stargrace

Returning to Eve Online (4 years later)

The last time I wrote about Eve Online was back in 2020, so I assume that was the last time I was playing it, too. A LOT has changed in four years – but the basics were still familiar as I dove head first into the game. First of all, there’s (yet another) new / returning player experience by means of the AIR Career Program. This is great for old and new players, and it’s meant to give you a little more direction in what you want to do. You basically complete tasks like you would in a regular quest journal, and you get rewarded for it. I had a task to complete a mining mission, and you get to pick any that you have access to, so I didn’t have to complete L1 missions when L4 were available. I like this method, instead of being forced to do lower level content. Of course now they want me to complete 5 mining missions, and so on. After running a few of those, I swapped over to the Epic Arc Agent I had been working for in the past. This is the SOE (Sisters of Eve) quest chain that I never really completed. Doing these missions also check some points off in the AIR Career Program, which is nice. Daily log in rewards were a thing when I played last, but now there are also daily goals, like killing 25 NPC, etc.

Even though I’ve been away for a fair amount of time, it didn’t take long at all to reacquaint myself with my ships and my tasks. I set my scanners running again for PI, insured my most-used ships, and defeated some bad guys with the Tengu. I’m not exactly sure what goals I want to work towards, but it feels nice to be playing again (I know, I say this every time I return). For now I have no expectations, and I’m content to just fumble my way through while lurking in the Rookie Help channel. If you happen to be playing Eve, feel free to say hello! My in-game character name is Ellithia.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Making Gold with the 10th Anniversary Hearthstone Event

By now people have figured out you can actually sell the Hearthstone toy – and it is selling (screenshot is from the WoW Econ Discord).

The achievement you get from the event is account wide, so you can’t obtain that again – but to get multiple toys, just log in to your WoW accounts (if you have more than one) BEFORE you complete the achievement, and every character that is online will receive it.

** IMPORTANT** This COULD be changed in the future, it’s probably meant to be BoP – so be aware of that fact.

Save them until after the event and they become more rare, or sell them off before any changes happen, that’s up to you.

Happy gold making!

Weekly Wrap Up [Mar3-Mar9]

The TSM ledger is acting a bit oddly ever since leap year happened, so this post is a bit late while I manipulated the display. In any case, the past week was pretty much on par for what I would typically earn in a week – but sales were WAY lower than usual (the number of sales). A lot of high ticket items sold, and I didn’t even break 300 – normally that number is around 1,000.

This week was another winner for transmog, I imagine the collectors are in full force until we get that 10.2.6 patch and some new content. I know the Hearthstone 10th anniversary event is running right now, but I’ve been staying away while the bugs are fixed on NA retail.

I did also have a few pet sales, but these were all under 150,000g in value, my biggest sale for the week was the “Domed Buckler” which went for over a million gold! It’s great when those sporadic transmog items sell. I didn’t see many crafted transmog sales, but I had a handful of lower value ones, and I decided to skip restocking this week. Instead I did some comp stomp across all of my characters and I worked on collecting knowledge on a few slacker crafters that I had. Plus of course I partook in my very first RP event over on Moonguard, which was a LOT of fun. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Turning Good Habits into Gold

This year marks the 6th year that I’ve had a solid focus on making gold in World of Warcraft. I’ve gone from cautiously working towards my Brutosaur mount (which I did get in time) to now having over 100,000,000 gold strewn across various characters and servers. If there was only one piece of advice I could give to people who are interested in making gold, it would be the following:

Make good habits.

This covers a broad range of ‘things’ that you would ideally ‘do’ – but that’s what it comes down to. I would focus on things you actually enjoy doing in game, and then turning those things into habits that you can profit from. Here are a few examples:

  • I have 24 characters set up at the moment to do tables in SL. These are characters who don’t do anything else, there’s no travel time, they’re just parked at the tables. If I need anima, I use my main and then ship it to whatever alt needs it. I do have 50 level 70 characters, so I could expand this much further if I wanted, but 24 is a nice neat number (it’s two servers worth, minus Dracthyr). I’ve had this going for two years now, and I earn a LOT of pet charms.
  • I do everything crafting related on 8 characters. You could use 4, but I have both horde / alliance crafters (4 on a high population server, and 4 on a low population server). When they were working on knowledge, I’d focus on one character each day, and do all of their crafting quests. I would also do the weekly world quest on them, and now I do superbloom. That means I now have 8 characters with max DF factions just by slowly completing things over time. I didn’t grind, which meant I didn’t burn out. I complete a LOT of crafting orders on my high population server (which is where I spend most of my time), and I don’t fuss too hard about the alliance team (they’re mostly there to collect alliance specific recipes). I restock crafted goods once a week, using SimCraft & TSM.
  • I do all of the pet battle quests on 4 characters once a week. This isn’t ideal, but I love pet battles, and that means I’m slowly chipping away at achievements, family familiar, and other goals. I only do this one day a week so that I don’t get completely burnt out. I’m still making progress.
  • I do all of my dungeon / raid runs on one day a week, with however many characters I’m feeling at the time. I usually multibox these, and I just take a day to knock it out. Over time, the items I earn (gold, recipes, pets, etc) add up, and while it doesn’t LOOK like a lot, initially, over time it builds.
  • If there’s a legion trainer up I’ll typically spend one day a week grinding out alts / leveling pets. I have hundreds of pets at any given time to work towards 25. I’ve gotten every single one of my alts to 70 with this method. It’s NOT ideal, but because I’m so consistent with it (I LOVE pet battles) I’ve got a nice army of characters now.
  • I don’t bother with things I don’t enjoy. I do not like to gather and harvest, so I don’t do it. The only time I’ve done it in the last 5 years was to get some achievements for professions, and I still don’t have legion mining finished yet, that’s how much I hate gathering. Doing things I do not enjoy is a sure way for me to avoid the game and NOT make any gold.

Find what you like to do in game, make it into a habit, and grow your gold from it. Figuring out what you enjoy doing is going to be the hardest part. If sticking with it is difficult then you may need to reassess. That doesn’t mean you can’t take breaks! I take them all of the time, especially during lulls in content – but I always find my way back.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

A Return to BDO – Where do I start?!

It has been about 2 years since I last played BDO, and while they’re celebrating their 8th year right now, I decided I had enough free time to squeeze in a little game play – except I have absolutely NO IDEA what I am doing. A lot has changed in those two years.

What I did manage to learn is that seasons never end, so you can pick up a seasonal character any time you want, and I also learned about this “new” (to me) tool bag, that allows me to put my gathering tools in a bag I can equip to alternate tools instead of constantly switching. I followed the guide by GrumpyGreen (thank goodness they still write guides, I loved their stuff before and I still love it) and finished it easily enough. That freed up a bunch of inventory space which I was VERY happy about. Inventory management is still a nightmare, maybe even more so now because I have so many items that I simply don’t know what to do with and I don’t know what they’re used for.

I also found out I had components to create a dream horse! What! I have never owned one before, having never really dedicated the time towards breeding horses (though I do have a nice stable of my favourites) and I have no idea when they gave this out, or why I had it. I decided to go with Pegasus, female, and I named her Fluttershy, of course.

What am I going to do next? I’d like to get my shai to 61 (she’s 60 at the moment), and then work on cleaning out my inventory, which is probably one of my favourite silly things to do. I am not sure if I want to create another seasonal character (I’ve done it a few times in the past) but I might ‘just because’. Eventually I’d love to clear out some of the quests I’ve been carrying around (for years) and try to learn what else has changed since I’ve been away. It feels nice to be back! I won’t be giving up WoW any time soon, but BDO can be played (well, life skills at least) fairly passively, one of the reasons I love it. There’s room for both in my day to day, hopefully!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Nomadic Gamer