Cornering the market

On my World of Warcraft server there is a guy making a fortune on the auction house by selling ores and herbs from Outland. Whenever somebody else is selling these cheap, he buys them up, and then puts them back on the auction house for his chosen high price, thus keeping the prices for resources up. I assume that when he isn't camping the AH, he is gathering herbs and ores himself. At some times all the herbs and ores of some types in the auction house are sold by this one guy.

That is insofar annoying that I need ores to skill up jewelcrafting, and herbs to skill up alchemy. But with me having a job I can only play at times when everybody else is playing, and at those times gathering stuff is hard, because so many people are doing it too. I wish there was a dynamic spawn system not only for mobs, but also for resource nodes. Even if I happen to be with a group in a dungeon, and there are adamantite ore nodes, there aren't more than 2 in the whole place, and I might not be the only miner in the group.

I'm not paying 60 gold for a stack of ore! But apparently other people are paying that much, otherway that guy cornering the market on resources wouldn't be able to do so. Now somebody is going to blame the chinese gold farmers for this, but I have a suspicion that this is simply a combination of cash saved up for the expansion, plus the fact that earning money is so much easier in Outland than it was before.

So the current plan is to put jewelcrafting on hold until I'm level 70, and then using the flying mount to gather the adamantium I need. Gathering is so much easier if you don't have to deal with mobs on the way. Alchemy I was able to get quite far by making tons of Greater Fire Protection potions, using materials from the old world. And I ended up skilling up herbalism in places like Azshara, which are totally deserted right now. But of course that only nets me the old type of herbs, which aren't worth much any more.