Friday, May 31, 2013

Market Value Exponential Failure

As many of you have realized by now, I like to share my mishaps and failures in WoW gold making as much as I like to share my success.

Enchanting
This week I've learned a lesson that quite possibly only be learned from playing on a small server.  I don't think that this would remotely happen on a server such as Illidan - Horde, which is a good thing for those playing on larger servers.  This actually happened to many of my enchanting groups, but I'm going to highlight my group for Enchant Bracer - Critical Strike.  This particular enchant I crafted because TSM thought it was profitable to sell at 100g.  Great 100g, only 25g in mats, sure I'll craft it, why not!  Turns out though that I was the only one on my server crafting these, which is where the mishap came from.

Posting Setup
I was lazy when I set up my groups.  I put all my enchants in one group and set the Fallback as 175% of the market value, and the Threshold as 35% of the Market Value, then let TSM fix my groups into individual groups within a category.  Now this is a fine and dandy strategy if you are posting relevant items where you usually have competition, but for those items that you are the only one posting, it can become quite troublesome to someone (like me) who doesn't constantly pay attention at what prices he is posting at.

The Result
The end result was quite hilarious.  I didn't notice what was happening until about a month too late.  Since I was the only one posting this particular enchant, every time I posted it, the "Market Value" changed to whatever I posted at.  So each time I reposted this item, TSM increased the price by a multiplier of 1.75.  Now just to put this into perspective, if I reposted 15 times under these assumptions, the 15th time I'd be posting at a whopping 4421x the original price!  Below is the result of who knows how many days of not paying attention:


All for an enchant worth 100g!  So let a lesson be learned here boys and girls, TSM can do a LOT of thinking for you, but there's only so much it can do.  Beware using percents when dealing with rarely posted items, or an item worth 100g can end up being posted at 127k.  Hopefully everyone who reads this pays more attention when setting up groups than I did.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

3 comments:

  1. I had a similar experience. I had some low level enchants set to % crafting costs. Someone posted 1 each of low level mats at 60000g which suddenly increased the price of my enchants from the 25-30g range to the 200000 - 300000g range. I didn't notice for a day or two then I looked up at my posted value of auctions and it was in the millions. Then I know something was wrong.

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  2. One of the nice things about still running auctioneer is that a quick look at the items in the ah identifies outliers fairly quickly. Yours or someone elses. Even better is the ability which is seriously overlooked to generate an ingame histogram, ie a pretty picture, not just numbers. It's a very old school addon and doesn't play so well with others in some ways - but sadly, much as I love TSM since it began getting bigger, neither does it. (The frequent crafting error message spontaneously errupting during combat has become tiresome) The evolution to include bids, and "autobuyout' features replicating the auctioneer features are interesting, as is the sniper module. TSM is imo still superior for posting and shoping categories under most circumstances and has the crafting integration - but it is interesting that it has started developing the same complexities.
    Like your example, I've encountered several occasions where it inflating prices while I wasn't looking and to avoid this now tend to use the % TUJ or wowauction region as my % fallback as this also detects global trends more quickly. I can't claim credit as my own thought - it came from the suggestions in setting up TSM like a boss. Credit where credit is due :)

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  3. I had the exact opposite happen with some of my enchants. Basically I ended up doing all the work for no profit and in some cases, heavy losses.

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