Coexisting in the inscription market

Lets face it, you probably aren't the only person in the market trying to make a living selling glyphs. From what I learned, there are several groups of people in this market.

1) Is the AH stalker. You can't get rid of him. he's been there forever, and camps the AH 5 hours a day. Do your best to undercut whatever he is selling, by using auctioneer - search - general - and type in his bank toons name. This is the worst guy to get rid of. The worst part about this guy is the constant undercutting. You can either crash the market or just go about your business as normal, and look for other avenues of profit. You can crash the market and he'll happily stay there, losing money on every glyph, to try and get rid of you.

2) The casual seller. This guy may post a few times a day for selected markets. Probably doesn't have everything. Not a real threat to your business

3) The QA market dominator. Makes every glyph possible, and blasts out several or dozens of each glyph. The best thing to do is is to undercut with one or two glyphs. Then he'll have to repost hundreds of glyphs, which takes a very long time. Buy up those glyphs that he sells at a loss. Know what glyphs this guy doesnt have and charge 30-50g for them.

Inscription woes continued

Well I did try undercutting to the bone, with a 5g price ceiling and a 1g minimum. Things are picking up, but I noticed my competition has adjusted accordingly. So i am still getting undercut, but things are selling faster. Overall that's more gold in my pocket; at this price point things move alot quicker, and making the glyphs isn't a huge pain (just a small one) . However there is the huge benefit of knowing that the AH campers must decrease their prices to barely profitable to undercut me.

So this will be the reality for a while, i'll revisit in a few weeks and see if I am still getting undercut so much. Up to about 2000g on the bank toons, which while nice is pretty bad considering the time investment. Hopefully with more glyphs learned the profits will increase. I'll probably start farming herbs and doing dailies to get into a safe margin. At this point I am upgrading two toons, a few upgrades a week, so once I run out of honor (for gems) my cash is going to drop like a rock. Plus when 3.3 hits I will need tons of enchants.

Inscription woes

So I discovered a few things.

First, there is a way to make glyphs very very easily. Not totally automated, but pretty dang close. It's called KTQ, and links altoholic and Skillet (and i think some others) into a seamless process. Check it out!

Second, I found that my new server ET is much much more competitive than my old server. I would post every night or twice or three times a day, only to find every single glyph to be undercut. Sales are slow at best, I am only selling 10-20 per day. Hardly enough keep afloat. Still, I managed to buy all books of glyph mastery that I could, now I just need to learn 90 glyphs by research. This is the main problem and will just take diligence, logging in every day.

So what to do. Well, I can continue with a horribly inefficient model as is, or undercut like crazy. So I am trying the new tactic of carpet bombing, reduce prices on everything dramatically. If they want to undercut go ahead, but i am not playing Mr. Nice Guy any more. The glyphs are essentially free from a material point of view, i sell enough other things to cover their costs. We'll see what happens.

Glyphs and a new server

I transfered my hunter to ET, the alliance server where I do some day raids (1x per week so far), and got started in a serious way to make glyphs. Well I burned through all I made in 10 days (about 2000g), by buying herbs, parchments, and most importantly 30x books of glyph mastery. I think I am pretty close to knowing all the glpyhs. I now have the DK, druid, hunter, priest, paly, and most of rogue markets on two different bank toons (and a third bank toon for misc stuff). So I've been able to track those pretty accurately. So far things are good, about 200g in the first day just due to glpyhs, and probably another 500-600g for vellum, scrolls, offhands.

The offhands are great, they are nearly free (just 2 ink of sea and 1 frozen orb), and sell for 200-300g. That's at least 150g profit from each. The key is the snowfall ink, which is pretty worthless otherwise (useful for NR research also), also I sell about 5 vellums every day with several gold (or more) profit each day. These are huge sellers and if you are not providing vellums I ask why not.

Glyphs

Are glyphs profitable right now? I'd say yes. I ran an experiment. I have a 445 scribe hunter. I transfered the druid off to another server, and took basically all the gold except 100g and whatever goods were still being sold on the bank toon. I then started making glyphs. Lots and lots. At first I did only DK, then DK hunter, now I am doing DK, hunter, mage, and paladine. (First time with the last two). So essentially from 9 days ago I started with almost no gold and only two classes. I'm up to 2200g now, with only two classes and one bank toon. I'll try to get into the rest of the classes later next week and see how it goes.

My thoughts (random as always).

It's pretty time consuming to do glyphs. The profit for each is small. You need to accept that on some you wont make much profit.

You can also sell the two off-hands and scrolls and vellums. Most people ignore that, and these items give you just as much profit as glyphs and sell just as frequently.

Buy 10 stacks of NR herbs a day. The cheapest on our server is tiger lily and deadnettle. Then make glpyhs once a week. Make 5 glpyphs per stack.

Addons: Use QA2, Advanced trade skill window, and altoholic. Config QA; 24 hour post time, undercut 1s fall back 50g, minimum 2g 1 glpyph per posting (or maybe 2).

When you want to make glpyphs. Look to see how many you need by mouse over. Queue everything up. Then buy all the ink and parchment you need (ATSW willl auto-buy parchment but not ink). Burn through your queue. Helps to have 2 scribe bags on your scribe making toon and 4 such bags on your bank toon.

Then post on your bank toon. I post in the morning, 5pm, then as i log out. This ensures a steady flow. You can just post and tab out for 5 minutes (like I'm doing right now)