Radish The Hodre!

Upon return from a romantic honeymoon getaway, our heroes Fulguralis and Fuubaar found themselves the center of a celebration of epic proportions. Fellow warriors and champions from their adventurer's alliance gathered in The Slaughtered Lamb to celebrate the joyous occasion. Much alcohol was drunk. Much fun was had.

It was then suggested that a raid on a horde town was in order... naked. Of course, when one goes streaking in search of a cross-faction incident, one would likely choose the closest town. This was the case as the honor unfortunately fell to Stonard. A short gryphon's flight and several strippings later, a group had gathered and begun to traverse a route from Nethergarde Keep to the stronghold of Stonard.

Upon arrival, the group pummelled the village guard with their fists repeatedly, casting very few spells, yet still managed to demoralize and subdue the small town. This was perhaps facilitated by the under-seasoned nature of the horde guards. After the massacre, a photograph was taken by chance, and can be found reproduced below.

(Side Note: You can see a fairly good representation of the UI I'm rolling with. Feel free to ask questions about it)

Of course, the shot is blurry and this is in no small part due to the imbibing of the rather strong beverage Nethergarde Bitter, which was drunk in massive quantities.

Having completed the mayhem, it was then suggested that a more challenged brawl was desired. Our heroes had raided the horde (or radished them, as it were), and that left another faction unscathed. Fortunately, the Dark Portal was but a stone's throw away with members of the Burning Legion on the other side. Rumor had it that the pit lord on the Stair of Destiny had made an inappropriate remark concerning the patronage of one of the warlock's minions. For this, a lashing deemed in order.

The group then staggered drunkenly back across The Blasted Lands and stumbled through the slightly dim portal. The glow did seem rather bright for a so-called Dark Portal, but that's a story for another time.

Upon their emergence on the other side, many of the combatants reclothed as there were scores of minions assaulting the gate. Besides, dying was found to make one lose one's buzz, and that's just not very sporting. Chaos ensued and a battle of epic proportions raged on the Stair of Destiny. Wave after wave of burning legionnaires crashed and broke on the drunken front held haphazardly by our heroes, finally enticing the offending pit lord to join the battle.

After the dust had settled, a mighty cheer rose up from the combined forces on that forsaken stair. The pit lord had been slain! Much revelry ensued.

Some time later, after sobering up, the following picture was taken. Sadly, it did not capture the pit lord, as his body had already been dragged off and violated profusely in the course of the revelry. Such descriptions as are not fit for this narrative we visited upon his personage, but suffice it to say there wasn't much left to photograph in any event. However, you can still see the bodies of many of the minions as they lie slain upon the stair.


(Thanks to everyone who came to our "WoW reception" and made it a blast. It was good to be back.)

Profitable Professions: Inscription Versus ALL!!11!1!

Hello all!!!!

Long time no see :D

I know that everyone and their mom has been talking about the prepatch blues blah blah blah.

You know what?! Who cares! I have ADD, I get distracted by all sorts of crap. My little gerbil on the wheel starts spinning and ideas start to fly.

Where my brain has been wondering as of late (before the wedding) was trying something that I've never attempted before: THE AUCTION HOUSE!

Since I'm back from the MUCH needed Honeymoon, I've decided to actually go through with this ludicrous idea of trying to make it big.

Here are my Goals that I will attempt to Achieve:

- Attempt to find a profitable niche that is not completely overloaded with competitors
- Do this by using Alchemy/Herb gathering as my Professions (because many other Experimenters are using the Inscription profession to make gold, I want to prove that you can make it using Alchemy)
- become established before 3.2 drops

With those Goals in mind, I must tell you that I'm not doing this for a Mammoth or a Motorcycle mount. I'm doing this to challenge myself to trying something new in a four year old game. I don't really care if I actually make it to Gold Cap but I would like to have a comfortable life with around 100k gold. To not have to worry about if my Alt will have to wait for her flyer & epic flyer would just feel wonderful!

I've been reading up on the Greedy Goblin, One Copper, JMTC blog ; & forum, even a short meandering over to Casual Hardcore to find out how I, Fuubaar, could be the next Hundred Thousandaire! (Gold cap is some where over 250k so I can't be a millionaire /sad day for me)All of the sources are wonderful and extremely useful to the competent Addon user/ Brain user... then there's me. I become all gung ho on an idea so I strive to know everything about everything then... OH SHINY!!!!

Wait... what was I doing again?

Focus!

Since my two Professions are Alchemy & Herb gathering, I need to start here. Where can profit be made with this combination? I am not planning on dropping either of my professions so that's out of the equation. I'm only saying this because many people jumped on the Goblin bandwagon and on board the Inscription Train to Profitsville. I know that there is profit to be made in every profession in any market at any time. Sometimes you just need to be willing to accept that you might have to work a little harder.

My thoughts on as to why so many others had tried & succeeded with inscription is that it has SO many items that can be made for profit. Small amounts of profit but spread across every classes glyphs. Think about it for a second, if you are level 80, you have probably invested in 3 major glyphs and 3 minor glyphs for your spec. Many of you might have even dual specced so... double that. If you're like me, I'll bet that NONE of your glyphs are the same ones. That means that there are at most 12 different glyphs that you thought were the best for your play style. That's just for ONE PERSON!!!!! Think of the possibilities here. What other profession is made like that? Alchemy sure isn't!

Lets take a look at Alchemy, you have three separate types of Master that you can become: Flasks, Potions, & Transmutations.

If you are a Potions master, when you create a potion, there is a chance for you to make double that amount. Now, if you mass produce these potions for money, you can see where the profit comes in. You sit down to make a stack of Potions and you end up with 26 instead of 20, with the same amount of materials, you sir are a happy person. 6 of those potions are straight profit but herein lies the problem. Who are the major buyers/ users of potions? Raiders. These people can buy in bulk or 1 at a time depending on what their needs are. Raiders want the best potions for their class and will ignore lower end potions (TBC potions). It's like buying a used car when you see a new car sitting there that is cheaper in cost & better looking. This is not to say that there aren't going to be people who will buy lower end stuff before they hit 80 for instancing and such but it's not quite the raiders market that we are more interested in.

This limits the Alchemist on profitable recipes. The Alchemist may have 150 recipes but only 4 Flasks, 5 Potions, and 2 transmutations are profitable. Many other professions are in a similar situation. No other profession has such a wide range of profitable recipes in their arsenal like inscription that it's very hard to look elsewhere when thinking about crafting your way to Fortune & Fame.

Now I'm not blind to see that yes Alchemy Flasks & potions are consumables so after every raid, people are running back to the AH to snake up more for the next run, but it gets REALLY boring crafting the Same Flask of the Stoneblood 10 gazillion times. Give me some variety damn it! Since every Alchemist has this small list of profitable recipes, there is a LOT of competition. Driving profits down into the red. One must be smart to enter into this blood bath that is the AH Flask business. Obviously, the best time to sell a flask is right before raiding time (normally 1-4 hours beforehand) so everyone is clamoring to post TONS of Flasks before the Deadline or you'll be receiving those beauties right back in your mail box.

Regardless of Alchemy's Handicap, I will turn a profit.

When doing my research at the many gold making blogs, I found a common thought that made me laugh.

"The Auction House is the Real PvP"

You are competing with the people that are playing a strategic game of wit & intellect to make more profit than you. It does not pay off to just run in & attack them without a strategy. One-shotting them does you no good as they will be back. It's like running a triathlon not a 300 meter sprint. You better be prepared to do some dirty work before you can turn out the profit in this industry.

Now to the Starting Line!!!!

I will start this triathlon by prepping a bank alt to carry out my bidding. I will need LOTS of bag space for all of my herbs and Flasks. This could possibly have a VERY large cost upfront. From what I've seen, Herb bags are OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive. On my server, a 28 slot herb bag is running close to 200g each. OUCH! The same 28 slot inscription bags are going for a whopping 4g.... Yeah, well I'm not amused. GG Blizzard.

Lucky for me, I'm married to a tailor :D

I will deck my banker out in the biggest bags I can muster and start filling it up with herbs and other materials that are needed to mass produce and keep the market stocked with Fuubaar Quality Potions & Flasks. My only concern is how to send my materials back & forth from Fuubaar to my alt.

I guess people: log on to their bank alts, clean out the Mail box of gold & items, sending Fuubaar all of the materials she would need to produce for that week, log off & on to Fuubaar, clean out mail box of Materials, mass produce until my eyes bleed, send everything back to the bank alt, Log off & on the the bank alt, Clean out Mail box & post the daily amounts of items.

/wipes sweat from brow

Well that just seems... mind numbing don't you think? This is probably why I've avoided having & actually using a Bank alt. I've done all of my storage, crafting, and selling on Fuubaar but I'm just completely out of space. It is time to grow and to allow this project to spread its Gold Making wings.

What I'm going to do is start working on a Bank Alt and get him ready. I'll keep track of how much gold I use to start everything and prove to you and myself that Alchemy can turn a profit.

Since this post is longer than most papers I wrote in College, I'll shut up now :)

SIDE NOTE: After I wrote this, I was flipping through my Reader and found this over at JMTC. I must be on to something /evil smirk

Play Nice Children

It's official. We're in the grip of another case of pre-patch malaise. There are confirmations all over on the blogosphere of patch related anxiety. We're in the trough before another patch washes over us and fills in the empty spaces we've dug. That's okay though, it happens every patch. This too shall pass. Now is a good time to take a break, get some beer, and enjoy the last vestiges of summer as school threatens to rear its ugly head once again. For those of us that work all summer anyways, it's business as usual except that now we're going to have to start waking up in the dark again. The good news is, we've probably bottomed out on raid attendance and are going to start climbing back up here in the next few months. Give yourself a break. Eat a Snickers or something.

For me, this means I've been getting increasingly excited about the release of Aion. I'm at the point in WoW where I don't feel the urge to do it all, but know what I enjoy and don't have to spend gobs of time to get that enjoyment out of the game. To me, this is a good thing. I've never been a one-game guy and so it's nice to kind of settle in, have fun, and not worry too much that you're going to fall behind because you're not on every night. Sure I may not get every cool crazy epic thingy, but I'll still be able to run and try the new stuff when it comes out.

It also means I have time for other stuff. Right now, RL stuff is filling in the gaps, but I do look forward to being able to start a new adventure in a new game with Aion. And when you're excited about something, you probably start to read about it. At least I do. I mean, it seems like Blizz is taking forever with this patch anyways, right?

So, as I'm reading a few things are occurring to me. Try this conspiracy on for size...

As Samo pointed out over at Massive Nerd in the link above, perhaps there is more to this whole competition than we think. I've personally been very hesitant to paint things in a WoW vs Aion light, since both games can coexist in my world and I don't really think Aion is a "WoW-killer", merely a fun game that I'm looking forward to playing for many reasons. Howerver, just because I'm not pitting them against each other doesn't mean their respective marketing teams aren't.

I'm not going to regurgitate what Samo has already written, since he does a good job of it, but it got me thinking about the timing of things. What if Blizz is waiting until early September to release their major patch in order to compete with the release of Aion? Sounds a little crazy, right? After all, Blizz could be doing nothing more nefarious than stringing us out to have something exciting to talk about at BlizzCon (yet the date is relatively early, as last year's was in October, but the year before was in early August, so who knows). Also, it could have been the other way around and NCSoft could have plotted their release as well (I don't think the timing lines up as well for them though).

But look at it this way... I'd love to have Blizz release the patch right now. We're all sort of anxious for some new content and I certainly have time before Aion is released to go on a WoW binge and tackle the new stuff before their release. In short, if Blizz released the patch today, I could very easily play one game and then the other.

But if they wait? If they drop the patch right before Aion releases, then I, along with every other western gamer interested in both games, will have a choice to make. Dive into a brand new game at the expense of the one we've already invested heavily in, falling behind to some extent and delaying our WoW gratification - or - Ignore the new game for a bit and focus on WoW at the expense of falling behind there.

Now, for me, I'll balance the two games regardless, but to others, this may be a big staying point on whether or not to play. Think about if half of your friends are saying "hey come try this new game" and the other half are saying "dude, we got new WoW stuff to do, get in on this"... how torn are you going to feel know that, maybe, if you choose one, by the time you get to the other your friends will be "beyond" that. We certainly might be seeing a marketing ploy meant to prey on a "gray area" of gamers, trying to keep them firmly in one camp OR the other.

Is this even good for the industry? I mean, after all, couldn't both games theoretically co-exist? Couldn't the companies "play nice"? After all, if we are enabled to play both games, we won't have to choose to leave one or the other, both groups get our money, and everyone wins.

Unfortunately, that's not really the trend gamers have set. As a community, we don't tend to spread ourselves over multiple games (sure there are many who do this, but I'd argue it's not the majority. We tend to pick one game and focus on it at the expense of others. In a sense, this probably hurts the industry that we operate like that. Sure, we're encouraging a competitive market, and that's good for us, but we may also be encouraging "copy-cats" which is one major complaint many gamers have: "It's just a WoW copy".

There's not really an easy answer, solution, or deep point to all this. It's just food for thought and something I've been mulling over recent that I wanted to share. I tend to think of the money I pay each month as my "vote" for what I think is good and what I think is bad. The beauty here is that I can have as many votes as I want. Similar to buying CD's nowadays, I like to throw my money at groups that I appreciate the work they've done. It's just a shock for me to sometimes realize that they may not be playing nice with each other, even though I'm fond of them.

It's sort of like having those two friends that you love hanging out with, but you can't have in the same place or they'll rip each other's heads off. Individually they're fine, but together it's caustic. Then add a bit of crazy to it, and imagine those two friends are jealous of your time spent with the other, and have a team of people plotting how best to monopolize your time. It's like a soap opera love triangle. Just watch out for the fake boobs and heavy make-up. She may look amazing, but in the end you might find out she's high maintenance and you're gonna pay for it later. Then again, maybe you were just in it for some short lived thrills...

And that analogy has gone on long enough, but I'm sure y'all could take it to new levels. :-D. With that, I bid you adieu.

Patience is Not My Virtue

Do you ever have one of those days when you just want to punch things?

I'll save you an off topic rant and just say that hopefully my muse will return tomorrow after a day off...

Aaaaand Back to Live Action

So yeah, from the title, obviously we made it back alive. The vacation was wonderful. The wedding wasn't bad either. :-D

Football season is coming up, so my duties there are increasing. Meanwhile, Fuu is trying to dig herself out of a mountain of Thank You notes and wedding gifts. (Any other married guys notice how little of the actual wedding gifts are really "for" guys? I mean, srsly, we got more cooking and cutesy house supplies than we know what to do with. Not that I'm saying cooking things can't be for guys because I certainly am at home in a kitchen, but it wasn't like the crazy cool chef's knife or the awesome barbecue set... no, it's the vegetable organizer. And I say f*#! vegetables. Bring on the meat! Amirite guys? Warlocks in general are just meat-lovers. Woot for parenthetical rants).

What this adds up to is that married life already doesn't agree with WoW time. However, we perceive this as only a temporary hurdle and will take it in stride, hopefully getting to raid at least one night a week and jumping on on the weekends (where we finally don't have meetings/travel galore). In other words, we'll probably be on every night, just chatting and doing nothing. It's what we do *shrug*. I just hope Blizz drops a patch in my lap soon to give me something to write about.

Hmmm... 91 entries on the feed reader. I gots some catchin up to do.... Let's see what the interwebs are buzzing abotu and I'll get back to you with some more topical discussions later. Until then... how you doin?

Day Five: Let's Do The Time Warp

*Sparkie trots in, parchment in mouth, looks around at the destruction sadly*
*Spaz is asleep over in a corner, surrounded by various food wrappings and empty bottles of ale*
*Midnight sneaks quietly from a side room, shutting the door softly behind her and tiptoeing into the kitchen*
*Berry Blue comes out of one of the back rooms, rubbing his head slowly*
Berry Blue: "Man, that was one coool party last night, Nighty."
Midnight: "Yeah, it was wicked."
*They both look at some burn marks in the carpet*
Midnight: "Pablo stops in for a bloody minute, and look what he leaves us to clean up!"
Berry Blue: "Chill Nighty, we got until Monday to get this place back together."
*Midnight huffs and opens the parchment, tossing it to Berry Blue*
*Berry Blue starts cursing in elvish*
Midnight: "What in the bloody hell are you saying?"
Berry Blue: "The letter says they'll be back tomorrow!"
*Midnight curses in demonic*
DeeGee: "Dudes, can you keep it down?"
*Berry Blue glances over at the side room where the voice just came and looks questioningly at Midnight*
Berry Blue: "Seriously?"
Midnight: "Oh come off it. He'll be out of here in fifteen minutes anyways."
*Midnight stalks off towards the room*
*Berry Blue takes a step towards Spaz, then thinks better of it and just sits down, rubbing his head slowly*
Berry Blue: "Stay cool, Berry. You'll get this place back together before the Master and Mrs. get back."
*Posts picture*

Our final day finds us exploring Fuu's favorite place: the Caverns of Time. What better way to extend one's honeymoon than to go to a place that is timeless? With that being said, you should know that Chromie has agreed to warp us back at the end of the trip, so we won't need to travel home. We should be back tomorrow, I think... you know how confusing time travel can be... Hope everything is in order! -Ful

Day Four: Polaris

*Sparkie trots in, parchment in mouth*
Spaz: "Weeeeee! Sugar!!!!"
Berry Blue: "You let him get in the pantry again, didn't you Nighty?"
*Midnight shrugs*
Berry Blue: "You really do love pain, don't you?"
*Midnight grins seductively*
Berry Blue: "Don't get any ideas, I'm ephemeral. All smoke, baby."
*Midnight frowns*
*Sparkie nudges Midnight's long leg*
Midnight: "Oh bollocks. I guess I'll just have to live vicariously now."
*Opens letter*
*Berry Blue posts the picture*
Day Four finds us picnicking in Nagrand under the stars. We watched the heavens swirl and shared intimate stories. Then I got jealous of the shooting stars, so I made some of my own. -Ful