Alternative World

The alternative world I chose to explore was Dungeons and Dragons Online. I chose this because I don't really know much about Dungeons and Dragons, though I do know they got much of the inspiration for their ideas from Tolken, and Blizzard got many of their ideas from Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to experience WoW's grandfather, even if it wasn't traditional D&D. I know one of the primary goals was to get past the newbie area and explore elsewhere, but true to its namesake, leveling is very, very slow.

First impressions were not terribly positive. I have limited experience with any MMO other than WoW, save for a few hours jaunt into Guild Wars and feeling brave enough one to install the EVE Online demo - that didn't last long, I opened the title screen, decided it wasn't worth the time or effort, and uninstalled it. Basic UI and the way the basic gameplay handled though was just like WoW - granted, I do mean using WASD to move, mouse to look around, and the number keys to use spells. Anything that was too much a derivative from that would probably be very clumsy, I think.

I played as a Warforged monk - pretty much a robot that punches and kicks things, occasionally I could use a staff as well. It sounds a lot more awesome than it actually is. Race means a lot more in Dungeons and Dragons online than it does it in WoW; in WoW the primary reason to pick a race is aesthetics. While all races have racial abilities, they aren't something anyone relies on by a long shot, they're more like little extra bonus spells if anything - especially since a lot of them eventually scale so badly they're useless, like the Blood Elf and Dranei abilities. The race I chose (normally a race you have to buy extra, but I borrowed a friend's account) was immune to many things that non - robots are susceptible to, like drowning, poison, sleep, paralysis. On the downside, normal healing spells didn't help much, but the 'repair' skill did. Other classes are traditional D&D fare, dark elves, dwarves, humans, elves, and halflings - all lifted from Tolken, but that's not really the point.

I was honestly hoping to see more of the origin of some parts of WoW, but like I said I didn't get that far into it. I probably should have also played a more tradition race / class, like a human mage or a dwarven warrior, but I really wanted to be a robot. With my limited experience as a rogue / druid in WoW, I can say the combat felt similar, as a high - dps melee class limited by the weapons it can use. DDO - or at least the starting city, is very small. I got the impression everyone starts there, and virtually all fighting / questing seems to be instances. My first quest and venture into the game was to go into a cellar and kill rats. The originality of this was astounding, I could barely contain my enthusiasm. I partied with some random person to see what the party system is like - you can still see the hp and mana off your party members like WoW, so that's nothing new. Granted, anything different would be pretty dumb. The quest was actually surprisingly difficult - I probably could have soloed it if I had a better idea what I was doing, but I turned off the tutorial out of habit and to also learn the hard way. I started with more abilities - I don't really want to call them spells, but that is pretty much what they are - than you do in WoW, and not being familiar with how to play a monk I basically button mashed and hoped I didn't die - which I didn't.

Graphically, the game also looks radically different. WoW is brightly colored and cartoonish, with DDO is all about the rust, brown, and grey. Overall, I think WoW takes itself significantly less seriously, while DDO is meant to appeal to the tabletop players who are, on average, more hard core than the average WoW player.

/hug Adventures

For the /hug assignment - detailed here, I teamed up with a level 33 cat druid who goes by the name of Lkt, Tony in real life. We played at roughly similar times - 10 pm to 2 am most weeknights, and agreed to idle in Vent if we were playing to make it easier to find each other. We found Arathi Highlands to be the most convenient place to meet, with Tony already have the flight path and Tarren Mill being relatively close. We met at the wall. Apparently, we had one of the easiest times meeting, some people I talked to later took a half hour or longer to find each other. I ran to the Horde outpost Hammerfall to get the flight path; after which we decided to go kill some trolls straight south of it. It was relatively late server time, so I didn't expect to run into many people - one of the advantages of playing on an east coast server. Just in case, I made a couple of macros, one beseeching fellow Horde to not kill Lkt, as he is a friend, another that could be spammed and would rotate between /hug, /welcome, /wave, /hello and /cry. Surprisingly, I only needed each once.

The only Horde encounter we had was outside of a cave full of two types of trolls Tony needed to kill for a quest that weren't found anywhere else. As we were running out after a bad pull, we ran into a shaman and a mage. They were surprisingly amicable, and cheerfully left us alone, as seen here:

Not a great screen shot I know, but I didn't think about it until several seconds after they ran off to kill other trolls, and had to chase them down to at least prove we saw them. Afterwards, we continued killing trolls until Tony finished, and we were about to leave - until a paladin decided to get up in our business. He was a level higher than me, and though I probably could have taken him - I used my heart wrenching macro to try to convince him that I was a friendly, nice undead priest. (It's true, I'm totally a care bear, the affectionate term for a player who doesn't find great joy in tracking down and ganking member of the opposing faction. I'll even help them given a chance.) Tony tried telling the paladin that I was his friend, and I was helping him with quests. According to Tony, the paladin said little more than 'No f*** her, she's f***ing Horde!' Sadly I forgot to get a screen shot, though everything he yelled would have looked something like 'heth awolk garrrosh' or whatever. Luckily, he found camping my corpse boring and wandered off after my first and only death.

Afterwards, we killed some raptors together, I needed them for a quest. As always, the baffling part is I needed eyes, but it was something like a 30% drop rate. The age - old MMO question gets asked: how are all of these raptors blind yet they manage to find and kill me?

In either case, I had a lot of fun. It was a little annoying partying with someone and only getting half of the XP since we took turns - at a certain points Tony needs more drops off of the trolls than I did, so I let him have at it. The fact that the members of the Horde we ran into were willing to leave us along is probably because of the severe ratio imbalance of the two factions; the paladin had probably suffered plenty at the hands of bored death knights and rogues, while at best what the horde has is Justinblade. Sadly, because of the pretty heavy hit to XP and the inability to do instances, I would not call this a viable leveling strategy most of the time.

Auction House Fun Part 2: Actually Selling

Alright, now you have your two gathering professions. What does this have to do with the Auction House? Well, several things. First of all, level 80s are lazy. Really lazy. Lazy enough that when they switch professions there is no way that they are going to farm up their skill. After a year or longer of playing, many of them have quite a bit of cash laying around, and they're perfectly willing to drop what seems like a large amount of cash on low level items.

Also, on older, more established servers, there aren't too many new players; most of the low level characters running around are usually alts. As a result, they also have large amounts of cash and are less than inclined to farm up skills as opposed to just trying to power level as quickly as they can. Therefore, a lower player actively trying to level up skinning, herbalism, and mining has a valuable resource. Level 80s don't want to spend time on alts gathering items while a lower level is going to do that anyway; so it is not a waste of time for the lower level.

Anyway, enough about the justification, it's time to take it to the Auction House. A general rule of thumb is do not sell incomplete stacks of any item, unless it is extremely rare and / or valuable, like gem stones. Otherwise, no one is going to waste time even looking at a incomplete stack of eighteen Light Leather. (On a side note, as a beginning skinner I've noticed Ruined Leather Scraps almost never sell; best to vendor, smash, or give to a leather working friend. If they do sell it is never for very much, since technically it is a half - stack of Light Leather.) Gems can be the exception to the rule, in general people don't need twenty moss agates. Usually stacks around four or five sell well.

An important thing to do before selling is checking the prices of the other same items for sale - this particular part will deal with production items, like herbs and leather. If prices are wildly fluctuating - like a stack of Peacebloom going for 2g, 5g 10g, 25g, and the odd weirdo that posts it for 100g - I recommend not selling. Look for times when most of the stacks - there will always be very overpriced stacks by ambitious people not really looking at the auction system - an undersell, only by a little. AddOns like Auctioneer help keep track of the average price of what items are going for, though I've yet to find a decent AddOn that consistently shows the overall average.

If a stack of , say, Peacebloom again is going for a bid of 3g 50s and buyout is 5g, the best was to sell it is first make the bid very cheap - in this case, make it go for around 1g. The bid amount should be cheap because then it shows up higher in the list, making it more likely your item will sell sooner. People very rarely just bid on items, especially for crafting items which they normally need right away, and they're more willing to spring for the extra buyout cost because of its instant delivery. The buyout for this example should be something like 4g 84 s. Rounding up, it is also nearly 5g in cost. But, the 84s makes it not quite close enough to 5g that it makes it seem like a better deal. Keeping it in the 90's does not work as well in my opinion, and a loss of less than 10s is negligible, especially if your item sells on a consistent basis.

This is a strategy I've used the entire time, and the only time I've had trouble with it is when I'm attempting to sell rare times like Arthas's Tears, because there is rarely any examples of the item available to compare costs, let alone entire stacks. I pretty much go for what I think is a silly buyout cost to 'test' what people are willing to pay - let's just say inscripters and alchemists must be desperate to get Arthas's Tears.