auctioneer
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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.
Auctioneer ready for 2.3
Reader V3T sends word that the folks behind Auctioneer did a long testing session last night, and they say that the latest builds of all the Auctioneer addons are now working under 2.3. They are, we're told, still in alpha, but V3T says they are stable enough to use and that all functions are working-- including BottomScanner, an awesome little addon that finds bargain auctions for you as they happen.That cheering you hear is frugal and money conscious players everywhere happy to have a new build of Auctioneer under 2.3. Preview versions of the addons can be found on Auctioneer's Preview page. V3T also says they're looking for more usage and feedback, so if you do download it, make sure to report any bugs or errors and let them know what works or what doesn't.
A sneak peek at AuctioneerAdvanced
Whenever I ask people what the best way to make money in game is, chances are the word "Auctioneer" will be somewhere in the reply. Recently we received a head's up from Tagor that this fabulous addon is getting a revamp, but it isn't available to download just yet. They call it AuctioneerAdvanced, and soon it will be available to organize all your auctioning needs.They've added a ton of new features to this already powerful tool, the chief amongst them being a smart scan ability that will enable you to walk away from the Auction House when you are in the middle of a scan. No longer will we have to stand for 20 minutes at a time doing nothing but letting the addon do its thing, only to have it cancelled in the middle and have to start all over. You can now pause and resume Auctioneer, to run to the mailbox, buy reagents, have a dance contest on the AH bridge, whatever. Also of note is the retooling of the memory usage on this mod. Evidently it will no longer take up a huge chunk of your memory as it goes, which is definitely good news. I'm also pretty excited about the incremental scanning feature that will scan items even when I am not standing in the AH. I dunno about you, but spending that half an hour once a week standing around like a dope in the AH was really cramping my style.Currently AuctioneerAdvanced is available as a preview only, and if this doesn't strike you as odd, it should. I can't for the life of me remember when an addon received demo time like this. If you are interested in demoing the mod, it can be downloaded here. In any case, it looks like this mod will definitely be worth the wait.[thanks Tagor!]
Breakfast Topic: Refreshing addons
I'll admit it-- I'm a lazy addon user. Whenever Blizzard updates the client, I always manage to forget about my addons. I'll log in, realize I have no addons working, and then jump back out and just "enable out-of-date addons." Eventually, those addons will show bugs, so I'll log back out, disable them, and then keep playing without them for a while.And sooner or later, as happened this past weekend, someone will point out that I'm not running KTM, or that I don't have the latest version of CTRaid up and running, so I'll write down a list of everything I need, go and download them all at once, and refresh them all completely. When I do this, it's a good feeling. It makes the game seem new again to me-- everything works, and everything does what I want it to once again.Until Blizzard puts out a patch, and then the whole grueling process starts over. I would just download new addons when a new patch drops, but addon authors aren't all on the same schedules. And I know programs like the WowAceUpdater help (by checking for updates for me), but so far I've never gotten around to installing those programs either.But that's just me, and I've got to deal with my own problems. How often do you refresh your addons completely? Do you have a good system for keeping your addons up to date, or, like me, do you only get around to redownloading everything when something stops working?
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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 ...
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?
Getting your addons 2.1 compatible
In expectation of the coming patch (though it might still be a while), Curse has posted a compiled list of all their known 2.1 compatible addons. Unfortunately, that list is of Curse-only addons, so while both KLHThreatmeter and Healbot are on there, lots of other high profile addons are not.That doesn't mean they won't be 2.1 compatible, however-- it just means that, well, in most cases we don't know. Titanbar (an addon I live by) was updated after the last big patch, but hasn't yet been updated for the new one. It's the same story with Auctioneer. CTMod hasn't mentioned 2.1 yet, but they update pretty quickly, and even if they don't get a new version out before the patch appears, it's very likely the latest version (v2.001) will still work.Since I'm not an addon creator, I'm not sure how much functionality is changing in 2.1, but from what I can make of the UI Forum, it won't be nearly as much as the expansion patch did. There may be a few problems (ui.worldofwar.net has a short list of known problematic addons on the PTR), but for the most part, we can probably expect 2.1's addon changes to go pretty smoothly. You'll still have to manually enable your addons (since they'll all be out of date), but chances are none of them will be really broken.
Best practices for a banker alt
Lately, I've really been pushing hard to get the 5k gold for my epic riding skill-- as I said on Friday, that Netherwing mount is calling my name. And so, on the advice of a rich guildie, I've finally made it a point to get a fulltime auction house alt. I chose one of my younger, less-played alts, stuck him between an Auction House and a mailbox (it happened to be in Thunder Bluff, but it could have been in any capital city), and made it a point to start scanning the AH every day, posting auctions when I start playing, and sending items to the alt when I'm done playing. That way, the next day when I log in with my bank alt, all those items are sitting in the mailbox, waiting for me to put them on AH-- right after I scan it again.That's what Amanna at Adventures in Azeroth does as well-- though she goes even farther and looks for deals on gear she has in mind to buy. It would be great to have that kind of know-how, and I'm sure it makes money, but I don't have time to know the approximate costs of every little thing-- I leave that to Auctioneer. (Auctioneer does come with a mod called Bottomscanner (used to be called Bottomfeeder) that is supposed to find deals on high-priced items for you, but I'm not sure that I can get it to work right-- I'm worried that I'll spend a bunch of money on an item I can't sell).But if nothing else, I do have to agree that the formula works-- check the AH with your alt when you log on, and mail items back to that alt when you're done playing for the night. It's a basic thing to do (and anyone who's been interested in making money before has probably already started doing it). But making money seemed like such a chore before (I'd rather be killing stuff or grouping up then worrying about prices and checking the mail), but it's actually become fun for me to log in every day and check what's sold and how much gold I've earned.
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.
WoW Insider Best of 2006: Addon and Player
This is the second-to-last entry in our end of the year awards here at WoW Insider. Last week, we asked your opinion on ten different categories throughout all of Azeroth, and over the weekend, the WoW Insider staff rounded up what we thought represented the Best (and in one case, Worst) of this year.Earlier this week, we gave away the awards for Server, Guild, and Class of the Year, and yesterday we picked a Friend, Enemy, and Instance of the Year. Today, we've got one easy choice, and one hard one. Addons were all over the place this year (thanks to a late year "addon meltdown" courtesy of the Blizzard devs), but we've chosen one that we think represents the best of what an addon can do. And since there are eight million players throughout the World of Warcraft, it was very hard to pick just one-- so we decided to go ahead and pick four. Click the link below to read our choices for Addon and Player of the Year.And that leaves just two more categories: tomorrow we'll announce Blizzard's Best and Worst Moves of the Year, so check back then as well.
Essential Addons for the Discerning Level 60
Seeing as my Shaman (Shamanic on Thunderhorn, by the way, in case you want to say hi) is finally about to hit 60 and start raiding, I figured that now might be a good time to sit down and update and refresh my UI addons, something I haven't done for a patch or two now. So I monitored my play habits for a little while, checked in with guildies for their recommendations, and in the end, these are the five addons I decided were necessary to put in my /Interface folder. -Titan Panel: If I was only going to put one addon in, this would be the one I use. Titan creates an extra bar at the top or bottom of your screen (on my setup, I actually have it in both places) that tracks all kinds of things for you: time played, XP/hour, Durability, stat buffs, FPS, game memory usage-- pretty much everything about your WoW experience you'd ever want to know (it also will tell you the coordinates of your position in the game-- extremely useful for getting around Azeroth). Titan, like the famous CTmod (which I tried but didn't like as much), is so complex there's even addons for the addon. If you've never tried a meta-addon like Titan, definitely give it a try. Four more after the jump...
Five Easy Ways to Make More Gold
Your gear starting to smell from overuse? Your weapons rusting up because you can't afford new ones? Your mount looking a little rickety (or nonexistent because you haven't seen 100g yet)? Worry not! We're here to help. Here's five easy (and TOS-compliant) ways to rake in the moolah.1. Get some greedy professions. If I could tell people two things about professions, I would say: always take First Aid asap, and, if you want to make money, get herbalism and skinning. Those two, skinning especially, are your best bet at making tons of cash on the Auction House. Leather is used by almost all the professions (not just leather workers), and as any alchemist will tell you, even though Silverleaf literally grows on trees, there's never enough of it around to make the potions you need. Some people will say enchanting or mining, but for the first, I'd rather auction my green items off seperately, and in the second case, well, maybe that's just my personal taste. Mining seems to sell well on the AH, too. And speaking of the AH,2. Get real familiar with the Auction House. Don't ever sell anything to a vendor unless you really, really need the space in your bags, because even stuff that seems worthless to you can usually find a buyer on the AH. Twinkers are looking for good low level items all the time, and even fish scales are used by Shamans as reagents. If you're serious about making gold, you've probably already done this by now, but make yourself a level one alt, get him or her to a city with an auction house, and park them there, then mail things to them from your other characters. One more note about the Auction House...3. Get Auctioneer. This is a no brainer-- if you haven't heard of this wonderful addon yet, then it's no wonder you don't have your mount. Once you've installed it, run to the nearest AH, let it do a scan, and boom, you've got all the AH prices cached on your computer. Then, when you're out in the world, you've got exactly what every single item in the game should sell for. Plus, when you have things to sell, Auctioneer will tell you the best price to put your items at so they'll sell and you'll make money. Usually, you can sell a little higher than the price Auctioneer puts your items at (especially in the high levels, this can squeeze you a few more gold), but there's nothing easier than just throwing all your extra stuff on the AH, and letting Auctioneer set them up for you. And having Auctioneer around will help you...4. Look for deals everywhere. Don't ninja anything, but there's no shame in casually announcing, as your party makes their way to SM, that you're saving for your mount, and so you'll be rolling on everything that no one needs. When you get quest rewards, most of that stuff is soulbound, so if you're offered a choice of two things you can't use as a reward, always take the most expensive item. And watch vendor prices, too-- every once in a while, Traveling Salesman Antonio Perelli (or any of the other NPC vendors) will be selling a potion that's selling for a few gold more on the AH.5. Play! Finally, the best way to conjure up more gold also happens to be the best way to conjure up experience-- get out there and kill stuff. Any looting at all is better than standing around Orgimmar telling Chuck Norris jokes. Of course, you should choose where you're killing stuff, too. If you're just grinding for XP, pick humanoid mobs-- they drop much more money, and usually better items. And if you can get a group together, an instance run is (literally) a goldmine for hard-to-find items.But above all, the best way to make a lot of gold quickly is just to have fun playing the game. Do what you want, enjoy it, and before you'll know it, you'll have the epic mount you so desperately desire. Just in time to start saving for flying mounts...
