With all said and done I will take the glyph approach to JC market.
I am doing this right now with blue gems although their price has gone down and I still yeld some sort of profit.

Glyph approach = carpet bomb. Just make every single pattern you know(or will learn at that point) and dump the gems on the AH(by that I mean 2 of each gem you can make at a time and repost as they sell). Yes some profit will be lost, yet you will sell the gems before they get "rotten" and yield no profit all.

Just FYI: I believe that with the nerf to dodge rating and agility contributing to dodge, that defense becomes the best avoidance stat or close to it.

I was under the impression that tanks usually gem for stam and only switch gear for stats(avoidance//tps sets) and they only use odd gems for meta activation.

The main difference for glyphs is that the AH fees are so much lower, I usually post around 400 glyphs at a time and the cost is almost negligible, doing that with gems is a fairly large investment, and aggressively canceling and re-listing will cut a large chunk out of your profit.

Bad tanks? Even gemming the proper colour for a parry bonus is worth it. All tank stats are good stats, and having a good mix of avoidance and hp leads to the best effective HP. There's no reason not to gem for socket bonuses if you can use it at all (i.e. DKs shouldn't socket for block bonuses...).

Gemming straight HP hasn't been effective since the start of TBC where healing throughput was ridiculous and mana was near-infinite.

The problem with the alliance glyph market on Stormrage is one person (Vendrun) posts all their glyphs at 4g or less, never ever higher. He posts a lot of them too and is on every day so it's not like you can just buyout his and relist.

Seems unlikely, he isn't really doing anything wrong. Even at 4g a glyph you're still making a profit, not like he is selling them below cost.

I think Blizzard looks at how many total listings and average list price when determining whether or not someone's conduct on the AH is actionable. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Assuming that he's not exploiting to get his supply of materials or something, has Blizzard in fact taken action against people for this in the past? He's basically just taking the Wal-Mart approach, selling huge quantities at razor-thin margins and driving out competition that can't compete on volume. I would hope that there's not some nebulous line across which legitimately "winning" at the AH game constitutes ruining the game for others and gets you in trouble.

But the key is his strategy is not in anyway hurting the economy for consumers. It's only hurting other sellers.

Blizzard gets involved when someone price fixes and artificially inflates the price giving the consumer no alternative but paying the absurd prices.

I don't think he actually sells many glyphs anymore, other sellers (like me) undercut him on pretty much every glyph.

Apparently his only goal is to cap the max glyph price.

So they do actually intervene if someone pulls out a stunt? Has this actually happened?

No, Blizzard does not intervene on the AH market as long as no illegal activities (goldselling stuff) takes place. I spoke with the number 1 gold earner of European realms about his dealings with Blizzard when he was under investigation by them. And Blizzard told him that as long as he does not cheat, he can do whatever he wants with the AH. During the BC period, he controlled the AH with the epic gems and made alot of money, but did this by buying out his competition. He had the supply to do this also. People reported him to Blizzard, but Blizzard does not mind, because the AH is an integral part of the game, and noone can force a player to make a profit selling on the AH.

Oh I already do that, has no affect.

It rarely works.

Let's take glyphs for an example. I know this market pretty well because I used to "carpet bomb" it.
- Its common to have 15 to 18 glyphs of every type at all times. This is because you really can't do it efficiently with any less. Once you have this much stock, you can't really stop and sit on them unless you are suffering from AH burnout. Sure I might stop for a day or two, but never for extended periods.
- It becomes a habit and a routine. So much so that you don't even care about being undercut because you know that you will be the cheapest on AH in a few hours anyway. "Hmmm, I got 45 mins before the next Wintergrasp battle, time to put up some glyphs."
- This person on your server might be putting up big quantities but I normally put up 2 to 3 glyphs each at any one time. Since I routinely sell out, people who sell at a higher price are often reluctant to undercut me because they do know they will get some sales too. They also know that they often make double or triple my margin. Facing this, most competitors will just not bother and let me sell my 2 or 3 pcs.

Now I wouldn't say it can't be done. Its just that it would require you to spend a LOT of time at AH consistently over a long period of time. You must remember that you are trying to make someone who has invested a lot of gold in stock give up and its not going to be easy.

In fact, i would say you cant make him stop unless you are willing to do the same thing that he is. Willingly putting up with a lot of gold stuck in stock, spending a LOT of time and all for very little profit.

If he has been at it for over a month, I doubt you can make him stop unless you push it on an almost daily basis for the same duration. Simply because he has too much stock to stop. That is effectively throwing your gaming time down the drain for one whole month just to make some gold and to so call "kick his butt" :P

At the end of the day, you might find that it just isn't worth it.

One bloke on the gem market had an adverse reaction, in fact. It was of the days when the hackers/cheats had first arrived, so saronite prices took a rapid fall. I was listing fairly aggressive, and I had a stock to back it up, plus, a lot of funds too, or so I thought. So I was running listings of 120 or so gems per shot, and refreshing undercut scans fairly often, and re-listing. This random guy once whispered to me that he's bought 500 stacks of saronite, and had sold barely any gems, and told me to "stop it". He started really furiously undercutting. Cuts went from 50g to 8g overnight. First I bought him out a bit, and then just stopped bothering for a bit, because, surprisingly, some more joined the bandwagon.

This persistent little thing had cut the gem prices down to a 15% rate of the original, and somehow the prices stuck there for a while. Needless to say, I was slightly devastated. I doubt he made too much profit over his venture, though.

This might be server based but I started buying Saronite Ore again last week

Titanium stacks were going for 220+ and Saronite was at 13g. It seemed like a no brainer to me.

While no one will know for sure what the epic gem supply will be like, I'm pretty sure that not all toons will be going for epic gems right off the bat. Especially when you consider the potential price difference. In fact I can't imagine over 20% of the general population spotting all epic gems by the weekend (assuming 3.2 is today). Most toons either don't have the money or badges or honor, or they haven't loot that would be worth an epic gem at the moment.

Hence I've stocked up on 300 stacks of cheap Saronite ore and hope to cash in on the "middle" market, buyers that don't want to or can't afford to get epic gems and who feel uncommon ones are too "cheap".

In either case, there is always an outlet for Saronite Ore, be it through crafting or prospecting. I'd recommend it to all JC simply because the downside is so limited and the upside pretty decent.

Problem is, the middle market's also populated by titanium ore prospecting: it yields rare gems too. To say, the arrival of epic gems is going to reduce demand on the middle market, and increase supply. Good news there? No, not really.

Yes, titanium prospecting will yield rare gems as well but I feel the raw amount of titanium prospects done will be constrained by its limited supply.

There may be a lot of us with 100 or even 500 stack stockpiles at the moment but this will dwindle quickly due to the mad rush to supply the early buyers (who pay the best prices). This will invariably drive the rare gem prices down a little at the start but I expect this price to rebound after the initial wave is over.

I doubt the impact of titanium ore can have a sustaining impact due to the supply factor. Once the initial stockpiles are gone, I don't see too many of us being physically able to get even 10 stacks of titanium a day for prospecting.

Even if such supply was available, I think most JCs will be snapping them up at an increased rate for the dust. This might even drive the price up enough to make it not worth the while unless you are including gem cutting profits into the equation.

Here's the thing, though: all attempts to expand titanium supply will lead to an explosion in saronite supply: thus saronite is already selling below the prices of simply smelting and vendoring it (see: any saronite ore under 12g50s is already "low" enough to warrant simply vendoring it after a little smelting). This means, if titanium rises in demand due to a dimunishing gem supply and upwards price pressures, saronite will, ironically, become more abundant onthe market and not really go up in price.

This is why I think it's fairly pointless to stock it: the price won't be going upwards until the mining hacks are banned, removed, and/or blocked somehow. At least on my server, the mining hacks consist of such a considerable amount of the ore economy it's just mind numbing. If there weren't such hacks, saronite'd probably never fallen much below 17 a stack. Certainly, if rare gems start moving upwards, people will surely take a note of it and list rare cuts: but there's probably going to be plenty of saronite available for now.

Actually, who knows, maybe 3.2 will end the mining hacks. It's a patch fixing a lot of issues, after all.

You're overestimating the demand of the "middle" market. The people that aren't getting epic gems, or abyss crystal enchants are the sort of casuals that are also not upgrading gear often.

Don't forget the saronite supply will not suddenly dry up, you will still have the influx of gems from whatever Saronite is prospected alongside the byproduct gems from Titanium ore. This is a simultaneous increase in supply and drop in demand. The price will plummet.

Even worse the prospecting of titanium ore is not being driven by blue or green gems, as a result the rate of titanium being prospected will not slow related to their value. As blue quality gems prices fall the prospecting rate will not slow due to lack of profitability, the prospecting is driven by epic gems values, blue quality gems are just an extra.

In the patch notes, it says that all mining nodes in northrend now require level 60 (IIRC, can't find it on the official site).

That seems to be at least a superficial fix to the mining hack.