Perpetual Burnout

Fungibility  is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. It refers only to the equivalence of each unit of a commodity with other units of the same commodity. Basically, Gevlon's idea that your herbs from farming are identical to herbs purchased from the AH and should be treated as if you had, in fact, purchased them from the AH in terms of appraising their value.  Opportunity cost  is the value of the next-best choice available to someone who has picked between several mutually exclusive choices. In WoW terms, you can only use your time in WoW for one activity at a time. If you run instances, the opportunity cost is the amount of gold you would have made running dailies, farming, or playing the AH. If you chose to farm instead, the opportunity cost would be the emblems you would have made running heroics. It's basically the concept that to do one thing, you must choose not to do something else. So where am I goin...

There are two methods of profiting from other players using the AH. Business profit and work profit. Business Profit involves taking advantage of mistakes other people make. It's essentially what drives the buy low/sell high mechanic--person A posts for below the market price, you buy that and repost above market price. Person B buys your overpriced repost. If the market price of item X is 10g, you bought at 5g, and sold at 15g: you made 10g business profit. Work Profit involves providing a service generally inaccessible or inconvenient to other players. They're willing to pay a premium because it saves them time. The person trades his gold for your time--the method works because as the producer, your time spent can be much more efficiently spent producing items in bulk compared to finding someone to craft a single item at a time. This is the aspect I focus on. Let's take Sapphire Spellthread as an example. It's a leg armor kit produced by tailoring. Its materials ...