Crashing The Market

Posted by J.E. Douglas at 1:01 PM

I was gluffing around Orgrimmar, getting ready to run through some old raids when an interesting chat discussion came along.

Paraphrasing,  two players were taunting someone else for a advertisement they had been barking for cheap glyphs.  In their advertisement they bluntly stated that they wanted to crash the inscription market to bring 'cheap glyphs to all'.

I had spoken about this before the first time that I watched an inscription market crash and burn.  Of all of the different markets, inscription is really the easiest to crash.   Herbs on many servers are at dirt cheap prices.  Being able to craft hundreds of glyphs,  listing them at inexpensive prices and still being able to net a small profit. 

To crash any market you need to have a base amount of gold sitting unused.  Mostly because it would be impossible once someone has bought out your first round of glyphs to have that many herbs stockpiled.  I probably shouldn't say impossible but ultimately you will run out of raw material and either have to purchase extra or go and farm them.

A conglomerate of players would find crashing the market easier simply by one or two funneling the herbs into the scribe.  That way the scribe can be keeping the product artificially low.  

Where morally crashing a market could be seen as reprehensible,  financially it can be a very strong strategy.  There are 150+ glyphs.  Only about 30 of those actually making a large amount of profit.  The others end up dribbling profits since they are not in high demand.    So let's say you take the 10 highest profitable glyphs.  You can live healthily off of those 10 glyphs and then crush the rest of the scribe market.  Many players run away from markets that aren't quick 'list and profit' type of markets.  This leaves only the die hard players who know how to fight back.

Ultimately a market will snap back simply because the planning on keeping the market artificially becomes boring.  Even the best of intentions will get someone only so far.  But the damage has been done when a player leaves the market for easier and more fertile ground.

With Warlords of Dradnor,  inscription is going to have some changes in different glyphs.  Many of the more powerful glyphs will be given to players in their book as they level.  New Glyphs will become important to players,  with the 'best set' of glyphs yet to be determined.

Don't let the chain rattling of someone determined to sew anarchy into the mix to remove you from the scribe market.  Look at how the scribe market has always reacted to incursions and be prepared.

Good Luck and Good Profit Hunting

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