They say life is better down where it’s wetter. Let’s put that theory to the test.
Here’s where you can see my playthrough of Giant Squid games’ ABZÛ! Check out the vids below OR CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE FULL PLAYLIST.
In-game economy has always made me interested in MMOs. From the very first time I booted up Everquest and realized I could set up a shop to hawk my loot, I was sold on the concept of massively multiplayer games. During the end of my stay in World of Warcraft I played strictly the auction house. I figured out what the demand was and how I could capitalize on it and cornered the market. If you want a chance to win extra cash by playing casino games, you may try joker388 slots. Casino players who would like to continue betting at the convenience of their home may explore various slot gacor machines online. Explore the exciting betting games offered at luxury333al.com.
By the time I quit, I had bought every single item money could buy and had tons of gold on reserve. So when I heard that Diablo 3 would have an auction house where players could buy items with real money, I was intrigued. Here is a log about how I attempted to make enough money in Diablo 3 to buy the next StarCraft II expansion, whenever it comes out.
While I was into playing the game I pretty much ignored the real money auction house. I hadn’t found anything good enough to sell on the RMAH even while playing on the highest level of difficulty, Infernal. So I ignored it and happily played the game while using just the plain old gold auction house. This all changed when I was running through Act 1 Infernal with a friend (post 1.0.3 patch, which made rarer drops more common) and that glorious weapon dropped.
To be realistic it wasn’t that glorious, a level 63 one handed sword with around 850 dps and 200 strength, but finding it was definitely a highlight of that run. I threw the item up on the RMAH for ten bucks, not expecting to get anything from it, but the next morning I woke up to an email saying my item sold for ten dollars in real American currency. With the prospect that I could earn actual money from this game, my priorities of the game changed. No longer was I playing just for fun, I was also gambling, mostly BTV168. Every time I killed an elite pack, champion or boss I had a small chance to earn actual money. This aspect added an exciting new layer to the game.
Who doesn’t like a large screenshot of a blogger’s Diablo III dude with all of his sweet gear on?
My problem with Blizzard’s RMAH is that I can’t sign up for real money to be transferred to my PayPal account because I don’t have a mobile phone number. Well I do, but apparently they needs a mobile phone number that isn’t a prepaid phone number. Everyone living in my house only has prepaid phones, because they work so well for what we need. It kind of sucks, but the ability to buy stuff off of the Blizzard store is still nice. Plus they don’t take a %15 cut when you buy from them. Maybe I will get into the World of Warcraft trading card game with all the money I earn on the RMAH. For right now, I would rather aim for the goal to earn enough money off the RMAH to buy the Heart of the Swarm expansion for StarCraft II. Another great option for making money is through Bitcoin.UK Bitcoin Buying Tips offers advice on navigating the crypto world and getting started with Bitcoin investments safely and effectively. You can also learn about the New Crypto Opportunities offer that can help you with your investment. Those who are interested in more traditional investment assets like precious metals may get in touch with scrap gold buyers in Adelaide.
Day 1:
Yup this little digital item with numbers on it might make me some real cash.
So here I am now trying to recreate that glory again and working towards my goal, but so far no luck. I have been farming Act 1 over and over with my Witch Doctor trying to get another useful level 63 item to drop, but to no avail. After about 4 hours of farming and watching TV, the best I got was an item level 63 two-handed crossbow with 819 dps called the Striking Avenger.
I threw it up on the auction house just for grins and giggles for $13, but I am not expecting anything to come out of it. Although that is the same attitude I had about my old one-handed sword, which magically turned into $10. I’ll come back tomorrow morning and see if anything has happened to that item. I might have gotten a little greedy by asking $13 for an item not nearly as good as the last one. Only time will tell.
Current money in account: $10
Day 2:
After grinding in Act 1 for a few hours, I was getting discourage. I felt like I had been churning my wheels and wasn’t ever going to make any more cash out Diablo 3 and my sword was a onetime fluke. When I was making my way through Act 2 for progression purposes and stumbled upon a pair of gloves that sold for $5.
Finally something happened. Now with a $15 nest egg, I wonder if I could invest that in a cheap item that I could resell for an even bigger profit. After looking for an hour, it seems item flipping on the RMAH wasn’t the most effective strategy. I used to do this all the time in the gold auction house, but it really wasn’t that much fun due to the clunky interface. Maybe I need more money and take bigger risks on the RMAH. My best bet was to do what I had been doing, which was running the route that was shown on this video. So far it seems pretty effective. On an average run, I make off with about 40 rares in an hour.
Today I beat Belial in Act 2 Infernal as well and hit a brick wall in Act 3. This act will require a bit of grinding and gearing up and with the increase in repair bills in the latest patch, this seems like a good place to quit for the night. Right now I have 3 items up on the RMAH, but only expect one of those to sell, which is why I’ve been checking out Rainbow Trading as a smarter way to boost my in-game gains.
Current money in account: $15
Day 3:
Finally, a patch for Witch Doctor arrived this morning. Zombie Bears are debugged and are now probably the best way for my class to farm Act 1. I logged in and noticed my bow had been taken off the auction house. I guess I had been asking too much. When I put it back up, I asked for $6.99, which is about half of what I asking before. After running about two of my farming runs I went outside to do some shopping. While out, I got an email that said that my bow had sold for $5.99.
Can’t say I am disappointed by the quick turnaround. Even if I made less money than I had hoped to get, money is money and it all adds up. I don’t have as much time to farm today, but I threw another piece of unsold pants up on the auction house at a discounted price of $3.99. All of this writing about sales prices makes me feel like a sales man. Anyway off to bed dreaming about waking up to a nice email.
Current money in account: $20.99
Day 4:
Busy day today with my mom’s birthday happening and all so not much time to fiddle with Diablo 3 farming, but I did log into to check my auctions. Nothing sold, which is discouraging, but then again I knew the stuff I was putting on the market wasn’t good enough for people to actually want to spend money. So I put back up a not so great Witch Doctor knife for the price of $2.99 and we will see if anyone bites.
Current money in account: $20.99
Day 5-6:
I didn’t have any time to play games these two days, but over this time I never received any emails, so I knew exactly what that meant.
Current money in account: $20.99
Will I reach my goal of not paying Blizzard a dime (just my time that I will never get back) for StartCraft II: Heart of the Swarm? Find out next week when the second article goes up!
Featured image done by Maxarkes. Original art can be found here.
This article was written about a month ago and from what I have read, a large percent of the player base has stopped playing Diablo III. Since then, the demand for high end items has gone down, so I can imagine that the amount of money I would have made in today’s market would not be as high.
Now the air conditioning is working we bring you back for Episode 15!
We talk the addicting qualities of Skyrim and Civ, games that make you feel like a horrible person (Spec Ops), and games that haven’t come out yet! We have very different ideas about the 3DS XL and Ouya, but anticipate their releases, while rounding out with some speculation on upcoming fighting game rosters!
Email us at podcast@pixelegends.com!
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The southern Califonia heat takes it toll as we do our best not to shout at each other while talking about the games we’ve played this week. As well as an interesting new development in the Kickstarter space. An open source game console? Could it work?
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Nintendo must have thought the best way to grab the attention of the hardcore crowd was to release a zombie fps game. Honestly they weren’t wrong. While not a Nintendo game, seeing something so violent and gory running on a normally kid friendly Nintendo machine can catch a person off guard. The question remains, is ZombiU just for the people who buy a game off a shelf just because it has zombies? Or is this game actually interesting and full of good ideas that will change how we play FPS games forever? I had a chance to play with the game at E3 and here are my impressions.
Not as offensive as an African zombie.
While not much footage was shown at Nintendo’s press conference about ZombiU, besides a pre-rendered trailer, Ubisoft was showing it at their allotted show floor space. After waiting in line for two hours and watching numerous people, presumably investors from the looks of them, cut in front of me, I was led into a poorly lit room. In the room there were three Wii U systems (covered of course) displaying the game’s start screen with the option of multiplayer and singleplayer. The lady showing me the game put the game on singleplayer and walked me through how the game worked. For the most part I picked it up pretty quickly. The controls felt standard to an other FPS game and even though my two hands were farther spaced from each other, it didn’t seem any less conformable to handle the Wii U’s gamepad as opposed to a traditional controller.
One of the biggest problems I had with the game up front was the graphics. They weren’t completely bad, but they looked like a very early Xbox 360 game. In other words, they were primitive. This could be because the developers didn’t want to pay too much money on graphics or they haven’t figured out how to make full use of the console yet. I am hoping for the later because then they still have time to make the graphics stand out as much as the control scheme.
There are a few unique gameplay ideas in ZombiU. The first one would be the way a player deals with ammo and other items. On the bottom screen a player has access to an always open inventory menu. This comes in use when a player finds a corpse or a box to loot or needs to switch guns. The player’s character bends over to check the corpse if there is anything useful and utilizes a drag and drop loot management system. While in this state, the TV screen shows the player in the third person to let them know if it’s time to pack up shop when a zombie gets close. Juggling between dragging and dropping items and looking up at the screen can be stressful and adds a lot of the suspense a player would want from a survival game, but at the time I played the game, it had a “take all button”. It didn’t take me long to figure out that whenever I would find anything to loot, I would just tap that button as soon as possible to make sure I spent the least amount of time in the area as possible. This of course would be the wisest game play move, but it takes out all of the suspense out of looting. Hopefully this will be addressed and the button will be removed or maybe later on in the game a player won’t want to loot everything because bag space will be rare.
Another neat feature has nothing to do with the Wii U’s gamepad. When a player dies, their character dies permanently. They will spawn in as a new survivor who has to kill the zombified version of the old character if they want to get their stuff back. While playing I also saw players before me who had died earlier and were now zombies. I killed a Nintendo representative and received all of the items he had on him before he died. It seems like a very neat idea, but how far will Ubisoft take this concept? Will I be able to kill my online friends whenever they die in their game? Or will it only be available to people who die on the local machine? I asked the representative who was showing the game and she sadly didn’t have an answer for me.
It doesn’t feel as good as it looks.
The strangest feature in the game was the aiming mechanics associated with the sniper rifle. When a player wanted to pull off a sweet headshot, they would have to raise the gamepad in front of their face and then the gamepad would display the aiming reticule. Now the player was in aiming mode. To get a good shot on the zombie the gamepad itself would be moved left or right to get the perfect shot. On paper this sounds great, but when I was fooling with the aiming it felt unnatural. Every time a zombie showed up on the screen I would throw the gamepad up and then lose track of where I was aiming. This disorientation could just be so different from what I am used to that I haven’t got the hang of it yet. The real problem lies in that the system didn’t feel very intuitive or natural and that’s a problem for Nintendo.
I can’t help but to feel that the Wii U is splitting Nintendo’s audience down the middle. A casual gamer might be turned off by the new gamepad, thinking it looks too intimidating and not simple and intuitive enough to use. The “hardcore” gamers didn’t really get a good hard sell at E3 either. ZombiU was one of the only “hardcore” titles being shown solely for the Wii U that wasn’t Nintendo and even the big N showed “Nintendo Land” long enough to overstay its welcome. Sure finally being able to play high definition games with up to date hardware on a Nintendo console is long overdue, but will the Wii U improvements actually matter or is it too little too late? Or better yet, will the improvements be fun and actually improve the game? My time with the game was too brief to make this call. Only time will tell.
ZombiU has some really great concepts in it that could use some polish, but they still have the potential to utilize the Wii U features to make the game more enjoyable instead of being tacked on and not affecting the game much. These are just concepts that leave good impressions though. Not much else about the game has been revealed. We don’t know anything about the story yet or if it will have any online capabilities. As most gamers know, it takes a whole lot more to make a great game than just cool concepts and neat gameplay mechanics. A great game needs the whole package. We can only hope that ZombiU really sells the concept of the Wii U, and doesn’t turn into another Red Steel.
Matt explains what makes Civ V: Gods and Kings even more addicting than the original game!
Sorry for the low audio levels, it was our mobile studio this episode!
In Episode 11 we discuss our post E3 impressions, after barely getting in on the last day. We spend a bit of time with special guest John Sollitto from the Game Creators Vault, and go over our impressions from the games we managed to see on the show floor. Ryan Moore also joins in on the discussion. And our first competition! Email pixelegends@gmail.com and expect more articles soon!
Check it out our first carcast episode here!
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While it is still very early in the days of E3 2012, a lot of press conferences have already been done. Out of all the new information that has flown out of E3 this is personally what I have found to be the highlights. Feel free to disagree and let me know about it!
Even before Nintendo has had their press conference, they have released new information out on their Nintendo direct channel. The information wasn’t release dates, hardware specs or anything huge, but it was interesting to see Nintendo’s console and its features slowly be revealed. So far we have a new controller to buy on top of the WiiU’s GamePad, in the form of the Wii U Pro controller. This controller mimics the tradition controllers being used by current generation consoles in an effort to make the Wii U easier to develop for and port 3rd party titles. My favorite feature reviled about the controller, was the use of a full fledged D-pad. I feel this will give Nintendo an edge on the competition when it comes to releasing older titles and indie games on the Wii U.