Thursday (25 Apr) - Asleep at the House

Thursday (25 Apr) - Asleep at the House

Warning - Do not attempt to read the below without having heavily-caffeinated beverages handy and in large quantities. May cause intense sleepiness and suicidal thoughts. Final Warning: This is worse than the baseball talk.

When Happy finds himself napping on the Auction House floor, you know things are slow. There are few people in the world of Warcraft that would consider the Auction House entertaining, and Happy is one of them. Yet even he has had to admit that the latest batch of enchanting mats from the Pandaria expansion is the most boring and plain "bla" of all time.

Take five spirit dust and Wild can make a mysterious essence.
Take five mysterious essences and Wild can make an ethereal shard.
Take five ethereal shards and Wild can make a Sha crystal.

Spirit dust is very common and obtainable at 2g each or less. Happy always deals in the "less" when buying mats, but overall the margin is less than 50 silver (half a gold). Happy sets a base cost of a mysterious essence, therefore, at 10g (2g per spirit dust). So, the base prices are:

2g - Spirit Dust
10g - Mysterious Essence
50g - Ethereal Shard

Sha crystals are priced differently, because enchanters can only make one per day, which limits their availability and raises the base price. The posted prices vary depending on availability, from as low as 300g to up to 450g or even higher if the buyer is desperate. Prices change rapidly, though, so buying and selling sha crystals is a crapshoot.

What does all that mean? From a practical perspective, it means that the pricing of the three main mats is so consistently within a narrow range, there is almost no wiggle room for Happy to find any profit in buying and selling them.

Everything starts with spirit dust, and it is relatively easy to farm. So, if the dust price climbs to 3g or so, the farmers will pour more dust into the AH and the price comes back down. If the market is flooded, the price might go down as much as 50 silver, but the margin is still very thin.

Happy can make a profit all day long on Mysterious essence. Wild can make them endlessly at a cost of 10g each, and they typically sell in the 15-18g range. If they sell. The marketeers like Happy are all over this, and the bidding war to have your mats listed at the top is fierce. Happy is building up his stock of essence to be able to compete with the others. The problem with that is inevitably, prices wars will drive the price below what Happy needs to make a profit.

Price wars have already doomed ethereal shards as a money maker. As noted above, from a practical standpoint ethereal shard prices should hover around 50g. A couple of Happy's farmer competitors have driven the price down to around 43g now, and sellers above that price line don't get much business. Happy recently bought forty ethereal shards at 30g each when a frustrated player dumped them on the AH. Happy will make a profit on selling those, he hopes, at the current going price of 40g. Maybe. Happy predicts that the price will keep falling.

It is a bad sign to Happy that the newest enchanting mats are losing so much value so soon. The lower the price, the less profit. Another big factor is that the demand for those enchanting mats seems to be way down from previous expansions. I don't know why.

One part of the answer is to actually make stuff out of those mats. Happy has Wild making enchants, and that has helped. That's a different kind of competition, though, and even there the prices for those enchants keep falling, of course, as the price of the mats drop. That's good news to the folks who need those enchants, but bad news for the sellers.

Happy has branched out into selling more high end bags, which still have a pretty high margin of profit if Happy is careful to snap up the cloth Wild needs to make them cheaply. Happy has always sold Satchel of Cenarius bags because few can make them (it is a pain to get the recipe) and it is a great buy for those who can't afford the high price of the larger versions. Happy also sells the Bag of Jewels for a similar reason. Happy has only one competitor for the Satchel, and they have a gentleman's agreement to match prices. Happy is the only seller of the jewel bag. Both types of bags net Happy over 230g profit each. Happy only sells on average one of each bag a week, though, which is another reason why there are not more players selling them. Still, 460g a week profit is a tidy sum.

Happy recently began selling the general purpose, 20 slot Frostweave bag and the general purpose, 22 slot Embersilk Bag. The prices of these bags fluctuate quite a bit, but buyers tend to buy them when they need them and often pay a premium. There are a number of sellers, but only a couple who are really into it and post 5-10 bags at a time. The rest of us are the leechers. We wait to see what the big boy prices are and then we slightly undercut them. The big sellers don't seem to mind, as all of their bags eventually sell. Happy doesn't carry more than 2-4 bags at a time because that is all that Wild can make at the discount mat prices Happy can get. Frankly, most of Happy's profits lately have come from the bags, not enchanting mats. Both bags net 200g profit each at the upper price level, and Happy won't sell if a leecher discounts the price of bags too much. Happy even buys up their bags if they drop the price too much, although Happy gets less profit from that. There are always more buyers than bags, at the right price, if one is patient.

Nobody is going to feel sorry for the AH sellers. For Happy, though, he isn't concerned about the dwindling profit so much. He's concerned that the enchanting materials market on the AH has become boringly predictable and stale.

Happy is considering branching out further, into the gem and glyph markets, but that would be a lot of work. Happy is not really into working that hard - unless he can make it fun.