KevTool Queue (KTQ)

When I got into the WoW auction house business, I found a community of other auctioneers. This community was willing to teach and share their ideas with others. I received lots of help and before I knew it, I was running a very large and successful auction house business.  I eventually started this blog and was very active in that community helping others.

As I started dealing with glyphs on a large scale, I found that the manual steps in my process became very tedious. I knew there had to be a better way. I think I spent 2-3 hours doing inventory and building the list of things I needed to make. I never wanted to do that again.  So I wrote a little script to do the work for me. Once I did that, I could do it daily and that's exactly what I did.

I used it for about 2 months and my business flourished. I started sharing it with other and eventually released it as KevTool Queue. This is something that I easily could have kept to myself but I wanted to give back to the community. It was a huge hit. Even though my competitors started using my tool, I know I made the right decision. I know I made a positive impact on a lot of players. Although I stopped playing wow years ago, my contribution continues to make a difference.

I stopped development on the tool when I left but I have been approached by other authors asking to contribute to my mod. I feel very honored that someone else wanted to contribute to the project that I started. AsaAyers was the first author to contribute to KTQ on Curse. Although KTQ was flagged as abandoned on Curse, I expect that others in the community kept it alive within the forums of the auction community. I want to thank those unknown authors for that work.

More recently, I was approached by another author that would like to pick up the project and continue the work I was doing. Alisonnic has picked up development and reactivated the project on Curse. Seeing that this mod is still important and making a positive impact to others means a lot.  Thank you Alisonnic for doing that. I would like to extend that thank you to anyone else that has contributed to this project.

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.

Getting Ink CoD

We were raiding last night and someone in the raid spent the night milling and inking. I tossed some questions his way to see what part of the inscription market he is in. It turns out its the Snowfall Ink market. With the price of them up, he farms herbs and sells the Snowfall. All his ink of the sea gets converted into snowfall.

We got a deal worked out where he sends me that ink of the sea directly now. First time I ever pulled this off. Only time will tell if it sticks. I have had many farmers set up to CoD stuff that stop after 2-3 batches. When I logged in today I had 30 stacks waiting for me.

I expect that is what he had in stock. I let him know I will use as much as he send me. Even if I don't bounce production back up to match it, rebuilding my stockpile of ink of the sea is never a bad thing.

Creature of habit

I am very much a creature of habit or I run on auto pilot sometimes. There are times when I am driving someplace and the destination takes the same path that I take to work. I will catch myself trying to finish the route to work and almost miss the path to my target destination. I eat at the same place almost every day. It's a fast food place 1/2 block from work. I also refill my drink as I leave every time.


Today I walked out the door and could not remember if I just filled up my drink or not. I look at the drink and it is full so I must have done that. Then I remember that I did the exact same thing the day before. So I let my mind wonder about other time I have done that or other things I do that with.

A few weeks ago, that was how I ran my glyphs. Total auto pilot. I ran a tight schedule for so long that it became part of my day. Next thing I knew every thing I did to make glyphs was mindless and just doing the motions. I am off that schedule now but I could easily fall back into it. That had a big part to play in how I could keep such a big glyph opperation going for so long.


I remember talking about it to my wife about what I was doing. I basicly said I was spending more time doing this than anyone else possibly could. A good deal of the time was 1/2 afk.

Why do glyphs fallback?

In a market where QA dominates the undercutting, why do we ever see any glyphs post at fall back prices? I am not talking about when you reset a glyph. I know why that happens. It's all those other ones.

I know I have very close to full coverage (I am 9 glyphs from having them all). I know not all my competition has every one of them, but there are enough players that everything is covered by several posters. With me posting as hard as I am, and them posting as hard as they are, how can glyphs randomly post at fall back prices with that much coverage?

This is a side effect of QA and heavy undercutting with long posting periods. As the price gets lower and lower, eventually it reaches the point where only one person is willing to post at that price. To QA, this glyph is now under the threshold for everyone else. QA will now skip this glyphs until the price goes back up. Either the low priced ones get purchased or they expire. If they expire, every glyph that was above that one will expire first.


This glyph becomes that last one. It holds everyone out of posting that glyphs until it disappears. Once it is gone from the AH, the next person is open to post at whatever price they want. Someone who works hard to reset the price of glyphs will see this loner and reset the market. But those people don't take the time at every posting to do that.

The colors on the left indicate the value of the glyph. Red is near cost, orange is minimal profit, and green is all the mark up. Everyone undercuts in the green area, few will do so in the orange. This will cause many glyphs to cycle in price over and over. The worse the glyph is, the more often the glyph will cycle like this.

Buyers will bring some stability to glyphs and slow the cycle. Also someone liquidating leveling glyphs (they are not using QA anyway) will hold those down longer. But there are several lukewarm glyphs from research and books that will do this.

I do not expect every server to see this. For the longest time, I was the main cause of this effect on my server. Some things like this I don't do as aggressively anymore. But it was a nice way to passively reset the glyph market when I did do that. All it takes is one person to post by hand or use some other logic to post glyphs with and that cycle can be interrupted.

Inscription: Step by Step Guide

1) walk to auction house
2) talk to an auctioneer
3) type adder's tongue in search box
4) click search
5) buy some of those
6) walk to mailbox
7) open mailbox
8) get everything out of mailbox into bags
9) mill all herbs
10) make ink of the sea
11) make snowfall ink
12) walk to inscription vendor
13) buy some parchment
14) make some glyphs
15) if you run out of parchment, go to step 13
16) if you run out of ink, go to step 1
17) walk to auction house
18) talk to an auctioneer
19) post glyphs on ah to sell
20) post snowfall ink on ah to sell
21) if you sold some glyphs, go to step 1
22) cancel glyphs that have been undercut
23) go to mailbox
24) collect glyphs from mailbox
25) send hate mail to people that undercut you
26) go to step 17

Inscription bags

Telburn just dropped a hot tip as a comment to one of my posts.

Inscription bags are a hot item at the moment. If you have some leather sitting on your leatherworker make up a batch of these. Normally inscription bags sell for less than the mats (the 2-3 times I ever looked at them) because they are a skill up item.

With the new guide posted on MMO-Champions, people are picking these up to jump start inscription. Remember the names of these people that buy 2-4 at a time from you. Add them to your friends list now. They are either the main or alt of one of the new players on your server.

The rush of new players

It looks like we should be expecting a rush of new players to the glyph market soon. The Greedy Goblin gave some step by step screen shots that produced a few. Not it looks like mmo-champion just released a guide. This new guide will reach a much larger group of people that will understand it less.

The think this new group of people are going to focus on are how much they made the first day and how fast they sold glyphs. If you can poison those things from the start they will not last long at all.

If someone jumps into the market and has a huge day the first day, it will stick with them for a long time. That is what drives them to stick it out when the market turns down. Looking at the results I had before, I would last weeks on break even profits and not think twice about it.

If they shoot for full coverage of all glyphs, they will get several sales that first hour. That is so exciting. The higher the buy out the more the excitement. Nothing better than looking at big sales before you even log out.

How do you poison those experiences? Help the good glyphs crash and deep undercut them when you see a new name post on them. Then reset the crappy glyphs that you can.

First impressions matter. What they see in the market this first time will last. If you crash the good glyphs, they will think they are worthless. If you reset the crap ones, they will be so excited to list some so high and they will curse the market when they fall back down.

I had a few leveling glyphs sell at fall back prices when I first got started and I got very attached to them. It took me a while to break out of thinking they were some how worth more than the others.

I am sitting good on my server. Competition is already fierce so it is a great time for them to come and play. My ideas are all theory craft and I don't plan on trying any of them. But it was interesting to think about.

Update: I wrote this before the guide was out but now that I see its up I have a few comments.

That threshold is way to high for my server. Even the lower one to drive out competition is not low enough to drive out competition on my server. I'm going to treat these guys just like all the other noobs that get QA for the first time.

I expect the market to dip a little for a few days and then back to normal for me. Good luck on your server.

Strange thing today

For the first time in a long time there were only 2471 glyphs on the AH after I finished posting. This was hovering in the 5000 range for a long time. I have 995 of them on the AH. So that puts 40% of them as my glyphs. Whats even stranger is that I raised my threshold up a gold this week so I posted less than I usually do.

I started buying herbs again because my stock of ink is getting low. The market felt a little dry but I was still able to pick up enough herbs at the prices I like.

Thunderdome: 2 scribes enter, only one will leave

One common tactic in working the auction house is to drive your competition out. If they leave, you have it all to your self. The rewards can be huge if you do that and eventually become the major player. Sometime you have to drive off a major player and it could be more work than you think. People try to move into my glyphs all the time. It is a big market and no way can I control it all. Sometimes the market will crash and I wonder if someone is trying to drive me out or not.

So would it take to drive a player like me out of glyphs?

This can be harder than you think. Not all people play the glyph market like I do. When I moved in to the market someone was top dog and I don't see them any more. I see people that could have the potential to take the market, but I am already established. They would have made a lot of gold with out me here.

I have a stack of every glyph. That is a ton of inventory. If for some reason my competition won and I decided to leave the market, I am not going to let that inventory sit. All that would have to be sold. If I am exiting the market, the threshold is no longer an issue and the market could easily fall. My competition would have to wait that out.

I run the lowest threshold. well, almost. I see leveling glyphs way below cost and flooded all the time. In general my threshold is lower then everyone else's. It is still above what I think they pay for mats. Lats thing I want to do is post for less than it takes for them to make the glyphs. They would just crash the market and buy up my glyphs. It is still a profit for me but it adds time to myself and gives them a break.

I have the largest market coverage. I use 3 alts to post with and while I still need about 10-12 research glyphs, most people posting have not been doing it as long. Not many people track every glyph. If you were looking to drive me out, you need to cover all the glyphs I sell. Also be careful that I don't cover all the glyphs they sell.

I drive the prices down constantly. If you think driving the prices down is going to tick me off, think again. I run a 20-60 silver undercut. That pushes glyphs down fairly fast. The harder my competition works to undercut me, the faster the prices fall. The result is usually some part time players leave the market opening up the research glyphs to just me. Fewer people means more sales for me.

The thing with the lowest threshold is that my mats are cheaper. Sometime I have a farmer that sells to me direct. When I tell them I will take all you have, they are happy to give it to me. I can often get all 3 of the high yield herbs for the same price. I love buying lichbloom for the farmer price of adder's tongue. It is not very often that I resell it, but its extra profit when I do. I also check the AH several times a day for herb markets to crash or other farmers unloading under market price. I am probably a major factor keeping our herb prices stable.

I have a large stock of reserve herbs and ink. I have a 5 tab bank to hold my reserves when needed. It isn't full all the time but it is not uncommon for me to fill it with herbs when I catch 2-3 farmer dumps within a few days. I try hard to mill/ink it as quick as I can, but a few 120 stack purchases can take a while to melt. I also have a 2nd guild bank that holds reserve ink of the sea. On any given day I have 3000-6000 ink of the sea in the bank. This helps when herb prices are high or glyph demand spikes.

I have gold in reserve and fingers in other markets. If I ran out of all my inventory of glyphs and herbs and ink, and if my farmers disappeared, and if the herbs on the ah were way over priced, I would still have the gold to go toe to toe with anyone in the market. I have a 3 months head start on any new player to the market. Look at the advantage that gives me.

I am not saying that I cannot be beaten or that it is impossible. The odds are just in my favor. I have the time and the patience to go along with it. I read all the same sites and have access to all the same mods. I have access to all the same tricks. Its possible they learned everything from me. I am just saying that I will not be an easy target so they need to be prepared.

Welcome to the Thunderdome.

Keyword: carpet bomb auction house

To carpet bomb auction house is to post a wide spread of items. This is commonly used with glyphs and jems. The way it works is to take just a few of every glyph or every gem you can cut and post all of them on the AH.

I carpet bomb glyphs. I take 2 of every glyph I can make and post them all on the AH. I under cut every glyph by a set amount. Someone like me that carpet bombs are playing the numbers. We expect so may people to buy our item but with so many categories and options, you never know what ones will sell that day. So by posting a glyph of each type, I know I will get the next sell no mater what glyph is purchased. I will keep getting sells until someone undercuts me.

In a market where you are the only one carpet bombing, you will have huge rewards with a small time investment. If everyone else does the same thing, you will have to post more often. I carpet bomb around 5 times a day at key times.

Sometimes I will have 1200+ glyphs on the AH from carpet bombing it. The people that are the best at this use Auctioneer's batch posting or Quick Auction 2 to do it. I bet other mods can do it, these two are the ones I have used. I prefer QA for glyphs.

Buying Herbs for ink

Graylo posted a comment looking for a mod to help decide the cheapest way to get the inks off the AH at the current market price. I take a different look at this. I feel that if you are buying herbs of the AH on the spot to make your glyphs you are over paying for them. It would be best to get a farmer to send them to you or just buy the herbs when they are low.

I am a firm believer in having a large stock of ink of the sea. Keep 7 days worth of ink in stock when you can. It is a buffer between you and high prices. It also gives you the supply you need when demand spikes.

I only buy the northrend herbs and use the ink trader for the other ink. Snowfall ink can be an issue for many scribes. You need to decide on the bulk value of it. Just because I see it on the AH for 18G does not mean that I can sell 6 stacks of it for 18G. The market value is around 15G so I supply it to my buyer for 13G each. I know at that price he will buy every stack I send him. Even when the ah dips down to 12G (from me driving it down), he will still pick it up. I send him 3 stacks a day so he does not even have to look at the AH.

Because I can sell my snowfall ink, I prefer the high yield herbs like lichbloom/icethorn/adder's tongue (but at the right price, I will buy the others too). When I had a farmer I made it clear to him that all I wanted was the adders at a set price. I would take the other two herbs only if it was for the same price. As long as I took his entire inventory, he was happy to give it all to me for that price. I do the same on the AH. Lichbloom will usually sell for 50-100% more then the other two. But when it matches the others, I will buy it just as fast.

Instead of deciding how much my ink will cost me on the fly at current AH prices, I set how cheap I will get it a long time ago. I look at my inventory to decide if I am paying too much or not enough for it. Sometimes I will buy out the entire auction house because of a undercutting war or farmer flooding it. It can be intimidating to buy that much at once, but after you do it several times you get use to it.

I can easily go a week without buying herbs off the AH. I only do this when prices are too high and in that case, I do let my stock run low. That is exactly why I have it. I don't build that stockpile of ink so that I don't have to buy it but once a week. I am constantly buying it and it gives me the ability to only buy it when it is cheap.

I do use 30 stacks of ink a day on average (100 stacks of herbs). I have to have a huge stockpile. Even if you are small time, you can use that 7 day metric as how much you should have in stock. You would be able to use a much lower threshold then I do (unless someone like me buys it as much as I do). I would like to say I pay less than market price, but I'm one of the major players that holds market price for herbs where it is.

Crafting Glyphs: Anything thats worth 10G method

The full stack method was one where every single glyph gets created and stashed in your inventory. A variation on that is to only craft stuff worth more then 10G (or whatever price you pick). This is a better choice when ink is in short supply. You need every sale to count and have little room for waste in your budget.


This is also a great system if you keep all your inventory on the AH. If you keep cycling it onto the ah, this will help you only craft the stuff you plan on posting. If you do the cancel/repost cycle on one char, you will probably use this method.


If you are lucky and on a server without a lot of undercutting going on. One where you can post once for 48 hours. This will shine for you. You would still use altaholic for the counts. To check prices with out having to search each one by hand, use the QA summary page or the little sparky workshop. Both will give you the price of every glyph in a list.

Crafting Glyphs: Full Stack Method

I have seen many different ways that people use to decide what glyphs to craft. I plan to talk about the details of all the ones I can think of in later posts. I am going to start with the one I use and the one that is related the mod I wrote. I am posting about this before I talk about the mod so you understand the power of the mod a little better.

The full stack method is fairly simple. You don't have to make full stacks, any set number will work and it will depend on your market. I use a stack of 14. Some do 2-3 and others will do the full 20. The idea is you make a full stack and the next time you craft you fill that stack back up.

This way you are restocking inventory. It is very easy to see how many of an item you have and knowing how many you need to restock with. Altaholic is the mod I use to see item count. It is great to use even if you don't have any alts. After you crafted that next batch, every time you restock, you are making a glyph that sold. It is the backwards way to track sales but it works.

When you sit down to do your crafting, anything that has a full stack in your inventory is something that does not sell well. The number you craft shows you how well it did. All the single and double glyphs that you craft show you how many you sell by having a wide spread. Those are the strange spec or worthless glyphs that nobody buys very often. The more different glyphs you post then the more of these sells you will get.

The glyphs that you have to craft several of are your popular ones. If you ever have to craft a full stack, you know that you ran out of that item. This would be a good item to craft extras for. The more glyphs I craft, the more extra glyphs I craft. I bet I make 20% more of the item I sell out of. Let the stack size tell you whats going on.

If I craft every single glyph in my craft list. I can mindlessly just check the count on each one. Some glyphs sell for nothing and other for a bit more. There are also those few glyphs that you never know what price it will go for today. Those are the glyphs that get misses when you only craft the good sellers. When a glyph like that hits a dry spell, it falls out of sight and you are not there to get sales when it recovers. If you use the stack sizes, you are ready for any glyph to bounce back.

This system is very mindless. I don't care what sells or for how much. I don't care how often something sells. I don't care what the popular thing to do is. I don't care whats a raid or pvp glyph. I don't care if its a good or bad one. All I care about is getting my stack full every time I craft.

Pro Tip: Instead of crafting the glyphs that sell for nothing, buy them off the AH if you can get them for less then the cost of mats.

Are you ready?

I talked about the different phases of selling glyphs. I don't know how true they hold, but that's how I progressed from one to another. I would get settled in how I was doing things then something small clicked and I took it to a new level.

One important detail in my process is how I decide what glyphs to craft. The system is so very simple. I start with a stack of every glyph I can possibly make. Then I go sell a many of them as I can. It is a great system when you are moving in bulk. The details of what gets sold are managed for you just by managing your stack size.

The mod I am working on fits into that system. I saw when I opened it up to some beta users that several people jumped onto this system of doing things. They all mentioned how much ink it would take and how much they needed. If you read my early posts you know that one thing that is important to my process is the back stock of ink that I keep. So when they start to mention how much more ink they need a few warning bells went of.

I make a lot of gold by catching the market when my competition is unprepared. I can tell when they run out of ink. I can tell when the herbs are too high for them to buy. They leave the market to me. Prices go up and more and more stuff list at fall back prices. I keep over a weeks supply of ink ready to go.

The last thing you want to do is invest you stock of ink into glyphs that will not sell when you need it to turn a profit on other glyphs. This system has an investment cost. I make glyphs that I do not expect to sell. The cost of gold is worth the time it will save but I never cut into important stock I needed.

If you are ready to make that jump then go for it. Do not let me stop you. It a great method if your operation is in place to support it.

Breaking New Ground

The way I am making gold with inscription is not new. Many people before me did the same thing and shared the results. The process has changed over time as new people try it out and discover different ways of doing things. I saw myself as one of those people. I jumped into the system and took a good hard look at it. I picked at the details and tried different things. I also took a step back and looked at the big picture.

Early on I was struggling with a part of the process that just took too much time. What do I craft? I tried a few ways on my own and I tried the ways others were doing it.

My first method was to recraft anything that sold. When I collected gold from my mailbox, I would queue up each sale in skillet and craft it later. It was simple but it was easy to miss things. If I let something sell out, I never knew to recraft it.

Several people use altaholic to show how many of something you have in the tooltip. Works great even if you don't use alts. I would then walk the list of glyphs and make a few of those that listed over 5g. I did that every few days and I was still crafting from my sales.

A method I saw the big players suggest over and over is set stack sizes. The idea here is you have a set number of every glyph. When you go to recraft, you fill those stacks back up. You are only crafting the ones that sold at that point without tracking sales. I started small and worked up but I quickly saw how much time it took to check each stack and queue up the amount needed. As I looked at that process, the pieces of it were very simple.

Select a glyph, mouse over it in the skill window, get the total count, subtract that value from your desired stack size, queue that many items. Then repeat. This required no judgement or thinking. It was a process. A very exact set of steps. I knew this could be automated.

After hunting for someone else to automate this I broke down and did it myself. I interfaced directly with the mods that I was using. The result was a very small script that would do exactly what I did manually. It did in a matter of second something that took a large chunk of my time to do. Over the last few weeks I have used it and shared it with one or 2 people that were grateful for the script.

This is my chance to give back to all those that provided me with the great information that got me to where I am in the glyph market. I am working on cleaning this script up and releasing it as a mod. Consider it in early beta now with a full release down the road. I will give more details on it later.

The Power of Quick Auctions 2

This is the mod that makes you a rock star at posting glyphs. I talked about QA before, but a update has been released for it a while ago. It has moved from the command line to a gui to manage your items.

You do have to make a group for your glyphs and add them all to it. I did not like that idea at first but the author made it easy to add everything at once. When you first start out put everything in the same group. More experienced glyphers will create a group for single and double ink glyphs and manage the threshold differently.

One thing that QA2 does better then QA is posting faster. It had a multi threaded posting ability that allow it to post several auctions at the same time. The speed is very fast. If you leave it a good deal of bag space, it is even faster. I think it uses all your empty bag slots to split different stacks at the same time now.

The power behind this mod is how easily it lets you post all your glyphs at once. You run up to the AH and click the post button. It does a quick scan of the glyphs on the AH then it post yours faster than any other mod I know. If your competition is using anything else or doing it by hand, they will not be able to keep up with you.

Do not overlook its ability to cancel auctions you are undercut on too. If you keep your inventory on the AH, this is a life saver. It will check each glyph for you to see if its had been undercut. If it is undercut and it can post a lower priced one, it will auto cancel the auction for you. If someone undercut lower then your min price, it will just leave it there. and if you are the only person up, it will cancel it so you can repost at a high price.

This is a powerful weapon that in one person hand can easily give them the market. At the same time, if too many people use it too aggressive the market will crash by the constant undercutting. My next post I will give info about the weaknesses of QA.

Glyphs: Phase 4

At this point you have 2-3 chars that post your glyphs for you. It became too much work to move them into and out of the bank. A few classes of glyphs are dedicated to each alt. You know by color what glyph goes to what character.

Your operation is huge at this points. You feel like you control the herb prices on the AH. They never drop below your buyout price. Your stockpile of ink would last a week without restocking. You craft your glyphs to a full stack when you craft.

Snowfall is a dead item. You produce so much of it that you will never be able to unload it. You do what you can with it but now consider it worthless for your calculations. This brings your cost per ink up and even with a minor adjustment in your threshold you are sill making a profit on the glyphs.

This is the point where you realize that you spend way too much time working inscription. The gold is great and comes in fast, but the time commitment is killing you. You mill it all yourself because nobody can supply you with all the ink you need. You control the market and you know there is no possibly way that your competition can spend as much time as you on it. You outproduce him and you know he cannot keep up.

Glyphs: Phase 3

At this point you are a master of the posting automation and the cancel/post cycle is second nature. You find yourself doing this every chance you get. The profits are starting to flow in and its more then you expected you could make.

You are working directly with suppliers. You have a few farmers either whispering you when you log in or sending you stuff COD. Negotiations have begun with people that make cards. You either buying ink from them or selling snowfall to them.

You primary herbs are adder/lichbloom/icethorn because of the snowfall and you are starting to get a over stock of it. As your production gets bigger at this point you are making more snowfall then you can sell. So you have to start adjusting your ink costs to account, but its no big deal at this point. Glyphs are selling well even with the competition.

You have all of the other posters on your friends list. You find yourself hopping on to post when they log off. You know they just undercut all your auctions. So you have to go correct that.

All those glyphs are starting to be a problem. You have way more then your bags will hold. You have several inscription bags in the bank now and you have to make 2 trips to the AH to post every thing. Your bags fill up often when clearing the mailbox now so you have to shift glyphs to and from the bank bags.

You are a top seller on your server. You sit with 20% of the glyphs on the AH and are building a huge bank roll. More gold is coming in then you know what to do with it.

Glyphs: Phase 2

To make the jump to phase 2, you probably already had it in your mind that it was a profitable professions. Some guide or blog gave you the idea and you had to try it for your self. At this point you are focusing on buying all the books of glyph mastery. Research is something else you are doing daily.

You know the leveling glyphs don't sell well, but you see potential in the book glyphs. The research glyphs really shine. They are not all that great but the competition is lighter. You make a little bit of everything that you see sells over a set value. You find yourself with all inscription bags to hold all the glyphs you are working. Most of your glyphs get reposted whenever they land in your bags.

Finding herbs at a discount is now a focus. You are making and selling a lot more gyphs then before. If you were buying ink off the ah, you have moved to milling herbs. This is the point where you look at selling snowfall to offset the cost of your ink. You do the math and see that the snowfall makes your ink dirt cheap. You may even shift your focus to the higher quality herbs when you discover this.

If you have any competition, this is where you start to play the undercut game. Every time you hit the AH, you cancel any undercut auctions and repost at a few silver undercut. Posting automation is just starting to work into it for you. Your first night of using an auto poster tippled your profits for the day.