Inflation is a pretty well understood concept in Economics. I put together a post back on page 37 that discusses it pretty thoroughly, and relates it to the WoW world.

The Art of Making Gold

If you are interested, I am sure you will find it informative and enlightening.

Is there any point, monetarily wise, in soloing the lvl 60 5 mans not being an enchanter, or would my time be better spent farming BT stairs, etc? If so which ones give the best gold/hr? I’m thinking its Live Strat, righteous orbs still sell for about 30g on our server.

If you're not an enchanter then you'll always get more gold out of the BT stairs then out of a lvl 60 5 man.

Righteous orbs are nice, but the drop chance isn't that high. You'd be lucky to get 2 in one run.

Except he's worth 9.1g.

As well as they are nerfing the reward in the next patch. I haven't copied over a character to the PTR so I can't say what the quest reward is though.

They are taking away the potions, as far as I know.

Nothing impressive, due to everyone having that goal. The mana pots went for more. This could obviously very well be server specific.

I just want to check my logic here. On my server the void crystals are literally the same price as large prismatics are. I've gone and bought up a lot of void crystals. Certainly not all the ones that are up at any given time, but the ones that run at about the same price as the LPS. I know that people are worried about the new enchanter spells to break one void into two LPS, but it seems to me that there really isn't any way to go wrong with this. As long as I don't panic and sell out the voids at a loss, either A I'll be able to break them bit by bit and sell them off as LPS and I very much doubt that the supply of LPS will ever grow so great that the price will halve. Or B, even if that does happen that the supply of LPS grows so great the price halves, it must be because so many voids are being broken and thus the supply of voids should be dwindling. Thus the price of voids will rise and I can sell my supply of voids at a greater price than I bought them (In fact, if they remove the timer on the breaking spell, like some people have suggested, the second option could be the more likely).

The only real setback that I can see is the chance that there are so many voids currently in people's banks that both the price of LPS plummets to less than half of what it is now AND there is such a backlog of Voids that people aren't trying to sell now, that the price of voids drops as well. However, long term, I don't see the people that are currently holding onto voids as the type of people that are willing to spend a month trying to sell them off either. So I doubt that even if they have a couple hundred voids in there bank that they will stick with it long enough to have a lasting affect on the market price of voids. Anyway, what do you guys think? Any other obvious flaws in my logic?

None of us know what the price points of LPS and VC's will be. I and others expect that VC's will end at about 5g to 10g higher than LPS, simply because the real limiting factor will be transmute cooldowns. The VC->2 LPS transmute will probably be worth about 15g in it's own right, which is roughly on par with other 24 hour transmutes.

The only flaw in your planning is that you're putting aside a decent amount of money that you could be investing now. Also the price of VC's may actually decline (along with the price of LPS) once guild banks start flooding the market with their stockpiles (which are vast). So you could be currently stock piling VC's only to find them cheaper later. Or maybe they'll still rise yet more? It'd hard to tell, and speculating is inherently risky.

Lastly, LPS will probably skyrocket the day and week of 2.4, and then begin a steep and irreversible decline.

Quick question, I forget the exact name of the schematic I got in Kara the other night but it's the +crit scope that requires 375 ENG. I'm currently sitting at 361 skill. I have plenty of money and could powerlevel to 375 making repair bots, or go farm the other scope schematic out in Netherstorm and make those. My question are, is the +crit scope profitable? Will the new 2.4 Patch goggles require 375 engineering to upgrade, so I should just go ahead and boost up to 375 anyways?

On my server the crit scope is profitable (most of the time). The materials to make the scope are easy if you are also a miner (with a epic flying mount). However, sometimes several people list them at the same time bringing the price down. They don't move very fast - maybe 1-2 a week. 400-500g per scope is common.

Now that the tid bit about the JC's being able to convert 18 uncommon gems to 1 rare gem has been out for a little bit, are any of you seeing a market response? On my server, there has been no adjustments to the price of either. Currently the average uncut price of all rares is roughly 32g. This is bounded by talasites at 10g, and rubies at 50g. I've been buying up batches of uncommons for an average price of 75s each. This gives me an average conversion cost of around 13.5g per rare. This makes me think that I have about a 15g margain of error for a decrease in the average bundled rare price. Even if the conversion is limited to once per 24 hours, this seems like a great opportunity.

I have been trying to find uncut, uncommon gems, but I think the people who would get large quantities of them on my server are just lazy enough to vendor them, rather than try and try and get any added value. Either that or they are getting eaten up by alchemy transmutes. I might have to look and see if fel iron ore is cheap enough on the AH to buy it and then prospect.

While a 15g "margin of error" may appear safe at the moment, it's more risky than a lot of people realize. I regularly communicate/collude with roughly one third of the high-volume JCs on Bonechewer Horde side, and our current stock of uncut uncommon gems awaiting transmutes in 2.4 will provide an average of 300-400 rare gems each. This number will only continue to grow as 2.4 languishes on the PTR. Combine a massive influx of rare gems with a shrinking demand as non-T6 raiders begin spending badges for epic gems in their best-in-slot gear and you have an inevitable and significant decline in prices across the board. Further, you have to realize that as rare gems are no longer the best-in-slot available for players, some (or many) will forsake rare gems for uncommon gems until they can upgrade to epic gems. Frankly, the hefty premium in gold per stat rare gems currently enjoy is only because of the intangible value of being best available. Patch 2.4's removal of that value may very well reduce rare gem prices more than the changes in supply.

That said, I *am* buying uncommon uncut gems from the AH - but not for more than 40s each (of which there is a surprisingly high amount available). At 7.2g per random uncut rare gem, I will only need to be able to sell the cut gems for 8g, on average, to break even. This should allow a hefty 25% or so profit margin (10g per uncut, on average) in even the worst-case scenario.

Edit: I wanted to be clear that "300-400" rare gems is not a typo or an exaggeration. While 50+ stacks of each uncommon gem is a lot, they do accumulate over the months. Sometimes, being a pack rat really pays off. Thank god for mass mail between alts and one-man guild banks.

The problem is the same as constructing Darkmoon decks: you are bounded by whatever resource happens to be the rarest. In my case, I'm having trouble finding Golden Draenite in bulk for less than 1g each. It doesn't matter how many cheap peridote I can get because if I only have 30 Golden Draenite, I'm only making 10 gems. Less than that actually, because I have two alchemists that usually do Earthstorm Diamond transmutes.

The other issue is that the existence of this recipe increases the supply of rare gems. Combine this with a demand drop for rare gems because epic gems are purchasable for badges and you have a guaranteed price drop. The only thing that could lift the price is an undiscovered transmute or glass recipe that turns rare gems into epic gems. But even if they made an analogous 3 of each rare become 1 epic recipe, I doubt prices would lift. Even if rare gems cost 30g each (a bargain on my server), the net cost would be 540g, which is already above the average cost of epic gems. Rare gems will almost certainly drop in price. I've stopped buying adamantite ore for this reason, actually.

There are a few different strategies I use at different times depending on the market conditions:
1) Buy, Produce, Sell
This is "business as normal" where the costs of your mats are reasonable and the price of your finish product is reasonable with a healthy profit margin in between.
2) Buy, Produce, Hold
This happens when the price of the finished product takes a temporary dip and you expect it to come back in a short period of time. It still makes sense to keep producing as you know that once the one idiot who screwed up your market gets bought out, things will return to normal.
3) Stock up raw mats
This happens when I see someone dump a bunch of what I need on the market at a very cheap price, or I expect a shortage of that mat in the near future. I will buy up a lot and hold it expecting to use it later.
4) Play dead
When a market goes crazy, or upside down with raw mats costing close to or more than the finished product, I will just suspend everything, sometimes for weeks, until it returns to profitability. I quit buying, I quit selling, and sometimes I will just hold some inventory to make it easy to restart operations once the market favors it again.
5) Shut down and unload
When I think my finished product will be dropping in value considerably in the future and is not likely to recover, I will quit buying raw mats, finish producing anything in the queue, and unload everything I can to completely escape the market. It is pretty rare that I do this in any of my ventures (maybe once or twice a year) because usually if something is worth doing, it will recover in the long term
6) Raw speculation
This is when I expect the value of a good to go up radically in a short period of time. Buy a bunch off the AH today up to a certain price expecting to sell it later for far more than that price. I have learned that this is almost never worth doing for 3 reasons: 1) it usually takes a long time, during which you could have made more money using that cash to do something else, 2) people tend to jump on this stuff pretty quick and the price rarely moves enough to make it worth while in the long run (minus the 5% AH fee), 3) if you guess wrong, you end up spending a lot of money to lose a lot of money.

As for the Void Crystal market, I would advocate strats 2) and 3). If you happen to get some VCs from disenchanting, hold on to them. If you see some available on the market for a decent price, buy some, but only enough that you can convert them yourself.

Avoid speculating. Don't buy 200 VCs expecting the price to double, because it won't, and you can easily find yourself dumping them for less than you bought them, trying to compete with a guild bank that wants a little extra gold, but did not spend 3-5kG to accumulate them.

Plan to go into 2.4 with 2-4 stacks. This gives you about a 2 month supply for your own production. It is very unlikely that the price of LPS's will drop to half of what you are paying now, so there is very low chance of losing money. If the price does go up temporarily, you will be isolated from that, and not have to spend a lot to get them. If the price goes up a lot, you can just sell some excess at a profit and not even worry about converting them yourself.

I am guessing that most of the money to be made off of this will be the 10-15g per day that the enchanters get for breaking them up. The LPS market is pretty vast, and the 1 day cooldown will prevent this from flooding the market. The fact that you need lvl 70 and reputation will prevent a lot of the sub-70 alts from being used to crank them out as well.

Remember, people have been D/E'ing epics for over a year now, and no one has vendored any of them, and very few have gotten used. Where do you think all those Void Crystals are right now?

Too right. I have collected about 50 of them one at a time doing heroics or DE'ing blues and getting lucky. Our guild bank has several hundred last i checked, even after passing them out whenever anyone needs an enchant and crafting BT shadow resist items. Magister's Terrace will only make this worse. I plan on doing a heroic run every day for a while to try and get the mount. With every boss dropping epics, and most of the group i do it with not needing any, that's a lot of void crystals being generated relative to their demand.

The price might spike just after the badge vendor gets unlocked in the event as hundreds (thousands?) get a new weapon on the same day. If there's any time to unload that'll be it. However, as has been stated, it's hard to predict such things. Too many people with stockpiles planning on unloading at the same time, and too many people pre-buying for their anticipated needs, the price can conceivably crash rather than spike. Personally I think it's too risky. Rather than spending my time browsing the AH and figuring, I'm just running dailies at the moment. Not as rewarding as playing the market successfully perhaps, but there's an immediate return for no risk (barring durability loss).

The AH appears unchanged but apparently the supply side chain of large volumes of Adamantite Ore as COD shipments is failing.

Regarding the vast stock piles of Voids in guild banks. I can only speak to my personal experience with this one. My previous guilds passed out voids as they were DEed. My current guild does hold them and I believe does have a huge stockpile of them. What I do not see changing however is the psychology of the people in charge of the guild bank. By that I mean, I believe there are two main reasons why we have a large stockpile. A, the bank wants a stockpile so that raiders will always have one when they ask for one for SR gear, Enchants on PVE gear, etc. B, the guild officers all have better things to do with their time that play the AH, be it Raiding/Raid planning/or just making there own money on the AH. So I am very doubtful that guilds will really unload VC onto the market. I don't think that even if the price per VC jumped from 20g to 30g, any of the officers in my guild would figure that it was worth the time to unload some of the VCs we have built up, or if they did, that they would feel like continuing it for more than a week before they lost interest. I guess my main point is this, if people have a stock pile built up (100+, at least), there is motivation, or lack of motivation that is the cause of them sit in the bank. I don't see a one per day transmute change as being enough to drastically affect the personal motivations to suddenly start selling something that they have been happy to just drop in the bank and forget about thus far. Anyway, just wanted to throw that argument out there to see what people thought...

This statement is false. Databases don't work this way... and even if they did, the DBA's don't have the power to alter the game economy to reduce their load.

Seen the same thing on my server. Adamantite ore is dropping back to 25g/stack (down from 28-30) and theres a huge surge in raw blue quality gems which is driving down the whole market as people seem to have started panicing and are unloading their entire stockpile of gems.

In fact our server has seen a general surge all of a sudden in most raw materials including Primals, Herbs, Arcane dust, Greater planar essences (not shards), and Knothide leather. Green quality gems are in short supply as people are stockpiling them, and there is a shortage of Netherweave cloth (or more people are aware of being able to vendor it). Feels like everyone has suddenly started farming and stopped doing dailies.

I'm not sure if it's worth stocking up too much in anticipation of the market picking up again or to wait it out and see what happens. I have fair stockpiles of most things which I can happily use for my alts/main if the market stays sour, but I have a feeling that it will stay like this for a while.

I never really saw it below 3 gold a stack terribly often, even when BC came out and everyone and their mother was blasting through tons of humanoid mobs and trying to unload gobs of cloth, but I still find stacks every now and then on the AH or just in trade for under 3g. Some people don't really want to be bothered to create one thousand heavy netherweave bandages, and then go vendor them. Selling them to a player for a discount is a better option in their eyes. While I haven't seen any cheap cloth in the past 3 or 4 days, about a week ago I spent ~1k gold on stacks, so it's out there, you just have to catch it.