There is No Floor

The last post took a lot out of me - and I've been busy with a few other things this week.  If you haven't heard, Sterling, over at the Consortium has put together an Ore Shuffling Spreadsheet, with some help from myself, RavenC, Drrwho and Euripides.  You should go check it out.


When writing this post up, my mind somehow went back ~12 years to a quote from The Matrix.

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

Today I'm talking about price floors.  So there's no confusion - I don't mean the 55g floor on Obsidium Ore that Jewelcrafters have.  I'm talking about pure purchasing - no shuffles, today.  As auctioneers, we like to have access to cheap mats.  If you've crafted glyphs in Cataclysm, without a stockpile of inks to fall back on, this should hit home.   There can be long stretches where the herbs to craft a particular ink are either super-expensive, or just flat-out unavailable. 

I've skipped crafting many a glyph over the weekend because I just hadn't been able to buy enough cheap herbs for the ink during the week.  I'm certain tailors have done it with bags, scribes with Darkmoon Cards, Jewelcrafters with Ore, Enchanters with dust, essence, and shards - and on and on.  If we know we can't turn a decent profit from our mats, we just won't buy them, and will skip crafting altogether.  And we'll blame it on bad luck (Bayside reference).

But, there's a lot we can do to drive prices lower - and sometimes higher.  Some methods are risky, some aren't.  I want to talk about a few today.

Driving Down Prices:

• Let Sleeping Dogs Lie - The easiest thing you can do to keep prices low is to not buy the lowest price auction.  People selling mats usually dump them, undercutting the lowest auction.  Just buy everything except that last one, and you've a good chance of letting the prices stay low.  This works even better when the stack size of that lowest auction is small and/or weird.  Not a lot of folks are going to buy just 2 Goldthorns, but all the other sellers will undercut it.
• Fat Wallet (aka Epic Wall of Singles) - I saw a lot of this the first few weeks in Cataclysm - people would try to drive down ore prices by posting a huge wall of single items.  This is useful for when leaving or posting a single low auction doesn't work.  I'd suggest that you be reasonable and try not to post more than a full stack of singles - I've been known to buyout 30 auctions of 1 Obsidium Ore, reasoning that I'm at least getting a full stack.
• Baiting - We've all heard about it.  Baiting is the same as Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, but it involves you actively posting the low auction, rather than passively leaving somebody else's low auction up.

Raising Prices:

• Sabotage - Quite simply, this is doing the opposite of everything listed above.  A great way to get bang for your buck from this is to buy up the smaller auctions, leaving just the walls.  This way, prices won't trickle down, but will only fall when a huge wall is posted at an undercut.  

Example:
Wall of ore posted at 200g / stack.  I'm not buying it.  But, there are 6 posts of <10 ore each, cascading all the way down to 58g / stack.  What to do?  Well, if my guild bank is full of ore, and there are 80+ stacks sitting in my JCs mail waiting to be prospected, then I know that I won't be needing to buy cheap ore anytime soon.  And, if I can't - then why should any of my competition be able to?  So, I buy up all he smaller stacks, and I leave the wall.  On the other hand, if I only have half a tab of ore, and I see the prices falling like this, I may just leave it and check back in a few hours to see if a wall gets posted at an undercut.


I hope that clears up a few things, and maybe gives you some softer skills with which to manipulate the price of your mats.  Cheers!