Entrepreneurs corner the market … just not the way you’d think

I had a quiet chuckle when I saw this.  Two enterprising individuals have bought an auction house and have started charging quite a bit more for the stock on hand.  These two didn’t bother buying the expensive stuff and marking them up, mind you.  Rather they did what made companies like Gillette profitable, they bought the things the auction house’s customers need every day – low cost consumables.  There has been quite a fallout over this with customers baying for virtual blood.  Why, you may ask?  Well because these two entrepreneurs have done all of this on the Elune server of World of Warcraft:

Two entrepreneurs on the Elune server of World of Warcraft have
recently purchased the entire auction house, then re-listed everything
at prices 2 or 3 times higher than normal. They didn’t buy epic items
that go for hundreds of gold, but all of the trade items and green
armor and weapons. This has caused an uproar on the WoW forums from
people whining that this isn’t fair, begging Blizzard to ban the
accounts of these people, etc.

…

Another genius tactic was to bid on everything before the weekly
maintenance, rather than to purchase things with buyout prices. Then
when all of the servers went down for maintenance, all of the auctions
ended and no one else could bid on the items because the servers were
down. Brilliant.

There has been quite a bit of discussion on the World of Warcraft forum.  I think this is brilliant and very sneaky.  Then again, if no-one else thought of it before, why not?

(via Elliott Back)