In all fairness, you dont need ingots to fill some of the 'junk' bods. Most of my charactors have 0.1 tailoring and some have 0.1 smithing. The reason for this is cause they get the very cheep bods, like 10,15,20 skullcaps or whatever of normal quality. I then buy said items off the tailor and put them in the bod so I have a fulled bod. Every few months or so, I put all these filled bods on my Mule charactor and just go one for one. Bods are still a valid point of income for a lot of my friends on different shards for a reason, they actually require a little work, a little detication, and a LOT of storage space to do efficiently.
I have gotten like 20 Barbed Kit Large bods that I have either sold or filled. I have gotten enough parts for One Val hammer, but I dont like to deal with the Smithy bods sence it does take so much more and Val hammers have a little more of a limit then the other runics in the game for the work you put into it.

Exactly what I do, turn in normal bods that have been filled by buying stuff from vendors and taking the reward shovels for mining for the ingots required to fill the exceptional junk and iron bods. I currently have 300 filled color junk bods, 270 filled large bods, 150 filled normal bods (which I will be turning in after I get home in half an hour, because I need more shovels) and around 800 exceptional small bods, iron and junk that have been filled. Soon as I get 1k in exceptional iron bods its time to litter the smithy with gargoyle pickaxes and prospector tools. starting the process all over again. The problem is that while I can mine 5k in ore an hour with lots of focus on my part, I normally am also watching the tube while I am mining. That ore I can use in 15 minutes filling them exceptional bods.

Also I seem to get way more large bods of the high end color ores than the actual parts.

I also do not have a bunch of mules with .1 in both skills because I am not so intent on gathering bods that I will log in and log out 6 times an hour. All the information I have seen so far on automated bod running indicates that its not quite legal, so I wont even go there.

i'd have to agree with black dahlia...brokering isn't necessary.

For whomever it was that said 'it's a good thing because then people who can't play as much can get these things'...if they're going to do that, keep it in game. No need to get real life with it. People that make money in real life (and some people, most likely illegally as they LIVE off it) it's disgusting.

I have no problems w/ brokers w/ brokers or people who buy from them as long as they are legit. It's like Merc said some people do not have time to do everything and they want to jump right in and start competing w/ everyone else and it's the shady/greedy brokers that bring the game down.

Remember the key word is TIME. Some people can only get on for 1-2 hrs a day if they are lucky, so how would they get anything? I know people like to say well earn it in game, but how do you do it in 1-2 hrs? I personally know new guild mates that we wanted to help but they did not want total charity. Some earned stuff in game, other bought some stuff online. They went to brokers and basically bought time someone else spent to get something so they can enjoy the game as well. Now they hunt w/ us and have more fun since now they can hang in there in areas where they constantly died.

If someone can make a living from it legitimately I say good for them. They found something they enjoy doing and they can make some money from it. Something a lot of people are looking to do.

I think 9 out of 10 of the val hammers you see for sale are duped. They MUST be, if people are selling them for 40-50mil each. You figure that a lot of your Doom arties sell for that, and you see those much more often.

Then again, a lot of those Doom arties are duped too.

I'd expect to see a real val hammer go for 100mil+.

I don't mind people who sell ingame items on Ebay and whatnot. I've bought books of tailoring bods off people on Ebay before, back when I had extra money to waste on UO. But when they're getting their main source of income by playing a game all day, if you think about it, that's stealing from EA.

Kylana

I will totally agree that the hammers are potentially duped. I was on a shard a few months back (not gonna mention the name of shard or person) but the character was selling a bag of val hammers for 15m per. It was too good to be true to me, of course idiots were buying them left and right. Then a few hours later he was back again selling them for half the cost. Suspicious?