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.

Milling Macro

I use a milling macro to mill my herbs. The on I use only included the northrend herbs, but I saw where sarlalian posted this as a comment a while back. It includes few more.

/cast Milling
/use Lichbloom
/use Felweed
/use Deadnettle
/use Adder's Tongue
/use Tiger Lily
/use Ragveil
/use Liferoot
/use Kingsblood
/use Wild Steelbloom
/use Dreaming Glory
/use Goldclover
/use Icethorn
/use Mana Thistle

Skillet over buying ink/parchment

Sometimes Skillet will not refresh the buy list when you visit a vendor. So it will re buy all the same mats it picked up the first time. Most of the time it is stuff you need, but you still have to manage it in your inventory.

If you mouse over the vendor buy button, it will pop up with the items it will buy. You should have a good idea if its close or way off. If you just purchased all but 10% of your items and you have to make a second trip. Pay close attention to that tool tip. If the full mat list is still there, it will buy the stuff you already got. It will do it in the same order as it did before.

So if you run out of gold, bag space, or what ever else and it does not finish. Take a second look at that tool tip for the next purchase.

Here is what I do to refresh it. Open up the skillet shopping list then mouse over it. If that window is open then the tool tip will refresh for me and the purchase will be correct.

Keyword: Bulk2Mail

Bulk2Mail is actualy BulkMail2. I was just calling it the wrong thing for about a month. I don't know why I thought that was the name. That is an interesting way to mess it up. I knew I gave some details on this before but I'll take a moment to give the hilights.

The main reason I use this mod is that it allows me to auto mail stuff to alts. It lets you configure types of items to send to a character. You can either do item types like cloth/ore/enchant mats or set items like netherweave cloth. When you visit the mailbox, it will check your bags for stuff to send. One button allows you to just send it all. No mater how many items you have or how many targets you have, it is very quick.

This is great if you use one character to buy or snatch everything and send it off to various alts to craft it. You can even put the finished items into it so it gets sent to your main AH character.

So Bulk2Mail is the wrong name for it. Here is a link to get it downloaded: BulkMail2

KevTool NoobDetector now on curse

I just moved KTND to curse. Curse gives me better statistics on how often it gets downloaded. It had a few small changed that the previous download did not have. Thunderfury is now in the word list. I also fixed a bug where it would report an extra time on some other player. And I changed the color of the text to yellow.

I am about to rework the word list. If you have any suggested word to add that are work safe, feel free to leave them in a comment. I am reviewing my original list and taking out stuff that is just to common. "lol" for example. I use that enough that it was inflating my noob percent so it has to go.

I did change the way noob counts are recorded. Before it just recorded if once if anything in the message was noob. Now it counts how many unique items there is in the list. So someone that is spewing garbage gets a much larger noob score.

My logic could be flawed, but here is how I calculate the noob percent. I take all messages and subtract all CAPSLOCK and repeating messages to get my valid messages count. I then divide my noob count by the valid messages and that's the result. If the valid messages are 0 I do something different. So people that spam noob in CAPSLOCK over and over will greatly inflate the noob score.

Will the good sellers please stand up?

I hate to micro manage things. If I can think up a process or method to do something for me, I will do it. I removed myself from the details of my glyphs a while ago. I have configured 2 groups for posting glyphs. A single and a double ink group so I can manage the threshold differently. When I have to think about my costs then I just lump them all into the 2 ink + 50 silver group. That's simple.

I have QA to post everything at whatever price it wants to. I have KTQ to craft how ever much of anything it wants. I have auctioneer snatch to buy as many herbs as it wants. The only time I have to think is when I decide what alt gets what glyph. I know I could automate that too but I recently decided to make that a little more fluid.

My previous method was the light colored ones go to one alt, the red and pink to another, and everything else stays on the crafter. Its click by colors. Not much thinking but that's how I did it. I am looking to get out of the camper game and into the undercutting game, but while I am still camping I wanted to move my most profitable glyphs to a new alt with out much work.

I could mouse over every one to see the tooltip but I want to do something simpler. That's where my mod gets to save me yet again. I let it craft the better ones first and then move those to that alt. Then I return and craft everything else. I have 2 types of glyphs to move.

1) 10G or more glyphs. The glyphs with the high markup. Anything over 10G gets crafted first. All of those get moved over to that alt. I can adjust this value to give him more or less of my market. This sell with a huge profit so I want to stay on top of them

2) The sell-outs. The glyphs that just sell like mad. After my 2nd craft session, I move every new stack that has 10 or more glyphs to that alt. These move in high volume so I want to stay on top of them.

After a few nights of this the good glyphs all end up on that new alt. There are 2 advantages of this. First is the new name. All my other guys are on everyone else's friend lists. That is the camping game. This only works so long but it can catch them off guard. The other is all my best selling and high profit glyphs are on one char. I can work those glyphs harder and its OK if I let the others slide a little bit. I still keep coverage of them all, but the new guy will never miss a posting time.

Now if I have 5 min to slip in and post, I hit this one char and he took care of all the glyphs that matter. It is also more exciting to check his mailbox. The gold just flows in.

I was able to take the process of crafting glyphs with my KTQ mod and by playing with the threshold, I saved myself a ton of micro managing. I know eventually that char will get bloated with glyphs. But this process is simple enough that I can move everything off of him back to the other guys and start the process over the next day.

I spend more time camping the glyphs that make me the most gold but also have the ability to cover the rest of the market.

KTQ: Kev Tool Queue Tips

Like any command line mod, you can put commands in macros.

I have a group in place for gems. Several people manage the different colors differently. I would use a macro like this:

/ktq queue 5 solid sky saphire
/ktq queue 2 forest emerald
/ktq queue 3 monarch topaz
/ktq queue 6 scarlet ruby

Now looking at this, you can do the same thing for other professions.
/ktq queue 20 netherweave bag
/ktq queue 5 frostweave bag


Another feature it provides is adding bonus items for those that sell out. Its a simple feature and here is another way to do that.

/ktq queue 3 glyphs
/ktq queue 14 glyphs

It will queue up for items that you have less then 3 of and then it will do the same for a stack of 14. So the result is if something sells out, it will queue up 17 of them. If you have 1 it will queue up 15 for you.

Featured Mod: Kev Tool Queue Features

The main feature of this mod is that it quickly queues up lots of items in a generic way for you to craft with skillet.

So the main command is "/KTQ QUEUE [NUMBER] [KEYWORD]"

So any item that partially matches that keyword will be added to the queue. I did start with 3 groups of items but later opened it up to any keyword search. The build in groups are GLYPHS, EPICGEMS, RAREGEMS. I know its silly to have a group called glyphs when the work glyph will work as a keyword and get them all. I already had that group in place before the keyword thing so I left it.

Because its a keyword match, it does a live check of your craft list. If you don't know it, it does not try to queue it. If blizzard adds something new, this should still work and pick up the new thing.

I do have other features built in to target the different ways people make glyphs. It can be set up to craft extra items when you run out. If you have 0 in stock, it can add 2 extra to the queue. It has a threshold feature that will allow it to check your recent Auctioneer scan and only craft items you find to be profitable. This works best with glyphs and gems where the mats for everything is basically a set cost.

It will also skip singles if you want. When I was making 14 at a time by hand, I would often just skip of the ones I needed to craft only one of. I craft them all now that its automated but it was an easy feature to add.

This should get you up to speed on what it can do. I'll give you power users some advanced tips later.

Featured Mod: Kev Tool Queue

If you have tried to recreate some of the processes I do in my glyph factory I am sure you have ran into some of the same issues that I have. Building my queue of glyphs to make was one of the most repetitive and time consuming parts of the system. This mod made that step instant for me.

Kev Tool Queue (KTQ) will auto queue items that match a keyword into skillet. You tell it how many you want to have and it will check with altaholic to see how many you already have. It will then only craft the ones you need. It also has optional support for auctioneer to check prices and have it skip any item listed too low. You can use any keyword, but it has a few built in.

The beauty of this mod is its simplicity. It does have a few simple features that give it a lot of power. Here is a quick sample of the commands. I will be covering more features over the next few days and show you how to get more out of it.

Open up your tradeskill window in skillet and for inscription type this command:
/KTQ QUEUE 2 GLYPH

So the syntax is like this:
/KTQ QUEUE [number to queue] [keywork to match]

Here is a download link: KevToolQueue (Altaholic and Skillet are required, so is auctioneer if you use the threshold)
/KTQ HELP for more info

Give me a few days to get several posts up about it. They should answer most of the questions you will have. Feel free to play with it.

UPDATE3: Curse has approved it so I took down the direct link.

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

Featured Mod: KevTool NoobDetector

This mod watches all your chat channels and tracks stupid things people say. You can shift click the name to see a percentage that will tell how much of a noob they are. The word list is a work in prorgess and the formula could use some work but it is tracking and reporting noobness.

Install this mod and it will track in the background. Let it gather some data and later shift click the names in chat. It watches key words, use of caps, and repeating the same thing over and over. I spent some time in the barrens while testing it and picked up a lot of key phrases to use. And yes, I do know that it will report more then 100% noob. Watch out for those guys.

Here is a direct link to download my initial release: KevTool NoobDetector

This mod was inspired by this post over at the Greedy Goblin and is a shameless attempt to drive trafic to my site. It has nothing to do with working the auction house or making gold. But have fun with it. Once I get a good set of sample data (more than today) I will see if I can make it more accurate.

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.

The Power of Quick Auctions 2

This is the mod that makes you a rock star at posting glyphs. I talked about QA before, but a update has been released for it a while ago. It has moved from the command line to a gui to manage your items.

You do have to make a group for your glyphs and add them all to it. I did not like that idea at first but the author made it easy to add everything at once. When you first start out put everything in the same group. More experienced glyphers will create a group for single and double ink glyphs and manage the threshold differently.

One thing that QA2 does better then QA is posting faster. It had a multi threaded posting ability that allow it to post several auctions at the same time. The speed is very fast. If you leave it a good deal of bag space, it is even faster. I think it uses all your empty bag slots to split different stacks at the same time now.

The power behind this mod is how easily it lets you post all your glyphs at once. You run up to the AH and click the post button. It does a quick scan of the glyphs on the AH then it post yours faster than any other mod I know. If your competition is using anything else or doing it by hand, they will not be able to keep up with you.

Do not overlook its ability to cancel auctions you are undercut on too. If you keep your inventory on the AH, this is a life saver. It will check each glyph for you to see if its had been undercut. If it is undercut and it can post a lower priced one, it will auto cancel the auction for you. If someone undercut lower then your min price, it will just leave it there. and if you are the only person up, it will cancel it so you can repost at a high price.

This is a powerful weapon that in one person hand can easily give them the market. At the same time, if too many people use it too aggressive the market will crash by the constant undercutting. My next post I will give info about the weaknesses of QA.

bulk2mail trick

I use this mod called bulk2mail. It lets me set up send lists so that all cloth gets sent to my tailor and all leather gets sent to my leatherworker. It is very slick. It pulls those items from your bags for you.

I have a large snatch list. I could easily buy a fewhundred items at once. Those purchases fill my mailbox and over flow my bag. With builk2mail, you can send and receive at the same time. I start to open all of the mail (with potal) and as stuff is flowing in, I flip over to the send and buil2mail already has the first message ready to go. I click send and off it goes while the mailbox is still getting cleared out. If I flip back from the inbox to the send box, it will have the current items ready to go again.

I started sending slower and it feels faster. I flip over to send, but I pause for 10-20 sec before I click the send button. When that stuff sends, it rechecks inventory and build a new message with the stuff that there now (the things that showed up in that 10-20 sec pause). It realy feel very slick now that I am using it.

Macros

I have started to use a lot of simple macros to help me manage my glyphs. Here are my macros as they are on my action bar.

1) Mill
2) Move glyphs to bank (from bags)
3) Move glyphs to bag (from bank)
4) Sort bags
5) Cancel auctions 12 hours or shorter
6) Craft next item
7) Continue QA posting ( a workaround for the 0/0 bug)
8) Open skillet (my craft window)
9) Empty Mailbox (and refresh)
10) Reload wow
11) Move herbs to bag


Milling
That is a common macro that most sribes use (or some other smart milling addon). Just click it and it will mill the herbs in your bag one time. In the macro you list the herbs for it to look at.

/cast Milling
/use adder's tongue
/use icethorn
/use lichbloom

Move glyphs from bags to bank
I use bank stack to manage my bags and made a macro for my groups. "glyphs" are my first 4 char bags and "bglyphs" are my first 5 bank bags. All of those are inscription bags.

/fill glyphs bglyphs

Move glyphs from bank to bags
Just lis the other one but reversed.

/fill bglyphs glyphs

Sort
That same mod quickly sorts your inventory. I like it looking sharp. I click this sort macro all the time. After posting, before crafting, after crafting, and after I get the mail.

/sort bags

Cancel auctions 12 hours or shorter
I use this any time I don't think I will make the next posting time or if I think it will expire before I post again. This macro checks very listed auction (not just glyphs to watch it) and if its is going to expire within 12 hours it will cancel it. I run that before I do my smart undercut cancel.

/script local o="owner" p=GetNumAuctionItems(o) i=p while (i>0) do local _,_,c,_,_,_,_,_,_,b,_,_=GetAuctionItemInfo(o,i) t=GetAuctionItemTimeLeft(o,i) if((c>0)and(b==0)and(t<4))then CancelAuction(i) end i=i-1 end

Craft Next Item
I put this into a button so I could keybind it instead of click with the mouse every time. Skillet lets you queue thins up but you still have to click the button to craft. Now you can put it a macro like this one.

/click SkilletStartQueueButton

Continue QA posting
I have this strange bug that I cannot fix where it posts 1/2 the auctions and calls it quits. It looks like it posted them but it actualy skips every other one. Each time I repost it, the count is in half. This continues the posting without it doing a rescan of the AH first. I think this is the common 0/0 bug. Sometimes it says 0/0 and others it says complete.

/script QA:PostItems()

Open Skillet
Not a macro as much as where I put this button. Next to all the other important ones. Mount is another button on that bar.

Empty Mailbox
I use portal to manage my mail box. This macro refreshes the window and takes all the items using that mod. I have to click it twice if it does refresh.

/script CheckInbox(1)
/click PostalOpenAllButton

Reload
If you type /reload it resets your ui and it refreshes the mailbox faster then waiting on it. I made it a macro because I was typeing it so much

/reload

Move herbs to bag
Just like with my glyphs, I have one set up for herbs from the guild bank. I edit it when needed if the herbs are in different tabs. I use this during my mass milling sessions.

/fill guild4 bags

The only other thing that I click on is sprint. My scribe is a rogue and I use that sprint often.

Bank Stack

I love this simple mod. It lets me move and sort my glyphs very quickly.

I create 2 custom groups
glyphs 1,2,3,4
bglyphs 5,6,7,8,9

The first one is the 4 inscription bags on my character and the other is the 5 inscription bags in my bank. To move all my glyphs to the bank I type this command:

/fill glyphs bglyphs

And to move them back just swap the the names:

/fill bglyphs glyphs

Once I have that working, I create a macro for both of them and put the buttons in my action bar.

Then to sort everything:

/sort

It makes glyph management very smooth. When it sorts glyphs, it does it by class/color. Very clean looking.

Quick Auction

Quick Auctions puts the automation into posting glyphs. After you install, you will want to run these commands:

/qa toggle glyphs
/qa fallback 72g13s54c glyphs
/qa threshold 4g57s9c glyphs
/qa cap 2 glyphs
/qa undercut 1s76c glyphs

And make sure /qa smartcut is off. It will round down your undercuts to the nearest gold.

Fill your bags with every glyph you can fit in there. At the AH on the auctions tab is a button at the top to post with. It will prescan the ah then post your glyphs.

The fallback price is the price it will use if nobody has anything listed. It's ok to set it high. When people need a glyph, they need a glyph. You will sell more then you think you should at that price.

The threshold is the lowest you want to post an auction for. Set it above your cost of mats and you will make a profit on every glyph that sells. Set it just under a solid gold amount. It is common that people will set limits at nice even numbers.

The cap is how many you are willing to post at a time. If you have been undercut, it will post 2 more. If you have 2 at the lowest price it will not repost anymore. 3 is also a good number. I find that doing more makes the other people relist more often.

The undercut is the undercut value. I like to use odd looking offsets, Keep them small. If you do large undercuts and repost often, then all you will do is crash the prices. Unless you are driving your competition out, I would keep them small.

This mod will also allow you to cancel auctions that have undercut you. With glyphs its dirt cheap to post them so its possible to stop them and repost with little cost. This is very common for people to do. I have recently started just reposting more glyphs at the lower price and leaving the old glyphs up.