The milling data on wowhead has reached over a hundred thousand samples. It's clear there is no difference between lichbloom, icethorn, and adder's tongue (and no difference in the lower tier either). Tiny sample sizes are simply anecdotal at best.

Icy Pigment Milling Data

Auctioneer confirms this data, per stack of 5 herbs:

Adder's and above, 300% Azure pigment and 50% Icy pigment
Below Adder's, 250% Azure pigment and 25% Icy pigment

On another subject, the vendor price on [Nerubian Legguards] has dropped from 5,33 gold to appr. 3,38 gold, making this easy way of printing money pretty obsolete, since now each borean leather piece has to be bought for a price far below 0,4225 gold. That was a hotfix change announced by blue already, as per this MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Recent In-Game Fixes - 4/16/09 link. A fast search to my LW tab, didnt yield any other way of converting leather to vendor-worth items.

Any other items that can be done like that? I remember the blacksmith leggings could be crafted that way. I'm sure there is more available to use.

It seems that enchanting dust has finally settled back down to normal on Earthen Ring. Mats are back to their normal price of 4.5G+/dust 12G/essence as with all these nerf's finally come back to allowing people to get more gear. Has anyone else noticed this happening to them?

Finally: I've finally tracked down 3 of the "people" who sell materials for ridiculous amounts below normal price to being gold farmers. They sell dust for 1/2 the normal price, essences for 6G each, do not respond to any tells, messages, in any clear/concise english and are on 24/7 selling massive quantities of items at a time. I've tried contacting them directly but they are all level 1 alts with similar names (orcie, dorcie, borcie)

What is the best/fastest way to report them and get their accounts locked, banned, changed. If it's beyond the scope of this thread I'll understand then please delete. I know this happens on other servers and since this affects the way I profit I wonder how others have solved this problem.

As have been pointed out many times in this thread there is an obvious solution:
If someone is selling things far below market value, buy it and sell it for market value and you will earn lots of money.

This can only be done a finite amount of time pending available sources of income

. I've got a nice cushion of cash but I can't keep hording/buying thousands of gold of items every day and relist and pray to make a profit.

That's the kicker. These guys have been around for AGES and I just caught wind of their deeds. Driving them out of the market is one way of doing it and making them move onto other more profitable items would help. Currrently they are in the JC/Enchanting market and making a kililng in it compared to me. Selling gems at 1/5 the price (Glinting at 10G each) in which most of us cannot even begin to touch. I'm having to maneuver heavily into trying to find out what time they post, and what items they are doing it but it's been strictly dust/blue gems for the past few months now that I think about it.

The names they use are easy enough to spot and most folks consider them "normal" heck I thought they were until I was told about them then it all made sense. A few of the low ballers I contact and try to set up some sort of price fixing. IF we all profit by driving up higher profits on goods it benefits us all. If Microsoft and Gilette can do it, why can't we? I'm sure i'll get howls of rage/anger for that statement, but it's happening and I'm not the only one doing it.

If the prices they are charging are below the material costs, then you should stop producing, purchase and relist for the price you think is correct.

If the prices they are charging are above material costs, then you may have to accept the fact that they're going to lower the price for that good and you're going to have to take slimmer margins. Try to find other ways to produce the goods you're producing, or you might have to move on to other goods.

I've recently started purchasing goods that are sufficiently below market pricing and relisting them with much success. I'm probably up to 200g a day this way so far, but I'm working on a mod to do it for me automatically. My analysis of my market shows that there's about 4500g sitting in my AH at any given time (and that's profits). Unfortunately, this number is obviously optimistic because it doesn't account for sales at a particular price, but just that someone has listed at that price. Sales data is going to come from inference and spending more time watching the market for various goods, to determine where the market really lives for that item.

There is no fast way for them to be banned but reporting them can lead blizzard back up the trail. They are most likely attempting to launder money with their cheap sales of goods. Though they may be a mule blizzard can see what accounts they have been interacting greatly with a track down the selling accounts that way.

Buying out and reselling in order to raise prices cant work on all markets.

For instance today I had a war in the infinite dust market. I was listing ridiculously low on purpose (3.2 - 3.3) and people were buying me out. Then I relisted again and again. This made me a fast 1k gold and probably annoyed that person and caused him to leave the market.

You might have driven him out of the market today, or he might've bought a bunch of your dust with plans to relist it when the price comes back up--either because you've pushed it back up, run out of stores, run out of production or run out of raw materials.

The startup cost to get into any of these markets is so low that there's no real chance of you pushing someone out of the market forever, unless they just quit playing wow--and there will almost always be someone behind them ready to take their place.

In fact, with your price war, assuming that it was your "enemy" that purchased your dust, all you've done is strengthen his margins when the price comes back up. You've given him 1.075g/dust for every stack you sold him when the price returns to 4.5g/dust (and that's after AH fees). I honestly probably would've sat there and bought every single bit of dust you sold me, and would've sent you a whisper asking for more. Assuming that you made 1000g at 3.2/dust, you sold him 15.625 stacks. He'll only make 335.93g when he sells later, but that's pure profit, and probably in the neighborhood of your profits from the days escapades.

Also, I'm not talking about trying to hold a monopoly on dust, or push the price above what the market will tolerate. I personally prefer lower margins on higher volume than the other way around, so I want the price that maximizes the equation profits = (sale - cost) * volume. I find that--in general--a 1% reduction in (sale - cost) increases the volume by more than 1%, making it a net win.

I agree that you can't do this in every market--it's mostly feasible for markets that have no posting fees, because if you're patient enough--barring a permanent pricing change--you will make the target you want.

If i understand this correctly, the problem boils down to how low you can drop the costs of the end product. And if you are farming 24/7 and selling the end product, rather then buying the raw mats from the AH and just selling the end product, the minimum price is dictated by the initial money investment, which is zero (you farm all the mats).

So getting into a price war with 'the professional farmers' will net you, at best, a small profit. Since their money investment is smaller (or non-existent) they can always undercut your prices. What might work to increase the profit margin (not the overall profit) is to not trade at all on the weekend. But that most probably will lower your overall profit as well.

On the other hand, i might have misunderstood emeril80's point. Because on my server, even with serious undercutting, selling a hundred (or even a thousand) stacks of dust in one week might be impossible.

that being said, i would wait a few more weeks and hope for the market to resettle.

The whole discussion of how to drive someone who is selling at a lower price from a market is pointless. If said person is doing so consistently then they consider what they are doing good business. You cannot buy them to "teach them a lesson" or "make run dry", they will simply perceive it as demand for their products and continue business as usual.

At my server (and I suspect a lot of other servers) there are some farmers who are flooding the market with cheap Saronite Ore, Adder's Tongue, Icethorn and Infinite Dust. The solution is never to compete with them at their very small project margins, but to utilise the raw material price for new businesses: All crafting professions relying on the cheap mats will have the cost of production reduced and that leaves you room for increased profits in new markets.

TL;DR Abandon the market and find something else

hey,

with my professions beeing blacksmithing/enchanting two good ways to make some gold are:

buy:

1x [Eternal Earth] 5-8g
1x [Eternal Water] 4-6g
1x [Eternal Shadow] 4-6g
4x [Saronite Bar] 1.5-2g (total 6-8g)

= [Eternal Belt Buckle]

you buy mats for 19-28g and the buckle sells for a minimum of 50g going up to 100g on weekends.

Thats up to 81g (-auction fee) profit per buckle.

here´s another one, buy:

7x [Saronite Bar] 1.5-2g (total 10.5-14g)
2x [Crystallized Air] 0.5g (total 1g)

= [Deadly Saronite Dirk]

disenchanting this gets you 1x [Dream Shard]

you invest like 11.5-15g and the [Dream Shard] goes for like 19-29g on my server

I blame all the drugs I'm on due to swine flu (no not really, just a cold) that I didn't think of capitalizing on this trend earlier. Today after I read your post I went through and saw that Essences, dust, and shards were selling at 1/2 price and my enchanter was only 400/450. So i went through and bought up all the materials to get him to 440/450. Overall it cost me about 500G which is not much considering the cash that I'm making normally, I got rid of the bottom feeders and now my goods that were selling at the top now look "affordable".

I don't know why I didn't think of doing this during the Crash of 2003.1, it would have been a smart move to gather up all those low balled mats and do this, probably would have saved several hundred gold in the process.

Hungtar, you're right that you cannot win against someone who is basically producing all of their own mats. But there's an opportunity cost for doing that (namely that when they're out farming mats they can't be at the AH as you purchase all of their cheap goods and relist at a better price for you).

However, you have to assume that someone who is intentionally trying to drive you out of the market is attempting to drive their profits up (with the assumption that a monopoly will enable them to control the price of the good they're selling). Therefore, they should never sell the goods below their cost for an extended period of time, because if they're smart enough to try to get a monopoly, they're smart enough to realize that discounting goods they produced below fair market value means they should've just sold the mats instead of the final good.

There must be a typo there Alk, 4g per Titansteel bar? If I could get them at that price I wouldn't need to read this thread. I must sadly note that a few hours after I posted my Combat Shotgun tip I was undercut by several others. Time to find something new.

There was a type indeed, fixed

You guys are obviously talking about [Titanium Bar].

Anyone else with experience in controlling the raid buff food market?

1) How much are you generally charging for it?
2) How large stacks?
3) Timing? Posting short term on mon-thur at about 18:00 server time? Constantly up?

4) A little review of how I do it:

- I have more or less every available raid buff food up on the AH at any time at about 9-10g a piece.
- I more often than not have several competitors at 1-5g a piece:
a) Anything below 3g, I usually just buy out.
b) Anything above 3g where the stack is 10 or 20 doesn't really concern me, as there are tons of irrational raiders who would rather buy 3x10g than 20x3g.
c) Any stacks at 4-5g with 2-5 pieces are generally owned by semi frequent posters (by this I mean people who post maybe 5-10 stacks a week in 1-2 different food categories) these I ignore, as they are bought out rather quickly and there are still buyers for my food

-----

My real problem is the classic "undercutter". I can sell 10-15 stacks of +40 strength food per night at about 9-10g, and then someone comes and posts 200 at 6-7g.

- The risk of buying him out is too large as he or others might do the same again, and the margin is rather low (buying off for 6-7 and selling for 9-10 with deposit fee's etc)
- The risk of NOT buying him out is that I most likely won't sell any of that buff food that particular night

Now what I currently do is to maintain my high prices on 2-4 stacks of food even though there are tons of food listed, and then I empty it out and list more when I see the AH is almost out of food. Are there any alternate strategies that might work just as well/better?

I use auctioneer quite heavily to counter balance this and vary my times that I have material up for.

Your ideal day of posting is Tuesday with Friday and Saturday being the next 2 biggest days. I would put food up for 48hrs on Tuesday and 24hrs on Friday night around 9sih. That'll save you some money in posting. Ideally as an EST server raids start at 6pm and go till 12pm on Tuesday. I post stuff around 5pm (or whenever I get home) the people who completely forgot to farm over the weekend buy it up and by 8pm the rush is over. Find out what large raiding guilds raid times are and plan around that. You could vary and put it up for 12hrs at high prices then vary throughout the week till the weekend. Vary your stacks too: 5,10,20 Some people will only buff for certain bosses and you could make more money selling more/higher at 5 than at 10.

Now what times are these others doing their bulk sales at? Same days? Same times? Different times? You could put a few stacks up as 12G on Wednesday, save some and on another toon put your real stack up as 10G for 48hrs on Tuesday.


Besides the normal talking to your competition or looking them up on armory to see if they are a farmer or not not much you can do. You could take all the advice that you see with us JC folks when gems go from 50G to 19G in 24hrs and apply it to your problem.

You can use /who Ulduar to find out raiding times of some guilds. On my server sunday evenings are raid heavy. Best time to list your raid consumables on the ah is sunday noon/afternoon for 12h. And on sunday evenings i list my enchants, belt buckles etc. to supply raiders who got a new item that night.

on wednesday it´s time to buy raw materials on the ah, to get ready for the raiding weekends.