With WotLK right around the corner, do you intend to change any of your Auctioneering Habits? Will you stop buying up stuff? What items will you be stocking up to sell for the expansion or for inscription?
On my particular server, the AH is still hot. It seems like people are still spending their gold pretty easily. What about on your server?
my server seems like people are just unloading all their stuff. the prices have about cut in half for almost all the items. its very hard to make any money now except for enchant mats as people will always need enchants. gear is almost at a stand still
i also cleaned out my whole bank of stuff. i'm sure some of it will actually be worth more in the future, since people will need the mats to level up new professions and whatnot, and no one will be running the content any more, but i'm not a huge speculator so i'd rather just unload it all and not worry about it.
i still do both resale and disenchanting, though i am much more careful. as matt said, the very high end gems and stuff have all crashed, marketwise.
My markets are still moving, and it is still possible to make money on resale, but I'm *much* more careful about buying up loads of something than I used to be, at least for anything where I don't have reason to believe demand will increase in wrath (like herbs).
I actually took a bit of a bath (probably 20-30% of my big-picture net worth), as I had a *huge* stash of void crystals and large prismatics, nether vortexes primals, darkmoon cards, epic gems and other high-end items when the announcement of a wrath date hit. I was already beginning to be more careful about accumulation, but was trying to maintain fairly high prices and I couldn't get most of my inventory sold before the market weakened. My biggest loser was quite unexpected though -- I still have, unsold in my bank about 60 stacks of large brilliant shards, all bought for between 5 and 8 gold with the expectation of selling for 9-10 (or more) which I was consistently doing until a month or two ago. I lowered my expectations, but soon found I could not sell even for 5-6g, as a new farmer kept putting more and more shards on at 3-4g a piece.
I have no reason to think that the price for large brilliants should go down significantly in wrath. They still make some of the best enchants for the 19 and 29 twink brackets which I expect to remain popular. They will still be difficult to solo farm in quantity, even at lvl 80, and many of the people currently farming them for various reasons should be busy with new content in wrath. Small radiant shards, for instance, are no harder to farm today than large brilliant will be for Lvl 80s, and yet their price is maintained at around 8-10g ea. So I'm hanging onto them, in hopes that the price goes back up.
I started a new character on a completely new server (to me) a few weeks ago. He now has less than 1 day played and a net worth of 3-400g. I started playing the ah with around 2g from selling a stack of copper. And I've been very conservative, probably more so than I was on my way up as feldeprecor, because I'm more confident in my ability to make consistent money slowly, so I don't want to risk getting my capital tied up in stuff that doesn't sell for too long. I am constantly seeing deals that would probably make a lot of gold that I won't risk investing in at my current bankroll. If anything it looks like this server will be easier to make money on than feldeprecor's. But even with my high-level of caution, I believe my net worth is growing by about 10-20% every auctioneer session (typically once a day for a few minutes to a 1/2 hour at most)
And amazingly enough just like fel's server, people constantly complain about the economy in trade (oddly despite being a pve server, twink items are *far* more expensive on my new server). I'll bet it's like that on every single server. heh. Just wait until I have 5-10k gold to play with, then you'll see what an economy should look like. :)
So what did you manage to do with the rest of your high-end stash? I've got a bit of enchanting mats as well - though not nearly on your scale :-) - and am trying to decide whether to offload them as fast as possible before Wrath or hang on to them in hope that the prices will rise a bit as supply goes down since players will still want it for leveling enchanting. This probably doesn't work out well for the prismatics since leveling mostly is taken care of by dusts and essences so maybe I should just offload the prismatics (for next to nothing, /cry) and hang onto the rest.
I probably need to figure out how to move my auctioneering to the next level too; can't seem to break 10k gold and there you are investing in LBS for 6-9000g without blinking - any tips for large-scale investing? ;-)
Well, one auctioneering habit that's already changed is... being able to auction anything at all! With the auctioneers constantly dead as zombie gankers run amok, I for one have pulled the pin on WoW, at least until this mess settles down and the game becomes playable once more. :(
Hooray! I was happy to find Exodar mostly peaceful and did my business there until I realized that none of my customers could use the AHs in Stormwind and Ironforge ;-)
Nice event though all in all. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens next.
Yeah, for some reason, my bank alt has been largely unmolested and been able to use auctioneers up through yesterday morning (In IF!) but he's hardly sold anything since friday.
As for the high end stash that I didn't sell before wrath, I've mostly sold them off at prices like I usually bought at (or less) while continuing to buy new good deals. It's mostly about recognizing the new market and dealing with it. I used to hold the price of LPS on my server at 27+ (and post 2.4 often well over 30). Now they go for 15-20, and any attempt to push the price above that range results in a flood from somebody emptying their bank. So I sold em off for 17-20, and I buy the 15s and under (or the 16+ when I can make 1g off them). But I bought 38 voids for 20-23g the other day. Guildie broke them, and I sold off the shards, made a few hundred gold like that even after tipping 2 crystals for an enchant he needed.
Biggest danger in a bear market is that you let your old expectations blind you to new profit opportunities. For instance, until she talked to me, my wife was holding out on selling her nethercleft leg armors because they are going for 285 instead of the 350+ we were used to. But you can now buy the mats for less than 150 (used to be >200 mostly nethers crashing), so 285 is good profit and it's stupid to pass it up.
I still have about 5-10k worth of things that I expect to be worth very little once we're a month or so into wrath. (that doesn't include the LBS). This scourge invasion has the potential to make me eat more of that than I was expecting to.
But I might live with 70k going into wrath. People who still have banks full of stuff and no 10k+ gold in reserve are going to be more upset.
One of the reasons I held back on BC, apart from an expectation (based on my previous marketing experience in the industry) that Blizz will do some kind of BC/LK bundle, was that I figured it would be much easier and cheaper post-LK.
I have 35 alts, in sets of 8, plus strays, on PvP and PvE US, Oceania and Latin servers. So I can skirt a lot of downtime and peak-hour lag and such, and I can source all my own requirements usually. I have been selling off stuff since day one, while buying up cheap stock. For example, I get 1g per piece of Mageweave, and often buy it for under 10s, so who cares if it doesn't sell? With 8 lots of First Aid and a Tailor to feed, my only concern is bag/bank space. 2,500 slots is just not enough!
I'm not in the high end much at all, mainly because I can't yet farm anything myself. I'm happy to deal in say SR Shards, because I can occasionally get one from a DE, and my average cost is well under 10% of current market value. But if I started dealing in things I can only source on the AH, I'd be taking much too high a level of risk, plus I wouldn't be able to use the stuff myself if the need arose, since all my crafts are capped at 300.
Luckily, cash is not an issue. 12k is more than enough to buy a set of Lv60 mounts, plus anything I might decide I can't live without. I can gradually move up the food chain once I get to Outlands, and if prices crash with LK, it will make it cheaper to level, so I see it as a win/win.
But I do feel sorry for the speculators out there who are going to be bitten hard by this.