Transferred from paxdora.blogspot.com [LINK]
Original Post Date: 6/16/11

This is a very easy method to gain plat, even at early levels.

Before I start though, I want to explain some prerequisites if you're serious about making RIFT Platinum. There are a few things you need to do first.

* All of your characters should be either a High Elf or Bahmi. Angelic Flight and Mighty Leap are INVALUABLE, I can't stress this enough. They're extremely useful for making plat and can get you out of tight situations like getting stuck. Time is money after all.
* Your MAIN character should be a Priest AOE build and should have all 3 gathering professions.
* Create a secondary MULE character that has Runecrafting, Outfitting, and Weaponsmithing. (As soon as you get out of your first training instance, run straight for Sanctuary or Meridian.)
* Your MAIN should always be mailing loot/mats to your MULE character for crafting purposes or selling on the AH.

I've leveled all classes to 50, and by the far the Priest is the fastest and most useful for collecting loot quickly. The Priest can also DPS, Heal and Tank.

As you're leveling your MAIN, simply send all of your gathered materials to your secondary character, have them construct cheap garments/weapons to level up and runebreak them. Most of your plat will be made from selling rune "disenchants". Don't waste your time with Runes (the "enchants"), there's very little plat to be made at low-med levels.

Alright, now that that's out of the way.. here's one simple strategy for making plat:

* There's always an imbalance of disenchant prices on the AH.

* If you have no plat, start out with Flickering Crystals (they sell for 2G or less ea), break them down, and sell the individual Flickering Powders for 50s each. That's a profit of 4.5g minus the 2g expense. Powders sell very well, and you can typically sell a dozen stacks per day (40-75g per stack).

* As you earn more gold/plat, use that as investments into more expensive disenchants and break them down (or upgrade the disenchants if the prices more favor that direction.)

* Familiarize yourself with the various levels of disenchants and how many mats you can collect by breaking them down.

Sentience Spark / Blast (5 Sparks) / Surge (15 Sparks)
Perpetual Blur / Glow (5 Blurs) / Flare (15 Blurs)
Kinetic Arc / Charge (5 Arcs) / Burst (15 Arcs)

There's always a vast difference in prices due to the imbalance of high/low leveled players.

For example, you can buy a Kinetic Burst for 40g, break it down, and resell the Arcs for 7g each giving you a profit of 1p 5g.

* Also very important, remember that you can TRANSMUTE one type of disenchant into another. You can convert between Bursts, Flares and Surges and all it costs is an additional Flickering Crystal which are very cheap. If a Kinetic Burst is selling for 80g, just purchase 40g Sentience Surges and convert them for profit.

* Always sell in large stacks and undercut your competition by a big amounts. Buyers will be hard pressed NOT to buy your disenchants due to their very reasonable prices.

* You will have a lot of competition, so make sure you're checking for undercuts every 30 minutes or so. You will need to cancel and re post your disenchants frequently, so I would recommend that you only post 1 or 2 of each Rune type.

I've played on over 10 servers (low-high population), and this strategy has been highly effective on all of them. I can typically make 30-40p per day just buying/selling disenchants and transmuting.

Here was another draft he had created a few days after his "Year of the Banhammer" blogspot.

So, yeah.. if you've been reading the blog for a while, you know I've been talking a lot about what to expect from Blizzard in 2011.

Because of decreasing WoW subscription growth and the expected lack of Activision Blizzard releases for the year, there's going to be a lot of cutbacks within the company and implementation of new paid services to increase revenue as much as possible (that have actually been planned for a long time, but were waiting for the right opportunity to deploy, like when revenues for the quarter were lower than expected) and before BlizzCon.

This isn't just for World of Warcraft, though, you can expect the same for their other line-up of games. Virtual items especially, and other paid services.

Shortly after posing this, Blizzard announced their new Winged Lion mount.

And then just 2 days after I mention "Maybe guild paid services?" they just announced Guild Paid Services. =]

Expect more. Virtual pets and mounts are good sellers, and they might even experiment with a price drop to see if they can increase demand for the item. Or the ever predictable tax-deductible charity approach. Perhaps a pet that will fit in with the lion or Egyptian theme?

How about "game breaking" items like a larger bag? (RIFT did it.) It probably won't be something to replace your default bag slot, though, but that's planned for all users in the future. A wise person would sell a larger/cool looking bag for $5 (to sell more of them, since everyone will want multiple) and announce that part of the proceeds will go to charity. It takes the sting off.

Maybe demon/elemental renaming services? Paid visual customizations of gear/clothes/items? Forum (or in-game) avatar customizations?

Cross-realm grouping or raiding? Their current Real ID feature is an easy way to implement this ability so that you can party with (PVP/Raiding) friends and family members.. for a price.

"Paid Un-Banning Services"? Pay to have a permanent ban changed to temporary ban (or have a really old account recovered) with the understanding that you'll play nice moving forwards (and monitored more closely during their probation period). If you work in Blizzard marketing, pay close attention to this. It sounds absolutely crazy, but it works and with little investment. =]

There are a lot of possibilities.

One thing is certain however, they have already made promises and commitments to WoW microtransactions (e.g. that they won't be game-breaking) but they haven't made any promises in regards to their other games.

Their Next-Gen MMO will probably take great liberties and flex "Blizzard ethics", and I can definitely foresee game-breaking transactions available in future titles. This shouldn't surprise you though, this is just the way Blizzard is heading and they've made all of the signs and trends quite obvious.

Flame on.

Unfortunately, over the past several months I've been flying a little too close to the sun.

It's still a pretty new blog (I started writing back in July '10) and I suppose this was ultimately fated to happen.

It's fitting, though, that it happened at the 9 month period too: like a newborn baby it was ready to explode from the womb.. but with a huge amount of information as the afterbirth, rather than pieces of placenta.

There was just way too much information collected and researched thoroughly.. and it was scary for some (e.g. the real costs of services and devices, profit margins, real players and subscription figures, extracted sales data, uncanny future predictions, new games and their release dates, the return (or introduction) of a ton of content that everyone believed were gone forever, correcting a ton of misinformation in gaming news, unannounced games, next-gen game details, what things are really like behind the veiled curtain, etc. etc.)

There were two big projects I was working on in the past couple months (one was actual subscription data, the other, well.. it was a huge spoiler). By investigating publicly-available information (very hard to find, but it's there), I had collected details about an upcoming next-gen MMO and even had concept art. It's still a few years away, but due to this current situation it's not anything that I can publish. Even where it came from (public data), it would still be considered "private, confidential, and proprietary" to a certain corporation. =]

I hope you enjoyed the fun, dramatic entertainment, critical analysis, the information and data, and frequent sarcasm. It was definitely one-of-a-kind, but a machine that accurately predicts the future and reveals future business plans and game details should not be permitted to exist.

They did what they had to do, and I understand completely from a business perspective. I love all of the games I've written about, and will continue to support the companies.. but I just can't research them in such great detail anymore.

On a related note, if you're in the game development field: get rid of your entire global internet footprint. You shouldn't have a Twitter account, a blog, a YouTube account, participate in any forums, play online games with people you don't know, share art or pictures, take pictures within your workplace and post them online, have a Facebook account, share details with OPEN Facebook accounts, or even have a Google account w/out making sure your Docs and Buzz are completely disabled. I don't even know where to get started.. I know way too much now.

Even when you have your "work" alias, and you create multiple new aliases and fake names across the internet (thinking that they're safe), it's still very easy to find out the new names and link them back to one person. Also, you shouldn't be surfing non-business related webpages from work.

As for me, time to move onto new adventures. There are a lot of options available, and I like to keep busy with fun side projects.

You can't know the future, though, without it's stakeholders kicking your ass.

(P.S. My email address was just another throw-away account, like this blog account. Time to implement "Plan Alpha".. see you all around.) =]