9.2.7 has just landed, and with it we got some major changes to the Auction house. Commodities have gone region wide, there have been gold dupe bugs and TSM has been broken.
Material quantities go BRR
I’m in a bit of crunch time at work, so I haven’t had too much time to follow markets, but I gather that material quantities have been absolutely sky-rocketing. A good chunk of materials have gotten significantly cheaper based on pre-patch prices. The AH has been a bit broken, so it’s too early to tell how it will look when the dust settles.
Commodity sales through the roof
I’ve not really been selling commodities in Shadowlands, so I have not experienced the new market as a seller yet. I’ve seen Hikons generate some absolutely incredible sale numbers with alchemy, and it looks like the balance is in favor of high demand yielding very high sales for some items. Once again we will have to look back once the dust has settled in a bit more before we draw any clear conclusions on how markets have been impacted.
Broken TSM = no competition
Due to the patch all auctions were cancelled, leading to a completely empty AH after the patch came out. In addition Tradeskillmaster has issues posting items (I still can’t get it to post more than two or three legendaries before the scan stops). This combination is of course great for goldmakers. Prices started high again, and with no TSM it was a lot harder for players to crash in. I essentially did manual cancel scans with the base UI, and yesterday I generated more than 1 million in sales off of legendaries. Compared to 2 million over the last 14 day period, it’s safe to say the opportunity was great.
Problems are opportunities
Many players are mad as hell that TSM is having issues, I’m not. First of all it is expected with such a huge patch. In addition to this I quickly realized that TSM being down represents a huge opportunity. If it is harder for players to post all their auctions it means there will be less competition. Some people won’t be bothered doing it manually, or they will forget to cancel some of the slots or they will focus on fewer items. The upshot of all this is that I realized we had another short term opportunity on our hands. So I spent as much time as I could be bothered with recrafting and manually reposting legendaries. Of course this isn’t a content patch launch level event, but I still generated more sales in a day than I typically do in a week.
If it’s hard for you, it’s hard for everyone
If things suddenly become harder for you due to a change in the game, this will also apply to everyone else. Barriers, annoyances and time wastage are all factors that generally increase the profitability of a given market. Prospecting before mass prospecting was more profitable, as it was a lot more annoying. Expulsom scrapping was boring as sin, but Expulsom gear had fantastic profit margins. So take advantage of this when you notice it, if Blizzard makes something harder, it will generally be more profitable, so don’t get mad, get posting!