Author Archives: Saate
Make lots of gold with Archaeology
Busy Busy Busy! Have been caught up in Cataclysm a fair bit lately and working on a number of side projects for the site. Probably will be a little quiet with Christmas and all the family stuff the next few weeks but rest assured cool things are coming!
After hitting 525 Archaeology on the first day of Cataclysm I’ve felt compelled to continue working on uncovering everything. I’ve recovered 15 rares so far and after recovering another 5 more I’ll receive the title ‘Professor’.
One of the most interesting developments for me has been the realisation that there is substantial profit to be made from selling the Keystones. For other completionists out there you too can stand to make a lot of gold here.
The key to profit is patience. Based on the distribution of sites per race some are going to take longer than others to recover 100% of artifacts. If you want 100% of the Tol’vir relics, for example, you’re going to reach 100% in Fossil and Night Elf relics LONG before you get there.
This means that you should NOT be using Keystones for those races to speed up solving. Even without them you’ll reach 100% recovery before you do Tol’vir. So sell the keystones! I’ve had no problems selling Night Elf, Troll and Vyrkul keystones for 100g each on my server. Unbelievably I’ve also see the Tol’vir keystones fetching up to 2000g each.
There’s an interesting opportunity cost calculation people are making here! “I have a rare item in my archaeology book and I can wait longer to farm enough for it – or I can spend and have it now!”
It’s amazing how often now wins :)
Realm First – Archeaology Achievements!
What a whirlwind the Cataclysm launch has been so far! After being griefed by login servers and losing at my [Realm First! Illustrious Cooking] bid I threw my all into Archaeology.
It’s been a long time since I’ve even done an all-nighter so I have to admit I wasnt tremendously confident I’d be able to pull it off. Throwing in there the big unknown about how much advantage dwarves would have with their [Explorer] racial I was in for quite a ride.
After 17 hour 23 minutes I hit 450 Archaeology and got the realm first achievement. I was so relieved as I’d truly believed up until that point that there was some phantom out there slightly ahead of me. I wanted to sleep at this point but needed to press on to 525 for the second realm first achievement.
Boy did those skill gains not come fast, though, and it wasnt until 22 hours 30 minutes in that I hit 525 and got the second realm first achievement. After one of the longest stretches at the computer ever I had surprised myself and done it! Definitely one of those rare obsessive achievements I think I can be proud of!
Here’s the screenshots of the 450 and 525 whispers:
I owe a lot to my amazing girlfriend, Suzanne, who booked in leave for the day after launch so she could be around to keep me awake and motivated. Also a big thanks to Frozome, Khaosbane, Larina, Malevola, Mercy, Raphael and Tyrok for being around to chat with me and provide support through the hours.
I suspect that to some people these kinds of achievements might seem silly or way over the top. I think the important thing to note is these endeavors are not your standard friday night ‘nerding it up’.
They’re the kind of challenge that comes up once every couple of years and are instead about a (relatively) short period of very focused gaming toward a specific objective. Exactly the kind of thing the ‘massively obsessed’ among us live for!
Posted in Achievements
Tagged archaeology, first, grandmaster, illustrious, rare, realm
Reverse Speculation
What am I talking about? Instead of making a profit from accurately predicting upcoming market swings you make a profit from market swings that have already occured but for which your target market remain unaware.
A really good example of this kind of market – throughout early WOTLK one of my best selling enchants was [Enchant Boots - Surefooted] and for the life of me I could not figure out why. I was creating the scrolls for around 15g and selling them for 150-200g each.
I had no competition and these things kept selling. I tried to figure it out – there were now better boot enchant options and this particular enchant wasnt viable for twinks as it required a level 35 or greater item. So what was going on?
After some time thinking about this I eventually whispered a random purchaser and asked. What response did I get? “Oh, well I didnt know there was anything better”.
Pristine Black Diamonds in the wake of 4.0.3a
So the world has changed and with it the Shen’dralar reputation quests are out. [Pristine Black Diamonds] were selling for around 400g on my server leading up to all the recent announcements. With the patch in the diamonds are worthless…right?
Well check this out:
Although there’s a definite negative trend in pricing it certainly doesnt reflect the lower value you’d assume. This could be for a few reasons:
- They have potential value if Blizzard reinstates Shen’dralar rep quests
- They have potential value if buyers don’t know the quests have been removed and pay the listed price
- Nobody is actually buying them, so the prices are slowly slowly trending down over generations of undercuts
Whatever the reason I think it’s very interesting to examine trends like this one where the anticipated or intuitive outcome has not eventuated! anyone have thoughts or wisdom to add on this?
Patch 4.0.3a Observations – Part 2
A couple more observations from my playtime tonight:
- New mob in the BRD Bar – Dark Iron Brewer. You can choose a dialogue option to get drunk with him
- Only the old (pre-sundering) version of [Dartol's Rod of Transformation] works outside Ashenvale. Bad luck if you didnt already get it!
- The emperor in BRD no longer calls the rest of the mobs in his room when you attack
Still going..
All the post-patch ‘new’ stuff – updating as I go
Hey Folks,
Thought it might be worthwhile posting the ‘oooh!’ stuff as I come across it tonight. I’ll keep updating this post as I go. Don’t forget to check out the forums as well for further information.
- You can buy a [Gilneas Tabard] in Darnassus next to the flight master. This gives you rep with Gilneas (new Worgen race) while running dungeons. Unsure which dungeons yet. UPDATE 2 – Working for rep gains on non-heroic deadmines! Also reports of rep gains working in Stratholme!
- New fishing achievements are in! Fishing around for the [Limnologist] and [Oceanographer] one as I go.
- There’s a bunch of new achievements in general tab including another /love squirrels one. Locations when I find:
[Alpine Chipmunk] – Winterspring – Spread all over, ignore the wowhead dots. - Lots of new ‘complete x quests in y zone’ things to do in the old zones.
- As a druid I’m already finding my Teleport: Moonglade spell to be invaluable!
- Just looted a [Golden Pearl] from a clam fished up in Azshara – wonder how common these will be now?
- No 50 exalted reputations achievement – new highest is 45. Boo!
- New achievement [Iron Chef] for learning 200 cooking recipes. I’m already at 168/200 on Saate. You guys?
- This is win – nuff said! [Unidentified Cooking Utensil]
- I will not access the world map by pressing TAB to view my pip-boy. I repeat, I will not access the world map by pressing TAB to view my pip-boy.
- Jumping into the gaping water filled hole (aka ‘The Sundering’) in Stranglethorn vale will occasion death.
- Redridge appears to have been hit worst of all – they have a boulder on the road near the bridge that needs moving…
Continuing my exploring! What have you found?
Update 25/11 – Raimondas emailed me with a link to a post he wrote on all the changes impacting insane.
Irrationality and information availability
I like information. I could probably leave this blog post at that simple fact and be happy I think. It’d probably be better than some of the stuff I’ve written in the past as well so it’d really be a win-win for all concerned really!
When I say I like information I guess what I really mean is the relationships between different pieces of information. How when you know one thing, you can use that to infer all sorts of other things. I remember, in my early call centre days, discovering that there was a whole department dedicated to forecasting how many calls would arrive at a specific time on a specific day. It seemed crazy! Yet these people were able to do it with amazing accuracy.
Ever since then, some ten years on, my fascination with information relationships and trends lives on strong. Sometimes the relationships I find are probably best kept to myself (If I take the first letter of the name of each person who works at the cafe near work and rearrange them I can make the words MEAN and NAME!) and other times they can lead to discovering trends or linkages that help me in my job or..say…making gold in WoW.
So with my bias on the table I have to get this out – it really annoys me when people have access to quality information but for some reason refuse to use it. Refuse to use it? Maybe that’s a bit too far really, I think it’s a few steps back from that and something more like “Make a judgement call weighing up potential gain versus effort of expending mental energy and decide the use of mental energy is too much of a risk.”.
Yeah, that’s it I think.
I see with people who want to make gold but don’t want to have to read. I see it with people who ask for quest help in trade chat and arguing with trolls for half an hour instead of a thirty second bit of wowhead reading. I see it with people in the workplace who recoil in horror at the idea of quicker ways to do things. It’s this whole comfort sphere thing and the horrible terrible notion of CHANGE! (queue dramatic music).
As a manager in the workplace I’ve always enjoyed challenging the “fear of change” people. It usually boils down to a single poorly constructed notion in their head that they’ve long ago adopted without question and forgot to ever challenge. Think about your workplace – these are the “..because that’s the way I was told to do it!” people that often lack big picture thinking.
There’s something big to this I think. There’s a beautiful solution floating around that I can more feel than see. It’s not just about attaining a better understanding of the ‘why’ in this irrationality but about finding that elegant solution that helps overcome it everywhere.
It might yet be a long time coming, but I’m not giving up.
Posted in General, Gold Making
Tagged change, fear, information, maturity, psychology, rationality, work
Why do we like to polarize?
No, this isn’t a post about Thaddius :p Over the last couple of months I’ve been paying particular attention to conflict between people. I’m talking about the vibrant tapestry of trade chat and pug arguments we’re exposed to every day in-game and like to attribute to immature teens. Even in times of cooperation we see it expressed aggressively in other ways:
There’s a bunch of other flavours too – my gearscore versus yours, my guild’s progress versus yours, my dps versus yours etc. Any basis for comparison is apparently an opportunity to rubberstamp one’s superiority.
If opportunity is lacking there then real life insults are a safe bet – I wonder how many of you have observed (or received) insults from total strangers related to ability, country, education, social standing or even sexual orientation?
The notion of qualifying the insulter and assigning appropriate emotional engagement is a foreign one. Insult gets delivered, recipient accepts it at full strength and is enraged. Why? Why? Why?
It seems to me that the thought process for these people is something like this:
It would be easy to answer this question with “well that’s immature teenagers for you!” but take a look at the world around you. This behavior is commonplace regardless of what age people are. I think our ego and subconscious require these challenges for growth and drive these thought patterns.
If a person doesn’t develop the meta-cognitive ability to replay, analyze and adapt to these interactions it’s difficult to ever break the cycle.
It’s hard, too, when instinctively your brain is in overload assigning negative characteristics to your opponent – They’re a bad person. They want to screw you over. You did nothing to deserve this. – and after accepting this it’s tough to change your mind.
It’s a really interesting thing to learn to empathize with ‘the bad guy’. Instead of assigning negative characteristics to an enemy you make a genuine attempt to think of them in a positive light – what are they in this for? how would this situation seem to them? what kind of outcome are they after?
A good place to start is to think about a bad guy in a fictional scifi/fantasy/etc movie you’ve seen. What if he had won the day? Have a think and fill in some of the gaps that the movie didnt show you – what’s the guy like with his family and friends? what’s he like to do on his birthday? what about when he’s badly hung over?
It does take a lot of practice to see your enemy as just another honest human being – especially if they’re attacking you. Gaining the ability to master this, though, is something that can genuinely change your life and make you more personally effective.
I’d love to hear your thoughts (and especially related stories) so share away!
Achievement Forums now up!
This is a really big step for me! Thinking a few years back when I started saate.net I was pretty determined to never add forums to my site. I’d seen way too many blogs with dead forums on them that nobody used and I didn’t want to be one of ‘those’ sites.
Things have changed a lot this year for the site. One of my big goals had been to have a day where I broke 1440 hits, which is 1 visitor/minute for the whole day. I thought it a very lofty (and thus worthy) goal and wondered if it would ever arrive. I’ve well and truly surpassed that goal now and it indeed seems to be the ‘norm’ these days – check out the web stats for this past week:
Together we’ve built a great community of achievement fanatics (the 100 plus members in the insane hall of fame would certainly suggest that!) and I can think of no better way to continue to build upon that than for us to share our knowledge and communicate via some proper forums.
I’ve added a few sections that I thought made sense but would welcome feedback and direction! I’m also interested in identifying any regular contributors that could assist with forum moderation and general direction so leave a post on the forums and let me know.
Thanks everyone for your contributions to date – I’m really looking forward to what the future holds!
Insane Changes – New FAQ Page
Interesting couple of days! Yes I’m getting a heap of emails from people about the Blizzcon Q&A panel information on insane in the membrane changes. We still have over a month before Cataclysm and I have a feeling the true extent of the changes won’t prevent the dedicated amongst you achieving your title.
I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments here and on twitter so if you have any niggling questions then ask them. There’s a whole community of insane around here and plenty of assistance to make sure you get the help you need!
5-Boxing Warcraft on an iPad
Running five WoW times through an iPad – Yeah really! :)
After having a play around recently and realising this was possible I had to put together a quick clip to share. You can see how responsive it all is and basically that it’s possible. I’m not sure I’d ever play this way (certainly not multibox!) but it was an interesting thing to do just to say I could.
Here’s a few screenshots taken on the iPad.. It’s a 1024×768 resolution so with warcraft running five times things are naturally a little squished:
So the diehard geeks will probably be asking “how?!” right about now. I actually used an iPad app called ‘Splashtop’ that lets me remotely control my desktop PC so, really, it’s sort of cheating :p
The result is the same though and I can even access my desktop through normal mobile network while I’m out. Granted the video quality is diminished but for small tasks (eg cancelling/posting auctions with the help of addons) it’s fantastic.
Any questions? I’d be happy to answer!