And There Was Much Rejoicing (Yay!)

That's right, I have an auction boy.  He's making me money RIGHT NOW.

I've been mentioning on and off that my new game inside WoW is playing the glyph market.  I switched over to Quick Auctions for batch posting and did the 1c undercuts and turned a nice profit.  I bought my chopper and vendor mammoth, upgraded all my gems, and wasted gold on my alts.  All was well for a while until one of my big competitors, Woodwitch, decided to set up a script.  They must have been running a second account because they were online 16 hours a day parked in front of the AH and immediately undercutting everything I posted.  They ran the same path back and forth to the mailbox whenever I did a batch cancel.

Eventually, I got mad and undercut everything to minimum to kill their profits.  That pushed the little guys out, but the bot just kept on botting and undercut below that.  I don't play enough to keep up with that kind of pressure.  Woodwitch tried to buy me out once while I was online, so I pulled everything for a few days and kept going.  They took a vacation for a little while and I made some money, but when they came back it was the same thing all over again.  When I realized just how much money I was losing to a bot, I finally reported them.  Within a few days Woodwitch disappeared, and I haven't seen them since.

In the meantime we got a huge batch of new Horde to our server via a transfer from Dentarg.  Blizz decided Dentarg should be a PvE server, so here they came.  Winning Wintergrasp!  Fair World PvP!  People in Dalaran!  There was much rejoicing.  And of course the market went squirrley from the new volume of people with their prices from the old server, but the glyphs stayed the same.  I was splitting it with two or three other people, and profits were good.

Fast forward to yesterday.  I came home from the end of a very long and depressing week at work and my mailbox was, of course, full.  Except this time, it was full of money.  All 550 glyphs worth of money.  A new competitor had come in and bought up every glyph on the market and re-listed them for 150%.  My jaw hit the floor.  I got to empty my bank and my guild tab!  I made a ton of money!

I sent a tell to Avaskie who also make big batch posts and, yep, their entire stock got bought out too.  We chatted briefly and it looks like Avaskie is a self-farmers and will need some time to restock.   I didn't mention I buy all my supplies and can keep going for a while, especially now that I can buy herbs at twice the price and still make a profit.  I made sure to mention I was only undercutting the new guy by 1c as usual and will enjoy the higher prices.  Hopefully Avaskie got the hint.  I'm fine sharing the market as long as I can make some gold too.

I'm thrilled at the new price spike, the buyout needed to be done but I'm not enough of a risk taker to drop 10k+ into the market.  The new horde population should support the new prices just fine.  I parked my auctioneer where the new guy is to make sure they're not botting.  I learned my lesson about letting it get out of hand.  My three 80s will have no problem taking flight after the Cataclysm hits.  Yay!