I used to be just ok at making gold in WOW. My biggest market would be patch notes. I would figure out what changes caused market changes and invested like mad. Sometimes I get burned but more often I would make bank. This last year something changed. The general population started doing that too. They saw the results people like me made early on and everyone shared what they thought dream shards would do. This did not take that market away, but it made it swing a little more and made it harder to predict. If everyone invests into something, your payout is smaller.
So I went online looking for other things people did to make gold. I revisited some sites I looked at before and it indicated that inscription was the new market to be in. I also discovered the JMTC forums where there were a lot of very helpful people. I learned as much as I could from them and became an active member helping others and sharing my ideas. I found myself stalking the forums a little too much. I probably should have asked to be a moderator. I developed my inscription method that lead me to write the core logic in KTQ from those forums. Many people there helped me beta test and refine it.
I was talking about inscription soo much on the forum that I decided to move it to a blog. On my blog, I didn’t have to wait for someone to respond too. I could also lay out my story. My blog grew at a fairly steady rate. I commented on other blogs and I released a few mods. KTQ is the most well known that drives most people here. I did enjoy sharing my ideas and the ways I made gold. Even my competition told me they liked to read my blog.
I had a nice solid system in place. Bulk herbs, large crafting queues, lots of inventory, and tons of posted auctions. While I was doing that stuff, I could write on my blog and I had a lot to talk about. Then my system kind of fell apart on me. I had a lot of issues in real life that needed my attention out of town and shortly after I returned my account had issues for a few days. My guild was also only doing easy content to make everyone feel good about killing stuff. It just got me out of my pattern.
I did keep posting and I did work auctions from time to time. I did less and less and over the holiday break, I didn’t even log into wow. So my unofficial break is more official. Its also hard for me to come up with good warcraft topics while I am not playing it. I am just shifting my focus to other things for a while. I kind of did the same thing at the end of Buring Crusade. The content is winding down and I will not miss much if I take a break now. I expect a full return for the next expansion if not sooner. You may still see my mid level warlock riding nude in the barrens when my daughter is online.
So what exactly is my focus now? Programming. So I am still around writting code. I have just started on a few mini 3D games. I think they will be a lot of fun if I can make them look as good as I see them in my head. I’ll talk more about it once I get some core features implemented. So be ready to see more of me in the future.
I finished this faster than I expected this weekend. I also added this FAQ and changelog to my KTQ page.
FAQ
What price does it use for the threshold?
It pulls this price from auctioneer. It takes the most recent scan and using the simple stats module it gets the losest price.
When will it support Enchanting scrolls?
Enchant scroll support was added in 1.03.
Why is there no group for enchants?
My group for glyphs is redundent because glyph would queue them all. Same holds true with enchants. Use enchant as your keyword to queue them all. There is a bug with release 1.03 thats fixed in1.04 to make that work.
Whats the best way to queue enchants if there is no group?
For now I would make a macro. Use the item id of the scroll (not the spell id of the enchant) to save space. Remember, you can queue these by name. You don’t have to use groups.
Attempt to call method ‘QueueCommandIterate’ (a nil value) ?
This was an error message that people got if they used a old version of Skillet (the only one on curse). This should be resolved in 1.03
Changelog
1.05 changes
Fixed issues where enchant id matched item id and messing up the item count
1.04 changes
Fixed error when using keyword that matched a skill category (ex. the word enchant)
1.03 changes
Added LilSparky’s Workshop as required mod
Added Enchant Scroll Support
Added support for other Skillet Versions (the common one on curse and the mainline branch)
Increased the keyword match from 3 words to 6 words
Added option to use Item ID for keyword
Downloads
KTQ: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/kevtool-queue.aspx
Skillet: http://www.wowace.com/addons/skillet/repositories/lilsparkys-clone/files/
Altoholic: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/altoholic.aspx
Datastore: (Included with Altoholic)
LilSparky’s Workshop: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/lil-sparkys-workshop.aspx
Auctioneer (Optional): http://auctioneeraddon.com/
lilsparky has made some great contributions in the mods he has made for wow. I have looked to his code a number of times and it helped me pick up LUA. Once again I found information I need in his code. One important detail I needed to enable KTQ to work with enchant scrolls is matching the produced scroll with the skill that makes it. All the other crafts produce an item and that info can be gathered with a built in wow api. The only reason enchant scrolls did not work was because I lacked that information. This is where lilsparky saves us. For LilSparkysWorkshop, he already had to make that list.
I will be adding LilSparkysWorkshop as a required mod for KTQ in the next release. I could easily copy and past the code into KTQ, its still easier for me to interface with LilSparkysWorkshop for that. It helps give him credit and while I have to maintain the api interface, it is less code I have to maintain. Code reuse is a good thing.
I have also resolved issues people have with the main branch of Skillet. I check the version now and KTQ makes that adjustment. It turns out that the craft queue api in both of them is still fairly close. In my next upload of KTQ, it will include this fix. This is the most common issue that people have with this mod that I only support the lilsparky branch of skillet and not the main one.
My 4 year old girl Charis has started to play Warcraft. It is interesting watching her discover the game. I started her out on a 63 warlock at the xroads on a mount. She would ride all over the place. I would let her be and after a while she would come get me for help.
I guess she likes to take the horse swimming. Her corpse was way out in the water several times. So told her she had to keep the horse out of the water. Once she stopped taking him swimming, she lived a lot longer. I also placed the mount on the action bar and showed her how to mount up on her own.
Her next issue was getting inside a building and not able to mount up. She likes to check things out. I pulled out a pet (her little buddy) and let her know she was not allowed to ride the horse inside (or in the water). Other than getting stuck in odd places, she managed to find her way around. One of her favorite things was ridding the blimp. She managed to find the blimp outside org, go up the spiral stairs, wait for the blimp, and get on it.
I later showed her the mini map. There was one point she was a ghost not far from the graveyard (i usualy just spirit rez her). I have Carbonite installed so it draws a line on the mini map directing you where to go. She was able to make the connection from the mini map to her character. When there was something in her path like a tree, she would navigate around it and use the mini map to get back on track. She was in northrend on that 63 lock so I got her back to org where it was a bit safer.
Charis, her horsey, and her little buddy are cutting into my pre raid game time a bit. When its my turn, she sits and watches me raid a while. I use headphones to protect her from vent though. I need to get her set up on her own computer and get her into some more educational games. But for now I will let her have fun with her horsey and little buddy. Thats what she askes for when she wanted to play. A horsey and a little buddy.
I am still trying to work a few things out. Im trying to consolidate my stuff better, but looking at I don’t want all of my warcraft stuff showing up on my main blog. My last post I started out talking about herbs. If you are thinking wow its on topic for wow stuff. If you came to the blog from something else where wow was not on your mind and i’m talking about purchasing herbs you may want me to show up for a random drug test at work.
I have it set up that posts from one area auto show up in the other. I just have too much getting republished. I know I am falling behind on my posts. I do that often, but I usualy have a large queue of stuff to cover. So now that my queue has ran out, I am missing more posts.
I’ll get back to a schedule here before too long.
I have been falling behind on my herb purchases. I never did pick up any new farmers after I lost my last few. What I did instead was just camp the herbs on the AH. Never letting them fall below a set price. I moved the market average up and it held there for a few months. I no longer camp those mats and instead just check them every few days.
Today I made a huge purchase because they fell so low. I spent 3400G at the AH and took a great deal of herbs off the AH in one pass. It feels good to have a lot of herbs again. I think I just picked up close to 250 stacks of various herbs. It’s going to be one huge milling session.
I made the mistake once before where I cut myself off because the low prices scared me. I never should have stopped buying last time.
The patch loaded fine on my laptop but my tower failed on me. I know I have something odd on my tower because for the first time in 4 years I actually had to install it. Before now I used the trick where I could just copy it to the computer and run. I am still running Windows 7 RC1 64 on it. But it has worked fine for me. So when the patch worked fine on my XP laptop and failed on my tower I knew that if it didn’t work I would be reinstalling the OS. So lets start from the top.
I start wow and it kicks in the downloader. The full screen one with the percentage counter in the middle and a big cancel button. It is going so very slow compared to what I just saw on my laptop. I cancel it once and start it over. It started at 0% and I lost what I had. So I left the room and did other things. When I returned to log in to the wow client I get the message that the patch failed to apply and I had to do it again. So I close wow and reopen it and start over. This time it holds out at 0% for a long time and jumps to 100%. Same message when I log into wow.
I open up the wow folder anddon’t see any of the patch files. I kick of the launcher (because I tend to skip that). It shows that download view like its downloading the patch but its at nothing with no indicator. It looks like it froze as it opened. Had to kill the process and ended up rebooting it. I try it the normal way 2 more times and no go. I also tried running wow.exe “as Administrator”.
I head to the Blizzard forums and see lots of people having issues like this. One sugestion I saw was to run 2 sessions of wow. I tried a few variations of running 2 sessions of wow and I eventualy got it to work. I opened 2 sessions and let them load to the login screen. I then logged into both of them as fast as I could so they were both running the downloader at the same time. And they both started downloading. Not the jump for 0% to 100%, it actually did a download.
While they are downloading I decide to go hunt down the files. At this point I have not seen any patch files. It looked like scan.dll was changed because of the updated timestamp. That looked a little strange to me but I don’t know how it should look. When the first session finished downloading something different happened. Windows 7 UAC prompted me asking if I wanted the BlizzardUpdater to run. That was the first time all night UAC prompted me. I let it run and it flashed past. Then the 2nd wow session triggered UAC and I let it run but it said that the version I has was too new for it. Looking at the Warcraft folder showed a few files with new date stamps.
I logged into wow and was presented with the authenticator prompt. That was also the first time I saw that (I discovered I could enter random chars for the password and the downloader would start). After I spent all that time getting it updated, my kids kicked me off the computer so they could play Warcraft.
I started taking a serious look at making gold in Warcraft several months ago. I rediscovered a few blogs that I knew about before. I took a much closer look at those sites and started to make more gold. I got more involved and found myself teaching other what I had learned. I turned to my own blog to do that.
That is how My Auction House Banker got started. One thing that separated me from other bloggers and helped me build connections with others is how I will dive into code for solutions. My KTQ mod was a big hit and it saved a ton of people a lot of time. Now I am looking to expand my topic area a little bit and bring more code solutions to my readers.
So I have moved the blog to a webserver and taking this opprotunity to rebrand it. The new home is www.ithinkincode.com/warcraft and is now called Kevmar on Warcraft. All of my old content was moved over and is ready for you. Gold will come to you when you are doing the right thing.
We are getting close to that point where we need to start watching for the next patch. Here are some important details to keep in mind when trying to guess when the patch will arrive.
Battle.net account merger is required next week. Support will be flooded with people that don’t understand why they cannot log in. The smart thing to do would to be wait for that to settle. The patch will not be next week.
2 week notice for when the 310 achievement mounts will go away. This needs to happen this next patch. With the next tier of content, this will be that much easier to get. The ideal time to remove this is during the 3.3 patch. They did say they would tell us 2 weeks before the change and I did not hear them announce that yet.
Activity on PTR. There is a lot of activity on the PTR at the moment. Play testing the encounter like they did for ulduar. They recently had a developer event on the ptr where players can join the new LFG tool and play with a blue. This type of activity indicates major features are done and they are doing bug resolution passes. This is why I think the patch is getting close.
Major holiday is getting close. They will not release the path the week of the holiday. In the event that something needs to get immediately fixed, they do not want the holiday in the way. It will either be a week before the holiday or 1-2 weeks after. If they wait until after, they get a good deal of ptr test data from the people on break. This fleshes out any uncovered bugs and gives them a week for a dev/test cycle.
Historic release dates point to the first week in December. If you look back at patches going live, you will see that the first week in December has been a popular one. Part of that could be the position of Thanksgiving in the week before. Looking at the time between patches would indicate we would not see this patch in November. Does not make it impossible, but its way to close to the releases behind it.
Arena season for the last 3 seasons were around 17-18 weeks. They tend to release a patch just before the end of the season (1-3 weeks). That gives them a bit of time to uncover any balance issues in arenas before the next season starts. This season started Sept 1 and a patch early Dec would put that 13 weeks into the season. 4 weeks before the end of the season is pushing it. They may cut a week off of the season or release the patch mid Dec is this is any kind of indicator.
Before I started looking at all these details, my gut was saying to keep an eye for the patch as early as one week before thanksgiving. Now that I looked into it a bit more, I am favoring early December. Looking at the 8th from everything else I looked at.
How close do you think it is?
Comments Off
It was such a long time ago, but I still remember my first pet. I was a fairly young priest at the time. New to the game and struggled to save every silver. I remember looking at the snake pets in org when I would visit my trainer.
One time I chatted with the snake vendor looking over the pets he offered, I actually had 70 silver. I was a little excited at the idea of having a pet. For 50 silver it had to be good. My mind was filled with visions of my snake attacking my foe. It would be such a great thing for the weak class that I was playing.
So I forked over the 50 silver that I saved so hard for. I got the pet out and was kind of hoping it would be a bit bigger. But as long as it did sick damage to the mobs it would be worth it. I headed back out into the wild to check out what my new helper would do.
The stupid thing just stood there. No attack command, so way to control him, and he would still just stand there as I was attacked. It was such a worthless pet. It didn’t actually do anything. When I went to get my silver back, the snake guy wanted to rip me off. So I kept the snake.
Not only was this thing not helping me, he actually got in the way of my healing. Sometimes when I would go to click on my self or a party member to heal him, I would get the snake instead. I would try to heal over and over and it would never go off because I had the stupid pet selected.
It also took up a whole slot in my bag. I eventually just tossed him away because I needed the room for something important like a pair of grey leather boots off of a ghost in SM graveyard. That was the last time I ever paid for a pet. No way was I ever going to make that mistake again.
Comments Off
