If you are involved in any market on the auction house you have to deal with competition, some competition is more aggressive than others by the rate at which they cancel and undercut your items.
Many times these competitors, and hopefully you, have a friends list of all their regular competition so they can monitor when they log off and on to see a pattern so that they can immediately undercut your auctions once you log off.
I developed a posting strategy for the glyph market to deal with undercutters I discussed in a previous article on how to push others out of the market, this article however will deal with how you can manipulate your competitors psychologically if they do happen to attempt to communicate.
At times, you’ll have a competitor message you, to either try and bargain a “truce” with you, set up a cartel, to flame you on how you’re doing it wrong, or just to get to know you a little more. It is satisfying to get any one of these tells since it shows that you are having a pretty big impact on the market and you’ve been on your competitors heels long enough that he feels he needs to do something about it.
I had a competitor message me a few days ago and I was just going to ignore the tells but as I thought more I figured there was a strategic way I could reply to the tells to discourage my competitor from continuing to compete in my markets.
Methods to Discourage Competition
Here is how the conversation started in my case:
Log on posting alt #1
Competitior: “Hey, I just wanted to let you know you’re fallback price is a little low, you’re undercutting my 75g auctions with your 48g ones, you should raise it ^_^”
There’s a few ways you can deal with this:
#1 – ignore him – Probably always a good way to deal with competitors, they get no response and they’ll either think they’re dealing with a bot or just feel disheartened that they can’t make you change your ways through tells.
#2 – flame him back (insult etc.) – This is the worst thing you can do, not only is it kinda immature to insult people but this will fire up your competitor and it’ll become more of a You vs. Him (or her) that your competitor will no longer care as much for profits rather than just to “beat” you.
#3 – co-operate, be nice, make a truce – this works very rarely, being nice could give you a good advantage as you may get some sympathy from the competitior, but truces and cartels rarely work (They’ll just post everything on a different alt you don’t know about)
#4 – Act dumb and portray that you play a LOT and don’t care too much about how much profit you make – This I find is the most annoying kind of person to compete against. How do you undercut someone who’s willing to craft at cost, is always online to undercut and thinks “I gather my materials so I get them for free”. Be this person!
My response to the tell was to enact strategy #4:
Me: “Meh, I already hit the gold cap and I don’t care too much about gold anymore, playing the auction house is just fun for me”
Me: “I might just bring down the market to 8g per glyph for a few weeks for fun” (I shouldn’t have said this, it told him my new cut off price and was setting up a Me vs. Him situation)
I logged off at that point, 2 days after I starting posting all my glyphs at 8g he sent me a tell
Competitor: “Now why’d you have to go and do that?, you’ll run out of inks and can’t stay profitable given our herb prices”
Me: “I’ll be fine, I have all my bank tabs full of inks and I farm my herbs for free anyways”
Competitor: “You should learn about opportunity cost, herbs aren’t free when you gather them” (lol I know 
)
Me: “Also I think people deserve some cheaper glyphs, I feel good about doing something nice for people”
I logged off again, last communication.
Haven’t seen him online for 4 days now, thinking about going back up to my 48g cap. This was just an example though to show that how you communicate with your competitors can have an influence on if they stay in your market, leave, or want to have a straight up war with you just to beat you.
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My competitors are actually not that communicative. Luckily the stuff i make a lot of gold on is sold pretty quickly so some undercutting from their side won’t harm me. When they do undercut me a lot i usually wait for a few days for the price to climb up. I even have some undercutters/farmers in trade goods work for me so I get cheap stuff all the time which I sometimes list for marketprice on an alt that they don’t know about.
I agree with you, and I have gone the #4 route several times, specially with glyphs because it is such a frustrating market.
But generally I tend to go with option #3, no truces or whitelists mind you, but just being friendly. Making clear it is nothing personal. Just chat a bit about strategies and markets you’re in, it’s not like it’s hard to figure out or highly classified information. I may end with saying ‘I’m logging off now, have at it!’. It doesn’t change anything, but it might lower the animosity by reminding them that any frustration they feel is also felt by his or her competitors.
If the guy has planned ahead at all he has is buying herbs from a couple farmers, extra account to be posting while he raids, and a stack of anime to catch up on
Thats what I have been doing so not having any shortage of ink. Lil’ Sparky and qa3 has made it where you don’t even have to look at your computer anymore… So if you figure out a way to remove the last couple glyph sellers let me know… So far its two separate accounts and posting almost every 10 minutes and almost none stop posting when a glyph seller is online… Not a nice way of going about it but learned quickly if I wasnt undercutting they would enough to not make it worth the effort to craft… I just happen to have a internet connection in more places than they do I guess…
Why would you post at 48g when you will make just as much, or more, with a fallback on 75? O.o x)
Through testing I’ve found I can get more sales around the 50g range, anything higher and players start to think “this is pretty expensive, maybe I can just get a friend/guildmate to make it for me”.
It’s like saying, if I was at 75g, couldn’t I make more with 95g fallback?? You have to draw the line somewhere.
Ah, sounds fair.
On my server I had my fallback at around 50 for a long time, and when I changed to 75 my sales dropped quite a bit for a few weeks, but I figured that I better make people used to higher prices for when cata hits, and now I make more gold by selling with 75g as fallback and will be able to raise the prices more when cata comes (or maybe even before that).
It might not work on your server, but it did on mine.
I agree, a nice 50-60g range seems to be the sweet spot for glyphs. As far as dealing with competitors I was very fortunate on my main server that nobody really did any aggressive undercutting. We all pretty much just posted our glyphs a couple times a day and all made money (I presume they made money, they seemed to do the same things I was doing and I made a ton.) However on my server with alts it was a pretty intolerable experience because there was one guy who just used a bot and was on 24/7. By biggest tip to anyone dealing with competitors (If you’re like me and don’t really want to get into these little battles) is just to get into more markets. Any time one of these little skirmishes broke out and prices plummeted I just focused more into the other markets waiting for these to bounce back.
Nice post Kraklin.
I would definitely follow your tactics if I cared about the competition at all. Personally I’m fine with not watching and dominating the market 24/7, unless I see someone log in right after I’ve logged out from my AH char.
I just do my thing at my own pace and time and if that means losing some sales, then I’m okay with that. I think people should be less affected by the competition than they sometimes are. I don’t want my gaming habits controlled by a person I don’t know, just for gold when I already have enough to last me a lifetime.
Euhm , let’s say there are 4 groups you can devide your competition in:
1) Slow undercutters – they contact you
2) -||- – you contact them (and/or they ignore)
3) Agressive underc. – they contact you
4) -||- – you contact them (and/or they ignore)
You explained your approache to group nr.1. Although i already had my own way to handle with them i would appreciate you explaining your strategy with other groups
Thanks for posting this really helpful article on how to deal with undercutters. When I started, I would always try to get the highest possible price and I never considered undercutting anyone, it was kind of a tabooed practice in my opinion. In fact, there was a time when I was the person contacting others trying to set up truces and asking them to raise prices (it never worked XD).
Then I started to realize that it’s all just business and I could actually increase sale volume with cheaper prices, and I could drive out competitors.
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