masteff

I wonder if the arrival of the RMAH has more people trying to sell in the GAH? While HC doesn't have an RMAH, the publicity of it would have more people thinking about the AH in general.

So I'm finally starting to find some pretty decent drops to sell in the AH. And after selling 20 or so items, I'm trying to figure out what my strategy is going to be. Here are some of my thoughts... Minimim bid - do you set it at 100 or do you set it at, say, 2000 which is roughly what the item might cost from a merchant? I think my strategy will be to roughly match the merchants. This means prices of 1000-5000 depending on how good the item really is. BUT, if I'm totally unsure of an item, then I'd rather it sell then not sell, so I'd set it at 200-500 and hope the auction does it's thing. Buyout price - How fast do you need money? Did you just lose several HC toons in a row and you're broke? Then set a reasonable buyout price. Sure, you might lose some profit, but a properly priced item will sell within hours rather than the standard 36 hour auction. Also keep in mind that you can only sell 10 items at a time, so if you have 100 items in your stash, then you need to move them faster, rather than at max profit. On the other hand, I had a helmet go for 18,000 when I thought it was only worth 8,000, so if you're not in a rush, let the auction work for you. Also keep in mind that some players want something they can use right now, not tomorrow, so they'll pay a little more for that convenience. When to put things in the AH - auctions are 36 hours. Many players play in the evening. This means that starting an auction in the morning means the 36 hours will expire in the evening when the most players are around to make last minute bids. My plan is to log in every morning before I leave for work and top off my 10 items. And actually, if you can manage to do it around noon, then your auction would expire around midnight the next day, which would be ideal for getting lots of last minute bidding. Don't get discouraged by slow bidding - if you don't set a buyout price, don't get discouraged by slow bidding. At 12am, I had only 1 bid on 10 items. By 7am, I'd sold 6 of 10. This is because many players want something they can use now, not tomorrow, so they'll look for items with shortest time remaining and/or buyout prices. Mule toons - yep, I had to go here - last night my stash was so full of stuff for myself or the AH that I had to create a mule toon to hold some of it. The nice thing in the AH is you can switch which toon your looking at, so you don't have to leave the AH to sell stuff off your mule. But keep in mind that if you're having to use mule toons to hold your overflow, then you need to use reasonable buyout prices to get that gear sold faster. So what's your pricing strategy?

The "join game" button for friends is broken. Hopefully they'll get a quick fix for this, but in the meantime, you'll have to use chat to ask for an invite from friends in order to join their game.

So in the previous patch (1.02c or something like that) you could join friends in higher Acts. I made use of this to go shopping. The quality of the goods offered by merchants increases with each step of the main quest line. So by taking an Act 2 toon into Acts 3 and 4, I was able to find some really nice stuff. Well, I happened to find a min level 20 chest armor with +vitality and 2 sockets!! Naturally I bought one for myself. And then I had a thought. If I buy it for 4250 from the merchant, I wonder what it will sell for in the HC AH? The answer is more than double my money. I bought 10 of them and will sell them one at a time over the next couple of days. So next time you're shopping, don't just think what you can use, think what you can resell in the AH at a profit!!

I found this thread on the D3 forum, Steve, which might answer some questions for you: Follower Compendium and FAQ

So I made an attempt at the "complete act 1 in an hour" acheivement and here are my thoughts on how it might be accomplished. 1) Your sole purpose is to advance the questline. No detours, no pit stops at merchants, no events or any other delays. If it's not a yellow or better drop, don't pick it up. 2) Make effective use of the town portal. Get back and forth as fast as possible to advance the questline. 3) Be high enough level to have a decent one hit attack, preferrably one that hits multiple enemies at once. I was using a late teens Barbarian and I was able to kill the Skele King in under 20 seconds (and earned that acheivement). 4) Run, run, run, rabbit, run. Run straight past enemies unless they are literally in your path and you can one hit them. (This gets a bit scary on the zig-zag with all the goat people after you get the staff to unlock the gate, but if you focus, you can run thru them all.) Which is why you should... 5) Buy the highest level health potion you can and equip it. Since you're running past enemies, you won't get any health globes. Just be careful of the cooldown. I actually had to stop and fight thru the zig-zag solely so I could get a health globe (yes, I failed to manage my potion cooldown). 6) I'd probably wait until my toon is at least in the 20's and trade other mods to get "+movement speed". With so much ground to cover, you simply have to run faster. And lastly, and this is were ya'll come in... 7) Have at least 2 other players with you to divide and conquer the random locations. Use town portal and player banners to regroup. In the cemetary, send one player to each of the three crypts to find the right one. In dungeons, everyone takes a different hallway to find the stairs and later the ghost prisoners. In the fields, split up to find the cave w/ the sword piece and later the cart with the staff. My first serious run took an hour and twenty minutes. To cut that by 25%, I see #6 & 7 as nearly essential. Any other thoughts on how to cut the time?

Wow, yesterday I realized you can completely skip the pillars, just open the next door and keep running! There is absolutely zero reason (except for the "kill all 4 in one blow" acheive) to even pause for the pillars! You don't even get bonus "massacre" experience from the spawned skeles! (Same goes for the ghost sword in the floor just before that, don't need to touch it. It's only purpose is storyline, which I admit is a nice touch.)

Nope, health globes and health globes only. Any experience or drops was from the skeles that come from the side corridors.

This is a "save others from wasting time on the same thing" post: Not sure if anyone besides Knuckles might remember how in Sacred I'd "farm" experience from goblins spawned by goblin shamans... In D3, I've been watching for monsters/objects that spawn minions (especially non-bosses who aren't hitting me in between spawns). Well, how about the 4 activated pillars before you reach the skele king? The pillars spawn skeles endlessly. The bad news is those spawns give zero experience points. I parked my monk just out of my range of the pillars and I killed wave after wave after wave of spawns and got zero experience points (the only experience points I did get were from the few skeles from the side hallways). Only thing I got from the spawned skeles was health globes. So focus on destroying the 4 pillars as fast as possible. I haven't double checked but one webpage says you get an achievement if you destroy all 4 at once. (Note: I haven't figured out if other spawned skeles are the same or not. The other two sources (skele sorcerors and a trick resplendent chest) I can think of only give a limited number of spawns, so I'd think those would give proper experience.)

I think it'd be a cool list. "Here's all the randoms that occur in Region: BlahBlahBlah" I'd replay certain regions more if I definitely knew it had a chance for a good payout.

So late last night, I was playing HC in the Public Games and someone comes in right when I reach a resplendent chest, so I tell him to come get his share of drops. We talk for a minute and he offers to sell me a couple of gems. Said he'd lost a level 32 and a level 25 toon in the last day and didn't have any gold left to buy gear. I said he should put in the AH w/ an instant buy price but he claimed gems sell slow. Well, coming from the Sacred "what's mine is yours" HC community, I simply gave him 5000 and went on. So my question is: I definitely dislike people spamming general chat with items but how do you all feel about players approaching you to sell something in a Public Game like that?

To discourage spammers and hackers, I'm tempted to be cryptic and say that my battle net id is my user name here plus the year that Coca-Cola was invented. EDIT: I removed my id. If anyone wants it, feel free to send me a PM.

Just reading some of the discussions/reviews, one question is how much electric usage you have in your house. It's unclear but more than one place comments that performance can be impacted by 1) electic usage throughout the house (not sure if it matters whether on the same or different circuits) and 2) noise from the overall grid outside the house (think summer and every house using fans and AC). Of course if you're not doing something high bandwidth, like streaming video from a PC to a TV, then as long as your data rate is higher than your modem rate, I don't know why you'd notice or care. (For instance, I talked myself out of gigabit networking because my DSL is such a tiny fraction of that speed.) I think it's an interesting technology. I'd certainly try it in a house that has issues w/ wifi. The cost of a powerline startup kit is less than having an electrician install one single point-to-point data line. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4695/handson-powerline-networking-how-well-or-not-are-latestgeneration-devices-working/3

Argh!! My first HC toon didn't even make it out of Act 1! I decided to take a break and exited while my toon was in the Highlands. Only problem is I'd just gotten the staff and had triggered a checkpoint, so I respawned in the middle of the Highlands which meant in the middle of mobs. Oh well, lesson learned.

The Templar is Dominic Keating, you might remember him from Star Trek: Enterprise http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0444098/ And the chick from Farscape and Stargate is the Mistress of Pain http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0085227/ The only other person I recognized in the list of actors is James Hong, who you might remember from "Big Trouble in Little China" among other things http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0393222/ Full cast list: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2186735/fullcredits#cast

Employment issues like this can get tricky as certain underlying legalities vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. My first question to you is how typical is weekend work there? And is there more than one shift? Which is to say, do any/many people work schedules other than what you're working right now? If 99.9% of people work Mon-Fri 8am-5pm, then you obviously expected that you would be too. If some big % of people work other schedules, then you'd have less grounds to expect to never be changed. Now, putting aside the poor handling of it by your manager and the associated annoyance, are you interested in working the different schedule? (don't put your answer in writing, don't put yourself on record, just consider the question) My approach might be the little white lie method to test how much wiggle-room you have... "gee, I have a regular activity on Sunday afternoons that I'd have to cancel. I'm wondering how critical this change is to achieving the desired results." (if they try to ask about the activity, just deflect them with "it's my personal time on my weekend, the important issue is my understanding why I should agree to cancel it."; they don't need to know it's playing Sacred ) Edit: also, how long is the change expected to last? If it's just, say 3 months, then you might "take one for the team" in hopes management will look more positively on you and it furthers your long-term career.

At first I was going to say it's the larger number of sellers. But it's a bit more complicated than that. Whether you have 100 or 100,000 players, you still have an equal number of potential buyers and sellers. The underlying reason is the very natures of SC and HC. In SC, death has a low absolute "cost". Thus, your statistically average player is only willing to spend a certain amount to avoid death. This means that demand is lower in SC than in HC. And not dying means every single player survives to exit the game and enter the AH with their gear intact, increasing supply. Lower demand with higher supply results in lower average pricing. In HC, death has a very high "cost". This has 3 results. 1) Players hoard good gear for themselves (this reduces supply). 2) Players die with good gear on them before they can get to the AH (this reduces supply). And 3) Player covet good gear and will pay more (think of it as insurance against an absolute loss) (this increases demand). Reduced supply with increased demand means higher prices. So, your strategy for making money in HC should be to farm drops, making sure to off-load good drops immediately. Is the stash persistent between toons in HC? If so then off-load to your stash. Otherwise, exit and off-load directly to the AH.

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/gritty-game-star-wars-1313-fans-buzzing-165432419.html (I will note that some of us remember playing Dark Forces which was a first person shooter that did not have "the force" in it, so SW1313 is sort of a step back to that)

This article might be helpful: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-gaming-performance,2991.html And this article says that "write endurance" is becoming less of a factor with SSDs: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html Of course a few articles suggested that as PCs come with ever increasing amount of RAM, the swap file will be less and less important... of course software will then catch up and make use of it and more. And for gaming, keep in mind the elite graphics for Sacred 2 took like 7GB of space, that's a lot of data to get moved around so every performance edge is a plus. I remember Crysis was designed for hardware that was barely on the market yet and people were building ridiculous gaming rigs with quad-disk raid and such. (It appears from at least one interview article that they learned their lesson for Crysis 2... Crysis lost out on sales because not everyone can buy a new rig just to play the latest game. Of course it did make them THE graphics benchmark for several years.)

As some folks say around here: a bad day fishing/camping/hunting is still better than a good day working Enjoy your break!

How tragic! I hadn't realized how common such refrigerators are in campers until I read up on them just now. Must be the same principal behind the giant ice machine that Harrison Ford made in the jungle in the movie "The Mosquito Coast". Good points, wolfie. Another thought, Gogo, is how much content does your freezer have in it? If it's pretty empty, you might keep a couple of ice packs to help the temperature stay more stable (a little thawing on more items vs a lot of thawing on one). They actually recommend that for both compartments. A couple jugs of water can make great heat sinks. Yep, finally found a middle of the line fridge with the right dimensions. It's actually about an inch smaller on both sides and the top, but my friend who does commercial refrigeration said that's a good thing because now it has space to breathe and will hopefully last longer. And yes, the beer is properly cold!

Can you tell that I'm a bachelor that I'm just finally getting my fridge replaced? (I mainly miss having milk and deli meat. I only messed up once and then had to store food in the fridge at work.) So I built a small platform from 2x4's and plywood. It worked like a charm. About two weeks ago, a friend who does commecial refrigeration came and tested the compressor. It was completely locked up. This pic shows the fridge on the platform. Behind my friend's head, you can see the large opening that the fridge rolled out of.

When some new hardware was bought at work, I managed to snag a 22" Dell Ultrasharp. And I absolutely agree about how great the image is. I got a nice 24" Asus last fall for home, and it's good, but still a step below the Ultrasharp.

On my recent trip to London, one of the tour guides said the London Eye ferris wheel does not have a working car #13 because so many people refused to ride in it. This news article states the same: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-1256584/London-Eye-celebrates-tenth-birthday-iconic-landmark.html In place of the 13th car, the Eye has one that is simply a frame w/ no glass (I presume the frame's weight is needed to counterbalance the wheel).

Wow, talk about over the top privacy invasion for a browser game. They basically want your entire FB content in exchange for playing their game.