My Arena partner and I are both jewelcrafters, and last night in between bouts of slicing opponents into little pieces, we spoke about the overall level of fail of trying to sell epic gems on our server. To put it bluntly, you can’t. Well, not to make a decent profit anyway. Rare gems I can sell, even green quality gems, but not epics. I’d be lucky to sell one a week on the Auction House. The only way you can make any money off them is by cutting other players own raw gems, but that entails hanging around on street corners rentboy style.
The reason that players are not want to spend 190 gold or so on an epic gem has been given to the both of us on repeated occasions by the players themselves. When told the price of a gem and a cut together they reply with a depressingly similar phrase:
“No thanks, I’ll just go farm some quick honor and get my gem that way.”
Honor, particularly with the PvP changes in the last patch, flows in at a very quick rate. It is not hard to farm 15,000 honor in an hour if you win a few battlegrounds. The first random battleground you win in a day will give you around 5500 honor. How much does a raw epic gem cost you? 10,000 honor. If you look at how many badges of whatever an epic gem costs you it is clear that farming them for honor is much, much faster. So fast in fact that you would be a fool not to. I thought that there were more fools out there, but not apparently in this case.
I don’t know if this is an oversight by Blizzard. Perhaps it is relevant only to my weird server. It could be that on other servers people can’t be bothered to run a couple of battlegrounds for an epic gem. You see the effect that this has when you compare selling epics to meta gems. Meta gems sell fairly well, and they only go into one slot. Each player only needs one meta, but they still sell. It’s a sad day when you can’t rip your players off and they can sort themselves out. What is the world coming to?
May 13, 2010 at 12:43 pm
They still need to have the gem cut though, and surely that’s where your value is – after all as a JCer you have no real additional access to raw gems yourself, you have to obtain them in the same way as your customer.
A flood of cheap gems for honor and emblems should bring down the cost of the raw materials, and so on my server at least it’s still possible to buy a raw epic gem, cut it, and relist for profit. It’s just that instead of buying the gem for 150 and relisting it for 200, I am buying for 70 and relisting for 110.
May 13, 2010 at 12:58 pm
You can relist them as much as you want on my server, but they DON’T SELL. People want to give you their epic gems and have you cut it for them and then balk at having to pay anything more than 15 gold. And to do this “business” you have to hang around on street corners and actually talk to people. Horror!
Actually, one other type of gem does ell and that is Nightmare Tears, only because the customer has great difficulty in getting the mats themselves.
May 13, 2010 at 2:42 pm
No deposit either, so you can’t go wrong.
May 13, 2010 at 1:12 pm
I’m having big troubles selling Copper on Maghteridon alliance. Copper is much cheaper than epic cut gems, but average players still prefer to “farm for free”, while “goblins” are obviously using horde alts to supply their needs. This is more of a server issue, a symptom of a medieval natural economy and “abomination of desolation” we have on alliance side. On Haomarush EU where my main lives I can easily sell 5-6 epic gems a day, 150-200g each. But buying raw gems in big quantities for cut and resell is still a risky business because of a high deposit (~6g for 48h).
I don’t think that there was any oversight made by Blizzard. It’s all working as intended and doesn’t cause serious issues on medium and high populated servers where everybody is loaded with gold. The real problem is that current BG system does not encourage players to get better and win. You will reach honorcap very quickly, regardless of whether you win or not. It turns battlegrounds into dull and boring grind zones, which is not intended. Hopefully rated battlegrounds in the next expansion will fix it.
May 13, 2010 at 1:25 pm
it was just like this on Lothar US as of five days ago when i stopped playing. i’ve had similar reports from friends on other servers. the only market for cut epics on the AH now are progression raiders who just got a major gear upgrade and want to use it immediately. based on your and gevlon’s reports on your server, that’s not much of a market.
May 13, 2010 at 1:29 pm
wow lol 1 hour to farm honour for a gem that is valued at ~110g? erm you can do dailies and earn 300-500g/hr, buy the gem with gold and come out ahead.
and they can’t say “yes but i get honour which i can later use on gear” because the gear and the gem share the same currency.
May 13, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Although I am selling less than half as many cut epic gems as I did before the patch, I still easily sell over 200 a week with very little effort.
I am a deep undercutter and my goal is to sell each cut gem for 15 to 30 gold profit, after deducting all costs.
It may not sound like much but 4000 gold profit a week for a 2 hour time investment is good enough for me.
May 13, 2010 at 6:52 pm
You can still make gold: spam trade that you BUY epic raw gems for 40G. Then sell cut gems for 90.
May 21, 2010 at 3:11 pm
I agree- if your balance is lower, just focus on buying the raw mats. Also, you can contribute to demand by refusing to link JCing in trade.
May 13, 2010 at 10:44 pm
You don’t even need to run battlegrounds. If your faction tends to control Wintergrasp you can EASILY rack up stone keeper shards from running dungeons then turn THOSE in for honor.
I know I cash mine in every time I get over a 1000 just because it annoys me to have that many on me at a time.
May 14, 2010 at 10:57 am
The market on Mag is ‘different’ to alot of other markets. It fails even to support modest netherweave bag sales sold below the netherweave cloth cost.
I expect sales to be slow with moderately competitive pricing. No 1000g gold a day i’m afraid.
Because the market is ‘different’ we need to adopt different styles of making cash. Cross fraction transfers are one, doing dailies another, spamming in chat for sales (as the AH sales) are slow etc. Yes i’m even selling bugs (moths).
Also ask yourself do you need the cash? Having gold is nice but is it neccessary to have. People who reach the gold cap for unexplainable reasons – 200,000g in itself gives you nothing. Do you need it to get better equipment/items if so go for it. If not then whats the point?
I also speculate the alliance side might be suffering from a cash shortage. A large number of new players require gold to get flying, epic flying, learn skills, buy gems, enchants, boost professions etc this in the short term must restrict the amount of cash characters have.
PS. I thought you transfered your character here so you should not be having any trouble really? Did you plan properly for the move its a bit late now
. For any characters transfering to mag transfer with the right stuff.
Also it is impossible to rip someone off by trading with them if they are happy to pay you should be happy to deliver the service.
May 19, 2010 at 4:41 pm
these sources of gems exist on other servers, but when the market is as bare as it is on magtheridon, cash is too valuable. On medium and high pop servers, lots of people have plenty of gold, so would never spend an hour farming for a gem rather than buying it, or spend 15 minutes spamming trade for a jc when I could pay an extra 20-25g and get it now in the ah.
But if I rolled new over there and had hardly any gold because of the terrible economy, things might be different. I might be saving for epic flying or whatever.
It’s quite possible that the goblin influx has sucked too much money out of the economy, so you are experiencing dramatic defltaion.
Normally, there are so many people grinding mobs and doing dailies that it more than makes up for those who make all their money trading and then spend on epic flight, cold weather flight, etc. But put 40 goblins on a server with a population of a few hundred, and this might no longer be true. Eventually prices might go low enough that it will be more as worthwhile to do dailies as craft or play the auction house.
In theory this is what would happen if everybody was a goblin of equal skill and had no preferences about how to make their money other than maximizing g/hr — all markets would have roughly the same profit rate, and it would be about equivalent to whatever the best PvE grind profit is (grinding spot or set of repeatable dailies).
You’d see goblins doing dailies or grinding mobs for drops! Cats and Dogs living together!