How to defeat an Undercutting Goblin on your Server’s Auction House
Check out http://justmytwocopper.blogspot.com for wow economic discussion and strategies about making gold with auctioneer, farming, etc.
You can also check out the forum: http://20kleveling.com/JMTCforum/
I’ve had numerous emails from people trying to discover the secret to out’ing a goblin on their server. Some even have an infestation of goblins running around undercutting glyphs down to 50 silver.
Before I explain how to defeat a goblin, perhaps I should discuss what exactly being a goblin entails? A goblin gets their herbs and focuses on selling the snowfall ink to make up for most of their herb expenses. If they sell their snowfall ink for 60-100% of the cost of their initial investment then they can sell their glyphs (using the average 6 inks per stack of herbs) for super cheap and that is where their profit comes from. This profit margin is entirely dependent on how much the goblin paid for his/her inks, but the key here is that the snowfall ink is always the linchpin for their profits.
How then, do you defeat the goblin and raise the price of glyphs on your server? I have a theory and I’m going to implement it very soon on my own server. There are currently three goblins I’ve found using approximately 3 gold threshold and QA2. They post a 40 gold glyph three times and if anyone undercuts they will in turn keep undercutting down to this 3 gold threshold. To defeat these goblins I’ve been recruiting dedicated farmers with these mouth watering prices for herbs:
10 gold a stack of lichbloom, icethorn, or adder’s tongues
5 gold a stack for any other stacks of WOTLK herbs
Sounds delicious right? Well with that price I can sell snowfall inks for 7 gold and then glyphs for 1.1 gold and make a 10 silver profit (-50 silver each for resilient parchment). The only thing is… I’m not going to sell glyphs! In fact I have almost never sold glyphs (I only focus on the discovery ones), and instead sell armor vellum III’s and weapon vellum III’s, as well as the inks themselves.
So my plan is to focus on getting inks of the sea down to the 10 gold range (It’s going to take thousands probably over the course of several weeks, I’m currently down to the 13-14 gold range) and in a sense cut the legs right out of the goblin method. Next, I’m going to control the armor and weapon vellum markets so that they have no way to compete with my prices. They will be FORCED to sell glyphs for more in order to make any profit at all.