Sorry about the lack of a post yesterday. I was too sick to even climb off the couch. I still feel a bit under the weather but improved enough to come to work.
Luckily you had a gold farmer comment to keep you company. I guess now I know I've hit the big time. ;)
Speaking of farmers, about the only thing I did yesterday was help my husband with an AH transfer. We've been doing this for years since on our server the Horde prices are substantially higher and the selection not as good. So if one of us needs something, like enchanting mats, etc., my husband will buy them from the Alliance side and I'll fire up a second account to bring them over via the gobblin bank.
The key here is to sell/buy the items in the gobblin AH for the minimum price, 1s. Those gobblins get a huge chunk of the profits, so you have to be careful that you're not spending the gold you've saved in transfer fees.
But the last two times we've moved items over, we've lost them. No matter how fast we are from the time we post to when we buy, someone else is quicker. So far we've lost a stack of leather and some patterns. Even when we increased the BO price to 2g in the attempts to avoid addon detection, it didn't work.
Doing some testing, I think you can steal items using the normal Auctioneer addon with its bottom scanner. And since all they're doing is buying items off the AH, it's not like we can report them for stealing. If these are normal players ripping us off, then perhaps just doing transfers at odd times (like in the morning before work, or during lunchtime) may help. But if gold farmers are monitoring the AH 24/7, I'm not sure what else we can do.
2 weeks ago
3 comments:
Sorry to hear you haven't been feeling well. There seems to be something going around. Mere days ago, for example, my boss had to call in sick because not one but two of his kids came home from school with none other than The Plague, as it seems. This sidelined him for a day and a half. With everyone else around me starting to cough, the germophobe in me inevitably surfaces.
Hygiene tip for dummies!
When you sneeze or cough, if no tissue or handkerchief is available, do so into a part of your body that is unlikely to come into direct contact with others. Using your elbow-pit or the sleeve of your shirt helps slow the spread of diseases. This works best for dry sneezes and coughs. If you're runny, what are you doing out and about without a box of tissues anyway?!
The G-F (henceforth known as "He Who Shall Not Be Named") was an interesting addition to your comments. I wonder, exactly, what fine tradition it is he plans for you to continue. Interesting, to me, was that the information he offered was directly out-of-context with his chosen profile picture (if you missed it: a naked draenei female playing with herself - where one even finds such a picture is beyond me and not knowledge worth pursuing). Unless we're to accept the metaphor of Those Who Shall Not Be Named being the figurative rapists of an undeserving victim, that is.
I'm torn, because on one hand they are scum of the Earth. Everything you ever hated about popups meets the sins of practically building a large, lit billboard for "Boudreaux's Alligator Wrestling and Curio Emporium" in your front yard. On the other hand, though, they would not exist without a market to support their endeavors.
Similarly, I'm torn for your situation. Having He Who Shall Not Be Named pop up on your site means you've sort of landed the big-time. It also means they'll be back. He was simply the opening volley; the first bee sting that alerts the rest of the hive.
I see your dilemma with Bottom Scanner, though I have not run into it first-hand. Now that all auction data are sorted server-side instead of client-side, without any sort of search limiting imposed by Blizzard, there's no real lower limit to how quickly some bot can buy you out. Perhaps you can use this to your advantage, though, especially if you're having "no luck" avoiding detection with 2g buyouts. It seems to me this would be a decent way to bankrupt an auction bot, were one so creatively evil.
It appears the days of easy transfers from Alliance to Horde are over, due to the changes to the AH system combined with certain add-ons. We've been lucky in that we learned the lesson the easy way, with relatively inexpensive things being stolen in the transfer process. It would have been more painful to learn it on a valuable item.
Transfers can still be done, but have lost much of their advantage. To not have a transfer intercepted, we'll have to actually sell the item from ourselves to ourselves for full price so that the auction doesn't show up on bottom scanner, and even if it did it wouldn't be a particularly good buy. This is unfortuante because the goblin AH cut is hefty, much higher than a normal AH (perhaps 30%?). This makes imported items more expensive, and greatly reduces the benefit to them in the first place.
On our server, the Alliance side has a roughly 2:1 population advantage over the Horde. This results in the Alliance having an active, vibrant AH with prices that pretty much match those listed on the database websites like wowhead and allakhazam. On the Horde AH, items are more scarce and prices are much higher. I've gotten around this since I started playing WoW in early 2005 by buying things on the Alliance AH for "normal" prices, and then transferring them to Horde side for our characters' use. For the transfer, it's best to use 1 silver sale price, the minimum price, so that you lose virtually nothing to the goblin auctioneers.
Now that gold farmers or unscrupulous players can stand at the goblin auction house running scans and ripping off anything someone is transferring, we'll have to transfer things at full normal price. Let's use Primal Air for example. Let's say they are 30 gold each on Alliance and 40 gold each on Horde. If I really want that alliance primal air, I'll have to transfer it at 30 gold. If the goblin cut really is 30% (need to confirm), then we'll lose 9 gold on the cut, making the total cost 39 gold. Might as well just buy the overpriced primal Horde side for 40 gold.
Oh well, it was a good 2-3 year run compensating for our poor Horde economy due to low faction population.
What I think Blizzard should do is make both Horde and Alliance one common AH, so that both factions have the same dynamic, fluid economy with equal access to resources. It would eliminate another source of faction imbalance. From a lore standpoint, you could just make all auctioneers in all cities goblins, to explain how the trade between factions takes place.
I hope by now you've gotten to feeling better. Also, it's too bad the AH transfers aren't working for you guys anymore, I know quite a sum of money has been saved/earned that way.
This is mostly just a run by head poke in since I rarely get a chance to chat in game. I'll have to keep popping in to read this though and stay in touch.
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