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WildStar Wednesday tours Algoroc
Who doesn't fancy a trip to the wild and lawless frontier to try to strike it rich? Blue crystal fever has spread in Carbine Studios' sci-fi title WildStar, and galactic prospectors will have the opportunity to stake their claims in the new land of Algoroc. Complete with boomtowns, murders, slave-traders, rampaging killer security bots, and ancient ruins, this place sounds perfect, right? Shake off those civilized shackles and prepare for a gritty adventure. Adventurous types can head toward Tremor Ridge, a small mining camp in the western part of the land. Though the area was dangerous before, recent attacks by space pirates make the stay there just that much more exciting. Fancy a trip to a boomtown? Head east to Gallow, where the the peace needs to be kept after the local lawman was brutally murdered. Or if you prefer ancient civilizations to current ones, an Eldan facility is being excavated in the western mountains -- just watch out for the security system that the archaeologists accidentally triggered!
The post-patch 4.3 rare gem market
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him, tweeting him at @foxvanallen, or sacrificing your first-born to him. And be sure to catch the return of Basil and Fox's podcast, Call to Auction! Some things in life never change. Heart will always be the best band of all time. Tyler will always be dangerously underweight. And gem prices will always spike after a new content patch, often by 100% or more. The best way to profit off of (relatively) short-lived price increases is to stockpile ahead of time. While it's clearly too late for that, there are still plenty of opportunities to profit off the rare gem market before demand dies down. It's not too late. Regardless of whether or not you're a jewelcrafter, you've probably noticed that the market is going crazy. The red gems everyone wants are scarce enough to result in doubled (or even tripled) prices. And because people aren't gemming red because of the cost, more folks are buying orange, purple, and to some extent even blue, green, and yellow gems. Why? Socket bonuses are pretty attractive, and if you're expecting to have a piece of gear for only a week or two, why spend 300 gold, especially when you can get a decent boost out of a gem that costs a tenth of that?
Gold Capped: Is prospecting still worth it?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him or tweeting him at @foxvanallen. The jewelcrafting shuffle used to be an incredibly lucrative way to make money. It was simple: You went to the Auction House, bought out the stock of ore, and then hit your prospecting key as fast as you could. You'd craft what was profitable to craft; you'd vendor the raw gems that weren't otherwise useful. And because the vendor value of the raw gems was almost always more than the value of the Elementium or Obsidium Ore prospected to get those gems, we had a no-lose situation. A jewelcrafter's risk was 0; the profit potential limited only by the amount of time you had to waste doing the "shuffle." Of course, that was prior to patch 4.2. After the patch, each green gem (for example, Zephyrite) saw its vendor value slashed to a mere 50 silver. The days of the jewelcrafting shuffle were over. But still, the days of profitable jewelcrafting still live on. This past week, my Gold Capped tag-team partner Basil opined that patch 4.3 will bring epic gems. He's probably right, but that doesn't mean you have to bide your time, stockpiling Pyrite Ore until patch 4.3 to make some serious money as a JC. Let's take a second look at the old jewelcrafting shuffle and see if we can still find profit hiding in the jewelcrafting profession.
Gold Capped: Will epic gems be prospectable from Pyrite Ore?
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! This week's gold blog spotlight is the JMTC guide to profiting with engineering. So far in Cataclysm, the best gems we can cut for gear are blue quality. They give 40 core stats, depending on the cut, and are obtained from prospecting Cataclysm level ores. Blizzard will, of course, eventually release epic gems. The question is when and how.
Gold Capped: Milling and prospecting changes ahead?
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! This week's community post is the Auction House Junkies podcast's most recent episode. The recent UI developer Q&A contained a little nugget that I found interesting: Quote: Milling and Prospecting are incredibly dull and very manual tasks at present, especially when you do them in bulk. Speaking as a scribe, the entire manufacturing process from herb to pigment to ink to glyph is both time-consuming, boring and sending me well on my way to repetitive stress wrist and index finger injuries. Yes, we totally understand why this is a problem. The reason we can't make it work just like other trade skills, is that we don't know which herbs and ore you want to use. If you have some cheap ore and some very expensive ore, we don't want to accidentally use the expensive ore. There are a few ways to fix this. One is we just redesign Milling and Prospecting. If they were recipe-based, then we would know exactly which material to use. It would also add a huge list of repetitive recipes to your Professions pages. We could also make some kind of new UI (think of something simple, like the Reforging UI) to let you drag and drop the materials you want to use. The advantage of the "box" solution is we could also use it for Disenchanting. source I was thrilled to hear Blizzard's considering changing the way this works. I had always just assumed that the clunky design of milling and prospecting was on purpose to put a limit on how much ore or herbs one player could process.
Gold Capped: Ore-splosion
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 auction house is starting to have to stack all the ore they're listing for sale out back of the warehouse. Elementium Ore and Obsidium Ore have, in the last few days, been listed in quantities most people would consider unimaginable at prices that make auctioneers cackle. Until they realize that everyone has gotten this amount of stock. Level ones have been cropping up like mushrooms and listing hundreds of stacks of ore per night on every server I've checked into. I'm not the only one who has written about this. Everyone loves cheap Cataclysm ore. It means cheap blacksmithing goods, cheap gems, cheap enchanting mats, and cheap engineering items. It also has the unique benefit of having the highest price floor of any ore ever introduced to the game. Obsidium prospects into 6 green quality raw gems and an average of 0.3 rare gems per stack, and elementium into 4 green and 1 blue. This means that if you do nothing but cut and vendor the greens for 9g, the "floor" for obsidium is 54g, and elementium is 36g. Then you have the rares. This floor is the bare minimum of what the ore is worth, but it's used for so many things. What else can we do with all of it?
Gold Capped: WoW Prospector for profitable prospecting
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, hate mail, or guild applications! Prospecting is something jewelcrafters can do to turn ore into raw gems. It takes 8 seconds of pure casting time to prospect a stack of ore, as well as whatever time it takes you to look all the gems out of the four loot windows that entails. It can't be legally automated, so that makes prospecting the semi-porous membrane between the ore and raw gem markets. Without this barrier, the relationship between the prices of ore and raw gems would be more like the ore and bars in which unless you have a small market with no active miner auctioneers, the price of bars isn't usually much more than the ore that went into making it. As it is, you may often find the price of ore is much lower than the gems you get from prospecting it are worth, even if you just sell them raw on the auction house. The reason for this is that mining ore is hard enough, and many times, miners will just throw their wares into the AH and rely on the market to snap up any ore below the price where prospecting is profitable. Also, unless these miners happen to be (or have) jewelcrafters, they may not exactly know what their ore represents in terms of raw gem money. Enter Wow Prospector, which allows you to input the price per ore and for the raw gems, then output whether it's worth prospecting.
Gold Capped: WoW Prospector and mailbag
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail, as well as check out the long awaited 11th episode of Call to Auction! I got an email from the creator of WoW Prospector asking me to cover it. After he assured me that his servers are housed in a fire proof room lined with asbestos and at least 300 meters from any residential zones, I agreed, mainly because it's an incredibly useful tool that has saved me a bunch of spreadsheet time. Essentially, the tool will tell you how much money you stand to make prospecting various ores, given the price of ore and what you can sell the raw gems for. Here's a screenshot of it in action:
Gold Capped: Automating the grind
Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast, and the Call to Auction podcast. Don't forget to drop by Onyxia-US this Sunday at 7:30 PM eastern time to get ganked by one of the CtA hosts and take the money of the other one! A good time will be had by all, and we'll be sticking around after the event to chat with readers and listeners! Grinding is a pain. Avoiding grinds is why I got into the auction house in the first place. Repetitive and boring tasks are not fun for most people. Unfortunately, while some businesses are relatively grind free, certain tradeskills require us to do something like milling (inscription), prospecting (jewelcrafting), or disenchanting (enchanting). The more volume you want to sell, the more volume you need to process. I know of scribes who sell 1200g a day of glyphs at an average of 8g each. That's 150 glyphs sold, which means 150 Ink of the Sea squeezed out of northrend herbs. You get 5-6 inks per stack of herbs, so this guy mills a minimum of 25 stacks of herbs a day. Each stack of herbs requires at least 4 hardware events (clicks or keypresses).
Insider Trader: Patch 3.2 Q&A
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Patch 3.2 has been shaping up to be a welcome event for professions in World of Warcraft. Soon, we will all have access to the next "tier" of gems and profession-unique buffs. This week, I will be devoting the column space to answering some reader questions. Pre-patch notes and Public Test Realm data can often create confusion, especially when we know that anything could change before we ever see it live. At the very end, I have included a bit of a spoiler, although I attempted to keep the details to a minimum and the wild speculation to a maximum. Are the new flasks for Alchemists only? - JoemamaThe new flask is called Flask of the North and can only be used by Alchemists with a skill of at least 400. This flask is clearly inferior to the Wrath raiding flasks because it is meant to be used in arenas. While it should give you a bit of a boost, Blizzard does not want everyone suddenly becoming Alchemists in order to compete. Of course, if you play the game primarily for arena, then you might consider switching if you haven't already. The most exciting changes for Alchemists will likely be the new epic gem transmutes and the fact that potions will stack to 20.
Time is Money: Saronite
Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don't want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I'm not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I'll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply). Saronite translates into easy WoW gold, and can be farmed in massive quantities in Sholazar Basin, Icecrown and Storm Peaks. Wintergrasp is also a great place to farm it, despite being ground-bound.MinersSacred Duty, a prot pally blog, recently posted an excellent example of a simple yet effective saronite farming route in Icecrown. If you cannot fly yet, I highly recommend Sholazar Basin. Follow the rivers, run around the pillars, and circle the province perimeter. In fact, pretty much anywhere you go, you will find saronite, and the mobs are mid-seventies, unlike the heavy hitters in Icecrown. As for Storm Peaks, make sure to fly up where you would think you have no business being. Giant cliff walls that stretch for miles and random peaks may be boring, but they do contain nodes. An hour could easily grant you a few hundred ore. Before you smelt it, check your AH prices for ore versus bars. Because two ore go into a bar, you will want to smelt your ore into bars to sell if one ore is worth less than half of one bar. Otherwise, sell the ore! Jewelcrafters will buy it up for prospecting.
Insider Trader: To prospect, smelt, or let alone?
Recently, a reader wrote in with a question that everyone ponders from time to time. When trying to make money from a profession, it can be difficult to determine what to sell, what to convert, and what to avoid doing all together. Here's what she asked:Hello, When making gold from Mining, is it better to Prospect the Ore? Or is it better to just sell the Ores and Bars?Thank you!Regards, Kristy. Taking a break from the faction recipe series to shake things up a bit, let's take a look at how this breaks down.
Hands-on with Inscription in the Wrath Beta
By now you've heard of inscription, the new trade skill coming with Wrath of the Lich King. We've already given you a few sneak peeks, looking at glyphs, enchantment scrolls, and other beta insights. This time, though we had a chance to fiddle with Inscription directly, on the Beta servers themselves. The trade skill is most obviously only in the very first stages of implementation, but there's still enough to play around with to get an idea of how it will all work once things go live. %Gallery-28616% To start off with, we needed to do a little running. There's no inscription trainers to be found in Dalaran or any of the capitals. We found one in Vengeance Landing, so it seems likely that Alliance could find one in Valgarde as well. However, there are no Inscription suppliers nearby, so you'll still have to run to Dalaran to get the Scribe Tools and parchment you need for most recipes. It's probably a given that that'll change for the better as we get closer to live, but for now it's a pain. You'll probably want to go buy the Scribe Tools and stock up on parchment before you go to train if you're doing it in Beta. Luckily, Light Parchments stack up to 20, so you can carry a lot -- be warned though, most of the scrolls you make out of them only stack to 5. Anyhow, to the meat.
Insider Trader: Jewelcrafting, the final stretch part 1
Despite the overwhelming support from our readers during our brief but flower-tastic adventures as HKO-Insider, I will be unable to delve any further into the professions of the Flower Kingdom. That's okay; they were prejudiced against jewelcrafters anyway.Two weeks ago, I posted Insider Trader's guide to the final stretch of Alchemy, and Runstadrey posted the following comment in response: Excellent article, very in depth and thorough. I'm eagerly awaiting the same treatment for my stalled JC.How could I resist a request preceded by flattery? I might have even produced this last week, had patch 2.4 not have dropped; after all, we can't have all of our jewelcrafters stalled mid-level. I am looking forward to reading the comment section for this guide, as the cheapest way on paper always varies because of unique server economies.For the first part of the guide, which will show you how to reach 355 jewelcrafting in the cheapest manner possible, pass on through the break. Each week, Insider Trader takes you behind the scenes of the bustling sub-culture of professional craftsmen, examining the profitable, the tragically lacking, and the methods behind the madness. For more guides to maximizing your chosen profession, check out the final stretches for Leatherworkers and Alchemists alike. For a complete list of profession guides, feel free to peruse our directory.
Recruiting in NCAA 08 Football
The other day EA released a new recruiting video to show off NCAA 08 Football's new and improved system for recruiting players. Not only will you be able to schedule campus visits, make sweet offers, track which schools each player favors and set a lunch date, but you'll even be able to give their mom and pops a call. It's quite the recruiting system if we've ever seen one. But what are your feelings about implementing such a hands on approach to creating your college team? Does this busy work add to the game's overall value or do you just want to play some college football?
Breakfast Topic: Gambling with prospecting?
The other day I got a message in-game from Sigrdrifa. He mentioned that he had been spending the day spamming the trade channel offering his services prospecting ore. In his advertisement he stated that he could virtually guarantee a blue gem from each stack of Adamantite ore. Some players mentioned that this could never be a guarantee and so in a way he was gambling with other people's ore. Now, I'm not exactly sure if we could call this a game of three ore monty, after all he is saying that on average he receives a blue gem with every stack of ore. But it brings up an interesting idea. If there are possibilities of failure with prospecting, can you ask for tips for such a service? And if there is a gamble, could there by extension be a bet on such a risk? I don't know if this sort of thing is frowned upon by the devs or not, but I would definitely be curious to see how a betting system would work within the game. Not with actual money, but rather with virtual gold. Is prospecting more gambling than not? And if there are assumed risks in the game we deal with, would you ever consider betting on them?
