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Discover wealth and achievements with the Riches of Pandaria
Who doesn't like free gold? You'd be silly not to nab what's out there for the taking -- and there's far more for the taking in Pandaria than you'd think. Wowhead just finished up a guide for the Riches of Pandaria, which explores free gold and the achievements associated with said bounty with easy to follow maps and instructions for discovering all that Pandaria has to offer. Scattered throughout Pandaria are objects called Treasure of Pandaria. Collecting these items will nab you a progressive series of achievements ultimately ending with the Riches of Pandaria. These Treasures of Pandaria are small, clickable items that you can find hiding in various places around each zone. Each object vendors for free gold -- up to 100g, free and waiting for you to just grab it and sell it. Lest you think this is a task best saved for level 90, you should also note that these items grant a chunk of experience when they are found as well. Whether you're leveling through Pandaria for the first time, or simply on the lookout for free gold and more achievement points, Wowhead's guide is an excellent starting point to hunting down all the precious items that have been scattered across the continent. Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
Time Is Money: Felwood's wildlife
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). After all, Time Is Money. Today, I'm going to talk to you about a way to make money skinning in Felwood, although similarly leveled zones work as well. This can be done with higher level characters or those who are at-level (50-60), although it moves more quickly if you have a character capable of chain pulling without having to stop to eat or drink or run back to your corpse all the time. If you don't have a skinner that is a high enough level, you really should get one. Leather sells consistently well, and is very easily gathered. In fact, you could get one today! Create a Death Knight, train skinning, and go on a rampage, starting with a low level starter zone and working your way up. Now that we've settled that, let's get down to the particulars.
Time is Money: Addons to beat the Vendors
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).Earlier this week, I taught you a system for making the most gold from vendoring quest rewards that you can't use, without bogging down your computer system with addons.If you don't like the cheat sheet, or think that "heavy items" are too difficult to remember, or you simply love the way that addons can enhance your gaming experience, I have the inside scoop on mods that will tell you which quest reward will sell for the most and that will help you manage your vendor trash.
Ask A Beta Tester: AABT's greatest hits, part 2
On to part 2! This series of questions spans August and early September, and we'll keep moving forward this week.Hoops asked.... How much gold roughly would you get from questing 70-77 (until you unlock the flying mount)? I was wondering if it would it be worth farming money beforehand or would the money from questing be enough. Elizabeth answers: I'm not 77 yet, so I can't exactly address the question as asked, but I can tell you that I've made about 400g leveling from 70 to 72. That's just from questing, vendoring trash & unneeded greens -- and it includes some stupid deaths, plenty of repair bills(I blame Dalaran for many of them!), and training a couple of professions (35g to train a primary profession to the next skill level and 100g to train a secondary profession to the next skill level). Allie adds: I finally started keeping track of how I was doing gold-wise while leveling. On the beta I leveled a lot through instance runs because the demand for healers was so high; on the live realms I've leveled mostly through questing. Between 70 and 76 so far (remarkably fast for me but my guild starts raiding next week) I've made somewhere in the region of 2K gold after training, repairs, professions, etc., mostly through questing and keeping my bags as open as possible to sell vendor trash. As Elizabeth observes, that part's key; Northrend vendor trash and greens sell for a LOT.
Tracking the BoE market in Wrath
The folks over at WoW Economist have started up a blog on one of the most popular problems in World of Warcraft: making money, and lots of it. The truth is that it's not hard to do, whether you're working with professions, trying to hang in the AH, PvPing, or just starting out, but everyone's got a tip to share, it seems, and WoW Economist is no exception.This time around, they've got a good short analysis up of what might happen to green BoEs in Wrath of the Lich King. Once upon a time, there was actually a good market for BoEs on the AH -- some of them even challenged Karazhan gear in the early days of level 70, so anyone new to 70 could just spend some time in the Auction House and pick up some nice gear for running the basic instances and starting to build up blues and epics. But in my experience the market has thinned out lately -- while there's always a market for enchanging materials you can get from BoEs, people aren't that interested in buying green gear with epics so easy to get elsewhere. Most of the time, I get more from vendors for greens than I can actually sell them for on the AH.But WoW Econ says there's a bump on the way -- Death Knights are going to be shooting through 60-70 directly after Wrath, and they're going to want the level 66-70 greens floating around (plate gear with Strength and Stam on it), so that will probably sell well. But everything else is pretty much dried up -- DE it if you can, or just vendor it away and move on. The gold will come quicker in Northrend anyway.
Terra Nova looks back (and forward) at the Diku legacy
EverQuest, World of Warcraft, The Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and many other MMOs all have one important thing in common. Well, okay; they have a lot of things in common -- like about 85% or more of their gameplay mechanics. But the main thing -- indeed, the reason why they have so much in common -- is that they are all descendants of a kind of text MUD game called Diku.Acknowledging that, virtual worlds blog Terra Nova published a "State of the Diku" article for the year 2008. The article was written by Timothy Burke. It's mostly a dispassionate look at game design -- serious business. Burke starts out questioning the purpose of "vendor trash" drops (or grey items as they're generally known in many popular contemporary MMOs). Then he analyzes the public quests of Warhammer Online, viewing them as a positive variation on traditional Diku design.If you're into thnking critically about MMO design, it's worth checking out. We take for granted the fact that most of today's MMOs are based on the Diku formula; maybe that means we're clinging to old ideas that don't make a lot of sense in today's world.
Curing mudflation before it starts
For many players, the mysteries of a virtual economy are best left as that -- a mystery. The numbers, the abundance of terminology, it all conspires to create an environment where players generally don't want to know why the economy works, they just know that they'd rather it did than it didn't. Is that really too much to ask?Steve Williams of Living Worlds proposes some potential solutions for curbing mudflation -- that seemingly unstoppable inflation that occurs at the endgame when players accrue large amounts of currency and the once high price of rare goods comes tumbling down. He proposes that it's actually possible to limit the amount of currency available in the economy by allowing players to use alternative currencies like vendor trash to barter for basic services like armor repairs. It makes sense, since repairs and vendor trash generally exist in limitless supply and don't actually need to be a part of the economy proper. This is only Part One of Williams' proposed system, so we'll have to check back again soon for his full set of ideas.
AddOn Spotlight: AutoProfit
One of my favorite little add-ons, AutoProfit does one thing and it does it well. When you click the stacks-o-gold icon that it adds to vendor windows, it automagically sells all your gray items (aka vendor trash) to the vendor. It's customizable, so you can tell it to hold on to certain gray items or conversely to sell certain non-gray items (Fish Oil, anyone?). It also tells you how much all your junk loot adds up to when you mouse over the sell-all button, and let me tell you, there's nothing like making a few gold in junk rocks off elementals in the Badlands to make late-40s grinding feel a little more pleasant. Since getting this little baby, manually clicking on 37 items after having moused over my entire inventory to seem what's salable seems like such a chore. This is one of those "should be in the default UI" things. Download it at Curse; it's updated for 2.0.1.
