So, no new blogs that I know of this week – however a great new website has been put up which is worth checking out.

It is wowoah or WoW Online Auction House.

It is in a fairly early alpha at the moment, so it has a few kinks and it only has data for US realms. This makes it rather useless for me currently, what with being a Brit, although it could be really useful for some of you.

Searching for Netherweave Bags on wowoah (random server)

At first I thought the site was just a wowecon clone, which should the average value of goods for any server and faction.
This is NOT the case.

Essentially it allows you to do a search on the auction house of any server or faction (again, currently US only) and get ‘live’ data as if you were searching in game.

This means you no longer even need WoW to search the auction house!

It even lets you do things like see every item a seller has for sale, via the SellerData. Very handy for spying on competition even when you can’t be at home, as well as allowing you to easily do so without having to install Auctioneer.

It is in alpha however so there are a few bugs. A couple of times it wouldn’t show any data from Live Searches and I had to search a couple of times.

Another great thing is that you can see time left and current bid on any auction. This means you could bid on an item, then still check and see the time remaining and if you have been outbid all from outside of WoW.

Then there is also the Data buttons, which tell you the sale prices, and sale volume, for the past 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days – displayed in easy to understand graphs. It also tells you the total amount seen in that time frame.

I'm giddy for graphs, so this is heaven for me!

I am really really impressed with this site, and while it might not ever be a big hit like Wowhead or Thottobot because it’s target audience is limited to just people like us, it could easily become a major WoW website once it is up and running.

So, go check out WoW Online Auction House! Remember it is still in alpha – and that any website thrives on feedback from its readers, so make sure you send them your feedback!

That is all for this week. Again if you know of a something that deserves to be highlighted then let me know.

This weeks Freeloader Friday is another question, again about glyphs! It comes from ‘Alex S’ and his question is

“Sarainy help! I’m not sure what glyphs to make!”

Now this ties in really well with my previous post today, on using KTQ to queue all glyphs. This strategy just relies on creating everything out there because you know eventually at some point or other it will sell.

However…Alex throws a slight spanner in the works.

“…and after spending all my money on all the Glyph Matery Books I don’t have enough money to just blow on creating a few of every glyph.”

Hmmmm, okay so that changes things a bit. Alex now needs a way to only create the profitable glyphs on his server. This is actually a fairly common problem for people new to inscription and glyphs.

It is also an issue for people who don’t want to spend the time maintaining stacks, or who can’t create bank alts to hold and post large amounts of glyphs.

So what ways are there that can help ensure you only create the glyphs that are profitable?

This needs to work on every server, so no listing of specific glyphs please!

As always help out and give some suggestions in the comments!

Download all the addons you need – KTQ, Skillet, Datastore and Altoholic

Hope you enjoyed the video! Please leave a comment once you are done reading.

Also make sure to check out Kevmar’s blog My Auction House Banker.

Again please remember that you do NOT want to use the versions of these addons found on Curse or anything like that. So that means do not update them either using the Curse Updater or WoW Minion or anything – leave them as they are!

Here are the commands used:

Bringing up the KTQ help
/ktq

The macro
/ktq queue 5 Glyphs

The 5 can be changed to whatever number you like, and you can change Glyphs to any name you like.

As mentioned in the video, Kevmar has set up some predefined groups. These are Glyphs, RareGems and EpicGems. As you may have guessed using this as the name will craft all the Glyphs, Rare Gems or Epic Gems we can create.

You can also chain together multiple queues in a single macro, just add a new line below with the details, so this would craft 5 of every type of both Epic and Rare gems.
/ktq queue 5 RareGems
/ktq queue 5 EpicGems

There are some minor corrections however:

First of all, to make use of the BonusQueue, SkipSingles, Threshold or Fallback you have to first enable them – which I didn’t mention in the video. Here’s the code for each;

/ktq enable bonusqueue
/ktq enable skipsingles
/ktq enable threshold
/ktq enable fallback

Next, I said that the threshold used the Auctioneer appraisal price, so was fairly useless. Kevmar explained to me however that it actually uses the latest Auctioneer scan data, and if the current lowest selling auction for each glyph is below your threshold – it won’t queue it.

For example let’s say you just scanned the AH and your threshold is 3g, it checks all of the current glyphs on the AH and if there any glyphs where the lowest sale price is under 3g then it won’t add it to the queue.

Finally I didn’t mention the use of the fallback. What this does is if you have a threshold set, and yet there is none of the item in your latest AH scan, it will queue the item.

If fallback is turned off any glyphs that are not currently for sale on the AH will not be queued – this is good if you don’t want to run the risk of creating glyphs that sell for under your threshold.

But it also means it will not queue glyphs even if they might normally sell for over the threshold, which is a loss in sales. By turning it on this means if there are no glyphs of a certain type on the AH, it will queue the glyph anyway.

These settings are apply to everything you craft using KTQ, so be careful if you use it for more than just glyphs however.

A bit long winded maybe, but all fairly simple.

Again thank you Kevmar for such a great addon! Please leave comments in the blog letting me know if you liked this video.

This Freeloader Friday was meant to be posted on the 23rd of October 2009, hence why there it is being posted on a Wednesday!

Today’s Freeloader Friday is a question sent to me by Wee. His trouble is that there just is not enough people buying his glyphs!

He is posting roughly 500 glyphs, five single stacks of roughly 100 different glyphs. Yet even with a price of 5g each, he is only selling 10 or so glyphs total a day.

Wee’s pretty sure no one is managing to undercut him under his threshold which is at crafting costs, so how can he start selling more glyphs?

Help out and give some suggestions in the comments!

Following last week’s discussion, where there was a unanimous vote that addons are fair it would be interested to see which addons people do in fact consider essential.

So for example mine are… Postal, Auctioneer, QA2 and KTQ and I feel that some sort of Postal ‘Open All Mail’ button should be added to the default UI.

This is purely for addons you could not do without and do you think any of them or their functionalities should be added as standard to the blizzard interface?

Quick edit: I went away last Thursday and scheduled a load of posts…which apparently haven’t posted while I was away!! Rather than spam you all with five posts today, I will simply post double posts until they are all posted.

Well well, it seems that every single response said that addons were in fact fair, as long as everyone has the same ability to get them – which we do.

Almost every single addon out there is available at Curse or WoWInterface. It is up to the individual user to find, learn and use these addons themselves to compete.

In saying that, there does seem to be a lack of knowledge out there. A lot of people might want to use addons such as KTQ or Market Watcher yet it is not always easy to know how to use these addons, or even know of their existance!

It was interesting to hear that some people, such as Bobreaze, said they wouldn’t even bother with the auction house if they didn’t have the benefit of addons. Does this mean that the standard auction house UI and design is lacking? Or is it just that now we have all these tools, we would hate to go back to it even though it isn’t all that bad?

Arkraven suggested an experiment whereby someone would try to dominate a market without the use of any addons. LargeRichard took this one step further, asking if it could possibly be done in a highly competitive and more involved market such as glyphs, which a lot of people perceive as an ‘addons are mandatory’ market.

There were a lot of really great replies to this weeks discussion, more than I can hope to discuss here without going on too long! If you haven’t you should definitely read the post Are Addons an ‘Unfair Advantage’?.

Thank you all for your comments and for adding to the discussion.

This weeks discussion post will go up at 23:59 this evening for you all to muse over!

Download Podcast #1.mp3 – 00:47:38

Shownotes

Intro and Direction
>Introductions
>What is the AH-Whoring blog?
>Why a monthly podcast, why have a podcast?
>Long term goals for the blog

Crafting Spreadsheet
>What is the Crafting Spreadsheet?
>Advantages to other available spreadsheets
>Reasons for using the spreadsheet
>Advantages over LilSparky’s Workshop

Dealing With Campers
>What defines ‘Camping’?
>Things that work in every market
>Fast moving markets
>Slow moving markets

MMO-Champion Guides
>What are they
>Why they don’t work
>Only people that proffited majorly, were the sellers of raw goods

Abyssal Shatter

3.3 Talk
>Disenchant loot option
>New crafting patterns added for all professions
>What to stockpile for 3.3
>New glyphs being added
>Reputation changes
>Frost mages more viable in raids due to new glyph
>Keep up to date on patchnotes!

Corrections

I said that one of the new glyphs being added was Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain, this is not true, the new glyphs are Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation, Glyph of Eternal Water and Glyph of Quick Decay.

Links

@01:10 – Posting Schedule
@04:13 – Crafting Spreadsheet
@08:34 – Contact Me
@21:46 – Post on Bag Cost per Slots
@23:26 – MMO-Champion Guides #1 #2 #3
@38:10 – Post on 3.3 Glyphs

Again this was the first ever AH-Whoring Podcast, and as such I am sure there are a number of things that could be done better!

If you have any comments, suggestions, criticisms or corrections please leave a comment below!

Using trade chat is worthy of a blog post of its own, if not multiple. However I thought today I would share a quick tip with you on how to link items in macros.

This actually came up in the IRC when debussy asked if there was a way to do this.

You see, while you can copy and paste links, you can’t make a chat link in a macro by shift+clicking it into the macro text box. Instead we use a small script to have the macro link the items for us.

First before showing how you do it, I want to explain that while it might look confusing it really isn’t! Will explain it as simply as I can however.

All of the macros shown need to be on a single line – the website is just putting them on to two, you shouldn’t! If you copy and paste them they should still be on one line and work however.

/run SendChatMessage("TEXT1 "..(select(2,GetItemInfo(ITEMID))).." TEXT2","channel",nil,CHANNEL)

The things in bold are what you need to edit. Replace TEXT1 with what you want before the item link, such as WTB and then change the ITEMID to the item id of the item you want to link. Finally CHANNEL is the channel number you wish to link to (normally 2, for trade chat) and TEXT2 is any text you want after the item link.

So if we wanted to say “WTB [Netherweave Cloth] 3g a stack!” in trade we would use

/run SendChatMessage("WTB "..(select(2,GetItemInfo(21877))).." 3g a stack!","channel",nil,2)

You can find the itemid of any item in game by searching for it in Wowhead and looking at the url.

Finding an Itemid (click to enlarge)

Linking more than one item in the same line

To link more than one item in the same line is fairly simple, although it does make things a tiny bit more confusing. To do it you simply need to add another ..select(2,GetItemInfo(ITEMID)).. after the first.

So if we wanted to say “WTB [Adder's Tongue][Icethorn][Lichbloom] 20g a stack!” we would use

/run SendChatMessage("WTB "..select(2,GetItemInfo(36903))..select(2,GetItemInfo(36906))..select(2,GetItemInfo(36905)).." 20g a stack!","channel",nil,2)

Hopefully this will be helpful to you in your buying and selling in /2 !

This is a repost of the information found in the Item Overload! Bank Alts, original and best? post. I am reposting it because it is important information that needs to be highlighted on it’s own.

The following assumes, that all bank bags purchased, and all bags are of the same type – as well as the following prices.

Netherweave Bags = 10g
Frostweave Bags = 80g
Glacial Bags = 650g
Crafting Bags = 100g

As you can see, even with 32 slot crafting bags, Netherweave Bags are cheaper per slot gained. This means that if you have the character spaces and don’t mind the extra work then you are always better off making a new bank alt rather than buying bags bigger than Netherweave for your existing bankers.

Remarkably this is true even if you can get 32 slot crafting bags for 25g each! They would have to be 22g or less to be more worthwhile. The only crafting bags seen under 22g each commonly are Inscription Bags. Just remember, if you can get the crafting bags for under 22g each then they are definitely worth using instead of neatherweave.

Obviously mains are slightly different, and people are willing to prepared to pay higher CpS for the convenience of additional inventory on their most played character. This information is primarily for the storage of items that would normally be sent to bankers.

This week’s discussion is about addons, specifically if they confer an unfair advantage on the players that use them compared to those that don’t – specifically in crafting and using the auction house.

I posed this question to Seth of One Copper, who answered it in his podcast.

The question was
“What is your opinion on addons, specifically Auctioneer, QA, Auctionator, Postal, BulkMail2 being unfair considering the power they give compared to someone without the addons.”

To paraphrase his reply in to a single sentence

If you don’t use it, you lose it… use whatever you can to make your life easier.

And I agree with him! If you can make use of it, and it is not against the rules then why not?

On the other hand, I can see just how powerful these addons really are. If you’re in the inscription market just think about doing everything you do, from buying herbs, milling, crafting ink, buying the right ink and parchments, creating the right glyphs, creating enough glyphs, possibly mailing the glyphs and then listing them all – without addons. Do you think you could still compete on the same scale?

So that is the discussion point for this week
Are addons an unfair advantage in the AH-Whoring game, and if so which in particular? If not, why not?