Wow: gold-making

I've been playing and researching World of Warcraft a lot in the last few months. I returned in September after not really playing for about 10 years so I had a lot to catch up on.

I found the conventional end-game somewhat frustrating. Each hard fight is an exercise in moving in the correct manner, a kind of dance. I felt like I was always the dance partner with 2 left feet. I know from past experience I do eventually master these dances and then I become one of the people other players look at and feel frustration but that doesn't especially appeal to me as a goal.

So I looked into other ways to enjoy this complex game and particularly gold-making.

Gold-making is in some ways a more fun minigame than the "proper" game of dungeons and quests. It's much more strategic (for a line member, for a raid leader I can see that there's a lot of interesting strategy). It improves almost every other aspect of the game, for instance you can burn consumables like flasks and goblin gliders without worrying about the cost. And it's been utterly transformed by something that has developed in the game since I last played.

Traditionally gold-makers got rich then ran out of things to spend it on. Now with the addition of the WoW token which is a bit like Eve's plex you can turn gold into real money - sort of. You can turn it into Blizzard balance which can only be spent on Blizzard stuff. So becoming a Wow billionaire has the added perks of being able to buy Blizzard games and store items and account services.

The other great change to the gold-making playstyle is the addition of sellable Battle Pets.

Battle Pets are one of WoW's minigames. It's a Pokemon clone and quite good fun if perhaps a little slow in the gameplay. However the pets can be sold cross-realm. If I have a cageable pet then I can sell it on any EU server. If I have alts on multiple servers I can buy a pet cheap on one server and sell it high on another server.

This is way way better than any other market.



In a sense as a gold-maker I don't care what I sell. If I can buy a thing for 1 gold and sell it for 1000 gold I don't care if it's a sword a herb or a battle pet.

Compared to other commodities Battle pets have very cheap auction house fees (1 silver), high prices, slow turnover, and the cross realm aspect I've talked about. They're also immune to obsolescence - a battle pet from a level 20 zone is just as valid as one from a 120 zone unlike, say, a sword.

Here's my plan: to build a trade empire of alts across multiple servers, possibly multiple regions and buy low, sell high. It's pretty easy to get money across to new alts - I let them take pets from the journal to sell. Eventually I want to use the TSM addon to run efficient shopping searches and fast listing but for now I'm doing it manually to help me learn and understand the market.

I have 6 alts camping vendors and buying pets. I have 2 other alts camping vendors who don't have any money yet - they'll become active buyers once one of their auctions sells. I do a run of buying, logging in to one vendor after another which gives me 3 copies of 13 vendor-sold pets. I then log into a separate series of alts who list 1 copy of each unique pet on their server's auction house.

The beauty of this system is that it's multiplicative. Currently I have 13 pets times 8 servers offering people sales that will make me a couple of K each. Eventually I could have 50 pets across 50 servers as I build up the trade empire. As I build up the gold I can do other schemes such as camping the Black Market auction house as a source of big ticket pets, developing garrisons on my alts which allow daily pet quests, etc. When I become rich enough I could consider boosting some random alts so they can do dailies.

One thing about this strategy is that it incorporates some rather predictable price changes. For example right now at the heart of the Winter's Veil event there are lots of very cheap pets from this event. In a couple of days supply will cease until next year's Christmas period. So price will slowly go up as people stop listing them and most people's copies sit forgotten in their banks. For example the Festival Lantern from a Spring event is worth 40k now because people don't seem to have farmed that many last Spring and steady demand has pushed the price up. We can be 99% sure that this price will drop like a stone as soon as the next Lunar Festival goes active.

The Winter's Veil event has a particularly interesting feature in that it's in two stages. The event is live from mid-December but we don't get our presents until the 25th. So next year I plan to be showing off and advertising cool present-sourced pets from about the 19th December, steering people to my auctions as auctions will be the only way to get one before the 25th.

Barking (advertising) is an important part of the strategy and I hit a macro after I list my pets on each realm, encouraging people to get into pet battles. Currently I can point out that pet battles give triple exp because of a weekly event.

It also has made the game in general more interesting to me as I now look for ways to collect new and interesting pets and understand their markets. Island expeditions for example introduced a lot of new pets and recent patch changes made them drop more. In fact even if you don't want them you can't help but get them because people run these islands for azerite power and the weekly mission, occasionally earning a pet as a by-product. This creates an ability to see the future of this market, fun for any speculator. The market will become more and more swamped as people run this, eventually seeing these pets sell for under 10g, possibly under 1g. As soon as the new expansion drops and people aren't motivated by AP these islands will almost never be run as they're quite dull. This will mean the pets slowly gather value as supply is effectively zero, they won't really be farmable as old content and demand remains a trickle but greater than supply. This is a very long term investment but a year or two after the next WoW expansion hits these pets which will be bought in 2020 for 1-2g will sell for 5000g+.

So there we have it: gold-making through pets, a complex and interesting minigame within a minigame.

RIP Test FC Swet Maggs (Cody)

I'm very sorry to say that one of our players passed away at the unimaginably young age of 23.

Swet Mags (Cody in real life) collapsed at work and died shortly afterwards.

Dreddit CEO Cornak Firefist posted this:

Cornak FirefistToday at 3:49 PM

@everyone Good morning friends, As you may have heard, our good buddy Swet Mags, or Cody, was taken from us last night. He was a pillar of our community, and was the only thing that kept a lot of us going even when things seemed like they weren't going to work. Swet never stopped looking to do better and achieve more. He was the core of our fc team, the bossman of our mentors, and the inspiration for everything we did. Without Swet Mags, I can safely say Dreddit would not be anywhere near where it is today. He was a force that would not stop going, no matter the odds. The Battle of 46DP was one of the best examples of this, where despite having a full hostile fleet, then caps, then supers, Swet kept pushing through, and managed to win despite the odds. His joy after that was one of the greatest feelings I've known, and he showed us all what it really means to play EVE. He was an icon, and possibly the best known member of Dreddit. Everyone, from the newest newbro to the bitterest bittervet knew Swet, and everything he did. We will never forget him, nor should we. Without Swet, our lives will all be missing something we cannot get back. But one thing that's important to learn from Swet is to never stop looking up. Always keep going, even if things look dark, or you feel like you're up against a ceiling. Swet didn't just break through those ceilings, he didn't even acknowledge that ceilings can exist. There was nothing that was too high for Swet to strive for, and he, often unexpectedly, would always manage to hit that target. He will be missed.

Test Alliance are holding a cyno vigil in our home system of D-PNP9 in Esoteria. People are very welcome to come down and light a cyno in Swet's memory.

Swet Mags Cyno vigil D-PNP9

Swet was a delight and an inspiration, one of those few people you meet in life who were permanently sunny. Last time I flew with him I cocked up lighting a cyno (not enough Liquid Ozone) and Swet handled it with competence and calm while an angry titan pilot yelled at me. We also did quite a lot of flying together to promote corp ops and Swet Mags was the driving force behind an invigorated corp fleets drive that has transformed Dreddit from a corp people joined just to be in Test to a corp that is fun and impactful in its own right.

I'm heartbroken.

His family have started a gofundme for his funeral expenses.

Blaugust reviewed

I think the Blaugust project, to get bloggers from various mmos to blog once a day, was pretty successful.

Personally I got distracted - by the AT at the start of the month then by World of Warcraft at the end of the month.

Still a discord was set up, there were some pretty  interesting blogs to read and a chance for bloggers to build their sites by adding and being added to each others' blogrolls.

I'm pretty satisfied. I got a few posts up in August after a rather dry year till then and if I didn't blog every day then it was because I was absorbed in other ways to spend my leisure time.

Wilhelm (who didn't miss a day) has a more detailed analysis. It's definitely worth checking some of the listed blogs.

My favourite new blog is a Wow one: https://diaryofaguildleader.com/

Reviewing Abyssal site running

Phew, coming up for air after being immersed in the Alliance Tournament I can now think about picking up where I left off with other Eve projects.

I tried running abyssal sites tonight and lost a Gila on the second site. Luckily it was only a T2 fit ship so it wasn't too expensive. So I sat down and reviewed the theorycraft.

First point is clouds. Clouds are bad. I didn't pay attention to clouds and honestly don't know if I was in one which is doubly bad. I ran out of cap booster charges so it's likely I was in the cloud that makes active shield tanking much more cap expensive. Doh!

Next I'm not really min-maxing the weather effects. From E Uni's excellent wiki page we see that Electrical weather gives a bonus to cap which is good for active tankers, particularly those using Cap Batteries rather than Cap Boosters. And Gamma weather gives a bonus to Shield HP which is good for passive tankers.

I decided I'd like to test if a passive tanked Gila is comfortable in level 4 sites, specifically Raging Firestorm sites. The thing with passive tanks is that they're all or nothing - either you tank like a boss or your tank collapses and you die really quickly. The fit I've made tanks 214 ehp/second and has 56.4k ehp. In Gamma weather that goes up to 50% more of both I think I'll need to check.

It's a lot more resistant to being neuted than my previous fit which so far has been the reason I die. It's a little more expensive but because it doesn't use Crystal implants it's not too expensive, Pyfa shows 508m for ship + implants.

This is the ship fit I'm going to test on sisi, the test server.

[Gila, passive abyssal]

Damage Control II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II

Republic Fleet 10MN Afterburner
Republic Fleet Large Shield Extender
Republic Fleet Large Shield Extender
Republic Fleet Large Shield Extender
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Thukker Medium Cap Battery

Rapid Light Missile Launcher II, Nova Fury Light Missile
Rapid Light Missile Launcher II, Nova Fury Light Missile
Small Energy Nosferatu II
Rapid Light Missile Launcher II, Nova Fury Light Missile
Rapid Light Missile Launcher II, Nova Fury Light Missile

Medium Core Defense Field Purger II
Medium Core Defense Field Purger II
Medium Anti-Explosive Screen Reinforcer II


Valkyrie II x2


Eifyr and Co. 'Rogue' Navigation NN-603
Zainou 'Gnome' Shield Management SM-703
Inherent Implants 'Squire' Capacitor Management EM-803
Zainou 'Gnome' Shield Operation SP-903
Zainou 'Deadeye' Rapid Launch RL-1003

Effect management

Orange cloud - mildly good
Blue cloud - sig bloom (bad against battleships, good against frigates)
Towers - all bad, Deviant Suppressors have an edge case use against drone swarms.

Kill order

Neuters (Nullcharge, Dissipator, Firewatcher, Sentinel, Starving)
Webbers (Snarecaster, Entanglement, Entangler, Warden, Upholder)
if Battleships present Paints (Spotlighter, Illuminator, Deepwatcher)
Reppers (Fieldweaver, Plateweaver, Preserver)
Disruptors (Fogcaster, Confuser)
High dps (Aegis)
DPS ( Spark, Ember, Strike, Blast, Escort)
Irrelevant ewar (Gazedimmer, Nullwarp, Spearfish, Obfuscator)

Alliance Tournament: blogger showdown

In a couple of hours the team I fly for will face A Band Apart, the alliance run by and represented in the AT by the incomparable Rixx Javix, writer of the Eveoganda blog. You can watch it on Twitch here.

Both teams made top 16 last year. This time only one will, the winner of this match makes it to the crucial benchmark that guarantees seeding for next year's tournament. Seeding is very important because it means you won't face another top 16 team in your first two matches so generally (but not always) you will face teams weaker than yourself.

I briefly joined ABA earlier this year while looking for a new home but it wasn't quite right for me. I'm happier in an alliance that is busy in EU timezone and the patient low sec pirate style wasn't quite what I was looking for. Also they generally don't hop on comms for brief skirmishes which was something I'm no longer accustomed to. I can see a case either way but personally I'm very much inclined to communicate on comms while fighting in a gang.

Those things said I'm an enormous ABA and Rixx fan. I hope they'll forgive me if I don't wish them luck today ;)

The Battle of X47

I had the pleasure of going on my first serious capital op tonight, a major fight to kill the Keepstar owned by NC. in X47, a nullsec system up north in Pure Blind.

The first stage was actually yesterday evening when we did a move op that took almost 3 hours, delivering 38 Test titans plus supercarrier and fax support to a nearby Keepstar.

This is a two front war with the North being the Goons' front but tonight we came to help them against a massive NC., PL and Darkness titan fleet with several other alliances in support.

This evening we jumped in after Goons had established a presence already and killed about 3 titans, losing 1. The evening proceeded to be a real struggle to stay logged in, I didn't actually see much of the fight, spending most of my time logging back in. That took 15-20 minutes each time.

The fight peaked at about 4200 in Local but what made it particularly difficult for the server was a decision by Gobbins of Pandemic Horde to spam frigates and interceptors with ECM Burst modules. When a ship gets jammed by an ECM burst the server has to recalculate its ability to use its modules afterwards so as people got jammed then tried to relock and start shooting again they were getting messages "You don't have the skills to use that..."

The wits over at /r/eve were not slow to put their amusement that this dirty tactic backfired into meme form:

The effect was devastating, with Imperial Legacy kiling 19 titans and a keepstar to losing 1 titan.

Test FC ProGodLegend had this to say after the fight.

PL leader Doomchinchilla had a number of things to say, none of which are repeatable on this mild-mannered blog.

Why blog?

If you've been idly considering starting a blog this month is a good time to put your toes in the water and see if you like it.

Blogging is about getting your opinion out there. For some of the best bloggers it goes beyond opinion and towards journalism where the writer is sourcing his information and checking financials etc: this guy is Eve's best exponent of that style at the moment.

Blogging has advantages over other forms of expression.

- Control. This is my blog, I control what appears here, I can publish guest articles from other writers, I can delete comments I don't like, etc.

- Community. Typically other bloggers will make up a lot of your active community. All blogs have a majority of readers who quietly absorb the articles and never comment. The people that interact with you tend to be other bloggers. For instance Ancient Gaming Noob and Rixx Javix, two of the most admired Eve bloggers commented on my last post. We're a community and in some ways quite like-minded.

- Archiving. By google's grace these blogs endure indefinitely. I can go back to my articles from about 10 years ago when I started blogging. That's probably more enduring than if I saved them to a hard drive unless I maintained a collection of detachable drives or something. In an ephemeral age these free blog platforms are very persistent and it's very nice to be able to look back on what I wrote years ago. (And how right I was! ;) )

- A place to start. It's very easy now to write for the semi-professional Eve sites like INN or CZ. But if you're new it might be nice to blog first, find your writing style, then publish on a site that will draw a wider audience but potentially more criticism.

- A diary. Blogging has its origins as online diaries, the word literally comes from "web log." Diarising your game activites helps you keep organised and abreast of activities and decisions. It can be particularly useful for people whose actions impact other people to be able to go back and check things you have decided before.

- CV/Resume item. If your cv is very light you could put your blogging on there. Be sure it's a blog you're happy for employers to look at (eg no NSFW stuff) and that establishing yourself as an Eve nerd may be helpful to your application. (It probably does for a job in the games industry, it probably doesn't for a bar job). Just bear in mind that to most employers writing about a video game makes you a less interesting person, not a more interesting one.

How do you start?

Think of it like a diary but maybe a bit more freeform. Any time you're stuck "today I did this..." is a usually a good blog article. You can also post whacky armchair game design ideas or soapbox rants. The Blaugust requirement to blog daily is a good starting point because your writing will get better the more you do of it.

Frequent regular blogging is a hallmark of many of the most successful bloggers. People like Ancient Gaming Noob and (historically) Gevlon and Jester publish(-ed) pretty much daily.

Some people use blogs to produce very infrequent but extremely expert articles such as Suitonia and Capri

Promote your blog by commenting on other blogger's articles and politely mentioning you have just started a blog. Don't be too pushy, I'd probably delete a comment that just pimped a blog without any interest in commenting on what I was writing about but I do look at commenters who take an interest in what I write.

There's a Eve blog sites collator, get yourself on that. There's also the My Eve section of CCP's official Eve forums.

You can also post your blog article as a link on /r/eve although you might get some rather brutal feedback.