The price of mats on the AH for Moon Guard is literally insane. I remember back in DF trying to level up WOTLK leatherworking, and there was like 60k borean leather, 3g each. The other day, it was 50s each, now it’s back up to 3g33s each. 48k available. How is that possible? Shouldn’t be.
Let’s look at another cheap, plentiful mat: Runecloth. Runecloth is now 9g77s EACH, which is truly absurd. 15k for 1500 of it. How much was it in DF? I have it in my excel sheet, it was 15s each. So from 15 silver to 9g 77s with 43k available… That’s an increase of approximately 6413.33%! So the bots mass buying and mass relisting runecloth have increased the price over 6000%. How can you possibly think this is a functioning game economy? It’s nonsense, truly absurd.
On the flipside, Netherweave cloth hasn’t yet been affected by the bots, presumably because they’re out of gold or not worth it to them to manipulate. 91k available at a cost of 9s, which is reasonable. Why is Runecloth 9g? Market manipulation
If they don’t do something, this game is truly toast. Done, dead.
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Is there a reason to care about old crafting mats?
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If you want to level your crafting. They’re needed for certain things. I buy them to help out friends/guildies with filling their mogs to collect mog sets / offsets. It’s unfair because sometimes, I have no choice but to contribute to a bot driven market unless I want to go farm it all myself. But you can be certain if they’re listing 50k of a material, they’re definitely selling lots of them.
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So just go farm them. One of the perks of these old mats, especially cloth, is the fact they are dumb easy to farm now compared to when they were actually used lol.
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That’s not bots, that’s cornering the market.
Not that their isn’t an automation problem with current commodities using a type of flash trading to also manipulating prices.
For the free market to work it needs to be free to set prices based on supply and demand. Not controlled by market manipulators, monopolies, oligarchs, or politburos.
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you just gotta ignore some in here…lol…the mind forgets things for some…like old content existing and SOME of us still liking to go thru it and level professions lmao
Like how to use the ignore feature when you say you will. Yeah, you are a prime example.
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ignored…go bug someone else today and waste their time
Exactly
sounds exactly like someone flipping it all…buying all the cheaper up to 3 gold.
Flippers have seriously gone stupid nuts since combining the AH.
They were bad before but now theyre literally competing with each other to see how far back in the content they can go to flip every single mat on the AH. lol
Im half tempted to do it myself at this rate…why let just them make the gold.
I don’t flip myself really, but these people are necessary for a healthy economy. Unless we all want prices to tank and never keep their value, because most things right now have supply save a few higher prized items, but there’s thousands and thousands of mats. “Flippers” will buy low, and then re-adjust the price for what it should be.
I swear sometimes I feel like Blizz does this, and it would be easier to control with the servers sharing mats.
Borean leather was probably cheap last week because there was a pre-pach event in one of the old wrath zones. Now that event is over. And anyway, three gold for leather is not expensive. 4g to 7g is normal for Borean leather.
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You seem to have picked the one cloth type that has gone up in price.
Shrouded cloth - 1s. Shaldorei Silk - 3s. Silk cloth - 5s. the list goes on.
What is all this panic and hand-wringing over a spike in the price of one old cloth?
(And just in case its a spike that lasts, I put 300 of my own Runecloth up to see what it could make me…) 
PS: It all sold in like 5 mins, for 7473g. So, thanks for the heads up, appreciate the tip.
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Lets’ see if the stack of 289 in my Guild Bank is actually visible …
Yep.
Guess it’s time to farm BRD again. Wonder how much per hour we can make
You know it’s the first week of a new expansion right? People won’t be listing their stuff because they’ll be leveling, overall supply of anything not current always drops at the beginning of an expansion.
What usually happens is everything delists for 48 hours or so, then goblins list it much higher until the majority of people that have been hoarding it come back, and the price is way higher. Since the AH is LIFO, people just set the price thinking their runecloth is worth more because a few people relisted it at some random value without consulting price histographs, then it won’t sell and will drop back down to what the market will pay.
This is how any fair market works. If something is dirt cheap and someone can afford to buy absolutely all of it they do. If people are still willing to pay 9g/unit and it stays at that price then that’s what the market value is, people were just undervaluing it before. They take a large risk trying to buy every piece of material on the market, if they’re successful in cornering (which they shouldn’t be able to do in a market where people are participating), then they are rewarded. If they fail this gambit they have massive amounts of stuff that is virtually worthless.
Imo AH addons should be limited in some way but it’s not really botting. You could do this yourself with a single wow token for say silk cloth if you think it’s that simple.
The Warband bank could be a temporary work around if you don’t have any characters on other servers, you can create one and buy materials off of the auction house on other servers.
It’s bots because they are able to artificially keep the prices extremely high due to immediately buying lower priced items and instantly relisting at their higher price point.
There are 225k stormcharged leather on my server right now and it’s still 220g per. That doesn’t make any sense in an functioning economy.
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Bots are cornering the market by spam posting stacks of 1 for cheap then canceling the auction before anyone can buy. This baits players into posting their own auctions cheap which the spammer then grabs before anyone else gets a chance.
Players just trying to buy mats for professions can’t buy anything even at higher prices for hours because of the AH sorting issue. Then with all the pent up the demand and a huge supply the botter posts everything for 10x’s the price and sells as quickly as possible before starting it all over.
I hope they put a cooldown on creating and canceling auctions for each item type.
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Why? Why would I be looking at the price of runecloth right now?
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