Deep undercutting with QA3

The PuG update: 84 people in the guild. We killed Festergut and Rotface. That's not much, but considering running 9-man before we got to the mentioned bosses and 3 people have close to 0 ICC experience (I mean "never been in ICC" to "Marrowgar"), I'm pretty satisfied. There were terribly many errors in the first tries, but people learned, we discussed mistakes, no one gave tantrum, no one "DC-ed", and the bosses finally died. Most items were sold for minimal price, a few had bidding war. No one seemed to try to abuse the 1/3 rule, simply because trying to rob other goblins is rarely a smart move. You can only rob M&S.

Almost forgot: as I told, we do PvP events, on completely volunteer basis. This time we killed those hordies who wanted to desecrate flames. We were a bit (khm) healer-heavy, making the ganking effectiveness hilarious.

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I wrote that why I hated QA3 and preferred Auctioneer. QA3, not remembering any "market" price, just undercut with a set amount, regardless of current price. QA3 fits to the AH-camper strategy. The camper sells way above the equilibrium price, keeping his position simply by always relisting, making sure he is always the cheapest by 1c. You can beat a camper two ways. One is being better camper, relisting more times, therefore being cheapest more times.

The other is the deep undercutter strategy, driving the prices down using as little time as possible. The strategy depends on the fact that camping is time consuming, so the camper will quit if the prices is low enough. I mean if you spend 5 hours/day camping, you must make 5000G/day to have 1000G/hour. If you just spend 0.5 hour, you are fine with 500G/day. Since the amount of buyers is fixed, by driving the prices down you decrease the G/day available to everyone on the market, killing campers one by one.

The reason why I loved auctioneer is the lack of "price reset". If there are no glyph on the AH, QA3 of the first guy listing will post at his fallback price. It's usually pretty high for campers. The "no glyph" situation can be reached by either luck (some players are absent for some time), a buyer surge (new flavor of the month) or someone buying out everyone to force a price reset. Auctioneer posts at old_market_price*some_factor (mine is 1.25), making the reset impossible. This "soft reset" also allows you to automatically elevate prices when the camper is out, but not high enough to lure him back a week later.

However QA3 has 2 great reasons to use. One is treshold price, allowing you to make sure you won't post below a price you don't accept. The other is being very quick in posting. Took some time to figure out how can I use QA3 to deep undercutting (as I obviously won't camp). There is a brutal and a more sophisticated method. The brutal is simple. You calculate your breaking point. For example I want to make 4G/glyph or it doesn't worth the work. The ink price is 3G so I must sell for 7G min. I set my threshold to 7, my fallback to 8 and let the angry mails come. This brutal carpet bombing does quick work of the campers, however leaves money on the table. What if the campers would quit at 10? Then I'm losing 2G/glyph.

To do the more sophisticated method, at first switch off "intelligent cancel" or something like that that automatically cancels your auctions if you could relist higher. You don't want to relist higher. Secondly set the post time to 48 hours. Set the fallback to 30-40G, it's high enough to make nice profit but low enough to get angry mail. Set undercut to 50s min but 1-2G is better for quick result. Cancel-repost at least once a day, two is better. The trick is that as long as the camper is around, your glyph will never expire, since he undercuts them and you cancel-repost. Since you always have glyphs listed, you form an upper limit to the price. If the camper undercuts you, you undercut him, driving the price down. Sooner or later he quits.

Here comes the core move: once a week run a summary, or simply look at your listed auctions. Approximate the average price. Set your fallback to 1.25*average. So if the camper quits and your glyphs expire or he buys you out to force a reset, your price will be up to old_average*1.25, making a "real" reset impossible. You won't leave money on the table, but the camper won't come back either.

One question remains: what happens if 2 people play this strategy? Simple: the one who sets his threshold lower (because he is ready to work for less) will win the market and sell glyphs for (second guy's threshold-1s).