Category Archives: General

2 1/2 months after Diablo 3′s launch

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Muten left me a comment asking what had happened to the crew and the blog. Perfect timing. Let’s look back at what has happened, what we achieved, what we didn’t achieve and what we’re planning for the future. Feel free to join me. ;)

I – The Crew

I love movies that give you a small glimpse of what eventually happens to the characters. Jane married and finally got in touch with her mom again, Jimmy combined his love for space with his Lego collection and shot himself to Titan and Jeremy joined a Hippie commune in Iowa. So what has happened to the crew.

Thuata

Our Demon Huntress got a job at a local don’t-ask-me-what-exactly-they-do company. She’s working nine to five during the week and almost completely stopped playing Diablo 3. What she still does though, is crafting and selling gems – and writing about it.

Mike

We had problems integrating Mike from the get go. Not only the fact, that he wasn’t on-site, but also his irregular working schedule made it hard to include him in our team. Add an unforeseen family emergency to that and you get the reasons why I haven’t heard from him in weeks. Sometimes priorities simply shift.

Rob

Rob’s enthusiasm declined visibly once our hardcore two-week perma gaming ended. With his final exams on the horizon, his barb giving him a hard time in Inferno and the game simply not being what he had hoped for, he had to divide his time between work and gaming. Not to mention Dota 2, which somehow seems to be a lot better at grabbing and holding its player’s attention than Diablo 3 does at this time.

Cash and Saphirus – aka “The two Daniels”

That leaves Saphirus and me – which isn’t all that bad. We still take Diablo 3 serious. While he focuses on farming, I keep an eye on the auction house and creating a baseline income from D3. I really enjoy working with Saphirus. He’s a relaxed, hard-working dude and he keeps me grounded (and working).

II – Making money

The question I get asked the most is: “Can you really make money with Diablo 3?” My answer usually is quite cryptic, so this time I’ll try to not bullshit you. Yes. Yes, you can. Is it enough to live from? It might be. Some day. And it is – for some people. But it’s not for us. At least not yet. So why not?

The first few weeks

The time after Diablo 3′s launch was dominated by black (or grey?) market sales. Selling Softcore Gold, selling Hardcore Gold, selling Diablo 3 weapons through ebay. Stuff like that. The real money auction house wasn’t live yet and people made a killing selling to the needy. There’re stories on the net about people making hundreds and thousands of bucks.

We didn’t. Why? Cause that wasn’t how we wanted to play it. We’ve worked in the industry for a few years and we both didn’t feel good about breaking the rules. Well almost. I had someone on IRC asking if anybody was selling gold and I sold him a million for 20 bucks. I felt dirty afterwards. Our business is about making money – legit. That might not be the easiest and most lucrative way, but we believe it’s the right one.

After RMAH

Since the RMAH got released we’ve been working on ways to constantly create income. Instead of doing risky high value flips, we settled on sure flips. Instead of selling all our gems or gold, when the commodity and gold markets opened, we settled on staying liquid. We experimented a bit with crafting, lost a little money here and there, spent some money on upgrading our characters to make farming more lucrative. Not counting the equipment we’re wearing and some high value items we still have on stash, we’re sitting at roughly 400 bucks. That’s not a lot, but it’s a start.

III – The future

After chasing after the golden goose for a while, we realized we wouldn’t find it. At least not right now. We needed another baseline. An item that we’d be able to convert to cash. One we’d be able to calculate with. We found gold. At a conversion rate of 0.25€ per 100k (before “taxes”) it’s not awesome, but reliable. We also started trading on the US market. It seems more active than the European one. We’ll see.

The next few weeks I’ll try to get into a routine. Auction house checks, Blogging, Networking, create KPIs, see what happens – and tell you about it. :)

Taking the weekend off from Diablo 3

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We managed to reach our week one goal of making fifty Euro with Diablo 3 and the real money auction house and decided to give ourselves a little time off from work. When you mix playing computer games and trying to set up a startup business the lines between work and spare time can easily blur. So we thought it’d be important to just stay off the game for a while and refuel our power cells.

Thuata flew over to Austria to visit her family and Triple, Sapphirus and me decided to chill and just enjoy ourselves – playing other games. Luckily my man Martin was able to get me one of those shiny Dota 2 invites, so me and Triple spent most of the last two days (and nights) pwning noobs. Sapphirus mostly spied on foreign nations and spread his new-found religion known as “Hentaiism” throughout the known world in CIV 5 – Gods & Kings.

Our goal for week two is to make 75€ with Diablo 3. After we pretty much emptied what we had stashed item wise in the last few weeks, we’re looking into a few possibilities to make that happen. We’re taking it slow, aiming for a gold to money conversion rate somewhere along the lines of one buck per hundred thousand gold, going for five Euro range items. I’ll let you know how that works out.

Balancing Diablo 3

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I managed to crack the 60k DPS on my wizard. Yay. Well – that was two days ago. Today was patch day and Blizzard implemented the changes to increased attack speed on items. So uhm… yeah! I managed to crack the 40k DPS today!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m totally for balancing. And I can see the upside of today’s changes  in the long run. Buffing multiplayer can only lead to more people playing with their friends and that will most definitely lead to people sticking around longer. And IAS – well yeah. It was totally imbalanced. The damage gain from it stood in no comparison to the one you could get from other stuff. Progression felt more “gimmicky” and less based on actually killing stuff and progressing step by step. But seeing your damage drop to two thirds of what it was just hurts. I’m sure it’ll go by though.

Now – a change i really love is the whole “five times the old repair bill” thingy. Oh. You pay stupid amounts of gold cause you keep dying while trying to progress?  Bohoo. Try getting better gear, try finding a few friends to play with, go back to content that doesn’t own your ass clockwise, stop watching porn while you’re playing and concentrate, optimize your build – and grow a pair. Yes it hurts – but it’s a good pain. Like the one you get from working out all evening (or more than five minutes in my case). There are many ways to avoid dying. Try them.

Being serious about life – and Diablo 3

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So it’s taken me about a month to settle in. With my move from Ireland to Germany, finding an apartment, buying furniture, getting everything set up and so on it’s been a crazy time. I was pretty fascinated how easily – after I spent the last year on changing many different things about my life – I fell back into old habits. I picked up smoking again, I went back to drinking caffeine and sugar-ey drinks, my sleep cycle is anything but healthy and I haven’t seen the gym for about two months. Seems like it’s easy to fall back into old patterns, once your mind is occupied with other things. But hey – I’m only human, right? No real excuse though, I feel terrible. So let’s do something against that. Starting today – in addition to my Diablo 3 endeavours – I’ll work on disabling auto-pilot and go back to a more organized and healthy life and working day. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Another big part is of course Diablo 3. The RMAH opened its gates a few days ago and so far we sold some stuff. Nothing major though. And nothing that might become a regular stream of income. Have to work on that. Flipping items on the gold auction house has become harder, too. Now with everyone and their grandma trying to convert their virtual currency to hard cash. Still waiting for an inspiration there. Almost through Act 3 Inferno by now. Managed to get to Siegebreaker yesterday with 5 active Nephalem Valor buffs. Trying to put my work day into a more “organized” form. Started today with creating “blogging hour” from 2pm to 3pm. Will sit down every day and write about whatever I have on my mind. Create the habit of just writing (no matter how bad it is).

D3Inc – Three weeks after release

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It’s been a little more than three weeks since Diablo 3 got released – and we’re on our way to set up a good baseline for when the real money auction house comes live (hopefully) next week. So – what have we been up to?

Progression

Aside from leveling to 60 within the first week we’ve progressed slow but constantly. As one of our members is only available during the weekends we’ve moved Inferno progression to those times and spent our weeks farming content we’ve already mastered, building up our regular, magicfind and goldfind equipment. While we were doing mostly Act 1 Jailer/Butcher runs two weeks ago, we switched to Act 2 Maghda and Kulle/Belial runs last week. During this weekend we plan to progress through Act 3 and hopefully finish it. Our focus here was not to die our way from quest to quest, but to actually tackle the various champion and rare packs and be able to kill those.

Thuata

Our female crew member spent most of her time buying raw materials and crafting various items – selling them with big success. With commodities back online competition has been rough the last few days and so she started researching the gem market and flipping gems with increasing success.

Triple

Being one of our part-time members, he played from home most of the week. He’s been doing some testing on Nightmare gold runs, tinkering around with +gold find and pickup range equip. In his free time he likes to do solo Belial runs and crying for help once he realizes that the Lord of Lies eats melees for breakfast.

Saphirus

I have an incredible amount of respect for people who are able to switch off their brains and spend the day doing repetitive work. Saphirus is one of those guys. Watching reruns of his favourite TV shows he spent the last week doing one champ/boss run after another and found us a lot of set items and legendaries.

Mike

Being the only one who has a full-time job and isn’t on site, it has been hard to integrate Mike into our routine. He managed to get to 60 about a week ago and has equipped his witch doctor since. Hopefully we’ll find a smart way to merge him into our crew more in the next few weeks.

cash

I’ve spent the last week with my new best friends – spreadsheets. I’ve tracked market movements on specific markets and made most of my money doing big-ticket flips. I’m excited to see how the real money auction house will influence the markets I’m playing at the moment. For next week I plan on getting an overview over the weapon market and start flipping mid to high dps weapons.

What have you been doing? Any specific markets you’re playing? Found a super rare item? Leave me a comment. ;)

D3INC – Day 9

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We’re slowly settling into a more normal rhythm. Have a good weekend ahead of us. I’ll go watch a football game and meet with some friends, Daniel’s gonna chill out at a wedding, Caroline will go shopping and Rob will take some time to unwind at his apartment. I think, after being stuck with each other for such a long time, we all are looking forward to some time alone. I hope we’ll get back fully recharged and with new energy.

Diablo 3 real money auction house release is six days away. They’ve been tinkering here and there, but I’m still worried about the general state of the auction house and not fully sure if we’ll be able to carve our niche. With the prices dropping like crazy everywhere around, it looks like supply is far higher than demand. Maybe this’ll change, now that we get into regions that take far more dedication than just clicking your way through a few dungeons. We got through Act 1 Inferno today. Butcher was a serious bitch, but we had some nice progression and were able to beat him after changing some skills and finding our rhythm. Act 2 was… deadly. We got owned hard by the first mobs we met – and each one afterwards. Went back to Act 1 and it gets easier and easier with every piece of gear we get (duh!). Hopefully we’ll be able to switch to MF soon to get some more upgrades before we hit Act 2 Inferno again.

Plans for the next week:

- Do some more group farming tomorrow morning

- Say goodbye to the guys and do some solo farming

- More solo farming, a few blog posts, etc. on Friday/Saturday

- Weekend on Sunday/Monday

- Get the gang together again on Tuesday and maybe tackle Act 2 by Friday

So yeah. Blog posts. Was thinking about some FAQ style newbie guides, detailed character focused things, opinion pieces on the auction house and maybe a few zone breakdowns for Act 3 / Act 4 Hell and Inferno Act 1. Mob types, tactics, etc. What do you guys think? The comment section is waiting.

D3INC – Day 8

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So apparently there’s a reason a regular work week just covers five days and lets you relax for two days. After about a week of spending almost every single minute with Diablo 3, I suffered a mild burnout today. Come Thursday two of my crew members will be out-of-town for a few days and I guess I’ll use the time to recharge my batteries, clean up our apartments and get some well deserved “me time”. Doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything though.

- Been reading up on strategies, builds and what people are thinking at the moment

- Went a little further into Inferno. Especially liking the “Weeping Hollow” and “Fields of Misery”. Nice variation of rares, champs, events and dungeons and a lot of space to kite and evade your enemies.

- Managed to crack the 20k dps, although I get two shot by everyone and their grandma now

- Sold some more stuff, did some sales analysis, got a few million gold by now

Liking the group dynamics of our little crew. Spending more than a week in one apartment could’ve been stressful, but somehow we complement each other. Still happy to get some time away from them and have our apartment for ourselves for a few days though.

How’s your past week been? Are you playing with others or solo? Feel free to leave me a comment.

D3INC – Day 7

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After I’ve been getting more and more hits every day since the start of this blog, I managed to crack the thousand daily views today. Me likey. In game it’s been slow but successful. Here’s the list:

- had a relaxed start with one of our crew missing

- did some solo farming

- started group farming Hell Act 4 for items, got bored and went to get our asses kicked on Inferno

- developed some good tactics and managed to keep “Nephalem Valor” going, had a few nice drops

- got a cheap set recipe, enabling us to get rid of all those Normal essences we bought a few days ago, speculating they’d go up in price again. Steady seller.

- Harvest Moons are still selling for some profit

- managed to find a workaround for the auction house crafted gem bug I complained about yesterday

- got rid of the gems I had as fast as I could, only taking a small hit on my investment. Wish I would’ve found the solution earlier

- went totally crazy and linked my solution all over the interwebs

- jumped back into the game and killed Inferno Leoric

So far it looks as though we could still use some better items to ease our way through Inferno, but we’re making progress. Babysteps, right? How about you? Already done with Inferno and farming Act 4 for Legendaries? Didn’t even finish Normal yet? Let me know – leave a comment.

D3INC – Day 6

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And it’s after midnight again. One day I’ll manage to go back to a regular sleep cycle. Very slow day, enjoyed the sun shining through the window, leaned back and relaxed for a bit. The highlights:

- one of our crew members was still at a friend’s birthday party, so we decided to take it slow

- started separate solo farm Act 3 Hell farm sessions in the morning

- watched a lot of TV while solo farming

- Optimized my “crash and burn” wizard build, pretty fragile

- crafted and sold a few more “Harvest Moon”s, wonder how long they’ll stay at such a good profit margin

- servers were down for a few hours so I used the time to write a little about “Surviving Hell”, check it out

- finally finished Diablo and Hell. After we decided to kite the adds in p2 it was a cakewalk

- took a look at Act 1 Inferno, decided to spend some more time in Hell

The only thing that really bugged me today is the Perfect Square bug on the Diablo 3 auction house. Most people aren’t able to post Perfect Square Rubies on the auction house. You try posting your stones, the auctions show in your active auctions, but they aren’t shown in the search results for the stones and apparently people can’t buy them. Problem is: I didn’t know that. All I saw was the price being around 250k gold and the mats being somewhere around 100k. So I put in around 1 million gold and crafted 10 of those puppies – which now block my stash and tie up a big part of my liquidity. Hopefully I’ll be able to sell them at minimal loss, once I’m able to post them again. I imagine those few lucky bastards that are able to post those stones at the moment are making a killing. With problems like these I’m just glad they didn’t release the real money auction house yet. At the moment it’s just virtual currency, I’d be more stressed out, if it was a real million tied up.

What are your experiences with the Diablo 3 RMAH? Did you encounter any bugs yet? Did you sell a lot of stuff? What’s working for you? Leave me a comment.

D3INC – Day 3

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Constant gaming is slowly taking its toll. Today we didn’t manage to reach our set goal – which in retrospect was set far to high anyways. It’s almost midnight and I’m pretty much falling asleep in front of my machine. So here’s another few bullet points, highlighting what we did today.

- tried to go through Hell Act 1

- got our asses kicked from what feels like thousand-affix mobs

- went back to Nightmare with some MF equip and farmed for a bit

- went back to Hell Act 1 and started farming in MF gear

- got some lucky affixes (Vortex Mortar Waller anyone? They start shooting you, pull you back to them before they managed to kill you and lock you both in stone afterwards… poor guys)

- did some breaks

- farmed some of the items for the new secret level

- Flawless Square Ruby day trading

After two days of constantly spending time together the crew had to get some breathing room, so we decided to do an hour break every few hours and it definitely helped lighten up the mood. Favourite pastime: Flawless Square Ruby day trading. Here’s how it works: Usually Flawless Rubies are like 50k on the auction house. Every once in a while someone posts his ruby for something like 10 to 20k – you just snatch it, instantly relist it for 50k and three, two, one – sold. I just love it. It’s like a mob dropping 10k gold at once.

By the way: Anyone else been surprised by how low gold and magic find stay? I saw the datamined range of those item affixes and am seriously baffled of how low they stay throughout leveling. If you found any big mf/gf, feel free to leave me a comment. Would love to hear if and when it improves.