Looking for farmers

Finding farmers can be a simple or difficult process depending on the server you are on. One of the easiest ways is to go to the auction house and search for the item you’re trying to buy.

If you see a large listing of the item all by the same seller then there is a good chance they are a farmer.

For example if you look at the screenshot you’ll see a large listing of herbs all by the same person. This is far more herbs than any normal person would sell at one time. While this does not mean the person has to be a farmer it is still worth checking just in case.

There are many ways you can go about checking if someone is a farmer. The first of which is to add the person to your friends list, and the next time they come online whisper them and ask. However you might not find the person online, in which case you can mail them a simple letter.

Finally you can spot farmers in trade chat. Look for people that are using very few words in their messages, such as just saying “WTS [item] [price]“. This does not necessarily mean they are a farmer, but is unusual for farmers to use much more than this in their messages.

Communicating with Farmers

So once you have found a farmer you need to communicate with them. As I mentioned before, you can mail them a simple message.

Try to keep this mail short, if the farmer does not speak English then you will confuse them by writing a long and complicated message. Here is an easy example of you to copy and paste and use yourself.

Hi there,

I want to buy [item] for [price] each.

Please send me all.

Thanks

It might look stupid and badly worded, yet it is important to use easy to read and translate words.

If they are online however then it is worth communicating with them directly, as you’ll get a much better response face-to-face than you will with a mail message.

First of all always say hi in the simplest way possible, such as just “Hello”. Then in a new line simply state what you are after, such as “I wtb [item] 10g each”. Again this may look stupid and be a poor way of working sentences, however it works and that’s what’s important.

In some cases it is apparent that the person you’re speaking to is not able to speak English very well at all. As such it can be a good idea to find out where they are from, as this will allow you to try and speak their language if possible. By doing so it will allow you to more easily communicate with them and get better deals.

As a large majority of the hard-core farmers are Chinese I have created a dedicated post to talking with Chinese farmers. This post is before this one, and you can find it here – Chinese Phrases to Talk to Your Farmers.

It is never a good idea to just assume the person is Chinese however. By starting a conversation with “Ni hao ma” you might offend the other person if they are not Chinese!

As such, start with “Hello” and go from there!

Was this post useful to you? How do you find farmers and communicate with them? Let me know in the comments!

You can use other online sources of translation in different languages but be aware that some of them are very inaccurate.

Before starting to use these, first ask “Ni hui jiang zhong wen ma?” which is “Do you speak written Chinese?” If they don’t then these sentences are useless to you!

I owe a great deal of thanks to Zekta from Phase 3 : Profit! for this list – as he had a friend spell check the entire thing for me and add a few corrections for me.

So thank you Zekta!

For more information on getting farmers and talking to them check out my post Finding Farmers and Communicating With Them

Snatch is a great way to get the items that you need at cheap and consistent prices. A good use of snatch is too use its prices to feed into my crafting spreadsheet.

It is a good idea to snatch every time you login, or even multiple times while you are playing. This allows you to grab all of the great deals on the auction house, without having to search through a whole load of items manually.

As I mentioned at the end of the video there will be future videos on using other searches in auctioneer. The next of which is the general search to find out more about your competitors. You can expect this video on Thursday.

Okay so first up we have GreenGuts series on Goblins: Who and Why? Part 1, 2, 3 and the soon to be released 4.

These posts are part of her new idea for a ‘Goblin Psychology’ blog, which seems like an awesome idea. There’s just so many people making random blogs right now, that it is nice to see a WoW Economy blog with a specific focus and plan.

This is a blog you need to subscribe to if you aren’t already. You do not want to miss out on all the great content GreenGuts is producing.

Next up we have The Promenade. This pretty new blog is by Debussy and it’s yet another blog that isn’t just “This is what I do!”. There is obviously a lot of thinking and forethought that goes in to his blogposts, and like me he isn’t afraid to make them as long as they need to be.

Take for example his recent write up on the new microtransaction pets Blizzard introducted, All the pandas were Kung-Fu fighting. It weighs in at just over 1,200 words, yet this is a boon to the post not a drawback.

This blog post isn’t the exception either, almost all of his blogposts are really great reads that are long enough to fully discuss the matter.

For reference, if you want to know what I think about the new microtransaction pets, for now just read his blogpost – he is 100% on the money as far as I’m concerned. My thoughts on this will be appearing sometime next week.

And that’s all for this week! Remember to comment on this weeks Discussion post!

These reviews are my way of giving others my thoughts and opinions on websites and products.

Any review I make will be…

• My own opinion
• Unbiased – no favouritism
• Commenting on the good AND the bad points
• Showing why the review is being done, along with any transactions or services that were done with the reviewed party (such as freebies/blog posts/advertising etc.)

With that out of the way, on with the review!

This blog review is being done due to Veliaf posting about my Crafting Spreadsheet last week, where anyone who did so got a free blog review this week.

So Veliaf’s blog is der Hexenmeister, and it is a really fantastic blog.

Before we get started it is important to note that der Hexenmeister is NOT primarily about gold making. It is his own personal journey, blogging about things that cross his path or interest him in WoW.

That’s not to say that his blog is ‘just another random WoW blog‘ – not by a long shot.

His blog has great insight into many different aspects of the game, as well as things that help take the edge off all the playing.

For example each week Veliaf posts a puzzle, which you have a week to try and solve before he posts the answers. People in the comments try to solve these puzzles, so it’s best to avoid reading them before you think you’ve figured it out! I do this by reading in my Google Reader, as it just doesn’t show the comments.

In addition because Veliaf plays a warlock, der Hexenmeister has some great guides on them. From some awesome beginner friendly video guides on how to play a warlock – perfect for showing the girl friend to get her started playing! ;) – or on each spec at 80, as well as a decent rundown of each ability and its uses. These are split in to level brackets, like 21-30, which allows a leveling warlock to quickly see not only what they might have, or are getting soon, but also some tips and help with integrating them in to their current playing.

There are also numerous high quality content blogposts on his site, most recently about account and computer security. These talk about things like using the Blizzard Authenticator and using Firewalls. Some of you might think these have nothing to do with a WoW blog but if you look at just how many people get hacked – and how easily – then you can’t deny that the WoW playerbase needs educating in these matters, and Veliaf is really doing that!

He has actually been blogging for quite a few months, and has an extensive archive of posts, recently hitting his 100pth post a couple of weeks back. While the majority of his early posts focused almost exclusively on warlock related matters, there are some amazing posts lurking among them, like his series covering Blizzcon – parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6!

Now on to my favourite part of reviewing a blog – the design, structure and overall feel it has

It has to be said, that the theme isn’t a favourite of mine. It is too ‘involved’ to be a simple theme, yet is too ‘lacking’ to be an advanced theme…

What I mean by it being too involved is that it has a rather garish and colourful header which is a blue to red gradient. Within that is a salmon pink tab which is essentially useless in a practical sense, and sticks out like a sore thumb from a design perspective – No where else is this pink used.

This isn’t to say the scheme itself is flawed. It just needs to be taken advantage of!

The colours actually make a warm and cool split in the blog, with an overarching  triad colour scheme.

The triad of colours come from the deep blue to red gradient which interacts with the yellow of Veliaf’s ambigram avatar to create his triadic scheme. The problem is, it doesn’t look remotely intentional! The yellow is not used enough to truly bring out the effect, and neither is the red apart from in the header.

The warm and cool split really does work however. The pale blue sidebars really contrast against the deeper reds and blues used, while complementing nicely with the dark on light text.

The sidebars themselves however are rather cluttered. The calendar on the left is rather useless when used in addition to the Archived posts. Also the site search is tucked away in the bottom of the left sidebar, when it should be displayed right at the top or not at all – nobody is going to use it down there!

Next, there are no sidebar links to subscribing to the blog, either by email or RSS. These are really handy features, and remind less experienced web users that they can actually do these things.

The posts themselves are fairly basic style wise, which in my books is a good thing – Veliaf makes good use of markup, such as bold, italics, lists and so on which help keep the blogposts looking interesting even if it’s paragraphs of text (like this blogpost is!)

Personally I think that Veliaf would be better off taking his site ‘back to basics‘ and getting rid of the bright header and avatar and replacing them with something slightly more subdued.

However if he were to go the other way, then he needs to build upon the triad of Blue primary, Red secondary and Yellow tertiary he has in place. The blue could be done by making the links a blue which matches the header. The red by making permalinks and postmeta the same as the header red. As for the yellow, this can be difficult. The problem with a triad like this is that it too easy to make it feel cartoony, like your website is a super hero costume or something. Too little on the other hand and it just doesn’t work! Use the yellow sparingly like an ‘accent’ and be careful to not over use it.

As for the structure…it’s pretty good!

Above the sidebars at the top right of the header we have buttons for About and Contact. These are too hidden and need to be given more screen space. Some quick client side editing later and it seems they would ideally be of a 24px font, twice the current size – just so they can be noticed.

It is great that Veliaf added them though, as in my opinion they are necessary for any blog. Yet so many blogs don’t have them! An About page lets a new visitor catch a glimpse in to what your blog is about in a single page, and he has done that perfectly.

As for the contact page, it’s easy to use and just right in what it gives the user. Trying to get in contact with a blogger, and not being able to find their email address is a nightmare – you may not want to leave a comment to do so! Veliaf has given everyone the abilitiy to get in contact with him in seconds, and that is exactly what you want.

All in all his content is top notch and can’t be faulted. There is not too much ‘heavy reading’, yet he doesn’t just post single sentence posts about stuff nobody cares about. It is all exciting and interesting stuff that is worth a read.

He even has a competition going at the moment, where you can win great prizes AND support a fantastic charity. So make sure you check that out.

All in all, I think the theme needs a lot of work done to it. But in reality that isn’t that pivotal – what is important is that he has a blog with great foundations, and a whole load of pillar content which will help his blog to continue to flourish.

Go ahead, check out Veliaf’s der Hexenmeister and leave him some comments!

Most of you won’t be saying “Easily, and with no effort on my part!” right about now.

In fact almost all of you will find it a boring, monotimous and laborous task which can take a very long time.

As most of you will have noticed, if your mailbox has more than 50 messages in the inbox, you will only be able to see the first 50 until you remove some. Even after clearing some mail it does take up to a minute or so before any new messages fill in the gaps in your inbox however.

Well there is a way to speed up this process, which is really fast and easy to do.

All you need is to simply type /reload and press Enter after you open the first 50 messages.

This will unsurprisingly, reload your UI, and suddenly your mail box is instantly back to having 50 messages in it, until you have less than that in total. So no longer do you have to wait the minute or so between batches!

If you have fairly good load times this can speed up the rate at which you open your mail by over half!

There are a couple of drawbacks to this method however.

One is that you simply get the loading screen and the progress bar until you are back in to the game. This means you can’t chat, use the AH, craft..or do anything at all on WoW in these loading periods.

You can offset this by using the time to do other things, outside of World of Warcraft.

The other is that if your computer sometimes struggles to fully load World of Warcraft, and you get ‘World of Warcraft Errors’ on the loading screen, they can happen while reloading too. Obviously if they don’t happen to you then this is not an issue at all.

It is also worth noting that using /reload updates your saved variables. What that means is all of your settings and addon data is saved once you do it.

While this trick is not new, it is something that I feel a lot of people overlook because of its minor drawbacks. On top of that a lot of more experienced players don’t share this trick with others, not because they are trying to be sneaky and hide it from you, but because they forget that not everyone knows about it!

Tomorrow’s video blogpost was supposed to be about Postal, an addon which in my opinion is essential to anyone who makes use of their mailbox… and if you don’t ever use the mailbox, you are doing something wrong!

However because my World of Warcraft account ran out, and I can’t reactivate it yet (doh!) I can’t make the video. As such there will be two r

Yesterday I received a screenshot from Fragmaggot, who brought out a stack of every cheap vendor brought tradeskill item he could, such as tailoring inks, threads, parchments, copper rods, wood etc.

He’s selling most of them at 10g each, and seems to be doing pretty well so far! Unfortunately he took the screenshot after a lot had already entered his mailbox however, but you get the idea.

Fail! (click to enlarge)

Have you seen any Fail which you want to share? Then simply email it to me via the Contact page!

To see the current, and all previous discussions please check out Discussions.

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!

This Monday’s Weekly Discussion blogpost will be posted at 23:59 GMT tonight.

To see the current, and all previous Weekly Discussions please check out Discussions.

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!

So, no new blogs that I know of this week – however a great new website has been put up which is worth checking out.

It is wowoah or WoW Online Auction House.

It is in a fairly early alpha at the moment, so it has a few kinks and it only has data for US realms. This makes it rather useless for me currently, what with being a Brit, although it could be really useful for some of you.

Searching for Netherweave Bags on wowoah (random server)

At first I thought the site was just a wowecon clone, which should the average value of goods for any server and faction.
This is NOT the case.

Essentially it allows you to do a search on the auction house of any server or faction (again, currently US only) and get ‘live’ data as if you were searching in game.

This means you no longer even need WoW to search the auction house!

It even lets you do things like see every item a seller has for sale, via the SellerData. Very handy for spying on competition even when you can’t be at home, as well as allowing you to easily do so without having to install Auctioneer.

It is in alpha however so there are a few bugs. A couple of times it wouldn’t show any data from Live Searches and I had to search a couple of times.

Another great thing is that you can see time left and current bid on any auction. This means you could bid on an item, then still check and see the time remaining and if you have been outbid all from outside of WoW.

Then there is also the Data buttons, which tell you the sale prices, and sale volume, for the past 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days – displayed in easy to understand graphs. It also tells you the total amount seen in that time frame.

I'm giddy for graphs, so this is heaven for me!

I am really really impressed with this site, and while it might not ever be a big hit like Wowhead or Thottobot because it’s target audience is limited to just people like us, it could easily become a major WoW website once it is up and running.

So, go check out WoW Online Auction House! Remember it is still in alpha – and that any website thrives on feedback from its readers, so make sure you send them your feedback!

That is all for this week. Again if you know of a something that deserves to be highlighted then let me know.