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Opening Mail in WoW Quicker

So for most normal players, or Prey as we like to call them at AH-Whoring.com now, opening mail is not really an issue. They typically have no need to receive more a couple of dozen at most in any one go. But how do you handle opening hundreds or thousands of mails?

Most of you won’t be saying “Easily, and with no effort on my part!” right about now.

In fact almost all of you will find it a boring, monotimous and laborous task which can take a very long time.

As most of you will have noticed, if your mailbox has more than 50 messages in the inbox, you will only be able to see the first 50 until you remove some. Even after clearing some mail it does take up to a minute or so before any new messages fill in the gaps in your inbox however.

Well there is a way to speed up this process, which is really fast and easy to do.

All you need is to simply type /reload and press Enter after you open the first 50 messages.

This will unsurprisingly, reload your UI, and suddenly your mail box is instantly back to having 50 messages in it, until you have less than that in total. So no longer do you have to wait the minute or so between batches!

If you have fairly good load times this can speed up the rate at which you open your mail by over half!

/reload

There are a couple of drawbacks to this method however.

One is that you simply get the loading screen and the progress bar until you are back in to the game. This means you can’t chat, use the AH, craft..or do anything at all on WoW in these loading periods.

You can offset this by using the time to do other things, outside of World of Warcraft.

The other is that if your computer sometimes struggles to fully load World of Warcraft, and you get ‘World of Warcraft Errors’ on the loading screen, they can happen while reloading too. Obviously if they don’t happen to you then this is not an issue at all.

It is also worth noting that using /reload updates your saved variables. What that means is all of your settings and addon data is saved once you do it.

While this trick is not new, it is something that I feel a lot of people overlook because of its minor drawbacks. On top of that a lot of more experienced players don’t share this trick with others, not because they are trying to be sneaky and hide it from you, but because they forget that not everyone knows about it!

Tomorrow’s video blogpost was supposed to be about Postal, an addon which in my opinion is essential to anyone who makes use of their mailbox… and if you don’t ever use the mailbox, you are doing something wrong!

However because my World of Warcraft account ran out, and I can’t reactivate it yet (doh!) I can’t make the video. As such there will be two r

Posted in Addons, Featured, GuideComments (6)

Which Addons Do You Find Essential to AH Whoring? Conclussions

This post is a summary of the comments left on Which Addons Do You Find Essential to AH Whoring? A discussion post on which addons you feel are vital to your auction house success.

This Monday’s Weekly Discussion blogpost will be posted at 23:59 GMT tonight.

To see the current, and all previous Weekly Discussions please check out Discussions.

Well well, a week has passed and there were quite a few people saying exactly what addons are pivotal to their success on the auction house!

As can be expected, there was some overlap with a lot of people recommending the same addons. Due to this I thought it would be a good idea to list all addons mentioned, and tally exactly how many mentions they received.

  1. Auctioneer – 13 mentions
  2. Postal – 11 mentions
  3. QA2 – 10 mentions
  4. KTQ – 7 mentions
  5. Auctionator – 5 mentions
  6. Auditor – 4 mentions
  7. Altoholic – 3 mentions
  8. BankItems – 3 mentions
  9. LilSparky’s Workshop – 3 mentions
  10. Skillet – 3 mentions
  11. Market Watcher – 2 mentions
  12. Advanced Trade Skill Window – 1 mention
  13. Auc-Util-Broker – 1 mention
  14. BankStack – 1 mention
  15. BulkMail2 – 1 mention
  16. Enchantrix – 1 mention
  17. MailGet – 1 mention
  18. MailTo Next – 1 mention
  19. Wow Instant Messenger – 1 mention

It is worth noting however that a number of these addons are similar to eachother – as such if we break it down in to ‘types’ of addons we have

  1. Auction Posting Addons – 28 mentions (Auctioneer, Auctionator, QA2)
  2. Mail Addons – 14 mentions (Postal, BulkMail2, MailGet, MailTo Next)
  3. Crafting Addons – 12 (KTQ, Enchantrix, Skillet, Advanced Trade Skill Window)
  4. Data Addons – 8 mentions (Auc-Util-Broker, Auditor, Market Watcher, Lil Sparky’s Workshop)
  5. Inventory Management Addons – 7 mentions (Altoholic, Bankstack, BankItems)
  6. Chat Addons – 1 mention (WoW Instant Messenger)

Thank you for everyone who voted!

The comments from last weeks discussion blogpost have helped me to identify some addons which I hadn’t stumbled upon before, and hopefully it has done the same for you too!

If you did not get the opportunity to vote this week, then make sure you vote on the next Weekly Discussion which comes out later tonight!

Posted in Addons, DiscussionComments (0)

Video Guide to Kevmar’s KTQ

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.

Posted in Addons, Featured, VideosComments (19)

Craft and Never Run out of Space

This is a hastily put together video on how to create an unlimited amount of items without worrying about running out of space.

I remember before I discovered this how annoying it was to need to create 200 JC rings and so have to stop 2 or 3 times to mail them all before there was any room to craft more. Yet this very easy technique allows you to chain craft items, as many as you want, without ever running out of space again.

All it requires is Quick Auctions 2, an alt, and at least one empty space before you start.

Posted in Addons, Crafting, GuideComments (8)

Speed Up Disenchanting, Prospecting and Milling

Current Gold Total: 2,500g
Working on: Paladin leveling (72)

Yesterdays video has been re-uploaded with a voiceover! On to the actual post…

So we all know that disenchanting, prospecting and milling take a considerable amount of time – and can’t be automated like creating Frostweave Bolts or smeling Saronite Bars can.

Yet there is a way to cut out at least some of the work. This quick video shows you how.

If you need the commands or macros used, you can find them below the video

To bring up the Enchantrix configuration type
/enchantrix config

The macro you can make to auto click yes type
/click AutoDEPromptYes

This same macro works for disenchanting, prospecting and milling – even though it says DE. There is no seperate macros for each one!

Hope you found this useful, if so please leave comments either here or on YouTube – I will cross post comments on YouTube here if I feel that is required.

Posted in Addons, Auctioneer, Crafting, Disenchanting, Guide, Jewelcrafting, Milling, Prospecting, VideosComments (8)

Use Auctioneer to Search for BoE’s to DE

Current Gold Total: 2,000g
Working on: Away from home

Auctioneer is a great addon, and some would call it near essential for anyone seriously trying to compete on the AH now. While you can get by using no addons at all, it certainly does make things a lot easier if you do!

One of the brilliant features of Auctioneer over other AH addons is it has “Searchers” which are predesigned to find specific items for certain uses. This sounds broad, but that’s because there are a whole host of available searches. The one we will be focusing on today is the Disenchant Search, although I will be using DE instead of disenchant throughout this post.

What is the Disenchant Search?

The disenchant search checks through your latest scan data* to find items that can be DE’d for profit.

Now that is still rather broad – what is scan data? How much of a profit? What if I don’t have the ability to DE high level items or don’t want to deal with low level enchanting mats? How do I actually do it!?

Scan Data?
Auctioneer, as well as other addons, have the ability to ‘scan’ all of the items on the AH and add them to a database. This allows them to do lots of complex things with them, but most importantly it allows them to keep average prices of all items seen for sale on there.

There is an additional bonus post before this one which details exactly how to scan the auction house using Auctioneer, so if you don’t understand this part, worry not – check out Scanning the Auction House!

It is important to remember however that scan data is not necessarily what is in the auction house. For example if you haven’t scanned for a day, the data Auctioneer searches through will be a day old! As such, anytime you are going to do any kind of search on Auctioneer it is advisable to scan first.

How much profit?

Auctioneer gives you the ability to set price limits on the search. For example the default is to only show items which will give you 50% profit, provided they sell for full price once you have DE’d them.

This can be adjusted fully, so you can either set this lower if you don’t mind spending time for less of a profit, which is great if you have spare time on your hands, or if there is little on the AH that will make such a massive profit.

I don’t have max Enchanting skill / I don’t want to deal with low level enchanting mats!

You can customise Auctioneer so that it will only show you items from a certain level of enchanting skill needed to disenchant them.

This might sound more confusing than it really is. Say for example you are fairly new to enchanting and only have 100 skill. Simply change the defaults to only show items that require a maximum of 100 skill to disenchant, and then that is all it will search for.

If you don’t want to deal with lower level items, then simply adjust the minimum to a higher number so that they don’t show up. If you set your minimum to 325 skill then you will see only items that disenchant in to Northrend enchanting materials (needs to be tested in game, fairly certain however!).

How do I actually do it!?

It’s a fairly simple process in reality, especially once you have adjusted all your settings for the first time. I will post a quick video on how to do this, however for now the process is a simple seven step system

  1. Scan the auction house
  2. Switch to the Search Tab
  3. Click ‘Disenchant’
  4. Click ‘Search’ and then wait
  5. Buy the items using the Purchase Button
  6. Go collect the items from your mail box and disenchant them
  7. Sell them!


So essentially Auctioneer allows you to search for great deals on BoE items which you can buy, disenchant and then resell the enchanting mats at a profit. It is all very customizable to make sure you are getting the ROI you are after, and is fairly simple to use once it is setup.

Now we know how to Use Auctioneer to Search for BoE’s to DE and yesterday we learnt about Disenchanting Crafted Items for Profit. What comes next?

Now we learn how to disenchant hundreds of items with even less effort! Look forward to that post tomorrow.

P.S. As mentioned there is a bonus post, before this one, that explains about scanning the AH – it is a really basic primer for people who have never used Auctioneer before, so check it out if you don’t know what scanning is!

Posted in Addons, Auctioneer, Disenchanting, Enchanting, Guide, VideosComments (0)

Bonus Post – Scanning the Auction House

Bonus Post – Please note that today’s real post will be after this one. Sorry they are being posted rather late in the evening – didn’t get home until recently from the hospital.

This is just a quick and simple guide on using Auctioneer to scan the auction house, explaining…

  • What the term ‘Scan the Auction House’ even means
  • Why you would want to scan
  • How often you should do it
  • How you actually go about doing it

If you already feel like you know all of this, or don’t need quite so much in depth information feel free to skip to the end of this post and just watch the video.
For the rest of us, let’s get started.

Scan the Auction House, what’s that?

A whole bunch of addons are able to pull all the data from the auction house and store them in a database.

This database contains information on every single item seen in the AH, including how many have been seen, who’s selling them, how much they sell for* and a whole host of other things depending on the addon – we’ll be using Auctioneer which you can download from their official site here, from Curse Gaming here or from WoWInterface here. If you don’t know which to pick, just use the official link!

By ‘scanning’ the auction house Auctioneer gets all the information on the items currently in the Auction House at that moment in time. The last part is important – it can only collect data from items in the AH when you actually scan it. As such you should scan regularly, preferably at least once every single day, so that your data is up to date.

*Auctioneer is probably the most detailed in it’s information, all together allowing you to see a tone of different information on the data, from the average price over the past 3 days to the standard deviation in price, complete histograms on items and so on. This is in some part Auctioneers curse – it is TOO good. It floods the average user with so much information that they probably don’t fully understand, let alone care about.

Why would I want to spend time Scanning the Auction House?

Nothing is worse than buying a whole bunch of items that looked like a bargin, and then finding out your data was innacurrate and you just paid 800% the normal price!

As such you should try to have scan data that you have been collecting for at least a week, if not longer, before you start really buying or selling on the auction house. The longer your data collection is, the more accurate it will be.

If you use the GetAll scan (described below and in the video) it is also pretty quick, taking only a couple of minutes on most computers.
A great way to remember to scan is to do it as soon as you login, before you start doing anything else.

How often should I scan? Does the data get tainted if I scan too often?

Aucitoneer is able to detect duplicate auctions from different scans – as such there is no possible way to scan too often and mess up your data. You can scan as often as you like without worrying!

However, Blizzard has put in place a limitation on what addons can do, and so Auctioneer can only do a GetAll scan once every 15 minutes. Truth be told you are probably wasting your time if you are scanning every 15 minutes, but it can be helpful if you are doing a scan before doing a Search (like we did in today’s real post on Using Auctioneer to Buy BoE’s to DE)

If you really do need to scan more often than that, you can do the standard scan. This however can take a very long time, depending on how many items are in the auction house at the time. Even on a fairly medium population server it can take 10, 20 or even 30 minutes or more. Worse it stops you from doing anything on that character other than chatting really. As such, I wouldn’t recommend doing a standard search unless your internet connection or computer can’t handle doing a GetAll scan (detailed bellow)

So how do I actually go about scanning?

Okay, so now we know what scanning is, why we should do it and how often – now how do we actually go about doing it?

With Auctioneer it is surprisingly simple to scan the auction house. This is a lot easier to see in game than to describe, so refer to the video below! It has a rather basic recap of the above too, so you can just refer to the video from now on, unless you need the in depth information listed in this post.

There you go, it’s as simple as that!

Posted in Addons, Auctioneer, Guide, VideosComments (0)

How I reduced my latency by over 90% in 2 minutes.

Current Gold Total: 2,000g
Working on: Paladin leveling (70)

Well it’s just gone 02:00 as I right this and I’m level 70. Ended up working from 18:00-23:00 in additon to the morning so it has taken me till now to get the 2 levels for today!

Due to being away at least one day this weekend, and anything else that might crop up, I have decieded to stay up tonight and keep leveling and see how high it can take me.

Anyway, enough about me – how about something for you guys?

How I reduced my latency by 80% in 2 minutes.

Whopse, I typed 90% by mistake in to the title… it’s 80% – still a major major reduction though!

Simply download Leatrix Latency Fix from WoWInterface, extract the zip file and double click Install.vbs and then restart your computer.

Now for the hard part…

Or not! There is no hard part – that was it!

Doing so reduced my latency from 120ms to just 25ms instantly, which is just remarkable. And it isn’t just some fancy number change, it really is that low – consistantly. It’s a joy to be playing at this time of night with 19ms, and you can only wonder how helpful this will be in arenas or raiding where latency really matters most.

Now there are some caveats, so you should read through the documentation on WoWInterface carefully. Most notably it only works on the follow operating systems.

  • Windows XP (SP2 or higher)
  • Windows Vista (SP1 or higher)
  • Windows 7

So it looks like Mac/Linux/other users are out of luck… or are very lucky to not be using Windows, depending how you look at it ;)

Posted in Addons, Lag, Leveling, Paladin MainComments (2)

Make getting to 80 easier, thanks to James

Current Gold Total: 2,000g
Working on: Paladin levelling (68) and passive mining (375)

Today is all about levelling! It’s split in to two parts, this post which describes what’s happened today – and then the next post which describes the ‘Challenge’ I have set myself which is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

As for today’s news, I did 4 levels today alone, all following James excellent horde levelling guide (Alliance version is also available) With the only downside being it is apparently no longer maintained and has no guide for 77-80. I’ve done 60-68 without a single error however.

The greatest part is – it is 100% free. No need to even sign up for website or mailing list.

Having used the text version of his guides before, back in TBC it was great to use his addon version. It is amazing how easy it makes it to know exactly where you are meant to be and what you are meant to be doing.

Up until now I have been using Questhelper, which in itself is a fantastic addon – however it gives you no real direction or purpose, it just tells you the quickest way to do the quests you already have. James addon on the other hand tells you exactly what you are doing, why, in what order (not just because it’s the quickest path) and where to go next. It even has little helpful tips, which can be a godsend on a tricky quest which might not be explicit in what you have to do.

This makes levelling even easier than before – you literally can no brain it and just follow the guide. It probably falls apart slightly if you have heirloom chest/shoulders, due to you levelling faster than expected. Still, it’s not an issue really – especially as I have no heirloom items on this server yet!

Talking about transferring heirloom items, it seems bringing Sarainy over *might* take longer than planned. After having to buy a brand new computer my money is a bit low at the moment.

Also managed to double my money, just through selling all the items acquired while levelling. This also includes everything mined – ore for JC will be brought upon reaching level 80.

To find out when that should will be, read the next post!

Posted in Addons, Faction transfer, Leveling, Paladin MainComments (2)

Data! No, not the guy from Star Trek…

Current Gold Total: <300g
Working on: Away from home

Well yet again still away from home, although things will be back to normal from tomorrow.

This is just a quick post with something that anyone serious about the auction house should do, preferably weeks in advance to actually trying to compete on there – Scan the AH! Although if that is not possible then at a minimum wait for a week of scan data.

Now if the notion of ‘scan the AH’ makes no sense to you, then worry not! Simply download the Auctioneer addon. Now log in to the game and open up the AH. You will see at the top left of the window 5 new buttons. These kind of look like the ones you might see on a DVD player.

Ignore all of them for now except the one that looks like a fastforward button >>. Click this and you will get a warning, which you should read. However that’s fine, close the warning and click the button again.

Now the Auctioneer addon will do a full scan of the AH – which will take anything from a minute to 10 minutes depending on the speed of your computer and your latency.

Once this is done, Auctioneer will spam a bit of information to your chat window about the scan, which you can ignore. Now you’re done – Simple as that!

Obviously I will be going far more indepth with Aucioneer and other addons at a later date, however it is imperative that you scan like this at least once a day if possible.

Posted in Addons, AuctioneerComments (0)