Pest Control in the AH

Well before I get into today's post I wanted to talk about my success today with the start of the new arena season. Prices jumped significantly as predicted (infinite dust 60g to 97g a stack within 30 mins of the server being online and greater essences from 8-9g to 15-16g each) and I've been jumping between the 3 of my characters cutting gems, posting glyphs, or desperately prospecting ore hoping for a few autumn's glow as I'm completely out >.<

Within the first hour I made 800g off rare gems and about 300-400 in glyphs. In the hours following it was literally non stop AH spam every few seconds. I didn't even have time to cancel my glyphs to repost. I just threw more up to save the 5 mins canceling and digging them out of my mailbox. At the moment I'm really not looking forward to the morning as I have over 800 glyphs posted in the AH all on 12 hour listings.

All in all I made about 6k off glyphs, gems, and enchanting mats. Not to shabby considering I'm on a medium low population server. I could have possibly made more had I been smart enough to post all my auctions on 24 hour listings instead of 12. Im pretty sure I lost a good chunk of sales digging 100 or so gems and 400 glyphs out of my mail and posting them. GG blizz on extended maintnance.

Anyways that my evening and now on to today's actual blog :)

There are many different ways to handle with competition in the auction house. I'm one of those people who thrives off competition. Knowing I can mess with someones market and make money off of it is my kind of motivation. I guess you can say I play to grief other players and the AH is the perfect place to do that. ;)

First off, what to do if you have no "monopolist" types of competition but you have tons of small time competition who are merely an annoyance to your plans on auction house domination. While we may have our different ways of handling this kind of problem I'll toss out my strategy which I'm currently using myself in the glyph market on my server (and it's working so damn beautifully lol).

Gold farmer's are believed to bounce from server to server flooding markets and then leaving once they saturated that server. I saw the farmer's leaving slowly and decided to take action. In a sense I was testing out to see if the farmer's were still on the server so I bought out all the northrend herbs from the AH minus lichbloom (I can't bring myself to mill it lol). Yes, that's right, all the herbs. There was not a single goldclover, tiger lilly, deadnettle, adder's tongue, icethorn or telandra's rose (or whatever its called :P) to be found anywhere in the AH.

My reasoning behind this was simple. I needed inks anyways as my backstock was down to 500 or so and one of two things would either happen (in theory):

1) The gold farmer's had left to another server thus the supply was gone. Me clearing the AH would inflate prices to unbearable prices for fellow competition while I sat on hundreds of stacks of herbs and able to still craft glyphs cheaply. This would give me a significant advantage in 2 markets, Glyphs and cards. I had just got done making approximately 72 or so darkmoon cards of the north and so naturally the AH was low on those as well and pushed prices to almost double.

2) There was still an abundance of supply on the server and this would be like turning on one of those bug lights that zaps bugs. People / farmers would see an empty herb market and start flooding their stashes into the AH thus crashing the market and allow me to buy everything up and enforce theory 1.

Now I had tried this a few days prior and it didn't work out as well as I had planned. A few days ago prices spikes about 50% but by the next morning they returned to normal. This time around I planned it almost to perfection in my opinion. The darkmoon fair is less then a week away. Herb stashes were already low from card making, Arena season is starting so people will be focusing on pvping instead of sitting around farming, and the farmer's were starting to show signs of departing the server for the time being.

The result? For the past 48 hours or so the AH has been clean dry of any herbs minus lichbloom. Well until this evening when herbs finally started making their way back on the market.

The prices are the following:

Goldclover - 20ish stacks at 40g (normal under 10g)
Tiger lilly - 5 or so stacks at 35-40g (normal under 10g)
Deadnettle - Empty
Adder's tongue - 30ish stacks between 40-50g (normal 10-13g)
Icethorn - 20ish stacks stacks at 30g (normal 12-15g)
Rose - Empty

Now I know this wont stay for to much longer and prices will fall back to normal but its giving me a few days of low competition glyph making and putting a strain on card makers. I've been checking the markets and I keep buying anything that gets posted under 20g a stack to kind of prevent the prices dropping back down to quickly.

The result on my competition? I've seen 2 glyph makers in trade advertising they are trading snowfall ink for ink of the sea and various people in trade trying to buy herbs for the past few hours on end.

While this is not a permanent solution it's definitely something to consider when your dealing with lots of low level competition or even the infamous goblins.

I was going to write about how to put some stress on your monopolist competition but I didn't realize I was going to write this much on that topic.

Thanks for reading and if you have any success with this or have done anything similar feel free to drop me a comment and tell me about it :) As usual try anything I say at your own risk. Don't invest your life savings into these kinds of strategies because they are highly risky and can backfire. There now i feel less guilty is someone goes broke listening to me :P