Re: Gotta go level my banker alt... :-(

"Bother!", said Pooh, as he read Indiana Joe's latest post to
alt.games.warcraft.

>If you're an herbalist (and moderately patient), the materials are free.

This is a persistent and particularly annoying misperception.

Materials are not free. They're *never* free. Whether you gather them
yourself or buy them on the auction house, the market value of the
materials is *exactly* the same.

If you can sell the herbs for more than the finished potion, then you have
lost money on the recipe, even if you then sell the potions for multiple
gold.

If you're trying to skill up, then you probably don't mind selling at a
loss, because you have to make things to get skill points, and you might as
well get *something* out of the deal.

But I see *so* many people trying to claim that gathered materials are
free, and to anyone that has a basic understanding of economics
(opportunity cost) this is blatantly *wrong*.

Granted, swiftness potions are generally a profitable recipe. This is a
very rare exception to the rule that production tradeskills are
unprofitable until the very end. There's a number of reasons for this one
exception. But it's actually a fairly slim profit margin. Nothing near
the two gold a stack that you claim. Swiftthistle has a fairly high market
value, for such a low herbalism score to gather it. But the finished
potion has an even higher market value, because of all the Warsong Gulch
players that keep using them up, and have plenty of cash to burn on pots.

This rant mostly had nothing to with the rest of the thread. I'm just
tired of seeing the "herbs I pick myself are magically zero-value" myth.

Brian
--
ICQ#: 68214833 | AIM: LineNoise54
..
....and the aptly named 'Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film'. -- Monty Python
.

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