Monday 16 July 2012

Nev's Glyph Strategy | Lazy Girls Guide to Glyphing

Laid back glyphing © Nev 2008
I received a reader email the other day asking about 'Nev's glyph strategy' after they had listened to an old PowerWord:Gold podcast & I realised that I'd never actually written a post about it! The timing is also fortuitous as there has been a fair bit of glyph talk on Twitter too so here we go - how I do glyphing - laid back, get there eventually style - my Lazy Girls Guide to Glyphing!

Some scribes like to make a few of every glyph, they have bags & bags of stock, they 'wall' prices in an attempt to control the market & to be honest, I admire their dedication & organisation skills but I just don't work that way. If you want to read more about hardcore glyphing, have a look at Twitchie's latest post 'Two Character Glyph Operation', Faids 'Glyph Competition: A Primer' or Huntermastery's 'Return of the Inscriptionist'.

I have my TSM groups set up by ink & I cherry pick the highest priced glyphs to craft & list. I suppose this is a variation on the 'Buy Low, Sell Normal' theory although I do prefer 'buy low, sell as high as possible' version :) I am also averse to hard work in a game so my method works well for the more casual gold maker.
Each morning I empty my mail, do a cancel & relist at the Auction House then do an Inscription only scan - it's very quick & gives me the information shown below in the screenshots. As you can see, someone else is raising glyph prices on my server & doing all the hard work for me. The bulk of the glyphs I craft are Ink of the Sea or Ethereal Ink ones & depending on herb availability, I may only craft glyphs above 400g or 200g if there is a good supply.


I've only recently returned to the glyph market but without spending huge amounts of gold on herbs, I am happily making 4-8k gold per day with just 2 or 3 cancel/relist sessions - each of which takes only 5-10 minutes. Ink is currently costing around 10 gold per ink so I have changed my Threshold price to 50 gold. This means that I don't have to worry too much about what price TSM wants to post a glyph. Even a sale at 50 gold is making me some profit - not much, admittedly but the time saving effect is worth the loss of a little profit.


Now before you saw 'wow, look at those crazy prices' - yes, my server does seem to be a bit special when it comes to glyphs but I did a little experiment on another server using only a level 10 scribe & I still made a fair bit of gold. The trick is to control your herb costs & only buy inks or herbs when the craft cost is much less than the glyph prices. When leveling your inscription, don't make 5 of the same glyph just to get points! No, just make the glyphs that show up as profitable in TSM & watch the skill points accumulate painlessly!


The above screenshot is a sample of my listed auctions - you can see the wide range of prices TSM has listed them for. Now I've only been crafting glyphs that TSM says are above 250 gold but as the market prices move, TSM adjusts & undercuts other listings, hence the 104 gold glyph - but that is still way above my crafting cost so I have no problem with that.


As a very extreme example - look at this screenshot! Some random scribe has listed glyphs at 1000 gold each - TSM automatically undercut him by my few silver preset & I left my auction there, even though I had zero expectation of it selling! Well, I'm happy to say - it did sell!

4 comments:

  1. Nev, I envy your server. On mine, I have yet to find a single glyph above 40 gold, and many are much lower. Granted, I'm making sure my cost is always below 20 gold, so it's not as bad as it seems, but still, under normal circumstances, I'd just plain leave the market alone.

    Still, I'm hoping the upcoming "Glyphmas 2" will bring prices (and demand) back up, at least temporarily. In fact, I'm kind of banking on it, to the point where I'm currently milling like a madman to get ready.

    For now, I've got a bit of a hybrid strategy going on, and since I'm up very early for once, I think I may actually make a blog post about it today.

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  2. I never knew this but the alliance side of my realm is like this! Glyphs are normally over 200g each and i've been making good good with just trainer learnt glyphs :)

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  3. Dude, those prices are unreal. I've only ever seen one sale above 200g on my server, and the standard fallback is 199g, with most glyphs under 30g.

    Glyphing is good money, but it's so competitive that it's very hard work. And without a system? Forget it.

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  4. Bots have totally ruined the Glyph market on my server. I recently sent in a question to Faid from Clockwork Riot to discuss and really the only option was to continue reporting these bots, but after months of reporting and no action, I pretty much gave up on this market.

    That said, at least the Glyphs on my server for people to buy are very cheap as bots are battling bots and generally post for only a few gold over mats cost. A win for the buyers, but if you're trying to turn a profit... :/

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