AION of ODST

I'm back! Sorry for the long wait it just takes a while to move and get settled for me I guess. Anyways, there has been much talk over the forums in multiple websites about ODST & AION the most recently released games (ODST Today, AION Yesterday).

AION - The so-called messiah of all MMORPG's, well to tell you the truth so was DarkFall & Age of Conan & Warhammer Online. Basically its Lineage 2 having a baby with World of Warcraft. All of the same gold farmer attracting attributes as Lineage 2 had but with a flare about it that draws 14 year olds to it like a moth to a flame. The only gimmik in this whole game is the fact that you can PvP and have huge Wings as you progress through the game. Yes wings like a bird that you can fly with for only a certain amount of time. PvP has been done, there isnt gonna be much change from the battleground format that WoW implemented so that gimmik is done. Also the wings thing has been done before, in Shadowbane. To tell you the truth I honestly think Shadowbane was ahead of its time as a crappy MMORPG, simply because DarkFall & AION are so similar to it mechanically. I won't buy this game, I dont have to play a game to know how good it is for christ sake I've been gaming since I was born practically I have been doing this for a long long time and know when to spot a game lemon.

ODST - Oh my another Halo game, I like halo. But what I dont like is when companies try to milk a franchise for all its worth then throw it in the dirt as a dried up husk. The only good series games in the history of videogames were RPG's, and those were a dime a dozen. When I look at the ODST game I just think to myself, "Don't they thing its... finished?" Basically they tailored it to compete with other shooter games, where is the innovation? I mean Gears of War 2 Horde mode was excellent, so was the Call of Duty: World at War zombie mode. You cant just throw in a survival mode into every game, it makes it less unique and more mainstream.

ODST & AION are an example of how the gaming industry is going downward into a poophole. Back in the late 90's there were so many great games I cant remember there being even one crappy one... oh wait Azurik.

Great Combo, whaddya know!?

As I was complaining to my friend that was sitting on my couch on how incredibly expensive Enchanting & Blacksmithing is to skill up (that is if you want to do it quickly instead of do farming for ages) I got this crazy idea to start using them as the main professions for my alternate character. To my suprize if you buy the bar's, or go mine them on another character, or bum them off the guild bank and begin to make greens through Blacksmithing you will have a pretty steady flow of mats for the Enchanting profession. Infact if I go and buy enough copper bar's then smith as much greens as I can with it and afterward disenchant the greens and enchant my own equipment over and over again they skill up at exactly the same rate. For once I didnt feel like I was focusing on just one profession but two at the exact same time. So just throwing that out there for my readers this neat little tid bit of information. I havent been posting much lately because I am moving!!! Florida -> New Hampshire, sound retarded right? I gotta go move with my wife to be so things will be a bit slow while I pack!

Analysis of Current v3.1.3 Professions in WoW's Economy

In the previous post I cited how using professions correctly on the auction house can seriously bring in some big gold if you spend the time to invest and grind. I will be reviewing every profession to show the possible ways to get gold from the auction house using them and what your gold per hour would be if you use them. Keep in mind the gold per hour I post is a dependable figure, and doesn’t figure in if Joe Shmo buys your copper bar’s for a million gold every blue moon. I will tell you the gph (gold per hour) for each profession first:

Remember these are dependable figures that relate to the current patch and the current expansion. V3.1.3

Alchemy - ~50gph
Blacksmithing - ~150gph
Enchanting - ~100gph
Engineering - ~0gph
Herb Gathering - ~200-250gph
Mining - ~250-300gph
Inscription - ~20-40gph
Tailoring - ~200gph
Skinning- ~150-200gph
Leatherworking - ~150gph
Jewelcrafting - ~100gph

Alchemy – ~50g per hour - During BC everybody was making money through transmutes because you could proc a butt load of Primal Might’s if you was specced into it. That definitely isn’t the case here. I would say if you DON’T have Herb Gathering you will not have much any income at all, if you do then it will be roughly 50 gold every hour. To tell you the truth this profession only serves as a vending machine during raid’s that you attend. You can make way more money selling the herbs to other alchemists and millers on the auction house.

Blacksmithing – ~150g per hour – Most people that try and make money through blacksmithing sell set’s of gear through the trade channel and try to make it out that the person buying it is getting a good deal and make off with the extra income. This isn’t dependable because not many people go out looking for a full complete set of gear. This profession is mostly just used to twink out your alternate melee characters. Quite possibly it has the potential to give you a burst of income if you have mining as well. Because you eventually get enough resources to make titan steel weapons you will be rolling in the gold. But to tell you the truth in the end you could have made a more steady cash flow mining instead of blacksmithing. This is a utility profession not a money making one.

Enchanting - ~100g per hour – Depending how much you keep up with your banking with mats this has the potential to give some good income. But it is way too dependent on if the prices of the mats on the auction house are low. This would be a good lazy man’s profession to make money on because you can just every now and then hop on and scan the auction house to buy mats that are 10-40% of the average market price. Yet again you might as well make more money with the disenchanting skill that this profession comes with. A profession that is used for twinking alts and that random request from guildies to get a free enchantment. Don’t get this profession if you want to make serious gold.

Engineering - ~0 per hour – Self explanatory. Engineering is strictly used as a form of entertainment for the person that has this. You will be spending all of your days trying to get enough money for that god forsaken motorcycle. Not to mention this is an EXTREMELY expensive profession to skill up.

Herb Gathering - ~200-250g per hour – This is a very good profession to make money but ONLY if you are extremely lucky. The prices for herbs fluctuate on nearly every server depending on the demand. But the good thing about this profession is that herbs sell like hotcakes, sometimes almost instantly. There are two other professions that use herbs to skill up and this is an excellent way to get money quickly.

Mining – ~250-300g per hour – If you follow the previous guide that I posted before you will be making this amount of gold dependably. The prices for ore don’t really fluctuate at all on most servers and the ore is bought relatively quickly. If you want to get a huge burst of income weekly then save your ore till Monday night and put everything on the auction house. The same goes for Friday night. This profession is excellent because it is used in three other different professions (Prospecting & Blacksmithing & Engineering) giving it the maximum amount of demand possible. Although for some reason herbs still sell faster, maybe they are just used in higher quantities.

Inscription - ~20-40g per hour – This is a terrible profession to learn if you want to make gold. Some of the glyphs are somewhat moderate to put on the auction house because you find some people re-speccing quite often. But the problem is ever sense the secondary spec was implemented into the game people don’t use glyphs barely at all. I would say get this profession so that you can save some money on your alternate characters.

Tailoring - ~200g per hour – If you are exalted with the Kirin Tor and the Son’s of Hodir then this profession will give you what I like to call Niche Cash. What you will be selling is Glacial Bag’s and Sapphire Spellthread. Most people that put these on the auction house put them at a pretty crazy price. But you can chop off nearly 25g and make atleast a 50g profit from just buying mats off the auction house. If you need frostweave then go to icecrown and the wall in the middle of the map (above the mountain that the glacier goes around) to the north there are some alchemist cloth wearing mobs that spawn like crazy and drop frostweave like nuts. This is pretty dependable as a profession but it costs a TON to skill up and is dependent on the prices of mats in the auction house.

Skinning - ~150-200g per hour – Depending on how fast you can kill and how responsive you are to skinning dead skinnable monsters this is an okay way to get gold. Every once and a while you will get the rare leathers that will sell for a buttload but I would say this is completely dependent on your gear and class.

Leatherworking - ~150g per hour – This is almost the same strategy as Tailoring with the item enchants for melee classes but you can’t really make any glacial bags so it cripples the strategy a bit. The melee item enchants on the auction house are usually fluctuating in price and a low demand makes for a high abundance. But if you watch the auction house and notice a armor enchant that doesn’t populate the auction house that much then monopolize it for maximum income.

Jewel crafting- ~100g per hour – I would say definitely that Prospecting will get you more gold than actually jewel crafting. The amount of gold spent for ore (or even free if you have mining) is only one third of the amount of gold you will get out of the prospecting if you are moderately lucky enough to get some Ruby’s. The problem with this profession is that it is mostly about luck. The market is flooded with gem’s so you wont really make much income that way.

Free Gold Guide (Professional WoW Player *cough*)

Everybody knows about the so called "Ultimate" guides that are out there for getting gold in World of Warcraft. Pretty much everybody just wants that god forsaken Traveller's Mammoth. I mean sure the Son's of Hodir multi-passenger mount looks the same but can you repair with it? No. Can you buy reagents so you don't have to get off your fat ass to truck it to the nearest vendor? No. So with that said I am going to share with you my personal ways that I get gold quickly in the game. With these strategies you can get your 15,000 gold pieces in roughly 8 days. First lets compare the obvious choices for getting gold. You can do dailies, gather, or do Auction House. Every single damned guide that you will read on this subject will say that the Auction House is the best source of income via addon's like Auctioneer. This would be a viable way to get gold quickly if everyone and their mother didn't know about the extremely predictable ways this addon scans and undercuts in order to make some sort of income for the player selling the items. Doing daily quests is a good way to make around around 260 gold a day, but it will take you about 2~4 hours to complete this. I can make that much gathering in around half an hour easily. So basically the way to get 15,000 gold pieces in 8 days is to use a combination of the Auction House and gathering. If you get bored of gathering then do daily quests. If you are a constant raiding player then I would leave daily quests as a last resort to earn money because this is a good way to offset the decrease of gold caused by repair bills. If you are completely dependant on the Auction House game of buying low and selling high then you will be sadly disappointed because the biggest factor in this isn't smarts it is luck. I don't know about you but I like to have a dependable easy way of getting gold without staying on the computer for very long so I don't get the 5Th degree from anybody that I am converting into a vegetable. What is the best gathering skill you might ask? Well I don't think its a question of which is the best but which is the easiest. The easiest gathering skill to get money with is Mining. You will even make around 1,000 gold your first day trying to skill up this tradeskill. It took me roughly 10 hours to get max skill in mining. Just so you know I already had my epic flying mount so that definitely made the outland and northrend mining easier. Actually I wouldn't even consider this strategy until you get yourself a epic flying mount with cold weather flying. I know what your thinking,"But gee wiz you have to make a ton of money to get an epic flying mount with cold weather flying." You should have made close to enough money if you didn't blow it the whole time you was leveling your main character up. Besides this is 2009... your main character should have these by now and if not I'd reconsider uninstalling the game. Let me tell you a little secret about mining in Northrend. Everybody that does this type of gathering does millions of circles around Sholazar Basin. This would seem to be the easiest way to get money considering all you have to do is fly in circles for hours until you see a shiny mining node on the ground and then repeat the process over and over again. That would be true if there wasn't a million other people doing it and not to mention paladin's have faster mount speeds and will ninja every node that you can see in the distance. Get these addon's : Auctioneer Suite, Gatherer DB, Carbonite. When you are in-game upload the wowhead database into gatherer and turn on your mining node HUD. Now make your way toward the South-Eastern section of Icecrown, the part that is ontop of the actual glacier and closest to Dalaran. You will be making a rotation in the form of a giant upside down U. Be sure to snag the Titanium as soon as possible. You dont want to smelt any of the saronite ore that you find. Just fly around getting nodes until your playtime is about up or you just get bored. When you are done fly to Dalaran go to your nearest Auction House city. First thing to do is smelt all of the Titanium ore that you found, if you can try and make a Titansteel Bar. At the Auction House click the button on the far right that says Appraiser. Click on the item you wish to sell on the left and then click Refresh in the bottom right then click the Post button. You want to sell all the saronite ore, crystallized elemental items, Titanium, and Titansteel Bar's that you have on you. I promise you half an hours worth of getting nodes in Icecrown will net you around 200g if you are quasi-lucky. If you are unlucky it will net you about 150g every 30 min. If you get bored of doing this method then do dailies. Do all of the Son's of Hodir, Oracle (or the other), and Coliseum dailies that you can get your hands on. What ever you do: do NOT do the daily dungeon quests. Also if you want to make money don't do dungeon's period because it will in fact cause you to slowly lose money. I will write more in the next couple weeks so stay tuned!

Questing.. is it needed?

In nearly 95% of the MMO's that are out there today consist of basically grinding out xp, and ALWAYS have the option of doing it the "easy" way through questing. I dont know about you but questing for so long in the games I have played has made me believe they are extremely trivial. I mean the only questing that we would do during our hardcore raiding days is so that we could progress further into the storyline and be able to access more content in the raider's perspective.

This isnt the case now, because after you hit a adiquate level where you can raid they still force you to quest to do things the easy way. I would rather do it a different way than the normal so I usually refuse to do quests unless I absolutely have to to progress. As a person that doesnt do NPC scripted quests I am pretty used to setting personal goals in my brain for what I want to achieve in the game that I am playing, this in and of itself is a quest of sorts. I remember back in EQ1 I used to dream and drool of being able to go to a plane of sky raid so that I could get to the seventh island and retrieve my Crown of Elemental Mastery. Oh the days I would see it in the bazaar for 100k and drool over it constantly, of course by that time planes of power was the latest expansion and everyone in the guild would tell me damn it man you have better stats than that outdated piece of trash. But you know what I wanted it more than anything still, even though I was way higher level than the item was intended I still couldnt aquire it alone.

These are the quests that need to be put forth, personal goals and player driven achievements to make you feel like you actually accomplished something. Do you think I give two damn's if a NPC said somewhere in the quest text dribble that they was greatful to have me around and help them out? Hell no I didnt really give a damn I just sat there and thought to myself wow I got about oh say 2000 more quests to go before I hit max level or get to the amount of gold that I wanted or get to the level of reputation with a faction. Developer's think that we have a blast when we do questing but to tell you the truth it is the only thing that we CAN do. The good old games back in the day didnt really have questing at all, I mean you could quest but good luck finding the NPC and knowing what the hell he is talking about and where to go because you was pretty much SoL in that department. A true fun game would not have questing unless it was for content progression requirements. A true fun game would have adventure instead of questing requiring adventure. The game would put me into a spot where I felt the need to venture out and discover things on my own and find out the secrets to the world that I was new to, not to get some old ass guy a book he lost in a river what the hell?

What makes a MMO a success?

Many of the articles that I have been reading in the press about MMO success the same phrase keeps coming up over and over, "If an MMO can grab 1/10th of the 11 million WoW players it is a success." That is actually saying a lot if you are a press company that is based out of the US, because I dont know you but I only really care if there are ENGLISH players, I hated it when EQ1 guilds consisted of only french players from france and canada because it made it where I couldnt raid with them.

FACT: WoW has around 1.9 Million players from US (notice I said PLAYERS not active subscriptions)

FACT: Most WoW server's are under populated compared to some other MMO server's. Also because of the faction division this decreases the amount of people you have to play with by atleast half, maybe less.

So if a MMO can grab well over half of the US players (not active subscriptions) then it will be considered a success, that is pretty much impossible unless it is the messiah of all MMO's.

Age of Conan -> FAIL
Warhammer Online -> FAIL
Darkfall Online -> SUPERFAIL/SUPERSUCCESS

Final Fantasy NerdRage!!11

• Final Fantasy XIV (14 tards) - It's like square-enix didnt take a step back and realize that final fantasy 11 wasnt bad enough, they are all like oh we need to release something newer with better graphics and more streamline. No offense to anyone that played that horrible excuse for a final fantasy but the characters looked terrible. I was actually considering playing FF XI recently but I took one good hard look at the character's in a couple screenshots and said PASS. I looked at the new FF14 screenshots and the armor and characters dont look to different from the first mockery of a mmo. So I will probably pass on this game, unless I hear some mad crazy responses when it releases in the near future.
• Final Fantasy VII - This is the game that should have been remade not some stupid ass mmorpg are you kidding me square-enix knows that this is a gold mine, they could get millions and millions just by charging $1 a copy because people would be hording that shit like nuts just so they could sell it on ebay for a couple hundred dollars when the game is out of print.
• Square-Enix What the hell!?! -I loved the hell out of your games and look at what you are doing?! Okay so you slightly redeemed yourself by releasing the original FF7 on the PS-Store, but I would like something physical to hold in my hand. If there was some black style cd's with original case and it said PS1 I would be spaztastic about the whole deal but geee wiz you had to go ahead and make it digital distribution, I didnt have internet at my house when FF7 released you retards why the hell would everybody get it if its only available for PSP and PS3!??! Milking me for every penny so I can play your watered down RPG's that arent half of what they used to be! If FF15 is an mmorpg, so help me god I will throw my PS3 into a brick wall.