D'oH Brewfest very bad for Darkmoon Faire Cards

Over the last few months, I have been playing (more) in the darkmoon faire market.

I still have to give the profit numbers, when I get to it, but it's been OK.  Until now.

I forgot about the trinket market killer - otherwise known as brewfest, starting next Tuesday.  Apparently this year it has reasonable ilvl 365 trinkets.  This should kill the market for trinkets for a month at least. 

Oh well.  At least volatile life should have a chance to come down. 

This weekend I am selling trinkets at a discount.

Preparation for 4.3

First of all, I'll be honest.   I won't do as much as I could.

A new tier of gear means a new raft of gems to be sold, and gear to be enchanted.  What ever is 'hot' now, will become hotter.  So, the usual suspects - Inferno rubies; cut and uncut, celestial essence, and heavanly shards will be popular.  For me - this means I need to put away more inferno rubies and their transmute mats : carnelians and heartblossom.

There is also a bit of talking about transmogrification.  Now, I do not pretend to know what will sell and what won't.  I will leave that up to Kaliope and the like.  However, some of it is likely to be old world crafted gear, needing 2 things : recipees and mats.  Personally, I probably won't purchase much old world, but what I do have for crafting vanilla, BC I will now sit on until 4.3.  I have some very rare patterns.  Come transmogrification, some players will have to catch them all.  I want to sell these to rich bored players.

Two glyphs new scribes may be missing

If you have only taken up inscription since Cataclysm, you may be missing two glyph 'techniques' : Mana Sheild and Lash of Pain.

They are purchased as a BOE 'technique' from Larana Drome in Dalaran.  They are not quite what I would call 'must have' glyphs from a sales perspective, but they are at least profitable.

These glyphs are sold in "limited quantities", if you call 4+ technique's on a 15 minute respawn timer limited.

If you are a scribe, you should probably get these.  Even if you are not a scribe, and are passing through Dalaran, it would be worth stopping in at the scribe's satchel - facing away from the magus commerce exchange in dalaran, to purchase a few techniques to put on the AH.

Blue post coy on Epic Gems 4.3

I'm harping on a theme - but I've just seen a Blizzard post coy on epic gems in 4.3 here .

My theory has been that the purpose of Epic gems is to nerf older content. There is a possibility that a very slow release of Epic gems may be used to gate access to deeper 4.3 raid content.  Note: Having JC's with thousands of tokens, stockpiled pyrite ore, capped Justice/Valor/Honor points ready to pounce does not count as a slow release.

Player 1 : If they don't release epic gems in 4.3 i will be mad
Player 2 : Protip: they won't.  Sometime mid 4.3, maybe, as an indirect nerf to the content. But not at the start.
Player 1 : i mad



Blizzard : A more useful reply would contain details of why, in your opinion, epic gems should be added sooner, how it would benefit the game as a whole, the knock-on effect to progression, something like that. You being mad wouldn't be a solid reason I can pass on to the devs :(

As JC's we are salivating at the possibility of gemmas (myself included).  My advice is to be rational instead of emotional.  Just because you want it, does not mean you get it.

LFM 2Tank+3Heal BWD Must know fight WTF

I really don't understand DPS organisers of raids - not when they advertise for the hardest to fill roles, and put this kind of barrier up.

Sure, if you get 2 experienced tanks, 3 healers that know the fights, chances are you will get a full clear.   That's a pretty big if.  No tanks, no healers mean no raids.  However, I complain if I have to wait 3 minutes for DPS to respond.


I do prefer a certain level of experience in firelands raiding, and would certainly prefer any toon I took to have some raiding experience, but for Tier 11?  If you are so short of tanks or healers that you are pugging, it's time to recruit new tanks and healers - at whatever level of skill or gear.

I want to pug exactly those players that want to run as tank or healer - those looking for a new challange, or simply are prepared to take on the responsibility.

Glyph predictions 4.3

I've been looking at my crystal ball, and I think I see a few things. 

I expect that there will be new tanking glyphs.  New glyphs give players additional choice, and will 'allow' tanks some options for mitigation.  These 'choices' are in reality likely to be mandatory.
Scribes will be able to learn all research major and prime glyphs from either Books of glyph mastery (no cooldown), or via "northrend" research (or a similarly named skill).  While this has already been flagged as something that will happen, I expect it to occur in patch 4.3.

If the combinations of the above two items are true, then there should be a short term increase in demand for Books of glyph mastery, followed by a sustained and significant fall in demand.

I think there is a possibility that "northrend" research will be renamed, and will require inferno ink instead of snowfall ink.  If this occurs, the price of snowfall ink will plumet, and inferno ink will rise temporarily.  This in turn will lead to a shortage of 'cheap' crafted trinkets, and possibly a fall in the value of volatile life.

Crystal balls are interesting things, and are generally subject to interpretation. This community has only middling luck with predicting future pricing; and even when we do guess things correctly - we tend to over stockpile, causing the opposite effect of what was forseen.


Caveat Emptor

OT: In praise of Steam's customer service

My previous experience with internet ordering has been cheap prices but shocking customer service. 

The story starts out with a young boy, a credit card tied to a steam account, and a 'free to play co-op game' .  Free to play games sometimes have expensive addons.  Buying with someone else's money was so much fun, he thought he would buy gifts for other friends too.  And look at all these other games to buy. 

This happened over a month. Think of a dollar amount you would hit the roof with.  Add a zero.

Sob Sob.

Yes, as a parent I am responsible - if for nothing else than allowing the credit card to be linked to the account.  However, talk to other teenagers, or their parents, and my story is not at all uncommon (though many of these stories involve phone bills).  Let the parent beware.




Steam have an established procedure to handle unauthorised purchases.  They also let you know that while they might be able to help, they will terminate the account involved, and block any further access to that particular credit card.

Not a problem.  We had already cancelled the credit card, and gave them the full history; including that it was our son, and the details of the unauthorised transactions, and would be very happy for the account to be terminated.

Steam reset my hopes of customer service - in a very good way.

As requested, we have processed the refunds and enabled account.

Your bank or credit card issuer will return the funds to your account - please allow 3-5 business days for the funds to be posted.

Please note in the future that Steam purchases, per the Steam Subscriber Agreement, are not refundable - this refund was issued as a one-time customer service gesture.
Today the funds were returned to my bank account.  As a bonus - if only for the child involved, they allowed him to keep his account as well - which I was not expecting.

Now my only 'problem' is working out which month or year my son is allowed near a computer again.

Glyph demand - this is as bad as it gets

Today I'm talking about demand instead of supply. 

Back in the final days of Northrend, (other) bloggers were worried that the end was comming.  Way back then, players would need 6 glyphs (if I recall correctly) per spec - so a total of 12 glyphs.  Your average players changed glyphs ... less often than a 8 year old voluntary showers.

Long time scribes remember glyphmas, where we got to have 9 glyphs per spec, and could permanently learn all glyphs (roughly 30 per class).  This followed by a boom while everone was getting to 85. We know that generally demand has fallen from those wonderful days.  Established, fully glyphed lvl 85 toons simply have no reason to buy new glyphs. But all is not lost. 

This graph from MMO champion shows a steady stream of new level 85 characters, that has essentially been stable for 4 months now.  Spikes over the weekend, and troughs on Mondays (no one likes Monday).  While the graph only shows level 85, to get this level of consistency means that you must have a consistent stream of levelling toons.  They also mention a brief dip when 4.2 came out.


Seriously - from a demand perspective, this is as bad as it will get. 

JC's daily - the other one

I assume that most JC's still doing their Stormwind/Ogrimar JC dailies : to pick up their gem cuts  that they don't already have, get a chimera eye, or stockpiling JC tokens in case 4.3 drops trainable epic cuts.  Assuming we get trainable epic cuts, and assuming they use the existing Cata JC tokens, we will want hundreds of tokens.

However, there are another set of profitable dailies to do in Dalaran providing Northrend JC tokens.  Just like the Cata dailies, these provide either recipes or an eye (in this case Dragon's eye).  The Daily takes 15 minutes, and usually requires 2 green quality northrend gems - prospectable, usually available cheap on the AH.

• 1 daily token can be traded for a Dragon's eye, selling uncut for an average US market price of  Alliance 160g & Horde 185g, even more cut into a nightmare tear.
• 5 4 daily tokens can be traded for an epic northrend gem cut.  I buy uncut northrend epic gems for up to 100g, selling 21 in the last week for 6.5k sales.  Won't make me a WoW millionaire overnight, but I already have a JC, and it is easy gold.

On the note of Epic cuts, most other bloggers I read are sure that 4.3 will drop epic cuts;  just like we had epics from northrend - with prospectable gems - most likely from pyrite ore.  There is nothing so dangerous as 'knowing' something.  Neither BC or Northrend epic gems were first released in this manner at first.  There is every chance this will occur, but you will get little sympathy from me if it doesn't happen.  I will be eagerly following patch notes from the PTR.

There are a couple of options for self powered transport to Dalaran.  First of all you can set your hearth there & portal back to Stormwind/Origmar (yes they put those portals back).  Many guild's now have 'cooperation' cloaks giving you a personal portal ever 4 or 8 hours.  Finally, there is a ring of the Kirin Torr, purchasable for 7k (less rep discount?) that allows you to port back to Dalaran.

Gold sellers now leaving breadcrumb comments on our blogs

Gold sellers are becoming creative.

• There is a site out there that copies my posts onto their site so it looks interesting, changing just enough to remove all references to my site.
• I have now seen a relevant, on topic response on two blogs; mine and and another, where the link was to a gold selling site.

I have not been interested in making the very very few dollars from general advertising or selling gold guides, though I can accept that others are.

Apparently buying a game time card with in-game gold is officially a grey line (citation needed but I did see a blue post on this recently.  Edit: Went looking for the citation and did not find it; but found plenty contradicting it).  Outright buying or selling gold for real life cash is not permitted.  Botting is not permitted.  These are the rules of the game.

I will not knowingly link to gold sellers.  This includes removing comments where either the name or the post links to gold selling websites.

I read the RSS feed on the comments to this blog, and not just for vanity.  Sometimes I get an interesting question (I love those), other times I catch a dodgy post.

Blogger and wordpress (the software that most of the wow goldmaking bloggers use) both allow you to track comments.  This is worth doing.