Thursday, September 3, 2009

Breaking New Ground

The way I am making gold with inscription is not new. Many people before me did the same thing and shared the results. The process has changed over time as new people try it out and discover different ways of doing things. I saw myself as one of those people. I jumped into the system and took a good hard look at it. I picked at the details and tried different things. I also took a step back and looked at the big picture.

Early on I was struggling with a part of the process that just took too much time. What do I craft? I tried a few ways on my own and I tried the ways others were doing it.

My first method was to recraft anything that sold. When I collected gold from my mailbox, I would queue up each sale in skillet and craft it later. It was simple but it was easy to miss things. If I let something sell out, I never knew to recraft it.

Several people use altaholic to show how many of something you have in the tooltip. Works great even if you don't use alts. I would then walk the list of glyphs and make a few of those that listed over 5g. I did that every few days and I was still crafting from my sales.

A method I saw the big players suggest over and over is set stack sizes. The idea here is you have a set number of every glyph. When you go to recraft, you fill those stacks back up. You are only crafting the ones that sold at that point without tracking sales. I started small and worked up but I quickly saw how much time it took to check each stack and queue up the amount needed. As I looked at that process, the pieces of it were very simple.

Select a glyph, mouse over it in the skill window, get the total count, subtract that value from your desired stack size, queue that many items. Then repeat. This required no judgement or thinking. It was a process. A very exact set of steps. I knew this could be automated.

After hunting for someone else to automate this I broke down and did it myself. I interfaced directly with the mods that I was using. The result was a very small script that would do exactly what I did manually. It did in a matter of second something that took a large chunk of my time to do. Over the last few weeks I have used it and shared it with one or 2 people that were grateful for the script.

This is my chance to give back to all those that provided me with the great information that got me to where I am in the glyph market. I am working on cleaning this script up and releasing it as a mod. Consider it in early beta now with a full release down the road. I will give more details on it later.

14 comments:

  1. Sounds awesome.. looking forward to trying it out.

    The only thing holding me back in my market now is the time commitment. With only an hour or so a day, I have consistantely been making 1.5-3k/day because there aren't any other people who know how to rule the market or have the tools that I do. This would just give me one more advantage and cut down the time I use.

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  2. Tried it out, brilliantly simple.

    Thanks a lot

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  3. I can't thank you enough for this
    using the beta version now,
    done some localization myself, and got it running :)

    Just for the record, I spent 170g just on the Parchment, for the first refill of my stock (consumed 800+ ink of the sea in the process)

    Reduce my crafting time a lot.
    You are my hero of the week :)

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  4. I don't see a link on where to get this? Do you have it posted anywhere?

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  5. I released the beta to a small group. I want to polish off some features and get it working with new versions of skillet and altaholic. I will post a link when I have a more stable release.

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  6. Wow thanks very much. This looks great.


    I have a similar blog at http://100k-gold.blogspot.com/.

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  7. Thanks again kev :)


    Very awsome mod and has saved me hours of work :)

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  8. Really amazing, exactly what I'm doing (minus the script that I'd love to use ;) I still use the default tradeskill window for inscription but using ArkInventory for my bags. I'll see for altaholic and try skillet (I've tried ATSW once upon a time till bugs bored me :s).

    On my server I try to allways have 5 glyphs of each sort that I can craft with inks of the sea at the ah. Do you put more than that ? Do you craft really 'every' glyph that you can or juste some categories ? Till now I put my stock one time each 48 hours with no cancel on undercut, do you cancel often ?

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  9. Ps : I use Auctioneer for individual prices and statistics and Quick Auctions 2 for posting glyphs (400 glyphs in 'no time' each time, incredibly fast, auctioneer x5 in my opinion ^^) But it's soo bad that translation in french is wrecked for the tradeskill listing on alts :'(

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  10. This mod sounds amazing. I'm really new to the Glyph game and was not expecting it to be quite as time consuming as I'm finding it. I'm sure with practice I'll get my production/post time down but this sounds really helpful on bringing my production/repost time down. Can't wait!

    -Zeller

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  11. I understand your reluctance to make a beta version available to the masses since I'm sure the incoming flood of "fix it, Kevmar" requests would be intolerable. But I'm excited for the script as soon as you choose to share it (whatever the stage of polish, I promise not to pester).

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  13. I have a few posts lined up for next week to that should give it a proper introduction and give me that last bit of time I need. I should have something up here about it before the end of next week.

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  14. I am turning blue trying to be patient and holding my breath!!! This will be sooo awesome! I spend probabaly 35-40% of my time looking to see which glyphs Ihave < 3 of....ty in advance!

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