Category: Gaming

BDO – Seasonal Fun

I know I have too many BDO accounts (the total right now is three for those of you keeping track at home) but I have to say, this is probably one of my top favourite MMO of all time. It’s just that good. Anyway, I decided to cut down playing all three accounts and I’m trying to focus on just one. I swapped my 60 tamer for a newly boosted 60 guardian in the season, and I’m hoping to finish off the achievements they have before it ends, but one of those achievements is to kill 5k mobs and that one I’m a bit reluctant to get started on because ew.

Like most games I play I tend to spend all of my time crafting or doing life skills, so going out and slaughtering bad guys for a few hours doesn’t exactly speak to me. That being said, I have been having a LOT of fun in game. Artifacts were added, and new content releases just a few short weeks from now. BDO also recently celebrated their 6 year anniversary, a huge congratulations on that milestone!

I am unsure as to whether or not I’ll participate in the next season event. I think I have more than enough characters by now, and running through the same content at ultra fast speed has never really been my thing. I’m quite taken with my Shai, and I play very little else (the guardian is a close second, and the lahn is my combat character of choice). Next? Maybe working towards a dream horse…

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Solway Firth – The Largest Deed I’ve Ever Owned

Back when Wurm Online had their black Friday sale, I bought two years of game time (30% off) on two of my accounts. One on the Northern Islands, where I live on Independence (Hermit Island) and the other on the Southern Islands, on Cadence. It has been two years and I’ve waited for these islands to be joined together so I could condense things, but so far that hasn’t happened. In the meantime, I had done very little work on the Cadence deed. I’ve spoken about this before, but I am not a huge fan of building a deed from scratch. After playing this game for 10+ years, I prefer to work on my characters, decorate, and look at pretty things. Building from scratch isn’t something that has ever interested me that much.

I decided the best thing for me would be to see if anyone was selling a completed deed. I had 50 silver to spend, and I posted on the forums that I was looking for something with highway access so I could make use of wagoneers, something I’ve never been able to participate in before because I always seem to live on some secluded island.

Before the day was out, I had a response. Kookii was interested in selling Solway Firth, an enormous deed on the Cadence island. The deed was worth well more than what I could afford, but they seemed in a hurry to sell, and they were willing to accept what I was offering. This place is amazing, to say the least. It has over 1g in upkeep paid, and the monthly cost is 15s (I’m planning on downsizing it slightly to reduce this cost). It came with 10 completed buildings, a full mine, an enormous amount of bits and bobs, a magic chest, guard tower, clay and tar on deed, pens with animals, and so much more.

Considering I am only one player, it will take some time to get it set up the way I want, but I am VERY excited about this deed. I’ll have to remember to work slowly, so as to not burn out. It is large enough for multiple players to live here comfortably but I don’t think anyone I know is actually playing WO these days. I do know quite a few who continue to play WU (the self hosted steam version). I wish the company had not stopped support of WU, the new WO UI is so much easier on my hands and I absolutely love the graphic chances they’ve made to the game and the new features they’ve added over time (caffeine is their latest). Anyway, expect lots of pictures in the future!

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

[Unpopular Opinion] You don’t HAVE to make millions

One thing I’ve noticed when it comes to making gold (honestly this translates to anything anyone ever feels passionate about) is that there is a handful of people who consider their opinions elite – and they are not afraid to let you know it. They talk with confidence about things they may or may not actually know about, and if you’re making gold in some other ‘lesser’ way you feel shamed over it. Consider this the min/max conversation of the gold making realm. It’s no different than raiders discussing the best mechanics and gear to wear. There are plenty of great gold makers out there who are successful at what they do and don’t make you feel like a lesser being. Those are the ones I love listening to.

My unpopular opinion: You don’t have to make millions of gold to be a successful gold maker. You don’t have to min/max and optimize every second of every play session. Making gold is a frame of mind, and if it’s something you enjoy doing then guess what, that makes you a goblin (or whatever other phrase you want to use). Are there optimized methods of making gold out there? Yes, there are. If you don’t enjoy doing it the chances of you sticking with it are not going to be that great. Be open to learning new methods, trying new things, and taking in advice – but you shouldn’t feel pressured into it. This is, after all, a game. It is OK (and even expected) to make mistakes. Learn from them.

If you happen to be an amazing gold maker, try not talking down to the newer goblins who are still learning the ropes. Embrace their sales (yes, even those small ones), encourage their methods, and make suggestions that could help them out when requested. We don’t have to be condescending. This is an amazing community, with some fantastic people that I’ve gotten to know over the years – but it can still be an unwelcoming place if you’re not constantly playing by those unspoken ‘rules’.

Sniper vs. Shopping Lists in TSM

Disclaimer – this is NOT a post telling you what items you should snipe.

If you’re familiar with Tradeskillmaster in any form you probably remember the older version of the addon when you could constantly run ‘sniper’ to find deals on the auction house that people had miss priced (this still works if you’re playing classic) but at the end of BFA things changed. Using shopping lists in TSM will get you results faster than sniper will (depending on how many items you’re trying to search through sniper). Personally, I still think there’s room for both depending on the situation.

If you’re running a second account while you’re doing something else, sniper may still have its use. Instead of searching the last page of the auction house scanning for constant deals (this doesn’t work) you create a group in TSM with very specific items you’re looking for (remember, you CANNOT assign a sniper operation to the base group). The smaller the group, the faster the search. In my case, I still search for current tier reagents this way. My operations are simple, whatever the maximum amount is that I’m willing to pay for something is what I assign as an operation. It’s usually a static number rather than a big string. There might only be 10 items I’m looking for, so sniper can happily run searching for those items and nothing else. Simple, right?

Then there’s shopping lists. These are usually groups you’ve created with numerous items in them, categorized in some way like ‘transmog’ ‘recipes’ ‘mounts’. You’d assign a shopping operation to these groups and run a shopping scan on them. I usually just scan one group at a time so that things keep moving. They’ll slow down if you have too many items in the groups or you select too many groups at once, but they’re still much faster than sniper. I know there are other addons that reportedly do this function faster (Auctionator) but I personally have no experience with it. The very basic formula would be using dbregionmarketavg and buying something that is cheap and re-selling the item or using it. You don’t have to use that price source though, /tsm sources and check for what makes sense in your situation.

One last thing – in the screenshot above you’ll see that TSM includes a handy list of recent searches, as well as favourite searches. You can create strings of things to search for and then save them if they’re items that you search for frequently.

My suggestion to new goblins is to start small and don’t get complicated with your strings until you’re ready for it. Don’t randomly import other peoples strings until you understand what they do – that’s an easy way to lose gold. I know it looks impressive when you see an operation that includes ifgte and a billion custom sources but you can get there with time. You also absolutely can still make plenty of gold not using any of these addons or methods. The key point is finding something you enjoy doing that you’ll actually stick with. The rest will fall into place.

Avoiding The Pitfalls of Flipping

A thank you to Vahdis for actually starting this discussion with a fellow WoW Economy & TSM discord member, it’s what spurred on the motivation for this post.

Continuing this week with our discussion about battle pets – let’s take a look at one of the pitfalls that potential gold making goblins can fall into.

In the screenshot above, you’ll see a search for ‘Emerald whelpling’ – and there are two different items that show up, because they’re identified by two different ID in game. One, is the uncaged version of the battle pet (the first one), and the others below are the caged version. Collection wise there is nothing different about these pets unless you’re going after a specific breed because you can’t see the breed of the one that has never been caged before. It ‘looks’ like a better deal on paper, because there have been so few for sale. How to tell? When you mouse over a pet it will show stats like level and breed. When you mouse over an uncaged pet it will say use: teaches you how to summon this companion.

When you’re looking at deals on the auction house for potential flips, you have to keep things like this in mind. What might SEEM like a great deal, might not actually be one.

Another tool in deciding which items might be actual deals to flip and which ones may not is the addon AllTheThings (ATT). This addon will tell you where the item comes from and more importantly, it will tell you what items out there have the same look. If there’s a long list of similar looking items, chances are, you don’t want to take a chance on flipping it.

Take the replica armour above. You can see that it comes from the Darkmoon Faire, that there are four other items that have the same graphic – but – that red icon in the front of their names means those items have been removed from the game. Currently, nothing else shares the same graphic.

Finally, spend some time lurking around other goblins. I highly recommend joining the WoW Economy & TSM discord as well as the Reddit, and just observing for a while. See what others are selling, what people are avoiding, and learn to formulate your own lists on what you value and don’t for your own servers. If you have questions, try using the search function first to see if anyone else has already asked. Chances are, they have, and there’s a nice answer just waiting for you.

Remember that making gold isn’t filled with a lot of absolutes, so when you ask if ABC123 item will do well on your server, or what craft makes the most profit, or are looking for others to tell you specifics other gold makers are not trying to be elusive and coy. There are just a lot of variables to take into consideration, and what works and sells on one server may not work on another