Game Blogging - 3 Principles for Effective Communication

The vast majority of video game bloggers are focusing on promoting their blogs and forget or simply ignore a very important factor, which is communication. Learn to generate traffic is one thing, good communication skills is another, and both must be complementary.

To communicate clearly, you must follow three steps:

• Give a message
• Create interest
• Provide a way to remember

As a blogger for video games, you must communicate effectively in your blog. Not once, not twice, but every day. Let's see these points more closely:

Give a message

I think this is something we take very seriously. We always write our articles in order to give a message. However, simply give a message is not enough. If we want our message to pass to the next level, we need to push people to action.

Give a message means we know what we're trying to convey and what we want people to take at the end of the message. If we do not know what we want people to do, it will be very difficult to get action.

When someone reads your blog, it is important to draw a path for them. Communicate is also giving people a call to action that we want them to take.

Generate interest

• A person interested in what you write is more motivated to act
• An interested person is more likely to share your content with their friends
• An interested person is more willing to contribute via a comment

I think the logic is there, a person who does not feel interested in what you say will not feel concerned, a person who does not feel concerned by your message will not be willing to communicate with you.

Your message should not only be of value, but it must have value for them. They must see that what you share with others can assist them, inspire them and improve their video games knowledge and interest. Your content must be able to touch their motivations, their feelings and values or desires to which they are attached.

Provide a way to remember

Sometimes people do not act for the following reasons:
• They change their minds (sometimes in the last minute)
• They are busy and sometimes they simply forget your message
• They do not feel concerned by the call to action

Let's focus on the first two reasons, because they are the most frequent, especially if you've passed the first two stages. Before they leave your blog, you must give them something that will remind them what you want them to do. At this level, I must admit that there is no magic formula, each one has their own method. Some use photos, videos, free reports, newsletters or social bookmarking.

Video games and Internet are evolving very quickly, whenever you discover new ways, always remember to include these three components in your articles. Keep in mind that communication is the key to success.

Rai Frontera is a funny games developer and member of a large community of video game bloggers.

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Poker Play: An Effective Strategy At Any Level

I never had an interest in gambling until I moved to Vegas. I was living in the suburbs of Chicago and working as a kitchen manager of a downtown restaurant. I never had time to socialize since work seemed to take up all my time. I was usually too tired from the long days of managing the restaurant. My wife and I were in the process of building a house in a brand new development. After our house was built, we made the decision to moved to Vegas. The timing was perfect, there was a housing boom in full force at the time and we bought our 2nd home at a great price. I moved out ahead of my wife for the purpose of finding work in the restaurant business. She was a registered nurse and was guaranteed work at a very nice hospital. Everything was good, or so I thought. Still unable to find a job at that point, we both eventually settled in our new home in Vegas and sold our house in Chicago and then divorced. I was single and jobless. I went through a few meaningless jobs before I landed a job dealing poker at Binion's Horseshoe during The World Series of Poker. I had a natural love for the game and was intrigued by the math involved in poker. My fascination with being able to get good "reads" on people led me on a pursuit to learn all I could about body language and the math behind poker.

I have always had an interest in understanding people. I studied psychology at Middle Tennessee State University in the early 90's. I have spent the last 11 years studying body language and facial expressions to better understand peoples' personalities. It has led me down a completely different path than I had anticipated. My aim is no longer to improve my poker game but to use research and studies to help myself and others understand personality.

Poker was originally played by groups of guys getting together for a "friendly" game of cards. Games were held in inconspicuous back rooms, dimly lit, where going "all in" could cost you more than the money on the table. There was always the threat of being raided by police, mugged by gunmen or both. It wasn't until Benny Binion moved poker to the gambling mecca now known as Las Vegas to legitimize what we know as poker. However, today's poker is an entirely different game. From excessive numbers of players to accessibility to information found on the Internet about the game and new and improved methods of play, finding the advantages in poker are becoming scarce.

There are three basic ingredients when it comes to playing poker effectively. The first is understanding the numbers behind poker, in other words knowing poker math. Next, is the ability to read someone's body language. And the third is understanding a person's personality. In this article, I am hoping to show you how these three interact with one another and how you can improve your ability to read others.

The first part to learning poker is the math skills. If you are saying to yourself that you are not good at math, that's ok. With a little logic and common sense, you can understand the fundamentals. Just understand that the math never changes. The statistical chance of drawing a specific card has, is, and always will be a 20 per cent chance. The basic are the percentages or probability of making your hand. For example, when I was playing consistently, I would look for certain percentages of my hole cards (Texas hold em) before I would get up from the game and try my luck at another table. I know that I should see a pocket pair once every sixteen hands, suited cards once every three to four hands, and suited connectors once every forty-six hands. The big statistic that saves me a lot of money is the issue with pocket jacks. I always thought this was a strong hand, however I learned that when holding pocket jacks, my percentages of a higher card coming on the flop are greater than my chance of getting pocket jacks! Lesson: don't play jacks to strong, you end up a long-term loser. An advanced skill to keep in mind is your expected value. Without going into too much detail about it, it is basically what you expect to get from a given betting session, and armed with this value, helps make your decisions. It's a little tricky and should be reserved for when you move up the poker ladder to then next level of game. For now just focus on the basic percentages. Don't get ahead of yourself. Get the basics down. It wont take you long. It took me about a week to understand the basics, then I was off to the races. Once I had an understanding of basic percentages and EV (expected value) I was still hungry for more. I felt like something was still missing from my game. I found that in my ability to read body language.

The next ingredient is the ability to read someone's body language. The skills you learn here can help you in every aspect of your life. As I continue my research and study in body language, I am still in awe of how this information is not valued enough to be taught in schools. The basic premise to body language is never, and I mean never, take a single body language and make a judgment on just that one trait. Some guys say if you really want to know what someone is going to do on a poker table look at their feet. At their feet? Come on, when I am sitting at a poker table, the last thing I am going to is say, "your all in, can you wait a second, I have to look under the table at your feet and then I can make my decision. " no, I'm afraid this isn't what would happen at a poker table. And it defies our basic rule to take gestures in isolation. The key to body language is to take body language in context. If someone has their arms crossed, it usually means they are being defensive. However, if they are sitting under the air conditioner vent and its 60 degrees in the poker room, it could mean they are cold, not being defensive. This is the best advice I can give you when it comes to reading someones body language. Once you become familiar with the putting body language expressions together in a meaningful way, the more advanced stage is to focus on the face and facial expression. There are more nerve connections between the brain and the face than any other part of the body. The poker face is expressionless, motionless but full of information if you know what you are looking for. There is a lot to facial expressions, too much to cover in this article, but what i can tell you is that your game will drastically improve once you start studying the face and all that it has to offer. Once again stick with the basics, learn to read overall body language, then move to more detailed information in the face.

Once we put these first two together, we have almost completed our poker game. The third and last ingredient is understanding the personality of a person. Poker, at a basic level, is a game about cards. You play cards, you look at cards, and understand the cards. As you progress and step up your game to higher levels, poker becomes a game of observing and understanding people. The cards don't matter as much. Naturally, the best hand wins in a game of poker, but learning the skills to understand body language (in particular, facial expressions) and the type of personalities you are dealing with, is truly what the game of poker is about. It is very important to be able to tell if a person is lying to you. The greatest gift you can have is the ability to not only make good statistical decision, and read their body language, but to baseline the person's personality by what you see and hear at the table. Personality is composed of five key elements. One, the level of intellect. Two, their temperament. Third, their skill level. Fourth, a person's morality. And finally, number five, their attitude. To function highly on all five takes a rather unique individual. And everyone swings on a pendulum from high to low in each area. But knowing this is half the battle. Knowing how to apply this information is the other half. Once you are able to make intelligent decisions based on personality, with enough practiced, can make you unstoppable at any level of play.

These are the three basic ingredients when it comes to playing poker effectively. In this article, my hope was to show you how these three build upon one another and how you can improve your ability to read others and improve your game. First off, learn the math, it wont ever change. It is the foundation to build upon to be good at playing poker at the beginning levels. Next, learn body language skills, emphasize the facial expressions and context. Learn how the facial muscles react to stress and how wrinkles form based on the long-term use of certain muscles. And finally, read someone's personality traits by how they behave at the table, how skillful they are at playing, their level of intelligence and temperament.

By doing these things and becoming a life long student of the game, you should not expect to stay at whatever level you are at. You can improve you poker game and see amazing returns when these principles are applied. A word of caution, once you head down this path, you will see everything in a new light and understand human nature better. Your new found abilities may just lead you into directions you may not expect!

I will end this article with a true, real story. In 2004 I was full-fledged studying, reading body language, and profiling personalities everywhere I went. (I am sorry to those poor clerks at the Smith's on Flamingo). It was new to me then and it seemed as though I could read people at a different, higher level. I could predict how they were going to react based on the things I said and did. It was time to take a chance at the poker table. I had 140 dollars in my checking account and withdrew the money to try my hand at applying this to poker. I played for 31 hours straight, applied all that I had learned at that point and presto, it worked like a charm. I cashed out over 30 times my investment (over 100 dollars per hour) and was able to take home enough money to cover my bills for that month. With the little extra I had, I bought into a satellite at the Mirage a few days later. The WPT kicked off their season that year at the Mirage, so I wanted to test my new strategies at the next level. It was about 200 dollars for the satellite. I won it. Entered another, won it. Entered another, won it. In no time, I won enough money to cover the super satellite into main event that year. They were giving 37 seats that year and I think there were 355 satellite entrants. When they announced we had made to 37, I was about 15th in chips. A ten thousand dollar seat was mine, with only a two hundred-dollar investment. I sold the seat at a very reasonable discount to a friend and didn't play the main event. I took some time off to get better at my skills, and here I am, eight years later. Do I regret not playing? Sometimes. I think about what could have been. But in reality, the matter is I have not looked back on the decision to take a break in regret, and who knows, when the timing is right, you may see me at a final table of a main event someday.

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Effective Money Making in World of Warcraft

Much as in real life, money is a constant necessity in World of Warcraft and having ample amounts of funds can save you tremendous amounts of time and frustration. However, making this large amount of money is often considered itself a time-consuming and potentially frustrating task, but it doesn't have to be if you take the right approach.

Many World of Warcraft players make more than enough gold to fund the purchase of anything from crafting resources/materials to otherwise difficult to obtain raid gear from top-tier guilds with very little time invested each day, simply by following an effective and efficient routine.

Below I'll detail some of the basic methods of making money in World of Warcraft and tell you a bit about optimizing your approach as well as what I feel are the best ways to make gold.

1. Farming

Farming is the simplest and least complex approach to making cash. It's also probably the most widely used as everyone understands that killing monsters to make money is a surefire way of making gold. It's just quite often the slowest method too, mainly due to the fact that practically everyone does it from time to time leading to competition for farming locations and often an overflow of resources from popular farming locations, which drives down the prices of even rarer item drops.

Still, picking the right location for your class and level can generate a more than adequate profit if done for long enough or if you get lucky and find a rarer drop. Additionally, after the release of every expansion and patches that add new content, farming becomes perhaps the most profitable method of making money for a brief period of time as people scramble for new materials and items only available in newly released regions.

Sometimes this applies to old locations, as well. New expansion crafting recipes that make use of already available materials can allow you to farm what is at present an unimportant location only to turn your findings into a great deal of cash come the release of the next expansion.

In general, I'd rate straight up monster farming as the least effective money making method, excluding special circumstances such as the release of a new expansion and/or region containing rare and highly sought after materials/drops.

2. Gathering

Gathering is the next step in basic money making, providing all profit for little to no expense as you find and sell crafting materials on the auction house. Gathering can be combined with monster farming quite effectively assuming you're farming in an area where valuable crafting materials spawn.

Another way to use gathering is to find your own materials to level up crafting skills and them create items to sell on the auction house, a great way of saving money and depending on the profession equally effective at making additional profit.

Gathering on its own varies in profit, but I would say that pure gathering without any monster killing probably outweighs farming, or even farming and gathering, in potential profit. Keep in mind you'll be competing with a great number of other players looking to do the same thing, and the crowd can grow to unmanageable levels at peak times making it impossible to scrape up even a meager amount of materials after hours of searching.

If you find your gathering area of choice crowded, it's usually better to move on and try an otherwise less profitable location, as the actual profit per hour is likely to be higher than what you'd get competing with multiple other players in more popular regions.

Crucial to making a good income with gathering is to find a good synergy between your gathering professions, assuming you take two of them rather than a crafting profession. Something to consider when starting on a new server without the benefit of funding from a higher level character is to pick up two gathering professions early on and later replace one of them with a crafting profession once you've obtained a decent cash supply to fund yourself with.

Personally, I keep a few characters with purely gathering professions to use as my farming characters and then transfer their materials and profits to my crafting characters, each of which have two crafting professions. My favorite gathering characters are hunters for general purposes and rogues for PvP servers, due to stealth.

3. Crafting

Much as how gathering can be used in combination with farming to obtain additional profit, crafting synergizes with harvesting for those of you seeking to supply your own materials for crafting, as opposed to purchasing them off the auction house. Crafting is a great way of making money when done properly, but it also requires a higher initial investment before you actually start making a profit, whereas gathering and farming can be done at no personal cost aside from time.

Once you have a decent amount of cash saved, you'll want to start looking for opportunities to purchase materials for popular items at a lower price than you can sell the completed item for, cutting out the time you'd otherwise spend searching for materials on your own.

In many ways effective money making as a dedicated crafter requires the same skillset as playing the auction house: learning prices and looking for deals on materials that you're fairly certain you can turn into a product that sells for more than you initially invested buying the materials.

Done properly this can lead to an exponential increase in wealth at a very quick rate; it also doesn't take much time comparative to farming and gathering everything for yourself or to sell on the auction house.

4. Playing the Auction House

The most effective way of making money in World of Warcraft is without a doubt playing the auction house, however this is also the most complex method as it requires the monitoring of numerous potential markets and swift identification of opportunities to buy low and sell high. What this means is that you need a general knowledge of prices and the value of nearly all items, rather than focusing solely on your profession as with gathering and crafting.

Players who dedicate themselves to this method, and even casual users of the auction house, would be wise to find themselves an addon which greatly assists in simplifying the otherwise overwhelming amount of information to digest about pricing and supply.

For more information on making gold visit http://www.gotwarcraft.com/

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Make Lots of Gold Through Effective Farming in WoW

Do you like to play World of Warcraft? WoW is an enormously famous game. The Warcraft series was first launched in 1994, and has since been purchased by millions of people. This online role playing war game has caught the imagination of millions of children and adults alike. Consequently, a lot of attention has been focused on improving the gaming experience, both from the side of the user and the side of the company. The user wishes to discover newer and newer secrets for carrying out each and every task in World of Warcraft. One of the most important activities in WoW is farming. Farming enables you to earn money, with which you can buy war gear and other items for your game character. There are many tips and tricks concerning WoW farming. If you look up some interesting websites, you can get hold of many such tips and tricks.

By following these tips, you can farm minerals, leathers, and herbs easily, thus collecting enough gold to buy high quality war gear. Many online players are now making thousands every month by just farming these particular items. The basis for farming these items only is that they retain value and sell fast. Items like Pyrite Ore, Twilight Jasmine, Savage Leather, Volatile Fire and Embersilk Cloth are regularly farmed to make money. These can be found in the new Cataclysm zones. These items can be farmed for hours and auctioned off for a great price quickly. There are also tips as to where exactly each of these items can be farmed most profitably. For example, you can undertake WoW farming of the Pyrite Ore in Twilight Highlands to obtain the most profit. The World of Warcraft websites will also provide guidelines as to the places in Twilight Islands where the Ore will be located. Apart from the Twilight Highlands, Uldum is the best place to farm this ore.

The primary problem faced by many players of WoW though is that they are yet to reach level 85, and the above items can only be mined after reaching this level. However, on the website, you will find out about several items that you can farm from level 10 onwards. For example, between levels 10 and 20, you can farm light leather, peacebloom and silverleaf, copper ore, linen cloth etc. The website even tells you the exact amount of gold you can earn by farming each of these items in every level. Between level 80 and 85, there are several beasts you can kill and skin. These beasts will provide you Savage Leather and Savage Leather scraps. These items can be used to create Pristine Hides which are very valuable on the auction house.

There are many other things which the WoW websites can help you with. It can help you learn how to equip yourself with the best farming routes, maps and farming add-ons. You can also learn how to evaluate the auction house to make sure you are making the maximum gold by farming the right commodities.

Mel E Dora is the author of this article on WoW Farming. Find more information, about WoW here

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