Researching the Competition ( TUJ Part 2 )

   So now that you have decided which corner of the market you would like to jump in after spending some time into doing your research of the market scoping out those good deals it is time to take a shot at evaluating the second most important thing in the market and that is the competition, and for this as well we will be using the The Undermine Journal.

   Now in the previous post i explained everything you needed to know to get a feel of the market you want to get into and like i said before it's time to get down to checking out if the competition is low, ok of being farmed by a farmer/botter. (FOR THIS INSTANCE I WILL BE TAKING INFORMATION FROM THE SERVER EU-RUNETOTEM ALIANCE SIDE)

   In this next bit i will explain how to get detailed information about a certain seller of a certain item so if by chance your server or name comes up in the explanation don't be a hater due to me explaining how to scope you out :) ( p.s. i decided to keep your anonimity so no danger to you ) ( Scoping - Term used when you are actively following a certain player only to undercut him on any and all auctions leading to him having to repost all his stock and eventually piss him off enough that he vacates your corner of the market )

   For this next part i will continue on like if you had decided to get into the Jewelcrafting market, and we will go step by step in the whole matter so lets begin.

   First things first open up The Undermine Journal and from there go into the Enhancements and Jewelcrafting.

    Provided you did that you will end up on a rather unique page of the TUJ where it shows all the gems and their prices all put down in a single page for you to follow and see which is the most profitable.

   Now you can click on any of the prices and from there it will take you to a page directly showing the details about that item. Now down to actually scoping out the competition, the best way to do this is simply open up some cut gems pages and see who the most active poster is down in the Recent Sellers portion of the page as you can see on the image below.

 
      So now that we have some vague idea as to what we can expect from the market we can either go and say, it's ok five guys i can beat that no problem and jump in straight away or you can spend a few more minutes and actually get the posting times of those guys and see if they are just a one time posters or a regular jewelcrafter that's pretty much supplying the whole server with gems, and the way of doing this is, you guested click on their name. Now that you have done that you are given a bit of information about that character as to what markets he's into (what items he's posting) what times he posts them at (this is the good part) and how many he has posted.

   Now i've taken the posting tables from 3 of the guys i saw that were posting gems and from what you can see from all those white and blue squares is that their posting times are not very cramped which means if you lets say for an instance are a late night bird and stay up till late you can easily take out the 2nd and 3rd competitors for the Late Night Shuffle but the 1st competitor is still going hard at it so you might have to brush elbows with him. On the other side if you are a early bird and wake up early in the morning like 7-8am then you should expect some strong competition in the first hour due to people waking up and going to work and posting their gems before doing so like you can see with the 2nd and 3rd poster.

  ( Just so we are clear for this example i took 3 guys that were showing up on 3 different gems but doing a research on posters only by basing it on 3 items would be wrong because you want to find the big posters not the one time guys so do a more extensive range of research and check all the gems for people that appear on the Sellers List, and if you see a name that shows up on almost every gem then you have a big fish and need to keep an eye on him)

    So to know your competition all you have to do is simply check out the profession you want to do, then check out the items for prices and availability and finally scope out the competition with their posting time so you have their schedule so you know what is the best time to undercut them and take those sweet profits.

   That was about it on how to do the research and just so we are clear this is not ONLY for Jewelcrafting but general for every single profession and item in the game, and all of that provided by our best friend TUMJ (The Undermine Journal)

   So like always keep your eyes peeled for good opportunities out there.

   So