Perceived Wealth

I had a discussion today with a guild member who was eager to get to max level in his profession so that he could produce epics to sell on the auction house. While I have had less then spectacular results with it myself I have made a profit selling epics and considering that I always see them being sold on the auction house we would assume that others are as well.

As I discussed this with him, I wanted to go into depth on why I thought that the epic market was less then worthwhile I realized it would take a lot of time and typing in the whispers to explain it all. So I decided to Blog it. 

I believe the market in wow often revolves around perceived wealth. obviously perceived wealth is how a player perceives their wealth in the game, are they rich, poor, etc... More then that perceived wealth affect buying patterns as players decide what is affordable and what isn't. The root of this is what level is the average player perceive their wealth to be at.

I believe the average wow player bases their wealth on gold/time earning, in a subconscious way at least. Those items that can be purchased for 10-15 minutes work are low priced, 30 minutes equals a middle level price, an hour work makes an item upper priced, and at 2-3 hours work it is expensive. Translated through the average player who probably earns gold off dailies or questing and we can input cheap at sub 25g, medium at 25-50g, high priced at 50-100g, expensive running in the multiple hundreds of gold.

While I doubt players actually consciously think in these terms, I believe they base their opinions on what is expensive by how quickly gold seems to appear in their bags. It is interesting to note how this effects purchasing habits and how sellers can adjust the market to capitalize on these changes in trends. When 2.4 released with its influx of easily accesible dailies the gold liquidity within WOW jumped and the average players pocket wealth also saw an increase. I was able to make a nice mint on selling my common level gems for a 500% mark up (5 to 15g) because the average daily brought in 10g and took 3-5 mins. Which made them, despite being five times the normal price, cheap.

Anyway I am jumping slightly off topic here. As players scan the auction house they will subconsciously label items as cheap or expensive, affordable or not. They make these distinctions regardless of the profit margin in an item. I am able to sell glyphs for three times the price of production because they still come under the category of cheap (15g). No one thinks 'hmm I could buy the mats and ask my friend to make them' because after time and/or tip cheap is still cheap. However at a certain price items move from the affordable to the expensive column and a different mindset is applied to purchasing them.

Buyers will either not buy the items because it is too expensive, or look for ways to make it cheaper such as having a friend craft it from the raw materials. After this point is passed as a seller/producer I found it harder to sell regardless of profit margin. Even when I was only making 100g of a 1000g epic item (10% profit), that 100g is labeled under the expensive column for a buyer, so they will apply that second mindset and look for a way to save that gold.

As a seller/producer I personally look for items that have a large profit, and yet still fall below the expensive mindset. I personally want to sell items as close to that maximum point without going over it. This allows me to sell less items, with more gold per transaction. As a side benefit I spend less time at the auction house listing auctions.  Glyphs are a gold mine, but listing 100 to 200 auctions still takes a lot of time (despite batch listing). 

I hope this can give you some ideas on how I personally decide what markets to try produce for. Next time I will talk about the factors that affect how much you can sell of the different level price items and how that effects a sellers daily profits.

Miy