JMTC Wow Gold Forum

I've been recently getting into playing the auction house and have found a pretty good niche in the gem and enchanting mats market. However, I have one competitor that's really starting to annoy me.

A few times in the last few weeks, the supply of gems (let's pick one as an example, Solid Ocean Sapphire) dropped pretty low and there were only about 10 of them on the Ah. Normally this cut gem goes for around 15-20g on my server. There were around 10 of them so I decided to buy them out and relist for 100g each. On my server, those gems will easily sell for 100g each and I'm able to sell just as many at that price as I can at the normal price.

However, no matter what gem it is when this happens, there's one seller in particular that comes back in and starts posting his gems back at their normal price of 15g. He appears to have an endless supply of gems, so I can't just buy him out or he'll just realist again at that price.

Anyone have suggestions on how to deal with this?

Every thought about whispering him and buying him out? Sounds like it could be a decent partnership if the market is what you're describing.

Thanks for the reply.

I actually have sent him whispers very nicely asking why he chose to undercut by so much right away and that he could make a lot more profit by letting the prices reset themselves over a longer period of time. His reply was to the effect of "lol whatever." So I think a partnership is out of the question.

The problem is that the market will not stay at that 100g price for that gem for more than half a day at a time because there's about 15 major players in the gem market and they're all perfectly willing to sell at 15-20g. Through a long series of undercut wars the price goes right back down. I'm fine with that because if I can catch it at the right time, I can make sales all the way back down and make a good bit of extra profit along the way. Everyone else undercuts by 1c to 50s each time.

I'm trying to discourage him immediately dropping the price by 70g+ when there's a great opportunity to turn a bit of extra profit for a little while.

Maybe there just isn't a solution to discourage this. I can't think of one. Hoping some person has experience this before and came up with a wildly creative solution.

I'm not surprised with the "lol whatever" response. You're asking him why he does something which almost never ends well. Just because he responded that way doesn't mean he wouldn't be open to a win-win partnership.

The trick is to make it worth their time and hassle free. I had someone come to me with a deal to increase profits. It was made in my favor but it was a pain in the rear (a big hassle) to maintain. I quickly regretted making the deal but stuck true to the deal until we had extra competition making the deal void.

You can always open up the conversation with, "Hey, are you open to making deals if we can find something that we'll both be happy with?". Most reasonable people will at least listen. Then it'll be up to you to work out something that works for both of you.

We're not reasonable, we make lots of gold

I will usually give someone the "I farmed it so it's free" routine, so they'll think they're dealing with an idiot and stay away from my markets
Otherwise is a month of making no profits at all (and still buy a new "BLING" mount to add more body to the farmed-it routine )

If people post with auctioneer, it will post at what it considers " reasonable" and not just undercut by whatever like TSM, QA, etc do.
This works better for some items, and some people just use that and are happy. But if you can sell them at 100g, your still better buying all his stock off the AH. gems stack now so holding 50 or 100 of a gem isn't as insane as it used to be. I routinely reset the gem prices in our AH on my JC if its too under priced IMO, and I make more money doing it. I usually max out at 100 of any gem, if they post more then that they may win, hehe.

Try to buy out his stock at about hat hes AH them for, it will save you aggravation. But don't be surprised if you have to buy em off the AH instead. A Lot of people play the AH to piss people off more then to make money, and to aggravate someone who's deep in the market can be an epic win.

The other thing is to cu out the supply of ore, be aggressive about buying ore in trade and off the AH so the supply is gone ( this is the main way other JCs try and get me out) they aren't going to farm themselves 100 stacks a week for long, so the supply will run down.
if you end up with WAAAY too many gems, try moving some to the other facion and dumping them there to move extra supply.

I doubt he's using auctioneer with the market price posting, because that would post gems at the market price when there's cheaper ones. He doesn't do that and still undercuts ones under the market price. So he's either doing something highly customized or setting the price manually.



If I were to buy his stock, I'd probably have 10-15 stacks of each gem within 24 hours. Multiply that by each day. He can cut and post them faster than they sell (as can I since I have a pretty regular supplier of Ore), so he'd be making all the money and I could never resell all the ones I bought fast enough.

Also, Ore is one of the least profitable markets on my server since there's always an insane amount of supply 600-700 stacks of Elementium at any given time), so trying to bottleneck that market would be a massive risk.

He might be using TSM with a low fallback price.