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Breakfast Topic: To farm or not to farm?
My guild-mates have told me more than once, "You shouldn't buy X (or Y, or Z) on the auction house! Farming it yourself is much cheaper!" I don't doubt them at all -- after all, farming something makes it free, doesn't it? But for some classes and specs, going out in the world and farming for items is a slow, slow process. And when the time spent farming is longer than it would take to do dailies to acquire enough gold to buy it on the open market... do you go out and farm, or do you hit the auction house when you need items? And even for classes that have an easy time farming whatever they might need, sometimes you find yourself with limited playtime, but you need one more primal fire to craft your epic thingamajig? Food or potions for tomorrow's raid? The Goblins tell us that time is money, after all. So today I ask you, readers. What do you find to be easier? Farming or buying?
More item changes incoming
Earlier today I posted regarding a change coming to the Chaotic Skyfire Diamond in a future patch. Not long after that, I noticed a couple of other posts on the WoW forums regarding more changes to two other new items that will help make them easier to sell on the auction house.First off, Drysc let us know that one of the new ammo pouches will be changed. While its functionality will remain the same, the Knothide Quiver will no longer be tagged as a "unique" item. This will make it easier for leatherworkers to craft multiple copies of the bag for other players.Secondly, in another thread, Drysc mentioned that the new engineering-created ammo machines will be easier to sell and purchase on the auction house. Currently they are not listed under "Projectiles", unlike all the other ammunition. This was making them difficult to find for some players and will be changed in a future patch as well.
Preparing for 2.3: Pre-patch farming, part 2
The other day I listed the items that will be used in new recipes after the patch. I did miss a few things, but with your helpful comments, I've updated the original article to be more complete. I'll mention again that it's difficult to make predictions on what will sell the best, but nonetheless I've decided to list some of my thoughts on the subject below.
Nobody's perfect
If you play WoW long enough, you're bound to make mistakes. Whether it's accidentally picking up the wrong piece of loot off of a boss or pulling a bunch of elites before your group is ready, everyone messes up once in awhile. While I normally make a habit of doing research in order to avoid such things, the other day I made a mistake that only affected myself, but it was pretty annoying nonetheless.I had been spending a lot of money power-leveling professions for a few of my alts when I got lucky and picked up a couple upgrades for my main character. I was low on funds and needed to grab some enchants and gems quickly so that I'd be prepared for an upcoming raid. With little time to farm, I hit the auction house and looked for some deals. When I noticed the low price of Nexus Crystals, I was reminded that my enchanter alt could transform those into Small Prismatic Shards and then again into Large Prismatic Shards. After double-checking the prices for the various materials, I concluded that I would not only save a good deal of money, but I'd make a bundle by selling extra shards. I bought all of the Nexus Crystals on the auction house and shipped them off to my enchanter. Gleefully imagining the piles of money I'd soon be raking into my coffers, I switched characters and converted the first crystal into a shard. My schemes where short-lived, sadly, when the realization that the conversion of Nexus Crystals has a cooldown, much like an alchemist's transmutes. Oh well, at least I'll have a nice stockpile of shards after about a month or so.What are the biggest mistakes you've made?
Preparing for 2.3: Pre-patch farming, part 1
Although your time to farm before the release of the patch is quickly dwindling, hopefully everyone will be able to spend some quality time over the weekend preparing for next Tuesday. It's always difficult to accurately predict what will be big sellers, especially since the economy on one server may be radically different than another. With this in mind, I've decided to simply provide a list of all the items that will be used in new trade recipes or for obtaining the new reputation rewards.
If you can't beat the gold farmer, make everyone's life miserable
I'm able to roll with the changes. I can accept I can't bring more than 3oz. of water through a security checkpoint because an over-eager Homeland exec thought 24 was a documentary. We live in Changed Times. At least that's what the TSA guy said as he instructed me to bend over and I heard the snap of a latex glove. But this delay on receiving gold from auctions may have pushed me to take action. I'd write my Senator, but since his claim to fame is driving a good-looking woman off a bridge in Chappaquiddick (a family record his nephew beat when he flew two good looking women into the ocean off Martha's Vineyard), I don't see where he's going to help.We all know why this was added. Those wily gold resellers came up with a fun way to get around the delay-in-mailing-gold problem by having you sell spare ribs for 5k gold. I don't know about you, but when I heard that I laughed my arse off. Talk about a way to game the system.Changes like this make me think Blizzard hired that guy that forced NyQuil to now have the potency of children's aspirin. Really, whom do they think they are kidding here? If someone is going buy the gold to get their epic flyer it's unlikely they are going to hover their mouse over the checkout button and go: Ya know, I'd really like to just buy the 5k gold and not have to farm motes for the next five days, but, now that I think about it with the hour delay in the AH, I'll just go farm it.
Playing the AH on Patch Day
Richard and Paul are both way smarter (and by consequence, way more rich) than I am. They thought ahead, took notes on all the ingredients for the brand new recipes in 2.2, and had all the supplies sitting at high prices on the AH yesterday, ready to be sold to anyone who didn't want to wait to make the new items. Beautiful. I'm jealous-- wish I'd thought of it first.Soulcloth is the big winner, it seems-- it requires Netherweave (which pretty much everyone has), and tons of Soul Essences, which basically drop like candy in Karazhan. If I recall correctly, Soul Essences have sold ok but not great in the past (at least on my server), and they probably still won't sell well, once everyone's made everything they want. But for the next few days, while everyone's learning the new recipes, you'd probably do well to clean out your Soul Essence inventory.Primal Shadow and Primal Air are also doing well from the patch, but since those are Primals, they're fairly rare anyway-- if they were really everywhere (like, say, they dropped off of every demon in the world), Blizzard would change things. But over the next few days (and probably every few days after a big set of crafting changes, so keep an eye out for 2.3 profession news), there's lots of money to be made.
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.
Insomnia, or, I can't sleep so I play when no one else is on
One of the biggest problems I have is that, from time to time, I suffer from extremely painful bouts of insomnia. I've had this issue ever since I was a very young boy, and it still reoccurs from time to time. This has lead me to discover the joys and pains of logging on to play World of Warcraft in the middle of the night. Since I tend to play on servers in the same basic time zone as I am (Edmonton, Alberta if you're curious) this often leads me to discover that it can be an entirely different world when most of the server is asleep.One of the large positives is that I often catch the Auction House when a bid is about to expire - I got my BE pally a Sword of the Magistrate for practically nothing not an hour ago, for example. It's also a lot easier for me to do quests that involving farming mobs that are otherwise popular either because the quest itself is popular or because they drop something folks want, like the elementals in the badlands that everyone and their parents tend to farm.There are some big downsides, though. For starters, instances? Forget about it. If I can find two people on at my level at any given time it's a small miracle. Also, when you're bleary eyed from lack of sleep, that may not be the best time to try and do an annoying escort quest. Admittedly, I tend to find escort quests in general to be the second most annoying quests in the game, with "bring me x number of the eyes/hearts/brains of y" being the absolute worst, but I want to level my characters so I do them anyway.Is anyone else out there playing on the graveyard shift? It sometimes seems like I'm totally alone, but a few folks must be toiling away alongside me. Do you prefer it or are you just there sometimes? What's good, what's bad about it for you? I sometimes like the relative peace and quiet, but I miss being able to get a Sunken Temple group when I need one. And I can't say that playing the game makes me feel any more rested.
Addon Spotlight: Auction Filter Plus
I want to apologize to the other writers for dominating the Add-on Spotlight feature for a few weeks. I think it's an obvious I'm an add-on superfreak. I'm constantly upgrading add-ons, trying add-ons, ditching add-ons, and replacing add-ons. This feature, therefore, is something I really enjoy. I want to talk to you today about "the little add-on that could." This little piece of programming brilliance has been around forever and over the course of time some of it's features have even been worked into the default World of Warcraft user interface. Auction Filter Plus won't die though. The author just keeps honing and refining it for all of us to enjoy. What does it do? It allows you to manipulate auction search results in ways that the default auction interface does not. How many times have you been to the auction house looking for silk cloth for example, typed "silk cloth" in the search field and had results that included "bolts of silk cloth" as well? One of the things AFP does is allow you to do "exact" name searches which allows you to find precisely what you're looking for without a lot of "bogus" (as my guild leader would say) search results. Suppose you need a lot of that silk cloth, fast. Your wallet is heavy, you're not worried about the price, and you just need a ton of silk and you don't want to mess around with the vendors who are selling it one-piece-at-a-time. AFP also allows you to specify what stack sizes you want to search. So in this example, you could click the "Stacks of 20" box and it would only show results that were stacks of twenty. The most obvious and beautiful feature of AFP though, is shown to the player on a budget who is shopping for stackable items. I used to only buy big stacks, because I assumed people who were selling the items in bulk were offering better prices. I've found since installing AFP that this isn't always true. Once you have your search results in the auction window, you can click "Show Best Deals" which will then categorize auction offers based on the cost-per-item. Sometimes the lowest buyout is not always the best deal! You can also hide items that don't have a buyout, or (if you're a gear freak like me) hide items you can't afford. There are other features, but the best way to find out about them is to download the add-on, or check out the write-up on one of the add-on sites. In my books, this little gem will always be a "must have" in my add-on arsenal.
Enchants on the AH in WotLK
On the French-language EU forums, Blizzard poster Thyvene gives enchanters a hint of news on something they've been wanting for a long time: the abilitity to sell their enchants on the auction house. For those of you attempting to confirm on the site, but failing your language skill check, Thyvene's comments approximately translate to: The developers plan to give to enchanters the possibility to sell their enchantments at the auction house, nevertheless this shouldn't be implemented into the game before the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.Of course, without knowing an official release date for Wrath of the Lich King, this change could still be a year off. However, I'm certainly looking forward to a time when my enchanter won't have to stand around in a major city spamming macros in oder to market and sell my wares.[Thanks, Boubouille!]
The story of your first epic
The first time you experience an event in World of Warcraft is something you never forget. The first time you saw one of the enormous player cities. The first time you saw a player on a mount. The first time you got a random tell from a gold spammer.Amadeais of the Nazjatar server remembers his first purple, the Underworld Band. He created a thread on the official forums and many have chimed in with their own first epics. From the hard-won PvP purples to the surprise gift from a generous guildmate.What about you? What was the first purple drop you remember receiving? Was it a world drop, boss loot or did you save up your coppers and bought it off the Auction House? Do you still keep it in your bank? Tell us your story.
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.
The biggest bargain in the AH
Now that the 48-hour downtime has begun for "selected realms", which unfortunately includes my home turf of Magtheridon, I feel I can release this delicious orange of wisdom for future downtimes. Blizzard GMs have confirmed that auctions do indeed continue during downtime. Specifically, this means that if you find an auction with an extremely low bid using Auctioneer and bid on it right before the server goes down, you can pick up that item insanely cheap. Hopefully, this method has netted me two stacks of Arcane Dust for the low, low price of 1 silver 10 copper. Since other realms may be suffering the same 48-hour downtime, this plan may help ease the pain of two days without WoW by knowing you're at least making some gold! Edited to fix link.
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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 ...
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?
This space for rent
There are many places that lie empty within Azeroth, those interesting nooks and crannies that get our imaginations going. While exploring Stormwind I came across Cut-throat Alley, a little cul-de-sac hidden away in the Canal District. This is exactly the sort of place that makes me curious. I can see in my mind's eye a thoroughfare bustling with shady dealers and rogues, tucked away and out of site from the rest of the city, their dealings too dark to go on under the public eye. One of my favorite empty spaces is now filled: I used to camp all my characters out in what is now the Stormwind Auction House, since I enjoyed pretending it was my own private home within the city. Or the courthouse in the Dwarven District. Here the great magistrates of Stormwind might have sat, dealing out justice to those who break the realm's laws. There are all sorts of stories that we can build out of these empty spaces. I once found an empty cave in Azshara without mob or mining node, the sort of place you might expect a hermit to hang out in, or a mountain troll, hungering for the flesh of wayward travelers. Perhaps these are the places that originally had content but somehow it changed over the course of the development cycle. In the case of Cut-throat Alley, it looks to me like it was the original home for the rogues of Stormwind, but somehow seemed too difficult to find. Now, being that I play mostly Alliance characters, I don't know the empty spaces that might be found in Orgrimmar or Undercity. But these places get me wondering. Are there any empty spaces in the game that you wonder about?
Auction House Updates in 2.1
I love the Auction house. I've got a mule parked there just specifically so I can log over periodically, scan, and then snap up any bargains and either stash them for tradeskills, send them to an alt, or resell them if it's an item that has been severely under priced. (I can't tell you how many copies of the Savory Deviate Delight recipe I've bought from the AH for 40s that I resold for at least 5g.) But I have to admit, I've never thought that the search interface was too terribly good. Then I saw a blue reply to a forum request for changes to the auction house that made me a happy panda. According to Eyonix:...We're also working to improve our user-interface, which includes the auction house. Below are some of the changes slated to be implemented for the next patch. The Auction House now has a reset button that will reset all fields you have entered to allow you to quickly try a different search. When items are being put up for sale on the Auction House, if the item you are putting up for bid is the same item and quantity as the previous item you put up for bid, it will automatically fill in the price and buyout for you with your previous price. Gems are now searchable in the Auction House under the heading of Gem with the gems then broken up by color so you can search for all gems of a specific color. I just wonder if the end version of automatic fill they implement will remember prices from when you were logged in before like Auctioneer does? Or will the auction house "forget" things as soon as I log out -- or perhaps even as soon as I close the auction house interface? It's not enough of a change to replace Auctioneer for me, but it's a step in the right direction at least. And I lest I forget -- Hooray searchable gems by color in case you missed it in the previous patch notes![via the General forum]
I'll bank on it
Recently I donated a character slot to the cause of guild management. One of our guild officers thought it was a good time to start a guild bank system, and since I had an extra character sitting around (goodbye Fela, I'll miss you) I offered my services for managing the guild bank. So we created Donations, an officious little gnome with a penchant for bureaucracy. Our system is highly organized, thanks to minds that are substantially better at these things than mine. We built the donations system along the gold standard. Each item donated is assigned a point total based on how much gold it is worth in the auction house. I downloaded Auctioneer, and that has cut my research time in half. The guild bank accepts certain crafting supplies along with monetary donations. Any greens or blues donated are auctioned and the player is given points corresponding to the amount of money it sold for. The points are a lot like DKP, you spend them on items or gold whenever you need them. The more points you have, the more points you can spend on items donated to the guild bank, or withdraw in the form of cash should you need to pay for some hefty purchase in the future – epic flying mounts anyone? So far the system has been pretty successful in its beta phase. Several of us, myself included, were able to save enough points for mounts for our alts. I am hoping that when Blizzard instigates its guild bank system in the future it is something that is this intuitive. I know personally I like being able to get value from items that I cannot use (exactly how much Knothide leather does an Alchemist need?), and it's important to me that we are able to provide supplies to those in the guild who need them. What are you guild bank systems like? Do you tithe, or are the donations all voluntary? And what would you like to see in the guild bank system Blizzard is proposing as an addition to the game?
