Posts with tag trading

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Ideas for unique guild concepts are hard to come by. This week, a guild leader who thought she had a winning formula finds out that no one is interested. Let's look at what she came up with and how we can rework her ideas to entice more recruits.

I have recently transferred from Nazgrel to the RP server of Moon Guard. I did this with a certain goal in mind, to establish an all Goblin Trade Guild. I have hit a crucial snag however and can't seem to generate any interest in my Guild idea. One major selling point of my Trade Guild would be that we would hold a monthly [Bazaar] in which other Guilds would be encouraged to join in and sell their wares along with us. Using [Gryphonheart Items] we would create an item catalog and haggle over prices. I was hoping that this would help revitalize the role play community. Nothing I have tried has worked to recruit Any suggestions?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail!

I walk a strange line. There are two distinct extremes in the readers of this column: those who feel I shouldn't be telling people their "secrets" about how to make gold, and those who believe that anyone who uses the auction house to make gold is somehow bad (in skill or character -- I get both). While the majority of readers are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between these extremes, let's look at the arguments.

Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil Berntsen takes a short break from trying to build a raiding guild on US Drenden-A to write up a guide that will help you achieve the goal of acquiring 214,748 gold, 36 silver and 48 copper. Well, technically that's just a symbolic milestone. The goal is making gold, no matter how much you have or how much you want. Got feedback, questions or hate mail? Email Basil!

This game is constantly changing. Every new patch, Blizzard delivers new content, new rules and new interfaces. We've seen some major quality of life improvements in the auction house of late, and these are continuing. The latest one (which is still in beta) is that the mobile armory now lets you trade on the AH from anywhere using either an app on an iPhone/iPod touch or your browser.

Right now, for testing purposes, we're limited to 25 actions a day (purchases, bids, auctions), but we can clear out our mail! To be honest, that's the killer feature for me. I spend an inordinate amount of time clearing out my mail. The majority of my profits in, say, vellums will come from sales of singles. I list stacks of all sizes, but the singles are what sell best. On my mid-range population server, I can easily sell 200 of these a day, and that adds up to a lot of time watching my mailbox empty.

With the impending switch to necessary Battle.net accounts, Blizzard has an opportunity to create and extremely secure and hardened gaming community. They can do this by waving a magic wand, angering a certain amount of their customer base, and eliminating in one swoop nearly all, if not all, account hacks.

Blizzard can make authenticators a mandatory feature on all Battle.net accounts.

There are many pros and cons such a move would bring about. Let's examine the cons first since everyone likes to complain about stuff. The largest con would be that people would be required to have a physical piece of equipment specific to WoW and other Blizzard games. Some people would obviously not be okay with this and cancel their subscription, and others would not understand how to push a button and punch in numbers (I'm not kidding). There would be a large cry from people around the net, particularly people who enjoy scamming others out of gold and their accounts, but those are easily enough ignored.

Well, The9 is going down in flames, but if you're looking to make some money in the stock market lately, you could do like BRK and buy some stock in Activision-Blizzard. Goldman Sachs has upgraded ATVI to "buy," and even marked them out as a "conviction buy" -- while the stock price is almost $11 right now (it jumped up about .75 on this news this morning), GS says it's headed to $14 eventually. "Conviction buy" just means that the wily traders at Goldman Sachs expect the stock to outperform in the future -- Activision is already saying it will do well, but GS thinks it'll do even better.

Medievaldragon over at WorldofWar.net points out that there may still be trouble ahead: while Blizzard has gone with Netease for their service in China, they still have to make it past the Chinese government's approval process, and there may actually be service outages if things aren't approved quickly. But that won't affect Activision's business very much, and given that the company still has a bright future (even in a harsh economy), picking up a few shares is probably a relatively good investment.

Please note: I am not a financial expert, and none of this should be taken as serious financial advice. You invest in the stock market and any other financial institution at your own risk. If you're getting stock tips from WoW Insider, it's probably better to keep your money in your pocket. AH tips, on the other hand...

Penny Arcade, those funny WoW comic guys, are giving away a metric ton of loot, via a contest, that they've gotten for the WoW Trading Card Game. Things that they're giving away include "four boxes of boosters, tournament playmats, a Winterveil collector's box, deckboxes, sleeves, two binders, three raid decks, three starter decks, and one of these awesome dice chest things." That's a ton of stuff to be handing out. But it gets better.

They're also handing out an X-51 Nether-Rocket card to each winner. You can get your very own Rocket Mount!

Three lucky winners will be quite happy. What's the contest they're holding? From the site: "you must write a short story, set in World of Warcraft, and this story must be precisely ten words long." It's so simple and so easy you just have to chuckle. Head on over to their site for more information on how to enter the contest.

Of course, you'll have to go up against a certain WoW Insider writer on this one, since I've already submitted my story: "A casual paladin casually walks up and one shots Illidan."

Good luck!

An interesting hypothetical question came up in guild chat recently. When new to WoW, you have to make a decision that can persist for months -- the decision whether to go Horde or Alliance. I've met players who frequently switch sides, and others who have never deserted the faction they chose when they first ran the game.

What if you could switch? Trade in a level 60 of one faction for an equivalent of another? Would you do it, and why?

I'm not sure that I would; I personally enjoy seeing new scenery from both sides, levelling up through both factions. I know some players who role-play would love to, for example, turn a human into one of the Forsaken, but somehow I don't think it's a game feature that's ever going to happen.