Tuesday (5 Dec) - The Neutral Auction House

Tuesday (5 Dec) - The Neutral Auction House

Happy had his alliance counterpart, Lost, do some house cleaning recently. To Happy, "housecleaning" means sending him stuff across the Neutral AH for Happy to sell or use. Lost grumbles that she never gets anything back from those exchanges. That's not entirely true, but with most the alliance side of the family on semi-retirement, they don't need much gold.

On Wednesday morning, Hap and Rakta happily got some game time in at Booty Bay in Stranglethorn Vale, manning the Neutral AH at separate locations. Weekday mornings are best for the transactions, since that is when the fewest people are likely to be using the AH. So, it was pretty surprising to find that the area where one of the Auctioneers hawked his wares, there were four other players hanging around. They hung around, and they hung around ...

Hap is a little new at the process (due to a certain death in the family no one speaks of), so he was going by the books - no transactions if there are other possible buyers around. Rakta is the vet, and she decided to do some testing to see if it was possible to get some business done without losing stuff to buyers stalking the AH for bargains.

Rakta's first surprise was that the neutral AH was empty! There was not one single thing for sale. That was a first, never seen before situation. Just to make sure the AH was functioning, Rakta posted a cheap recipe to see what happened. It posted and appeared in the AH. Ok, so it seems to be working.

The only player hanging around that Rakta took particular note of was a low level alliance with a "bank-like" name was standing right next the Auctioneer and had the Auctioneer targeted. His nameplate said he was "Away" but that did not mean he wasn't watching. Rakta monitored the player for five minutes, but no transactions appeared on AH. Thinking that the ally was watching Rakta, Rakta left the area. Hap, all by himself at the other location, monitored the AH instead of Rakta. Still, no transactions were being made. For all the players about, none of them seemed to be using the neutral AH.

Rakta returned, and tried slipping in a few things, to see what would happen. Hap saw them pop up on the AH and bought them as he was supposed to. No other player jumped in to try and buy the items, which Rakta posts for a single silver piece each to minimize the high cost of transactions charged by the neutral AH.

For the next fifteen minutes Rakta posted items and Hap bought them, moving many stacks of mats between the alliance side to the horde side. The two of them could have been all alone in the world. When the two finished up their business and left, the neutral AH was again empty.

The experiment with a Windowed WoW setup (instead of full screen) has been working well. There were no screen lockups Tuesday night, and Fist was pretty busy, mostly on the Townlong Steppes, where there is a war going on. Fist seems to have picked up a good quest thread, and has been happily bulling her way through them. I'm using about 90% of the screen for WoW and I can't tell any difference in response between windowed and full screen. In fact, logging in and screen swapping seem to work even faster in windowed mode.

Another side benefit of all the scrubbing, deleting, and reinstalling I've done, is that it gives me a chance to standardize a user interface that all of the toons can use. The UIs for each have been built as needed at the time, and don't follow any common template. I will keep the number of addons to those I feel are essential, but I'm not overly worried about the addons anymore. I don't think they were the problem. Fist will be the guinea pig, of course, since she gets the most game time and needs to be the best prepared.

The use of the default game UI was an interesting experiment in itself. I learned that it's workable, when necessary, but comes up well short of what addons can provide. I would not want to use it in a raid, for example, with the expanded number of spells and abilities I would need to have ready access to, versus just questing. The default UI did have one unexpected benefit - without my 3x3 grid of spells (the default UI spells are in one long line) I was pretty much forced to memorize what spell was assigned to what button since I did not have the visual 3x3 array as a crutch to look at. I'm not quite sure whether I will incorporate that into the standard UI, though. I do intend to try to keep the clean look that the default UI enforces. I really do like the way it looks.

Fist's efforts in Townlong Steppes got her to 30% of the way to level 90.

She was also excited to learn she had reached Exalted status with her first Pandaren faction, the Forest Hozen. She was very disappointed, though, to learn it was an empty honor. The Forest Hozen faction does not have any special rewards.

Raiding Update - Fist spoke with MM2 guild leader and raid leader, Bd, Tuesday night. The guild has one raid group that is pretty stable. They have one boss on farm, Bd said, but no other bosses down. They also have a weekly Looking For Raid (LFR) event that pulls in 10-15 players to help improve gear for real raiding. In addition, the guild has two contests coming up - one is a competition in doing Scenarios, and the other is an ambitious pet battle contest. Fist will look into the LFR once she hits level 90, but will probably need to do her dungeon runs to get her gear level high enough for the LFR. Lao caught Wild in game on Wednesday morning and .. well, she wasn't exactly impressed with Wild's gear, calling it "oh so last expansion."  Lao was more than half right, since Wild's gear score is only i422, but Wild had to point out that ALL of his gear is Pandaria level. And it's not that pvp stuff, either. So there.

For all the work Fist has been doing, her gear level is not all that much better than Wild's. Fist's equipped gear level is i426. She's being held back by an i384 trinket and an i399 cape. The cape may be taken care of shortly, but the trinket will continue to deflate her gear score until she can get something solid to replace it.