Know Thy Enemy

ThiMilitary tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards... Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing. Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions. He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain.

-Sun Tzu

We all know the Auction House is a type of pvp. It is player vs player to make the sale. Eventually, you begin to realize who your real enemies are.

Identifying your enemy is the first step to defeating them. The first step is simple enough. If you have a persistent competitor that is invading your market...you simply add them to your friend's list. When you are on, then you'll know when they are on.

In game, you can find a constant foe and then look at their achievements. By looking at the amount of gold they've earned and how many auctions they've posted, you can better size them up.

This guy has done about 34,000 auctions...to my 457,000.  He's aquired a mere 400,00 gold to my 3.7 million.  He's bought 3,100 auctions to my 32,000.  Basically, he can compete but he's not going to have deep enough pockets to be a real threat--of course unless he does business on other characters.

The next step requires the Undermine Journal. This allows for you to watch their schedule over time. It also lets you investigate their business—what pots do they have their hands in? If you have more time than they do, then you can invade all of their markets. I've figured out the schedules of my foes...when they go to work or in the case of college students their school schedules by watching their activity. This is pretty extreme, I'll admit, but again you have to adapt like water.

Basically, if you can babysit your auctions more than you can be the lowest price and win the undercut war. Jewelcrafting is really high traffic, and thus this is especially true of that market. Enchanting is middle of the road (because it used to not be possible to sell enchants on the open market, many people still seek out enchanters) and glyphs are really low traffic since most people won't engage in that market.

Inevitably there will come a point where you run into a bigger fish. He's got more time to spend undercutting you. There's literally nothing you can do to stop him—he's on 24 hours a day and undercuts like no one's business. Maybe its someone who is unemployed, works from home, or that is stay at home, or even a retiree.

In this case, they'll always undercut you and you don't have the time to stop him—this is the main reason I don't spend too much time jewelcrafting these days

 Businesses in real life used a tactic called predatory pricing. They'd sell at a loss sometimes to force other businesses out of business. You really can't do this in Warcraft. They can simply pull their wares and wait. You might demoralize them but more often than not, they merely hibernate. If you learn their schedule, you can tank the market, then when they aren't around, cancel your auctions and reset it.

For example, if I drop glyphs to 15 gold each and my enemies leave the market completely, and I know he won't log on a few hours on a Saturday, then I can raise glyphs to 375 each that day. When I know he'll come back around, then I'll tank the market back to 15. He can stop this...if he makes a “wall of glyphs” at 20 gold.

How do we counter that? If you have deep pockets, you simply buy all his cheap glyphs and repost. If you are really powerful, you can use the money to buy all the herbs up out of the market, so he can't get good ink. In most cases, you can't keep the market for say glyphs really high forever. You might drive whiptail up to 80 gold a stack, but then people will farm it. If people buy it and make glyphs, glyphs will fall in price. If they don't buy whiptail, then it will fall in price and then glyphs will eventually get made. Furthermore, who is to say, how many glyphs a person has in reserve? I had 16,000 at one point! Even at only 20 gold per, that's 320,000 gold to buy me out.

Ultimately, a marketeer has to accept prices will rise and fall. These cycles are the key thing to under. If I sell most of my glyphs at 375, then when they are only 20, I can let other people sell. Adapting, again like water, is the key to the market.

Accounting

One of the most important parts about doing almost thing you will repeatedly do, is reflecting. You realize what went well and what you should repeat and what didn't go so well.

During this last week, I saw a huge gain from Darkmoon card sales. I still have over half my supply to sell, but I am making progress with moving them. There's so much profit there, I wonder why I make glyphs at all sometimes. Logging in once or twice a day for 4 auctions is much easier than dealing with several hundred glyphs at least.

Not that glyphs have been terrible to me either really...

On that note, I've been looking at the accounting function on this mod. I bought up a ton of glyphs earlier in the month to resale them. It actually tracked that for me. As you can see, the profit percents are really nice. If I was more active in the market, maybe I should start doing that again. I hadn't really considered it before reflecting. I used to do it more often. Of course there's always the risk of the glyph changes. There's been very few herbs for sale again lately, which makes me think that maybe it is time to pounce the cheap glyphs out there.

Another nice feature in the accounting gives me a break down. I've spent almost 189k on materials this past month. That's a staggering number. I've brought in nearly 261k though.

My most sold number was clogged up with the volatile life I resold after the fair and most of the cost of the decks were from all that life. Apparently, I've milled almost 24,500 whiptail. At this point, I am coasting and haven't really made a major purchase in the last week. It is just time to watch and wait for deals.

Tournament Pets

At the start of Cataclysm I had a death knight on another server, but to make a long story short I quit playing him about this time last year. He literally was completely broke. I started playing him again because my friends over there were active and twisted my arm. My guild is casual enough that I have plenty of time for side projects like this (we only raid twice a week for 2 hours and often times raids are canceled because someone can't make it.)

I dislike waiting for queues and I've always been fond of the blood spec, so I fixated on working on a tank set. Truthfully, I liked the old blood dps much better, which is part of my reason for dragging my feet with the character (and why my glyph dk is only 84). I started with enough normals to buy a few 378 pieces and went right to heroics.

After a few intense seasons, I steadily made money from running dungeons, but in one of the bags, I received a mechopeep. I had sold a few of these during Wrath and bought a few horde set on my alliance characters. My DK was horde and if the pets become account wide, he'll get everything from my shaman. I decided since I had one I didn't need, I might as well try to sell it. Within a few hours, it sold for a tidy sum.

I really don't have ambitions to make thousands of gold on my DK—the money generated will keep me in gems and enchants for awhile. I really wasn't trying to make any money, simply get 378 equipped so I could run with my friends there. 

I started thinking about the tabard that ports you to tournament in icecrown and how fast a level 85 could run those dailies and accumulate pets. If you have two accounts, you could launder the pets to the opposite side. No one knows which pets will be good in the pet battle system yet. Everyone is speculating. This is a great chance to generate pets through hard work and sell them to the side that can't do the factioning. In effect, it is the same as the lanterns.  I bought most of the pets in Wrath for 500 gold each--the fact that the prices have gone up by a factor of 7 makes me predict they'll go up again as gold becomes more plentiful.

Warcraft has traditionally had only two routes of advancement---pvp and pve. Pet battles are a side system and if they are fun, maybe people will really get into it. I've truthfully disliked most of their mini games, though the exception was the Zombies vs Sunflowers. If pets really catch on, this would be a great way to generate funds for a newcomer to the market.

In The Black

So I am starting the 6th day of this case study; I am in the black as the saying goes, I've started to make profit.  I've included inscription in the mix because I invested quite a bit of cash during the darkmoon fair and maybe you guys will be interested in seeing how it turns out.  This type of information may be useful for the darkmoon fair in mop.  The big "if" is how good the trinkets are.  Tsunami and Volcano and greatness before have been the sort of trinkets that are exceptionally strong.  They perform way better than their item level suggests.  The new darkmoon trinkets may not be this good.  If the new ones are equal to the monsters they've given us in the past, then the fair is definitely worth investing in.
   
With my jewelcrafting this week, I've sold probably 2/3 of my red gems and most of my oranges, but raked in 22,626 gold.  This is a thrilling profit for almost a week.

I never really fixed or restocked my enchanting market, but my profit margin was a respectable total of 8,882 gold.  I definitely could push this one harder if I diversified.  The amount of dust I have left is woefully high and probably will not sell easily, if at all.  The enterprising investor, keeps it for people that might try to level their skill in mop.  Great if you have a few enchanting bags on an alt or a guildbank of your own to store stuff in.


I had mentioned I'd made almost 50k since my low point during the darkmoon fair between selling a few decks and glyphs.  With a constant flow of glyphs selling (already down to two bags of ink in the bank and have reduced my crafting amount drastically) and selling a handful of decks, I've pulled in 38,232 gold.  To be honest, I need to push the decks harder and I am alarmed about how few I've sold.  On the other hand, I am still confidant, they'll continue to sell over the next month.  I've resold about 7 stacks of volatile life as well.  I was buying them for 5 gold per and selling for over 12.  That's a great payoff.  Normally, I would stockpile life for making more darkmoon cards for the next fair, but I really am beginning to think I'll avoid doing the fair in the future.  My current stockpile of cards will likely last.  Admittedly, I've told myself this many times before and always find cheap whiptail that changes my mind.

My grand total is 69,740 gold!  The gems and enchants have turned about a 10 percent over what I invested in them.  From here on out, everything I get from the remainder is pure profit.  Glyphs and the fair continue to great cash cows, but this is partly due to the time I invested in them.

If you are wondering why I focus on these professions, I talked about in my early entries that inscription had strong barriers to entry.  The thing that should be noted about jewelcrafting and enchanting is you get repeat customers often.  The basic progression in Warcraft leads to a constant flow of upgrades.  Most players want to be "the best" so they will always gem and enchant their new gear.  Whether this is for pvp or pve, is irrelevant.  The desire to be strong is constant.  Thus, these professions are highly contested and highly sought after.

Anyway, happy selling...unless you are on my server!

Reset Day Profits

One of the most important things is when to sell. Usually, I have seen the weekends have a huge increase in sales (Friday Night/Saturday/Sunday) and Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursdays, Mondays, and early in the AM on almost any day are the best times to buy. Weekends is fairly obvious since more people are off work, and Tuesday and Wednesday are when raid lockout reset, so you'll see fairly high profit. When the lockouts reset people get new gear from raids (either through drops or valor points which buy them drops) and in turn there's a frenzy for enchants and gems.

Using my example of the other day, let's see what I raked in on Tuesday:

My inscription reset was interrupted last night, it was split into two parts. 3,261 was my first log in for the day. After I got back to it, I had made another 920 was my second. I pulled in 1,584 this morning from over night glyphs. I didn't sell any darkmoon cards unfortunately, but I still pulled in 5,765.

For jewelcrafting on my first log in, I brought in 3,479. My late night gems included no reds, and was a mere 463. I was merely undercut and ignored in this market over night. I tend to stick to only the best selling cuts as opposed to inscription where I craft any glyph that is profitable. For a grand total for jewelcrafting over 3,942.

My shaman sells my caster leg enchants and enchanting. I really haven't made a large enough variety. Mostly because I want safe sure things and I don't really want to micro manage scrolls. On my first log in, I made 1,464 (not counting the two pvp rings I sold for about 500 total), so 1,964. I made another 1,842 over night bolstered by selling some of those way over priced enchants. This totally, my profit at 3,306.

5,765+3,942+3,306= 13,033 for my grand total for Tuesday.

I could have probably had a much stronger showing with jewelcrafting if I would have spent more time on it. My gut tells me I was just undercut too quickly. I am used to doing glyphs once or twice a day and that's it. Jewelcrafting isn't that friendly—there's huge competition. I did jewelcrafting in “waves”--I'd post two at a time and then repost. Each time, I'd gain more and more auctions. This tiered system, saved me some time on cancel and repost cycles.

For enchanting...I just wasn't selling enough. I mentioned It before, but only a few types of enchants doesn't really grab the whole market. I probably needed about 20 more.

Inscription did so well because I have 350 different items up as opposed to 10 or 20 like the other two professions. The one major difference is...all the glyphs are the same to craft. It doesn't really matter what it is. (This isn't entirely true because shimmering ink is much cheaper than other types, but relative to say enchants, it is easy to price glyphs in a range.) Jewelcrafting has this same truth within colors, but a red gem is very different than a yellow one. Glyphs are definitely easier to micro manage.

I don't know if I'd bother disrupting the status quo, but those would be the best ways to do so.  Knowing your market and putting your time in to do so are the strongest skills.

Jewelcrafting--A Case Study

In the previous entry, I talked about the theory behind jewelcrafting—it was more theory than anything else, but let's test that theory, shall we? Let's look at an actual example. Jewelcrafting takes much higher amounts of money to start with, but the principles remain the same whether you can afford 20 stacks or 2,000 stacks. The time to sell of course and the risk goes up the more you buy.

First, we invest in the market and buy ore. I bought 274 stacks for about 100 gold a stack or 27,400 k in costs for this example. That's a sizable amount but again you can do more or less depending on how your auction house is.

After watching the history channel and breaking the ore, I yield 37 red gems x300 gold each =11,100 gold. 

I transmute the carns into inferno rubies. This should yield 61 red gems (x300 gold each=18,300). During this process I procs 10 times for 71 gems total, adding another 3,000 gold. Included is one lucky 5 proc! This brings my total estimated bring it at 32,300 gold!

 

The profit rate is about 17 percent or for every 5 gold invested, we get 6 back. That's not too bad. Of course, we gained both common and uncommon gems of other colors too. These are all pure profit.

If we count in 70 oranges and 66 purples (at 15 each is 2,040).  This is a real low number--you'll probably get more than that.  I like to pad my margins some, just in case.

When I actually started selling, I didn't get quite what I had wanted, but they were flying off my virtual shelves.  That's one of the reason I like really big margins.  Of course this left me with a slew of common gems.  The theory says we make enchanting materials and then DE them.

 The jewelry itself is easy enough to make, but sending them all to your enchanter would be...tedious.  Thankfully, TSM has an automailer.  You just choose the item types you want send, add them to a list, and then the addon will send away.



The first screen shot shows you how to add them.  It is just like adding glyphs to your list.  The second screenshot shows the addon whisking the materials away to my enchanter.

I also decided to take a gamble and make some pvp jewerly.  I had quite a bit of volatile water around that I wanted to get rid of and amberjewels, so why not.  They always disenchant into 1-2 shards with the guild perk, so it seemed like a way to convert stuff I didn't want into stuff I could sell. 

 

On a whim, I put a few rings up and sold them for even greater profit!  The rings were going for almost 250 gold per.

Our  macro trick doesn't work with all the different jewelry names.  Doing it by hand would be tedious.  I don't want to spend my time looking around in my bags!  So I use the addon Panda to find the stuff I want to disenchant and make it easy clicking.

 I disenchant the jewelry and then scour the market.  There's plenty of profit to be made.

918 hypnotic dust x 1 gold = 918

69 greater celestial essence x80 gold=5,520

39 heavenly shards x 100 gold =3,900

This brings our enchanting total to 10,338! That's a combined grand total of 44,678 gold!

 Why sell the raw materials when we have an enchanter?  I want sure things, so I look for Int enchants mostly.

 Of course there's always more. Look at 50 Int to cloak. 9 gold in dust and 4 essences (320 gold) somehow equal 625 gold?

Int to offhand...4 essences of 320 gold and 6 dust is somehow 630 gold? These are almost 100 percent mark ups!

I found mighty stats and earthen vitality to boots to be great as well.  They took fewer mats and the later was a great way to move dust.

If we consider that most of the pricy enchanting mats will sell as enchants for double their price, we can project profit as high as 54k range...just over double our initial estimates.  Jewelcrafting is very profitable and even if we don't hit some of the higher ranges we were hoping for, it certainly offers great yields.

Darkmoon Decks--Success!

This is a quick update on the darkmoon fair.  As you can see I made a fair number of decks this go around.  At the end of the fair, I was down to 122.  The screenshot pictured to the right shows that I've made back some of it off glyphs already.

I wanted to see how much I really gained from the fair, so to make the math easy,  I put all my decks up at the same time.  Tradeskill master is tellimg me my worth is almost 350k....that's 200k higher than I had at my peak.  I don't think I'll actually make 200k profit on all those decks.  Prices are inflated and I'll have all next month to sell those cards without any new decks entering the market.  New 85's will have to buy from me and like minded individuals if they wish to get into the new 5 mans and lfr faster.



A few days after I took those screenshots, I had already made another 40k back.  I still have a huge stockpile of ink and cards left to sell too.  I am well ahead of where I started and with even mediocre sales, I'll certainly come up ahead.  So there you have it, inscription at work is still viable.  I've started working on a case study for gems as well, which as I've discussed in early entries much more friendly than inscription--it is easier to sell red gems than it is to complete decks.  

Jewelcrafting Overview

I am going to talk about the basics of jewelcrafting.

The first thing about jewelcrafting that is important is realizing that only your red gems really matter. When I was doing jewelcrafting actively, my reds would carry my entire inventory.

Why are reds so good? Every healer and every dps wants all or nearly all red gems. They are optimal. The only exception is when you can get a +20 bonus to your primary stat from a socket bonus.

Thus there are three cuts that are really good. +40 Int (brilliant), +40 Agi (delicate), and +40 Str (bold). Brilliant is the most important because every healer and every caster dps wants it. That means all 3 mage specs, all 3 warlock, 2 shaman specs, 1 paladin, 2 druid, and all 3 priests—or 14 specs. Delicate has 3 hunter, 3 rogue, 2 druid, and 1 shaman or 9 specs. Bold only has 2 dk, 2 warrior, and 1 paladin or 5 specs. It takes 9 days to get all three main cuts.

Purples and oranges still sell for those socket bonuses. Unfortunately, it is less clear cut what you want. Haste/Int (reckless) is really good, but some classes might want spirit/int or master/int or even hit/int. Of course hybrid str and agi gems are all good. I would get one of each color and then alternate until I built a good list.

I've had an awful time selling greens, yellows, and blues. Sometimes you can sell the tank oriented cuts here. Pure stamina, stamina/dodge, stamina/mastery, and pure mastery are all cuts that might sell. These often go for next to nothing and sometimes aren't even worth posting.

All the same things we've done with glyphs can be down with gems. I would make a different group for red (your high sellers) and then orange and yellow. Finally, I'd make one for blues, greens, and yellows.

So let's talk about how to get gems. You can make a macro, just like we did for milling herbs, merely change mill with prospect. If your server prices are favorable, then you can buy it and prospect through it. It is more costly to relist gems though. I recommend only posting 1-3 at a time and then posting more when you are undercut. The jewelcrafting market has huge undercutters and you'll only optimize your profit while watching it constantly. Constant vigilance is exhausting though.

You'll get common and rare gems. Let's talk about commons first because there's really not much to say about rares.

Carnelians are your bread and butter. These are great because with an alchemist you can transmute 3 of them and 3 heartblossom into an inferno ruby. There's no cool down on it and you get a 15 percent proc rate with a transmuter spec. If your prices are favorable, you can even buy the carnelians raw and transmute them. If you end up like me, keeping red gems in stock is your greatest challenge.

Jaspers (green), nightstones (purple), and zephrites (blue) are used in the daily. Zephrites can only be used on the daily—there's no other use besides leveling your skill up on them. I have stacks and stacks of these I can't get rid of.

Jaspers and nightstones can allow you to make jewelry as do hessonites (orange) and alicities (yellow), you can make jewelry. You'll rarely get a blue piece and always a green if you didn't get a blue. The greens are utterly worthless, but you can disenchant them into dust or if your are lucky essences. The blues might sell for several hundred gold each! If your server economy is depressed, you can turn them into heavenly shards. Furthermore, if your guild has the perk that allows for extra mats, this really generates large amounts of materials. If you are adventurous you can use this to full your enchanting business. (I'd highly recommend some enchants like 50 int to cloak, 40 int to offhand, the drop bracer enchants, or 15 stat enchants to chest.)

When I was doing this actively ore was only 30 to 40 gold a stack (but reds were only 50 each). These days I see ore for as high as 150 to 200 gold a stack and reds for 300 gold. I haven't dabbled it much lately, but I believe this could be extremely profitable, though it almost demands an enchanter and alchemist to make it really work. If you lack an alchemist, you can make carnelian spikes, which commonly de into 2-3 essences. This isn't ideal by any means, but it gives you a way to use them efficiently.

This was just a brief overview of how to make money with jewelcrafting. Hopefully this helps that are learning the trade.  Jewelcrafting requires heavy watching of the market, but you can quickly entry into it since it only takes 3 days to get the best cut.  It is very casual friendly.  In theory you could even manually put your auctions up or use a mod like auctionator--it would require little work.

Inscription in MoP

“Back in May of 2010, we began tossing around ideas about how to improve Inscription. But at that time, Mists of Pandaria was still in the early stages of character talent development. As that was hashed out, it directly affected how we were then able to approach potential Inscription and glyph changes. As a matter of fact, at one point during the discussions, glyphs were going to be removed altogether. That then evolved into the idea of Prime glyphs being removed, Major glyphs being adjusted such that their added bonuses did not affect talents, and Minor glyphs being revamped so they felt more interesting.

Have no fear, I have been assured that Inscription and glyph discovery are being actively discussed in preparation for upcoming changes with Mists of Pandaria. This comes with one albeit relieving caveat: Glyphs that are now learned solely through the Book of Glyph Mastery are planned to be available through the Northrend and Minor research dailies."

Here's the link

Link to the source information 

Just an entry ago, I talked about this, but I'll rehash it because we have talk about it from a blue Blizzard source.

I am pretty shocked that they'd think about removing glyphs all together. Not completely I suppose, but still that would be a really radical step. That would leave inscription as a very empty profession. Even without prime glyphs, we'd probably see at least 150 glyphs cut off the list. That's a massive number. The ones added for the new class won't make up for it.

The second part has them talk about all glyphs being gained through research. I am actually okay with this. The time barrier will still be immense for new competition. Goblins are still likely to outlast their foes interest. I am really happy with this actually. Of course, I'd prefer they never made any changes at all because the northrend ones are hard to farm. The worse case was if they had the books simply dropping off everything 78 to 85. It would flood the market with them and eventually, we'd go back to 15 gold glyph books instead of 500 gold ones.

The other thing is Blizzard talks about redoing minor glyphs. I wholeheartedly agree. There's some really good modern minors...like treant and shadow. Both are great sellers. Then, you have the paladin glyphs—half mana off spells that don't matter. I'd love to see paladins get one that puts their avenging wings on them 24/7. Druids could get glyphs that alter their bear and cat forms. Heck, there's a host of visual effects that could be added. Rain clouds for druids, frost circles for mages, maybe auras for hunter and warlock pets—or even different clothes for the former. None of them would have the slightest gameplay effect, but all would be high in demand. Blizzard would have happier players because they could make their characters more unique. Of course, glyph sellers would make a pile of gold on the exchange.

That's all for now, but these are certainly interesting times. (I did manage to complete three more tsuanmi decks though, bringing my total decks up to 30 this fair.)

Darkmoon Fair viablity?

With love is in the air, going on, there's a couple great opportunities to make tons of money. The larger one is the love bird mount. In theory, it might sell for quite a bit later on. I am not as confidant as the cross faction pets though, since they inherently are harder to get. The second items are the charm bracelets. I see people buying them for over 100 gold, though I think they manually have to sell them. I've not explored it too much, but I have to admit, it is a pain to farm four of them each day.

I've been really busy with the Darkmoon Fair. I originally had about a dozen decks to sell, but one thing lead to another and I found good prices on both whiptail and cinderbloom. I lost track, but I think I bought around 600 stacks of it and 16 stacks of life to boot. Talk about tedious, but three movies, later it was all milled. The ink isn't so bad because at least you can go do something else while your character creates it.

All those herbs brought me 81 darkmoon cards. It certainly is a respectable haul. I finished 2 earthquake decks, 2 volcano, 2 tsunami, and 7 hurricanes. I had almost depleted my volcano cards before from making decks, so I already had a number of those. I am just a few cards short (mostly the ace of waves) of making a few more tsunami decks, so I'll be watching the AH hard for that card. I actually bought too much life, but there's always used for it.

 

I'd guess conservatively 2.5 k for the earthquake decks, 9k for volcano and tsunami, and 5k for hurricanes, for a grand total of 76k. That's about a return of 1 to 2 from gold spent to gold earned. 

As shown in the screenshot to the right t, I have a huge stockpile of ink again. (It also shows the original 14 decks I had made before hand.) Glyphs will trickle in money for the next month without any more milling. It might be time to start making fortune cards again even.

In conclusion, the darkmoon fair is still profitable. It would have been much greater if the darkmoon cards were still demanding double digits. The danger of course is, once Mists of Pandaria arrives, the darkmoon cards are worthless, though by then, the new cards will give us greater options to earn wealth.

Prediction about Prime Glyphs

One of the great things about taking all these screenshots is the ability to look back accurately. I was looking at my old screen from a week ago Tuesday. I had 145.5k. Today I have 172.4k. That's 26.9k in 9 days days. That's alittle under 3k a day with about half an hour a day spent on average—our nearly 6k an hour of work. Plus, I have a bank brimming with ink and quite about of infernal ink to use.

Interesting my total glyph worth had dropped to 35k and then jumped up to 70k. I also noted that one of my new competitors (can in this expansion) probably had been buying cheap glyphs out. On one hand, I regret they are gaining inventory at cheap price. On the other, they are doing all the work and I am coming in and undercutting them, so that's good too. We aren't a cartel...we didn't talk about it, but we are more like gas stations both matching each other's (in our case) inflated rates.

In an early entry, I talked about the barriers to entry in the glyph market. That's why this type of behavior is occurring. I know I've seen blue Blizzard posts talking about how unhappy they are with the glyph books from Northrend. They could very easily make these all researchable. I would actually be okay with the change. The complainers would simply have to spend more time researching (and hopefully get bored during the long research times. Unlike say the gem market, where only a few cuts matter, there's usually at least 9 glyphs for every spec that are best. There's some overlap especially with minors and majors, but primes are almost always unique to a spec. I would never try this with gems because there's just too much competition. You can certainly make money with gems, but that is by activating fighting the opposition. It is too broad based to actually form a cartel.

The second threat to the inscription market is the possibility that Blizzard would remove prime glyphs. There was some talk about how they were unhappy with prime glyphs. This makes sense. The average person doesn't know where lava burst or lightening bolt does more damage. This person relies on some outside source to figure out which is a bigger portion of their damage. Worse yet, if this hypothetical person doesn't have any real way of knowing and can easily make the wrong choice. If encounters are balanced around making the right choice...then the person is doomed for failure. (I remember seeing a resto druid without Nature's Swiftness or Swiftmend during Wrath. I pitted them because they were trying to operate without a full tool kit. )

Deep down, Blizzard wants us to have difficult, but succeed. That's why you see content being nerfed down and stacking buffs like the ones for ICC and Dragonsoul. The current model of inscription really doesn't fit this model. (This is also why you don't see long grinds of experience or even the ability to meaningful progress your character outside a few small venues—mostly quests, then dungeons, then heroic dungeons, then raids (with crafted gear and rep gear tucked in the list) and then a more narrow route for pvp...just sometimes crafted, then a two week hazing while you build up resilience from the honor gear in battle grounds or Tol Barad, followed by arena or rate battle grounds. World pvp might be fun, but it isn't productive and isn't present on most servers. If you look at older games like Everquest, there were a myriad of ways to progress your character through solo quests and older items that were simply broken. (Clerics in that game used the same main hand weapon for something like a decade straight, because the click effect was so valuable!)

It is my prediction that Blizzard will do what they have hinted at and eliminate prime glyphs. Glyphs were divided between prime and major in Cata because Blizzard didn't like how prime simpily override major for pvers. There was no meaningful decision making process. Just like their changes to the talent trees were ultimately failures and Blizzard simply wants to scrap them with Mists of Pandaria, I believe that prime glyphs will be eliminated.  This simplifies the bulky glyph system and makes it more accessible to the average person.  Their inability to fix the issue with Northrend books seems to be less of an issue because the new system will have fewer glyphs in it.  Also, with fewer glyphs, the barriers to entry lessen into inscription.  These are all goals Blizzard surely has.

Perhaps I sound paranoid, but I believe Blizzard doesn't like us gold mongers.  The removal of epic gems from ore is an example of this type of behavior.  Of course, this just lead for the prices on red gems to increase (on my server they went from 50 to 300 to 500 gold each!).  Similar things happened with not allowing epic gem transmutes.  After all, Blizzard has a good reason to loathe us.  When people flip things in the AH or the like, essentially, we are making it harder for the average player to make money.  They would much rather we do dailies to make cash and actually experience the content, rather than buying and item and reselling it for twice the amount.  Anyway, I am digressing.

If you agree or disagree, I would love to hear your comments.

How Blizzard could decimate gold sellers

I've never been a fan of Eve online, but I've had some friends that played.  The one thing I liked about the game I had heard about from other friends.  Essentially, the economy was really complex and vibrate.  Anyway, my friend that played it was telling me, people could buy and sell game time as an in game item.

That was rather interesting to me when I thought about the applications in Warcraft.  Say, someone wanted to buy gold.  They buy a month's time to the game...and then sold it for 15k in the AH.  What are the consequences?

First off, illegal gold selling would virtually disappear.  It makes me think of Prohibition in the United States in the 1930's.  The United States Government desperately tried to stop alcohol and the organized crime it spawned.  Eventually, this was a dismal failure and instead Prohibition was repealed and the government just taxed it.

When applied to gold and game time, players that want to buy gold suddenly have a safe way to do so.  Why risk getting your account banned when you could buy it safely.  That's a huge plus for the portion of the population that would consider buying gold in the first place.  No risk!  At the same time, players who have plenty of gold could buy the game cards and play for free.  Both sides get something they want.  All players benefit from players no spamming trade chat!

Best of all, for Blizzard, they get all the gold buying revenue in their pockets instead of some going to third party companies.  With no reason to hack accounts since people aren't buying gold, their customer service burden is lightened.  If people were afraid of their credit cards getting hacked and buying tons of cards, then maybe the cards are only sold in your local game stop or what not.

Everyone wins.  It isn't that different than what the Guardian Cub was.  There's essentially one big difference.  I myself bought a guardian cub.  Then I was done.  Even if they allowed all the pets and mounts to be droppable, once you have them all, then you are done.  For game time though, I'd keep buying every month.  Repeatability would make it a long term solution to both keep demand high.