Blizzard has done a fantastic job on regulating bots the past two months and the results are already apparent to most players who buy out herbs and ore regularly. Lichbloom for 50 gold a stack? Icethorn for 25 gold a stack? My my my these are the prices that we saw at the START of wotlk! Sometimes it gets so bad that lichbloom break 100 gold a stack.
It’s funny, I think back to all the posts gevlon has written on how blizzard secretly loves botting farmers and how they are so evil. Blizzard actually HATES bots and has done an excellent job removing them. However, the killing off of most bots is a double edged sword for real gold makers who buy tons of herbs/ore every day. No longer can you employ strategies such as snagging mats real cheap when a farmer posts each day. What’s going to happen eventually is that the price of crafted goods will gradually rise to sync up with the new material costs, but until then the markets will be a little lopsided.
Throw into this mess the holiday as well as kids being back from school and you have a seller's market. Here's a look at how you can respond:
Saronite Ore
Transmute into Titanium Bar – One stack of saronite ore gets you 1.25 titanium bars. With transmute spec this can be a nice 133% return on investment. Titanium bars tend to be around the same price as a stack of saronite ore.
Prospecting + Cutting/Transmuting – You can take everything you get from prospecting saronite and cut gems or use the mats to do epic and meta transmutes. Even with 20 gold a stack of ore you can still make good money doing this. On some servers you can even craft rings and disenchant for profit depending on the price of infinite dust. I see between 16 and 40 gold on average from prospecting a stack of saronite. The key is cutting the uncommon gems and quadrupling their value, as well as transmuting meta gems.
Lichbloom, Adder’s Tongue, Icethorn
Here’s where it gets tricky. These herbs are skyrocketing and it’s going to get tough for glyph makers very soon. The best deal I’ve seen on my server is adder’s tongues for 18 gold a stack and that’s about as good as it’s going to get. These herbs are the best for milling to craft glyphs and other inscription items, so seeing them so expensive really limits what you can do unless you change the price range on your glyphs. Since it’s my blog I’ll tell you how I’m dealing with this :). For starters, I am only selling glyphs that cost 20 or more gold. Next, I’m selling armor vellum III’s for 8 gold or more, runescrolls for 5 gold each, and faces of doom + iron-bound tome for 200 gold each. With these prices I basically avoid the pain of posting hundreds of 1-19 gold glyphs and instead can craft 100 20 gold glyphs for maximum profit to time ratio.
Borean Leather
Haven’t noticed a change on my server for borean leather. If anything the price has decreased and leg armors are making even more profit, especially rare versions of armor kits.
If prices get to the point where they are ridiculous (ie 100 gold stacks of lichbloom) just go farm it! Also, don’t prospect/mill everything you own so that you can take advantage of when material prices get unusually high. Is it time to go farm on your server or continue crafting?
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14 comments: on "A Time to Farm? Bots Dying!"
Magz said... May 31, 2010 at 8:40 AM
Greetings Markco
The lichbloom problem has/had materialised on my server but I've managed to counteract it, although it took some serious outlay and use of my time.
Lich reached 60-70g a stack. Now I contributed to this when it was active, mainly because 2 months prior I bought roughly 500 stacks of the stuff at 15g. When the prices rose dramatically I cashed in, but it left me with a problem. My stacks of Flasks ran dry and I wasn't sure what to do.
So, I waited. Viewed the market. Then when teh farmers came and posted at high prices, I bought a few extra stacks and relisted single herbs at 1/3 the price. Slowly but surely the prices dropped although it took about 2 weeks of constantly relisting single herbs. Mainly due to normal AH buyers seeing the lower herbs and buying then for singlee flask production for their own needs.
Luckily (depending on yer point of view) the last few days Prices dropped back below 20g a stack and I spent 12k on buying them all out. Time consuming? Yes. Worth it in the long haul I think so as already today prices have already risen by 10g a stack to 30g.
From a glyph POV These farmersalso posted Icethorn at 10g astack, about half normal price, so those too were bulk procured. Now to mill the feckers but tbh I'm now looking at beign extremely well stocked on all fronts for the foreseeable future.
To be honest the thought of f arming sends shivers down the spine.
Damn, I may have to restart the gold making blog again after so long away. This comment is longer than anticipated. :P
Unknown said... May 31, 2010 at 10:43 AM
Yeah i can confirm that they've beaten down the botters a bit, lost all 3 of my suppliers.
Also just wanted to say that thanks to this site and the forums i hit 30k this weekend and was able to get my mammoth that I set out to get at the start of this expansion,
JayTekStorm said... May 31, 2010 at 11:22 AM
I'd have to disagree with you markco on bots being. Bots are thriving right now because there is two bots available that blizzard cannot detect with warden.
Blizzard does there very best to find these bots but the bot creators also do a very good job being elusive and developing their own counter detection systems for warden.
Lichbloom only sells for 30g a stack on my server because the auction house is flooded with it. I can only assume because of botting on my server. Not only do I see the same bots gathering the same locations I also see bots that farm all day eternal fire, air, life, and earth.
I do agree with you comment on what Gevlon said about bots. Blizzard wouldn't have filed a lawsuit against glider to get the shutdown if they didn't hate bots. The issue now is the two current undetectable bots are not housed in the U.S. making it very difficult to have any legal standing against the authors.
Groshnak said... May 31, 2010 at 11:27 AM
Thank you for confirming what I suspected. Three weeks ago I bought a G-bank + of saronite at 10g a stack. Since then the market has dried up. Guess I am going to have to farm my own mats for a while.
Anonymous said... May 31, 2010 at 5:43 PM
on my server i actually cant see these consequences. the herb-prices are even falling below 50% normal value
pagb666 said... May 31, 2010 at 7:07 PM
But they seems to like AH goldfarmers... the glyph one in my realm has been up for 3 months already.
Backthief said... May 31, 2010 at 9:08 PM
ive got several bots on my friends list so i can keep track of them. they are still alive. They farm mithril, adamantite, thorium, they are far from over.
Anonymous said... May 31, 2010 at 9:13 PM
Yes! I reported a bot 3-4 times over a 1 week period. I left the ticket open and just kept updating it in order to keep the ticket open..help desk ppl hate that:-) They definitely DID remove this bot, and wow it's make a HUGE impact on the market I am trading.
elan vital said... May 31, 2010 at 10:15 PM
This same issue popped up in burning crusade for me on my server, after about 3 weeks enough people had leveled herbalism to drop the price of herbs again. Sort of interested to see if that will happen again.
Anonymous said... May 31, 2010 at 11:40 PM
I've totally trashed the glyph market on my server. Threw up a wall, and probably wont stop for awhile. Just trying to get rid of competition.
Keeping up with the inks as well to make sure no gold is made.
Anonymous said... June 1, 2010 at 4:34 AM
herb prices right now make me cry. I remember picking up 100 - 200 stacks of Icethorn/Adder's Tongue for less than 9g a stack. Now i can't find anything under 25g and my ink store house is drying up.
Anonymous said... June 1, 2010 at 6:46 AM
My response on the glyph market has been a bit different. I'm running a glyph wall now at 5g and have been for days and I have no intention to stop. This is the perfect time to discourage people from playing in the glyph market. Lets see what is left of the insane undercutting after a few week of this with these herb prices.
Hinenuitepo said... June 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM
clearly a server specific issue.
Prices have never been lower on my server.
herbs are very cheap, suppressing flasks (like endless rage) below 20g each, and resulting in low profit margins in most professions. Yes, there's still ways to make money, but whether it's the ubiquitiousness of bots on my server, pre-Cataclysm apathy, or something else, there's not much going on on my server.
Interesting.
mogul said... June 3, 2010 at 12:45 AM
Mats are not so much on the rise as on the seesaw I'm guessing. The steady stream of mats is definitely not there - as a result I'm finding herbs, for example, are 17-18g one day and 60g the next - interestingly the glyph market on server hasn't caught this trend. I'm assuming because it is simply too large to fall prey to daily shifts. If you are well stocked, now would be the time to cap the market at about 5g and watch your opposition's stocks dwindle. Hey Mags - I better restart my own blog too ; )
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