No, not really. Bank alts are prevalent in the game, and since they’re not intended for serious play most folks don’t bother with decent names for them. Further, gold farmers aren’t interested in meaningful transactions on the AH; at best, they’ll use the AH to launder money through unpopular items.
Relics of Ulduar are very valuable, since Hodir rep is basically imperative for endgame raiding and most folk who’ve been playing in the endgame for a while are dead sick of doing the dailies. So they buy up about 1000+ Relics and trade them in for easy rep. Heck, it’s what I did. Didn’t cost that much either.
What you’re most likely looking at is not a gold farmer, but a plain old farmer who’s been collecting mountains of Relics. They dropped them on the bank alt who consolidated them and threw them on the AH. Perfectly legit.
Huh. Reason I ask is that I see certain “bank alt” names (this “Fb” being one) who constantly have huge quantities of farmable items posted on the AH. Not just one particular kind of item, like Relics or Saronite ore, but rather they will, at any given time, have 10 full stacks of Relics, 20 or so stacks of each of several different kinds of ore, craploads of herbs, and Primals from Outland, etc. - and a lot of this stuff drops in completely different zones, so it’s not like they’re just picking it all up while farming one place. And it seems like far too much crap for just one person to be farming, especially with the rather low drop rates on some of this stuff. The quantities suggest multiple players shuffling everything off to a single bank alt.
I mentioned some time back how my main received, accidentally I assume, an in-game mail containing multiple types of ore — everything from saronite on down to copper — from somebody named “Eg” or something like that. It seemed weird to me that somebody who can mine saronite would have still been holding onto copper and tin.
I suppose it could be a gold seller, and it’s one way they bring in gold to sell. It could also be someone with a lot of time on his hands playing a bunch of alts at different levels. I’m leaning toward gold seller, but there’s a chance it’s not. Maybe. I’m sure more experienced posters will be in here to tell me how wrong I am, SFG, right?
Sorry. I explained in another thread how much typos “bother me”, but in the interest of keeping this thread helpful, and stop me from posting useless shit such as this, can we just conclude and accept my mistakes because I’m a little hinky in the finky these days?
Yes… LotRO is a mess of spam in Bree from gold farmers advertising, and the farmer-bot situation is so bad in Aion, I understand some areas are unplayable (I don’t play Aion myself).
It could be a guild bank alt, it could be a bank alt for a person who plays multiple characters, and it could also be an AH speculator. There are a lot of people who play the AH, buying up materials at lower prices and then corner the market by placing the materials up for a higher price. There’s a guy on my server who does so with enchanting mats - he has enough inventory to set the price and just buy out anyone who undercuts him by much. I’m almost ashamed to admit I let him; it isn’t worth it to me to hassle around with the AH trying to eek out a couple more gold. There are guides on the web about how to play the market; apparently some people find it incredibly fun to amass lots of gold to no purpose, sell it to gold re-sellers, or just get off on controlling the market.
ETA: on the various types of ore (copper to saronite), we recently picked up mining on a level 70+ alt and sent all the mats off to my jewelcrafter; it’s possible the mail you received was something similar.
On my other server I have an 80 level DK, and I have no interest in raiding, so I have maxed out my faction in a number of areas, so I tend to keep farming and selling various items - elemental goodies, herbs, some fabricated potions, tokens/rings/books and so forth. I use the gold to twink the bejebus out of alts on 2 playing accounts. I believe I farm maybe 2 days a week and play my twinks to level them up the rest, and I also play on several servers [thunderhorn, elune, cenarius, with BDL … I have friends spread out on a number of servers that I like to play with to keep in touch.] I also play EVE, Runes of Magic, Aion and spend about 4 hours beta testing different games for various devs I am friends with. I will frequently be playing eve by setting up and AFK mining ice on my laptop and playing another game entirely on my desktop.
i am one of those wierd people that likes farming … I treat many games like chatrooms with graphics and a bit of light killing. I have given up hard core raiding, so instead of raiding 6-8 hours a day, I farm the same time =)
Well, the idea is that [many of] the farmers are often sellers. Farm lots of mats, sell them for much gold on the AH, then turn around and sell that gold.
That looks about right; I played Aion for about a week on release (got a character to 21, got bored with the grind and the downtime). After the first day or two, it got so bad, for every new character, I immediately made a window excluding public chat, and hid the public chat window. Every logon, immediately switch to the /anon state so the spam-whisperers can’t find you (not so fun side effect: friends lists are rendered useless). The gold spam in that game is worse than it ever was in WoW, which is bizarre considering they have to pay $50 for their accounts, unlike the WoW free trials (although it is amusing to see them offering CD keys for lower-than-retail prices, when you know those keys are going to belong to accounts banned for gold spam…).
Some friends of mine still play Aion, they’re not having so much fun these days because the Elyos on the server exploited some elite mobs to level quickly and are now level 50, bored, and won’t leave the mid-30’s Asmos alone to level… then they go complain about how the Asmos aren’t catching up, heh. Really really glad I quit before I got to that point. Also makes me really glad I never got into contested areas on WoW PvP servers.
Anyone else slightly disappointed one has to do all this research before a fight to get anywhere the end game? I’d really like to discover all these little tactics and strategies myself but even though I’m only at level 67 my guild is already pointing out what needs to be done on certain boss fights at 80 so I can prepare. I can see why we are a casual guild but the number of 80s is slowly going up and they want to see the end game content without having to PUG like they have to now but still, a pity.
Netherstorm is fantastic. I love the look, the giant mana things, the domes, the goblin comedy (“Dammit Boots I’m a doctor not a priest! Clear!”), the conversation in the Area 52 inn and so on which adds up to the zone with the most character yet for me. I’ll miss it when I move on.
I tried some PvP for the first time in a while and really didn’t enjoy it, even with the XP off Twink option it seems unless you have specced for PvP you’re at a huge disadvantage. Maybe I was unlucky with the BGs I ended up in but I’ll give it a miss on my pally I think.
I have also decided to level up Blacksmithing which is damned expensive and I have a problem spending my gold. Which is odd, in real life I have the quite opposite problem usually. Ever since I passed 1,000G in my early 60s I am loathe to let it go under that number and now, after buying a lot of copper, iron and tin, I am at 1,000G and some change I can’t bring myself to pay for the ore in the AH. I know I could go and farm it myself but how long will it take?? I’d rather be levelling. This brings me to a question apart from cold weather flying and the usual repair raining costs will I spend any other major gold between 70 and 80? I have had a quick look and can’t see anything else.
Oh and Quasi that’s a great screenshot, you captured Wolkie beautifully I haven’t quite got he art of that myself yet.
You have the level of flying skill you need for high-speed mounts to pay at (nominally) 70, and that’s a STEEP curve from the original flying…5000g. That’s not counting the high-speed mount in the first place.
…but you’re boldly going where hundreds of thousands of other people have gone over the last four years. It would be rather difficult, at this point, to actually have a full group of genuinely new players to the game, to start Raid 101 entirely fresh. Raiding, in general, is vastly more accessible now than it’s ever been in the game’s history, but by this point in the game’s evolution, there’s a large amount of basic gameplay that they expect you to know (don’t stand in this, kill that thing now and not this thing instead…) that you get to play catch-up on, if you haven’t been the type to be attentive and diligent in the 5-man instances that are supposed to train you in these things.
Also, most people that you would be raiding with will be well ahead of you in experience (the real sort, not the numerical), especially a year after the release of the current expansion and months after the latest content addition, so virtually anything will be old hat to them as they encourage you along.
If you really want to forge your way through uncharted territory, you have to be in the initial charge when the new frontiers arrive, or by the time you get there, you’ll be linked to the bosskillers page and the tankspot video.
That said, as nice as it is, swift flying is a luxury, not a requirement, especially now that they’ve increased the speed of the slow fliers. You don’t need to cough up that 5k when you hit 70, and really, if you’re not a fiend for gathering, you don’t need to do it ever.
Unfortunately, unless you are a hard core gamer that is doing cutting edge content, half a dozen guilds have already wiped hundreds of times to figure out a few strats that work on an encounter before you ever even see the encounter. Thsi doesn’t mean that you won’t have to adapt the strat for your raid composition or that you can’t tweak the strat to make it better but a lot of folks wipe hundreds of times just to figure out how an encounter works.
I spent a lot of money on the 8.5K ring that gives you an extra port to Dalaran and the 16K mammoth that has a vendor and repair on it. Levelling up a tradeskill can cost a lot of money. Enchants and gemming costs a pretty penny but towards the end game you are only getting an upgrade every couple of weeks so its not a huge burden.
I remember tanking a group of people through Old Kingdom, and none of us had any idea what to expect; this was a few months after Lich King, so we could easily have read about it on wowhead or whatever, but none of us had.
It was a blast. I figured out that we had to kill the guardians on the first boss; none of us had any idea what to do when we all went insane facing the end boss. It took us several more wipes than if we’d known the fights, but it really felt like we were discovering something. Big fun.
But yeah, I don’t expect to get to do that again before Cataclysm, if ever.
So…I now have The Exalted, my 25th title and the one I’ll wear from here on out (until/unless it gets diluted with any new factions released with Cataclysm, anyway). Took me about three and a half months after I first decided to go for it, starting at 28 exalted factions. During that time, I’ve killed thousands of pirates, and hundreds of fel orcs, blood elves, trolls, and dragonkin. And spent many a coin. But, it’s worth it, I think, for that little something to set me apart from the “little people”
Especially since my gear is pretty crappy…
I’ll probably do some BGs for now, while working on my rogue alt – who was actually my very first toon; he was my first to 60, second to 70, and he’s been languishing there for all of WotLK thus far. I figure I should get him to 80 before Cataclysm. Besides, I need someone to open all those Froststeel lockboxes I’ve found during my rep grinds.
That’s how much storage space you have available on your hard drive. HDD space is almost never going to affect performace–you’d have to use up hundreds more gigabytes of storage before running into problems.
If things are looking choppy, check your latency, which is a measure of how long it takes your computer to “talk” to the server. Look at the little computer icon on your action bar: when the screen is green, your latency is good (fast); when it’s red, it’s bad (slow).
It could also be that your computer is running too many programs at once. If you have something else open at the same time (especially something like a virus scan), try closing that.
If all else fails, try rebooting your computer. Sometimes things just get stacked up and you need a fresh start to clear it all.
Oh my, yes. It’s also very helpful for most tanking encounters, if you ever get into doing that.
Fort + Kings + Sanct + GotW + Commanding + Stoneblood = gobs extra HP.
The Light Vortex (attacking dark-buffed players) is Fire damage, and IIRC the Dark Vortex (attacking light-buffed players) is Shadow.
You **absolutely **still have to kill the adds ASAP, and very quickly. With all four of them together, the cast time on Shadow Strike is down to a second. Literally, one single second. So you can’t count on interrupting it–you have to chain-stun the adds right before the ability comes off CD, and then kill the adds before the stuns are done.
You know the BoP (er, HoP these days) strat for kiting, right? You have the person being targeted kite Anub all the way down to the opposite end, HoP them and have them sit just off of an ice patch while Anub attacks them (with no effect because of the HoP), and then with one second left on the buff, they run over the ice. Totally maximizes your kiting time, so you shouldn’t go through more than one, maybe two ice patches per burrow phase.
Scarabs, I’d assume we just burn down.
I saw the slider the other day, but I’m pretty sure that you can still force the camera out farther with the command.
I play my character “smaller” (i.e., with my camera scrolled further back) so that I can get a better view of what’s around me. It’s important when tanking, when I need to see as much around me as I can. For what you’re doing, though, the closer view is just fine!
I’m a fuckin’ terrible influence.
Aook sounds like it could be a real name, but Fb is a little suspicious. Hard to tell, though, since it could just be somebody’s mule–just 'cause I give mine real names doesn’t mean everyone else does. I would guess that gold farmers generally tend to avoid the AH and advertise in trade, though, since that would make what they’re doing harder to trace.
For example, this weekend I twice reported level 1 characters with faceroll names in a faceroll guild (pretty sure it was the same one) selling a bunch of ToC25 patterns in Trade chat. Given the progression on my server, it struck me as incredibly suspicious–the kind of thing that would happen with a hacked account and/or a stolen gbank.
Given repair costs, I, for one, am insanely happy that someone else did the dozens (hundreds?) of wipes and long hours of combat-log analysis to work out the strategies.
I salute you and your complete [del]insanity[/del] dedication! That’s amazing.
Those characters often don’t even have the item they’re advertising. A new tactic I’ve seen is posting in /2 “Selling [Merlin’s Robe] [Bejeweled Wizard’s Bracers] [Crusader Orb] pst!” Then if you do they respond with a URL to a dodgy website.
Obl. Raiding stuff: Our guild just (re-)started raiding. Last week we took out the first four bosses in Ulduar without too much trouble (a couple wipes on Ignis until we changed our strat). This week, we did OS + 1 (one wipe when our Sarth-tank healer got owned by the whelps when they spawned from the portal), tried EoE (total disaster), and did the first 7 bosses in Ulduar (I think we only wiped on Iron Council this time). Raiding is fun!
