While I haven’t really been inclined to get my wookie on and swing a lightsaber, I do follow some aspects of STWOR if for no other reason to have some inkling about what people are getting uptight about.  Usually I end up nodding and saying something like "Some things never change."

One recent controversy did raise my eyebrows, though. There was rumblings about enrage timers, but then a more interesting twist emerged: no damage meters, no combat log.  As so many experience DPSers will tell you, this is pretty stupid.  Here’s one now:

So I’ll come down in favor of DPS races and enrage timers, but only if there are combat logs (and the subsequent parsers and DPS meters) so you can actually FIX the problem if you’re not beating the content. The problem generally isn’t with DPS meters themselves, anyway; it’s with the way some players choose to use them to exclude their "inferiors" from participating in content, and the fact that they often broaden the definition of "inferior" well beyond the needs of the content.

If you think I’m shallow enough to link to this to say I-told-you-so, you’d be completely accurate.

The DPS role is dependent on its numbers, whether you take them subjectively or absolutely is irrelevant.  But of the two, an absolute reference is much better than a relative one. Numbers are absolute. You can feed them into spreadsheets, save them off, compare them to each other. You can make multiple passes and chart your progress or lack thereof. Your damage meter is your friend. If you were doing 20K last week on a particular boss, and only 18K this week, you have something to look in to before you’re the cause of an enrage-timer wipe in the future.

Smug mode: engage.

I’m sure Bioware or whoever will address this to everyone’s satisfaction at some point.  I’m not sure if WoW came with a working addon API out of the box, but given how late it was announced for STROW I’d venture that it was an afterthought and still has some work to go.  I’d advise patience, but that’s not particularly the hallmark of your average STWOR player¹. So, good luck with that, I guess.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

That’s not actually what this article is about. Well, peripherally, it is, but only in that damage meters and combat logs are involved and it deals with DPS.  Namely, mine.

A couple of patches ago, we got changes to the Beast Master Hunter spec that promised near-parity with other specs. Then the guild got gutted of over half its overall raiding roster and it became more difficult to judge my performance against those of my fellows. Then there were more adjustments in the last patch, including some buffs to both SV and BM. Then we started inviting some people from another guild to raid with us regularly, which included a SV spec hunter.

I saw that BM wasn’t doing that great at all. He was topping the meters, I was bringing up the rear. My best choice at that point was to focus on utility. I’ve had to do this before, many times, as far back as Kara. Hoping that being useful (rather than deadly) would keep me in the rotation.

Or, I could change specs. Give it a go.

Looking at gear and gems and reforges and enchants, I realized I only had to change one enchant – agi to mastery – to optimize my armor for SV.  Stat-wise, there was virtually no difference.  So, I left myself geared for BM and greased into SV mode.

After looking at the meters, after looking at the combat logs, in all respects, my performance improved. On average, a 3K difference in output, and I’m not really used to the rotation yet.

So here we are at the end of the expansion and I’m having deja vu all over again.  Because this is exactly where I ended up as I started crawling the passageways of Icecrown in the final patch of WotLK. Survival.   BM was the red-headed stepchild of the team; people like me ran it if we had to, but otherwise we used one of the other specs because they delivered what our class is expected to: ranged damage, and lots of it.

So that’s the upshot of my weekend: I guess I’m shifting to SV and swapping my BM pets for a stock of SV. Alas. BM is, by far, my favorite hunter spec, because it’s so darned fun. But sometimes you gotta give up some funsies to get that boss down. And that’s a sad thing. Of all the issues about talents and specs, that is the greatest one of all – that one cannot just play the spec that one enjoys the most and still expect to perform the same as others.  Maybe you get lucky and it works out. Maybe you don’t.

In my case, not so much.

1. i.e. "Blizzard doesn’t add content fast enough" impatient.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 26, 2012.

Between Grimm in DS and my own undergeared butt in Heroics, we’ve finally – as of last night – gotten to see all the threads in the endgame story for this expansion¹.  It’s gratifying to see that the endgame has a more solid narrative than ever before.  Only twice does it succumb to what I call the "Gallery of bads" syndrome.

If you remember the pilot movie for Babylon 5, you no doubt remember the Gratuitous Alien Gallery, a venue that Sinclair and Alexander cut through on the way to somewhere more useful.  The Alien District, as it was called, resembled more of a toxic petting zoo than a place where aliens lived and carried out business – glass booths with aliens standing in them, cubicles with aliens standing them, empty spaces with aliens standing in them – you get the picture.

A lot, it might be noted, like Icecrown Citadel, and many other raids. Just dudes. Standing around. Doing standing around dude things.

Some examples.

• Karazhan – you have to beat up the stable boy, the castellan, and a travelling group of troubadours to even get close to the guy that’s making the place go bad².  And even then, there are rooms off to the side with a couple of dragons, a bereaved father, and a studious demon that you can go beat up just for funsies.
• Icecrown Citadel – With an airship at your disposal, you can just fly to the spire and take care of business. But instead we go the long hard way through a gallery of bads, none which even matter, and some which were plain made up – had no previous connection to lore – for this instance.
• Naxx – For this gallery of bads to even make SENSE, they had to force you to clear each wing as part of unlocking a portal to the one guard dragon that stands between you and the big bad.
• The Eye – Aside from Alar (and who doesn’t want a shot at a flaming mount?), you can walk right in to Kael’s throne room and start beating on him. And speaking of dudes just standing around. Don’t belfs own chairs?
• Ulduar – After taking down XT and Kologarn, not much stopping you from just jumping down into the pit and getting jiggy with Yogg. Well, aside from the invisible barrier that forces you to go the long way, but it is not mentioned as part of the lore.

The common thread here is that you have a bunch people standing around scratching their butts, doing nothing but looking decorative until a bunch of mercenaries comes along to rob them.  You don’t have to kill off Moroes³ – he doesn’t drop a key. You don’t have to kill off Putricide ⁴ to get to the Lich King. Notwithstanding game mechanics, why exactly is Ignis standing around? What is the purpose of Aran, other than fleshing out some lore that didn’t, really, exist? 

While this is coming off as a rant against how artificial and contrived the circumstances of most raid bosses are constructed, it is intended as praise for Dragon Soul.

The five-mans leading up to it, while somewhat contrived and confusing at times, do actually link up to the raid elegantly.  The escort quest at the end exists for a reason (as any raider knows, the front door is blocked). And, granted, the "echoes" do fall into the "contrived bad dude just standing around thinking bad dude thoughts" trope, but the next instance in the chain more than makes up for it in integrating the bosses into the story. ⁵

The only raid-related boss issue in this case are Zonza and Ballchucker.  They exist only to be beaten and looted. They serve no part of the story other than to stand around and look lootish. Had they been integrated better⁶ I’d have no complaint, but they weren’t. They block nothing, unlock nothing, drop nothing related to the story⁷. They are Miscellaneous Bad Dudes. In holes.

But, overall, the endgame for this expansion has proven to be far superior to what we’ve seen before.  I don’t know how much of an actual story that MoP will have. If it does, I hope they improve on the linear story-based raid instance over the collection-of-loot-piñatas rogues gallery approach. It was a lot more fun and a lot more interesting.

1. Minus Deathwing, which Grimm is working diligently on.
2. Oh, and before a "fix" in 3.0.2, you didn’t even have to do any of the lower castle stuff – you could go straight to Curator if you didn’t want loot.
3. Within the story line – I’m not counting locked doors suddenly popping open, which isn’t the case here anyway.
4. Ditto.
5. Plus, bare-chested Nelf Illidan has to count for something in somebody’s scorebook. Flora like.
6. "To get to the temple, you must take this tunnel, heroes! And beware the Faceless Ones!"  I dunno, that was too easy. Should Fargo send me a check?
7. While I love it so, loot doesn’t count for this discussion.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 24, 2012.

"I realise there is a portion of the gaming fraternity for whom getting online and talking racist, sexist, homophobic smack talk is part of the fun, but they are not my community and I’m not interested in any websites which actively engage with them. I’m also not interested in playing any games with them. LTM (learn to moderate)."

– Spinks

That in a nutshell will do for me, as well. Well said, succinctly put, madam Spinks.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 24, 2012.

Pontificator In Chief what’s no longer doing MMO blogging Tobold went back to the well to pontificate, yet again, how DPS R Bad Peepuls, yawl¹.

If by the tone of my opening paragraph you conclude that I stand in direct opposition to his conclusion, one would be right in supporting your impression, for I certainly do.

In Tobold’s world, everything lives in a theoretical vacuum, a world in which the likes of Gevlon can be as correct as he, for neither of them really engage in what I would consider practical theory crafting.  Gevlon’s world is one in which everyone is a total rat bastard on toast, out to get you and deflower your mum.  Tobold’s word differs slightly in that everyone involved is somehow a robot following preprogrammed pathways that have no dependence on those around them.

When isolated in such a way from reality, conclusions such as "healers and tanks are the only responsible gamers" can be fully formed and realized without spending any amount of time reflecting on the premise that the problem is not the group dynamic, but, in reality, the LACK of group dynamic.

First of all, I wish to lay out some bona fides here.  I prefer the DPS life because I like making things go boom, whether it’s a gun or a fireball. I have, however, also ran a toon through an entire expansion as a healer, two-healing my way through all the Wrath raids (which kinda explains the eventual burnout, but hey – BONA FIDES!). So I am INTIMATELY familiar with two of the three roles in this game.  I’m not so certain about mister Tobold.

What I DO know is that Tobold’s over-simplistic view of the DPS role is as shallow as a Las Vegas lounge lizard, and only half as agreeable.  His view is that the typical DPS player is the kind of person that sits around the periphery space-bar-jumping over and over and pausing occasionally to go "hurr de hurr durr" in between the occasional frostbolt and side trip to the nearest burning patch of fire on the floor.

What he described was the average BAD DPSer.

If you’ve spent any time being any good as a DPSer over the past three expansions, you’ll have noticed something.  You’ve got a LOT of responsibility going on.  Soaking crystals. Pulling down drakes. Banging gongs. AoEing parasites. Run into the portal. DPS the brain, but not too much. Burn down the Sons. Hell, I don’t think many of the bosses in this last expansion ever allowed a DPSer to sit around and pew pew pew, though Ultraxion comes close. But you have to DIG to find something from Kara on forward that didn’t offer new challenges to the DPS team.  Challenges that the healers were usually excused from.

So, you want to talk responsibility, Mister Tobold Sir, you go right ahead.  All it’s really doing is making it look like you never set foot in Firelands, for starters.

There is a group dynamic in raiding and instancing that changes depending on the people you are with. LFD and LFR represent the worst-case scenario. You get the utter dregs from there.  You can’t really judge the game in its intended form by those examples.

But if you take a group of repeat raiders and repeat dungeoneers, you get a different reality.  In that reality, bad DPSers don’t come back if they don’t improve. In that reality, people talk about the instances and communicate who’s job is what. In that reality – the one in which people are people rather than asshatty robots – responsibility for failure is shared by the whole team, DPS, healer, and tank. It is, in reality, a team, and functions in a team dynamic.

Tolbold, apparently, has not instanced with anyone but total strangers, been required to carry the entire instance on his frail shoulders, and has never once been able to get DPSers to do anything but stand around and scratch their belfy butts. I’d be bitter in that scenario, as well.  But I’d reach a far different conclusion, because I read more than my own blog and those like it.  Every day I read about yet another group of my friends getting through another tough fight, in which everyone worked to get the job done and nobody was getting off on blaming one or the other particular role in the group.

The choice is yours, of course, but if you’re inclined to listen to this guy, I gotta tell you he’s about as wrong as a whistling fish. You can do better than he as a source of information when it comes to MMOs.  Especially since, yaknow, he doesn’t blog about MMOs now.

1. I feel dirty linking back, but fair’s fair.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 23, 2012.

One first-world problem associated with blogging is keeping up with current events. Well, we’re a couple of months into the Transmorgapocolypse and I’m just now getting around to saying the first thing about it.  Mostly, because, well, I really didn’t think that making it a thing was going to be a thing. But it is, so there you are.

It’s funny the subtle distaste that some people show for using this new feature. I’m not sure really why it’s a big deal to draw a line and step to one side or the other of it, but you will find staunch proponents of each.

But seriously, to have the choice in how your characters appear  is a glorious, fun thing for some, and as long as they don’t force fashion-forward sensibilities upon one’s withered soul, why should one complain?  The game world has become filled with color-coordinated mages and bat-winged warlocks, toons actually have some individuality, and people wanna complain?

Maybe it would be better if I discussed my Wookie Jedi Techno-dance-fight master instead¹.

Maybe not.

All I know is that the haters are out there, and they’re gonna hate.  I’m going to point and laugh, because, well, it’s low-hanging fruit².

If you were to look at me on the armory, the first thing you’d conclude is that I’m one of the haters, since I’m pretty much up there in my T12/T13 underoos for all the world to see. There’s a reason for that.

It’s true, I’m a hater. But I’m a hater with a difference.

I’m a hater of almost everything there is about the gear sets they’ve made for Hunters.  Oh, I kinda liked the eyeball shoulder pieces, but that’s not much of a foundation to work from.

Basically, it comes down to mail. I’m not a big fan of mail. Woodsy ranger-type archetypes are generally more leather-y than we get depicted in WoW past level 40. Something I’ve never understood is how a woodsy ranger-type is supposed to function properly as a woodsman in all that clanky metal crap. And don’t get me started on the T13 shoulders … I’m wider than I am tall with those on!  I’m supposed to slip between trees like this? Truly? I’m not an Orc, I expect my wardrobe to make some sort of sense!

Truth is, forest leathers and a camo cloak are the one right look for a Hunter, which IS available, but NOT to mail-wearers. And, unfortunately, one cannot mog mail to look like leather.

There is, also, a sad footnote for my favorite axe. You may recall that I had doubts that Legacy even existed, when it dropped for me in the twilight of Karazhan raiding. I’ve kept it all these years as a memento of past exploits and a reminder that patience may indeed be rewarded. When mogging came about, I was eager to mog my current staff³ to resemble my treasured axe.  And, well, you guessed it. Can’t mog a staff into an axe. And there ARE no suitable two-hander axes in Cata endgame.

So, aside from my goggles⁴ and my cloak⁵, I haven’t sussed a look yet.

We’ve managed to get Jas and Illume gussied up, at least, and Fai’s choice was pretty much a done deal as soon as they made the DK starter gear available for purchase. Not gonna lie, though, Flora’s swinging towards frumpy, but we’re still looking at options. Her opinion that it all looks good when lit by the burning bodies of one’s enemies may well be true, but keeping up appearances is sometimes important. I guess we’ll come back to that.  I don’t like the look in her eyes right now, nor how she’s swinging around that red-hot poker that passes for a dagger.

But here’s some armory links in case you’re curious about where the mog templates came from: Floramel, Illume, Jasra, Faiella.  I’d include WoWHead links (for the 3D aspect), but that part of WoWHead is down.

1. This needs to be a thing.
2. And if there’s one thing that Dwarves are good at, it’s swinging at low-hanging things.
3. Really, why on earth did Hunters get staves in the first place? Does Blizzard even READ fantasy novels?
4. Engineering pride, yo!
5. Ironforge, REPRESENT, yo!

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 21, 2012.

Update: First post of this had two pictures not show, and that’s probably what made it into the feed, so if you normally read via a feed reader, you missed a couple of pics.  I had to manually edit a few things. /le sigh

Saxsy of I Like Pancakes has tagged me as part of some “666″ meme that goes a little bit like this.

• Go into your image folder
• Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
• Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couln’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
• Challenge six new bloggers.
• Link to them.

Alrighty then.

As many bloggers thus tagged have found out, the originator of this meme was unually well-organized, and the whole sub-folder thing often falls apart.  Or maybe s/he had a Mac. Who knows? the upshot is, we often have to interpret a bit, and I’m no different.

For example, I keep my WoW screenshots folder fairly clean, rarely accumulating more than 20 or so screenshots that don’t get dealt with.  Right now, the sixth image is this.

When I went to the End Time, I just had to get a screenie of Deathwing’s smoking corpse.  Possibly one of the most iconic images of the whole expansion.

My “Blog headers” directory is full of the images that you see appear at the top of this blog. They are an accumulation of screenies and art that I have come across over the years. The sixth image from that directory is this.

This is Jasra, with our guildies, preparing to attack Ignis in Ulduar. I will not deny, she’s voguing for the camera in this shot.  If I remember, we took him down on this attempt.

But I do have a folder where all the blogging stuff goes, and it has many subfolders, so let’s have a gander.

Ah, yes, Fanny Thundermar. This folder is where I collect “incidentals”, images that I use to illustrate whatever point it is I’m illustrating. It’s a real swamp in there, so I’m glad it was something as good as this fiery young lady, slayer of ogres using nothing but an iron skillet (hey, it worked for Sam!), and originator of the phrase, “arse like an anvil”.

And finally, for giggles, here is the image for the “My Pictures” directory.

Obviously from a Dwarf Humor website.

Oh, so now I have to challenge and link some new ones. Here are my choices.

• Ratshag (no, not THAT folder!)
• The Artist Formerly Known As Alas
• Courtney Doodles – seriously, an artist might have a few interewsting images here and there
• Nymphy and Orv (Gimli says that only counts as one!)
• Liala (allegedly still with us!)
• Imraith dos Santos (because I love saying that name almost as much as I love saying “guava!” Say it with me. GUAVA! GWWWAVA!)

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 16, 2012.

And the first one to say it, will learn new uses for those lunar lanterns that are so popular here in Moonglade.

Brief note: the Elder in Thunder Bluff is nowhere near where WoWHead says he is.  Look at the map. You’ll suss it.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 6, 2012.

In every MMO I’ve played in, we eventually see the game population divide up into populations of unusual – some might say freakish – creatures.  The exact nature of these sub-populations varies, but the point is, they exist, and they’re downright weird.

Let’s take raiders, as an example. Once we hit level cap, it’s all about the raiding.  Everything we do is bent towards improving our performance in raiding. We practice on target dummies, grind for cash for enchants and gems and potions, hone our trade skills to feed those needs, farm mats for consumables, do dailies for tokens and cash, fish for buff food, and so forth.  If any of us manages to get off and do something that is the least bit enjoyable – but not related to raiding – we feel guilty about it.

And look at that gear. Min/maxing is hardly adequate to describe what we do to our gear, and what sort of gear we look for. It’s like you took a battleship, and shrank everything down to the size of a destroyer – except the gun, which swelled to five times its normal size. That’s a typical DPSer in a nutshell. A typical tank is a brick with legs. A healer is best represented as either a giant bandaid, or a giant ball of cotton (Disco priests, yo!).

I mean, Hunters wear mail. And mail with higher armor values is – by any measure of common sense – better. Except for raiders.  If it doesn’t make our gun bigger, we’re not interested.

Don’t get me started on PvPers.  I mean, they have entire separate gear tiers from everybody else in the universe. I’ve seen periods of time where priests have been the terror of the battlefield. Arenas give rise to such perverted stat mixes that even the developers can’t sort out what they’re doing.  Hey, Johnnie found a +50 to pillar-humping sword!

My point here is that the endgame, be it PvP or PvE, warps perceptions of whatever game you’re playing. Somebody spent a lot of time and effort putting together a game world that has NOTHING to do with either of those things, and most normal people actually get out there and enjoy them.  While we’re QQing about cooldowns and OP rogues, the larger population is taking its time and enjoying the game they paid good money for.

It’s true – Blizz kind of stacked the deck against itself with the inexplicably high XP rates during leveling (Most zones, you can’t even complete all the quests before they go gray). But outside of that, there are a number of interesting and compelling stories out there that the power-leveling supa-raider has never seen. I wonder how many people right now are scratching their heads over the entire "Fangs of the Father" questline, wondering where this black dragon came from.

The "normal" people out there know.

Right now I’m seeing a bumper crop of this syndrome from STWOR players. "I’m level 50, now what?"  The usual answer is "grind, dailies, raid."  Right now, a lot of people are finding out they paid sixty clams only to do the same thing all over again. All the work that Bioware put into other parts of the game, totally unappreciated and likely unsampled.  As much as they wanted to break the mold, they simply failed to take the herd mentality of your average raider/pvper into consideration.

I have to give kudos to Blizzard on this. The average bored raider has no idea what to do outside of get ready for more raiding.  So Blizz has provided a means to measure one’s progress in, for example, experiencing the stories told in each of the zones – i.e. the various Loremaster achievements.

Within the Raider / PvP / Roleplaying echochaimers, our plaintive bleats are loud and distinct.  But from outside, all people care about is what is that annoying buzz and how do I stop it? It isn’t any wonder that you often experience resentment from those outside of your special little tribe. They’re enjoying all the new content while some group of shmoes have already beaten the end boss and are crying about how the game’s all over for them.

The ongoing challenge for MMO creators is to create content for all the normal people and all the mutants like us. We haven’t seen it yet, and nothing looks to have a solution forthcoming, so we’ll keep watching and hoping.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 3, 2012.

There is no complex formula to memorize or fiddly process to follow.  It’s all a matter of good old common sense and old-timey business practices.

Without trying to force my precise methods on anyone, let me put down what the general principles are. You can follow through in whatever fashion you want.

First Principle: I am a shopkeeper

When a buyer approaches the auction house, it is often with trepidation that the item they wish to find won’t be there. My job is to ensure that when someone comes to buy a glyph, one of mine is there to be bought. I may have been undercut, but with 430ish glyph types out there, the odds are pretty good that I’ll have something they want at the price they’re willing to pay.

This is all about opportunity. A customer provides an opportunity to fulfill a need. Your job as a shopkeeper is to ensure that you can fulfill that need.

Practically every specialty shop I have been in sticks to a specific type of product and/or service, but within that narrow confine, covers all the bases.  Big*Mart may carry camping tents, but only Camping Equipment World carries tents in fifteen different sizes, from fifty makers, all the time.  My job is to be the Camping Equipment World of glyphs.

This means inventory

A shopkeeper doesn’t generally have five items in the front window and make everything else to spec. They maintain an inventory of items to sell¹.

This means a couple of things to me and you.  First it means that you need to know what the possibilities are – what kind of glyphs exist in the first place? And secondly – and more importantly – it means you need to keep track of what you have on hand at any given time.

The main reason for the latter is that you don’t want to tie up assets in stuff that won’t sell – but you also want to make sure that stuff that DOES sell is always available to your customer.

I’m afraid some effort is required at this point.

How you go about this is up to you.  I have a spreadsheet on Google Docs that I use to track average sale price, inventory levels, item status (available, stocked, warehoused), and so forth. There are many other tools available for this, but this was the weapon I chose.  There may even be in-game tools for this.  Or you might choose an old fashioned bound ledger².  Up to the individual.

At any rate, when an item sells, you decrease inventory. As you create replacements, they get noted, too. All you need to do now is figure out what the right levels are.

This is a difficult subject. Different servers have different demands, and things tend to move in cycles.  I’ve seen glyphs that didn’t sell for months suddenly fly off the shelves, then cool off just as quickly.

My own personal practice is to keep two of every glyph in stock at all times. For items that sell faster, three may be more appropriate, but you have GOT to know the market before you run the risk of overstocking, and since I check things once a day there is very little down time even if I sell out on an item.

Getting stocked up

Developing an inventory in the first place will more than likely be a drain on the coffers, if you buy your materials.  Most dealers will need to take time to develop inventory slowly.  But choosing the wrong items will likely result in bankruptcy.  So, choosing your initial stock is important.

There are many tools out there to help out with this – such as The Undermine Journal – but be aware of what they represent. Most, if not all, of these tools use the WoW Armory Auction House feed to access AH information periodically. That feed, however, does not offer real sales data, last I looked. It offers data on what was posted, and what was no longer posted, but it does not indicate if an item disappeared because it was bought, because it expired, or because it was cancelled. Without that information, the best these tools can offer is a guess, which some of them do attempt.

A fair approximation can be gained from the average post price of an item over two weeks’ period. Such an item with a lot of activity and a fairly flat price curve is probably a reliable seller.  An item with a steep sawtooth sales curve (starts out high, drops off rapidly) is probably moving nowhere and all the activity is due to constant undercutting. Items that sell quickly rarely see a lot of undercutting.

You can use tools like this to glean, say, the top 20 items and then work your way down. This way you get some income to fund your subsequent stocking operation.

Yes, there is risk here in that a price is inflated due to artificial manipulation, but since you’re going to make at least one of everything anyway, just view that as an advance copy and move on.

The Supply Chain

Where you get your glyphs is largely up to you.  In my case, I actually make the glyphs, but I purchase my raw materials.  But, if you have the time, gathering your own mats and milling them is a lot more profitable, by many orders of magnitude.

However, a lively glyph market will support a vendor that buys supplies off the auction house. You just have to know what to buy and when.  On my server, for example, Whiptail is generally as cheap as Cinderbloom and Stormvine, with a significantly higher yield per stack.

A really lively market will pretty much require you to at least supplement your supply chain with bought materials. On my server, I generally go through twelve to twenty-four stacks of Whiptail per day, usually in excess of twenty. Unless you give up a significant amount of your time to gathering, there’s no way you can keep up with that sort of demand on your own.

If you choose to buy your glyphs straight up for resale, then your margins are going to be even thinner, and you will need to account for supply costs in a lot more detail. That will also require a LOT more of your time.

Keep the good stuff up front

With over 430 types of glyph to sell, just moving and posting them can eat a significant chunk of time. This is why I have a three-tier inventory.  Tier 1 is the stuff that sells. Tier 2 is the stuff that usually sells but isn’t right now. And Tier 3 is for the stuff that rarely, if ever, sells.

Tier 1 I always keep in stock, two items at a time.

Tier 2 generally gets rotated out of stock for a week, then gets brought back in. The price levels have probably reset³ so it’ll probably move back into Tier 1.

Tier 3 items go into a virtual warehouse, where they sit for a few weeks before being popped into circulation again. I almost always break these out during special events, such as holidays or content patches when a lot of people show up needing a lot of things that normally don’t move.

Now, what you call "selling" is up for debate. Currently, I determine that any glyph that doesn’t sell for at least 25g needs to go to Tier 2 for a week, and if it doesn’t sell for ten weeks in a row, it goes into a warehouse.

Due to undercutting, the "average" price an item brings in is highly questionable, since it varies depending on which part of the sawtooth you’re on. Therefore it is better to establish a minimum, below which you aren’t going to waste time on it.

Don’t sweat the goblins

I read, every week, posts by people that appear almost fixated on undercutting.  Gotta be the lowest price for an item or it’s the end of the world, or something to that effect.

There’s always a "goblin" – real or wannabee, doesn’t matter – out there undercutting something. Can’t get away from it.  You can either engage in a long, wasteful, elaborate "war" with this individual (or – horrors! – a bot), or you can ignore him or her and work to alleviate the impact of such activities.

With 430ish glyphs on the market, you buy assurance through quantity. You will get undercut somewhere, but you won’t get undercut EVERYWHERE at ALL THE TIMES.

The proof is in the pudding. On a well-populated server with an active AH ecosystem, products sell every day, easily. Maybe I miss a few opportunities by not obsessing over The Other Guy, but then, he’s not my customer. My customer pays the bills, not that goblin dude.

Tools for the times

I will be first to say it: without tools, this process would be impossible. I’d be doing nothing but getting glyphs made and posting them, every day. Call that a game if you want, but I call it a job. A boring, soul-destroying job.

So, having the right tools for the job is important!

I am going to take off my hipster glasses and gladly join the throng of people that recommend Trade Skill Master (TSM). I use two of its modules primarily to get things done, and a third for non-related activities⁴.  The Posting tool moves items from your bag to the AH quickly; the destroy tool takes a lot of pain out of milling herbs.

Advanced Trade Skill Window or Skillet can be used to set up queues for making glyphs (the former has a better feature set but the latter seems more reliable).  This, also, is a massive time saver.

Gathering tools like Gathermate 2 and Routes help organize your foraging expeditions.

Postal will help you process mail en masse, moving glyphs to your bags and cash to your bank. There’s also a TSM module for the mailbox, but I haven’t used it.

Google Docs will provide you with free tools to organize your data and find holes to fill and bumps to sand off.

Do be cautious of the more automated tools, though. Understand your market and train the tool to work properly within it.  For example, I posted all my auctions by hand for weeks before letting TSM take over the job, by which time I was aware of the peculiarities of my market and either didn’t care, or developed a process to deal with it.

The most important tool is between your ears

And that brings me to the point that, regardless of what process you develop, what tools you use, or how you deal with adverse situations, the most important things you bring to the table are your heart and mind. If you engage in practices that are a little seedy, expect others to follow suit. If you play the game honestly and fairly, however – you’ll get by just fine.

Above all, keep your eyes open.  For opportunities, trends, potential issues.  Gather what data you need to make it possible.  Don’t rely on tools to drive the whole thing. Keep your hand on the wheel at all times.

Room for improvement

The whole "working as a storefront" process is not without failings. Some are inherent, some can be improved.

I’m bothered by having to put items in warehouse, for example. That makes it impossible to make all things available at all times.  Unfortunately, the AH doesn’t facilitate the customer doing the equivalent of walking up to the counter and inquiring about a rare glyph that isn’t out front.  And NOT warehousing things just eats up too much time and bag space.

The other thing that doesn’t get captured well is sales frequency per item, in my current process.  I don’t record when I sold an item; I don’t even have a database, and that’s what you’d need.  I wanted to do this earlier in the process but eventually arrived at the conclusion that if I have everything up at all times, who cares about when it sells the best?  I’ll be there anyway.  But that does run the risk that the item is currently warehoused.

My current process is also very dependent on me personally catching all the details for sales, etc. Sometimes I forget to record a sale and my inventory gets skewed badly because of it. I live in fear of NOT documenting a sale twice in a row, meaning I’d have no items for sale, and no reason to make more when I looked at my inventory. My next step in that regard is to make a tool that will record each for me into a text file or something, but that’s for another time.

Glyph-Related Accessories

A while back I read on WoW Insider the advice of their goblin advisor regarding the selling of Darkmoon card decks. and the like. At the time it was very good advice, as many of the Darkmoon cards were BiS for several classes. But a week or so later, a new content patch dropped, and they were immediately trumped by the next tier’s trinkets, for the most part.

The upshot is this: Darkmoon cards – and the entry-level relics we can make – really aren’t as profitable as they used to be, not with so many good endgame items available through LFD and LFR.  So, don’t build your business around them. It won’t work out all that well.

While there is still a very minute market for the very patient, don’t expect to see them flying off the shelves.

In fact, after close analysis, you may find that selling Embers or Ink will be more profitable than selling the cards they create.

And that’s pretty much all I’m going to say on this part of the market.

Does this work for other markets?

In a few weeks we’re going to move into the Enchanting market once again. Jas was doing that for a while, and it was tedious and dreary.  Now that I’ve got a new system, though, She’ll be trying her hand at that and see how it works out.

The BIG question mark in all this is Mists of Panderia. With an overhaul to both abilities and talents, how will glyphs be handled? You can bet that I’m watching that like a hawk!

1. The Internet does change those rules a bit, but let’s pretend it doesn’t exist on Azeroth and see where that takes us.
2. This does have a certain romantic appeal, I confess. Especially if I get to use a fountain pen.
3. I mentioned earlier how posting prices have a sawtooth pattern to them as they get undercut from a high price to a low price. This happens to Tier 1 items as well as Tier 2.  Eventually the price bottoms out, at which point everyone withdraws. The next posting will be again at a high price, and we start all over again.
4. Basically, the AH buying tool is handy for finding bargains to resell, but I use it minimally because the glyph market is just too busy!

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on January 25, 2012.

Anyhoo, the upshot is some people weren’t being honest about this sort of thing, making up excuses about why they weren’t showing up to raid, so they would should they deign to return, still be assured a spot on the raid. They weren’t really able to commit, either way.

Thinking of this, I noticed another, similar, trend.

A lot of people are going out of their way to not have a strong opinion, one way or the other, on the whole STWOR-WoW¹ thing.  Time and time again I see people griping about either a STWOR or WoW feature or lack thereof, followed by more disclaimers than you can shake a stick at.  In some cases the disclaimers are longer than the actual opinion.

Consider the lack of LFD in STWOR, for an example. That topic’s been popping up a lot recently, in posts that more or less almost approach thinking about almost committing to a possible opinion that STWOR might possibly under some conditions slightly benefit from such a thing, but NOT SAYING IT’S BAD WE DON’T HAVE IT Y’ALL and OF COURSE THE WOW ONE STILL MOSTLY ALMOST SUCKS EXCEPT IT PRETTY MUCH DOESN’T EITHER. SORTA.

Ahem …

Okay, the point I’m dancing around² is that a lot of gamers are playing both sides of the street today, are happy with that, and want to blog about that new thing, but there appears to be a problem with doing that.

Being part of a large blogging community in WoW, we have all made many friends. Many of those friends³ have no interest in the new shiny, but still read the blog because, hey, still friends!

On the other side of the coin, they are also painfully aware of many of their peers (let’s assume STWOR peers for the moment) have far less "give" in their opinions, and are likely to have little to no tolerance of pro-WoW attitudes – or in some cases, apparently, tolerance.

What seems to be happening as a result is a lot of beating around the bush instead of getting right to the point of things one likes, dislikes, for fear of offending either camp.  One wishes to remain in good stead with the New Order, but feels like being too positive for STWOR or negative on WoW might burn bridges one does not wish to burn.

It’s a shame this is happening, because it tends to marginalize all three camps.  The STWOR partisans become more extreme in aggregate, as do the WoW partisans, and those in between end up tying their own hands and miss many great opportunities to discuss the merits – and pitfalls – of both games in an honest and frank manner.

Hopefully, as things settle out over the next few months, and we can manage to have honest opinions on the things that really matter, such as Pandas versus Ewoks.⁴

1. Or WoW-STWOR for those wavering the other way.
2. C wut I did thar?
3. Hello!
4. I’m a purist. If it doesn’t have Ewoks and Gungans, it’s obviously not canon.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on January 24, 2012.