There is a certain party, a regular emailer to us among our readers, who believes that we here at WoW Insider take a little too long at the start of our posts to get to the actual point of each story, so in this one, I'll just get right down to it: Blizzard needs to put Auction House information on the Armory.
I've been on the grind to the 5000g for my epic flying mount lately, and I've been playing the Auction House like a demon: calculating, buying, selling, and crafting my way to as much gold as I can throw together. And while Auctioneer has definitely helped, the best way I've found to track prices and make sure I get the most for my time in the AH is just to see the prices themselves -- no average price calculated by Auctioneer is worth enough as seeing the real thing. And that's where Blizzard comes in -- while there are a few sites that attempt to track prices with various methods, they have actual, constant access to the prices on every server. And they have a great place to put them: on the Armory.
The item pages on the Armory right now are practically empty -- besides some vendor and reagent information, there's almost nothing there (especially compared to, say, Wowhead). Giving player access to AH information would pull them into the game even when they couldn't play, not to mention let some of Blizzard's most talented web programmers -- their fans -- at data that they could do tons of great stuff with. Want a text alert when your favorite mats drop in price, or when there's room on the AH to finally sell off those Elixirs of Agility you've got? By passing out AH info to the Armory, Blizzard could give fans access to the data needed to make their own great tools, not only leaving Blizzard free to work on actual development, but giving us Auction House haunters all the access we need to track prices and have that much more fun playing the AH.
The economy in WoW has some interesting nuances. Players spend oodles of WoW gold on their crafting professions, and sometimes manage to turn a tidy profit.I'm often surprised to see some items that are strongly in-demand, like Light Feathers. Shrewd players use the auction house to build their bankrolls.Lomentari of EU-Draenor is exasperated with people who fail to use the auction house "properly."
She is angry that other crafters are selling the same product she creates for several gold lower than her preferred price.The items are placed on the auction house en masse at the low low rate, which the original poster blames on Leather Workers skilling up.She feels powerless to do anything about her "massive money loss."The original poster is willing to accept small cuts in pricing, but has a hard time deal with steep declines in prices.
PlayNoEvil is a blog that claims to do "MMO security news and analysis" -- they've got an interesting post up trying their best to track gold selling prices over time in various MMOs (the information itself seems to come from MMOBux.com). The World of Warcraft graphs (US seen above, EU on the site) show that for whatever reason, in the US at least, gold prices seem to be dropping. Of course, whether that's driven by low demand (thanks to Blizzard's daily quest implementation and other anti-gold selling mechanics), or high supply, we aren't quite sure.
In the EU, things aren't so clear -- while there are still bumps around content releases, things are holding pretty steadily at a price well below the United States. Either way, no matter what price it is, we should note as well that buying gold from anywhere is against Blizzard's terms of service and will get you banned. Hopefully, these lower prices in WoW mean that Blizzard's attacks on goldsellers are working, and that low demand has driven the price down further than its been in a long time. Even so, and even assuming that these prices actually do correspond to the market (no idea where MMOBux gets their info from), there's not much concrete info we can suss out of this other than the fact that prices are dropping in the US.
We've been talking about this for a little while, but the always insightful Relmstein has a nice summary of what's surely one of the ideas behind Blizzard's daily quests -- they serve as a kind of "Federal Reserve rate" for Azeroth, in that Blizzard can control inflation and gold flow by routinely pouring money into the economy. Before daily quests, Blizzard had big problems with gold sellers -- raiding cost a lot of money, as did the various mounts, reputations, and everything else our characters had to buy. But really the only way to get gold was from farming and grinding, both things almost nobody wanted to do.
Enter daily quests -- with just a few minutes effort, players could cash in and pick up a nice chunk of gold. And with the coming of patch 2.4, daily quests are everywhere. Do an hour of quests and you've easily got sixty gold, do even more and the gold starts pouring in. Which means the reasons for gold buying and selling are shrinking. Of course, it won't erase gold buying completely (some people will always cheat, no matter how little effort it takes them to earn the gold legitimately), but the barrier to earning more gold is lowered that much more.
But, says Relmstein, the Federal Reserve's control is a two-way street. Once you start pouring too much gold into an economy, then you have to start dealing with inflation. He expects that the Sunwell dailies will start to disappear from the game as of Wrath, because if not, then Blizzard will have to go the other way to control inflation: raise prices. Think 5,000g is a lot for a flying mount? In the future, if the amount of gold in the game stays the same, it may be even more.
What do you get when you mix up a whole bunch of useless green gems?On the Public Test Realm you get Brilliant Glass.The most recent patch 2.4 notes state "A new jewelcrafting recipe has been added to transform many green quality gems into a single random blue quality gem. This recipe is available from grandmaster jewelcrafting trainers."Good news for those of us with stacks of semi-useless uncut green gems.
We've already discussed the loot, but we now have official confirmation: It is badge gear, and the vendor is unlocked with the "Make Ready" quest from the smith herself after the Armory phase of the daily chain is unlocked. You're going to want to start saving up the badges now, though. the prices are as follows:
-150 badges for the two-handers, the crossbow and the one-handed caster weapons. -105 badges for the main hand melee weapons. -45 badges for the off-hand melee weapons. -100 badges for chest and leg armor. -75 badges for waist, belt, and foot armor. -60 badges for the rings.
This is the PTR of course, so these totals could easily change, but if you want to get yourself some of this phat loot the moment the vendor gets unlocked on your server, you'll probably want to start planning those Karazhan runs and Heroic sessions now.
If you want to go check it out yourself, by the way, the portal to Quel'danas from Shattrath has been opened on test server as well, so you can just head to the center of Shattrath city and teleport directly there.
I can't say I shop the AH enough to spot a great deal when I see one (I mostly just use the AH to offload all the BoE junk I collect, and Auctioneer watches prices for me easily enough), but I can appreciate the feeling frostaholic talks about here: just like opening up a loot window and seeing that drop you've always wanted, there's definitely a thrill in finding a long-awaited AH bargain.
And I don't know that we've talked about Bottomscanner in any depth before, but that's exactly what the addon is designed for-- given the price information from Auctioneer, you can hit a button in Bottomscanner, and the addon will scour the Auction House for any items that are priced for less than they're worth. It's automatic speculation, really, and while it only works because not everyone is using Auctioneer (because if everything was priced right, no one would find it cheap), it can be used to find good deals.
But still, there's nothing like finding a diamond in the AH rough yourself. Checking the AH for an item and then finding it one day for half the price you expected to pay-- that's an entire realm of excitement in this game by itself.
So as you've probably already heard, Dell is releasing an ultraswank gaming laptop computer, bedecked in WoW paraphernalia like no computer ever has been before. If you're a WoW fan, this is the clearly the ultimate bling in laptops to own-- the kind of computer that Mr. T plays his Night Elf mohawk on. But it retails at a whopping $4500, which makes it too rich for my blood, and probably too rich for yours.
Still, it does come with a lot of stuff-- not just a sweet 17" laptop, but also lots of Blizzard swag, and even that FigurePrints coupon. But the burning question is: when you add it all up, is the WoW laptop really worth it? I could probably think of better ways to spend $4500, and I'm sure you could, too. But if we really did want all of this stuff, and had the money to buy it with, would the Dell deal really be a bargain?
That's what I'm planning to find out. After the jump, we'll break down what you get with the set, what it costs, and whether or not this Dell deal really is the WoW fan's biggest dream, or whether or not you could save some cash just by buying it all separately.
My guess is that it's the old laws of supply and demand-- by the time Burning Crusade dropped, everyone knew it would be a hit, so Blizzard made a bunch, while the original CE probably had a lot fewer copies made. But the noncombat pets might be a draw as well-- the original CE had Diablo, Zerg, and Panda pets, while the Burning Crusade only had a pretty unimpressive Netherwhelp pet.
And the other interesting question is what will happen when the next expansion drops. Being that WotLK is much more integral to the Warcraft that everyone knows and loves (while BC was much more involved with the ancient history of Warcraft), will people who've skipped Burning Crusade so far be more inclined to pick it up when Wrath releases? Maybe the BC:CE will get rarer as we get closer to Northrend.
More mote issues going down on the forums. Hildebrand says the recent changes to Mote of Shadow (in which Blizzard removed them from all demons everywhere to just void-based creatures) have caused the droprate to go too low. Removing them from demons wasn't a bad move, because considering the expansion is based on fighting the Burning Crusade, they're everywhere. But void creatures are pretty rare, and while you can pick up tons of motes just killing the Hellfire Peninsula void crowd, you just don't run across them in normal grinding anymore.
Drysc says that even though the drop rate was lowered, something strange has happened-- the Mote of Shadow prices have generally stayed the same. Either someone had a stockpile, or the demand just isn't there. Of course, prices in the AH on every server are different (one server's trash is another server's treasure, so to speak), but Blizzard doesn't see a problem with Mote of Shadow right now-- if anything, they want them rarer.
I think the center of this argument really lies in how crafters are supposed to come across these items-- is farming supposed to be part of the game? I'm a big fan of the "you should get every craft item you need just by sweeping the landscape while you level," but obviously many more players go above and beyond that, and actually spend hours just farming craft items. Should Blizzard tune the drop rates for the farmers, or for the grinders?
There is a certain party, a regular emailer to us among our readers, who believes that we here at WoW Insider take a little too long at the start of our posts to get to the actual point of each story, so in this one, I'll just get right down to it: Blizzard needs to put Auction House information on the Armory.
The economy in 
We've been 
What do you get when you mix up a whole bunch of useless green gems?
I can't say I shop the AH enough to spot a great deal when I see one (I mostly just use the AH to offload all the BoE junk I collect, and 
In case you really wanted it, 
More mote issues
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