Another Wasted Day

I think that part of waiting for a highly anticipated game, is the shear boredom of things. I have sunk low in troubled times such as these. There are only so many ways a gamer can keep himself or herself occupied before a big game release. Let's list a few shall we?

• Play another game.

Sometimes this one helps. It keeps your mind off the fact, you are still waiting for your MMO or new game to arrive. Picking another game similar to the one you are preparing to play is the best idea. It allows you to up your skills before release. More or less, it keeps you occupied in gaming and nothing else. Including keeping you away from unnecessary things like cleaning your room / house, doing laundry, or replacing the weather stripping on your back door because the rainwater from the no gutter system off your poorly built house is leaking in and destroying your door and floor.

• Endurance training

Old people, like myself and a few others that fancy themselves readers of blogs such as this one, prefer endurance training. We aren't young anymore, and quite frankly, we cannot stay up past 12am. For that matter I pulled a muscle this morning putting on a sock. So we must train ourselves to be able to keep up with you young whippersnappers. It's not exactly the easiest thing to do considering games don't captivate us as well as they used to. We have to find a totally addictive game or an activity that keeps us staying up past our pill / bed time.

• Character Creation

Before we launch full steam ahead, a good majority of us, will begin to create our characters in our minds. We will even have names picked out, so that we aren't searching randomly for a named item on our desks at launch time. (I literally have a character on WoW named Aqualibrium for that very reason.) We will make sure we have made a final decision on whether our characters will be Female or Male. We will decide if we want to start as Argonians or Redguards. We will write long roleplaying stories on our characters. We will be prepared.

• Guilds

For the more nerdy of people, we will find other people to align with. This is a tricky one. Since there is no current game to play, boredom runs rampant. I have seen only a few guilds this go around that have not 100% went to the dark side. I joined a guild before the launch of SWTOR and they were hardcore. As memory serves, they kicked me out, because I said if SWTOR releases on Thanksgiving day, I would spend my free time watching football.  I guess I got kicked out for having a life? No idea..

• Forums

Joining Forums is the greatest thing you can do. Forums often times have a lot of news and like-minded people talking about the game you are about to play. They even have some developers come in and do private interviews which is kind of cool. As long as the information doesn't violate the NDA, most websites, including this one, will discuss things from videos and other official sources. Forums are a great source of information, and should never be overlooked. I like Enjin's forum over others because its straight and to the point. You don't have to wade through a trough of useless garbage to read what you want to read.

• Writing

Sometimes you just feel like writing. I like writing because it is a form of stress relief. With a generous amount of time, you can have a plethora of information waiting for you at launch. Dust off that old Microsoft Word program you got back when you were flunking out of college, playing video games instead of going to class, and write something useful. Or don't and spend your time playing internet spades with a guy that never covers your nils! Either way, enjoy yourself before launch. Be sure to friend me on Enjin, and we shall play, oh yes. We shall.

(Original Version on ElderScrollsForum.com)
Thanks
-CB

Alternative Currency for ESO?

As we all know, The Elder Scrolls Online uses a megaserver. I don’t know the technical jargon behind this, but the end result will be every pc and mac user being able to interact and trade with each other. In other MMOs with such a large player base, gold sometimes becomes a useless currency for high tier items. This is primarily due to the lack of ways for gold to leave the game economy. In these instances, the new currency (such as Chaos Orb in Path of Exile) is valued equally to each player.  Other games such as Guild Wars 2, have had almost no inflation, and players haven’t adopted an alternative currency. With Guild Wars 2, there is a tax on certain player transactions, removing gold from the game’s economy. It also doesn’t hurt to have economists on staff to help maintain the game’s economic balance.

I don’t think Zenimax Online Studios has, or is currently looking for any economists unfortunately. After an extensive search, I found a few LinkedIn profiles, dozens of job postings, even Matt Firor’s phone number (don’t worry Matt, I won’t be prank calling you). But not a peep on if they have anyone qualified to monitor and manage ESO’s economy.

If ESO does end up having a ton of worthless gold, what items should you look out for? From what we’ve heard so far, and provided that the in-game items and crafting system is similar to past Elder Scrolls games, speculation is possible.

Certain tier of gear? Possibly. Without hands on experience in deconstructing equipment, we have no way of knowing the nature of the items you can acquire this way, their abilities, nor their rarity.

Crafting material? Possibly. Additives are these mysterious items that are an optional ingredient to craft gear with, but we effectively know nothing about them. There have been interviews with Nick Konkle and Paul Sage talking about them in the past, but no updates on how they might have changed, or the specifics on the items themselves.

Other crafting materials? Not a chance. The normal ingredients such as ore, or alchemy ingredients are going to be those things you trip over every ten feet. They’re also the kind of item gold farmers will find a way to exploit and sell for gold, and then sell for money.

Glyphs? Not likely. In case you’re not up to speed on what glyphs are, glyphs are the items crafted in the Enchanting skill line. They are items with an enchantment on them, and when used, transfers the enchantment onto a piece of equipment. While glyphs are a crafted item, giving them potential to become a currency, enchantments can be recharged (at least in past TES games) using a soul gem. With that in mind, soul gems are much more likely to become a currency item.

Soul gems? Likely. If soul gems are indeed used to restore charges onto enchantments, they gain value since everyone will desire them. With the exception of glyphs, everything else listed do not have equal value between each player. Soul gems in past TES games such as Skyrim also have a very high gold to weight ratio, making them highly valued as loot.

I thought about adding horse feed to the list, but decided not to. When Matt Firor talked about horses, and feeding them at E3 2013, he made it sound like there are only have two or three different types of food to feed your horse. It is possible, even probable, that there will be different rarities for these items with increased effects, yet I am not convinced there is a chance they could become a currency in ESO.

That brings my speculation on the subject of alternative currency to an end. If you’d like to weigh in on this topic, please post in the comments below.

I’ll leave you gold goblins for now, with a quote to ponder:
"The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

A WoW Economy

It's not a very easy thing to do, posting a blog per day that is. It's hard to stress that my methods will work for any game. Not just for one in particular, but any game. That is not to say that it isn't work. This line of things is not for everyone. It's not given to you like cheats would, or like hacks or bots. These guides allow you to achieve for yourself, but with help. It's just like these blogs, I am not at this alone. I have help. Help, from individuals whom have proved themselves worthy of the Gold Goblin tag. I look forward to reading what they have to say, as I am sure you look forward to that as well. Hopefully, with any luck, you are reading this now, and are excited, like I am, for the things to come.

I got my start with gold economies from World of Warcraft. The name now, makes me cringe. I realized that I really have no photo evidence of my success on World of Warcraft. I only have my word. Seeing is believing so to speak. So over the course of the "waiting 3 months."  I will show, and explain my methods in depth, via YouTube. Unfortunately for me, this means either resubscribing to World of Warcraft, or "borrowing" an account from someone who already plays. Most likely what I will do is create an entirely new account, using the basic World of Warcraft game. I will not need the expansions to show that my methods work. I will attempt to show you each week, my progress, from limited to no leveling, and moderately all auction house transactions, that it is possible to show a large increase from start to finish, in a few days, if not less. 

As I have mentioned before, becoming a Gold Goblin, is not for the faint of heart. It takes work, a LOT of research, and time. You may find yourself getting up at 6 am to get in on those auction house deals, or those early market trades. Like anything else, including real life work, none of the work matters, it's the pay day that counts. Yes, it may suck, and yes, it is boring. People pay good money for tips like these. Here, you pay nothing but your time reading the blogs. Your success, is our payment. 

Share us, follow us. More to come I promise you.

-CB

Auction Houses? Guild Stores.

Hello Internet! Happy New Year.

For those of you following ESO (Elder Scrolls Online), you probably know that there is no Auction House. Instead, there are Guild Stores. This changes the nature of economy and trade in ESO. Most MMOs go with a system of being able to buy from any player, and being able to sell to any player, and being able to view EVERYTHING currently on the market. With Guild Stores, your market is now limited to a maximum of 1500 players. PLAYERS. You see, each account gets to join 5 guilds. And unless I missed something, the guild cap is 300. It has been said the guild cap will probably rise, I’m guessing to 500. Even still, this puts your market up to 2500 potential buyers.

If you’re a crafter, you’ll have to manage your guilds very carefully. If you’re not a crafter, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. I don’t mind. As a crafter, you’ll need to make sure you’re in active guilds with a ton of people in them. Preferably with no other crafters. You’ll need active and full guilds to maximize that 1500-2500 player base, and have characters that are leveling up and need new gear, more potions, or more food. So if you haven’t yet, check out some guilds, join one or two. Going back a bit, I said “Preferably with no other crafters”. I really meant to say “with almost no other crafters making the same stuff as you”. By being one of the only people crafting a certain item in your guild, say, heavy armour, you’ve now got a niche market. Niche is kind of a funny word, isn’t it? Sounds a bit like quiche. To maximize this niche, you should only focus on the one craft. If you want to craft more than one type of item, that’s cool too. More people will buy your stuff if you’re selling more than one thing!

Even if you’re not crafting, it is still wise to select your guilds carefully if you want to make a buck off the Guild Store. If you like to buy things cheap, and re-sell them for a higher price, you’ll want to be in guilds outside of the Six Degrees of Separation (it’s ok if you need to google that or niche). What I mean is you want to be in guilds with as few people in common as possible. Because if someone is doing the same thing and is in the same guild as four of yours, you’ve got some serious competition. If you’re more of a PvPer or raider, consider joining some non-pvp or raiding guilds too. There will be less chance people are putting up the same items to the Guild Store. Of course, size and activity are also key to making money off any Guild Store. You won’t make any money off guilds with 20 people, and you only ever see yourself online.

As an afterthought, I remembered how Cyrodiil plays into this. I almost even clicked send to Chillbilly to post this article.
Cyrodiil (PvP) unlocks a whole new element to how Guild Stores function. If your guild owns a keep in Cyrodiil, anyone who visits that keep can browse your guild’s store. And likewise, you can browse the Guild Store of any keep your faction owns. So ideally, you want to be in five guilds that each controls a keep. If possible, at least one in each three alliances. If you can achieve this, then you can now sell to everyone playing the game.

I’ll leave you gold goblins for now, with a quote to ponder:
Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
- Andy Warhol


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Adapting to the surroundings. Elder Scrolls Online

I use the same methods no matter what game economy.

That's a bold statement. It's true nonetheless. I have been speaking with several of my future guild-mates. My specific job has been handled and changed, but remains almost the same. I have recently been pseudo-promoted to a position as a battalion general / tactician. One of the many reasons why I was selected for this position was that I have an ever changing mind. I am able to adapt. Adaptation in several colleges around the world is considered a virtue. Adaptation is something I consider to be a very good quality in someone who is claiming to be a Gold Goblin. Adaptation allows you to achieve more than you would prior to becoming adaptive. However, I spend most of my time using the "same old tricks" as it were. Everything is primarily the same each game, each area in which you are trying to learn. So without current game or beta knowledge, I am certain I can achieve greatness and overcome challenges with the upcoming release of Elder Scrolls Online. 

As with my tactics in PVP, my strategy so to speak is going to be that of the same. Pick a foothold. Any will do, but it needs to be sufficient with the goal set in mind. Our goal, like any other sword swinger is to be victorious. So how would we go about being victorious in a pre-decided battle of wits? Easy. We prepare. We train. We fight. 

So how would we go about being victorious when it comes to money? Easy. We prepare. We train. We calculate. A small difference, but it can mean all the difference. Preparation is one of those acts that I like to thump into the heads of my pupils. Preparation can mean the difference between 10 gold, to potentially 1000 gold. Without the proper money guided knowledge, how can you expect to take advantage of the markets? 

What is my strategy at launch you might ask? 

Without prior knowledge to what is happening in the beta, I can only tell you this. Penny pinching. Buy only what you need, and save the rest. Set aside every penny you can afford. Do not neglect yourselves, repair bills and food. Set a budget. Calculate what you want to have by the end of the day. When you press that button to log out, you should have more money in your bag than you started with. As long as that number keeps going up. You are on the path to success. 

Here are some helpful tips for you. 

• Goblinism - Sell grey or otherwise useless items
• Hoarder - Do not keep items that are no use to you. ie. Do not save materials that you are going to use later like for blacksmithing or weaponsmithing. Sell it now, deal with it later.
• Level. Your. Toon. - The first thing everyone worries about is money to spend on items such as fast travel and gear. Do not worry about these things, they will come with time. 
• Preparation. - In world of warcraft terms, this would be considered a chest spawn, or node spawn. Keep up with these places. Mark them down on a little pad of paper, so you can come back later. 
• Ironforge Jumping - When you find yourself bored, and you are merely jumping around in place, or conducting lewd acts in trade chat. Go fishing, go back to those areas you have completed, help another player. Anything that can result in your pockets jingling a little more than earlier is a step up. 
• Research - Many of you, will just ask, others will seek. Whatever you have to do, you need to explore as much for yourself as possible. If someone tells you, you may not remember. If you see it for yourself, you most certainly will. 
• Notes - I keep a journal of everything I bid on, sell, research. I keep it in the filing cabinet next to my computer. If I want to know what the market price of iron was 2 weeks ago, and want to know the contrast of what it is today. I have those records. I can establish a median on my own. 

As far as techniques go, Well I guess you will have to follow me won't you? I will divulge as much information as possible prior to launch. I am afraid it won't be until after launch that I really get down into the nitty gritty. With the NDA under the beta, I cannot release any information what so ever, as far as the game goes. Having that said here are some helpful informational tips on the beta:

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I hope that helped.

-Ashleign