Greedy Goblin

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Morons of the week 2

I can fully agree to the blue poster in this official warcraft forum topic (by mike)!



Daniel found a genius on a German server, and sent him with the translation of his wisdom. Pay attention to his teachings! People buy belt buckles even for 100G, but if someone destroy the prices they won't buy them! So keep the prices high for more sales!

In: You really need to learn how to handle money.
Out: So?
In: You undercut the prices for eternal belt buckles by 50%... well,
not very smart.
Out: So buy them and repost for more.
In: You should leave them the same price and earn twice the amount -.-
In: Really unbelievable
Out: I prefer selling to getting them returned because I was undercut
In: They will always be bought, except when there are people like you
who destroy the prices, when they're not sold that cheap they'd get
bought for 100g.
In: As you can see you would be undercut, so you earn even less.
Out: Of course they'll be bought but I don't want to camp the AH. And
without doing that, I'll be undercut all the time. When I sell cheap,
others don't bother.
Out: I have an idea. I'll sell you my whole inventory of belt buckles
for 35g each so you can sell them for 80g. Deal?
In: This has nothing to do with camping but with thinking. You seem to
have leveled blacksmithing far enough to be able to produce them. This
wasn't cheap, so just use it to earn gold.
In: If you just want to get rid of them, why don't you give them away
for free?



I reached goldcap selling titanium ore and flasks as singles. N00b me! I could do it much faster selling full stacks! But Grimak is my savior. I'm N00b no more! (by Carler - Hellscream -Eu)



Joern from Norway found a ... very strange being:



There is no morons of the week post without the good old "I farmed it myself, so it's free"! (by Victor)

PS: If I'd had to farm up a whole bank tab (98 stacks) of herbs, I'd delete WoW, my blog and maybe even join the emo community!


Just like "I farmed it so it's free", the "I buy vendor stuff for 1000%+ markup" is an evergreen. (by maik)

24 comments:

Yaggle said...

I agree that herbs you farmed were not free, but buying something in the AH cheap and then whispering the seller "thanks for the free glyphs" is really stupid, also. The other person could then say, "Thanks for the free conversation", I mean, time spent picking herbs, time having a stupid pointless conversation, what's the difference?

Anonymous said...

Your comment about farming 98 stacks of herbs really made me think.

I go through about 100-150 stacks of herbs per week (well... I don't mill them... I have a guy I hire for that) but when you stop and think about it, every one of those herbs had to be picked. Thats really freaky. 100-150 stacks.... wow. I did herbalism when I first started WoW so I know how long that can take.

Man I'm glad there are people with nothing better to do than fly around right clicking on plants for hours and hours and hours and hours.

Smeg said...

i think the key with this whole "i farmed it so it's free" and opportunity cost mentality is interesting.

obviously, IF you did have something better/more profitable to do, then it would be a cost. But if you are unemployed, derelict, both or employed to farm for herbs to sell for gold, then you have probably NOTHING better to do. Since they have nothing to trade this time in for it makes sense to them to "farm for free."

not excusing this practice; we need these people in society and in WoW. But opportunity cost needs more perspective. Saying "you fool, you could've walked the Himalayas instead of farming 98 stacks!" is just lulz.

to counter my own argument: if you are playing WoW it's safe to assume you do have something better to do, because you need to have some education and an ok comp and some way of financing recurring subscription to continue existence. Could definitely put your efforts to better use.

Bell said...

Sometimes farming is necessary. There have been plenty of times our guild bank has been prepared to buy Frost Lotus for flasks (with money earned from drake sales, item sales, etc.), but there have been none on the AH. So, the herbalists of the guild need to go farm, or there will be no flasks for the raid as a whole.

You can't always take farmers for granted, especially on servers where the rarer commodities go quickly.

Armond said...

@Bell: I don't think anyone is taking the farmers for granted, given how vital they are to the Alchemy and Inscription economies. The reason they're lulzy (and this ties in to what Smeg said) is that flying around the Basin for herbs/ore is almost never the most productive thing you can be doing. Still, plenty of people do it; I'd like to blame that on human stupidity, but that's only part of it. If 90% of the farmers stopped farming, the price of mats would skyrocket and it would suddenly be much more profitable to farm than to craft. The wonders of economics theory...

Also, I encourage people to make macros (/addons) that will link people who say "I farmed it so it's free" to http://lmgtfy.com/?q=opportunity+cost

sdfsdfsdf said...

@Smeg

The problem is not what cost him in time to farm those herbs. the problem is that those herbs have a value, defined by its AH price.

If he priced the glyphs below the herb prices, he lost money, because he would get a better deal selling the herbs as herbs.

Kreeegor said...

@luv - there are people that generally enjoy flying around in sholazar and herbing and mining. People that use wow as a social network, or just some that are bored and have some time to kill.

The farming a s hobby is nice. The farming as a saving for big mammoth is awesome for people like me that have successful industries. There can never be too cheap herbs and ore.

Rob Dejournett said...

I almost never farm. Its boring. However, some idiot (or goblin, whatever) decided to monopolize the frost lotus market, sending prices soaring for weeks. At that point it became more profitable to go out and farm myself. (frost lotus was 50g each, everything else was about normal cost for the 4 servers I have access to. In exactly an hour I made 500g. That's not really a statistical abnormality. I gathered 7 frost lotus. Not a ton. ANd 500g is, you know, whatever. Maybe its good, maybe its bad. But dailies only make (only) 250g per hour or so.

So when you disparage the people who 'work' hard farming, it can be a good income stream. I mean, figure with those prices, 10-20 hours will get you an epic mount. To me that's pretty good. (it took me months to accumulate enough to get my first epic mount).

Anonymous said...

I dont think there is anything wrong with farming. i get a lot of joy from it. but then again i refuse to buy anything from the ah lol.

Anti said...

i about to suggest that others besides myself might be getting bored by the "morons" posts every week.

perhaps some new "edutainment" concepts could be trialed. how about a "Challenge Gevlon" post?

to get the ball rolling how about this: spend one hour reading wow general forums and try to find a single post worth reading.

Anonymous said...

I'm going to have to agree with Anti, the Moron of the week thing is getting a little boring now. It was entertaining to start with, but now it's just copies of the same moronic acts each week.
Of course, Gevlon, it's your blog, so you can post whatever you want, just think about replacing MotW with a new weekly gimmick.

Yaggle said...

You know what might be interesting, rather than another "making money with xxxx profession" guide, would be a re-sellers guide. Especially from a perspective of somebody with massive amounts of gold who could buy, store, and re-sell items so expensive, that the average person would be overwhelmed with just the thought of.......well, you get the idea. Just a thought. I don't mind hearing more morons too, though. It's more funny than some of the bad movies I have seen lately, and it's free.

Anti said...

i'm leveling my vanilla gnome mage to 80 before faction xfering him to my horde server.

a while back, before i decided on leveling him before xfering (to see ally quests), i converted most of his cash to titanium ore stacks. this added to his stocks of eternium and khorium (yes i thought prospect epic gems might be implemented in BC)

so now i'm trying to fund him with 300 enchanting, 375 tailoring and not much liquidity. to make matters worse i'm on a backwater ally server with 10 : 1 horde ratio and a fail ecconomy ally side.

luckily i have dual accounts so i can use the neutral AH and lvl 1 bank alts to access the Horde's thriving AH.

i've been selling ally only cooking recipies horde side for 8-24g each. had a nice chat with my main competitior i happened to bump into in booty bay as i was doing the xfer. he doesnt have dual accounts so is stuck using the neutral AH to reach horde players.

i needed to level disenchanting to 325(350) so i can DE my quest drops. the ally market was empty of arcane dust. netherweave sells for as much as 10g per stack (i also sell bags for 15g) so tailoring for DE was no good. so i bought all of the 2.5g-3.5g arcane dust from the horde AH. then i realised i had an opportunity to try and reset the price so i posted them all for 6g each. 7 hours later and i have all my investment back and still enough
on the AH to xfer over to ally side tomorrow if they dont sell.

i also sold a scroll of enchant bracers assult for 80g.....just shows you that morons buy as well as sell.

Anonymous said...

So I've got a question for Gevlon, or anyone else here who can handle it. For a while I was making a killing selling glyphs, but after the write up on MMO-Champion theres probably 15-20 other people who are competing for the same space. This has led to almost every single glyph falling to production cost or below. Is there anyway to recover this market, or should I just dump my inventory and find new ways to profit?

Anonymous said...

The phrase is "agree with" not "agree to", Gevlon. Keep up the good work!

Satan said...

98 stacks only takes 3-4 hours.

Ephemeron said...

Gevlon, you seem to have overlooked 2 factors in your dismissal of farming:

1) The difference between a casual gatherer who occasionally farms a few herbs "because they're free" and a professional herbalist is akin to the difference between a guy who sometimes sells a couple of frostweave stacks on the AH, and a consummate tycoon like yourself who moves goods in tens of thousands, uses an arsenal of specialized addons to maximize efficiency and knows the market like the back of his hand.

For a professional farmer, acquiring 98 stacks of herbs isn't an equivalent of the "Insane in the Membrane" achievement - it's less than a day's work.

2. Unlike AH trading, gathering has no diminishing returns from time.

Unknown said...

anti, surprised neither you or your competitor know this, you can make horde and alliance toons on the same account on the same server regardless of server type now. you have been able to since 3.3

Anti said...

yes but you cant buy your own sales at the neutral AH.

it takes a second account either your own or a friends to move items from ironforge through Booty Bay directly to orgrimar.

friends dont tend to have the patience to move 100s of small items. long ago when i only had 1 account i used friends to buy small amounts of big ticket items.

with two accounts i can list 100s of items in booty bay, buy them imediately and mail them to sell in Org. my competitior is stuck listing them in booty bay for smaller profits.

Anonymous said...

I don't understand the spite directed towards the
"I buy vendor stuff for 1000%+ markup" players. In fact, unless it's an item available in a city in which someone has an auction character, I believe this can be a smart move.

I for one, would not take the port from Dalaran to Stormwind (for example) because stepping in Dalaran is likely to cost me at least five minutes of 0 or 1 fps, and that's assuming my older computer does not crash.

I am not saying it is necessarily a smart purchase; just that it is impossible to assess without knowing the exact context.

Hugmenot of Suramar

Anti said...

i dont understand the people who claim to have 1-15 fps in Dalaran.

i play on a six year old laptop and the only time i have had issues was when i was running 4 instances of WoW at the same time experimenting with keyclone. even then it was only when i walked into a city that i started to lag. i was able to fix that by running with fewer addons than normal.

its either something else running on your system, a stupid amount of addons, or you need to adjust your graphics setting.

Kohaku said...

It took me a few monthes of casual herb picking to gather half a gb tab of herbs.

/bow to the person who farmed a whole tab of it.

Without these people, the profitable glyph business wouldn't exist ^_^

Anonymous said...

Gibbiex, how can you read this blog, but then spout such ignorant nonsense. No one is monopolizing the frost lotus market on servers. Supply is low and demand is high. It's econ 101. The frost lotus supply is way down and demand is way up. Guess what? Supplies rise.

I've talked to different people about the issue and a lot of herbalists are getting the extreme feeling that the drop rate is much lower than what it was. I haven't seen patch notes to this extent, but what I can see is that prices have been rising to the point that they are selling for about 50G+ on average.

You want to drop prices? Farm frost lotus every hour of every day and flood the market. Prices will drop like a rock.



I almost never farm. Its boring. However, some idiot (or goblin, whatever) decided to monopolize the frost lotus market, sending prices soaring for weeks. At that point it became more profitable to go out and farm myself. (frost lotus was 50g each, everything else was about normal cost for the 4 servers I have access to. In exactly an hour I made 500g. That's not really a statistical abnormality. I gathered 7 frost lotus. Not a ton. ANd 500g is, you know, whatever. Maybe its good, maybe its bad. But dailies only make (only) 250g per hour or so.

Anonymous said...

/sigh
To everybody siding with the "The herbs are free because I farmed them." argument, realize that the criticism was NOT because they farmed the herbs. Rather, it was because the person sold glyphs at an extremely low price because it 'didn't cost them anything' to make. The point is, those herbs HAVE a value, and by not selling the herb itself at this value, the person lost potential earnings.