fallback
Latest
The Daily Grind: Do you have a fallback MMO?
My first fallback MMO, though I'd not have called it that at the time, was Ultima Online. Whenever I got sick of EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot, I found myself wandering back to my houses in Britannia. World of Warcraft took over for a while, and then Star Wars Galaxies (yes, post-post-NGE) became my safe MMO -- the world to which I could retreat after a particularly nasty break-up with the latest and greatest themepark shiny, something that seemed to happen with increasing frequency as post-WoW games rushed to launch and left me wanting more. More recently, I've set up camp in City of Heroes. I don't play it every day, but since it went free-to-play, it's always there when I need to tool around in something happily familiar that hits all the right nostalgia notes. What about you folks? Do you have a fallback MMO, a game you return to when you're in between games? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Gold Capped: Cataclysm glyph addons
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The glyph market has spawned quite a few of the important modern auction house addons. It's a uniquely challenging market, as there are hundreds of different products, each with their own balance of suppliers, buyers, and materials. The challenges faced by early glyph producers were met by a hodgepodge of fairly complex addons and macros, and only recently have unified solutions began to appear. I remember that at one point, I had addons to: Keep track of how many glyphs I had on the AH, in various characters' banks and in their inventories. Allow me to queue a list of glyphs and build a materials list (that allowed me to buy the vendor mats with one click). Automatically queue enough glyphs in the second addon to assure that I kept stock levels at my desired level. Automatically post every glyph I made onto the AH. The tasks needed for this market are not unique, and so the most important tool that can trace its origin to the glyph market is certainly TradeSkillMaster. TSM is an addon that I've covered before, and it's built from the ground up to be perfect for glyphs. It's also perfect for a lot of other markets, but mostly those you can treat like glyphs.
Gold Capped: Why deep undercutting on the auction house works
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Cold's post on Cataclysm profitable commodities. In a thread in the comments on my last article in which I had advised a reader to undercut his glyph competition heavily instead of camping the auction house, I got another comment that got me thinking about pricing. It basically stated that every time the commenter undercut heavily on glyphs, he would immediately get re-undercut by a few copper unless his price was down to the point of no profit. I've written a little about the topic of pricing and undercutting before, but I felt it was time for a refresher. I'm going to start off by quoting what I wrote last March: "If everyone is knocking a copper off the next highest auction, they only way to undercut successfully is to try camp the AH and make sure you're always the competitor who has visited most recently. Needless to say, this is a colossal waste of your time." This is as true now as it was then.
Gold Capped: Bait and tackle
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! I'm going to start trying to include a link to something I've enjoyed reading in the gold-making blogosphere every week. Our first installment is JMTC's blogging carnival about lessons learned while preparing for Cataclysm. There are 18 submissions, which should keep you busy for a while. We've talked about auction house PvP before, but today we're talking about a glyph PvP method I like to call bait and tackle. Here's the problem: In order to sell glyphs, you need to spend a fair amount of time crafting them, as well as milling. In addition, on most sizable realms, there are a few hard-nosed competitors who are willing to play for longer than reasonable players. There have been times when, day or night, if I posted a batch of glyphs, every single one would get undercut exactly every 10 minutes.
