I'm so very excited about this. I've been Justice point capped for AGES, and I was really hoping they would be introducing something I could do with the damned things. So let's take a look at how these new vendors will alter the game.
Let's look at the prices (Source MMO-Champion):
Hypnotic Dust x1 200 JP or 100 Honour
GCE x 1 800 JP or 400 Honour
Heavenly Shard x1 1200 JP or 600 Honour
Savage Leather x5 750 JP or 375 Honour
Embersilk Cloth x 20 2500 JP or 1250 Honour
Elementium Ore x 20 2000 JP or 1000 Honour
Satchel of Herbs 3000 JP or 1500 Honour (Reported to give 20 assorted Cata herbs)
Right now most people working for honour are doing it for gear. Anyone running endless heroics are doing it for gear, and will likely spend their JP on gear instead of these items. However, some people do Tol Barad to win access to extra dailies, Baradin Hold, rep and also currency to purchase reputation items. So people will eventually accumulate extra honour.
Then you have people like me, who run a daily heroic for the VP and have all this JP accumulated. Personally, I'll certainly be utilizing the new vendors to purchase mats to level up professions, craft items I need for "free", but I doubt I'll be purchasing any of the enchanting mats. For my time, I gain more profit by shuffling ore into enchanting mats. Savage leather, however, is fairly scarce on my server, and my leatherworker is teetering on the very last edges of being maxed out. So 750 JP for one heavy leather, is actually fairly profitable for me.
As far as markets are concerned, though, I don't see much of an impact. All Blizzard are doing here is giving you more options to get a hold of materials, but they aren't any more convenient. The AH is still the most convenient way to obtain any of these materials, however, it does provide a way for people who can't figure out how to earn gold, but know how to grind it out, to get things they might need... But it'll take a pretty long time. But the prices are too high to cause any long-term market effects. You might see a few things flood in the first week of this, as people dump their 4000 JP on various items, looking for a quick buck. But any goblin knows to simply not post in those markets that week, buy out any of the flood items, stock for later sales, or convert to something that sells and increase the profit ratio. You could even take a risk and attempt to manipulate the market by posting low and buying out the undercutting flood. But in the end I don't see market prices declining any faster than they already are, as the demand for materials decrease.
However, there's news of a popular farming bot being bashed with the ban hammer, which may effect the supply of ore and herbs. Supply is already low enough on my server, so maybe I won't see a difference, but it could mean big profit for legit farmers with cheating competition knocked out of the game.
On the topic of hackers:
An officer in my guild was hacked recently due to battle.net being down an a very inconvenient time while they were disassociating one authenticator and associating a new one (phone upgrade). Either way, the hacker figured that, while officers needed an authenticator to access the guild bank, their alts, which have their own rank, didn't have to have an authenticator. The hacker cleared out the guild bank, and their characters for good measure, by inviting his own characters to the guild. Interestingly enough, the invited toon was one of my main competitiors on the AH. So, the moron flagged himself by putting his main bank toon in our guild logs. I do believe this person was banned, but likely will just pull out another account.
In the end the GM's replaced everything from the guild bank and the hacked account, and we've adjusted our ranks and taken more precautions to prevent this from happening in the future. But I thought the story would be a good warning to other people, especially with your own alt guild banks for storage. Unfortunately, this doesn't prevent hackers from putting an authenticator on your account once hacked and accessing things that way, but it's worth utilizing this tool.
Other than that, I'm looking forward to the tooltip updates, dungeon nerfs, profession material nerfs (buffs?) and over all post-expansion release game tweaking.
Also, if you haven't had a chance to start raiding yet, get into a raiding guild! The new raid encounters are a blast, and I've been enjoying my guild's progression.
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