Thursday, January 20, 2011

Epic 5k Fortune Card: Why The Physical Copy Is Better Than The Script Macro

Epic Mysterious Fortune Cards

I have been heavily into selling mysterious fortune cards via barking in the trade chat channel.  These mysterious fortune cards continue to be a hot seller.  On Tuesday night, I was lucky enough to log in to barely any competition on the auction house.  A whopping 13 Mysterious Fortune Cards were all that were posted.  Of course I bought all of those 16g cards out and relisted them along with my own for 36g each with price breaks for 10 and 20 packs.  After my usual round of barking macros, they started to sell like crazy.  How crazy?  35k in 5 hours crazy.

Give Them A Reason To Buy Yours

One of my tried and true strategies is to give the buyers a reason to buy your Mysterious Fortune Cards over your competitor's fortune cards.  One strategy is to list in multiple size packs with a slight discount.  10 packs and 20 packs work best in my experience.  Another strategy that has been ingenious in driving buyers to my Mysterious Fortune Cards relies on one of my barking macros.
"Mysterious Fortune Cards in stock on the Auction House now!  Your chance at winning the 5k Jackpot.  If you win the (Insert Epic 5k Fortune Card Here) from one of MY CARDS, I will buy it back for 5.5 k gold - That's a 10% PRIME BONUS!" --Primerib
This barking macro has 2 purposes. 
  • Even though I have no way to tell that the winner came from a card of mine, people tend to skip right over the under cutters and buy my cards because of the extra incentive. 
  • This 5.5k epic fortune card is a great item to actual own yourself as a barking scribe.  Barking that you will it back gives you first dips at any card out there.
Let's look at why you should get one. 

Epic 5k Fortune Card - Why You Want A Physical Copy

Many players are skeptical about just how rare these cards actually are.  They think the odds are very low that anyone will win.  Having one of these cards to show to players improves their perception about the chances of themselves getting a winner.  This leads to more sales.  Linking in trade chat from a macro works to drive more sales, but physically showing someone that there has been a winner drives a lot more sales than linking alone.

The crazy thing is that I actually own 2 now.  Bought them both back on the same night.  I cannot prove it, but I have a hunch that there was a hotfix this last Tuesday that improved the odds.  I had 2 winners from purchasers boths on Tuesday night.  One reported buying 10 cards and the other had bought 60 cards.  I purchased both of these as promised. 

Another benefit is that I can thwart trade trolls by showing these cards to players in the trade window.  They usually run right from me and into the auction house and convert to more sales.

I also use them on alts of mine procaliming that I just won and thank my scribe in trade chat for selling me a winning fortune card.  Trolls shout out in disbelief, I show a few more players and they confirm it in trade as well.  More sales roll in.

Funny thing is a can actualy charge an "observation fee" of 5-10g just to have a peek at the rare card.  Made some gold already by just letting people see it or betting that I do in fact have one in my possession.

And lastly, having one makes linking a lot easier.  Using the macros and scripts has worked some nights and other nights the scripts seem to be broken.  Some times they owrk and other times they appear to work, but are actually unlinkable or only link the non-hyper linked versions of the card text only, which is worthless.  Having a physical copy in your possession completely eliminates that issue. 

I am a big proponant of using the AnnounceIt Add-on to make all your barking much easier.  The biggest drawback is that you cannot code the script into the macro for the 5k epic fortune card.  You must have a physical copy as it relies on a drag and drop interface to register the hyperlinks.  Now that I have one, I can use a 1 click macro and never have to link the scripted card version into a new bark.  It makes barking a one click masterpiece without any problems at all. 

So I highly recommend picking up at least one of these Epic 5k Mysterious Fortune Card Jackpot Winners to both help increase your sales and make your barking career much easier.

Get caught up on a ton of resources for Mysterious Fortune Cards.  This is also the post featured in the Auction House Junkies podcast, Episode #1.

Check out Cold's Mysterious Fortune Card Mastery Guide

9 comments:

  1. Another benefit of owning the physical copies of the 5k cards: You can circumvent the gold-limit when transferring characters to other realms.

    Keeping this in mind, it might be possible to sell these cards for more than 5k to people who are transferring...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Agreed. I touched on that in my very first post on Fortune cards and fortune cookies.

    Already had offers of 6k for it, but it is too good of a sales driving tool to let go just yet.

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  3. I'm buying those cards too, but more for x-realm trades with TCG Mounts or something like that. I usually sell a batch of 1000 cards within an hour or two, and there's a winner there quite often.

    Another tip: buy not only the 5000g card, buy the 1000g one too.
    And then sell it right back at the auction house for something like 2k.
    Yes, the AH fee will be ridiculous, but on my realm every time I'd do that someone buys it within a few hours, believing it's the 5k one

    ReplyDelete
  4. haha I never bark myself, just undercut people when i see them barking.

    my server has probably 3-4 people selling these at all times, and prices fluctuate around 15-20g.

    Strangely enough, I've been selling stacks of 100 cards fairly well, and i've just transitioned to keeping a couple of stacks on the ah and moving on to my other businesses.

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  5. What about the practical use of the 5k Fortune Cards for server transfers? If I want to move my characters and all my gold, I'd want as many of those as possible as an easy way transfer more than the Blizz limit.

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  6. I agree completely, but I already touched on that subject in my first post before Cataclysm was even released. :)

    An ever better use is for transfering gold cross-faction through the neutral auction house as it is instant gold. No need to wait on the transferred items to sell.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Tried the barking method last night. Was working great until I received 3-hour suspension:

    "Account Action: 3 hour suspension and password reset
    Reason for Action: In-Game Chat Policy Violation - Advertisement and Spamming

    This suspension happened because one or more characters on the account were identified exchanging, or contributing to the exchange of, in-game property (items or gold) for ""real-world"" currency. This exchange process negatively impacts the World of Warcraft game environment by detracting from the value of the in-game economy."

    Don't know if it was because maybe I was spamming it too much or someone didn't like me moving in on the market, I still don't have chat or mail privileges pending a GM review...

    ReplyDelete
  8. @RamataKahn

    I bark 2-5 hours a night almost every night, get reported for spamming all night long, and no problems at all. Must have been something in your macro that was what led to the suspension. As you said the reason was for trying to sell in game items for out of game money.

    What were you barking?

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  9. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

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