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Gold Capped: Auctionator addon helps you buy, sell and profit
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Kaliope's Cataclysm jewelcrafting coverage. Auctionator is a simple, lightweight addon that allows you to do some pretty basic stuff very efficiently. I've said before that there are some serious problems with the auction house interface, and even though the last design pass left it in a better situation than it was before, it's still pretty bad for a few reasons: You can't see the price of your competition when you are listing your auctions. The default suggested price is absolute nonsense and doesn't contain a buyout. You can't see the unit price for auctions when you buy. You can't sort by anything useful when you buy. You can't save searches to avoid retyping each time. None of these are game-breaking, but they're the reason every single person with over 100,000g uses addons. I am still an Auctioneer user, but while its dev team was sitting on a nonfunctional development build when patch 4.0.1 broke the addon, I had to go elsewhere to avoid being tormented by the almost functional default interface. I discovered that of all the addons I played with, Auctionator is the one that will remain part of my toolbox going forward, simply because it has a few killer features that I find easier to use for some tasks.
Insider Trader: Using Auction Profit Master and ZeroAuctions to sell
Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped. Basil can't figure out a way to make this a full-sized post, so he's just going to write it here: the gold cap is 1 million now. Email Basil with your questions. In my recent post about using addons to more efficiently craft, I promised that I'd explain how to use these same Quick Auctions-based addons to sell. The basic workings of both Auction Profit Master and ZeroAuctions are actually quite simple. You give it a list of items, and you give your list a pricing scheme. Each time you batch post, it goes through your inventory looking for items on your lists to post.
Gold Capped: Manage your crafting with a queuing addon
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! If you are a crafter and you sell your items on the AH, chances are you've realized exactly how much time crafting can take. Obviously, a portion of the total crafting time is going to be spent actually crafting; however, not all of it is. A large portion of your time might be spend poring over the AH searching for prices on your finished goods and taking notes, as well as buying materials from the AH and vendors. There are addon solutions to this, and we're going to talk about a way to address the biggest time sinks involved in crafting: queuing and price management.
Gold Capped: Patch 4.0.1 fallout for cooldowns, addons and glyphs
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Thursday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! Patch 4.0.1 has come and gone, and we can now use the benefit of hindsight to see how well our predictions did. I'm going to start off with the elephants in the room: alchemy transmutes and addons. I reported that the cooldown for epic gems had been removed in the PTR and that this was likely so that people wouldn't be put into the poorhouse by having to regem. In reality, the datamining that determined this was incorrect, and the cooldowns are now resetting at midnight instead of the old way. There's huge demand for epic and rare cut and raw gems now, and people are tending to go toward rares because the epics are just too expensive.
Breakfast Topic: AH undercutting = bargain shopping
I, Robin Torres, would like to state clearly and for the record that as a casual player, I am all for the price undercutting wars going on between the AH PvP types. What is AH PvP? It's the sub-game that is played in the auction house among players fighting to make the most money they can while trying to drive other players out of their markets. It can be vicious and lead to tons of trade chat drama, but oh, I love it so. It's not that I am all for people being mean to each other. Oh, no. I'm on record for being very much against that. But I think that players' trying to undercut each other on my local AH leads to a big win for me and my crafting alts: bargain prices. Whether it is just a casual player's using Auctioneer carelessly and selling stuff at accidentally low prices or a big war between mat vendors, if I time my purchases correctly, I win -- and honestly, so does everyone else trying to buy the affected items. This, of course, mirrors real life. When stores have price-cutting wars, observant consumers win. Duh.
Gold Capped: Quick Auctions Poster does the undercutting for you
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! Quick Auctions Poster is here, and it's going to change your life. It was written by one of the auctioneers who inhabit the Just My Two Copper forums, and here's the description of what it does, straight from the download page: This addon is a plugin for Quick Auctions that adds a checkbox to the auction house posting frame with which you can toggle continuous scanning and posting of Quick Auctions. It saves you the effort of hitting the post button whenever a scan has finished. Sadly, because this Quick Auctions button doesn't have a name and its function is private, this action can't be macroed, but this addon manages to obtain the correct button and simulates a click on it. In essence, you can fill your bags up with stock, and instead of using QA3 to post a single batch, it will keep refreshing your scan for you while you wander off to do something else. It will keep automatically undercutting everyone until you run out of stock.
Gold Capped: Ask an auctioneer -- time is money
This week's Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) is brought to you by the letter "s." Shortly followed by the letters "t," "e," "a" and "k." I'm in Texas on day job business, and nobody -- I'll tell you what, nobody -- does steak as well as Texas. The barbeque here is also pretty darn good. Mmm, meat. Oh yeah, and it's like a bajillion degrees out all the time. It's so hot that the wind doesn't cool you down; it makes you hotter! Want to make money on the auction house? For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! I swear on everything that's good and just in the world that I will eventually dig myself out from under these emails. If you ever stop sending them, that is. So if I don't get back to you in a few weeks or so, try emailing me on my podcast email and see if you have better luck there. Luca asks: Thanks to a misapplication of the snatch tool, I recently found myself the unhappy owner of a ridiculously large stock of bronze bars, purchased at around 100 percent of their regular value (which seems only ever to go down since). I'd like to try to recover my profits as best I can, having learned my lesson -- any ideas? Should I simply wait it out and leak them back into the economy slowly or try something more daring?
Gold Capped: The Undermine Journal
So you want to make gold in WoW? Basil "Euripides" Berntsen is here to help! Auction house PvP is the only true PvP: There are no relevant racials, all classes are equally balanced, and the only differentiators are knowledge and guts. Gold Capped can help with the first one, and if you can make it through a whole article's worth of my typos, bad puns and feral druid jokes every Wednesday, you're guaranteed to have the second one. There's a new tool in my kit. The Undermine Journal, whose alpha was just recently launched, is a site that lets you see data from your auction house live from the internet. My realm was recently added, and when I searched for Eternal Belt Buckles, it showed me a convenient Google Finance-style graph of the price and availability, as well as the mats needed for it, and a list of my competition! Words fail me, so hop past the break for a screengrab.
Fujitsu's motion sensing laptop interface makes no sense (video)
We're not sure what Fujitsu is thinking here, but it has to stop. Get a load of its motion control interface running on a 15.6-inch laptop. Yes, a 15-inch laptop. We might be able to understand this if it was plugged into a big flat panel television or projector, but trying to manipulate those itty bitty controls from 10-feet away is, well, silly. The Core i3-350M-powered Fujitsu LifeBook AH700/5A does feature HDMI-out but you still have to place the laptop in front of you (and the TV) with the display popped open so that the camera can see your movements. On a positive note, it looks like a great way to develop your wax-on / wax-off ninja tuna skills.
Gold Capped: The pinch
Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil "Euripides" Berntsen takes a short break from trying to build a raiding guild on Drenden (US-A) to write up a guide that will help you achieve the goal of acquiring 214,748 gold, 36 silver and 48 copper. Well, technically that's just a symbolic milestone. The goal is making gold, no matter how much you have or how much you want. Got feedback, questions or hate mail? Email Basil! I've spent the last few months describing different ways to make money. I've also touched on auction house "PvP" a bit but haven't talked about it in depth. The reality is that when you post something for sale, every sale you make is a sale your competitors don't make. The reason I got involved with the AH and in-game economy at the beginning was that I needed money and hated farming. The reason I stayed? My competition. You know that feeling you get when you are in a battleground and everything just lines up, and you win? That feeling is what I get when I empty my mailboxes every morning. Playing the AH would be much less rewarding if there were no competition.
Insider Trader: Selling arrows in singles for the price of a stack scam
Got trade skills? Want money? Insider Trader is the column to read. Whenever they let Basil write it, he'll do his best to fill your head full of ideas and your bags full of valuables and gold. I'm going to come right out and say it: Don't do this. I recently wrote about ways engineers can make money, mentioning (among other things) selling epic ammo to hunters. The problem with making the best raiding and PvP ammo in the game only available from players is that it forces hunters to either find an engineer with the recipe who is willing to do all the crafting by mail, or buy it off the auction house. What do I have against the auction house, you ask? Well, overall it's an excellent tool and far superior to the much nastier alternative of being forced to actually use trade chat for, you know, trade. It's not perfect, however. In fact, there's one massive glaring inadequacy that can be found.
A less-than-graceful keynote
We've seen the keynote in 60 seconds, and we've seen the "only the adjectives" 'approach before. Here's a slightly less complimentary way to show off the keynote, though, with all of the "ums," "aahs," and other interjections that popped up during the iPhone OS 4.0 keynote a while back. Far be it from us to make fun of Mr. Steven P. Jobs, of course, but something funny like this actually shows off how good he really is at doing it right. Seeing him up there on stage with his turtleneck and jeans, all enthusiastic about whatever "magical and revolutionary" device they've cooked up this time, is half the fun of a new Apple product announcement. If Steve were any less eloquent and smooth than he is, you might end up with something like this: a guy desperately trying to put a few words together about his new product. It's not nearly as effective, but it's much funnier. [via MacStories]
Milling cast time reduced to one second
There have been reports in the blogosphere that there was an undocumented reduction to the milling cast time in patch 3.3.3. It used to be two very long, agonizing seconds for a scribe to turn herbs into pigments, and is reportedly going twice as fast: a blazing speed of one mill per second. This is a huge deal to anyone who uses inscription to make money. Milling herbs into ink is one of those tasks that limits your production capabilities, and can't legally be done while afk. In fact, the milling grind time (four clicks, and until now, eight seconds per stack of herbs) is one of the reasons I rarely advocate new auctioneers getting into selling glyphs. In addition to generally overcrowded marketplaces and auction house campers, it's a business that requires almost super-human patience. This will probably make the glyph market even more crowded, as the amount of unhealthy AH camping you can do with a finite amount of playtime just went up by a fair bit. [Thanks to Wolfgang Staudt on flickr for the image] Patch 3.3.3 brings about small but noteworthy changes to the World of Warcraft. From a faster CoT, to putting those old Frozen Orbs to better use, to changes to the auction house -- there's several things all WoW players need to know. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3.3 will keep you up to date!
Gold Capped: Buying with Auctioneer's snatch list
Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast, and the Call to Auction podcast. Auctioneer has a myriad of uses. I've covered selling, and this week, I'll be covering buying. This addon has way more functionality than most people use, but because of the incredible quantity of complex options, many people never do any of the really cool things with it. The best way to buy lots of types of items with Auctioneer is with their "snatch" search. The way it works is it goes through your most recent snapshot of the auction house, and presents you with a box that allows you to buy or bid on items you've defined as a "good deal."
Blizzard announces upcoming premium AH through Armory feature
It's fairly common knowledge that Blizzard has kept updating the Armory with new features and new apps. Now, Bornakk comes forth with news of an app that will be to the armory what a giant Steve Allen pog was to pogs: behold, the ultimate feature! In the glorious future, we'll be able to work our auctions from the Armory itself or apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. Yes, one more step closer to actually living full time in Azeroth. I have my eyes on a nice cottage outside of Elwynn, myself. In all seriousness, I know a lot of people who would probably club me over the head and hand me over to a cabal of secretive necromancers for this feature. No news yet on exactly how it's going to work, and Bornakk does point out that with the amount of work it will be to develop, you're probably going to have to pay extra for it. This is a fairly complex service to develop, due in large part to its unprecedented integration with the game, so we don't have an exact release date yet. It's important to note here that certain elements of the service will be premium-based, which we'll go into more detail on once the service functionality is finalized. As with all of the services we offer, we plan to integrate the Auction House and Armory in a way that won't disrupt the gameplay experience, and we won't release it until it meets the quality standards that we've set for our other features and services.See the rest of the announcement after the break.
Guildwatch: We're over applications, too
The image above is a little tough to read, but you can probably get the gist: someone posts on the forums that secretly, he's been taking things from the guild bank and selling them off on the AH to make money for himself. He posts on his alt, supposedly, but whoops: he leaves his forum signature up. And the very next post is someone from the guild saying he's been caught red-handed, with a gkick imminent. Moral? Steal if you want, we guess, but never, ever tell. Or at least don't use your forum sig when posting on your alt. Much more drama, downed, and recruiting news in this week's Guildwatch, which starts right after the break. We are super low in the buffer for tips, so please be sure to let us know about your guild's action in Icecrown, any recruiting you're doing, or any drama you see on the forums by sending us a quick email at guildwatch@wow.com. Thanks! Enjoy this week's column.
The ups and downs of the Battered Hilt
Yesterday, Bornakk said clearly that the Battered Hilt drop that starts the Quel'delar questline was dropping at the right rate, which is much less than when the patch first hit. And then of course, in last night's fixes, they went ahead and increased the drop rate anyway. He also claimed there were no plans to make it BoP, but who knows what'll happen in the future? For now, however, you can still buy and sell the quest item for quite a bit of gold. We'll have to see where the price eventually ends up -- on the staff here, we've seen anything from 8,000g to over 23,000g, and Twitter tells us that people are paying an average of around 12k or so, going up to as high as 30k (or even shady real money offers in online classified ads). Our own Matt Low has actually seen the drop three different times, and lost every roll. It drops off of any of the mobs in the Heroic versions of the Frozen Halls 5-mans, and as Bornakk says, any class can use it to come up with a pretty solid weapon, so the competition will probably keep the price high, depending on where the drop rate ends up. The silver lining, if you really want one, have terrible luck, and don't ever expect to have all that money, is that the price will probably go down eventually. Bornakk says that as people move up into Icecrown and start picking up weapons that are even better than the sister blade, demand is likely to drop off a bit. But he also says that Blizzard does want this to be a special and relatively rare item, so you'll still have to probably either be lucky or ready to grind it out. Good luck -- I'm out there searching for one with you.
Cooking after Pilgrim's Bounty
So you took advantage of Blizzard's little Cooking leg up during Pilgrim's Bounty (don't be ashamed, I did, too), and you want to know: what's next? The holiday let you level up all the way to 350 Cooking with easily purchased vendor items, which was awesome, but cooking tops out at 450, so maybe you're wondering how to get up there. Let us help. You may not have made it all the way to 350 during the holiday -- if you need to nab a few other points, you'll have to head to Outland and level up there for a little bit. Talbuk Steak is a good one to do if you need that extra boost -- it's vendor purchased, easily farmable (or buyable on the AH), and the Stam boost isn't bad. Once you've hit 350, then you'll need to head to Northrend. You can train at the cooking trainers in the faction inns in Dalaran. You'll probably also want to stop off and pick up the Northern Cooking quest, as Northern Stew will help you get relatively easily to 375. After that, it's time for the booze.
Patch 3.3: Fishing pool guarantees and what it means for the market
Wryxian has written a book on fishing over on the forums -- he originally responded to the thread with a quick link that affirmed in patch 3.3, you will never ever catch trash from fishing pools, regardless of your fishing level. If you put the bobber in a pool, you'll get what you're supposed to, no matter what (presumably to allow even low level players to do the fishing quests). But players have problems with that. First, there's the old issue of things always getting easier as the game changes -- people are complaining that they had to level with missed catches and trash, and those who level fishing after 3.3 won't. For that, I don't have a better answer than Wryxian does: that's just the way it works. The game is ever-changing, and most changes make things easier. That shouldn't devalue what you did before. The other issue is that this may destroy the fishing economy -- if even low level characters always get the fish they want 100% of the time, that means more fish in the market, which means any money high-level fishermen would have made off of rare fish will probably go bye-bye. But Wryxian says that's OK -- people will still use fish for themselves, and he believes that the pain of losing that AH sale will be solved by the bonus of always getting the fish you want. We'll have to see -- it's true that between the updates to cooking lately (and the future fishy updates we're expecting), Blizzard is making sure the secondary professions are much less exclusive, which means there has to be the balance of also making them less lucrative. Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
Auction houses broken across Azeroth
Many users have been reporting tonight problems at the auction houses across Azeroth. Those people experiencing the issue are finding that nothing is listed in the AH, or all of their items are gone without a trace. This problem has been going on for about six hours, and only appears to be affecting US realms. Zorayn has posted that Blizzard is aware of the problem and their network technicians are working towards fixing it. So sit back, have a glass of wine, and enjoy your Saturday night. Try not to use the AH, because finding all your stuff gone wouldn't be cool (you'll get it back though, I'm sure, if it is gone, one way or another). We'll update this post when a resolution is announced. Update: Rolling restarts are being issued to correct the problem. For servers which have been restarted, the issue appears corrected. The opening announcement on the loading screen makes note to say that no items will have been lost during this AH outage.
