Thursday, January 21, 2016

Pay Attention to What You're Buying!

Recently I added a vendor subgroup to my TSM Transmog List, because there were quite a few items on my transmog list that happened to be vendor items, that people were unaware of based off my list alone. As I was shopping later that week, I came across an item, Glorious Shoulders for 600g. At first I clearly recognized this item as the shoulders for Glorious Transmog Set, a very sought after "platekini" set for transmog. Seeing it for 600g I thought, what a deal! These pieces sell in the 10's of thousands, and these shoulders were only 600g!

Of course, I moused over the item to see it's DB Global Market value before purchasing, and I noticed something odd. The market value was 5k and it was in my Vendor group. Of course my first thought was "you can buy pieces from the Glorious set from a vendor!?"

I took to Wowhead, and if you were sleuthy enough to click my Glorious Shoulders link above, you'd know that the linked shoulders are nothing but!


Nothing Glorious about these Shoulders...except maybe the name!


Wednesday, January 20, 2016

TSM Wowuction Prices are Going, Going, Gone!




As many of you may have noticed, TSM_Wowuction has been a bit unstable recently, with price updates taking much longer than normal. To this effect, the TSM team has announced they've decided to end support for Wowuction pricing as of the r303 release of the TSM App.

What does this mean for you?
Most likely, not much. As mentioned in the above post, the Wowuction price sources will now map to a corresponding TSM price source. Also, TSM has created their own Region Market price source in DBRegionMarketAvg. Quite frankly, I was unaware that DBGlobalMarketAvg was truly "global" (US and EU servers combined), and I had thought that it was a Region-wide (US or EU specific )price source all along. The difference now would be that you should be able to recognize nuances in the price sources between US and EU servers now, which is most likely quite noticeable in high end items.

To me, this update is a bit of a nonissue. I've stated multiple times that I much prefer TSM sources, as they are updated hourly to my addon, and the TSM team is much more involved in World of Warcraft, and have been consistently there to fix things when they go awry, whether it be a battle.net Auction House API update, or changes in game that require the addon to be fixed. They are the gold standard for the WoW gold making community, and I believe they will remain so for time to come.

I believe that to an extent this will also clear up some confusion for newbies when considering price sources for items, as now there is not as much confusion between the sources and they're all fairly well described. If these changes go live before the weekend, I'm going to attempt to put together a video on price sources over this weekend, as quite frankly it will be a lot more straightforward now.


Cheers,
Phat Lewts

Monday, January 18, 2016

Volatility of the Transmog Market

Earlier this week I got a sale that I thought really exemplifies the transmog market.

The sale was for a 60k+ transmog piece, and I decided to look it up in my TSM Accounting to see when/for how much I bought it, because I was pretty sure it had been a recent purchase. Lo and behold I found this:



As you can see, I had bought this item just 10 days prior to selling it for 1,400g, and sold it for 67k. Prior to that though, I had bought this piece 426 days ago, and sold it 49 days ago, which means I had held on to it for over a year before it sold (377 days roughly).

I think this really captures the true volatility of the transmog market. Are there people out there that will pay the hiked up prices for these rare transmog items, especially items like this one that are no longer in game, but you never know when that person will be looking on the AH for your specific item. That person can take just days to find your item, or literally over a year. In both cases, even with posting fees, I made gold hand over fist. This is really important to remember.  You may sit and watch one item for a year and see it never sells, but that doesn't mean all is lost.

My transmog inventory is a mix of things that are fast sellers, slow sellers, things I've never sold, and inventory I can't keep on the shelf. Each individual item cannot alone sustain me, and may result in pure loss, but all items as a whole will profit in the long run, and that's really all there is to it.

Cheers,
Phat Lewts

Don't Call it a Comeback

Okay. You can probably call it a comeback in this case. I've been gone a long time. So if you follow my Twitter you'll know I recent...