The Glyph Wall

My idea for how to create a glyph wall is extremely useful if done correctly. What is a glyph wall you ask? It's when you create a literal wall of glyphs of every profitable type that your competition sells and then post them for way below normal price. You're probably thinking why the hell would you want to do that? The answer is simple: learn their fallback prices and discourage competition.

To create a glyph wall, create 10 of every glyph worth over 5 gold and post them all for 2 gold each. Make sure you got all your herbs for 15 gold or less and sell your snowfalls for 10 gold each. You will make around 5 gold per stack on average from milling and turning herbs into inks (taking into account average parchment costs).

Your competition will do a few things:

1. They will most likely post like always but their addons will push their prices up to their fallback rates.
2. They will not find any glyphs worth posting and will probably be very confused.
3. They will buy out glyphs they remember are worth much more and relist them.

Doing this every once in a while really messes with the heads of your competition and provides you with some valuable information about their market awareness, thresholds, and fallback prices.

An extension to this method is to continue doing this but raise the price up from 2 gold incrementally until other suppliers start undercutting you. This will tell you the lowest rate you can sell all your glyphs at and have glyph sellers wanting to buy off you because their threshold is below your price. Many refer to this as the 'goblin method' and it's an ok way to make gold with inscription but definatley not the most profitable. It is far better to use this method once in a while for information gathering purposes and to throw off the competition. Simply buy the glyphs off people practicing this method too often and relist them for their actual market value. They'll make money and you'll make more.

Have you tried to make a glyph wall for the fun of it? Have you taken advantage of those that do it too often?

15 comments: on "The Glyph Wall"

  1. Very interesting i will look into trying this tactic out

  2. Been half heartedly selling a lot of glyphs on a server of mine. I'm getting undercut on about half to three-fourths of them. I've got about 2000 ink of the sea's just sitting there.. hmmm maybe this would be fun for all the people undercutting for 10g less when they dont have to. hmmmm.

  3. There is someone doing it at 5g atm on my server. Too bad for him, my treshold is 1g!

  4. Since I've already hit gold cap, it is worth it to me to buyout someone's glyphs at 2-3g each, especially ones I know will sell for much higher, because it saves me time and effort milling and making inks. If I was poorer, I would not buy them out though.

  5. I've tried it and against some people, it just doesn't work. There are at least two people on my server that play lots of wow almost for the sole purpose of making gold. Idk if it's a secondary account that someone is playing or if these people literally spend their day in town on the AH, but they tend to undercut, regardless of price. If the price falls below profitability, they will still return to undercut the moment there is any profit.

    The only real way to counter this is by spending more time than they do re-posting and undercutting them, which honestly, isn't worth the time.

  6. "...and sell your snowfalls for 10 gold each..."

    Always the rabbit in the hat. If someone buys you wall but lets your Snowfall Auctions expire, you can find yourself in the red quite rapidly.

  7. I do this on my server every month or so. Shakes things up and gets rid of some competition.

  8. My problem is I do not know what glyphs are the most valuable. I crafted two of every glyph, used QA to list them. Every day I make new ones and unfortunately for me, never bothered tracking what sells and what does not. I'm currently at 40,000 gold.

  9. On my server this is how I normally do business. as of now I put up 12 of each at a time. I still have 5 main competitors that will undercut me no matter how low I go.

    Regardless of the competition I can make 1.5k each night by restocking my sold glyphs if I "fire and forget" in 48 hr auctions. If I AH camp I can make 3k or more. I'm sure my competitors can do the same

    I am slowly building up my stock to be able to post a full stack of 20 of every single glyph. Once I have that stock I will post my threshold at 23c above my avg mats costs and my top end price at my high end mats cost. Hopefully if I can keep it up for a month I can force out a few of the big time sellers.

    the hardest part of posting glyphs on a high pop server is the abundance of herbs. I have 3 people supplying me with herbs at a way low cost and still find cheaper ones on the AH at times.

    This fact makes it impossible to force others out by grabbing up all the herbs. The only way to do it is to grab all the herbs under a low price and post all the product under that threshold.

  10. to anonymous (about the non tracking what sold)

    check out beancounter in the auctioneer

  11. So, given a realm with most glyphs 1-2 gold average prices, (some, the leveling ones, less, a handful 2-5 gold) and snowfall down to 5g each and rarely selling, I'm not sure that this would work well!

    The only way to prosper with glyphs there is to drive mats costs ever lower.

  12. So what this "glyph wall" exactly do/help in goldmaking? Is it worth at all spending my time on it ? How about lost income etc...

  13. For me this was worthless. Alot of effort, not much return. Sure, they sell, but for what. You make back your price of materials and waste several hours making stuff. The key is does the snowfalls sell, and the answer is not really all that much. You could make them into cards. But again you are doing alot of work for nothing.

    If the glyph market is that bad, just step out, switch to vellums or cards or something. Or start controlling the herb market. Buy up every single high end herb, sell them for 1g each or 1.5 each. The only way to deal with low prices is to force prices higher.

    I guess your tactic of the wall would force people to reset the market. Which is interesting. Or you can just buy everything out and reset it yourself.

    When my market was that bad I just continued with my 4g cut off, eventually the competition left and now prices are a bit higher. Just my opin, but if there are 4-5 major suppliers, there is really no good way to get prices high, because there will always be the guy who can sell for 1g profit and consider that good (because their time is free I guess)

  14. When I started out selling glyphs below the 300 skill, I posted them manually(yes, manually! No addon! Im that kind of person that doesnt trust anyone or any addons :P).
    By doing it without the use of addons I could easily see who the real competition was and I added them to my friends list to all my characters so I knew when I could log my glyph alt and put up new glyphs.
    Luckily for me theres not much competition on my realm.

    Eventually I got bored and got Quick Auctions+Auctionator and now I have no idea who and how many Im competing with. The thing is that it doesnt really matter as I still make the same amount of money each day.
    I dont know if I could make more money by changing my pricing. I dont post for more than 15g each glyph as I think the prices the other glyph sellers sell for(max price) its a rediculous amount of money for a simple glyph. My serious competiton all seem to have their glyphs at up to 75g each, so if I joined them I could maybe make more, but also maybe make less if less glyhps would sell?
    I think I make enough however for simply logging an alt for a few seconds to mass-post a bunch of glyphs, so I wont experiment.

    On my realm people have now also started advertising in trade that they make glyphs for 20g with their mats. Not sure if this is something new only on my realm tho, and if it actually works(I know I wouldnt bother as it takes time)?

  15. Quite honestly too many people miss what I consider to be the real point of the Glyph Wall. It isn't to block the sales of your competition. It isn't sell your wall. To be honest, when i post a wall I don't even want any of my glyphs to sell.

    The real point of a glyph wall imo, is to screw with the head of your opponent and burn them out on crafting time and upkeep for negligible profits. If you are able to hold a wall just above their threshold for an extended period and they continue to post, their glyphs will sell extremely fast(yes ppl actually do tend to stock up when the prices drop that much), and they will spend forever milling/crafting...day in...day out...craft craft craft. I have had this actually turn into an overcutting battle before where me and my competition were raising prices by alternately walling with a price slightly higher than the other.

    It isn't an easy fight, you have to be prepared to keep the herb market dry, and wall out the opponents snowfalls/fort scrolls/OHs/Vellums. But it is completely possible to chase off competitors...I have one who was a fierce undercutter, I walled him for a couple of weeks. He now only tries to post once every week or so, the moment i see him log on, i switch to one of my glyph alts, and he goes away.

    I also believe in complete coverage, not just "the profitable glyphs". if nothing because at the right times your competition can buy out the crappy glyphs for silver repost for 50 gold and make a few sales before the levellers undercut back to silver...making your efforts worthless...even a glyph of sap will sell for stupid high amounts when the right moron is looking for it...don't overestimate your buyers.

    The big thing with walling is
    1)Be vigilant about not allowing holes to be punched.
    2) having the proper addon setup for crafting
    3)minimizing the addons used on posting toons for fast reloads for mailbox emptying
    4)and to pay attention to when you start selling too much and need to start slowly testing the waters with prices.

    I've already given too much info...so i'll stop here...but to the people who write off walls as useless...maybe you just aren't using them properly.

    -Ytsejam

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