An alternative cross faction 'business' idea ...

I play horde and on my medium populated realm alliance is double the size of horde. While the top 20 guilds are divided evenly among both factions, alliance has way more casual guilds than horde. Bottom line: 90% of my gem cuts and crafts are shipped to alliance over booty bay. On top of that it seems like horde on my realm gives no shit about vanity items, whereas they sell like candy on alliance. Anyway, few weeks ago I got intrigued by a pet on the neutral AH that was up for days, without getting sold. It was listed for 400g: the mechanical chicken. My auctioneer has seen 2 of those since december. Did some research and figured out it's a rather easy to get pet. So i got this idea for a while that i wanted to create my own market, or even a bubble/hype. Here is what i did.

Over the course of 2 weeks i advertised on horde side in /1 in lower zones that i would pay 500g for each chicken they could deliver me. Whispered a few officers from 'leveling guilds' as well. A couple of friends who were leveling alts got informed. I tried to avoid drawing too much attention by using trade or advertising with my main. The feedback was overwhelming and I ended up with 27 mechanical chickens, a 13k investment. A few days later I created some alliance lvl 1 toons, did a few easy quests to get them lvl 7, 13 + a dk. Send them a chicken, equipped it and went to stormwind on hours i figured many 'younger' players would be online. Did many inspects and used armory as much as i could to 'spot' people who i thought would be interested and who would have enough gold. My first sale was like this: i listed a chicken for 4k on the alliance AH? Then i whispered a player who clearly had enough gold: many BOE items on her (all female toons) main, and her alts were in the same guild and had similar names and also a mix of heirlooms and lower level crafted BOE (few low level epics). I asked her some basic questions about the game, made some jokes, ... actually some pure role playing. When i got her attention (standing in front of her) she spotted my chicken and asked me where i got that. No kidding, 3 minutes later my 4k listed chicken was sold. Over the course of the next week i kept repeating that a few times. And the chicken hype more or less created itself. I played the AH a bit with listing several chickens on different toons, and started to bid myself on my own auctions.

Long story short: over the course of 6 days i sold 24 mechanical chickens anywhere between 2k and 7k with net earnings somewhere between 55 and 60k. I couldn't do anything but smile when i logged my AH alt in stormwind today (sunday afternoon) and i saw 6 mechanical chickens all over the place. Other people stepped in the niche and I'm sold out.

Since I have read a ton of good gold making tips on this forum, i figured i'd share this little story with the community. Be it for lols or as an idea, that's up to you.

On a final note: While the net earning is pretty decent, i could have probably made more gold for my time spent by farming dungeons (i really spent a lot lot of time to find the right people). But the fun i got from this experiment was really worth it :)

Sounds like more effort than I'd be prepared to invest, but that's just me. Was an interesting experiment though, particularly hyping up the desirability of the item. I'm surprised you made as much as you did, given the chicken can be obtained by either faction.

A pretty funny social experiment.

But well beyond my attention span, awesome job though.

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Originally Posted by OzPhoenix

I'm surprised you made as much as you did, given the chicken can be obtained by either faction.

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I honestly can't answer that. But why do eternal fire sell for 35g on the AH while the frozen orbs are listed between 16-20g? Why do I sell a pair of Boots of Kingly Upheaval every few days for 5k+ while one could buy the mats from the AH for about 2800g and tip a crafter 100g? Are they unaware, lazy or plain stupid? I really don't know. I copied more or less what blizzard did with the horse lately: create social value for an item.

Heh. Interesting. But very limited in practice. Grats on it working :)

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Originally Posted by zenga

I honestly can't answer that. But why do eternal fire sell for 35g on the AH while the frozen orbs are listed between 16-20g? Why do I sell a pair of Boots of Kingly Upheaval every few days for 5k+ while one could buy the mats from the AH for about 2800g and tip a crafter 100g? Are they unaware, lazy or plain stupid? I really don't know. I copied more or less what blizzard did with the horse lately: create social value for an item.

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me being one of those people, lazy, it is sooo much easier to just click buy and open mailbox and just jump around

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Originally Posted by zenga

I honestly can't answer that. But why do eternal fire sell for 35g on the AH while the frozen orbs are listed between 16-20g? Why do I sell a pair of Boots of Kingly Upheaval every few days for 5k+ while one could buy the mats from the AH for about 2800g and tip a crafter 100g? Are they unaware, lazy or plain stupid? I really don't know. I copied more or less what blizzard did with the horse lately: create social value for an item.

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True, I must admit AH prices often are little attention to commonsense.

On my realm Titansteel Bars for example have sold consistently for less than their constituent materials for months now.

And yes, Frozen Orbs, which can be converted into Eternal Fires always sell for substantially less.

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Originally Posted by OzPhoenix

True, I must admit AH prices often are little attention to commonsense.

On my realm Titansteel Bars for example have sold consistently for less than their constituent materials for months now.

And yes, Frozen Orbs, which can be converted into Eternal Fires always sell for substantially less.

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I do this... buy @ 10-12, sell for 20-30

Lol awesome. Great to read when experimental stuff like that actually works out. Amazing that people actually spend that much gold on a pet lol.

I always somewhat asumed people know how to use wowhead. But that seems far from the case. I always have a wowhead tab open in firefox on my second screen and search for anything i need to know. very helpful.

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Originally Posted by Littleburst

Lol awesome. Great to read when experimental stuff like that actually works out. Amazing that people actually spend that much gold on a pet lol.

I always somewhat asumed people know how to use wowhead. But that seems far from the case. I always have a wowhead tab open in firefox on my second screen and search for anything i need to know. very helpful.

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It is actually amazing how people copy behavior from other people. As a multiboxer you even have more 'influence' I noticed. Maybe because you have some 'coolness' status when people see 5 of you, i don't know. But a few simple harmless things i like to do now and then:

- find a word, and then use that for a few days in an ad in trade. My word was 'decent'. So I wrote in /2 now and then: (tank lf decent icc 25m pug, ... or ... ele shaman with decent dps lf decent icc 10 group, etc). After a couple of days you see how other people start to use 'decent' in their ads. Even raiding guilds were looking for 'decent raiders'. Not because that was 'me' and i'm so cool that used the word, just because they saw it in a certain context. (btw, i'm aware that the fact that i picked 'decent' as a word can be influenced by something else like a movie, a website i just saw, ...i.e. that its not my free choice either)
- I got me a travellers tundra mount today. It's been a while since i saw one in orgrimmar. More than half of my online time (if not more) i spend just standing in towns as i'm busy with work/whatever. So now i'm mounted on my travellers mount on main and 4 alts are around him on a bear. I can guarantee you that if i do this for a day or 2, more people will come to orgrimmar on their travellers tundra mount. Not saying more people will buy one, but the ones having it certainly will mount it more often. They might consider it a status symbol and since one is already doing it, they are fine to do it as well.
- I don't have many mounts, but if i decide to stand their on my mammoths i got from wg shards, you can be sure that more people will mount that one as well.
- equip the onyxian whelpling, ... more and more people will equip their companion as well. and because one will equip a rare on, another player has to top that

I like those silly little things where you try to play the mind of people without them realizing. It's basically how the whole GS hype works: people see others using it, and whenever they try to form a pug they use it as well, without thinking.

So true. On my server, some people sometimes decide to start a mammoth procession. They only need to be 3 or 4 people slowly riding around Dalaran and a few minutes later you'll see a huge queue of mammoths of all sorts, the first one almost touching the last one because so many people take part in the procession -_- Now I bet these silly but always funny spectacles must be started by people like Zenga that enjoy such little social experiments :P

More than half the people that play wow play because someone they know plays, not because of any particular love of the lore, gameplay or personal judgements of the game. Don't the wow ads even say something along the lines of "Millions play, why don't you?"

Do love the marketing though, glad you profited from it Zenga.

- Souca -