Is cornering the market on an item and then jacking up the price wrong? Or is it good business?

So I have been farming alot of old content lately and as a result I have gotten quite alot of a certain crafting material (Don’t ask. I won’t tell) and i noticed that when I was posting it to the AH that it was selling fast, but for a very low price. Not only that but there was not much of it to go around. High demand. Low supply. But also low cost…hmm thats not usually how that works. So I took a chance and bought all of it. And by all of it i mean literally all of it. I got about 2200 pieces of it for about 2.5k. and then turned around and jacked up the price by ALOT. And it absolutely worked. I have tripled my money so far and I have only sold a little over half of what I bought.

And I can’t help but feel a bit dirty? Because of course I know what it cost before I bought it all, but everyone else doesn’t unless they were paying very close attention. But at the same time I think it was just a smart move on my part to notice the trend and I capitalized on the demand for the item.

So is it bad to corner the market and raise the prices? Or is that just good business?

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Good business.

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Either you sell it for big bucks or someone else will.

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That is free market economics 101.

Don’t worry, someone will notice and join in. A little healthy competition never hurt anyone.

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Good business. If you can play the AH, play the AH. If you can monopolize something, there’s nothing saying you can’t.

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I once got a free 20k gold in Wrath, I was hacked and when Blizzard recovered my account, the hacker had leveled my DK to max and had tons of auctions going that all sold after my account was mine again.

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If you want an example of what you’re doing and how people feel about it, look no further than pharmaceuticals.

Hint: no one likes artificially bloated prices.

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Someone will be tempted to undercut you if there’s a demand for that item.

And if there isn’t then it wasn’t a gain in the first place.

Grateful that the mount water walking equipment still sells for a pretty penny here. :stuck_out_tongue:

Real medicine that people need to survive is not the same as AH fodder in a game.

Because, Pharmaceutical companies didn’t “find” the medicine, they developed them in a lab. It’s their product and they own it, and can charge whatever they want for it, because nobody else can sell their product without their authorization.

It’s not really “artificial bloat” to charge a huge amount for a product, it’s just the price that is marked.

Would you go to a Ferrari dealer and tell them their cars are only worth $300 of scrap metal? It doesn’t really matter how you feel about a price or how much it is even worth at all, you either want it or you don’t.

And, nobody needs anything in the AH for their real life.

Now, if you wanted to get into how much doctors charge insurance companies for services, that would be a good example of artificially bloating a price.

And it is bloating when doctors do this, because they work with patients who don’t have insurance, being that they want to retain patients.

However, when doctors know insurance is paying for it, they go all out and charge the absolute maximum, sometimes lying to charge even more.

And, the patient typically has no idea what medical services cost until after they have been billed, and could even be paying out of pocket when they shouldn’t be due to artificial bloating of service charges.

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I feel like thats a bit harsh to be honest.

Nice flex… but people have been doing it since day 1. I dont know how long you’ve played WoW but welcome to the game of AH.

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I don’t see why it can’t be both.

Pharmaceuticals can charge absurd prices because the government grants them a temporary monopoly after successful development of a new drug/medical product. This serves to incentivise research and development on niche drugs that would otherwise be completely unavailable to the public. It’s a unique circumstance that can’t really apply to the example in the OP, since Blizzard has not given him a license to control supply. Other sellers most likely will enter the market and drive the price back down, that’s how it works.

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It is an example of taking advantage of limited options.

If we had a single global auction house this would not be practical and prices would balance out more reasonably according to actual time/effort investment, which is better for everyone in the long term.

Even if it is too much effort and investment to convert WoW to a single Megaserver (one each for PVP, PVE, RP, etc.), which seems dubious given they already have an instance/phasing system built into their game engine, it would be a huge quality of life improvement to at least centralize the AH.

Being on a low population server makes finding decent xmogs and even basic mats for leveling ridiculously costly and time consuming, relative to high pop experience.

When the game experience is radically different based solely on the server you pick, you can be sure it is time for an upgrade of some sort.

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You sound like a sales rep. I fully understand wanting to get a return on development investment, but please tell me more about why $600 for an epipen is acceptable. It was released in the mid 70s, not 2 years ago.

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You either want a $600 epi pen or you don’t. Whether or not it is acceptable has nothing to do with it.

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You either want to survive or you dont? Is that seriously your argument?

Unless you’re insisting the government take control of medical services and make your medical decisions for you and your family.

That’s the only way you get out of paying for insurance or medicine, well that and being poor.

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People do this all the time, but also get burned by it too. You never know what people are sitting on with their army of bank alts.

Just because it isn’t on the AH doesn’t mean it’s not on someone’s bank alt looking to undercut you.

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Im insisting that pharmaceutical companies be less greedy. You still havent really justified the $600 price tag. Just for reference, it was hiked up from $100 a couple years ago. This isn’t some price increase for a drug that these multi-billion dollar companies need to survive. It’s purely price gouging because they can.

Did a bit more research. It costs, including R&D costs, about $30 to make each epipen. The components itself are about $5 each for each epipen.

Soo, $600 for a 2-pack means a profit margin of 900%. Please tell me more about how this is acceptable practice?

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