Thursday 18 April 2013

The end is near....

For some people on my real id will have noticed i have not been playing WoW alot lately, which mean's no new ideas for posts on this thing.
I have how ever been playing D3 alot and quite enjoying it. lvl 60 barb(thanks to the help of ZH) with paragon lvl 14!

Been gearing it up pushing it's limits... dead alot... but having fun none the less. Many people have looked at D3 as a failure to succeed a good series of games but i on the other hand believe it to be a good addition. the story of D3 could have been somewhat better but it's good.

The meat of this post was meant to be me saying, i may be taking a extended break from WoW for a while until i can find something in the game that makes me happy to enjoy it. Addon's will still be updated as much as i can. but dont expect any drastic changes.

Wow just had nothing to keep me intersted.. dailies were just boring and i got nothing out of it. raiding, i gave up back in cata and LFR just isnt the same. The new death system in it puts emphasis on people wiping to get it done and people generally being bad.

I might repost auctions every now and then on WoW but other then that, the game is mostly dead to me.

I will be doing the D3 AH as i go both GAH and RMAH not too sure if people would be interested in that. But as most people will say, information and guides to the D3 AH shouldnt be posted because we are all against each other on one giant AH.

The thing is Diablo AH prices are all about the stats. so you arent directly competing with friends when selling, but you are competing when buying and flipping, so if i was to tell you the stats to look for on a piece of gear we would be against each other looking for the cheapest of that item.

Which makes me not want to share information.. but we will see how that goes.

for now...
Cheer's Sw

Wednesday 10 April 2013

The 15 Minute Rush - Making Profits From Server Shutdown


The Intro

Just tonight, the servers went down which gave me a good idea for a quick write up, which was the 15 min bid war every time servers go down. It gives me a great feeling/rush to know that i got the last bid on something and can/will make profit on it when i log in.

For me servers go down Tuesday night, come up Wednesday morning, so its a good time to start bidding.

The method

The basics of this is, the moment the 15 min warning comes up(or maybe at the 10 min warning for less wasted time), you run the AH and look out for items that could be bid on that will make profit from either reselling ,vendor or if you are good enough you can calculate profits of what you can make with the item I.e vendor a crafted item for more profit or crafting an item to sell you could in theory also DE the items for dust.

The Addons

This can be done quicker with addons, but most addons don't have an up to date scan of the AH at the time that it goes down. So i prefer to do this manually also, it gives me a better feeling of winning an item.

There are some addons that are a must have when doing this, well more like. Any addon that can provide a vendor amount on the tool tip will suffice, I.E Auctionator and TradeSkillMaster.

The execution



  1. Rarity settings: This setting helps alot when deciding between junk or treasure, most grey items are worthless so you don't wanna be buying those unless for vendor, but if you have low gold supplies bidding on low profit items isn't recommended if your money can be tied up somewhere else. A general good idea is to just search for white items(common) or higher.
  2. Specific areas: These are specific areas that you are looking for, Normally i would search into these and check the items in there before doing a full view of the AH. But generally i just search the whole AH and go through one by one.
  3. Click search: Pretty self explanatory.
  4. Sort by: Generally if you are bidding on items, you want the lowest bid to be displayed first, so clicking on this little, thing? not sure what to call it, Header bar or what ever. until the items on the AH are going from lowest bid to highest bid.


Generally i will search through the ah for 15 mins. Get outbid switch over the bids page and rebid if worth it(This is where it gets exciting). While searching through the AH i will generally mouse over items on the right so i get there tool tip and scroll mouse wheel while looking at both bid price and vendor price and thinking in my head what i can resell it for or do with it.

Look out for the tricky items that have a low bid, but normal Buy price, those are good items to buy for resale.

And hopefully by the end of the 15 mins, you have had a mad rush of bidding/getting outbid and your bids page will look like this



And in the morning your mailbox will look like this:



Not as many was won as i would like, alot of outbids and some still ending.

The Conclusion

In the end, the profits were good, but i could have done better and looked for items only ending soon(inb4 i write an addon to do this). that way the profit right now would be bigger

The abyss crystal i shattered into 9 infinite dust,Which gave a good profit.

I DE'd the vest, and marked everything at there min buyout right now if its lower then market.


Cheers Sw

Saturday 6 April 2013

Modifying Auctionator for stack switching(Addon Code diving required)

Heya!

Due to how many people have wanted a modified Auctionator code and i'm not sure on the ability for me to release the addon with the modification without being in trouble from Zirco the original author of the Auctionator.(I have messaged them asking them but yet no reply)

What are we doing?

Hopefully learning something atleast. But at the most you will be adding a button to Auctionators sell interface which in turn will swap Stack size with Amount of auctions. So if you had 20 stacks of 1 hitting the button will make it say 1 stack of 20 instead and then clicking Create auction will proceed to post that 1 stack.


Requirements

  • Auctionator - Well this one is obvious
  • ScitE or Notepadd++ - Although you could use any text editor, i prefer these 2 due to the line numbers which will be needed.
  • Me - Could be replaced by someone else with knowledge.

DISCLAIMER:BACK UP YOUR WTF AND ADDONS FOLDER BEFORE ATTEMPTING INCASE YOU ACCIDENTALLY MAKE WOW CRY WITH YOUR BAD EDITTING I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANYTHING YOU DO INSIDE OF YOUR WOW FOLDER

Let's do it?

Ok, to start you will need to open your choice of editing program i will be using ScitE for this but you can follow along with anything(including notepad but enjoy counting lines).

First thing is to go to your addon folder mine is located at "C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns" Then go to Auctionator folder and you want to open Auctionator.XML and Auctionator.LUA file.


What are these files?

The LUA (Pronounced Loo Ah)file is the main code for an addon, this is where most of the magic happens for addons  Lua is a pretty simple programming language that can be used for multiple things, WoW uses it as a language to interpret into WoW.

The XML(Extensible Markup Language) file contains the UI elements for Auctionator. Simple to use, complex to write.

We will add the button into the XML file and the commands the button does in LUA.

The Code

Open up the XML file and scroll down to line 697(this is where having line numbers comes into play) and add the code: http://pastebin.com/LAgszsaJ


Let's break it down.

<Button name="Atr_SwitchSizeButton" inherits="UIPanelButtonTemplate" text="Switch Sizes" disabled="false">

This line Creates a button called "Atr_SwitchSizeButton" which can be referenced inside of the LUA file at a later date.
Inherits tells the button to get the same layout data from blizzard own "UIPanelButtonTemplate" which is a basic button that has the red background.
Text is the text to display on the button.
Disabled=true will mean the button is able to be clicked, Disabled = false will make the button grayed out.


<Size><AbsDimension x="150" y="20"/> </Size>

<Size> refrences the size of the button object it can be changed directly by <size x="150" y="20"/> but most developers tend to use absDimension which if i remember right stand's for Absolute Dimension.
<AbsDimension> refrencs the absolute dimension of the object, x being width and y being height of the button.
</Size> just closes the object reference. When programming its easy to forget to close a function or object

<Anchors><Anchor point="TOPLEFT"><Offset><AbsDimension x="25" y="-240"/></Offset></Anchor></Anchors>

ahh anchors, Anchors define the core placement of objects on the screen in wow the place they reference is inside of its parent frame. Setting an anchor point to "TOPLEFT" means that by default without positioning the button will sit in the "TOPLEFT" of the Auction house frame.

<Offset> is how much to offset from the Anchor point that was previously stated. x="25" means it moves 25 pixels across and y="-240" will move the button down from the anchor point the reason we use -240 is due to that if we did a straight 240 it will move up instead of down, also if we did -25 it would move in the opposite direction.

<Scripts>
<OnClick>
Atr_SwitchSizeButton_OnClick();
</OnClick>
</Scripts>

<Scripts></Scripts> inside of these lines is where we reference what each command the object can recieve will do. The basic button command <OnClick> is what will happen when someone clicks the button. In our tutorial here we see it references a Function Atr_SwitchSizeButton_OnClick(); which we will talk about when we get into LUA, but for now anything between <OnClick> and </OnClick> can be LUA or should be. For our tutorial you could test this out by replacing the function with "print("Hello, i am running")".

The other parts of the XML section only close objects/frames, typically anything with a preceding "/" will be a closing argument. </End of xml section> :P

Lua time!

Ok, now comes the coding of what the button does.
Open up your Auctionator.lua file and scroll down the very bottom and add this code: http://pastebin.com/EJH8uA9D
You may notice my screen shot has 1 extra line then your code will that is because the "--print(NumOf,StackSize)" was just there to test out if the code was working =]

Breaking it down!

function Atr_SwitchSizeButton_OnClick()

This is a function in lua, basically a function is a block of code that can be run my referencing its name anywhere in the existing addon. You may remember this function from the previous XML section on the <OnClick> command of the button. here is where will be issuing what pressing the button should do.
Basically a function will have 3 constant things, the command "function" which tells that the following is a function. "Name" which is the name we give to the function which in our case is "Atr_SwitchSizeButton_OnClick()" having a good name that describes what the function does is normally good to do. and finally "End" which tells when the function should end, as you can see in our code that is after we switch the numbers.

local NumOf = Atr_Batch_NumAuctions:GetNumber()
local StackSize = Atr_Batch_Stacksize:GetNumber()

These 2 lines are variables. Variables hold different type of data that can be used just by referencing the variable name. These variables reference "Atr_Batch_NumAuctions:GetNumber()" and "Atr_Batch_Stacksize:GetNumber()" which basically references different text boxes inside of our XML we edited. "Atr_Batch_Stacksize" is the frame to reference and ":GetNumber()" is the command to run on the frame. GetNumber() will literally do as it say's, get the number for the frame.

Atr_Batch_NumAuctions:SetNumber(StackSize)
Atr_Batch_Stacksize:SetNumber(NumOf)

As we just previously saw Atr_Batch_NumAuctions and Atr_Batch_Stacksize are frame name's and what follows is the command to run on that frame which we currently are doing is ":SetNumber(StackSize)" which i am sure if you have gotten this far you know what it does.
Inside the brackets are what we are going to set the Frame to which is our variables previously created.

As you can see what we basically did was add each frames contents into a variable then added the opposite frames variable into each other which in turn switches the stack sizes and amount.

end

This just tells us that we want to end the function here. if we don't end a function WoW will throw a <EOF> error, which stands for End Of File which typically happens when WoW cant find the end of a file.

</End>

Now all you have to do is Save both those files and /reload in game or log on and make sure you have no errors!

I hope this was helpful and in the future if you wish to see more tutorials for addons like this please leave a comment!

If you need any further help please feel free to drop me a message on twitter @shiftywarloc.

For now...

Cheers Sw

Monday 1 April 2013

Adventures as a lowbie gold maker Day 6(boring post, don't read)

Heya!

Day 6 of writing this and to keep people that interested, well.. interested i thought id post my results over the last few day's since we last talked.

I'm going to break down how much i made into the method of what i used to make those as mentioned from a previous post.

Low level gem prospecting: 
Bought a bunch of tin ore and prospected about half of it and came out with around 2500g across 2 days
Cooking Savory deviate delights:
It's hard to find these at a low price, most people seem to be farming them to make it so they think they can push prices down. so only around 100g in sales
Xmog flipping
Only deal in plate so i have not had much sales with these only around 1000g
Mop Green flipping
Selling my green's for about 500g each they are very random on when they sell,  but they do sell. past 2 days about 4000g
Mop Blue Flipping
only 2 ghost shard weapons for about 800g each, so 1600g there
General Item Flipping
0g, havnt had much luck selling anything like this lately
Buying MoP epics and getting them DE'd and then re-selling the material
900g, they sell fast but the supply isnt that fast/cheap so it's a bit of work to find the right ones.

Roughly 10k give or take a few thousand from memory loss

While i write this im actually prospecting more gem's, im currently at the rate where i buy any tin ore below 1g and i have TSM dealfinding lists set up along with the TSM app to help along the way. If you don't know how to set up the TSM app, just go to my previous post and read!

It's good to be constantly buying item's you use, Ever hit that dry spot where everything is too expensive to craft? if you constantly buy at your set prices then your stock should never dip too low. it's a balance between price and quantity.



For now...

Cheers Sw