Some time ago I’ve started noting few bugs or oversights. Call it as you want. Within time, the list became bigger & bigger thus I’ve made an decision to divide it into few paragraphs.
First part is about data, sheets, some proof of experience etc.
Second is just a list of bugs. Please note that this part was done without any tools what so ever.
The last one is some kind of “think tank” on subject of future patches & MoP expansion.
Internal Auction Error example: [1] IAE
Bots example: [2] Bots
Some older spreadsheets: [3] + Cata’s sheet difference: [3.1] + Cata DMF card distribution: [4] Sheets
Raw Cata DMF data: [5] Raw Cata DMF
AH experience: [6] Few banks’ data
[1] An example of what happens when IAE starts kicking in.
[2] Gathered while digging through some parts of AH. It’s just an example of what happens on daily basis there.
[3] Sheets’ evolution goes like this: BFA > Legion > Shadowlands > Vanilla > TBC > Wotlk > Cata. More specific about sheets:
- Data is being gathered manually. If there is an error in code, you won’t be refunded by Blizzard thus the method.
- As expansions came along, the sheets became more detailed, divided, and automated.
- Vanilla’s sheet could be applied to SoD unless the percentages were changed. Though some adjustments has to be make.
- Simple rules to mark final results (green or red).
- TBC’s sheet had attempt to calculate demand through population amount. Even though we don’t have official data, we can do workarounds. It’s needed to have some addons’ & sells’ data. Then depending on the approach (one, two or three “σ”), it’s possible to calculate the demand.
Please note that it has to fail more or less the first time. It’ll tell you how far you’re “off”. It’s a little dynamic static variable so to speak, or “constant” which can change its value due periods where people play less. Yet it’s possible.
If you wonder then my overshoot on first attempt was between 10% & 20%. Depends on from material stocked we’re speaking of. - Wotlk’s sheet was more detailed then previous ones. Milling got a new touch. It can be adapted to Cata if you’re willing. It used indexing which resembled mapping from JVM. It’s easier that way.
There was also a money printer in that expansion. “Forged Cobalt Claymore” was its name. - Cata’s sheet is for personal use. At least for now. I always publish current expansion’s sheet later on. It has few more “upgrades”.
[3.1] Milling got an upgrade which tells you about profits and losses of cards’ value. Speaking plainly, if you’re have pure profit of 20k on 50% (16) cards then you can craft cards at the loss of 1250g on other half. It’s some kind of threshold where anything below that is pure profit. It also has to be that way due the nature of card crafting. In perfect world, you’d always land with 1/32 or 3,125% chances to get specific card.
Shuffle also got an upgrade. Little more advanced than milling’s one. The idea behind was to get calculated the best source to shuffle (AH raw materials or prospecting) for three inputs (Obsidium/Ele/Pyrite). Prospecting tab in Wotlk’s sheet is correct, yet simplified. It could go with indexing for Nightstone, Hessonite, and Carnelian which yield the most profits.
[4] An extra spreadsheet which contains Cata’s DMF card distribution. Data gathering was simple: - In single “crafting run” perform few one hundred casts,
- Each hundred casts gather & manage output data,
- Note how many of the cards are within margin of proper distribution (rules were set as : (<2,9%;3,35%>),
- Aboves “rules” were at that level due 100 casts / 32 possible outcomes = percentages of which should happen with error of 0,225%,
- Keep in mind that in Wotlk, the threshold for similiar experiment was around 400 casts
[5] It’s the same as above yet as pure raw data. Pattern goes like this: “To <Number_of_Casts>”
[6] Some proof of experience from few of my banks. If you’re interested in time interval, half of them was made in Wotlk, and other half in Cata. Not so much, yet not so low either.
If you wonder how much time it’s required to put some number like those then the answer is not so much after all. It all depends if you’d go for instance full TSM only or sheets or both. On average it takes 2 x 30 mins daily. That does not mean durring those 60 minutes you spam AH somehow. It’s more likely “stand by” mode divided into periods of time. For instance, 30 minutes before “rush hours” start posting, and check for undercuts. Repeat it after 30 minutes.
That method is for Europe mostly due not so different time zones. I belive, it’s best to combine it with reading daily news or doing daily chores in house. Otherwise if you’d go into “you dare to undercut me” mode, and you’d get addicted.
After short introduction, let’s jump into some bugs. Please note that they were gathered in few weeks. If I’ve noticed something, it landed here as note. Then it was rewritten few times so some may be outdated.
General:
- AFK kicks in faster than in previous expansions.
- Guild achievements don’t progress with players. You can have legendaries, no rep, and after getting it, the achiev will kick in. With guild’s achievement it doesn’t work. You could have for instance millions of disenchanted items (before guild achievements introduction), and still the progress wouldn’t count.
- Depending if player attacks mob, the NPCs hostile towards that mob does different damage. Best example is Elemental Goo (JC daily) where NPC almost one shot mobs when players are not involved. The result is way different when you start attacking the mob.
- TAB targetting gets its targets from the air. You can stand in front of the never focused target and your next “TAB target” will be mob 20 yards away.
- “Hacks@Blizzard” could use extra hands. Sometimes it takes weeks to get rid of a person which daily posts 10,000 - 20,000 of raw materials.
- You can only C.O.D mails up to 10,000g.
- There is no “lag protection” on “crucial systems” durring “rush hours” (for instance mailbox).
- Soothsayer’s Runes, Captured Insignia, etc. (PvE) have too high drop rate comparing to original.
- You cannot put bought tokens anywhere else than their personal bags. Bank etc. is no option to stock them.
- Why Deathwing’s favourite zone to burn is Uldum?
Auction House:
- While posting items at AH there is no “intelligent” system within. If you’ve got for instance 6 gems to post where you’re holding 3 + 20 in your bags then the system will pick up from those 20, not 3 from 3 and rest from latter. At the end of if you’d be left with 3 + 17.
- Posting fee is not adequate to what’s being posted.
- There is no snapshoting auctions before servers’ shutdown. If you have posted auctions in specific order then after servers will go back online, you’ll end up with something like this: A,B,B,E,A,C,A,B order in mailbox.
- There is no players’ protection against addons’ exploitation. Within AH’s addons there are option (for instance in TSM): “What to do when”. Those options are abused by people whose goal is to get items posted at lowered price, and then buy it.
Bots:
- There is none real time protection at AH. No red flagging suspicious activity.
- There is no help from GM sides when reporting bots. They won’t “pass the names” higher up. You need to write an email.
- There is no QoL right click raport fuction at AH. Sometime when names are taken, folks use extended ASCII table to get what they want. Reporting that kind of names can be a nightmare. If there would be action in this direction, please for the love of God, don’t use chat’s report system.
- There is “zone checking” against bots. For instance fishing bots near AQ’s shoreline or any other “public known location”.
- There is no “reward” towards bots’ reporting besides ingame mail. Maybe something like retail’s “wall of glory” could encourage people.
- There is no “local rollback” after bot is getting banned. If someone buys for instance 100,000 of raw mats when bots are getting purged, there is no repercussions for that specific person. Don’t take this wrong. Banning buyers shouldn’t be a thing. More likely just a refund for materials.
- There is no undercut protection from bots. There are situations where you’re manually posting things and before you finish, you’re arleady undercutted. This is normal till you’ll reach the point where you’re being undercutted over and over again by same “person” within same period of time.
Internal Auction Error:
- Years ago I’ve been misleaded into beliving that this was “addon error”. It’s not.
- It has been reported from many people on different setups.
- It’s an kind of “exception catching” from JVM languages.
- It was introduced within classic to the point where it became too heavy to carry on.
- It was “boosted through the roof” within classic Naxx patch (1.9).
- It’s not there to catch the bots. They can put hunderds of stacks with no problems. It’s there just to prevent normal people from “brute force” the AH. Kind of throttle system.
- It has ICD which is connected with amount of time passed. Which means, if you’d encounter that error then you’ll have hard time posting / cancelling anything from AH untill some time have passed.
- It can pops out literally on first action you perform at AH after logging in.
- Similar to RNG system, it’s spreaded upon the players within same common source. That means you’ll get more of those errors in reset days around rush hours.
- If you put an item into auction menu without posting, it suspends your ICD. In other words, putting without posting blocks the timer from resetting itself.
- Also this problem is related with the amount of stuff pumped into AH. As more stuff is being posted at AH as often you’ll get this error.
- This error also shares some kind of ICD with cancel system within AH’s system. If you’d get it while posting, it’ll affect also cancelling.
- Internal Auction Error is fun to deal with when you’ve got glyph bank with scroll posting. Within 1000 auctions you’ll get like 30-40% of errors. That means you’ll have to scroll recursively from 1000. The results for posting glyphs in rush hours is more than 2300 scrolls instead of 1000.
- It can pop out when you search too fast too many stuff at AH.
- If you’d like to reproduce it then just spam posting at AH.
- It’s not related with API. PostAuction, PlaceAuctionBid, CanSendAuctionQuery (etc.) don’t have error catching nor returning any type of variable.
Professions:
- Crafting can auto cancel itself. There is no rule when & how. You can get canceled after 10s or 1 cast.
- Getting AFK status doesn’t always cancel the crafting mentioned above.
- After you’ve got cancel while crafting, you need to reopen profession’s tab again or swap to default UI, and then back to your addon.
- “Internal Bag Error” while fishing is still there. You can “fish nothing” (empty loot space). It can happen once in an hour or several within 5 mins. It’s not helpful for instance when Kalu’ak’s event is up.
- JC daily rotation is broken. You get repeated dailies all over. For istance Elemental Goo x2-3, green gems x2, fashion x2, and then it resets to entry point.
- Darkmoon Cards’ normal distribution was tampered with. In Wotlk expansion the threshold to get normal (Gauss) distribution was around 400 casts. This means that in those 400 casts, on average you’d get 25% of each deck. In Cata I’ve tested 708 casts (±30) in a row. That try was divided into 100 segments. It’s nowhere near Gauss’ distribution. At 708 (±30) you’ll land around 6-7 cards which will have the probability which they should have.
- Players should have personal RNG system instead of server / region wide one. That means if you’d like to get those tasty percentages which wowhead provides, you’d have to deep dive into mass prospecting / milling in single run. Otherwise your RNG is so to speak “communist”. There is a exploitable where you’d land with mass red gems and stop. Let others “have” blue/green/yellow (cheap ones).
- Daily cooking (crabs in SW) allows player to collect more crabs than maximum required for the quest (i.e. 11/6). Don’t know if that was intended.
- Transmute: Living Elements doesn’t work like it should? Shouldn’t it work on entire batch (15) or singular each time?
Mage:
- After almost 20 years, mage’s blink still can teleport you backwards or in the same place.
- Similar thing happens to “Flame Orb”. When that spell meets the difference in X axis between two short segment of the ground, it can stop moving at all.
- Impact doesn’t work as it should? Its range is too random. Sometimes it doesn’t spread on targets who are stacked up, and sometimes its range seems too big. It doesn’t seem to be connected to melee’s minimum range.
Sinestra [7]:
- Twilight Slicer ability breaks sometimes. It picks up the target then breaks, and goes wherever it wants. This breaking doesn’t depend from the class nor the abilities used.
- It can also wander off without the specific target, and then pick up another targer (3rd one) without any beam on that person. Even without the visible beam, the slicer follows that target.
- Slicers can spawn, target you with link, and then change to different target.
- Using mages’ blink ability at the moment of slicer’s spawn cause them to break, and don’t follow the target at all.
[7] Please note that this is from mage’s point of view.
Suggestions:
- Due the faster expansion timing, we’ve got DMF twice often. So how about mass production cast time reduction(milling / prospecting / DE, gems, enchants etc.)?
- If you’d like to avoid or mitigate “Internal Auction Error”, divide your banks into smaller ones (Gems / Pots + Flasks / Raw mats etc.).
- An indicator could be set for “Internal Auction Error”. Just like archeology has one.
- Doubled archeology findings could be exchangeable for anything else like bronze in Remix.
- Retail’s AH system is not solution to present problems within AH.
Please, read this part as results based on playing AH as hobby. Those are only my toughts what will happen within Cata & MoP. This part also contains a little of politics, or in another words, my point of view.
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There are three scenarios which can occur:
(A) “Do nothing” or “leave it as it is”. This will make MoP, BMAH, and end materials so costly that majority of users will be like children looking through the glass of the candy shop. You’ll be able to afford something at BMAH very late in the expansion.
(B) “Do something”. Depending on actions performed, we’d get levels of BMAH’s bids which was around 100-150k per piece on average. Yet we didn’t have tokens nor so popular GDKP back then so the number would be a little bit higher. Especially at the beginning.
(C) “Butcher mode”. The situation which “push pedal to the metal” comes to life. A monstrosity which would include getting rid of or a limitation of GDKP & amount of tokens, dealing with bots in a way they should be dealt with. That scenario would limit GDKP’s bids to “beliveable levels”, bring back maximum acceptable bids at BMAH to MoP’s levels, heal a little AH’s prices, make quests’ gold meaningful again. Yet this is more sort of “think tank” which would never come to life due nature of bigger companies. Their job is to bring an income, and limiting sells (tokens) or GDKP (income via tokens) is against shareholders’ interests. -
We’ll get more & more decision dropping without any notice whatsoever for instance DMF changes a day before the reset. Guess what did happen to folks who buy consumambles hour+ before raids after that info.
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From my point of view there is no economic analysis before releasing crucial info.
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To limit inflation, there should be a limit towards maximum tokens bought like there was when it was introduced in WoD.
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Token should be exchangeable for balance. Otherwise you’ll land with snowballing inflation.
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GDKP should not exists in classic where we’ve tokens. Especially within MoP where BMAH will be reintroduced. The inflation will sky rocket.
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With GDKP & tokens, BMAH should be limited to old gold cap. Otherwise normal folks won’t be able to afford anything there.
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If GDKP & tokens would go into MoP without any touching at all, I belive we’d need to have a discussion if token’s gold should be different currency than normal gold around for instance BMAH.
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If there would be a “no” towards tokens’ exchangeability then perfahps consider gifting tokens with gold. At least with closed circle like guilds.
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To fight off the inflation, some items could be added in MoP @ BMAH. It could be just cosmetics or removed items which weren’t added in Vanilla.
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There has to be some kind of “valve” to release pressure from inflation. Anything besides BMAH in MoP. Otherwise we’ll land at WoD’s level of income even before MoP. If you’re curious then depending from the amount of alts that number varied between 40k and 180k of passive income.[8]
[8] Some may say it’s much, and some may not. It depends from point of view, costs, time spent, and so go on. In old days of stormspire’s forum there was a topic about first day at AH when Firelands was released. Absolute top which I saw was 2 millions in first day of the patch. So again, the point of view.
We as community have reach some kind of paradox in terms of population vs. gold amount. In Vanilla Cata we had a lot more players, and less gold. Some may say, it’s due tokens. They would be correct but only partially. I belive, the tokens alone cannot be held responsible for the state of the things. They’re only a tool used by players.
GDKP & show offs would be there to blame. Where people see a a bid of million, two or three, others can belive it’s a “normal thing”. It’s not.
PS Few weeks ago when I’ve started writing this piece, I’ve started to “collect” possible bots through AH. It took around month, and the amount of the names is: 89. Even with false positives at ratio of 50% (coin flip), it’s still staggering number.
If you’re curious, the raport was sent.
Best regards
Ket