The Background: Patch 5.04 had major changes to the glyph system, by eliminating Prime Glyphs and then adding a bunch of new glyphs into the game. Inscriptionists everywhere prepared for the patch by stocking up on inks at all levels to be ready for the mass infusion of sales. It appeared on the Beta that the Blackfallow inks would not be tradable for lower level inks, so everyone traded and hunkered down for the storm.
The Reality: The patch hit, the glyphs changed and new ones were added. Blackfallow ink is still tradable after all and the market is flooded with glyphs. Sales were slow. I am betting this was on most servers, so I would be curious to hear from others how it was on their servers. I posted about 200 glyphs and sold maybe 12 for a total of about 2400 gold. On a typical day this would be fine, but on patch day this is horrible.
Some of my feelings about this are probably stemming from the awesome patch 3.0 which was the pre patch to the expansion for WOTLK. This patch introduced us to Inscriptionists and glyphs for the first time. This is also known as “Glyphmas”. I was posting glyphs, as were others, and they were selling so fast we could not keep up. I made over 50k in sales that first day and nothing can really compare to that day since then. So when we do have a day like yesterday it seems so mild in comparison that it feels likes a letdown or a market crash even though it wasn’t.
So why was it a letdown? There were many people posting glyphs, more than ever on the server. Normally there are about 3-4 regular posters of glyphs on the Auction House on my server, yesterday that number was over 20 and each one was undercutting the last one, cancelling their listings and reposting them etc. I am sure that if you were willing to sit there and post, cancel and repost these glyphs for a few hours straight then you would probably have made some decent sales for the day. But that is not my game, I love to spend a small amount of time to get big rewards and I had other stuff to do, like check out my talent specs, try out an instance to see how they affected game play etc.
Yesterday was not a bust however…Most people overlooked the secondary market. This would be the herbs that people use to mill and get ink. I made a killing here. I spent most of my auction house time over the last month or two stockpiling herbs that were selling so cheap due to the large number of alts running around the server who were farming their herbs to level their profession. Everyday these herbs were sitting at such low prices, many times I would pick up entire stacks of herbs for less than 10 gold. Sales were slow on herbs for the last 2 months; evidently few of these alts were becoming alchemists or inscribers.
How good was it? I was selling those stacks of herbs that I bought at 10 gold, for 200 gold or more! Sales were not crazy, but I had little to no competition and after spending all of 10 minutes posting some of my herb stocks I was able to clear a handsome profit of over 10k in one day and the sales are still coming.
Lesson of the day: Don’t follow the crowd! While everyone else was focused on inks, I decided that I would focus on herbs and it is paying off. There are many people unwilling to spend the 400-500 gold for a new glyph and are either an inscriptionist or know one in their guild and so they just make them and buy the herbs in the AH if they need them. Based on what I saw in the AH, very few people were stockpiling herbs, they had milled them into inks.
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