Pure Profit

Yesterday featured the launch of patch 4.0.1 in World of Warcraft. This patch was the precursor for the expansion due out December 7th and brought with it a lot of structural changes to the game. All classes saw massive changes to spells and talent trees. The raid system was revamped. Currency rewards from PvP and raiding changed. Most stats were reworked. Many other things changed as well, but most important here is that the glyph system changed.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was considering going head to head with Sky for the realm first jewelcrafting achievement in the coming expansion. He had massively more money than me but I thought I might have enough to win anyway because I did have a pretty substantial amount myself. (I've since decided the guild achievement is more important to me so I'm going to drop JC anyway and go after other things.) The tie-in here, though, is the 100k gold I had was generated almost exclusively from selling glyphs. When I was working on Insane in the Membrane I leveled inscription on my rogue alt so I could build my own Darkmoon Faire cards. In the process I  made an awfully lot of extra ink so I found a good mod to let me sell glyphs easily and got into the market. I was only making a few thousand a week but it was steady income and I was marking things up in the 300%-1000% range.

Now, in the old glyph system, glyphs were 1 shot items. If you wanted to change your glyphs you had to buy fresh ones every change. As such there was a pretty high demand for some glyphs used in popular raiding or pvping specs as people changed between the two. The new system has you learn a glyph once and know it forever. This means the long-term saleability of glyphs has tanked. The guy who switches a lot no longer needs a large number of the glyphs he's swapping; he just needs one of each. On the other hand, the immediate demand has shot through the roof. I know I want to have every glyph learned just in case a situation pops up where I might need it. It turns out a lot of other people want that as well since I've sold an absurd number of glyphs in the last day. I think I sold close to 1000 glyphs in the last 18 hours and have pulled in over 22k gold. My cashflow has gone up by more than 20% in less than a day from stuff I mostly just had left over from months ago, and shows no real sign of stopping.

Eventually I'm going to be left with a bunch of pretty much unsellable garbage but I intend to keep my stock full for as long as this initial craze keeps going. Who knows, maybe I'll try to buy a realm first in inscription for my alt to pay him back!