Milling Statistics

I owe someone an apology. In my previous post regarding Inscription, I gave some milling numbers for Icethorn, Adder's Tongue and Lichbloom that in end proved to be wrong. An anonymous commenter attempted to correct me but I stubbornly held on to my opinion. After careful experimentation and observation, I discovered that he was actually right and I was wrong. So thank you Mr. Anonymous for pointing this out.

What really happened though? In my defense, because I'm not really that bad at math, I simply misinterpreted Wowhead's numbers. Quoting from my own example:

100% chance for 2-4 Azure Pigment per mill (5 herbs), average is 3 Azure Pigment per 5 herbs or 12 per stack of 20 which translates into 6 Ink of the Sea.

50% chance for 1-3 Icy Pigment per mill (5 herbs), average is 2/2 Icy Pigment = 1 per 5 herbs or 4 per stack of 20 which translates into 2 Snowfall Ink.

My error here is that I took the 50% chance for 1-3 Icy Pigments to mean just that: a 50% chance for an average of 2 Icy Pigments for each milling (5 herbs). Thing is, these two numbers are independent of each other. 50% merely refers to the chance of getting 1 Icy Pigment, while 1-3 refers to the minimum and maximum Icy Pigments that you could get from each milling.

I went ahead and milled a large enough number of herbs to create a fairly accurate statistic. This time I jotted down every ink. My numbers are 2.98 Azure Pigment and 0.56 Icy Pigment per mill. This syncs nicely with Wowhead's numbers and I'm sure that if I were to increase the sample size, I would get much closer to 3 and 0.5 which are the actual yield figures for Azure Pigment and Icy Pigment respectively.

Up until now I was rather convinced that the numbers I had originally given were correct because I could have sworn that I got 1-3 Icy Pigments per 5 herbs.

All this doesn't change anything though. The anonymous commenter remarked that I'm actually losing money if I'm selling glyphs for only 99 silver each. Like I said in the comments section, not quite. I'm making a hefty profit in fact. In fact, profit isn't even my main motivation right now.

In reality I'm not selling a lot of glyphs for 99 silver, but just a few. I could care less about those. Other glyphs still sell for anywhere between 1 gold and 20 gold. Or even more. My real and guaranteed profit comes from the stuff that I craft from Snowfall Inks.

My main motivation, and the thing that drives me, is simply to mess with the competition. This bunch of post-mmo-champion-guide noobs (I hate using this word but I don't wanna use a harsher one) needs to go back to what they were doing before that. They've helped "ruin" the glyph market but now I'm helping them run it right into the ground. This weekend I'm gonna try some AH flooding with most of the existing glyphs to see how they like it. My only disappointment so far is that I haven't gotten any hate mail yet. When I do, I will know that someone's getting desperate.

Here's to a fun weekend!