The Consortium

Blizzard AH API is down at the moment (EU)

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 06:47:00 -0400

Edit: It seems that the situation has now improved and all is back to normal again.

A bit of a service announcement, Blizzard's Auction House API for EU realms has been down for a considerable while now (over a week now I believe). Some servers have come up and then down again, some have managed to stay up, but it seems that most are still experiencing problems.

Blizzard have been pretty good about keeping in touch about the situation, even if it is just a "we have no updates for you at the moment". The most recent update I have for you all is from 20 minutes ago:

Forum Maintenance

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:54:00 -0400

Just a quick heads up: we will be performing a quick forum maintenance to rebuilt threads and forum ranks. Downtime should be minimal, but be sure to back up any thread/post you may be working on in the event of a rollback.

Thank you.

Member of the Month - 03/13: Stede!

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:59:00 -0400

In 2012 we launched the Mists of Pandaria Guide Contest. The contest wasn't a success by any stretch of the imagination, in fact we had only one qualifying entry amongst several incomplete ones.

The sole entry, Stede's & Company's MoP Shuffling Spreadsheet, was a home run. We wanted to reward Stede for his work, but felt that a contest result post would be underwhelming, so we came up with something a little different: Member

Blizzard talks about the economy, the auction house, and professions

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:36:00 -0400

@Stede, @Namssob, and I, who do the Call to Auction podcast together, recently sent some questions to Ghostcrawler and professions designer He-Rim Woo about the economy, the auction house, and professions. Here are their answers!

Thank you for taking some time to talk about this part of the game that we all find so engaging! The professions, auction house, and economy

Selling green armor for Transmog

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 03:48:00 -0400

Transmog is certainly one of the more baffeling markets we can attempt. Unlike selling gems or armor, how much to charge and what to sell is extremely server dependant. Those playing on servers with higher populations or a RP focus will likely do quite well with some effort, whereas those on small servers will struggle to turn a decent profit.

I've been selling transmog for about a year and a half now on both factions of my server, one very large and one very small. Both turn a profit, though the larger faction much more. However, even on the small pop side, for 5 minutes every other day, I typically make 1-3k gold a day, which is pretty good for the time I spend.

I'm going to share some of my experiences and

TradeSkillMaster Theme Contest - Part 2

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:24:00 -0500

Part one of our theme contest is now over with 8 people submitting a total of 13 themes. This post gives all the details for the second and last part of this competition.

Entries
Billiard
Gold

Stede & Company's MoP Shuffling Spreadsheet

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 22:45:00 -0500

28-November-2012 - Ran into a major SNAFU when I mixed Excel versions to try to update stuff, so I've rolled everything back to the old, slow version. The new version has some bugs, if it works at all, that I won't be able to fix until later this evening. Really didn't anticipate VBA completely breaking down when up/down converting the file like this.

Major Update posted on 27-November-2012: I just pushed a revision that now uses a much faster computation method. Recalculation will only bog down when you change the data in the Prices Worksheet, and a message box will usually alert you within 5 seconds when its done. This makes altering your allocations lightning-fast. On top of that, I've added a Reset Allocations

TradeSkillMaster Theme Contest - Part 1

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:50:00 -0500

It's time for another TSM contest! As always, we have some awesome prizes to give away.

In August of last year, as a result of a prior contest to come up with a new design for TSM, the addon got a much needed visual overhaul. We also added many options to allow users to customize the look and feel of TSM. You can access these options by typing "/tsm" or clicking on the minimap icon and then clicking on the "Options" tab and scrolling down to "TSM Appearance Options".

This contest will be in two parts. This post outlines the

Smelting Success - A Mining Guide

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:28:00 -0500

MINING IS NOT A GATHERING PROFESSION

Okay well maybe Mining CAN be used to gather some ore and pretty jewels, but that is not where this profession's true greatness lies. Out of all of the gathering professions, Mining has the distinction of being the only one that is ALSO a crafting profession! That's right, I'm talking about SMELTING!

As of