The Wall

Sorry for the lack of posts. :) Real life crooks her hand and I follow like a stray sheep. AH playing has been business as usual, except I've been rapidly expanding my mount collection with all the shinies I could not have afforded before, like the tiger. I'm also scheduled to get a Mimiron's Head in a month for 100k. (My guildmate pointed out that I've already spent over half a million gold on mounts alone....oi vey.) Today, however, we're going to take a look at this comment from Anon.

Im having the same problem on my server atm. Glyphs going for 70 b/o, and the good ones at 30g+ avg for weeks on end.

A new guy comes along and posts 15g fallback, 5g threshold. one of every glyph. Its crushed the glyph market on my server. He only posts 1-2x per day from my experience too.

Tell me about how the glyph wall works. The only problem I have is that Im sitting on ~250 stacks of herbs and just 200IoTS. I do have a stock of 12-20 of each glyph in the inventory now. I dont know how long I can keep a wall up.

I have no farmers hooked up. Theres only one on the server and he sells on the Ah. I've had no luck contacting him. Herb prices are very high 20+ mostly. I just dont know what kind of amount of ink I may be needing to keep a wall up.

A wall is fascinating because no profession other than Inscription is capable of forming one. This AH strategy occurs only in glyphs - a high-volume, intensely competitive market.

The purpose of a wall is to drive out one's competitors - either by forcing them to run out of supplies, boring them, or making them feel that lower profits are not worth the labor that goes into crafting and posting glyphs. As a long-term strategy it is fairly effective and can drive out competition as well as discourage new scribes from entering the market.

To form a wall, a "mason" simply needs to set his QA3 to post only at a set max amount and under - for example, if Glyph of Blahblah is at 30g he will only post his at 15g. If Glyph of Blahblah is at 14g19s he will post at 14g15s and so on, with a minimum threshold at the bottom.

So what can you do?

Our friendly neighborhood anon is in a tight spot. He's got a small stock and no farmers hooked up to supply him with cheap herbs. He fits perfectly into the waller's target range.

Every cloud has a silver lining though! 15g a glyph is still a good price. It sure beats a 5g roof, and even with herbs at 20g a stack you can turn a profit. Even better, I can immediately spot some glaring holes in his competitor's wall.


1) He only posts twice a day. He is not a camper. Phew! This makes it a zillion times easier. It won't eliminate the wall, but the first thing you can do is add his characters to your friends list and undercut as soon as he logs off. (If you're not using Quick Auctions 3, set it up ASAP!) Since you have a large stock of glyphs, only post 1-2 at a time so you can keep more in your bags to undercut without wasting time canceling. If you can keep your glyphs under his he will notice his profits drop even further since you will be getting all his sales, and it might force him to let up a bit. At the very least it'll keep your profit margin high and indicate to him that you're serious.

2) What's even better about his posting schedule is that it makes it very easy for you to price reset! Do you know which glyphs are the most popular on your server? (You should. :P ) After he posts, buy out all of the popular glyphs and simply relist them at a higher threshold. You can make all your money back easily and increase profits for the rest of the day until he relogs to reinstate his wall. In addition, it saves you time and money crafting those glyphs - he's doing all the work for you, no farming or herbs required. This is a fantastic strategy for scribes hurting for supplies.

Some examples of reselling glyphs can be found here:
Just My Two Copper: Tailoring and Inscription Goblins Misconceptions
Buying up low priced glyphs and relisting.


I hope some of this is helpful to you. There's even more information about walls in the JMTC forums (check out the Inscription board).

Oopsie!

I'll be honest and tell you that I don't pay much attention to my server's glyph market. It's fairly common practice among scribes to watch one's competitors, add them to one's friend list, and watch for patterns to determine who is whose alt. This allows one to post after they log out, decreasing the chance you'll be quickly undercut.

I don't cancel/relist, it is too time-intensive for me, so I do a waterfall posting. I post, wait 1-2 hours, come back, post again, so all my glyphs stay up. The only time this is annoying is in the morning when all my glyphs have expired, but for the time I save it's a small price to pay.

However I've never really watched other folks. Before the ban wave there were a couple persistent glyph-bots on my server, but once they were out of the way profits steadily increased. Lately I have noticed my auctions getting undercut more frequently but again, I didn't really pay attention...


...until I got a whisper on one of my glyph alts from an unknown rogue. Apparently there is a new fella in our market who is posting all his glyphs at a max of 25g, even popular glyphs that can sell for 70g or more. Rogue fellow was combating it by buying all his 20g auctions and relisting them for higher (something that I consider too risky to do). I did a quick Auctioneer scan and indeed, his highest price is 25g. Ouch.

I am simply going to keep undercutting by 1c. Profits are still okay, and my hunch is that this deep undercutter is either going to get bored, or is going to run out of gold or, more likely, materials. A couple herb botters are active but I have a huge backstock and am still buying herbs daily at the right price. My cost to make is about 60s so my minimum to sell is 70s.

The funny part, though, is this guy was rattling off whose glyphs alts he thought were one person's. He grouped one of mine with another guy, but he did manage to get B. and my scribe together. lol! He also said he was going to try and price reset and not post until 8....so now that I'm done posting I'll try and come back in an hour or so and cancel/repost to get prices back up. Can't really hurt to try, eh?

State of the Union: Glyphs

I'll make it clear right now, I am very late to the party in terms of glyph-making. A lot of people got filthy rich off of this earlier in the expansion; by contrast, my scribe was first created about 2 months ago. Feeling there was still money to be had, and that if it failed it would still be a good learning experience, I dived right in.

At first I was very hesitant to use addons. I'd dabbled in Auctioneer before and I did regular scans, but anything beyond that was a scary jungle of command lines and Skillet buttons. And honestly? I still don't use Skillet or KTQ, holding a deep mistrust of Auctioneer's market data accuracy. What has revolutionized the way I post (in all markets) is Quick Auctions 3. I won't bore you with the how's and why's, since there are many excellent guides out there for this addon (Yumfries' on Youtube helped me immensely), but this is a must. have. addon. No if's and's or but's. I was ACTUALLY posting glyphs by hand before I figured this out, and on the scale glyph-making must be to be profitable, that is not an efficient, feasible, or sane way of going about things.

About two weeks after I started making max-level glyphs, the 2nd version of Blizzard's Warden came out, and the Great Bot Holocaust of 2010 occurred. Ore, herbs and leather vanished from the AH and prices for raw mats skyrocketed. Some influential crafters farmed mats or had their own stock that kept crafted prices down for a while; however, they have inexorably crept higher in price, sometimes by 40g (cut epic gems). Only in the last two week have bots slowly begun to trickle past the new security and back into the game.

After 10 days of scrabbling for mats, I was almost ready to give up on glyphs. Fortunately, at around that mark is when I found "my" botter. For a while we did face-to-face trades at great prices, but nowadays I usually let him post on the AH so I can see if he undercuts someone for even less. He's also a great source of Frost Lotus and Eternal Life - but his primary items for sale are Adder's Tongue, Goldclover, Tiger Lily, and Deadnettle.

I've been buying huge numbers of herbs from him for a couple weeks. To give you some stats, as of this posting I have:
6128 Adder's Tongue
2000 Tiger Lily
3528 Icethorn
1174 Deadnettle
389 Snowfall Ink
3140 Ink of the Sea

Of course,these numbers don't take into account the other herbs I have used crafting Runescrolls, offhands, cards, and glyphs.

With this huge stock in my bank, I got to work. After mass crafting about 10-20 of every glyph, I split them between two special glyph bankers decked out with 4 Pack of Endless Pockets. I do a Summary scan with QA3 and refresh my glyph stocks about once or twice a week. I do not cancel/relist. Instead, I do a "waterfall" posting strategy. I post in the morning, and then every few hours whenever I have time I simply post again. If no one has undercut me, my glyphs stay up. If someone has, I undercut them with MORE glyphs without wasting time running back and forth and refreshing the mailbox. Having a large amount of glyphs is what makes this method possible.

I realize by now this post is probably getting boring, so I'll end with a few tips about glyphs.

o Post for 12 hours. This way you can get your stock back without worrying about canceling.

o Find a farmer/botter who can supply you with lots and lots of cheap herbs. Having a "warehouse" of herbs can and will help you tough through AH dry spells.

o Oh, about that warehouse.... Get a guild bank. Hell, get two or three. When you start buying a lot of herbs and turning them into inks, you're gonna need the space.

o Know your market. If you're sure Glyph of Sunder Armor never sells even if it's listed at 45g, don't craft it.

o Post quickly after resets. When your glyphs are the only ones on the AH, people will have to buy them. For example, my server had a 24-hour downtime last week. Since then glyph prices has doubled because I posted at my fallback, and undercutting has been descending slowly from that point on. A formerly 5g glyph is now an average of 23g. Yay!




STATS
o 1000 - 4000g per day from glyphs
o 3 private guild banks
o 1 scribe, 2 posting mules
o approximately 1 hour per day posting; milling/making inks completed in windowed mode while doing other things