Not Quite Dead

As you may have noticed I haven't been posting anything here for the last week or so. The main reason is that I never had anything to post about, writing about putting a few hundred glyphs up on the AH is not very meaningful. I have nostly focused on getting the pilgrim achievment and leveling my death knight to 80 (she's 77 right now) and get into tanking just because I'm a crazy madman who loves having power over people. Other than that I am doing pretty well. Glyphs are selling and I can manage to pull in about 7-800g in sales every day by posting once of which at least half always is profit, but often a lot more.

I'm sitting at about 27 400g right now, which would be a bit more if I hadn't decided to suddenly buy all nether drakes setting me back 1000g. Luckilly just a few moments after I got Chestguard of the Vanquished Hero and sold it to someone for 500g. Of course, if I hadn't bought those drakes I would have had both the 500g and another 1000g at the same time but lets avoid any kind of logic here. So all in all, not much going on at the moment.

Slow Updates

I've been a bit busy these last few days preventing me from doing any posting so lets just do a quick summary of the last seven days. I revealed my "new revolutionary" posting method which, while proven to be not-so-new have worked out pretty well. I have noticed a decrease in sales but since yesterday stuff has started to work out very good, though I did make my fallback higher.

I also gave engineering a try to see the moneymaking potential. While many low level items seems pretty profitable the time spent finding the mats, crafting all diferent parts and so on is just not worth it. So I went back to mainly work inscription, which is now working out pretty well for me and I make enough gold to don't have to worry about it anymore. So for the time I am going to be a bit casual on the AH and just be using my JC and inscription to make a few hundred gold every day, which really is more than I need.

The Nobles

Today I decided to take my first real look at the new Icecrown 5-man gear. Many other scribes, including myself, have been worried that the trinkets in IC will make Darkmooncard: Greatness obsolete. After taking a look at the trinkets in question I am now much calmer. Lets take a look at the new trinkets.

First we got Ephemeral Snowflake. As it is a healing trinket we don't got much to worry about here as the biggest market is for agility/strength.

Then we have Needle-Encrusted Scorpion, a physical DPS trinket. While it may be slightly useful it only got a 10% proc chance on critical hits for less ArP rating than both Grim Toll and Mjolnir Runestone. It may be easier to get but as most people should be able to do Naxx without any problems by now it's not really a problem. Additionally it focuses on completly diferent stats than the greatness cards.

Then at last we got Ick's Rotting Thumb. Considering it's a tank trinket with no offensive stats while the greatness cards are mostly used for DPS they will be used by two completly diferent groups of players.

So in the end the only trinket that might cause some trouble is the scorpion, but as there already are better trinkets which should be (I don't know how hard Forge of Souls is) about as easy to get there's no need to worry. So be happy all scribes out there, those cards will most likely keep selling just as good as earlier.

There are still no spell DPS trinket which indicates that the loot table is not yet finished so any stats on these trinkets may change later on.

Screwing up

If you read my last post and the comments to it you saw how both Liene of Kul Tiras and Marketeer commented on how my pricing methods had nothing to do with the Goblin method. Unfortunantly I got to say that they are correct, I made a huge mistake and got Gevlon's posting method completly wrong which I, after some rereading, now realise. This however, does not make my pricing non-valid (as pointed out by Liene), just rare. If you ask many of the big glyph sellers of what the best way of selling glyphs is they will most likely tell you that it is crafting a bunch of every glyph, try to get your threshold as low as possible and carpet bomb. A very commonly accepted method to make as much gold as possible by getting a large volume of sales. Thus making you lots of gold but decreasing G/h. To show the results of my method I
took a few screenshots:




















So, 800g in sales over 24 hours, not much, most people get that easily in a day. But if we then compare it to the amount of glyphs I sold, about 100, we see that the average price of each glyph is 8g. Not much you say? You sell glyphs at your fallback for a lot more? Well, remember this is an average. If we now take a look at the production cost, which we can see here:

((Herb-Snowfall)/6)*2+0.50 There you go, the maximum price I pay to make a glyph. Now, lets say that herbs go for 17 (they usually go for less) and snowfalls sell for 13g (my valuation when making cards) we get:
((17-13)/6)*2+0.50=1.83
Then we take the average price of each glyph and subtracts the glyph cost from it:
8 -(((17-13)/6)*2+0.50)=6.166666666666667 ~ 6.16g

That is of course for glyphs that takes two glyphs (I like to use worst possible scenario, you can only be happilly surprised) for one ink glyphs it is:
8 -(((17-13)/6)*2+0.50)=6.83g profit.

Milling takes a little less than 2 seconds while crafting a glyph takes 3. That puts the time at just below 8 seconds if counting lag and such which means I mage 6g in 8 seconds. 3600/8=450 glyphs per hour. 450*6= 2700g per hour! Sure, I don't always sell that much glyphs but the gold:work ratio remains pretty stable. Of course we got to take into account the time spent posting, but that is mostly spent AFK doing other stuff, but even if I spent as much time posting as crafting I would average out at about 1350g per hour, a very good profit.

I know, lots of numbers. One of my (many) flaws is that whenever I'm going to show people something I have to do it with all the calculations made to make sure nobody misses anything.

The Speedy Goblin

Most of you are likely to have noticed the big QA vs Auctioneer "battle" Gevlon caused with a few of his posts not long ago which resulted in a huge argument on wether QA or Auctioneer's batch post function was best for glyph posting. Gevlon claimed that QA was "an automated noob" which could only undercut by 1 copper. I wont point out the flaws in his arguments, enough people have done that so there's no need to.

This was almost a week ago and most people have stopped caring about it, so why do I bring it up? Well, the way Gevlon defended his strategy got me thinking that if he cares so much about it it must work, so I took a look at it in detail.

As seen in this and this post he has already explained his methods twice, but I didn't really pay much attention to them. Now I notice that what is very special about this way of posting is that instead of crafting a bunch of every glyph and throw them up on the AH while trying to keep your threshold as low as possible to avoid being undercut is that it uses the Auctioneer market value, both to decide if the glyph is worth making and if it should be posted. He set a minimum value they need to have to make them and then starts crafting. Auctioneer is configured to not post glyphs at less than 60% of their market value. This makes sure he gets a good profit on close to every glyph he makes and gives a very good gold/hour ratio, but it can't be compared to carpet bombing when it comes to pure gold gain. So I started thinking, I don't got all that much time for working the AH, so why not try to optimise gold per hour?

I started thinking of trying the goblin method, but I saw a few flaws.
1. It takes a while to choose all glyphs that are going to be made (can be solved with KTQ though)
2. It's very dependant on regular scanning of the AH which I sometimes forget.
3. It relies on market values that doesn't instantly show changes to the price. A glyph with a market value of 20g may only sell for 7.
4. Market value is a subject to change over time. A glyph that is worth 20g according to auctioneer maybe only got a market value of 4g in a few weeks if it hasn't sold, resulting in a loss.
5. Many pointed this problem out in the discussion, auctioneer posts very slow and it takes really long time to get all glyphs up.

So why don't improve it? If I use QA instead of Auctioneer I can rule out most of these points, it's fast removing point 5, I can set it to a specific threshold to never go with a loss and scanning doesn't matter. That leaves only point 1 and 3, 1 can easily be solved by using KTQ to craft all glyphs, and only recraft those I have sold. That way 3 is also solved, I don't focus on any specific glyphs but go for them all, no matter value knowing that they will sell in the end.

By then having a high threshold and a low fallback I will put every glyph on the AH in that area unless I'm undercut below my threshold. So how will this work then? It's simple, the AH goes in cycles. You've all heard of the price cycles for example flasks and such over the week, but glyphs are slightly diferent. They don't depend on buyers as much as sellers. Lets say a glyph sells for 35g, I then come and lower it to 17g(made up fallback, pretty realistic though) where I will get undercut by a certain amount of silvers/copper which results in the undercutter himself getting undercut ending up in a spiral of doom leading the price downwards until it finally reaches my threshold.

At this time I will jump out and stop posting that glyph while my competition stays and fight for the profit of this glyph. The prices then reaches the point where only one person is posting as he's below everyone else's threshold which will result in no glyphs of that kind on the AH once they expire/sell causing someone (maybe me) posting the glyph at their fallback making the whole thing start over again. So as you can see I'm giving sales away at those low prices while focusing on only selling glyphs at a good profit margin. I wont tell you my prices but in a worst case scenario I make about 400g/hour selling glyphs and a lot more normally. This is including the time spent posting, something I only do once or twice a day, maybe three if I have time (unlike Gevlon who is only posting once every 48 hours).

So far doing this has proven very effective and I really start to see Gevlons point even if I don't completly agree with it.

Bringing Chaos and Destruction

Finally, after close to 3 weeks of barely any presence in the glyph market my glyph stock is finally filled and I got 5 of each glyph sent to my new alts using BulkMail2 an addon I have had for a really long time without noticing it's true potential. What it does is that it lets me set my glyphs to be autoposted to my diferent alts, and they can be set my class so half of them goes to bankalt A and the other half to bankalt B with a single click. It sure beats putting every glyph in there manually.

But to get back on recrafting and posting, I had almost forgotten how painful it was to make glyphs. If you really want to test someone's patcience just hand him a bunch of herbs and ask him to make glyphs out of them. If he hasn't made a whole through his screen by the 300th glyph you got someone with superhuman patcience or, if he giggles, someone who is incredibly easily amused and quite possibly crazy.

Now, in my last post I told you I wasn't sure on how I would set my pricing strategy, but I am now. I wont go into any details but I can tell you it's a combination between Gevlon's post method and the (in)famous QA2 camping. As I said, no details but I will tell you a little more about it once I got things set up, I expect to get quite some hatemails though.

That's all for today, hope you all will have a good day. I suggest you check out Carbon's post on subscribing. I've never tried it myself but as I am currently reading 16 diferent WoW blogs it's hard to keep track of them and after reading the post I decided to give it a try and was surprised of how easy it was. So I suggest that you all give it a try, both to encourage the writers (even those coldhearted goblins enjoys getting approval from their readers) and to simplify reading.

Preparing for The Grand Return

Hello there. I am finally back in cold, cloudy Sweden and am right now sitting in front of my computer preparing for El Retorno Grand! (yes, I'm bad at spanish so I used google translator) Before the vacation I may have told you about my really low glyph stock which I had planned to fill up now.

So, right now I got close to no glyphs, haven't touched the AH in a week and have slowly reduced the amount of glyphs I post on the AH. You may already have noticed the great opportunity I got here. To you who haven't, take a look at this through my competition's eyes.

A competitior is posting fewer and fewer glyphs on the AH for every day and finally disappears from the market. You don't hear from him for a whole week.

What will they think about this? Most likely that he left the market. So is there any way I can use this to my advantage? At this point many of you may have realised what I'm planning to do, new bank alts. I already got two actually though I haven't used them for glyph posting. Before doing anything I will stock up on all my glyphs (1100 in total) and then go into the market.

I will most likely be able to scare of at least a few smaller sellers but the bigger ones will be tougher. I have noticed that while I've been gone there have appeared new sellers and I got about 90 pages of glyph on my server's AH, something I will try to fix. All I need to do except crafting lots and lots of glyphs is deciding a pricing strategy.

I can choose between undercutting by one copper, a few silvers to avoid loosing the customers that don't buy stuff from people who undercut by one copper or more to scare people off. I am leaning to using a pretty big undercut at first as I know that my threshold is one of the lowest ones on my server (at least before I left) so I will surely be able to cause some people to leave.

As I am unable to decide right now I'd appreciate any advice that you may give me.

Updating The Blog List

If you are reading my blog you have most likely been linked here from some other source, most likely another blog. The odds are that this blog was also focused on the economical aspects of WoW. There are many great Gold-blogs out there, some better than others but with blogger making it so easy to make your own blog anyone with some time on their hands and feels like doing some writing can do it. The hardest part when starting out with a blog is getting readers. I used the JMTC forums to make people hear about The Scribe and it has worked out pretty well. Another way is getting a bigger blogger to hear about you and get them to link it on their own blog.

While I was trying to read at least a few of all the blogposts I had missed during my week on Lanzarote (which was great by the way) I realised that I was reading a lot of good blogs that I hadn't linked in my blog list (to the right below the subscription button). So I have now added all wow economic blogs that I am currently reading, I may have missed one or two though. Make sure to check them out. Also, if you're a new blogger who's got problems with getting readers feel free to mail me by clicking the Email link found here and I will check it out and possibly add it to my blog list if I find it good (I most likely will unless you overuse "lol", "n00b" and "im so l33t".

I'd like to make a special mention to Cameron from WoW Economic Review who have gathered links to most major Gold-blogs. Really great job.