The Misten Problem

Since returning to WoW I've cut down to only my primary account. On a college budget it's tough enough to run one, let alone having the second account (aka the Liquidate account) which was mostly just bank and AH toons anyways. It was super convenient but it's just not in the funds right now.

I miss u. <3

So when I was looking to get started in gold-making again I had my decision largely made for me: If I were to split my stock onto different characters, say by having one toon doing glyphs, one for gems, etc. I would have to clear the bags of my "real" characters in order to do this. I decided instead to work with one character and a guild bank, not because it was the absolute best strategy but because it was easiest at the time and with my available tools.

So that's where Misten came from. She'd been a neglected alt that I repurposed for AH-ing. I got her a guild bank started up and the guild bank holds all the glyphs, gems, enchants . . . everything, really. This has a few interesting effects on how I make gold right now.

In the "pros" column I am able to handle all of my markets from one character and it's easiest to explain where this benefit comes in when comparing my setup to a competitor.

I have a competitor who I will call Greg. Greg competes with me in nearly everything; gems, glyphs, enchants, crafted gear, etc. But he splits all of these markets onto different alts. Gregpaladin posts his gems, Gregwarrior posts his glyphs, Gregdeathknight posts his enchants, etc. This is great for me because I know what he'll be undercutting when. If Gregdeathknight is online I can tell TSM to only scan the enchant market for undercutting, cutting down drastically on my turnaround time for undercuts. When Gregdeathknight logs off and Gregwarrior logs on immediately afterwards I can do a final enchant cancel/repost, then switch from scanning enchants to scanning glyphs. (Then since Greg likes to use the Remote Auction House every once and a while I can throw in a total scan here and there to catch anything he's trying to sneak past.)

This is where having one central bank toon shines; since I'm posting everything from one source there's no big flag to competitors to say "Faidglyphs is on! Worry about glyphs, disregard other things since she's more than likely not undercutting them right now! You'll know when she starts when she logs onto Faidgems!"

I never saw an issue with single-toon posting. Other than a few slower-moving niche markets like transmog or low-level crafting materials which rarely benefit from undercuts I thought that One Toon to Sell Them All was always going to be the best.

But I'm considering splitting a few things up now. I was doing my usual cancel/repost scan and noticed that all of my Tinker's Gears were reposting to their fallback because the market was under crafting cost. This is very strange because, not only is that a silly thing to do, but because I pretty much never have competition on these. So I decided to take a look.

If I had to guess I'd say I wasn't the only one who powerleveled Engineering recently. Someone had crafted a bunch of every one of them and posted them for 3-4g each. (For reference 5g is right around the lowest you can get a single Ghost Iron Bar for on Argent Dawn, so this was under half the crafting cost.) So of course I bought them out to supplement my own stock and raise the prices.

I almost never do this whole "buyout ones under crafting cost" thing. I've always told myself it's because it doesn't happen that often.

But does it? When I do a post scan I literally see hundreds of auctions fly by my screen; I don't have time to notice weird changes in pricing. The only reason I even noticed this Tinker's Gear situation was because I was looking to make sure something else was being scanned properly. God only knows how many of these situations I missed over time since I just "let TSM handle everything" for me. I know TSM has resale scan options but that's the kind of thing I'm not super-keen on automating.

So I'm thinking today that I may play around with splitting markets among my characters, at least until I can afford to get Liquidate up and running again. While I'll lose the great benefit of a central character for all markets it will allow me to have a better view of each given market and so it may balance out over time. We'll see.