Mending Old Wounds

Does these turn ins lower your bloodsail rep?

Welcome to Wowhead. Here at this fantastic site, you'll notice that every quest comes complete with several things, including:

-The quest text and quest objectives, under the heading "Progress"
-A map of where one may complete the quest objectives, under the heading "Relevant Locations"
-The text you receive upon completion of the quest, under the heading "Completion"--though you need to click on this to see it, so as to prevent spoilers
-Any quest rewards, including items and reputation, under the heading "Gains"

You'll see above that the "Gains" section reads as follows:

Upon completion of this quest you will gain:
500 reputation with Ratchet
-500 reputation with Bloodsail Buccaneers

Thanks for tuning in for this edition of how-to-wowhead. We here in the World of Warcraft community hope you enjoy your stay and eventually pass on the knowledge you have gained. :D

Optimal Reputation Repair

For those of you looking to use as few mats as possible to repair your goblin reputation with all four factions in the most efficient manner possible, given current auction house prices, it is most cost-efficient to essentially just go in order -- turn in all the linen you need to get neutral with the first faction, all the silk to get neutral with the second, then all the runecloth to get neutral with the third, then all the mageweave to get neutral with the fourth.

I was thinking about this and whether there was any way to find a more optimal approach. The idea is that turning in cloth for one faction in addition raises rep with all the other factions as well, albeit at a smaller rate, so maybe by not maxing out each faction right away, we could save money

For each faction, one turn in yields 500 rep for that faction's particular cloth quest . That same turn in also gives 250 rep for all the others, so the problem we wish to solve is to get more than 42,000 rep with the following constraints:

* Once neutral is reached in any faction, no more turn ins for that faction can occur.

* At the end, each faction must have at least 42,000 rep (neutral).

* We want to minimize the total amount of gold spent on cloth at the AH.

To solve this problem, I wrote a MATLAB script to determine a "rep vector" whose four elements are the reputations with each faction at the end. Inside, there is simply a for loop that takes in a "turn in vector" whose elements are the number of turn ins for each faction. When rep with a certain faction exceeds 42,000, no reputation is awarded for further turn ins, which accounts for the constraint that the quest cannot be done at that point.

It goes through and allocates reputation linen first, then silk, then runecloth, then mageweave, since in my auction house on Cairne at the time, this was the order from least to most expensive, so the answer likely will decrease the number of turn ins as the expense per stack gets higher.

I used the following prices for a 20x stack of cloth:
Linen Cloth: 1.5 g

Silk Cloth: 4.5 g

Runecloth: 6 g

Mageweave: 31 g

These prices are basically in line with the normalized price of a 20x stack output from Auctioneer on 2009/12/22 on the Cairne realm, alliance side.

I then used a simulated annealing routine to essentially throw in semi-random turn in vectors and compute their cost. If the total rep vector did not equal or exceed 42,000 in each of its entries, the cost function would return an arbitrarily high cost (meaning it is not a solution).

The results I obtained for the optimal turn in amounts were:

Linen Cloth: 168 stacks (84 turn ins)

Silk Cloth: 84 stacks (42 turn ins)

Runecloth: 40 stacks (20 turn ins)

Mageweave: 22 stacks (11 turn ins)

This is essentially the turn in routine you would use above, with one tiny change -- use only 20 turn ins of Runecloth instead of the 21 you need to get neutral right away. With the above turn in numbers, this comes out to 1,552 gold total. With the simpler strategy of maxing out neutral immediately, after the 21 turn-ins of Runecloth, you still need to do 11 turn-ins of Mageweave, which gives a total cost of 1,564 gold.

So technically there is a more optimal solution to gaining your reputation back, but it only saves you twelve gold and if the prices for the mats on your AH are hugely distorted from the values I used (specifically for the mageweave), then it won't apply. But if they're close, then you could save twelve gold. Woot.

Anyway, I thought I would post this so that others who are curious about this question can find out and not spend the time to actually compute it all out, resting peacefully knowing that they're getting the most goblin rep bang for their gold.

Good luck!

For anyone repairing their Goblin rep, here's a list of all the repair quests.

Everlook Quest
Booty Bay Quest
Ratchet Quest
Gadgetzan Quest

Hope this helped (: