OutDPS!

There’s a common practice (often highlighted over at the greedy goblin) where people will make money off distracted (or rushed or just plain stupid) hunters by selling stacks of 100 ammo for only slightly less than the price of 1000. Depending on whether you use an auction addon or not, these stacks may even be displayed identically to you.

I am not blaming the guys who try this- in a free market, you can sell anything you want, and it’s the responsibility of the buyer to avoid being screwed. This might fall under the category of “false advertising” if your auction interface shows you the same graphic for 100 as it does 1000 (often something like “10…” for a stack size), but the reality is that they can’t overtly lie to us about the stack size. We need to have installed an addon that hides the true stack size from us. The default UI shows it.

That or we are running late for our raid prep and are just distracted.

Here’s the plan:

• When you buy ammo, don’t be a sucker. Double check in any way possible that the stack size is 1000 (or if you do want to buy 100 at a time for some reason, make sure you’re not getting fleeced). Turn off your auction addons if they’re configured so you can’t see this. Or even better, configure them so they sort by unit price instead of stack price.
• If you are an engineer (especially if you are able to make epic ammo), make sure that you list at least some of your stock for sale in 100 stacks, priced at a similar unit price you use for your 1000 stacks. This will push the fleecers’ auctions below the fairly priced ones. If someone accidentally buys a 100 stack, at least they won’t have been charged 10x the amount.
• Whether you’re an engineer or not, if you want to help and have enough cash to do this, buy full sized stacks and re-list them in stacks of 100. Heck, you might even make a profit doing this. Just don’t list them for 10x what they would cost if the buyer were fully aware of the situation.

Hunters, more than any other class, are a community. I can tell this by the fact that there are so many of your contributing in in so many ways. From answering questions on forums to writing guides and starting blogs, there’s something about this class that bonds people who play it together.

This particular auction strategy directly targets us. If you read this and say “Oh, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to me”, then it was worth my time to write it. If any of you take further steps to reduce the number of people who get tricked into buying 100 stacks for the price of 1000, then it was really worth it.

Myself, I’m doing this for blue and epic arrows, because that’s what I happened to have available. Once I get a chance to set up a supply chain (probably by bugging Darkbrew), I’ll try to make sure that there’s always 50 stacks of 100 bullets and arrows, both blue and epic, all priced at around a tenth of the price of a stack of 1000.