their alts are usually decked in heirlooms and have little need to buy epics for their little ones. Look for items that don’t have a heirloom equivalent. Heirloom slots are: weapon, chest, shoulders, trinkets and ranged (except wands). Stay out of the level 56+ market as the toons in that level range will soon head off to Outlands for quest items on par with BWL epics.

When I (rarely) flip epics I use auctioneer to search for deals, there’s often something down at the 30-45% price, just remember what I said about the welfare epics.

Trade Goods
Here’s my biggest market for flipping. Time matters alot here. During peak times (6-8 usually) and weekends trade goods are in high demand. People craft before raids, others level their alt’s profession skills. Now is the time to sell. Basically any trade goods can be flipped, but I suppose it’s different on different servers. As a Horde player Wool Cloth has a huge market that I buy for 10 and resell in the 30’s region. Runecloth is another solid income. The price usually dip down to 4-5 or even 3 in mid-weeks and can be resold at 10-15 during weekends. The reason for Runecloth’s popularity is all characters (and especially Death Knights) need them to get exalted with the capitals, unless they want to backtrack and do hours of grey questing. You need exalted to get the “Crusader”-title.

Also keep an eye on the low level crafting items. Copper, tin, cloth, herbs etc fluctuate alot. Some days copper is selling for 2-3 gold, the next day it’s up at 10-12. Herbs is always good to pick up at low prices since new scribes tend to need alot of these, and the supply is low.

What the Raider need
These items include flasks, potions, enchants, leg armor, food, etc. Again time matters. If you want to flip raid items you have to buy up a stock during the morning or early day. Raid items demand peak between 6-8 which is the time for you to sell. Again, have a good idea about your server market, the usual AHer is aware of this and will try to sell their items at the same time. Enchants tend to sell better after raid time, and especially on Wednesdays (people want to pimp their new loot).

Enchant materials
High level enchant mat items are by far the most traded goods on the Auction House, which means the price goes up and down alot. See those stacks of dust going for 60%? Buy them and relist for 48 hours, log back next day, pass GO and collect 200 gold.

Enchant materials have the major advantage of no deposit fee. Even low level mats can be sold at insane prices (Eternal essences, Nether essences, Illusion dust and arcane dust) when the market dries out.

This post became longer than I intended. There are more areas which you can flip with, I will talk more about it at a later time.

My biggest flip? Buying Orb of Deception from the trade channel for 200 gold, selling it on AH for 1900 in 2 hours. Pretty nice huh?

Intro

Welcome to my WoW-Auctions blog. My name is Nim and I’ve been playing on the EU servers since February 2005. Trading games and in-game trading in non-trading games have always interested me. On this blog I will post my thoughts about the market, hints and other WoW-related stuff.

I’m currently only using three characters for my business using Jewelcrafting / Enchanting and Alchemy as income. I also tend to do alot of flipping, because I actually find it entertaining to find deals while scanning. At the moment I’m sitting on 75k gold with an average 4k daily income (I have decided not to be cheap on my main and let her have all the stuff she points at). I never farm. Farming is boring, and a game is supposed to be fun.

Addons I’m using are Auctioneer Suite, Quick Auctions 2, MailGet, Sparky’s Workshop and Market Watcher. I also have a nifty crafting / disenchanting macro which allows me to go AFK during the most boring moments.

My goal is to hit the gold cap.

Keep checking in here from time to time, I’ll try to update this blog daily.

/Nim