Trade Alliance VS Plat Sellers

[Ghoste]

This is an idea I've been thinking about a bit. It's not something I would have the time to run fully myself, so if this idea is implemented I would like to see someone else take the reigns.

Here's the premise upon which it is based:
Plat sellers rely on selling items, whatever items players are looking for, to make their money. It's not good enough for them to have some, or even just many good items, they have to have exactly what players are looking for. To do that, they rely to a lesser extent on farming quests and hoping for good drops, but they also need plat to buy up the really in demand items off of the auction house. To make that plat, they rely on items that can be reliably farmed en mass and sell those in large quantities on the AH. Examples of those items would be: dragon scales, crafting ingredients, adamantine ore, gems when crafting is implemented further (it's not just speculation anymore that gems will be involved), etc.

Things to look for:
When Module 6 was first released, immediately on the AH on our server massive amounts of adamantine ore were posted filling up 2 pages. Every post was for a stack of 30 ore, initial bid 50k plat, buyout 60k plat, all the same end time. It seems reasonably safe to assume that plat sellers anticipated the coming need for ore, spent considerable time farming and stockpiling it, and moved to capitalize and that sudden demand by flooding the markert with their price. Their primary advantage in flooding the market in this manner is that players looking to sell the same thing (their competitors) look at the current prices, say "oh, that's what I can sell it for", and post for the same price. The few players who undersell the plat sellers? The plat sellers buy them out and re-post the item at a higher price. It may not be a big profit, but it will prevent buyers from looking for lower prices.
Later in the day of release of Mod 6, similar posts were made trying to set prices for other crafting ingredients.

What would happen if...:
-A whole bunch of players anticipated the same changes in needs and also stockpiled similar items?
-Players competitively sold their items in a way to directly target the plat sellers on the AH?
-Players coordinated this in a way to repeatedly frustrate the plat sellers?

The proposed methodology:
-anticipate items that will become high demand items with new updates.
-stockpile those items in advance, or if not available beforehand, farm them immediately after the update.
-let the plat sellers make the first move.
-when a large number of posts, all for the same farmable item, all in the same stack size, all for the same price goes up on the AH, we make our move.
-bad idea: everyone post their stuff for a lower price. This will force the plat sellers to lower their prices by cancelling their posts and reposting for lower prices, but we can do better than that.
-suggested idea: a few people post a small amount for a lower price. Wait for those to be bought out. Post a few more. Keep doing this so the plat farmers have no idea how much we have to compete with them. Force them to waste their plat trying to control competitors who they do not realize are organized.
-the need for coordination, or someone to take the reigns on this (again not me as I feel I have enough at the moment with running my guild. But I would love to be a participant) is to make sure people know who will post what and when, to make sure we constantly have a small amount of items undercutting the plat sellers.
-keep the general player base aware that they should not be too eager to buy new stuff off the AH, that the trade alliance will slowly whittle the prices down as the plat sellers are forced to first buy us out, then lower their prices, buy us out some more, lower their prices more, etc.
-train each other to do the loot runs to compete with the plat sellers.

What the alliance will not do:
-sell plat or items for $
-use the alliance to unfairly control AH prices for their own profit
-get yourself banned by doing something stupid like cussing out plat sellers who send you spam (just quietly report them and get on with things, no need to give them a reason to get you banned too).

Anyone got any more ideas to add to this?

[Brianius]

i liks buts you moved away from me so i guess ghallanda gonna have to make thier own ut were cheap anyway