Friday 12 November 2010

The dangers of following a WoW gold blog



I was looking The Undermine Journal (TUJ) yesterday looking at the economics of different servers (sadly, being ona EU server, mine isn't on TUJ), when I stumbled upon something weird. Between the "Hot Items" there were [Peacebloom]
and [Silverleaf]. I went to see the "Price and Availability History" of those two items and this is what I saw:

Peacebloom Price and Availability on Aerie Peaks US - Alliance side
Silverleaf Price and Availability on Aerie Peaks US - Alliance side
In both cases we see a very stable market that suddenly has an increase both in prices and availability. We can distinguish in both images two distinguished peak of this fenomenon, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. (you can see it better directly from TUJ, at least for some days, here and here), the latter one remaining stable for a while. After a while the prices became normal again, while the availability keeps growing a little longer.

Nearly the same happens for [Mageroyal] on Agamaggan, Horde side, Peacebloom on Alexstrasza Alliance, exept that only the prices rise, and not the availability, while in some other realms you may find some really "brief, but high" peaks in price:

Silverleaf Price and Availability on Borean Tundra US - Alliance side


Most server still aren't touched by this strange phenomenon, but the number of those who are is quite significant. Choosing servers and sides randomly, you will see some different pattern regarding low-lever herbs (Peacebloom, Silverleaf, Mageroyal) exactly November the 8th (Try it yourself). 

What happened on November the 8th?
Is it possible that lot of people started to level alchemy or inscription at the same time?
There was some blue post, or some mmo-champion report about how these profession will be cool come Cataclysm?

Or maybe one of the most famous blogs about gold making made a post about these herbs?


Here is a quote from the post:

"When I looked at my own server tuesday afternoon to see how prices were doing this is what I saw on average:

Earthroot : NONE.
Mageroyal : 5.5 gold each.
Peacebloom: 1.5 gold each.
Silverleaf : 15 silver each.
Of these only silverleaf had a decent amount on the ah (about 120). Mageroyal had 1 stack and peacebloom had about 50 of assorted stack sizes. "

Now, these weren't the prices of those herbs in the server where there were the peaks (except maybe for Silverleaf), nor there was any shortage. My guess is that Markco's blog has some followers in those servers who did the following things:
  1. Saw that the value of said herbs at the AH was much lesser than what they thought was their actual worth and started buying.
  2. Started farming the herbs hoping to make a good profit.
Of the two, the latter probably are the ones who lost less in the process (if they didn't waste too much time in farming), and they still will be able to sell those herbs in the next weeks, at normal rate... Or maybe even gaining something more from people power leveling alchemy and inscription when the new races (and the new races/class combos) will arrive with Cataclysm. Maybe in some servers they even succeed in selling those herbs to the people who did the first thing for some crazy prices!
But in both cases, people just followed blindly some advice without even checking what the reality of their server was. In every serious blog or guide about gold-making you'll find thousand of times the words "this could not work depending from your server economy", but still there is people that think gold-making is just following some formula you can just take out of context in a blog. 
You should still follow this kind of blogs, just try not to be that kind of person.



1 comment:

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