Its not how much I made, but how easy it was to make it

This never ceases to amaze me. And its been amazing me since Vanilla. I remember being completely floored by the fact I could simply fly down to Duskwallow Marsh and buy the First Aid books and then flip them for 1000% profit or better.

A few nights ago I was preparing to do some cross faction stuff and thought I'd throw the line out and see what I could catch. I flew about 15 seconds away from the AH to the Troll area of Orgrimmar and bought some snakes for a few silver each.

I flew back and put them on the AH and went to bed.

The next morning someone had purchased one of them for 20 gold. Not bad for about a minute of work.

Video Mention on WoW Insider

One of my videos (and my YouTube Channel) has been mentioned in a great article in a great column on a cool World of Warcraft site. WoW Insider has an article about Advanced Icon Selector in response to one of my videos.



Or go directly to YouTube and watch it...

As I say in the video I really love this addon.

When I'm the only one selling rubies....

I sell them for what I want....

I guess I'm doing something right.

What am I doing?

I'm new to blogging about World of Warcraft. Deciding what to blog about takes up valuable time when I could be writing.

I have about a month or less of refer-a-friend bonus left so my main focus right now is getting a pair of druids (currently level 40-ish) to 80. Once they are 80, no more RAF so I can hold off leveling them. The plan is moving one of the druids to my home server, Skywall Horde, so I have my choice of a healer, DPS, or tank opposite any of the 10 classes I have on my first account.

Speaking of my first account, as of yesterday, all 10 classes are level 80 and above. Four are 85, one is 84, and the rest are somewhere in between. Reaching this point was my main goal for the RAF bonus.

Having played all 10 classes to 80 and above I can say I honestly do like them all. My favorite is whatever I've had the urge to play. If I had to choose beyond that, if I had to pick one for a desert island where I was limited to only one "main" then my choice would probably be the warrior. Or maybe the druid. Yeah - the druid because of the versatility. But tanking is so much fun on the Warrior... and I really haven't given the DK and Paladin an honest try yet...

See why I have ten?

Once in a while I envy the connection people who stick to one main character have with their "main." There's that familiarity and focus. I just can't do it. Like a father with 10 kids I love 'em all, some maybe more than others at times, but the plan is to keep them all fed and send them to college.

And that's my stream of consciousness for the moment.

Heart of the Aspects Mount Video

I enjoy this mount very much. I'm not interested in doing a lot of the things that have to be done to get the in-game mount awards so I appreciate having access to a little variety.



I made this video hoping I'd be one of the first only to find that it is one of a multitude. All the bases are covered, you can hear the sound it makes, see it swimming, watch the special, catch various angles flying, and see various sized characters riding it.

Confessions of an Addon Junkie

My load times have been sucking badly. I've been dual-boxing for a week and I noticed that my second account's client loads in about 10% of the time it takes my "main" client to load.

I hopped on an unplayed alt and disabled everything. All addons. Typed /reload. The game came back lightening fast of course. I also noticed my frame rate had almost doubled.

That was hopefully the intervention I needed to start my journey towards recovery.

Prioritizing - What do I really need?

Just one more! I'll start on Monday! 

I had to get rid of something. A quick skim through my three pages (yes, three!) of addons in Addon Control Panel (yes, another addon itself) didn't reveal any obvious candidates for the bit bucket.

So I asked myself "what do you like to do most, and what do you need to do it?"

I gots to make goldz!!! Gold-making, crafting, etc is one of the primary ways I enjoy the game, so the auction house addons stay - I use TradeSkillMaster and Auctionator. TSM is pretty big, but provides a lot of utility.

I enabled it, all its sub-addons, and Auctionator and hit reload. Still very fast, no noticiable difference.

Over and over I basically repeated this process checking the load time and then frame rate once I logged in. I also used, eh hem, another addon to check how much memory and CPU each addon is using. (broker_CPU I think its called).

Through this process I determined I probably don't need TellMeWhen, Power Auras, and Watcher all at the same time - not on each of my toons anyway.

Getting rid of the bad guys...

I also learned that my formerly new favorite inventory addon, Baggins, is a huge memory hog and that go looking for a suitable replacement. I found Combuctor which behave much more nicely and does things better actually. It also works better alongside Bankstack.

There are a lot of cool little addons that really don't effect performance at all but do very nifty things when you need them to. For example FasterCamera which changes the speed of the camera zoom. My god did that need fixed. This is an example of an addon I don't really "need" but it basically costs nothing to have enabled. It stays.

I stayed up too late last night repeated turning things back on and checking, sometimes finding replacements. Finally I managed to cut my load time to about 25% of what it was and I'd say I maintained at least 80% of the collective functionality of my former stack of addons.

tl;dr

Lessons learned:

1. Some addons are resource hogs - just because they're popular doesn't mean they aren't bloated

2. Redundancy is not my greatest asset when it comes to addons.

3. Know the difference between need and like. Remember the game is actually playable without any addons installed at all.

For the comments, name three addons you can't live without, and name the first one you have enabled now that you would delete.