Buying Inks
This is a big one. Strictly looking at wotlk, there were three primary options for acquiring your inks:
- Buying northrend herbs and milling + trading
- Buying individual herbs and milling
- Buying ink(s) directly
This might change short term in Cataclysm with the horde of new gatherer alts coming along, but in terms of lich king - buying individual herbs simply wasn't a profitable strategy. For the majority of the expansion it was common to see Adder's Tongue and Icethorn at 15g a stack, while Goldthorn and other mid-tier herbs floated in the 30-40g range. The exact numbers aren't important - the sticking point is that raw volume was far lower, and far more expensive for non NR herbs.
By far the most common option was to buy the cheapest northrend herbs, mill them, convert to ink of the sea, and then use Jessica Sellers in dalaran to trade down for Midnight and other level inks. There were some pretty big upsides to this:
- Consistent supply in terms of volume and price
- No need to micromanage stock levels - simply buy more herbs whenever they are cheap. You'll use them eventually
- Very easy to find consistent suppliers - no need to spend time farming
- Reduced cost per ink/glyph if you are able to unload your snowfall ink reliably
I wouldn't be surprised for the Major glyph market players, if this was the way 90% of them operate - likely with their own personal farmer(s) feeding them an endless supply of herbs. For someone with a lot of time on their hands, or a spare laptop and a desire to click until their fingers are numb during a House marathon, this works very well. For the abbreviated player, this presents a pretty large drawback in terms of time invested. Consider the downsides (and conversely, the upsides in buying ink directly) in the Purchase -> Mill -> Ink -> Glyph cycle.
- Time/clicks spent purchasing individual herb stacks
- Time spent opening herb auctions from mail
- Time spent milling herbs into pigments
- Time spent crafting pigments into Ink of the Sea, Snowfall Ink
If you follow the entire cycle of crafting a single glyph, 75% of the time spent is simply in getting the ink created. By buying ink directly, your only extra overhead is acquiring the parchment in addition to the actual glyph crafting. Yes, it is true that with bulk purchasing and stocking you can avoid SOME of the time in running between mail and AH, but at the end of the day you cannot avoid the raw amount of time it takes to mill each herb stack and turn those into inks. Buying ink directly cuts your time to create a glyph down by about 50-75%, depending on how you craft.
Personally, I employ this method with some limited success. At the end of the day, raw ink of the sea is usually going to be more expensive than a stack of herbs, and you don't get the residual snowfall either. It requires some up front time investment, namely:
- Calculating the cost of a glyph, after milling and selling snowfall
- Calculating the cost of a glyph, buying raw IotS
- Determining how big this gap is and how it affects your fallback
On its own, blindly purchasing raw ink won't get you very far. You need to take a look at your thresholds, see how that affects your overall profit, and ultimately figure out if spending less time is worth less profit for you. Fortunately, it's a pretty simple calculation at the end of it. Can you answer the following question? "What would I rather do - spend 9 hours to make 9,000 gold or spend 3 hours to make 2,400 gold?". If you can do this - then you're on your way to seeing if this works out for you. For me personally, I've realized that some weeks to stay competitive and profitable, I need to engage in both.
Setting a threshold and fallback properly
Setting these two values properly is important. If you're considering employing the strategy discussed above, it becomes even more important. For the purposes of this discussion - let's get out some quick obvious points. For those that aren't aware - threshold refers to the value you won't sell an item below. Fallback refers to the value that you sell your item at if no other goods are available. There are some more complicated variants of this, such as auto fallback, but for now these are enough to work with. These values can be easily manipulated with an auction house mod such as ZeroAuctions or Auction Profit Master, so if you don't have these, you'll need these mods.
Now that that's out of the way, let's take a look at what your threshold actually gets you. It should be fairly obvious the the primary use of this is determining your profit margin. If I know that it costs me 8 gold to produce a single glyph (which in wotlk - for all intents and purposes each glyph cost the same gold to produce), then at a bare minimum my threshold for items in the glyph category is 8g. Some people are content to set this to 8g01s, others opt for 9g, others opt for 20g. The choice is up to you - again, it's a baseline.
Most people are fairly good about selecting a competitive threshold that ensures profit. For ultra competitive markets, there's nothing unreasonable about setting a 9g threshold for an 8g cost good. Your margin is lowish (12-13%), but not negligible, and you're guaranteeing that you are hitting as many possible markets as possible. You'll undercut all but the pickiest undercutters, and at worst you're making a profit. Not bad, right?
This is the trap I fell into when getting into inscription - until I realized the other element - time. Or, thinking about it in a more economical perspective - opportunity cost. Opportunity cost in essence states that given options A and B, the opportunity cost of doing A is not doing B. This is watered down, and coming from a non economics major, so please don't rage at the inexactness of this statement. In wow terms, your opportunity cost of selling that 8g glyph at 9g are the time you invest in selling it, as well as the option NOT to use that ink for that glyph to make that 20g glyph. Given an infinite amount of time, we want to sell both the 9g and the 20g glyph, and collect our 13g profit. However given a finite amount of time and resources (in this extreme example, a single glyph), we'll want to sell only the 20g glyph and collect our 12g profit for only half the time investment. Makes sense, right?
Taking another look at it - let's compare posting glyphs to another of my favorite gold making schemes - stormwind recipes. For a few silver each I can buy as many of each recipe as my bags can hold. Sure, the oppportunity cost of buying 10 recipes that only sell for 1g means less room for those nice 10g and 15g recipes, but what is this really costing me? Firstly - my supply is infinite. These are vendor goods, I don't have to worry about "running out" of supply for the higher priced goods. Secondly, I save no time in buying only the high return recipes. It takes me the same amount of time to run to Old Town and back, whether I buy 1 recipe or 50. The time shift-buying recipes is negligible. Thirdly, and by far most importantly - selling one recipe does not negatively impact selling the other. Posting 10 of one recipe does nothing to diminish my ability to post the others. Whereas with glyphs, at the end of the day each glyph has its own raw source. I can ONLY sell Glyph A or Glyph B. If glyph B sells for more I want to sell 2 of those rather than 1 of each.
I've said a lot here, without getting to the point - so here it is. The auction house camper can afford to have a lower threshold. They will sell more auctions, net more profit overall, and they will not take a hit to their supply.
The abbreviated wow player, on the other hand, wants to manage a higher threshold. Not selling 10 glyphs at a 1g profit means I lose 10g, sure, but it also allows me to restock those glyphs far less often. Less restocking means more ink for other, high profit high volume glyphs that I sell more of daily. If it takes me the same 20 seconds to restock 3 ink of the sea for a single glyph, I want my profit out of that 20 seconds to be 20g, and not 1g.
My income will be lower - definitely. But my gold per hour will remain competitive with, if not even higher, than those camping the AH and restocking each time even their worst profiting glyphs sell out of stock.
My advice to you for the last week of wotlk, and absolutely the start of the expansion - take your threshold and raise it 5-10g. It might not seem like much, but I guarantee you that you'll see a significant drop in time invested into restocking. I've personally seen my gold levels drop day by day. I've gone from selling 30-40 glyphs overnight to maybe 5-10, but I'm selling at an average of 80g per glyph versus 20g per. My gold per hour remains high and strong, and I'm still netting enough raw income to make it worth my time. Given the long run - I think this strategy will allow me to stay in the market for more weeks, and ultimately, net me more profit from the profession. Burning yourself out in a week is no fun.
I've said a lot with this one - so I'll touch briefly on my fallback strategy. With the rarity of inks after patch 4.03, I've cranked my fallback up considerably. I'm using an auto fallback if prices dip below my threshold, and selling probably 1 of these every other day simply from people searching and sorting wrong. I sell probably 1-2 total glyphs a day at fallback. This might not sound like much, but when you consider that I changed my fallback from 99g to 199g, I've essentially been making 200 extra gold a day for doing nothing. I don't expect my glyphs to sell at fallback reliably, so when that rare moment strikes, I want to capitalize on it.
To cancel or not to cancel
I'll close with something much less long winded: auction canceling. This one is a fairly basic math problem. Each auction takes about 2 seconds each to scan and physically cancel. Addons like Mail Opener can automate mail collection and refreshing, but at the end of the day you're capped at 50 mails per minute being opened. There's a minute delay between each set of 50 you open, and actually opening all 50 mails takes about 20 seconds depending on your connection.
Rough napkin math means that canceling and collecting 100 glyphs will take you about 5 minutes. Toss in that painful 20 seconds of travel time and reposting your 100 glyphs, and the whole cycle is about 8 minutes.
For someone like me who's into maximizing gold per hour, I will be honest with you and tell me that this one is hard to speculate on. Depending on the size of cancel/repost, you're looking at anywhere from 2-7 cycles per hour. If you're like me and abuse auto fallback, and only repost certain glyphs, you can crank out 6-7 reposts within the span of a game hour over an entire day. If you know every last glyph in the game (I'll be honest - I don't), and post more aggressively, you might only sneak in 2 or 3 reposts.
The hard part is calculating the gold per hour. It's not very easy to calculate how many of your glyphs sell the first time if you're cancelling. This is something that comes with time and practice. On average - the older a glyph posting is, the less likely it will sell. To be honest with you, I tend to fudge the numbers and average everything out. It takes me ~7 minutes to do a repost/cancel cycle. If I cancel 3 times a day and repost and make 1000g, then I've made 1000g for my ~20 minute investment. 3,000 gold per hour - nice. If I cancel only once and make 200g, then I've only made about 1,600 gold per hour - not so great!
The final option is simply reposting without cancelling. This one is obvious, and can even help you identify which of your glyphs are selling "first go". Don't bother doing an undercut cancel scan - simply hit post when you log on. If you post - you were either bought out or undercut. If you don't post, then your glyph is still the lowest priced. With some care, you can identify the high moving high competition glyphs, and the slow moving low compeition glyphs. In practice this comes down to pure stock levels. There's no advantage in time or profit to canceling. Reposting is what matters, but it requires far more raw ink and glyphs. If I want to maintain the same 3x a day posting cycle, I can no longer get away with having 2 of each glyph if I want two up at a time - I now need 6 of each. This comes down to raw time and stockpile. If you have the time, the money, or simply have a huge stockpile through raw luck or steadfast determination - then forgo the canceling and simply post. This will cut your time investment by almost 2/3rds. Technically speaking, this ups your gold per hour by 1.5x, in terms of posting.
With that being said, that's it for this entry. It ended up being a bit more long winded than I hoped. I hope that everyone focuses more on the principles of the article rather than the raw numbers. I will admit they aren't experiment-driven and are my best "Guesstimates". They're working definitions, and close enough to drive the principles home.
I'm looking to use these options more extensively in cataclysm. I can feel myself getting fed up with the mill-ink-post-cancel-repost cycle of inscription, and I'd much rather take the tortoise versus hare approach when it comes to glyphs. If I can maintain a consistent 4k gold a week for the next year, versus burning out at a 10k/week pace - I'll gladly take it!
What's your approach for cataclysm? Are you going to take a more relaxed, abbreviated approach and trade off smaller margins for less effort? Or are you taking a sprinter's mentality and trying to squeeze out every last drop of gold before a potential drying up of the market? Let me know your thoughts!
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