The Nature of the Beast, Inscription and Posting Auctions

I'll start with talking about inscription.  The greatest thing about inscription is...it is the worst design blizzard has ever done.  I have to hand it to them on how most of their tradeskills are designed.  There's roughly thirty or so items each produces that players actually want per tradeskill.  The really strong sellers are usually even less than that though.  Jewelcrafting is mostly about red gems (three cuts to be precise) and stuff to disenchant, smithing is about belt links, tailoring is about bags and leg enchants, leather working is about leg enchants, alchemy is about transmuting and flasks, but inscription is a monster.  It is not friendly to the casual player at all (and neither is the darkmoon cards, but that's an entry for another day).

To make a predict, I feel blizzard will try to address this.  There's been some talk of removing prime glyphs because there's little choice involved in them.  I believe this is a bandaid to their poor design.  But I digress.

The average say jewelcrafter can cut a dozen gems and post them by hand without the aid of addons.  One of my friends does it.  He'll spend a half an hour doing gems each day before raid time.  That's as fancy as he's willing to get, despite my protests.  The thing about inscription is it is much bigger.  The average person won't post 350 different glyph types per hand.  It just isn't feasible.  They won't devote a character slot to a guy using inscription bags and the idea of what to do with all the glyphs when they aren't in the auction house is another mess.  Especially when someone like myself can use an addon and cancel all my auctions in repost in under 8 minutes.  Thus, the scope of inscription is too big for you to do it alone.  That's why we use addons.  Addons make inscription feasible.  It simply isn't without them.  That's great for us because it means most people won't have the tools necessary to compete.  It helps us move towards a natural monopoly.

The next problem with inscription worth noting is the fact, that it takes forever to going.  With so many recipes found from research or glyph books, it takes many months of doing daily research (major and minor) to collect the recipes.  Glyph books were common in Wrath, but not so easy to obtain today--I bought them for under 15 gold each (around 60 of them), today they are 500 each.  It takes 9 days to get the three red cuts (delicate, bold, brilliant) and another 6 to get a purple and orange cut (say purified and reckless).  In two weeks type you can compete with most other people.  Inscription just doesn't work that way.  I am fairly consistent, but even when I step away from doing it, I still have the infrastructure of a glyph mule with all the recipes.  I can't do anything to speed this process up; this is a strong barrier to entry.  It protects you though when you get past this point.

People far more adept than me have been making great addons to handle this since Wrath.  I started using Quick Auctions 3...I don't know anything about previous addons before that point.  That addon was great.  It basically did everything for you.  In order to limit it, Blizzard required you to click once for each auction instead of it automatically posting.  Thus Auction Profit Master (APM) was born as a reworking of quick auctions.  It was supposed to be a temporary addon and quickly discontinued, but I used it for the better part of a year.  Finally, I've recently begun using Trade Skill Master (TSM).  This addon is like a perfected mouse trap.  It really does everything from accounting, to crafting, to posting....it is pretty impressive.  If you aren't familiar with it though, it can be daunting to use.

Here's the technical stuff.   The most fundamental thing to learn to do is posting.

This most basic function is to create a group.  You want to include items that cost a similar amount to craft.  Glyphs all take three inks and red gems all take an inferno ruby.

The first line is about how do you want them posted.  The three basic questions are how long, how many in a single auctions, and how many at one time.  There's no negative for posting glyphs for 48 hours (since you can cancel early), most people just want one of a glyph, so that's an easy choice, and finally, posting 2-4 is usually plenty.

The second line is how much do you want to undercut by.  This type of addon is how you see people undercutting by a single copper piece.  They aren't typing it in manually, they are having an addon follow script.

The threshold is how cheap will you sell it at and be happy.  That's the lowest you'll accept.  Fall back is if there's none on the market, then what do you want to post it at.

As you can see the numbers, I use are quite low.  Throughout most of cataclysm, I had a fall back of 275!  The reason my fallback was so much higher than it is now was because I was willing to babysit the auction house and undercut every hour or so.  This forced my opponents to do so or be undercut.  At this point, I am trying to drive my opponents out of the market.  I am willing to accept lower profits to simply not spend as much time doing it.

Basically you need to craft one of each item and then you add it to your master list.  Thankfully, you don't have to do each glyph manually, you can simply type on "glyph" and mass add them.  This gives you a pool of items you are looking to sell.

On the right hand side of the auction house, there's a button called "TSM."  It brings up a menu and the first option is posting.  Then you have to click "post auction" once per glyph.  This can be done fast enough, with little attention.  I tend to do it while watching TV.  The best thing, once you've set yourself up, you only have to do this final step on a daily basis.

The second button is cancel.  This screenshot is almost the same thing.  You click cancel and the addon does all the work.  It scans through your auctions and with a click from you, it sends the undercut ones to your mailbox.

Manually opening mails would be too tedious. so the addon opens them all for you.  It can only load 50 auctions at a time, so most of your 8 minutes is spent getting them out of the mail.  If I have alot of auctions, say 500 to 1,000 in the mail, I'll grab a morning cup of tea or coffee while the addon puts them in my bags.  Then you go back to the posting step.

This all seems really basic, I'll admit, but posting massive amounts of auctions like this seems inconceivable when you are starting out.  This entire process could be done with gems as well.  When I used to do gems, I would separate red gems from the other colors.  While glyphs are pretty much all the same, red gems are different enough from the other colors.

It makes it easy to flood your auction house with glyphs.  The questions of course are, how do I get materials to craft glyphs and how do I know what to craft?  This leads us to milling and restocking, which will wait for another day.