I bought one and sold it for 15k.

Maybe, until these pets reach the saturation point for the target demographic. And then they become cheaper and more obsolete, down to 3k... then 1k... then around 500 gold a few months from now.

At which point $10 for 500 gold isn't even close to the 3rd party rate. All those sites have to do is wait a little bit and it swings back in their favor heavily.

"Maybe, until these pets reach the saturation point for the target demographic. And then they become cheaper and more obsolete, down to 3k... then 1k... then around 500 gold a few months from now. "

Where do people get the idea these are going to reach 500 gold just because the biggest demand will wear off? As the demand goes away, so will the supply, naturally. In order for your theory to come to pass, people would have to see prices that low, yet still decide to buy the pet to sell it. The sheer terribleness of that deal is going to stop people from doing that.

The whelplings, for example, are still pulling in around 10k gold. I'd imagine these guardian cubs are going to continue to pull in the same amount into the distant future, because as demand dissipates, you're going to see people purchasing cubs to sell them just about as often as lucky farmers find whelps on corpses.

You're correct that there's going to be less of a market as it saturates, so this particular pet is going to cease to hurt the gold sellers -- but I think that's going to be due to the unreliability of quickly selling one or more at 10k...not because of the complete inability to sell one at that price.

I assume that when this pet's AH price drops to the point that people no longer consider $10 worth it for the gold they get, Blizzard will introduce a new BOU vanity item.

I don't buy any "extras" from Blizzard, but that's a personal decision. Were I likely to participate in this grand experiment, I could see paying $10 for something that'll get me 20k, maybe even 10k. 5k? That's a coin toss. But 500g? No way in hell.

It does makes sense for Blizzard to test this with something most folks only want 1 of. There'll be a pretty clear endpoint where they believe most (95%? 98%?) people who will want one have acquired one, and they can evaluate their data and apply it to forward decisions. If they like what they see, it'll make sense to apply the same model to some thing or things that you'll buy over and over again, like higher-octane-than-you're-used-to raid consumables.

Or, I dunno, perhaps... fightin' pets.

Yeah, and THEN I see that the next post down and at least a half dozen others are already saying the same thing. Try reading all the posts first, big guy...

"The whelplings, for example, are still pulling in around 10k gold. I'd imagine these guardian cubs are going to continue to pull in the same amount into the distant future, because as demand dissipates, you're going to see people purchasing cubs to sell them just about as often as lucky farmers find whelps on corpses."

People are willing to pay that for the whelplings because that is the only way to get them. If people had the option of buying them from the Blizzard store, that would drive the prices in game way down. There are plenty of people who would rather spend $10 for a pet than 10kg or weeks of farming.

I'm still expecting the cub prices to go way down. Sure, supply will eventually dry up with them, but unlike any other vanity item in game, people will always have the option of buying it in the store instead, preventing it from maintaining a high price in game over a long period of time.

I bought 3, and sold all 3 on different Realms for an average price just North of 10k.

I expect it to normalize at 10k, so for the rest of the week I am going to buy every panic sale I see, wait for market to stabilize, and then sell them at 10k for a massive profit.

Probably will go down in price because the potential supply is limitless... anyone who wants one can buy one for $10, but the demand is limited (number of buyers who want one but not @ $10.00

(cutaia) has it right. People will stop buying these to sell for gold when they become a worse deal than other things. Hopefully, though, Blizzard will have a new one in the pet store by then.

Yup. On one end you have people scrambling to buy the pets to make gold in the game, and on the other end you have the buyers that are fully aware of said strategy. So you have this sequence about to happen:

1.) A flood of new Cubs are hitting the AH. Let's be optimistic here and say they're selling at a steady 11k gold right now (they're at 4.5-5.5k on my server). Right now you can get 9k gold for $10 via 3rd party sites (this isn't me recommending anything, by the way). So right now, you're "making" 1,000 gold per Cub.

2.) The large slice of people that are keenly aware of the system are just waiting for Cubs to drop in price before they buy one, much like the Tankard O' Terror from the Brewfest holiday: Just wait until there's three pages of them in the AH and then buy the cheapest one. A week of undercutting will make these Cubs relatively cheap in comparison to the original, first-day Cubs.

3.) Now you have the majority of potential buyers buying them at the lowest price, which is far lower than the 3rd party rate of 9,000 gold (like I said, even right now there are Cubs under 5k on my server alone). It will take a couple weeks for all the cheap Cubs to be sold and for the sellers to stop undercutting the market to get the rates back up to the 1:1 ratio of 9k per Cub. But once they do, 80-85% of the demographic that wanted a Cub already has one. And 60-75% of the sellers that wanted to make gold off a Cub already sold theirs (more people want gold than want a Cub, after all).

4.) Result? More people are selling than people are buying. And if the Cubs ever get to 9k or more, it's smarter (in terms of money, not security or morals) to just go to a 3rd party site and purchase the gold directly again.

This Cub won't solve the 3rd party issue. It's sad, but the 3rd party market controls the WoW market, not the other way around. Because making gold in WoW is free (outside of the cost of time, which isn't quantitative), and it can be done infinitely. Releasing a new pet every couple months is not going to be the cure-all for 3rd party gold-selling. People only need one pet, and after that it's obsolete. Unlike gold, which stacks infinitely and can be used for virtually every in WoW (including buy cheap pets on the AH), pets don't stack. So they have a ceiling of value, unlike gold, which skyrockets in value every patch and expansion.

The best way for WoW to stop the bleeding and REALLY take a bite out of the 3rd party gold sellers is actually Diablo 3's AH model. It's brilliant, and renders the majority of 3rd party gold and item sellers useless. But that would flip WoW upside down at this point and kill the subscriber base. It's too late to do something like that now. Like one of the WoWInsider writers wrote in a column a month or two ago about gold inflation in the game, it's a tough, tough problem and I really don't see a concrete solution on the horizon. Which must drive Blizzard higher-ups mad.

But, sadly, the Cub isn't it.

Word.

That there's more than 3 of them listed is a bad thing - shows they're not really selling.