World Of Warcraft, WoW Hand Armor

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

How Much Is The Swift Lovebird Worth?

What is the Swift Lovebird worth? How much do I sell it for? How much is my time worth? Really, how rare is it? Those are some of the hardest questions in pricing items in WoW. Selling a semi-rare BoE like the Swift Lovebird is really a huge guessing game. But if you have the right tools, it's not that tough of a choice...or is it?


If you price it too low, and it sells fast, then you miss out on profits (and god forbid, someone else makes more profit than you!). On the flipside, if you price too high, you have folks undercut you and they get the buyers that could have purchased yours. I will not tell you your price, but if you use the tools I give you below, you can get a good idea of how I decide, then adjust to fit your needs!






First, you need to gather all the information you can:

USING THE UNDERMINE JOURNAL 

*Edit- Wanna see something interesting? Click the link below and click the picture so you can see the prices- Compare- In six hours since this post went live, the overall price dropped nearly 10%. 

Check TuJ (The Undermine Journal). Go to your server, search for the item. On the top of the page, you should see something similar to this:


At the bottom of the chart, you will see an option to click for "Check for Worldwide Stats" (or just click on that link...lol). Do that if you haven't already. Here you will see how many are for sale across every server (in this image, 2414). A few bars down, you will see the "Mean" (43,758g) which tells us the average posted price for two weeks. Below that is the "Standard Deviation" (27,035g) which is the difference of the current price "average" now and the "mean" average of two weeks (this tells me that the price is declining since the mounts release, and in my eyes, hasn't hit a "low" or a pricepoint yet).

*note this is not what they are selling for, it is what they are priced at. BIG DIFFERENCE!

Using this as a gauge for an "estimated" value is just that. Estimated. But it is a tool that you want in your garage...not shoved away in storage. Now back to my ADD raddled post...

Since we have that, that shows me a few things. Like I mentioned, the price is dropping. It hasn't hit "bottom" yet. That is when I will strike. My guess is on my med-pop server, it will be 20K by early next week. I will invest for the future and buy up 5'ish at that price, and more if they lower in price.

USING THE "HOW RARE IS IT" MODEL 

When looking at investments in "rare" items, I roll with the "how rare is it" model.

  • Since this mount is only available two weeks of the year, that leaves...math here....50 weeks that you cannot get it. 
  • Also, not everyone will be keeping/selling their mount. They will be using it on their toon(s). 
  • Most folks are scared of investments. If they do keep them for resale, they will watch the prices (auctions) like a hawk, get worried about their gold being tied up, and sell (at times for a loss of their initial investment). Don't be that guy. I didn't get the gold I have today by losing it, being worried about flipping, or going off a hunch that "x" item will give me profit. Neither should you. You can quote me that you will see that happen, so watch your prices and adjust accordingly. 

WHAT MY TIME IS WORTH? 

Let's say that I was going to sell a Swift that I just farmed up. I used my strategy I posted on yesterday, Unlimited Spawn Farming: Lovely Charms. Figuring on 400 Lovely Charms per hour, needing 270 for the Swift Lovebird, that's just over 6 hours. Using the AH, I can figure that my time is worth around 10K per hour (an hour posting/reposting/crafting nets around 10K a day). Let's figure the low end at say 8K. Six hours times eight thousand gold is 48K. 

So on a minimum, I would not resell the item for less than say 50K. 

"You so crazy" you say. I heard it. It's okay. I am. But it's this type of thinking that I use. Those that may have spent 20 hours getting the 270 needed only post theirs at maybe 20K. Yeah. 1K per hour. But they are happier than a pig in shit getting that 20K gold. /shrug. Do I look down on them for that? No way. That is what their time is worth, and they are happy. So am I, because I just bought them out and will end up selling their mount for 100K this summer. We both win!

DO I KEEP IT OR SELL IT?

If you have read up to here, you know what I would do. Here's my advice: If you are going to use that gold for something worthwhile (another investment, upgrade gear, etc) then go for it. However.....

If you are selling it just to have gold in your bags, DON'T DO IT! It is not worth it, as you will be kicking yourself in the ass each time you look at the AH in the upcoming months seeing your mount you sold for 30k today going for 100K+. 
You will wish you listened to my advice....

There aren't too many mounts in game you can resell (see Poseidus) unless you factor in TCG. I know, I know, it's only a ground mount. But it's epic. It's purple (okay, pink). Folks that haven't logged in during this holiday season and log in a month from now will not hesitate to dump their gold on it, seeing it as a "new" mount, and it's nothing for folks to drop big bucks on mounts, especially now that gold is so easy to make.


I hope that gives you some insight on pricing your mount, if you are going to sell it or keep it, and a bit of an idea of how to figure out your time's worth when judging your farmed items.

Alto.

There are comments below that hit on a few points I did not cover, so make sure and read them! Sometimes, the comments are better and more informative that my posts! =)

25 comments:

Belrandir said... Reply To This Comment

Good post, just want to point out that that isn't at all what Standard Deviation is. If it was just a minor difference I wouldn't get all math-nerd, but it makes the conclusions you draw from it seem false, even though other data backs them up.

Thanks again for your awesome site and all the gold it's helped me make!

-Bel

Backthief said... Reply To This Comment

Something important.

It costs 1 silver to deposit for 48h (according to my auction addons).So you wont be losing any money during the 50 weeks.

On IMHO, deposits are a huge part in big investments and hard sales, so thats a big plus.

theatermusic87 said... Reply To This Comment

I see blizzard starting a trend with the holidays... boe. Pets and mounts... and while yes. They may only be available one or two weeks a mount, they are relatively easy to obtain in semi large quantities during that time... esp with this mount where you can outright farm for it. I therefore see that the longer term value of this mount is actually going to be less than in the near term. Its one of those things with a very limited audience... collectors of mounts, and the occasional rp player or vanity collector. these people are esp with it being easy to obtain right now going to go out and get it for themselves (also they like the challenge of doing things themselves). Let's not forget that mount collectors are also willing to do a year long acgievement for one mount, so assume they would be willing to wait a year to get this one as well esp if they can save 50k doing it (they'd get the vial of the sands instead for example)

My vote is to sell now... for 30k or so, and get people who want to flip it, or buy it now to give you there gold while supplies are still low... come the end of the event I expect prices to be around 5-10k and stagnant... you can raise prices over the summer all you want, but virtually all of people who want them will already have them, and we will all be left with huge inventories, and as prices start to come down before next years love is in the air festival, the price will probably be around 20k max, but your gold will have been tied up for almost a year, for a much smaller return on your investment than u think.

As an example... sinister squashling pets... available in huge quantities at hallows end, very few people realized they are boe, but there are still large numbers on my servers ah for under 200g... if you were banking on the long term with these pets you would be very sdly dissapointed...

While the market is always fun to play in, I. Would urge caution with the holiday item... don't expect people to be willing to pay nearly as much near or long term as they would be willing to pay for something more traditional

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

Bel,

From my experience, Mean shows me an average based on the data (short term/long term) over two weeks time.

Standard deviation shows the difference from the price on the item right now compared to a two week data or "mean".

So basically the lower the deviation price (in this case near 50%) tells me that the price has dropped significantly.

I might have to update my post, it seems I must have worded things wrong. Thanks for noticing! =)

@Backthief,

Right on the money bruddah. Deposits are huge when posting/reposting. I will update the post with your comment!

Alto.

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

@theatremusic,

Good points. You are spot on that blizz seems to lean toward the BoE market.

But the difference with this is...it's....a....mount. Not a pet.

It's hard to compare apples to oranges. Especially when we are talking about mounts. You mention the Vial, and they are still selling when posted. And that is crafted, at any time, anywhere. So you won't see the price fluctuate much.

You also have to think about the fact that not all people are logged in daily, or even weekly for that matter (I hit on this in the post) and didn't have a chance to get it, so they hit the AH instead. And I will be there with your 30k mount I bought and selling it to him for double or triple that amount.

Like I mentioned in the post, when you look back over the summer and notice you missed out on tens of thousands of profit, just remember I told you so. =)

Alto.

theatermusic87 said... Reply To This Comment

@theatermusic87

Prices on Twisting Nether horde are now down to 15-20k, which i can see continuing on downward to 4-5k... probably around the same price as argent tourney pets and the festival lanterns...

Also don't get me wrong, i love the long term sale (It's one of the main reasons i hate glyphs, hte constant cancel/repost game drives me crazy)and i have several extremely rare/no longer obtainable items that i'm sitting on for the right time, same thing with holiday items from christmas and such. I just don't see the price on this going that high and actually having people buy it, it's far too easy to obtain atm, short of a major nerf to the current farming circles or something like that. But then I could be entirely wrong, have prices stabilize at the end of the holiday, and then end up buying like mad to flip come summer... thats the fun of something new in the market... you jsut don't quite know what it's going to do :)

Also because it's a mount, means there are likely less people that want it...

Belrandir said... Reply To This Comment

The new wording is much improved!

-Bel

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

Bel,

Thanks. Most of the time when I am writing a post I have about a thousand distractions, and sometimes my thoughts do not get worded correctly on "paper".

I appreciate you pointing that out, I don't want to give the wrong impression.

Alto.

Joe said... Reply To This Comment

Alto, either you haven't updated your page yet, or you're not really getting what standard deviation is. It is not the difference between the current price and the mean. It shows how much variation there is of data points from the mean. A low standard deviation just says that the data points tend to be close to the mean and a higher standard deviation indicates that data points tend to be spread out more. I don't see how a low standard deviation can indicate prices are falling

Of course, I can be completely wrong as I don't know what undermine journal means by standard deviation, but I gotta think that when UJ publishes a "Standard Deviation", they mean just that, Standard Deviation"

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

Joe,

From my experience, it is what I said above. It is the difference between the current average and the "mean" or 2 week average.

In other words:

If the SD is low, then the current price is near what it has posted for in the last two weeks. By average...

If the SD is high, then the current price is waaay off the "normal" two week price.

In the instance above, the SD tells me that the few days prices (we dont have two weeks worth of info on this mount) have "DEVIATED" by nearly half since the "AVERAGE" or "MEAN" price.

No need to use this jargon or that jargon to explain. No need to take a college course in economics to say that. It is what it is.

Alto.

Hopefully that explains it. Anytime I talk about anything relating to economics, so many people bring out their guns.

I do my best to explain, in the easiest manner I can, because I try to describe the situation to people in the easiest way possible. Sometimes it doesn't come out right, sometimes I am wrong. Other times, it seems that peeps just want to make themselves feel smarter than me (you probably are btw) by using this term or that term. It's all good, explain away.

I prefer the more easily understood way than the "oh shit, I used the wrong terminology" way. When someone has to google one of my words, then I am not doing my job I intended as a blogger.

Phat Lewts said... Reply To This Comment

Standard Deviation is a measurement of statistics and probability to show, in this case, how much the price varies.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8c/Standard_deviation_diagram.svg/325px-Standard_deviation_diagram.svg.png

A standard deviation on the normal curve would be omega. This would state that 34.1% either way (±1omega) of the average in the center ie 68.2% of the samples fall within the range 43,758 ± 27,035 based on your example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Deviation

Joe said... Reply To This Comment

When a blogger doesn't google a word he doesn't understand, then is he doing his job as a blogger?

Alto, Standard Deviation is not the difference between the current price and the mean. It is what I said it was, a measure of the variation of the historical price data points from the mean.

By chance, there can be a very high SD and the current price can match the mean.

The SD is more of a tool to determine how much you should trust the current price point.

A high SD does not tell you that the current price is waaay off the the two week price. It just says that there has been a lot of variation.

For example, The vial of sands referred to by a previous commenter has a very low SD, because there has been very low variation of prices to the mean, resulting in a smaller or tighter confidence interval about the mean and thus a higher confidence with your mean

I love your blog and I get some good information from it, so i hate to see the blog giving out incorrect info.

Cold said... Reply To This Comment

If you paid 2700 Lovely Charms for your mount you better be able to sell it for a metric fuck ton, because I'll get 7 mounts and 4 pets for 2700 Charms!

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

Cold,

Sure you can, but you also have to figure in the time you quested versus the time you spend farming....

Folks are noting that ToT gives 750 per hour. With that factored in, you will need to do your 6 dailies in about 20 minutes just to be even. So if you can knock em out in less than that time, by all means, but not sure about the metric fuck ton.

I am guessing either way is pretty close in time, one is questing (boring) and one is farming (also boring).

I think I will just stick with the AH. =)

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

Standard Deviation doesn't represent the time variation (there's no time at all in the formula).

Example :
An item found 2 times on the AH, priced 2g and 20000g; mean : 10001g; std dev : ~14141
If they are priced 10000g and 10002g; mean : 10001g; std dev : ~1.4

Low std dev means you can find a lot of auctions priced around the mean. High std dev means there exists a non-negligeable number of items priced way higher than the mean and an equivalent number priced way lower than the mean.

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

theatermusic87
Isn't the Hallows End Sinister Squashling pet available by chance in the bags for specific roles when entering dungeons? Maybe you overlooked this as the reason why so many are 'still' available on your server?
Ram

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

OMG, let's end the standard deviation discussion now. STDev represents a range above and below the mean within which approximately 66% of the data points lie. IE: 66% of the mount prices will be between (Mean-STDEV) and (Mean+STDEV)

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

I'm having a hard time selling mine for 40k right now...

Very hard to believe they'd sell for 100k later on, especially when most of the population will have at least one by the end of the event.

Plus, most people are like you and I (well not too sure about you), and are very reluctant/outright refuse to buy something they could've crafted/farmed for themselves. If I missed the event, I'd personally just say "I'll get it next year"

I second the notion that these will sell for 10k or less later on. WoW players have a tendency to force profits to almost zero - ie the cost of a crafted item tends to approach the cost of the mats very closely. This is because most WoW players become elated when they make a 200% profit but don't realize it was at a rate of 5g/hour.

The best gold is in the low-supply market - for example, glyphs while crafted are just too varied and not many people seriously get into selling them => low supply.

This mount however, will be in high supply. Even if in 6 months the supply dies down enough, the prices will have been so consistently low that people will refuse to buy the mounts for much higher than the regular price.

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

Anonymous,

You will have a hard time selling it for 40K. By next week, they will be all over on most servers for under 10K, some near 5K (unless blizz buffs the droprates on charms).

The point is to hold on to them (which most people cant as I discussed above). High supply now, but in two weeks from now, less supply. Two months from now, very limited. Six months, only a handful per server on the AH. By fall of 2012, they will be as rare as TCG mounts on most servers. That is when the profits will come.

Sure you might have to post every day for a week, but they will still sell.

Think of this post when six months from now you wish you would have kept one and made 80K in profit. Just sayin'.

Alto.

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

If you click on the button at the top of the page labeled "show video help", it tells you in the words of the creator what he means by Standard Deviation. He means just what it means in Stats, it's a tool to tell how volatile the market is. Low deviation means the price doesn't fluctuate much, high means the market is very volatile and scary. No need to be condescending or outright rude though in posting an argument, Joe. Grow up.

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

Anonymous,

It's fine. Some people just have to show how smart they are, when all it takes is an easy explanation.

I don't run a math'ish or arithmetic'ish blog, I run a gold'ish blog. As I have said before, I try to explain things for the layman, not for those that have doctorate.

I could really care less all the math involved. You said it how I see it:

Small number (or percent of mean), little change in price.

Big number (or mid-high percent of mean), risky pricepoint.

Seems easy enough to me without being a math whiz. But hey, more power to ya'll.

Alto.

Joe said... Reply To This Comment

Wow, That's exactly what I said, that standard deviation is a measure of volatility, not the difference between the current price and the mean that the blogger posted in his blog and perpetuated in his comments. Though I'm glad Alto finally got it right in his last comment. Nothing I said was any more rude or condescending than what the blogger said in his comments to me. Alto, nothing I said was mathematical or needed a doctorate to understand. I am glad though that you've accepted that the standard deviation is not the difference between the current price point and the mean!

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

I post as anon since I'm lazy and don't feel like creating any of the accounts in the drop-down box, but I just wanted to say that I love the blog. Keep up the good work. I just started trying to accumulate gold in the last month and have worked my way up to 325k so far. It's been a bit slow going as I hate playing the auction house for glyphs, but your site has been invaluable. Thanks!

DK

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

Anony DK,

It's all good!

Thanks for the kind words. Glad to know I am helping at least one person out there! =)

Alto

Yaggle said... Reply To This Comment

The time to sell these is going to be after the Pandaria expansion has been out for a few months and their bank accounts have a lot of gold. Most people like to spend their money, not save, and that is the time to put one of these you bought for 20k up for sale for 50k or more.

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