Monday (4 Feb) - A Failing Pot of Gold

Monday (4 Feb) - A Failing Pot of Gold

Happy has always been able to make gold on the Auction House. As long as someone was selling something, and someone was buying, Happy could make a profit off of it. There are other "professional" Auctioneers out there, like Happy, but very few with the staying power that Happy has had over the years.

For many months, now, Happy's main competition is another goblin I'll call Hobbs. For awhile Happy believed that this guy had acquired huge stocks of enchanting mats and would, eventually, run out of them. Happy and he constantly underbid each other, both of us looking for those sales. However, as the Auction House economy began breaking down following the latest expansion, Hobbs continued to post large quantities of goods at ever shrinking prices.

Happy now believes that Hobbs farms all or most of his goods, a time consuming process that Happy cannot match. Since Hobbs spends only time on acquiring goods to sell, he can measure his profit at whatever he values his time, which apparently he values very little given how low he bids. Happy might post stock for an item at 15 gold, only to see Hobbs underbid it, not at, say, 14 gold, but at 9 gold. That kind of bidding makes Happy grind his teeth. As the activity on the AH continues to slow down, Happy has had to take many of his own goods off the market because Hobbs seems determined to deeply underbid Happy and drive the prices down. Happy has always been able to counter such efforts by grabbing up heavily discounted goods and forcing the prices back up again. This works well in a market where there is active buying and selling. The market is moribund, however, on life support, and prices are stagnant. When the price falls, it stays fallen. There is no buy low and sell high, because there is only low, and lower.

Since Happy is mostly out of work, he has taken on the task of another cleanup of the bank. With so few of the normal things selling, the bank has become somewhat choked with unwanted stuff. Happy cleared out a bunch of decaying consumables, smelly fish, old armor kits, etc, in preparation for storing more of the vegetables Fist is growing, and doing some MoP level fishing, both of which have some slight market value that Happy wants to exploit. That means continuing his real, dig in the earth gardening, and farming fish in Pandaria.

Now, this may get Fist in trouble with the pet battle crowd, which wants every minute of game time devoted to leveling an endless parade of pets. My interest in pet battles waxes and wanes almost minute by minute, from excitement at getting another pet to level 20+ to despair at the stupidly arranged process of reaching far flung Tamers.

Happy has also resurrected another idea, which is to use enchanting mats that have become near worthless on the AH to make enchants that might sell better on the AH than the mats themselves. Wild was put to work making some test enchants to see how they do. Wild was originally convinced to sneak into Pandaria and travel - at great risk to himself - to Halfhill, where he now resides. Only there can he craft Imperial Silk, used by the tailoring profession. Wild was recently accused of having descended from the high of an elite raider to the low of common laborer, but Wild doesn't seem to mind. At least as long as he has his hammock.