This post was published 8 months 27 days ago which may make it out of date. This does not mean the information is wrong, or useless - it is a warning just in case!It’s been a few weeks since I posted my Copper Rod fail, where I was selling them for 10g a piece. Since then LeDree has been taking this further and even selling a load of vendor brought items for 100g!
Yesterday I received a screenshot from Fragmaggot, who brought out a stack of every cheap vendor brought tradeskill item he could, such as tailoring inks, threads, parchments, copper rods, wood etc.
He’s selling most of them at 10g each, and seems to be doing pretty well so far! Unfortunately he took the screenshot after a lot had already entered his mailbox however, but you get the idea.
Fail! (click to enlarge)
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sad really. i would have never thought people were that dumb.
It’s not that people are dumb that are buying these mats. though to a degree some of it probably is. What you’ll probably find is its more a case of they dont care.
To a lot of high level players theres little difference between 1g, 1 silver or 1 copper. Its a mob kill to them. In their mind its easier to buy 10 vendor items at a gold each from the AH and do a daily or kill a few mobs that the you are going to kill anyway later to cover the costs than it is to run back and forth between shops buying mats to powerlevel a tradeskill. Sounds crazy to people who think in terms of profit and gold per hour but not to the average player who to them the game is about killing mobs / questing / pvping etc, and that gold is something to be spent and not a way of keeping score.
The common player generally wants to minimise the time “wasted” running from vendor to vendor so will pay over the odd prices without thinking about it.
Now this is not to say we cant take advantage of it.
But dont mistake lazyness for it for being dumb.
I’m not sure that you are right. You are seriously suggesting that people buy 1s copper rods for 100g because they don’t want to “waste time” walking for under 30 seconds?
You say “But dont mistake lazyness for it for being dumb.” yet laziness on this level is dumb.
Sure this might be the case for some sales, however I just don’t agree that the majority of these people aren’t dumb for buying these easily accessible vendor brought items for ridiculous prices.
Not what I took him (her?) to be saying at all. Clearly, those that pay exorbitant prices are just in the dumb category. However, similar to buying marked up vendor recipes from exotic vendors (cooking recipes from feralas comes to mind) some people will pay more for the convience of one-stop shopping. And when the markup is small enough that the non-accountants out there won’t notice the difference (I.e. selling 1s vendor items for 1g) then why not pay for the convience? When you’re pulling in 200g/hr like the common m&s grinding dailies, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll notice that you spent all the money you made off vendor trash.
This is not to say that the decision to buy the marked up vendor item is a good one, but it’s not innately a bad one. A good example is rather than spending the time to find the enchanting vendor in IF you apply the same amount of time to a quick daily, and the g/hr of the daily is greater than the g/hr you lost to finding the vendor, then buying the item was right. However, since I quit doing dailies for g, I have realized most m&s cannot accurately judge the g/hr conversion.
When it’s obviously a bad g/hr decision, then yeah they’re just dumb, but there’s a large grey area of dumb-lazy-smart, and most fall into the lazy area.
I’ve actually started a new project. I sent 5g to a level 1 and bought trade goods found in IF. Including recipes. After the first night I was up to 30g before I dropped 20g on more recipes and restocking the trade goods I had sold. I’ll write a full out blog on this here shortly once I get the momentum going on it.
Sounds awesome Carbon, can’t wait for that!
Make sure you give me a heads up and I’ll give you a shout out when it is done :)