Saturday, October 24, 2009

The Competition

Normally I ignore the competition. I mean that I usually care less at what they do and do my own thing. I react to the market more than what an individual is doing. I would imagine that I miss some opportunities to mess with them by ignoring them. Recently I cut back my presence in the glyph market. Posting fewer times and not crafting as often. That threshold that I used to have lower than everyone else has been pulled up. So my market is very cutthroat at the moment and I am adjusting to let everyone else fight each other.


I decided this is a nice time to take a look at who they are. I put together a spread sheet and logged various details. What class of glyphs, min and max buyouts, durations, post counts. I ended up with over 50 names of posters. Some only had a few up so I didn't record much more than the posting name and what looked like min buyouts.

I found 7 major player that covered all glyphs with a single character. I found one player that used 3 atls and was able to connect them to each other. I also use 3 alts and I believe it would be very easy for my competition to connect them to me. Of those 8 other players, 3 of them post their entire inventory for 48 hours. 2 of them post 2 at a time for 48 hours. 3.07g was the highest threshold of them. Looks like 2 do not have a threshold. Only 2 of them had a high fallback (60g ish) and the others had fallbacks of 7-14g.

Of the remaining names on the list I found 7 people posting glyphs under 1g, 11 people posting some 1-2g. Most people posted with 48 hour auctions. I saw about 5 listings where the glyphs were in a stack.

I also saw a few people with a small representation that I know also work the market. I expected to find them as one of the major players but they had a small representation on the AH. Many things could cause this so I will not rule them out. They could be more selective with the glyphs they are posting in this market now or even giving it a chance to reset.

So I will say this market feels more cut throat than before. This last week I only crafted twice and posted less than half of what I normally do and had 740g a day in average sales over the last 6 days. That is way down from the 3-5k a day I was pulling a month ago. But I'll hang back collecting my small sales and be ready to dive in whenever the market resets.

2 comments:

  1. Just reading about how Gevlon likes to ignore his competition.... because... he's antisocial! He uses the off-hand excuse that somehow the only thing that matters if the actual price in the market, blah blah blah.

    Little did he know that timing the market (as some do in the stock market) can be a strategy!

    As you gain granularity about your opponents habits, you can change your own to suit a better return on your investment. Your investment being time and materials.

    Good for you that you have the intellectual and economic maturity to realize this is a worthwhile endeavor.

    I started friending my opponents in the market awhile back just to know when they would be on as well and it's worked out pretty well. :-)

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  2. Gevlon is correct and is incorrect. If you want to play the market to total control it doesn't matter what others are doing.

    If, on the other hand, you're a piece player this information can help you, but interpreting it wrong can hurt you. The player that tries to use this opens up more profit potential but also more loss potential.

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