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.

Diablo 3 Making Gold

   So it has almost been two weeks since the launch of Diablo 3 and the only thing i can tell you about the game if you are not playing it is to go and get it. Ok now that my persuasion has worked on you, and you have the game, it is time to tell you why this game is awesome and how you can be awesome in it by being a successful economy driven goblin. If you haven't heard anything about Diablo 3 you might want to check the three introduction posts i did before the launch of the game to get a general idea on what to expect.

   First place that i want to start would be the auction house. If you watched the video you get the general idea on what to expect, and how to navigate through the auction house. If by chance you are one of those people that doesn't like to watch videos i will try and sum it up for you as well. 

   When you go to the Auction House you need to know what you are looking for. Now even though this might sound like a stupid thing to say or even think because if you went to the auction house you wanted to get something anyways, it is not because the way the D3 auction house works unlike other games is that it will require a greater deal of information on what exactly you want to buy in order to give you a list of those items.

   First off, as you can see on the image is that you will need to chose a template of a sort on which class you want to look for. ( so it knows if you prefer INT,DEX or STR) Then after you have chosen the given class you need to choose an item you want to buy, be it armor or weapon.

   Now that you have chosen what you want to buy you want to define which affixes are found on that item. As you can see you can define an item with up to three affixes. Another important thing to help you with sorting out is to define a numerical value to your affix search ( adding a number in the little red square next to the name ) that will sort the items that have the minimum of that amount of that given affix. And last but not least, you want to put a price you are willing to pay for your item unless you want to get items that are all in the millions of gold range.

   So if you have done everything right you will find an item that has the affixes that you want, is within your price range and is generally a good upgrade to your character.

   After finishing up with reading about the auction house, lets take a quick look at how exactly we can use the auction house to make some gold without having to do much work.

   As you can see on the video here, one of the easiest way to get some profit is by doing the same exact thing that we have all done in WoW, where we sold vendor pets and vendor items. Well in D3 there really isn't much need for pets of any sort but vendor items are still a big YES.

   In general you can sell pretty much any piece of gear that you can find from the vendors that has decent stats, but the best luck i have had has been with selling the trinkets. When i say trinkets i mean rings and amulets that the vendors in each town sell.

   One thing you need to remember is that the vendors have a wide variety of items that they sell, and it is very rare to find him selling the same item twice, so if you see something that is worth it you better buy it and if you are pretty sure that it is a good item you better buy a nice stock of it as well.

   So after you have bought up a stock, next step would be to define a price and start selling all those rings/amulets that you bought up.

   The right way to defining a price for your items would be to start off with a lower price ( in my case i started off with 29950) and if you notice the items are selling and selling fast you gradually increase it up a notch ( got mine to around 45k). Now take into account that i bought all of these rings for around 7k and you will end up with profits that are in the 20-35k per ring sold.

   Ok since you are still reading i will give you one last tip on how to make gold, and mind you this one might be the BEST obvious thing out there that 90% of the people aren't doing, or simply haven't seen that it is there.

   This great little thing i am talking about is D3's very own trade channel. First things first, in order to get to the trade channel you need to press that cog like button in the corner of your chat screen and from there to access either the Trade or the General chat.

   I am still not sure as to how exactly it places people in channels, it might be by difficulty or localization, but that really isn't that important, what is important is that you have a place where you can advertise your items and hopefully get a sale done with someone that might be interested in buying a piece of gear that you would otherwise vendor or salvage.

   This little thing is almost one of the best things that you can use in your selling arsenal when your auction house slots are all filled up and you still have items that you want to sell. And on top of this you can mix it up with the vendor strategy and advertise vendor items for a price. As an example, if a vendor is selling an item for 8000g you advertise that item on trade or general for 40k and see if someone bites, if they do you just scored 32k profit as there will be no AH fee of 15% deducted from this transaction.

   One last thing you might want to know about D3 though. After you are finished with Hell and you step into Inferno, don't be mad if you get one shot by mobs as that is what the design of Inferno is. In order to progress you will have to deal with the gear check and kiting ability check in  order to progress with the game. There will be moments when you start freaking out, and even making up new cuss words and that will all be normal. Then just remember one thing, the auction house has what you need in order for you to be able to progress further in the game and all you need is gold. So if you thought that you were good in the economy in MMO's now would be a great opportunity to actually prove that and really rock the auction house and deck out your character.

   That is all for now, and i am hoping you people liked this post and that it gave you some ideas on how to work up the auction house, and how to make some gold even if you don't have the time to really sit down and go kill monsters and demons.

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

Making Gold With A Friend

   It's been a while since my last post, but in my defense it was Diablo 3 fault but non the less i am back again today with another post on how to monetize in WoW. Usually every time i cover a certain subject it revolves around the reader needing to have that particular profession, and hopefully have the patterns or materials needed to craft that item, well today we are going to take a look at how to use your friends/guildies to help you out when you don't have the aptitude for a certain profession.

   I will further explain as to how exactly does this work for the given market that is of interest for this particular post, and that is the WOTLK gems market.

   First of all why did i choose this market ? Well i did this on a different server then my own where i have millions to throw at the AH and not be afraid to loose them, so i needed something that i could control to a degree and something that i had experience with. The WOTLK gems are the bread and butter for all the twinks in the 62-80 bracket as well as the people that are leveling, and if you take into account that 80% of the people that have JC now didn't play in WOTLK or for some reason respeced and lost their WOTLK gems you end up on a market that is usually controlled by very few people or if you are lucky no one at all. 

   So now that you have chosen the market that you want to go into, it's time to get down to asking your friends or guild members to see if they have the ability to cut those gems. Don't be amazed if you find someone that has all the cuts of WOTLK and Cataclysm and claims that he can't make money from Jewelcrafting, those are the best kinds of people that you can encounter because they did the dailies not to make gold but simply because they were there.

   If you are unfamiliar with the WOTLK gem market you might want to check out one of my older posts that covered that particular theme, but if you are you will know that this market can be a bit of a volatile sort, so before you jump in head strong just scope out the competition, and the availability of the raw gems that is up on the auction house.

    So provided you have found a friend to help you out with the cutting of the gems, you checked out the prices and competition and they were in your comfort zone, the last thing you need to do is define the prices. In the previous post i explained that i i had priced my gems at 95g for the rare ones and 195g for the epic ones, but after i wrote that post i kinda changed my prices and added an extra 100 to those so the prices are 195/295g for the rare/epic cuts and they are still selling like hot cakes. So like the image here explains your server might be a lot different from the one i play on, but by following the simple supply/demand chart you can come up with a price that is just right for you.

   For this market you want to check out the prices of the red gems first, and when it comes to rare red gems you want to see if you can find someone to craft Brilliant Scarlet Ruby simply because crafting it would require one to be exalted with the Kirin Tor to obtain the pattern and that is kind of rare nowadays.

   Another thing before i go though, if you do decide to use a friend to do your cuts, or what ever it is that you want to sell, make sure that you give him some kind of a reward. In my case it was 10% of the profits that i made which was a pretty heft sum for him seeing as how he cut about 200 gems for me, and i managed to move half of them in the first 3 days. 

   I gave you this Jewelcrafting example because i have the most experience with this market but you can use your friend's help with pretty much any market that you want to jump into but don't have a character that can craft those items, and just to name a few PvP Armors ( Plate, Cloth, Leather, Mail ), Glyphs, Pots, Pets and pretty much everything you can think of that would sell, because remember WoW is a community game, and if you can't use the community to make gold then what good is the community.

   That's all for now and like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.