I have no doubt that there are very rational reasons behind the difference in price right now. But if you read what you quoted me as saying, I say: "even if the G/badge were the exact same." So I'm not talking about why people are willing to spend more on vortex than they are on nether, I'm talking about the choice that people spending badges will make and to them if a primal nether sells for 100g and a nether vortex sells for 140g, the rational thing to say would be, the primal nether is worth more. But what I'm arguing is that even if this was the case, people won't be rational and will instead say, even though I should be able to sell the primal nether for more g/per badge, I'd prefer to spend badges on a vortex to sell.

As far as the gear that they are being used on, yeah the gear is very different and that could be part of why people value vortex over primal nether. On the other hand, primal nether are what are used for the BOE crafted items out of Sunwell...

It's safe to conclude that a badge will have a "value" of something that ultimately is close to x once things stabilize. It's also equally safe to assume that irrationality and external factors will create situations that don't make sense on the face of it. For example, primal nethers come from 5-mans that aren't heroic Magister's Terrace (why Blizzard?). Therefore, primal nethers won't be sold quite as expensively "per badge' as nether vortexes or gems.

For example, Seaspray Emeralds are green gems which are generally not desired. It's pretty unlikely people are turning in 15 badges for Seasprays ever when 15 badges will buy a Spinel. So it's not likely Seasprays will track the "per badge" price.

I think we all agree that primal nethers are primarily coming out of banks at the moment and that we are likely running out of bank supplies of primal nethers as well. Are we days away? Weeks? Who's to say. But the backlog is going to disappear and the fact remains that eventually the price will likely begin to come closer to the badge equivalent value, while probably never really getting there. That said, If there's an anomaly in the vortex:spinel ratio that sits around after the gem vendor is open, I'd be somewhat surprised. Badges are fairly easy to come by and people will work under the margin fairly aggressively to reset the ratio I'd imagine.

If not, /shrug. Arbitrage it is.

I have seen Vortexes at sale for about 180 to 300+ Gold (the server is one of the older and more populated ones). The price ist not irrational and only part of it is influenced by people dumping their stockpiles into the market. The economic answer is obvious, if you look at it from the other end:

What would you pay for a badge?
For the majority of players, gold translates into equipment for mains and twinks as well as epic mounts, consumables, enchantments and socket stones. Most players will prefer impressive equipment over anything else from that list. But the equipment for badges is much more impressive than most items obtainable for Gold (exception: bop tradeskill "masterpieces" and girdles/boots, shoulders/whrists for vortexes and hearts). Therefore most players won´t part with their badges for a price of only 10gold/piece. And who can blame them? They can trade in hundreds of badges for the best pve - items obtainable for them or their twinks. Almost no one will have "enough" badges. Only a small number of players will trade in badges for Vortexes to sell them. Some players will trade badges for Vortexes to upgrade their own gear -mainly smiths for the new recipes and people who want one of the girdles/belts. But there are many players with a lot of gold and not enough badges to get every item they want for their mains and twinks. These will prefer to buy the Vortexes instead of spending their badges for them. I´m one of them. I don´t do a lot of heroics with my twinks. Every badge ist precious - 30 badges is more than I collect in one month. If I could buy one badge for 25 Gold I´d still be delighted.

Primal Nethers are different. They are mass produced every day. Every successful heroic yields at least one. Once the stockpiles from the last months are sold, there will still be a substantial supply of Nethers for the auctioning house every day.

You haven't been looking then. You don't have T6 legs on your character from the Armory now, and the Badge legs are better than the T6 ones. In fact, most of your gear is less than T6 level, and most of the badge gear is approximately T6 level. In specific, just as a first look, you could use the legs, the belt, and the chestpiece. If you want to discuss further, we can take it to a rogue thread.

The problem with this logic is
1. Badges themselves aren't tradable
2. Badge/hour rate increases massively when you no longer need badge items (ie, you're a well geared raider)

Thus you will have massive oversupply of badges with the raiders, and undersupply with casuals. Badges can't be sold from one group to the other, so raiders will dump their badges into nethers and gems regardless of how much they would be worth to the casuals.

The value of badges in the form of nethers and gems will depend on the hourly influx of badges to raiders, not on their intrinsic value for a casual player. The economy won't have enough gold/demand for nethers/gems to feed raiders hundreds of gold per week.

Imagine 3 months from now, when a raiding guild clears SW/BT/(MH) every week. That's potentially 40 badges per week for every raider. Add ZA, and that number reaches 55ish? If badges get a market value around 20g, those raiders would have to be paid 1k gold each per week doing what they do anyway. That's not likely to be sustainable, so badge value will have a lower equilibrium value.

Would casuals pay 20g per badge to get their badge gear? Sure, no doubt. But they can't, so you can't estimate price from it.

For those of you who still like to farm a lot, the mana cell quest presents you with a good opportunity. The mana beasts that you can see when you use it have a decent drop rate on motes of mana, you don't have to worry about other mobs, and even at peak times, there aren't that many people doing it. The guys respawn damn fast too. Casters have a slight advantage though, since the worms have a damage shield.

For people arguing about why nethers vs. vortexes don't have a rational price ratio, one reason is glaringly obvious: Heroics don't drop Nether Vortexes. Thus there is simply a larger supply of nethers from Badges+stockpiles than there are vortexes from Badges+raiding stockpiles. Add to that the point made about consumers being irrational, and price comparisons get tricky. Gems vs. vortexes is a much better comparison and while I expect to see some irrational price behavior I have good hopes that prices on all badge-purchased items will only increase in price due to decreased badge supply.

My server has vortices at what appears to be the widely reported average of 275-325. Primal nethers however, have made it up to 130 or so vs their previous 50-75. What's more they seem to still be climbing, which i gather is unusual, and was if nothing else more of an increase than i expected.

nethers have a lot more uses then vortexes i imagine the need for vortexs will be filled rather quickly leading to only a slow trickle of new demand.

Nethers on the otherhand are used in many, many tradeskill recipes, notably spellthreads which will be in high demand when badge vendors open up.

Yeah, I know what each goes into. What I failed to realize was what a large proportion of nethers must have come from the badge vendor, which is now a poor deal given the wider options.

The price of ghost mushroom and gromsblood have gone over the roof due to exceeding high demand by both high-end guilds(those in SW) and lesser progressed ones which progress from SSC/TK to BT having more demons to kill.

It is common to find a stack of mushrooms for 100g and gromsblood for 60 on the AH and they get snapped up.

This make farming them actually worth the time. A good place I found is in Maraudon, you can average 2 stacks a hour if you know all the spawn spots

I don't know if my spot's better, but I know it's full of Groms *and* Shrooms, and is also resettable. It's Dire Maul:East. If you head out from the east entrance (near Camp M) and do a little loop to and through the courtyard, you should get about 7-8 groms, 4-5 mushrooms and a few dreamfoil every reset, which just happens to take about 12 minutes if you whack a couple bosses along the way.

If you want to make serious gold with little risk, try creating a character on one of the servers farthest in SSO progression and studying how their markets react to the initial releases of the heroic badge and epic gem vendors. Chances are that your server's markets will behave similarly when your heroic badge and epic gem vendors are released, so you can plan ahead of the inevitable seismic price fluctuations and buy/sell certain goods accordingly.

This may hold true for most servers, however on Turalyon I don't think it's viable. Our market is insanely unstable, and far off the mark of any other server that we've ever seen or heard of.

Nether vortexes were actually selling for 150g for a couple days. They've come back up a little to about 170ish, however I seriously doubt any other server is hovering below 200g per nether vortex.


Gems are also quite low here. For some reason our server is just a bunch of cheap asses. Seasprays are below 100g each. Blue / Yellow / Purple are all selling for 150ish. Pyrestones shot up a little bit, and of course, spinels are no where to be found.



By the way, for any guilds holding onto some huge stockpile of epic gems... I'd offload them ASAP. We had in the range of 50-100 of every gem (except spinels). I've been selling them slowly over the last 2 weeks. It takes time, and honestly, they don't sell that fast if you try to get a reasonable price. In 2 weeks people will be able to buy their own gems, and your market share will decrease substantially.

You may want to wait at least until the Heroic Badge vendor is released. Masses of people will be looking to socket their T6-like badge gear with the highest quality of gems. With the demand for epic gems so high and the supply still very low, Phase 3B of SSO will probably be a good time to capitalize on a large stockpile of epic gems.

Is anyone actually getting Fel Lotus from the trees in Skettis? Either I am ridiculously unlucky or it's not working as intended.

On Frostwhisper EU I sold maybe 10-12 vortexes in the first couple of days after the patch for 250-275 each. Currently they've been stable for more than least a week at 150-160g. Nethers started at 50g andvery, very quickly plummeted as the AH was flooded with stock and have stabilised at around 25g (the same price as a shard). Currently I'm saving my badges (I have a fair few that I don't want gear from) to buy epic gems and hoping that they'll start off a a decently high price - and at the same time, hoping that everyone else is saving their badges for the gear vendor.

A few observations from my server: Vortex seem to be pretty stable around 150g, and I expect them to remain there for some time, Nethers at the same time seem to be very stable around 25g, and I expect them to rise in price in the future, and bought up a stack, just as I see many other people have done too. (I've seen lots of people having up to 10 nethers on ah, which implies that they have either been emptying their bank for nethers or for badges, and hopefully the banks will run dry. Either way, when gems are added to the badge vendor, the nether prices will most likely increase to near the gold/badge ratio of gems.)

I have also recently seen a great drop in price of arcane dust on my server, and with a lps market that's still going strong, I've been selling them for 23-28g a piece, making me a good profit of 8-12g per craft by crafting arcanoweave bracers, a thing which has otherwise been difficult to do on my server, due to arcane dust prices of up to 2g a piece.

The most dramatic change on my server's economy however, is a major boost to the prices of consumables, seeing that my server is #11 in europe, and got 8 guilds entering SW on horde side alone, plus just as many guilds entering MH/BT, I really should have foreseen this. Fact is Flasks of Supreme power price got upped from 30g to 50g within a few days, and has now been steady for a week, all other flasks have increased in price too. I think I could easily have earned a thousand gold or more from stacking up on consumables. Instead I'll now be trying to stack up a few leg enchants of each type, until the release of the new badge vendor.

I call BS. 1. It is sustainable, as long as given conditions are followed, 2. It is as unpredictable as drops doing dailies (read: not at all), and 3. It *DOES* have opportunity cost.

Time is money, friend. Unless you have two accounts (not everyone does), you cannot both scan the AH *and* "play" WoW.

If you want to drive to a club that's fifteen miles away, do you refer to your speed in miles per second? Unless you're on the freeway in Seattle in rush-hour, anything slower than 20mph is not sustainable. :P

Giving gold/hour and a rough guestimate at the amount of time said activity will take gives a fair, roughly accurate, and easy way to mentally do cost-benefit analysis.

Turning 50 stacks of cloth into heavy bandages certainly isn't something I want to sit around doing, but computing the time it takes to 1.) Click my "bid/buy" macro 2) Click my "retreive all mail" macro, and 3) Click my "make all bandages" macro allows me to write:

It takes roughly five minutes for me to bid/buyout all [Netherweave Cloth] and start churning them into [Heavy Netherweave Bandage]. The actual process completes about ten minutes later (assuming I have a completely empty inventory when I start). Average net profit is 20g Monday through Thursday and 25g Friday through Sunday. My eyeball gold/hour: 400-500g/hour. Account idle time gold/hour: 80-100g/hour.

Please, what's a better way of putting that?

The condition required for it to be sustainable is a pretty big one, you must have a X on the AH for below Y Price always. If it takes you 20 minutes to turn 50 stacks, there needs to be 150 stacks of X on the AH for a specific price. It is not a bad gold making idea if your server supports such an economy, but in the end you made 80g and because the conditions are not sustainable you are not going to make 240g/hr.

If you make 1$ for a 1 min job, it doesn't mean you made more money than the person who made 50$ in an hour unless you are able to repeat that 5$ 10 min job over and over again 60 times.

When we talk about drops during dailies, mobs actually have specific drop rates.

When you drive on a freeway the speed 20mph is sustainable regardless of the distance.

Look at it this way:

If you pay me $10 to mow your lawn, and it takes me half an hour, I'm making $10 per half hour. I am NOT making $20 an hour, because I can only mow your lawn once every few weeks. If your lawn is the only lawn I mow and the only way in which I make money, I'm making $10 during that half hour, and $10 during that hour, and $10 during that day, and $10 during that few week period. In other words, I'm making $10/2 weeks or whatever. I would say that it makes more sense to discuss it this way, rather than saying "Well, I made $10 during a half hour so I can make $20 an hour mowing lawns." That doesn't hold true, because I can't mow 2 lawns an hour necesarily because of moving from lawn to lawn and running out of lawns which need to be mowed.

However, as Toraa said, if you give a detailed description of what you are doing along with every reasonable way of describing your income from that activity, it doesn't matter whether people disagree with your way of putting it, as they can actually understand what you are doing.

In my opinion, the best way of describing it would be to say:
"I can do activity A for B amount of time every C days, making D amount of gold each time I do it. This equates to E amount of gold/hour, but I can only do it for B every C, so I really make about F each week."

Obvously, replace A, B, C, D, E, and F with numbers that make sense.

Yeah you are just unlucky, got like 2 or 3 from farming the trees while waiting to get a slot for the SW raid .
So yeah they drop but I would say a bit less than the Black Lotus previously (but my sample size is pretty small).