Getting Creamed

I'm getting trounced, barbecued, and filleted in the Glyph market lately. I know exactly why, and it's not like I'm losing money, just failing to gain as much as I probably could.

The glyph market on my server (Wyrmrest Accord-US, Alliance) is dominated by two glyphers: me and the other guy. There are about three or four other glyphers who have a big enough impact on the market that I pay attention to them, but they don't have our tenacity. When The Other Guy comes online, (and I can see him in my friend list, on all my characters, of course), I know that in about a half-hour, I'll have approximately 800 auctions to cancel. Happily, that's only about 2g50s in relisting fees, but it's still about 25 minutes of work (cancel, then 60 seconds per 50 canceled auction in mailbox delay, then relist).

The problem is, the Other Guy is more diligent than I am. He clearly has me /friended as well, because as soon as I pop off of my Glypher, he pops on to his glypher. I can see him log in, because he's a friend on all my characters (see my earlier post about Friends With Benefits). I don't know any of his regular mains, so I can't see when he's online in general, just on his character. He may or may not know my mains- I've been careless in choosing a posting toon, since my glypher is my posting toon (I'm lazy), and is guilded with the rest of my mains. Not hard to figure out in the long run. The Other Guy runs a lot more of a stealthy operation. For all I know, it's really Fizzle in disguise. But probably not.

Anyway, at this point, I seem to only get about 30 minutes of exposure during primetime hours. I can log in on offpeak hours and do a relist if I really want to, but they're called "offpeak" for a reason. As soon as I relist, he logs in and does his own undercut. Because I don't have the intestinal fortitude to keep up the tit-for-tat game, mainly because I have more interesting things to do, like raid- my guild downed Rotface for the first time last night, woooo!

I have four options:

1. Do nothing about it. I keep on going. Eventually he might get tired (unlikely, though) or just take a vacation. I'm still making money, just not as much as I'd prefer.
2. Offer a collusion deal. I'm not sure how "legal" this is- Blizzard has the right to hand you a suspension or other disciplinary action for "market manipulation". But I could contact the other guy and see about getting into an agreement to not undercut each other, and/or break up the market.
3. Step up my game. I could get another account, transfer all my glyphs to that account, and double-box my way to market domination. The cancel-relist practice is relatively automated (a few button presses every 10-20 minutes), so if I had that running in the background, it could be pretty simple. Of course, this boils down to paying $15/month to make more gold, which is kind of hinky.
4. Nuke the market. This is especially viable after 3.3.3, when all the 2-ink glyphs will be reduced in materials to require only one ink. Given my current supply costs, I can profit from selling any 1-ink glyph for 4g. So, I post ALL my glyphs, no matter what the current market value is, at 4g or so. The trick here is: I get much lower profit per-glyph, but since that's the lowest price I can afford to sell at, I can post all my glyphs with 48 hour durations and leave them be. If I get undercut, it's because somebody else has a cheaper supply of inks, and I can't re-undercut them or else I'll lose money on the sale. Better to just list at 4g and see if they get bought up by someone else.

That last case is the most interesting to me. I'd still avoid any glyph whose auction value is expected to fall below 4g, which comprise most of the low-demand, low-utility, trainer-taught glyphs. Some of the trainer glyphs are high enough demand that they sell fast enough to keep prices high, but not many. That case has the benefit of being simpler to manage, and the cost of totally destroying my profit margins on my best glyphs. I'd say about 50% of my profits (estimating from BeanCounter numbers) comes from only 10% of my glyph sales- those glyphs that sell for 30+g apiece. On the other hand, my volume of sales could make up for lost profit on the Mortal Strike, Cleaving, and Divine Plea glyphs.

Effectively, although The Other Guy and I are competing, we're also cooperating. It's an interesting prisoner's dilemma game: provided we both undercut each other by small amounts, the prices in the market will dip down a bit, but not too far. I tend to undercut by 2g, he undercuts by 10s. It's really only a matter of time before the market gets nuked by somebody, either myself, the Other Guy, or some new guy in the field.

Because it's only a matter of time, I should probably push the button first. Next Tuesday sounds like a good day- provided that's the day 3.3.3 comes out. I'd better stock up on inks beforehand. WTB Adder's Tongue, 50s per, unlimited quantities. PST or COD.

The Addon Corner: Friends With Benefits

Sometimes, addons are needed to do what World of Warcraft should do in the first place. For example: your friend/ignore list really should be an account-level setting rather than a per-character thing. At least, that should be an option. But it isn't.

FriendsWithBenefits takes care of that for you. It synchronizes friend lists across characters. Easy-peasy, really. Install and it just works.

This is a really useful addon for glyphers (or any other auction player), in addition to the normal uses. Whenever I see someone regularly undercut me on a lot of glyphs, I /friend them. This way, on all my characters, I can see when my competition gets online and goes offline. Of course, I can't see when they're online but on an alt, but neither can they see that of me. I'm not precisely a compulsive undercutter, but it really does help to know if someone was just online, if I've got nothing else going on, I can swap over, cancel-repost, and be the lowest again.

When do you get to brag?

This is pretty much the place. My gold growth has surpassed "obscene", I think. I feel embarrassed, or worried. Like the guys in Office Space must have felt when they found that the Superman Gambit paid off big time. I don't want to go blabbing it around my guildchat, since that's probably bad form.

So, I'm bragging here. As of March first, I've been in the glyph industry for exactly one month. A short one, as well- I started on February first and it's not a leap year. In that time, I've made approximately 33,000 gold. That's crazy.

The question to you, my dear reader(s): how much is enough? I don't know how long this gravy train will keep a-runnin' - future changes to the crafting system could easily undermine this market. Maybe sometime soon blizzard changes the way glyphs are learned, allowing people to skill up faster, and cherry-pick the good glyphs instead of waiting on random researches. Maybe they change the vendor/deposit values on glyphs, forcing a less-aggressive cancel-repost policy. Who knows? The only thing I know is - I should probably keep farming this market until I get enough money that I can say, "I don't think I'll ever need gold again".

How much is enough?

Reprogrammable Razer Naga Buttons, now for the Macintosh!

My faithful reader knows that I'm a huge fan of the Razer Naga. This is a mouse that was just perfectly made for playing MMOs like World of Warcraft. With an extra 12-button keypad under your thumb, you can keep your hand on your mouse all the time, but still have plenty of buttons to cast whatever spells you want to cast. It's awesome.

When it was released, you could only use the keypad to emulate the keyboard's number row (top of the keyboard) or the numeric keypad (right-side). A little while back, they released an update to the system to make it so you could reprogram those buttons, and create mouse-based macros, in the mouse driver. But that update was only for windows users. Earlier this month, with little fanfare (despite the fact that I had actually asked them to email me product updates when I registered my mouse, and had a ticket in with tech support about the mac driver), they released the mac version of the reprogrammable drivers for the naga.

Download it here. Change your buttons if you want. Frankly, for WoW play, I'm not likely to do this - I have a key mapping that worked fine under the old system, with the benefit of being fail-operational: if my naga died, I could go back to using the numeric keypad without having to learn a whole new layout. But still, it's nice to have, and will likely find its way into being useful for a lot of new things as I play with it.

Putting it all together: A day in the life

Step One: Go to the mailbox. Collect all my incoming gold and expired glyphs. Because I only post for 24h whenever I post, I will often log in to about 20% of my auctions having expired. This is part of the overall process, it might be better if I posted for 48 hours, but I figure I'm saving a little gold, since I end up canceling around 70% of my auctions anyway.

Step Two: Go to the auctioneer, and do a smart-cancel on all my undercut auctions. It's better to do this now, before reposting my expired auctions (the glyphs are in my bags right now), since that way there's fewer auctions to scan.

Step Three: Post everything that's in my bags. This includes the previously-canceled auctions as well as any glyphs I have in my bag where my total inventory was previously above my post limit (I limit to 4 on the AH at once, but occasionally make more than that, so there are usually 10-20 glyphs waiting for buyers to take one of the posted ones).

Step Four: Back to the mailbox. Get all the canceled auctions. Using postal to get-all is nice, but this still usually takes 5-10 minutes (since you can get at most 50 mails per minute).

Step Five: Back to the auctioneer, repost all my canceled auctions. Lately, this has taken a repeat of steps four and five, as there are only 144 inventory slots in my character, and usually more glyphs than that to ferry from the mail to the AH. I strongly recommend getting at least 4 Packs of Endless Pockets for this reason.

Step Six: Once all the canceled auctions are reposted, do a status report on the market (using QA3). Any currently profitable glyph that I have absolutely none of gets queued up, and I will try to replenish the stocks of glyphs that I have less than 4 of on the market. The actual number of each that I make is kind of eyeballed, depending on how quickly I know the glyph sells. Death Knight glyphs sell like hotcakes, whereas Warlock glyphs sell like coldcakes.

Step Seven: Hearth to Dalaran. Run over to the inscription shop and buy whatever parchments and inks I need to fulfill my craft queue. I might need to take a side-trip to the bank to get more Ink of the Sea to trade in. As I said before, it is usually only a very minor price reduction if you can find the lower-level herbs for lower-level glyphs, if that- while people regularly farm icethorn, there's very few people farming wild steelbloom, so the prices run high. I just trade in inks of the sea.

Step Eight: Create all those glyphs you had queued. Ponder why Glyph of Eternal Water takes 8 seconds to craft whereas all the other glyphs take 3.

Step Nine: Port back to Ironforge (or whatever city you like the most). Post all these new glyphs. You might have to run /qa config and add all your glyphs to the Glyph category in QA3 - sometimes you're making a glyph to post for the first time (either you just researched it, or it was previously too cheap to bother with but now there's a market void).

Step Ten: Using AuctionLite, scan for Icethorn, Lichbloom, Adder's Tongue, Deadnettle, Goldclover, Talandra's Rose. Figure out which is the best deal (on my server, it's usually Adder's tongue, because at iLevel 77 it mills more like Icethorn than Goldclover, but because it's not used for much in alchemy it's pretty cheap, and I'm not sure my competitors know about how well it mills). Buy up as much as you think you might need. My goal is to have at least 2 days worth of ink in stock, in case there's a sudden spike. If I log in right after somebody else cleared out the cheap inks, I'll wait on this and do it the next day. If I log in and find a majillion icethorn listed at 80s per, I'll buy them all. Even if that means I end up with 2,000 inks when I'm through. I currently use about 250 inks a day, so they'll go away eventually.

Step Eleven: Get all the herbs from the bank, mill them, and turn them into ink. This is the most tedious and time-consuming part of the operation. To mill enough herbs for one day's worth of operations, I have to press the "mill" button about 500 times, every two seconds. My good friend fizzle pointed out a helpful macro, that's even better than using the Autodisenchant system provided my enchantrix:

/cast Milling
/use Icethorn
/use Lichbloom
/use Deadnettle
/use Goldclover
/use Adder's Tongue
/use Talandra's Rose

Bind that to a key, and keep whacking it (make sure autoloot is on). Read the internet or something while you press the button over and over. The only problem is that if you have leftover herbs (say, you have 2 spare icethorn), the macro will choke. Just put them in your bank and continue.

Step Eleven-a: Once a day, remember to do your research if you still need it.

Step Twelve: Do this once or twice a day, every day. Profit. Ponder what you're actually going to do with all that gold. Buy a motorcycle? Seems extravagant.

Addons for the Aspiring Glypher

Okay, so let's say that you've done your chores and learned a lot of glyphs via Northrend Inscription Research (and Minor Inscription Research). As I mentioned in my previous post, that's all you really need to start making a respectable income providing glyphs to aspiring adventurers. Just figure out how much a single glyph costs you, and make the glyphs which sell for more than that.

The problem is that there are 449 glyphs in the game. That's a LOT of markets to watch. It is probably impossible (or at least really, really difficult) for a single person to keep track of everything necessary to make a strong profit in the glyph market without using addons.

There are four major addons you're going to need: Auctioneer, Quick Auctions, Skillet, and AuctionLite. Note that the Skillet link goes to the current alpha-dev page for Skillet, rather than the older (out of date) version on the main curse page.

I'm not going to tell you how to use these addons, since that's what the instructions are for. Instead, I'm going to tell you what to do with them.

AuctionLite: this addon adds two tabs to your auction interface. The key one is AuctionLite-Buy. On this tab, you can search for items just like elsewhere, but in the results page, you can shift-click to select multiple auctions and buy them all out at once. This is really helpful for buying up masses of herbs to mill.

Skillet: This is a tradeskill addon. I only mention it because the Glypher module that comes with Auctioneer integrates with it (more on that later). While I'm here, I might mention that Quartz can be configured to show the total time you'll be making ink for, instead of the normal cast bar which just shows the same 2-second craft over and over (which is nice, so you know to go get a sandwich).

Quick Auctions: This addon is pretty invaluable for me. The first thing you have to know in order to use it is that you need to create an "item group", and add your glyphs to that group. You can only add glyphs that you currently have in your inventory to this group. You can use QA to do a "smart cancel" of your current auctions. Because the glyph market is highly competitive, and the deposit on any given glyph is 60c, there's a lot of undercutting. So you will probably need to play that game too, and QA is the tool for you. Go to the Auctions tab and hit "cancel". It will scan all the auctions for which you have entries in your glyph item list, and pop up a second window once the scan is complete to cancel all the undercut auctions.

Now that you have a ton of canceled auctions, QA helps you at the mail window. Just hit "open all", and it will do just that. It also helpfully shows the 60 second mail timer - you can only receive 50 mails per minute, and can be configured to automatically re-load and continue gathering your mail if you have more than 50.

QA can post all your auctions as well, and so can Auctioneer. They use different strategies, though, and I'll talk about that later.

Finally, QA has a cool Status tool which gives you an overview of the glyph market. Hit status, then select Glyphs, and Get Data. You'll see what glyphs are on the market, where you're currently the lowest, and what glyphs you don't have posted (and the current sell-price of those glyphs). Left clicking any of those glyphs adds them to your QA skill queue. Unfortunately, this doesn't integrate with skillet. Hold down shift as you open your inscription window to get the old version of the window, which has a QA button on it. The QA button opens the skill queue. Scroll to the bottom to see a list of what you need to buy from Jessica Sellers, and then clicking on any glyph name in the queue will make that glyph. Pretty handy.

Auctioneer: This is the grand-daddy of all auction house addons. It does a TON, far more than I can get into right now. First of all, the BeanCounter module should track your sales and expenditures in this endeavor. This is really helpful for seeing which glyphs sell a lot (and are therefore worth keeping multiples of on the AH. I say "should", because it's broken for me. Some addon is interfering with it, not QA or Postal, but I can't figure out which.

Auctioneer does a ton of other things. There's another utility module called Glypher. You can use glypher to scan the AH and figure out which glyphs you can make are profitable. There's a GlypherPost addon as well, which can be used to set prices and post auctions. Glypher integrates with Skillet, which is a marginally more convenient way to create your glyphs for the day.

The Enchantrix module has an "auto-disenchant" function, which applies to milling as well. Whenever you have 5 or more herbs in a bag, it will ask you if you want to mill them. While it seems impossible to mill multiple times automatically (I have the feeling that blizzard requires a hardware event per mill), clicking the same button over and over in the same spot on the screen is still considerably faster than the traditional milling style.

Auctioneer vs Quick Auctions: Both QA and Auctioneer can help you select profitable glyphs to make, and post them for you. Which is better is mostly a matter of taste. As far as I can tell, QA is faster at multi-posting (it seems like QA runs 3 posting routines in parallel, whereas Auc only posts one thing at a time, and stack-splitting is the big timewaster in both cases). The big difference is that QA doesn't really think about past performance in glyph pricing. It sells your glyphs in configured blocks (I max mine at 4 per glyph), undercutting the current low price.

Glypher, on the other hand, integrates with BeanCounter to figure out historical sale prices and frequency when choosing (a) how many glyphs to post and (b) how much to charge. This can save your gold if you notice an auction "void". QA will note that nobody's selling the Glyph of Whatever, and you'll make 4 of them and list them at 50g, but then an hour later three people will log on and post the same glyph at 1g per, and you've got some dead weight. Theoretically, Glypher helps with that, but like I said earlier due to a bug in Beancounter (or more specifically my using an incompatible addon), the data Glypher uses is not quite right, so I end up with a lot of quirks in my personal Glypher pricing model. So I use QA instead most of the time.

So, between these addons, you can generate an overview of the glyph market in general (using QA), queue up profitable glyphs to create and mass-post with automatic pricing, buy out masses of herbs, and generate inks more rapidly. With all these addons running, glyphing is still (as Fizzle said) more like a "job" - I spend about 30 minutes each evening tending to my glyph business, but the money's good.

Obligatory Capitalist Posting (or how I learned to get rich and love the glyph market)

Okay, so I'm sure that this market is not for everybody. The high-end glyph market takes a combination of patience and, well, more patience, to get into. And in the event too many people get into the market, the profitability of this market is going to plummet.

That said, I've just today crossed the 10k gold mark on my characters. I started with approximately 2k gold in the bank, which I spent down to something around 500g after buying up a reasonable amount of raw materials. Since then I've spent more money on expenses and am currently sitting on approximately 800 ink of the sea and 10k gold. So I'd say that I've cleared the 10k mark in pretty much profits. All this in two weeks and change - I started seriously playing with the market on february 1st, and I typically spend about 30-45 minutes per day dealing with this business.

I'll post a series of articles about my particular take on the glyph market in the upcoming week or two. But let's start with the basics.

Before you can leverage this market, you need to understand why it's such a lucrative one: investment of time. There are approximately 80 or so glyphs that can only be learned by conducting Northrend Inscription Research, plus the 60 or so minor glyphs that only come from Minor Inscription Research (that's the only way to learn a minor glyph). Naturally, the trainer glyphs, while of high utility, are typically of very low profit margins. And by very low, I mean: you will lose money on them.

So, if you're starting Fresh, you not only need to get your inscription skill high, you also need to spend 80 days conducting research to learn the more profitable glyphs. You also need to spend a sizeable amount of gold on books of Glyph Mastery to learn that set of 50 or so glyphs that can only be learned that way. Now, you can jump straight into the glyphing market once you learn your first researched glyph, and if you're lucky it will be one that's of high utility and demand (and one that your competitors don't know yet). I've learned approximately 50 of the major researched glyphs, all of the book ones, and all of the minor ones. So there are still about 30 glyphs that I can't compete in (ironically, one of these glyphs is Felguard, which I just had to buy from the AH when I decided to respec Mariwocket to Demonology). But even with only a portion of the market covered, I have been making gold a lot faster than any other method I've found to date, at least in terms of price/effort ratios - you could probably make a ton of gold in a lot of ways, but glyphing isn't too much work.

Because of the artificial limit on how long it takes to learn your glyphs, there will be natural scarcity in the markets. Meaning that prices for useful glyphs will tend to be high enough that it is profitable to sell them. But what makes glyphs so lucrative is not individual profit (my margins run anywhere from 1g to 40g per glyph, but the majority of them are less than 10g profit per sale), but the volume of sales. There are some glyphs that people buy in bulk - for example, my warrior has a stack of glyphs of Blocking and Cleaving, because I like Cleaving for heroics and Blocking for raid tanking (not that I raid tank very much). There are some glyphs that just sell very quickly because they are the must-use glyphs for competitive specs, especially DPS specs (so when a rogue changes from muti to combat, they need all new glyphs), and there are some glyphs that I know are bad, but people seem to buy anyway (because, let's face it: most glyphs are just a 1% DPS "icing" on the spec/gear/skill, so it doesn't matter too much what they take).

Anyway, the key to glyph sales is volume. You can make a lot of money, because people buy a LOT of glyphs. The trick is to just figure out where your profit comes from. You'll need to completely write off the cost of training inscription in the first place. You'll make it back eventually, but don't worry about factoring that into your pricing scheme. The only thing you really need to worry about is the cost of ink. Profitable glyphs come in any number of paper types, but the most expensive paper is still only 50s, which needs to be attended to, but tends not to figure into my cost calculations (because I demand at least 1g expected profit per glyph, that works out to be a little less than that, you see).

There are two ways to get the ink for glyphs. You can just buy northrend herbs in bulk and make Ink of the Sea, which can be traded down for any needed inks in dalaran, or you can buy up lesser inks and herbs on the AH. What you do is up to you, but this is my strategy.

I buy up northrend herbs in bulk from cheap supplies. I tend to watch the AH prices, and when herbs dip below some threshold, I buy a TON of them and wait until I start to run low again before watching more. Currently, I'm on a batch of ink I manufactured from some lichbloom and icethorn that was dumped on the AH at 83s per herb. I spent like 2500g buying up all those herbs, and got a good deal out of it.

Let's assume for argument's sake that one of the "greater" nothrend herbs (lichbloom, icethorn, and adder's tongue) can be bought for 1g. I usually look at the lesser herbs, but those are often more expensive per stack than the greater ones (because farmers tend to farm flask materials and a single frost lotus proc will make the lichbloom market saturation worht it). Five of those herbs seem to mill for about 3 pigment, on average. That means a single Ink of the Sea (two pigments) costs about 3.3 times the base price of your herb, so if you spent 1g per herb, your ink cost you 3.3g to make. Glyphs are all scribed with 1 piece of parchment (which we're ignoring the cost of) and 1 or 2 inks.

That's all it takes to figure out profits. If there's a 1-ink glyph that you can sell for 5g, under those conditions you'd turn a profit. If there's a 2-inker that you can sell for 8g, profit. So all you need to do is watch the auction house for a little while to get a good feel for what the various glyphs are worth.

My secondary activity involves scanning the AH for lesser inks. Often, I'll find a dump of 20+ inks of the lesser types (lion's ink, celestial ink, etc). Provided they're the white-quality inks (the green-quality inks have no real use in the glyphing profiteer, as they're used to make offhands, darkmoon cards, and the like), and they are less than my current "per-ink" price, I'll buy them. Eventually I use them instead of trading down from ink of the sea, which will increase my net profits a bit over time. It's also possible to watch the AH for bargains on lesser herbs, but I find that the low-level herb market is WAY too volatile, and since the per-herb pigment milling value is not consistent (some herbs yield more pigments), it's too much work to do this manually. I will, however, post an article about automating this process in the future.

Anyway, that's the background for now. It's really all you need to know about the glyph market - there's plenty of sales, you've just got to get the useful glyph patterns and figure out what your ink costs are to establish profitability. In the future, we'll talk about practicality and automation in the business.