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Researchers craft laughter measurement system to gauge aH
We're pretty certain this isn't the first time researchers have dove in and tried to accurately gauge laughter, but it just might be the most thorough. Gurus at Kansai University have reportedly crafted a machine that can "scientifically measure the quantity of a person's laughter, as well as distinguish between the real and the fake." Apparently, the idea here is to gather such information and use it to "conduct more detailed research into the physiological effects of laughter on the immune system," and it's collected by a series of electrode sensors that monitor "bioelectricity generated by certain muscles that flex when you chuckle." Best of all, they've actually created a unit of measure to quantify their findings (aH), which certainly removes any doubt that all of this is just some elaborate joke.[Via PinkTentacle, image courtesy of TravellersPoint]
A bargain diamond in the AH rough
I can't say I shop the AH enough to spot a great deal when I see one (I mostly just use the AH to offload all the BoE junk I collect, and Auctioneer watches prices for me easily enough), but I can appreciate the feeling frostaholic talks about here: just like opening up a loot window and seeing that drop you've always wanted, there's definitely a thrill in finding a long-awaited AH bargain.And I don't know that we've talked about Bottomscanner in any depth before, but that's exactly what the addon is designed for-- given the price information from Auctioneer, you can hit a button in Bottomscanner, and the addon will scour the Auction House for any items that are priced for less than they're worth. It's automatic speculation, really, and while it only works because not everyone is using Auctioneer (because if everything was priced right, no one would find it cheap), it can be used to find good deals.But still, there's nothing like finding a diamond in the AH rough yourself. Checking the AH for an item and then finding it one day for half the price you expected to pay-- that's an entire realm of excitement in this game by itself.
Things to know about Patch 2.2
As is common with any major patch day, there are a few issues. Here are a few from the forums and what I've experienced:Instance servers are crashing on many realms. From AV to Tempest Keep, players are having a hard time completing instances. Raiding is particularly hard hit.It's OK to delete the Auction Sale Pending notice from your mailbox. You will still get your cash when the new 1 hour delay is up. And, yes, everyone else seems to hate the new delay, too.Windows resolutions and UI Scaling have been tweaked. It's not your imagination and it also, according to Hortus, isn't a bug. Changing resolutions of the same aspect ratio will only give you a higher or lower image quality, but otherwise your view will not change. Windows are automatically resized to maintain aspect ratios and to reduce issues with stretching and distortion. If you aren't happy with the new size of your UI, turn on UI Scaling in the Video menu and adjust it accordingly.Hopefully the instance servers will have been fixed by the time the patch is live in Europe. Sometimes it's better not being first.I also recommend checking out the undocumented patch notes.
A one-hour delay on AH winnings in 2.2
Alright, so maybe this morning's "final 2.2 patch notes" weren't so final. They were based on the files distributed with the patch, and there are a couple things that got changed after those files were put together. One is the Daze mechanic not having been retuned as the patch notes claimed (that change in fact got repealed last time on a very special episode of Daze of Our Lives). There is also a change that isn't in the (shipped) patch notes: when someone wins an auction that you're selling, it takes an hour for the gold to get to you.Apparently you get an in-game mail as soon as the item sells saying the sale is "pending," and then an hour later, you get your cash. Nethaera simply says "By adding in the delay we can better track transactions to assure the legitimacy of them;" I'm betting it has something to do with the gold sellers' new tactics. When will you learn, Blizzard, that the gold sellers are like the borg? You can stop one of their channels, but they will simply adapt and find another. Resistance is futile.Nah, I'm just kidding. One more inconvenience in the way of the RMTers is one more step in the right direction. In this case, it may be a little inconvenient, and it certainly makes playing the AH somewhat harder, as reader Vynn points out (thanks for the screenshot, by the way), but maybe that's not such a bad thing either. How do you guys feel about this change?And as Blizzard loves to claim, the latest patch notes can always be found at http://worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/. Those notes do contain the AH change and don't erroneously list the daze change. The reason I don't always use that source is because it usually takes a few hours after patches for the notes to show up there.
Are Auction Houses coming to Shattrath?
In a word, no. Blizzard blue Nethaera posted in response to the umpteenth request for an Auction House in Shattrath. At least this time we got an explanation behind the decision.Blizzard feels an AH in Shattrath will eliminate the only reason for players to interact with others in older cities. They reason players can use the Shatt portals to get to the AH in the older cities and then activate their hearthstone to get back to the Outlands.This plan also spreads out the population. Anyone remember when their was only one AH for each faction? Ironforge was known as Lagforge. Think what would happen to your framerate should they put an Auction House in the Outlands capital. Yeah, not pretty.Of course "not currently planned" doesn't mean "never." When the WotLK expansion launches and Dalaran becomes the player hub, they may reconsider. Until then, don't be getting friendly with any Innkeeper other than the ones in Shattrath, because your hearthstone setting isn't going to be changing for a long time. Unless you're a mage.
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Insider Trader: Working the Auction House
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Ready to become a market force? This week's Insider Trader positions you to fatten your pockets and line your coffers with every trip to the Auction House. No doubt about it, there are loads of AH guides and "rules" with advice on how to buy, how to sell and even how to play the market to resell items for profit. We'll show you where to find the information, mods and ideas you need to start using the Auction House with confidence.The best guide to the actual mechanics of using the Auction House comes from Blizzard itself. A careful review will give you a firm grasp of the basic parameters for profitable buying or selling. Beyond the basics, what most players want is solid advice on what's worth selling on the AH, how much to charge and how to get the best buys. And that's where we start looking at how to gain the edge over other players ...
Motes of shadow, and their drop rate.
More mote issues going down on the forums. Hildebrand says the recent changes to Mote of Shadow (in which Blizzard removed them from all demons everywhere to just void-based creatures) have caused the droprate to go too low. Removing them from demons wasn't a bad move, because considering the expansion is based on fighting the Burning Crusade, they're everywhere. But void creatures are pretty rare, and while you can pick up tons of motes just killing the Hellfire Peninsula void crowd, you just don't run across them in normal grinding anymore.Drysc says that even though the drop rate was lowered, something strange has happened-- the Mote of Shadow prices have generally stayed the same. Either someone had a stockpile, or the demand just isn't there. Of course, prices in the AH on every server are different (one server's trash is another server's treasure, so to speak), but Blizzard doesn't see a problem with Mote of Shadow right now-- if anything, they want them rarer.I think the center of this argument really lies in how crafters are supposed to come across these items-- is farming supposed to be part of the game? I'm a big fan of the "you should get every craft item you need just by sweeping the landscape while you level," but obviously many more players go above and beyond that, and actually spend hours just farming craft items. Should Blizzard tune the drop rates for the farmers, or for the grinders?
Sold to the highest bidder, or is it?
The Auction House system in WoW is one of the more popular mechanics in the game. Having a way to trade goods is one of the ways that Blizzard puts the Massively Multiplayer in MMO. But I know that when I use the AH, 90% of the time I buy something using the buyout price. I don't have the patience to participate in a bidding war. And evidently this is a trend within the game. Tobold explains that the system is actually designed so that players will be more than likely to choose the buyout rather than play the bidding game. Part of this comes from the fact that to not have an item sell is to lose the down payment we place on it when a bid is first posted. With the Auction House as it is currently designed the bidder gets no sense of the bid prices, of the history of bids, of really any of the information that someone might see on an auction site like eBay. It's actually too transparent for the purpose as an auction system. There have been suggestions as to how this might be improved. Perhaps, like Tobold says, tweaking the interface so that the auctions have more information provided might work. Reader Joe Szilagyi wrote in with a different suggestion. He mentioned the possibility of making the AH like the PvP system, system-wide rather than server-specific. He explains that this would be a way to bolster the economies of lower population servers while at the same time allowing loot to be available to both the Horde and the Alliance. The daunting task of such a reconfiguration makes this an unlikely solution, but it poses an interesting hypothesis. Either way you look at it, the Auction House system is a good game mechanic with some room for improvement. What would you suggest as a way to fine tune the AH?
Weekly AH data on Curse
This is interesting -- I had no idea they were doing it, anyway. Apparently Curse Gaming has been running a weekly story where they post the median global sale prices (from WoWEcon) on all sorts of high-selling commodities. It's a nice read, and helps me get a feel for how my server is compared to the global average, as well as giving me a touchstone for how to price things.It's broken down into categories, like flasks, food, recipes, trade goods, etc. There aren't a lot of surprises on the list (well, I spend a fair amount of time at the AH, so that might just be me). Mage books top the spellbook list, as always -- why is that? Perhaps it's because mage books teach new ranks of core spells like Conjure Water, whereas other classes' books just tend to teach group versions of buffs; you can get by longer without those. There's an interesting discrepancy between Fel Armaments, at around 20g, and Arcane Tomes, at about 17g. I guess Aldor is more popular than Scryer. Fel Iron is worth considerably more on my server than usual, though most other prices are about in line.In the recipes section, it looks like Blacksmithing has the most in-demand stuff -- people are paying 1200g for Plans: Dirge, and 1000g for three other plans. None of the other professions have any recipes that high. Anyway, go check out the full list over at Curse -- it's pretty neat, and has coloring depicting whether the price of an item has risen or fallen since the previous week. Thanks, Curse people, this is a nice resource.
WoWEconomy.com tracks the AH online
Curse points to an interesting new site that's taking on an idea a lot of players, I'm sure, have considered, if not hoped for: WoW Economy is a site that tries to finally monitor, and mirror on the web, real-time prices in the AHs on the different servers.Unfortunately, they're going uphill trying to implement something like this-- first and foremost, prices are different all over the servers, and that means that even if they come up with a price for something, there's no guarantee it'll sell for that on your server. They say they scan all the auction houses every day and provide information for trends, but if they only scan all the houses every day, the small collection of info they have is still pretty close to useless. (Not to mention the site is full of ads and a few spelling errors, but we'll give them a pass on that one-- buy any jewelry or mess around with a Flash paper doll lately?).On the other hand, I do have to give it to them: if you search for an item, they'll give you a price, right or not. They've even got a list of Most Traded and Most Valuable items (and it's kind of close to Blizzard's list... kind of). And they'll even track an item's listing over a period of time.But while it's the not most complete or worthwhile resource, it's one of the only resources we have on auction items on the web, so if you haven't yet installed the Auctioneer alpha, you might get a little use out of it. I'd like to see a few fewer ads and a few more pieces of valuable data, but I'll give them a B for effort... so far.
