League of Legends: Updates Inbound

Touching base quickly with League of Legends before this new update comes out, we’re seeing 5 major things:

• Spectator mode—this is the one I’ve been wanting. Now I finally have the power to just sit back and watch my friends screw up, instead of me having to be there too. It works out for everyone. What I didn’t get from Riot’s video is if they’re going to include with that a recording feature, something that I’d really want to make videos on LoL in the near future.

• Buffs to both Master Yi and Ryze—I’m not sure why Riot has chosen to punish the desciples of Summoner’s Rift, but I guess I’ll just go back to TF2.

• Tank/Supports getting more magic resist—this includes: Alistar, Amumu, Leona, Taric and Nunu. It’s your lucky day, kids!

• Changes to AP items—For a full list of changes watch the viedo, but I can tell you that Deathfire Grasp, Morello’s Evil Tome and Will of the ancients are all on the change list.

• Heracrim—The new champion. Half man, half horse, all played in jungle by Phreak.

Well, it looks like a new, adventurous update for everyone involved. I’m going back to TF2 for now kids, see you later.

--Santa

TF2: How To Trade

A Startling true fact

Trading, I would say, is probably the second biggest reason to play Team Fortress 2, closely behind the sheer amount of complexity to its plot, humor, and hat collection. Since this is such a big part of Team Fortress 2, Valve decided to monopolize on it by doing something unheard of: making TF2 free. This, to the average person, may seem like a bad move. But think about it, with half the community trading, and a cost to F2P members to get trading privileges (in total $10 purchase from the Mann Co. Store) and the promise of keys alluring in the eyes of new players, people jumped on it. Yes, the Mann Co. store was a fantastic move, but if you’ve now upgraded to a premium account, or actually bought the game, what do you do now to get to that end goal that you really want?

The first thing you have to know when you start trading is that you have to have a goal, otherwise, you’ll end up getting a hat, and never want to let go of it. I know because this happened to me. Many times. My current goal is set at a vintage earbuds, because why not? It’s a good idea to shoot higher than you think possible, and then bring yourself back down to a reasonable level when it seems like you’ve come close to something you’d like, in my case, either a Sunbeams Texas Ten Gallon or a Sunbeams Hotrod. Any earbuds after that will go into a pyro unusual, and then I’ll put the other things into earbuds, or other promos onto my way up to vintage earbuds.

The thing that will get you farthest when you trade is being polite. I’m not kidding, I’ve experimented with this. When you play the cool guy card, and are nice to people when trading, then you end up with the upper hand. When I trade people, I’m generally trying to be as polite as possible when the guy I may be trading is a complete dick. Why would you want to put up with this? The average person isn’t trying to be a dick, and probably puts up with a lot of them. When you’re nice, they may appreciate it, and that will get them in a set of mind that could get you that trade.

There is a strategy to trading. It’s all in the bit of advertising. How do you drag people into trading with you? The answer is selection, which comes with time, and power. I hold multiple amounts of metal, keys, hats, and other items to increase interest, but how do you tell the crowd what you’re selling? Simply put, like this:

Trading all items in my backpack. I’ve got keys, metal, nc/nv/v hats/miscs, nv/v/strange weps, and more. !bp LuLz. Pirate to see.

Breaking down my own add, let me explain its parts:

• Trading all items in my backpack: already implies that I have a good amount of items, which I do.

• I’ve got keys, metal: the two biggest forms of liquid money, most people want to sell their stuff for keys or metal, and I’m a provider of both.

• Nc/nv/v hats/miscs: shows that I have non-craftable hats, vintage, and normal hats and miscellaneous items, brings in a greater amount of attention.

• Nv/v/strange weps: tells them my stock of weaponry, once again attracts attention

• !bp LuLz. Pirate to see: the command !bp works on most trade servers, and typing in !bp followed by someone’s name will open up their backpack for you to see. Since as a trader, I want to trade as many items as possible, it helps to just trade everything, if you’ve got an item you don’t want to particularly let go of, raise its price to a level that someone won’t probably buy it at, and at that price you make a good chunk of profit.

With that in mind, you need to know prices. I use 2 sites for this: TF2TP (Team Fortress 2 Trading Post) and TF2OP (Team Fortress 2 Outpost), both sites allow you to post items from your backpack, and trade them, after using a log-in pass from Steam. This can help you trade items without getting on, and save you some time. It can also help you trade higher level items, and look for an unusual.

Some people may use spreadsheets, but I don’t. I’ve opened the TF2 Spreadsheet a grand total of 3 times, and never when I was on TF2, or actually trading. I use TF2TP and TF2OP for pricing, because I can immediately see what people are giving/wanting for the item at hand, which puts it as the most up to date data you can possibly have: community trends. After a while, you’ll get more item’s prices remembered, and won’t have to use this data as much, but it always helps that you’re in the Steam Overlay, and can easily look up some values on the fly.

When I trade, and some comes up to me, I always ask them what they want for their item. A good example of this is a couple weeks ago, a guy traded me and  asked me for a key. I answered with “What do you have for one?” and he proceeded to show me a bunch of items, but what caught my eye was a Fancy Dress Uniform (FDU), a strange Eyelander and a reclaimed out of the 20 or so items he had up. A FDU is worth 4 refined or so at the time, so I ask him “would you do the FDU, reclaimed and Eyelander?” The guy said sure, and I got it. I made about 1-2 refined profit, and walked away a happy man. To some people, this method is considered “sharking” and I took advantage of the guy, since he didn’t know the FDU’s worth. I personally believe that I was just doing him a favor. He traded me, telling me he wanted something of mine, he showed me the items he wanted to sell for a key, and I asked him if he was okay with it. He was happy with it, and so was I. For all I know, he unboxed an unusual, who cares? Pricing is in the eye of the man who wants an item. If I wanted a Ghastlier Gibus, and gave kid 17 keys for it, and I was fine with it, it was a fair trade.

With these ideals in mind, you have my basic method for pricing, buying, and selling items. I won’t lie, when you don’t have much, it takes time to get up to the level that I’m trading at, but it isn’t impossible. With a good head on your shoulders, you can get there with a bit of thinking, and of course, patience. It’s up to you to reach your own goals, as I’ve spent my own time reaching mine, hopefully this guide may help you get there a bit faster.

--Santa

PS: The blog hit over 4,100 hits a couple days ago. Thanks for your continued support, and vote in the poll if you’d like to see me possibly expand the blog to a different level, and bring in some gameplay.

Trading: The Full Story

Over the past few days I’ve been busy with trading, especially since I use a number of fairly helpful sites to get my trades to go better. I sold a pair of earbuds for a Genuine Merc’s Pride Scarf and a Vintage Lugermorph, and I have also amassed a large amount of metal and keys at the moment to keep some of my assets liquid. I bought a Bills Hat for 8 keys and 2 refined (painted Balaclavas are forever) and I’m now watching the unusual market, waiting to see what my next unusual market move should be; should I sell my Ten Gallon with Orbiting Flame and use some of my new, rare promos to help me get that Sunbeams Hotrod, or maybe a beams Ten Gallon? Or, should I move on and get myself a Pyro unusual, start to expand my backpack a bit, 300 slots is pretty small, or grab those miscellaneous items I’ve been wanting. There’s so much to do, but I didn’t always have this much “power” in the market.

Recently I’ve been trading more as I’ve found myself with a larger status of wealth. As this has happened, and my voice has grown on a few servers that I spend a good amount of time on, I’ve been asked if I would make a cute little guide for trading for everyone who wants to really get into it, and see if they can get that unusual that they’ve been dreaming of, or that Genuine Maul, or whatever else it is they’ve been yelling at me about so they won’t have to ask me for price-checking so much. So, I guess I’ve finally caved.

I am by no means rich, even by the standards of the unusual market; there are many more with a lot “money” than I have, but it is no small feat to get where I have. I have been trading since the update was released, on September 30^th 2010. Using tf2items (click here to visit the site) you can see what you had, all the way back to November 25^th 2010, back when I had two hats, a vintage ten gallon and vintage pickelhaube, a few weapons. On September 27^th, 2010 I had my first bills hat, albeit with no other hats, I had jumped up to a major goal in two days. On December 6^th, 2010, I got my first pair of buds. At this time, I had a very simple goal: get my favorite vintage hats, a bills hat, and earbuds for myself. That, and with the few vintage miscellaneous that were available at the time, I would be set. This was before the second misc. slot, a time where you could only trade up to 8 items at a time, a time where all unusual were valued at least 2 earbuds, when a key was 1 refined, and so were black and white paints. Name and description tags were a reclaimed each, there were no such thing as stranges, and the economy was still unsure of the value of most hats. Vintage was king, and I was caught up in it all. I spent all day at the face of my computer, feeling like a stockbroker looking at stocks going across the screen. By the end of January, 2011 I was pretty well established. I had a vintage hat for every class, minus the medic, earbuds, a vintage whiskered gentleman (probably the only item that I have refused to sell to this day, even with some pretty good offers) and a little bit of trade stock.

I won’t bother re-capping every tiny event, so I’ll fast forward to some of the bigger bits. After a while, I sold my earbuds for something stupid that was a good offer at the time. I had nearly my collection, when I decided I wanted earbuds back. So, as a complete change of directions, I put all of my items into earbuds, and a bills hat. Going back, I ended up selling my bills and earbuds for a 8 of my favorite vintage hats, all painted a variety of nice colors, which stayed with me for close to 6 months, and I would end up selling them all eventually, one at a time, except for a vintage panama, which I still have.

Fast forward through another few incidents of me having earbuds, leading up to me selling them for Fallout: New Vegas, quickly realizing I made a mistake, I started trading again. By this time, the market was completely different, pretty much the same market that we have today, except when I got right back in earbuds were still going for 2 bills, and earbuds were still under 18 keys,, I think 15 to be exact. In a few weeks I bring myself back up to earbuds level, and start getting my hats back. At this point, I had no real drive for getting into the unusual market, until I got my lucky break.

Right into the beginning weeks of 2012, around the 3^rd, a guy saw that I had earbuds. He freaked out, and traded me. I asked him what he was interested in, and he puts up his unusual. It’s a Big Chief with Orbiting Fire he had unboxed a few days ago. I asked him if he just wanted my buds. The events that transpired have changed my trading life since.

I’m now in what I refer to as the unusual age. For those of you who haven’t read my blog, I’ve covered it, and I’ll do a bit of a recap. I sold the Big Chief for 3 earbuds, and quickly sold two of them for a vintage bills hat, painted balaclavas are forever. I sold my earbuds and vintage bills for a burning magistrate’s mullet, and sold the mullet for a Nuts and Bolts One Man Army and Steaming Sola Topi; this turned out to be one of my biggest blunders, and ended up giving my Army and a backpack expander for a Peace Crocleather slouch.  I held onto these two for nearly a month before a friend came by with an Orbiting Fire Texas Ten Gallon. After two weeks of negotiation, I gave my two unusuals and 1 key for the Ten Gallon, and we’ve been together since. In the meantime, however, I traded up to get another pair of earbuds, and ended up selling them, and a vintage procedure mask for a Dragonborn Helm with orbiting planets, selling ti to an eager friend of mine for 50 keys, and acquired 2 earbuds, and have just recently sold a pair of buds for a genuine merc’s pride scarf, and a vintage Lugermorph.

Today, I’m looking at the unusual market in a different way, seeing all of the power that I never thought possible. It took me around 100 hours of trading to get my first pair of earbuds. Today, I’m worth around 5 to 6, and I sold a pair, so altogether 6-7, in around 500 hours of trading, not too bad, I think. That’s my story of how I got my little chunk of the TF2 market; time, luck, and patience. Tomorrow, I’ll go more into the methods of how I acquired my wealth, and maybe help you out too.

--Santa

Impressions-- Valve vs. Riot: Who wins?

If the Pyro was a character in dota 2, then I may have a better opinion of the game

I got the beta edition of Dota 2 from a friend of mine who wanted me to play it with him. This isn’t to say that I was exactly excited, since I wasn’t looking forward to the 2 hour download, but due to circumstances leading me to a Wi-Fi hotspot that gave me a blazing download speed of 2.6 mb/s during the download, I decided that I would give it a shot.

Downloading Dota 2 was an interesting experience for me. Valve is by far my favorite gaming company of all time; it goes hand-in-hand since they made TF2. But, I thought Riot, although sometimes I don’t agree with their updates, have done a fantastic job on League of Legends, so I didn’t quite see why Valve go into an arena where not only League of Legends, but HoN (heroes of Newerth) are already dominating. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of Dota, here’s a small history:

Beginning as a mod in Warcraft III, DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) became a widely popular game, and was the inspiration of Riot’s League of Legends, borrowing skills (in the setup of Q W E R) the leveling system, the idea of champions, the item shop, and many more aspects helped to inspire League of Legend. However, Valve has recently announced, and has now released a beta of their own version, a direct sequel of DOTA, named Dota 2.

I’ll get straight to my review, and it’s not good. I like to think of myself as an intelligent man, but figuring out how Dota 2 was supposed was one of the more frustrating things I’ve ever tried to do. This is based off of one game’s experience, but at the same time, my experience from League of Legends should have helped me a bit, and it doesn’t help much that my laptop was fighting back when I was playing along, stupid integrated graphics.

Getting right into the first game, I realized, that the champions were based of, and sorted by, the equivalences of defense, attack, and magic (speaking in LoL terms) with this in mind, I was  confused to see that immediately on spawn, when double-clicking on an item, it instead didn’t give me the item, it just let me look at the item in my “quick buy” slot, and I literally couldn’t figure out how to empty it, except for once, into my inventory. Now, I can appreciate this system if when you go back to spawn, you can just click a button, and bam! It goes right into your inventory. But, I think that double-clicking should be the easiest method to getting an item, this should be a one-step process.

The other major problem I had was mostly a bunch of small things. It wasn’t as refined as a Valve game should be. Valve can do better work that what I felt Dota 2 offered me, and although this may have come from only a small amount of time with the game, but even my first game of League of Legends was less frustrating than my first game of Dota 2, and that was a nightmare.

In a few weeks, I may revisit Dota with another post, when I have put a little more time into it. I do think it will be better, as I am pretty bad at most games when starting up on them, I won’t lie. But, I do think that Valve, if they do want to have a chance at beating out a market of FTP games with one you have to pay for, then they may want to make a few changes.

--Santa

My Prayers Have Been (Partially) Answered!

I really like these, too bad they'll be expensive forever

Yes, yes, yes. After about a month or so of worrying, Valve has answered my prayers. Yes, we have received an update for Team Fortress 2. Here's a list of the major updates:

• The Scrap Pack is now tradable, giftable, and craftable.

• Added the Texas Half-Pants (leather pants for Engineer) and the Bolt Action Blitzer (all class achievement item hat, looks like the Heavy's Football helmet with bolts on it)

• The Teufort Tooth Kicker can now be equipped by the Engineer
•  
• The crate number of crates is now displayed in the corner of your backpack (no more hovering, kids)
•  
• The ability to reset the kill counters on strange weapons by using the “restore” button in the backpack, along with the ability to remove Strange Parts with the same button.

With this update comes what I’ve been waiting for: the chance to sell the Scrap Pack I got for ooey-gooey amounts of money, however, I must say that I was quickly disappointed. I went to Team Fortress 2 Trade Post (TF2TP) to see what offers I could get. Now, I know that hoping to get a straight out Bills Hat for it was close to nil, seeing that a good 2.4% of the community owned one, and at least 25% of those would be on the market on day one, but this is when the demand would be at its highest, during its first week or so, so I decided to go with the highest bidder: 5 refined and a keys, equaling out to a nice 3 or so keys.

I know this may seem like little to some of you, but I see it like this: in around a month, the Genuine Scrap Pack will most likely have dropped, as most items do as the demand dies down after the initial rush (as I’m seeing people asking for 5 keys, but nobody getting that, and 4 being the absolute most, which would be the approximate value of Shoot Many Robots anyway) so when the price drops to 2 or 1 key, I’ll jump in and get another one, it’s a nice miscellaneous item to have, and I have to admit, I became somewhat accustomed to it being perched on my Pyro’s back.

I also heard that the Sharpened Volcano Fragment has been screwed up by Valve so it now doesn’t ignite people on hit. I hope this isn’t true, even though I usually use an Axestinguisher, I can’t deny the love I have for the V. Fragment sitting in my backpack.

--Santa