Cut Gems Will Stack
In World of Warcraft Patch 4.2, we finally will be able to stack cut gems in stack sizes of 20. Jewelcrafters everywhere will be dancing in the streets! The player base has been wanting this change implemented for as long as the Jewelcrafting profession has existed. So this will obviously be great for saving bag space, but what else does it mean? Will stackable cut gems lead to more sales? Less sales? No difference?
From The Crafters View, Stackable Gems Will...
- Decrease required bag space for crafting multiple gems for posting.
- Greatly lighten the space requirement for storage of multiple cut gems.
- Decrease the amount of crafting sessions.
- Allow crafting larger quantities ahead of time.
- Speed up the overall auction house process for gem sellers.
- Allow cut gems to be sold in stacks. I do NOT recommend listing stacks of cut gems.
- Allow bigger batches of cutting and tipping in bulk. Great when tipping for cuts that you don't personally have on your Jewelcrafting alt.
- Speed up reposting of gems from your stacks, instead of doing the mailbox - auction house run.
- Increase competition and undercutting as players have more pre-made cut gems to AH PvP with.
- Be accompanied by lower listing fees for posting your cut gems on the auction house.
- May end up trashing the market and turning it into an undercutting auction house camping market (like the glyph market) due to bigger bags, stackable cut gems, lower listing fees, etc.
- Make buying out low priced cut gems for later flipping more viable of a profit strategy.
- Make it harder to reset the market for specific gems.
From The Buyers View, Stackable Cut Gems Will...
- Allow the pre-raid purchase of multiple gems, without sacrificing bag space.
- Prevent hearths back to town for gear upgrades, when you can bring them along before the raid starts.
- Clear up some guild bank storage space.
- Allow cherry picking of gems at low prices to store for later use.
Will Stackable Cut Gems Affect Prices?
This question is a tough one to answer. Will the stackable gems effect prices? As Wes likes to say, "It's depends." Yeah. It depends. Every server can have a different market response to this Jewelcrafting change. Some servers may see a price drop. Others can see a spike. Others could have no change.
To really gauge the effect that this change has on your server, you can't judge until after the first couple of weeks of WoW Patch 4.2 have passed. As soon as Patch 4.2 releases onto the live World of Warcraft servers, demand will spike for all gems as raiders are getting new gear upgrades and looking for new gems. There is always an explosion of sales immediately following a patch that includes new content and new gear. So you must wait until that Patch wave of gem sales is over to truly see if there is an effect on the cut gem markets on the auction house.
As you may have derived from the listing above, I am inclined to believe that the overall price of cut gems level out lower than before the introduction of stackable cut gems. Think about it. With stackable gems, there will be more players crafting full stacks of cut gems for their auction house business to save time . If you normally post 3 of a gem and repost those when you get undercut, you no longer will be needing to cancel and repost. You have pre-cut gems already in your new JC bags that you can immediately undercut with.
As sales start to slow, there will be more crafters with excess gems to post against all of the other crafters with stacks of gems. If more players cut gems in large stacks, then you can't help but see a price drop as the supply increases. Some players will be crafting full stacks of poor selling gems, which will further drive the prices down. It is possible that players will buy extra gems to have on them prior to raids, but I doubt this extra demand will trumph the price dropping hammer of cut gems being able to stack in lots of 20. Hopefully we won't see a major undercutting war market wide like we currently have in all areas of the glyph market.
What do you guys and gals think will happen when gems are able to stack?
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Stacking is one part of the equation when looking at it, Remember that the uncommon gem vendor value changes and that could have an effect also. Either way ride the patch to riches and adjust after based on the market.
ReplyDelete@Aeg
ReplyDeleteThe vendor price of gems is irrelevant as only people clueless to making gold vendor their gems.
Does't matter if it sells for 5 gold or 50 silver, if you are vendoring gems, then you should look at better ways to shuffle.
This already happens on our server. JC's regularly flood each gem cut with 5,10 or 20 cuts at prices well below the market. It is a way of saving bag space by keeping the gems either in the AH or the mail.
ReplyDeleteA future topic you should cover is how the use of the AH and mail provide basically unlimited storage well in excess of bags, the bank or guild vaults. As an example, you can store 100 emails on a toon with 12 items/stacks each. Elementium ore stacks in 20. That allows you to store 24,000 in your mailbox. Just label the emails when you send them from your "farm" toon or the toon that buys them.
I think that the lower vendor prices will mean the price floor on uncommons will drop, having a much bigger effect than stacking. The unit costs of gems being 2-5 times high than glyphs will hopefully prevent gems from turning into that Camping nightmare. Time will tell!
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