gathering posts

Go out and steal oil in Planet Calypso's 10.1 update

by Seraphina Brennan Oct 9th 2009 at 6:30PM

Filed under: At a glance, Sci-fi, Entropia Universe, Economy, Game mechanics, Patches, PvP

In a move to make our virtual lives eerily more like our real ones, the First Planet Company has re-opened the oil pumping station on Planet Calypso with patch 10.1, offering all players the chance to make a quick profit by grabbing oil from the pump -- if you can make it out alive, of course.

The pumping station is not only in the middle of the wasteland, but it's also surrounded by angry NPCs (the wastelanders) and it's right in the middle of an open PvP area. Sure, you can make a tidy profit by grabbing oil from the station, but you have to be efficient and sneaky about it. Otherwise, you'll just end up with a bullet in your back and your blood mixed with the oil.

Tags: dung, first-planet-company, fruit, gathering, mindforce, oil-pump, patch-10.1, ped, planet-calypso, rocks, teleportation, wasteland

Why you should be playing Runes of Magic: Open Crafting

by Shawn Schuster Jan 30th 2009 at 4:00PM

Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, Game mechanics, Guides, New titles, Crafting, Professions, Player Housing, Free-to-play, Massively meta, Academic, Education, Runes of Magic, Why You Should Be Playing

"Why you should be playing ..." is a freeform column from Massively.com intended to inform you about our favorite parts of our favorite games. We want you to know why we're playing them, so you can know what to play.

Runes of Magic is enjoying some well-deserved attention lately as it's wrapping up its open beta and preparing for a launch in March. To offer some more incentive for interested gamers to check out the game, we figured we'd let you in on a little secret: this game is awesome! How awesome? Although this would be a 10,000-word essay if that question were to be answered entirely, we're going to give you some information on just one of our favorite features of the game: open crafting professions.

What exactly is open crafting? It's a crafting system with no restrictions and no limits. The crafting profession system in Runes of Magic is the gathering and manufacturing of materials to create in-game items. It's the process of creating these items with special recipes and selling them on the Auction Hall. This is something we're accustomed to in most of our favorite big-name MMOs, but in RoM, you can take all crafting and gathering professions right from the start.

Tags: crafting, featured, frogster, frogster-interactive, gathering, joystiqfeatures, professions, rom, runes-of-magic

Making/Money: Hurry Up and Wait

by Alexis Kassan Jul 24th 2008 at 5:00PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Economy, Crafting, Making/Money

It took a few weeks, but I finally made it to level 20 in Age of Conan. It was an intense time getting through quest after quest, killing random mobs, and starting to mark my map with waypoints in anticipation. Though the levels did seem to go quickly, they just could not be fast enough for me as I was trying to get to... resource gathering.

Yes, resource gathering is that important. It's the first look you get at the crafting system and a great opportunity to start hoarding money for later use (like for purchasing the lowest level horse in AoC, which costs a seeming fortune at 75 silver). That's especially true of games that put level minimums on skills as is seen in both AoC and World of Warcraft.

But AoC takes a new tack in the way that they approach leveling crafts. Keep reading as I take a look at what the pros and cons of this new system are for the crafting system and the economy overall.

Tags: age-of-conan, crafting, featured, gathering, joystiqfeatures, resources, world-of-warcraft

Crafting, what is it good for?

by Chris Chester Jun 20th 2008 at 7:00AM

Filed under: Age of Conan, MMO industry, New titles, Crafting, Professions, Warhammer Online, Opinion, Tabula Rasa

Crafting in MMOs is a complex and widely varying thing. While most games include crafting in some form or another, it doesn't seem like there's much of a consensus on what purpose crafting is supposed to serve, and similar systems are often received radically differently depending on the title in question. Brian Green of Psychochild has had crafting on the brain recently and simplified the perceived goals of crafting into three areas (which I have further simplified): fun, utility, and money sink. His analysis is pretty in-depth, but he stops short of offering his own version of a crafting system, which we would have liked to have heard.

It's interesting that something as valuable to a rewarding MMO experience as crafting is so routinely put on the back-burner. Age of Conan and Tabula Rasa are both glaring examples of recent releases whose crafting systems are either incomplete or mostly useless as they exist in the game. We'll be interested to see whether Warhammer Online's crafting system will be as interesting as it seemed when it was explained to us, or whether it will join the ever-growing pile of time wasting duds.

Tags: age-of-conan, brian-green, crafting, gathering, professions, psychochild, tabula-rasa, warhammer-online

Making/Money: Flawed by Design

by Alexis Kassan May 18th 2008 at 9:00AM

Filed under: Lord of the Rings Online, Economy, Crafting, Player Housing, Making/Money

Last week your intrepid blogger was caught up in the other kind of beta testing - a Statistics final. Yeah, that was a bad pun. Oh well. Back to the money talk!

In the last column, we discussed value chains and how, in World of Warcraft, they work when dealing with NPCs but not the auction house. Today we are looking at another game and how it deals with value chains to ensure that they do not work when crafting by NPC purchases/sales alone.

Lord of the Rings Online offers players vocations - sets of three linked professions that cannot be chosen by themselves. In any given vocation, there is usually one "useful" gathering profession which supports one of the craft professions in the set and another, unsupported, profession. In other words, vocations are structured to enforce cooperation and trade between players by ensuring that no one can gather all the raw materials they will require to level their craft. But that doesn't mean that the supported profession is good to go from the start.

Tags: crafting, crafts, economy, featured, gathering, housing, ingredients, lord-of-the-rings-online, loss, making-money, npcs, professions, profit, recipes, vendors, vocation

Making/Money: My value chains are broken

by Alexis Kassan Apr 27th 2008 at 10:30AM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Economy, Crafting, Professions, Making/Money

There's a person out there who claims that all they need to know about business can be learned from World of Warcraft. A fine sentiment, to be sure, but I take issue with its accuracy. Today we are discussing the first of their eleven business topics: value chains – and why they don't work.

In brief, value chain analysis states that for any good requiring multiple stages of production (meaning you don't just rip it out of your backyard and eat it), value is added at each level of refinement. Therefore the price should increase along its path to becoming a finalized product.

Tags: auction, auction-house, blacksmithing, crafted-items, crafting, debate, economics, economy, featured, gathering, goods, materials, money, production, professions, value, value-chains, world-of-warcraft

SOE promotes player-run events

by Shawn Schuster Apr 11th 2008 at 9:00PM

Filed under: Contests, Events, in-game, Grouping

Socialization is the key ingredient in any MMO, I think we can all agree with that. So why is it we don't hear about more in-game events run by the players in our favorite MMOs? Everquest's Community Manager Lydia Pope has recently made a plea for the players of any SOE game to advertise for their special events and let the world know about them. She also states that if the SOE community runs more events, SOE will find new ways of supporting them. This includes SOE's help in spreading the word for you, and even the chance for someone at SOE to attend these gatherings.

If you're interested in doing something like this, but you're wondering what type of event to do, there are many fine examples cited. For example, you could create a scavenger hunt across a wide area of your favorite game map, or hold a performance where players can act out their favorite scene from a play. The possibilities are almost limitless, but no matter what you decide, be sure to check out the EQ guide entitled Tips on Player-Run Events. As with any MMO, be sure to also contact the appropriate community manager for more information or advice on running your very own event.

Tags: community, events, everquest, everquest-2, gathering, in-game-event, performance, scavenger hunt, ScavengerHunt, soe, sony-online-entertainment, swg