Inst-spawning Jute and Other Resources

You know those bots that are gathering that jute that re-spawns at an incredible rate?  Apparently its not a ban-able offense if a real player is gathering the jute.  It's only ban worthy if its a bot doing it.  How do you prove its a bot in your report?  Let me know if you have a way that works.

One way to get rid of those level 3 bots is to drag one of those AoE archers over to shoot them.  But now the bots have a bunch of rez stones so they just simply rez again and continue along in groups.  You can feasibly leave a high level character there and let the AoE arrow shooting mobs just shoot across the way at you till they run out.  Too bad players not familiar with that strategy will often come by and kill em, not knowing what's going on.

Latest Update Drops % on Guild Stores

Before the most recent update, the House Cut was 15%, and Listing Fee was 10%.  All that gold went poof by the way.  (The Guild doesn't receive any of it.)

Now its a more reasonable.
1% Listing fee
7% Closing fee.  Does not take this if it doesn't sell.

It actually makes sense to use the Guild Store now.

Cashing In On Crafting

For a long time, investing in crafting hasn't paid off.  Its a pretty big money/skill sink because the best way to level up is deconstructing everything.

So where the money is in crafting?  Refining raw materials.

The latest trend is purchasing stacks of raw materials in order to refine and get rare, epic, and legendary upgrade materials.  Apparently with a high enough crafting level, and the full three points placed into extraction is all you need.  This will allow a crafter to refine a stack of any material and end up with at least one legendary and one epic upgrade material on average.  Luck will have something to do with it, so if you want favors stacked on your side, roll an Imperial toon along with max in extraction.

Prices for these upgrade materials are typically over 1000 gold a piece to 5000 or 6000.

This is why raw materials prices have been going up lately, but cost of upgrade materials will be falling.

One side benefit of this is that you can expect these higher end of grade materials to drop in price as this trend continues.  And actually being able to craft something that you want to wear and be affordable enough that you will do it every few levels is a good thing.

(This obviously doesn't apply to any craft where you don't refine anything.)

5 Days Compensated Game Time

Good news!

As of May 1st, everyone already in the game will get 5 free days of game time to compensate for launch issues, 'beta' testing, bots, farmers, and the game downtime due to these issues.  Local time, you have less than 30 minutes to activate your account to qualify.

Some information about upcoming updates posted here on the official site.  Check it out.

How To Rank Up Your Skills

Most players don't know the real answer, but its right there in front of you in the Skills Menu.   I have not seen a single person answer this correctly in Zone so I thought this would be the perfect next post.

Answer to how come my Soul Magic skill line has not moved in 20 levels even-though I use it

People often get the semantics mixed up and honestly pass along a lot of mis-information in-game about leveling up skills.  Skills are different from abilities, and abilities are leveled up most of the time by using them.

But to truly see how you rank up your skills, you really have to read what the skills says next to your rank.  Its the same all the way from Rank 1 to Rank 50.  So in my example above on Soul Magic, you can only improve the Soul Magic skill line by doing the Main Quest.

Active Abilities are ranked from I-IV (1-4), and after they are morphed can also rank up from I-IV.  At this time in the game, Active Abilities are only able to be morphed once.

As far as crafting is concerned, you basically use a crafting station to get XP.  Everything you do at a crafting station earns you XP to rank up your skills.  Read this post here.

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