Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Buying and selling: Things to note when selling bracers

Now that ulduar is out, more and more people are desperately liquidating their purplish assets before they drop drastically in value. I've seen several more opportunities, and had a few more questions directed my way. One of the more common ones is the prices the bracers should go for.

For people looking to sell their emblems of valor, if you have 60 of those then the next logical choice would be to convert them to bracers and sell them. As it is currently, I discourage the conversion to either frozen orbs or scarlet rubies if you have more than 60 emblems, as while the bracers will now embark on a process of devaluation, the decrease in price is not so sharp as to be less then the next highest alternative cost. That is, converting 60 Emblems of Valor into 60 Emblems of Heroism and following that into 6 scarlet rubies.

At least for the next two weeks, I do not expect the EoV BoE bracers to fall below 2 x the price of 6 Scarlet rubies/frozen orb (whichever is higher). That is, a good ballpark in which you should sell your bracers at would be.

Let's just call the price of a cut/uncut scarlet ruby/frozen orb a liquidating unit, where we take the value of whichever one of those three end products at its highest value.
On Medivh, that would be about 85 gold for a cut gem.

Minimum (for quick sell) = 9 x liquidating unit
which would be 765 gold, the lowest price I would sell at on medivh
at least for the next few days

Maximum price = 12 x liquidating unit
which is 1020 gold
If I can sell a bracer at around +/- 100 gold of this sum then I would consider it to have been a good trade.

Some of you might wonder why I use 9 units instead of exactly 6. Well, you must consider that if you try to sell say six runed scarlet rubies, you risk the chance of flooding the market, causing you to relist the same product several times, or even worse, deflating the value of that particular gem market. Furthermore, converting all the emblems to gems and so on and so forth would in real like curtail a processing charge. A rough estimate of all these will give you the 50% markup on prices I provided above.

An idea to keep in mind is that market price is not the intrinsic value of the item, but the aggregate price in which a purchaser is willing to pay for it.

If you're reading this page because you intend to buy bracers to jumpstart your ulduar career, and you wish to see how an equitable price for the bracers can be calculated, then you can factor the above breakdown into your considerations. If I were to buy bracers in these few days however, I would seek to purchase them at at most 6 x liquidating units, as I believe that is the minimum floor level the bracers will drop to for the next 4-6 weeks. That is, for medivh, 510 gold.

The key component in all these trades however, is that you must act fast, be it in buying or selling. Everytime a new patch breaks, markets has never failed to fluctuate violently, and you'll see prices go up and down to incredible highs and lows. The best way is to ride the wave as fast as you can, and retreat early to safeguard your profits. I hope that answers the emails I receieved :D

Cheers! Ulduar in 12 hours!!!

4 comments:

Gauri said...

I was just thinking about what price I should look to purchase items from all those people who will be advertising in trade once the realms are up this AM. The brief period that I was online last night showed trade to be flooded with desperate people, trying to sell anything and everything.

My guild is small and our players are all very casual. Hence I have not been to Naxx (oh! the horror, I know) and I am one of the potential buyers of the BoE equip from there. Using frozen orbs as the "currency" is exactly the kind of idea I was trying to puzzle out on my own from the badge conversion puzzle.

On another note. today I plan on listing some of the silk headbands and Spidersilk boots I have made. Just a few of course - not enough to flood the market. I also had the amazing fortune to find a guy selling 70 frost lotus (loti??!) @ 6g a piece. My server cost for frost lotus was 12-13g/piece at that time. The hope is to sell those over time as the mats for the newly adjusted and brand new patterns which take something like 6-8 frost lotus each.

As I said in my last comment (under Anonymous as I hadn't put in an identity), thank you Sherry for your blog. And thank you for your reply! I may take you up on your offer for more information re: twink market. I just hope my auctioneer mod is working when the realms are up this AM. Mine was messed up beyond belief last night-however the nice people over at Norganna's site pointed out that I was using an old version. Here's hoping a new version works!

Gauri - alliance, Dentarg realm

Sherry said...

I hope that the rough guidelines I provided in that post has helped you. From what I see of Ulduar-10 gear however, it looks to a small but notable leg up, so unless you are purchasing a very well itemized item, do try to bargain the prices down.

I hope your silk headbands and spidersilk boots are selling well, apparently someone is making the same thing on one of the servers I play on (besides medivh) and I havn't made much progress in that regard.

I believe you made a good choice for frost lotus. My guild have started whacking their heads against Ulduar and its quite a chasm apart from Naxx'r'us and eoeBay.malygos loot chests in 3.0x
I'm sure more and more guilds will start flasking up. Hmm, even the new VoA 25 is hard to pug.

Thank you again for commenting!

Anonymous said...

I would like to exchange links with your site medivhgold.blogspot.com
Is this possible?

Anonymous said...

last few days our class held a similar talk on this subject and you show something we haven't covered yet, appreciate that.

- Laura