I've been thinking a lot about trying to sell Stormchops recently.
Stormchops is a cooking recipe from The Burning Crusade expansion. The recipe is somewhat rare: it drops randomly from the crate of meat or barrel of fish you get from the Shattrath cooking dailies, and I've also heard it can drop from the spice bag from the Dalaran cooking dailies. The food it makes gives you a buff that makes you shoot out lightning every few seconds. The lightning does a few hundred damage to non-friendly mobs within a certain range of your character. The buff lasts for a half-hour, and it will hit critters.
When the Critter Kill Squad guild achievement first came out, I read on a forum I belong to about people using Stormchops to help them get this achievement. Essentially, what you can do is park yourself somewhere where there are a lot of critters with a fast respawn rate (Alliance's best bet is the Ironforge side of the Deeprun Tram), eat a Stormchop, and then go read a book or something for a half hour, occasionally tapping the space bar to keep yourself from logging out from inactivity. It's not super-efficient (you will have to eat a lot of Stormchops), but it basically automates a fairly tedious grind.
That's the kind of convenience people pay gold for, right? That's what I thought, but when I just threw some up on the AH a month or two ago, they sat there and didn't sell. It wasn't until I noticed how many people I had to explain the Stormchops strategy to when I personally was using it that I realized a lot of people [a] have never heard of Stormchops, and [b] have no idea that this is a valid way to kill critters for the achievement. Which meant I would have to bark it.
I amassed a few stacks of Stormchops over the course of the past week, and worked out what I needed to say in my barks. Today was the first day of the experiment.
Posting method: I posted in stacks of one, two, and five. None had a lower individual cost than the others. All were posted for 12 hours.
Barking method: I made sure to include a link to the Stormchops food as well as to the Critter Kill Squad guild achievement in all of my barks. I did not mention the pet reward from the guild achieve. In tomorrow's barks I may add that in. I barked no more frequently than once every half hour. Before I barked, I checked to make sure my auctions had not been undercut. (Not only were they not undercut at any point from 4pm to midnight, but there were also never any other people selling.)
Results so far: Nobody touched the five stacks. A few people bought the single stacks. One person bought out all my two stacks at once. (Not sure why they didn't buy the five stacks since the cost per item was the same.) Overall, I made about 200g on it, which may not be worth the work, but I'll also want to try out other times and other barking strategies. I've also considered raising my prices slightly since this food will never see mass sales, since it's fairly niche.
Stormchops is a cooking recipe from The Burning Crusade expansion. The recipe is somewhat rare: it drops randomly from the crate of meat or barrel of fish you get from the Shattrath cooking dailies, and I've also heard it can drop from the spice bag from the Dalaran cooking dailies. The food it makes gives you a buff that makes you shoot out lightning every few seconds. The lightning does a few hundred damage to non-friendly mobs within a certain range of your character. The buff lasts for a half-hour, and it will hit critters.
When the Critter Kill Squad guild achievement first came out, I read on a forum I belong to about people using Stormchops to help them get this achievement. Essentially, what you can do is park yourself somewhere where there are a lot of critters with a fast respawn rate (Alliance's best bet is the Ironforge side of the Deeprun Tram), eat a Stormchop, and then go read a book or something for a half hour, occasionally tapping the space bar to keep yourself from logging out from inactivity. It's not super-efficient (you will have to eat a lot of Stormchops), but it basically automates a fairly tedious grind.
That's the kind of convenience people pay gold for, right? That's what I thought, but when I just threw some up on the AH a month or two ago, they sat there and didn't sell. It wasn't until I noticed how many people I had to explain the Stormchops strategy to when I personally was using it that I realized a lot of people [a] have never heard of Stormchops, and [b] have no idea that this is a valid way to kill critters for the achievement. Which meant I would have to bark it.
I amassed a few stacks of Stormchops over the course of the past week, and worked out what I needed to say in my barks. Today was the first day of the experiment.
Posting method: I posted in stacks of one, two, and five. None had a lower individual cost than the others. All were posted for 12 hours.
Barking method: I made sure to include a link to the Stormchops food as well as to the Critter Kill Squad guild achievement in all of my barks. I did not mention the pet reward from the guild achieve. In tomorrow's barks I may add that in. I barked no more frequently than once every half hour. Before I barked, I checked to make sure my auctions had not been undercut. (Not only were they not undercut at any point from 4pm to midnight, but there were also never any other people selling.)
Results so far: Nobody touched the five stacks. A few people bought the single stacks. One person bought out all my two stacks at once. (Not sure why they didn't buy the five stacks since the cost per item was the same.) Overall, I made about 200g on it, which may not be worth the work, but I'll also want to try out other times and other barking strategies. I've also considered raising my prices slightly since this food will never see mass sales, since it's fairly niche.
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