Mists Of Pandaria ... Sets Sails

  As the title says Mists of Pandaria will launch later in September, 25th of September to be more precise. Now this is not a ground breaking news if you follow any of the major information gateways, or if you happen to check out the Battlenet site, but the reason why this is a good news is that with this information going public people will know that there will be new baddies to beat, and new gear to obtain. Taking into account that those same people will want to get into MoP with as much as gold possible, it is only logical that they will try and sell some of the stock they have obtained, and get a quick turnaround. 

   Needless to say, this is going to open up a whole new market for the worthy gold making goblins that will fill their coffers to the brim by doing  highly lucrative deals with a huge return in a very short time table. But anyways, after a long and boring wait due to almost nothing happening in WoW, i will re-start with the posting on ways to use the auction house to make a profit and hopefully greet MoP with a gold sum that will allow you to buy anything you might deem worthy of buying without having to deal with the fact that you are broke.

   So heads up and prepare, there is a huge profit storm coming and you want to be on the side of the people that will profit and not on the side of the people that will be carried away by that storm. So keep on reading the blog as well as the other informative blogs that you can find on the blogroll on the side and together we can all make a pretty decent profit.

Protecting Your WoW Account

   Lately i have been away from WoW as well as Diablo, but that doesn't mean that i have lost interest in the games. Well to be honest i kinda lost my interest in Diablo as the feeling i am getting while playing it is simply like i am playing a beta game. But that put aside i still have my interest in WoW, and the economy part in particular, even though we have hit a rough patch of boring as it is.

   As a gold making oriented individuals we love to play the game for it's virtual currency making aspect, where if you play it right you can influence and shape a whole economy. Well today we are going to take a look at the ULTIMATE way to influence the shaping of an economy by doing the most important thing that you can do, protect yourself from hackers and keeping your hard earned gold in your account and away from the black market.

   First of all lets clear one HUGE misunderstanding, whenever someone says that the Chinese farmers are the people that are responsible for the economy going to the gutter, you are dead wrong, it is in reality your own fault. Now let me explain the reasoning as to why i am saying this.

   Let us begin by defining the usual suspects: 

Chinese "farmer" this is basically some guy or a girl that sits in front of the computer and makes gold by actually playing the game, be it by actually farming or playing our beloved AH PvP. ( In many occasions these individuals aren't Chinese, but still the term is the term )
 
Botter this is a guy that doesn't like to sit and spend his time at the keyboard , so instead he is using bots (automated programs) to do all his work for him.
 

Gold Selling Sites well pretty much everyone that has ever gotten up to a major city without turning off his trade channel has had a run in with these guys. They don't actually farm anything as they are more or less a "middle guy" in a otherwise simple transaction. They connect the buyer of the gold with a seller and take a piece of the profit for them selves.

Hacker this is the highest threat to the economy of any game. These are the guys that steal your account information and then log in and pick clean your entire account in a matter of minutes.

   Like i previously said the hackers are the biggest problem by far. The reason why this is so is simply because of the gravity of the impact they have on the economy. When they steal your gold they transfer it away somewhere where they will be able to store it until they find a buyer that they can offload to and get their money. Well the issue arises because when you file a report saying that you were hacked you always get your inventory and gold back, but rarely is your original gold found before it ends up to a buyer. The reason why this is an issue is simple, lets say for an instance that you had 500k on your account. Now if you were hacked, the hacker got away with a 500k worth of loot for a 5 min work he did, that same 500k is now into circulation because it will end up on your same server to some other guy that paid money for it.

Now comparing the 500k a hacker for a 5 min work, to a botter is like comparing your local grocery store to a fortune 500 company. They will both make money but the difference in cash/hour is going to be huge. Don't get me wrong though, botters do have an impact on the economy, but they are dependent on the community to buy their farmed goods and are more or less a factor in the every day economy in WoW.

   So how do we protect ourselves, do we take up a bulwark and try that way, or magic or stealth ? Well the answer to that would be ... don't be ridiculous this it the real world. But still there are ways to protect yourself, and i will give you a few hints as well as the kryptonite of the hackers.

• GET AN AUTHENTICATOR !!
  This is the the one thing that you MUST get if you are serious about keeping your account safe. They are cheap to get on the market, but if you have a smart phone you can get one for free.
  
• GET A SOLID ANTI VIRUS !
  This shouldn't really require a description as to why as it is always nice to have something that will stand in the way of malicious software trying to steal your information ( keyloggers in our case)
  
• DON'T BUY GOLD OR POWERLEVELING SERVICE FROM SITES !
  Really there is no need for you to spend your hard earned cash to get some quick gold, or even worse for someone to play or bot the game that YOU bought, and YOU are paying a monthly price. If you need gold simply read up some of the articles that are on the blog, or some of the other FREE blogs out there and you can get your gold fast and FREE and you will have some fun making it. And not to mention the fact that giving your account information, or even worse your credit card information to a individual or a site that you don't know is not the smartest thing to do.
  
• !!! CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS !!! DON'T GET HACKED !!!
  This is that kryptonite that i was talking about. This is where more then 90% of the black market gold comes from. But to make it more clear, NEVER EVER use the same password you have on your account and your email that is attached to that account. On top of that, NEVER EVER use the same password on community sites that require you to put in a e-mail. The reason for this is that many, many people do that mistake where they would make an email and put in a password like (qwerty or 123456) and then use that same password for their WoW account and pretty much any other account they make on any forum or community site ( MMO-Champion and similar).
  The reason for telling you this is because many people do this mistake and then they wonder how they got hacked. YOU didn't get hacked, but the community site that you are a part of got hacked and their info was used to feel your account up and see if the passwords match, if they do then you are screwed. So i say it again, NEVER use the same password for your e-mail and community sites that require your password.
  And another thing you might want to do if you want some extra security would be to change your passwords on a monthly basis.
  
  P.S. If you are by chance actually using a password such as QWERTY or 123456 then you do deserve to get hacked !

   So i hope you had a nice time reading this, and i really hope that you didn't find out anything new ( it means that you already did everything right and you are protected) but if you did read something that you didn't know, then apply that to better the safety for your account, and stay safe and protected, and keep those hacking SOBs away from your hard earned gold.

WoW to Diablo Transactions

   It's been a while since my last post, but the reason for that is not because i don't want to make any new posts but simply there is nothing new introduced in the game to make it worth blogging about. I previously said that any "new" post would have to be a spin off from another post, but actually today i found out about something that is really interesting and rather unique.

   This rather unique thing i am talking about is a little something that started to show up in trade channels, and more importantly on the Blizzard forums, and that is people offering to sell/buy Diablo gold for WoW gold.

   Now at first glance this might not sound like a big deal, but belive me it is. As the rules are now, you are not allowed to sell your gold for anything that would be making you money, and you could get banned. But when you are simply trading your gold for another type of gold in a different game that is owned by the same company that you ultimately would either invest or sell on the RMAH, Blizzard doesn't mind. Well with the start of the RMAH and the ability to sell gold coming up any day/week now, does this mean that we will be able to actually have a way to sell WoW gold in a way that would be borderline gray zone but still legal ?

   So the question here is if you played WoW for a long time and decided to go for Diablo as a change of scenery, or if you tried Diablo but got sick of it and went back to WoW can you transfer your gold from one game to the other and profit from it ?

   Well the answer to this question would be YES. It is possible but you simply have to work a bit on the finding an interested buyer on your own server in WoW.

   So for now it's worth a while to know that there is some kind of a "trade" going on between the games, but if there is no problem between trading on those two games, then we might be ushering in a new era of the RMAH hitting WoW in a indirect way too.

   All in all it's something that is worth keeping an eye on, and hopefully this "RMAH  experience" that Diablo is offering won't spill into WoW and further screw up a failing economy.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Diablo 3 Issues, The Last Shine

   Ok so for the last month or so since D3 launched i spent it in playing and "enjoying" the game. Well in that time i got the perfect diversion to help me go through the very boring patch that World of Warcraft has hit. Well in the last week or so i kept getting this feeling that the game has gotten very side tracked and today, while browsing the forums i found a post that simply outlined all the problems that i felt were an issue in the game and i would like to share it here with you. 

   Oh and another thing, this will be the last post that i do about Diablo 3, coming next post (hopefully soon) i will get back to covering WoW and ways to get rich there. So here we go, brace yourself for an awesome read and a pretty big wall of text.

   Original post on Diablo 3 forums  

Dear Blizzard,

After playing 18 years of your games (started in 1994, Warcraft: O&H), you WERE one of the best company producing games. I’ve been with you for all this years. I spent much time to play your games. I’ve been playing all your games universe (SC, WC, Diablo), also paid a lot for your games (about £1200).

At beginning your games was like step in future. Wacraft & Warcraft 2 was delicious, after that, brilliant H&S Diablo and then my beloved game Starcraft. I’ve started playing starcraft in 1998, this game was just awesome. played till 2002 then gone to Diablo. I’ve played D2 till 2005 and this is a year of the end Diablo 2. After World of Warcraft success in 2004, you started give a !@#$ about other your games. Diablo 2 was killed by bots, cheats and other stuff. Same ballruns for 365days/year and you did nothing to prevent this, even if peoples written to you, you didn’t ban account for botting, cheating and others. For me in 2005 Diablo 2 was DEAD. I’ve been back to Starcraft. After few weeks I saw maphack was a HUGE problem and you still gave a %^-* about it. Starcraft Community made antihack for game. NOT game producer but community. Game lost sense to me. In 2007 started playing World of Warcraft – in TBC game was great, if there was bot – instant banned. You gave big care about this game till summer 2009. After summer 2009 bots where everywhere, furthermore cheats – speedhack, flyhack and many others. And after 5 years of WoW – again you gave a !@#$ about your game. I was a farmer and I reported to you 10 botters/day – and what I’ve seen? They could still play! Cheers for you Blizzard. What was sense of wasting my time to farm gold and buy best gear on AH in game if I could buy gold on ebay for 1£? Stopped to play after release of Cataclysm, when I made clear run of 10 in blue items. Game lost sense – bots, hacks, to easy contents. You made game for kids to leach money. Then in 2010 Starcraft 2 shown up – campaign – brilliant, multiplayer – well after almost 2 years it’s on very good balance level – but still maphacks since open beta release. Played Starcraft 2 like maybe 3 months(with huge breaks) – it wasn’t at all that good as SC:BW. And problem of cheats :).

After long introduction, time to go to main game DIABLO 3.

15th of May 2012. Game of the Year (or even a decade) – TOTAL FAIL. So let’s go from beginning.

1. Servers

15.05 – About 6 P.M. – You can’t play – to many players situation last for 3 weeks. Last week was good, without any breaks(but sometimes lags). You had statistics how much copy will you sell, so you could do something to prevent this. But no – ‘we have money on our account it’s good. People will get angry’ – but we do nothing, they are away – ‘Sorry guys we don’t give ETA but we would like to apologize’ - In my mind was something like this – ‘sorry guys, you paid money for BETA(cause we wanted to be faster than Guild Wars II) and now we give %^-* about you, we still working on game, you paid for testing game’. Me and many of my friends feel like this way.

2. Bots, speedhacks, maphacks, autoIT.

There are available bots. You want names? D3A, mmBBQ, MythBot, D3BOT, InfinityBOT. Good Job blizzard. After 25 days, we got whole gamma of bots. Furthermore Maphack – Simple Map reveal, D3Advanced Maphack. Speedhacks ? No problem – you have movie even here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O8sQptCTxM. Noclip hack? It’s so simple: D3CLIP.
After 10 years of online gaming community is smarter, so what the hell – let’s use MACROS. AutoIT v3. Will be very cool – let’s make scripts – Royal crypts, ACT 3 Meteor, even ACT 3 chest near jeweler . We won’t get banned cause we do not inject to DLL files – EPIC WIN.
Tell me dear Blizzard, what you will do with botters ? And we can go to point 3.

3. Hotfixes.

Ok, so you did hotfix to Royal crypts, goblin in act 2, meteor act 3, Tyrael. Why? Cause it wasn’t work as intended? In my humble opinion it was – especially royal crypts ‘cause been in beta. Time to say to community – we are so sorry, We’ve failed, our release was to fast – we give back your money – cause we cannot stop botters, game is not ready yet.

4. Exploits.

List of exploits is so long, that I even won’t write about it. Starting with AFK leveling, going through, afk gold farming, ending at bosses (each one can be glitch, butcher, belial, azmodan, siegebreaker, izual, diablo).

5. And now ladies and gentlemen, one of the biggest FAILS in this decade. AUCTION HOUSE.

RMAH should be deployed @30th of May. Now it’s 11th of June. But I ask you blizzard if you are ready for this? After EPIC fail and silent hotfix today?
The thing is about canceling auction – you can rollback system date 2 days before and you can easy cancel your auction. Simple right? So Like 4 hours ago, before hotfix Imagine this situation:

2 Players, Player A sending item on AH, person B buy, Person A take money for item, person B, reroll system clock before transaction. You get your money back - rinse and repeat:). I have news from people who made that like 3 billion of gold by this method in 3 hours. Good job blizzard!

Now think about this. Method was available since patch 1.0.2a been released. I think about 1000-2000 people would know about it. RMAH should be on 13/06. 1KK of gold will cost about $0.1-$0.5. There will be so much inflation. So I’m asking you blizzard. What you will do?

Going straight to end:
When I heard about RMAH idea I was like – finally, game will be protected, there won’t be bots ‘cause of RMAH, I can be a gold seller and earn money on thing I like. You wanted to do money on selling items. You wanted to get profits on it – and it would work. But implementation of idea is totally missed. I was counting on you blizzard. I thought that after 2-3 years I can write in my CV gamer as a job title – cause it was possible. The experiment you wanted to do was great – but you failed. The point 5 from my post ruined not just your company and RMAH, but others game producers going to think twice before implementing RMAH in theirs games. Your Idea was great, but first you should take care about game, bugs, exploits, test it thousands of times, then think about making money on RMAH.

Best Regards.
Lupi

Edit:
Continuation of the thread with proper criticism
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4698799997

Regards,
Lupi

Diablo 3 Magic Find

Here we are back again with another post that will be covering D3, and more specifically it will be covering the Magic Find portion of the market. Before i get in deeper into this i want to give you a small intro in how magic find works, and why people like to have it on the gear they are buying from the AH.

 Magic find is important because it increases the chance for you to get a magic or rare item, but it doesn't stop there. For instance lets say you kill a random monster on Inferno Act 1 and it drops you a weapon with 2 affixes ( 50STR + 50VIT ), this was dropped because you killed that monster with 0% magic find so you got a random weapon with 2 affixes. Now if you had extra magic find your chances to get an item with 3,4 or more affixes is increased, lets say you killed that same monster with 100% magic find, that means that the chances for that same item to show up with additional properties is increased double, if you ramp up the magic find to 220-230% and kill that same monster you have a chance to get that same weapon with 4-6 affixes, which in return would mean a more expensive and better item.

Add to this the 5 nephalem buffs which add 75% (for now) to magic find and gold find and you end up with a staggering 300% or more increased magic find and a chance to fish for those legendaries, set items and all round awesome items.

So as you can see the difference between getting an item that would sell for 10k and an item that would sell for 10 million is hidden in a bit of good luck and a hyped up magic find gear. Now i will get to the core of this post and the way to use this need for a better magic find to your advantage and more importantly to your profit.

As you can see on the image on the side (that took quite a bit of time to make it), different pieces of gear have a different price tag as their magic find amount increases. Just as an added clarification i started noting the prices from when they were worth it (20k and above), and you will see items with lower amount of Magic Find that i didn't put in the list but that is because their price was too low to mention, so i end up vendoring those.

One of the things that would be a good idea is to either download the given image on your PC/Mac, or bookmark the post and have it open while you are playing the game. The reason behind this is that when you are randomly killing monsters and they go about with dropping magic items, at times they can drop items with Magic Find that would be extremely expensive (300K+), but due to their blue color and nothing making them stand out from the crowd you can end up vendoring them and missing out on a great deal of gold. So like i said have that image in the background or the post bookmarked for easier refference to help you with the deciding of the worth of the magic find items you have for sale.

One thing though, if your piece of gear has a nice amount of a primary stat (STR, VIT, DEX) on top of the magic find that would only mean that someone can use it as his primary gear set and that he would be willing to pay a higher price for it, so price them accordingly. The prices that are stated in the image are all based on the Magic Find only, so if there are other stats that are important the price will be much higher. For instance if you find a high Magic Find item with DEX, VIT and Resistance to All, then you've found an item which is perfect and you can sell it for huge profits.

When i said his primary gear set, what i actually meant is the gear that you are always wearing for his killing opposed to the gear that you have in his bags ready to switch it before that elite champion dies. Oh, in case you didn't know what i mean, you need to have two sets of gear (prefferably), where one would be your HIGH survivability/damage build, and the second one would have a HIGH Magic/gold find on it (more magic then gold). Like i said it is pretty simple, you wack the champions with your damage build, and right before they die you quickly change to your magic find gear and finish them off. That way you have all the advantages of having a high damage gear as well as a high magic find gear.

An item in the 490k bracket being sold for 250k

Ok enough with the explaining on how it works, lets see how we can use this price list for making some profit. All you need to to is simply choose armors from the AH, then choose a piece of gear (lets say helm for instance) and then in the affixes field put in magic find. After that choose a percentage you want to see, put in 33% and check the prices from lowest to highest. Usually you will see that prices will be from 150K - ?? Millions, but what you are acually interested in is the lowest price. Many times people that don't know what they have will list their blue items for as low as 10k or 20k and think that they made a massive sale because they got 20k opposed to selling it to the vendor. So you simply buy it from them and relist it back at a discount on the average price, if the average price is 150k list it for 130k and it should take you anywhere from 10m to about an hour to sell it.

So that is the basic idea behind the auction house flipping, you need to have a base price to work from (the list), you need to factor in the 15% auction cut and you need to know which particular market you want to take a swing at (the magic find market).

Now as a unrelated topic. I have had mails of people telling me how i have been doing a good job with the blog and that they enjoyed it. But seing as how WoW hasn't had anything new added to it in a long time, and the economy has slowed down alot, i kinda set the blog in  a low activity mode as i didn't want to make posts that were a different approach to something that i have covered in some previous post. And the second thing is that i don't want to make posts about the BETA because that is what it is BETA, it changes alot and nothing is set in stone. I hope that Blizzard will add something interesting in WoW that will rekindle my interest in the gold making aspect of the game, and in return i will have more things to write about. Until then i will make post, but it won't be the usual 3 or more posts per week, and i might transfer the Diablo posts over to Jim Younkin's site he has about Diablo, but i will announce it if i do that. 

That's all for now, i hope you liked this D3 post, and more importantly i hope you are having fun in the game, be it WoW or Diablo 3.