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Atlantica Online: Money Making Guide - Jackpot and More

2010-1-3 1:34:05 |

In the Fourth Age, the Era of Global Recession, when the stress monster reigned supreme, sending the helpless pocketbooks fleeing for the hills, there arose a champion to fight for the masses. This was the MMO: an incredibly cheap source of entertainment that allows the average Joe and Jane to blow off some steam by hitting a dragon in the head with a hammer. Come home and relax, kill some monsters, chat with your guildies, and buy and sell your virtual goods in a stable, reliable market.

Whether you've been reading the AO forums or not, chances are that you've noticed that prices keep going up, and up, and up, and up. That long-awaited shiny new piece of conqueror's armor is going to cost you an increasingly large amount of shiny pennies. When I first bought my Conqueror boxes, they went for less than a million each. Now, just a few months later.

We've seen more than 100% inflation in only two months. Holy cow! (For those of you interested in such comparisons, the average annual inflation rate of the US Dollar is about three percent).

The theories for the cause of inflation are many:

Some say that the inclusion of the Hwarang quest, which requires 500 collection points (points which would have previously been spent on equipment boxes) and its heady 100m in cash has resulted in an overflow of gold.

Others have noted that removing the ability to JP indy items (i.e. torn pages, water dragon scales, etc) has removed an easy source of Sea and Earth Elements, which are often used in the Barter Shop to obtain high end crafting items. Thus high end crafters (i.e. the ones with the full bank accounts) have had no choice but to rely on Dragon, Conqueror, Freezing, and Divine gear to obtain their elements.

Still others have blamed the various minor adjustments, a supposed ninja nerf in Goonzu loot and an overall 80% reduction in item drops.

Whatever the reason, it's quite clear that outfitting our mercenaries in the latest gear grows increasingly costly. We are left with a choice: do we try to stick our fingers in the overflowing dam as it breaks apart, calling on players to be less greedy as if the market wasn't simply following the tides of supply and demand, or do we accept that that the dam is lost and build a boat, stock it full of delicious ripe apples (so as to avoid scurvy), put on our pirate hat, raise the ol' skull and cross bones, rattle our cutlasses, then sail forth to pillage the seas?!

Okay, perhaps I got a little carried away with my metaphor, but nevertheless I say: avast!

And so we come to the useful part of the article: how to make money in AO. Of course you've got your obvious methods: do some quests, kill some monsters and break their piggy banks, scam honest players by selling a freezing orb as a crystal ball of harmony... er wait... ahem... but I'm here to offer you some tips and tricks and hopefully soon you'll be sailing along, your weapons glittering as they smash newly-killable monsters left and right.

Jackpot

Jackpot is a non-secret alternative method of looting and the savior of my constantly depleted bank account. All of the high levels know it and use it, but I find that many low levels are simply unaware of its existence. I even have some level 90+ guildies who ask me what jackpot is all about.

The process is simple: buy a jackpot license appropriate for your level at a fixed price (300k for II, 3.6m for IV) from the market and let the looting begin. You've got twelve item slots to fill with quantities up to 9999 and at any time you can acquire all (which simply moves the items into your inventory) or you can select one item in the list and do a "Jackpot Challenge" which converts all of the items in your jackpot window into a single item, the quantity of which depends on what else you've got in there.

It is with the Jackpot Challenge that the real profits come about. At first, you can just leave jackpot on and simply pick any items you want, this is one of the best ways for low levels to get Ashen Crystals, which you'll need to upgrade mercenaries. Once you get into higher levels, though, you'll want to start setting up a specific jackpot by finding some highly used low cost material to place into your first slot, then filling the rest up with high value boxes and goods. For the purposes of demonstrating this, I used a low level boss to get an enchant II box and then ran ind. dungeon 101 (and photoshopped the result into the same picture):

In this case the result (using prices on my server) is worth twice as much as the input. Ta-da, magic makes it happen! Though some people accumulate month-long War Cry jackpots worth billions of gold, your best bets are commodities that many crafts use: topaz, animal bones, crystals, etc.
 

The Box Method

This is a golden oldie: you buy an equipment box or a book box or an enchant box or some other box, open it up, and sell the result. As of this writing, a shogun equipment box is selling for 240,000 gold. And yet a ghost warrior heavy armor, which can be found in the box, sells for nearly 4 times as much!

For the uninitiated, you might be saying what, what, what, what, people are dumb! but it's a rather simple economic principle. The more processed a good is, the more money it will sell for. Take raw shrimp, for example. I'm a cooking elitist, I like to make everything from scratch and so a bag of fresh raw shrimp might cost me $5. But on Tuesdays I become exceptionally lazy, so let's process it some more, let's say it's been de-shelled, de-veined, and pre-cooked. Now that same bag is $7. Let's go the extra mile and say on top of being de-shelled, de-veined, and pre-cooked, it's also been spiced up with Chef de Gustave's famous cocktail spice mix. Now the bag is $8.

The box method works on basically the same principle. Someone is paying you for having the fortune of finding the specific piece of equipment they wanted.

Quest Resets

Though often touted as a source of experience, quest resets can also be good money makers. In early levels, your options are limited, but there remain several good opportunities. Mercenary recruitment quests can be repeated to obtain the summoning marbles or other goodies (like the small marionettes in the Witch quest). At the 80-90 level range, inventor and necropolis ring quests can net you an extra nickel to buy some soda pop at the store.

Once you get into the higher ranges, though, many veterans suggest that the repetition of certain quests becomes a necessity. This starts, at least in my experience, with Knud, found in the Frozen Adlivun. For a relatively minor number of steps, you'll get a whole bunch of experience and gold and a final reward of 3 Freezing Boxes. Once you've so thoroughly exhausted Knud, such that if you ever see a Chimera again you're liable to vomit, you can move on to James the Pretender, whose final reward is 3 Divine Boxes. Plenty of other quests will do, though the above two are some of the most popular.

And, since Ndoors recently increased the maximum number of quest resets from 50 to 100, you can enjoy double the Chimeras!

Gambling

Ah, vice. Nearest and dearest to my heart. If ever there was a MMO in which gambling was an option, it would be Atlantica Online. The game's very lifeblood, its item mall, is based upon the gambler's addiction: just one more Hercules box for a hydra!

I hesitate to include gambling as a method for making gold as, nine times out of ten, you'll end up short, but... what am I saying?! Everyone loves to shoot for the big score! Just be careful you don't end up gambling away the armor off your back. Here are just a few of the options for gambling in AO:

Box-opening: many high-end nation or guild dungeons reward expensive boxes that contain items needed to recruit the game's best mercenaries. Evil Protector Boxes, which come from the guild dungeon Valley of Oblivion, have a rare chance of containing a Crystal Ball of Harmony (aka a cboh) which will be worth at least 1 billion and probably much more, depending on your server's economy. Others include Nimrod Boxes, Prison Safes, and Pirates Chests. The boxes are quite expensive, though, and can result in you throwing your computer out the window after you get your millionth mandragora.

Medici's Gold Box: a newly implemented feature, and obviously a gambling gold sink, where you spend 1 million gold for boxes that contain mostly experience books but have a chance of containing a rare weapon such an Officer's Shotgun or a Stormbringer. I've only seen a single rare weapon pop-up on Delphi, but there you are.

Arena: Every 4 hours (3, 7, 11, etc. EST, or GMT-5), 8 mercenary heroes and one of their several pre-set formations are randomly placed in a tournament against each other. Using the game's sometimes frustrating AI, they battle it off until one is the champion. Either remotely or through Maximus in person, you can place bets on the winner, the 1st/2nd match-ups, and the final rounds.

Going into the full ins and outs of successfully gambling on arena is an article in and of itself (I have a suspicion that it will be coming soon), but I can offer a few easy tips. Learn to recognize the strong formations: any formation with several Red-tooths (Red-teeth?), Alexandra with lots of spears, Hasard with a back row of gunners, etc. Likewise learn to recognize the weak formations: any formation with Raphael or Alkinarpay, archer heavy builds (excepting when combined with Guan Chang), or other bad mix-ups. Keep an eye out for high-dividends. When I was first getting into arena, I would often put minimum (10k) bets on high dividend 1st/2nd or final round match-ups because, even though they had a low chance of winning, you can never be certain with the arena AI.

In short, don't despair about inflation. Sure, it's tough to see everything going up in price, but one of the major draws of Atlantica Online is that the market has everything. When that's the case, you end up with a complex economy, where every little change can cause far-reaching and sometimes unintended consequences. And, call me crazy, I think that's really cool.