Thursday, March 3, 2011

Needing help with a few things


Hey all this is an odd Friday entry, but there's a number of random annoyances that I'm dealing with and was hoping to get some input over the weekend. I'm sure that I'm not the only person that has these issues so this can be useful for a handful of others. As you'll see they're nothing major, just small problems here and there that add up to one big annoyance.


Solved.
1. I'm having some major issues with long load times when I change toons. It use to take me about 20 seconds at the most to log out and into another one or to just reload my ui. Now it is taking well over a minute. It might not seem like a lot, but when you bounce around different toons as much as I do it adds up fast. Any thoughts on how to fix it would be great.

Keep in mind that I have very few addOns installed aside from the basic AH essentials. In addition to your standard AH set of tools I'm using recount, bagnon, carbonite, DDR (DK rune mod), mySales, auditor, omen, DBM.

Also, is it more likely that it's on my end with my connection or could it just be on blizzard's side?

- General concensus seems to be either A) blame the cataclusm, or B) upgrade to a solid state drive. Thanks to Jim and Snakeoil


Solved
2. First check out this screen shot right quick.



Notice the random things colored green? I have no idea what button I hit on accident to cause that, but I'm certain that it's auctioneer. It's always the first so many of listed auctions for any item. Annoying as hell, halp!

- It seems that it's a glitch between Atkis recipe list and auctioneer. Reloading or disable/enable shuffles seems to do the trick. Thanks to Kammler and a Anon.

Solved
3. I'm needing globe of water to craft the yeti pets but there's never any on the AH, not even at a crazy mark up. I'm looking for suggestions on where to farm them, with or without fishing. I've been using the suggestion of the wowhead comments and killing steaming fury's in Un'Goro crater but the drops are pretty low as you'd expect.

- General consensus is either eastern plague lands or ungoro crater. Thanks to everyone that replied.


On going important research... for science!
4. What's your favorite color?


Solved
5. How can I get rid of new player tool tips? Are they all that you get now? I'm talking about the ones that say "this attack does a lot of damage!" or "use this damage over time effect at the start of combat to get the full effect of the spell" and that silliness. I already know these things and I want to know how much damage something does in a tool tip aside from just saying "holy crap dude it's a lot!"

- Thanks to prancer and others that mentioned this. Interface, help, beginner tips. Never even thought to look there. /fail

On going
6. Anybody care to give me a quick once over on flasks now that the materials needed have changed? In wrath it was a god awful market to work in with the worst "profits" I've ever seen. I'm wondering if it's worthwhile now so any info would be fantastic.

- So far it seems that only one response was in the positive. Not looking good.

On going
7. I just found out the other day that large brilliant shards are no longer easy mode farmed from strat and that's why the prices have gone way up lately. Does anybody know of an easy-ish way to acquire these? It doesn't seem like DE is an option and the black rock instances are just plain hellish if you haven't done them a million times.

- So far it seems that UBRS is the way to go, but it can be very time consuming if you don't know your way around like me.

On going
8. I need a macro that cancels all of my auctions when I hit it. I used to have one that worked during wrath but now when I hit it, I get an error saying an addOn is preventing it. Well I'm not changing my addOns any time soon, so hopefully there's a different macro out that I can use instead.

- I know there are addOns that cancel what you're undercut on but what I'm wanting is any and all of them, even if I have to mush dah bootonz to sez ja it do are ok in words like makings now! LOUD NOISE!


Solved
9. I've taken to farming up rep from TBC to get the enchanting recipes from the various factions there. I do the heroics and a few on normal but that's when I get the "you've entered too many instances" error. I remember fro ma while ago when I was farming SM back at 70 that it was something like 5 instance resets per hour then you get locked out for a while. So what I'm wanting to know is how many is the limit? How long is the lock out for them? Does this include heroics as well as normals or are they on separate lock out timers?

- Thanks to Prancer again for the detailed answer and thanks to everyone else that confirmed it as correct.


Thanks for stopping by!

26 comments:

  1. Wow, I've been reading your blog for so long, finally a chance to give a little back!

    5. Interface > help > beginner tooltips. Turn that off.

    6. On my server at least, if you can make a good CoD deal with a local farmer, then flasks can be worth making for profits. In my opinion though, there are far better things to spend your herbs on, especially since more and more people will start using the cauldrons in raids. Your primary buyers will actually be the casual guilds, as any serious raiding guild will be using cauldrons. That kind of limits sales a bit.

    7. You can get a decent amount of shards from Blackrock spire if you actually learn the layouts and make yourself a proper route. It takes a little practise though, so I guess it all depends on how long you're actually willing to spend on it.

    9. It is indeed 5 instances per hour. This goes for any and all instances. If you enter 1 raid, 2 heroics and 2 normals within an hour, you'll be locked out of everything. For further annoyance, this is actually account-wide. If you do 5 instances on an alt, you can't enter any on your main either.

    The lock expires when, in the last hour, you've entered less than 5 instances.

    ReplyDelete
  2. arkraven - saurfang EUMarch 3, 2011 at 11:17 PM

    1. wow it self has been stupid slow except at non peak time so i think its server side (i can turn all my addon off and wow is no faster)

    4. blue is my fave coloUr

    8. trade skill master, has a button that cans all your auctions that have been undercut takes a while to set it up with your rules but it basically two button auctioneering, one to post and one to can!

    its still in beta so they update it quite often but is pritty solid

    ReplyDelete
  3. 1)I have had some success in speeding load times by going to my internet connection and repairing/flush dns once in a while. I think some change in Cataclysm patch makes a larger amount of data that gets dumped here or something internet-y like that. Not sure, does suck, repair/flush dns helps is all I know.

    2) The green and red are codes for whether your toon(s) know or can use an item. Green is they can, red is they can't, and yellow is already know it. I see this a lot with the cooking vendor Robbie Flay in SW. Somehow the colors sometimes get stuck and every auction on that line no matter the page, becomes red or green. Reload UI doesn't fix unless you disable Auctioneer, reload, enable Auctioneer and reload.

    3) Sucks huh? Set TUJ reminder and just buy them all when they appear. I have about 200 in my bank.

    4) Blues

    5) Above

    6) Twilight Jasmine is your worst nightmare. It takes 8 of them for one flask. If the issue is procuring the herbs, farming sucks and AH prices are horrible. If the issue is 'will they be profitable?', hit and miss. I make 5k gold on raid day this week, nothing last week, 4k the week before--totally random and server dependent.

    I will say that as herb prices begin to come down some the flask market seems to have become more saturated.

    7) I think its Honored with Qul'Danas that lets you buy the Shatter Void Crystal recipe, which makes Large Brilliants. Otherwise, yeah, set TUJ notifications or get used to farming.

    8) No such macro anymore. I refuse to use TSM so if that works I wouldn't know.

    9) 5 per hour, any mix of heroic and normal.

    Hope that helps!

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  4. TSM has a "cancel all" feature, but it'll only cancel everything with [XXXX] in it's name. E.g., "Cancel all - Glyph" will cancel every auction you have with "Glyph" in its name. Usefully for batch canceling stuff with a common name (flasks, glyphs, gems, PvP armor), not so great for canceling a bunch of random things. You could also use Auctionator, go to the "More" tab and have it check for undercuts. It'll prompt you to cancel anything that's been undercut, all you have to do is spam "yes." But as far as I know, there's no overall "cancel absolutely everything I have in the AH" macro / addon.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks for the great blog, it is one of my favorites, although I sometimes disagree with the amount you stockpile but who cares.

    1. Try to create profiles via the addon "Addon Control Panel". Then you can skip things like DBM, Omen and that kind of clutter.
    Check via the system settings what addon uses up the most memory cause this is likewise causing your issue. There was a fubar plugin in the past but it's broken now which showed you exact numbers for each addon.

    2. No idea, the only items that appear green in my AH are recipes I don't already know. Guess it's Ackis Recipe List doing that, but in your case it's no recipes, so...no idea^^

    3. Since cata Globes of water are dirt cheep and plenty on my AH. I wondered as well where they are all coming from. One guess is maybe Eastern Plaguelands around the lake in the south with the water elementals, but that is just a rough guess.

    4. Black

    5. see Prancer

    6. On my german EU server flasks still seem to be a bad profit region. If you would buy the mats off the AH you pay approx 150g for mats, with flasks hovering at around 50g-99g. So even with a appropriate spec that is not viable.
    The change was that now you need 8 vol life (6 before) and 8 of two herbs (12 before).
    On some flasks producing costs are cheap but on those for example requiring Tw Jasmin I do not understand how ppl can make profits besides having a chinese speaking bot supplier.

    7. See prancer, UBRS

    8. Since every AH interaction now requires a hardware event (meaning "click da button") I am not sure if such a macro still exists. But if it does, you will have to hammer it pretty often to get all your actions cancelled. TSM does sort of work around that. Check out "trading with zoxy", he made some tutorials on that.

    9. see Prancer

    best regards,

    Jinx

    ReplyDelete
  6. Love your column!

    1. I have long load times too and run fewer addons than you. Think it's a Cata thing.

    2. I have the same thing happen on occassion. Not all the time though.

    3. I checked out several spots for this as I needed some essences of water too. The drop rate has been drastically reduced overall but I think the best place is the water area in the western part of Swamp of Sorrows (can pop your mage over there). The drop rate isn't any better but they respawn crazy fast and there is no swimming involved like there is in E. Plaguelands. They are spaced close together and there are a ton of them. I found Un'Goro to be spaced too far apart and much slower respawn rate to be practical. Frostwhisper Gorge in Winterspring would be my 2nd choice. Good Luck!

    4. Green

    5. In the options menu - turn off beginner tooltips

    6. No clue, sorry

    7. I'm having trouble with these too. So many of my best selling enchants use them and never get stuff to DE. Let us know if you find a solution. BTW...Void Shatter is for prismatic shards

    8. No clue...but if you find out and want to share, please do!

    9. 5 an hour

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  7. 1. If you're willing to go the hardware route, I know when I upgraded my harddrive to solid state, my load times plummeted. I couldn't recommend it enough.

    ReplyDelete
  8. 7. IIRC, DM North is still a high level instance? I think a run through there wouldn't take incredibly long, and would net you several shards. Not sure about how many vs. UBRS though.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Just a correction to Kammler's number 7. That is in fact Large PRISMATIC shards Kammler is talking about. Besides UBRS, you can try searching AH blues, usually you can find a few cheap ones to dis a day.

    Improving loading times... Well buy a better computer or buy a SSD drive for WoW only. I used to have WoW in SSD in my old computer and loading times were significantly faster.

    ReplyDelete
  10. 1. Get an SSD-drive, 60 to 120GB depending on how many games/programs you play/use. The loading time with and w/o is tremendous.

    ReplyDelete
  11. 1. I clear my Auctioneer scan data every month or so because it gets ridiculously big after a while (I remember hitting like 200mb of usage on the scan data alone because I didn't know about it). It should be hiding around somewhere in your Interface or WTF folder, don't remember right now and I'm not on a WoW-enabled computer.

    2. I thought it was Auctioneer too but it stopped a little while ago. Maybe one of the updates turned it off? No clue to that one.

    3. I farm Toxic Horrors in Felwood.

    4. Any bright color.

    5. Answered by other comments.

    6. Flasks are actually pretty nice now since everybody's trying to raid (or still struggling in heroics) and selling overpriced flasks is great. I even swapped to flask spec since this is really profitable for me.

    7. I still have like a bajillion of these from Insane grind so I haven't found a need to farm these yet.

    8. I'm using TSM to cancel my stuff, can't help you. Sorry :(

    9. Should still be 5 an hour, regardless of normal/heroic.

    ReplyDelete
  12. @ All
    Holy crap that's a lot of fast responses! Ok I'll go through them all and update the main post accordingly. Thanks a ton to everyone that responded! After I update the main post I'll make a few proper replies to everyone that helped a bunch.

    ReplyDelete
  13. And also, my favorite color is black as well. It perfectly matches my avant gardé pizza sauce stain look that I'm trying to popularize.

    ReplyDelete
  14. It seems a lot of once simple macro's have been borked by Blizz. I did a search and found this: http://wiki.norganna.org/Auctioneer/Saving_Time_With_Macros
    Might as well start with the Auctioneer OP for dealing with all the PITA that Blizz has imposed upon Market Hawks and their favorite tools.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Zeroauctions does my posting and cancelling

    ReplyDelete
  16. I bet you would really like inventorium, it'll help out a lot with the random mats you need to find for the envy pets

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  17. @ Comments on canceling auctiosn
    I use zero auctions to my auction canceling usually like most or TSM. But there's many times where I'll have 100 auctions that expire in 2 hours and I won't be around by then. So what I'm wanting to do is hit a macro, like you used to be able to with glyphs, and cancel every auction I have up and smash a single confirm button.

    Example, it's 2am and I'm about 4 whiskey sours too deep and I don't want my auctions to expire while I'm working up a hang over. I'm too tired and/or lazy to shift click and wait for it to register. I want to hit "TAKE IT DOWN!" and then smash my "YES THAT IS OK" button macro.

    @ Flasks
    It's so weird that there's really that many people farming for free that flasks sell for as low as they do. I mean sure it could be understood for time to time for skill up dumps, but every day and night? That's just sad.

    @ Anon with the wiki link
    Thanks a lot, I'll look that over once my time without sleep isn't measured in days. Good stuff from what I can tell though.

    @ Snake
    Thanks for the tip on DE blues from the AH, I totally forgot to consider that. I fail. This is why blog posts like this are a good thing!

    @ Anon w/ auctioneer data
    I typicalyl flush it all out every 2-3 weeks or so but that only has a real noticeable effect on the momentary lock ups with I get the tool tip when I first log in or go to the AH. It takes up about 10 seconds at worst, so I don't think that's it. Good logical suggestion though.

    @ Solid state drives
    Got a brand name to recommend? I typically go with western digital when I get a new drive, but I know very little about SSD's other than they're wicked awesome.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Sheesh, what's a girl have to do to get her guy to listen?

    I told you Cata was the issue with our load times.

    Globes of water? Recall what my answer to that was and then your response to me?

    My fav color(s) Black & blues, but you already know that. (First reader to make a crack about bruises gets a thousand lashes with a cactus dipped in rock salt!) =)

    As for all the issues with AH addons...I'll leave that to all you "Pros" as I'm stubborn and refuse to use them to make the WoW gold.
    O.O Think I just shocked all your readers.

    No this isn't an "I told you so" post. I'll save the I told you so for when you get home!
    *evil grin*

    <3
    Fickle Little Riddle

    ReplyDelete
  19. TSM has Cancel all option. Great Addon. Use to find Crafting mats on the AH real easy also. Peace.

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  20. Just wanted to reiterate.
    TSM has a CANCEL ALL BUTTON that will cancel ALL auctions not just undercut auctions!! JEEZE.

    And marshmellows are ghost shit. That is all, thank you very much.

    ReplyDelete
  21. There is an addon called "Cancelator" that also lets you cancel your all of your auctions, and gives you a couple of options to limit it to only auctions with short/medium/long times. I use it all the time, just have to mash the button a lot (once per auction!)

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  22. Well I've had only one experience with a SSD brand, it was OCZ vertex ( http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-vertex-series-sata-ii-2-5-ssd.html ).

    Generally you want a drive that has a high write as well as high read performance. Do not go buy the cheapest one unless it has competitive performance.

    www.ssd-reviews.com is a very nice site to start looking for a drive.

    ReplyDelete
  23. What make the difference with an SSD is the low access time, so write and read speed isnt everything. I would look for a Corsair Force or Intel X25, they are the best bang for the buck at the moment (at least from what's availible here in Sweden, so your milage may vary^^).

    ReplyDelete
  24. @ Anon with Cancelator
    Awesome addOn, it's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks a ton, makes my job a lot easier.

    @ Snakeoil and last anon
    Thanks for the info on a SSD, I'll be sure to start looking into acquiring the money to pick one up.

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  25. 4) Blue!

    7) I've raised my buying threshold for LBS to 15g each, the same as my purchase price for Abyss Crystals. They appear infrequently, and are used for a ton of vanilla enchants that sell well, so until LBS start getting flooded on the AH, I'm keeping my buying price at 15g.

    8) TradeSkillMaster outclasses ZeroAuctions now in every way. It handles creating a crafting queue for each profession (and works with Altoholic to keep you restocked based on what your alts already have in their bags and bank, even your guild bank). It sets up auction groups just like APM, ZA, and QA3. It has a built-in auto-mailer and snatch list. It has a pricing database and getall scan. It has options for canceling when you've been undercut, and even a cancel all whether you've been undercut or not. I've set up a macro to work with the addon for posting and canceling, so instead of pushing the button in the addon, I can just spam a hotkey. It really is the best auction house addon that's ever been created, and that includes Auctioneer.

    ReplyDelete
  26. 4. Baby poop yellow (the color of gold!!!)

    7. quote from wowhead...
    The best spot I've found is Blackrock Depths. With the brewfest remote I spend no time traveling here. A run takes me exactly 10 minutes and yields 13-16 shards, depending on drops and whether the rare spawn is up. When done I can hearth out, and with the remote having only a 60-minute cooldown I can come back whenever I have 10 more minutes to spare.

    Port in, kill Hurley, Plugger & Phalanx. Ignore Ribbley. Head out the front of the bar, kill Arglemach and Angerforge. Nothing prior to Angerforge drops high enough level blues to DE to large brilliants. Head back through the bar, out the back, and jump down. Kill Incendius, head around and up killing Fineous, then kill Stigliss and Verek in the bank.

    After the bank, the biggest timesaver here is being able to jump the gap back to the bar, after which you finish up the instance, making sure to look for the rare spawn, Panzar, after Flamelash. Engineering nitro boosts work. Sprint / dash work, but you need good timing. The goblin racial should do it as well. Heroic leap probably doesn't, but I haven't personally tested it. If you can't jump this gap, going back the long way will probably add about five full minutes to your run.

    or...

    DE some level 60 pvp trinkets

    8. have you tried these?
    With this macro u are able to cancel all auctions of a specific item. Insert the item name at the appropriate places to make it work.

    #showtooltip ITEM NAME
    /run local i,n=1; repeat n=GetAuctionItemInfo(“owner”,i); if n and n:find”^ITEM NAME” then CancelAuction(i) end; i=i+1; until not n


    and..
    This macro will cancel all your auctions!

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

    ReplyDelete