Income has slowed - its funny because I have noticed that prices ont eh AH have risen noticably over recent weeks. Herbs have continued to sky-rocket (but this was predicted due to the increase in Frost Lotus and they fact you can now purchase with frozen orbs) - so much so that I am starting to make serious in roads into my ink stockpiles.
But its not just herbs - gems, enchanting mats (infinite dust back to 2g a piece at the moment), borean leather - basically all the trade goods have gone up in price.
I have a few guess why but these may or may not be correct - but my strongest hunch is the proliferation of toons being leveled now that the Lich King is dead and people are looking for stuff to do before Cataclysm. I am guilty of this myself - I now have a priest and a rogue in the 40s, and a warrior and a paladin in the 30s.
With leveling comes gear and also professions. People are investing in their missing professions and therefore there is a lot of power leveling going on.
The result is that trade goods have increased in prices. The effect of this is that the 'Buy low, sell normal' profiteering from the AH is becoming less and less erm profitable!
The answer? Well as I see it, those making money are those who farm. So if you havent been out into the wilds for a bit it might be time to take an hour or two to make use of this opportunity.
Horde side on my server things are slowing as well - but not so noticably. I recently decided to transfer my gold across from horde to alliance and purchased a number of 264 items and got them across the neutral AH without incident. They have slowly been selling - but I do hate having capital locked up in high end items - it un-nerves me to be honest.
But still, I'm back up to around 160k. There have been a GKP run or two in there which helps - but I have stopped buying the BoEs from those runs because I dont see the point in tying up 6k in an item to possibly sell a week or two later for 2k profit - I want to double my investment in BoEs as I know this market is fickle. I bought a Wodins Necklace for 10k two weeks ago and sold is early this week for 11k. I know 1k is 1k, but its only 10% profit - which is waaaay below my other thresholds.
This weekend I intend to review a couple of shut down markets where I know prices have increased significantly but havent plateaued yet. It will involve significant investments and I havent decided whether I intend to try and dominate the market or crash the market yet - both appeal to me and both will yield profit. In fact, pondering this I might try both techniques on different markets and report back. Watch this space.
2 comments:
I also think that the herb price inflation has additional factors (although the Frost Lotus increased drop rate and purchase using Frozen Orbs)
1. Less people are running Heroic Daily Dungeons, thus less Frozen Orbs on the market
2. In BC you pretty much had to farm to make gold. Even daily quests were capped at 5 then increased to 10 per day then up to our current limit. Over this expansion less and less people are choosing "farming" professions
3. In addition to the above, you can't raid seriously with a gathering profession. Raiding is becoming more and more accessible, but the attitude towards gathering professions for raiding has not. Thus more people raid on more characters and do not choose Herbalism or Mining.
4. When Frost Lotus was extremely rare Herbalists made their profit on selling Frost Lotus, the other herbs were a byproduct. When the Frost Lotus rarity disappeared the income from herbing seemed to dissapear too. Add in a steady stream of Frozen Orbs (same patch as Dungeon Finder, right?) and all those Herbalists found other ways to make a profit.
Perhaps they realised that gathering herbs kind of sucks. Perhaps they're playing different characters now and chose different professions.
What do you think?
Wake up and smell the coffee!
You'be been going on and on about this frost lotus vs orb theory of yours, but it isn't the reason why herb prices are up though it almost certainly is a minor contributing factor.
The real reason herb prices (and the price of almost all other farmed mats too) is the farming bots got banned on May 31st... All of them... On all servers.
Demand hasn't changed much but supply is way down due to the lack of all the materials those bots used to farm and put on the market every day. That's why prices are up... Because the bots are gone, not because you can buy lotus with orbs.
Consider the fact that herb prices remained low and stable for a long time after the orb vendor appeared but magically doubled almost overnight once the bots were banned.
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