Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail!

Today's inbox contained something that got me thinking about the definitions of botting and how weird the economy would be without the rules.

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If you are one of the many people who were unable to get tickets to BlizzCon or just couldn't afford to go, the World of Warcraft Official Magazine is giving away two tickets, airfare and a hotel stay for the event. Andy Salisbury, an editor at the magazine, had this to say about the contest:
I know as well as anyone that getting a ticket to BlizzCon is difficult. Having sat in the ticket queue with six browsers open across two computers I understand that they can go fast, and despite your best efforts you'll be left peeking in through the Anaheim Convention Center's windows.

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After a vicious, brutal campaign, the primary election between light-side Spiritual Guidance writer Dawn Moore and the shadow-specced Fox Van Allen (your host for today's article, of course) has come to a close. Fox had built a strong lead in the polls right up until this weekend, when a confused cadre of Tea Party activists misread Dawn's fondness for Earl Grey as tacit support for a right-wing economic agenda. Stupid democracy -- it just never seems to work.

Master of your own (spriesting) domain

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The Classifieds brings you weekly news from around the WoW community, including the famous Random Acts of Uberness shout-outs to players who makeWoW memorable.

I've seen nearly as many methods for maintaining a raid's morale as I have seen raids. Everyone does something a little different. I've even participated in "strip raiding" before. (I really try not to talk about it, you know? Let's just say that wipes affected more than just one's repair cost.) My point is that every raid tends to have its own version of the old carrot and stick.

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When I approached the editors of WoW.com to ask them if they'd be interested in letting me do some work, I was thrilled when they agreed and took me on. The creative freedom I got was incredible: "Write us an idea, and if it's all right, you can do it."

Thus, Byron the Tauren Rogue was born.

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Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped. If you're looking for general auction house advice, you'll find it in Gold Capped; Insider Trader focuses on specific profitable markets.

Got this from Thoorull on Steamwheedle Cartel (EU-H):
Blizzard has a long tradition of taking some "special" mats or crafts off of cooldown eventually, to help players along as content progresses. There are many cases: The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King cloth, Transmute: Titanium, Smelt: Titansteel, etc. What I completely fail to understand is why some now-trivial transmutes are still on a cooldown. Not just plain cooldown, but the all-important one which is used also for current epic gems. This includes vanilla iron, truesilver and essences, and TBC primals in addition to the said current-content epic gems and eternals. It completely baffles me why I can transmute a bajillion of titanium bars or current-content meta gems (as long as I have the mats) but not some old and obscure stuff. This is an excellent observation that's been bugging me for a while. Cataclysm is just around the corner, and everyone will be leveling new characters and doing trade skills from the ground up. It sure would be awesome to have the ability to turn readily available mithril and iron into much harder-to-find truesilver and gold. Let's look into what trade skill cooldowns really do.

Cooldowns are a limiting factor of supply. Economically, some items can't be available with virtually infinite supply, or else the items they can be made into would become cheap, and therefore less valuable, in the eye of the average player. Part of what Blizzard does (extremely well, in my opinion) is balance what players want with what they think they want.

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The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

He saved his people.

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Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we discuss the new glyph system and talk about which glyphs look good so far.

Back in the day, before Wrath was even released, I had incorrectly speculated that there would be three tiers of glyphs in the expansion. It was my very first post on WoW.com, and my mistake was clearly pointed out to me by some of the helpful commenters. It turns out that I was actually right -- it just took Blizzard a few years to get around to adding the extra tier of glyphs.

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column in which the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

This particular variation of the cute gnome picture was put together by reader Wabbajack. Playing with this picture is almost as fun as pasting Ghostcrawler's head onto various anime characters.

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