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Thursday 5 January 2012

The Auction House Camper - what is it and what is its purpose?

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continuing with the series on Advanced Strategies, we are now looking at the Auction House Camper.


The strategy itself is not advanced but the counter can be. It is however the most common strategy that is adopted in the market and typically adopted by competitors that have plenty of time on their hands! We have all met the Auction House Camper, and indeed their strategy is needs very little description.



The primary purpose of a strategy involving Auction House camping is to ensure that as many sales as possible of glyphs, if not all, go to one player. This is achieved by undercutting all competition within minutes of them posting glyphs on the Auction House. It is the ultimate “being there at the lowest price all the time” action.


Spotting this strategy is quite straight forward. Your glyphs are consistently undercut within minutes of being posted by one competitor and their alts. And despite constantly cancelling and reposting still your glyphs are undercut within minutes. Indeed, the camper may not even cancel their own glyphs and you will see their name several times in the order book as they focus on speed of undercutting.


The constant presence of this competitor ensures that profits from the glyph market all go to this one player whilst lowering the profits to other market participants to almost nil.


The Auction House camper may not be concerned with the sales prices as long as they are above cost price – though i have met some that do have a minimum posting price. Ideally the camper would like prices to be high but recognises that this strategy is likely to force prices lower and quickly, and keep them there. It is a strategy of high volume, low price.


The ultimate aim of this strategy is one of two aims.


Firstly it is to gather all the profits from the glyph market to one player. Whilst this player is willing to lower the profit stream from the glyph market they do so in the knowledge that they are increasing their market share to compensate.


Secondly it is to force other players out of the market by signalling to them that there is a competitor that is willing to sit at their keyboard at all times at the Auction House and so deny other market participants


In any event, it is likely that the camper will persist with this strategy until they are forced out of the market or forced to cease their actions. This is not an opportunistic strategy but one with longer term aims.

In tomorrows post i shall discuss how i counter this strategy.

5 comments:

  1. rock beats scissors
    scissors beats paper
    paper beats rock

    don't write anything tomorrow, already covered it for you

    garbage

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh dear you have nothing to post so you post that lets see whats said Today not rubbish people

    ReplyDelete
  3. this is definatetly the strategy i come across most often. I will be very interested to see what your counter strategy is. Good blog. Keep it up!

    ReplyDelete
  4. i dont think camping is an advanced strategy? though i will await your counter strategy to see what to make of it :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Camping isn't an advanced strategy, it's one of the simplest, most basic strategies of all. It requires almost no knowledge or skill, just plenty of time.

    The main counters (yes there are more than one)are

    1. posting at low (but still profitable) prices for 24 or 48 hours and let the camper camp all he wants for low profits.

    2. outcamp the camper

    ReplyDelete

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