Controlling your servers AH: Price Flooring

[Jaylock]

Have any of you ever tried to control the prices on your server's AH? If so, what strategies have you used to keep prices in the range you want them?

An example of how I like to control certain markets on my server usually has to do with mats that are stackable. So for example, with Ghost Iron Ore, if i want the prices to lower, I will farm up about 500 or so ores, and then list them at intervals in 1 stacks of 1. So in essence there are 500 single individual ghost iron ores.

Naturally some ppl will buy them up, but often times I have seen people just mindlessly post their ghost iron stacks for whatever the minimum is, (undercutting my very cheap single ores), in which case i buy those stacks up and relist a little higher single ores.

Frequently I will do some long farming sessions and then flood the market with hundreds and thousands of single ores just to get all the ore farmers to leave the market, in which case I now control the whole market of ghost iron.

Thoughts?

[GhostSkull]

My thought is that you are wasting everyone's time and that it is a terrible strategy.

[Squinty]

So your the guy who is doing this on my server? I'm unhappy with your actions sir!

[stomination]

ITs a common strategy. Either works or earns you a lot of disrespect.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

ITs a common strategy. Either works or earns you a lot of disrespect.

And quite possibly both. I prefer to go out and farm the damn stuff instead of buying stacks of 1.

[xskarma]

I'd love to see someone do this on my server. He'd just constantly lose his cheap ore to me buying it. I don't care about stacks of 1 if they come at the price I'm interested in. With auction addon it's a question of clicking a few buttons, and with mailbox add on it's a question of 1 button click and a timely /reload. I bet I can keep that up longer then anyone can having to enter prices manually for each stack of 1 they try to space out on the AH (if I understood your tactic correctly).

[Christan]

or you can make a macro to buyout 1stacks as easily as spamming 1 button
/run GetMouseFocus():Click()
/click BrowseBuyoutButton
/click StaticPopup1Button1

i've boughtout 100's of single item stacks because someone "tried" to post something 50% cheaper to drop the market
and i repost it half the time and make a few 5k for 2 minutes of my time.

---------- Post added 2013-04-07 at 11:46 PM ----------

one question...why do people say "farm X amount of Ghost iron ore ...random MoP herbs...? basically mop mats.
i've found vanilla bc wrath and cata mats have a large chance of being worth lot more.
excluding things like the secondary / tertiary ores for that xpack, people leveling dont' need many of those, compared to fel iron cobalt obsidium etc. though elementium sells relatively well still

it's just, less competition for gathering them up, and selling at a higher than mop mats price? what can you lose from that?

[Xenyatta]

I hate people like you. I will do just what Christan just said. I'll buy out all the 1's or less than 20's and restack them into 20's and sell them within the half hour for 50% more money than I bought it for. I laugh when I buy it that cheap because I know what the tactic is and it just pisses me off. So I take fiendish glee in knowing that person just lost all that inventory for half of what it's worth.

[Puffinstuff]

Heh, I am not a seller but a buyer/consumer and tbh I have never even looked at the stacks of 1 or gave them any thought. I normally just skip them and buy the larger stacks but ty for letting me know it is to floor the price. I will now pay attention to their price and use Christan macro posted above to buy them out if they are cheaper :-).

[Priestamgpwn]

In one hand i dislike people like you OP, but on other i love buying your cheap stuff and either resell them or use them.
Also @Christan : Those old mats are going to get more expensive when 5.3 hits since you can lvl up herbalism and i think mining just by mining/herbing in Pandaria and all those low lvl herbs and ores are still going to be high in demand because you still need them for lvling up a profession ( exclude BS from this as it got ghost iron ore lvling way).

[Venant]

You know that nowadays people use multiple AH scanning programs which sort the various stacks of items into categories, so that if you are looking at the default interface you would see pages and pages of your single stacks but in one such program it would just look like 'Ghost Iron Ore(500) ... 1g'

The problem is that it is exceptionally easy to control an AH if you have no opposition, but when you need to battle other AH barons who are well capitalized it turns into a very long war of attrition.

[IIamaKing]

There are just too many factors for this to work long term, unless you band together with other gatherers and price match one another, but of course that is against ToS.

[Wrekon]

alot of ppl do this and farm and control markets

[Westlo]

and more people lose their stock trying to do this while barons laugh to the bank.

[Deleted]

It works very well for high population servers, where there are many non-farming people that will just put their ghost iron ore below your deep-undercut stack. Some of less clever farmers might fall for that too.

But your ore and all the stuff posted below it might get bought out by ah campers & reposted fast too.

Personally i find it annoying because damn auctionator has to scan through 1000 pages of this shit when big stack in 1's is posted there.