Speculation Roulette

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

World of warcraft has an incredibly realistic economy where supply and demand truly shape the value of items, and there is an inate sense of how much gold per hour a character should make. This stable economy fluctuates rarely but when it does huge amounts of gold can be made. There are times however, when players go overboard with speculating.

Speculation has it's moments, I have made gold fastest on patch days when new elements are added to the game and everyone wants them right away. Inscription netted me 20k gold right off the bat on the first weekend after it was introduced. It was amazing openning my mail box and life was good. However, things don't always turn out so well for the speculator. In fact, most of the time you are going to fail at speculating. Remember the 80/20 rule? It applies here as well.

Speculation is dangerous and it frightens me to see players spending 90% of their gold on stockpiling items for a patch. You should never throw all your money at any one item, especially an item whos price is yet to be determined. Speculation is gambling, and you should go about it as such. Whatever you bet you should be prepared to lose and not have to get into the soup line anytime soon after. Also, if you plan on selling ALL your items on patch day then you have to consider two factors: What will the demand be (ie how many will I actually sell) and How much competition will there be?

The goal of this blog is to provide you with the tools to create STEADY, DEPENDABLE, ROCK-SOLID, and OTHER SYNONYMS FOR GOOD cash flow which will make you filthy rich in the long run. It's ok to invest in the latest goods, but you should also keep up your auction house, farming, and other wow gold practices to maintain a reliable source of income.

In particular I'd like to address the dream shard issue. Some players are very worried that they wasted their money and I'd like to comfort them with some important information which they may not be aware of.

For starters, guild banks were full of these shards and you have to expect a large amount to come from their stockpiles. Enchanters who bought all of their new enchants were easily gathering the shards as well. If the price dropped because of a flooding of shards, these two groups were the culprits. Understand that although the banks and enchanters have many many shards to sell, they will sell them all eventually and the price will increase. On some servers this process literally took an hour or two before the price of dream shards shot up to 30-40g a piece. However, many servers are still in the process of guild banks/enchanters selling their shards and depending on demand it may take a while for these to be used up.