Player Vs Auction House

In An Age

2011-09-30T00:49:00.000-04:00

If you are reading this... you shouldn't be. I am over at In An Age, you know, http://inanage.com.

I appreciate the patronage of getting 1500+ pageviews in the last month despite having zero new content. So allow me to reward your loyalty with In An Age, where I have made twenty-one (21) posts in the last thirty days. Know what else? I imported PVSAH in its entirety over there (including comments), so it is not even as though you will be missing anything. Indeed, by not updating your bookmark/blogroll you will be missing the most important thing: updated content!

Here is a sample of the last month:

What Have They Done to Me? (Sept 30 - Transmog & paladin S11 gear)
Class Warfare (Sept 21 - Internet arguments!)
Review: Bastion (Sept 21 - Did I mention game reviews?)
Still Skeptical of Storybricks (Sept 20 - Demo'd Storybricks with Nils and Namaste)
Diablo Learns from WoW (Sept 15 - Dev comments you'd never see on the WoW forums)
Inevitability of Decline (Sept 4 - Resistance is futile!)

The only thing missing is AH and WoW economic discussions. Which, if you haven't noticed, are not taking place here either. So what have you got to lose... other than one more second reading this nonsense when you could be enjoying the sweet, sultry voice of Morgan Freeman narrating* everything I write over at In An Age?

Naught a thing, I daresay!

*Some imagination required.

Transition

2011-08-25T02:54:00.000-04:00

So if it was not clear from my "900,001" post on the 10th, I quit WoW. It may end up being like that smoker joke "you never quit, you just stop buying packs," but it has been two weeks since account expiration and no signs of relapse. I don't know if it says something about me or not, but I somehow miss random BGs the most, and yet have zero interest in League of Legends, etc, games. Go figure.

In the meantime, transition your love for me (and links) to: In An Age. Yes, http://inanage.com.

Essentially, In An Age is this blog without all the Off Topic tags. As silly as it might sound (and stupid as it might be blogroll-wise), I felt exceedingly guilty making posts about non-AH things under the, well, Player Vs Auction House name. This site is technically "PVSAH" so perhaps I could just pretend that it was an acronym for something completely different, but... well, let's just see how this works out.

My first (new) post is up over there, and it's called Culpability of Questionable Design. ~~Bitching about~~ Exploring the ramifications of de evolving Blizzard game design is still something I enjoy writing about, along with the Diablo stuff I have talked about here in OT posts before. You can expect more of that plus posts about Steam games, possibly RPG reviews, perhaps publishing old D&D campaigns I designed (!) and whatever the hell else I end up doing that is related to gaming or about gaming minutia.

Hope to see you over there.

Future of Gaming: We (May) Be Screwed

2011-08-18T01:31:00.001-04:00

If you play games and had a pulse in the last fifteen years, you have undoubtedly bore witness to the meteoric rise of the Free To Play (F2P) model, which had been preceded by the Downloadable Content (DLC) model, which had been preceded by the "new Madden game every year" model, sandwiched inbetween the 8-hour single-player campaign and Skinner Box School of Character Advancement loafs. It is enough to make a grown man cynically quip "I told you so!" as he shuffles back into the 1990s when games were games, and boys dreamed of somehow getting credited as Writer in the next Squaresoft Final Fantasy epic.* You know, when gaming was cool because it was an ultra-niche hobby that catered solely to you and your demographic - back before the industry totally sold out** and before it was considered hip to pretend you were upset that something sold out.

Well my friends, it actually might be worse than you think.

First, I want you to read this thoroughly depressing article on CNN.com titled Why most people don't finish videogames. While the figures presented seem to skew heavily into the "90% of statistics are made up" realm of suspiciously round numbers, the essential premise is that only 10-20% of people who play a videogame end up finishing it. This should not be especially surprising news, considering how I estimated back in June that 71.2% of all (non-Chinese) subscribers did not raid T11 at all, and of the players that did raid, less than a third of them killed Nefarian on Normal***. You might argue that WoW endgame raiding is not quite the same as beating a single-player game, or you might even just sneer "Working as intended!" The bad news is that the lack of rational completion rates is leading to the death of single-player games in general, but the magnum opus solo experiences specifically.

Long gone are the days of starting a game on a high-level concept," says Konami's Airey. The reason: "It's costly," he says.

Fuller says the devil is in the details.

"I worked on a project that took 50 people and 18 months to produce 20 minutes of game play," he says. "With the expectations so high for visual and audio fidelity, lifelike animations, enemy behavior and movie-quality cinemas, it can take two years for a team of 100 people to create six hours of playable story. At an average burn rate of $10,000 per man month, that's $24 million just in developer cost. You're not likely to find a publisher that will foot the bill for extending that campaign to 20 hours."

Of course, why make a 20-plus hour game when most players aren't completing them, as is the case with "Red Dead Redemption"? The answer is, most publishers don't.

The story becomes a bit more chilling once you realize the conclusions these game companies are coming to:

Steinberg agrees: "Just because you don't slay the final boss or rescue the princess doesn't mean you can't see most of, if not all, of what a game has to offer in the hours leading up to it."

Not only that, but gamers are already warming to the idea of shorter games.

"Completion rates are actually on the rise," Lee says. "Many games now have a 40% to 50% completion rate, thanks to 10-hour campaigns instead of the 20-30 hour ones of yesteryear. Of course, that's good or bad depending on how you look at it. It's better than before. But it still means that more than half of all game content never gets appreciated."

To counter that, Airey says extended play content will increasingly come from expansion packs, a sort of best-of-both-worlds approach.

That is right, the creative minds of game companies believe they are doing us a favor by making shorter single-player games and fleshing it out with DLC and expansion packs. Indie games usually prove that gamplay depth beats gameplay length, and I agree. But when I think back to my favorite games of all time - Xenogears, FF7, Final Fantasy Tactics - I start to wonder if those type of RPGs would have any place in today's game market. The battle systems might exist in an indie development space, but what of the narrative depth? I do not know what is more tragic: that we may not see another Xenogears (Xenosaga did not quite cut it), or that perhaps 90% of the gamers who actually played Xenogears originally did not finish it.

It is enough to make this cynic (metaphorically) weep.

The irony may very well be that we come full circle as gamers, our niche hobby exploding into the mainstream to the point where the only games for us end up being niche titles. Be that as it may, I do see some sprouts of optimism in the rise of game platforms like Steam that give sunlight to the indie space. As Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation mentions in a lot of his written articles, the market drive for consoles to have better and better graphics erodes third-party game company support, forcing designers into multi-million dollar budgets for HD graphics or letting us drown in 1st-party rehashes as they get priced out of the market. Because who wants a side-scrolling 2D game on their Xbox 360 or PS3? If it is a good game... everyone should, yeah?

I dunno though, I have a hard time enjoying a game for just the game's sake. World of Goo, Braid, Eufloria, Osmos, Trine... all extremely entertaining games with cursory or non-existent plots. I had less fun playing, say, Dead Space but I would say Dead Space was the better game. I am not looking for things to occupy my time, I am looking for an experience. And with this game design philosophy shifting back to the Pac-Man era of gamy games, I do not know if there will be room for "old-timers" RPG fans such as myself.

I guess I should start picking up these "book" things I keep hearing about, eh?

* I can't be the only one, right?
** Everyone thinks their hobby sells out at some point. And they may actually be correct.
*** The number of Nef kills has increased 40.6% since the nerfs, by the way. Magmaw... only 6%.

900,001; Or How Tiny Tower Killed WoW

2011-08-10T23:55:00.000-04:00

The frustrating thing about canceling your subscription is that you never end up doing it for the reasons you want to have done it for. All of us have those little wedge issues that crop up in the process of an evolving game design that we disagree with on fundamental levels. Cash shop antics with the Sparkle Pony/Disco Lion. Heroics being too easy or too hard. Justice point gear and the availability thereof. Premium subscriptions. Racials, class balance, paladins getting nerfed into the ground every patch/not getting nerfed enough.

I had a whole post titled "The Unapologetic Grind" ready to go, talking about how the malaise that seems to be spreading in the "community" has more to do with the transition of the badge system into an "empty bar filling" system that both encourages you to grind way past your normal limits (just... one... more... bar...) and injects feelings of inadequacy when you inevitably fail to fill them. Indeed, the first day that my guild failed to hit our maximum XP cap was the day I could point to as the beginning of the end.

But... when you get right down to it, the answer is always simple.

I first came across Tiny Tower a few weeks ago after hearing Scott Johnson and friends talk about it on The Instance and The Morning Stream, two rather hilarious podcasts I have listened to for months. If you have never heard of Tiny Tower, it is a "F2P" Apple app that is objectively a pointless waste of time. There is nothing skillful or strategic about any of the gameplay, and obviously there is no plot to speak of. It exists on my iPod only because it stimulates my nucleus accumbens in a completely vapid way: it tricks my physiological drive to multi-task into believing that the accumilated time spent playing has any meaning. And yet I have not deleted the app. It is still on there.

The philosophical question of whether anything we do has value or meaning aside, WoW engages in this same remote, psychological pleasure-center stimulation. And why wouldn't it? It is an MMO with a monthly subscription. The difference between creating enough content to occupy people for a month versus creating content it takes a person a month to complete is the difference between bankruptcy and a sweet raise. Think about those Tol Barad trinkets you spent 30+ days "earning." That they required 125 marks and Exalted reputation was entirely arbitrary. It was not about creating content, it was about creating a time wall that needed to be dismantled brick by brick by repetitive activity which creates an illusiary value to the end-product. Something you have worked towards accumilates value that simply getting it right away would lack.

In WoW's defense, there is actually an end product there: a trinket that you might be using the rest of this expansion's lifespan. Games like Tiny Tower have latched onto the notion that you do not even need the end-goal, do not need a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Worse than that though, these designers have realized that the individual actions do not have to be entertaining either. These are sandbox games without the sand; play replaced by going through the motions of play, yet triggering the same biochemicals as if you were having actual fun. And having thus deluded you into believing your participation has value, they tweak the "gameplay" to make even this seem reasonable*:

Seriously. I am waiting for a Steam deal on Limbo because $9.99 is a tad higher than I would prefer, and yet I was musing on how much could be accomplished with 1,000 Tower Bux... at the low, low price of $29.99. Philip Morris has nothing on these "F2P" assholes.

As my friends started logging into WoW less and less, the weakening social ties to the game gave me room to stand from my chair and really examine what I was doing. The taste of daily quests soured in my mouth. The AH was still fun... but it was the deals and strategy and the profit, not the tedium of listing, undercutting, emptying the mailbox. Sure, I could (further) automate those actions, but that is like automating chewing to speed tasteless digestion - it misses the point. The one activity I enjoyed for the sake of enjoyment was PvP. But when I became Honor capped on my warlock, BGs ceased to be amusing nearly instantly. "If I'm going lose 5 games for every 1 win during Twin Peaks holiday, I may as well do it on a toon that has use for Honor." In other words, character advancement and fun had been so inexoriably linked in my mind that I questioned whether they could even exist independantly. Tiny Tower demonstrated that I would do something unfun for even the vaguest of rewards, and that was when I realized I was not actually having fun in those BGs. Or rather, it was no longer immediately clear that I was.

A lot of these sort of posts smack of "I quit WoW and so should you, for these reasons," but that honestly is not my intention. I think there are some definite missteps that the designers made in Cataclysm, and I would be happy to debate those at length any day of the week regardless of whether subs are lost or gained. The fact of the matter though, is that if I was still having an engaging social experience in WoW I would probably still be paying $15/month. Without friends, WoW falls to the merits of its single-player experience. When that single-player experience is no longer fun, it falls finally onto its time soaking skills. And in the arena of time soaking, WoW cannot hold a candle to "games" like Tiny goddamn Tower.

God save us all.

*Obviously anyone who has played this "game" will go on about how they haven't paid for anything. I haven't paid for anything either. But any time you looked at that Bux screen and did not laugh at the designers' overreach is a time you ceased to "beat the system" and became one with it. Nevermind all the stupid iTunes band previews or Youtube videos you watched because they gave you "free" Bux to do it.

Always Online: Missing the Point

2011-08-08T23:08:00.000-04:00

I still have a problem with the always-online trend, but it actually comes from the other direction. Fundamentally, I am always connected to the internet... but that does not mean I always have a connection capable of running a client/server game without lag.

Spotty Wi-Fi? It happens. ISP having issues with Blizzard's servers? Been there, done that. Indeed, Time Warner (the only cable internet provider in my area) frequently has intermittent disconnects in the 11pm-3am time period when I am most active (I work 2nd shift). And obviously playing multiplayer games like FPS and WoW is impossible when, I dunno, I am downloading torrents, Steam/iTunes/antivirus programs decide to update, someone on the same connection boots up Netflix, and so on and so forth. Any of those other things are about 1000% more likely than lugging a laptop onto airplanes, trains, or buses.

So please don't construe this always-online DRM as a value-added feature when it is nothing but movie executives futilely pushing 3D movies because it eliminates the majority of piracy. There are better ways of eliminating that kind of piracy, but the movie industry is choosing the one that makes them more money.

Speaking of choosing the option that makes them more money. Tobold mentions that the cash AH in Diablo 3 necessitates a constant connection, but cheating prevention is honestly a red herring as Tycho from Penny-Arcade divines:

For my part, and I’m not, like, The Lord or anything, but the gulf between able to install a Spawn copy of the game and not being able to play offline at all seems pretty deep. Don’t really know what else to tell you. I saw that Blizzard came out with a response response, expressing their surprise at the consumer reaction, when this is more or less how consumers react every single time they learn the precise circumference of their golden leash.

By their own admission, Diablo isn’t not really focused around a PVP experience; if you’re playing with someone who has duped items or whatever, all it means is that you will be more likely to defeat Satan. Without a means to gain advantage over another, “cheating” as a concept becomes substantially more opaque. Who is the cheated party, precisely? Satan the Devil? Fuck him, who cares.

Who is being cheated? This is the part of the movie where, in a series of retrospective realizations cut with you looking at your own face in the rearview mirror, you come bit by bit to the heart of it. The person you are cheating is Blizzard, Blizzard in the aggregate, with your attempts to interfere with their digital marketplace. You mustn’t play offline or goof around with your files or any other naughty business because they are endeavoring to transform your putative ownership into a revenue stream.

There, now don’t you feel better?

Diablo 3 was going to spawn a black market(place) if Blizzard did not do anything, but there were other options available. Flagging items as being offline-only, having separate offline characters*, or hell, even turn item/gold duplication into a (somewhat hidden) feature, preemptively destroying that market. If you choose to log onto some epic'd-out guy's server, it is indistinguishable to you whether said guy hacked the items into existence or bought them all from the AH. Don't group with that guy. This is Bashiok:

Q u o t e:
but it also has the potential to damage the game economy and overall experience for the many thousands of others who play World of Warcraft for fun

We still think that's true for a MMO in which thousands of players co-mingle in a persistent world and vie for supremacy in eSport competitions or 'world first' boss kills in raids. Neither of these are true though for a co-op action RPG.

The worst that could happen is you open your game up to the public, someone jumps in wearing some awesome gear, and you don't know if he found those items himself. But that'd be the case whether we offered an official way to buy items from other players or not.

I have a hard time reading that and accepting the premise that cheating harms anything, especially under the Diablo model of a co-op dungeon grinder. Hell, I have a hard time accepting the premise of a co-op anything that you play with total strangers all the time as opposed to with people you know, but that might just be me. I would never open up a public Minecraft or Magicka or Portal 2 or Dawn of War 2 server, for example. Competitive game modes like TF2 or Counter-Strike or WoW BGs are one thing, "intimate" team projects you cannot quickly exit are quite another.

*Blizzard did address this by saying they did not want someone leveling up to the cap, eventually coming around to the whole online idea, and then realizing that they would have to reroll completely. To which I reply: you are allowing the buying and selling of characters. Throw down $20 and you can have a fully epic'd, level-capped character to play around with online. Problem solved.

The Underplayed Piece of D3 News

2011-08-03T02:13:00.000-04:00

You can buy and sell characters.

The screenshots (from MMO Champ) are fairly low resolution, but it does clearly show Featured Heroes results, the drop-down box for the class, narrowing your search to level ranges and, of course, three listings of level-capped toons for sale. Apparently the market price for a level-capped Witch Doctor is 10,000g. I would recommend buying out all three and relisting for $20 apiece.

...things are going to get fun, aren't they?

One quick item of note (that may be old news to some):

Personal loot. I was planning on making a post about how the whole RMT value of gear would make grouping and co-op loot rolling bizarre, but hey, this appears to have been settled over three years ago. In effect, each player gets loot from bosses/kills individually. In WoW terms, imagine killing 10m Magmaw or whatever and each person getting a (random) piece of gear instead of two pieces of random gear that has to be divvied up between 10 people. The funny thing is that this works in Diablo because loot is truly randomly generated, but absolutely doesn't work in WoW judging by most peoples' reactions to the random-stat loot in Throne of the 4 Winds, etc.

Of course, grouping can still get weird assuming you are playing with friends. If a cool Barbarian axe drops that you can't use on your Wizard, do you give it to your Barbarian friend... or sell for $5?
Making things worse, few (if any) items in the game are BoP. This means you can swap with your friends (passing down a good item), but also that if you agree to mix-n-match loot in co-op, your friend can sell that Barbarian axe you gave him for cash later and you would never know (especially if he replaced it with a legit upgrade). Might sound petty or too goblin'ish right now, but believe me, this is a Diablo game; eventually there will be some 0.001% chance item drop that could easily sell for $100+ on eBay without even considering a Blizzard-sanctioned RMT system.

I would say that this will be the last post about Diablo 3, but honestly Diablo 3 is the most interesting thing that has happened in weeks. Other than Limbo being released on Steam.

Talk About Free Publicity (Diablo 3)

2011-08-02T02:39:00.000-04:00

Diablo 3 will let you sell pixels for dollars, in-game, and vice versa.

My first thought, along similar lines to Alto, was: can you imagine the number of gold guides for Diablo 3? WoW alone supported one costing $47 for the majority of the game's lifespan, and that is discounting the other, cheaper ones of the last few years. And you couldn't even really cash your gold out! In a game where you could presumably spend $47 and make $100 in-game using the tips, it might be foolish to not do so. Unless you could get those same tips from anyone with a blog, of course.

My second thought was self-reflection on why I instinctually despised this news. If you never use a cash shop, and if you don't care that other people do... then why hate it? There are two reasons why.

Number 1: It removes, or diminishes the value of time.

When you drill it down, by "value" I really mean "advantage." If I can play five hours a day and you can only play two, all other things being equal, I will have an advantage over you in an MMO. Especially in MMOs, where the design is to throttle content to ensure monthly subscriptions. I will reach the level-cap sooner, I will level more alts, I will have access to more professions, I will have more attempts on raid bosses, I will be geared to the teeth while you are still struggling for your two-piece bonus. Skill can overcome Time in many areas (Arenas, raiding, etc) and obviously a complete moron would be incapable of any number of activities no matter how much time they spent playing.

Most people, grudgingly, can accept when their Time was beaten by an opponent's Skill. In RPGs, people are more forgiving of when Time beat Skill - the premise being that Time is something that acquires value in only one specific way ("earning" it) that is available to anyone*. Cash Shops, RMT, and so on radically change the calculus. Time, which hitherto was "priceless" in-game, now has a price. If we are equally skilled, I can win by either Time or Cash whereas you may be limited (literally or philosophically) to Time alone. If the game makes Time capable of beating Skill, and Cash = Time, then Cash > Skill becomes possible. This is where the whole "Pay-To-Win" (Golden Ammo, etc) pejorative comes from. As a gamer, you have to start asking yourself why you would "invest" in Time in a game where anyone with more Cash could stomp you at any moment. If Time is all you have, there are other games without Cash Shops which would give you a better return.

Blizzard has thus far avoided the Pay-To-Win scenario in WoW by keeping the Cash Shop limited to cosmetic items and preventing gold from being (legitimately) purchased. Meanwhile, Diablo 3 is balls-deep in Pay-To-Win by every available measure. From their FAQ:

Will players be at a disadvantage in the game if they do not purchase items in the auction house?
All of the items available in the auction house can be obtained in the game. The auction house system is designed to facilitate the exchange of items (items can also be exchanged through character-to-character trades). Diablo III is primarily a cooperative game; while the game will offer some highly entertaining player-vs.-player options, we don't intend to balance items for player-vs.-player gameplay. We feel that a robust and powerful item-trading system will make the co-op experience more enjoyable.

The question after that is equally hilarious.

Can I just buy the most powerful items and breeze through the game?
Items will be level-restricted, meaning your character won't be able to use an item until he or she is at the appropriate level for that item.

Read: you can purchase the most powerful items for your level to breeze through the game with, until you hit the level cap of 60 where uber-gear** will likely make or break your character just like in WoW. For the low, low player price of $100 per slot, if we are lucky. And we may actually see sales that high or higher, given that it would be "affordable" after the sale of a bunch of $5 auctions. Keep in mind that while Blizzard is providing a "cash out" advanced feature, it is actually pretty misleading:

How do I cash out from the currency-based auction house?
As an advanced feature, players will have the option of attaching an account with an approved third-party payment service to their Battle.net account. Once this has been completed, proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house can be deposited into their third-party payment service account. “Cashing out” would then be handled through the third-party payment service. Note that this process will be subject to applicable fees charged by Blizzard and the third-party payment service. Also, any proceeds from the sale of items in the currency-based auction house that have been deposited into the Battle.net account will not be transferrable to the third-party payment service account. Not all regions will support this advanced feature at launch. Region-specific details, as well as details regarding which third-party payment services will be supported and the fee that Blizzard will charge for the cash-out process, will all be provided at a later date.

In other words, any dollars that actually reach your Battle.net account essentially become carnival tickets - non-refundable currency that performs as pseudo-cash, buying you the big fuzzy bear, Disco Lion, or 30 days of WoW. The "cashing-out" only occurs if you tweak your Battle.net settings so that AH proceeds never actually touch your Battle.net account, but get directly deposited into your Paypal account or whatever. Considering you can't actually buy anything with dollars until said dollars are loaded into your Battle.net account (thereby making them non-refundable), I have little doubt there will be quite a few surprised AH goblins out there who find that their $1000 nest egg will, at best, keep them subscribed to Titan or whatever for the next half-decade.

Number 2: It threatens design integrity.

This is decidedly a gray area, especially in a post where I already said "[...] the design [of MMOs] is to throttle content to ensure monthly subscriptions." What design integrity means to me is asking yourself whether what you are about to do is going to make for a better game (story, simulation, etc). I intentionally did not say "makes your game better" because typically gaining more subscriptions or selling more boxes makes a game with a multiplayer component better. Instead, design integrity is about making the game in of itself better at what it is. If a game can only be better if it had more people playing it, that is a job for the marketing department, not game designers.

One of the clearest, most easily recognizable breaches of design integrity to me would be the Firelands daily quests. There is nothing about this series of quests that gets better for them having been spread out over 30+ days. Nothing. Even if your argument is that the number of days serves to simulate the long struggle of a dangerous military campaign, I would counter that the same feeling could be accomplished by doubling the number of actual quests, and allowing a choice few to be repeatable once complete. An example could be, I dunno... the entire Hyjal zone itself?

Obviously the Firelands dailies were not the first incident of intentional content throttling (there were reputation grinds, etc, from Day 1), but it is particularly galling to me insofar as the way it was hyped and presented. Seriously, they came out and said...

Rather than these stages only becoming available after a certain period of time or at the end of a long quest series, players will instead get to use a new alternate currency called Marks of the World Tree to unlock them at their own pace.

...as if stages were not available until after a certain period of time (weeks) or at the end of a long (daily) quest series. Again, the Argent Tournament et tal did this years ago, but in that particular preview they merely state exactly what was going on: new dailies.

How this relates to Diablo 3 is simple. Does a currency-based AH make Diablo 3 a better game? I do not think it does. What it seems to be aimed at is what Blizzard mentions in the FAQ, along the lines of "since you guys are going to do crack anyway, we may as well supply it." If getting the perfect item or set is the motivator for playing the game (after finishing the story), does the inclusion of an AH at all make Diablo 3 better than, say, some profession/item/etc that could randomly turn items into a different version of itself? Such a thing would perhaps be distracting from the Skinner Box lever that is grinding bosses for loot (e.g. spend more time randomizing one item than simply killing things for a random shot at another), but it is a question worth asking anyway.

The fear here is Cash Shops and RMT lead to F2P-esque games that sacrifice the fun of the game for monetization of the game. Tobold has talked about the World of Tanks model many times, but it is most succinctly described in the opening paragraphs of his Payslope post:

Even Free2Play games need to make money to be sustainable. Many have some sort of paywall, reserving certain content for people who pay. World of Tanks doesn't have such a wall, everybody has access to all the maps and tech tree tanks in the game. Instead WoT has something I'd rather describe as a payslope: The high-level game becomes very tedious if you don't pay.

The effect is first noticeable around level 7 (out of 10): Starting from this level regular tanks on regular accounts tend to spend more credits on ammo and repair than they get as credit reward at the end of the battle. There are some variables there, winning earns you more than losing, and dealing a lot of damage also earns you more. But with level 8+ tanks costing millions of credits, money definitely is getting tight at the higher levels.

I am not opposed to game designers being paid for their quality products. I am, however, opposed to intentionally hobbling the player's game experience to "trick" them into paying to continue playing a game they found fun. If World of Tanks did not have a Cash Shop or RMT, do you think they would still have a point in the leveling curve where it became extremely tedious to play? Maybe. You would rightly call that bad game design however. Same deal with MMOs and systems designed to take weeks of repeated content to complete.

Blizzard stated that Diablo 3's loot system was developed before they decided to add an AH with RMT options. I have no choice but to accept that statement on face value. But given the carnival ticket structure of money in Battle.net accounts, it is abundantly clear Blizzard stands to make an absolute killing by implementing RMT even without considering the Blizzard cut on both listing and successful auctions. Even if you are a pro AH goblin and amass $10,000 without yourself ever paying anything into the system, that is $10,000 (+X% of whatever Blizzard cut) sitting in a Blizzard escrow account earning interest, all of which would have been "left on the table" otherwise. They repeatedly said they will not be selling anything or setting prices, but it would be incredibly naive to believe that future Diablo 3 balance decisions (drop rate, etc) will not directly affect Blizzard RMT profits, and/or Blizzard would not ever make changes with such things in mind.

Bottom line: you can only really trust someone who makes you pay everything up front. Provided they actually deliver the product you bought, you will know that they had no incentive make an inconsistent experience. And inconsistent experiences make for the worst videogames.

*In reality, Time as an advantage is just as "unfair" as Cash could ever be. Just ask anyone who has typed the phrase "no-lifers" or "you just live in your mom's basement."

**Even more interesting to ponder is whether Blizzard intends to limit the gear from Nightmare and Hell difficulties to only being wearable by players of those difficulties. I mean, I can only assume gear dropped from Hell difficulty would be better than Normal mob drops. It is possible they intend the level cap of 60 to only be achievable on Hell difficulty, although I imagine it would be almost as tough a sell as the opposite - not everyone can/wants to play on that level, but do you simply not give the average player access to the coolest spells? Or are the gaming veterans stuck with merely upgraded spell stats instead of abilities?

OT: The Problem With F2P and Microtransactions

2011-07-25T23:05:00.001-04:00

Are you someone who almost never engages in microtransactions, has no real issue with people that do, but nevertheless feel like you are losing something whenever a game company starts to embrace them? Do you get the sensation that the purchasing power of your money is decreasing the longer a game goes on, seemingly for no real reason? Do you think cash shops are just plain wrong but have difficulty expressing it in words? The good news is I finally remembered the name of the economic concept behind the sensation: consumer surplus. The bad news is... so have game companies.

Consumer surplus is the difference between the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay and the actual price they do pay. If a consumer would be willing to pay more than the current asking price, then they are getting more benefit from the purchased product than they spent to buy it. An example of a good with generally high consumer surplus is drinking water. People would pay very high prices for drinking water, as they need it to survive. The difference in the price that they would pay, if they had to, and the amount that they pay now is their consumer surplus. Note that the utility of the first few liters of drinking water is very high (as it prevents death), so the first few liters would likely have more consumer surplus than subsequent liters.

The description is pretty self-explanatory, but I think the graph is a bit more useful.

And why not, here is a Greek college professor talking about it.

Do you want some videogame examples? Think back to multiplayer Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. When I bought Diablo 2, it was because I wanted a quality dungeon-crawler experience similar to Diablo 1 - that there was an entire multiplayer experience attached was pure consumer surplus for me. Same with thing with Warcraft 3. Would I have paid an extra $5 for access to multiplayer? Probably. That $5 that I would have paid but did not have to amounted to Blizzard "leaving money on the table."* Non-game examples includes Netflix Streaming, where you can access hundreds of movies at any time for $7.99. In spite of the "controversy" surrounding them raising prices of dual streaming/DVD plans, I think it is rather obvious that most Netflix customers would actually pay $10, $15, or even $20 a month for the service, especially since Movies On Demand-style services can cost upwards of $4.99 per movie.

The entire premise of microtransactions is dividing your content into smaller chunks to (re)capture and monetize every ounce of consumer surplus. While it is true that overall the game and it's various monetized components are still worth buying - it falls within the bounds of the Demand Curve, which by definition means you value the game more than the money used to purchase it - it is equally true that literal value has been extracted from you. In other words, microtransactions remove value from games by reducing your consumer surplus.

Now, there may be the open question of whether the sort of microtransactions Blizzard is doing "counts" as consumer surplus mining. If Blizzard could/did not charge $25 for a mount, for example, would they have made the mounts at all? Would Blizzard have never made the Mobile Armory and/or the premium RealID grouping features if those did not tack on an extra subscription fee? I think they might not have developed those features and mounts, but that is more of an issue with the lack of credible competition** Blizzard faces than anything else. Indeed, competition generally engenders the greatest amount "value-added" consumer surplus since direct price wars are untenable. Then again, I might also bring up the Red Queen argument in that, much like raiding content, Blizzard has to continually be moving forward to maintain its present position. The artists that made and animated the Disco Lion would have been working on something either way, so if not adding that mount in as a PvE/PvP reward of some type, the effort might have been directed into a Titan or Diablo 3 model instead (increasing consumer surplus in those games).

In any case, I find the F2P and microtransaction model somewhat disturbing, yet inevitable. It obviously has the power to save games that would not exist otherwise (e.g. LotRO, APB, etc), and thereby opens the possibility of radical innovation in the types of games we play. Similarly, the rise of Steam and iTunes (and Facebook for that matter) as content delivery services makes indie games/music possible that could not exist in a typical retail box store. That said, the existence of that hitherto unexploited consumer surplus also leads to worse games, like Tiny Tower***. Meanwhile, instead of growing the industry, we have the major players pumping out sequals and squeezing the blood from what rocks are left instead of, well, mining for new rocks. This same phenominom is going on in the movie industry, with parallels like making movies 3D not because that adds value, but because A) they get to charge more, and B) it makes the movies nearly impossible to pirate.

The way I see it, the more game companies fall over themselves trying to monetize every corner of our consumer surplus, the less they fall over themselves giving us quality entertainment. Eventually, there will be some break-point beyond which lies an Era of Subsistence Gaming where we get exactly what we pay for and not one whit more. And those will be very bleak times indeed.

*Except Blizzard did not actually "leave any money on the table," since that implies there was no value to Blizzard for giving consumer surplus. As we all know, it is the exact opposite: we as players give that value back to Blizzard in the form of brand loyalty and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Part of that comes from the (historic) quality and polish of their games, but the feeling that we are getting more plays a non-zero part in the calculus.

**Blah, blah, Rift, LotRO, etc. Rift peaked at 600k subs and is now hovering around ~480k. LotRO peaked at 560k and is now at 360k. If you add both Rift and LotRO numbers at their peak, and then multiplied that by two, WoW would still have had more players than that in just North America... in 2008. Lost subs are lost subs, but I bet the Disco Lion made more money in the opening day it was released to cover a year's worth of lost subs.

***Worse as in psychologically designed to exploit your nucleus accumbens, and essentially disprove the economic theory of rational consumers single-handedly.

OT: The Single-Player MMO

2011-07-23T00:31:00.001-04:00

Syncaine made a very interesting footnote in a recent post:

*It’s a multi-layered joke. One: Immersion is a long-running inside joke. Two: While I jokingly say that I’m looking forward to playing an MMO solo, the sad truth is many today hope for just that in their Massively Multiplayer games, and SW will make Cata look like a sandbox. Three: Barrens chat will look tame compared to SW general chat in the first month or two. Not only are SW nerds the worst nerds of all, but you just know every Huntard is going to take their unique brand of ‘gaming’ to SW and making the most (worst) of it.

I do think it is an open question about whether gamers actually want an MMO versus a single-player game with (optional) MMO components. Unlike Syncaine however, I do not think people playing MMOs as single-player games is "sad" at all - it is more indicative of the lengths gamers are having to go to find meaningful entertainment. In other words, I think it is a lack of quality games that have driven this segment into MMOs in the first place.

This is not to say there hasn't been quality single-player games, but rather there are not enough being put out. Outside of the game-crippling bugs and sloppy design in several areas, Fallout: New Vegas was absolutely amazing and I spent 70 hours in there, loving every minute. I spent a similar amount of time in Dragon Age: Origins. Portal 1 & 2 both fantastic, both over in ~10 hours. So... that is 160 hours out of the 20 I play each week, or amusement enough for about two months. What about the other ten months?

I quit smoking when I bought WoW, joking I would trade one addiction for another. I have not smoked in 4 years.

My 4-year WoW anniversary was last weekend, having started 8/17/07. Adding up all the days /played across my toons, I ended up around ~322 days, or 7,728 hours. Depressingly that averages out into 5 hours a day, every day, for four years. I played more when I was unemployed for a year, of course, but it is still shockingly bad. Then again, that also equals $0.087/hour as far as entertainment goes. Or imagine buying a $0.99 app and getting 11.38 hours of gameplay out of it. I find it unlikely that I would have done something (more) productive with my time had WoW not existed, so with that in mind perhaps I should be instead celebrating all the money I saved ~~by switching to Geico~~ playing the everliving hell out of WoW.

I have heard and agree with many people who suggest that WoW will be their first, last, and only MMO. Although I am a storied veteran of games that require other people to play with, e.g. pen & paper D&D, split-screen Goldeneye, Magic: the Gathering, etc, the common denominator was a group of people you enjoy hanging around with. In the absence of friends, WoW is a pretty shitty single-player experience once you reach the endgame. And while this problem can be "solved" by making new friends, actually shifting through all the bullshit is a lot of work* for the payout of challenging gameplay that comes in the form of hoping people that are not you do not screw up, e.g. raiding.

In this light, I do not particularly think the trend of companion AI or whatever is necessarily bad. Having played Minecraft for a while now, I have reached that plateau where you want nothing more than to show off the cool biodome tower you built or the Pit of Doom you dug or the cross-Atlantic powered railroad to someone, anyone else capable of appreciating the amount of effort/vision it took to do so. Of course, the thought of trying to do what I have done on a multiplayer server where anyone could wreck my house and steal my materials at any time is mortifying. I want a Show & Tell, not a group assignment. I want a single-player MMO.

And until then, WoW (with liberal playing of Steam games) will have to suffice.

*As outlined in this three year-old Cracked article, which is still pretty dead-on.

Valor Back on T11

2011-07-19T03:42:00.000-04:00

Per recent blue post:

Due to some recent player feedback we’ve made the decision to implement a hotfix that will put Valor Points back on the bosses in Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight, and Throne of the Four Winds (except Argoloth).

We agreed that players should have some additional options for earning Valor Points beyond Firelands, Zandalari dungeons, and tier 11 Heroic difficulty raids. We don’t want raiding guilds to feel like they have to raid Firelands AND the old raids every week, but we do want players to feel like they have some options besides running ZA/ZG over and over.

Bosses in these raids will award 35 VP on 10-player normal difficulty, and 45 VP on 25-player normal difficulty, to match the rewards currently offered for the Heroic versions of those encounters. (Source)

That is correct, ladies and gentlemen. Now you too can experience the wonder of cobbling together a group of nine other people in a specific configuration and killing 12 (nerfed) raid bosses, walking away with your whopping four-hundred and twenty (420) Valor points. And then perhaps continuing to do your normal routine of seven heroics a week and still not capping out. Or, you know, solo-queuing for three ZA/ZGs and getting the same amount of VP. Admittedly, with the state of ZA/ZG queues you might actually spend longer in LFD than going 12/12, but hey. One of those two options requires a wee bit more organization than the other so I guess it "cancels" out.

I did not post last week because A) I barely played WoW, B) honestly there is not a whole lot more that can be said about making gold that hasn't already been beaten into the ground, and C) I now realize how much I painted myself into a corner calling this Player Vs Auction House when I would rather have gone meta and fostered some cross-blog debate on some of the crazy-ass posts people are making.

The irony I suppose is that I could have phoned in some filler episodes on my acquiring two (2!) Obsidium Cleavers cross-faction for < 15k apiece, a 10x return bringing over a 359 BoE chest from Horde-side, or my experiences in the Vial of the Sands market. Then again... why? I probably spent in the neighborhood of $140 in Steam games over the last two weeks of deals, and would rather be playing those and/or Minecraft and/or even goddamn Tiny Tower instead.

Speaking of foreshadowing, I would tell you to stay tuned for a post three months in the making, but I am not entirely sure when it will be finished.

Honorgate Solved: Mark Your Calenders

2011-07-09T17:28:00.000-04:00

In true, inane 24/7 News fashion, I hereby coin the PvP fiasco of this past week "Honorgate." Ladies and gentlemen, allow me also to bring to you a truly groundbreaking Blizzard solution to this controversy. From blue lips to your eyeballs:

We’ve been working over the past few days to evaluate and determine the best course of action to offer players some kind of compensation for those who were caught off guard by the new gear. The plan we’ve found to be achievable within an acceptable amount of time is to provide players who were affected with 4000 Honor Points. This extra Honor would function similarly to the currency down-conversion in that it would stack over the cap, but you would not be able to earn more until you spent under the 4000 cap. (source)

You read that correctly: four thousand (4000) Honor points. The announcement is hedged in "this is still uncertain" and "things could still change" but to come right out and say they would be giving out 4000 Honor and then not doing so would likely cause more problems than the initial screw-up. The other thing Blizzard mentioned is that the most likely date of this distribution of wealth would be July 19th, which is about a week and a half from now. I recommend marking your calenders because there will likely be thousands of players on your server getting 1-2 pieces of high-level epic gear that will need gemmed and enchanted. This is about as close to a patch day AH run you can get without it actually being a patch day.

Honestly, this post by Blizzard rather floored me. The solution I thought they would go with would be to simply reset the purchase timers on all of the Season 9 gear bought in the last week. You know, this thing:

After reseting it, you could simply sell it back to the vendor and recoup your Honor points to purchase the 371 gear. Perhaps that is more technically complicated than I am aware of, or maybe they did not want to run the risk of players missing the announcement and playing for 2 hours while the timer expired. Other solutions suggested were to add the ability to purchase the 371s with the S9 pieces like they sometimes do when you upgrade heroic raiding gear. Then again, that would require a vendor to always have that available, lest they remove the option and get bitched at by some clueless player a few weeks later. The "let them eat cake" option is truly unprecedented especially considering they decided to grant 4000 regardless of whether you just bought a 1650 Honor belt, or similar.

It will be intriguing to see whether my warrior ends up getting a 4000 Honor stimulus package despite my having gotten the S9 Chest refunded already. I must say though, this solution almost makes me sad that I did not "waste" Honor buying more S9 gear across my other toons.

OT: Welcome the C Team

2011-07-06T02:24:00.000-04:00

I think I will allow Blizzard's C Team speak for themselves here:

You are correct. The season transition and introduction of new PvP items was different this time around, and we apologize for the lack of advanced warning.

The Season 9 set was removed today. The items available for purchase with Honor Points are now considered lower tier Season 10 items. They are still the same items from Season 9 in terms of aesthetics, but the item level and stats are slightly higher to ensure that the Season 10 honor gear has the correct item level relative to the Season 10 conquest gear.

It's likely this is how things will work going forward and we'll be sure to make that more clear when the next season transition takes place.

New basic transition flow:

1) Season X ends and rated play is unavailable; Season X gear becomes available for purchase with HP; CP is wiped.
2) One week later Season Y starts and rated play is available; Season X gear is removed entirely; Season Y introduces a low tier of items which replace Season X vendor items and are available for HP; Season Y introduces the new top items available for CP and rated play. [source]

If it is not entirely clear from the above, or the 51-page post-capped thread, the basic gist is anyone who bought S9 epic gear in the last week got punked by Blizzard. The 365 gear that previously required Conquest Points, then required only Honor points - this is what you would expect in an universe of forms and logic and elegant game design. In bizarro-Blizzard C Team Land, taking the 365 epics and obsoleting them one week later with strictly better in every conceivable way 371 gear, for the same Honor costs even, makes sense. Here is a visual:

On the right, the 365 PvP chest that was 2200 Honor as of June 28th (gemmed and enchanted as you'll notice). On the left, the 371 PvP chest that is 2200 Honor as of July 5th, about 168 hours later. Luckily enough, I had not played my warrior all that often after purchasing the chest, so I still had time remaining to sell it back to the vendor for a 2200 Honor refund, and then buy the new 371 version. Whether the stat upgrade seems like a big deal to you or not really depends on how much you PvP, but one way of looking at it is that the 371 pieces give you 6% more stats.

And, you know, the whole fact this was such a huge designer "Gotcha!" moment; a fitting insult to the injury of literally wasting dozens of hours across hundreds of thousands of players. That is the other way of looking at it.

This is par for the course for what I can only imagine is the C Team. Remember when they accidentally did the Conquest --> Honor conversion a week early without raising the Honor cap, resulting in thousands of Conquest points being turned into relatively useless gold? Or when MMR values were so FUBAR that they made the 2200 weapons require level 86, then delayed returning them to normal for months because not very many people were clearing heroic T11 content?

It is hard finding a stickie thread that is not also an apology for some massive screw-up.

Achieving Zen

2011-07-02T21:08:00.000-04:00

So I warned you about certain crafted BoE epic gear and how the new Firelands dailies would essentially obsolete them entirely. At the time, I was under the impression that the vendors with these 365 epic gear would be gated behind 25 days worth of dailies. That is not entirely the case, as you undoubtedly witnessed yourself on Thursday if you have been doing them daily.

Our good friend Zen'Vorka here has some goodies for anyone who fights their way into the Firelands. The items themselves are Matoclaw's Band (Agility ring), Nightweaver's Amulet (Intellect necklace), Fireheart Necklace (Strength necklace), and Pyrelord Greaves (Tanking Plate boots). I knew the Pyrelord boots were going to obsolete the BoE JP boots, but I thought that was going to happen closer to the end of August, not the beginning of July. Speaking of surprises, though...

Blizzard snuck in a stealth hotfix allowing you to unlock Firelands on Day 1.

What ends up happening now is instead of ending up with 8 Marks of the World Tree when you get to the point of unlocking the "outside" dailies, you have 16. After doing a single set of dailies, you will end up with 4 more Marks, unlocking the Firelands portal after one more quest. At that point, you are a mere one elite mob away from unlocking our friend Zen'Vorka and his goodies for your alts. The entire process takes ~35 minutes from zero to epic 365s depending on the dailies you get stuck with.

It is an open question as to why Blizzard made this change, and it will be even more interesting to see whether they end up doing something similar once "phase 3" starts being unlocked by people. And that is on top of the question as to whether or not it will actually take another month to unlock all the vendors or if they will be more like our friend Zen.

In any event, if the thought of doing 50+ dailies a day was stopping you from pimping your alts, the way has officially been cleared. Get out there and get geared.

OT: The pre-4.2 Numbers

2011-06-29T02:01:00.000-04:00

I think it is a bit early for a more formal "postmortem" on Cataclysm's first tier of content, but for posterity here is a screenshot of raiding progression as it stood at nearly 4am Tuesday morning, before the numbers could be "sullied" by the 4.2 nerfs.

Since there is no 100% boss, some reverse engineering of WoWProgress's numbers shows that there was a total of 62,405 guilds that killed at least 1 boss this tier. A further breakdown estimate goes something like this:

1/12 - 62,405 - 100%
9/12 - 44,107 - 70.68%
12/12 - 23,122 - 37.05%
13/13 - 812 - 1.3%*

Depending on how many raiders you associate with a raiding guild (15-30), this means roughly between 589,245 to 1,178,490 players who started this tier did not finish it on Normal. WoWProgress pulls its data from NA, EU, TW, and KR servers, which comprise roughly ~6.5 million subscriptions per MMOData. This means that at the upper end (30) the raiding pool this tier is about ~28.8% of all accounts. Or, 71.2% of all subscribers did not raid, and of those who did raid, 62.95% did not kill all 12 normal mode bosses.** In this context, seven bosses in Firelands may almost make sense.

The other thing I want to mention briefly is that I expect Blizzard's Q2 investor call to either look absolutely amazing, or completely terrible depending on timing. As you may or may not have heard, Blizzard sent out emails to existing accounts which essentially contains a free copy of the original WoW game, 30 days of game time included. Secondly, Blizzard is poised to release Cataclysm in China July 12th. Finally, and perhaps more earth-shatteringly from a subscription standpoint, Blizzard increased the Recruit-A-Friend XP bonus from 1-60 to 1-80. If you are an alt person as I am (or was, considering I have a full 10 character slots on Auch), this is about as close as Blizzard seems willing to get to letting you buy a Cataclysm character. Back when RAF originally came out, I had two instances of WoW running and essentially spent $5-10 to get a level 60 rogue, priest, and hunter (with the gifted levels) in about two weeks of leisurely play. And for that month, for all intents and purposes I was two subscriptions to Blizzard. Of course, Blizzard recouped $25 or whatever it was when I decided to transfer the RAF priest to my primary account before shutting the RAF account down.

So, basically, depending on when the Q2 sub numbers are compiled Blizzard will likely be seeing huge growth (due to 4.2 being released, dual-boxing RAF accounts, free copies of games going out, new expansion in China) or further drops depending on when the numbers are locked in for the report.

*Apparently Heroic Ascendant Council is more difficult than Sinestra based on number of guilds having killed it: 812 vs 926 (Sinestra). It might be that people were racing for Sinestra kills before the patch, but it is interesting nonetheless.

**By contrast, only 42.32% of raiders who downed Marrowgar did not also kill the Lich King. It is entirely possible we will see more 12/12 after an equivalent amount of time has passed, of course.

Fate of Crafted Epics in 4.2 (and more)

2011-06-24T21:03:00.000-04:00

I talked about about this subject in a general sense with Fire(lands) Sale where I pre-lamented the death of the Darkmoon trinkets in the face of easy-to-acquire alternatives. Due to a reader's request, I have decided to focus more on what crafters can make right now and whether it might still be a good idea to make post-4.2.

Chest/Legs

This is perhaps the most obvious category of crafted epics at risk in 4.2. Players will be able to purchase T11 chest and legs for 2200 Justice points on Day 1 of the new patch, and I find it very likely many will do so immediately with whatever amount of JP they have stockpiled. Do not forget that you will (still) be able to turn Honor points into Justice points, easily bypassing the 4,000 cap if you choose. Three weeks of ZA/ZG runs later, they will be able to further purchase T12 (same slots) with their Valor points.

Belts
The situation with belts is more complex. Players will not be able to purchase any belts with JP nor VP this patch. Instead, there are two other sources of belts: a small sample from the Molten Front dailies after ~25 days, and a complete set after hitting Honored with the Avengers of Hyjal.

The three belts in the Bad category are Elementium Girdle of Pain, Light Elementium Belt, and Lightning Lash. All three have ilevel 365 analogs available after unlocking The Armorer in the Firelands dailies. The rest of the belts will not be replaced until you get a raid drop or hit Honored with the raid reputation. Last time I checked, the word on the street was that you could hit 11,999/12,000 Honored with the Avengers from farming trash - how difficult this will be or even if it is possible will remain to be seen. I find it likely however, that someone farming Firelands raid trash will probably want to do it with a purple belt in the meantime.

Trinkets
Already talked about this before, but...

The Darkmoon trinkets have given me a lot of AH mileage so far this expansion, but I stopped making the cards a few months ago. Players logging in after 4.2 will have the option of getting 359 trinkets immediately for 1650 JP and/or doing ~25 days of dailies for the 365 trinkets off of the vendors there. And if they hit Revered with the raid reputation, hey, more trinkets.

That covers the crafted BoE epics, but why stop here?

Cloaks
There are no crafted epic cloaks, but I am referring to any BoE epic cloaks from T11 content and/or ZA/ZG drops you may have in your bags. Sell them. Sell now.

Although I missed the chance to warn you before the Midsummer holiday arrived with its free 353 cloak giveaway, the 353 and 359 cloaks were still technically as good or better than what you could get ~~stolen by a scrub for an off-spec they will never use~~ from Ahune. This all changes in 4.2. Namely, every single player will be sporting 365 epic cloaks for completing the Thrall Got Zapped quest-line. Price your antiquated 359s to move, lest you get stuck with a 12,000g+ "investment" that you will have to dupe people into buying for even 800g. Indeed, I recently sold a Drape of Inimitable Fate and Zom's Electrostatic Cloak for ~6,000g each and the buyer immediately relisted for 12,000g. If he can snag a sell between now and Tuesday, more power to him. Meanwhile, I just made nearly half of his possible profit with 0% of the risk.

If 365 cloaks from a quest chain was not bad enough, you also have Valor cloaks for JP and 378 cloaks after however long it takes to get Friendly with the Avengers of Hyjal. Move those capes like they're hot.

Boots
Specifically the BoE epic boots you can buy with Valor today, and Justice on Tuesday. Seems pretty obvious that these would be bad deals to get, yes? Well... not quite. Ask yourself if you would be willing to buy Justice points for gold at, say, a 1:2 ratio. In other words, imagine spending 8000g to get 4000 JP. Would you? I would. You cannot get 4000 of course, as the boots are the only items that work this way and they cost 1650 JP. Point being, even though I can grind up the 1650 JP and get them "for free," I could also simply buy them off someone who values their time less than I do and spend those same JP getting something else. Similar to belts though, there is a small kink in the plan: boots from dailies.

The three boots in the Bad category are Boots of the Perilous Seas, Rock Furrow Boots, and Moccasins of Verdurous Glooms. All three have 365 upgrades available after a scant 25 days worth of dailies. The other boots will not be replaced outside of raid drops so you will probably be able to sell them on a decent basis. Of course, so will everyone else capable of running heroics/grinding BGs but if you have nothing else to buy with those currencies, it is better than buying and vendoring Wrath epic gems.

Rings/Necklaces
Is anyone still making this garbage? Please, stop, what are you doing?

The mat price for the 346 rings/necklaces was ridiculous even on Day 1, but there were still chances at sales and (low) profit margins. Generally people will tell you to make the Elementium Moebius Band because it's the cheapest but actually pretty good for any tank. Problem is that there is not one, but two epic tanking rings from the Firelands dailies. From the same vendor! I guess Blizzard's thought process was that since the one ring had Parry on it, that a 2nd one was necessary for the Feral tanks. Except now if you are a Plate tank you have easy-street access to both. Did I mention they are on the same vendor? Non-casters are in the same boat with two separate Agility rings AND two separate Strength rings... on different vendors this time, but still. Spellcasters and/or healers got the shaft though, with only one ring.

So you have the option of the Valor rings being bought with JP, the new Valor rings bought with actual Valor, the crafted blue PvP rings having a difference of a whole 90 stats for the equivalent of ~1500g in mats, the 365 rings from the Firelands dailies (which covers every spec), and eventually the 391 rings at Exalted with Avengers.

Necklaces are in a mostly similar place as rings. Spellcasters get a Firelands daily option as do Strength DPS however. Missing here are Agility and Tank necklaces, which means you may have a market for Brazen Elementium Medallion (assuming people didn't just get the Hyjal reputation neck) and Elementium Guardian. There are Valor necklaces available post-4.2, but I doubt the neck slot will be at the top of peoples' lists to replace for quite some time.

Conclusion and Caveats
The mark of a good goblin is being able to make gold when it is not especially obvious that it is possible. Although I am labeling some items as Bad and Fire Sale and so on, it is entirely possible that you or someone who likes to sweat by the AH will make money where money ain't got any right being made. Maybe that dude who bought my cheap cloaks will move both by Tuesday and laugh his way to the bank. That's fine, I'm already at the bank giggling myself. The only real loser is whoever gets stuck with the item when the music stops, and presumably that person paid for the privilege so I guess everyone wins... until that guy does those 10 quests and replaces it.

So, yeah.

If you are looking for some quick and dirty advice, I would say: clear your stock, stop making/buying more BoEs. Worst case scenario you will still have your mats, and can go back to ignoring whatever I say on Wednesday. Goblins strike it rich all the time by taking on risk that no one else does. Goblins like myself also strike ~80% of the richness of the other goblins, with 90% less effort and less than a quarter of the risk. Do what you like, and we'll all see how it pans out next month.

Crafted PvP Comparison

2011-06-20T09:30:00.001-04:00

As you may or may not be aware, when patch 4.2 rolls around all the old crafted PvP recipes will be going from their current ilevel 339 states to a much beefier 358. The material costs will also be the same, but just keep in mind that already crafted gear will not be upgraded. In other words, do not pre-craft this gear.

What interests me in this interim period though, is the question about whether or not the current crop of Honor Point gear is worth purchasing in the days before 4.2 compared to what you can get crafted post-4.2. Obviously the Conquest Point epics will be purchasable after 4.2 with Honor and be much better than either, but as someone who enjoys getting their BG on the Honor cap is still 4000. For example, I have a warrior in the current crop of crafted PvP blues with about 2500 Honor accumulated. Would it be more "efficient" to hit the 4k Honor cap and stop playing altogether? Or would there be some benefit in buying the current Bloodthirsty Gladiator pieces while still aiming at capping out before June 28th?

A couple quick notes about the above picture. First, the stat gains along the bottom of the page does reflect my adding of gems into those eight sockets. Basically there are three Bolds, two Resplendent, and two Rigid gems in there along with the meta. Secondly, I am only comparing the five "tier" pieces at the moment because I have no idea how to add items to item sets on Wowhead, only how to remove them. Finally, if you want to look at the comparison yourself or perhaps change the gems around, you can use this link here.

What we can see about this at first glance is current Bloodthirsty Gladiator gear > 4.2 crafted gear, even without considering glove and 4-piece bonuses. Wowhead's comparisons are not 100% accurate though, as the Bloodthirsty set does not have a 400+ resilience gain over the crafted gear - the discrepancy is likely from the crafted gear's 2-piece +400 resilience bonus not being properly coded into Wowhead. Taking that into account and then manually plugging in the full Bloodthirsty Gladiator set, we get a comparison like this:

	4.2 Crafted	Bloodthirsty Glad	Difference
Stamina	3,311	3,135	176
Strength	2,206	2,314	-108
Mastery	225	153	72
Armor	19,644	19,301	343
Resilience	1,873	1,930	-57
Critical strike	--	449	-449
Expertise	393	257	136
Haste	336	173	163
Hit	519	238	281

Note: the Difference column is focusing on the crafted gear. Looking at it in this perspective, Bloodthirsty Gladiator looks less obviously better. Indeed, the crafted gear has +146 stat points and +176 Stamina vs +108 Strength... and the existence of a metagem, a glove bonus, and a 4-piece bonus. Generally speaking, primary stats like Strength are valued at least 2:1 against combat ratings like Mastery, so the tradeoff becomes nearly ~2k HP against +3% crit damage and whatever goodies are on your gloves and 4pc bonus. Bloodthirsty Gladiator gear retains the advantage.

In an interesting twist, the crafted PvP accessories are unequivocally better than the current Honor ones:

The take-away from this is three-fold. (1) You should still be banking some mats to pump out the upgraded PvP gear for when servers come back up. New players and alts will still be hitting level 85 after 4.2 all the time and want something to cover their nakedness (or 'sploit them into ZA/ZG queues). (2) The Bloodthirsty Gladiator non-accessory pieces are still worth getting, assuming buying them does not impact your ability to cap out on Honor by the 27th. Speaking of which, people with Bloodthirsty Glad gear will not be buying your non-accessory crafted PvP gear post-4.2. In other words, the markets do not overlap. Sorry, crafters. (3) If you have a JC toon, expect a rather nice post-patch payday. Your rings and necklaces will straight-up replace any non-epic piece of PvP gear. The healer pieces merely requiring Amberjewel and a smattering of Volatiles is especially win.

P.S. If you are a JC still making those 346 rings, you might want to stop. Resilience is a dead stat for PvE, of course, but you have to start asking yourself whether ~90 stats makes this comparison make sense:

OT: Subscription and Correlation

2011-06-18T04:28:00.001-04:00

Did you know that ice cream makes it more likely you will drown? It's true. When ice cream sales increase, so do the number of drowning deaths. Clearly linked! Speaking of spurious correlations...

I fully expect Rift to now follow in the footsteps of WoW, in that it will decline. Vanilla and BC days had challenging content, and it’s not a surprise that sub numbers grew. WotLK made things ‘accessible’, and surprise surprise, the response was pretty meh (sub numbers dropped in the US/EU, but were offset globally by WoW launching in new regions, hence the overall stagnation). Cata tried to play both sides of the fence, but a combo of too little too late, a gimmick of progression (hard mode rehashes rather than straight-up new content), and a one-track, insult difficulty 1-85 game did it in. With no new regions to offset things, subs are dropping.

(SynCaine in the post "Accessibility killed Rift")

World of Warcraft's growth rate went from a perfectly stable 2 million subscribers per year during 2006 to 2009, to zero during WotLK. This was exactly the time when Blizzard changed the character progression mechanic.

(Nils in the post "Smoke and Mirrors")

"If developers design a game which requires too much effort from the average player for too little gain, the average players will start leaving the game. "

This is the part I strongly disagree with, and WoW's sub history does as well. Vanilla/BC, which had a MUCH harder end-game that fewer players saw to completion, saw massive growth. WotLK/Cata, with raids being cleared by all who stepped inside, have brought decline.

(SynCaine in a comment on Tobold's post "Syncaine on Accessibility")

The reason I bring these examples up is because this type of thinking (or lack thereof) is what I consider one of the most pernicious, asinine fallacies in any discussion of World of Warcraft. It is intellectual laziness at best, intellectual dishonesty at worse. Before I begin in earnest however, here is a slightly augmented graph from MMOData that most people refer to when they talk about WoW subs:

1) Correlation does not mean causation.

Standard preface to any claim that X means Y. Ice cream and drowning are only "linked" because there is a third factor involved.

2) Even if correlation did mean causation, why this particular correlation?

This specific point is the reason the argument is intellectually lazy. When you look at the graph, it is true what Nils and SynCaine said about there being a relatively rapid period of growth during vanilla and TBC that was not apparent after the release of Wrath. However, tying that solely (or even partially) to accessibility/character progression/difficulty/etc is a completely unsupported leap of logic.

There is zero evidence given by either author as to why it was "existence of more challenging content" and not, I dunno, the introduction of the PvP Honor System and BGs in the summer of 2005, which coincides with a 500k sub spike in WoW-West on graph. Or the release of ZG in September of that year, also suspiciously near another 500k sub bump. Or if I looked at WoW's overall numbers like Nils does with his "2 million per year growth" argument, perhaps I could argue Patch 1.12 with it's wildly successful:

The stage is set for intense, objective-based land battles as Horde and Alliance vie for control over important strategic positions and resources around Azeroth. Head out for Silithus and Eastern Plaguelands to engage the enemy on the field!

...was responsible for the corresponding bump of 1 million (!) subscribers. Clearly, clearly, more things like Silithus and the old Eastern Plagueland towers is just what WoW needs.

3) What does endgame accessibility/difficulty have to do with anything?

This is another intellectually lazy part of the argument that the authors never bother to address. What percentage of the playerbase ever actually makes it to the endgame, and is this percentage big enough to even impact subscription growth? That is an open question.

The best metric that I can come up with is to look at the number of guilds who killed Beasts of Northrend in 10m ToC after two years of it being out (86,187 guilds), multiply that by something charitable like 30 players, and then divide by the approximate population in the graph above while only taking into account the regions in which WoWProgress collects data (~6.5 million). The result is 39.77% of players killing the easiest boss in the easiest tier of which we have data (something like Noth the Lootbringer from Naxx 2.0 would have been better, but alas...). That actually sounds like a lot of people, and 19.88% assuming only 15 raiders per guild is not too shabby either when referring to raid content.

That said, there is no evidence whatsoever from those two that difficulty-related gyrations amongst the top 1/3rd of players doing raiding content has a meaningful impact in comparison to whatever the remaining 2/3rd non-raiders are doing. Between 2005 and 2009 the subscriber base was growing at ~25% per year. Is it even remotely likely that the top 40% had anything to do with a meaningful drop in growth rate?

4) Growth, or lack thereof, does not really mean anything other than what it is.

What I mean by this is that you cannot simply look at growth as anything other than what it is: growth. It does not mean anything else without further information. For all the talk about growth rate percentages and "the design decisions that caused them," look at the pink line for a moment. That represents subscriptions in NA alone. Unfortunately MMOData stopped tracking that information individually (or perhaps Blizzard stopped giving it out), but the whole of TBC resulted in ~650k more subscriptions in NA over a two-year period.

Is 325k sub growth per year more than the apparent zero sub growth in the year of Wrath? Sure... but we have no real way of knowing why that growth was occurring. Was player churn less of a factor in vanilla and TBC? Was the growth simply due to the release of WoW in additional regions? Does market saturation have any impact? Do we simply ignore, I dunno, one of the worst global recessions in world history?

Oh, wait a minute... early 2009 was when the markets were at their worst? And yet WoW subs were relatively stable in most regions during that entire year? Clearly Wrath's accessibility and stress-free raiding were the only things stopping WoW's overall decline in a tough market, as evidenced by Cata's increased difficulty leading to subscription loss once markets improved. QED, amirite?

The bottom line here is that you cannot use WoW subscription numbers as evidence of a claim without first proving said numbers have anything to do with said claim. Did World of Warcraft gain six million subscriptions worldwide in its first year? Yes. Was that because of the strength of its class balance? Its risk versus reward structure? Its accessibility? No one can really say; all of it would be conjecture.

Personally, I believe the initial rush was due to the strength of the IP - I know I certainly gave WoW a shot because of how much I enjoyed Warcraft 3 - and also due to the strength of the Blizzard brand. The designers also got a lot of things down perfectly that I feel other MMO designers stumble across to this day, such as letting characters jump, making solo-play possible, having quests with interesting plots, getting the reward faucet just right while questing, and so on. The tone and tenor of game balance has certainly shifted quite a bit from when I began in TBC, but where I disagree with Nils and SynCaine is that I feel that Wrath was actually a step in a better direction in most (not all) ways. Unfortunately, until the duo, and others who believe as they do, let go of the absurd notion that "the numbers" support their conclusions, it is impossible to have any rational discussion about it.

There is a separate argument as to linear raid progression vs episodic progression, but that is an OT for another time.

Fire(lands) Sale

2011-06-15T02:19:00.001-04:00

[Edit: Avenger's of Hyjal as a rep is from the Firelands trash up to the tail end of honored (11,999/12k) and thereafter rep gains come solely from boss kills. When I wrote this post I was assuming said rep came from the dailies even though I should have known better already. The rest of the points still stand.]

So... yikes. I was all prepared to write about my weekend cross-faction AH shenanigans when I realized something startling: we may see a cratering of Darkmoon trinkets and other BoEs soon. As in, within two weeks or so. It seems so obvious in retrospect with 4.2 coming out, but if the full scope of the changes slipped my mind, it is possible it slipped yours as well.

Everything on the Valor Point vendor will now be purchasable with Justice Points.

Duh, right? But consider what this means, slot-wise. T11 can cover chest, legs, and hands. Then you have cloaks, wrists, and feet (still BoE by the way). There are also rings, relics, and trinkets. When you look at what BoE 359 epics are available, they come in these slots: cloak, chest, feet, finger, head, off-hand, weapon (all types), neck, shield, shoulder, trinket, and belt. Or after you remove the redundancies... head, off-hand, weapon, neck, shield, shoulder, and belt. Maybe this comes across as more obvious than I originally thought (liquidate 359 gear before the new hotness of 378 comes out), but if you are still holding out hope for that Blauvelt's Family Crest to sell, you might want to reconsider a lower price-point before potential customers simply buy Band of Bees.

The Avengers of Hyjal faction offers amazing 378 gear at each reputation level.

You can see the actual rewards on MMO-Champ, but what I want to get across again are the item slots covered: cloaks at Friendly; belts at Honored; trinkets at Revered; ilevel 391 rings at Exalted. Following me so far? No one will be hitting Revered with the Avengers overnight, of course, but given time every ~~endgame player~~ raider will have access to trinkets for both slots (and see below). As a person with gold, I have no particular compunction against twinking out a toon or two - who really wants to grind out heroics and weeks of dailies with green trinkets from questing, amirite? - but the simple fact that said "twinking" would have a shelf-life of however long it took me to ~~do dailies~~ farm raid trash to 11,999/12k and get one boss kill and/or get 1650 JP dampens how much I would be willing to spend. To other more frugal players, it may straight-up remove them from the market entirely.

There are other Avengers of Hyjal vendors that offer even more gear than normal.

First off, why doesn't MMO-Champ have a single location for all this 4.2 stuff? It's dumb. Anyway, you can check out the specific vendor lists in this post. You should already know about the Blacksmithing weapon patterns that covers everyone. What you might not know is that belts, hands, feet, fingers, off-hand, relic, and goddamn trinkets again are also covered, depending on class/spec. Actually, only plate-wearers get belt options for example, but that is a rather huge market share cut out of what would otherwise be a very nice empty crafting slot.

Don't forget about all that lovely new 378 Valor Point gear and new BoEs

Slots covered by VP this time around are the standard chest/legs/hands, followed by Thrown weapons, wands, relics, rings, neck, and wrists. In the updated MMO-Champ list, it appears that wrists are the only definitively BoE item. I would talk about the BoE raiding drops, but it will absolutely be profitable flipping them no matter how many comparable items exist. I will also pass on talking about the crafted profession items to much, considering they require Living Embers which are likely raid drops. That said, they appear to cover boots and hands.

Summary
There will be ~~three~~ two reasonably easy trinket options (and a third for raiders from rep) for players to choose from without even considering Darkmoon trinkets: one from Justice Points and two from the Avengers of Hyjal faction. Even worse for Scribes is the fact that someone doing the Avenger dailies will likely get access to both rep trinkets simultaneously - I imagine grinding 125 Marks of Lazy Design will easily get someone to the start of Revered. What plate DPS* would give a second look at Hurricane when they can get Dwyer's Caber and Essence of the Eternal Flame from dailies? Nevermind License to Slay.

As for the other items/slots? It appears Blizzard is doubling-down on the "tier helm/shoulder being drops" design, so I fully expect epic BoE helms and shoulders to retain and/or increase in value heading into 4.2. Of course, with T11 content being nerfed by 20%, this otherwise consistent demand may be tempered by a new supply of farming guilds/pugs churning out BoEs, so keep your head... or sell it, as the case may be.

*I understand from the forums that some of the T11 trinkets are better itemized than the Avenger's trinkets and even trinkets from Firelands itself. My point is less about raiders in the market for BiS gear (who likely already got it months ago), and more about the people interested in getting epic trinkets right away.

WarcraftEcon Interview

2011-06-13T21:41:00.000-04:00

The 500k milestone interview is now up at WarcraftEcon.

If you read my 500k post two weeks ago, you will basically already know what is inside, gold-wise. It does have some more personal tidbits, however, including two mini-rant-esque paragraphs that I have hitherto keep out of this space, vis-a-vis the terrible design of Glyphs and my opinion on selling gold guides:

Why did you choose to collect this amount of gold?
My ultimate goal was to hit this level of gold without relying on selling Glyphs, to demonstrate that the worst piece of game design Blizzard has ever released was not necessary to generate wealth. Fundamentally, turning herbs into Glyphs should not be any different than turning herbs into flasks, but I abhor the way Glyphs ended up playing out. Instead of accessibility, here is a profession that discourages competition, encourages collusion, and has a ridiculous add-on requirements before you can even hope to get started. When the “right way” to run a profession is to have three guild banks and process thousands of canceled mail a day, you know it should be time to go back to the white board. [...]

How did you learn to do it? Anyone or resource you would like to thank?
I was more or less self-taught by experimentation, back in the TBC days when it seemed like no one really knew what they were doing. I would like to thank the members of my guild, Invictus, for putting up with all the unsolicited, in-game financial advice over the years. Also a shout out to all the gold bloggers selling gold guides for giving me the incentive to try and undermine their business by running a free blog without any advertisements of any kind. It may not be working out that way, but it is the thought that counts.

Regarding the latter, 5+ months into this process I can begin to see the appeal. I remember a post by a blogger a month or two ago talking about they get somewhere around $120/month from ads, "not enough to live on," but that is basically my car payment, so... wow. Then again, once you start down that road the motivations change, not to mention websites become an unreadable mess without AdBlock running. I checked out JMTC on a particularly slow day from work and could hardly even see the post below a 128x128 pixel ad from IRL gold sellers (height of irony, eh?).

In any case, new viewer or old, welcome to Player Vs Auction House. I post once or twice a week, usually close to midnight EST as I work second shift and enjoy playing WoW for a bit when I get home. Bookmark or blogroll, I hope to see you around.

When To Expect Epic Gems

2011-06-10T04:07:00.002-04:00

Are there really people still talking about epic gems? Apparently so. Let me make it really easy for you: epic gems will be released when all the profession bonuses are updated.

The stat bonuses from any one profession is around ~80 extra stats above what you could otherwise attain. As you can see from the pictures above, a Bold Chimera's Eye grants +67 Strength vs a Bold Inferno Ruby with +40 Strength. (67 * 3) - (40 * 3) = 81. Mixology from Alchemy increases your flask strength by +80 stats, Synapse Springs gives a 480 stat bonus for 10 seconds every minute which is a ~16.66% uptime that averages into 80 stats, and the wrist enchants such as Major Strength were expressly added into the game to counteract imbalance that came with Leatherworkers having Embossments, such as +130 Strength, when everyone else had to settle for +50 Hit or +50 Haste (nevermind how much better primary stats already are from secondary ones this expansion).

If epic gems were added to the game, the profession bonus for JCs would diminish from 81 to 51, assuming that epic gems are +50. Simultaneously, the profession bonus for Blacksmithing (two extra sockets for +40 gems currently) would outpace everyone else as they are able to fit in two extra epic gems. Clearly, this would be bad design. The imbalance was fixed in Wrath in patch 3.2 by increasing the stats on the JC-only gems, keeping them proportionally as good as the other professions, which were similarly boosted to account for Blacksmiths.

Yes, I know 4.2 sounds like 3.2 + 1, but it does not work that way at all. If you will recall, 3.2 was released as the third tier of raiding. Meanwhile, 4.2 is merely the second tier of raiding this expansion. We cannot rely on patch numbers anymore given Blizzard's new policy vis-a-vis "smaller, faster patches" (which I find unlikely will continue past 4.2, else we should have been hearing about 4.3 already, yes?), but it is safe to say that whatever patch will contain the third tier of raiding will also contain epic gems. But even more specific, epic gems will be in whatever patch includes updated profession bonuses. It has to, by design.

So until you start hearing about a stronger Mixology, Embossments, or Chimera's Eye cuts on some PTR, feel free to continue speculating on Pyrite and/or making bank on rare gem cuts.

A Question of Ethics

2011-06-08T03:27:00.001-04:00

One of the downsides to a small-pop server is that there are fewer things to spend your gold on. More people equals more AH competition, of course, but it also means more volume of BoE epics and other goodies. Having already hit my goal, I am more interested in perhaps seeing another Fury of Angerforge or basically new BoE epics instead of the tired 353 and boring 359 crafted pieces. After another day with nothing new, I lamented in Trade chat one night "WTB more interesting BoE epics" in an effort to shake something out of the tree.

The problem with shaking the tree is that sometimes hairy things actually fall out.

Vitreous Beak of Julak-Doom is a BoE epic drop from an elite mob in Twilight Highlands, and basically requires a raid group to kill unless you want to fight for half an hour. As you can see from Trade Chat however, the item itself is allegidly hot, e.g. the result of a "ninja." The question then becomes: do you care?

Scenario 1: You find Virteous Beak on the AH for 7500g buyout.

Scenario 2: You haggle someone selling Virteous Beak in Trade Chat down to 7500g.

Scenario 3: You win Virteous Beak in a raid, but don't equip it right away because you lack the enchanting mats to put Hurricane/Power Torrent on it. Two weeks later, your raid team collapses. You sell the Beak for 17,000g on the AH.

Scenario 4: You low-ball someone selling Virteous Beak on Trade Chat in spite of a random person going on about how the seller is a ninja (in a non-Master Looter situation).

Scenario 5: You buy 105 stacks of Elementium Ore for 24g/stack from someone who is clearly a bot.

Among the five scenarios, which ones are ethical and which ones are unethical? I think we could all agree that Scenario 1 is pretty straight-forward ethically... but does the difference between 1 & 4 really come down to ignorance? As long as you do not know the sweat shop conditions of the Malyasian plant that manufactured the shirt you are wearing, it is ethical to purchase said shirt? And what does it say to us as AH barons to flagrantly purchase bot-gathered Ore off the AH (or even barter directly with said botters!) when our actions directly affect the gold-selling trade?

Would you have bought the Vitreous Beak from the guy for 7500g (assuming you had a caster who could use it)? Would you have bought it and then resold it for, say, 17500g? Does any of this sort of thing phase you in-game when it comes up vis-a-vis ninja/bot-farmed goods? How goblin is goblin?

Let me know in the comments below.

A Tale of Two Economies

2011-06-02T04:14:00.000-04:00

As I may have mentioned before, every single time I log into WoW, the first thing I do is collect the sales from my JC business, cancel any undercuts from the day before (I list for 24 hours, but I don't log in exactly at the same time every night), relist unsold goods, and then see what is profitable to craft based on that day's prices. Just because three Purified Demonseyes sold during the night does not mean I will cut three more - if the price of uncut Demonseyes is higher than what Purified ones are going for, I will toss up 3 more uncut Demonseyes instead. If uncut Demonseyes are lower than some arbitrary number that feels good to me, usually ~20g, I will buy them all out to restock my supply.

Otherwise I allow the other JCs to do the legwork of clearing out the garbage when certain cuts tank the market, as opposed to being the fully-engaged goblin who buys out the entire market of thirty 15g-20g Pussiant Dream Emeralds in the hopes of reseting the price. To me, 15g-20g means the gem is not selling, and thirty of them means the price has not yet hit the floor. This sort of dovetails nicely into a reader email I received:

[...] My problem that I am currently having is that while I hear that JC is a fantastic profession, I can't seem to find what is so lucrative about it at the current moment. I am aware of the 4.2 lull that might be hitting along with some people, so gems are not in as high demand, but my server (Blackrock... where everything is worth pennies) seems to have no demand for cut gems at all. I scour over my Undermine Journal on the jewelcrafting page, and the scene is pretty stark. Almost nothing seems to be moving right now.

Should I be cutting my losses at this point and stockpiling rare gems for 4.2, or am I missing something here?

The unspoken preface to every gold blog post out there is the same as the ending to any fast food restaurant commercial: "Local participation may vary." Surely, I said to myself, things could not be that bad on other servers. Assuming that this gentleman is a proud member of the Alliance (as all gentlemen are wont to be), I walked doe-eyed into... a mental landmine.

The TUJ image on the left is from Blackrock Alliance, the imagine on the right from Auchindoun Alliance. So... yeah. I can see how - perhaps - someone might be questioning the ~~lucrivity~~ lucrativeness of the JC profession in the face of those post-apocalyptic figures. Bold Inferno Rubies selling for 25g apiece? Gazing deeper into the economic abyss reveals, if not why, at least how it is Blackrock maintains such absurdly low prices.

The above is number of auctions posted for Bold Inferno Rubies in the last 96 hours, or four days. You can see me on the right, plodding along with my 3 Bolds per cycle, just as described. Conversely, we have this Athenae character on Blackrock posting an average of 32 Bold cuts every twelve hours. At around 25g apiece. From my prior experimenting with TUJ, we all know that TUJ counts canceled auctions as "sales," so it is possible some portion of that number represents vaporware. Regardless... that is pretty absurd. Where were all these Inferno Rubies coming from?

Well, good sir, if you were curious as to the cause of this market collapse, look no further than what appears to be the bank alt Stillfurious. Four-hundred and fifty-seven uncut Inferno Rubies in the last 96 hours. Stillfurious only auctions gems, and ironically, red gems like Inferno Rubies apparently makes up only 18.7% of the colors of warez he has available; granted, he posts in the neighborhood of 800+ gems a day. I remain baffled as to where all these goddamn Inferno Rubies are coming from, though, especially considering Heartblossom is 100g/stack, Carnelians are at 9g apiece, and Elementium Ore is at an eminently reasonable 26g/stack, but still relatively cost-ineffective in terms of 26g Inferno Rubies. Then again, TUJ is indicating there to be over 8,000 auctions of Elementium Ore at various times in the last few days...

So I suppose the answer to the implicit question of "what is so lucrative with JC?" is... well, it is clearly not lucrative at all on your server, unfortunately. Or, at least, not any of the Inferno Ruby cuts. Some random smattering of other cuts like Defender's Demonseye appear to be going for 75g apiece with uncut gems at 9g. The formal question of "should I cut my losses and stockpile for 4.2?" would be a definite maybe.

Here is the thing. I named this blog Player Vs Auction House because ~~my first choice was taken~~ I reject the notion of PvP combat via the AH. Does PvP happen? Yes. Would crushing Stillfurious beneath your righteous boot-heel for making the cut gem market less profitable than selling Linen Cloth (no, seriously) feel good? Sure. Does it really accomplish anything in the end? Probably not. Stockpiling gems for 4.2 is not a bad idea at all, but it depends entirely on whether this supply glut is going to be maintained into the future. If it is, you may be kinda screwed by stockpiling. That is not to say that you should abandon JC entirely though.

It may be tough to read without clicking on it, but according to TUJ an Elementium Moebius Band worth 3299g only actually costs you 644g and some change to craft on the same server with those 25g Inferno Rubies. Blue 346 gear may not be as in season as it was a few months ago (and perhaps even less so moving into 4.2), but if your server is sufficiently large to support 8,000/day Elementium Ore stockpiles and 25g Inferno Rubies that depress prices for weeks, then it's likely enough newly dinged 85 toons are available for you to hawk your warez upon. Even "fire sale" prices like 1000g each is still nearly a 400g profit margin. It is risky this late in the tier with new patterns coming out and not being able to fall back on cut gems, but it is an option if you do not have another profession to easily fall back upon.

Good luck.

500k

2011-05-31T21:42:00.001-04:00

After being stuck at ~435k for what felt like forever, I finally cleared the hump and sped past the 500,000g finish line this weekend.

My normal revenue is around 3k a day with just gems, but it is amazing what you can pull out of your hat when you know you can (finally) go back to not caring about hitting arbitrary goals if you just get that last little bit. That last little bit came partly from not re-investing my capital for a whole weekend (and there were some nice deals like fifty stacks of 30g/stack Azshara's Veil that will probably pop back up to 80g-100g in the next few weeks), and also cashing out some investment material like ~14 bars of Truegold. I had a few Darkmoon trinkets up on the AH too, and it was sorely tempting to fire sale them on Trade for 10k when I knew they will go for 16k-18k eventually.

The interview with WarcraftEcon is done and will be posted sometime in the coming weeks. In the process of writing the interview, I happened to look at the MySales data that has been captured since Cataclysm:

Minus the BoE epic flipping (Fury of Angerforge, etc), my top 5 revenue streams this expansion:

Darkmoon Trinkets (169k)
Flask of Draconic Mind (33.8k)
Volatile Air (28.3k)
Inferno Ink (21.5k)
Enchant Weapon - Landslide (20.6k)

One thing that floored me right away was the Volatile Air. Obviously MySales does not differentiate stack sizes as it states I only sold "40" when I have basically been selling 13-16 Air stacks * 40, but damn. Hope you guys have been doing your daily transmute in Uldum on a regular basis! The Inferno Ink was another head-scratcher up until I realized that my average Volcano sale was 20,000g when that card has been below 10k for months now - in the heady days of the new expansion, I must have been pushing inks out like crazy. Oh, wait... I was. Finally, I am happy to see that the Maelstrom Gambit so far has been paying out some healthy dividends.

Incidentally, still have not sold the Windwalk scroll from before and Power Torrent is barely profitable. If there is one piece of sage advice I can offer people though, it would be this: bet on 2H Strength classes. In my experience, either more people have 2H Strength classes or 2H Strength classes are more willing to pay their dues. Or maybe it is harder (or easier!) to gear. Or something.

OT: What Players Actually Want

2011-05-26T22:12:00.001-04:00

If you come across anyone on any forum related to WoW exclaiming that Blizzard is nerfing content "because of the (baddies/Wrath babies/etc) whining on the forum," you can correctly call them morons. This quote from Bashiok officially dispels such nonsense for what it is.

Blizzard, you do how little people post on the forums yes? how about doing some in game polls to really see what people want, and not what the idiots on the forums want

You want them to not be nerfed, you're on the forums...

Just saying.

By looking at actual stats, actual progression, time spent playing, where, and to what extent, we can see that most people are looking for more accessible raid content, so yes, we absolutely are able to tell without a doubt that the plan we're enacting is actually what players playing the game want and need, and are not just listening to people on the forums.

No reading between the lines is necessary, but let me emphasize this again for posterity:

By looking at actual stats, actual progression, time spent playing, where, and to what extent, we can see that most people are looking for more accessible raid content, so yes, we absolutely are able to tell without a doubt that the plan we're enacting is actually what players playing the game want and need, and are not just listening to people on the forums.

"Want and need." Blizzard's words. I sketched the writing on the walls way back in March, and nothing has changed since that time... well, other than even more players leaving for lack of content tailored to their skill level. That is why Morhaime's investor call comments are so thinly-veiled:

As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over the many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content. And so I think with Cataclysm, they were able to consume the content faster than with previous expansions.

As of this writing, WoWProgress states 55,797 guilds have killed Magmaw, among the NA, EU, KR, and TW population it tracks. Looking at MMOData's WoW sub numbers, there are ~6.5 million non-Chinese accounts. The average raiding guild probably has 15 members killing bosses (most WoWProgress kills are from 10m), but let us also be charitable and also use 30 member guilds. Plugging in those numbers results in this:

55,797 * 15 / 6,500,000 =12.87%
55,797 * 30 / 6,500.000 = 25.75%

Cataclysm has been out for 6+ months and at best ~26% of the population has downed a single raid boss. The comparison is not entirely fair since not everyone is even interested in endgame raiding. Then again, I do consider it a fair question to ask how many of the 74% would be interested in raiding if things were not being designed around catering to hardcore players and/or being difficult out of principal. Only Blizzard knows for sure, but the answer appears to be "enough to matter."

Bread and Butter

2011-05-24T03:10:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite Enchanting niches back in Wrath was the "Everyone actually needs this all the time" niche. It does not make any sense logically, but for as much Enchanting competition there is on the AH, everyone independently assumes the (max level) starting enchants are covered. In Wrath, for example, the +28 spellpower to gloves was something every single spellcaster would want for every set of gloves they ever got. Moreover, the mats were ridiculously easy, leading to some pretty crazy profit margins as I was able to consistently sell them for 120g+ despite it costing barely 15g to make.

Welcome to Cataclysm:

Pictured above is +15 Stats to chest for 180g, +50 Mastery to gloves for 195g, +50 Haste to bracers for 144g, and +50 Haste to gloves for 249g. These four are just a representative sample, not an exhaustive list, although Mighty Stats in particular is the de facto enchant for basically everyone. So unless Greater Celestial Essences are selling north of 270g apiece on your server, chances are that you can make a serious margin peddling bread and butter enchants that will always have a deep pool that consists of anyone who gets gear above ilevel 318.

One unforeseen complication of the Maelstrom Gambit I was talking about a few weeks ago that I wish I had foreseen is the dearth of non-dust enchanting materials. No, seriously, I am talking about Heavenly Shards consistently at 100g each. Greater Celestial Essence is also high, but less so because it is part of the Shuffle. It makes sense that there might be fewer people running "normal" heroics and thus less shards coming in, but I also think the other half is simply the sort of Gambit I am engaging in. Power Torrent, for example, takes 8 Heavenly Shards each. All it would take is a few people doing some high-end scrolls to chew through the entire AH supply, just like what happens to Volatile prices anytime a JC takes a gamble on the crafted rings/necks. As for the Gambit itself...

Not anything hugely impressive. If you math it out, that is a revenue stream of 16,419g minus 6,000g for the Maelstrom Crystals to purchase the patterns (haven't sold Windwalk scrolls yet), leaving 10,419g split among the five scrolls, or 2083g per scroll. Based on TUJ's current numbers, Landslide would cost 2257g to craft while is Power Torrent 1947g and Windwalk 2563g. In all likelihood, I ultimately broke even on the Gambit on Week 2 after learning the patterns. Going forward, this will be an additional revenue stream, although obviously I was aiming for a bit of a killing before prices reach their future lows. We shall see.

OT: By The Numbers

2011-05-18T03:56:00.001-04:00

It is old news by this point, but I wanted to talk about the 600k subscription drop and what that actually means in the scheme of things. To be honest, my first reaction was "I told you so!" but without an actual breakdown of those 600k accounts no one outside Blizzard really knows what kind of people left - if the unsubs were from people who never zoned into a heroic dungeon let alone a raid, for example, then difficulty obviously would have nothing to do with that. Well... maybe they never zoned in because they were too difficult, but nevermind. In any case, here are some things to keep in mind:

Point 1: The numbers are actually significant.

The reactions among a lot of blogs and forum posters seemed to be almost dismissive of the numbers. "It's only 5% of 12 million, /yawn." While technically true, it is pretty inaccurate. Take a look at the following graph, which is a slightly modified graph you can see at MMOData:

The first thing you should notice, of course, is the huge dip that represents when WoW was banned in China for several months. It is worth noting because it indicated there are ~5 million WoW "subs" in China alone - the ~1.75 million subs still on the blue line represents the remainder of WoW East, which includes Korea and maybe Taiwan (the "does Taiwan count as China" deal is tricky business). With that in mind, here is Michael Morhaime:

Looking at the World of Warcraft side of the business, we were pleased to see record sales following the Cataclysm launch in the United States and Europe which helps drives growth and subscribership. During the first quarter of 2011, as players have eagerly consumed the new content, we have seen subscribership return to prelaunch levels in the West. We finished the quarter with more than 11.4 million subscribers worldwide. Moving forward, our objective is to continue delivering new content to players in all regions to further energize our community.

Key words: in the West. As in, that red line in the graph that has been largely stable since the release of Wrath. Now, there is nothing in the call itself that specifically says all 600k subs were solely from the West, but if they were, the drop suddenly goes from 5% to ~12% of anyone you or I could possibly be grouping with. Which leads me to my next point.

Point 2: WoW is not dying, but that is largely irrelevant to your individual experience.

I strongly believe people understand this point on a gut level, but sometimes get caught up in "logical" arguments over the internet. So picture this: did your daily WoW routine change at all when 5 million Chinese players suddenly could not log on? Assuming you are not Chinese, probably not. Ergo, anytime someone talks about ~~12 million~~ 11.4 million WoW subs, they are really only talking about ~5.15 million WoW West subs that could possibly impact them in some way - using the bigger number just makes you feel better by identifying with a larger group, as opposed to it meaning anything in-game. It should even be broke down further into NA and EU, but that level of data is sadly no longer being kept by the MMOData people. A rough extrapolation from the chart would probably be ~3 million NA subs total.

And so that is the rub. If WoW lost, say, 2000 subs... but they were all from your server, that suddenly is a (personal) disaster. You either have to fork over some cash to transfer to other servers, or probably just quit the game. I do not know how many servers there are across NA and EU, but if we assume 400 total servers and 300k subs down (it's possible the 600k drop came from post-peak Wrath launch in China), that still equals out to be 750 accounts per server. Drop in the bucket for Mal'Ganis with its 10k+ population, but a bigger deal on Auchindoun with our maybe 4k population.

Bottom line: any drop in your region is significant. WoW does not have to be dying overall for it to die for you.

Point 3: Ignore the vapid "there are always post-expansion peaks and drop-offs" argument.

It is literally true that more people buy the game/re-sub after an expansion is released than will be still playing the game several months later. However, I have seen this argument bandied about as if the exodus between Cataclysm's release to post-Cataclysm was par for the course. Do I really need to remind people that Blizzard did not get from 0 to ~~12 million~~ 11.4 million by having a 100% oscillation? At some point over WoW's lifespan, it retained more players than it lost. Right here we have evidence that Cataclysm failed to retain as many players than it lost in the entire West region, e.g. where Cataclysm was released. Vanilla retained more players than it lost. TBC retained more players than it lost. Even Wrath retained more players than it lost. Cataclysm, thus far, has failed to do so.

That essentially sums up what I think about that.

A transcript of the Activision Blizzard investor call is available on Seeking Alpha for free, and I suggest reading it for yourself. Among other things, it has Michael Morhaime mentioning things we are starting to see now vis-a-vis even more "premium services" for WoW. For the record, I do not care that cross-realm RealID LFD groups can be formed for $3/month or whatever it ends up being. What I will say is that it is dangerously close to crossing into the Uncanny Valley of F2P-esque cash shop design where features that would have been free now suddenly cost extra money.

Calling it now, though: tri-spec and Dance Studio will cost $3/month. On the plus side, maybe that would get them to actually finish the latter. After all, we sure as hell get new $10 companion pets pretty regularly these days.

Maelstrom Gambit

2011-05-10T01:36:00.000-04:00

As expected by everyone, the prices of Maelstrom Crystals have plummeted with the release of the quasi-farmable ZA/ZG heroic duo. Prices on Auchindoun have a floor of ~400g but it can creep up to 850g depending on availability. As is often the case however, just because material prices have gone down, that does not mean the prices of finished products need follow. At least not yet.

If you have a max-level enchanter, I suggest looking at the high-end scroll market.

I am talking about big-ticket items like Landslide, Windwalker, and Power Torrent. I am also talking about things like the wrist enchants. The weapon enchant patterns take around 2000g to purchase with Maelstroms at 400g, which is a reasonably expensive barrier to entry, keeping competition low. But just because Maelstroms are 400g does not mean you have to price them accordingly. Landslide might not be going for 26,000g anymore, but a "reasonable" 6,000g is still a particularly ridiculous margin now that Maelstroms are low. This is a sweet-spot time in terms of high-end enchants, insofar that everyone knows Maelstroms are less valuable than before (although still nothing to scoff at) but before the greater server groupthink expects weapon enchants to be cheap.

And as I mentioned in New Crafting Paradigm and/or Using the AH as your Bank, do not forget to put your leftover supplies on AH while waiting for the scrolls themselves to sell. I had four Maelstrom Crystals left over after making a Windwalker scroll and I simply undercut someone in the mid-level of crystal prices. Next day?

.

Flipping 400g Maelstrom Crystals for 650g might not be particularly glamorous, but that 250g is damn far more than I have ever made trying to sell things like the buff potions that I am tempted to just vendor out of spite at this point. Mythical and Mysterious? Sell well. Other potions? Not so much.

One final thing that I will drill into your head at every available opportunity: I highly recommend never crafting something that you could not eventually use. This applies more to the high-end scroll market or other markets that require steep up-front costs than, say, cut gems or potions. My first Maelstrom Gambit was actually a scroll of Windwalker that I can up and enchant my tank's weapon with right now if I felt like it. Merely knowing that fact gives me the psychological freedom to price it more aggressively (e.g. at the upper end of the price curve) without worrying about what happens if my gambit "fails." Worst case scenario: I (likely) have the cheapest Windwalker scroll available anywhere. Conversely, if you make a Power Torrent scroll and have no spellcasting toons, you might end up getting into undercutting wars with someone in a race to the bottom, or maybe discover there appears to be no market for the scroll above the cost of mats. Stranger things have happened, but this sort of uncertainty period is precisely what we will be capitalizing on.

Gemocalypse

2011-05-03T01:56:00.003-04:00

...because "Gemmass" just sounded lame.

Jewelcrafting has been one of my go-to professions since I started playing the AH in TBC, but this latest patch has been the biggest jump in profits I have seen outside the introduction of epic gems (in both prior expansions). This was my haul on Friday, for example:

Here is the local Undermine Journal graph for Inferno Rubies in the last week:

The new average in the above graph is ~90g. There are some obvious reasons for this surge, such as the shiny new epics from ZA/ZG and some additional sockets on the crafted gear. Then we had the near collapse of the Obsidium Shuffle when the botters seemingly abandoned mining ore on even the possibility that the vendor floor would drop, constraining the supply of gems - suddenly I am turning around and selling Obsidium Ore I was too bored to prospect for 150g a stack. The third factor? More people coming back, or at least having a nominal reason (e.g. new content) to log back on more often.

I generally try not to spend time on the "whys" of market upticks like we see with gems, because a player simply undercutting whatever gem cut is currently selling higher than the cost of the uncut gem will achieve 90% of the success with 0% of the effort. Indeed, that is exactly what I have been doing lately as Auctionator makes it particularly easy.

Props to Alto for being the one that pointed out the More tab in Auctionator last month that was staring me in the face for half a year without ever having clicked on it. Basically, click the More tab, press Check for Undercuts, wait a bit, and then spam-click Cancel Auction Track & Field-style. I used to get fancy with undercutting prices, but the gem market is sufficiently busy that you are liable to be undercut within a few hours no matter the price - it is faster to just let Auctionator undercut by the standard 10s anyway.

Like all upswings, the gem market will be correcting itself before too much longer. DPS queues went from the Wrath-like 8 minutes on patch day to the depressingly standard 35 minutes tonight, for example, which is a sign to me that all those people "coming back" are leaving out the same revolving door they came in on. Ore bots are also returning, correctly reasoning that guaranteed 30g sales is better than the hit-or-miss herb sales.

While the market is going to correct itself, one thing will remain different going forward: we are approaching the sweet-spot of sockets in gear. There are only 40 items (8 of which are relics) with sockets in the ilevel 318-339 range. In comparison, there are 51 items with sockets that drop out of ZA/ZG alone. Percentage-wise, the number of pre-raid items with sockets rose 18.4% (225 --> 276) in 4.1. If Blizzard sticks to the word circa September 2010, coming along in Patch 4.2 will be the ability of Blacksmiths, Tailors, and Leatherworkers to craft Bloodthirsty Gladiator gear, which is currently only bought with Honor points. So not only will ZA/ZG become more fashionable (and possible) to farm by solo-queueing in LFD and Valor gear hitting the Justice vendors, you can probably expect a second renaissance on the PvP side of things. And a lot of those PvP items have sockets that will need to be filled by somebody.

Bottom line: if you haven't been selling sackfuls of gems since the patch, you have been missing out. And if you don't start soon, it will only be worse for you/better for your competition.

OT: Crushing Blow

2011-04-27T21:49:00.001-04:00

[note: Blizzard updated the notes after I wrote this, but before I posted. See Edit at bottom]

The inexplicably undocumented Arena point change has been a huge blow to my drive to PvP in WoW. In case you missed it - you know, focusing on all the gold-making and "versus AH" opportunities - the way Conquest points are earned have been radically changed. Pre-4.1, you had to win five games to cap yourself to the week, regardless of whether you were at the minimum 1343 (sub-1500 rating) or at 2000+ (over 1500). This may have seemed too "easy" for some, but the entire point of personal/team MMR is to put you against other teams/players that will result in a 50% win percentage. In other words, you are expected to play 10 games in order to win those 5.

Now? Blizzard has at least doubled the required number of games everyone has to play to achieve the same results. If you do 2s for points with your friends, you are going to be playing 20 games instead of 10. If you are above 1500 rated, you will be playing exponentially more - a 1600 Conquest point cap, for example, means I need 12 wins, or 24 games... 14 more than last week. A 2300 cap is 18 wins or 34 expected games at a high level of play. This is what I wrote on the MMO-Champ forums:

You guys really aren't getting it.

1) This change hugely impacts everyone who does Arenas: it is at least doubling the amount of Arena game wins each player needs to have to get capped each week. If you are below 1500, it now takes 10 wins instead of 5. Blizzard balances your MMR around the idea of a 50% win percentage, meaning they expected you to play 10 games to win 5, capping yourself out. Last expansion, you could /dance or /afk your way through 10 games per week for points; the pre-4.1 change let people cap early if they get lucky (going 5-0), but if you have a lower win percentage you could end up going 5-13 and do more games than last expansion. This new change doubles the amount of games everyone needs to play. Now your "for fun + points" teams will be running an average of 20 games instead of 10, and the upper-crust PvPers could be required to play an average of 40+ games instead of 10. Between the queue times and how long matches can last (at any level), we are talking about a massive, extra drain on your time.

2) No warning whatsoever. Patch was on the PTR for months, and a fundamental redesign of the Arena system was pushed through like a Congressional earmark on a budget resolution at the 11th hour? Not only that, Blizzard already knows it "may be too low" but they pushed it anyway?

3) All of this smacks as a back-handed move to push Arena players of all stripes into Rated BGs for Conquest Points - "Hey kids, how about 4 Rated BGs instead of 20 Arena matches?" Instead of, you know, admitting that Rated BGs are a failure due to their overall design, and not the reward structure itself.

4) The lack of empathy from obvious PvE players who never Arena'd to save their life is just sad. This is the equivalent of them reducing the VP you get from dungeons from 70 to 35 (or 140 to 70), but leaving the weekly cap the same. How would you feel about suddenly needing to run twice as many heroics per week? Oh wait, "it isn't necessary to cap VP each week" so nothing changes, right?

I had not really paid any attention to the MMO-Champ forums before, but it is truly despicable garbage over there, way worse than even the official forums in terms of trolling (if you can believe that). Most of the "counter-points" were essentially saying "haha, suck it" or:

No, it's not the fact that they don't enjoy PvP, it's the fact that they don't want to grind for the same type of rewards that sole PvE players have to endure for their epics. That's why many people went to PvP in Cata due to the fact dungeons and raids are very time consuming again, and are not zergable as in Wrath... It's the extreme lack of paticence that these players have that causes them to rage, because arena battles are not as easy to farm as, say, normal 5-mans or unrated BG's... Plus, there is the rating issue... (lol)

There is a literal disconnection from reality with these people, and it is becoming impossibly hard for me to even wrap my mind around their worldview. "Extreme lack of paticence [sic]?" Is there no difference between a Tol Barad daily that requires you to kill 12 spiders and a hypothetical one that requires you to kill 24 spiders for the same reward? Is there no difference between a heroic that takes an hour to complete and one that takes two hours? What is the magical patience threshold they are using as a metric here? Imagine if it took twice as many heroics as it does currently to gain the same amount of JP/VP. Did nothing change? Did you lose nothing? Is the argument that your fun is actually increasing because you are being forced to play longer for the same goal?

I mean, good lord. Do people act like this in their real lives? "Pay freeze this year, so no raises. Oh well, nothing changed." Or does this masochism only appear when they sit down for entertainment?

I enjoy WoW PvP... more or less. On equal skill levels, the player with the better gear wins. You have to have gear to compete, as PvP sure has hell isn't balanced amongst players with 11% resilience (crafted PvP gear) and 31% resilience (4pc + weapon + trinkets) - one player is literally taking 20% more damage than the other. You know those unkillable healers running around these days? That doesn't happen in crafted gear. Well, it might happen if you both are in crafted gear, which is the reason why you are getting better gear.

Regardless, Arena games are stressful affairs to me, and random BGs typically boil down to squeezing blood-fun from the "inevitably getting farmed at your GY" stone that is Alliance PvP. If I wanted to play more Arena games, I would play more Arena games. Indeed, I do Arena on three separate toons. Now? I will be forced to cut at least one of those toons out just to scrape enough wins on whichever I decide is my main PvP toon. If this system was in place at the start of Cataclysm, I would not have geared up three toons and otherwise not have played as much.

If you cannot recognize a difference between doing 30 games across 3 characters vs 30 games on 1 character, or are dismissive of the former because "it's for the gear," then... I have to question your sanity. You are playing an MMO; being rewarded for the things you do is not something dirty, it's a huge part of the game. If the reward doesn't match the effort, you don't do it. If you disagree, well, I expect to see an Armory link of your main with "the Insane" title along with your response.

Which, ironically, would only prove my point.

Edit: Check out this post by Zarhym:

We saw that Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds were over-rewarding players for the time investment required, particularly compared to point gains in PvE. We felt the change we went live with in the patch was a little bit too low and overcompensating though, so we buffed up the numbers for wins just a bit to 180 (Arenas) and 400 (Rated BGs).

This changes the math a bit, but not by much - 8 wins (16 games) instead of 10 for casual Arena players, ~13 wins (26 games) for the upper crust. Make no mistake about one thing though: the Blizzard designers are very concerned about how rewarding you find the game. Fun cannot be metered out too quickly, because why else would you be playing, amirite? Think about that next time you find yourself grinding out Therazane rep for your 25 extra stats on shoulders. That kind of shit is mathed out on an Excel spreadsheet, and they just added three more lever presses before the Conquest Point food pellet comes out.

The Million Gold Question

2011-04-24T18:50:00.000-04:00

What would I do with 1 million gold?

The same thing anyone else would do: nothing different.

If you have been using Auditor for any length of time, there is feature of it that is useless 99% of the time, but this happens to fall under the 1%: total audit. The release of 4.0 broke most of my addons beyond repair, so this is only since Cataclysm was released:

I broke the 400k mark for the first time a few days ago, but nearly 2 million gold has whipped through my bags in the last five months. Does that not count? Why do I say "I've broken the 400k mark for the first time?" And for that matter, what exactly is the value of the 400k when, by definition, for me to have 400k means that 400k of whatever net worth I actually own is languishing in my bags, getting no return?

Gold is primarily a way to keep score, for gold bloggers and many non-bloggers. If my gold total goes up from day-to-day, that means I'm ~~Charlie Sheen~~ winning. Except that really does not make any sense. If I was serious about reaching a cap or maximizing my potential, I would not have 400k in my bags, I would have 400k worth of items in play on the AH. At the same time, WoW is a game to me, the AH is a game within a game Inception-style, and juggling 400k worth of items on a daily basis is just too much.

Thus I am skeptical of when bloggers like Mageshadow say:

I'm almost at 600k, what would I do with my million gold? Trading Card Game mounts for one, I've had my eye on a swift spectral tiger for a while, and a mottled drake & a riding turtle wouldn't hurt. I'd also probably buy a couple achievements/mounts that are obtained through raiding, mainly Invincible and Mimiron's head. I'd also probably hand out some gifts to my friends, mainly choppers and sandstone drakes.

None of those things require 600k to purchase, so why wait? One million is a number. And actually, it is a pretty arbitrary number when you have already "handled" 1.8 million. If I had one million liquid gold I would get the Warcraft Econ interview and... nothing else. Maybe it does become easier in some peoples' minds to spend the gold when they have finally achieved their "goal," but I doubt that ever ends up being the case. Most people who make this much gold have made it because A) they have a hard time spending gold, and/or B) they are addicted to getting an ever-increasing high score. Spending 100k on a Spectral Tiger is indistinguishable from losing 100k on bad Glyph bet (or whatever) to such people. I especially think it's funny buying mounts when you can only use one mount at a time - you cannot ride Invincible, Mimiron's Head, the Riding Turtle, Sandstone Drake, and the Spectral Tiger at the same time.

Then again, maybe I'm just crazy.

P.S. Regarding those two epic weapons I got off Trade for 11k apiece...

P.P.S. I am still fairly confident that BoE epics will retain their value despite ZA/ZG coming out, simply because of the 346 ilevel requirement to zone in. The only sales you should be losing would be to the budget raiders who believe the 353 is good enough for them (and are willing to farm heroics), as compared to the 359 BoE. Odds are good that budget raiders weren't buying many epic BoEs anyway.

P.P.P.S. If ZA/ZG is faceroll out of the gate though, all bets are off.

In the Meantime

2011-04-20T01:19:00.000-04:00

Not a whole lot to talk about in the gold space, at the moment. Patch 4.1 may or may not be next week, and that will surely shake things up quite a bit, but you already knew that. In the meantime, enjoy these Trade Chat finds:

The text version of the first picture is I bought Maldo's Sword Cane and Chelley's Staff of Dark Mending for 11,000g apiece and then turned and listed them for 28k and 29k. Sadly, they did not sell instantly like the tanking shoulders, but I relisted them tonight for a more reasonable 21k and 22k - I have every confidence of moving them before next Tuesday, but even if I do not, 11k for a 359 weapon is certainly something I would be willing to pay to buy from a vendor, if there were such a thing.

The second picture is of a guy whispering me about my 21k Darkmoon Card: Tsunami. Turns out he bought a Tsunami deck for 16.5k, but didn't realize that he had to wait until the Darkmoon Faire was in town to get the trinket. His deal? He would trade me his deck + 2 Maelstrom Crystals + 1000g for my completed trinket. All because he did not feel like waiting two weeks. Hey, I don't blame him, I hate waiting too. So I sealed the deal, put the deck in the bank, and pulled out Darkmoon Card: Tsunami #2 and listed that one for the same 21k. Got to keep the shelves stocked to keep the customers happy, you know?

Uber trade deals like these could be flukes, sure. It certainly is not some sort of residual business or source of daily income. But the thing about lightning not striking twice is that few people think to set up a lightning rod... which simply means more potential lightning for you.

Using the AH as Your Bank

2011-04-15T01:42:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, you may recall that I made a completely unnecessary personal purchase of Fury of Angerforge, ostensively to twink out one of my almost-85 alts. Even after both the DK and Warrior hit 85, I held off, as increasingly it is becoming apparent that my love of certain classes revolves around individual abilities and not the total package. For example, the first time I saw a warrior Heroic Leaping from the AH to the bank, I knew I wanted to level mine up. As a paladin, I have mobility-envy all the time anyway, but the ability to just kind of get goofy on a minute cooldown? Sign me up. Hell, I would have race-changed to Worgen (or goblin even!) had that race been able to be paladins.

Anyway, as it turns out, you spend a lot of time rooted in PvP, as a warrior. And without a healbot, you die rather quickly. I probably spend an equivalent amount of time Feared on the paladin, but the uselessness I feel is greater rooted as a warrior than Feared as a paladin.

In between the purchase of the trinket for 28,500g and my figuring out whether the warrior was for me, I was listing the Angerforge trinket on the AH for 45,000g. I had zero expectation that the trinket would sell for this amount. The principal here is simple. Sequestered away in my bank, the value of the trinket is effectively zero - I wasn't planning on selling it, but I was not using it either, despite having spent ~7% of my liquid bank for the option; I consider the initial 28.5k to be sunk costs. Meanwhile, if there even existed a 0.1% chance it would sell for 45,000g (a return of 16,500g), that would be worth the periodic 10g deposit every few days. Worst case scenario? I equip it on one of my toons a month or two from now and am out ~150g over the course of the month, which is minuscule compared to the kind of gold I write off as business expenses, e.g. canceling and reposting cut gems.

Then, I got this surprise:

Using the AH as your bank is not always feasible, of course. For example, there is no real point in keeping stacks of 400g Hypnotic Dust in there. Okay, well there actually might be a point in doing that, but not in the sense I am talking about today. Epic BoE items work amazingly well for this principal, as the supply is understandbly limited. Some crafted epics work as well, like Tsunami Decks.

In any case, when choosing your price, the important thing is not chosing a price based on what you would consider a good return on the "initial investment." That term is in air quotes because (presumably) you did not buy the item for its investment properties, but rather for your own future use. Rather, choose a price at which you would feel good about losing the future utility of the item. This isn't about opportunity cost, this is about pricing items that you had not planned on selling at all. Angerforge at 28.5k was at the upper end of the bang-for-my-buck scale. Flipping it for 35,000g might have been a reasonable return for some people, but an anemic 19% return on five-digit investment is not good enough for me. Nearly double that percentage though? Now we're talking.

Let me use a more pedestrian example: Inferno Rubies. I have a bunch of cut gems up on the AH at any given time, but I always try to maintain at least 10 uncut Inferno Rubies in my bank. Why? Because the absolute last thing I want to happen is to get a new piece of PvP gear or whatever, not have any Inferno Rubies to socket into it, go to the AH, and suddenly see that Inferno Rubies happen to be at 150g or something ridiculous. The personal value of the 11th Infero Ruby in my bank is signifigantly less than the first 10 - I would sell the 11th for whatever the market price happens to be at the moment, but the other ten would have to be at least double that for me to sacrifice the feeling of safety that having them conveys.

So, what I suggest is for you to head to your bank, take a gander at all of the varied sort of sellable knick-nacks or epics or stockpiled goods, and simply put them up on the AH for a price you feel is high enough for you to have justified selling them at to begin with (instead of warhousing them for the indefinite future) and see what happens. Most, if not all, will come back to you and you'll be out the deposit cost. Sometimes though, you will be that one guy out there with an item that someone else just cannot wait until tomorrow to purchase at a fraction of the cost. Being out there is always better than not.

Either way, enjoy the extra bank space.

OT: The Final Tanking Solution

2011-04-11T21:54:00.000-04:00

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding the systemic problems with the LFD feature when it comes to tanks, and quite frankly, a lot of truly bizarre "fixes."

Rohan from Blessing of Kings thinks that maybe we should move from the Holy Trinity (e.g. tank, healer, 3 DPS) to something like 2 tanks, 2 healers, 2 DPS. While that seems out of the blue, apparently it is more similar to what Age of Conan was (is?) doing. Green Armadillo at Player Vs Developer thinks that since there are more DPS than the other roles, why not simply have a tank, healer, and 7 DPS? Gordon from We Fly Spitfires thinks that simply no one wants to play those roles, and so Blizzard should either make those things more fun to do or perhaps give up on the Holy Trinity model altogether. Adam from The Noisy Rogue asks why Blizzard is bribing tanks when they could simply make running heroics required for raiding by adding a (stacking) buff for completing them. Incidentally, Adam appears to hate non-pure DPS classes and wishes them pain. Gevlon from The Greedy Goblin thinks it is an "education" issue that should be fixed by somehow teaching people how to play better (or how to tank), and that no amount of bribery will work.

And to round it out, here is actually Blizzard's official take on the situation:

We don't feel the tanking and healing roles have any inherent issues that are causing the representation disparity, except that fulfilling them carries more responsibility. Understandably, players prefer to take on that responsibility in more organized situations than what the Dungeon Finder offers, but perhaps we can bribe them a little.

With Great DPS-Power, Comes... No Responsibility
All of these "solutions" flirt around the two problems, outlining what is really going on in the vaguest of ways. Tanking (and healing) carry more responsibility... why? Easy: tanks and healers cannot be carried. When a tank fails, by definition, the group wipes. When a healer fails, the group wipes. There can be sloppy play, for sure, like a tank not positioning the boss correctly, or not reacting to a certain ability the correct way. However, if the group is still able to rally and defeat the boss anyway, the "failure" really is not a failure. Conversely, DPS failing generally means that the DPS died, which is not that big a deal...

...until now.

Problem 1: Cataclysm dungeons are (still) too difficult for the LFD tool.

The first time I zoned into the revamped Shadowfang Keep and saw that there were actually three separate spells that a DPS could (and ~~has~~ had to in two cases) interrupt on Baron Ashbury, I knew I would despise this expansion. Commander Springvale, Lady Naz'jar, Rom'ogg Bonecrusher, Corla, Herald of Twilight, Ammunae, Setesh, Rajh, Corborus, (post-patch) Asaad, Foe Reaper 5000, Admiral Ripsnarl, "Captain" Cookie... all of these bosses from nearly every single heroic have mechanics that the DPS has to take care of or else the group wipes. Blizzard actually thought they could add responsibility onto the historically least responsible role and have everything work out? Nevermind the endless mob packs that need CCing along the way.

It might come as a shock, but bad players play this game. I do not subscribe to Gevlon's "M&S" sociopathy, but there is a full spectrum of player abilities out there, and not every one is tall enough to ride this roller coaster, so to speak, especially after jacking up the scale a few more inches. You cannot keep these players out of the LFD tool though, because there are not enough "good" players to support the function - as I mentioned back in February, there has to be a critical mass of success going on for the tool to operate at a self-sustaining level. No matter what you think about the LFD tool, it is still entirely better than trying to make your own non-guild group, as otherwise you would be doing that instead of sitting in a DPS queue for 45 minutes.

I Ain't Got Time to Bleed
Speaking of sitting around for 45 minutes...

Problem 2: Cataclysm dungeons (still) take too long.

It is bad enough that having one (or two) bad players from the LFDisaster lottery in your group can torpedo an entire heroic run. What drives the situation into an irredeemable farce that it is today is asking raid-geared tanks to slog through perfect no-wipe, no-death runs... in 50+ minutes. All for 70 Valor Points. Every other non-raid aspect of this game is designed around being completed in 30 minutes or less. TB dailies? 30 minutes. Battlegrounds? 30 minutes. Arena games? They can technically last for 47 minutes or whatever, but most games last no more than ~3 minutes * 10 games (assuming 50% win percentage), so ~30 minutes. What happened to 30 minute heroics? As I have openly opined in this space before, where are all the players asking for 5-man raids on their off-nights?

Blizzard seems to be addressing this particular problem, e.g. 70 VP/hour not being good enough, without actually addressing the equally (if not moreso) pressing Problem 1. This is why their bribing "solution" will be a short-term improvement at best: I actually do plan on running LFD more often, but only because the Reins of the Raven Lord is something I have been farming off-and-on again since TBC was relevant content. So I will either get the mount rather quickly, or I will become so frustrated (again) at the prospect of running these heroics that I would rather be farming Sethekk Halls the old fashioned way, and getting done in a fraction of the time.

Always the Last Place You Look
So what is the actual final solution to this seemingly tanking crisis? Does it involve fundamentally changing the way the game is played, perhaps with 8-9 person dungeons with two tanks or whatever? Nope. How about rating systems, or game tutorials? Bzzt!

Solution: Tune Cataclysm dungeons like Wrath dungeons were tuned.

Problem solved! Did you, or anyone you know complain about DPS queues in Wrath? Not a chance. DPS queues were 11 minutes back then. Eleven minute DPS queues. Can you imagine? I can! Despite the low queue times, I still tanked on three separate toons because it was faster and I enjoyed tanking more. How could I enjoy tanking and it's responsibility? Because I had control over the outcome. You could be the worst player in the world and I would carry you kicking and screaming to a 15-20 minute LFD success. And then everyone could move on with their lives.

People did complain Wrath heroics were too easy. And you know what? Those people complain that Cataclysm dungeons are too easy. There is no satisfying those people, because they have such warped perceptions as to what daily group quests should consist of that placating them is a waste of time. These dungeons were new, relevant content the first few times you beat them. After that? They are farm content. Does anyone legitimately enjoy "challenge" on farm content? That seems like a contradiction in terms, does it not? If you are in heroic raiding content, does it please you to wipe on normal Magmaw? I find that unlikely. Challenge does not consist of RNG wipefests because you happened to be grouped with a stoned college student, a stay-at-home mom changing a diaper with one hand on the keyboard, a Fan of Knives bot, and/or the social bully studying to get his minor in Sadism.

Tanking and healing will always have more responsibility than DPSing. The goal should not be to "fix" that by adding more responsibility to DPS. All that will do is make tanking/healing more frustrating, because on top of what you already have to worry about, you have to worry about whether you will wipe through no fault of your own because Worgenlol of Random Server 316 did not interrupt the one-shot mechanic of a dungeon boss.

Challenging content does have a place in World of Warcraft and that place is in organized content. Grabbing five random players and sticking them into a group that will never exist again is not "organized content." You can even still have challenging heroic dungeons for people that want it... just don't stick those dungeons in the Dungeon Finder. The way the ravamped ZA/ZG are rolling out is a bastardized version of this, but Blizzard could do it better. Have them exist as brutal 5m content for 1-2 months or whatever, and NOT be in LFD. Then, nerf them appropriately when you finally do add them to the tool. This solution actually appeases the "save the community (that we never interacted back in vanilla/TBC)!" camp, as you could get your local e-Street Cred up for successful ZA/ZG runs while anyone else who couldn't be bothered could still get their ~~daily~~ 7/week VP the (now) old-fashioned way. Between the 353 gear and the doubled (!) VP gains from ZA/ZG, I do not think there would be any danger of there not being enough people running those dungeons. And when 4.2 rolls around ~~at the end of August~~ when it's ready? Glide ZA/ZG right into LFD.

No matter what you thought about Wrath, the one thing it indisputably got correct was how to make a vibrant, healthy LFD community. Player activity only went down after nearly a year without new content, and the prospect of another gear-reset expansion. Cataclysm player activity is down four months after launch. No, seriously. Blizzard talks big game about the design iteration process, but as we know from Wrath they kept the same difficulty model the entire expansion. I actually have little hope that they will turn Cataclysm around before plowing into that iceberg, and what we are likely to see is another brutal raid tier in Firelands and less reasons to feel the need to log on every day. Design decisions like "let's require endboss kills before they can get a 4pc bonus!" sound good on paper (and quells the forum trolls), but in practice it makes people less interested in ANY tier pieces. Cataclysm difficulty? Same kind of deal.

Data-Mine Shaft

2011-04-09T18:45:00.001-04:00

Nearly every blogger has talked about the data-mined gem vendor changes (including myself), but there have been a few people questioning the potential veracity of the change itself. This is from Stede over at Venture LLT:

Is this bad news? Not really. Blizzard gets about 2-3 weeks to test a patch build on the PTR. To understand how a drop in the vendor price would work its way through the WoW economy over a much longer span of time, they have to take it to the extreme. The good news is that 75s won't make it ever make it onto live servers. The not so good news is that Blizzard is seems to be openly considering dropping the vendor price of cut uncommon gems. My best guess, the vendor price will likely be about half of what it is now - that's ~4.5 gold.

Other people have pointed out, repeatedly, that this is data-mined information, and "remember epic gem cooldowns in Wrath?!" Well, of course. The issue is that this vendor price change was long overdue:

Gem	Uncut Vendor	Cut Vendor
Blood Garnet	25s	25s
Living Ruby	3g	3g
Crimson Spinel	5g	6g
Bloodstone	25s	50s / 1g
Scarlet Ruby	3g	4.5g
Cardinal Ruby	5g	9g
Carnelian	5g	9g
Inferno Ruby	3g	3.75g
???	???	???

It never made any sense that the uncommon gem cut and vendored for more than the rare gem, let alone how uncommon gems vendored for the same as the epic gems of the previous expansion. While this high vendor price provided a fairly stable floor price in ore despite the flooding of bots, an unintended consequence is that it never made any sense to sell cut/perfect uncommon gems on the AH (e.g. Bold Carnelian, Perfect Solid Zephyrite). As Wrath frequently demonstrated, there was a fairly stable, low-volume market of parsimonious gemmers that were okay saving 5-10g by putting +12 Strength into an empty slot instead of +16 Strength.

This market has undoubtedly been underserved by this artificially high price in Cataclysm, so I would not necessarily despair when it comes to ore prices. It makes prospecting riskier from an absolute standpoint, but there will be people making gold out there by selling cut uncommon gems competitively without having to worry about the rather obscene deposit cost (which is a function of an item's vendor cost).

Sinking Ships

2011-04-08T04:01:00.000-04:00

I think it is fair to say Cataclysm has not been going according to plan.

Right in the middle of my writing a very long post about the Great Tank Bribe of 2011, we get hit with a few more broadsides:

Honor is now purchasable from the Justice Commodities Vendor at 250 Honor per 375 Justice.
Justice is now purchasable from the Honor Commodities Vendor at 250 Justice per 375 Honor.
Conquest is now purchasable from the Valor vendor at 250 Conquest per 250 Valor.
Any cut of uncommon gem now sells to NPC for 75 silver instead of 9 gold.

Not to mention the things we already know:

The rate at which Honor Points are earned has been doubled.
Revamped ZA/ZG granting 140 VP.
Daily heroics --> 7/week heroics.
Tanks getting gold, gems, flasks, non-combat pets (including cross faction), and mounts.

All of this for Patch Four "WE SWEAR FIRELANDS ISN'T BEING DELAYED" Point One. Or perhaps it should be called Patch Four "Precipitous Subcriber Activity Freefall Solutions" Point One. Individually, each one of these could change the entire gaming landscape for millions of people, and they are all happening together.

The easiest change to grasp is the (data-mined) change of cut uncommon gems going from what we all knew was a ridiculous 9g vendor price down to 75s. This radically undermines the safety net of bot-bought ore for Shuffling purposes as the True Vendor Price (TVP) going from 54g for Obsidium to 4.5g a stack. Will that stop the bots from burying us under a mountain of cheap ore? Nope. What else will they farm? More herbs? It is correct that such a high TVP meant a fairly substantial inflation spiral, but honestly, all that removing the floor will do is send Shuffle components (gems, dust, scrolls, etc) down into further free-fall. The bots have to go; all the 9g gems did was act as a garbage bin for their goods.

But what of the other changes? It is almost impossible to even imagine all the interlocking synergy going on. For example, with the tank bribe deal? It is safe to say that the gems and flasks from the goodie bag will be normal gems/flasks (e.g. sell on the AH), but what about those pets? Can you even imagine having an X% chance of bam! opposite-faction pet in your bags and ready to be sold? If they are BoP when you get them, alright, but most flasks are still hovering at 100g apiece over at Auchindoun, which puts the gold total at 84g + 100g + however much extra that toss in the bag itself. It would take a truly ridiculous amount to bribe me to tank based on gold alone, but at some point I will do an otherwise useless gold/hour calculation. And, hey, while I am not a mount guy, Reins of the Raven Lord is something I have been interested in since Sethekk Halls was current content.

What is most interesting to me at the moment though, is the calculus involving the honor <--> JP conversions. It's set at 66% rate of return, which means you need to turn in 3375 honor for 2250 JP (e.g. a "tier" piece) and vice versa. On the face of it, that's a fairly bad return... but remember that all honor gain is doubling per the PTR notes. We don't know if that's honor from HKs or what, but can you imagine the alternative? I get 240 honor from a TB win, plus another 200 from the weekly quest, plus X amount from just general HKs around the map - 880 honor + X amount, let's just round that to a charitable 900. Random daily BG losses will be 90 per game minimum. All this stuff will add up pretty quickly. That 3375 honor target is actually 1687.5 honor post-patch. In other words, PvP will be the most efficient way to farm JP in that you can turn 1687.5 honor into 2250 JP. Conversely, you could simply be picking up the blue PvP gear for 1100 honor for the most expensive slots.

If it sounds like I'm all over the place here, well, I'm all over the place. It honestly feels like Blizzard is throwing everything at the leaking hull and seeing what will stick, to mix metaphors. The doubling honor deal went under a lot of peoples' radars, but added to all this other stuff? Madness, all around.

The Paper Tiger of Paper Losses

2011-04-06T00:07:00.001-04:00

Let me begin with an example written by an Anonymous poster way back on Cold's blog on Opportunity Cost:

Let's try a thought experiment. Say hypnotic dust currently sells for 100g per stack on the AH. Your friend decides to quit WoW and gifts you 1000 stacks of dust before he deletes his account. Did you just gain 100kg? Can you sell all of that dust at 100g per stack before the price depreciates? Let's assume that every crafted item you can make using dust values dust at less than 100g per stack, and the demand is such that I can only sell 10 stacks a day at the 100g price point. It's going to take me 100 days to sell that entire stockpile. Is a stack of dust going to retain its 100g value by the end of those 100 days (fwiw, on my server, dust is selling for roughly 50% of what it was 1.5 months ago)? If I can sell 30 stacks a day at 95g (either through undercutting or crafting or some combination of the two) is there value in paying that 5g per stack so that I can move everything in 1/3rd of the time?

Now instead of a friend gifting you the dust, let's say you can generate 10 stacks a day, every day, for the cost of 50g in raw mats from the AH. Hypnotic dust sells for 100g a stack, but due to the supply and demand in your market, you could sell 1 stack a day at 100g, or 10 stacks a day at 90g (again, either through undercutting or crafting). At the lower price point, I can make 400g a day everyday (at a 100g "paper" loss). Or, I could stick to the 100g price point and make 50g a day and bank 9 stacks a day for later sales and hope that those stacks will sell at 100g eventually. Only there's another 9 stacks coming in tomorrow, and another 9 the day after that, and the day after that. Or maybe I should just make the 1 stack a day, because 50g profit a day is much better than the 100g loss I was making selling 10 stacks at 90g. Right?

The defining characteristic of paper losses (or paper gains) is the unrealized part. Namely, they have not happened yet. In the real world, you can realize paper losses/gains rather easily considering IRL market prices are prices at which you have a ready buyer, by definition - if a stock price is $10 a share, that means someone (or a computer) will buy your stock at $10 right now with cash in hand. If no one would, the market price would be lower. As we all know in-game however, "market price" is really short-hand for average price for X period of time, or expected price given Y profit margin, or (as is often the case) simply wishful thinking.

It is in this context that I consider paper losses in WoW as a paper tiger, e.g. something that seems threatening but really isn't. In the example scenario posted earlier, there is really no circumstance under which "undercutting" the market price is a loss because there is no way to know what the market price even is. In the WoW economy, there is either a sale or there isn't one. Any other analysis is ispo facto navel gazing.

On Friday, as I was semi-AFK in Stormwind, someone was advertising in Trade for Heaving Plates of Protection and Kilt of Trollish Dreams "9k obo." In case you did not know, "obo" technically means "Or Best Offer," but in practice it means "I'm terrible at haggling, please gouge me." As I said in my two-part Haggling post, information is power, so why would you ever want to lead off with an admission that you would be willing to go lower? Who is going to ever offer 9k? Anyway, I whisper him with a 7,000g offer for the Heaving Plates which he accepts immediately. After paying him, I run 20 feet to the AH and list them for 21,000g.

A sale of something of that magnitude within two hours could be a fluke (the one person on the realm that would have spent that amount just happened to be browsing at that exact moment), or it could be an indication that whatever you just listed could have been listed for more. A lot more. If that was the case then, did I not experience a paper loss? And since the dude accepted my 7,000g offer instantly, does that not indicate I could have gotten it for less, perhaps 6000g? Another paper loss! And hell, what about the guy in Trade? What about his paper losses?

My first instinct is to say that my own successful sale "realized" the paper loss for the Trade guy; there was a chance to sell it for 21k (or whatever) vs guarenteed sale at 7k... at least until I guarenteed the 21k sale. But... what if the Trade guy doesn't read this blog? What if my buyer turned and sold the shoulders for 28k and I never know? What sense does a concept of paper loss make unless there is concrete, non-subjective market price?

Ultimately, I do not believe paper losses make any sense in WoW. The scenario which it attempts to describe is legitimate, e.g. being on the lookout for times when you could have sold something for more (or perhaps what will happen to Pyrite stockpiles if epic gems come from elsewhere), but in practice there is no such thing as paper losses. Return on investments? Recouping costs? Fire sales? Sure... but those only exist because the successful sale existed first.

Buying Stuff: Hard to Do

2011-03-31T03:40:00.000-04:00

I did one of the hardest things for me in the game last Friday... I bought something.

Specifically, I bought something for myself that I had no intention of trying to get a return out of it, e.g. for pleasure. *shudder*

The price tag was 28,500g bid with 30,000g buyout, and I assuaged some of my trepidation by winning it via bid. My main is Azuriel, a Prot paladin that I spec as Ret when I want to punish myself in PvP, so it was not even for my main. Who was it for? My level 83 (at the time) Warrior, or potentially my level 84 Death Knight. In other words, a total twink item for an alt I am not even 100% sure will get 30,000g worth of enjoyment out of it.

I do not bat an eye at investing 13,000g in, say, Chelley's Staff of Dark Mending and reselling for 21,000g. I am still bullish on the Strength version of Hurricane and Tsunami decks. I will (and indeed have) poured thousands of gold into power-leveling professions on my alts, including the now level 84 Blacksmith, buying all the Chaos Orb patterns even though the BS cannot acquire any just yet. To me, these are business expenses to be written off at tax time, so to speak. The cost of doing business, just like gold for repairs or the buying of mats for flasks and such.

Fury of Angerforge though? It was not particularly cheap. Even if I did resell it, the margin would probably not be that great. You do not see very many BoE trinkets on Auchindoun though, which is a point in its favor. And my mortal weakness in WoW are things that change your character model and/or debris you can set up in the game world, as opposed to pets or mounts that other people fawn over.

Dartol's Rod of Transformation, Arcanite Ripper, Ectoplasmic Distiller, Romantic Picnic Basket, Time-Lost Figurine, Piccolo of the Flaming Fire, Orb of Deception, Hook of the Master Angler, Bones of Transformation, Wisp Amulet, Brazier of Dancing Flames, Brewfest Pony Keg, Direbrew's Remote, Gnomeregan Pride, Standard of Unity, Crashin'Thrashin' Racer Controller, Alliance Battle Standard, Stormwind Banner, Crashin' Thrashin' Robot, Iron Boot Flask, Orb of the Sin'dorei, MiniZep Controller, Highborne Soul Mirror, Savory Deviate Delight (not pictured)

Why bring this up at all? Tell me... is it easy for you to spend gold in WoW?

One of the hooks of gold blogs is getting you enough gold so that "you never have to worry about gold ever again!" While it is true that I never really glance at how much repairs are after a night of wipes, I feel every individual gold piece evaporate any time I spend it on buying flasks instead of making them, or essentially anytime I am trading money for time. Do you have any expectation that your accumulated gold meter will reach 0g by the time you hang up your WoW hat? Or is gold really what it objectively is: play money in a finite, virtual game? Am I alone in feeling miserly despite not needing to be? Is there not some point at which a person cannot rationally justify making more gold without gold becoming its own game (e.g. you have to spend a significant effort to even give it all away)?

Let me know in the comments below. I'm especially curious to hear from other gold bloggers and/or people with 250k+ about this one.

OT: First Tier Vs ICC

2011-03-28T23:51:00.000-04:00

More and more, I think Gevlon over at the Greedy Goblin has gone off the deep end. In his latest post, he asserts that a Wowprogress chart proves that Cataclysm Raids are as easy as ICC. Here is the chart:

He goes on to say:

I placed some dots on the chart. The green dots represent the current situation of Cataclysm early bosses, the red dots are Cho'gall, Al'Akir, Nefarian. What?! More people killed Nefarian than the Lich King?! Cho'Gall is easier than Sindragosa?! There are 4 bosses (Halfus, Valiona, Magmaw, Omnitron) who are easier than PP?! What the hell is happening here?

What is happening here is that Gevlon has pulled a Nietzsche, staring a bit too long into the M&S Abyss only to have it gaze back at him. As we all know, aside from Gevlon himself apparently, is that ICC was gated content. As you can see from the very chart he posted, Lich King was not even available until almost halfway through the compared time period. If we actually shift the lines back to the beginning to simulate un-gated ICC, the chart suddenly demonstrates in graphics what everyone already knew:

I did not bother listing all the same bosses as Gevlon, because in his bizzaro-world more people hitting 4/12 this tier than 9/12 last tier after the same amount of time is some kind of coup to the argument that Cataclysm started too hard. That's dumb. What's missing from that chart? The lines for Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Lootship, Saurfang, Festergut, Rotface, Blood Princes, and Dreamwalker, any and all of which were easier than Magmaw or Halfus, and got peoples' feet in the raiding door. That top green hash mark is Magmaw, by the way. If you have killed Al'Akir and/or Nef by now, you should have been able to kill 10m Lich King at 0% buff. By the April 5th line in the graph, the ICC buff was 10%.

Remember the missing guilds from Wrath I was talking about? Yeah, the graph proves they're still gone. Speaking of missing...

WarcraftRealms is, well, WarcraftRealms, but it is showing less player activity now than back in April of last year. Remember back in October? Nothing much to do, ICC super stale, etc? Same level of activity right now. I am not trying to say WoW is dying or anything, just that if Firelands comes out at the same difficulty as this tier (or higher!), well... it might be time to start spending a bit of that fortune of gold you have just wasting away in your bags.

Crafting Paradigm Follow-up

2011-03-24T22:03:00.002-04:00

The following is a portion of the comments replying to the New Crafting Paradigm article.

[...] The constituent parts of a combo sell at a higher a la carte price than the combined cost of the combo. This is done to move more product than they otherwise would.

And your loss leader explanation is exactly my point. For example, let's say embersilk bags sell for 300g per unit. Let's say that the current AH price of embersilk cloth is 3g per cloth, but there is so much cloth on the market, and I know my competitors have so much stockpiled, that to move any amount of cloth in quantity, I'll have to keep on undercutting and so will only average about 2.5g per cloth. Let's also say that hypnotic dust is 6g per dust. A naive person might say "The raw mat cost of the bag is 75*3 + 15*6 = 225 + 90 = 315g, therefore I shouldn't craft it". A more wily person might say "In order to extract 3g per cloth, I will sell some of it raw on the AH, and I will package some of it in groups of 75 with 15 hypnotic dust @5g per dust (acting as my loss leader) by crafting embersilk bags and selling it for 300g".

This was a good example... had the topic been solely focused on why people make/sell flasks (etc) below the market price of mats. As I noted in the article though, there could be any number of reasons why people do that, and it is not entirely relevant anyway since we can never really know what price our competition is getting mats at. But that is not really the point of the article - the point is that depending on the volatility of the raw materials, it may never make sense to make any finished goods compared to simply warehousing them.

Let's look at the given Embersilk Bag example, since that is more tangible.

First, it was established that Embersilk Cloth is 3g/each, but will probably need to sell at 2.5g/each to push our supply; Hypnotic Dust at 6g/each, but 5g/each to push. The market price of the final product, Embersilk Bags, is 300g.

Market Price (Buying Mats) = 75*3 + 15*6 = 225 + 90 = 315g
Market Price (Selling Mats) = 75*2.5 + 15*5 = 187.5 + 75 = 262.5g
Market Price (Selling Bag) = 75*3 + 15*5 = 225 + 75 = 300g

So... is this a 37.5g profit or a 15g loss?*

It was never specified what it cost to get the Embersilk Cloth/Dust to begin with, so calculating profit is impossible. It is also debatable how much sense it makes to call something a "market price" when you cannot realistically sell items at that price, but nevermind that for now. My point to you is that if Embersilk is 3g today but 5g tomorrow, that Embersilk Bag better be getting crafted at a 150g profit margin or you were better off holding onto the cloth. Or even if it goes from 3g --> Xg such that you can push your supply at 3g.

Meanwhile, the Embersilk Bag market isn't likely to move from 300g even if it suddenly costs 1000g to make one. We cannot even say "no one would make any new bags at that price" because we don't know how much mats someone may have squirrelled away (and not chosen to sell at the higher prices), or if perhaps the bags have already been created months ago, etc etc.

The Anonymous commenter is absolutely correct that "locking in" Embersilk at 3g each via making bags > selling Embersilk at 2.5g. He is also correct in that selling mats in a package (e.g. any crafted item) allows you to conceivably move more product than individual listings - it is difficult to move Hypnotic Dust at any price on Auchindoun some days, so having the opportunity to "sneak" some into Embersilk is better than not selling any. The issue I wanted to highlight yesterday is this: "locking in" cheap mats into a finished product does not save you gold, it saves you bank space. If crafting something makes economic sense, craft and sell it. Do not craft more than you (believe you) can sell today though, unless you know that the price of your mats will not increase (beyond X% of the profit margin of the crafted good) tomorrow.

There is exactly one scenario in which it might make sense to turn all your mats into crafted items today, rather than crafting only when necessary: Alchemy specializations. It costs 150g to change between Potions, Elixirs/Flasks, and Transmute specs, and it typically is not profitable to, say, make flasks without being Elixir-spec'd - competiters having a 15% competitive advantage over you is massive, and the market itself is generally priced in such a way that the 15% proc bonus is assumed. So, if I wanted to crank out some Mythical Mana potions, it makes the most sense to go ahead and make as many potions as possible after switching specs if I plan on going back to Elixirs afterwards. Transmuting via daily cooldowns is generally profitable enough in of itself that you do not need to be specialized, but... transmuting a bunch of rare gems and/or metagems? You definitely will want to switch.

Incidentally, transmuting rare gems is an example of where locking in prices actually works out most of the time. Uncommon gems typically have extremely low margins compared to their rather massive listing fees such that being able to lock-in a price that works out to be higher than 9g/each has no real downside... provided the rare gem itself doesn't plummet to 15g or something ridiculous.

Hopefully the topic makes a bit more sense now.

*Exploring the concept of paper profit vs paper loss and the realization of both will be the subject of a seperate post.

New Crafting Paradigm

2011-03-22T21:53:00.001-04:00

I have been thinking a lot on various comments made both here and over at Cold's blog (specifically his Opportunity Cost Part 2 posting), all related to the variance between the market price of mats and of the market price of finished products. It seems like a no-brainer to say the market price of finished products moves independently of the price of mats - even beginning auctioneers can pick up on the fact that, say, cut gems generally go for more than uncut gems, or that profit can be made on making flasks at certain herb prices, and so on. It makes intuitive sense that by adding work to an object, i.e. turning apples into applesause or herbs into flasks, you increase the value of the object.

But... how do we thus explain when the finished product ends up being valued below the cost of materials? We already answered that question: the market price of finished products moves independently of the price of mats. The only real connection we could have is that when, say, flasks go "underwater" (e.g. become worth less than the mats needed to craft them), it becomes less likely that more flasks would be created. I say "less likely" because there is no real way of knowing what price points other Alchemists bought their herbs at, or if they are the type of people who overestimate the 15% Elixir Master bonus, or perhaps the people that sell whatever they have at whatever the current going rate is regardless of "paper profit."

What this is leading me to do is codify a new crafting paradigm for myself, putting numbers and words to a concept I was subconsciously doing anyway.

Twilight Jasmine = 4.32 - 10.5 | (x8) 34.56 - 84 (avg 59.28)
Azshara's Veil = 4.4 - 10.65 | (x8) 35.2 - 85.2 (avg 60.2)
Volatile Life = 8.07 - 12.5 | (x8) 64.56 - 100 (avg 82.28)

Draconic Mind = 132.54 - 241.55 (avg 187.04)

Highest End Mats = 269.2
Lowest End Mats = 134.32
Avg Mats = 201.76

60 flasks = 12,905.76 flasks (60 + 15%) - 12,105.6 mats (60) = 800.16 = 11.6 per flask

To put it into words, on average, you only ever make ~11.6g in profit making a Flask of Draconic Mind as an Elixir Master alchemist based on the last two weeks of TUJ numbers. Profit is increased when you buy mats below average and sell flasks above average, obviously. However, in comparison, the profit you would make buying 60 flasks' worth of Azhara's Veil at it's lowest price of 4.4g/each (2112g) and selling at it's average price of 7.5g/each (3600g) is immense: 1488g profit before the AH cut. Buying Azshara's Veil at 88g/stack and selling it at 150g/stack is on average more profitable than making flasks, without even considering the price of the other herbs.

Almost a "duh" moment, right? Flipping a 88g item into 150g is a 62g return that no one would miss, let alone the opportunity to do that with a bunch of stacks of herbs. As I mentioned though, this is a new crafting paradigm for me, or way of looking at things. Alchemy is one of my go-to professions, and thus I have an unconscious bias towards making things even when it appears to make no economic sense. Why even bother having professions if you are not going to use them, right?

In other words, in this paradigm it is not enough that a profit could be had by purchasing mats at X price and crafting something to sell at Y. The price at which I can sell Y has to be higher than the highest price of X, or I was probably better off just warehousing the mats until their market value swung higher.

I say I have been doing is subconsciously, and the reason is basically my Foundation article on Finding the Margin. By keeping my personal margin relatively high, I was inadvertently keeping myself from jumping into "profitable" albeit volatile markets which were prone to going underwater. With a personal margin of 30g, I would avoid making flasks at 11.6g average profit and thus expose myself to less risk. When mats are really cheap and flasks are really expensive, that margin increases up to 100g per flask - an obvious market signal that I should move in and set up shop... for a while at least.

One thing I wish I could do is be able to present this data in a graph or picture form, but I have no idea how to do so.

Cleaning the Bank

2011-03-18T02:46:00.000-04:00

One of my first posts in PVSAH dealt largely with throwing a wet blanket over the long-term investment craze in Wrath commodities like Saronite Ore and Abyss Crystals and such. As I went to collect my proceeds from selling stacks of Cobalt Bars for 300g today, it occurred to me that I should perhaps revisit the advice.

(12.1g per Saronite bar, 3.66g per two ore)

(13g per Cobalt Bar, ~1.1g per ore)

First, just to get it out of the way: go check your bank. I did not mean to stockpile 15 stacks of Cobalt Bars to sell later, it just sort of happened that way on my rarely used Blacksmith alt. Every stick of non-BoP debris in your bank has a constantly fluctuating gold value attached to it, and it certainly can pay to reevaluate how important it is for you to have, say, 2000 Deviate Fish (selling at 13g each on Auch) taking up space. Ironically, I was cleaning the bank out to make room for all the Pyrite Ore I have been accumulating for less than 70g a stack.

Secondly... I do not really feel I made the wrong call here. Time Horizons are an important concept when it comes to investment, and I guarantee that there were people playing three months ago that are not playing today. But let's ignore that for a moment and assume you had stockpiled a full guild bank page (98 stacks) of Saronite back then for 11g/stack. Your 1,078g three months ago is now worth... 3,586.8g. Assuming, of course, you can actually release 98 stacks of Saronite Ore into the economic ecosystem without depressing the price.

The real big news here is 4x-10x return I can apparently nab for simply smelting ore. Your 98 stacks of Saronite Ore looks a lot more impressive on paper when it is suddenly at 11,858g in bar-form. But, again, nearly 50 stacks of Saronite Bars? Not likely to all go for 242g a stack.

In any case, I highly suggest going out there and doing what might otherwise seem like a no-brainer, e.g. making sure you aren't sitting on a pile of gold.

(Nearly) The Last Post You'd Ever Need

2011-03-15T18:41:00.000-04:00

I have been slow to get on the The Undermine Journal "bandwagon" for several reasons.

First, I'm just edgy like that. You know, fighting the system, railing against the establishment by shopping at Hot Topic, and so on. Totally a counter-culture warrior.

The second, more serious reason? I had no idea, no idea, that it is as absurdly useful as it is. Other bloggers have done posts about notifications and such, but that sort of thing does not appeal to me. What appeals to me is basically a single website giving targeted, pin-point data on what is profitable and what is not based on practically real-time price captures of my specific faction's AH. I would not believe this without pictures, so here are a few:

So what you are looking at is the Auchindoun-Alliance page on TUJ. Before you go further, I highly recommend you find your own Realm on TUJ's main page, clicking the correct faction, and then bookmarking the website, preferably in your Firefox Bookmark Toolbar (assuming you use Firefox). Now, what you should look at next is Enhancements and Consumables dynamic "tabs" which break down like follows when you mouse-over:

As you can see, it breaks all of the professions down. When you click on, say, Alchemy, you get a page that theoretically puts all of us gold bloggers out of business.

The screen that appears has a lot more information on it than what I have shown above, but I want to specifically show you the Flask section. Namely... look at it. The Undermine Journal automatically tabulates the current market price of mats AND shows you the current market price of the resulting product, all tailored to your realm's faction AH. Are you still sitting down? Haven't fallen out of your chair? I highlighted the Flask of Steelskin as an example of a market in which I can probably net a profit rather easily by purchasing AH mats and turning around and selling the flasks at a mark-up. We can see that there are only 2 Steelskin flasks up currently, but that actually works in my favor for the most part. Meanwhile, I could probably make more profit selling Draconic Mind mats than the actual flasks at the moment.

Outside of some philosophical posts or patch speculation, what could any gold blogger actually tell you that TUJ could not? That is an open question.

I decided to browse the Leatherworking section, and again, I found elegantly tabulated data clearly demonstrating a market I have been a bit too lazy to dabble in, much to my own economic harm. 150g profit margins on the blue leg armors? Yes, please. The Leatherworking section includes crafted epics and the PvP gear and so on as well, so you can check out the pricing fluctuations and competition before deciding for yourself whether to jump back in X market. As far as the crafted epics go, just keep in mind that since Chaos Orbs are BoP, their price is not included in the material cost column.

Did I mention that all of the items listed through TUJ are Wowhead-enabled, meaning you can mouse-over the items for a description or click on them to go to their specific webpage?

One thing that TUJ cannot do (yet) is the sort of AH meta-game that results in Obsidium Shuffling, or figuring out that disenchanting the epic Engineering helms might net a profit. But that aside, if you were ever stuck wondering what you should potentially be doing to make gold under current market conditions, look no further than The Undermine Journal. It is very nearly the last gold blog post you would ever need.

OT: Firelands, Difficulty, and Cataclysmic Malaise

2011-03-10T22:49:00.000-05:00

As you have no doubt heard by now, Firelands has been delayed until patch 4.2. A lot of people are looking at the delay as a good sign, or perhaps dismissing it as irrelevant considering 4.2 is scheduled to hit (the PTR) "soon after 4.1 goes live," thus looking at it as though we are getting ZA/ZG early rather than the next tier of raiding late.

From my perspective, this announcement is the unequivocal admission that Blizzard has screwed up the difficulty of this expansion.

Stay a While, And Listen...
Let me start at the beginning. In the beginning, Blizzard created Cataclysm. Blizzard saw that it was hard, and judged it as good. Here is Zarhym on 1/7/11:

We don't think it was a mistake to start with the difficulty we did. We're happy overall with the progression path we have in Cataclysm. I think we've set an appropriate standard for this expansion, but we'll continue fine-tuning things (nerfs and buffs) to make sure the end game feels right as time passes. (source)

The forums were filling up with complaints about the LFDisaster tool though, so Ghostcrawler released a rather lengthy blog post called WoW, Dungeons Are Hard on 1/24/11, which can be summed up as "L2P." In it, he panned the design direction of Wrath with its "zerg-fest" dungeons and breezy Naxx difficulty. It is also the first time we hear about how they lamented the killing of Ulduar by releasing ToC too soon.

Then the numbers must have came in. At least that is the only thing I can imagine prompted this almost complete 180° in less than two weeks:

On the other hand, maybe things have come too far in the other direction. While we're seeing that player assembled groups have very good success, Dungeon Finder groups are having significant issues. That's something we're planning to address. [...]

Are you basing this conclusion off of forum posts or in game data? I hope it's the latter so you get a truly accurate picture.

That's an analysis pulled from hard data. We always try to base improvements an accurate overall picture.

(2/3/11, source)

The intent of Luck of the Draw is to help make up for the lack of coordination, communication, and familiarity that pick up groups suffer relative to organized groups of guild members and friends. Cataclysm dungeons, especially on Heroic mode, are quite challenging and ask for more group organization than the Wrath of the Lich King dungeons did. Therefore, Luck of the Draw became relatively weaker in Cataclysm. I'm painting the picture with unfairly large brush strokes here, but in general, Heroic dungeons are of appropriate difficulty for organized groups, but just brutal on Dungeon Finder groups. Players wonder, and rightly so, why Dungeon Finder supports Cataclysm Heroic dungeons at all when the chance of success is so low.

(2/4/11, Ghostcrawler's hilarious follow-up blog post)

The Luck of the Draw buff, however, is being made in response to the feedback we're seeing on the forums, as well as the statistics we've been reviewing which reflect all types of dungeon party trends. We feel it's a good way of closing the disparity between the success of pick up groups and the success of preformed groups, without trivializing the content for some players to appease others.

(2/5/11, source)

Direct from Blizzard's mouth, we see an admission that the success rate for LFD groups is abysmal. Players actually in the system need no such prompt; we already know the 50+ minute DPS queues and the constant wipefests of Stonecore, Deadmines, etc etc. There are a bevy of precision nerfs to heroic content, followed by a blanket ICC-esque 15% buff to players.

Always Darkest Before It Goes Pitch Black
Things are a bit more dire than that though. The 2200 PvP weapons, equivalent to hardmode raid drops, are delayed twice. In the announcement, Blizzard says:

The decision to further delay availability of weapons requiring 2200 rating was not made lightly. Currently very few guilds are clearing PvE content that drops weapons of this caliber, which would make rated Battlegrounds and Arenas the primary source for top-tier weapons. We of course don’t want players who are pursuing PvE content to feel as though they must engage in heavy PvP to obtain these weapons in order to be competitive or successful.

(1/25/11, source)

Read it again. The only reason why Blizzard would need to delay these weapons is if they anticipated one thing, and then something unexpected happened. In other words, Blizzard expected (more) guilds to have been downing heroic raiding content by the end of January. The 2200 weapons are released mid-February, and here we are at the beginning of March when we are informed that things have not improved:

In an interview at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, lead producer J. Allen Brack said that players were not sufficiently advanced through the raid content that shipped with third expansion Cataclysm in December to handle the challenge of Firelands. He also suggested that Blizzard was thinking of creating "smaller" content patches for World of Warcraft.

"We feel like the player base isn't really ready for the next raid yet," he said. "And that led to some changes where Firelands is now actually going to be in 4.2."

(3/4/11, source)

The above came from an interview with Eurogamer, not the PR-whitewashed version on the forums. In other words, a month later, there still are not "enough" players progressing through endgame raiding content. The objective statistics available to players also bears this out. Take a look at these numbers from WoWProgress:

Beasts (10): 86187 (98.74%)
Magmaw: 45140 (93.69%)
Nefarian: 8943 (18.56%)

I picked 10m Northrend Beasts because, as far as I am aware, it is the most defeated raid encounter ever. Thus, that will give us the baseline number of guilds out there remotely interested in raid content, at least circa Wrath. Now look at the most defeated encounter in Cataclysm: Magmaw. Where are the 41,000 missing guilds? Difficulty of content does not necessarily account for 100% of those 41k, of course. There could be attrition, there could be churn, there could be guild consolidation, indeed, it could merely be the death of PuG raiding (which may have registered non-raiding guilds simply because X number of individual members got the achievement via Trade pugs). I do not find the argument that the bottom half of the raiding population is still leveling/gearing up three months later particularly compelling (e.g. "Beasts was out for years!"), but it probably accounts for some.

Or perhaps we should just look at what we have now. Magmaw is the most defeated raid boss this tier with 45,140 guilds claiming victory. It drops down to less than 9,000 guilds for Nefarion. Looks fine, right? I would even agree that such a difficulty curve looks good... if it were not for the fact that 13 heroic bosses exist. Were the hardmodes designed exclusively for the top 15-20% of successful raiders? Does it make any sense for them to be?

Blizzard obviously expected a more robust completion rate months ago. Why has that expectation not been realized? Based on the above, I think it is beyond any doubt that Cataclysm was overtuned, from heroics to raids. You may not have needed any convincing on this, but I find it necessary to lay this groundwork so that I may offer a prediction. I predict Firelands in 4.2 will be easier than this tier of raiding.

It has to be.

Miasmic Malaise
This heightened level of difficulty and barriers against PuGing is what I feel is behind the general feeling of Cataclysmic malaise. It feels like we have jumped from one immediate grind (endgame ICC) to another (heroics/T11). Wrath heroics were easy because that is the point when it comes to 5m daily quests, which heroics have been since Patch 2.3. Meanwhile, Cataclysm heroics were 5m raids, taking upwards of 1.5 hours after 40 minute queues, and you were expected to do them daily. On the raiding front, Naxx trash was AoE-friendly from the very start and people were able to breeze through Naxx itself, yeah... but that was because the concept of hardmodes as we know them was not introduced yet. Naxx hardmodes would have solved the "problem" of challenging content while still fostering an environment that gets people excited about raiding.

Look, this is the first tier of (raiding) content for the expansion. The bar cannot be set here, for the exact reason other bloggers have noticed: burnout and malaise.

Anecdotally, my guild is in this position right now. We are 5/12 only by taking 2-3 raiders from a "sister" guild, and I look at our first few Atramedies attempts and think of Defile all over again. We have two months before ZG/ZA come out, and I cannot imagine mustering the strength to zone back into Bastion or Descent in May, let alone however long it takes Firelands to come out after that. I have not done a heroic on my main in more than a month because 70 VP an hour is not worth my time even with a tank queue. My guild has lost 14 members of a 10m guild between May of last year and Cataclysm's release, purely from burnout and boredom. I don't even bother looking at the raid loot tables because what is the point? We aren't clearing half the raid, gear upgrades are so infrequent as to not be exciting, and the gear itself is not particularly enticing anymore or have that big of a perceptable impact.

Looking at the bigger picture, I think it ultimately comes down to fallout from the 10m/25m gear merge. Blizzard would have to err on the side of caution lest the "25m gear" be given too easily in 10m raids, so 10m was tuned higher. Certain 10m hardmodes, like Magmaw for example, are reportedly miles harder than the corresponding 25m heroic encounter. So, we may in fact have a reversal of Wrath insofar as the 25m raiding tract is easier than 10m, leading to disjointed progression. Meanwhile, if you will remember, the gear back in Wrath contained more meaningful upgrades from 10m tier to 10m tier since it had to leap-frog the 25m gear to get there - getting 251 upgrades after 232 is a 19 ilevel jump as compared to 359 after 346, which is 13. Six ilevels may not seem like a lot, but just look how the reported 353 gear from ZG/ZA placated the "epix are too easy" crowd.

In Conclusion, [restate thesis]
Contrary to how I may come across with the massive wall of text that sits above this, I have no particular issue with difficult content per se. My philosophy has always been that players want content tailored to their skill level. Period. There is nothing selfish about that, or any reason to feel embarrassed by it. One thing Wrath proved rather well is that relatively easy content could in fact exist next to extremely brutal content (Sarth 3D when it was current, 25m H Lich King, etc). The pendulum has simply swung too far the other direction, and it is rather a shame that it has occurred in the first tier of an expansion that should have came out 6-8 months ago.

If you agree, disagree, and/or think I should have directed this 1900-word payload at the AH instead, feel free to let me know in the comments below.

The Case Against Bot Farmers

2011-03-08T03:26:00.000-05:00

Remember when I was talking about how bot farmers can be a healthy part of the marketplace? Yeah...

That is over 110 stacks of Elementium Ore below 40g/stack, and 143 stacks at 64g. Heartblossom is below 60g, Heartblossom, and you get a complementary stack of Whiptail whenever leave the Mage Tower in Stormwind (even the Horde!). The Auchindoun AH is simply getting tanked and spanked hardcore by botting, with no real sense that it will be addressed anytime soon.

So why am I not all excited and buying all that cheap ore up to vendor the gems at a minimum? I simply do not have the mental bandwidth. Addons and AFK-time aside, I actually want to spend maybe an hour doing my AH thing and be done with it. Going down the road of prospecting 200+ stacks of ore will only lead to burnout for me - knowing your own limits is crucial to staying in the gold game, especially considering once you start hating your playtime, the relative value of your gold goes to zero.

To give you a better idea of how warped the botting has become, look at this:

Let me do the math for you.

In other words, 46 stacks of Pyrite Ore at an average price of ~59g a stack. I did happen to find the mental bandwidth for that, let me tell you.

That said, I honestly do not know how to approach the AH market anymore. The prices of all things related to these ultra-cheap raw materials are themselves being tanked down by all the sellers smelling blood in the water, making the vendor-option the only real (albeit slow) avenue to profitability. So outside of this Pyrite killing - which I intend to bank for a while as my Blacksmith is not level 84 yet - I have not been doing much of note, other than big-ticket items like Darkmoon cards and flipping BoE epics.

Is anyone else seeing this kind of bot madness?

Sunk Costs & Investment

2011-03-03T04:10:00.002-05:00

Take a moment to muse on the following thought experiment:

Yesterday there was 10 stacks of Whiptail for 60g/stack and 5 stacks of Cinderbloom for 55g/stack. You bought them all for 875g and made 100 Mythical Mana Potions using all of the herbs, with the intention of selling them for 25g apiece. Today, the price of Whiptail is 110g/stack and Cinderbloom is 90g/stack.

Question: Is there a difference in profit between a sold Mana Potion yesterday and a sold Mana Potion today?

I find this thought experiment fascinating because A) it's based on true events, and B) my answer oscillates wildly even when I bring in no new information. To save you the time of mathing it out, Mana Potions made at yesterday's herb prices cost 8.75g each to create while potions at today's prices cost 15.5g. So if I sold 10 yesterday and 10 today at 25g apiece, how much profit did I make? 308g (16.25 * 20 - 5%) or 247g (16.25 * 10 + 9.5 * 10 - 5%)? What would be your answer?

The answer you choose largely has to do with how you view investing and opportunity cost. I think a lot of people would choose 308g because it "makes sense" in a static investment scenario, especially if you made all the potions yesterday. What does it matter the price of herbs today if you used them all up the day before? Well... it matters quite a lot, actually. If I had resold the herbs the next day instead of making potions, I would have gained 6.75g worth of profit per "potion" compared with the 9.5g profit of today. In other words, 70% of the profit for 0% of the effort (since you don't even need Alchemy to warehouse herbs for a day), and probably 0% of the risk (the market for herbs > market for mana potions).

Passing on the cost to the customer frequently does not work because, rightfully so, the customer doesn't care about your costs. I sold 20 potions at 25g apiece over two days; what possible expectation do I have that even 20 more will sell at 31.75g? Well, I could be optimistic and perhaps post during server raid days, relying on cyclical desperation.

One of the most fascinating Wikipedia pages I have come across is the one on Sunk Costs. It is fascinating precisely because it does not make any sense... until it does... and then the sense that it makes slips your mind even as you are thinking about it. No, seriously, go read it.

Buying cheap herbs are not considered "sunk costs" because the herbs can be resold. Once the potions are made however, the herbs can be considered sunk as you cannot un-potion them. I bring it up at all because, conceptually, I largely consider my own investments as sunk costs as soon as I make them. In terms of the thought experiment, then, my answer is (usually) the surprise third one: 500g.

This is not to say that opportunity cost is zero or that I do not make strategic purchases with an eye on profit margins; obviously I care about these things. Rather, I endeavor to not let past investments (unduly) influence future investment and/or the prices I set today*. This mindset is made easier by default as I have no real way of tracking the returns of each individual gold piece (there are addons which will do this though) invested. All I have is Auditor, which keeps the bottom line in plain view - as long as the number keeps going up, I am content with letting experiments like making Mythical Mana Potions potentially run at a loss. It would be miles easier (and more profitable) to have simply milled and inked those 15 stacks of herbs, for example.

It would have been easier, but way less fun.

*Incidentally, that is precisely the reason I stopped using Auctioneer and it's GetAll and historical pricing features: they are largely useless trivia. Obsidium Ore went for 75g/stack two weeks ago? Who cares? It is either a good price today or it isn't. What is a "good price?" Can you buy it now and turn it into something that will sell for more now? Good price! Things get fuzzier once the time horizon shifts further back, like buying the Bracer Enchant patterns in anticipation for cheaper Maelstrom Crystals in 4.1 (and subsequent demand spikes). Then again, how is the historical price supposed to help you there?

Specialize in Diversity

2011-02-28T21:53:00.001-05:00

If there is ever a question between whether you should specialize or diversify in a particular market or just in general, the correct answer is to specialize in diversity. A lot of AH advice is sort of wishy-washy "do what feels right for you" but this is one of the big, unequivocal no-brainers. Diversify, branch out, get your thumbs in as many pies as you can.

Only have two thumbs? Not a problem! Nobody wants to eat a piece of pie that has had a stranger's thumb in it*, especially if that thumb is already dirty from being stuck in other pies.

Think for a moment about markets that really require specialization. Like... uhh... yeah, exactly. Glyphs would be an actual example of "requiring" specialization, and a perfect example why you shouldn't be doing that. If you set up three ~~bots~~ alts and a cascade of addons and automate milling/crafting/posting/mail-collecting, you can make a lot of gold every day. Unless there is someone else doing it, out-~~botting~~-addon-ing you, while a couple of bozos are randomly tossing up high-priced glyphs at 80% or less of their current going rate. Will you still make a lot of money overall? Yeah, maybe. But I can probably make 50% of your profits with only 10% of the effort, while actually deriving enjoyment from the pie-thumbing in addition to the successful auction thrill.

When I talk about "specialization," I am not talking about "leveling that profession." Some people may consider Jewelcrafting to require specialization, for example, as if you have not hit 475 JC and been doing the JC dailies everyday for the last three months then you would be way behind the JCs who have "specialized." You will have less cuts, sure. But your Bold Inferno Ruby will be just as valuable as anyone else's Bold Inferno Ruby. Expanding your selection is not what I would term specialization, and it seems a bit silly even typing that out. To me, specialization is focusing on 1-2 markets to the exclusion of all others.

My question: if there is low-hanging fruit two steps to your left, why climb the coconut tree?

All that said, there is a finite level of mental bandwidth a person can devote to pie-thumbing, not to mix metaphors. You can over-extend yourself and it will lead to burnout. Diversifying is not about being everywhere, but rather about being ABLE to be anywhere. Imagine waging a guerilla war against the AH and you can kinda get the idea - get into a market, get paid, and get out when the heat turns up. Sure, it is not as glamorus as being a Captain of Industry or cornering a market. But if that is what you are after, you may need to come to the realization that getting paid is no longer your primary goal anymore.

Here is my routine:

Log onto Alch/JC, do JC daily, collect mail, browse AH prices of herbs and ore. If herbs are cheap, make flasks. If ore is cheap, prospect and cut.
Log onto Enchanter/JC, do JC daily. Check recipe, dust, essence, shard prices. If enchanting mats are high, sell enchanting mats. If enchant mats are low, check scroll prices. If scroll prices are low, log out.
Log onto Scribe. Check Inferno Ink and Darkmoon card prices. If herbs and Life are cheap, make cards. If Ink is high, sell Ink. If cards are low, buy cards. Log out.
If prices have been all wrong, log onto Tailor/Leatherworker, check prices of leg enchants, make/post, log out.

The fundamental argument against specialization is that it is entirely possible your market could simply tank and you would be left with a basket full of broken eggs. Meanwhile, my market spread generally cushions me from bad news unless everyone is having bad news. In which case, it's not really bad news anymore, is it?

So, basically, diversify. It is safer, (generally) easier, and probably just as lucrative as specializing.

*Unless it's Thumb Pie, in which case that is the point.

OT: Four Point What

2011-02-27T16:12:00.001-05:00

Patch 4.1 is hitting the PTR Soon™ and in the midst of flurry of blog posts about it, let me be the first to say: ZA & ZG what?

We had gotten hints at the beginning of Cataclysm that ZG/ZA might have merely been a setback with all the chatter about the Tome of Polymorph: Turtle and the vague gesticulations concerning the ZG mounts. The literal revelation that these are coming back though leaves me a bit floored. To a certian extent you expect a bit of redundancy within MMOs, for several reasons. For example, can you imagine 120 different Fire Elemental models? It would be absurd, a huge drain not only on development time but also taxing on players' mental bandwidth. The other reason why you should expect redundancy within an MMO is simply because of player churn. For however X number of players remember going through ZG and ZA back in the day, there are Y players who never did... making the content new to them. If recycling content gives the designers space to make all-new content, that is an acceptable trade-off.

That said, it remains to be seen whether we will be, in fact, getting gameplay returns for developer recycling or if Blizzard is simply repackaging our shampoo into a "new and improved" 9 oz bottle (down from 12 oz) while charging the same $15. Revamped Onyxia was better than no Onyxia in Tier 9 content, unless we could have had Completely New Boss X instead. Blizzard promised Throne of Tides - Abyssal Maw in 4.1 though, so unless that makes it Live in addition to the other two, it is conceviable Blizzard is peddling some Adjustable Rate Mortgages our way.

Ultimately, the above kind of gut reactions miss the PVSAH mark. The only relevant aspect is: are these heroics/boss fights fun? If Blizzard makes them fun, what does it matter if in patch 4.2 we see 5-man Karazhan (hopefully with Chess Event and the legions Malchezaar commands intact) or even the ultimate slap-in-the-face Magister's Terrace revamp? Fun is fun. And while that may seem like a tautological cop-out, at the end of the day it is the only thing that really matters.

Edit: I wrote the above a few days ago when the changes had just been revealed. Since then, my feelings have shifted more towards Acceptance. The Deadmines revamp was essentially an entirely new, innovative instance wrapped in nostalgia packaging. The same could sorta be said about Shadowfang Keep, but I hate the place honestly. I don't like running Deadmines either - both still take even a guild group close to an hour to finish - but if the ZA & ZG heroics turn out like Deadmines from an innovation standpoint, it's win-win for everyone.

That Which Has No Life

2011-02-24T11:30:00.000-05:00

The other day I noticed I was undercut on cut gems within approximately 30 seconds of posting. Could be a coincidence, right? At the time I was talking within guild about The Undermine Journal and the voyeuristic possibilities ("Hey, your sister posts auctions only between 7pm and 11pm Wed/Thur/Fri/Sat"), so I decided to go ahead and eyeball my competition:

Err... WTF?

I actually knew about this guy for a while, as he is "that guy" on my server who has 3+ different toons with slightly different spellings who runs a Glyph racket. This particular specimen is in the ~~blood diamond~~ gem market and appears to be ran by a bot - even if he was unemployed, there simply is no way that he would be posting ~40 auctions every hour on the hour, seven days a week.

The question becomes: short of acquiring the Sword of A Thousand Truths, how does one compete with this?

Answer: the only winning move is not to play.

More specifically, what you do not do is play the game on someone else's terms, especially if they are bad terms. Is it possible to combat this seller? Sure. There is a lot of different things you can do to try and counteract addon automation and/or botting behavior. For example, most of these programs/addons have threshold limits you can probe with trial and error - other gold blogs have detailed this specific gambit, in divining a competitor's threshold and then "tricking" him into posting a bunch of stock at that price, then buying him out and relisting.

My issue is that fighting someone with a competitive advantage is almost never worth it in the long-term. This does not mean you have to give up making any gold in a particular market, it just means you have to start thinking in shorter terms. This guy undercut my five auctions of 275g Timeless Demonseyes with his own three auctions at 274g 99s 90c within one minute of my posting them. I don't believe this market is deep enough to sell four of them in a given day* so I am left with the dilemma of whether to just leave them up or cancel and repost. What I ended up doing was canceling and reposting them for 225g each. As I talked about in my Foundation article on undercutting, one of the (emotional) advantages of the savage undercut is the fact that even if your competition continues undercutting you, in very real terms you have taken gold out of their bags. In this case, if the bot cancels and reposts, he loses his own deposit fee (which matches mine) + 50g per gem. That 50g doesn't go into my pocket of course, but by driving down the profit margin I potentially discourage the bot while also reducing my own desire to even be in this particular market.

There is a tendency to look at the Auction House game as being Player Vs Player. In some respects, it certainly can be. As the title of the blog suggests though, I consider it simply to be Player Vs Auction House. Part of that philosophy is to not shoot for Pyrrhic Victories when I am just here to make some gold. If someone wants to be an AH hero, the floor is all yours - I will quietly exit an overextended market and find the lower-hanging fruit elsewhere or start exploring un(der)developed ones.

I am curious as to what other peoples' gut reactions are though. If you noticed someone like Harry Botter** muscling into a market like this, what would be your response, if any? Would you try to undermine him? Fight fire with fire? Mosey out of town? Go to the mattresses? Let me know in the comments below.

*The first question that should pop into your head after you read that is "Hey, if you don't think the market is deep enough for 4 Timeless gem sales, why would you post 5 of them?" I wish I could respond with "It was a test to see if you were paying attention" but it was honestly more a combination of oversight and laziness. Or possibly optimism.

**It occurs to me that I might be reading TUJ's "heat map" wrong and/or having an overly broad definition of botting. My guildie and I figured out that canceling auctions registers as "sold auctions" on TUJ, for example.

Rare Spawn Profits

2011-02-21T11:30:00.002-05:00

Did a bit of raiding the other day and ended up having to switch out of my usual MT role into Ret DPS for the Double Dragons. As it turns out, my Ret gear was pretty abysmal with some imminently embarrassing greens. After being shown why Theralion is his mother's favorite child, I started going through AtlasLoot and Wowhead for possible upgrades. One particular weakness I wanted to stamp out was plate bracers - ilevel 318 greens seemed pretty bad. Doing some Wowhead database magic resulted in this list, which basically indicated I would be stuck in 318 greens unless I did Halls of Origination (yuck) or BRC on heroic. Or bought a pair of BoE bracers off the AH that dropped from a rare-spawn with a ~8-15 hour respawn timer.

Wait, what?

Terborus's Rotating Bands is a BoE 346 blue wrist that drops off a rare spawn in Deepholm 100% of the time. It is more or less identical to another blue wrist that drops in heroic HoO, and the two of them are essentially pre-raid best-in-slot for both plate tanking and DPS. At the time I discovered this, there was one pair on the AH going for 3100g, but The Undermine Journal indicated that this was somewhat of a low-ball estimate across most other servers. Being the miserly auctioneer that I am though, I decided to finish up some Therazine quests on an alt while keeping an eye out of Terborus myself. About an hour later, the big yellow worm was dead and I looted the equivalent of several thousand gold.

As you know, I usually do not advocate straight up farming or camping rare spawns - in most cases you can leverage the Transitive Property to farm something worth more, and just buy what it was you needed to buy. That said, if you happen to be in the following areas, I recommend stopping by to case the place:

Stonecore - Terborus - Terborus's Rotating Bands
Twilight Highlands - Tarvus the Vile - Tarvus's Poison-Scarred Boots
Twilight Highlands - Overlord Sunderfury - Sunderfury's Sundries
Vashj'ir - Shok'sharak - Sussurating Treads of Shok'sharak
Hyjal - Blazewing - Blazewing's Furious Kilt

Clicking on the mob name will take you to Wowhead's maps with their exact location(s). There are some other rare spawns out there, but only the above ones drop 346 BoE gear. Anecdotally, any one of those items should fetch 2000g minimum.

Art of Haggle: Haggler

2011-02-16T11:30:00.000-05:00

Last time we talked about getting haggled. Now let's look at doing some haggling.

Fundamentally, haggling is a tug-of-war battle between two people with imperfect information. As the seller, you do not know how much the buyer is willing to pay - as the buyer, you do not know how low the seller is willing to go. Even if the buyer/seller tells you exactly how much they are willing to accept, there is no real way for you to know if they are telling the truth or whether it is merely a gambit on their part. In fact, it's entirely possible that the buyer/seller does not even know the truth of their own statement.

Within World of Warcraft however, there is one piece of information you do know when it comes to people selling items through Trade Chat: they are desperate.

"But... Azuriel! I/my friend/some dude sells things over Trade all the time and isn't desperate at all!"
"You/your friend/that guy is merely a good haggler and/or enjoys it."

Think about the market for your item, say, a Volcano deck. Who would buy it? You might have raiders, you might have PvPers, you might have alts with sugar-daddy mains, you might have just some random guy just hitting the level cap. Your market would include people specifically looking for that deck, and it could also potentially include people who were not specifically looking for the deck, but just happened to stumble upon it and thought it would be good for them. Depending on the price you ask for the deck, you might also create demand for it from goblins willing to assume the risk of flipping it.

Who is excluded from your market? People whom have been priced out of the demand curve of your deck. You also exclude people who never knew you were selling the deck to begin with.

All of the above assumes you listed the card in the AH. Why? Because by selling it solely in Trade chat, you exclude another group of potential buyers: everyone not currently in Trade chat. Think about that. You could have raiders and PvPers fawning over your item and willing to pay through the teeth... but they are currently in a raid/Arena, and not around to even know you are selling. Or, hell, they could merely be out doing dailies or questing on an alt. Or AFK.

So your entire market is solely the people currently in Trade chat. No reasonable person would pay more for an item from Trade that he/she could buy from the AH for less. In fact, everyone instinctively accepts that AH prices have a "premium" built-in for the convenience of being able to buy at one's leisure, which means they instinctively know the opposite to be true, e.g. things are cheaper in Trade chat. Any seller that consciously chooses to handcuff themselves by selling in Trade, almost by definition, is either desperate or willing to limit their profits to push product now rather than later. I would call the latter "desperation" anyway.

I typed all the conceptual framework above as a preface to this otherwise simplistic suggestion: low-ball the hell out of them. Keep it in the realm of possibility, but low-ball it.

Let me give you a literally true example that occurred just two days after my Volcano hagglee experience, and is the height of irony. For one thing, I was on my Inscription toon reposting unsold Darkmoon decks when, lo and behold, someone came on Trade wanting to sell a Volcano deck for 16,000g. I whispered them with an offer for 12,000g. Why 12k? What I wanted to do was provide a tantalizing floor at which someone might end up going "screw it" and selling it at. If I had made a truly absurd offer like 8000g or less, they would dismiss it out of hand as a troll, just like anyone in Trade chat offering 1g for it. Personally, 12k is pretty ridiculous by itself for a Darkmoon deck worth 16,000g in Inferno Inks, but if someone wants to pay the reverse-premium of a guaranteed sale right now, let'em.

I did not actually get a response right away from the seller. I saw him barking it up a few more times, and I whispered "I'm still willing to buy at 12,000g." He came back with a "Well, 12k is kind of low. I'm splitting it with another guy." Remember when I said I was a big softie? Yeah, well, it comes and goes. There is no way for me to know whether he is serious or just cynically playing the heart-strings, so my default bargaining state of not believing anything they say kicked in. "I'll buy at 12,000g if you end up changing your mind." This is my signature haggling move, the Artful Disengage, in which I indicate "this is my deal, take it or leave it" without actually achieving that aggressive posture. Sure enough, the guy went back to Trade with "WTS Volcano deck, have 12k offer. If you want it, offer has to be 13k." Interesting gambit on this guy's part and it almost inclined me to offer 13k just to seal the deal.

Remember from last time when I mentioned that my internal bargaining position would be weaker if I was selling something I could not actually use/have a use for? It also works in reverse: I already had an unsold Volcano deck, so it was not as though I was emotionally invested in this transaction outside of the gold-making possibilities. I use the Artful Disengage no matter my level of personal involvement, but this time I actually meant the "take it or leave it." After another 5-10 minutes of waiting, the seller took it. I met him outside the Dwarven District AH, traded the 12,000g, and then I immediately walked 15 yards to the auctioneer and listed the deck for 21,000g, the same price as my other Volcano deck.

After logging on the next day, I discovered someone had bought one of the decks for 21,000g. That is a profit margin of over 8,000g. You can be damn sure that the buyer was NOT someone in Trade chat the night before.

When you see someone selling on Trade, try to establish a floor for them. The "floor" in this case is a bid high enough to make them think twice about *not* selling it to anyone, while low enough for you to have room to maneuver should they drive a harder bargain. If you read my Hagglee post, you should now see why I had you establish a floor for yourself, lest someone else try to do it for you.
If you find yourself bad at haggling, you will ironically be more successful the less important the transaction actually is to you.
Usually goes without saying, but being aware of the market price for the item in question is important, especially when the seller is giving away no information (other than their inherent desperation), such as when they just say "WTS X, pst" or "make an offer." The seller is secretly hoping that you, the buyer, will make an offer higher than their expectations. If the seller wants 50g for the item, they hope you offer 60g and think you are getting a bargain.

That about sums it all up for haggling. I could possibly squeeze in another entry focusing on the Volcano deck, considering how much mileage I have gotten out of it already. I jest, I jest. The trinket just so happens to be a fairly interesting case-study given the profit potential of all the steps leading up to making it, and the (reproducible) profit from the discrete object itself. Not everyone deals with Darkmoon cards though, so I will try to find more generalized examples next time.

Art of Haggle: the Hagglee

2011-02-14T22:15:00.000-05:00

Last night, as I was collecting the spoils of sold Darkmoon cards, I noticed an established raider saying in Trade chat "WTB Darkmoon Card: Volcano." The first thing I did was head to the AH to check if I had been undercut on my own Volcano deck. Seeing that I was the only seller up, I quickly canceled my current auction with it's 18500g buyout and relisted for 22000g. Smiling to myself on a job well done, I prepared to check in on my other alts. Before I could log though, I got the whisper.

...the dreaded, dread whisper.

I am going to let you in on a dark secret: I am terrible at haggling. Brutal, cut-throat AH PvP? Does not phase me a bit. My exorbitant prices leave poverty and destitution in its wake? Don't care. I mean, hell, I smelled blood in Trade chat waters and ate the 6g deposit fee to jack up my Volcano price by 3500g (nearly 20%) to capitalize on the potential desperation. Part of that comes from my over-arching philosophy that is summarized by the title of this blog, e.g. player versus auction house. I am playing against the AH, not the individuals that make up the AH. When I repost, undercut, or engage in social engineering for my personal benefit, I do so in Solipsism Mode - treating the game as single-player with AI bots that clearly (okay, mostly) pass the Turing Test.

This is a self-defense mechanism as, generally speaking, I am a big softie that is receptive to social guilt. I don't succumb to the "total chump" level of eating a loss, but I'll feel bad about it later... and later still will be angry at myself for not drawing a harder line.

Lucky for me, the raider short-circuited any possible guilt mechanisms by going straight for the "Okay, bottom line, what's the lowest you would be willing to go?" line. For future reference in any haggling you do, that is a bad opening gambit. Insulting, even. If you don't want to haggle, buy it off the AH at the premium my time and your convenience demands. "Did you have any Waves cards to trade?" I asked the question because in Trade he specified he would be willing to swap decks. As it turns out, he only had the Hurricane deck, of which I had three unsold sitting up on the AH already. The Tsunami deck is a slam-dunk for every type of healer, but I was missing the A, 2, 6, 7, and 8 of the deck. "Which ones do you need?" I specify the five missing cards, having already looked at their prices on the AH and noting that the 6, 7, and 8 alone add up to ~15,000g (with obviously no competition). "If you don't have Waves cards to trade, lowest price is 17,000g." My prior Volcano posting was 18,500g which meant the bid was ~14,800g before I canceled it. At 22,000g buyout, the bid floor is now 17,600g. Selling at 17kg is 2125g per card; assuming 7g for Volatile Life, that means 191.5g per Inferno Ink, 19.15g for Blackfallow, and any stack of herbs below 153g that mills into three Blackfallow and half an Inferno would be profitable.

No, I did not actually calculate all that at the time.

Looking back, a successful 17,600g bid would end up giving me 16,720g assuming a 5% AH cut, so I could have offered less than 17kg and came out ahead. Then again, I would prefer the full 22,000g or, you know, as much as humanly possible. The haggling ended in a draw with no exchange taking place other than me telling him the name of my main in case he changed his mind. I anticipate him doing exactly that, insofar as saying "screw it" and buying my auction straight-up or finding a different seller altogether. Even in a nightmare scenario in which I never ever find a buyer at any price, the Volcano trinket is still extraordinarily powerful for Elemental shaman and warlocks generally (among others), both of which I have. Had this been an item I could not ever possibly have an interest in, say Crimson Deathcharger or epic spellcasting leather or something, my (internal) bargaining position would have been weaker.

You might wonder why I would bring up this topic at all given my lack of ability/confidence in this position. Well... obviously to get better at it. Everyone has to start somewhere, eh? If I were to distill all the above into bite-size, homework-esque bullet-points, it would look something like this:

If you are bad/nervous/unconfident at haggling, acknowledge it. To yourself, not the other guy.
You don't actually have to haggle. The reason why you might want to is that theoretically the haggler is a guaranteed sale within a certain price range. It just comes down to finding the perimeter of their price range and seeing if it overlaps your selling range. Speaking of that...
Figure out your selling range. Start at the top, which is the lowest price of any competing products. If there is no competition, the sky's the limit, although you may want to cap it at the highest price you reasonably believe it could go for on the AH. The bottom level of your selling range should be whatever price you believe the item would sell for instantly on the AH. Alternatively, you could choose the current or historical price of materials, whichever is higher, plus 10%. You are not running a non-profit here, so unless you can repair your gear with the warm fuzzies you get from charity work, make sure to get paid for your time. Once you have both ranges, ignore the low one and offer AH price -10%. You figured out the low-end price just in case the haggler came back with a lower counter-offer.
Information is everything. If the buyer is desperate, that gives you information, namely that he/she will probably go higher than normal. Same thing works in reverse. Have you seen people in Trade say "WTS X, 1000g or best offer, pst"? That's dumb, no one is going to offer them 1000g straight-up after an opening like that. Why not? Because the seller gave away the information that they will accept less than their original target.

Next time, I will go over the other side of the coin: being the haggler.

OT: LFD and Difficulty

2011-02-12T20:03:00.000-05:00

OT = Off-topic, e.g. no AH advice.

Chances are good that you have at some point been exposed to the debate still consuming the WoW forums in regards to the recent nerfs to heroic difficulty, the buff to Luck of the Draw, and the overall "Wrathification" of Cataclysm. The arguments are pretty rote by this time, usually coming down to "morons/bads should L2P and not have faceroll epixs" and "back in my day we wiped and liked it" and possibly "the elitist no-lifers just want exclusive content for themselves" or "my $15/month is just as valuable as your $15/month."

All of that kind of debate is besides the point.

The point is two-fold: the DPS queue for heroics is north of 45 minutes and the completion rate of LFD groups was garbage. Period.

LFD is Here to Stay
It is interesting from a philosophical point to debate the whys and the hows, but again, it would be besides the point. The LFD genie is out of the bottle, and it is never going back. That said, LFD as a tool requires a healthy feedback loop in order to function. Players like Gevlon from Greedy Goblin might refuse to use LFD under any circumstances, even if that meant he simply was never able to do another heroic again. I would imagine that everyone else would be more reasonable insofar as they would prefer grouping with friends, but if they could just grab someone to fill the empty slot(s) they would. Sometimes only three people you know are online, or perhaps only three out of X many are willing to go. Other times you may literally be the only person online for whatever reason and want to run a heroic. In those situations, you will want the system to be there.

LFD in this sense is like public transportation. You may never actually need to use it, and you may certainly never want to, but it is still in your best interests for it to be there in case you do.

That all changes if the average completion rate of LFD pugs is 40% after having waiting for nearly an hour. Most sensible people would not bother with that, and instead take their chances with Trade chat pugs, waiting for guildies to become available, or simply going and doing something else entirely. The people who would still queue for such a LFD failure would be the terminally optimistic and those for whom a 40% chance of success after an hour of waiting is more than they achieve on average anyway. This means that when you end up needing to use LFD to avoid not being able to do what you want to do, you are far more likely to not end up being able to do what you wanted to do anyway and wasted your time besides.

What Does Not Wipe You, Makes You... Err...
Were the Cataclysm heroics too hard? Would the "difficulty" have solved itself once tier-gear was available for Justice Points in 4.1 and beyond? Is having players struggle through difficult content better for them and the game overall? Interesting questions... but irrelevant to the issue of the negative feedback loop the LFD tool was stuck on.

Success breeds success. There are highly successful people IRL who say that success is the worst teacher, that adversity and frustration are better motivators. Sure... sorta. I am not opposed to difficult content - fundamentally I believe everyone who plays wants content tailored to their skill level - what I am opposed to is the notion that a LFD system could survive the same design philosophy used in, say, raiding. If your first few forays into eBay or Craigslist ended up in scams, frauds and embarassment, how likely would it be that enough people would trooper on in the face of such adversity to make those marketplaces function on a healthy level? Even on a raiding level, success breeds success. How long would Gevlon's experiement have lasted if <The PuG> endlessly wiped on Magmaw and saw no improvement from week to week?

Does the 15% LFD buff and targeted boss nerfs make people better players? Not necessarily at first. What those things do accomplish is increase the completion rate of LFD dungeon groups as a whole, which then encourages more people to use the tool, which improves the aggregate skill level of groups, which further increases the completion rates. I truly do believe that a smoothly functioning LFD tool encourages individual improvement in the people receptive to the idea to begin with, as they get a foundation of success that translates into confidence, plus the gear that takes raiding into the realm of possibility. Just think of how many potential raiders could be buried under the fail of current LFD groups, never knowing how much better they could become because any improvements they do accomplish does not translate into meaningful group success.

Collateral Damage
The final thing I wanted to briefly talk about is the following argument:

"This sort of thing is exactly WHY the 15% was bought in.
Are you saying we should all fail just because some of the peeps were scrubs?"

"No they should not reward poor play. Groups should fail sometimes people should learn mechanics. The issue is they put the bar on the floor for wrath."

One of the root design questions of LFD is: should good players be penalized for getting randomly grouped with bad players?

There is no way to avoid rewarding poor play without also penalizing good play in the process (unless all five players are bad). Such a philosophical hardline is the same concept as the teacher punishing the entire class because no one came forward to say who threw the spitball or whatever. The idea is that by holding the entire class hostage, one can guilt either the perpetrator or someone who knows who the perp is into confessing. Based on personal anecdotes, such a gambit works approximately 0% of the time - someone with no compunction against being disruptive in class in the first place isn't likely to be persuaded by guilt (even if they are, they are getting punished either way, so no-win), the people who knew who did it likely don't want to be labeled as snitches and otherwise suffer retaliation later (no-win), and the rest of the class that would tell who did it if they knew are punished as though they did it themselves (no-win). Such blind, indiscriminate punishment does not actually encourage any good behavior whatsoever; the only real thing it encourages is either acting out yourself (may as well have fun if you suffer the consequences either way) or an avoidance of that class/teacher, which represents the LFD tool in this case.

Is it "fair" that bad players get carried? Maybe not. Then again, I'd say the downside of being bad is being bad. If someone is so conceited and ignorant that they are unable to recognize their own terribleness, they are not likely to learn anything from the group being wiped either. Meanwhile, I do not think anyone believe it fair that otherwise good players get punished for something they had no hand in doing.

[Should good players be penalized because of bad players?] In a word? Yes.

Because the flip side of the question is, "Should a player be guaranteed a successful run no matter what the other 4 people in the group do?" And the answer to that is, "No."

A good point, but presumably the line does not exist at such an extreme. Should two good players be punished because three bads happen to be in the group? How about three good, two bad? Four good, one bad? And what about when the the binary distinctions are dropped, and we start adding "above average" "average," and "below average," to the mix?

Ultimately, I believe the changes which Blizzard did were amazingly nuanced. The targeted nerfs are nerfs, of course. But full guild groups looking for challenge can avoid the 10% portion of the buff by doing what they always did anyway: run heroics as groups. And if they ever need a 4th or 5th member to round out the run? At least they will not have their run torpedoed by a kid shooting spitballs.

Cataclysm Thus Far

2011-02-09T23:38:00.000-05:00

Based on some of my prior posts, I would probably have to describe myself as a Fairweather Auctioneer. Based on my realm's markets thus far in Cataclysm, I would probably describe it as containing fair weather. A visual aid:

In short: 137,811g over 71 days or just shy of 2.5 months, averaging 1,941g a day.

Tragically, I only downloaded MySales in the past few weeks so I don't have as much hard data as I would have enjoyed browsing. Generally speaking though, I do not pool the gold across my various toons as you can see; by keeping it separated, it gives me a way of judging how profitable and/or self-sustaining certain individual professions can be.

In essence, this is a personalized recap episode for my time versus the Auchindoun auction house thus far. Feel free to keep right on browsing if these aren't your thing, although I would like to think I can make it somewhat entertaining for the both of us.

Inscription
The clear darling child of this expansion thus far, just as the expansion before it, is Inscription. As various blogging man-machines can attest to, selling your soul to the gods of addon automation can net you practically limitless amounts of wealth by the ancient rite of Glyph-making. Being the hopeless conscientious objector I am, I have made zero glyphs for sale. Fortunately, there are other ways to squeeze blood from the Inscription rock and the 60,000g made in the last two months (nearly half of it all) atests to this. At the time of writing, the Faire is currently making it's rounds and I have a Volcano and three Hurricane decks still at large.

Nearly every stage of the Darkmoon card creation stage has space for profit, from milling and selling the Inks up to the individual cards and finished trinkets. If you haven't explored the potential yet, you are missing out.

Jewelcrafting
The first heady days of an expansion presents many opportunities to corner the market on certain cuts, while also giving those with less predatory inclinations to simply turn the JC daily into a 300-500g payout by selling the special JC gem (e.g. Chimera Eye). While I have been getting my hands dirty, I actually prefer the mature JC market to Wild West one it is presently. As you can see on most realms right now, gem prices are getting tanked hardcore by a truly prodigenious turnout. Six months or more from now, things tend to quiet down, and cuts that are selling for less than the gem it takes to make it will start heading back up to sustainable levels.

What I do want to say is that the color shuffling and stat consolidation has really invalidated entire gem types. There is no practical use for Amberjewels, for example - DPS is in every circumstance going to want a hybrid +Int/+X or similar cut, whereas pure +Crit was a decent seller throughout Wrath (nevermind the +Hit). Straight blue gems needed the boost of +Hit to feel useful, but I am pessimistic about the future of Amberjewel in general.

Alchemy
Outside of Transmutation, there really has not been any Alchemy this expansion thus far. Flasks have been a complete disaster on Blizzard's part in every respect - it is difficult to imagine that the designers have any idea whatsoever what the hell they are doing when they expected guilds to have created ten thousand (10,000) flasks for a 10m guild within two months (e.g. hitting the level 10 guild perk that buffs only guild cauldrons). And that is putting aside for the moment the absolute re-goddamn-diculous material cost of the flasks themselves. Twelve (12) different herbs of two different types for one flask? Frost Lotus was the limiting factor for Wrath flasks, of course, but what people often forget in that comparison is that the recipe ended up making two flasks. Yeah, originally they made one flask before they were changed, but that one flask lasted two hours. Over the course of the last few years we have gone from a two-hour flask, to two one-hour flasks, to a single one-hour flask while materials necessary to farm has increased. ~~Patch 4.0.6 cannot come fast enough.~~

Potions have largely been a joke as well, mainly due to the throttling of herbs. It simply makes no sense even as a Potion Master to crank out normal potions when you could be selling those, say, 2-3 Heartblossom at 14-15g each. Potion of Treasure Finding is garbage, and Potion of Illusion needs to last 30 minutes at least. Hopefully the unnerfing of Heartblossom and Whiptail will allows those potions more room for a margin.

Transmutations though? Obscene. Truegold can be hit or miss, but a controlled Living Elements is genius, even if it is almost always more profitable to go from Life --> Air. Rare gem transmutes without a cooldown also opens interesting new market correlations, or at least they would, if herb nodes weren't so heavily nerfed. If Heartblossom comes down far enough, we may see the prices of Carnelians spike since they may actually become more widely used in Transmute: Inferno Ruby.

Enchanting
As par for the course, Enchanting right now is really hit-or-miss. If you were one of the lucky bastards with the otherwise obtuse Alchemy/Enchanting combo, you are probably logging into WoW from your retirement estate in the Hamptons via the very-late hotfixed Maelstrom Crystal farming. Enchanting materials are still selling rather well, but the scroll market is still groping for the bottom of the hole they are falling into. By the time it rebounds, who knows whether it will bounce higher than the price of Hypnotic Dust and Celestial Essences? Like the JC market though, the more mature the market, the easier it is to find the margins.

Blacksmithing
I do not think it has ever been a better time to be a Blacksmith. Assuming, that is, you are level 84+ and have been soaking up Chaos Orbs. My own Blacksmith is stuck at level 80 as the fourth alt in line for some TLC, but I have still made ~10,000g or so from selling the level 81 rare weapons and some missing pieces of the crafted tanking and Redsteel set.

Mining/Herbalism/Skinning
I am trying to remember back to TBC and Wrath if there was a better time to be a gatherer than presently. I don't think there has been a better time, unless you count being a Herbalist with an extended Freya-room ID. By the end of Wrath, we saw herbs like Adder's Tongue down below 16g a stack, but even though the number of bot farmers seem to have increased since then, I think the Inscription changes have stabilized that market. Even low-balling the ore markets still means between 12-27g per node depending on the type, which ain't bad. I cannot comment much on Skinning other than note it's volatility, which is par for the course.

Tailoring/Leatherworking
Unfortunately, I cannot comment much on these two otherwise disparate professions because they currently share the same fate as Blacksmithing: trapped on non-level-84 alts. Indeed, my Leatherworker is on a level 75 hunter I never plan on leveling, so I got particularly screwed on that account. Well, not entirely just yet. The reason is that both my Leatherworker and my level 80 Tailor can make the rare leg enchants, which is a market you do not want to be neglecting. I can occasionally be the only seller of Twilight Leg Armor for example, and can push the ~90g-in-mats item into a very healthy 350g range considering the raid-worthy Charscale Leg Armor takes a Pristine Hide trading north of 500g by itself, not counting the 20 Volatile Fires.

Similarly, don't forget about the deceptively deep Ghostly Spellthread market. After all, +Spirit is amazing for healers and some hybrid DPS classes like Elemental shaman who basically get free +Hit out of the bargain (as opposed to +Stamina from the other spellthread).

In any case, this has ran on particularly long, so thanks for slogging through it with me. Here is for hoping for continued success in 4.0.6 and beyond, one and all.

4.0.6 Primer

2011-02-05T22:44:00.001-05:00

MMO-Champion is reporting that 4.0.6 will be dropping on Tuesday, and I tend to believe them.

There have been a lot of posts around the blog world after each PTR build, but some of those have been weeks (or months) ago, and it becomes pretty easy to lose track of the changes that should pique your interest. What follows are the top three things I think are important to keep in mind in the days before the patch.

New BoE patterns. Three new JC metagem random world drop recipes, all of which are going to be unbelievably hot commodities for the rest of Cataclysm - Wowhead is showing that they are +54 Agility/Strength/Intellect with the +3% crit damage, making them strictly better than the Chaotic meta, in every possible way. So stop making Chaotic cuts immediately, and you may want to consider dumping your remaining stock as well. It may be a while before the new metas saturate the market, but you don't want to be left holding bag either.

Enchanters are getting three new +50 Agility/Strength/Intellect wrist enchanting patterns, which are also BoE world drops. The demand for the patterns themselves will probably be high, but since all three require two Maelstrom Crystals to enchant, I would not expect high demand until after 4.1 (when I expect the new 5m to drop epics on heroic).
Expect a surge in herb/Volatile Life prices. The number of herbs needed to make flasks will be reduced by approximately 33% across the board (8 of two kinds instead of 12). This reduction in mats should correspond in a surge of demand because now A) making flasks is closer to being profitable, but more importantly B) getting the guild achievement Mix Master is now within (easier) reach. To get some idea of the scope of the change, the herb reduction means a guild will go through 400 less stacks of herbs. Yes... four-hundred stacks. These aren't 400 stacks of Cinderbloom either (for the most part). The Volatile Life demand will come as a consequence of the quantity of flasks being made, especially since each flask will take two more Volatile Life each, basically creating an extra 2,000 Life demand per guild.

Also supporting the extra herb/life demand will be the new Alchemy trinkets, like the Vibrant Alchemist Stone, which are amazing. Whether the alchemist never made one before or if they made the +Stamina version, chances are good that every Alchemist on your server is going to spending 50 more Volatile Life and nearly two more stacks of herbs each.
More people will be running heroics. Not only have almost all the heroics been targeted with some precision nerfs, the recently announced broad-spectrum, ICC-esque 10% buff to players using the LFD tool will mean more successful heroic runs are being made. More successes mean it's more likely that individuals will queue again, which means more cloth, more enchanting materials, and ultimately more demand for enhancements like gems, flasks, and even enchants as players more quickly replace their old gear and perhaps move on into raiding.

Two more things to keep in mind that are not necessarily patch-related, but will impact us nevertheless. First, the Darkmoon Faire is rolling back into town on Sunday. I fully expect the competition on the Darkmoon trinkets to be particularly fierce this go-around, so just keep in mind that you don't have to undercut everyone; if your competition is going for a scorched-earth, fire-sale strategy, just hold onto your trinket until next week. If you have extra cards laying around or the mats to make them, the opposite is true: sell those to desperate players trying to find that one missing card and willing to pay a premium to avoid sitting around for another month.

The second is that Love is in the Air holiday is also starting on Sunday. It remains to be seen whether or not there will be any explicit money-making schemes like there was last year (Lovely Charm Bracelet fiasco anyone?), but it has been "confirmed" on Wowhead that the holiday boss drops ilevel 346 necklaces this year, some of which are strict sidegrades to the crafted JC ones. So if you were prepared to put down the cash for one, you might want to slow down. And if you were planning of selling some, well, you still might, but I would not take any undue risks attempting to do so.

Cataclysm JC Rings and Necklaces

2011-02-01T03:36:00.004-05:00

[Note: Other blogs have talked about this topic already, a fact I was only made aware of about 10 minutes ago. However, I think I'm bringing a bit more beef and original research to the table, so just hang with me till the end]

There is a general sense on the WoW forums - something I read regularly as a sort of barometer for AH behavior "in the wild" as it were - that the crafted JC rings and necklaces are terrible, a waste of time, "should be epic 359s" and so on. For the most part, such lamentations are besides the point. Whether something is objectively good or not has no bearing on its marketability, as any Mysterious Fortune Card or cigarette seller can tell you. These JC items being remarkably amazing would certainly help things along, of course, but it is not strictly necessary.

But are they actually any good?

The short answer: Sure.

The long answer: Ehh... some of them, yes.

When looking for advice or comparisons for items, Wowhead is the first place I go to. Not only is the website extremely elegant despite having a rather robust database of information, but it has a comment section for every item that is fairly well self-policed. Good posts generally get "greened" pretty quick and the garbage is thrown out. The problem when looking at the JC crafted item comments was that there weren't any. Until I made some. For all of them. My handle over on Wowhead is redraven937, and if you end up finding any of the comparisons useful, feel free to rate them up over there.

Instead of rewriting everything or simply copy/pasting what I wrote from Wowhead over to here, I'm going to do a quick summary. I still very much recommend checking out the items themselves to see how/why I arrived at my conclusions vis-a-vis whether the items are objectively good. Clicking on the item link will take you straight to my comparison comment. Keep in mind you can (probably) sell any of them at a 500g profit margin or higher regardless of how good or bad they are.

Elementium Moebius Band (tanking ring)
Verdict: Not recommended.
Reason: You get an extra +15 Stamina from this ring compared to the Revered Therazane ring, but most peoples' mains will hit Revered after questing in Deepholm + a few days worth of dailies, so at best it will be the Moebius and the Felsen. What I found was that I liked the ring from Revered with Ramkahen, the Red Rock Band, since it doubled up as both a tank and DPS ring. The Moebius ends up having 5-10 extra item levels over the Red Rock, but getting two tanking rings from two factions was too easy for me to recommend the pattern.

By the way, there are three JCs in the AH right now on my realm getting into an undercut war over these rings, which are the easiest the craft. Highest buyout right now is 2800g. There is still a margin in there, but it is looking pretty slim.

Elementium Guardian (tanking neck)
Verdict: Very Good
Reason: There is no reputation alternative for (plate) tanking, and this necklace stacks up pretty favorably against the necklace off the JP vendor. Easy way to save yourself 18 heroic boss kills and applying those JPs towards other upgrades.

Ring of Warring Elements (Intellect ring)
Verdict: Slightly Good
Reason: The crafted ring is technically better item-point-wise than the Therazane ring, but it comes down to Haste vs Mastery, with most spellcasters preferring the former over the latter. Using one of each is fine, but Lost City of Tol'vir has two chances of dropping sidegrades in a single (usually easy) run.

Eye of Many Deaths (Intellect neck)
Verdict: Garbage
Reason: This item is underbudget. Normally, a socket on an item of this level comes at the expense of 20 Intellect, but the Eye loses 40. Yes, the socket bonus grants 10 back, but that still puts it 10 Intellect down from where it should be. To get an idea of what this means, compared to the necklace off the JP vendor, the Eye has +112 Haste vs +20 Int, +92 Spirit, +3 Mastery - in other words, 112 vs 115, but 20 of those points are from Intellect (e.g. they are worth more) so it is even worse.

Two other issues are that A) Twilight Highland factions offer an epic caster necklace at Exalted, and B) the upcoming Love is in the Air holiday is most likely going to be dropping 100% sidegrades to this crafted necklace.

Elementium Destroyer's Ring (Agility Ring)
Verdict: Amazing
Reason: Simply put, this ring is probably overbudget. The other Agility ring is a joke compared to this one, as you end up looking at +30 Agility vs +27 Crit and +3 Hit - even if primary stats had the same item point budget as secondary stats (they don't), under no circumstances is that Agility gain not leaps and bounds better. The budgeting discrepancies continue when compared to the other 346 Agility rings, with the Destroyer consistently coming out 9 item points ahead despite being 346 like all the others. This ring is the closest you can get in WoW to a free lunch.

Band of Blades (Agility Ring)
Verdict: Mostly Garbage
Reason: Now we know where the Elementium Destroyer got all its extra lunch money... by stealing from its little brother. Essentially, Band of Blades does not compare well with the Destroyer nor does it compare very well with the Therazane reputation ring - it has 116 vs 107 from the Therazane ring, but 10 of that 107 is straight-up Agility. I am not aware of the exact formula of primary vs secondary, but when you have to bust out that particular design rubric just to figure out if a potentially 5000g ring comes up even with an easy reputation option, it is time to throw in the towel.

Obviously Hit rating can be important, which is the only reason why Band of Blades is "mostly" garbage. None of the rings are Unique-Equipped, so if you have a dearth of Hit rating on your otherwise amazing gear, you might get some benefit from dual-wielding (dual-knuckling?) these rings.

Brazen Elementium Medallion (Agility Neck)
Verdict: ~~Not Recommended~~ Actually BiS?

Reason: Everyone who finishes questing in Hyjal will be Revered with the Guardians of Hyjal, which means all those people will have access to a necklace at level ~82 that they cannot wear until 85, but is basically identical to this crafted one. The Medallion (once socketed) will have +112 Crit over the Acorn's +96 Mastery and +5 Haste. Yes, 112 > 111. Incidentally, 5000g > 21g. ~~Your market for this necklace will be idiots and people who have sworn a blood oath against questing in Hyjal. So, idiots, basically.~~

Update: As pointed out in the comments, Shadowpanther is actually showing this to be BiS for rogues, 2nd only to an epic 372 heroic Valiona neck drop. This obviously changes things quite a bit.

Entwined Elementium Choker (Agility Neck)
Verdict: Garbage
Reason: Against its Brazen brother, the Choker is down 11 item points. The Chocker is down 1 item point against the JP necklace. Finally, against the Acorn (aka Revered with Hyjal neck), the Choker sits at +65 Crit and +21 Haste vs Acorn's 86 Mastery, e.g. they're even. Individual stat weights will probably push the Choker ahead in that particular case, but nothing approaching it being more worthwhile to not just buy the damn Acorn.

Hopefully you will have found the above useful, as I spent a tremendous amount of time writing it all. As I mentioned before, whether or not the JC items are objectively good has no real bearing on your ability to squeeze some profit out of crafting them. I have personally sold two Eyes of Death for an average of 5500g thus far, and that is by far the worst/most underbudget option out of any of them. If all the rest were on the same level as the Elementium Guardian and Elementium Destroyer, we would probably see a lot nicer demand across the board.

But let's be honest here: we have all probably sold Ice Cold Milk, Enchanting Vellums, Vanishing Powder, and so on, at 1000% mark-ups. If we can sell items to people standing not even 20 yards away from the vendor we bought it from, we can sell rare BoE jewelry that looks/sounds cool for 4000g or more.

Coattail Surfing

2011-01-30T18:50:00.001-05:00

(This is my submission to Best of the month Blog Carnival, hosted by Not So Secret Society)

Being a highly successful auctioneer is a lot of work. It is all about risky venture capitalism, identifying nascent markets, tapping into hitherto untapped fonts of wealth, cultivating your own army of farmers, constant awareness of breaking-news patch notes, daily (or hourly) scanning of the AH, commercial espionage of your competition, and occasionally downright sabotaging of said competition.

Being a mildly successful auctioneer, by contrast, is pretty easy.

So you don't have hours and hours to do dedicated research on potential markets and programming profit spreadsheets. What do you do? You do what the majority of the rational world does: you let other people do the heavy-lifting. Part of that is doing what you are doing right now, specifically reading gold blogs. There is a huge wealth of information out there that other people have obtained through grueling experience that you can simply read about and absorb vicariously. The break-point of Obsidium Ore, the various things you can do with it, pitfalls to avoid, and so on.

Of course, every server is different so it is not always profitable to just cut and paste. What does happen to be mostly profitable is to just cut and paste what your local competition is doing.

Remember when I was talking about owning the Defender's Demonseye market? I had "discovered" that market after doing a lot of research on the Elitist Jerks website and basically had a monopoly for several weeks. Nowadays, I have at least four other JCs competing with me such that I would be lucky hitting a 10g profit margin per gem. While it is possible that these goons independently came to the same conclusion I did based on EJ research, I find it infinitely more likely they simply saw that I had 250g gems up on the AH and was making money hand over fist.

So, if you are strapped for time, be that goon.

My goon-making addon of choice is Auctionator. If you head over to the Buy tab, you can Shift-click an item in your inventory to search for the current prices of that item. If that item is a raw material whose name appears in the finished product, you can get some rather nice information. For example, when I went to my AH just now and Shift-clicked on Demonseye, the following appeared:

Err... yeah. So apparently there were a lot of Demonseyes up for 39g whereas the Defender's cut was at 120g. I had basically moved on from that market, but in the course of writing this article, it appears to have been (temporarily) profitable again. Aaaaaaaand that really proves my point about surfing coattails. If they are making money, then I should be able to make money undercutting them. So I bought a bunch of uncut Demonseyes and tossed some Defender's up on the AH.

Notice towards the bottom of that list there are Sovereign cuts going for 195g with 1 available and Timeless cuts at 350g with 3 available. With some leftover JC tokens, I went ahead and bought those patterns and tossed some more cut gems at 185g and 250g respectively. Did I have the time or inclination to research whether those cuts are valued and desirable? Nope. I'm simply assuming that whoever that guy is who listed them knows what he/she is doing. They shouldn't get too mad since I won't be moving into their market long-term, and even if they do get mad, what are they going to do? It is not as though they can sabotage a basically random coattail riding strategy.

If you also noticed, I did not buy the Guardian or Shifting Demonseye patterns despite them being listed at the top there with zero auctions up. I absolutely would have done that instead if I had the time to research the matter a bit more. I actually do have the literal time, but I'm writing in-character to prove a point. Namely that one should expect mild success from this strategy, not fantastic, mind-blowing, gold-capping success. It could entirely be the case that the Sovereign and Timeless cuts are garbage that only one dude is supplying because he is a highly successful auctioneer engaged in some AH R&D in squeezing blood from rocks... and failing. In which case I just blew six JC tokens and six Demonseyes on nothing.

On balance though, surfing coattails generally leads you to second-hand success more often than not. Or at least the general zip code of success.

I used the example of JC, but this really applies to every profession out there. In the purest form, what you are doing is what any Herbalist does when they go to the AH: look at what is currently the most expensive herb and then going out and farming that. You end up always chasing the market instead of leading it, but the price of the latter is blood, sweat, and tears. Many, many tears.

The Case for Bot Farmers

2011-01-28T01:23:00.000-05:00

As I was browsing the prices of herbs and ore the other day, I was struck by the disparity in prices. Twilight Jasmine was tanking down below 100g a stack whereas Heartblossom was still going strong at 300g, seven weeks after the expansion hit. As most of us remember, Blizzard nerfed the spawn rate of herbs and ore pretty hardcore a week after release, but that apparently had no real effect on Twilight Jasmine and other select herbs, right? After all there were 100+ stacks up on the AH for way less than market price... all from the same seller... in 12 hour auctions... with a name like Hlakwjerna...

Ladies and gentlemen, we are dealing with a bot farmer.

More specifically, what we are dealing with is someone with an insurmountable competitive advantage when it comes to farming ore and herbs. Although WoW is played on Blizzard servers (as opposed to private servers), most of the terrain features are actually handled client-side, which means illegal 3rd-party hacks can cause your toon to zip around the map, farm inside terrain features, and otherwise eliminate the tedious flying time between nodes. Then the bots off-load their ill-gotten gains on the AH as a way of farming gold, which they turn around and sell to other players at a premium, which they recover later by the keyloggers they festoon their pages with. There is a sort of sick, predatory logic that probably sends marketing directors' black little hearts aflutter.

The reason I bring all this up is because I never quite realized the role bot farmers played in the complex AH ecosystem until... they were gone. Perhaps it was a ban or perhaps the botter went on vacation, but most of last week saw the soaring of ore and herb prices on my realm as the cheap supply all dried up. My normal routine, like most auctioneers I imagine, is to log on, loot mailbox, relist unsold merchandise, and then eyeball the AH to see about replacing sold goods or exploring new markets. The problem was... I couldn't. Or, rather, it did not make any sense to.

When Obsidium Ore is below 54g a stack, the sky is essentially the limit. You could prospect the ore, cut the gems, and sell them to a vendor. You could try selling the raw gems. You can take the gems and transmute them into Shadowspirit Diamonds. You could even turn the gems into Fire Prisms for kicks (and probably a loss) or just to see if you could squeeze a Chimera Eye out of the deal. Or, hey, how about smelting the Obsidium into bars and selling those. Or smelt the bars and then make gear/weapons via Blacksmithing. And so on and so forth. When ore is that cheap, not only do you profit, but generally other people further down the chain also benefit, perhaps by flipping your own goods or further processing your product.

When Obsidium Ore is north of 150g a stack however, things start to slow down. Prospecting the ore and vendoring cut gems is off the table. Selling uncut gems only makes sense if you can fetch more than 25g per gem on average. Even then, there really is not much of a reason for you to even attempt the endeavor since you are taking on huge risk (deposit fee of 3g per gem) for a slim-to-none profit margin. Getting 18 gems for a Shadowspirit transmute would take 450g worth of ore in a perfect world, but likely closer to 750g; selling uncut Shadowspirit Diamonds for 375g apiece sounds good, but only because we were getting them out of 54g Obsidium Ore stacks.

Expensive Obsidium Ore causes everything derived from Obsidium Ore to become more expensive to compensate. "Duh," right? But expensive ore also causes aunctioneers like myself to withdraw from those markets as the profit margins similarly shrink, further constricting supply, driving prices higher. Buyers dry up as they are priced out of the market, further reducing demand pressure. The supply/demand logic would normally dictate that high Obsidium prices would mean more people farming it, but that only holds if that Obsidium is actually selling for 150g. If it is selling at all, it certainly wouldn't be to me - while I am not egotistical enough to believe I represent even a signifigant portion of the Auchindoun AH market, I do believe I am a decent enough precursor to the behavior of other aunctioneers. Less demand, less supply, and that ineffable quality of less AH activity period, which further depresses the market as players start to decide "this realm's AH sux" and either transfer or don't bother using it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing stagflation in a videogame.

There is no question that bots (usually temporarily) ruin gathering profession markets. With Obsidium Ore at 54g, it makes almost zero sense at all to go out mining for the purpose of making a profit. Bots also sell gold to gold-selling sites who then gum up Trade with spam and force us all to type in 7-8 digit Authenticator numbers every time we log in for the rest of time.

That said... cheap materials light up the AH like a Christmas tree. People buy more, turn what they bought into more stuff, and everyone in the AH ocean rises together as the water rains down (though some of us are in bigger boats). Items which make no sense at all to make at the true market price of their mats (i.e. potions) sprout up like mushrooms. The volume of activity encourages more people to get in on a piece of the action, and everyone generally profits thereby.

Are bots strictly necessary for a healthy, functioning WoW economy? Ehh... right now, I would actually argue yes. The reason why you see a bot posting 100 stacks of ore/herbs for ridiculously cheap is because whatever gold he/she is losing by selling below the market price is more than made up by the competitive advantage the bot has in terms of time spent farming it. A human player may not farm for anything below 100g a stack because they probably will only collect X stacks in an hour, and they will want more than the Y gold they could have gotten by doing dailies for that same hour. A bot could probably farm X*5 stacks in comparison, so profit is being made even at 20g.

Blizzard cannot directly dictate farmed material prices, but what it absolutely has control over is how long it would take to farm various things like Obsidium or... Heartblossom. Indeed, Heartblossom is really the control group in my argument as its nodes were nerfed just like the others, but it is a market untouched by the botters (presumably because of the level requirement to zone in). Right now, Heartblossom is at 300g a stack, with there only being 2-3 stacks up at any given time. At 300g/stack, you would assume the market would be all over Deepholm farming the crap out of the herb, but that is precisely what you do not see. With how difficult it is to farm post-nerf, the price should actually be even higher, but no one really wants to buy any at 300g, let alone higher. The market has essentially given up on Heartblossom, to everyone's detriment.

Things might be different on a larger server. The sheer, crushing number of warm bodies might be enough to sustain a non-bot-driven economy. All I know is that on my small pop server, when the bots unload their warez on the AH it feels like two tons of bottled water was air-dropped onto the deserted island that is Auchindoun. Twinks get geared, potions get brewed, fortunes are made. When they don't show up? The AH turns into The Road v2.0.

The Cost of Undercutting

2011-01-24T10:30:00.001-05:00

Making gold from the Auction House is all about managing risk.

The risk you take is that your auction will not sell, making you lose not only the deposit fee but also whatever time it took you to list it to begin with. Sometimes your goal is not necessarily to sell the item at all, or perhaps the profit margin is big enough by itself that infrequent sales is not much of a risk as long as one or two make it through. Your risk of a non-sale increases for each competitor in the market with an identical good, and increases further still when you get undercut.

When Not to Undercut
You do not actually have to always undercut the competition, or otherwise cancel your auctions and repost. In a demand-driven high-volume sales market it is entirely possible that buyers will chew through the lower-priced competition's wares and still be hungry for more. The risk you take by not undercutting is that there will not be enough sales within the listing period for your auctions to be on top (and then get sold) - you can also be burned if your competition lists additional auctions throughout the day. Of course, if your competition continues to list goods throughout the day, your undercutting is not going to help anyway.

An example of a demand-driven high-volume market: Mageweave Cloth. The people powerleveling their First Aid are going to need 4-6 stacks while the Tailors are going to need ~20 stacks. Considering that not everyone levels their First Aid as they level their character up, the demand pressure for Mageweave is always there at every level (e.g. a level 40 and a level 80 toon could both need it). While the same could be said of Wool Cloth or Runecloth, Mageweave is special insofar as it is much more difficult to farm as the dungeons in which it drops are out of the way for most max-level characters.

MFCs are also fairly high-volume although they are not entirely demand-driven as they are pushed.

When To Undercut, and How Much
There are generally two approaches to undercutting and using either depends on the circumstances and your expectations.

The first approach is the mechanical undercut. This is when you let addons like Auctionator just undercut the lowest-priced auction by X amount, usually a few silver. The benefit of mechanical undercutting is that it places your auctions at the front of the line while maximizing your potential profits for each sale. The downside? The competition you are undercutting can undercut you by canceling/relisting for the price of the deposit fee + the few silver. In essence, by undercutting by the minimum amount possible, you are taking the risk that you will snag some sales before your competition returns the favor.

The second approach is the savage undercut. You just put up some Bold Inferno Rubies on the AH for 250g because you happened to be the only seller at the moment, and here comes Noob B. Esq. with some of his own Bold cuts for 150g. Why a 100g undercut?! Does he not understand that he could list them for 249g and basically make an extra 99g? Hell, at that price I could buy them up myself and relist them for...

...hook, line, and sinker.

Fundamentally, the savage undercut model is used when you want to guarentee sales - the lower your price, the more of the demand triangle you get on those Supply/Demand charts, which increases the likelihood of a quick sale. The irony here is that if you undercut savagely enough, the buyers actually start to include your competition. If your competition wants to give you 150g for a chance at making 100g, I say let'em. In fact, I insist! Especially when I am getting the uncut gems at 80g or below.

Unless you are cashing in your chips and exiting a market, the key to savage undercutting is to understand your own profit margin independant of what else is going on in the AH. Would you be happy buying uncut gems for 80g and selling them for 150g? That is a 70g margin per gem. If you see someone selling them for 250g on the AH, that potential margin increases to 170g. The key word here is: potential. If you know the gem market and know the market price is 150g, then you also know the likelihood of getting those gems back in your mailbox minus the ~4g deposit if you start pushing 250g apiece with competition afoot is higher.

While the gem deposit fee is big enough to discourage casual cancelling/reposting, the same cannot be said of other goods, like Glyphs for example. If you show up at the AH with a handful of glyphs and start undercutting the 80g ones at 79.99g, the Glyph Barons lose around 3 silver by undercutting you (their time is irrelevant, since they are already committed to the abysmal time sink that is selling Glyphs). If you show up and start savagely undercutting their glyphs, say posting them at 50g, then... well, you will still probably get undercut. The point is that the Glyph Barons aren't losing 3 silver by undercutting you, they are losing 30g. Even if savagely undercutting results in no sale, what you lost was the deposit cost, while they lost nearly half of their margin. In the scheme of things, I'd call that a win.

Have I mentioned I hate the design of Glyphs top-to-bottom?

So What is the TL;DR?
The answer is going to cost you, conservatively, around 10,000g. A month. That is approximately how much you stand to lose by A) never undercutting, B) always undercutting by 1s, or C) always undercutting by 50g+.

If you missed your Ritalin dose for today though, here is the quick and dirty version. Don't undercut in fast-moving markets like Dust/Cloth OR when there are just 1-2 severally discounted auctions compared to the normal, more reasonable market price. Undercut by a minimal amount when it is unlikely your competition is going to bother canceling/relisting, either because they aren't hardcore auctioneers (e.g. normal players who just check their mailbox 48 hours later) or because the deposit fee makes a 1s undercut from you cost them 1g or more. Savagely undercut in slow-moving and/or high margin markets to guarentee sales.

Virtual Demand

2011-01-20T23:29:00.000-05:00

I occasionally like to dabble in social engineering via the AH and have seen some measure of (temporary) success by doing so.

It started out with an exploration of how profitable it might be to craft Spidersilk Boots. These are a level 19 blue-quality footwear that are pretty nice for twinking and are otherwise better than a lot of quest rewards up until the Arathi Basin PvP boots you can buy at level 28. Part of the mats to make the boots include Iridescent Pearls. Checking the AH, I notice that there are only two Iridescent Pearls each going for 6g apiece. Two pearls are enough for one pair of boots, but getting a steady supply is really necessary if this Spidersilk Boot thing works out. So I have a decision to make. Do I:

A) Buy the pearls and make 1 set of boots?
B) Buy the pearls and create virtual demand for Iridescent Pearls?

What do I mean by virtual demand? I bought the two pearls and and posted them for 40g apiece.

The majority of players, even those using addons with historical pricing functions like Auctioneer, take cues from the pricing of materials on the AH within reason. There is an unspoken assumption that human beings are rational creatures (many real-world economic models are based on ridiculous assumptions like perfect information and rational consumers), so in seeing two Iridescent Pearls on the AH for 40g the average person would most likely conclude that Iridescent Pearls have enough demand to support that price - the thought someone was just tossing them up there to screw with them probably has never crossed their mind.

Now, remember I said "within reason." Posting a stack of Linen Cloth for 3000g in an effort to make the 50g/stack look reasonable in comparison is called "poisoning" in Auctioneer-speak, and the addon has some tools to combat that. My goal is not to poison Auctioneer's data or even reset the price (it would indeed be counter-productive to do so). My goal is to motivate players to farm more Iridescent Pearls. How do you get people to farm Iridescent Pearls? By convincing them that Iridescent Pearls are selling at 40g apiece. Suddenly, starting a 20-minute pogrom against the Naga and Murlocks in Hilsbrad is more profitable than doing the normal daily quest routine, thus encouraging (more) people to do it.

I have zero expectations that those two Iridescent Pearls will sell. In fact, I hope they won't, because that would mean I would have to find two more before trying out the Spidersilk Boots thing. If they do, well, I made 68g by flipping Iridescent Pearls. It is virtual demand in the sense that I do not believe the market is capable of sustaining 40g Iridescent Pearls, or 35g, 30g, or even 15g pearls. The best case scenario here is for a handful of people to farm the pearls, get into an undercutting war with my 40g pearls, and after several unsuccessful AH cycles at the inflated price, everyone gives up and goes back to the "true" price of 6g. At which point I now snatch them up and continue on my Boot venture.

Virtual demand does not work in mature markets, but that is fine considering mature markets should not be experiencing such item droughts to begin with. The other problem is the passive nature the initial ploy. You are telegraphing real demand to the person(s) who you bought the first two pearls off of, but what are the odds that they will come back and check on the current AH prices? I mean, I would, but normal people probably will not. What you are really banking on is future people unloading a pearl or two on the AH and seeing the "demand," or those people who want to buy pearls but see that they have been "priced out of the market."

If you have less scruples than rubles, you could probably jump-start the engineering by acting flabergasted in Trade Chat: "OMG! Iridescent Pearls for 40g apiece? This economy sux." I consider that more willfully misleading than simply posting the auctions and giving people space to come to the wrong economic conclusions, but hey. Word of caution: don't be dumb and post that Trade message on the same toon you listed the items on.

The Snowball Effect

2011-01-17T22:14:00.004-05:00

(This post is my submission for Cold's Gold Factory Blogging Carnival on February 11th.)

The hardest part of any endeavor is usually taking that first step. You may have it in your mind to do something - starting that research paper, beginning an exercise routine, jumping into the dating pool, deciding you want a piece of the AH game - but it is easy to become overwhelmed by all the options and variables available to you at the start. This is especially the case for beginning Auctioneers, as no matter what server or faction you play on, there are hundreds and hundreds of potential markets for you to dabble in and not enough time in the day to participate in all of them. No, seriously, you can't. So if you want to succeed as a fresh Auctioneer from rags to riches, I recommend using the Snowball Effect, in three stages.

Stage 1: Taking Stock, or I am an Unique Snowflake
Everyone has to start somewhere. So... where are you starting from? Take stock of how much gold you have right now, what characters you have on the server, what items may or may not be in your bank, and any professions you might have (at any level). Do you happen to have any addons installed to assist you? If not, go and download Auctionator right now, and perhaps Auditor if you enjoy tracking the progress of your bottom line. Successful use of addons, especially Auctionator, is what I consider one of the Foundations of gold-making, so if you remain leery of using these tools, just understand you are holding yourself back.

One thing to keep in mind concerning professions, and by extension other characters, is that having more available to you allows access to markets that would otherwise be shut. Can you be highly successful with zero professions and just a level 1 character? Yes, it is possible. Not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, of course, as anything a level 1 character could do, you could do faster on a level 85 (and presumably have fun things to spend that gold on). Point being, I always recommend leveling professions to max level if you have not already, even on alts (but especially if they are level 75+ alts as you can hit 525 on them, depending on the profession).

Stage 2: Seed Money, or Getting the Snowball Rolling
You have probably heard that it takes money to make money, which is true, but a bit misleading. The reality is that it doesn't take a whole lot of money to at least get more money than you had before. The goal with seed money is to provide a base of capital from which you can start making larger and larger investments. But where do you find the seeds? You find them like anyone finds seeds: by digging for them.

One way to dig for seed money is to actually get down and dirty by doing daily quests. Yes, a gold blogger actually recommending daily quests. Once the snowball starts rolling you won't need to do any daily quests for the gold itself, but if you are starting from nothing, daily quest rewards allow you to at least start expanding. The other benefit from doing these is that it gets you out in the world killing and looting things, some mobs of which drop items that you could sell: greens, cloth, food, or other materials. If you have not already, start getting into the habit of putting a price tag on all the things that grace your bags; an addon might do it automatically for you, but appraising the true market value of an item is 1 part skill, 1,000,000 parts prior experience.

The other source of seeds is low-hanging fruit. Heard about Enchanting Vellums? Ask a guard in any major city to direct you to the local Enchanting trainer, and the Enchanting Supplies vendor is probably nearby. Buy a few stacks for 10s or less apiece and then toss a stack or two of them (as singles) on the AH, letting Auctionator automatically undercut any that may be already on the AH. If there are none, count your blessings, and list them for 2g apiece. One sale at 2g pays for the entire stack, with any further sales bringing pure profit. You can usually do the same with practically anything from vendors, with limited supply recipes commanding hundreds of times more for the same sort of effort. There are a lot of guides out there to give you ideas about markets, and I talk about some of said markets in my other Foundation article, Finding the Margin.

Stage 3: Being the Avalanche, or All Your Gold Are Belong to Us
Part of the benefit of getting your seed money from low-hanging fruit, such as selling vendor recipes, is it gets you acclimated to making small investments that net large returns. Seed money in hand, you simply redefine what you consider a small investment. Spending 10s on Enchanting Vellums should almost be trivial to you by now... but what about spending 50g per stack of Obsidium Ore? As you should know from here and elsewhere, 50g is below the True Vendor Price of Obsidium if you have a Cata-level Jewelcrafter, so it should not even register as a risk. Should you be dropping 5,000g on a hundred stacks at a time? Maybe not at first, but as each investment you make in any particular market grants a return, your purchasing power increases and allows you to either take on more risk, or at least make more and more low-risk buys.

One of my alts is a max level Scribe who I basically abandoned at the end of Wrath because I no longer wanted to be a part of the Glyph racket. Cataclysm rolls around, and in doing my character audit, I note this toon has around 2000g in its bags. From this starting point, I went to the AH and noted that some farmer has sent Azshara's Veil and some other Cataclysm herbs down to 60g per stack. What did I do? I bought 30 stacks of herbs at 60g, leaving me with all those herbs and 200g. At a minimum, each stack of herbs would make four Blackfallow Ink, which sell practically instantly at 15g apiece. Of course, each milling attempt has a chance to give you Burning Embers, which then turn into Inferno Ink that go for 150g at the lowest possible end. In effect, I was taking on zero risk for a fairly good shot at 150g profit per stack, or 75g every two stacks. I do not actually advocate selling the Blackfallow Inks themselves, as there are ways to turn each ink into a different good that adds 20g to its value, as I documented in Low-Impact Inscription.

Once everything has been milled, crafted, and listed on the AH, I waited. Did everything sell? Irrelevant. Did you get discouraged when not all of your Enchanting Vellums sold? The only important thing here is that enough things sold that I got my 1800g investment back plus the unsold merchandise. As it happened, most everything sold so I got a lot more than 1800g back, and what did not sell immediately eventually moved after a few more days of listings and uncutting. Now instead of 2000g, my capital has grown to 5000g, which means I can either purchase 80 stacks of herbs next time instead of just 30, or I could jump into other markets... like buying Blackfallow Ink someone else listed for below the cost of Mysterious Fortune Cards and/or Inferno Ink, saving me the 17+ minutes of milling while fostering the next generation of goblins besides.

Epilogue: ???, or Profit
Where is that Scribe alt now?

The only thing that I have that a brand new auctioneer doesn't is the confidence that comes from experience. Hell, many of the gold blogs I read today did not even exist when I started playing, so in many ways goblins fresh off the boat will have an easier time getting started than I did. The key is to take stock of what you have to work with, start small by collecting seed money and becoming comfortable with the AH, and finally escalating your investments and otherwise being the avalanche. Whether you cash out and buy that Tundra Mammoth once you hit your goal, or reinvest the gold in your alts to get thumbs in more pies is a choice I leave up to you.

Good luck, and most importantly, have fun.

Enchant Scroll Speculation

2011-01-15T18:31:00.000-05:00

In my For the Hoard! post, I warned against following WoW investment advice given by persons with longer time horizons than you. That warning is still in effect, but...

...this is getting a little ridiculous.

Chances are good that if you have an Enchanter, you already knew that your Enchanting peers were dumping scrolls on the market with complete abandon. You would probably even be (somewhat justifiably) upset with this situation, since it destroys any semblance of a market. Well, any semblance of a Seller's Market. After all, if you stumbled upon people flooding the AH with items not only below their (probable) market price, but also below their True Vendor Price (e.g. the cost of mats to craft them), you would buy them all and relist them all day, yes?

Well... maybe.

Take a look at these other Enchant Scroll examples (click for full size):

Some of those listings border on the criminally insane. Enchant Shield - Blocking takes twelve (12) Hypnotic Dust to make and someone listed four (4) of them at 2.95g each. Is the average price of Hypnotic Dust 24s on your server? It fluctuates between 12g and 18g per pinch o' dust on mine, although you probably wouldn't know that based on the above picture. That scroll of Blocking should be at 144g minimum just to break even, but someone felt selling at a 141g loss was better than... just holding onto the scrolls for later?

Fundamentally, that is what enchant scroll speculation is asking you to do: purchase these uber-cheap scrolls and hold onto them for weeks/months until the supply of leveling-Enchanters dries up and the market returns to some semblance of normality. Just like any sort of speculation, there are risks involved... although the risk of buying 3g scrolls is pretty small. The problem starts creeping up once you eliminate the uber-cheap and start working your way up to the, say, 33g-100g scrolls that cost 200g in mats. It is a problem, that is, unless you follow my 2nd Commandment of Investing:

Never invest in something you would/could not end up using.

I bought all of the sub-50g enchanting scrolls listed in the pictures above, and have been stockpiling anything below 20g automatically. I do this without worrying about whether the market will ever recover because A) it probably will recover at some point, but more importantly B) because I can use these myself, or my guild can in any case. In fact, the guild bank has roughly 200 scrolls of various flavors such that any Strength-based DPS will be covered whenever they get a glove upgrade until the end of the expansion. There might be a small issue with the +35 Strength to gloves enchant, actually, considering it is not BiS: Mighty Strength is actually BiS, although it takes two Maelstrom Crystals that are north of 800g apiece at the moment. Nevertheless, I can carry a few in my bags whenever we raid and have something cheap, but effective on-hand so that we aren't wasting time if that guy wants something on his shiny-new drop.

You may think this is a lot of words compared the the easier "Yes, buy cheap scrolls" response. And you would be correct. Be that as it may, I do still feel very strongly that what is a no-brainer for someone with a long-time horizon is bad advice for someone with a more immediate one. Enchanting scrolls are speculations, not investments, and there is no vendor alternative (e.g. selling cut gems from Obsidium) should the market lurch into a bad direction as you are cashing out. So stay smart and stay safe by speculating on things you could see yourself using anyway.

Elitest Jerks, and the People that Love Them

2011-01-13T03:41:00.001-05:00

The website is http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php and if you are at all serious about the PvE aspect of World of Warcraft, you should already have it bookmarked. Why? Because this is where all the the mathematical modeling magic takes place. Why are you stacking Strength as a Retribution paladin? Why do you hear about Enhancement shaman running around with spellpower weapons?* Why is that Unholy Death Knight wielding two 1H weapons and dealing 2,000 DPS more than you?* Because Elitest Jerks (hereafter EJ) said so. Fire mage rotations, Resto druid stat weights, and more can be had for free from people who enjoy simulators and spreadsheet more than you. The format is not always conducive to to finding summaries of the information you care about, but when they do summarize, they do it better than anyone else.

Whether or not you have the site bookmarked, you have probably heard the EJ haters. Maybe you even indulged in it a bit yourself. "If you aren't getting the socket bonuses, you're doing it wrong." "No thanks, I'm going to spec the way I want to." Sure, no problem. I mean, unless you care about maximizing your character's potential, there is no wrong way to spec. If your intention in picking one talent or enchant or gem over another was to improve performance, then there are, in fact, ways of doing it wrong.

Why bring the EJ forums up at all? Simple: the site is a really, really good market indicator.

I alluded to the Defender's Demonseye in my Transitive Property Farming post, for example. The Wrath version of that gem was complete garbage because Parry as a stat suffered diminishing returns faster than Dodge, so you were almost always better off using anything else in red sockets. That was Wrath. In Cataclysm, Parry and Dodge suffer diminishing returns at the same rate so balancing the two stats (11%/11% is better than 12%/10%) becomes very important. I did not know about the Defender's Demonseye before I was looking for something to put into a red socket for Protection paladins, and it was the EJ forums which indicated that the gem was useful at all. So, I bought the pattern, socketed my gear, and decided to toss a few extra on the AH for 150g since Purified Demonseyes were being tanked down to 60g. There was no competition for Defender's Demonseye. I listed some more for 175g. They all sold, usually to the same tank. Raised to 250g each. Still sold. It has been more than 30 days since Cataclysm has shipped and the hardcore JCs will have had gotten 10 cuts by now... and yet I have the Defender's Demonseye market all to myself. The tanks have done their EJ research, but apparently the (other) JCs have not.

Sometimes the EJ advice is not particularly useful to Auctioneers. "Stack Strength gems." Yeah, okay, there are 40 Bold Inferno Rubies going for less than the uncut gem at the moment. But if you dig a little deeper, you may surprise yourself. In browsing weapon enchant scrolls on the AH, I noticed Berserking still up there at 600g. That seems a bit silly, I thought. I tossed a few up and they sold. It was not until I looked at the stat weights for Retribution paladins that I realized that Haste was worth 0.27 per point whereas AP was worth 0.69. In other words, Berserking provides more DPS than Hurricane for Ret paladins by about 150 DPS (based simply on 400 AP vs 450 haste, not uptime considerations). The upcoming patch 4.0.6 will probably shake things up, but until it does, I will continue buying Abyss Crystals at 15g apiece and pumping out Berserking scrolls at 400g margins to the people doing their homework.

Do you have to understand why something sells before you sell it? Nope. But understanding the why of things helps you get an idea of how deep a market might be and when you may want to hop off the train before it hops the rails.

*Not after 4.0.6, of course.

PTR Patch Notes, 1/11

2011-01-11T22:27:00.000-05:00

Some things to eyeball if you have not gotten to eyeballing the PTR notes already:

A socket has been added to all crafted epic armor pieces that did not already have one.
The number of herbs required to create flasks has been reduced, while the Volatile Life needed has been increased slightly.
The drops from Tiny Treasure Chests have been improved slightly.
The Electrified Ether recipe now creates 2 to 3 Electrified Ether instead of 1.

The epic items gaining a socket is very good news as obviously it makes acquiring them more appealing. MMO-Champion is reporting that the flask change is pretty significant, going from 12 herbs down to 8 while the Volatile Life has been increased from 6 to 8. It is hard to overstate my jubilation over this change as it might, might make flasks worth the trouble of actually making now. In the meantime, stock up on Volatile Life. Unless Blizzard has a radically different definition of "improved slightly," I doubt the Potion of Treasure Finding change will amount to much - Heartblossom is a huge pain to farm since the node nerf of 2010, and Auchindoun's current market means these potions cost 84g to make just considering the Heartblossom.

The last note may not seem like a big deal, but I have been making a pretty penny out of Electrified Ether. Not just items made out of the Ethers (the new Cata pets for example), but the literal Ethers themselves. The material cost right now is two Volatile Airs for one, but I have gotten 150g+ for each Electrified Ether despite that being nearly double the cost of the Airs for an item that I can only assume is being bought by people who could make it themselves. You cannot quite make a living out of such sales, but you can very occasionally make a killing.

Transitive Property Farming

2011-01-10T21:53:00.000-05:00

"Hey Azuriel, where is the best place to farm Volatile Fire?"

"The AH."

"No, really."

"Yeah, really."

It is one of the measurable milestones of any Auctioneer's life when they no longer have to worry about farming their own materials. When my friend was asking me the best farming spot for Volatile Fires, the AH was the first place I checked. At that time they were going for around 17.35g each at the cheapest, but there were probably 200+ Volatiles within a 17.35g-22g band. Is that a good price? Well, it depends on why you want some. If you were intending to put up some Scorched Leg Armors for 100g then, no, probably not. If instead you were hoping to replace an Etched-Fire Dagger that had just found a new 999g home, then yeah, those prices are not bad. My friend wanted to farm however, and so I sent him on his way to go fish up some Volatile Fire over in Hyjal.

Sometimes you are just in the mood to farm and that is 100%, perfectly fine. My recommendation though is farming via the transitive property. My friend wanted Volatile Fire and was willing to spend X minutes farming it. Since the AH has plenty at a subjectively reasonable price, if you really want to farm something, then farm something worth more - or easier to acquire - than Volatile Fire, sell it, and buy the Volatile Fire. Or more likely, buy the Fire now and sell what you farm later. "I'm not paying 18g for an item fished out of pools in Hyjal." Okay, cool... then why did you buy my Defender's Demoneye for 250g that I bought uncut off the AH for 45g? The Volatile Fire did not get any cheaper when you fished it out yourself - in fact, that personally-farmed Volatile Fire is probably more expensive considering you spent your otherwise valuable time doing it.

Farming via the transitive property is a fancy term for something most everyone knows instinctively on smaller scales. If you need Wool Cloth, for example, do you head down to Stockades and farm some? How about Copper Bars/Ores? Unless someone is being cheeky and listing Wool Cloth at 300g/stack, chances are you simply buy what you need with gold you got doing something else. There simply appears to be an invisible line after which a person's indignation (Khorium Ore at 60g a piece!) overrides their rational mind (Pyrite Ore is going for 60g per node) and they end up farming something out of spite... that doesn't affect the source of their ire at all, while harming themselves. Don't be that guy.

Low-Impact Inscription

2011-01-07T03:51:00.000-05:00

A month ago, I hated Inscription. Hated it with a passion and intensity that led to a 2,000+ word rant against the profession that would have been eventually been posted here, had Blizzard not opened a timely release valve in the way of low-impact Inscription. What made me so angry? Glyphs. Top to bottom, the entire design of Glyphs and what it did to Inscription... but nevermind. You are going to make gold in less than 20 minutes a day, three times a week, and all without making a single glyph (other than the ones to level you up).

I am pretty late to the blogging party when it comes to commenting on the Mysterious Fortune Card (hereafter MFC*), but that is fine, because there is nothing to really talk about. It sells. It sells in defiance to all common sense. There is plenty of text devoted to barking MFCs, undercutting, "bait & switch," and so on. You won't even need to worry about that. People bark for you, the undercutters will get bought out, and you will sell most of your stock without even trying. Price it between 35g-50g apiece and watch them fly off the shelves.

Depending on the going rates of MFCs and its market saturation, you may actually lose money doing anything else with your Blackfallow Ink. Unless, of course, you desire to profit off Inscription without even having the profession.

The above happens - look for it. Blackfallow Ink should not be trading below 10% of Inferno Ink's going rate, at a minimum. I have been selling Inferno Ink at 190g for the instant sales it generates, and with that low-ball price buying the above 60 ink for 657g would bring back 483g profit, minus the AH cut, in about nine mouse clicks. The beauty of turning Blackfallow Ink into Inferno Ink sales is that you don't even need Inscription to do it. Just park an alt in Dalaran and you are seconds away from the AH, Jessica Sellers, and the AH again. Turning those 60 ink into MFCs at 35g each would bring in 1,000g more profit however, if you did have a scribe.

...so yeah. Inscription is going to be pretty boring to talk about for the next 1.5 years.

Despite MFCs sucking all the oxygen out of the gold blog sphere vis-a-vis Inscription, I did want to offer some advice on making Darkmoon cards. The biggie? Darkmoon Card: Hurricane =! Darkmoon Card: Greatness. The latter was the Darkmoon lottery of Wrath precisely because the trinket was best in slot for most melee classes up until, and even including, Icecrown Citadel. Greatness survived four entire tiers of gear and was still amazing two years after its introduction. Hurricane, on the other hand, is likely to be outclassed as soon as 4.1 hits some months from now. It is already somewhat of a sidegrade to Crushing Weight that drops off the 4th boss in Bastion of Twilight, and people can purchase License to Slay from the JP vendor once T12 rolls around. The point is if you are thinking about jumping in, do so sooner rather than later.

I did sell a Strength Hurricane trinket for 26,000g which set the individual cards at 3250g, or the Inferno Inks at ~300g apiece once you discount the Volatile Life. If it at all looks like you can get a higher return selling the individual cards, I would do that - getting 5000g in the mail from a Three of Winds is always better than getting 400g for a Two of Stones by using Inferno Ink that would have sold five times that price. Inferno Ink that that makes each card worth at least 3500g in MFC sales at 35g apiece.

God, I hate MFCs.

*Not to be confused with that other MFC (Dane Cook, NSFW).

Mobile Armory and You

2011-01-04T18:53:00.000-05:00

Chances are good that you already know about the Remote AH, and how you can pay $2.99/month to buy, list, cancel auctions and so on. What you may not know is that the $2.99 is there if you plan on actually moving any product. If you just want to check to see what is listed on, say, the Neutral AH, that is free. Just use your smartphone or iPod Touch to download the Mobile Armory app and go to town.

You may be confused, as I was at first. The Remote AH is a part of the Mobile Armory, and it's ability to see currently listed items on the AH is a part of its free service. If you are like me, you have toons parked in the goblin cities to periodically check for deals on the Neutral AH, or perhaps even cross-faction toons to keep an eye out for arbitrage opportunities. Well, save yourself several log-ins and potential travel time by using the Remote AH (again, for free) to check up on those without ever having to log off your main character.

As for the actual monthly service, I do not think it is quite there yet. While it is fairly easy to search for specific items, you obviously do not have access to the addons you have when playing the game proper, some of which have more powerful searching and filtering tools (to say nothing about their listing powers). The one feature that would send everything over the top though, would be the ability to buy something on the Horde AH, list it on the Neutral AH, and then purchase it yourself for sale on the Alliance AH. Such arbitrage requires you to have a second account on hand to do it solo, but $15 extra a month is a bit steep in my opinion just to make some extra gold. $3 on the other hand? Instant sale.

If you are using the Remote AH and have some feedback to share, please do so in the comments.

Low-Impact Leatherworking

2011-01-01T15:24:00.000-05:00

If you have a character with a Leatherworking skill of 485 and a character at level 84-85 (it does not need to be the same character), it is quite possible for this scheme to make you thousands of gold in the time it takes you to take three portals. How? First look at the following picture:

Anything jump out at you? For the uninitiated, Savage Leather Scraps are Skinned from lower-level Cataclysm mobs and have no function in of themselves. You can, however, combine five of them at a time into one piece of perfectly good Savage Leather at 425 Leatherworking. In the above picture, we can see that the prices for Savage Leather Scraps are not, in fact, anywhere close to matching their proportionally-priced counterparts. In other words, you can buy five Savage Leather Scraps for ~9.75g, right click them, and sell the result for 35g. I did just that in the opening days of the expansion and ended up with something stupendously large like 14 stacks of Savage Leather without having skinned a single mob.

It would be easy to stop there and be satisfied with our haul, but we can click a few more buttons and increase the profit potential by, oh, let's say a thousand times. With all of your 28% priced Savage Leather, you can combine them via a 485 Leatherworker into Heavy Savage Leather which increases it's value quite a bit already (none was selling at 1000g apiece however). With your Heavy Savage Leather neatly stacked in increments of 10, it is time to take the final plunge: Pristine Hide.

Much like Arctic Fur of the Wrath days, Pristine Hide is something that can be Skinned very rarely from level-appropiate mobs... or very commonly purchased from Misty Merriweather (Alliance) or Threm Blackscalp (Horde) out in Twilight Highlands by anyone with 10 pieces of Heavy Savage Leather to rub together. This was actually one of my favorite activities in Wrath, as you could easily come across cheap Borean Leather on the AH and after some Leatherworking alchemy turn around and start selling Leg Armor kits with a 60% margin. In any case, I had neglected this market for quite some time until there was an auspicious bidding war in /Trade that was establishing Pristine Hide's value in the neighborhood of 1850g.

Yeah, my jaw did the same thing.

Prices have dropped quite a bit since I wrote this article a few days ago, but the underlying scheme still works:

If Scraps x5 < Savage, then Buy.
If Savage x5 < Heavy Savage, then Convert.
If Heavy Savage x10 < Pristine, then Trade.
???
Profit.

Dec 27th Hotfixes

2010-12-28T02:23:00.000-05:00

I always get excited when hotfixes roll out, as they tend to shake up otherwise fairly stable markets. For example:

Dec 27th Hotfixes

Inscription
The following reagents no longer have limits and are now available from Una Kobuna and Casandra Downs in unlimited quantities: Deathwing Scale Fragment, Scavenged Dragon Horn, Bleached Jawbone, Silver Charm Bracelet, and Preserved Ogre Eye.

If you were not aware in a general sense, the items listed above were limited stock vendor items necessary to make the following Inscription relics/offhands:

Even if you did not have a Scribe or were not interested in making those offhand/relics, people (above level 84) still camped the vendor for hours and hours in order to flip the limited stock items on the AH for some serious cash. The Ogre Eyeball, for example, is bought for 26g and some change and was going for 200g-300g on my server. The idea, then, is to jump on this opportunity now before the rest of your server and the market at large corrects what it may otherwise still believe to be a limited item.

The other angle is that this lower vendor price may make the crafting of those offhands and relics profitable whereas it was not before. While the first two on the list are fairly low-level, the last three are all ilevel 346, which means they are at least equivalent stat-wise to anything you can get out of heroics. The Notched Jawbone in particular is pretty amazing for not just plate DPS, but also Protection paladins. With the Jawbone itself accounted for, the biggest question mark becomes the Inferno Ink. Twelve Inferno Ink is pretty pricey considering you could play the Darkmoon Card lottery with 10 and possibly hit the 4000g-6000g jackpot, but I would say the Jawbone should rake in more than what you would get for any of the "of Stones" cards, and would level your Inscription besides. Then again, other Scribes could be flooding the market for that same reason (creating the Notched Jawbone for leveling purposes) so definitely check it out beforehand.

Alchemy and JC Synergy

2010-12-27T00:01:00.000-05:00

How have I been making gold so far this expansion? Several ways, but my favorite is the Alchemy/JC cycle.

I originally picked Alchemy and Jewelcrafting for my main back in TBC because I did not want to rely on the AH to supply the metagems I wanted to cut and sell. The metagem transmutes back then required nine gems and four Primals and were on the Alchemy daily transmute besides. These days, the synergy between these two professions has only deepened and become refined into almost a pure cycle.

What is the cycle? You start with buying Obsidium or Elementium Ore off the AH - in my experience Obsidium Ore is preferable for our purposes, and the bot farmers have driven it down to 70g a stack on my server. Once the ore has been obtained, you prospect all of it with a goal of getting the uncommon Cataclysm gems. As mentioned in other articles, each one of these gems vendors for 5g by itself, or 9g if you cut it into anything at all. Rather than vendoring, we are going to use Alchemy transmutes to bake in some additional profit.

As with all things, you are going to want to check your own realm's AH prices to judge which direction you take the next step. The first thing I recommend is the Transmute: Shadowspirit Diamond. This transmute takes three of every type of uncommon gem, including Nightstones, which are likely to be at or around 100g apiece due to their use in leveling JC and the daily. Fortunately, the Shadowspirit transmute makes two metagems before any transmute mastery procs. Once you have these metagems you can either sell them uncut or cut them yourself if you have snagged any patterns by now.

The second option you have is to utilize the other gem transmutes to turn three uncommon gems of the same color + a few herbs into a rare gem of that same color (e.g. Transmute: Inferno Ruby). The uncut rare gem market right now is a state of flux given the lack of socketable gear for the majority of players combined with a lack of JCs with the appropriate cuts. What this means is that you are not likely to be able to make much of a profit off of selling uncut gems - this state will naturally correct itself over time to resemble what we all remember from epic gems at the end of Wrath. The good news is that cut gems are probably going for 100g+ minimum, turning those three somewhat useless carnelians into, say, Brilliant Inferno Rubies which will sell for 7-9 times as much as the vendor price.

As a sort of thought experiment, imagine that 10 stacks of Obsidium Ore at 70g a stack gives you enough uncommon gems for a single Shadowspirit transmute and two other rare gem transmutes. If you are able to sell the Shadowspirits (cut or uncut) for only 350g apiece, you come out even before considering the rare gem transmutes (cut or uncut), not to mention any rare gems gained by prospecting and/or excess uncommon gems in quantities below three. Odds are good that you will be gaining more than that, widening your possible margin and allowing you to maintain a profit in case Obsidium Ore prices higher on your server.

There Are No Shortcuts... Except This One

2010-12-23T02:13:00.000-05:00

Auctionator.

I have been a huge fan of the classic Auctioneer since I started playing the game back in the beginning stages of TBC, and it worked for me all the way until patch 4.0.1, Destroyer of Addons. With Auctioneer out of commission during that Black Tuesday, I decided to give Autionator a try. And I have never really looked back.

What is the difference? Auctionator is designed to be easy to use. Drag and drop your items into the box (or Alt-Left Click) and it will automatically undercut the lowest auction, with your competition listed to the right. If the lowest is too low, just click on what price you want to undercut. Hell, you can even buy other peoples' auctions or cancel your undercut ones from this same screen. Auctioneer is capable of auto-undercutting, but you actually have to hit Refresh to get the current prices, which doubles the clicks necessary to offload your loot.

The Buy tab is similarly elegant in its simplicity and power. Want to see the current prices of Amberjewel and what it can be cut into? Bam! If you have auctions up that are being undercut you will see a red X next to it, compared with a green check-mark to show you are still the classiest act in town. Your most recent searches are saved along the left-hand side, but you can make shopping lists if you want to be pro. One of my favorite uses for these shopping lists is using the "advanced" search function which looks like this:

This search string will bring up every scroll for that gear slot and clicking the price will re-sort them so the most expensive (and thus most profitable!) are at the top. You can do the same thing with Glyphs if you want to remind yourself how much you hate the Blizzard designers.

I am known to troll the AH for deals on occasion though, and unfortunately Auctinator does nothing to change the hideousness of the default AH screen. That is why I do recommend installing Auctioneer too so you can easily browse 50 items at a time and sort things by prices. As has been reported on some of the other blog sites though, the future of Auctioneer is currently unknown considering the sweeping behind-the-scenes code changes that make scanning the entire AH in a few minutes unreliable at best, impossible at worst. While I recommend using Aunctionator simply because it IS a good AH tool even compared to Aunctioneer, you may want to become familiar with it should Auctioneer suddenly find itself no longer working or being discontinued.