Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Brawling Time - BMAH

I want to start out this post by appologizing a bit for the lack of content in the past few weeks.  I was busy for a while IRL and when Sandy came (I live in NJ)  things got hectic for a while, but now things have settled down and I finally have some time to write and play WoW.

First Rule of Brawler's Guild
Well I'm breaking the first rule by writing this post, but when reading an article on Wowhead about Brawler's Guild on the PTR, I was surprised to see that you can access this content by invite only.  And where does one obtain such an invite?  The Black Market Auction House, or as Cold pointed out to me, through member invite.  Invites take Rank 7 in the guild which this post (read it for more info) says currently requires ~75k dps on the PTR.  Needless to say these non-BMAH invites won't be spreading around for a while.

BMAH on the PTR courtesy Wowhead.com













Now, the number of invites  you see in this picture will most likely be more than that on the live servers when 5.1 comes out (maybe not though), but these are going to be a pricey commodity when 5.1 first comes out and the weeks to follow.

What does this mean?
Well, you have two options.  Maybe you're one of the elite gold makers on your server and you want to try out this Brawler's Guild before everyone else, perhaps because you're after the Realm First Achievement associated with it.  If your pockets are deep and you can outbid your competitors, and babysit the auctions, you can be the first to try this, and possibly get the Realm First.  On the other hand you can just wait.  If you're not interested in the Realm First I HIGHLY suggest this route.  Sure go back and check daily what they're going for, or check trade for people selling cheap invites, but wait it out at least 1-2 weeks.  Maybe even get an invite from a friend if they have one.  Prices will drop exponentially by then and you can get your invitation for a great deal.

General BMAH Tactics
In general when using the BMAH you have to take 2 things into consideration.  What you're willing to pay, and where you're going to be when the auction expires.  If you're not going to be on when the auction expires you may very well lose the item to someone who is willing to just pay 1k more than you at the last second.  You may have to pay a premium if you really want an item on the BMAH but just can't be in game when the auction expires.

Always set a price threshold.  If there's an item you're interested in, decide what the maximum price you'd be willing to pay BEFORE you start a bidding war.  This way you don't get caught up in a silly bidding war and end up in a situation like this:
Click to Enlarge.  Image courtesy reddit user jlwg.
















Finally, if you're able to be in game near when the auction is expiring, don't start bidding until then.  This one is pretty simple, if you start bidding before then you're only raising the price for yourself, and why do that?  If you're going to start a bidding war, do it as late as possible.

So, if the system goes as planned, when are you going to try to get your invite to the Brawler's Guild after 5.1 is released?

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you like my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!!

7 comments:

  1. If I can find it cheap, I'll get one, but I'm willing to wait for prices to go down. More than that, I really don't want to start a bidding war on one of these and feed into the anti gold maker sentiment this whole thing has stirred up.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, sometimes I can't help myself. Once I was bidding on a mount I shouldn't have payed more than 45k for, and someone was bidding against me every time I placed a bid, eventually moved from the ~1,000 increments to 10k increments, got a little out of hand lol. I've been good since then, and look forward to trying this out maybe a week or two into it. Plenty to do with the new dailies and whatnot to keep busy with.

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  2. Something unique to the BMAH, you can't just bid at the end of expect to get it for cheaper then you would of if you started your bid out at a high ramp up.

    What I mean by this is that, the BMAH has a clause in its Auctions that if the auction has less then 5 minutes remaining on it when a bid is placed, the time left is reset to 5 minutes.

    For a Heroic Item that pops up, Instead of opening with a small bid of 23k, I'll open with a bid of 50k to scare others off.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. For these specific items, I just don't want to ramp it up too high, usually you'll have at least 1 other interested party, I just bank on them not necessarily being on when the auction comes to a close. I'm on a small server so that may just tend to work better for me because of the low pop, and be less practical in a high pop situation.

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  3. I really feel that this AH would be much more benneficial to the community and much more effective if it used a bidding system similar to that of Diablo or ebay. Currently it has zero to do with who's willing to pay the most (wasn't that the point of it to begin with) and has everything to do with who is standing there at the end.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, I really don't like that about the BMAH. 90% of the time if there's something I want I have to be willing to either jack the price up really high, or plan to be around when it expires.

      On the other hand having it expire at random times could make it harder for players to find what they're looking for because they'd have to check it multiple times a day. 9 times out of 10 I look at the BMAH say "meh." and go about my life. If they were posted at random times and expired at random intervals of 12 hrs, feasibly you'd have to check it multiple times per day.

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  4. The planned realm first achievement for Brawler's Guild has been removed. The brawler's guild doesn't have anything to attract pvp players and pve players won't have time for it.

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