Sunday, August 30, 2015

Theory of Transmog

This is a post I've wanted to do for a while, so buckle in kiddies, we're going for a ride.

The Latest in Xmog Fashion
Transmog is a Long Term Investment
One of the most common questions I see from transmog selling beginners is "I've got X items, and I'm not getting many sales, what am I doing wrong?" The answer of course is nothing, granted X is insignificant, say less than a few hundred. Even in the hundreds, transmog can be slow. Transmog is slow.

I also see people claiming they're going to farm a bunch of xmog and turn it around for a WoW Token before their sub expires in 3 days. Really? No. Sure, you can get a piece that's worth 11k, but your buyer needs time to find it. Now if you are trying to sell to sellers, then by all means mark it down low and lose lots of gold, but transmog is the Looooong Game if you're playing it right, and is not a quick turnover market.

Transmog to me is not a market you get in immediately. At first you want to invest your gold in fairly liquid assets so you can reinvest, and get that delicious quickly compounding interest. Only when you have a sizable quantity of gold to invest, and are running out of options, should transmog be your go to market. That's not to say you cannot make gold off xmog alone. With 2k start up capital, and patience you can turn it into hundreds of thousands, but that key ingredient is patience and time. You do not want to tie up all your capital in transmog the same way you do not want to tie up all of your capital in mounts. It's just silly to put all your eggs in one long term basket. You want a nice portfolio of long term and short term strategies, to really optimize your gold's potential future value.

When you decide it's time to invest in transmog, you need to understand unequivocally that you will probably be down gold for quite some time before making it back. Yes, you'll always see those success stories where the first thing someone buys is worth 10k, they spent 5g on it, and sold it overnight. Outliers happen.

Just know that the key to transmog is amassing a large, diverse stock of items, and constantly reposting. Do not worry about items as individuals, but your stock as a whole, and have something else going while you're acquiring armor, or you will lose interest.

One Size Fits All
Now if you're reading this and have tried the xmog market you've probably tested out my price sources which roughly are:

Buy: 20% Global
MinSell: 50% Global
NormSell: 125% Global
MaxSell: 250% Global

These are not perfect price sources for all servers, which I expressed in my transmog video, but people tend to gloss over that. I do like to go off of the entire WoW population when pricing. The global averages give you a nice baseline of what something is potentially worth relative to other items transmog items. For example if Chestpiece A is worth 600g globally, and Chestpiece B is worth 1200g globally, I know that in general, people value Chestpiece B to be worth twice as much as Chestpiece A. That to me, in a perfect world (of Warcraft), would mean that using these sources at a percent optimized for your server would give you ideal pricing, but unfortunately that's just not the case.

That's why I choose to use global sources personally, and lean towards the hypothetical, but if you're on a larger market, incorporating server specific prices can be extraordinarily useful too, as market prices will tend to behave a bit more on large servers. The bottom line though is that you need to experiment with price sources to find out what works best for you. I have been planning for a while on giving multiple examples of what different people are using for transmog pricing on my pricing page, but that will be up when I do my transmog video over for TSM 3.

Hopefully this helps shed some light on some transmog misconceptions, and these are a few I want to address in my upcoming TSM 3 Transmog video, while also addressing the new transmog mechanic in Warlords (possibly separate videos). What else about the transmog market do you think people tend to misunderstand?

Cheers,
Phat Lewts

3 comments:

  1. The thing that I think is most missed is that its not an easy thing to maintain and manage. While it is the long game - some items are around too long. Cheaper items come along and before you know it you've 5 or more of the same item - and your snatch list finds more each week.

    So you have to watch what you are buying, keep an eye out for people playing you (like the Blacksmith who started posting crafted t.mog pieces ever few days at bang on my buy price), and maintain your lists. Remove items that don't work on your server (no matter how long you wait). And with any market, it has its cycles. In the SOO content drought I made lots of sales, when WoD dropped, sales plummeted. Now with another content 'pause' alts are getting rolled and sales go up.

    As you refine your lists and your approach becomes more sophisticated, its becomes more profitable. And income is steadier.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good post. People foolishly venture into this market thinking it's just an easy way to make a quick buck, failing to realize that while this market may not take any skill or effort, it takes a lot of time and upkeep.

    This isn't an "easy market" just like any other market isn't an easy market. Every market requires something different from the player.
    This specific market requires accepting the feeling of defeat every time you look into your inbox and realize you haven't sold anything yet, but pushing forward in spite of that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good stuff. <3 I'll bookmark this to link for when people have frustrations.

    ReplyDelete

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