Wednesday 7 October 2009

1vs2

Due to a request in the comments I decided to replace all pieces of lua code in download links to make it easier to compare to the .lua file used by quick auctions 2. Sorry about the 60 second wait to download but it was the first thing I found. If you don't get what I'm talking about you will when you read the rest of the post.
Ink is the thing with inscription that matters the most when setting prices, or to be more precise, ink of the sea. Snowfall also plays in here by reducing the IoS price but in the end it all comes down to the IoS. So what every scribe tries to do is to reduce their ink cost in one of 2 ways:
1. Either they reduce the cost of their herbs or
2. they sell their snowfall ink or uses it to make cards, offhands or, since the patch, runescrolls. There are two points in reducing the price, both to get more profit of each glyph and, to me the more important of the two, to make you able to undercut lower than your competition.

Pretty simple and common knowledge to most scribes, but there is one more thing to it, something I should have done long ago. While most glyphs have the requirement of 1 ink of some kind (= ink of the sea) and 1 parchment. But of course that's not all, many glyphs use 2 inks, making the price the double - 15c to 50s depending on the parchment used as it still only takes one parchment.

So to not loose money you'd have to put your glyph threshold at the cost of 2 ink of the sea plus 50s. Considering most of your glyphs only requires one ink this is a huge loss of how deep you can undercut, so what is the solution? If you thought of making two diferent QA categories you were completly right. But how are we going to do it? Checking every single glyph up would take stupid amounts of time and you's have to check every new one you learnt up before adding it to your group. The solution is on the JMTC forums!

In the thread linked a few of the great people there are discussing how you could set up QA2 to post 2 ink and 1 ink glyphs separately, and they found a way to do it! Just a bit down on the first page Debussy posted a list to paste into your Quick Auctions file in the saved variables folder.

To find it you just go to your WoW folder, open the WTF folder, choose account and open the folder with the same name as your account (it's usually only 1) and then got to Saved Variables (it may be a bit hard to find but it's there). Inside that folder there is a bunch of text files, find the one named QuickAuctions and open it. There you go, but I reccomend you make a copy of it in another folder before trying this.

Download

That's the code, now you just have to put it in the file, or do you? While this piece of code is completly correct, there is one way to improve it, and it has already been partially done by j on the third page:

Download

As he says, you are supposed to paste the code after this part. But as a none programmer you may find this part hard to get right, at least I did. If you can't find this part remember that all information about your groups is stored in this part making it look diferent for every user. The important part about this code is:
["groups"] = {

If this part gets changed at all the whole addon may stop working (this is true for all part but this is the one you'll risk to break), to prevent this I decided to merge the two pieces to make it a little easier for users with no programming experience.

Download

As you see you are supposed to place the whole thing below the groups part and at a certain distance of the left side of the document, this is the same for all items so just make sure they are at the same distance from the left side as all other items in your other groups. Do the same with the name of the group compared to the names of the other groups, in the programming language used for WoW addons (lua) whitespace is very important.

The result of these modifications in the code is that you'll get a group only containing 2 ink glyphs, you can then add all other glyphs to a 1 ink glyph group. After doing all this you can set your prices a lot more precise than you could previously.

Now I better stop writing before my brain melts from all this code...

4 comments:

  1. any chance on getting a copy of your .lua file? :-D

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  2. Wow this is awesome!

    For reference WoW addons are written in lua, not C++

    And yes a copy of the .lua with just in this in it would be a godsend :)

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  3. Great idea, I actually made all the code into text files so you can just copy them right over as they both use the same layout.

    @sn0n
    As I said, I have put all code into downloadable text files. Unfortunantly I can't give you a direct copy of mine as that would completly remove all QA groups you got stored.

    ReplyDelete