Greedy goblin

The final step for a social place

2009-11-09T07:00:00.002+01:00

I greatly underestimated the importance of the $10 pets. Since I'm antisocial, for me it's just another pointless thing that socials will buy to show off and just another mean for Blizzard to exploit them.

Elnia's post shown me how big step it was. No matter how many times I see it, it always surprises me when I see the same thing trough the eye of a social. That's what I love about the blogs. They are all little windows to social minds that help me a lot understanding how they work.

He honestly expresses his negative feelings about this issue and also pinpoint the difference between the pets and faction changes, server transfers, name changes and such paid services: "If I am standing on the auction house bridge in Ironforge and your character that just had a faction change walks by I am clueless about any RMT activity unless I know you personally. If you have a RMT pet I know. I know because it is staring me in the face. With account services what is essentially out of sight can easily stay out of mind. Precisely because RMT pets are going to be always in sight the classist distinction will always be in mind."

I was right in my previous post, the personal motivator of buying these things is keeping up with the Joneses. Elnia expresses that he doesn't want to face with the fact that others have something he doesn't, (while doesn't care about things others have but he and other peers cannot see).

However I didn't see the systemic importance of these pets. These pets are the answer of the fundamental question: "Why playing computer games is not cool/trendy/socially acceptable?". Yes, this question was answered by Elnia without even noticing it: "the major issues I have with real money transactions is that they are classist. They create a distinction between the haves and the have nots that is based upon a person’s out-of-game rather than in-game accomplishments."

Social people always have social ranks in their head. They always look up on some "elite" and look down on some "losers" and in the meantime do their best to get higher on the social ladder. They don't even deny it, they merely claim it's "normal" or "coming from human nature and you can't do anything against it" (well, watch me!).

However the social order of a computer game is "wrong". I mean being "cool" in real life does not guarantee that you are "cool" in WoW. To belong to the elite of WoW you has to be a skilled and dedicated player. The "120 kg and lives in his mother's basement" image comes from this. It's obvious that 99% of the players are not living in a basement and have jobs or school, and surely everyone know that. "They are living in a basement" is just a short term for "they are such a twisted sub-culture that they ready to welcome even basement-living uber-losers into their elite, if the mentioned losers mash buttons good enough".

A place having "wrong" social order cannot be a socially accepted place. And there is only one "right" social order: "how much (real) money you have to show off". You can get to "elite" restaurants (where food tastes weird, I hate them), you can buy "elite" cars, you can buy jewelry, "stylish" clothes, stay in 5 star hotels and such if you have enough money (= you are a cool person).

By introducing microtransaction pets, Blizzard "fixed" the social order of WoW, therefore made the game a "proper place" for the "cool ppl": you can no longer be looked down by "losers" who just "mash buttons with no life". After all, they only have epics that will be replaced with next patch badge gear, while you have really cool things (where "real" is defined by "came from real money, the source of the "real" social order).

WoW 4.0 is simply a Second life clone where you don't die from boredom after the first hour. And I have to say, observing this Zoo of socials entertains me to no end.

PS: of course I don't think that the "normal" social order is right. I find it equally stupid.

PS2: please spare me from the "$10 is not an issue to anyone" comments. Blizzard will make sure that there will be enough vanity for sale. 100 pets for $10 each is ... whatever, theorycrafting is for no lifers we are fun ppl!

Morons of the week

2009-11-08T07:00:00.013+01:00

They just can't stop believing that the market could support endless amount of sellers without price decrease (by McRaffles):

"1G plz" is so last year (by Bryster of The Venture Co. - US):

Korban of Azuremyst sent us this little story about a very problematic cold weather flying:
A level 70 Hunter, Axechopper, contacts an old acquaintance in the guild and gets a probationary invite. With in 3 minutes of the invite he contacts the inviting guild officer asking for 269 gold. She of course turns him down quickly. This guild officer is my wife sitting right next to me tells me of the shenanigans and tells him gold begging in any form is not allowed especially in guild. He says ok and he won't do it again. He then contacts me and begs me for 269 gold. Wow, great move on his part. I ask him why he wants it and he proceeds to tell me it is for heirloom flying. I inform him he can only get it if he has a level 80. "But I do! Its on another server on alliance not horde. I can still get the cold weather flying tome." Oooookay, I ask for the name and server, just for grins and chuckles, and he tells me he cant remember the name and so on but insists he has one and he needs the cold weather flying to level in Northrend faster.

Steeh, Draenor EU found that politically correct terms are getting into WoW. RUN!

Elfanatior is a great specimen. Not only he has Fiery Weapon enchant as hunter, low level professions, terrible gear but also he looks for 2 more: tank, healer and DPS! On the top of that, he was spotted by the guy who sold him the Fiery enchant scrolls

Matt sent this chatlog from trade about a new attempt to stop undercutting: "it's a bannable offense"
13:59:20] [2] [2:Poěfect]: its your existing ah whores that will hate me

[13:59:46] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Fun fact. I vendor Saronite Bars.

[13:59:57] [2] [Kinoppally]: me to O.o

[14:00:40] [2] [35:Cromlin]: But, if you want to risk it bro. Enjoy the "Auction house exploitation" ban.

[14:00:47] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Not joking it's happened before.

[14:01:02] [2] [2:Poěfect]: posting auctions is not a bannable offense

[14:01:13] [2] [2:Poěfect]: i can post at whatever price i want

[14:01:14] [2] [Lethalshot]: "auction house exploitation"?

[14:01:32] [2] [Zanduppy]: basically they'll suspend you for anything shady

[14:01:57] [2] [2:Poěfect]: you all talk about things that you have no clue about

[14:01:59] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Let say.

[14:02:07] [2] [Zanduppy]: like you're doing now.

[14:02:09] [2] [35:Cromlin]: You buy all the AH's greens.

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: ............./´Ż/).............(\Ż`\

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: ............/....//..............\\....\

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: .........../....//................\\....\

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: ...../´Ż/..../´Ż\............./Ż`\....\Ż`\..

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: .././.../..../..../.|_......_|.\....\....\...\.\..

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: (.(....(....(..../.)..)....(..(.\....)....).....).)

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: .\................\/.../....\...\/................/

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: ..\................. /........\................../

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: ....\..............(............)............../

[14:02:13] [2] [80:Xeroxicide]: ......\.............\.........../............./

[14:02:21] [2] [80:Indígo]: lol

[14:02:23] [2] [2:Poěfect]: unless you have researched what you can /can not do on the ah.. you are just spewing

[14:02:24] [2] [Zanduppy]: I have a friend who was suspended for power leveling tailoring

[14:02:24] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Like, all the weapons, bam, resell them for higher prices.

[14:02:36] [2] [Zanduppy]: by buying a lot of runecloth.

[14:02:37] [2] [35:Cromlin]: That would be under exploitation.

[14:02:38] [2] [80:Marrylie]: LMAO TAILORING !

[14:02:39] [2] [2:Poěfect]: sure ya do.. not unless he hacked

[14:02:55] [2] [2:Poěfect]: if he told you that and you believe him.. you must be about 5 yrs old

[14:03:01] [2] [2:Poěfect]: he was probably botting

[14:03:04] [2] [Zanduppy]: I saw the email

[14:03:08] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Go buy all the enchanting mats on the AH.

[14:03:11] [2] [2:Poěfect]: mhmm

[14:03:12] [2] [35:Cromlin]: And resell them bro.

[14:03:34] [2] [Zanduppy]: :)

[14:03:37] [2] [35:Cromlin]: You can be temp banned, and it's under exploitation for some damned reason.

[14:03:46] [2] [2:Poěfect]: so you are telling me that its illegal to buy all the mats and relist them?

[14:03:53] [2] [Zanduppy]: no.

[14:03:54] [2] [35:Cromlin]: If you do it enough times, yes.

[14:04:06] [2] [2:Poěfect]: which is it? yes or no?

[14:04:08] [2] [Zanduppy]: I'm saying blizz can suspend you if they think you're doing something wrong on a whim

[14:04:14] [2] [Zanduppy]: both.

[14:04:18] [2] [2:Poěfect]: and whats wrong with buying and relisting?

[14:04:18] [2] [Lethalshot]: thats just effecting the wow economy to make a profit if u have the money go for it

[14:04:28] [2] [Drakcanheal]: I buy and relist all the time

[14:04:35] [2] [2:Poěfect]: as do most of us

[14:04:38] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Lethalshot, they don't want you doing it like that.

[14:04:43] [2] [Zanduppy]: I don't know how much you buy. he bought....

[14:04:46] [2] [2:Poěfect]: oh really cromlin?

[14:04:47] [2] [Zanduppy]: gobs of rune.

[14:04:53] [2] [Drakcanheal]: if I see something going for a lower then market price I buy it and repost at a higher price

[14:04:58] [2] [Zanduppy]: 100 stacks or more

[14:04:58] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Not like that.

[14:05:00] [2] [35:Cromlin]: In mass.

[14:05:06] [2] [Drakcanheal]: I have made thousands of gold that way

[14:05:09] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Like, all the illusion dust, for example.

[14:05:10] [2] [2:Poěfect]: why would they give us the tools to be wow economists if they didn't want that happening?

[14:05:15] [2] [Zanduppy]: blizz thought he was buying gold

[14:05:20] [2] [2:Poěfect]: think it through for 5 minutes

[14:05:26] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Sigh.

[14:05:29] [2] [80:Marrylie]: ALL be quiet and u can buy gold from me

[14:05:33] [2] [Drakcanheal]: lol, I buy all the green items below a certain price (I mena a lot) DE them and resell the mats

[14:05:34] [2] [Lethalshot]: y theres nothing wrong with it most of the time u will get screwed anyways because ppl will underprice their AH items to sell and then it would balance itself out

[14:05:39] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Go buy all the illusion dust, nay all the enchanting mats.

[14:05:41] [2] [35:Cromlin]: go do it.

[14:05:48] [2] [2:Poěfect]: indeed lethal

[14:05:57] [2] [2:Poěfect]: why would i waste my money?

[14:06:05] [2] [80:Marrylie]: then why u talking for

[14:06:14] [2] [2:Poěfect]: granted infinite dust is about 25% below the 2 week average atm

[14:06:21] [2] [Lethalshot]: thats just dumb ppl would just list them for the proper price in 5 minutes

[14:06:25] [2] [Drakcanheal]: I have bought all the runed orbs (pre-ToC) and reposted at a 20% mark up

[14:06:40] [2] [80:Mukluc]: exactly. so go for it Poi

[14:06:48] [2] [35:Cromlin]: No, I would then buy it, and resell.

[14:06:49] [2] [2:Poěfect]: no thanks

[14:06:51] [2] [2:Poěfect]: not my market

[14:06:56] [2] [35:Cromlin]: While I make a massive profit.

[14:06:59] [2] [2:Poěfect]: i just like to watch it

[14:07:04] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Dominate the market, so to speak.

[14:07:08] [2] [80:Mukluc]: yea, me too

[14:07:14] [2] [2:Poěfect]: you guys are ignorant

[14:07:21] [2] [35:Cromlin]: If you post 100 illusion dust, i'll buy it all, and resell it double the price.

[14:07:28] [2] [2:Poěfect]: you realize there are people out there with bank bags full of stacks?

[14:07:32] [2] [Lethalshot]: well then poi tell us all how it is teach us

[14:07:37] [2] [2:Poěfect]: the second you buy out and relist.. they will undercut you

[14:07:42] [W From] [80:Mukluc]: You're right. It's how my main made 1/4 million gold!

[14:07:49] [2] [Lethalshot]: exactly thats wat im saying

[14:07:55] [2] [35:Cromlin]: Yes and no.

[14:08:00] [2] [35:Cromlin]: I buy it, and then sell it.

[14:08:02] [W To] [80:Mukluc]: these guys are retarded

[14:08:10] [2] [80:Plekanec]: welcome to ignoreland

[14:08:12] [2] [35:Cromlin]: I will sill turn a profit, while you get whatever you posted it at.

[14:08:15] [W From] [80:Mukluc]: yeah, afraid so

[14:08:33] [2] [80:Holychix]: Obvious trolls are obvious today

[14:06:05] [2] [80:Marrylie]: then why u talking for

[14:07:08] [2] [80:Mukluc]: yea, me too

[14:09:07] [2] [2:Poěfect]: wow economy

[14:09:23] [2] [80:Obellix]: wow economy fall after anti twink patch

[14:09:27] [2] [Celerebella]: did***

[14:10:28] [2] [Lethalshot]: i just bought all kinds of tin ore and copper ore to make bronze bars when they were selling at 25g a stack i put them on for 13g a stack and now they r selling for 6g a stack

[14:11:07] [2] [Lethalshot]: even if u do buy all the matarials theres always going to b some one that will undercut u

[14:11:07] [2] [80:Mukluc]: Gotta love the free market

[14:11:13] [2] [2:Poěfect]: and there is nothing you can do about it because there is always someone with deeper pockets

[14:11:22] [2] [80:Mukluc]: yup

[14:11:46] [2] [Lethalshot]: doesnt really bother me and it shouldnt rly bother anyone else because u have all the same oppurtunities

[14:11:48] [W From] [80:Mukluc]: well, you go dude. just don't try to corner MY place in the market!....lol

Milkmen of the week

2009-11-07T07:00:00.001+01:00

This is an extraordinary Morons of the Week, commemorating those wonderful people who preferred to buy their ice cold milk and simple flour for 1000%+ price at 20 yards from the vendor who sells them for normal price.

The first by Phaye:

FoosYou even flipped the achievement bread up to the sky high 22s (yes, silver). Still it was found unethical by our next specimen:

Aronser from Spinebreaker EU also made profit on the retards:

Dorvan of Garona (US) said: I love the holidays. For Day of the Dead, as I logged on the first thing I saw was "[2: Trade] Were do i go 2 find [Simple Flour] lol". Without even taking time to switch to my banker, I loaded Wowhead, found the ingredients for Bread of the Dead (Simple Flour and Milk) and bought 40 of each.

Emmalinna started selling milk after she found them dropped by low level monsters. Later she continued selling from vendor:

My only mount

2009-11-06T07:00:00.007+01:00

On the picture you can see my only mount. There is an achievement for 100 mounts, which proves that you can have at least 100 mounts. Yet I have only one. Being druid helps, but my other characters also have 2 mounts, 1 for ground and 1 for flying.

My minipet collection is a bit bigger as quests and events give you pets and you can also buy them for silvers in cities. I used to trade them in the common AH back then and simply equipped some. Still, none of my characters have 25 pets.

Why is it important? Because you can pay 10 real world euros, aka 1 month WoW subscription for a single minipet. I can only quote Mimiron: "Now, why would you go and do something like that?"

Of course I'm not naive, I'm fully aware that Blizzard makes a killing with those things. Most probably they will be followed by other minipets, mounts, tabards, titles and RP clothing. I don't think (yet) that they would dare to sell items with top stats, however I can imagine that they would sell not-top tier emblems or honor.

Let's try to answer to our beloved provider of wonderous rapidity! Did I ever missed some other mounts than my wolf and flight form? Never. Did I ever missed a minipet? Actually I barely call upon any of my existing ones. Let's face it, they are completely pointless.

OK, you might think they are cute and funny. Possibly. But why do you have to own them? I mean I find Lamborghinies beautiful, yet I'm not planning to buy one. Not even to rent one for a weekend, although I could afford that easily. Every time I see one on the street, I turn after it, admire it, and move on my way smiling (not ironically, but filled with beauty). So, why do you have to buy it to receive its "cuteness". You could just walk to any pet in Dalaran and watch it!

The answer is pretty sad: people want to own these things because they believe that the Joneses doesn't have them yet, or even worse, they already have one and will look down on us if we can't keep up. If I'd have to point out one reason from many why I'm goldcapped in WoW and do pretty well IRL (granted, not Lamborghini-well, but with enough deposit to be unemployed for 3 years without a drop in my lifestyle), that one reason would be: "I don't give a damn about the Joneses". As far as an item serves me well, I don't care if it's old, out of style, "cheap" or whatever way unapproved by the Joneses.

WoW is a fantasy game. Joneses doesn't care about your mount or minipet. It's just pixels for them. Why don't you give the "what would they say about my stuff" idea a break, at least in WoW. Don't buy panda or lilKT! You'll see that no one will insult you for that (not like their words would make any difference). Why don't you get out of the threadmill at least in the video game you play?!

Most people will sooner or later buy minipets because they feel they are looked down by peers if they wouldn't. These MMOs, despite their fantasy or sci-fi settings are actually social places, where the actions of social people are governed by the same ape-subroutines. However in the game this behavior is obviously pointless and ridiculous (while in real life it's obvious only to a sociopath). I seriously believe that the biggest benefit of these games is exactly that: illuminating how obviously wrong the social people are.

PS: yes, fragment of this post appeared yesterday, as I wrote it and accidently post it instead of saving.

PS2: I bought the frostwolf at lvl60 while farming honor for lvl70 gear. I thought it's easier to win AV on 60 in enchanted lvl55-60 blues than against PvP geared lvl70-es. The marks back then could not be used for much, so I actually saved the price of the faction mount.

Gervais principle

2009-11-05T07:00:00.002+01:00

I got this link long-long time ago. It's a hard read and was unsure that I could turn it into anything that fits to the blog. It's not only I cannot just copy&paste someone else's idea (that's too easy to catch in the age of google), but also I was unsatisfied with the idea itself, despite its obvious brilliance.

It's based on the TV series the Office, that is more than just a gag-series, it's a Dilbert-like cynical philosophy about corporations, along the line: "organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs. Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological."

I couldn't agree more as no one (except the owner) is motivated for the success of the organization, merely for his own personal goals. It also explains a fact that is hard (or impossible) to explain by any existing management schools: "why do corporates always reorganizing, merging, splitting, laying off...". I mean if there would be some "good" management scheme, then someone would achieve it by now (even by luck), therefore this perfect organization would be stable and endure everything.

This idea presents the following scheme:
It appears to be true and simple, so it's quite easy to fall in love with at first sight. However the explanation for it is quite made up and lacks the style and simplicity.

It introduces the "sociopaths" as "Darwinian/Protestant Ethic will-to-power types who drive an organization to function despite itself". Cold-hearted businessmen and managers who comes up with a good idea, then do what must be done.

The description of "losers" is also correct: "they are primarily losers in the economic sense: those who have, for various reasons, made (or been forced to make) a bad economic bargain: they’ve given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability. Traded freedom for a paycheck in short." However I don't necessarily see them as "losers". I'd rather use the term "grinders", as they do repetitive work, but still, they are supporting themselves, which is not "loser" for me.

However the emerging layer of "clueless" is a major problem. The Gervais-principle says: "As it [the organization] grows it requires a clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion." is simply nonsense. Later it's telling that the clueless are created by the sociopaths for their own short-term goals, usually to take a fall or as scapegoats: "The simple reason is that if you over-perform at the loser level, it is clear that you are an idiot. You’ve already made a bad bargain, and now you’re delivering more value than you need to, making your bargain even worse. Unless you very quickly demonstrate that you know your own value by successfully negotiating more money and/or power, you are marked out as an exploitable clueless loser." This is nonsense. Such cases exist but rare, exactly because the scapegoat is built for sacrifice, so they cannot stay, therefore their current number is any time low. Also, as an anecdotal evidence, as a sociopath, I can guarantee that we don't feed this type.

So let me give a much better explanation of the cycle: the "clueless" are actually "the socials". People with no skill in what they supposed to do, nor with creative skills, but skills in manipulating other people, mainly the grinders. The "clueless" or "social" layer in the company is not created by anyone, especially not by the sociopaths. They emerge on their own using their connections and power over the grinders. They are obviously incompetent for their job, yet they can keep it because everyone around them like them or at least finds it "unethical" to remove them. They usually has the social skills to make a good first impression to have a chance, then they take it by manipulating the feelings of the people around them. They run under the flag "it wasn't my fault". They are pretty good to blame failures on non-personal actors like "bad luck", or even if it's clearly their fault, they can blame it on "mistake" or result of "good intentions".

The other major way of their emergence is that they were useful grinders once, but they got old, sick, depressed or simply their job changed or disappeared due to market effects. Yet they can stay inside the organization, either in their former job, or in a fake job created exactly for them. In this case often the law make them stay: it's pretty hard and expensive to fire someone simply because he is useless in several countries. It's easier in the short term to keep them in some jobs.

They can stay because they seduce the grinders around them. If the middle manager is another social or grinder (what is quite probable), he doesn't even think of touching them, while a sociopath must think twice before removing them, since the cost is the hate and despair of all people in the department. The reason for despair is that they see the social as "one of us", as they are unable to see that the social actually does nothing useful, so they fear they will be the next. After all, he was "loyal, hard working, selfless". In the eyes of grinders and socials these are more important values than competence (that's why they are grinders at the first place). So the sociopath is forced to keep the social to prevent a serious moral drop among his minions.

The number of socials does not just grow, it grows exponentially, as the more they are, the harder it is to keep any kind of competence standard. This way they soon reach the point when the hard work of the grinders can not provide for them and the company collapses. After, or soon before this point one of the sociopath start a reorganization plan, when he conspicuously moves departments and branches, but actually just lays off most of the socials with some grinders (collateral damage). The reorganization has to be big to hide the fact that it was targeted against the socials. The sociopath here uses the social trick: "it wasn't my fault, the economy forced my hand". With the losers remaining losers, the cycle starts again, collecting socials into the organization.

So reorganizations are actually spring cleanings in order to cleanse the organization from (non-loser) socials.

You can see it in non-top WoW guilds all the time. They are started by a core of relatively good players, and first collect people who are ready to farm, put things to guildbank and accept lower loot priority as trials. But over time the guild start collecting socials who mess up the raid and create drama, yet they cannot be kicked without huge drama. Sooner or later the guild breaks and new one is formed by those who could actually play (sociopaths and grinders).

The best thing you can do to a moron

2009-11-04T07:00:00.005+01:00

Let's say you want to do something good to the morons around you. Seth is in this position, since one of his RL friend just told him that he makes 50G/day. Not /minute, day! He is unsure if telling this moron to farm herbs for low is a moral idea.

Well, it's the only idea that helps this guy. Giving him an hourly paid job is the best thing you can do for him.

Oh wait? You could give him gold as a gift, right? No, you can't! You simply don't have enough gold for that. I mean you could help one moron, but why him? What about the others? I make 10-12K a week (yes I know, I'm lazy). The server has 4-5K horde players. So I could give them 2-3G/week. That wouldn't be much of a help. Of course I could focus on a few, but why them, why not others. It's unjust and unfair!

On the other hand if I give him an hourly paid job, I let him have gold without losing mine, therefore losing my ability to "help" others. Theoretically I could give a job to every single players on the server (of course I lack the time, but not the gold).

What guarantees that I don't pay him too little? My competition does. If they offer higher wages, he could go there. I have no competition? Than any payment is better than nothing. BTW in WoW this is not true, since the quest givers offer infinite amount of jobs for 200-250G/hour.

There are two reasons why people run around without jobs:

the lack of goblins who could give them jobs
their own rejection against jobs. This is based on mostly an ape-subroutine "dignity".

I just thought how many employees I could have in the glyph business:

herb-farmers: I pay them market_price-X% for herbs, X depends on my competition's offers, my guess is 20%
millers: I can pay them 20-30s/milling + inking, just make sure to count the inks I get back
crafters: that would be the big shot. I make a queue and link it to him and he crafts them. Someone could write a queue macro that let me send my queue to someone. I give him the inks and parchments and pay him 20-30s/glyph

This way I could decrease my workload drastically.

If there would be enough goblins in the world, there would be no poor, except the outright lazy or completely retarded. There would be jobs created everywhere. Too bad we are so few, because without competition we can make so much money that we are not motivated to give jobs. I mean it's easier for me to do the whole glyphs industry alone for a week and don't touch a glyph for another 4 weeks than organizing my employees every day. I could make much more gold with that, but why? To make a goldcapped alt? If I'd had to struggle for my economic freedom, I'd employ people.

However if I'd be a nice person I would waste this time just to help them, by employing them.

Business or gambling?

2009-11-03T07:00:00.004+01:00

I got record amount of comments on the post about my pricing method. Most of them go along the line "It wouldn't work on my server", claiming that their method are superior, despite the poor results compared to mine. Of course the limited success is caused by "bad server". (everything above daily G/hour is success just in different amounts)

So I'm making continued effort to analyze the QA2-undercutting strategy, trying to prove that the strategy is naturally flawed and necessarily provide poor results.

Let's state the obvious: if some NPC would buy glyphs for 50G, than every living body would be crafting glyphs and selling to him (assuming that herbs are available at their current price). It's also obvious that the glyph buyers are not NPCs, and won't buy that many. In economy terms: for 40-50G the supply is vastly bigger than the demand. The QA2 wizards handle this problem by 1c undercutting. If your glyph is the cheapest it is the one that's sold and the others are not.

When you undercut an 50G glyph by 1c (or post a glyph for 50G on an empty market), you are actually gambling. You place a bet that a buyer will arrive first and not a competitor. If buyer comes, your glyph sells and you get huge profit. If competitor comes, you won't sell and your glyph returns or you are forced to undercut, so you lost some worktime.

As in every gambling action your odds can be calculated. It is exactly: demand * your_cycles / competitor_cycles. Demand is the number of glyphs sold daily, your_cycles is the number of times you check the AH for cancel-repost, competitor_cycles is obvious. If you double your cycle number, your profit will double. If you put your competitor to friend list, and post after their logoff, you not only added one to your own cycles, but decreasing one of theirs. If you are online 24/7 and have everyone on friend list, you can instantly undercut, therefore own the whole market.

So in the QA2-undecutting game your only choice to increase your sells is camping harder. If everyone else plays QA2-undercuts, sells=profit as price is high.

My pricing is giving higher gold/hour active time and also allows me to batch my work. I don't have to camp the AH, I can assign time to my actions when I want to, with the only restriction to be within 48 hours. It is important to notice that a QA2-undercutter makes more gold than I do on the same market, however at the cost of much more time online and the (hardly quantifyable) "must check the AH every hour" unpleasant condition.

At first I use Auctioneer to determine market price. Many people claim that market price have no meaning. Actually it has: it holds the competitor activity. Price reset can happen when the buyers consumed all of the competition's glyphs. This case you can cancel yours and repost at 50G (or whatever fallback price) and still be the cheapest. A reset requires that buyers arrive in a row, buying all of them. If one of the competitors arrive before all glyphs are sold, he simply list more at the current price. If there are more competitors, there are more glyphs so it needs more buyers to clear the AH. Since they arrive in a random time, the chance of their random aggregation decreases rapidly with their number needed for a successful reset. If the resets are less frequent, more undercuts happen, so the price slowly climbs down. The market price of 30G means that repost_cycle:reset = 20G/undercut_value.

By using this price I adjust to the number of competitors. The more they are, the lower the price is. My first move is making random resets impossible and forced resets (buying all up) expensive and risky. Remember, if you buy my glyphs up and post at 50G, you may sell nothing before your competitor arrives. This case you lost your buyout gold for nothing. If the competitor number grows, my price lowers, so you have to risk less money to buy me out, but you have less chance to sell before one of the many competitors arrive.

My second move is slowly driving the prices down. Without resets, even with 1c undercuts the price will crawl down. I add my 60s undercut value to this. I can easily drive a 50G price into the mud in two weeks using only automated processes.

Why is it good for me? Because there are two possibilities:

the competitor gives it up, abandons that glyph (by having a higher threshold or simply by leaving the market). This case I post a bit higher automatically and have 5-8G profit on a glyph.
the competitor keeps undercutting, this case I sell nothing, so I don't have to craft, so I don't waste time.

I either have a nice profit or no work. That guarantees my sky-high gold/hour. The only case when I sell for 3-4G is the one session when the competitor gives it up. My glyphs are out, and with the competition gone, are the cheapest so sold. That is the only time I suck. But next time I can post higher (and automatically do) as I'm out of competition.

The point is that until the competitor is there, I'm safe from selling = working.

If the competition is very determined, I'm selling nothing at all, so I have practically 0 workload. Since I keep on decreasing the price with no chance of reset, his profit is closing to 0. There is no way that someone can keep up his determination with no profit, nor even the chance of profit.

You can claim that he can save himself by setting a 5G threshold. That case I will sell for 4.xx G. That's true. However here comes my savior, another QA2 wizard with 4.99 threshold! I've seen such funny threshold-undercut-war many times.

My safety-threshold is applied on crafting. If the price is too low, I stop crafting, but I use the existing glyphs to keep the price low, for the amusement of the competition.

The fundamental fault of the QA2 game is being more work intensive. I lose less time by selling for low than my competitors, so I can go deeper in price. My work-overhead is decreased by batching. Logging on 10 times a day cost time itself along with the annoyment. Me on the other hand can schedule the crafting session to the moment when it's less painful and have enough offline stuff available to decrease time lost.

By driving the price to the point where supply = demand, I have a stable business (as opposed to gambling) and I can decide if I want that business. If I don't I don't craft glyphs. Of course if the prices would reset in my absence, next time I post again, at the old market price, destroying the effect of reset. So I can set my crafting threshold to an arbitrarily high price (currently 6G) and still sell, simply by making the QA2 game so time-ineffective that all my competitors give it up sooner or later.

The only one dangerous to my scheme is my mirror image. This case we'd automatically share the market according to our crafting threshold. If I posted a glyph for low profit, he won't craft, and won't post, mine sell. If he did it, his sell. Our G/hour will be equal to the G/hour expectation of the one who is ready to work cheaper. If he needs gold more than I do and ready to work for less G/hour, he can make me not sell. However he can't drive me out or elevate his G/hour since I'd immediately start crafting and selling. My standby workload (relisting every 48 hours) is close to 0.

Your only real resources are time and skill. If we assume that 2 goblins use the optimal strategy, we arrive to the point that only time spent on business makes difference between them. If everyone would be an AH goblin, everyone in the server would have equal G/hour. My 3-4K G/hour (active time hours, excluding long auctioneer posting or clicking the mailbox once a minute while cleaning my home) comes from the fact that most people have no idea about economics and only do what MMO-champion tells them.

The aim when fighting with QA2 wizards is not stopping them from selling. You can't do that anyway without being one of them. The point is to stop yourself from selling while making everyone else sell at loss, making them leave. I usually do my glyph listing at the morning or early afternoon, to make sure that the QA2 wizards have enough time undercutting me before the buyers come in the evening.

One more tip: if the "pro ppl" are already selling below material cost, buy them out. Not to cause a reset, but to make them craft more, therefore driving them deeper in loss. As they craft, they not only wasting time, but driving herb prices up, making it harder for themselves to craft more. You can just sell the bought glyphs later. Just don't do it with leveling glyphs.

PS: it's funny that whenever I post something "philosophical", people comment "go back to WoW". When I post something as direct as it can be, they simply don't believe it or blame luck for my G/hour.

PS2: There are some clueless who claim that since they don't undercut by 1c, they are different from other QA2 wizards. The defining characteristic is the undercut-fallback cycle. If a QA2 wizard finds the market empty, he posts on an arbitrary high fallback price, while I post on old market price +25%. He welcomes undercutters back, I don't.

PS3: QA2 became famous back in the day when most servers had no or just 1-2 sellers. Nowadays (thanks to MMO champion) there are dozens on every servers. Most of them are desperate kids who put all their gold into starting an industry, so they will waste all the time they have (and they have a lot) to undercut you. You could make good money with QA2 back then. Now, when everyone else does the same, you have to beat the trend to win.

Generation Y my ass

2009-11-02T07:00:00.004+01:00

The net is full of this generation Y nonsense. If you are in the happy minority who has never encountered this, Tobold summed it up well. The main point is that the generation born after 1982 are different from the 65-81 generation, named generation X, who are competitive and lone wolves.

This nice generation Y is "lot more social oriented (not unlike baby boomers), cooperative, and prefer games that hand out rewards left and right, and are very forgiving."

I see this nonsense spreading and can't see how intelligent people can fall for it. For God's sake, "generation Y" is simply kids and young adults. Of course they are social and forgiving. Want to laugh your ass off? I found an essay that I wrote for a high-school competition for the theme "a new, better world". I wrote about the necessity of basic income, government funded education and health care. I explained why the people with incomes should support those who "are not there yet".

I was a silly kid, what on Earth did you expect from me? It was obvious for me that everyone want and can work after schooling is complete and unemployed can be nothing else than unlucky.

I can't remember a single essay that would support any form of "the person responsible for himself" idea. Actually my essay was a pretty right-wing as basic income, education and health care is available to everyone in the country, while most essays demanded direct social transfers targeted to the poor or to the Africans or whatever.

Then I grow up, so did my classmates. I work as an engineer, hating tax, spending my free time spreading anti-social ideas. Some of my former classmates turned into welfare leeches, most of them are employed and hate welfare leeches. The girl who won the contest and read up her essay between tears (it was about how could we end the famine of Africa by everyone working 2 months/year for free in the lucky countries) is currently the director of a marketing agency and last time we met she was telling how much money she made on the "morons who buy shit just because my ads tell them that they are losers in life otherwise".

We grow up. "Generation Y" will learn that there is no free lunch. One day they will leave the school and find that the prospective employers don't "hand out rewards left and right, and are very forgiving".

And instead of whining, here comes a praising of Blizzard's new anti-social patch 3.3. You no longer need to even talk to the people around you. Just queue up for the instance, the system will assign you groupmembers, you shall only do your job. If someone doesn't does his, he'll be voted out.

This voting out system will be the most anti-social thing that was ever included to a video game, making Darkfall a "hand out rewards left and right, and are very forgiving" game. Being ganked by a single jerk is one thing. Being told by 4 people that "you suck and we want you out" is very different.

Also, the "people from your ignore list will not be in your random group" will be a great tool to blacklist suckers.

Do you think Blizzard has not planned it without careful research? They never made a bad major move. If I'd have to guess, the next generation will be much less social than ours. The "social" motto of the new generation could be: I want people around me. I don't care who they are as long as they serve me well. If they leave, I don't care, someone else will come.

Morons of the week

2009-10-31T07:00:00.009+01:00

A must be post from my favorite fun thread. Read it! NOW! (If you are unfamiliar with the thread, read the "original post" at the bottom, maybe even click on the provided armory link and then read the mod's answer).

World PvP is serious business. Knockback spells are overpowered! Nerf shamans and druids! And always have enough gold for repairs! (by Edgar)

Crilde--Magtheridon (US) sent this trade chat with someone having a bit too big e-peen for his own good.

He also found this. I couldn't believe it's not photoshop. But here is the armory. Does anyone has any faith in human race left?

Helen keeps supplying her server with vendor-sold reagents and us with moron pictures:

My pricing

2009-10-30T07:00:00.004+01:00

It's a weird post. I mean I already wrote it, linked it from the about page, yet people keep asking about my pricing like it never existed. The simple answer for this is that people write before they read, that's a common reason to get to my favorite fun thread.

However I'm afraid some of the readers assume that my post is merely "basic steps for n00bs", that somehow does not apply to the "pro ppl" (him and myself), therefore like all "pro ppl" I also use QA2 and keep my pricing strategy secretly.

Well, no. What I wrote in this post is my pricing strategy. And I don't have QA2 installed. And I've reached goldcap again and again because (and not despite) of this. So let me brake my pricing down to the "pro ppl". In QA2 you set your

threshold price: you don't post below it
fallback price: you post at this price if competition is above it or absent
undercut value

Surprise, I do the very same:
My threshold price is Auctioneer median price -40%, besides that, I have one more threshold, if Auctioneer median price is lower than 3G, I don't craft that glyph.
My fallback price is Auctioneer median price +25%
My undercut value is 60s

The Auctioneer median price is an automatic evaluation of what the competitors do. If they bitterly undercut in the 1.5G range, it's low. If they usually post high, it's high. I don't have to keep an eye on any specific competitor, Auctioneer does it for me. I scan the AH 2 times a day in random dates, so I'm immune to the "put your competitor to your friend list and wait until he logs off" nonsense. I do scans on characters that never post anything so the competition have no way to prevent me from seeing what they are doing.

The big shot is the fallback price. The "pro ppl" live for the fallback moment. They hope that they can catch a moment when there is no competition, post at 50G and sell 1 or 2 until a competitor logs in, or alternatively, a competitor did just that, and they post at 49.99.99 and sell 1 or 2 before the next (or the original) comes and undercuts to 49.99.98. Well, if I'm in the market, you never see an 50G fallback, unless you buy me out or for some reason the customers clear the AH (happens on patch day). If the glyphs go around 6G and I find the AH empty or only 49.xx.yy glyphs, I'll post for 7.5G (6*1.25).

So unless I miss a patch note or some wannabe monopolist buys me out, you never ever sell any glyph for 50G. That usually demoralize the "pro ppl" who sooner or later find out that cancel-repost cycles for 1.5G profit/glyph gives the G/hour of the dailies. Note that it's not contradicting Andrew's experiment, if everyone else use QA2 too, you can make good gold with QA2. But not if I'm or someone like me is around.

Of course if people abandon a glyph its market median price will rise (as I post old_median*1.25) so next time I post higher, but as soon as some form of competition arrive, the undercutting starts again.

The dynamic threshold price also has its uses, it's for automatically killing "I farmed for free" and wannabe "I dominate the market" guys. If the glyphs go around 6G and a few posters start selling for 3G I won't undercut them, Auctioneer conveniently places my glyphs above them , below the first "valid" competitor. If it's a new trend, then in 2 days the median price will change, so I simply lost 48 hours. If it's not a new trend just a single kiddie being stupid, than he sells his glyphs, after that I will (unless he posted enough to serve the market alone). This case he crafts and mills and posts and collects mail for ridiculous profit. It's only a matter of time until he reaches the conclusion: "The market is shit on this server because of no lifers who camp the AH 24/7".

And the beauty of all this that I post once every 2 days, in an appropriate time when I have enough offline tasks to do while mass crafting, posting or mail-collecting is in progress.

QA2 is not a good tool. It's an "automated n00b", doing the n00b thing for a single click: undercut the current lowest poster by 1c, regardless if this poster is already too low or ridiculously high.

One more thing: PLEASE stop commenting "find a cheaper herb supplier". It's the "pro ppl" version of the "I farmed for free"! You got it below market price? Good job! However if the glyph is below market price material cost, you should not waste the herbs on them! Sell the herbs for market price!

Do they want challege?

2009-10-29T07:00:00.007+01:00

I don't like Blizzard is nerfing the endgame raids. I simply dislike it because it allows socials to participate and I simply can't stand their presence. I hate when someone litters the chat with "Megan Fox is so hot" or "Dr House is sooo cool lol". I hate their tendency to beg for help, usually in things that they should be able to handle (or avoid) alone. I really hate their completely pointless he-said-she-said dramas, the "if VeryFailBuddy can't join I don't go either", the "Why did you not congratulate for [explore Ashenvale], do you have problem with me?" questions and so on.

Hard content is a convenient screening factor to get this scum out of my sight. If only people with vials (Killed Vashj and Kael in BC, pre-nerf) can be in the guild, then 99% of these beings are outside without any other scans. Considering that good players tend to be Elitist Jerks, I assumed that the common dislike of nerfs is merely attributed to the lost automatic retard-barrier, and the necessity to make own effort to get rid of these annoying beings. I saw no other problems with nerfs, after all, challenge is not lost, you can do hard modes or in lack of them you can make up your own by adjusting player number, gear level or character level. Yet people constantly complain about "losing challenge". I found challenge several ways even when I found that my aims are incompatible to a hard mode guilds.

Tobold found a NYT article that made it clear. In it, "hardcore" Marathon runners whined about "casual" runners. Slow runners don't harm fast ones any way. They are behind you, they are not in the same clubs, you don't have to talk to them, they don't pester you with questions. Unlike in WoW, the HC runner has no contact with them, so has absolutely no reason to hate them. One of them said something that is very common among HC gamers too: "It used to be that running a marathon was worth something — there used to be a pride saying that you ran a marathon, but not anymore"

Running the Marathon fast worth the very same thing as the old times: you are a healthy, strong person with good chance of lot of healthy and therefore happy years. I never seen any other meaning in it.

Then it hit me: their reason for rejecting nerfs is not losing challenge (that's untrue), neither losing the natural barrier between them and the annoying socials, but the lack of feeling of superiority. Back then having top epic meant you belong to the elite. Now it merely means you have more brain than a piece of rock (that's not bad, you are already in the top 1/3) and have the monotony-tolerance to raid Coliseum 4 times a week.

Whenever I wrote about my disgust about nerfs I always got from trolls that "QQ moar for your lost epeen". I thought they are just bitter losers. I still think they are bitter losers and trolls, but I no longer blame them for their accusation. Majority of those who reject nerfs do cry for their lost epeen. Otherwise they would do the same as I do: distance themselves from the morons, either by going to hard mode guilds or make up achievements that they can do in a small group.

These e-peeners are socials, merely from the less dysfunctional group. The average socials aka "freindly heplfull ppl" are those who want acceptance, connection, love-and-be-loved stuff. Since their social goals are not conditioned to any kind of RL (or ingame) effort, they tend to do nothing useful for the society and to lack any useful skills (besides the things they are forced to do/learn). The e-peener wants respect of peers and the feeling of superiority. Since it can only be achieved upon completing a hard achievement, they often learn useful skills and do useful things to the society. However they can also get lost in completely useless - yet hard - achievements, like climbing mountaintops, making the Big Ben from matchsticks or clear a new WoW raid in the first day.

I obviously don't claim that all hard mode raiders are e-peeners. I also don't like to paint a black-and-white situation where someone is an e-peener or not. There are other reasons for hard mode raiding like reaching flow via a challenging task, theorycrafting (practicing RL math), being together with non-primitive people. The weight of these reasons differ in the people. However

the challenge-flow can be reached in a properly selected lowbie instance
theorycrafting is not affected by the difficulty of the content (you can calculate the last 0.1% even if only 30% performance is needed to complete the content)
primitive people can be fully and easily avoided by choosing solo or small-group content

This leads us to the conclusion: rejecting nerfs only has social reasons. It's either the social drive to be with similar, intelligent people, or the drive to be respected. I'm not ashamed to accept I has the former social drive and now I consciously want to weed it out. There is a huge difference between cooperating with such people and hanging out with them and it's easy to rationalize the latter with the former. Not anymore for me!

So from now on: "whining for nerfs" = "being social".

Find creative ways how to un-nerf the game! Create your own achievements. Feel free to send it here and I post to give hints to others.

PS: upon the description of the common social I no way mean that wanting love and acceptance is bad itself. It's bad when it's a primary goal, a major motivator of one's life. Also, all useful feat has good chance of drawing respect from others and it's not bad itself. But it's a side effect and cannot be a goal, or the person will surely optimize for it, quickly reaching some kind of useless activity like boosting lowbies or running 4 ToC every week.

PS2: there is a simple-looking answer why people go ToC and not WC: loot. However loot is just pixels and doesn't have innate fun value (you can't eat, drink or have sex with it). So it's only a reward if you can use it for something "fun". That can be the next instance, but this case ToC and WC has no difference, you can use the WC loot well in SFK or BDF just like the ToC loot in ICC. The only difference is social: you can't show off WC loot but you can stand in the middle of Dalaran with ToC loot waiting for envious inspects.

PS3: before you'd post "hard new raid is fun while old content is not" remember that no one bothered about Onyxia, and now, when her loot is upgraded, people swarm there.

Mutanus down!

2009-10-28T07:00:00.013+01:00

It's kind of obvious that the difficulty of the game depends on your relative strength to the monsters. The standard way to perform a challenging action in WoW is going to a hard mode raid. Here top level and near-max geared people fight with monsters tuned to very strong.

The same monsters will no longer be hard after the gear or character level rise. Sarth+3 was the pinnacle of raiding in 3.0, while "LF2M shaman and 4.5K rogue for nightfall zerg" today. The "old school" lvl 60 raids are done by 15-20 random players wanting achievements.

So it's obvious that game difficulty can be set to any point by changing the number, the level and the gear of of players. That's exactly what my girlfriend and I did. We locked level on 24 and the two of us went to a scary place:
The fanglords dropped one by one:

Werdant the everliving also hit the ground:

Finally, the endboss, the dreaded Mutanus the Devourer was found to be "not prepared":

Like all serious raiders, we analized the damage meters. (that's overall, on Mutanus I had 76.8 with AM-AM-FBlast rotation.

After the hard raid, relog to the PvP characters for some easy PvP:

I have to say it was easier than we thought. Maybe lvl24 and the remnants of the lvl19 twink gear we collected once was overkill for WC. However this could be fixed in the following instances. I guess SFK is already outgeared-outleveled (especially since we unlocked XP and got to 25), and BFD is considered ugly by my GF, but RFK on 28 sounds challenging enough.

What's the point (besides spending some time together in the game)? That if you want to do something challenging, you don't need a raid group. You can also find out your own strategy, as it's damn sure that no EJ article tells proper spec/rotation for a lvl24 druid-mage duo.

The big question is "why people claim to have not enough content?", when insane amount of class combinations can be created to play PvE content challengingly. Some examples:

Can a lvl18 5-man group do WC?
What is the lowest level where RFC can be soloed?
What is the best duo combination to do RFD the lowest possible level?
Can 8 lvl80 clear SWP? 7?

Why do the skilled people do 4 ToC a week and complain being bored while the game has endless possibilities to do challenging content? Please note that these possibilities have absolutely no "entrance barrier". No matter what is the current level or gear of your character, there is a place somewhere in the WoW universe that require you to do your very best now to complete. You don't need to farm gear, find groupmembers or use a fixed schedule.

So why can't we see lot of people doing such content all the time?

(My answers tomorrow)

9 weeks glyph pricing experiment

2009-10-27T07:00:00.004+01:00

I have received this research via mail and it's definitely worth publishing. If you don't want to read the whole - very carefully - presented research, I bolded the results for you:

I have been conducting a booking experiment in the profits available from the Glyph market under different pricing scenarios. I got into the glyph industry prior to ever reading your blog however from reading your posts and reader comments I have massively increased my profits and profit per hour. I was always a little unsure as to exactly the pricing strategy that you were using until you recently posted a more in depth discussion. I started the experiment prior to your post on the glyph market and pricing however so haven’t exactly replicated what was in it.

However, here’s how I understand the basics of the wow glyph market and how the various pricing strategies are supposed to work.

In any week there are a certain amount of glyphs used – A
These glyphs are sourced from either
Inscriptors making it for themselves or friends for free – B
Trade channel – C
Auction House – D
A = B + C + D

At a very rough guess this is probably something like 100% = 5% + 5% + 90%
The amount of gold available on the Auction House is total glyphs sold on the AH (D) * price X
As you increase the price X, you will see more people try to buy their glyphs from trade or find guild friends to make them for them.

If you look at the total glyphs sold on the AH your share of those sales will depend on your pricing strategy and the competitors you face, so if D can be split between, any number of sellers, usually a few larger goblins, a few medium sized casual sellers and a few leveling inscription.

First Scenario; Some people believe that you should price high 30g-50g or more, at these prices some will leave the AH for trade or friends but not too many, the total gold generated will be high, so even if you are sharing that gold amongst a number of competitors selling on the AH you will still make a very high profit. So for example, if the total glyph sold on the AH is 5,000 in a week, 3 Goblins compete, taking 25% market share each, average sale 20g-17g profit, each goblin makes 21,250 profit in the week.

Second Scenario; Others believe that you should drive the price very low, ensure that few people leave the AH and more importantly that there are few competitors around to share the total gold generated, hopefully none, by selling a far higher volume, for a lower cost, the total gold generated from glyphs on the AH will be lower than in the first Scenario however your personal share will be higher. So for example, now the price of glyphs on the AH is 8g-5.5g profit, the total sold D increases to 6,000, there is only one goblin seller taking 70% of the market, profit of 23,100.

There has been heated debate over which of these scenarios is the better one for the glyph industry or other gold making businesses on wow. As far as I can tell each of the commenters posted single experiences from individual servers, there were comments of, “that would never work on my server” but no one who said they had tried multiple strategies, or if they did, provided very little detail. My experiment was an attempt to put hard numbers behind the theories. I used two basic pricing styles

Undercutter – Glyphs listed at a small 10s (wanted to avoid socials who though a 1s undercut was nasty) discount to the current – Note this is not camping, I don’t watch to see competitors online or if undercut, just post when I have a spare 5 minutes. Using Quick Auctions 2 this is very easy and very quick. The actual posting of glyphs is almost the smallest proportion of time spent in the production cycle, though collecting unsold ones is almost more of a factor in how often you should ideally post.

Low pricing – Glyphs all listed at a standard fixed price for a minimal level of profit, you list more of them, less often, less time spent posting, may have to spend more time producing glyphs as higher volumes sold, for lower price.

I had presumed from your early posts that you followed a Low pricing strategy, in fact your more recent post on pricing describes your strategy as heavy undercutting. You undercut by a largish amount until the price gets to a very low price and drives competition away, then revert to a high price once they’ve left. Personally, and others have commented the same, I think this is actually almost the same as Undercutting by a small amount and I will explain why later.

Server stats. Herbs sells for around 18-25g a stack, I was mostly picking them up around 20g from AH and some from dedicated suppliers, ink of the sea sells for 2g-3g, snowfall inks for a lousy 12.5g. Very approximate cost of making a single ink glyph is 2g, 4g for two ink glyph (it’s a bit more than this but for simplicity). When I started the experiment there were probably 3 other large volume glyph sellers in the market. I have all glyphs learnt. I am on a medium population server with quite a few well established raiding guilds (Hellfire EU for those interested). Profits shown relate solely to glyphs and not to sale of darkmoon decks/cards or other off hand items etc. Glyphs were selling mostly between 5-25g, with perhaps 15% of the market in the 1-5g range and 10% in the 25g-50g range.

Intention was to run my normal strategy for a few weeks to check profitability accurately then move to a very low cost strategy to see if this did produce the higher profits and also to try see if my competitors would be driven away or not, then return to my original strategy to see what effect there had been. Note while using Low pricing strategy I still sold double ink glyphs even though they were then going for a loss, partly to cover the entire market and drive competitors away and also as I couldn’t be bothered trying to figure out all the ones that were double ink ones and remove them from my stock.

Things to note – while I was reasonably careful in my booking, I wasn’t putting in the time to have this be a perfect accounting analysis, when counting up the number of glyphs I had in stock, some errors may have been made, I used approximate values for herbs, inks, glyphs etc without allowing for weekly price variations, the same applies to hours, I booked all time, auction house buying of glyphs, mail time, milling, making glyphs, listing (not when I was afk at mail or AH) but not to the nearest minute, further I tried to maintain a consistent level of glyphs/inks/herbs but there was some variation and the varying levels of time/cost on the varying levels of stock may cause some small variation in perceived profits as well.

This was by no means a scientific experiment, endless variables were not controlled and my data was not measured by a machine, mistakes could have been made.

Results:

Week	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Strategy	Undercut	Undercut	Low pricing	Low pricing	Low pricing	Low pricing	Low pricing	Undercut	Undercut
Auction time	12hr	12hr	24hr	48hr	48hr	48hr	48hr	12hr	48hr
Listing rate	2-3times weekday, 2-4 times weekend	2-3times weekday, 2-4 times weekend, some days missed	once a day	once a day	once a day	once every 1-2 days	once every 2 days	2-3times weekday, 2-4 times weekend	once every 2 days
Price	4-30g	4-30g	6g->4g	4g->3g	3g	6g	8g	4-30g	4-30g
Number of Glyphs listed at each posting	2-3 depending on time of day	2-3 depending on time of day	8	6	4	5	5	2-3 depending on time of day	5
Gold Made	20,161	16,892	11,632	9,490	-2,504	7,730	3,008	15,569	6,965
hours	9.0	7.5	12.0	7.0	6.0	5.0	3.0	9.0	3.0
Gold per hour	2,240	2,252	969	1,356	- 417	1,546	1,003	1,730	2,322
Issues		Realised at end of week was low on some stock, also small issue with QA2	Made too many glyphs as hard to track stock with too many on AH		Too many double ink glyphs sold, or booking not quite right

(note with QA2 listing each day brought the total glyphs listed back to your listing levels, so if you listed 5, 2 sold, 3 still on, list again the next day brings back to 5, not 8)

I was aware that prior to this experiment I had a couple of heavy competitors who were undercutting me regularly and some were posting glyphs as low as 2g! With an initial cost per glyph of approximately 2g I wanted to be able to make a reasonable profit after AH cut. I guessed that I was currently making around 12-15g profit per glyph, if low selling sold 3-5 times as many glyphs I could sell for around 6g which is were I started my first week of “Low pricing”. I listed far more than usual as I was planning not to be reposting as often. 1st Day of this I got a nice mail from one of my main competitors who was concerned that I had recently installed QA2 and hadn’t quite figured out the settings properly yet and how I should change them, thanks! In fact I had been using Quick Auctions in its original non user interface form as well but hey. I wasn’t sure how many of my competitors would follow me to undercut below 6g but I wasn’t surprised to see that by next day 95% of my auctions were undercut, so price war, I each day lowered the price by around 25s to declare my serious intention to lower prices and drive them away (I hoped), price went down to 4g over the first week and I did see some of my competitors move off. I got a nasty email from my one of the other main sellers about I must be an idiot and not know how to make gold etc etc. I also saw increased volume of sales and thus increased hours making glyphs. I also spent a lot of times collecting glyphs from the mail box (at that time I didn’t have the screen refresh macro and would change between alts as each box ran empty). I also had issues with too many glyphs on the AH and difficulties keeping track of how many sold, how many needed to be replaced so ended up making too many of some glyphs that weren’t selling. By week 4 (2nd week of low prices) I was still regularly being undercut and continued to drop my prices hoping to drive competitors away with only limited change. Week 5 I was getting desparate having seen little change in being constantly undercut and moved to my lowest make no profit drive competitors away price of 3g (my booking suggests I made a small loss that week which may be true or may be booking error). I saw little change, a few less undercuts but not that significant. Week 6 I’d given up hope of getting rid of the goblins but hoped some medium/smaller sellers had moved on, moved back to a more relaxed pricing level 6g, and a more relaxed level of booking every few days, sales volumes were OK, thought I would try and a slightly higher gold level the following week 8g. Having had 5 weeks of pricing between 3g-8g I hoped that I might have got rid of some competitors however my observations of the names of those selling indicated that little had changed in fact there appeared to be some new competitors who had joined the market! where perhaps 1 or 2 had left 3 or 4 had now joined, perhaps the knowledge that glyphs = gold was spreading to a wider audience. So back to my original selling pattern for one week for comparison. Finally a week of my original undercutting pricing strategy but this time following the low maintenance post every 2 days to match the theoretical low pricing time at AH strategy.

As you can see, undercutting on my server for me, produces a significantly higher amount of total gold, as well as a better gold per hour, both before and after attempts to drive competitors away and whether I posted 3 times a day or only every 2 days. In fact the highest gold per hour was generated by following an undercutting strategy but with a low post rate.

Looking back at the two original scenarios, why has this result occurred? Well to be honest I can’t absolutely tell you, as I don’t have the complete data, from all the sellers in the market, total glyphs sold, my % share of the market etc etc, I can’t make any hard conclusions. I can only revert to theory (which I was trying to avoid in doing the experiment) and suggest the following, lowering the price was unable to drive enough competitors away, while I did sell more glyphs at the lower prices it wasn’t enough to counter the much lower profit being achieved. Further, the reduced posting time from the low pricing strategy was countered by the increased time required to buy herbs, mill herbs, make inks, make glyphs to supply the increased sales. In fact it seemed that the time spent posting was one of the smaller factors in the total time spent (thanks to QA2!), the actual making of the glyphs taking much longer.

The reason I think that your deep undercutting is nothing more than undercutting is that on my server with heavy competition, the competitors have little regard for if you undercut by 1s or 1g. I personally would never notice that you were doing that, QA2 would be set up to keep undercutting you all the way down to 4g. I would run QA2 which would simply undercut you unless you went below my absolute minimum. My minimum was set at the price of the two ink glyph, I know that some of my competitors, rightly or wrongly were going below this, they would continue to undercut even if you were following a low pricing or heavy undercutting strategy.

I definitely believe that in probably all other wow markets low pricing, where the price is set at a low level of profit above cost, is the ideal way to maximise profit, ensuring you capture the majority of the market, few people go to trade/guild, and you have few if any competitors. I think the very nature of the glyph market, extremely low listing cost (can list and relist often without issue), low total cost (few people go to trade irrespective of high % profit), are exactly the reasons that low pricing is not necessarily the best option. If you have few competitors or more importantly weak competitors who will leave the market and not undercut you at the lower prices it still might work but I suspect that for most servers this is not the case. My observations are obviously not 100% conclusive, it was not a scientific experiment, it was just my scenario, on my server etc etc but I think they do show what many have suggested that there is more profit available from undercutting even where you are 1 of a few goblins, as the higher prices far out weigh the loss of market share and that should you try to push the prices lower you are in no way guaranteed to drive your competitors away.

Irrespective of your or others opinion of the theoretical difference’s or actual results of this experiment here are some key lessons I have learned which will help all to increase their gold making

It’s better to spend time ensuring you restock those glyphs which are selling well and get to the AH less often, than to spend your time reposting at the AH regularly and run out of your top selling glyphs

Keep a reasonable stock of herbs and inks in your bags. Herb prices vary widely, buy when low (use Snatch) and ride out the high weeks (Darkmoon faire week). Further by ensuring that in weeks you have more time you mill herbs, on weeks you have less time, the small time you have can be devoted to making the glyphs that are selling well rather than buying/milling.

If you run QA2 and the first time you set it up you didn’t have a complete set of all glyphs that you sell make sure to go back and update those it sells when you have a full stock in your bags

Possessions/Who has isn’t always perfect, it seems to sometimes get errors recording what you have, so sometimes you think you have stock which you are selling but in fact you don’t. Running the QA2 summary straight after you’ve listed all your glyphs will highlight those glyphs you haven’t posted. If the market price is above your minimum sell price, and you think you are full stocked, the reason you have nothing posted is that Possessions/Who has made a mistake, you probably need to make a few of these glyphs.

Andrew
Hellfire EU – Experiment ran from approximately late July to late September
Main – Aizell, Glyph alts Hazella, Goldmachine, GreedyGoblin, Darkmoon decks/cards/offhands - Bankaboy

I (Gevlon) will write a post about my pricing method to clarify the difference between the different undercutting methods, and can only agree, that posting low regardless competition is a bad idea, and you should have one of the undercutting schemes.

Finding out intentions

2009-10-26T07:00:00.003+01:00

A Gnome's conquest introduced an addon. It's the weirdest thing I've ever heard (besides "Age of Conan sex"). This addon tries to figure out which characters on your friend list belong to the same person. Obviously you know your friends, so it is used to extend a strange habit: put your competitors to your friend list, to see when they are online.

It helps you win the Auction house PvP, aka to show the others that you own this market.

I've never put any competitor to my friend list. I've never been aware of their existence (except for the one I used as example of bad trading actions). I never checked any names on the AH, I couldn't care less.

I respond to market situations. It doesn't matter who created the situation, it exist now on its own. The market is flooded because someone wants to put competition out? Or is it flooded because some punk dumped the stuff he "farmed for free"? Maybe he was an investor who is now cutting his losses and gets rid of the damn things?

Doesn't matter. The real situation is the same. The price, the quantity and the quality of the item does not change with the intention of the seller.

The essential advice is simple: ignore others and react only to the market situation.

Easy for me, you can say. Being anti-social, I couldn't care less about the people behind the avatars. However social (or "normal" if you prefer) people do. There are several studies, that show that the same person, in the same game experienced more "fun", involvement and stronger feeling of achievement upon victory when they believed to play against people (of course they all played the same game).

If you have even a little bit of "social" in you, you naturally want to find out the intentions of the "opponent", and want to win against him. This behavior is good for one thing: losing money. I can only repeat: the price, the quantity and the quality of the item does not change with the intention of the seller.

Mind only on the measurable market factors and you'll make good business or at least can walk away without losses. If you get into a personal "I must win" situation, you may do, at the cost of losing lot of gold and getting to the Morons of the week.

KevMar written about the same topic recently, check it out if you want to!

Morons of the week 2

2009-10-25T07:00:00.002+01:00

I do not accept morons buying Resilient Parchments. But the morons never stop finding new ways of being stupid. Ravensear for example chose to pay 20000% markup for heavy parchment. That's the way to fame! (by Sovash of Korgath)

Things change. Kids grow up, industries emerge from new inventions, making others obsolate, the climate gets warmer, people find new MMOs. One day we may start living in different planets, or machines with true AI will walk among us. But one thing will never change! There will be retards who think "we all can make profit" on a limited market (by Benjamin):

Nowadays I get less morons than in the old times. I hope it's because they are learning (or simply died because they forgot their breathing skills). If not, please send them here to fulfill their destiny, to let them contribute to the mankind the only way they can: by giving us a good laugh.

Morons of the week

2009-10-24T07:00:00.008+02:00

Oh no! They are on the official forums. RUN! (by Craig and Joshua independently)

Edgar was told plain and simple: if I make 100G/day, you can't make 5K/day. Clear logic, right?

Stormcloak of Korgath sent me a strange conversation. I'm not sure what the moron's problem was, but his insult is at least innovative. The second post shows someone being way too determined to get low lvl greens for DE.

Brian wrote: "This guy routinely buys me out to try to reset the price, not realizing the immense amount of inventory I'm sitting on. My new game is trying to figure out the optimal number/price at which he'll buy me out, reset the price, and instantly be deeply undercut again. That buyout point is higher than I would have expected, and rises in inverse proportion to the number I list. " What can I add? "Dear beloved, we gathered here today to laugh on Catheroes who thought monopolizing an obviously mass-produced item is a good idea"

Erias wanted someone to heal his instance at 3:30 AM! Well, the best way to motivate someone to join your PuG is showing that others want in, that's simple marketing. But I think he is overplaying a bit. Just a little bit. By Hielde:

The fundamental problem

2009-10-23T07:00:00.005+02:00

Let me finish my economical doomsday prophecies. There will be no more. Believe them or not, do something or not is your call. I made my own actions: all my RL money is either in gold (I mean real world metal gold in a safe) or on bank accounts (with lousy 7-8% interests) that has government guarantee if bank goes down.

In the previous posts I claimed that:

Technological advance will decrease the income of the uneducated, unskilled workers
This is already happening, in the last decades the richest 20% of the population increased their income share (their income / income of all people) by 0.5%/year, 60% in 2000.
The GDP/employed cannot be increased arbitrarily, it's defined by technology at the level of 2-3%/year

To prove that these effects will lead to large-scale GDP loss, I have to prove the following:

The uneducated, unskilled workers will be displaced instead of employed for low wages (income inequality is incompatible with employment)
This cannot be stopped by education (transforming them into skilled workers)
The displaced unskilled will not be employed in services area (where jobs cannot really be done by machines)
The employment rate will fall faster than GDP/employed will increase, resulting in net GDP/person loss

Let's start with the first and simplest one. Theoretically the already existing person has several advantages over a machine:

The machine must be bought. So it needs either loan (with interest) or cash (with opportunity cost of being invested elsewhere).
Binary barriers: you either have $100K for the machine or don't, a bank either gives you $100K or doesn't
Scalability: you can owertime/send to unpaid leave some of your current workforce to respond market but can't buy/sell 10% of your machine
Risk: you can fire all your workers and end your company but you can't sell the now useless machine overnight regain your money (or even worse, to repay the loan)
Workers can be reused for different purposes in emergency (for example digging snow to let your transports out in a nasty winter day), machines not
Being an employer makes you a (locally) respected member of the community. This often has $ value (for example the city will more likely be permissive to your factory being noisy if everyone has a friend/family who loses his job if it is shut down)

You can assign $ value to these advantages, add them to the costs of machines (maintenance, amortization), and get a nice $/year number. If you can employ people below this cost, doing that is the effective choice. If we assume this scenario, than the advancement of the machines simply means that this $/year number decreases over time, so the workers make less. Is it a problem?

In China, not. In the USA and EU it is, due to welfare. If you get $5K/year for nothing, you won't work for $10K. It's not laziness, simply maximizing utility. People want "fun" at the end, so if the "fun" gained by the salary (a car, a travel, a big TV, better meal) is lower than the "fun" lost by the job (you are away from friends since you are at work, you must go bed early, you can't drink, boss is mean, job is dirty), it's the right choice to refuse employment.

The only way to overcome this, is putting welfare/basic income below the survival rate: if you don't work, you can't eat or pay medical bills. However you can't do it in a country where these people have rights. They will vote for welfare and they will steal to survive, and you can't just hang them on the trees, you must put them into the expensive legal system (that is expensive exactly to avoid violation of the rights of people).

The second issue is harder. It's obvious that (besides a few mentally disabled) people can learn new skills. We are genetically the same mankind who dug the dirt a couple thousand years ago, and look at us, even the dumbest of us are driving cars, can read, install WoW to a computer and somehow get out of the starting zone (I'm always puzzled how they manage that). So there are no serious limits for the dumb people to go back to the school and learn new things.

However studying is a long process. Even a technical school takes 1-3 years and it assumes some pre-existing skills like fluent reading and user-level computer skills. However you must eat during learning. If you have no money now, you can't go to a school, pay education costs just to get a job 2 years from now. The only way out is someone else paying for your school, food, home until you get a job. For kids, these are the parents. For bright young people, it can be a profit oriented banker who makes his profit from student loan interest. But who would give student loan to a 30 years old illiterate homeless?!

The country could provide education, housing and food free for such people (in the hope of later tax revenues). However by doing so, it destroys the reason for getting the job. You get what you pay for! If you pay for being a student, you'll get lot of students and only a few graduates able to get a job (common thing in country found universities in Europe)

Can you pay for graduates? I mean could the country give student loans (that must be repaid from salary) to everyone? Of course it could. But what do you do with those who default? If there is no punishment, people will take the loans and don't bother learning. On the other hand how can you punish defaulted student loans in a country where people have rights? Do you think you could pass a bill in the US or the EU to imprison or rather put to chain gang forced labor those who defaulted their student loans?

To handle the "services area" issue, I start with a personal anecdote. I really don't like cleaning my home, so I went to a home cleaner company to order their service. Their hourly cleaning fee was more than 2x higher than my (pretty good) salary. I chatted with the boss a bit and she revealed the reasons behind these extremely high fees:

At first they have to find people who don't steal, don't stink, don't curse, don't drink and so on. Their workforce are practically middle class women for cleaning and middle class men for gardening. They can't employ random guys for minimal wages since they will work in the homes of the clients, near their kids and car keys.
Secondly, their employees must be transported from a town 100 km away, to make sure that their neighbors will not find out that they are "lowly servants". Yes, these middle class women tell their neighbors lies about their job, they take the bus, travel two cities away, work here 4-6 hours, transported back. That has costs, right?

The mass-services (like shop-vendor) can be done by machines, see self-servicing supermarkets or the cleaner-machine used in offices. The personal services (home cleaner, baby-sitter, waiter, escort girl/boy) need manners that needs to be learned first, and has a very negative social stigma that needs to be compensated.

These services are usually done by immigrants (less than citizen) or young people (less than grown person). Here we are talking about giving jobs to average people. If we comply to both requirements we reached to a luxury-service! An ordinary man doesn't afford the luxury of eating out in a real restaurant every meal. We can afford it now-and-then, usually on our vacation. There are some people who can afford it whole year. So there is demand for such services and some people will work there. But the situation where every employed person (who is not a personal servant himself) have 2-3 personal servants is completely impossible.

Servitude was in custom in the feudal age and the XIX century, so we just have too look up why this "ideal" world diminished? Simply because being a servant had no alternatives. If someone refused such jobs, he died on the street or was whipped by his lord. Do you think it could be re-introduced?

So we have an ever-growing group of welfare leech, who refuse to work for $5-10K/year, refuse to study and refuse to work as a servant. However we still have one hope: GDP/employed is constantly increasing. If we assume this trend continues, the GDP/employed of 2040 will be 220-240% of 2008. So even if 20% of the population will be employed (instead of 44%), the GDP/person will be 2.3*20/44 = 1.05 of 2008. That's "only" stagnation, not collapse.

However in the "top 20% will outplace everyone else by 2040" theory I used the assumption that the welfare gives 20% income share to the other 80%. Can it be? The answer is sadly: no! The welfare is low because the welfare leech is a minority of the society and gets welfare only because of the "goodness" of the employed. The average employed person doesn't want to see his fellow men starving on the streets.

However as the amount of permanently unemployed increases, their political power grows. If today I'd start the "welfare party" in the USA with the only program point "moar welfare" aka "nerf the world", I'd get 10-20%. In the EU, with lower employment rate, such parties (socialists) are common and get 30-40% and the other parties often have to make compromises with them, making the welfare a "holy cow" in the EU.

As the employment rate drops, the "welfare party" gets more and more voters, gets more and more power, giving out more and more welfare. The higher welfare makes more jobs unfillable. With $5K/year welfare, you can get workers for $15K. If the welfare gets to $10K/year, you can't. This speeds up unemployment, increasing the power of the "welfare party" even more. It's also important, that with the increased number of welfare leeches, the social stigma of being one diminishes. Today lot of people choose work over welfare because they don't want to be looked down. If the local majority would be welfare leech, the work could be socially stigmatized! The workers would be "no lifers" opposed to the "fun ppl" living on welfare, hanging out with friends all day! Haven't you seen such normative change somewhere?

Now comes the solution! I have to disappoint all my fellow sociopaths, no genocide involved. It's not humane action on my side, simply logic. Any "waste-disposal" method could be (therefore necessarily would be) abused by some person, group or movement to get rid of their enemies/competitors.

The solution is: if you choose to ask for any kind of welfare, country found education or health care (after the age of 18), you give up your right to

vote in any elections (president, congress/parliament, city mayor, judge, public vote)
your right to be a juror
to serve in any elected position
law enforcement, bureaucracy (on fields where you actually enforce something on people, you can still be CSI, secretary in some government office or janitor in the courthouse)
in the army in any positions which is not under constant supervision of a superior
as a boss (employer) of any people (if you can't handle your personal finance, how could you manage a company)
bear arms

You can still have a one-man business or obviously can have a job. You can only regain the political rights by repaying all welfare received in your life, with (Fed) interests. By this scheme no man's rights are limited unless he ask for it in return of the welfare.
This scheme would create a new class besides the full right citizens, people who have personal rights but no political rights. This way the welfare leech could not vote for more welfare, could be forced to learn or take "lowly jobs".

Wait a minute!

unable to vote
unable to bear arms
cannot be a boss
forced to study
works as a baby-sitter

It's not a new class at all? It's the class known as children! I merely suggest that anyone who has welfare-loan towards the country should be equal to children in rights and obligations. My guess is that 18+ "children" would work their ass to become adult.

PS: if someone would commit crime, the costs of the legal procedure, the compensation to the victims and prison costs would also be added to the welfare balance, rendering the convict a "child" until he repays the damages he caused.

Walking in their shoes

2009-10-22T07:00:00.003+02:00

This is another post that is irrelevant to you unless you are a blogger. It's about handling commenting, and understanding Blizzard.

No skilled player has approved Blizzard's game changes. (if you make 2200+ DPS and can clear the content on normal, you are in the top 30% skilled)

We want to game more challenging, and entertaining. We want lively conversations with developers, since we know their game almost as good as they do. They nerf it and refuse to talk. I never liked it. I still don't like it when I do the same. I don't like me doing it. But I understand it now and see no other way. And because I still don't like it, I definitely don't expect my readers liking me for doing it. But there is no other way.

To explain it, let's start with blog trolling. I saw a perfect example at Tobold's (there are no such on my site simply because of their treatment described below). He wrote a post that he is playing in another server too, he had low level alliance characters there in the other faction and wanted gold now. Instead of buying gold, he paid Blizzard to transfer one of his horde characters to the other server, then utilized his wife's account to trade the gold/items between the factions in the neutral AH. His conclusion was "I effectively got my paladin 4,000 gold for just 20 bucks. Completely legal, safe, and cheaper than buying gold." The story he presented supported this conclusion, so it was a completely OK post.

Along came the blogger's best friend, Anonymous. He is a busy guy, he is reading every blog out there and his aim is often trolling: "The Terms of Use you agreed to when creating your WoW account are very specific about account sharing. Using your wife's account was not a gray area, it was breaking the agreement you entered into and thus your account can be banned. The only kind of account sharing allowed is if a parent purchases an account for his child who is still a minor." He refers to that Tobold mentioned that he logged in his wife's account instead of asking her wife to do it. Does it affect Tobold's point (that you should relocate gold between servers/factions instead of goldbuying)? No it doesn't. It is aimed on irrelevant circumstances.

Tobold replied: "Anonymous just banned about 2 million WoW players."

Re-reply: "Yeah.. but you are such a stickler for rules, no? ^.~ It is in the ToS that a parent can only share an account with 1 child. No exceptions, ifs, ands or buts. So technically you broke the rules just as much. (and if you want to go really into it, you didn't really get 4k gold for free, since you still had to farm/AH on your Horde server to make it yourself.) The reality is of course different... but meh. ;)"

And it continued. The focus of the comments shifted from the original post to some pointless paper-crunching on legal nonsense about ToS. Perfect trolling. Don't mistake a retard to a troll! "First!", "This post/blog suxx/fail/crap", "Write about [whatever I want to read] instead of this shit" are honest opinions of a primitive mind. He has no other reason to write than giving us the product of his heart and soul. We just don't want it, since he is a retard and the mentioned product is crap.

A troll, while can write with primitive language, is not a retard. He has an aim: to derail the conversation in order to feel control over other people's emotions or actions.

Technically speaking Tobold violated the ToS. But it does not matter for the topic. The proper answer to the troll is not "you are wrong" but "who cares about it here?!" However you should not answer it to him. Even such sort answer is a waste of time for the readers, who will soon find that it's pointless to grind through your comments to do their own since "only kids and trolls comment here".

Never hesitate to delete a trolling post. It's your blog, he has no right to destroy the conversation itself. Of course you should not delete counter arguments on the point, even if they are very far from your point or even you think it's completely wrong.

One more thing, trolls being right. In this case simply fix the post and delete the troll. You should not post incorrect things, even on details. If I were Tobold, I'd replace the last line to "I effectively got my paladin 4,000 gold for just 20 bucks. Completely safe from ban and hacks, and cheaper than buying gold." or even lie inside the text that I asked my wife instead of using her account.

That's OK, but has nothing to do with Blizzard. Here comes that part: "what if someone derails the conversation without any sign of trolling intent?" Several times they ask legitimate questions about some branch of the topic, or try to dig deeper than I did. Do I answer them? No. A commenter once asked "Is the author answers to commenters at all except for adding a PS or a sneak edit to the post?".

No I don't. If your comment refers to the point of the post, and you make me change my mind, I change the post itself, to make sure that the next reader gets the most recent version. If your comment refers to a side-branch or a too deep thing, I may write a post about it later if it's interesting, but I won't engage in conversation in comments, because it would derail the original. If the derailing would be serious, I don't hesitate to delete such comment either. I also delete comments attacking a troll (and defending the conversation, me, the blog, the Tooth Faery), simply because without the troll they are pointless.

The focus group of my blog is the silent reader. There are 3.3K regular and 2.5-3.5K random silent readers. The latter often don't stay long enough to fully read even the post, not to mention the comments. 90% of my visitors doesn't read the comments, just the post. So anything that doesn't reach them is not cost effective for me. What I write in comments won't reach them.

My most disliked action is "sneak editing", aka fixing an error in the post and delete the referring comment. I'm writing it for the readers. See it from this perspective. He is not interested in old incorrect versions and their incremental fixation, nor the comments that pointed out the errors. He wants to read an error-free post.

Exactly like Blizzard I won't make content for only 1-10% of my subscriber base. While I personally like intelligent commenters more than a random guy who spends 2:15 on the site, my personal feelings does not matter. Business is business, cost effectiveness above all!

PS: I found the funnies thread ever, and it fits very well to the topic "trolling". It's the Elitist Jerk's Banhammer topic, the collection of the trolls there.

GDP/worker

2009-10-21T07:00:00.010+02:00

This is the last post in the series of my doom prophecies, aimed on proving that without serious changes, the GDP will fall, due to the incompatibility between the economy of a technologically advanced country and the legal-social system of the same countries.

First let me re-introduce the graph that I've presented in a badly written post:
You can see two lines. The green is the GDP of the USA divided by the number of people having jobs or businesses. (employment source, GDP source, 2009 is estimated from Q1&2). The red line is standard GDP/person. Both are displayed as percentage of their 2008 value. Of course their absolute value differ seriously, $99.5K and $47.5K/year.

What is important is that the green line is much-much smoother. It's more or less immune to recessions and booms, including the current great recession. It's shows something fundamental: the productive power of the average worker. It's slowly but surely rising all times as technological makes man more and more powerful. The market trends have little effect on it, as it's a deeper layer, it's defined only by the underlying technology.

The red line on the other hand dances around the green. In booms it jumps above it, in recessions it fall below it. If we divide red by green, the GDP falls out from the equation, and we get "worker/person" aka "employment rate". So we get to the fundamental conclusion:

Booms and recessions are only defined by employment rate, as GDP/employed is a fundamental thing and unchangeable for politicians or market actors. (except by education in 20-30 years)

I mean in booms people get employed to create value (so they do), and in recession they are fired (so they do nothing). Captain obvious says: "keep employment rate high and we'll be in a forever boom". Yet - as communist countries so clearly proved - it's impossible. You can't keep a company running if no one buys its products. The last two boom-recession pairs were doing exactly this.

The first one employed lot of people in the .com business, paying them from investors money who invested in the hope of huge profit. When they realized that these profits will never come as the .com markets simply does not have enough customers, the .com balloon popped, the investors lost their money and the workers creating useless products were fired.
The second was powered by the subprime loans. People bought homes, cars, consumer electronics, restaurant services, travels and so on without money. When it became obvious that the loans will go default, the further loaning stopped, the buying force disappeared and the workers who created the products for the loaners were fired.

However in itself it does not prove my prophecies, it merely proves that the current recession was inevitable and now a correction phase is in order, until the "proper" employment rate is reset. To prove that the GDP of the USA (and the rest of the World) will keep on decreasing I have to prove that the employment rate will decrease faster than the GDP/employed grows.

To prove that let's see this graph:

The data above shows income shares of different percentile classes (source is the appendix of an IRS study). It says that the red group (richest 20%) of the USA is not only get much more income than the the other 20% segments (that's obvious) but also that their share of wealth increases every year.

In 1980 the red group got 50% of all salaries and other incomes. In 2000 they had 60%! Captain obvious says that in 2080 they will get 100% of the income, meaning everyone else will get nothing!

Captain obvious is wrong, we don't have to wait for 2080. There are social transfers, meaning no one can reach 0. You will have income, even if you work nothing. If we guarantee 5% income share to every group, then the red group needs to get "only" 80% to put everyone else to welfare. They will reach it in 2040.

If you think that the cake grows faster than the slice of the red group, look at the graph below (from the same IRS study). It shows the group limits in 1983 dollars (inflation-free dollars, about 0.46 2009 $). As you can see, the slice of the other groups decrease in absolute terms (as far as inflation-free $ is absolute).

The employment rate of the USA was 44% at 2008 (considering the whole population 100%, 65% if you define the working age as 100%). To decrease this to 20% by 2040, we have to decrease it by 0.75% of the whole population. That's 2.5% decrease of the actual workforce every year (the 100% is the previous year). Remember the picture from my two weeks ago post?
I see 2.7%/year decrease here. Just coincidence, right?

Wait a minute! GDP/worker increases by 3-4%/year, so it could overcompensate the employment rate decrease. Our GDP will still increase, just the world will change a bit: only 20% will work, the rest will just enjoy life, granted in a poor fashion.

In the last post this optimistic view will be destroyed, along with the wrong hopes that the people who are too dumb to work in a technically advanced workplace could go to services area, to work as waiters, home-cleaners, baby-sitters and such.

I farmed it for free

2009-10-20T07:00:00.017+02:00

This is the most common mistake of business-noobs. I wrote about it several times, including in "middle class", mocked it in "morons of the week", referred it countless times. This time I'd like to write it so simply as I can. The purpose of this post is to be linkable to people who claim "I farmed it for free". If a guildmate, a friend or just an annoying "why do you charge 20G for a cut" person claims it, you just direct them to this page. Not the blog in general, but to this page.

At first and above all, all frost lotuses are equal! The stack in the AH for 800G is absolutely equal to the stack you farmed. You can make equal amount and quality flasks from them, no exceptions. You can gain the stack several ways:

buy it for gold, usually from AH, this is the most obvious case, you paid 800G for it
get it from a friend, this case he gifted you 800G worth of herbs
buy it for gold, on the trade chat, for 500G. This case your herbs are still 800G, and you made 300G business profit
farm it yourself. This case you created 800G worth of product by working.

The most typical error is ignoring the fact that these herbs could be sold for 800G, and treat them like they were themselves worthless. Of course you can give them someone as a gift, but then be aware that you just gave away 800G.

More often they are transformed into flasks and then sold for less than their price. I mean if lichbloom and icethorn cost 1-1G on the AH and you are flask specialist, you can make 2.5 flasks from 50G worth of herbs. If you sell a flask for less than 20G, you gain less money than you would get by selling the herbs themselves. You still gain money, true.

But the steps are the following:

Farming 1 frost lotus, 5 lichbloom, 5 icethorn. This step you created 50G value by working.
Transforming them to 2.5 flasks. Assuming that a flask go for 25G normally on the AH, they worth 25*2.5 = 62.5G. This step created 12.5G value by skilled working (not everyone can do that, only those who are elixir spec alchemists).
Selling them for 15G each. This step you made 62.5-15*2.5 = 25G business loss.
You have now 37.5G

The reason why AH goblins are so shamelessly rich is that the business loss/win step is very fast. To farm the herbs you need 5-10 minutes. But you can sell them below their value in a second. If I find 100 such bad businessman in an hour, I just made 2500G.

One good question: what if the flasks always go for 19-18G on the AH and you simply can't sell them higher or you are undercut and the auction expires? Then the flask transforming step ends with 18*2.5=45G value, that's 5G smaller than the herb price. This case don't transform. Sell the herbs themselves. If you haven't transformed for a long time, simply drop the elixir spec or the whole alchemy profession and get something profitable.

Last thing: just because you like farming or you picked herbs during questing, it's still not free. It's easy money, true, like you find a wallet on the street. But still, it worth the same and you could realize this money by selling it on the AH. Just because you got it easily, you should not waste it.

Muscle and brain

2009-10-19T07:00:00.006+02:00

My Friday posts about the imminent collapse of the economy (to be accurate the continuous decline of GDP for years) got lot of attention and comments. Some must be answered. Promise: the series will end this week, including a rewritten version of last Friday's and a solution suggestion (which will contain no genocide).

At first, many accused me to be Luddite and tried to disprove my statements based on that. I've never told technological advancement is anyway bad for the economy. I did not tell that technological advancement caused the current crisis. The inability of the political, financial and social system to adapt to the technological advancement caused it. In a very short and rude summary: "unskilled people no longer can pay their loans but banks kept giving them".

Technological advancement is good for the GDP and the well-being of those who are able to use it. It allows us to work less in average, yet have more medicine, better food, bigger homes, more items and so on. However the differences in the distribution of wealth and work is constantly increased by technological advancement.

Let me introduce SmartJack and DumbJack. They are both lumberjacks, cutting down and slicing up 4-4 tons of wood every (8 hours) day by axes. For every tons of wood the employer give them $20, so they are both making $80 a day.

Let's introduce woodcutting tractor that have an arm to grab a tree, drive it to fall to the right direction, and putting the cut parts to the cart it's pulling, plus a chainshaw. SmartJack can now cut 20 tons of wood a day. Now 24 tons of wood is cut instead of 8 so the +200% production causes price to fall somewhere to $8, so DumbJack's income is down to $24/day instead of $80. SmartJack makes $160 now. DumbJack is poorer than before the invention of the tractor and the chainsaw. If we add that he will see the new stuff of SmartJack every day, he will feel poor even more than he really is. It's important to notice that everyone else in town are happy because of the cheaper wood, the community's standard of living increased without doubt.

But does it matter? Can it cause large scale economical or political problems? The technological progress existed since the dawn of men. The axe that DumbJack uses wasn't always around, once people used stones and metal axe was a huge thing. So what changed?

Every time some new machine displaced people from a job, they found a new one, typically in a more advanced industry. When the bronze axe displaced some people who were chopping trees with stones, they could be employed by the by the smith who made the axe. The same way DumbJack could find a job as a machinist, building or maintaining chainsaws and tractors.

Except... he is too dumb for that. Feeding the forge with firewood doesn't need more brain than chopping trees or digging the ground. The carpenter master or the master smith did need more brain, but their servant did not.

In the previous centuries, 90-95% of the work was menial. It needed the worker to perform certain moves with his muscles. Pickaxing coal, driving a plow, feeding a sawmill, carrying boxes to a shop, or inserting screws into the same hole by the conveyor belt does not need intelligence or creativity. The boss of the job needed more and more knowledge and skill. However his servant only needed obedience and ability to learn a simple chore.

The paragraph above is not accurate. Carrying boxes does need brain. You have to know where they belong, what force you should apply, which is fragile, what tools (carrier belt, wheeled cart) should be used. Just because such "mental skills" are obvious to a mentally healthy human being, it does not mean it needs no such skills.

The advancement of technology until the last decades of the XX. century meant stronger and stronger "artificial muscles". The axe cuts trees faster than a piece of stone, and the chainsaw is stronger than an axe. However they are equally useless without a human who knows where the trees are, how to cut them, how to make them fall to the right direction or which part of the tree is considered "useful lumber".

Someone, who was able to do these basic thinking steps and was ready to work was a useful member of the society. The technological advancement meant nothing than replacing the muscles of the workforce with stronger and stronger machines.

What changed in the last decades of XX. century, (arbitrarily dated by me to 11/26/76, the birthdate of the biggest company doing it) is that machines started to think. Not creatively, intelligently, but now machines are able to do simple, repeatable thinking actions. I mean machines can sort mail according to their zip codes or capable of identifying and removing bad apples from a box, "remembering" what kind of websites you use to visit and give you targeted ads, booking your salary and so on.

Now we can replace the brains of the workforce with machines. Since the muscles are already replaced by machines, the whole human is now replaced. Only those can not be replaced whose job requires such complicated thinking that machines can't do yet, or solving non-repetitive problems, that machines cannot be programmed to (unless they contain true AI).

DumbJack has nowhere to go. Every job that has openings needs higher intelligence than cutting trees. The chainsaw is created by automated machines overseen by a single engineer. Repairing them would need him to set up a small business with paperwork, advertisements, contracts with spare parts suppliers, paying tax, and so on. He is not even competitive in cutting trees, otherwise he would not be unemployed, how on Earth would he turn into an engineer or a small business owner?!

The only advantage the non-creative human left is that he is already existing, while a machine must be bought first. Machines also need maintenance, so if someone gets less or equal salary than machine_maintenance + machine_price/time_in_service + loan_interest*machine_price, employing him is the right move. However this price nowadays is around $5-15K/year. Since our wonderful societies pay welfare in this magnitude, such workers simply doesn't work.

So we reached the present state: someone works 10 hours/day trying to keep the tractors alive, SmartJack cuts trees 6 days a week and 4-8 people are doing nothing since they are too dumb to be employed to any of these jobs and due to welfare, too lazy to keep on working the old way for $10K/year.

And their number will just grow!

Morons of the week 2

2009-10-18T07:00:00.005+02:00

I can fully agree to the blue poster in this official warcraft forum topic (by mike)!

Daniel found a genius on a German server, and sent him with the translation of his wisdom. Pay attention to his teachings! People buy belt buckles even for 100G, but if someone destroy the prices they won't buy them! So keep the prices high for more sales!

In: You really need to learn how to handle money.
Out: So?
In: You undercut the prices for eternal belt buckles by 50%... well,
not very smart.
Out: So buy them and repost for more.
In: You should leave them the same price and earn twice the amount -.-
In: Really unbelievable
Out: I prefer selling to getting them returned because I was undercut
In: They will always be bought, except when there are people like you
who destroy the prices, when they're not sold that cheap they'd get
bought for 100g.
In: As you can see you would be undercut, so you earn even less.
Out: Of course they'll be bought but I don't want to camp the AH. And
without doing that, I'll be undercut all the time. When I sell cheap,
others don't bother.
Out: I have an idea. I'll sell you my whole inventory of belt buckles
for 35g each so you can sell them for 80g. Deal?
In: This has nothing to do with camping but with thinking. You seem to
have leveled blacksmithing far enough to be able to produce them. This
wasn't cheap, so just use it to earn gold.
In: If you just want to get rid of them, why don't you give them away
for free?

I reached goldcap selling titanium ore and flasks as singles. N00b me! I could do it much faster selling full stacks! But Grimak is my savior. I'm N00b no more! (by Carler - Hellscream -Eu)

Joern from Norway found a ... very strange being:

There is no morons of the week post without the good old "I farmed it myself, so it's free"! (by Victor)

PS: If I'd had to farm up a whole bank tab (98 stacks) of herbs, I'd delete WoW, my blog and maybe even join the emo community!

Just like "I farmed it so it's free", the "I buy vendor stuff for 1000%+ markup" is an evergreen. (by maik)

Morons of the week

2009-10-17T07:00:00.001+02:00

Since so many people claimed that it's bad to call them morons as they can play the way they want to, so I shouldn't put them to pillory here. So no more morons.

Instead here is a perfect specimen who is a perfectly smart person with little flaws like (by Panasi):

Have no idea about deep undercutting strategy and its benefits
Wants to tell other players how to play
Doesn't know that you can't talk the competition out of his position
Cannot type without extreme amount of mistakes
Keep calling fellow players "fukin idiots"

PS: I want to be "proper ppl" so please send me shining examples of their awesomeness so I can learn to be like them. I need lot of examples though, so keep sending!

Cranberry (Runetotem) summarized perfectly the vendor-stuff reselling market: "I just stick em on AH for 48 hr auction and relist is low price, so just keep putting them up. At the moment, i have pretty much every vendor item related to professions on AH x10... This doesn't make me a lot of money granted, but the markup is huge, time spent small and it always makes me giggle to myself :)"

Please note that selling stuff or remote vendors (like the goblin in Alterac mountains) is not M&S bashing just transportation business. Fair and viable, but don't belong here, as the buyer pay for your time getting the item.

Poer of Garrosh got a mail from another genius.

He didn't stop at sending me the letter. He engaged conversation with Gaeldar, came to a cartel agreement... and instantly violated it on an alt. That's the way!

I'd like to ask all contributors to send better quality pictures. If you really don't know how to make your picture fit to 800x600, send me bigger and I'll resize it properly.

Joethecanoe - Dragonblight EU, like most of us is unable to understand the M&S axiom: you can farm it, so it's free!

Tim St. Clair found a "great" advertisement:

You can buy a guide for real money to get 150!!! G/hour. I guess a bunch of random dailies give more.

GDP/smart

2009-10-16T07:00:00.015+02:00

Here I am again to ruin your beautiful Friday as a self-proclaimed prophet of inevitable doom!

Based on comments this post is looking forward a serious rewrite, keeping the point but changing the argumentation.

The idea that GDP can be decreased by technological advancement is counter-intuitive, as technology make us more productive, and the letter "P" in GDP is "product". It's obvious that we can't compare the GDP of countries since they are very different in population. Since you are a guy and not a country president, you want to live in a country where you can be rich. A place where the GDP/person (and no raw GDP) is high offers better chances for that, if all else is the same.

However let's make a change in methodology: let's include the dogs into the population. If the country has 4:1 human:dog ratio, then the GDP/(person+dog) will drop by 20%, despite nothing changed in the economy.

Why does no one suggest to include dogs into the "person" field of the GDP calculations? Because both the production and consumption of dogs are directly linked to their owners and not to other man. If some guy chooses to have a pet dog, his wealth will drop, as he'll spend on dog food and vet costs. If he buys a guard dog, his wealth can increase due to less thefts. But your wealth won't be affected.

Your chance of being rich is not affected by the number of dogs in the country, so it would be stupid to calculate GDP/(person+dog).

However let's introduce morons, people who cannot do skilled jobs. With the technological advancement they can no longer employed in productive industry. The technological advancement increase the productivity of the company, therefore the income of the owner and it's workers. So the GDP/smart people will increase. If we approximate "smart" as "capable of holding a job or business", then we'll get the following chart (USA, employment source, GDP source, 2009 is estimated from Q1&2):

Where is the recession? The GDP/smart shows no recession in 2008-9, also no problems in 2001-2 and no booms either. It's a straight, smooth line without either positive or negative peaks. It's just like the one imagined by the most romantic daydreamers: mankind progressing forward without stops and fallbacks.

We could claim that the GDP/(smart+M&S) is just as wrong indicator as the GDP/(person+dog). All we have to do is replace the indicator with GDP/smart and we can watch the beautiful green line moving forward forever and ever.

However life is not so simple. Remember that we rejected GDP/(person+dog) on the basis that dogs of other people have no effect on our life. But the number of M&S in your country does affect your life, therefore they must be included to the GDP calculation. The main difference between dogs and M&S is not their contribution to the society. Both does very little to none.

The difference lies in our political systems. Dogs only consume the wealth of their owners. If I don't want to have dogs, I don't buy dogs. Dogs have some rights, like I can't throw out or kill my existing dog, but having a dog was my choice on the first place and I can stop the growing of dog population on my yard by sterilizing my dog. On the other hand no foreign dogs can just walk into my yard and demand food and home.

M&S on the other hand, despite their close-to-dog use to the society have the same rights as you. They have equal vote on how to spend tax money (though they have no contribution to it) and also you can't get rid of them. Even if they commit serious crimes, they can't be just disposed, but processed trough the extremely expensive legal system and then kept in expensive prisons.

So no. You can't watch the green line. As long as the M&S is equal to the useful member of the society, it's methodologically right to use the red line. The green will keep on growing in the following years, like it always did. The red will fall down.

PS: some could say that by defining "smart" as "employed or business owner" I put kids, between jobs and elderly to the M&S. It's theoretically true as they have no more current use to the society than a dog or a welfare leech. However they did or will do useful things. If we assume that every smart people spend equal time as active worker and as child-pensioned-jobseeker, then it doesn't affect the shape of the GDP/smart curve, just translates it with the "active time/all time factor". The main difference of the M&S and some random currently not employed is that they did not and will never contribute to the progression of the mankind.

And they are not even cute like puppies.

Pwned!

2009-10-15T07:00:00.012+02:00

Do you know the origin of the gaming term "pwned"? Who is literally pawned? Well, it originally came from a typo, "owned" was mistyped "pwned" since "o" is next to "p".

However let me give a more entertaining definition: "A pawnbroker (or pawnshop) is an individual or business that offers secured loans to people, with items of personal property used as collateral. The word pawn is derived from the Latin pignus, for pledge, and the items having been pawned to the broker are themselves called pledges or pawns, or simply the collateral." (by Wikipedia)

The pawnshop is typically the last step in loans (before filing for bankruptcy). The guy usually has so bad credit report that no one wants to give him more loan. As long as he posses items usable as collateral, he is loan-capable at the pawnshop. Being pwned means being deeply in debt (to the one who did the pwnage), without much hope of repaying and most probably losing everything to him.

I found an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal. The strange thing is the chart below:

It says that the lower income someone has, the higher chance is that he can't repay his loans. It's not obvious or intuitive. I mean people with smaller income get smaller loans. If you have to pay 10% of your income to loans, it doesn't really matter if that 10% is $3000 or $30000.

However the article also shows that debt amounts increased in the low-income segment more than in the high-income segments. I mean in the last years the poor man increased his loan more than a rich.

That's not OK. I mean why do this segment of people take too much loans? The model-person of the article lists some strange behaviors that poke my eye instantly:

"I would start paying it, and then my sister almost got evicted from her old apartment, or my grandfather decided he couldn't pay the rent. They needed help," ... "$400 a month she contributes to the rent on her grandfather"
"wanting to buy gifts for her mother and sister and clothes for a young niece, she applied for credit"
"I kept up a busy social life, eating out several times a week and going to movies -- even as the collectors called"

Helping others when she has more loans than income/year?! Buying gifts from loans?! Hanging out with friends in expensive places when she has delinquent loan?! I mean what the hell is wrong with this girl?

She tells it with her own words: "I was a social person. I had interest in a lot of things, I had dreams. Now I'm just paying off the past."

Yep. She did not take loans to start a business. Neither to get her first home or car that she needs for simply living. She wasted it for social things: helping, gifts, hanging out with friends. Things that cost money but give no meaningful rewards. They won't make you more rich, more effective, more healthy, more wise, they contribute your life in no way. They just feel good.

It is the big difference between the middle class and the poor. The first can cut back on social things when he can't afford them, the latter can not. The poor more often have parties, show off to friends, follow fashions. The middle class, who can't do it is often pictured "boring" or "without style". However it's just clever spending.

The "heartless" middle class wouldn't help others when already in bad situation. The "good heart" poor will share his last slice of bread with his fellow man... oh wait, he shares the last slice of bread of his creditor.

Getting loans for social reasons is the highway to be poor, to be literally pwned!

PS: the only valid reason to get a loan is to buy something that pays you more money than you pay for interest. If you want to start a business, that's an example. If you want to buy a used car to skip taxi fees, or to not waste time (time x your hourly pay = money) on the public transport. Getting loan for "fun" things or to enable socializing is a terrible idea.

PS2: please spare me from the "life has fixed costs and the poor simply can't decrease its spending". You can live in a decent home from low money if you live with roommates. I started my life with my GF in a 28m² one-room flat. Now my bedroom is larger than that. It's not miracle, simple clever spending and avoiding pawnage.