Author Archives: Azuriel
Gold-Making in MoP
I had a guild member ask me what I have been up to so far on the AH side of things, and I figured I may as well share here too.
The backbone of my routine is/was the Saronite Elementium Ghost Iron Shuffle. Basically, you buy stacks of Ghost Iron Ore at X gold, then through Prospecting/Alchemy/Enchanting/etc you turn it into a product worth X+Y gold. Every realm/faction market is different, so individual research will be needed to find the values for X and Y. Right now, for example, I buy Ghost Iron Ore at 4g apiece (and below). This ore ends up being:
- Smelted into Ghost Iron Bars –> Transmuted into Trillium Bars –> Transmuted into Living Steel
- Prospected –> Rare gems cut for >60g minimum
- Prospected –> Uncommon gems turned into necks/rings –> Rare necks/rings procs sold for 300g, uncommon necks/rings Disenchanted for Dust
- Disenchanted Dust –> Enchanting scrolls and/or sold for mats
After a while, I started getting exceedingly lazy and stopped prospecting altogether. Instead, I keep an eye on the Golden Lotus market and snatch any up that are 50g or less. From there, I keep ~5 of each flask up on the AH and then Transmute the rest into Rare gems which I cut and sell for a minimum of 60g, but generally 100g+. This probably lowers my margins significantly, but once I made it back up to my 300k starting gold reserves (even after gambling ~100k on Darkmoon trinkets), relisting hundreds of auctions a day becomes less and less interesting.
One market I was surprised to find was the Ghost Iron Dragonling. While most Engineers will be dumping a bunch on their way up to 600, what I have found is that in 99% of the cases they list them without bothering to fill in the Cog sockets. Considering the item is damn near useless without them – and taking a cue from someone spamming trade chat for an Engineer to make some – I started selling mine with a variety of useful Cogs already slotted in; configurations like Haste/Mastery/Spirit, Haste/Crit/Mastery, Hit/Expertise/Dodge, and so on. Remarkably, they continue to sell at an absurd mark-up: 750g apiece compared to the empty ~200g models.
Presently, I am buying up a bunch of Ghost Iron Ore again, in preparation for the new Blacksmith changes coming in 5.2, and the whole Lightning Steel Ingot deal. I am somewhat doubtful that the price of ore will jump up in the long-term on my particular backwater server, but I figure I may as well start stockpiling now. In fact, it is far more likely that my server will experience a lack of availability than a lack of affordable goods. Until a week ago, you could not find Blood Spirits at any price, for example.
Keeping Valor
In perhaps one of the more refreshing moments of sanity in quite some time, Blizzard recently announced that Valor points would not be reset in 5.2. The prior plan was best described as a triple-gate clusterfuck:
- Current players got VP downgraded to JP, which buys heirlooms and little else.
- Players below the ilevel 480 cutoff for the 5.2 LFR would essentially have to either re-grind more Valor to purchase (discounted) rep gear, provided they had the rep, or replace 100% of their items with 483 gear from the last two LFRs.
- New/Returning players would continue needing to grind reputation to grind VP to get gear to enter LFR to get gear that let’s them grind 5.2 LFR bosses to unlock more VP gear locked behind more rep. (Yo dawg, I heard you like grinds, so…)
The level of nonsense was incredible. Downgrading only ever makes sense when the items are downgraded (to JP) too, lest your purchasing power actually be destroyed.
The new rubric makes much better sense. Those 3000 banked VP mean nothing when you can’t purchase 5.2 VP gear without killing raid bosses anyway – a gate mechanism already exists, so double/triple gating is unnecessary.
As always though, having a new patch within sight does engender a bit of progression fatalism. I abandoned all pretense of shooting for the weekly VP cap for several weeks now. Because… why would I? While it is silly to take that argument all the way – “why gear at all when gear resets every expansion” – it simply makes economic sense to me to wait out the 5.1 clock. Instead of 2-3 items after weeks of work, I can get 2-3 items after weeks of non-work.
In the meantime, a more pressing issue presents itself: the race against the upgrade vendor disappearance. Not an upgrading of standard gear, of course, but an upgrading of the Bind of Account staves that my level 85 Scribe can craft… if not for the 5+ Spirits of Harmony required. Of the once-a-day Scrolls of Wisdom, I have 45. Which… is a little disturbing to think about, actually.
The Wages of F2P
I finally buckled-down and purchased a 3-month subscription to PlanetSide 2 last night. I say “finally” because I had been waffling back and forth for quite some time on the decision, all of which has resulted in me losing out on +35% XP gains (which translates into faster Cert gains, which translates into character/weapon upgrades) for the duration of the indecision. I have been playing this game 1-2 hours a day for the past several months, so it is not a trivial amount of potential lost progress.
One machine I don’t mind being a cog in.
But still, even with credit card in hand, I felt like I was getting suckered. Since Steam, I never pay full price for anything. And this is a F2P game, right? I know things are designed to part me from my cash. I could technically get everything (non-cosmetic) from gameplay, so why purchase anything? Or, you know, bide my time until the next double/triple Station Cash sale at least.
But… you guys have no idea how much fun I’ve been having with, say, that underbarrel grenade launcher. Or rocket pods on the jets. At what point does it become silly to intentionally have less fun for a long duration for a reward at the end, versus spending that same amount of time having fun with the reward?
Actually, the former sounds like… erhm… daily quests.
By the way, this means, to date, I have spent ~$85 (x3 SC cards, 3 month sub) on a F2P game. Mission fucking Accomplished, SOE.
The Number of Subs Goes Up and Down, Up and Down
As MMO-Champion reports, WoW had “more than 9.6 million” subscribers as of December 31st, 2012. This is down at least 400k from what Blizzard reported at the end of Q3 2012. I’m not particularly interested in spin or theories of causes, because as we all know, these sort of losses are rarely attributable to any one thing.
I do find it useful though, to keep the following in mind: the subscriber count was 9.1 million back in August of 2012, pre-pandas. If this is what decline and a descent into irrelevance looks like, then we’re in for a pretty soft landing.
Wrong Choices
Ghostcrawler tweeted the sort of thing I’m sure sends “real” MMO players into howling fits:
“No,actually,there is not a wrong choice.Wether we(players) buy new items OR upgrade old ones should be our decision,not DEV’s.”
Giving players the ability to make choices with wrong answers doesn’t make players happy overall. (Source)
Choices having bad consequences is the best (only?) way to make a decision matter, as the argument goes. However, this quote got me thinking: do such players actually enjoy being able to make the wrong choice, or is it simply that the bad choice existing (which they did not pick) validates their good decision? Or put another way, who really likes making bad decisions?
I understand that the demonstration of skill necessitates there being wrong choices. Demonstrating skill, or improvement thereof, is fun. At the same time, the Mass Effect series (for example) was fun to play even though there weren’t any “wrong choices” (provided you weren’t specifically looking for X result).
There is only ever one correct answer to the questions of “which does the most DPS” or “what is the most efficient use of resources.” Ergo, is there actually any real decision to be made when one is correct and the other(s) not? I suppose the fun is supposed to be the result of figuring out which one is which, but that sort of clashes with the mockery and disdain frequently attributed to those who don’t look up the correct decision from the Wiki/EJ. Compare that to the question of “which transmog set is the best?”
I do not believe that there has to be a wrong choice in order for choices to be meaningful generally. We make identity choices every day – what type of person do I want to be, what do I believe in? – and I do not think that anyone would suggest that those choices are either irrelevant or have wrong answers (well… no one with any sort of self-reflection). And while I am willing to concede gameplay being under the (broad) umbrella of choice, e.g. one makes a wrong choice by pressing 11342 instead of 11324, I consider there to be a distinction between executing a rotation under pressure versus avoiding falling into a designer trap. One has its place as a legitimate test of skill, and the other is simply you winning via a few mouse clicks several months ago.
Valor Getting Converted to Justice
Mystery solved.
Valor -> Justice
All Valor is converted to Justice
Justice -> Gold
Justice above the 4000 cap is converted to gold at a rate of 47 silver per point
So let’s say the realms go down for the 5.2 patch and you have 450 Valor and 3800 Justice. Because of the 4000 Justice cap, you’d log back in after the patch is released with 0 Valor, 4000 Justice, and be 117 gold and 50 silver richer after the conversion.
With 5.2 we won’t be changing current Valor items to cost Justice, but they will be much cheaper (discounts from 50-75% off their current costs). You’ll need to acquire Valor after the patch is released to buy pieces for their discounted rate, or to buy the new 5.2 Valor items, but we’re also introducing new items to spend your Justice on, including heirlooms and Pet Battle stones. (source)
In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious that this is what they would be doing – this exact thing happened every patch in Cataclysm – but the “triple-gate” of 5.2 Valor items being locked behind new reputation vendors and the old items still being bought with (50-75%) less Valor was throwing me for a loop. And I like how Blizzard’s Justice Point consolation note says “new items like heirlooms and Pet Battle stones” instead of something useful, like I dunno, maybe all the shit they rolled out in Cataclysm, e.g. herbs, orbs, trade goods? I would love to see Chaos Orbs and Spirits of Harmony on the vendors for ~1500 JP or whatever.
PlanetSided
PlanetSide 2 continues to be a part of my daily gaming routine. It’s a tough game to nail down though, balanced as precariously as it is between FPS and “MMO.” Battlefield 3 is probably the better shooter, and certainly can be paced better, but there are moments in the epic firefights of Ps2 that simply cannot be replicated in any other FPS that I have played.
Flying around in one of the “jets” is how I usually start any play session. Sometimes – more often than I like to admit – I die within a minute of taking off. Since my timer on the jet is 8 minutes long (I spent some Certs to bring it down from 15), I usually try and spawn at some sort of hotspot, hopefully in an already-filled platoon. Sometimes that is enough for the rest of the night. Other times we either win or are pushed back, and it becomes difficult to tell where to go afterwards. If I am more than 5 minutes away from any sort of action, I usually just log off.
I inadvertantly joined an Outfit (aka guild) a few weeks ago during the Double XP weekend. During that time, the coordination resulted in Certs raining from the sky and was pretty awesome. Other times… well. To be quite honest, actual coordinated “fights” in Ps2 are pretty boring. It is like running around in premades in WoW BGs: a lot of time spent rolling over a handful of randoms, while actively avoiding other premades. Capping empty, undefended bases is about the most boring thing you can imagine. At the end of the night, you have “claimed” territory that is fairly irrelevant to your gameplay the next day, barely getting the equivalent of 2-3 kills worth of XP per base. I caught myself thinking “I should have been doing daily quests in WoW instead” the other night.
That’s the macro view. On the micro view, I’m having tons of fun in the actual shooting.
For the longest time, I was stuck in a limbo zone of wanting to buy a new gun, but wanting it to go on sale first. About a week ago I finally buckled down and bought my Engineer (some guns can only be used by certain classes) the Solstice SF, which is basically a slightly-worse default gun… with the possibility of an under-barrel grenade launcher. It cost 700 Station Cash, i.e. $7, or technically $2.33 since all my Station Cash came from a Triple SC day.
I have an extremely hard time justifying purchasing anything in F2P games as I end up second-guessing everything. “Do I really need this gun?” “Remember that one time you threw down money on a F2P/DLC purchase and then quit the game two days later?” “Will I even be playing this game 2-3 weeks from now?” It is kind of a vicious cycle, or perhaps more of a self-filling prophecy – the longer I deny myself fun, the more likely it is that I quit playing. It is not as though I even need to be so miserly with my IRL money, I just derive zero pleasure from spending money on non-deals. It’s why I can have hundreds of dollars in Steam purchases for games I have never played, but waffle for weeks on a cash shop purchase for a game I’ve got 51 hours into and counting. My hesitation is actually even dumber than that, considering the SC was already bought and paid for months ago; why I cannot see the $30 as being a box purchase of Ps2 instead of dollars I can hoard instead is beyond me.
But, yeah. Otherwise, I am having inordinate amounts of fun in the jets, and now sitting on my own engineer’s ammo boxes shooting endless grenades at my foes. Now all SOE has to do is stop releasing patches that drop framerates.
Saw That One Coming
Just another Black Temple clear when…
What? Even monks can use them?
Ayep. Called that one.
The funny thing I realized, inbetween the tears, is how the error message is “You can never use that item.” Challenge accepted – I’m tweeting Ghostcrawler as we speak.
Bugs
As you may have noted along the sidebar, I am “playing” the original Crysis on and off. The scare-quotes are there because the game itself is borderline unplayable with all the bugs and crashes I have been experiencing. For as much as I love Steam and try to get 100% of my PC gaming through it, I am finding it increasingly asinine how little support Steam offers for the very games it sells. Generally speaking, if the game is more than 5 years old, I don’t even bother trying to install it before checking out the forums first; luckily, most of the first page is usually filled with similar customers in dire need of tech support as all of us stumble in the dark together.
I give games like the original Borderlands a pass – despite needing to download a swath of mods to make it less of a brain-dead console port – because that was how the game was designed. With Crysis though? The goddamn game crashes 100% of the time when you try and change any of the settings. If I alt-tab out of the game, it automatically switches to windowed mode, with no way to go back to full-screen without crashing the game. And it’s buggy even inside the game too; I was stuck for over an hour before I realized that the Objectives not updating was a bug and not me missing some sort of programming trigger (which would still be stupid).
I get that computers are hard, what with all the potential variations in hardware and software. But, seriously, some of this shit needs to be bundled with the download of the game itself.
Unabated
My WoW playing continues unabated.
I have reached Exalted with Anglers and Klaxxi most recently, and the Tillers/Cloud Serpent weeks ago. I am a step away from Honored with Shado-pan, and stopped at Revered with Shieldwall and Golden Lotus (may whomever is responsible for Golden Lotus dailies burn forever). Since I am neutral with the August Celestials and they have nothing of interest for my paladin, I have not bothered doing any quests for them.
Of my 10 alts, the highest remains stagnant at level 88; dailies and/or LFR consumes all of the WoW time I permit among my other diversions. With me hitting so many reputation milestones though, this may change.
My (high) opinion of LFR has not changed, although I did have a few bad experiences. During the first fight of Vault of Mysteries, we had a AFK warlock leecher, who stood by the stairs during the encounter. While it was annoying knowing that he/she could possibly get rewarded for doing so, the greater issue was how the encounter was reset TWICE when he was targeted by one of the bosses’ abilities. The reason why it took two resets to kick the warlock was because it was not immediately obvious why the encounter reset.
The luck I experienced with my first run of LFR has not held up to repetition. Two weeks ago I received nothing, maybe 1-2 of those coins, and this past week I received naught but a tier helm. I will agree that the “failbags” do indeed start to feel worse than not winning rolls under the traditional model… although that is more a psychological artifact than reason to go back. I think it is easier to believe you pessimistically expect nothing to drop, when you are not immediately reminded that you had a discreet chance via the roll. The difference between Blackjack and slot machines goes much further than the mere odds.
For the second week in a row, I have also cleared out Black Temple solo. I am not entirely certain that every class can do it, but my Retribution paladin with 474 ilevel does not have much trouble with a full clear in 50 minutes. The 2nd phase of Reliquary of Souls is the only time things get truly dicey – Council also requires frequent Word of Glories while kiting – but beyond that it is fairly easy at this level and gear. I got the T6 pants and shoulders on my first run, and picked up some other Transmog-worthy pieces along the way.
Unfortunately, both the T6 chest and Bulwark drop off Illidan and he has yet to drop anything useful for the 3rd week running; clearing the place is easy, but 50 minutes is still 50 minutes. I could probably “cut my losses” and spend a ridiculous amount of honor for the Season 3 off-color chest (seriously, 1000 honor vs 175 honor for the S4 chest), as I grow increasingly weary about the odds that one of the legendary blades will drop. In many ways, getting one of those on the paladin, an item I could not even equip let alone Transmog (…yet), would almost be worse than never getting anything from Illidan.
Gaming psychology. Such a twisted thing.
In An Age 