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EVE Evolved: Trading: Tips and tricks, part 2
If you spot a market manipulation in progress and have some of the item yourself, take advantage of it by repeatedly listing the items on the market in small amounts. When small and medium rigs came out, the first producers made an absolute killing on them too.
EVE Evolved: Trading: Advanced trading
In the first part of this guide I covered the basics of trading in EVE Online and some of the jobs best suited to newer players. There's a lot more to trading than buying low and selling high and in this week's installment, I'll cover some of the more advanced trading and marketeering tactics that have proven themselves effective in EVE. From margin trading on the market to making a living off the contracts page, anyone with enough dedication can learn to rake in hundreds of millions of ISK per day without even leaving the station. For the gamblers and risk-takers among you, market speculation and price manipulation can produce incredible short-term profit but with significant risks attached. In this second part of my concise guide on trading, I look at margin trading on the market, playing the contract pages, market speculation around patches and the dirty art of market manipulation.
EVE Evolved: Trading: Advanced trading, part 2
A good example of market speculation is the recent issue of moon minerals and the Dominion expansion. It was predicted that the expansion would contain a revamp of the moon mineral distribution system. For those who felt the risk was worth the potential rewards, it was a no-brainer to buy up rare moon minerals now and wait for the expansion.
EVE Evolved: Trading: The basics, page 2
The two primary ways to make money off the items you get are reselling them for a profit and reprocessing them for minerals. Tech 1 items may be resold or reprocessed depending on which will give the most profit. Keep in mind that some named modules actually refine into fewer minerals than their standard Tech 1 counterparts.
EVE Evolved: Trading: The basics
Of all the moneymaking endeavours you can take in EVE Online, trading is perhaps the one with the highest potential for profit. While mission-running profit tops out at a few tens of millions per hour and the profit margin from production isn't that big, trading is limited only by the amount of effort you're willing to put in and is much improved by inherent business talent. At the low end of the trading spectrum, beginners can make a healthy income ferrying items from A to B. At the other extreme, a market-savvy individual can pull billions per week out of the players in EVE's great conglomerated marketplaces. In this first guide in a short series on trading, I look at the different types of trading options available to newer EVE players.
How to email a Second Life DMCA notice
While Linden Lab allows you to submit a DMCA notice via post or fax, there is a third option that's valid while you're waiting for the promised new DMCA process to come along. While many service- and platform-providers insist that they do not accept emailed DMCA notices, if you submit them correctly, the provider is lawfully obligated to accept them. Interestingly, a proper DMCA notice by email can actually give the recipient more surety about the identity of the submitter than faxed or posted notices.
Five quick tips for Aion (week 3)
Welcome to our third installment of "Five quick tips for Aion." The title is pretty self-explanatory so let's just jump right into things, shall we? This week's post features the trade broker, group recruitment, faster XP, rift locations, and custom signatures! 1. Quickly search the trade broker It can get annoying typing out the full name of an item in the 'Buy' tab, especially when the names are all case-senstitive and can be quite long. Here are two quick tips to speed up the process. a) If you have an item in your inventory and want to do a quick 'Buy' search to see how much it is selling for, simply ALT + Left Click the item in your inventory and the search bar will be auto-filled with the complete item name. b) If you don't happen to have an item in your inventory but know its name, you can simply enter the first letter of each word (capitalized) in the search box. For example, you can search 'T S L J' instead of Thin Soft Leather Jerkin. Some item names share the same initials, so you can narrow the search by adding a second letter in lower-case. For example, 'M W F' will result in Major Weapon Flux and Minor Weapon Flux. If you only want Major Weapon Flux, search for 'Ma W F.'
Crafting in Final Fantasy XI: A few tips to achieving success
Most games give crafters the shaft. There's no real art to pushing a button and having an item pop out, especially when today's modern MMO design heavily favors "quick crafting." Crafting is an afterthought to most games, or something that players can do to both pass the time and perhaps offer an alternative to buying items from the shops.Then there's Final Fantasy XI. The game equipped with a crafting system so complicated, people still have arguments about how the game calculates success 6 years after its American launch. A crafting system so complicated, some people like to refer to it as "voodoo crafting."The ins-and-outs of the system may be hard to grasp for the starting player, but we here at Massively want to give everyone a fighting chance at what is a very interestingly designed crafting system. So if you want a few tips on how to leverage the crafting system in your favor, or if you want to find out what makes crafting in this game so difficult and draw so much debate, then this is the guide for you.
The Daily Grind: Make your own kind of music
The optimal ways to play are pretty easy to find, these days. If you didn't have several dozen sites with forums, guides, and other tricks to let you know exactly what the best approach to a given game might be, many players will also be very helpful in offering their advice. (Often they'll offer it repeatedly, whether you want it or not, with little regard for phrasing or whether or not they even know the subject well.) Naturally, if you want to play the game at your best, you should be reading these guides and tricks and deviating as little as possible. For some of us, of course, that's exactly why we've disregarded everything the guides say. When you play an MMO, do you try and make your character optimal, or do you throw all caution to the wind and grab whatever you want? Do you play undervalued classes or use skills generally considered sub-par just because you like working up to the challenge? Do you like trying to crack a new build that no one else will realize the strength of for a while? What are your little ways of rebelling against the "correct" way to play and build your character, if you have them?
Tips and tricks: Putting Things in your Dropbox makes syncing simple
After several years of trying to figure out what task manager for Mac and iPhone worked best with my peculiar style of organization, I finally settled on Things from Cultured Code. The Mac application is easy to use, uncluttered, and can take advantage of many keyboard shortcuts, while the iPhone app [iTunes Link] gives me a portable version of the Things database to take on the road. While the iPhone app can do a local sync to a Mac, it still doesn't do over-the-air syncing, which I hope Cultured Code will add in a future release. When I made Things my task manager, I needed to make sure that I could use the same database on both my desktop Mac and my MacBook Air, since the Mac version doesn't do syncing either. It turns out that one of the easiest ways to do this is to use the wonderful cloud storage application Dropbox to hold my Things database, and then point Things on both Macs to use the shared database. Fortunately, a Brit by the name of Bradley Wright had already done all of the hard work and had written up some command-line instructions on how to do this. Brad does all the work in the Terminal; here, I'll describe how to do most of the work in the Finder with the exception of creating a symbolic link at one point.
TUAW Tips: Get a better view with Quick Look
Quick Look is such an awesome feature of Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, making it really fun and easy to view files and folders from anywhere on your Mac. But what happens when you have a folder with multiple items and want to get a better idea of what's inside? Well, you could always just open the folder in Finder, but there's a cool modification you can make to get an even quicker view. You can get this working on your Mac in a few simple steps: Quit/Relaunch Finder using the Force Quit menu Open Terminal Paste (or type) the following command: defaults write com.apple.Finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1 Relaunch Finder The contents of the folder will now be shown when you use Quick Look. In true Apple elegance, the files will even fade and cycle through the contents. [via Mac OS X Hints]
Auto refresh any web page
Last night when the Apple store went down, I got tired of hitting refresh in Safari every few minutes while waiting for it to come back up, and went searching for something that would do the job for free. Now, this is not for coders who will laugh hysterically at my incompetence, but for those of you that are either lazy or don't program at all. I fit both categories. Back in 2005 someone going by the moniker of Biovizier posted the solution on Macosxhints.com. It's a little html snippet that will refresh any web page as frequently as you'd like, and its easily customizable for any page at all. Here it is: <html> <head> <**** **********="refresh" content="60"> </head> <body> <FRAMESET> <FRAME src="http://www.tuaw.com"> </FRAMESET> </body> </html> Copy this into TextEdit and save it with an .html extension. Then just double click it. You can change the refresh time from 60 to the amount of seconds you want to wait before the page refreshes, and you can change the URL to anything you want. I was using: http://apple.com/store and having it refresh every 20 seconds which must make me a certifiable fanatic. Since I saw this I've found a ton of uses for it, like refreshing eBay auctions in the last few minutes, or just leaving it set for TUAW to see new stories coming up when I'm doing something else. At present I have four or five of these snippets in a folder on my desktop for different purposes. Give it a try and see if you don't find a handful of uses for it. Okay, you coders can stop laughing now. Note: TJ Luoma just let me know that this tip won't work with Twitter which intentionally blocks this sort of thing. Thanks to macosxhints.com and Biovizier wherever you are.
Five more quick tips for Aion
We spent a lot of time playing Aion last weekend and have another round of quick tips to share with you. Check out last week's list in case you missed it. Enjoy!1. Cheaply level your craftThis tip assumes you know the basics of crafting. The fastest and cheapest way to raise your crafting skill is to complete work orders given out by your crafting trainer in the Artisan district in your capital city. Crafting costs kinah (money), but there are three important things you should bear in mind to maximize your savings.First, only grind up your skill on work orders 10-15 levels below your current crafting level. For instance, if your Tailoring is at 40, only do work orders that require a 30 Tailoring until you reach 50 skill points. Each work order will give you around 1-1.5 skill points, will complete more quickly with a higher level of success, and your extra ingredient(s) cost will be lower from the crafting vendor.Second, only make as many items as needed to complete your work order. Each work order only requires that you create 6 items but the trainer gives you enough basic ingredients for 8. Too many people click "Craft All," which ends up wasting additional resources (i.e., money). Manually type in "6" and then press your craft button.
Five more quick tips for Aion (p2)
The two main ways your character gains levels in Aion is through questing and grinding. Nodes always respawn in the same spot within about 5 minutes, so you should be able to keep up a decent pace killing mobs and collecting between two or three nodes.
Survival tips for Fallen Earth
Fallen Earth is one of most recent titles to arrive on the MMO scene. If you weren't a beta tester, though, you might have some questions about the best way to progress in the game. Syp over at Bio Break put together some tips to help Fallen Earth players get a handle on the game, and hopefully points out a few overlooked aspects of this post-apocalyptic title. Some of his tips are practical and relate to game mechanics or common mistakes made, others are simply advice from someone who's clearly spent a lot of time wandering the wasteland. Pair Syp's "20 Tips for Fallen Earthers" with Massively's "FAQ That" for Fallen Earth and you should be well on your way to getting the most from the newly released title. Also don't miss our Fallen Earth guides -- A WoW player's guide to Fallen Earth and the Beginner's guide to horse crafting -- for a closer look at what this MMO can offer.
Dear Auntie TUAW: What happened to the mini player in iTunes 9?
Dear Auntie TUAW, With all the shiny goodness of iTunes 9 and a way to finally organise iPhone/iPod Touch apps without getting a friction burn on my thumb, I settled in for some music lovin'. Now I don't know how everyone else in the world likes their iTunes experience, but personally I'm quite fond of using the miniplayer. I love having it floating atop everything else for quick track skipping without having to resort to any kind of ghastly menu bar or dashboard trickery (I'm a purist maybe?). To my dismay the zoom button now... actually... zooms the iTunes window rather than presenting me with my favoured miniplayer. It's no great loss (considering the hot key is only shift+cmd+M) but I liked the simplicity of "The green one gives me small happy player." Love and kisses,Your Nephew James Dearest James, Auntie TUAW wanted me to answer for her; she's in the process of baking some cakes for the annual church social at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion, so she's a bit tied up right now.I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with the new functions of iTunes 9. I have hope! Apple didn't change the functionality too much. In fact, they made it more consistent with the rest of the operating system. The green "+" button now acts as a proper zoom button like every other app out there -- BUT -- if you hold the option key while pressing it you still get the mini player like the previous versions of iTunes. Sure, you can use the shift+command+M hot key if you'd like, but there's a still a mouse click solution that will hopefully help you and the rest of our readers out. With best regards,Cousin Josh
Lost your favorite Safari plugin after upgrading to Snow Leopard? Try 32-bit mode
Snow Leopard has brought a host of improvements to OS X, but Safari has been changed in one way that could ruin your day if you're used to using third-party plugins. Support for Input Managers has been removed in 64-bit Safari, which means that popular Safari plugins like Saft won't work. Getting these plugins to work again in Safari is easy, but there is one tradeoff to keep in mind. Re-enabling plugin support for Safari is as simple as forcing Safari to start up in 32-bit mode. When you choose "Get Info" on Safari, you'll notice a checkbox in the window that says "Open in 32-bit mode." Check this box. That's it. Safari will now open in 32-bit mode, and any Input Manager plugins you were using before upgrading to Snow Leopard, like Saft or PithHelmet, should work just fine. Additionally, running Safari in 32-bit mode allows Multiclutch's custom trackpad gestures to work; these weren't working for me when I ran Safari in 64-bit mode, probably because Multiclutch is a 32-bit prefpane. There's one caveat to running Safari in 32-bit mode: there's a tradeoff in stability. One of the features you gain by running Safari in 64-bit mode is that Safari will "sandbox" plugins like Flash, so if (when) Flash Player crashes, it doesn't take all of Safari down with it. This is because when Safari runs in 64-bit mode, plugins actually run as their own separate processes rather than being bundled up with Safari. But when Safari is run in 32-bit mode, Flash and other plugins work the old way, which means if (when) Flash crashes, so will Safari. Safari in 64-bit mode: Flash runs as its own process. Result: far fewer four-letter words in your workflow Safari in 32-bit mode: Plugins work, but Flash makes it crash If you can't live without your plugins (and I can't – Safari without Multiclutch or PithHelmet is like a day without sunshine), then the small sacrifice in stability you'll suffer by running Safari in 32-bit mode is probably going to be worth it to you. Note: if you're running anything that runs off the SIMBL input manager plugin like Saft or PithHelmet, you might have to take a few extra steps to get things running properly in Safari on Snow Leopard. This procedure is specifically tailored toward getting PithHelmet running, but the steps for Saft should be similar (Procedure courtesy of versiontracker.com user tech.bear). – Edit the file "/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/PithHelmet.bundle/Contents/Info.plist" using either TextEdit or another editor (If you're dealing with Saft, substitute as needed); you can find this file by finding PithHelmet.bundle, right-clicking on it, and choosing "Show Contents" from the contextual menu. – Look for "<key>MaxBundleVersion</key>" down towards the bottom of the .plist file; now look at the next line. It's the <string> line. – Change the number to 9999.9 – Save the file What happens is there's an identifier string that checks against the version number of Safari; by changing that value to 9999, you shouldn't have to deal with that incompatibility error ever again. Of course, this is at your own risk -- this version check is designed specifically to prevent SIMBL plugins from "breaking" Safari when Safari gets updated, but if you don't want to or can't wait for the developer to update the plugin, this procedure shouldn't really give you any problems. I've been doing something similar for four years of using PithHelmet, and I haven't run into any major issues.
Five tips to make the most of your new Champion
It's a new day, and a new subscription. Fresh outfit, powers, setting, rules and things to remember. If you don't know that Champions Online has launched, then you've been hiding under a sizeable rock. The odds are you didn't read the manual, and face it, most folks just aren't going to, despite its brevity. There's also some tips and tricks that you're just not going to get out of it, and the last thing you want with a new MMOG is to screw up your build and tactics, right? So, with that in mind, we've rounded up a number of simple things to remember to help you get more out of your Champions Online character.
Spoiler Warning: Shadow Complex secrets and strategies
With Shadow Complex closing out the second Summer of Arcade today, the Joystiq crew has been hard at work compiling a series of videos and images to help would-be explorers unlock the secrets of Chair Entertainment's latest adventure. Of course (as the headline would indicate) this feature is filled to the brim with spoilers and strategies necessary to unlock some of Shadow Complex's many secrets. If you're looking for a Shadow Complex news fix, this isn't the feature for you ... but if you want to know where (and how) to find most of the game's hidden gems, jump in. %Gallery-64709%
A Second Life user's guide to tier
At its heart, tier (as it is called in Second Life) is the capacity to own land. This capacity is paid for in a number of steps (or tiers, hence the name). Each ownership capacity tier is double the area of the previous tier. Tier is a ubiquitous concept in Second Life, but a frequently misunderstood or an incompletely understood one. Understanding land-tier in Second Life is important, whether you are owning, renting, or part of a group that owns land, so read on, and we'll tell you all about it.
