Here’s the easiest methodology I’ve come up with for doing this as Horde — as some of the items are only available in some of the cities, and as they have a duration, you can’t mail them around, forcing you to travel between the three old capital cities.

1. Go to Thunder Bluff. Talk to the vendor at the base of the south elevator, and buy 70 Mulgore Sweet Potato. Also pick up the Bountiful Cookbook, which contains the five new recipes you’ll use.
2. Go to Orgrimmar. Talk to the vendor outside the city and buy 70 Tangy Southfury Cranberries.
3. Go to Undercity. Talk to the vendor in the courtyard and buy 70 Ripe Tirisfal Pumpkin.
4. Talk to the Cooking Trainer. Learn the skill and the Spice Bread recipe.
5. Craft 70 Spice Bread, then learn and craft 70 Spice Bread Stuffing, then 70 Pumpkin Pie, then 70 Cranberry Chutney, then 70 Candied Sweet Potato. All the mats needed will be on the vendors right there. Remember to skill up your Cooking level at the trainer as needed.
6. As the trainer in Undercity won’t train you past Artisan Cooking, you’ll need to take the Zeppelin to Vengeance Landing and learn Master Cooking there. Do this quickly, then take the Zeppelin back.
7. Now one of the components for the last recipe (Slow-Roasted Turkey) does not appear on a vendor. For this, you’ll have to go kill and loot Wild Turkey. For Horde, the easiest place to find these is in Venomweb Vale, which is nice and flat. If you’re lazy, you can pick up some Tracker Snacks to make them even easier to find.
8. Once you’ve looted 70 Turkeys, come back and make 70 Slow-Roasted Turkey. You should end up at 340 or so Cooking, perhaps a bit higher.
9. To get to 350, the simplest way is to go to Garadar, pick up the Roasted Recipe from Nula the Butcher in Garadar, kill a handful of Clefthoofs until you have 5-10 Clefthoof Meat and then skill to 350.
10. Once you’re at 350, you can go to Dalaran and learn Grandmaster Cooking as well as pick up Cooking dailies.

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I had left my Warrior, Alcashi, at 79.5 or so. Once I resub’d, I painlessly leveled to 80 in just a few wins of Alterac Valley, while questing to unlock the phase for the Ebon Blade tabard. Queue-from-anywhere is truly a wonderful thing (though enabling it to work from within battlegrounds would seal the deal).

A fresh 80, I took to running easy heroics right away, skipping any time in normal instances. After a bit of research and advice from friends, I decided it best to go Arms initially as it would provide the best dps with my craptastic gear.

I geared up quickly, almost stupidly quickly. A Naxx 10 kitted me out in better gear, and a bunch of Trial of the Champion runs on normal, along with consistent heroic runs soon had me sporting solid gear. All that eluded me was a decent weapon, as I still used my trusty Heirloom Arcanite Reaper.

A pug Uld10 that ended up wiping diastrously on Mimiron provided Stormedge, and soon after Edge of Ruin dropped in Heroic Trial of the Champion. With two solid two-handers, I respec’d Fury.

Since then it’s been remarkably smooth sailing — Mal’Ganis has a solid community of intelligent players thanks largely the presence of Elitist Jerks on the server, which makes finding groups far less painful than it would otherwise be.

I’m still a bit surprised how easily and painlessly I geared up, and how I’ve been able to experience the latest and greatest content so quickly (I’ve run both Trial of the Crusader 10 and 25 man several times). That said, I haven’t done the Heroic versions of either size raid instance yet, nor have I even finished a complete Ulduar run, let alone done a hard mode there (spent a rather amusing hour trying to help do Yogg+1, and just watching people walk into clouds over and over again). But I’m not an achievement whore, and could care less about nerd points (not that I wouldn’t do hard modes if I had a consistent group to do them, but it’s not something I care enough about to organize a consistent group for).

Diminishing returns on advancement means I’d rather level another character to 80 (I have quite a stable between 60 and 70) and learn a new class rather than perfect one character, especially as there’s just one major content patch (Icecrown) before Cataclysm, and with Emblems of Triumph set to drop from heroics next patch, it shouldn’t be too hard to get geared out enough to experience the normal versions of the Icecrown raids. Seeing Arthas won’t be restricted to just the hardest of the hard modes, thankfully.

All in all, I’m impressed by WoW’s continued polish and accessibility, even to a serious casual player like myself.

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First, I think of how close I already am to 80 — my warrior’s level 78, with full rested. Once I hit 80, I can gear up and go forth and tank to my heart’s content, starting out with five-mans, then heroics, then Naxx, and perhaps even Ulduar some day.

Then, I think a bit more and realize — but wait, I want to tank. That means I need to pick my tanking set carefully. And there are tons of stats to choose from, all of which have their own importance. Further, certain bosses will require different sets of gear. And all the while I’ll need to juggle reaching the defense cap, as well as keeping in mind plus-hit so I don’t miss the boss…

Wait, I know how to solve this gear conundrum: with a spreadsheet.

Well gosh, that doesn’t sound fun, that sounds like work. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love spreadsheets and linear optimization and all that — but it has its proper place. That place does not include alongside slaying dragons. I see it now:

The dragon swooped once more lower than ever, and as he turned and dived down his
belly glittered white with sparkling fires of gems in the moon — but not in one place.

The great bow at his ready, Bard held off on shooting his black arrow. “How should I shoot so as to maximize the velocity to strike the dragon’s belly with optimal force?” he mused. He looked at the arrow, and then, opening up his laptop, fired up Excel. “I’ll just run a couple of simulations here to see how far I’m supposed to draw back the bow, or whether I should use a lighter arrow, or whether…”

His meditations came to an ignominious end as Smaug breathed flame, enveloping Bard, the dock, and Bard’s laptop. A flap of wings of the great beast later and only dust and ashes remained, floating with an odd tranquility on the surface of the Lake.

(With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien).

In other words: I know that to play the best, I’m going to have sit down and hack out a spreadsheet to help me decide which pieces of gear to wear when. Or I can use a tanking spreadsheet over on EJ, or Rawr. Either way, before I can start having fun tanking, I need to sit down and have some fun in good ol’ Excel.

I’m not the only one who notices this. Writing from a mage’s perspective, Player v. Developer’s Green Armadillo notes that mages get to do their own bit of spreadsheeting to manage hit cap.

Contrast TF2 — now I’m a noob of the first degree in TF2, but from my noobish perspective, I don’t need a spreadsheet. Perhaps I’m wrong, blinded by the dazzling light of my noob aura. But maybe I’m not. Maybe TF2’s designed so as to be fun throughout, and the way to get better at it is not outside the game, spreadsheet in tow, but inside the game, playing.

Now, not all of WoW is like this — but gear selection largely is, and because WoW focuses so much on gear, that echoes everywhere else. Tanking is a unique beast — unlike DPS, which well, is all about damage-per-second — tanking’s answer is more nuanced: it depends.

Because I’m not a fan of doing something only half-right, I’d rather not bother leveling up my warrior all the way to 80, because I know I’ll have to spend some time with a spreadsheet min-maxing my gear. Add in the random drop factor and that higher level gear tends to have less defense on it than lower level gear… and you start to see why tanks need to juggle more than most. While I love spreadsheets, I don’t want to have bust one out every time a drop happens to decide whether I need or want it. At the same time, I don’t want to roll on everything because it “might be useful.”

In short: If the optimal gameplay of some aspect of a game effectively reduces to min-maxing a spreadsheet, you’re doing it wrong. Simplify away the spreadsheet and make it fun for players. Move the focus away from the numbers and to the actual game — remember that? — that part where we kill the dragon.

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But, because I don’t plan to come back to the game until the next expansion or at least the next awesome-sauce patch (3.1 doesn’t have me that excited), I’m liquidating all my inventory — pretty much everything I have is going to go down in value in the future (hi2u deflationary market). Glyphs will get cheaper with dual-specs reducing their churn rate; mats and crafted epics will also fall in price. The only thing I’m holding onto is my supply of uncut Northrend green gems, which I know will go up in value about midway through the next expansion, once no one mines Northend any longer but people still need to level Jewelcrafting (the same thing happened with Outland green gems). And gold. Gold should retain value; 40,000 gold or so should prove handy if I ever come back to the game (hopefully that much after I finish liquidating, we’ll see; at 32k right now).

Why I’m Letting My Subscription Lapse

I barely have time to play, and time I do have to play feels like a chore … “level to 80″ “gear up” “tank this, tank that” “heal this, heal that” “do arena (either enjoy my overpowered comp or bemoan counter-comps — perhaps 2s is not the best place to arena for this reason…)” “list 500 glyphs on the AH” “collect thousands of gold.”

I don’t remember the last time I honestly had fun in WoW; Ulduar doesn’t look like it’ll change things, as it’ll likely be quickly cleared and then devolve into hard-mode e-peenery and achievement whoring, two things that never appealed to me. I’ll leave my warrior at 78 and wait for the Emerald Dream or the Maelstrom.

I’ve always been a firm believer in the “if you’re not having fun, don’t play” philosophy, and right now I’m honestly not having fun in WoW. Leveling — even with rested — feels chore-like, likely because it’s a re-hash of content I’ve done before, and there’s nothing much to look forward to except for doing Heroics with doubtless terrible pugs to gear up for raids where I can stand in fire or watch other people stand in fire or collect loot that will quickly be outmoded with at least the next raid instance or for certain the next expansion.

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On Sunday I had invested another 1,000 gold into glyphs. Last night I recovered another 2,000 gold in revenue.

The total balance sheet for my inscription adventures thus comes to:

Cost

(3,000 gold)
(1,000 gold)
Total Costs: (4,000 gold)

Revenue

1,500 gold
2,000 gold
Total Revenue: 3,500 gold

Profit

(500 gold)

So I’m still down 500 gold on net, but because I relisted the 400 glyphs that hadn’t sold yet — and didn’t spend a copper on making new ones — my balance sheet will hopefully soon turn net positive.

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Here’s how they looked in my bags before I listed them:

And here’s how my bags look now, after 48 hours of having all those glyphs up on the AH:

Total revenue: 1,500 or so gold.

Factoring in costs of about 3,000 gold, I’m down 1,500 gold — but I still have a lot of glyphs left, that I can relist at practically no cost, so it looks like this is a good start.

Looks like this process is effective!

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Thus, this blog moved (again), this time to: http://alcaras.subcreation.net/

Last move, I promise.

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Oh. Glyphs.

A bit of a preface: I played the Auction House quite regularly last year, amassing about 50k gold before giving 45k away, and then coming back and re-amassing 50k gold before taking a break once again (though I didn’t give away my gold this time, having learned from that experience).

But Gevlon’s particular post — specifically the screenshot of all his glyphs, combined with his innovative yet simple methodology for selling and listing them, inspired me.

I realized that while I had been making gold (see My Auctioneer Advanced Settings and Methodology from 8 months ago for details as to how), I had made a few mistakes:

1. I hadn’t realized the power of multiple AH alts.
2. I hadn’t realized the power of book-keeping.
3. I hadn’t been industrious.

I hadn’t realized the power of multiple AH alts

First, I hadn’t taken advantage of the power of multiple AH alts to help manage inventory. I had tried to funnel everything through my main AH alt, Purchase. Why was this bad? Well, at one point last year I had 3,000 auctions running. That wouldn’t be too bad if not for the fact that:

1. Bag space is limited.
2. You can only view 50 pieces of mail at once.

So what ended up happening? I spent a lot of time in front of the mailbox — waiting to see the 20th batch of the next 50 pieces of mail. Even if I played Kdice on my second monitor while waiting for the mail, waiting for the mail itself wasn’t fun. Further, WoW’s mail database’s code requires 30 or so seconds before it’ll refresh the next page of mail. So while I could get the first 50 pieces of mail out quickly thanks to the Postal addon, I’d then have to wait for the database to refresh the mailbox with the next page. But while waiting, nothing happened — making it painfully boring.

The new process

What did I change last night?

Well, I decided to segment my AH alts. Purchase, the Queen of my AH alts, remains with her task of listing anything I gather on my main characters; she also continues to run my Disenchanting business. But Inscription and Jewelcrafting are now siphoned off to other alts. Jewelcrafting becomes the province of Alcaras, my level 70 mage with 440+ JC, and she gets a new home in front of the AH in Silvermoon. Similarly, my Inscriber, my level 68 hunter Alcari, also parks in front of the Silvermoon AH. But she gets a co-conspirator, as Alcaria, my level 62 rogue, gets a bunch of Inscription bags and will actually list the glyphs.

Why have the Alcari/Alcaria tag team for my glyph industry? Why not just make the glyphs on Alcari and list them on Alcari? After all, she’s already in front of the AH herself.

I considered this at first, but then, after further reflection, I realized Gevlon had a reason for using an alt to manage all his glyphs. By using an alt, he could make the data structure — the inventory — contain valuable information about the sales success of various glyphs. In other words, he could reduce the number of decisions he had to make while crafting, thus making his crafting process more efficient. This contrasted pleasantly with my old process of crafting glyphs, where I had milled some pigments, made some inks, and then tried to figure out which glyph I should make to garner the most profit. Functional, yes, but inefficient.

Here’s my new process, as adapted from Gevlon’s process.

1. Log on Alcaria, the Glyph Lister.
2. Retrieve all auctions. Since the only auctions are Inscription-produced auctions, Alcaria’s bags will only have Glyphs (and a few Vellums and Certificates of Ownership).
3. Once the mailbox is empty, log off. Since Alcaria lists all the auctions at the same time, they all go up together and any unsold auctions come back down together. Effectively, this lets me quantize the process of listing glyphs.
4. Log on Alcari, the Glyph Crafter. Scan the AH using Auctioneer to get the latest prices and survey the state of the market.
5. Resupply Ink supplies as needed — there’s more detail here, but for simplicity’s sake and to focus on the crafting/listing process, let’s just wave our hands over the actual process of how I come to have the ink to craft the needed glyphs and simply say that I always do.
6. For each glyph:
1. Look at its tooltip. Since I’m running Auctioneer, I see the value of glyph, as well as the current state of the market. Since I’m using Sanity, I can see whether or not Alcaria has the glyph in her bags (e.g. I’ll see something like Alcaria has 2).
2. If the current Auctioneer price, after Undercutting, falls under 10 gold, move on to the next glyph.
3. Look at the cost of crafting the glyph, as reported by the addon Lil’ Sparky’s Workshop; if the cost is more than the current market price, there’s no point selling this glyph — the mats would sell for more, so move on to the next glyph.
4. Look at how many glyphs Alcaria has in her bags.
   • If 4 or more, that means sales were light or non-existent. Move on to the next glyph.
   • If between 1 to 3, that means there were some sales. Craft enough so as to have 5 at the next listing.
   • If 0, then that means they’ve all sold out. Craft 10; there’s more demand here than I’ve supplied.
7. When all the glyph crafting’s done, mail all the glyphs to Alcaria. On Alcaria list everything all at once, for 48 hour duration auctions. Don’t worry about Inscription until after 48 hours have passed, and then start the process all over again.

I hadn’t realized the power of book-keeping

I use MoneyFu, an addon that keeps track of how much gold I earn, both across my account and across each character. But since I had done all my auctions on Purchase, I couldn’t separate out my various industries to see which were most profitable. And keeping track of everything by hand would be tedious enough that I’d never do it.

But with multiple alts, I can use MoneyFu to see how much I spend and earn. For example, if the only purchases I made on Alcari, my glyph crafter, relate to making more glyphs, then I have a single number that tells me my costs for crafting glyphs. And then I can look at Alcaria’s income to see how much she earns from the auctions she lists; but since Alcaria only lists glyphs, then I have my glyph revenue. Revenue minus costs gives me profit — good book-keeping that’s done automatically. Similarly, I can track income and sales on Purchase and Alcaras for Enchanting and Jewelcrafting respectively. Perhaps I should designate another alt than Purchase for my “gathered in the world while leveling/playing” sales, so that Purchase’s numbers can remain purely for Enchanting/Disenchanting. We’ll see.

Gevlon also has a useful post on book-keeping, though he advocates keeping track of everything manually (the horror!); a commenter, however, mentions using different alts with MoneyFu.

I hadn’t been industrious

Why make so many glyphs? Because the strength of glyphs as a money making tool lies in their very diversity — with so many different types of glyphs, the investment portfolio, so to speak, is quite broad. This means that I can invest 3,000 gold into glyphs, but since I’m investing in about a hundred or so different glyphs, I’m not saturating any single glyph market — usually I’m making 5, sometimes 10 of a particular glyph. If I had put all that gold into one glyph, then I would have flooded the market, since I’d have a hard time selling 565 of a single type of glyph, whereas it’s quite feasible to sell 5 of 100 different types of glyphs.

In short, by previously cherry-picking only the most profitable glyphs, I had encountered a lot of process overhead — getting the right ink, the parchements — in economic terms, think of the fixed cost of crafting a glyph. I had to get the right ink and parchments whether I made 10 glyphs or whether I made 500 glyphs. Per glyph, the time spent on initialization tasks of that sort went down if I made more glyphs, since the actual process of making a glyph — clicking the button — didn’t take very much time at all.

So I hadn’t been industrious before — in the sense of the word that I hadn’t been treating glyph making as an industry. Instead, I had acted as an artisan — crafting a few select glyphs here and there. Unfortunately for my artisan inclinations, glyphs are all alike — there’s nothing special I can do to distinguish an Alcari-crafted Glyph of Battle from every other Glyph of Battle out there. But product differentiation tactics are precisely what enable artisans in the real world to charge a price premium for their product. So, as I learned, approaching a commodity market with artisan mindset held back my profits and increased my overhead-per-unit-of-production as well as my frustration, thus creating a disincentive for me to even bother with the whole enterprise.

Whereas now, with the new industrial strength approach I learned from Gevlon, I can craft a hundreds of Glyphs at once, list them all at once, and then forget about them for 48 hours. I can focus quickly on the task at hand (crafting glyphs), accomplish it, and move on. Unlike my previous artisan approach, I don’t need to constantly evaluate whether this or that glyph might be worth making, or whether I should make more or less, or whether I should list now or later — the industrial process takes all those decisions away from me, which is a good thing because a decision I don’t need to make is one I don’t need to worry about, and less worry means less mental overhead. And who put the process in place anyway? I did. So to speak more plainly, it isn’t the process taking those decisions away from me, it’s more that I pre-made those decisions for myself, and now the process is giving me a tool of discipline to enforce those decisions upon myself.

The end result? Less worry, less time, more gold. We’ll see how the auctions fare on Sunday morning, but I have high hopes for this new industrial process.

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Why am I moving?

1. To join the conversation
2. To provide a real feed
3. Because Subcreation’s all grown up

To join the conversation

Blogs and forums, while similar beasts, are not quite the same. Bloggers posts on blogs, reading each other’s posts and linking to each other. With my blog as a sub-forum, it was hard to link to me — further, any references I made to others’ posts didn’t get trackbacked to them, which meant they didn’t learn that someone had replied to their post. With a proper blog, I’ll be able to join the conversation with links and trackbacks.

To provide a real feed

Subcreation runs on PunBB. While PunBB is amazing forum software, it less than shines as a blogging platform. It can certainly work, but it isn’t optimal for the purposes of blogging. For example, the RSS feed — while available — is a bit buried, making it non-obvious to most visitors (and thus useless). Further, the feed itself only shows excerpts. While I certainly could edit appropriate php file to generate a full text feed, the fact that I hadn’t in spite of over a year of my blog-as-a-forum shows that well, sometimes it’s better to use the right tool for the job and not try to make a hammer into a screwdriver.

Because Subcreation’s all grown up

I founded Subcreation back in Fall 2005. The forums took off when I included a link to them in my updated A Guide to Mage Talent Specs in Spring 2006, right around WoW Patch 1.11 (the first big mage patch). Subcreation’s grown, gently, and I’m happy to say that it’s remained a cozy corner of the Internet for discussion on topics near and far from gaming. But my blog didn’t quite fit in; it stood out like a sore thumb: one of these things is not like the others. Far better then to move the blog to here, where it can be a blog among blogs, rather than a blog among forums.

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