Greedy Goblin

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Surviving the queue

I want to report interesting stuff from making hoards of gold and the great adventures of The PuG, but there is neither. My businesses are really slow, except for selling every piece of cloth that I find during questing. It goes for 200G/stack! The PuG is leveling well, we have 4 new members again, offsetting for the 4 who have been kicked for 1 month inactivity. We are lvl 2 guild now, just like every single guild in the planet after the XP change. We ran instances without wipes, but most players prefer questing.


However I figured something out that helps me a lot to not having to suffer the crowd. I mean waiting for hours in a queue is an annoying thing, but hey you picked a high-population server, not me. I picked Agamaggan-EU exactly for its non-existent queue. While 70% of the EU realms have "high" or "locked" in the population field while 20% have "medium", our server has a green "low" written next to it. By the way, have you noticed that free character migration is available from at least 20 servers? If you are sucking in the queue in one of these servers, join The PuG for free!

OK, enough of guild ad. So you got in after waiting in the queue. You go to explore the world, to undertake great feats to save Azeroth from the Aspect of Death, but instead you find the floor littered by corpses, monsters spawning from the nowhere in huge waves while legions of players shoot, cast, charge on anything below a red name. And in PvP realms that includes you!

I have to tell that I find this experience worse than the event when one of my companions who supposed to participate in some great feat just say "lawl i need l33t helm cud i get it if it dropz plox". And I'm on a low pop server, I don't want to imagine how a high pop or queued server looks like. But I finally figured out how can I evade this zerg. It slows down the theoretical leveling speed, but possibly doesn't slow the practical. It's about doing the end of your zone. I mean, when a player reaches lvl 82, he drops Hyjal/Vashij'ir and goes to Deepholm. When he gets 83, he rushes to Uldum. On lvl 84, Twilight Highlands. Since you can get the mentioned levels after doing half of the zone, the second half is nearly empty. In the first 60 quests of Deepholm I bumped into several players even on early afternoon. The alliance gunship was terrible. But after lvl 83 I see less and less as I keep doing Deepholm quests while they all left for Uldum.

So the suggestion: complete the whole zone. It's true that as a lvl 83 I could get more XP for an Uldum quest than for a Deepholm one, but I can complete the Deepholm ones fast, in absence of huge competition and I can enjoy playing instead of suffering the legion of arthasdklolz swarming around me.
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Oh, almost forgot the morons of the day: all those people who pay 25-30G for a mysterious fortune card. It's a lottery item, you use it and it turns into vendortrash. Most of them are 10 silver trash, some 50s. Wowhead says that there are 5000G versions, I assume with 0.001% droprate. But still, people buy it like candy.

17 comments:

Yaggle said...

People love the mysterious fortune card because people love gambling, as do I. Playing Everquest and World of Warcraft helped me control my urges to visit the local Indian casinos quite a lot. Of course, it's not controlling those urges, it's substituting a less harmful one. It is probably not coincidental that I don't play Wow any more but I am going to the casino later today. Hiawatha probably is going to get my money again. But I think there should be more gambling in World of Warcraft such as these mysterious fortune cards. Another way for goblins to make money from M&S, right? And yeah, I am saying gambling is moronic and goblins run casinos.

Anonymous said...

You're restricted on which servers you can go to with the free transfer.

It has to be PvE -> PvE, RP -> RP, or PvP -> PvP.

Boukev said...

You forget a fact in the mysterious fortune card selling. It can also be cooked in a Fortune Cookie, which as it stands 'can' give the best foodbuff available. So from a min-maxing point of view there worth isn't that weird. The people getting it to try the gamble for loot are idiotic in my eyes as well.

Greetings Boukev of Existence Guild Journal (Btw... Existence Guild Journal might be a great place for you to observe m&s behavior)

Unknown said...

Agamaggan EU is currently not open for free migration from anywhere:
https://www.wow-europe.com/character/character-move-eligible-realms.html
(requires battle.net login)

Anonymous said...

I sure chuckled when I sold a Mysterious Fortune for 100g and then the buyer messaged me with, "Thanks, it vendored for 1g." Win some; lose some.

Ulsaki said...

Goldmaking tip: sell enchanting vellums on the AH. I've sold a hundred for 10-15G each, and you can buy them from the vendor for 8 silver.

I wouldn't label the people who buy them morons though because I was initially unaware you could buy them from vendors (and brought a few myself off the AH). I haven't read about that change anywhere.

Otherwise not too much to report so far. I powerleveled Alchemy to 525, and sold a Truegold bar for 5K, immediately paying back the costs to power level it. It'll be interesting to see what I can sell them for this week. If I can sell it at the same price, that's a huge amount of gold.

End game is very hard at the moment; heroics are not to be taken lightly. Will be interesting to see if Blizzard caves to the casual players who will complain.

Anonymous said...

I agree, having to wait for the named mob to kill respawn while players camp him can be annoying, I'm currently doing Deepholm quests having in mind I'll need them for my shoulder enchant later, luckily people are smart, I send invites and receive invites to kill "the named", unluckily my faction is outnumbered two times by the opposite one so then I have to wait when they camp him.

However to level up I was doing mostly instances, maybe it's not fastest but it prepares us for 85 and heroics, gear wise and tactics wise. Good I'm in a guild that runs them, my friend was pugging Vortex Pinnacle yesterday and cursed cluelessness of the puggers. In "the pug" guild I guess it's a viable option too to run the instances.

Anonymous said...

On the first day I went straight to Uldum at level 80. The zone is large and had relatively few players. I couldn't do any quests but could gain good XP by fighting level 83 mobs and exploring. I also profited by fishing and skinning along the way.

thehampster said...

Gevlon, your business is probably slow b/c most people already have bags and glyphs for their main toons. Gems and enchants are fairing a little bit better, but due to the huge number of people leveling up their trade skills, those aren't generating much profit either (at least for me anyway).

Is the only way to make gold right now by farming mats? I've made decent gold just by minimal farming to level up my mining on an engineering/mining alt. Volatile air's have been selling for over 50 gold at peak times, and volatile earths for over 35 at times. Obsidion and eternium is selling great too.

Fishyfishfish said...

On a sidenote, for these very few days after launch, I found very practical to have two gathering-based alts, one being a Miner/Herbalist, the other being a Skinner/Engineer [for Motes, and now the Condenser]

Price/unit 2 days after launch:

Obsidium: 25G
Elementium: 10G
Volatile Fire : 15G
Volatile Water : 7G
Volatile Earth : 25G
Volatile Life : 9G

Cinderbloom: 2.5G
Heartblossom: 1.5G
Stormvine: 8G
Azshara's Veil : 18G
Whiptail: 13G

Savage Leather: 5G
Blackened Dragonscale: 7G
Pristine Hide: 130G

All in all, farming leather at a particular spot in Hyjal, which is a highly skinnable quest hub for everyone, I'm "CURRENTLY" getting anywhere between 3000 to 6000G per hour.

Gathering professions are useful to have, if only for these "crazed-for-materials" moments.

Wolfblitzer said...

Does anyone know if there are any U.S. servers with a guild similar to The PUG? My current server does some GDKP runs (or did during the closing days of WOTLK) but they weren't very well run and only happened at odd hours. I'm looking for something closer to Gevlon's setup.

Slurp said...

Wolfblitzer - Why not start a guild on a US realm like this! I know I would be interested, I have been trying to do this on Winterhoof Horde side but am only lvl 22 currently, could use some help.

energybomb said...

Gevlon, I can't believe that the cards take a mere "ps" position.
I always believed that their success would be THE ultimate confirmation of your moron-goblin theory.

Let me explain:
First, a quick look at the official forums. As of now, there isn't a SINGLE thread anywhere demanding to "nerf" the cards (like, increase the drop rate of the expensive cards).
On the other hand, every day I went to the suggestion forums, I saw at least 1-2 "low the gold needed to make a choppa kthanks" thread.

So, why do people DON'T want extra money in this case?

Because it works for them perfectly!
See, now the morons with 50g on them actually have a (in the eyes of socials) undeniable truth: luck is to blame that I am poor!

Some might hit the 5k. Even then, this 5k will vanish to thin air in, propably, minutes for a random mini-pet or "1337" mount.

If they increase the money made significally, the excuse will suddenly become much weaker and the M&S will still be poor (after all, all then money earned will go straight to the goblins again).

I, of course, don't really have to explain why goblins are satisfied. This item is a treasure mine.

So, socials can explain their failure with the intagible luck AND asocials can make money out of it. It is a win-win situation and the most perfect item blizzard has ever made for the economy.

Wolfblitzer said...

Slurp - I wish that I had the time to commit to leading a project like that, with my real life commitments, there's no way I could be online enough to make it work. That I is a big reason I'd like to find a guild like The PUG. My current guild uses a loot council, which means if I want to raid, I must show up every week. With The PUG, I wouldn't ever feel obligated to show up for the good of the group.

Lima said...

I made around 12k gold through levelling my blacksmith to 525.
People were happy to pay +50% to 100% of the already silly price on ore, on armor and weapons.

Davee said...

OMG guys this card business is awesome:)
I started to advertise it i had about 60 cards. I sold them about 5mins, and one of my custommer, got a 200g card. After that the guys spent almost 6k for cards at me:) i just making them and making:) what a morron and all of them was a trash max 20g:)
im sad i forgot to make a screen:)

J. McNair said...

Right, as I am a mostly casual player, I have no problem questing zones to completion. Hyjal took me from 80-82, and now I am casually facerolling Vashj'ir. Now that "optimal" 80-85 guides are being released, the glut in the early parts of questing clears pretty quickly.

I am happy I noticed this trend by myself. Not that it matters, but thanks for your blog. You always provide supporting evidence for your conclusions, and you are unafraid of mathematics.