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.

Farewell

This is a post that I should have written a long time ago.  I wish to thank everyone for the support I got while I ran this blog and worked on KTQ.  In the end I just faded away without saying good bye.  Leaving Warcraft is never an easy thing to do and so many people return to the game after a short while.  I know saying good bye now is a little late and the people that are men't to hear it will not see it.

So I guess I am telling you good bye.  I am not sure how you found me but I am no longer playing Warcraft.  I hope you still find value in the information contained here.  But the truth is that this info is very old and I am sure that many of these tricks do not apply any more.  It is very possible that the ideas behind them still work.  There is often value in knowing what worked in the past because it can give new insight in new markets as they change.

My Auction House Banker is now Kevmar on Warcraft

I started taking a serious look at making gold in Warcraft several months ago. I rediscovered a few blogs that I knew about before. I took a much closer look at those sites and started to make more gold. I got more involved and found myself teaching other what I had learned. I turned to my own blog to do that.

That is how My Auction House Banker got started. One thing that separated me from other bloggers and helped me build connections with others is how I will dive into code for solutions. My KTQ mod was a big hit and it saved a ton of people a lot of time. Now I am looking to expand my topic area a little bit and bring more code solutions to my readers.

So I have moved the blog to a webserver and taking this opprotunity to rebrand it. The new home is www.ithinkincode.com/warcraft and is now called Kevmar on Warcraft. All of my old content was moved over and is ready for you. Gold will come to you when you are doing the right thing.

Update: This site is no longer active. I have moved onto other projects and have let the domain ithinkincode.com expire.

Patch 3.3 getting close

We are getting close to that point where we need to start watching for the next patch. Here are some important details to keep in mind when trying to guess when the patch will arrive.

Battle.net account merger is required next week. Support will be flooded with people that don't understand why they cannot log in. The smart thing to do would to be wait for that to settle. The patch will not be next week.

2 week notice for when the 310 achievement mounts will go away. This needs to happen this next patch. With the next tier of content, this will be that much easier to get. The ideal time to remove this is during the 3.3 patch. They did say they would tell us 2 weeks before the change and I did not hear them announce that yet.

Activity on PTR. There is a lot of activity on the PTR at the moment. Play testing the encounter like they did for ulduar. They recently had a developer event on the ptr where players can join the new LFG tool and play with a blue. This type of activity indicates major features are done and they are doing bug resolution passes. This is why I think the patch is getting close.

Major holiday is getting close. They will not release the path the week of the holiday. In the event that something needs to get immediately fixed, they do not want the holiday in the way. It will either be a week before the holiday or 1-2 weeks after. If they wait until after, they get a good deal of ptr test data from the people on break. This fleshes out any uncovered bugs and gives them a week for a dev/test cycle.

Historic release dates point to the first week in December. If you look back at patches going live, you will see that the first week in December has been a popular one. Part of that could be the position of Thanksgiving in the week before. Looking at the time between patches would indicate we would not see this patch in November. Does not make it impossible, but its way to close to the releases behind it.

Arena season for the last 3 seasons were around 17-18 weeks. They tend to release a patch just before the end of the season (1-3 weeks). That gives them a bit of time to uncover any balance issues in arenas before the next season starts. This season started Sept 1 and a patch early Dec would put that 13 weeks into the season. 4 weeks before the end of the season is pushing it. They may cut a week off of the season or release the patch mid Dec is this is any kind of indicator.

Before I started looking at all these details, my gut was saying to keep an eye for the patch as early as one week before thanksgiving. Now that I looked into it a bit more, I am favoring early December. Looking at the 8th from everything else I looked at.

How close do you think it is?

My first pet

It was such a long time ago, but I still remember my first pet. I was a fairly young priest at the time. New to the game and struggled to save every silver. I remember looking at the snake pets in org when I would visit my trainer.

One time I chatted with the snake vendor looking over the pets he offered, I actually had 70 silver. I was a little excited at the idea of having a pet. For 50 silver it had to be good. My mind was filled with visions of my snake attacking my foe. It would be such a great thing for the weak class that I was playing.

So I forked over the 50 silver that I saved so hard for. I got the pet out and was kind of hoping it would be a bit bigger. But as long as it did sick damage to the mobs it would be worth it. I headed back out into the wild to check out what my new helper would do.

The stupid thing just stood there. No attack command, so way to control him, and he would still just stand there as I was attacked. It was such a worthless pet. It didn't actually do anything. When I went to get my silver back, the snake guy wanted to rip me off. So I kept the snake.

Not only was this thing not helping me, he actually got in the way of my healing. Sometimes when I would go to click on my self or a party member to heal him, I would get the snake instead. I would try to heal over and over and it would never go off because I had the stupid pet selected.

It also took up a whole slot in my bag. I eventually just tossed him away because I needed the room for something important like a pair of grey leather boots off of a ghost in SM graveyard. That was the last time I ever paid for a pet. No way was I ever going to make that mistake again.

Restructuring

I am working on rebuilding this into a website. Picking out domain names, crafting a new look, setting up a web server, and thinking up new content. I have several mods or programs I want to focus on a bit more and need a home for them. Not all of them are related to making gold. I have one big idea that is related to making gold and it will need a better home than a post on my blog. (more on that later).

I have been thinking about these things and have let them distract me from the blog. That happens from time to time.

Some things in progress

I have a hand full of things I am working on. I am manipulating the AH in a few ways that's too soon to talk about yet. Just put in place some revisions to our loot system. Making updates to the KevTool NoobDetector.

I have been running my KevTool NoobDetector for a long time now and got to thinking about other things I can do with it. What if it had a feature to give you a report on the raid you are in? You get into a group or raid and have it do a raid check. It reports back how the group averages and possibly points out the top 5 noobs for you to watch.

My loot system changes were just an increase in weekly decay and to add a minimum decay amount. People raiding normally will not feel much of an impact. People that miss raids will feel it more. Also adding an attendance tracking component to it. Already have that written, but need 6 raids worth of data to make it accurate.

I am also cutting back my auction house time as much as I can. Trying for no camping in a few markets. I also don't have many idea to post about while I work out some details on a few other things. I hate to spoil any of my ideas by talking about them here to my competition.

DE Patch Details

I think I'm slacking on keeping up with my patch notes. A detail that almost slipped by about the group loot disenchant option.

You have to have an enchanter in the group for it to be available. And he as to be of level to DE the item. It is just a way to accommodate the people doing cross server groups that would normally trade all the DE items at the end but can't because of other restrictions.

Also while the need option restricts what items you can need, greed does not have that restriction. So if the armor class of the item is not one you can need on, greeding is still an option.