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Leveling Inscription required a ton of herbs. It was only through laziness and a little farming that I was able to level Inscription quickly. When we leveled HerbSkinner and Qwaitxseven, we dumped all of the herbs over to IBJammin and put them in the bank. Over the summer, I let my membership lapse and in the week before it ended, I made as many herb bags as I could and put them in the bank rather than sort through and list the herbs on the Auction House. As it turned out, this was a good thing.

To level inscription, I only needed to farm herbs in Arathi Basin (massive PVP battles for herbs) which was quite humorous. I never thought I’d see the day that people would kill opposing faction members for Kingsblood or Wild Steelbloom.

However, inscription was quite profitable, though, it probably would have been more profitable to sell the herbs I had stashed in the bank than it was to level inscription, but, due to two lucky discoveries, I received the mage minor Glyph of Slow Fall on the first day, and Glyph of Levitate on the third day. During the day, another player named Demonwarlock would constantly undercut me, bringing the price of the Glyph of slow fall from about 35g to a low of 9g yesterday. Once he sold out, the price came back up into the 25g range at which point Demonwarlock started undercutting again. I moved over to Glyphs of Levitate which I could price around 35g and they sell somewhat quickly, though, not as quickly as the Glyph of Slow Fall did.

While I was pulling out more Auctions and seeing which glyphs would sell (the paladin minor glyph didn’t sell well), I received this tell:

When I saw the name, I realized that I had seen it in BeanCounter and noticed that he had purchased all of my Glyphs to mark them up and resell them.

/lol

— It gets better. Received this email later on in the day.

I didn’t start the price war and honestly, for the few herbs it takes to make the Glyph of Slow Fall, 65g for it just seems like taking advantage of people. Maybe its rare, yes, first one discovered probably made some good cash, but, a stack of Mageroyal will make 3-4 Glyphs resulting 150g-250g pretty quickly. However, the market will dictate the prices. At 65g, you got a few buyers. At 35g, I couldn’t keep them in stock, selling 20 of them almost as quickly as I could put them on the auction house. At that point, another person started putting them up for 1g under my price. The next batch I put up would go 1g below that until the prices got into the 9g-10g range. Who got hurt here? The free market didn’t support 65g — it supported 35g and certainly supported 20g. Buying out my inventory to resell it at twice the price and thinking I wouldn’t continue to list them since they were selling is just ridiculous. If I didn’t run Auctioneer, I would have never known who purchased my auctions because I just shift-click and open all mail when it is received.

Price fixing is inefficient. Collusion only results in a temporary remedy, and in this case, benefits only one person — the one that overpaid for his herbs expecting to turn a huge profit. If I had to guess, 35g puts him at marginal profitability, but, not a loss. As each day passes, and more people gain these minor recipes, downward pressure on the prices will continue as they will become more common.

Sorry about your profit margins, but, I don’t believe the market will support 35g as sales have slowed down considerably today even at 15g. Your letter was eloquent and well written, but, unconvincing.

—

And the saga continues.

Translation: I’m taking my toys and going home and I’m going to undercut all of you. At 15g, they weren’t really selling that quickly anymore. The market had dried up substantially since the first day, and, he’ll get a number of expired auctions and will have to relist a few times.