Posts Tagged ‘gold’

WoW: Advanced Pricing and Costing Strategies for Mists of Pandaria Inks to Maximize Inscription Profit

23 November 2012 | 1 Comment » | Heartbourne

Another expansion, another revamp to glyphs and inscription. Lots of things have changed between Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, but many have remained the same. Glyphs are still highly profitable and the ink trader can still trade down the highest level ink to any other. As well as convert 10 common ink to rare ink. However, there is a new twist in the mix.

There have always been certain floor price mechanisms in play, but this one is a doozy: Ink of Dreams should never be less than 6g 25s. You can make shoulder enchants with 3 inks and a 3 copper reagent that vendor for 18g 75s, so if you aren’t internally pricing your Ink of Dreams at this price or more, you are losing out, my friend.

Even for non-scribes, this is a big deal. Any glyph that uses Ink of Dreams (which a lot of the new ones do) won’t be sold by savvy scribes for less than the price of 3 Ink of Dreams, or 18g 75s. I am constantly surprised by people not knowing about this or the details of the ink trader. I took up someone on trade selling stacks of Ink of Dreams for 120g/stack (6g per), and I instantly told them I would buy their entire stock of 2,000. It’s certainly easier than milling my own, and worst case scenario, I make 700 shoulder enchants while AFK and make 500g.

As for the rare ink, Starlight Ink, we know that we can buy one for 10 Ink of Dreams. With herb prices on many realms plummeting, likely thanks to bots, everyone is swimming in a sea of ink. Should you cash in all your Ink of Dreams for Starlight Ink?

My answer is: probably not!

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Making Gold in Guild Wars 2

20 September 2012 | 5 Comments » | Mike

I’ve played a lot of MMORPGs over the years and one thing has always been consistent, I’ve always been poor.  Most of the time it was because I didn’t want to spend the time grinding to make money, I never crafted and I’ve only slightly dabbled in auction houses.  Guild Wars 2 however makes it so easy to make money that for the first time ever, I consider myself in the upper-class.

I went into GW2 with the same mindset as every other MMORPG and after 2 weeks I was poor, with only 90 silver to my name at level 41. That day I crafted my way to level 43 which dropped me to about 60 silver and that’s when it happened. I said to myself, ‘I’m done with being poor’ and turned straight to the auction house to see how I could make some coin. Up until this point I’ve used the auction house sparingly to buy some mats and a few pieces of armor and weapons, but this time my goal was different. Continue Reading

Diablo III: Commodities on RMAH Live, Help Athene Raise 400 Billion Gold for Charity

14 July 2012 | 1 Comment » | Heartbourne

Earlier this week, Blizzard released patch 1.0.3b for Diablo III, which added the ability to buy and sell commodity items on the real-money auction house. This includes gems, dyes, crafting materials, and most recently, gold itself. This makes it quite easy to convert gold to real-money if you don’t have outside funding available, and will hopefully start the trend of selling things for gold rather than real-money.

In related news, the “best gamer in the world”, Athene, launched his project to raise 400 billion gold for Save the Children. By selling the raised gold and items and donating it to the charity, he hopes to help address the hunger crisis in West Africa, where there are more than 18 million needy people. In today’s prices, 400 billion gold would sell for $10,000, so we will see how much he raises. He also plans to visit West Africa at the end of the August and livestream some of the benefits of the charity. Already, his project Operation Sharecraft raised $1 million for Save the Children, culminating at Dreamhack earlier this summer, and Razer has been very supportive as a sponsor in his efforts.

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Diablo III Real Money Auction House: Analysis of Fees, Market Forces, and Strategy, Part 3

24 May 2012 | 4 Comments » | Heartbourne

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Last time, we looked at some of the pricing implications of the Diablo 3 auction house fee structure and why Blizzard implemented these fees. This time, we’ll propose some other fee systems and consider some economic ideas that have relevance to the Diablo 3 auction house.

One of the basic ideas of economics that gets thrown around a lot by laymen is “supply and demand“. They are really two separate ideas that can be used in conjunction with each other to predict market behavior. Let’s delve into some of these economic ideas to approach the auction house and its fees.

To make a basic graph of what “supply and demand” looks like, we need to understand how suppliers and consumers react to pricing. Intuitively, if something (lets say a super-awesome sword) can be sold for a high price, people are going to do what they need to in order to get it so that they can garner a large sum of money. Conversely, if the sword is offered at a lower price, less people are going to be willing to sell it. At higher prices, more swords will be offered for sale, and at lower prices, there will be less swords. As for consumers, they will buy more swords the lower the price is, as they will be able to more easily afford them at lower prices and be more willing to part with less of their hard-earned cash. At higher prices, people will only buy swords if they really want them. Thus, at higher prices, less swords will be bought, and at lower prices, more swords will be bought. If we asked sword-producers how much they would sell a particular sword for at a variety of prices and graphed it, then asked sword-consumers how many swords they would buy at a variety of prices, we would get a graph like this:

The important idea is that the supply curve has a positive slope, whereas the demand curse has a negative slope.

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Diablo III Real Money Auction House: Analysis of Fees, Market Forces, and Strategy, Part 1

10 May 2012 | 9 Comments » | Heartbourne

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

On May 15th at 3 A.M. PDT, the heavens will tremble and Diablo 3 will be live. Players will be able to scour Sanctuary for gold and epic loot and trade it on the in-game gold-based auction house immediately, and a week later, the real money auction house will open, where players can trade their items with other players for real world currencies.

The recent announcement of the fee schedule for the “real-money trade” (RMT) auction house had some players astonished at the prices. The fee for the gold-based auction house is 15% of the sale price and while the real-money auction house matches that 15% for “commodities” (e.g., stackable items, gems, materials, dyes, etc.), it charges $1 for equipment and unique items. These fees are charged to the seller and deduced from the money they receive from the sale of the item. Additionally, the real money revenue is credited to a Battle.net account balance; if you want to be paid and withdraw the funds to Paypal, this incurs an additional 15% charge. Once you get the money into Paypal, you can transfer to a bank account for free, or do anything you could normally do with Paypal credit.

If you are at all familiar with Blizzard’s other major auction house system, the WoW gold auction house, you might notice the similarities and differences easily. Here’s a quick rundown of WoW’s auction house fees:

  • 5% of the sale price on same faction auction house (99% of the trading), 15% on neutral auction houses
  • Players must put down a deposit when selling items. If the item fails to sell, the deposit is not returned. The deposit varies based on the length of the auction and the vendor value of the item.
Seems like the Diablo auction house is a lot less forgiving, doesn’t it? Read on for some of the possible motivation.

Guild Wars 2 Microtransactions Explained: RMT Included

20 March 2012 | No Comments » | Mike


Today ArenaNet revealed more details about Guild Wars 2‘s microtransaction item-store, revealing that it will allow players to participate in real-money-trading (RMT).

The basic system works on three currencies: gold, gems, and karma. The karma currency is not trade-able, and is only used for unique in-game rewards. However, the gold and gems currencies can be traded freely; with gems being purchasable with real money, and are the only accepted currency in the item-store.  This works similar to EVE Online‘s PLEX system, but goes a bit further.

With EVE‘s system, PLEX can only be used for one thing: to add game-time to your account. Players can purchase extra PLEX, and sell it in-game to players, who can then purchase it with in-game credits. This gives players a way to play EVE Online free, if they’re good at making money in-game.

Guild Wars 2 system is similar, but instead of one purchasable item, it gives players an entire item-store to buy things with.  This also creates a dynamic between the two currencies, as gold will always fluctuate in value, while gems will not. The reason being, that the price of items in the item-store are a lot more consistent than items sold in-game by other players.

This system then creates a sub-market that will actually allow players to make, potentially, huge profits by constantly trading gold for gems. When the value of gold is high, trade it all for gems. As the value drops, trade your gems back to gold, and depending on the fluctuation, you’ll get more gold back then what you started with.

The good news is that the item-store will only sell cosmetic items and items to speed up certain in-game processes; most likely EXP boosts and things of that nature. ArenaNet made the following statement about selling items that give players any sort of advantage,

But it’s never OK for players to buy a game and not be able to enjoy what they paid for without additional purchases, and it’s never OK for players who spend money to have an unfair advantage over players who spend time

The reasoning behind this move is to prevent gold farmers from ruining the game as they’ve done with other MMORPGs. By allowing the players themselves to buy and sell gold, it destroys the RMT blackmarket.

As far as I’m concerned, ArenaNet can do no wrong. The system sounds great, and I’m even more excited for GW2; if that’s even possible.

First Impression: Dungeon Overlord, the HARDCORE Facebook Strategy MMO

4 October 2011 | 1 Comment » | Mordil

You read that right. Night Owl Games has made a game it proclaims to be the first hardcore Facebook game to date. Frankly, after playing it since PAX Prime this year, I have to agree. Not only is Dungeon Overlord substantially more intense than say, Farmville, it has Mrs. Mordil and I logging in daily to check up on our dungeons and strategize together.

The first thing I have to comment on for Night Owl was the quality of the graphics the company offers for the game. Dungeon Overlord is a 2D game, but all the models and objects have great detail due to them first creating everything as a 3D model, then converting it to 2D. Making DO a perfect blend of 2D and 3D models.

After noticing that, and jumping into the meat of the gameplay, I felt right at home due to my playing of Tribal Wars all that time ago. The gameplay is very similar, in the fact that time is the handicap; with different “rooms” as the buildings from Tribal Wars.

However, there are so many more resources you need to gather to create things – and upgrade, of course – that the game constantly has you strategizing to earn the needed rewards. Taking it a step further, not every dungeon offers the same resource nodes, or the same number of nodes, forcing players to explore and conquer new lands out of necessity. From simple gold and iron, the quicksilver and diamonds, you need a plethora of resources to support your dungeon empire.

Also a different feature one must notice: all you have to start out with in a new dungeon is the “Vault” which holds all your gold. It’ll take some time to get it to Scrooge McDuck levels.

After the jump is the introduction video created by Night Owl Games. Read on for my last first comments, and gameplay footage. Continue Reading

Economic and Efficient Archaeology: Leveling, Keystones, and Epics

23 May 2011 | No Comments » | Heartbourne

I have a pension for efficiency: I have my inscription business down to a science. It’s all fully automated, and my revenue and time investments are carefully calculated to contract out my milling and herb buying labor at a price that maximizes my gold per hour.

Archaeology taunts me with its complexity. I have no idea if I should be using keystones or not, nor do I know the best region in which to dig. There are many theories on the mechanics of discovery for rare and epic artifacts, but there isn’t a consensus in the community, nor a good source of data. Even with data, there are so many nuances that may or may not affect the outcomes. Apparently, Bountiful Bags is believed to be affecting fragment gathering. Patch 4.1 introduced a new mechanic: dig sites for races that you have completed all the rare finds for will be less likely to appear. Do races have different drop rates for keystones? Does the location of a dig site affect the number of fragments discovered? What determines which artifact you will have next, and what are the chances of getting which artifact?

These are only a few of the questions on the tip of my mind. What follows is my anecdotal account of leveling to 525 and a few weeks spent digging while skill capped, and my thoughts on the best way to level and dig.
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