Thread: Golden Lotus - The great 5-1 crash

So here is my thing.
After 5.1 i think everyone noticed this pretty large change of herb drops.

It might be my server but this is kind of getting ridicoulous.

http://www.wowuction.com/eu/silvermo...s/72238#tabs=1

The price of Golden Lotus dropped in a few weeks/days from 100g down to 30-35g while the quantity availible doubled.

This has pretty large consequenses for a minigoblin like me as i usually and primarilly trade with flasks.
It was allready a pretty bad market with alot of people competing and its more or less down to competing with procs or even worse than that (farmed farm mats are for free!). But a good day without too many Kobolds and a welltimed reset can on the other hand be extremely profitable that makes me stay in the market.

But well to my problem.
I did always have a pretty large stash of Golden Lotuses. As mentioned, the flask market is filled with people that sells stuff at an underprice or just at crafting cost. My solution to that has been to buy even more lotuses to lower my overall crafting cost and thereby my loss.
Also trying too keep the price of Golden Lotus up some days makes the flask sales more profitable.

But, the thing is the price keeps falling. And i simply cant stop buying them. Its like an addiction, if there is cheap lotuses availible i will probably buy them. But the amount availible has gotten so large so i cant simply catch up to it anymore wich makes my whole business more or less collapse (ok i got another basket or to, but still). But i still buy them, its like a drug (a boring one). A solution would probably be to only craft what you can sell in one night as i think most of my competitors do. (I like doing things BIG). But that would also mean not having stock when it suddenly is empty one day and you can make the big money (because people buy flasks at any price aslong its reasonable).

Right now i found a solution to not loose that much money by transmuting a few hundred metas, but as everything else they are also down alot probably ending up in a loss aswell.

This is my debacle, and it annoys me to hell. Cheap mats arent necessaryily bad until someone will lower the market price so it resembles the crafting cost, wich has happen. Its actually so bad that flasks that people happily payed a 100g a piece just a few weeks ago is down to 35g (and the days i make money they still go for 50-60g:s without any hustle).
That is kind of sucky when the procs (or smart market maneuvering) are the only thing that gives profit.

Now the consequense is that all golden lotus-related markets are about to crash. Everything from gems, metas and flasks.

Is this some kind of evil plot of Blizzard to kill goblineering? I can understand that they want mats you need for raiding should be cheap so everyone can afford it, but isnt this a little to far? Normal blue uncut gems at 5-6g !?!?

I know the first thing to do would be to buy it all out. But my pockets arent deep enough (i have tried and spent my last copper). The server is a "one-faction" and still one of the largest in Europe. The supply is almost unlimited.

After a reread this seems more lika a an anoyed ramble than an actual issue.
But!

Is this phenomenon spreading? I can see that the all EU alliance market price of Golden Lotus currently is 75g, while it on my server is 28g.
Is there any possibility that Blizzard will decrease the droprate of Golden Lotus? (i guess not).

I think this is something that will start to spread to most realms.
What will the long-term consequenses be?

I hope it will start to drive out some people from the market, atm the quantity and amount of undercutters is way to large to do effective resets.
I also hope that people start to realise that farming golden lotus isnt (and has for the majority of time has never been) the most profitable thing to do, as you probably can rake in the double on a stack of pumpkins or cabbages. Atleast on a server where there are alot of serious raiders.

I started my business ventures in Cata so i wonder, has this happened before?
Blizzard crashing a market totally in a patch (2k Golden Lotus on ah Dec 5 - 5k Golden Lotus availible today), with the risk of also taking the gem and meta market down aswell?

A positive thing though is that lower prices makes resets easier to make. You dont buy that 8 stacks of flasks listed lightly if theyre at 100g a piece, but its nothing at 30g. Hopefully more people will do that. But i assure you, its way more fun to open 200 ah mails where the flask was sold for 100g than 200 mails where they are sold for 35g.

TLDR - annoyed at patches that crash markets.

In October, GC said that "Yeah Golden Lotus (the herb) is too rare." so I think we were expecting more supply and thus lower price.

I think the change for non-crafting, e.g. my mine/herb druid, toons to switch from Songbell to buffed Enigma has also added some stock since on my realm Enigmas seem to be a bit better than veggies.

It was a contrast with the price spike in herbs & ore. In particular, herbalists are now getting half as many herbs yet more GL.

zerohour, I would add that the MoP change to allow 1-525 cooking in halfhill also changed the food market, at least those of us who sold some 275-300 items like lobsters.

You are on Silvermoon Alliance, you have lots of competition including 2 very prominent people on these forums.

your common markets like flasks, gems, enchants, leg armors, are highly competitive as is the ironpaw shuffle, since 5.1 golden lotus are a lot easier to acquire and as such bots will acquire more meaning more supply on the AH.

if you think plasks are bad think about the people selling GL at 70g when flasks were over 100g

Originally Posted by Argalin

Cheap Golden Lotus means one very great thing. Cheap gem transmutes. [Golden Lotus] + Uncommon gem = Rare Gem. I've been making a lot of [Vermilion Onyx] in this way with my transmute master for great profits. Of course it takes a JC with plenty of cuts to maximize this.

Yes that what i have been doing aswell, but gems is more or less down to the price of a golden lotus. I havent been arsed to move my jc there yet so using guildies to craft wich isnt optimal.

Originally Posted by Zerohour

Stash4cash, this happens all the time. I've been grinding gold since Vanilla. Half the fun in this game is Blizz making changes that crash markets or even boost them. You cannot rest on your laurels and think something is ever going to last forever, unless it's previous content which they rarely screw with with the exception of Cata giving Azeroth a facelift.

Some very fun and memorable changes -

Vanilla - Implementing Dire Maul, allowing for easy Large Brilliant Shard, Living Essence, and Felcloth farming between 2 people as well as opening an entirely new market (librams). Actually, that's about it, Vanilla was actually not messed with in terms of the economy as much.

TBC - Primal Nethers and Vortexes going unbound. Adding Void Shatter. Changing prospecting to guaranteeing at least 1 gem from each prospect of ore (used to give you dust only and gems were luck). Allowing the purchase of epic gems for badges and then allowing anyone to purchase cuts for rep, after they were T6 drops for a year. Adding new grinds that offered common resources to be farmed easier - Cobra Scales, Motes of Fire and Mana. Adding 1 epic per heroic dungeon, allowing for collection of epic crystals outside of raiding.

Wrath - Removal of cloth and titanium steel cooldowns. Implementing Titanium prospecting. Offering "catch-up" gear for the first time ever completely enhancing the game for alts and casual players. Buffing herb collection rates from 1 to guaranteed 2-4 for Northrend herbs and beyond. Removal of fishing skill requirements throughout the game and allowing fishing from pools requiring only Level 1 and no bait (cratered foods).

Cata - Completely homogenizing the herb and ore collection process by placing the same nodes throughout a zone, no more mix and match. Removing mob after mob from dropping anything useful.

MoP - removing the ability to skin about 100% of the easy-kill mobs in Dread Wastes and Townlong Steppes. AOE Looting anyone? Complete removal of old raid "raid party" requirements. Removal of various nodes. And now looks like not offering new "catch-up" gear.


The key to this is to always keep your ear to the ground and be open to change. Lots of people get upset when their primary market is broken or becomes saturated, but they don't look around and see that a new door opened.

Thanks for that. I needed that to get my motiavtion up again Im still making money, just not as fast as i want.
As you say, only something like AOE-looting has had an huge impact on stuff like cloth (and bags).

Originally Posted by hag

In October, GC said that "Yeah Golden Lotus (the herb) is too rare." so I think we were expecting more supply and thus lower price.

I think the change for non-crafting, e.g. my mine/herb druid, toons to switch from Songbell to buffed Enigma has also added some stock since on my realm Enigmas seem to be a bit better than veggies.

It was a contrast with the price spike in herbs & ore. In particular, herbalists are now getting half as many herbs yet more GL.

zerohour, I would add that the MoP change to allow 1-525 cooking in halfhill also changed the food market, at least those of us who sold some 275-300 items like lobsters.

And i would say GC was very wrong there. Looking at the curve Golden Lotus had a pretty steady decline in price before the changes.
I would also say that the changes to cooking isnt having that much of an impact.
Most people are still to lazy to level their cooking and choose to buy food from the ah. That is probably still one of my best markets since you need to spend quite alot of money to max it out. The change from 4-5 viable dishes up to maybe 10 to make also diversifies the sub-market somewhat so less competition there overall.