Lessons learned in 5.2

Let me recap.  Last Tuesday I got started around 5pm my time, and the servers had been up for about 2 hours.  Ironically, being on one of the largest servers in the world I half expected to see a 1 hour queue, which is the standard penalty for having responsibility during the day.  We had no queue until late in the evening, and I found that out trying to log into my other account to fetch some extra GIO from a mailbox mule - and even then it was only 800 deep, which was about half what 4.2 brought.

That sort of stinks, I expect queues because it means there's a lot of people coming back to the game.  Our queues during release hit 4000+ in line, which was actually up over Cata's initial release.  When more people come back to the game, it means more opportunity to sell lots of things to people who want to either catch up quickly or are retaining some gear out of LFR/Dungeons and need to update them.  Given the number of people that I saw in my own guild that got to 90 and quit, I expected more people to resub.  I guess maybe I was wrong.

I was also on a mission when I logged in.  I needed to locate the Leatherworking patterns while also going about my normal routine.  Like others, I want to see new content and such, so I figured I would go look for patterns there since reports were good that they were dropping quickly there.  But the Isle of Thunderlag came with 5 second lag and lots of spikes, so I changed course.  I completed several series of dailies finding ONE pattern.  I even tried Scenarios.  So here's a pro-tip for the day if you're thinking of powerleveling a LW:

If you need the Magnificence recipes, your best bet is to run dungeons.

I acquired the six I needed within 3 dungeon runs across the 3 LWs.  They dropped almost immediately for me and there was no sharing.

As of 7 days later:
Tailor:  19 PvP recipes, 2 Epic patterns
Leatherworking:  19 PvP recipes, 1 Epic pattern, Magnificent Hide Bag

Nobody learned a duplicate PvP pattern, I ended up with a one duplicate epic pattern.  Honestly, the epic patterns at this point can burn, why would anyone want these things outside of bleeding edge guilds who have the ability to retain the Haunted Spirits at this point?  HS started showing up immediately on the AH, but it was about 45k per.  Yes, the price has since dropped, we're down to 40k here.  Either way, I'm now 2 weeks ahead of the standard competitor, since I'm now halfway through the entire process for tailoring discoveries after a week.  I'm predicting I'll start seeing duplicate recipes heavily this week.

Ahh, Leatherworking

My favorite feature of this PvP gear rush is that LW is more cumbersome, while tailoring is definitely going into the ground.  From the beginning, the tailored gear was undercut over and over, and today Contender's gear is sometimes more valuable and actually sells.  I don't give it too long before we hit a point of saturation and people stop making the items entirely.  The problem of course is that cloth is widely available, whereas leather requires a specific profession to collect it - and hundreds (if not thousands) of skins to supply the market.

Leatherworking requires more reagents, and that's a good thing.  Not everyone is prepped for this type of demand, since making a 2 hide item requires 100 exotic leather (or save up those 20 leather CDs for a few months to justify a cost in the 40-80g range, since TUJ is using the CD price as the standard cost).  Since that's unreasonable, and there are approximately 58 recipes that require these items, anyone wishing to keep a stock of all the different types is going to put some extreme pressure on the prices.

My prices of this leather are fixed since I stockpiled these for the past 2 months and have an enormous supply (one mailbox shows 834 mails available, and that's normally 10-12 stacks per mail, and that's just ONE mailbox), and I further snap up all idiots posting Mag Hides below my costs since right now is a good time to do it while people look for epic recipes to pop.  Sure they get to make a little money on their CDs, but it also keeps them out of the market and others from doing what I'm doing.

If I was looking to put some hurt on this market, I would insure prices of leather were kept a bit higher.  I wonder how I would do that?  Hmmm. 

Blacksmithing and GIO

Firing up the machine...  I heard the following statements prior to this patch:

* Living Steel is going to go up!  Buy it!
* Trillium Ore is going up!  Buy it!
* Ghost Iron Bars will go up!  Buy it!
* Ghost Iron Ore will go up!  Buy it!

The gold prognosticators that seem to hold Master's Degrees in Economics from the London School of Economics from their BFE Internet Campus location at Starbucks were calling for these things to skyrocket in value.  Just kidding, I doubt most of them hold a degree in anything at all.  Many of them seem to be revising what they were saying and backtracking their advice.  God forbid they were wrong and didn't know wtf they were talking about and have to admit it, right?

After the patch we saw (if your server isn't a backwater):
* Living Steel went up!  For about 4 hours.  It's been at normal prices ever since.
* Trillium Ore has sat where it was prior to the patch.  Still easy to come by.
* GIB and GIO are at normal prices.

I knew they were wrong.  How did I know?  They were talking, and they had no logical or rational reason based on anything except tertiary profession changes for this speculation that was never truly analyzed, but they are halfway decent at social media.  Stick to one thing or another, I think Jim Kramer's job is filled - and he did it for over 20 years prior to telling people what to do with their money on TV.  He actually does his research however before he answers any questions, so you can be reasonably certain he knows what he's talking about.

I've been buying GIO for sub-market pricing everyday ever since we went live.  Even when the forge is opened (legitimately this time), there will not be much pressure on the prices.  The last bastion of hope for a bump is this event, but I doubt you'll get it.  Tailoring should give you an excellent example of what to expect so you don't expect prices to just go up when this event happens.  Everyone started learning the recipes (and many already started), everyone jumped into the market, and today the prices are in the shitter.  Windwool did see a slight bump here by about 25 silver, but there's a big difference.  Windwool hasn't got botters.

GIO is heavily botted and is not exactly in limited supply.  Prior to the release of the patch, Blizzard banned many, many bot accounts.  This placed some pressure on the prices prior to the release.  It's been some time, so these guys are back in business.  To make Trillium Ore, it is directly in line with the price of GIO thanks to Alchemy, and it has enormous downward pressure.  Meanwhile, Blacksmithing is not exactly popular, and as I proved the week before last, anyone leveling it via GIO for the most part are fools.  It's not going up, so dump your stacks now, or COD directly to me.  Send me an email for mule info on my server.  My buyer is standing by.  Otherwise, hold out for a rise in price, and keep listening to the soothe-sayers.  I can also give you the name of a good psychic, too.


Margin Call - Week of March 3

First week of a new patch, it was a tad slow going this week as recipes get learned and I try to squeeze in some actual play time in between jobs here.  Not the most sparkly number, BOEs sold well, new PvP gear sold well, Contender's sold well, as did some enchants.  I'm fairly certain this next week will be better since I saw a level of undercutting this week that I hadn't seen since release of MoP.  I've also held back some stuff since LFR opens this week and THAT is where the money is at moving forward.

Someone PMed me asking why I black out things in this.  Simple:  I don't want you seeing my best sellers and what I buy the most of.  I'm not here to make copycats of techniques, I want copycats of the thought process.


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