As some of you may know, 3.3 is adding a Disenchant option in the Need or Greed roll window. It now only works if there’s an echanter with high enough skill in the group however.

3.3 Disenchant Option

Yet do you think the sheer amount of extra dust (from Green items, mostly) will effect the dust and cosmic markets? Is it going to push the prices down, or do you think it just won’t have much of an impact at all?

Have your say and comment below!

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!

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!

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?

Last week’s discussion was about why we play the auction house. The results were slightly mixed, yet there was an overwhelming thought of ‘freedom’.

Firstly freedom of time. The auction house is something you can dive in and out of at your own leisure, and use it at your own pace. You are not tied to raid schedules, nor do you have to rely on other people to be about.

There is also the freedom of being able to buy what you like, when you like. It is fair to say that the majority of players live with a constant battle, where they try to earn money at an equal or slightly greater rate than they spend it. Yet if you have far more gold than you are spending, there is no more battle. You are also able to splurge on things that might be large expenses to other players, such as epic flying skill on all of your alts.

Some disagreed however, Dàchéng even went so far to say that gold is a fairly useless currency and the only thing that matters in the end is raid emblems. Not sure I agree on that one – gold is the only currency that doesn’t go out of date.

He mentioned not being able to convert gold in to Emblems as their weakness, yet Emblems can not be exchanged ‘upward’, only down – so the old Emblems become unnecessary whereas the gold is still used for enchants/gems/glyphs and the like. Still a very interesting take on gold, and I can understand where he is coming from in some regards.

There also seemed to be a challenge aspect to it for a lot of people. They pushed themselves to reach a certain amount, either a small amount which they keep raising or something more fixed like 50k, 100k or the goldcap.

Overall it is fair to say that while there is not any single reason for people to use the auction house, it is a means to an end: The enjoyment of doing so, the fun of a challenge, the freedom from being poor, the freedom of doing what they want when they want or simply to leverage themselves in other areas such as raiding or arenas.

Thank you to each and every person that commented, this week’s discussion post will go up later today for you to all muse over!

This week’s discussion post is about why we as ‘AH players’ try and make more gold than we need.

There are a lot of people out there who simply use the auction house to make gold that they need for ‘essentials’ like repairs, gems, enchants and the like.

Then there are others who simply want gold for vanity items, like the Chopper.

But then there are a few people who simply want more gold for no real reason at all – at least, not an obvious reason. The majority of ‘us’ are in this group, the people reading my blog, and other WoW Economy bloggers… but why do we do it? Obviously the above two reasons can factor in, especially at the start – yet is there more of a reason?

I’ll start the ball rolling by telling you my reasons, and it would be great if as many of you as possible could say why you do it, and expand on you reasoning if you want to.

For me, it’s not about raiding essentials as we currently aren’t raiding. It’s not about vanity items, as they don’t interest me at all any more.

Now it is simply for fun. I haven’t killed a mob in weeks – this game is now *all* about the AH and nothing else for me. Not sure how long this will be the case (maybe 3.3 will change it) but I’ve not even seen the new VoA boss or Onyxia on one of my own characters.

Nope, for now the Auction House is my ‘WoW’!

I’d love to hear all of your reasons, so…

Why do you make gold?