Spending In Second Life

Second Life is a well known virtual world in which every single item of content is created and designed from scratch by the residents, or users of the platform. However, Second Life is simply miles ahead of the competition for one main reason. It has a booming virtual economy. Even as the real world struggled with global recession, Second Life residents continued to spend their ‘Linden dollars,’ and 2009 was a record year. Residents spent the equivalent of 567 million US dollars in Second Life.

Linden Dollars, the ‘currency,’ of Second Life can be bought through an exchange, the Lindex. They can then be spent in world and those earning Linden dollars in world can convert them to US dollars and cash them out of Second Life, thus meaning that the platform has immense earning potential for its users and actually generates a very real life income for many.

But what do the users of Second Life actually buy with their Linden dollars in Second Life? One of the biggest expenses for those who choose to buy it is Second Life land. People often pay a fee in advance and an ongoing monthly fee for the duration that they ‘own’ their land. Many then use this land to set up stores of their own from which to sell their goods, clubs or homes. Significant amounts of money are also spent on avatar appearance items such as Second Life fashion items, skins, virtual hairstyles and all things to make our pixels look good!

Another big money area is in that or services. People may pay talented marketers to run the marketing campaigns in world for their brands or they may pay a live musician to perform over microphone at their event.

While many may complain that it’s simply bizarre to spend money on items that don’t physically exist, Second Life’s economy is providing a real life income for many and continues to grow. Besides, do you spend money on your Internet connection? Can’t really touch that either, can you?

Skylar Smythe

The Five Things you Should Know About the New Warcraft Movie

Let’s take a first look at what is happening “under the hood” of the first Warcraft movie. Many of the outline details are now available, so let’s see what we can expect.

It will be directed by Sam Raimi. This is good news. Sam has great directorial experience on films such as Evil Dead and Scream, not to mention the first three Spider Man movies. The Hollywood rumour mill has it that Sam is keen to keep to the existing lore and outline of Warcraft. Something that can’t be said for many film tie-ins who immediately alienate the audience by breaking the whole Lore of the product they are based on. Good news then.

The writer is Robert Rodat. He wrote Saving Private Ryan. Apparently, the story goes that he was “inspired” to write the Ryan screenplay when he realised his son’s birthday was 6th June (D-Day). Let’s hope nothing of importance happens on Ester Sunday during the writing of Warcraft, or we could have bunnies and chocolate eggs everywhere.

Back down under, the rugged landscape of New Zealand is being cited as the most likely location for the outdoor scenes. I like this idea as well. There is enough scope and variation there. I can picture an “Azerothian” landscape quite easily.

Drum your fingers and tap your toes. It’s going to be quite a wait. Although films of this type can be put together in two years, expect three years as a minimum from now (so 2013 most likely) I would like to bet that it is released to tie in with the expansion after Cataclysm – possibly with some plot overlap between the film and the game. That’s just my guess, but you heard it here first. Lore is an important part of Warcraft, and has been since Warcraft 2. The film will almost certainly stay true to existing lore, but may look to advance it in certain areas. That was, after all, one of the stipulations of the licence.

At this early stage, one thing dopes seem certain. The film will be action based (as opposed to quest based) though whether we have Alliance verses Horde or either verses Scourge – or indeed a mixture of the two – remain to be seen. Of course, we could always have a new entity introduced just for the film.

Some things are still very uncertain though. There is currently no view on who will star in the movie. Certain names have been put forward in the last six weeks, then quickly denied., It’s unlikely that anyone has signed up for it yet, but expect a few major stars, some beefcake and some attractive ladies (I don’t think I’m risking being wrong with this prediction).

The production company is Legendary Pictures of “300″ and “Batman Begins”. Again, fantastic news for those of us waiting for a real action movie with top notch production values. I’m just thankful that Michael Bay has nothing to do with it any more. A man that can turn any specific title into “generic mush” with his direction should be kept well away from this movie. With it now being clear that this man is no longer part of the Warcraft movie we can breath easily knowing that it’s unlikely that our much beloved game will be turned into “ABC action movie on rails – with no regard to existing plot or Lore – made to showcase my special effects team Part 4″ like most of Bay’s output seems to be. Rant off.

We are back up and running now, and will continue to bring you the news on this movie, and anything else Warcraft as it happens.

Discuss the latest with other Warcraft fans @ The Warcraft Blog We offer the best professional, downloadable Free Warcraft Guides as well. Free guides. Now that’s got to be a good thing!

Becoming a World of Warcraft Gold Generator. Auction House Domination

The Auction house is where the most profit potential is in Warcraft. The reason for this is that in the Auction house there is a lot of price variability. One day Titanium Steel is 150G a bar, the next it’s 160g a bar (or 130g).

In short, it’s the variations in price that offer you the possibility of making gold. The in game NPC vendors do not offer variable price. Sure they offer a fair price for your “white” loot, but if you have uncommon items or better, then you are often missing a profit opportunity if you just vendor them.

Playing the auction house properly is something you should not try and do until you have taken the time to understand the variations. Is 2G for Borean leather a good price or a bad price? Unless you track prices over a period of time you won’t know.

To start with download the auctioneer add-on. Once installed, this tool will run a full scan of the auction house at the press of a button. Collecting the price for every item it finds and storing it. Early in the game just run the scan and get on with powerleveling, don’t bother playing the market yet

Once you have run auctioneer once a day for about ten days it will give you some decent average averages that are being asked for items.

The scans will have recorded each item at auction and given them an average asking price. You will see a percentage next to each item now in the auction GUI. This percentage is a ratio of the average price Auctioneer found when it scanned. So 80% is 20% below the average asking price. 120% is 20% above

Using this detail, you can make decisions on what to buy and sell and more importantly when. But low and sell high. It works in Warcraft as well as the real world

However, before you rush off, there are a couple of very big potential pitfalls

As I mentioned above, it records the asking price. Not the selling price, it doesn’t even know whether the item sold at all. People can ask whatever price they want at auction. If you’ve seen a piece of wool cloth or similar on for 10,000g (it happens all the time) then this figure will massively increase the average that Auctioneer thinks Wool cloth is worth. It won’t have sold of course (at least not to someone who was keeping within the ToS and actually wanted it) People do this to either move vast amount of gold around, or in the hope that someone accidentally clicks on the item and buys it. The result is the same. Auctioneer’s average asking price gets completely skewed with rogue data.

Secondly, and more importantly, Auctioneer doesn’t follow the game dynamics. It doesn’t know that certain items will soon have a massive drop in demand because an upcoming patch is going to make them obsolete. Or that new items will be added that make the ones you have now pretty much worthless.

Auctioneer is a great tool to start with, but it is just a start. It’s not the holy grail of gold making in Warcraft. If you want to be a World of Warcraft Gold Generator then you will need auctioneer, but you will also need a lot more besides.

Really dominate the Warcraft Gold market with our fre guide. Visit Free WoW Guide Blog to download it. If you just want to comment on this or any other post visit the Warcraft Information Exchange