Advance class: Threat Assessment

If you are already the Glyph Market Leader, competition threat assessment is vital. For each serious competitor assess his/her threat level to your business. One way to assess the threat level of a competitor is to answer the following questions and at the end assign a threat score. For each one, in the brackets, I have noted where you can get the info from. Spy hats on ladies!

1. Camping - hard core camper, semi-camper or non-camper? (TUJ)

2. Undercutting - heavy undercut, medium or 1cp? (TUJ)

3. Cancelling - cancels and relist or does not cancel and leaves old ones up? (TUJ)
If he throws up 2 and 2 and 2 without cancelling (like gems) this a more serious goblin with good glyph supply.

4. Quantity per glyph - 1 to 2? or 4 to 5? or 10 of the same glyph? (TUJ)
1-2 is a careful profit margin watcher. 4 is a non-camping, reasonable price poster. 10-20 is the goblin telling you this base belongs to him.

5. Glyph recipes - how many recipes is he missing? all glyph recipes? vendor only? half learnable? (bnet)
A glypher with all recipes is a dangerous and tough competitor. A newly levelled scribe who made 200 glyphs whilst levelling is not. Learn to distinguish between the two.

6. Level - 1 to 19 (walker), 20-39 (slow riding), 40-59 (fast riding) etc (bnet)
A level 1 is cheap to make and use but movement is slow. Vice versa for an epic flyer, fast but expensive.

7. Main or alt - lvl 75+ and have inscription? or no professions? (TUJ)
A main will scan, buy, mill, craft, list all on same character. Bad bottleneck for him, good for you.

8. Professions - inscription plus what? (TUJ)
Herb as a second profession can make the bottleneck even tighter. Having non-related professions is also a good thing. If you get someone into a corner with no escape they will fight tooth and nail to the death. If they have an escape route, most will take that instead of fighting a tiring battle.

9. Glyph type pie - all 10 classes? only 3/4 classes? 5 classes? (TUJ)
If he posts all 10 classes on one char this is likely to be his only posting char. But be careful and check that he is not just posting Primes and Majors and then posting Minors on another char. 10 classes on 1 char means he is selective and most likely tries to choose profitable glyphs only (good for you). 3 or 4 classes means 3 posting chars. A tough goblin will post 5 classes on 2 chars (bad for you).

10. Buy and relist - does he buy you out and relist? or ignore (mySales)

11. Sell floor - what level does he stop readjusting his Threshold (TSM status scan)
A seller's floor is his true Threshold and takes patience to find out. Be careful, lowest the price on TUJ is not a glypher's real floor. He/she may allow a few to list at that price but if you tried to make him post them all at that price he wont. His floor is usually a few gold higher.

12. Fallback - 350g (exceptionally high), 200g (high), 100g (reasonable) 60g (cheap) (TUJ)
If he is a dreamer and still falls back to pre-cata prices this is good for you. A competitive goblin understands the good old days are gone and understands having a high fallback is like cheese, it attracts unwanted pests. 

13. Guild - alt guild or real guild? (bnet)
If alt guild see alts.

14. Items - only glyphs or other items? (TUJ)
Low level Uncommon inks means he buys and mills low level herbs. Gems/armor/enchants means not a pure glypher.

With these answers give competitor A a threat score out of 10, where 5 is medium threat, below 5 is low threat and 9 or 10 is very high threat. Remember this score is a gut feel score. Not really true thin-slicing but I think you get the idea.

Remember this only "knowing your enemy". You must also know yourself. For fun and gigglez tomorrow we are going to strip Rimu bare.

Thanks for reading, Critical out.