5 Keys to the Kingdom – How to Conquer any Online Video Game

Today’s online video games (MMORPG’s) are extraordinarily complex worlds that take a lot of time to master. Whether you play a couple of hours a week or a couple of hours every day there are some fundamental rules you should follow to maximize what you achieve within these online worlds.

Kingdom Key 1: Tracking and managing your time spent
This is the most important key. Regardless of how much time you play you have to make the maximum of your time. This means keeping track of what is going on and what you learn in the game then applying a simple rule: Do what makes the most use of your limited time. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Often times you will embark on a quest or harvest and mine raw materials. Let’s say you do a specific task that takes you 1 hour to complete and your reward is 1,000 gold. This is great. You now understand that for this particular task one hour is worth 1,000 gold. But this isn’t the end of your learning. There are many other tasks that you can do. Let’s say there is a simple harvesting task that reaps you 100 gold every five minutes. Well if you do the math on this task you will see that in one hour you can actually earn 1,200 gold. This is a 20% improvement of your time. By doing this you will actually be squeezing in an extra hour of game time every five hours. See how this can be significant? This careful tracking of your time also works in the other direction. There may be a complex task that takes you a five full hours to complete. But this task rewards you with 10,000 gold. If you were to do the original one-hour task for five hours you would have earned 5,000 gold. This more complex task has earned you twice as much gold.

The simple rule here is to keep notes on the various tasks you do and to record how much of a reward these tasks earn you. You will quickly see which tasks earn you more money for the time you spend.

I will often do a very specific task for one full hour and include all the ancillary necessities in the task, which might mean trips to the shop, repair of equipment, buying, selling or anything else that the task entails. At the end of one hour I have an exact count of what I earned. This gives me accurate data that I can compare to other tasks.

Kingdom Key 2: Harnessing the Power of other People
This key is also very important whether you are new to an online game or a seasoned player. There are people in the game that know things about it that you don’t know. This is plain and simple, and you have to get them to help you to get better faster.
There are three things that you can do to maximize your benefit from other people. The first thing you should do is join a guild or clan as soon as possible. It should be a medium to large clan because this will give you access to a wider variety of people, and it should be a clan that is in alignment with your goals for the game. If you really like PK (Player-killer) action then you should join this type of guild. If you really like magic or a certain type of character you should join a guild that focuses on that. The second thing you should do is join online forums that are devoted to the game. Forums have an absolute wealth of knowledge about games and they give you a quick understanding of the people that are knowledgeable. You can quickly form a friendship with an experienced player after just a few friendly forum comments and posts. The third thing you can do, and this is the most difficult, is to start your own guild or clan. If you have the people skills and leadership ability this can be the absolute best thing you can do because you can guide groups of people toward tasks that benefit your guild and you can achieve your personal goals at the same time. The wealthiest players in many games are almost always either guild leaders or in a leadership position. You can even assign other people to gather information and keep notes for you and for your guild. This is a great savings of your time.

Kingdom Key 3: Keeping track of the enormous amount of information. You are playing a game that is enormously complex – it is probably more complex than the city you live in. There are more people, more tasks, more quests, more locations and more opportunities. Do you know every location and every street in your city? Probably not, and when you need tofind something where do you look? In the Yellow pages or on map quest! You need to create your own yellow pages for the game you play. Get a brand new empty notebook and take extensive notes. Where are the interesting things? Run into something unusual and don’t know what it is all about? Write a note about it in your book. I guarantee you that at some point in the future you will need that note! Draw small sketches and take down all sorts of information you discover. Did you find an interesting mine or a nice plant that you can harvest? Did you find a den of goblins and can’t fight them yet? Having all this down in a notebook will make you so much better as you progress through the game. This step is hard for some people to do because it means actually taking your hand off the mouse and not playing the game for a minute but it is well worth the effort. It is also a very good idea to make notes about other players in the game. Did you meet somebody that is an expert on a certain topic or quest? Write that person’s character name down and a quick note about them. You will be able to look them up in the future when you need that type of information.

Kingdom Key 4: Do your Out of Game Research – But Don’t Cheat! Every popular online game has lots of websites, forums, and chat rooms affiliated with it. People are very passionate about these games and many people give lots of tips, hints, and ideas about the games. Spend the time out of the game surfing the Internet for good information that will help you solve quests, find resources, and make more money faster. But, never do anything unethical, don’t use cheat programs, automated programs, or any other type of software or information that the developers of the game would consider a violation. And always avoid any website that offers these kinds of cheats. If a website will help you cheat the game company they will have no problem cheating you too. Some of these websites lure you to them then secretly load programs, viruses and worms on your computer so they can steal your game password and login information. Trying to cheat is just not worth this risk. At the minimun you will get caught by the game company and banned and at the worst your account could be hijacked by an unscrupulous webmaster and you could log in to your character one day to find all your stuff missing and your account emptied out.

Kingdom Key 5: Remember to have fun! It is after all just a game and that’s the whole point. If keeping track of all this stuff becomes a chore to you then scale it back a bit and spend time just enjoying the game and chatting with other characters. Acquiring the skills I have outlined here takes time. They are habits you will get into over time. Just don’t give up on them. Do them a little at a time and before you know it you will have a great compilation of information about the game and you will gain a reputation as one of the best players in the game.