Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Last week we took a look at some of the more popular and requested enchants and how to get them for yourself. I also promised that I'd continue the faction recipe series by taking a look at enchanting for this week.

So far, I've talked about the following professions and which factions hold appropriate recipes:

• Designs for jewelcrafters part one, and part two.
• Plans for blacksmiths.
• Recipes for alchemists.
• Patterns for leatherworkers.
• Patterns for tailors.

Here is a complete list of the factions to which any enchanter should "suck up" and how far you'll need to take it:

• Shattered Sun Offensive, honored.
• Consortium, revered.
• Cenarion Expedition, exalted.
• Thrallmar/Honor Hold, exalted.
• Keepers of Time, exalted.
• Lower City, exalted.
• Sha'tar, exalted.
• Violet Eye, exalted.

I have a confession to make: I've been playing the AH pretty hard for a few weeks now (ever since I started grinding up to the 5000g for my epic, and yes I got it finally), and I've come up with a lot of good tips for you guys, but I've kept them to myself, because I was selfish and didn't want my sources of gold to dry up. But now, I've got pretty much all the gold I need, and I'm ready to bring these to the world. Lots of you will already know what I'm going to say here (some of you might even be angry that I'm telling everyone), but for those of you who haven't found these little holes in the AH, here you go.

First of all: level up your First Aid to 325 right now, because I've got three words for you: Heavy Netherweave Bandage. Think all that they'll do is heal you? Think again -- they vendor in the game for a whopping 6g per stack, so every time you log on your AH alt, the first thing you should do is run to the Auctioneer and buy up all the Netherweave cloth you can find for less than 3g -- crafted up into bandages, each stack of cloth is worth at least that, so anything you buy for less than 3g (I've seen it as low as 1g 50s -- people are throwing away money) is pure profit. This is the biggest moneymaker I've found (you don't make much per stack, but after you've "processed" a few hundred stacks, the money adds up), and it made me regret selling Netherweave for anything less than 3g before I figured this out.

Second big tip: don't ever buy anything on the weekends. Ever. Prices soar on the weekends, so much so that you'll often be able to take advantage of huge bargains during the week, and then turn around and craft or just resell those items on the weekends, when everyone else is playing. I know you really, really want that Primal Air on Sunday so you can finish off your profession leveling, but wait three days -- by Wednesday, all of the AH sellers will have seen their auctions expired and will be ready to lower the price.

Time once again to put the considerable brainpower that you, dear readers, have to good use (and by good use we mean other than making funny things about the Failoc). It's time once again to Ask WoW Insider. This week we have a question for you from fordarkness over on WoW LJ -- it's about Badges of Justice, and just when and how would be best to cash them in before the expansion.

Obviously, the expansion isn't going to bring in new badge vendors that we can use these for.... Epic level 70 gems will probably still be around and used for your intro raiding gear, but chances are they'll be replaced pretty quick too.

I'm debating liquidating my badges into gems, nethers and vortexes and selling them on the AH. Of course, there's the issue of "how soon is too soon" and "what if the patch puts in some new vendor items", along with "I need to get the items out on the market before it becomes flooded and no one wants them due to the imminent release of the LK expansion"!

So whaddaya think? If you have extra badges, liquidating them into Nethers and Vortexes isn't too bad an idea, since even Badge gear might be overtaken by green gear a few quests into Northrend. But then again, even crafted gear that uses those items might end up being useless within the first few levels, so what's a Badge hoarder to do?

What's your plan for getting rid of the Badges you have left? Are you just going to spend them as you need them and see what solutions present themselves when Wrath arrives? It would be interesting if Blizzard, say, offered an XP reward in exchange for them after level 70. Or have you already liquidated your stock by selling out Primal Nethers on the AH? What happens to your Badges when the way to Northrend opens up?

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

If you've ever spent any time sitting in trade chat, you could probably make a list of some of the most popular enchants. Requested frequently, any enchanter possessing the the knowledge to imbue a weapon or piece of armor with the proper stats stands to make a fair amount of gold.

For example, a healer seeking Major Healing, or a meleer seeking Mongoose, will know the materials, and gather them. Each time they replace their respective weapons, back into trade they will go to request the enchant.

Today, Insider Trader presents a list of some of the most requested enchants with information about how to obtain them so that you can offer them to friends, guildmates, and your server.

It is by no means a complete list, but it will get you off to a shining start and provide you with quite a to-do list. Check out the comments section for helpful details as well.

Drop rate data was gathered from the Armory, and Blizzard uses ranges such as Very Low (1-2%). This is narrowed down with data from Wowhead where appropriate, but keep in mind that some bind on pick-up recipes can only be seen by enchanters, and Wowhead cannot filter out that data, making their estimate much lower than the actual drop rate.

In the next couple of weeks, I'll be working on the faction recipes series, focusing on enchanting, so stay tuned.

This idea's been floated before, but a few people on the forums have responded pretty enthusiastically to the notion of introducing a "guild income tax." Others...not so much so. Basically, there was a proposal made in the Beta forums that Blizzard give GM's/officers the ability to levy a percentage-based tax on members' earnings. Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan responded, saying that it "was an interesting idea" and they're considering options for improving guild administration, but there was no way they could program a change like this in time for Wrath. Bear in mind that the original tax being suggested would apply to your toon both inside and out of raids (although no one was seriously suggesting that the tax should apply to non-raiding members of the guild).

I have to admit that I'm not too keen on the idea of a broad-based "income tax" on players, if only because the game's current mechanics make it all but certain that the main beneficiaries will be people who either can't (due to class/spec) or won't put much gold into the guild coffers. Moreover, the taxation idea acts as an incentive for people not to guild their alts, thus avoiding taxation entirely on toons that are usually the real means of support for a raiding main (someone remind me to go reserve a hunter named Swissbank). As an herbalist/alchemist, I farm a lot for friends and have been known to chuck the guild bank a few hundred gold from time to time. Maybe I'd save time and money under a system that required me to hand over 2-3% of my income, but still. Being taxed removes an element of individual responsibility, and it certainly takes away the nice feeling you have for voluntarily helping others.

If nothing else the idea's given rise to a few nice jokes (Cacora of Hellscream: "Do I get money back at the end of the year if I claim multiple alts as dependents?"), but the final word may well belong to Grig from Whisperwind: "So, Blizzard is considering taking one of the most universally loathed concepts from real life and adding it to a game. Why, they'd be silly not to do it."

A few weeks back, I was a guest on the Canoodle Strudel radio show, a Sunday night show about gaming on WIUX, Indiana University's student radio station. In the comments of that post, our good friend Totalbiscuit at WoW Radio was kind enough to offer to host an mp3 of the show, and the recording is now up over on their site for your listening enjoyment. It's a long show (about two hours), but we hit on pretty much everything there is to talk about in the World of Warcraft, from what it's like to start out in the game, to what's going on in Wrath, what it means to be "human" in Azeroth, and how easy the recruit-a-friend program's triple experience makes leveling (two of the guys on the show just recently started playing WoW, and they've been using the triple experience and level grant system extensively).

The show was late on a Sunday night, so I was a little loopy by the end, but hopefully it turned out OK. I did share a few Auction House secrets that I haven't really posted here on the site (though if you're already an Auction House hawk, you'll know what they are already), and we talked a little bit about the behind the scenes on the WoW Insider Show that might be fun if you're a fan of that.

Was a great time -- thanks to the guys at Canoodle Strudel for having me on. It's always a pleasure to talk Warcraft, on the radio or anywhere else.

Recently, a reader wrote in with a question that everyone ponders from time to time. When trying to make money from a profession, it can be difficult to determine what to sell, what to convert, and what to avoid doing all together. Here's what she asked:

Hello,

When making gold from Mining, is it better to Prospect the Ore? Or is it better to just sell the Ores and Bars?

Thank you!

Regards,
Kristy.

Taking a break from the faction recipe series to shake things up a bit, let's take a look at how this breaks down.

You just need $100 million to beat it. No, we're kidding -- after Activizzard founder Bobby Kotick's presumptuous statement a few months ago that any game company would need at least half a billion dollars to challenge World of Warcraft, EA/Mythic's Mark Jacobs has responded in kind on the eve of their big Warhammer Online release, telling MTV Multiplayer that the number is closer to around $100 million. And that they spent less than that on their big MMO.

We'll be realistic here: we don't think anyone believes, including EA, that WoW's numbers are attainable for another MMO coming out this year -- even Blizzard believes that eventually WoW will go by the wayside, but as Jacobs says, anyone releasing a game today isn't just competing with WoW, they're competing with WoW and Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. And no matter how long your development cycle or how big your budget, you can't compete with three years of people working around the clock to make the game better for live players.

But EA does want to be successful, and Jacobs says success for him would mean upwards of half a million players. Six months from now, he says, if Warhammer is folding servers and not adding them, the writing is on the wall. There's no reason to think that will be the case, of course -- Warhammer looks like a great game led by one of the biggest publishers in the world supporting one of the best MMO developers, and it's about as close to guaranteed a success gets in the MMO space. But even Mythic would say WoW stands on its own -- while WoW is running, it's highly unlikely we'll see any MMO come anywhere near its 10 million total subscribers.

A Hungarian site about Starcraft has put together a petition that a lot of folks who weren't able to grab BlizzCon tickets will probably want to sign: they're asking for Blizzard to create a live Internet stream of BlizzCon. Of course, DirecTV will be streaming the whole show (for a price, of course) on television in the US, but Blizzard fans in Europe and elsewhere have no such luck.

To tell the truth, we're not sure why Blizzard made this deal with DirecTV -- well, to be fair, we know why (to make more money), but they did provide a live stream of the Worldwide Invitational in Paris, and while sure, there were occasional problems, it worked far better than I ever expected it to. Why Blizzard didn't just upgrade the servers and send the stream of BlizzCon out into the world for free (as much as DirecTV wouldn't like it) is a good question.

The petition has already 1800 signatures as of this writing (more, we'll note, than the actual number of tickets sold to BlizzCon of course Blizzard has sold thousands of tickets, not hundreds. Sorry about that.), and we're sure it'll be way more than that soon. It's likely that Blizzard has tied themselves down by selling the rights to stream the show to DirecTV, but you never know -- maybe a groundswell of public support for an internet stream will make them reconsider.

[via BlizzPlanet]

Normally, we don't concern ourselves with sales charts too much -- we really only cover the one game, so comparing it to others really isn't our thing. Unless it's the only game in town, which, according to this month's NPD PC game software sales charts, posted by WorldofWar.net, it pretty much is. Out of the top ten PC games, Blizzard is responsible for a full half, and of those five, four are World of Warcraft related.

1. WoW: Battle Chest
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
3. World Of Warcraft
4. Nancy Drew: The Phantom Of Venice
5. Spore Creature Creator
6. Diablo Battle Chest
7. Warcraft III Battle Chest
8. WoW: Burning Crusade
9. The Sims 2 Ikea Home Stuff
10. Call of Duty 4

Just wild. Diablo's Battle Chest is undoubtedly there because of the Diablo III announcement, but the rest is all World of Warcraft -- people are picking up the game, its expansion, the Battle Chest (which combines both), and even the predecessor Warcraft III (in which the Wrath backstory features prominently) in droves.

PC gaming isn't dead at all. But there's no question that of the struts keeping it standing, Blizzard is definitely one of the strongest.

There is a certain party, a regular emailer to us among our readers, who believes that we here at WoW Insider take a little too long at the start of our posts to get to the actual point of each story, so in this one, I'll just get right down to it: Blizzard needs to put Auction House information on the Armory.

I've been on the grind to the 5000g for my epic flying mount lately, and I've been playing the Auction House like a demon: calculating, buying, selling, and crafting my way to as much gold as I can throw together. And while Auctioneer has definitely helped, the best way I've found to track prices and make sure I get the most for my time in the AH is just to see the prices themselves -- no average price calculated by Auctioneer is worth enough as seeing the real thing. And that's where Blizzard comes in -- while there are a few sites that attempt to track prices with various methods, they have actual, constant access to the prices on every server. And they have a great place to put them: on the Armory.

The item pages on the Armory right now are practically empty -- besides some vendor and reagent information, there's almost nothing there (especially compared to, say, Wowhead). Giving player access to AH information would pull them into the game even when they couldn't play, not to mention let some of Blizzard's most talented web programmers -- their fans -- at data that they could do tons of great stuff with. Want a text alert when your favorite mats drop in price, or when there's room on the AH to finally sell off those Elixirs of Agility you've got? By passing out AH info to the Armory, Blizzard could give fans access to the data needed to make their own great tools, not only leaving Blizzard free to work on actual development, but giving us Auction House haunters all the access we need to track prices and have that much more fun playing the AH.

The debate over whether Death Knights should get a free hand up on their primary professions continues to rage, but what actually interests me most are some of the arguments put forth by those opposed to Death Knights getting "free" tradeskills. Some of them are saying that it doesn't matter that Death Knights have to wait, because people should wait until max level to deal with professions anyway.

This is a completely alien concept to me. On any new character, the first thing I do upon hitting level 6 is run to the nearest profession trainers to learn my chosen professions. I like being able to doing something about those herbs and mineral nodes I see while I'm leveling. I can go do some tradeskilling if I start getting bored of leveling, and I can use the final product for my own leveling process, or sell the raw materials on the AH for a nice chunk of change.

I can't really fathom waiting for maximum level before I started a profession in earnest. Why go back to Elwynn forest to harvest bushels of Peacebloom at level 70 when you could have done it from level 1-11 while you were there?

So here's something that may be considered somewhat of a companion question to yesterday's profession question: Do you level your professions while you level up, or do you leave them until after you've leveled up?

With Wrath's release inching closer and closer, we've had a flood of profession information coming in. The latest Blizzcast gave up some insight into the future of professions, and we've seen rumors and recipe lists for quite a few professions. Even gathering professions aren't immune to the fun, with some nice little innate bonuses being granting to mining, skinning and herbalism.

So, with Wrath coming, it's the perfect time to take inventory of your tradeskills and decide which way you're going to go. Will you drop Leatherworking now that you don't need the drums for raiding? Will you head over to Inscription so you can trick out your own spells and skills? Will you go strictly gathering for the buffs and for selling off raw materials to everyone trying to level their professions?

In short, what profession will be your primary pursuit in Wrath of the Lich King?

There's a ton of asking going on around this site lately -- between "Ask a Lore Nerd" and "Ask a Beta Tester," you guys are asking more questions than a two-year old who just learned what "why" means. But this column, Ask WoW Insider, is the O.G. of Ask columns here on the site, and unlike all of the other Ask columns, we put the question back to you readers. Chippen of EU Doomhammer sent in this great question this week:

We are having a discussion in our guild whether alts have priority on loot before guild members and we do have different views on this. Some say that an alt is an alt, and need to wait to be geared up, while others can't really see the problem. What is a main and what is an alt?

I suppose a main is the...well...I don't know. The first character I created? Or is it the character I play the most? Or is it the character I want to play the most and also enjoying playing the most? When does an alt become a main, and is it possible to swap between the two?

If you're asking me, I'd say it's definitely possible to switch mains (I've done it a few times) -- your main is currently the character that's getting the majority of your playtime, and the one where loot matters the most to you. Some guilds ask you to declare a main, so that they can make a clear distinction for passing out loot, while other guilds just have players switch alts depending only on what situations require what.

So let's show up those other Ask columns and give this great, open-ended question out to you, our dear readers: what is a main and what is an alt? And what's the difference between the two?

If you've got a question for our readers to be posted right here in the original Ask column, be sure to send it along to ask@wowinsider.com. And there's lots more Ask WoW Insider, including this question on abusing the /roll, and how to make friends and influence raiders on a new server.