Now this website was interesting for several reasons. They sell new, factory sealed, high quality items such as cameras, electronics, and jewelry. The winners of the auctions get these items for insanely cheap prices, such as $83.28 on a Garmin GPS System (retail price $259.99) or an iPad 3G 64 GB for $43.47 (retail price $899.99)! Wow!  That iPad was 95% off the retail price!

I, being the cheapo bargain hunter that I am, was immediately intrigued. I sought to find out more about how I, too, could save hundreds of dollars. It sounds easy, right? Well, as they teach you in Economics 101, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The moral of this story, as you will soon see, is that there is no winner here (except the house).

To win an item on www.bigdeal.com, you must be the last bidder on an auction when the clock reaches zero. In order to bid, you must purchase something called “Bid Tokens.” Guess what? Bid Tokens cost $0.75 each, and this is where the house makes all of their money. When I first read this, I thought, “Oh, $0.75? That doesn’t sound too bad. I could purchase an item or two and it might only cost me a few bucks. I just have to be the last bidder, right?” Well here’s the kicker – normally that would work on an eBay auction, where you can simply be the last person to bid when the clock reaches the last second. I’ve won a bunch of auctions by being sneaky and sniping at the last second. But on www.bigdeal.com, if you bid in the last 15 seconds on the clock, the clock RESETS and adds another 30 seconds on the clock.

Okay, now let’s examine that this does. It means that bidders can engage in prolonged bidding wars, where the auction draws out until the last man standing. Meanwhile, every time that the players in this game snipe the other players, they are paying the house $0.75.

As you can see in the screenshot below, sometimes people will go to GREAT lengths to win an item. Some of the items only increase by $0.01 when a new bid is made. If an item, such as the Nikon D90 camera shown below, is currently at $17.78, this means that 1778 bids have been made on that item! The house has effectively made (1778 * $0.75) = $1333.50 on an item that retails for $1249.99. And the bidding isn’t even over!

Now let’s examine the strategies here a little more deeply using the Nikon D90 as an example. As soon as a player has submitted a bid, they have a sunk cost of $0.75. And it’s more than likely that there will be competition over an item. The natural human inclination at this point is to think, “Well, in order to make my $0.75 retain its value, I need to keep putting more in. Besides, I’m still under the retail cost of this item, which is $1249.99.” The bidder can technically bid 1,666 times before they’ve spent the retail cost of the item. (1,666 * $0.75 = $1249.5)  This psychology is flawed, and you can see why. It imprisons the user in a downward spiral, where as long as they keep bidding, they’ve put more and more money into the sink. Thus, their sunk cost increases over time and the value of their bid decreases over time (reaching 0 or even a negative loss if their bid goes over the retail value of the item). At a certain point, the player has two choices: 1) retract from the bidding war, in which case they may lick their wounds and mitigate their losses, or 2) keep bidding until they at least win the item, in which case they will not have lost everything.

In this type of auction, only two people win — the house, and the item winner (and this is debatable, depending how many times they’ve bid). Everyone else who even bid on the auction has lost.

The true genius of this auction site is that they may have hundreds of people employing the same psychology over a single item, and you can see that easily reflected in the ending price of an item. In the Nikon example, the house will likely make 2-5x the original retail price on the item. Just breezing through a few other completed auctions, they made $225 off a $75 mouse, $10,463.25 off a $299.99 laptop, $1634.25 off a $100 Visa Gift Card, and the list goes on and on. And to put a cherry on top, they often auction buckets of “Bid Tokens,” which can go for 5x the retail price of “$0.75,” but HELLO!??!? Bidding actions doesn’t cost the site a SINGLE CENT! It’s just made-up value!  It’s pure profit!

Anyway, a couple other observations:

• The house always wins (duh, I said this already). It capitalizes on the competitiveness of the bidders, which drives up the number of bids.
• If multiple people are bidding on a single item, you’ll notice that the clock counts down to 0, and at the last second, MULTIPLE PEOPLE will bid on the item at the same time so the current leader doesn’t get that item. Thus, within the last few seconds of the timer, you might get 5 or 6 people pumping up the price at the same time. These are “wasted bids” of $0.75 each, but it happens because the players can’t communicate with each other.
• It’s fascinating to watch the bids go by in real time. People can get REALLY MAD and be RUTHLESS! They’ll get into bidding wars several seconds apart, which really only hurts them and helps the house!
• Is this capitalism at its best? Or worst?

I couldn’t help but marvel at the genius of this system, but Volty kept insisting that it was a scam. A terrible, terrible scam on stupid people. I’m not sure I would go that far, because people SHOULD be able to figure out the advantages and disadvantages of the system, but I do agree that it is a system that only favors the house, and does not really favor the bidders at all. And who knows, maybe there are folks who actually do profit significantly from this “game.”

To be fair to bigdeal.com, they do provide a couple of “safety” measures for their customers. If a bidder on an auction loses the auction, all money the spent on bids is subtracted from the “Buy It Now” retail price of the item. So for example, if I bid 100 times on the Nikon D90, which cost me $75, then I can have the option to Buy the camera for $1249.99 – $75. Okay, it’s something, but the whole point of coming to a site like bigdeal was to SAVE tons of money, not purchase something for its original value!

Bigdeal also matches credits for money spent on bids. So if you spent $50 on bids, you get $50 off a $100 gift certificate in their rewards store. Okay, that’s actually a pretty good deal. Every dollar you spend on a bid actually translates to a physical dollar value in their retail store. Honestly, that’s a pretty nice, helpful feature for customers, unless you notice that you can buy a lot of the goods in their store for cheaper on Amazon. A Panasonic camera in their store costs $275 retail, -$30 off (thanks bigdeal!), so your total is $249.99. (But you can buy it for $229 at Amazon. Oh well…)

Lastly, bigdeal does gives its customers quite a lot of data about past transactions. So if you have your eye on an item like an iPad, you can see that past auctions have sold at around $152 (again a $820 iPad earning the site $11,400).  So keep your Bid Tokens until that baby hits at LEAST $100 in bids! You’ll save yourself a couple thousand bucks in bids!

Anyway, my goal is actually not to bash bigdeal.com. I think their business model is brilliant. I wish I had come up with that idea. However, if you are participating in an auction, you might want to think things through. In this case, the best strategy for winning is to not bid.

Needless to say, I have seen many healing add-ons! Here is my all-time top 10 list of most helpful healing add-ons. These are mostly geared toward raiding, but may also be helpful for leveling or PVP:

10. Healbot?

Healbot is my #10 add-on because I actually couldn’t think of a 10th add-on. I used Healbot ONCE back in the day, probably about 3 years ago, and the version that I downloaded allowed players to click on a person’s name in their raid frames. If you left clicked, you cast one spell. If you right-clicked, it was another healing spell. You could bind certain abilities to certain mouse buttons. However, I thought it was awful.

In order to write this article, I checked a number of healing add-ons, and to my surprise, Healbot actually looked like it could be…useful. I have not used this add-on myself so I’d be interested to hear what people have to say about it.

#9. Heal Assign

This add-on is most useful for healing leads. If all the healers in the raid have this add-on installed, they can easily see who they are assigned to heal. The downside to this mod is that all your healers need it for it to work, which probably is only useful for guild raids or a raid group with a consistent attendance.

#8. Rebirther

Another helpful mod for raid leads is Rebirther, which keeps track of druids’ Innervates and Rebirth cooldowns. The great thing about this add-on is that the druids themselves don’t need to install this mod.

#7. Outfitter

I would recommend this add-on to everybody, not just healers, but it can be especially useful for switching out gear sets without rummaging for half an hour through your bags. This add-on allows you to create and save outfits, and put on or take off outfits with one click.

#6. Recount

Recount is an add-on that tracks real-time data regarding things like damage done, damage per second (DPS), healing done, healing per second (HPS), resurrections, deaths, decurses, and things like that. Recount can both be a help and a curse. You can honestly use Recount to get immediate feedback on your healing performance during a raid. You can see which spells you used the most often, and compare them against those of the other healers. You can see who you healed the most. This information can be very useful, as long as you take it to improve yourself. The reason why Recount is a curse is because you can sometimes get caught up in topping the meters, or feel very bad when you are at the bottom. The point to remember is that Recount is a tool that can help, but at the same time, numbers don’t always paint a true picture. If you are a tank healer, for example, you may not have as high a healing output as the raid healer. If you are a single-target healer like a Paladin, perhaps you won’t do as well on a fight with lots of small, incoming damage. Use the numbers to your benefit.

#5. Prayer of Mending Tracker

This add-on is extremely useful for Priests who have no idea “who the what where and when” their PoM just went. In a raid of 25 people, it may be hard for your eye to see where exactly your Prayer jumped to, and thus you don’t know when you should refresh it (pssst…you should refresh it after the 5th charge is used up….or if the charge is on someone you know isn’t going to get hit).  This handy tool eliminates that problem by showing you exactly where your PoM has gone.

#4. SmartRes

SmartRes adds a series of nifty bars that show up on your screen, showing exactly who is rezzing whom. No more wasted time rezzing the same person!

#3. PallyPower

This is a must-have tool for Paladins in a raid (as long as your raid leaders use it!). This add-on creates a list of classes along the side of your screen, and the type of Blessing that you are assigned to give them. Simply click on each class icon, and your Paladin will automatically buff them with that blessing. Ideally, someone who is a raid leader or assist will set this up so that the Paladin Blessings are organized.

#2. Deadly Boss Mods (or an equivalent boss mod helper)

DBM creates all sorts of messages and alerts to help the player succeed in a boss fight. For certain mechanics where you have to jump out of the fire, heal someone, decurse someone, run together, hide behind a pillar, and so on, this mod is there to help you out. The mod also shows timers until the next boss event, such as an Enrage, a special attack, etc., thus helping you set up for success.

#1. Pitbull (or an equivalent unitframes mod such as Grid, ora, etc.)

Pitbull is a mod that allows you to customize your unitframes, which is the name for that piece of your screen where you see people’s portraits and health bars. This is the #1 area where healers must have perfect information, otherwise you are healing blind. Pitbull is fairly complicated to use (and I’m planning to write a guide on how to use Pitbull later), but you get a lot of control over a ton of information. Most specifically, I would suggest setting up your unitframes such that:

• You can clearly see the health and mana of all the people you need to heal.
• You have easy access to click on those health bars to deliver a heal.
• You turn on “healcast,” which is a special colored overlay on a health bar to show you how much incoming healing that person is going to get. I have mine currently set up only to show my own incoming healing, but I know there are mods that will show you the incoming healing from other healers as well.
• You turn on the range checker, which will fade out the health bars of anyone who is not in range of your heals. That way you are not mindlessly pounding healing buttons and not seeing the little system message that tells you your target is out of range.
• I also turn my Pitbull options such that I can only see my own buffs on the raid. This is especially helpful for a Resto Druid, because then I can clearly see the duration left on the hots on each person.

Now, if only there were a mod that would say “AWESOME JOB!!!!” and give you a cookie whenever the healers do a good job…

Images courtesy of www.curse.com.

In Café World, you cook different recipes on stoves. Recipes can take a different duration to cook – for example, 5 minutes, or 10 hours. You earn a little bit of XP up front for preparing the dish, and then a bigger payout of XP at the end of the cooking duration.

Well, if you happen to have a lot of cash in the game, you can engage in sport cooking. This is when you assign a stove to cook a particular dish, collect the up front XP, cancel the dish immediately (thereby losing your cash investment) and then repeating the process.

In Café World, each dish that you cook takes 3 steps to prepare, which equates to a total of about 15 seconds before your dish is cooking away. Well I now own two super stoves, which allow me to instantly cook the dish without having to click and wait through the 3 steps. The super stoves are especially helpful for sport cooking because you don’t have to make all these extra clicks.

I’ve identified the dish that gives me the most XP for the cash amount, which are the Rackasaurus Ribs – 51 XP for 600 gold coins. The only problem is that I’ll have to sport cook over 166,000 times in order to catch my friend who is #1 on the ranking charts.

Is this a totally retarded thing for me to do?  YES. Do I still sort of want to do it? YES. I wish I were playing a real quality game like WoW again, but both WoW and Café World have their advantages and disadvantages. For now, though, sadly, this is my preferred form of entertainment. It’s not a terrible thing to be doing while catching up with my TV shows, though.