Whenever I hear someone telling me about a shift of prices to do with their market I immediately assume it’s just something going on with their server and they are over exaggerating.
However this issue has come up so much in the last week that I’ve had to finally bring it up as I’ve consistently noticed it on my own server as well and heard about it from other blogs I follow.
Raw Material Prices Going Up
Why do prices rise? There is either a rise in demand or a drop in supply. Seeing as how less people are playing WoW these days compared to before I wouldn’t pin it on this.
Example:
Adder’s Tongue
Average price bought for : 82s each
Last 14 day average = 1g 23s each
Average in the last 3 days = 1g 39s
Notice that all 4 price averages are steadily increasing since people started reporting the wave of bots banned at the end of May. I have found it increasingly difficult to keep my herb stock up at my buy price of under 90s each.
The main purpose of this post however is to get some feedback from the community here
Have you noticed a rise in prices or much less herbs/ore on the AH? Do you suspect this is due to botters getting banned?
Have you had any of your suppliers suddenly stop logging on?
reply in the comments below.
Herb prices have skyrocketed on my realm. While I used to be able to buy Adder’s Tongue for 50-80s per on any given day, it’s currently fluctuating between 1g50s to 2g per. This is across the bench, and the cheapest herb out there from all Northrend herbs tends to be Icethorn at around 90 silver per.
I still make good money with inscription, working towards my own 100k gold goal, but it’s become harder. Rare uncut gems went up as well, and even saronite ore seems to be a bit more expensive.
Yup going up on my server… in fact there is o most no supply at all of herbs or ore
i dont know what is up but some examples:
use to be that their was only 1-3 runed orbs on the market now theirs 150 and their prices are sky rocketed!
Heavy stone! use to be that i could buy a entire stack for 1g! now for 1/2 a stack its 32g!
their are many many other things i could say but these are the one that are most dramatic
Stormrage has doubled or tripled many of the herb prices. It wasn’t uncommon to find 50-100 stacks at 30s/herb. Now I’m lucky if it breaks below 80s, most often near 1.2g.
It’s odd actually, raw mats across the board (cloth and leather to a fair degree – ore seems stable though) have increased in price yet final products have stayed the course or even dropped. Some items like flasks have priced themselves out of any possible profit.
The price of Northrend herbs on my server have also gone up a lot. Adder’s Tongue went up from 50s per herb (10g a stack) up to the current level of 1.35g per herb (27g a stack). Icethorn is much the same.
I did swap to buying Tiger Lily and Deadnettle for under 10g a stack but those herbs are also going up in price.
There is most definitely a lower supply. I’ve seen a reason being that Frost Lotus dropped in value, resulting in less Adder’s Tongue being farmed, but that wouldn’t lead to an increase in the other herbs too. Maybe with the summer lul coming or in force, plus general interest in WoW waning until Cataclysm, there are just less farmers in general.
I have also noticed the overall value of glyphs not increase at all, but I am thinking of increasing my threshold so I don’t run through my stockpile of IOTS too quickly, especially if there will be a boom in demand come Cataclysm and the price of herbs are going to stay high.
can’t bother
my farmer is still actively selling items for the same price so maybe it’s time to buy him out. we’ll see
Honestly, it isn’t hard to realize there are a ton of alts with alt professions leveling right now increasing demand on mats.
The finished products are being sold at a loss because so many people are doing this.
IMHO.
~Sal
I actually put some suspicious names on my friends list a few months ago when I started to establish my Inscription industry. Hundreds of stack of herbs from the same seller are suspicious after all, aren’t they? Anyway, most of them turned out to be bots farming 24/7, but a few weeks ago they all disappeared (and farmable materials’ cost skyrocketed) so Blizz probably got rid of them.
Still I am not worried that much as it helped me pushing out others from the Inscription business and new farmers already showed up, spamming the AH with all their half-prized herbs.
On chogall both the farmers I bought from have not logged in for about 3 weeks. Prices have not gone up much from 5g to 7g for low level northrend herbs. The part that is most noticable is how few are posted to the ah. Been having to buy it up as often as I could and still runnin into supply issues. Want my farmer back I miss paying 3g a stack
@Sal
I doubt that on my server. There used to be 8+ pages of icethorn daily with auctionator. Now I’m lucky if I see 3. Stacks of 20 at a price point rarely go over 10-15, where I could usually buy 30-50. There aren’t more finished items on the AH either. Supply has dropped by the thousands and demand seems to be stable. Decent time for non-bot farmers to make money.
On Burning Legion the prices are sky rocketing! I am buying all Tiger Lily I can at about 40s a piece. Adder and Icethorn don’t seem to dip below 1g20s each. I am actually selling herbs from the alt I am leveling since the gold/herb is better for some of them then what I would get per glyph….
I can’t speak to the situation with herbs but one thing stands out on Uldaman about raw gems and it seems to be the opposite of what everyone else is experiencing with herbs. Prices of raw materials are quite low. I used to mine ore for raw gems. The market seemed to be better for the raw materials than it was for the cut gems. Even so I used to get 35G for Scarlet Rubies and now the price is in the low 20′s.
I wonder how many people, like myself, are rushing to level alts before the expansion comes out. If so that might be the answer to dwindling supplies but it should also signal an increase in unit prices.
It’s all beyond me.
My server has been marked as a “New Player Friendly” server, so we always have a constant supply of new players so I can’t really say it’s because of people making new alts.
However, that being said the bot ban has definitely caused a major upheaval in herb pricing. Herbs that I could buy for 65s a piece are now going for 2-3g a piece! I don’t follow Lichbloom as much, but the price has gone up insanely over there as well.
Same things happening on my server .. Northrend herbs used to be as low as 40s a piece and now they’re up at 1g20 or even more. And the supply dropped as well
On the other hand, a lot of the competition isn’t logging on anymore so the glyph prices are also going up which keeps my income steady and myself happy
An other possibility is that herb farming isn’t worth the time any more. Even with Bots you need people to attend to the Bots/PCs from time to time.
The goldprice at ebay dropped down to 2€/1k at least here in germany, so the gold they get from hacked accounts is enough.
Can speak about the herb market on Vek’nilash cause it’s not really where I make my gold, but the ore market is the same as always. If anything, I’m finding more deals than ever. I just bought 122~20 stacks of Saronite for 12g each. I lawled, prospected, and turned a nice 3k profit off the gems. And still have yet to do anything with the uncommon gems. On a side note, the gold-sellers / hackers are infesting my server atm. Anyone else seeing the same thing happening?
The last couple weeks I was actually back to selling raw mats for profit rather than craft or stockpile. Today I logged in and planned to sell off a load of Herbs I had on 1 of my famrers and I was semi shocked kinda when I noticed just today the market for herbs CRASHED. Well I guess I could buy everything and hope for a rebound. Or plan on holding 2-3 Tabs in my storing vault for CATA powerlevels. Noble cards have evenned out in price deck/Trinket. I did make abour 1.5k gold off buying decks and getting cards made then reposting. I guess I’ll figure something out or see what happens
It seems as if the bot farmers are dumping more ore than herbs. The other day I bought about 300 stacks of saronite @10g ea. I’ve also constantly been able to get a good supply of saronite for under 12.50g a stack. Herbs however, they seem to be undersupplied. I saw a posting of about 90 stacks of Adder @ 20g a stack and snatched them up because that’s pretty cheap for the recent prices. As for other herbs, there’s barely been any posted in bulk and for under a gold a unit.
Maybe The botters are focusing more on mining now?
Over the past month or so herb prices on Burning Legion (US) have doubled, it makes a lot of sense that this is a result of the banhammer being brought down on botters. It sucks for my bottom line but is good for the game.
Over the past months the price of alot of raw materials have gone up, but some of the wierd things I’ve noticed on my server is that some people have way to much gold and they are able to clean out the entire market of certain items and dominate it as they whish. This might not be a problem you think, but when it comes to items like enchanting mats and uncut gems its sick and sometimes people don’t even bother gemming/enchanting their new items because of the prices (Which nerfes the progresson in pve and pvp). Also since alot of bots have been banned (presumably) alot of items are in a very short supply and it varies around 50% of that items value over just a few hours since everyone is undercutting and reposting all the time. Atm my servers economy is TOTALLY ruined. If you wan’t gold, you have to either do dailes or farm. I was spending 3h on the AH yesterday just to have an example how bad it is (I got Enchanting, JC, LW, Tailoring and constantly advertising in trade) and I was able to make a profit of 700g (IN 3 HOURS) and I bought mats for over 4k gold. The average profit margin of items are somewhere around 3% which sucks.
I have been having trouble just lately making money on my server with inscription because there are a couple of people that insist on no matter what the price for certain glyphs are, putting them up for 2g 99s 99c… this goes from 50g glyphs that i am making that on steady straight to 3g.. Theres another person using this way to make money, I beleive him to be a bot, because usually seconds after i undercut him, he undercuts me and hes online 20 hours out of each day. He is not the one doing the price from 50g to 3g tho. I have tried buying out all of these and it works sometimes, but none the less there is another post by this person. I think they are using auctioneer batch post at a price set at 2g99s99c or something. Any tips on getting past this? Its basically making the glyph market on my server pointless.. I have them on my friends list hoping im there when they get on some day soon… but i havent seen them
I dont know what to do anymore, its driving me crazy.
Funny you should mention that. I have noticed someone lately posting gems for 101G when the market value is significantly higher. Not only that but they posted that same price for a number of different gems.
This price is very close to the cost for raw gems so, like you I have purchased some of the product but there is a limit to how much of that you can do if they keep posting.
Hehe yea, after I posted that last night, I read a lil more and found that thats a strategy that is even mentioned on this site
drives people away from the market so they get tired of doing it for no profit almost and makes them quit doing it, atleast for a while. Im sticking with it though, as I think you should. The prices will get back up, im kinda watching mine and today i have very few items less then 3g.. so i think the fall will slow down some 
I love this site.. so much good info.. btw, i never even tried making money wiith my glyphs till i saw the addon video about what addons Will uses to make money with glyphs, I downloaded all of them and its a whole nother world now 
I love all the tips and stuff this site has..
You may be correct but I was wondering if the gems were being sold low to get the gold quickly because they were stolen from a hacked account.
I only store raw gems. My operation is not large and keeping the gems raw allows me to stack them which I cannot do with the cut product. This also allows me to stock “X” amout or raw material which can be cut into several possible finished products. It is much like the “Just in time” philosophy used by many manufacturers of finished products.
However, it would seem to me that many of the stratigies suggested here would require a large stock of cut gems. If an account like that was hacked then the hackers would be trying to strike a balance between selling as quickly as possible while still trying to maximize gold return.
There is not any way that anyone purchasing these gems would be able to know this unlike those that purchase gold. Of course, even though much of the gold sold for real $$ is realized by farming and selling the mats there is still a portion of it that is the result of theft from hacking. People who purchase gold to take the easy way out are feeding these leeches just as those in real life who profit from the misfortune of others by buying and selling stolen merchandise to avoid paying the full price for it in hard earned $$.
As you say, this site contains a wealth of information, ideas and tips. It is up to each of us to determine what will best suit our needs and adapt. I have learned a great deal here and continue to learn. I often wish I was smart enough to understand it all but I am happy to use what I can and I have passed the URL on to several friends who have benefited themselves.
Demand for herbs has gone up as people are trying to stockpile all variety of inks for new leveling since Ink of the Sea will not be exchanged for lower ink! This plus the Glyph market requiring 3 times the mats for glyphs has created a higher demand.
Combine this with a shorter supply created by banning even a few bot farmers per server, and the general desire to avoid farming, reduces supply.
Each aspect of this causes prices to rise, combined it causes them to spike. However, the price of materials is still acceptable and profit’s are simply there for the more wary buyer.
Stockpiling 300 of each ink type will remain profitable as you dump them on the AH for new leveling scribes. Expect a sales price at 15-20g per ink if you keep it listed for the first month of the Expac. With roughly 8 types of ink at 300 per, you can expect 18,000g in sales for roughly a 5000g investment since the high end cost of inscription is on the glyphs, not on then ink!!!