Uriul.com

What do you say to taking chances,
What do you say to jumping off the edge…

I’ve discovered that it’s tempting, when you’ve got a good amount of gold and have a nice routine, to just go on autopilot, watching your gold count grow gradually. And over time, all those markets where you make a few hundred gold a day will certainly increase your net worth. But it can also be monotonous – which is when it’s time to take chances. I’ve taken a number of small ones, but only two that I would consider big – at least in terms of the amount of gold involved.

First, the more recent and smaller of the two: I bought two Reins of the Crimson Deathcharger to flip. If you’re not familiar with them, the reins teach you to ride a mount that looks a lot like the Death Knight mount… except red, instead of blue. I’ll admit that doesn’t sound terribly exciting (especially to someone with a Death Knight main), but the reason it’s valuable is that this item only comes from the Shadowmourne quest chain after completing Shadowmourne. If you kill Arthas while using Shadowmourne, you get this and a few other vanity items. So there are exactly as many Crimson Deathchargers around as Shadowmournes.

So when I saw a pair of them on the auction house for 41K each, I grabbed one immediately and didn’t think long (and most of that thinking was about why a single character would have two of these to sell) before buying the second. I hope to sell each for over 100K , but may end up settling for 70K.

The second place I took a chance was with glyphs. I mentioned previously that I don’t believe the new glyph system will destroy inscription – or even just the glyph market – in Cataclysm. I stand behind that post – to the tune of 33,000 inks. I’ve been growing my stockpile over the last few months and certainly have not bought every cheap herb available (something I now regret), though I bought a lot of them.

Roughly 90,000 gold and countless hours of milling later, I’ve got two five-tab bank guilds full of ink and most of the two bank characters’ personal banks as well.My original hopes for these inks were modest – I was looking forward to  10G on average. But I’m already selling glyphs for 15G average on live, and my hopes are – well, modest isn’t the word.

To briefly sum up the reasons I already believed glyphs will still sell well – and for a good price – in Cataclysm:

• Lots of new alts – more than ever before.
• Many players will want to get all glyphs for their class, or at least the 20 for the achievement
• 3 more glyph slots, so everyone will be buying at least those, and new characters will need 50% more glyphs
• Ink of the Sea will no longer be the trade-in ink – it will be the new Cataclysm ink, milled from a new Cataclysm herb. This herb will be quite expensive for a long while.

There’s another reason, now – one that will probably not affect demand at all (if anything, it may lower demand a bit) but should increase prices dramatically – after the patch, glyphs will require 3 inks to create. So triple the cost to create inks! That doesn’t necessarily mean the price will triple, but it could. Combined with the new universal ink being milled from a more expensive herb, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of glyphs going for 50 gold or more once most sellers run out of their current stockpiles. And with stockpiled glyphs, a huge portion of that 50G (about 48 of it, in fact) will be profit.

33,000 inks and the possibility of 50G glyphs – that’s 1,650,000 gold. 1.65 million gold. Of course that’s the optimistic view; but in my opinion I should be able to sell all of them for an average of at least 30 gold, which would still give 990,000 gold.

So my point, I guess, is this: Once you can afford to, take a chance! Sometimes it won’t work out, and you’ll just break even or possibly lose gold on it. But sometimes it’ll turn out better than you could have dreamed…

In Cataclysm, the way glyphs work is being changed a great deal – in addition to there being three tiers instead of two (though it’s not yet clear how many new glyphs there will be, and how many will just be moved around), once a player learns a glyph they will be able to use it again and again – like with learning a skill or spell.

Some see this as the death of inscription, or at least the glyph market. Blizzard may see it that way, given how many other things they’re giving inscription in Cataclysm. I believe that not only will Cataclysm not kill the glyph market, it could improve it.

The usual disclaimer first: All of this could be highly server dependent. This is based on my experiences on one server, and may or may not be relevant to yours.

The reason to fear spellglyphs (my own made up term for the post-Cataclysm way glyphs will work) is that players will only have to buy each glyph once. Once everyone has the glyphs they need, they’ll never have to buy another! I admit it sounds scary – as though, a few weeks into the expansion, glyph sales will fall off a cliff and never recover.

But I left something out – players will have to buy each glyph once per character. Yes, we will lose the repeat business of players who swap in situational glyphs. However, we will gain the business of all the new alts people will be making! Not only all the goblins and worgen and human hunters and night elf mages and tauren paladins etc etc that people will be making on release day, but all the alts they make from that point forward will still buy glyphs. Of course alts already exist, and they already buy glyphs – but Cataclysm is putting a heavy emphasis on leveling again, and raiding with multiple characters, and I think there will be a long-term increase in the number of characters people play.

In addition, there will be a total of 9 glyph slots per character in Cataclysm, rather than the current 6. That means that all existing characters will be buying at least 3 glyphs, and that every alt made in the future will be buying 50% more than those of today.

In my opinion, the increase in alts, the new glyph slots, and the chance of many players buying all glyphs for their class ‘just in case’, rather than only buying them as needed – will more than outweigh the loss of repeat sales from raiders.

Glyph sales WILL fall off a cliff – but it’ll be the cliff of the release of this new system, when there will be a mad rush to get new glyphs for the 80-85 journey, and for the new tier, and for new Cataclsym glyphs. Once that fall is over, though, I believe glyph sales will still be as strong as they are now.