The icy art of making gold - Page 132

Doktre · 02/02/10, 10:00 AM

Originally Posted by Brekk

I would be very careful doing that. Undercutting is fine, but buying up everything on the AH and re-posting them at an aggressively increased price is the sort of price fixing Blizzard does not look kindly upon.

Depending in the scale and severity of it you could get a suspension and ban for that.

I would love to hear any first-hand accounts of price fixing-related bans/suspensions. I just don't think it happens, but if it does, I'd like to hear about the circumstances.

Price fixing occurs on a regular basis in the glyph market, and there are some remarkable stories in this thread where folks pushed Book of Glyph Mastery prices into orbit (5kg per) for extended lengths of time. None of these folks were suspended.

Nilaus · 02/02/10, 12:44 PM

Originally Posted by Brekk

I would be very careful doing that. Undercutting is fine, but buying up everything on the AH and re-posting them at an aggressively increased price is the sort of price fixing Blizzard does not look kindly upon.

Depending in the scale and severity of it you could get a suspension and ban for that.

That is complete bogus! I do that on a regular basis, so does a lot of other players on my server and I am sure that half the readers of this thread are doing exactly that when the opportunity strikes.

I would warn against it because someone just sold their goods to you, so they are likely to put up some more. How long can you afford to buy out the competition. The competition will never tire of it, as they are making money at a steady pace from you.

That being said, whenever I level I'm always shocked about the prices of Vanilla mats, so it is definately a sweet market if you can get it alone. My own personal favorite in that department is Thorium prospected gems.

kaytwo · 02/02/10, 4:27 PM

Originally Posted by Bornakk

Since the launch of the World of Warcraft Armory, we've been regularly releasing updates and new features designed to help players stay connected to the game even when they're not logged in. Today, we wanted to give you a heads-up about a new service now in development that will let players access the Auction House directly through the Armory website or Armory App for iPhone or iPod touch.

While there are still plenty of details to be worked out, we're designing the service to offer auction functionality similar to what's available in-game. Players have been requesting -- and we've been hoping to implement -- a feature like this for a long time, and we're excited that the Armory and the game have evolved to a point that makes it possible.

This is a fairly complex service to develop, due in large part to its unprecedented integration with the game, so we don't have an exact release date yet. It's important to note here that certain elements of the service will be premium-based, which we'll go into more detail on once the service functionality is finalized. As with all of the services we offer, we plan to integrate the Auction House and Armory in a way that won't disrupt the gameplay experience, and we won't release it until it meets the quality standards that we've set for our other features and services. You may be seeing bits and pieces of the Auction House service pop up in the test builds we use for the public test realms as we go through the process of internal testing. We'll have more info to share with you here and at World of Warcraft Community Site as we get closer to release.

Source

Still far off on the horizon, but this certainly poses some interesting questions about the future of AH automation.

Merovengian · 02/02/10, 6:12 PM

Originally Posted by Doktre

I would love to hear any first-hand accounts of price fixing-related bans/suspensions. I just don't think it happens, but if it does, I'd like to hear about the circumstances.

Price fixing occurs on a regular basis in the glyph market, and there are some remarkable stories in this thread where folks pushed Book of Glyph Mastery prices into orbit (5kg per) for extended lengths of time. None of these folks were suspended.

Bans MAY happen, but you have to be extremely unethical and very obvious to attract the attention of a GM. Example, I routinely completely buy out several smaller bottleneck markets and repost at rediculously high prices, up to and including solid color epic gems. This is very risky and if you don't have massive capital to back buy undercutters it will end up in huge failure. That said, it's not griefing.

What will get you in trouble is spamming something like "Buying all XXX for YYY rediculously high amount, NO LIMIT, COD NOW" and then allowing them to sit in your mailbox for 2 days while you basicly eliminate the competition. I say this because last weekend I attempted to throttle the frost lotus market on my server by using such a strategy, as mentioned previously in this thread, and unsurprisingly was contacted by a GM Sunday afternoon. He sent me the standard abuse macro and told me he was returning all COD's sent to my account, and then kicked me off for a relog.

In summation, you may be able to do it and not be caught, but if you do get caught, it's not the end of the world, at least the first time. It wasn't very profitable, and I wouldn't reccommend it.

Gaff · 02/03/10, 3:59 AM

Originally Posted by kaytwo

Source

Still far off on the horizon, but this certainly poses some interesting questions about the future of AH automation.

You'd expect this to have the same effect as when any market moves to an electronic platform:

- All sorts of clever tools for automatically trading and tracking the AH will appear.

- Prices will tend towards their fair value and will fluctuate much less.

- People who currently do well by trading niche markets will lose out.

- People who like to farm (be it crafting mats, or rare drops) should do better since they will have better information about what to gather.

- The goblins that run the AH will see their takings increase, which is good as it should help deflate the economy a little.

The change won't directly benefit gold farmers. If you don't believe me you may want to consdier why gold farmers would want to automatically buy and sell saronite all day to make wow gold when they could automatically buy and sell microsoft shares all day to make real gold.

However since gold farmers are good at, well, farming and farmed goods will have fairer prices it will probably help them indirectly.

Flechette · 02/03/10, 4:19 AM

Originally Posted by Gaff

However since gold farmers are good at, well, farming and farmed goods will have fairer prices it will probably help them indirectly.

Wouldn't that also benefit the legitimate farmers, in essence canceling out?

Tanoh · 02/03/10, 5:26 AM

Originally Posted by Merovengian

In summation, you may be able to do it and not be caught, but if you do get caught, it's not the end of the world, at least the first time. It wasn't very profitable, and I wouldn't reccommend it.

There's a huge difference between taking advantage of an unintended side effect of game mechanics. Breeching a verbal agreement with your fellow players to buy their items through the use of cash on delivery mechanics, and simply posting auctions that people can buy if they think the price is fair.

I'm not surprised they frown on the CoD thing, but so far I've never heard anyone getting in trouble for posting auctions. Nor should they.

• Narcosleepy · 02/03/10, 1:50 PM

Stop posting worthless speculative shit such as "I think this will be bad" and "lots of folks will write bot programs to control the armory web site", etc.

I have cleaned out the crap best as I can. Gaff's post is an example of GOOD discussion on the subject.

Zynum · 02/09/10, 5:42 PM

Depending on your server, you may still be able to make a quick couple of thousand gold selling lovely charm bracelets. You can harvest bagloads of them in minutes solo farming the FL trash in Ulduar.

• Chicken · 02/09/10, 5:46 PM

Originally Posted by Zynum

Depending on your server, you may still be able to make a quick couple of thousand gold selling lovely charm bracelets. You can harvest bagloads of them in minutes solo farming the FL trash in Ulduar.

My server's weekly raid quest was in Ulduar today and completely none of our raiders, myself included, got any Lovely Charms on the way to Flame Leviathan. It's likely this particular method of easily generiting charms has been nerfed.

zoombini · 02/09/10, 7:58 PM

Confirmed:

Lovely Charms should not have dropped from enemies that do not give experience and this has been recently fixed.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> After patch lovely charms not dropping

Cuer · 02/19/10, 8:39 PM

Some announced 3.3.3 changes with economic ramifications:

* Runed Orbs: Recipes which require this item have had their material requirements significantly reduced

Inscription
* Most recipes that required 2 inks now only require 1.

Mining
* Titansteel Bar: Creating this item no longer results in a cooldown.

Tailoring
* Glacial Bag: Creating this item now invokes a 7-day cooldown.
* The cooldown and location requirements have been removed from creating Moonshroud, Spellweave and Ebonweave.

Interesting shift on cooldowns; it's gone from the crafted cloth, but added to the Glacial Bag, to keep that from being crafted in mass quantities.

reydien · 02/19/10, 9:51 PM

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Patch 3.3.3: Frozo The Renowned

Originally Posted by Zarhym

I'm sure some of you noticed this in the 3.3.3 PTR patch notes:

* Frozo the Renowned has moved into the Dalaran Magus Commerce Exchange and will be trading your Frozen Orbs for various other trade goods.

For those curious, here are the items for which Frozo will be trading. These each cost 1 Frozen Orb unless noted otherwise in parentheses:

* Crusader Orb (6)
* Runed Orb (4)
* Eternal Fire
* Eternal Earth
* Eternal Water
* Eternal Air
* Eternal Life
* Eternal Shadow
* Frost Lotus
* Pattern: Frosty Flying Carpet [Tailors Only] (6)

PTR Patch 3.3.3 Notes: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> PTR Patch 3.3.3 Notes

Unless they introduce limited supply, that is 1 frozen orb = 1 frost lotus or 1 Eternal fire. Frozen orbs have already jumped from ~6g to over 17g on my server, and I expect it to keep rising.

Mideci · 02/20/10, 5:34 AM

Originally Posted by reydien

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Patch 3.3.3: Frozo The Renowned

Unless they introduce limited supply, that is 1 frozen orb = 1 frost lotus or 1 Eternal fire. Frozen orbs have already jumped from ~6g to over 17g on my server, and I expect it to keep rising.

And frost lotus to keep cratering. It's not like these price moves will be all on one commodity.

Belegûr · 02/20/10, 11:36 AM

I also expect another consequence: with lotuses purchasable for frost orbs, and therefore losing much of their value, people will probably farm them less, meaning that other plants used for flasks will probably go up in prices. I'd start stocking up on Lichbloom/Icethorn/Goldclover now.

Edit: I wonder if eternal lives will go up too. If people farm less plants there will be much less available, and I can hardly see someone buying an eternal life with a frost orb if they've already spent them on lotuses. Maybe, maybe not, could be interesting to see.