I passed one million mark three days ago (and then promptly gave some money away), and I made almost all of it on glyphs. I have noticed the trend you have mentioned maybe two weeks into Cata already. Also, most of the scribes on my server moved into cards, so I had a chance to play almost solo. I pushed the rest of the stragglers out with aggressive reposting (what! I was on a vacation, I was bored!), so for the last couple weeks the prices of glyphs, especially the rarer ones, are well over 150 g, and most of them are at 200. I post at most two of one glyph, and I produce at demand (I stock inks, not glyphs). All of which is hugely time consuming, but at this point in game, it’s the most relaxing and interesting thing for me to do. My threshold is 16 gold, since I bought out one scribe’s stock and inherited a pile of very common glyphs, together with the good ones, so I’m still getting rid of those. But, my fallback is 224, and lately I have been noticing more and more 224 postings, due to the fact that I am the only one producing that glyph.
As for my supply, I buy everything reasonably priced on AH (meaning, stack of herbs can be max 30 g). I have seen the prices of non-Cata herbs slowly creep up, and the Cata herbs are still holding, but there is always someone clearing their bank, leveling a new toon or similar. What I lack, I farm myself – old Azeroth has had the number of herb nodes drastically increased, Northrend’s Sholazar Basin is deserted and full of herbs. The only difficulty I have is with Outland, since the herb respawn there is out of whack (some weird thing with sharing repops with gas clouds?). For that, I do a couple laps in Uldum, and exchange inks. I sell the infernos and volatile life I get on the way, so it’s profitable all around.
My projection for glyphs is that the demand will slow down, but it will be there. New scribes coming into the business will have a hard time learning all the glyphs through Northrend research and books of glyph mastery (there is a bug with those too, where it says you have learned all even if you are still missing some glyphs), so there will mostly be one or two real players in the field, depending on the size of the server.
In a follow-up mail they added:
a business update – a few more people sniffed out that the glyph market is almost solely my playground, so I have more competition. The prices are being pushed up though, not down, by people (including me) buying out low priced glyphs and reposting higher. Even if the glyph I buy is not really useful, it sets the trend of expensive glyphs. What some of the scribes still fail to understand is that it's not a bulk market any more. Players buy one glyph of a kind, and one only, so it makes absoultely no sense to sell it to them for 20 g. It's there to stay forever, unlike gems, enchants or even gear. It would make sense to price glyphs at 1000 gold, but not enough people understand this so you would be undercut too badly.My response - its amazing and humbling for me to receive such astute insight from someone gold capped - why they read my blog I havent a clue - they are obviously very capable of teaching me a thing or five.
Its also interesting for me that the pressures I feel are being felt identically on other servers - in this instance on a European server. Outland herbs indeed...I am sure we can all sympathise.
As the last statement - Amen to that. A glyph is the only enchancement that will stay with your toon forever - and therefore prices should reflect this. But alas they wont because of the price of herbs, and the fact that there is no restriction on the profession.
I am sure my friend would welcome your feedback :)
7 comments:
Lol, omg. Im watching blues clues right now with my son. They LOVE that show ...
Sorry, thats all I came in to comment on :)
I hope you have your handy dandy notebook nearby then :P
I just cannot fathom how those servers' markets are working and mine is not. I looked yesterday and the highest glyph price on the server was 89g. There are literally 10-20 of just about everything.
I have set aside time today to just go through glyph by glyph to see if I have any that are not posted at all but I haven't found one yet.
It's kind of funny to see that post, as that's the way I've been doing things since day 1 of inscription and I was beginning to think I was the only one doing it that way since most blogs seem to handle glyphs differently.
I find it incredibly effective to stock inks and not glyphs since it lets you maneuver very quickly in the event of price shifts, which I've found are super common in the glyph trade. I usually only bother to scan and repost twice a day and I also only ever produce 2-3 of a single glyph at a time. On my server I've actually gotten the price of glyphs up to 249g as my fallback and I've noticed once I started doing it so did my most of the my competitors.
I also completely ignore any sort of historical or market pricing for glyphs. I set my fallback to 249g and threshold to 39g. I feel like anything under that isn't worth my time and undercut by 5s. Once you're in the market for a bit you get a good idea of what the big seller are and which ones hardly ever move. Then once or twice a day I scan the AH for glyph prices and typically only bother crafting 1-2 of glyphs currently selling for over 100g. I might got a little lower for glyphs I know sell well and use cheaper inks. Then it's just about being able to keep tabs on your competitors and undercut them as necessary. I'm a big believer in AH camping. I find it does a good job of keeping a nice barrier in the way of newcomers. I've found once people start to get a taste for just how profitable the market can be it's very hard to force them out, but if you can make their lives a living hell for the first couple days they post most times they'll give up. Also I never hesitate to buyout cheap glyphs that I know are good sellers to drive the price back up.
I stock a combination of ink and glyphs. Since I'm only posting one of each glyph twice a day, I know that stocking up on 6 of each will let me ignore everything for at least 3 days. A couple times a week, I run a KTQ scan and replace whatever is running low.
I've chosen to compete with the other scribes over the price of herbs instead of meeting them head-on trying to outcamp their glyph undercuts. I aggressively buy any Classic herbs under 40g and any Cataclysm herbs under 100g. I'm using a 60g threshold to give them the bottom half of the market, forcing them to burn up their ink as they try to undercut each other with low-profit glyphs. So far, it looks like they aren't able to find enough ink to keep up with demand, as I see a constant stream of 400g fallback listings (and sales) as holes appear in their inventory.
I had the market mostly to myself for the first month or so after the release, but over the past three weeks the competition has moved back in in force, and it's made a gigantic difference. For a while there, I was pulling in 5-8k per day, with at most one post per day, no cancel and repost ever. I used it to buy at least one epic for each of my raiding guild mates.
But now, my average sale prices has dropped from about 160 to below 60. I still sell a few in the 100+ range, but I'd guess it's less than 10%, with the majority of sales being in the 30-40 range.
My strategy now is to raise my thresholds to 50 or above and cut back on my time and effort (to be spent rebuilding my stockpiles and maybe pushing up another profession to work). I'm really hoping for a strong and vicious goblin to come in and chase out most the noobs, but I'm not willing to put the work into doing it myself. I find that on my server, 3-4 competitors can typically coexist quite nicely, but that number cyclically grows up to 10+, and then a trade war breaks out killing profits for a month or so, and then the market gets very very nice for a little while for those who stay in it and play nice after the bloodbath gets old.
And despite greedygoblin and Stokpile's recommendations, I've never yet seen the bloodbath *not* get old after a while. I don't care who you are - once most of the competitors are gone, you're going to prefer to sell 8 glyphs at 225g and tolerate a few remaining competitors rather than sell 10 glyphs at 30g and have the market alone.
I was reading this letter and it almost sounded as if it was me. I just hit my million last week. Like him I was bored and decided to push so in one week I made 105k to hit the million. Most people in glyphs are gone. I post glyphs with a threshhold at 70gold and fallback at 275gold. I dont stock glyphs but have 1-2 up of all glyphs that are over 100gold. No need to deal with lower price ones. I buy whatever is less than 20gold and reset the price. Glyphs since 4.0 has resulted in about 700k of gold for me. I read all these blogs about glyphs and never understood the desire to kick people out of a market. Like a couple other posters.....I have seen rising prices and little comp
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