One of the main reasons I enjoy MMORPG’s and WoW is the fact that your effort and time spent in the game builds on your previous days, weeks and months of achievements. You are constantly improving in different areas of the game such as your gear, gold amount, achievements, reputations and so forth. With other games such as an FPS you play for a brief period but have nothing to show after months of playing except improvements in skill.
However, an FPS player could devote only 10 hours/week of practice and matches and remain much better than another player who plays 30+ hours in the week, because the game is based on pure skill alone.
WoW is different, it’s a progressive game where the more time you put into the game, the farther ahead you will get from other players, if you run an extra raid a week than them you will get greater chances at gear upgrades and thus most likely have better healing/damage/tanking ability if you are around relative skill.
On a larger scale, you could say that WoW is a game of relativity, meaning that while you are improving your gear and reaching milestones, it depends upon the speed and rate you are achieveing them compared to the average players on your server and the rate that Blizzard releases new content. You can think of it as a realese of a new tier – item level of 258 is really a (subtract -13 item levels from your current gear)
So what is the best way to not only keep up, but maximize your playing time to stay ahead of the pact.
One of my passions in the game and mission of this site is to research the most efficient routes to each goal achievable in WoW, whether its making the most gold an hour, leveling the fastest, gearing up as fast as possible or other goals.
A great way to stay ahead is to prioritize your play. Blizzard has slowly been releasing features in the game that can be done only once a day/week which provide a much larger incentive then a similar activity in comparison, and also sets “limits” on the rate of progression players can achieve in certain areas of the game.
Incentives
- Double Experience for Rested (earned during logged off time in a city/inn)
The first feature Blizzard released to help casuals keep up with hardcore players. While a hardcore player is free to continue leveling hours on end/day, a casuals invested time and effort is multiplied (ex. A casual player can invest 3 hours in a day and get a level, or a hardcore player can invest 3 hours, get a level, then invest another 6 hours and get another level, but at a much more diminished rate, slowing their progression)
- Heroics Dailies
Doing the heroic daily not only gives you the chance of receiving loot and the usual badges, but awards 2 Emblems of Triumph,
- Wintergrasp Quests
Since changing over to the weekly quest format instead of daily, this has become even more casual friendly only requiring you to invest 1 attack and 1 defend to finish all the “WG Dailies”
- Vault of Archavon (Emalon, Koralon)
Another casual friendly feature, You get a shot at pretty much the best gloves and legs currently available for a 15 minute time investment. And collect the best emblems too.
- Raid lockouts
Imagine if a hardcore raid guild could do ToC 25 man every day, anytime they wanted? Hardcore players would love this but the disparity it would create between hardcore and casual players gear wise would be HUGE. It would make a casuals gear and efforts look very tiny in comparison.
Raid lockouts are also a way to prevent a hardcore guild from blasting through content within a week then getting bored and waiting for the next content release.
- Fishing, Jewelcrafting and Cooking Dailies
- Normal Dailies
Prioritize
With the list of incentives, you can prioritize things to do dailiy/weekly for the most return on time spent playing, ensuring you complete the top components before moving down the list or logging off:
1. Post on Auction House Craftables, Items for sale (Gold)
2. Complete Vault of Archavon before Tuesday Resets (PvE/PvP)
3. Complete WG Dailies as soon as they become available (PvP)
4. Trial of the Crusader before Tuesday Reset (PvE)
5. 10 games of Arena for points before Tuesday (PvP)
6. Heroic Daily (PvE)
7. Daily BG quest (PvP)
8. Fishing, Jewelcrafting and Cooking Dailies (Gold)
9. Argent Tournament Dailies (Gold/Rep)
10. Ulduar, Naxx before Tuesday (Badges, PvE)
11. Heroic Dungeons
12. Dailies
13. After you are locked out of all dailies/raids, you are open to BG, Gather for Professions or play an ALT.
You can further prioritize your playing time by focusing on a certain aspect of the game, choosing to only do PvE, PvP or Gold making activities from the list to remain the most competitive in those areas, I enjoy Gold Making and PvP the most so I rarely do Heroic Dailies or all my lockouts in a week, but VoA and WG Dailies are very important to me.
This was all I could think of, what is your “priority” list when you log on? Do you ever feel bad when you log off but forgot to hand in the heroic daily or a week went by and you never did your VoA reset for the week?
Popularity: 2% [?]
I love your blog! It's inspired me to go for the WOW gold cap and i'm writing a blog while doing it
Check it out at:
http://hitthecap.blogspot.com/
Thanks, good luck with hitting the gold cap, looking forward to seeing your progress.
Isn’t the graph backwards? Or are you saying the more time you actually spend in the game the less the reward? I think you meant, the more time you spend in a game, the greater the reward.
By the way, I need tips on how to make some profit off of jewelcrafting with a bombed economy… cut gems are 100-150g (the highest being cardinal rubies, lowest being eye of zul or ametrine) and uncut gems can be from 100-190, mainly around 155g with LOTS of undercutting and LOTS of competition on most days.
Or if you’d like just please answer this quick question, say a card ruby cheapest was going for 150g, and people in trade chat are only willing to buy for 135 uncut. But in the AH say 23+ spell power is for 156g, would you take the chance of buying that card ruby at 150, and cutting it relisting it at 156 just for a 6g profit?
“Isn’t the graph backwards? Or are you saying the more time you actually spend in the game the less the reward? I think you meant, the more time you spend in a game, the greater the reward.”
The graph is correct seeing only to one area of the game. The more time you spend a day playing the AH, the smaller your gain/hour will be.
Great blog, congratulations on your million =D