How Breaking a Market Lead to 675k Profit in Just Over a Week.

[Lockybalboa 618]

I posted this on Reddit, posting it here also since I think this community will enjoy it.

Tl;Dr - I decided to do some economic correction to help the raiding guilds on my server (and because I'm lazy) and in doing so discovered a market that I hadn't touched before. Finding how strong it was, I did a little math and religiously abided by my numbers. Earned 675k net in about 9 days w/ 20min a day active and an hour or two a day AFK crafting.

I'm a warlock. Sorry, I'm a warlock Summon-Stone-Dropping-Raid-Slave-That-Is-Expected-To-Summon-Everyone-Back-Every-Freaking-Boss-Because-They-Are-To-Cheap-To-Buy-Bloody-Tomes. Until 7.1.5 this didn't really annoy me since tomes were about 750-800gold per on my server and that is really just an outrageous amount to pay. With 7.1.5 and the change to Tome mats, I literally squealed for joy - but my joy was short lived. A day after 7.1.5 tomes were still at 675-725g per.
This kind of made me mad, the cost to make tomes were down to around 125g per and people were putting them up for a 500% markup, wtf?! I'm as red blooded capitalist American as they come, but this was ridiculous.

So I crashed it. Hard. I bought out all the Sallow pigment on the AH for under 145g (all 250,000g worth of it), made it all into tomes and listed all 2000ish of them for 10% markup (5% to make up for AH cut, 5% profit). I sold a few 100 to guildmates wholesale but the rest was on the AH for 1/5th the price of the market.

I got hate mail. Literal - freaking - hate mail. THREE people took the time to send me an in-game letter telling me that I was ruining their market (duh) and that I should do some disturbing things with myself and/or my family. Oddly I only had two people whisper me raging, the other three must have been too cowardly to talk to me directly.

So I decided to do it again. And again. 4 times I did it, each time spending around 200k - 250k on mats and making around 2,000 tomes listing them for 10% markup on the AH and getting around 95%-100% sell-through on 48 hour listings.

After almost a month of battering the tomes market on my server the prices had stabilized around 165-180g per tome, I found this acceptable and stopped flooding the market.
The weird thing was that pigment hadn't moved in price, it was still around 135-140g per. So I decided to make some gold just for me and started selling tomes at market value (sometimes slightly higher since I posted in sets of 10 and people seem to like that).

After all of this, I had my spreadsheet made and wanted to use it a bit so I started buying, crafting, and selling aggressively for normal market value...and ran into about 20% sell-through. I found this odd since I only raised my prices by about 40g per and wasn't being undercut much.
Talking to my guild one night it kind of hit me, people didn't know that tomes were so much cheaper. The prices had been so high for so long that no one even looked at them anymore. My raid team was mostly shocked to find out they had dropped so low in price.

The next day I did some marketing and kept posting in trade that I had tomes on the AH for 185g per.
100% sell-through. After that the market really took off and in the past 9 days I've had 98.2% sell-through on 24 hour listings at standard market value of 196g per average. Around 8,989 tomes sold, making me a gross of 1,761,844g and a net of 674,175g.

That's my goblin story. Some people play the AH for personal profit, some people to pay for game time, I did it because I was sick of summoning people 10 times a night.

[demonardvark 556]

I'm linking this in my twitter, this was an awesome story and also a great view into ways to make gold. Plus it entertained me that you basically crashed an economy, revived it, simply to not have to put down a lock box every 10 seconds. 

10/10 best story 

[Valks 2,375]

Another of your comments I hadn't seen leading me to another interesting thing demon. You tha man!