Duplication Stinks

For once I'm not talking about Blizzard's blind eye to their games.

When I wrote about my 5.2 Marketing Plan, one of the features I was installing were multiple crafters of the BS/Tailor/LW type.  This week I've gotten to 29 Tailoring patterns, 28 LW patterns, and I now know almost all of the epic patterns for LW/Tailoring.  The problem I had this week were crafters learning duplicate patterns.  I recognized this would possibly be an issue, and this last week I acknowledged I got excessively lucky the first week in not getting any duplicates, but this week I felt like I was buying baseball cards in foilpacks and getting the worst possible cards. Basically 7 new PvP patterns of each, which is what everyone else retained, which still puts me at 2 weeks ahead of everyone else but I couldn't get over the fact that my luck always runs out when I get on a streak.

If anything, I'm able to craft most everything a little easier, since I've had to bounce around different characters just to restock.  These things still sell for a decent profit, but not 1000% like they did the first week.  We're approaching saturation of the talking monkeys.

Talking monkeys tend to craft things, and then just put it up for whatever they want to make.  If something only cost them 100g to make, they post it for 110g.  Thanks to TSM, these same people just follow downward spirals in the pricing.  What the hell am I talking about?  The leatherworking CD gives a lowball price to items, and people don't adjust their addon to account for the full value of the materials required for the craft.  So they post an armor for 110g, when it really has a cost of 200g.  It would seem like a good idea to try to reset the price, but these items are not like gems.  These items will sit for a while before they sell, sometimes requiring 2-3 reposts to sell just one.  In that time, talking monkey takes my gold and starts the process all over again, sticking you with overpriced items.  High pop server problems, sigh.  It's not that bad, many items are very well priced, although the profits on most of them are not that great.  50, 100, 200g?  Items are considered too high priced and people waiting?

This is why I love leatherworking even more.  Most of the playerbase posting these 5.2 items today were incredibly lazy during 5.0 through 5.1.  They couldn't be asked to grind out the Contender gear.  1 SOH per RECIPE!?  That's criminal and bad design, I'm going to vote No!

Since the 5.2 items are playing the game of "Race to the Bottom", I've made a truckload in the previous market. After all, who the hell would want to buy crap from the previous patch?  It's outdated and we've moved on, right?

Answer:  Most people.

Are you a consumer in real life?  I'm pretty sure you are.  Ever go to a Walmart and see your favorite shampoo and then notice that they have the store brand for about half price?  If you're someone that buys the brand name, you have lots of extra money to throw away.  If you're me, you're snapping that offbrand up and probably buying two of them and congratulating yourself for saving money.  Maybe this is a bad example, I'm assuming people wash their hair here.

My point is consumers want a bargain that will satisfy their needs for the least possible outflow of cash.  Not everyone playing Warcraft is wealthy, and they tend to treat their gold like they would real life money.  Blizz has stated it before, the average amount of gold people have is incredibly low.  I was chatting with a friend of mine that came back to the game, and he told me he only had about 7k to his name.  After all his repair bills being paid, flasks paid for, foods, high end enchants, and him grinding all those dungeons with friends for years, he only has about 7k.  Another guildie after Firelands received a 20,000g severance package from me when I let her go from our raid group.  She told me "No hard feelings, I'm now rich!".  A warrior I brought in (who was really good and listened) had extreme money trouble - he was worth 3,000g after 4 years of playing.

Most people are really, really bad at making and SAVING gold.  Even with all the dailies, enhanced gold drops, and opportunities to make gold in the game, they flat out aren't going to have the spare gold to blow on your 1k bracers or 2k chest pieces.  The target market for these expensive new items are people who don't have the alts to make things, but have the gold to spend on their alts.  If everyone was extremely wealthy and carefree with their gold, then I would be selling through everything within an hour, given my server has about 22,000 90s running around on it.  People budget what they spend on their characters, and they aren't always going to choose top of the line, just good enough.

So I'm still posting everything from 5.0 leatherworking daily, and it's selling out.  Tailoring, much harder to do because the reagent cost is not as much. 

Enchanting - If you didn't know this trick, you're in the dark

I can't understand why Crystals haven't plummeted through the floor.  I haven't had the time to really sit down and analyze my market, but my gut guess is that people are still not doing math or the demand is behind the supply since people aren't aware of it.  Since Tailored items now offer several recipes that will give a cheaper Ethereal Shard, I shake my head nightly as I see them still priced well over 50g per.  Either people aren't in this market or someone's keeping pricing fixed in place, and the latter I highly doubt given the supply of them.  If anything it's made me nervous about keeping a large stockpile of Shas laying around, last time I did a 2 week supply black came up and I spent the next week running Gold-Cost-Averaging calculations.

Here goes (plug these into your spreadsheet to get your own ceiling):

Windwool Cloth - 2g per (cap)
Windwool Bolt - 10g per (cap)
1x458 Cloak/Wrists Armor - 4 Bolts, 40g cost
Disenchant the item, you now have a 40g Ethereal Shard, 20g if you get a proc.

And it goes down from there.  I use 2g because that's the extreme price on my server.  Even funnier because nobody is keeping the cloths off the AH, they keep going lower and lower.  This alone should put enormous pressure on the tailoring market, but it's not for some reason.

If you want to get in on the action, just do the basic math, make a bunch of these, and post at primetime.  It's not exactly awesome GPH or ROI, but you can cash in before the herd finds this watering hole.  Mooo.

Margin Call, Week of March 10

This week was not nearly what I would have liked to have seen, but given I'm putting in 60 hours a week at work this month (yes, exhausted, thank you) and putting my spare time into valor capping (the joke this patch for LFR, your BIS more than likely comes from the new raid rep) three different characters, it wasn't too bad.  I was hardly even paying attention to restocking things, just selling inventory, getting CDs and Tillers done, and doing some mat snatching while hanging around in queues.  Here, check this out:

Hardly any purchases, a decent amount of sales.  If only I cared right now.

And by the way dps in LFRs on Council, It kill the adds before the bosses, or else you get the hose again!  Watching Living Sands wipe the raids over and over told me it's gonna be a long, long patch.

Thanks for stopping in!

p.s. While I have other topics fleshed out in my blog queue (including a nice roast), I am still working on them.  Once this smoke clears I'll be in a better position to get them done.  Not having weekends is wearing on me.  Next time, I'm going to go over my leveling process, or possibly publish a long awaited roast.  I can't decide.