Realm AH Markets for pets

[Beesknees]

So I created a DK on an Oceanic realm and found the AH market there wildly varied from what I'm used to. I sold a Sea Pony for 4k gold to buy a Mechanical Chicken for 3500g.(Lists for 60k on my realm).

Now I'm realm hopping to all the realms I'm on to check the markets. I bought several extra Tiny Sporebats and have one up hoping it will sell and I can buy something else. This seems to be a good way to move money from one realm to another, to get money off a realm I no longer play on, etc.

I have characters on Malygos, Trollbane, Elune, Scarlet Crusade, Gnomeregan, Cairne, Nesingwary, and a few more I can't remember right now.

Has anyone else done this? I'd noticed before that some new pets, like when they introduced the Direhorn Runt or Lil' Bad Wolf that the market varied depending on the activity of the realm. My realm you can buy Calico cat for 25-30 gold (buy from vendor for 50g), on another I found people selling Moths, Crazy cat lady cats, and Booty bay birds for 10-15 gold. So that seems to be a place to unload some of the pets I can't sell on my home realm.

Right now since since the TCG pets seem to be heavily on the market, I'm watching for upgrades and trades.

[Mehetabel]

Yep, I've been doing this too. On a smaller scale though. I'm on a "medium" server but the pet variety on the AH is bad, very few rares and never any TCG so I made an alt on a "full" server that has overflowing AH and have been selling a few excess pets (sporebats too) to build up some gold there.

[Graven]

Mechanical Chicken is 60k on your realm? Huh? Sure you don't mean Rocket Chicken? 60k for the one you get from the 00X quest is a little bit kinda sorta ridiculous isn't it?

[Yalina]

I've been realm AH hopping for pets since the day pets became cageable. I fleshed out my collection and picked up a lot of pets others needed for cheap. It's a fantastic way to earn gold on servers where you have alts. Now I mainly use it to find pets I think are underpriced and resell them where I need gold (or think I can get a higher price).

[Kpb321]

I've been doing that and have noticed the same thing. I had my original character a human warlock that is on a much busier server than my current horde characters. I've done a lot of buying and selling and picked up quite a few things to fill out my collection from that server and gotten money to do it by selling off misc extra pets from raiding with leashes, BMAH or even just pandas and elementals from the dalies.

I've also added another server because I needed to move some money over to buy my thundering hatchling so I've got a little bit of gold over there and a couple things for sale there but it's secondary.

[Poofah]

Has anyone else done this? I'd noticed before that some new pets, like when they introduced the Direhorn Runt or Lil' Bad Wolf that the market varied depending on the activity of the realm.

At this point, I think it's basically required. As more and more people do this, it drains pets from low- and med-pop servers and concentrates them on high-pop servers. The result is a vibrant pet market on the high-pop servers and a completely dead market on the others. I've never seen a Viscous Horror at any price on my med-pop home server (for example); I've seen dozens on my high-pop foster server(s). So there's no good reason to sell pets on my home server, because the gold can't buy me anything I want. It's a vicious cycle that's just going to keep getting worse as people continue to realize how much better off they are by conducting their pet business off-server.

[Hootstwo]

I certainly fleshed out the pets I was missing (mainly a few TCG pets) by selling any excess pets I had on Illidian, but lately I've been doing pet arbitrage on a few servers. Surprisingly, on some fairly dead servers I've found some seriously underpriced pets. I grab them there and sell them on a server that's high priced for that pet. I do it all directions, simply increasing my gold supply on a few different servers.

Some notable pets that have wildly different prices according to the server you're on are both the Darkmoon Eye and Rabbit as well as the Crawling Claw. The price differences can be huge. Also never hurts to toss out a "Buying xxxx pet, PST" and asking them to name a price. You can get some mighty good deals like that (Crawling Claw for 4k a while ago was a good score for me!)

[Azrile]

Has anyone else done this? I'd noticed before that some new pets, like when they introduced the Direhorn Runt or Lil' Bad Wolf that the market varied depending on the activity of the realm.

At this point, I think it's basically required. As more and more people do this, it drains pets from low- and med-pop servers and concentrates them on high-pop servers. The result is a vibrant pet market on the high-pop servers and a completely dead market on the others. I've never seen a Viscous Horror at any price on my med-pop home server (for example); I've seen dozens on my high-pop foster server(s). So there's no good reason to sell pets on my home server, because the gold can't buy me anything I want. It's a vicious cycle that's just going to keep getting worse as people continue to realize how much better off they are by conducting their pet business off-server.

I kinda disagree with this. On my server at least ( low-mid) the ToT raid drops are extremely rare because there are so few guilds raiding. However, on high population servers, they are so common that they are down to almost no value. I think the reason ( at least on my server) that you aren´t seeing the Viscious Horror is simply that the drop rate is like 1%, and you probably only have 5 guilds killing that boss each week.

You just have to figure out the second part of the equation, and that is the stuff like the fithling.. which is much easier to farm on my own server ( I always have the pool to myself), and sell on Illidian. The other thing is it is much easier to win BMAH TCG pets on my own server.

So the process is easy. Fithling and BMAH-TCG on my server.. sell on Illidain.. buy ToT raid drops and sell them back on my server.

Finally, and I don´t mean to give away this secret. But there are two very big ´pet collector´ guilds. On the server where those guilds are located. the Pandas and Spirit pets are extremely cheap ( I bought a bunch this week for 250g). On my alliance server ( low pop) I am able to sell them for 1500g. Because of that, I now have two low population servers with a lot of gold where I can watch the BMAH.

I have been doing this for the past month, have one a bunch of Rocket chickens, tuskar kites etc and then was able to trade them for the Blizzard store pets. I have all 12 blizz store pets now, without paying any money, simply using the BMAH on my two servers to get TCG pets.

[Azrile]

I certainly fleshed out the pets I was missing (mainly a few TCG pets) by selling any excess pets I had on Illidian, but lately I've been doing pet arbitrage on a few servers. Surprisingly, on some fairly dead servers I've found some seriously underpriced pets. I grab them there and sell them on a server that's high priced for that pet. I do it all directions, simply increasing my gold supply on a few different servers.

Some notable pets that have wildly different prices according to the server you're on are both the Darkmoon Eye and Rabbit as well as the Crawling Claw. The price differences can be huge. Also never hurts to toss out a "Buying xxxx pet, PST" and asking them to name a price. You can get some mighty good deals like that (Crawling Claw for 4k a while ago was a good score for me!)

Another one to keep an eye on is the Gilnean Raven. I have been able to buy them for 10g on some AHs and sell them for 1000g on Illidian. I had a spare stone, and got 8k for that one.

[Eekmeister]

Yup. Didn't take too long to figure out that cageable pets would be good for getting off-server alts some gold, and didn't take much longer after that to figure out that you can find pet bargains while you're at it So mostly I was selling pets to buy other pets, but I was also selling to afford looms. Because lvling SUX. Although now that more folks are server hopping, it makes the market less lucrative. Ah well.

[Beesknees]

Mechanical Chicken is 60k on your realm? Huh? Sure you don't mean Rocket Chicken? 60k for the one you get from the 00X quest is a little bit kinda sorta ridiculous isn't it?

I think I got them confused, but neither of them is cheap. I need to get my toons out and see what they need to complete to get more of these cute little devils.

The Rocket Chicken is harder to get. That one has been listed for more. But I have one coming to me in the (snail)mail. *rubs hands together greedily

[Imeagle]

Just bought a Sentry this morning for 150g on a server and posted it on my "home" server for 5k, which seemed to be the median price.

[Poofah]

I kinda disagree with this.

It seems like you don't disagree with the main point I made though, which is that it's important to do business on high pop servers and not stick to your home server. But yes, you're definitely right that there's additional benefit to finding good deals on the lower pop servers and using those to make money on the high pop servers (ie market inefficiencies). In fact you're doing exactly what I described -- taking high-end pets (Kites etc from BMAH) from a low-pop server and transferring them to a high-pop server. It's similar to brain drain, which is a big factor that keeps poor nations poor and rich nations rich. I think we have a genuine pet drain problem, which puts people on low-pop servers at a much larger disadvantage than prior to account-bound BoE pets.

Just to use Viscous Horror as an example, yes you're right that fewer are generated on low-pop servers -- but not none. But as you can see from the undermine journal entry (scroll to the graph at bottom), Horrors do not exist on low pop servers at this time, except at sky-high prices (150k+). They are concentrated on high pop servers exclusively -- and you can see that many Horrors have hit the AH on lower pop servers in the past (the light shaded gray dots), but they're quickly gone. I'd bet a lot of them were funneled to higher-pop servers to transfer funds like you do for BMAH pets. The result is that it's nearly impossible to get a Horror on a low-pop server unless you massively overpay or get outrageously lucky (or both).

[Shikon01]

Anyone on Bonechewer Horde side and if so what do you think of the prices? There are always plenty of blues listed and of course on weekends they jack up prices, but during the week its more reasonable and bargains can be found.

[Azrile]

I kinda disagree with this.

It seems like you don't disagree with the main point I made though, which is that it's important to do business on high pop servers and not stick to your home server. But yes, you're definitely right that there's additional benefit to finding good deals on the lower pop servers and using those to make money on the high pop servers (ie market inefficiencies). In fact you're doing exactly what I described -- taking high-end pets (Kites etc from BMAH) from a low-pop server and transferring them to a high-pop server. It's similar to brain drain, which is a big factor that keeps poor nations poor and rich nations rich. I think we have a genuine pet drain problem, which puts people on low-pop servers at a much larger disadvantage than prior to account-bound BoE pets.

Just to use Viscous Horror as an example, yes you're right that fewer are generated on low-pop servers -- but not none. But as you can see from the undermine journal entry (scroll to the graph at bottom), Horrors do not exist on low pop servers at this time, except at sky-high prices (150k+). They are concentrated on high pop servers exclusively -- and you can see that many Horrors have hit the AH on lower pop servers in the past (the light shaded gray dots), but they're quickly gone. I'd bet a lot of them were funneled to higher-pop servers to transfer funds like you do for BMAH pets. The result is that it's nearly impossible to get a Horror on a low-pop server unless you massively overpay or get outrageously lucky (or both).

I do think on low-mid population servers, viscious horrors actually do not exist, at least not ones that are sold. I believe it is a 1% drop. There are 5 guilds that clear that boss each week on my server.. if they have been doing that for 20 weeks, that means that with perfectly average RNG.. exactly 1 dropped TOTAL on my server... and more than likely that raid has at least one member who wants it enough to use dkps or whatever to keep it for their collection.

The number of raid guilds on a server grows exponentially based on server population. If Illidian has 5x´s my servers population.. it probably have 50x´s more guilds clearing TOT each week.

The brain-drain you are describing needs to work both ways, if I weren´t able to buy stuff on Illidian and sell it on my server, than I wouldn´t have gold to keep winning BMAH auctions on my own server. I would simply end up with a crapload of gold on a server where I have one lvl 29 character. The reason I disagreed with you is because I am, in fact, planting a ton of pets on my server that are rarely seen ( tot drops, the carps etc). I am putting 1 rocket chicken on illidian, and puting 15-20 other pets on my own server.

[Poofah]

The brain-drain you are describing needs to work both ways, if I weren´t able to buy stuff on Illidian and sell it on my server, than I wouldn´t have gold to keep winning BMAH auctions on my own server.

The difference is that on your home server, you have high-level toons that can farm or craft or do dailies for gold -- if you're doing the tamers dailies for example, you're making hundreds of gold per day just from that. And you probably had gold from before MoP. Somebody on a high-pop server can just use that gold to buy high-end pets, whereas you have to find ways to transfer gold to a high-pop server to buy them.

The reason I disagreed with you is because I am, in fact, planting a ton of pets on my server that are rarely seen ( tot drops, the carps etc). I am putting 1 rocket chicken on illidian, and puting 15-20 other pets on my own server.

When I say pet drain, I don't mean pets in general, I mean the quality of pets. In your example, you're moving a higher-end pet to a high-pop server and bringing back 15-20 lower-end pets. And you're certainly not the only one doing this. The result is a general trend of high-end pets leaving low-pop servers and being sold on high-pop servers, which reduces the overall quality of pets for sale on low-pop servers.

[Maizing]

I think the only way to eliminate pet drain from low to mid-pop realms would be if the AH was shared by all realms. I am not sure if that would be a good idea though as there is the matter of server economy to consider. For example: I know that some low level crafting mats sell for a LOT more on my primary realm than they do on Illidan (where I have an alt just for the purpose of buying pets). If the AH ever were made universal, it would certainly create chaos in the economy of some realms (at least in the short term, I have no idea what it would do in the long term).

[Poofah]

I think the only way to eliminate pet drain from low to mid-pop realms would be if the AH was shared by all realms.

I agree, and also agree that it would open up other problems. Currently, we have one resource that's shared by all realms (pets), and other resources that aren't (everything else) -- so naturally, pets are used as a form of cross-realm currency, and they tend to flow toward larger economies where purchasing power is higher. This is great for people who have pets and want other stuff; but bad for people who have other stuff and want pets.

They are planning to implement a limited form of AH sharing -- it won't be all realms, it will be little subsets of realms like battlegroups are now. It should improve competition for many of the mid-tier pets (e.g. LFR drops) on merged low-pop AHs, but genuinely rare stuff is still going to flow toward the really large economies.

[Mehetabel]

It will be interesting to see how the Connected Realms thing affects this when it goes live. With several realms all having a connected AH we might find our "home" AH's becoming much more lively.

[Mystik_sok]

@Azrile and others if they wish.

I watched two servers, one is at least medium Pop as an opening day server (Elune) and the other is not empty at least, and I have never seen a Viscous Horror on either server eve though I check several times a day via armory.

Can you (or someone else) give me names of servers where "they are down to almost no value. " or at least available on the AH?