Git'cho Enchants

Tobold writes about not seeing enchants on the AH since the release of Inscription and the vellums that you can enchant and sell, thus freeing enchanters from their lives of spamming trade channel.

Who really knows, but I'm thinking it comes down to risk.

Lets look at an enchant like Mongoose. Even though it drops off of Moroes, its still a pretty rare enchant. My guild has killed Moroes a bazillion times, and we have only a single Mongoose-capable enchanter.

So its rare, which is nice if you're an enchanter.

But its also expensive. Just off the cuff, I'm thinking its between 500-600 gold for the mats, plus if you've got any integrity you'll be slapping a nice fat tip on there for your enchanter.

For an enchanter to choose to sink all that gold into mats, and then irreversibly lock those mats into a Mongoose enchant, without any real knowledge of a buyer on the other side. That's a pretty big risk. Sure, there will be a buyer come along sooner or later, as lots of people use it. But until you have a buyer, you've locked up a big chunk of change.

Here's two possible proposals....

1. We currently have the AH. Its a place where people who have something and want to sell it can post their wares, and customers can come and buy them. When you post something to the AH, you technically have no knowledge of the demand for your wares, other than seeing the current market conditions, and maybe your own observations of the recent history of market conditions.
   
   Blizzard could develop the converse of this. Give us a place where customers can post an item they are looking to buy. Would-be sellers can look this over and send price quotes to the posting customer. OR they could allow a customer to post his desired price, and a seller could click it and automatically have it convert to a CoD for that price.



2. An alternative...We already have CoD as an option. This means that a seller has to tie up his/her gold into an item, and send it to another player. The seller is taking the risk that the other player will just sit on that email. Sure, the customer does not get use of the item until they pay the gold, but until they do that, the seller has their money tied up in those mats they invested up front to craft the item.
   
   Give us the converse of CoD. Item on Delivery or Product on Delivery. Build an interface that allows a customer to send an agreed upon amount of gold to a seller. The seller now has 100% confidence that they'll get paid for their product. They'd still have to front the gold for crafting, since the customer's gold would be sitting in the email escrow, but the seller would have no worries about compensation for the money they put into crafting. The system would have to have some way of allowing the customer to specify the EXACT item they want in order for the seller to complete their portion of the deal that would release the money from the escrow, so maybe this part is the kicker that would prevent the system from working.
   
   In this scenario, the buyer is the one who locks up his money, running the risk that the buyer will sit on his thumbs. Sure, the seller does not get the gold released until the correct item is attached and sent to the customer, but I think that's a little more reasonable than the flip side.

Generally, I'm a big fan of the vellums and the ability for Enchanting to be done without face-to-face contact. We'll have to see how it plays out over time, because in addition to the risks and such discussed above, its a big cultural change for people to move away from traditional Enchanting.