What is wrong with people?Follow

OK I know its the beginning of the Expansion and prices might be volatile for a bit. Thats all well and good but whats with all the selling crafted items for Less or WAY less then they cost to make?

I understand this might just be my server, or some weird trend. I run auctioneer and scan 2 times a day (Primetime/ morning).

while getting my engineering up most of the last few levels cast Hardened Elementium and a few of them. Going price is 189 a bar pretty steady for over a week now. So bows cost me to make something like 2k in mats. AH price (Drum roll please) 40g

Ok I can blow that off to many people leveling there engineering i guess. But Flasks are different they are useable, they need to be bought many times.
Lets take a look at Flasks of Wind:
-12 Azshara' Veil
-12 Whiptail
-6 Volatile Life
-Flask

Steady price on Veil 220g, Whiptail 200g, Life 6 g per

So to use a round numbers for less math I want to make 10 Flasks. SO i need 6 stacks of each herb and 60 Lifes.

220x6 = 1320g
200x6 = 1200g
60x6 = 360g
2880g Total

So take 2880/10 to get your base price at where you would sell flasks, right? 288gold each, Now i understand flask mastery if going to proc sometimes and get you a few more But it cant be relied upon enough to lower the cost to substantially.

Going price for Flasks of Wind on my server 198g avg. Each Flask is possible net loss of 88 gold ish(Not taking procs into effect.

So i ask what the heck is going on, something i don't know about or what? I understand Herbing can lower costs myself and i often herb Veil while waiting on q, or boredom. But I still dont see the point in wasting Herbs to make flasks when the mats sell for a higher profit?

Sorry i know this has ranted on a bit. Maybe someone could clue me in, or shed some light on the subject.

Some thoughts:

- They're (power)leveling alchemy - flasks are the route from 500 to 510, and if you don't have a pocket JC but do have an herbalist, they might seem like the best route from 510 to 525. And as other crafters know all too well, naive people who make a recipe just for the skillup will then turn around and sell it for whatever they can get. See [Cloak of Beasts] for one egregious example, along with some of what should have been juicy enchanting scrolls.

- They don't understand opportunity cost. There is a pervasive opinion that herbs (ore, etc.) you personally gathered are free. So they don't include the cost of mats as a price floor, and list items priced purely to sell. Basically, they treat the finished cost as "found money", and don't care about the book loss they just took.

- They don't realize that there's a viable alternative. They don't even do the calculation of whether it would be better to sell the raw mats or the finished product. The same fallacious line of thinking that causes people to buy three Lesser Celestial Essences at 19.99 each rather than one Greater Celestial Essence at 50.

Yeah, most people just generally don't think about it, and it seems to have gotten worse. I'm really kicking myself for not selling the transmutes I did during the first week of the expansion then. It cost me about 230g per transmute for the Ocean Diamonds (or whatever they're called) and at that point they were selling for 200g a pop. I didn't want to take a loss so I figured I'd just bide my time and wait for the prices to go up. That didn't happen. Here we are a month into the expansion and people are selling them for 30g a pop. I'm also kicking myself for not making rare gems I could at least use.

Elixirs are even more ridiculous than the flasks are. Granted I haven't researched the cost of the mats since I'm an herbalist, but they're going for 2-15g a piece. I could sell any of the Cata herbs for that price for just one. There's a reason I haven't been making anything to sell on the AH, just farming mats makes a lot more profit while people are still trying to level their professions.

Omg, this is a perfect example, I finally leveled my LW and buying mats off AH since I didn't have a skinner at the time, about 225g per stack of savage leather, when I finally made these to skill up to 510 they were going for about 40g on the AH at the time, in which they cost probably 900g to make, if not more.

I eventually did make some money back from the Bloodied pieces getting to 525.

Bang on the money. Or the gold XD.

I find making gold off the AH is a far better idea than trying to make gold from tradeskills. Sometimes, leveling a proffesion is almost irrational. Take the wrist stamina enchant back in wotlk. At the time the price to get learn to enchant that was in the region of 300g. I'm pretty sure I haven't enchanted dodge on writs more than 10-15 times. There's other, far more profitable enchants out there for very little gold.

Incidentally, since you are an alchemist, I've seen some people ask for a 5k fee for Vial of the Sands. I know it's a rare recipe, but wow, I wish I could try and farm for an item with such a potential profit margin.

Anyhow, back on topic. In my experience gathering proffesions make gold, crafting ones don't (Chaos Orbs now are unsettling this balance a bit, but I'm unsure about for how long).

Right. At every step in the chain, you have to decide whether it adds value or not. If you use 100g worth of mats to craft something you can't sell for more than 75g, you've cost yourself profit. The only way I can see in which this is a rational choice is if you're trying to convince the competition that the crafting step is permanently unprofitable, so that they give up.

However, since even on a backwater server like mine, there are 1) others who are vertically integrated too, 2) goblins who stockpile mats when they are low, and 3) guild crafters who draw from guild gatherers, a monopoly position can't stand for long without constant wars, since a) the real competition is just waiting you out, b) lots of people have alternatives if you jack prices /too/ high when you do own a commanding position.

You might be getting your herbs at 200g a stack, but I"m getting those same herbs for 75g a stack from my farmers who send their product to me directly so that they get an instant sale. Get yourself a few farmers and see your profits sky-rocket.

I have also been suspecting it might be Gold Farmers that have raided, read hacked, other accounts and have stolen the mats from the banks and used them to make items that people want. They under price cause in their case the mats are free and they just want to get the gold as fast as they can and get out.

Not necessarily. It all depends on how quickly the person notices that they've been hacked. The hackers can have several days to do their work if the person is casual enough, and by then, the goods can be dispersed between any number of both legitimate and illegitimate players, complicating the effort to track them.

Edited, Jan 20th 2011 12:46am by Poldaran

Taking a different side of it....

The market price may not be "Right" but it's never "Wrong"

People say that selling pots at prices less than their respective mats is "Wrong" (I think at least one person said Naive) - but really it's not.

Assume a pot costs 10 mats and each mat costs 10G. Thus one pot = 100G if you go by input costs.

The logical person might say that anything greater/less-than 100 is wrong. It's really not.

Assume I have the mats. (If I bought them or farmed them doesn't matter - they have an market value of 1000G - thus I can make 10 pots). To me they do not represent 1000g - they represent 10 skill increases and whatever gold I can get for the pots.

If the pots sell for 500G - I don't look at it as me losing 500g. I see it as leveling 10 points cost 500G. Could I have sold the mats at market price and earned 1000G, yes. But that wasn't my goal. Could I have waited until prices normalized - yes, but 1) that wasn't my goal and 2) markets can move against you.

I'm frustrated when I see End Products selling for less than the mats (at AH) cost, but there's nothing you can really do...