KevTool Queue (KTQ)

When I got into the WoW auction house business, I found a community of other auctioneers. This community was willing to teach and share their ideas with others. I received lots of help and before I knew it, I was running a very large and successful auction house business.  I eventually started this blog and was very active in that community helping others.

As I started dealing with glyphs on a large scale, I found that the manual steps in my process became very tedious. I knew there had to be a better way. I think I spent 2-3 hours doing inventory and building the list of things I needed to make. I never wanted to do that again.  So I wrote a little script to do the work for me. Once I did that, I could do it daily and that's exactly what I did.

I used it for about 2 months and my business flourished. I started sharing it with other and eventually released it as KevTool Queue. This is something that I easily could have kept to myself but I wanted to give back to the community. It was a huge hit. Even though my competitors started using my tool, I know I made the right decision. I know I made a positive impact on a lot of players. Although I stopped playing wow years ago, my contribution continues to make a difference.

I stopped development on the tool when I left but I have been approached by other authors asking to contribute to my mod. I feel very honored that someone else wanted to contribute to the project that I started. AsaAyers was the first author to contribute to KTQ on Curse. Although KTQ was flagged as abandoned on Curse, I expect that others in the community kept it alive within the forums of the auction community. I want to thank those unknown authors for that work.

More recently, I was approached by another author that would like to pick up the project and continue the work I was doing. Alisonnic has picked up development and reactivated the project on Curse. Seeing that this mod is still important and making a positive impact to others means a lot.  Thank you Alisonnic for doing that. I would like to extend that thank you to anyone else that has contributed to this project.

Featured Mod: Skillet_IStat

I know you guys are eager to see my new mod but here is another small mod that I picked up that should be released first. Skillet_IStat from TekNoir. He is retiring from the AH market so he thought it was time to share this. He has no plans to support it and that is where I come in.

The main feature I am looking at is the ability for it to query altaholic and put your item count into the name of the skill. So now you can just look at your skillet window and see how much you have of every item in stock. I hacked skillet to do that a while ago and didn't know how to make it a different mod like TekNoir did. He has some interfaces with other mods too, but the item count is huge for the way many inscriptioinists work with skillet.

I wanted to get this out first because it complements what my mod is intended to do. There are some people where I think my mod would be over kill and this mod would serve the needs they have.

Here is a direct link to the download: Skillet_IStats

Big Spender

I broke down and made my first big purchase. People that know me, know that I don't do anything small. So when I say big purchase what I'm talking about is a shocking purchase. First let me show you what I got.

[Royal Moonshroud Robe]
[Royal Moonshroud Bracers]

I think its a server fist to have 2 pieces of that crafted gear. The people that crafted my gear told me that I was the first person they crafted it for. But someone else could have those patterns.

What makes that purchase so shocking is the mats required to make them. 32 moonshroud is nothing to sneeze at. I picked up half a stack several weeks ago from someone selling it too cheap. A good deal is hard to pass up. The rest was on the AH. I may have over paid a little bit, but when looking at the other mats a few hundreds gold here and there isn't much.

It is the Crusader Orb purchase that shocks people. We don't see many on the AH yet and the ones we do see are fairly high. This weekend I did see a few listed and decided I could get one item crafted. The AH listed them 4.7-5.5K gold each. So I started out in trade offering 4.5K gold each to save on AH cut. People started lining up to give them to me. A few canceled auctions to sell direct. At the end of the evening I cleared the AH and was siting on 11 Crusader orbs.

In my hunt for that last orb the next morning, the person that had it also had the pattern for my robe. I gave him 450G for making the robe. Later that night I got the bracers crafted too. Full epic gems and enchanted.

When it was all said and done, I bet I spent close to 60k gold on 2 items. I had the gold to spend and didn't have any thing better to spend it on. I feel good knowing its probably a server first and it does let me show off my gold just a little bit. While my robe wasn't all that bad but my bracers were in dire need of an upgrade. Now if I could only buy a weapon.

Accounting Time

I am going to start tracking how I spend my time and what the return on it it. I have used this before to my advantage but didn't think to apply it to my gold making.

I never do anything small. When Blizzard released Recruit A Friend program, I jumed on it big. I picked up a 2nd account and talked 2 friends into joining me. I Grabed another lvl 70 mage (it was BC at the time) and powered up 4 chars at a time to 61. I did the multiboxing thing and at tripple XP, it was so fast that I had to do more.

I did it again and again. It became a game about XP per hour. Before I was done, I had 11 characters on my 2 accounts and my friends had a few on theirs. I learned a few things along the way.

I found it faster to lvl to 10 with quests and head to sfk then it was to level to 8 and head to rfc. The mobs where just so spread out in rfc and at tripple xp you could just do the easy quests.

I found that 12 min is the magic number for instance power leveling (due to the instance lockout of 5 per hour). In the lower level instances it was a race to finish in 12 min. When doing SM armory and cath that would usualy be by skipping the bosses. The extra 1-2 min it took to gain that little xp wasnt worth it, even with skipping the loot. I would pull the boss in cath to kill stuff but ran out before getting sleept.

Other instances it was kill as much as you could in 12 min and reset. If there were good groups of high xp mobs keep going, if slowed down you were better of to reset. One the last set of alts we leveled from 1 to 46 in one long Saturday session.

I am thinking back to that now as I head into the gold business. There are lots of things I can do to make gold. Each has a optimal time that can be spent. Like that 12 min window for leveling. If I can cut my time spent and produce the same thing or produce more in the same time I will make more with less effot or make it faster.

This weekend I spent a lot of time making bags (New market I was checking out). I would check the AH every few hours to see how many of my bags had sold, I would then search for mats and buy them, then craft them, and post. All those steps are needed, I can't cut them out. But I can find faster ways to do it or do more less often.

For searching I could add those to my snatch list of my normal banker. So each time he snatches stuff, all the cloth I need also gets snatched.

I can craft in bulk. I can build a good supply of mats and craft it all at once. Something like that you can be afk and just return to your computer every so often to click the next batch. This weekend I was making snowfall ink in batches of 400. I could watch tv and every 2nd or 3rd set of comercials I would start it on the next batch.

I can post in bulk. I already have one alt that manages most of my listings. Now that I plan on batching the crafting, I can forward it to my banker. If I set it up in my mod correctly, it will just post like any other item.

So when it is all said and done I have cut my time back to just the craft time. The other steps were things I was already doing. Now if I can find more things to craft I will be making more gold and diversifying where my gold is.