Do they mean it? Are they that stupid? I can't figure it out (by Fragmaggot):
It began with a /trade LF engineer to craft bike
If you learn from morons, you'll be one (by Bonewalker):
I doubt that martyn_wynne@hotmail.com meant a topic here, but his idea to make gold so he'll become "imba raider" definitely deserve a place here. How on Earth could my techniques make someone "imba raider" if they did not make me one? 99% of the raiding result comes from skill and dedication, not the gear that money can buy. And yes, the news from July are really from July. Actually I will start posting stupid requests here. Think before you ask me a question! (Of course I still answer intelligent ones and simply delete the ones on the fence. But really stupid ones will be here!)
"I've only been playing wow for less than a year, and was brought into the game by a HARDCORE raider who's ideas' would go against many of your principles. He spends 30,000g on a upgrade that gives him 3 more spell power, (no lie), and probably lasts a month till the next item comes along. But he is in a guild currently ranked 18th in the world at the moment, so its just something that he does.
To fund this, ofc, he buys gold, another idea that would probably go against your principles. I sort of see his point, we both irl, earn very good money working in Investment banking, and our irl time is worth a lot. For instance when I started here I was contracting at Ł50 per hour, I now earn more than that, but lets use that as an example. So I can spend an extra hour at work, and earn around 6000g. (Ł25 after tax) We're just doing what we do best, and paying someone else to grind for us.
But here's the catch, I feel buying gold is just plain wrong, its a game after all, and just buying it once leads to a slippery slope. What I want to do, is to work out how you make your gold, so I can use those techniques to be a imba raider like him. Make sense? If I can truly make 3k per hr of work, it would be well worth the time.
Anyhow I wrote all that, mainly cause I noticed back in July recruiting apprentices, I realise that was back in July, and probably well and truly done, but with out trying, you get no-where in this planet. :)" Well, Marty, you got somewhere, enjoy your fame!
Matthew found that selling flasks is a risky business:
Manjelly was threatened "seriously". It seems that Maeverenni doesn't get the point of deep undercutting. I hope he enjoys producing all the glyphs of the server for 0 profit:
It began with a /trade LF engineer to craft bike
If you learn from morons, you'll be one (by Bonewalker):
I doubt that martyn_wynne@hotmail.com meant a topic here, but his idea to make gold so he'll become "imba raider" definitely deserve a place here. How on Earth could my techniques make someone "imba raider" if they did not make me one? 99% of the raiding result comes from skill and dedication, not the gear that money can buy. And yes, the news from July are really from July. Actually I will start posting stupid requests here. Think before you ask me a question! (Of course I still answer intelligent ones and simply delete the ones on the fence. But really stupid ones will be here!)
"I've only been playing wow for less than a year, and was brought into the game by a HARDCORE raider who's ideas' would go against many of your principles. He spends 30,000g on a upgrade that gives him 3 more spell power, (no lie), and probably lasts a month till the next item comes along. But he is in a guild currently ranked 18th in the world at the moment, so its just something that he does.
To fund this, ofc, he buys gold, another idea that would probably go against your principles. I sort of see his point, we both irl, earn very good money working in Investment banking, and our irl time is worth a lot. For instance when I started here I was contracting at Ł50 per hour, I now earn more than that, but lets use that as an example. So I can spend an extra hour at work, and earn around 6000g. (Ł25 after tax) We're just doing what we do best, and paying someone else to grind for us.
But here's the catch, I feel buying gold is just plain wrong, its a game after all, and just buying it once leads to a slippery slope. What I want to do, is to work out how you make your gold, so I can use those techniques to be a imba raider like him. Make sense? If I can truly make 3k per hr of work, it would be well worth the time.
Anyhow I wrote all that, mainly cause I noticed back in July recruiting apprentices, I realise that was back in July, and probably well and truly done, but with out trying, you get no-where in this planet. :)" Well, Marty, you got somewhere, enjoy your fame!
Matthew found that selling flasks is a risky business:
Manjelly was threatened "seriously". It seems that Maeverenni doesn't get the point of deep undercutting. I hope he enjoys producing all the glyphs of the server for 0 profit:
30 comments:
What kind of idiot spends 30k on something that only gives 3 SP? That would add up to what....1 less cast per fight?
For someone who is in "investment banking", he sure doesn't seem too bright.
@ glyph
i suppose that's why the banks needed a bailout
Is it just me or are these "Moron of the week" just boring these days?
They used to be funny to read, but now they're a little... lame.
Well, Glyph, the guy said his friend buys gold.
The more money you make IRL, the cheaper it seems. If an investment banker makes $300K a year, what's $50 for a few thousand game gold? Maybe that's like a quarter for a piece of vending machine gum. Maybe he tips his shoe shine boy more.
Of course, that game gold, Blizz says, isn't coming from farmers anymore. It's coming from hacked accounts.
I guess uber raider doesn't care about that.
Yes, the section is boring because 90% of the cases are repeats and a significant proportion are claimed to be morons because they don't do deep undercutting.
Don't get me wrong - deep undercutting has its uses, but it is far from an end all / be all. The last case in particular looks like a perfectly sensible trade war, but, well, you know... it's Gevlon's blog.
Moron of the week got boring long ago. Running jokes get pretty stale after awhile.
@Sweetiebird
It's boring because it's always the same thing. The funny thing is the "morons" are actually giving useful advice, not because they're kind but because they want to keep the profit margins high.
It's all the ammo Gevlon has though, so he rolls with it in an attempt to reinforce his viewer base, and that of the person who sent him the screenshots.
Surely it's illegal to post someone's e-mail address on a site without their permission.
The "advice" morons are morons not because of their pricing but because of their letters demanding the COMPETITION to adapt to their scheme.
@Magz: read mail policy
Honestly I agree with the moron claiming it won't sell faster. Well, really I disagree(again) with Gevlon that claiming it won't sell faster is always wrong.
My friend, inelastic demand is inelastic. When you need x of y, then you buy x of y. You don't buy x*z of y (z>1) because you only need x.
So in an inelastic situation, one does better to maximize the price one sells at, unless one is only trying to do better than one's competiton. Which, in turn, raises the question, who's more social? The social, or the anti-social that judges his actions based on how he compares to others?
I fully understand burning your competition out, but to make that your sole objective (I did well by making them do poorly) seems to be a rather weak position coming from the Guy that solos Rfc for a challenge he doesn't need others for.
Perhaps, I've read too much, but Max g/hr is a weak number when you modify your hours to be small. (I can make 1000g/hr farming vendor trash in BT as long as I login, nuke, vendor, logout... so what if I only made 50s, I made 1000g/hour)
@Zeran
But it will sell faster. Inelastic demand is not perfectly inelastic so it will still sell faster. But what makes you think the demand is inelastic in the first place? From personal experiences, I beg to differ.
Do people who post these comments even read the blog at all?
The point of deep undecutting is to reduce competition. One effect of reduced competition means less people undercutting you and therefore faster sales. Seriously, its not difficult.
I love those undercutting threats. I've got my fair share of them too and I still can't wrap my mind around their logic. They don't like the extraordinary low price, so they threaten to go much LOWER.
It's like saying: "hey man, you drive way too slow, so I'm going to stand still for a while... that'll teach you" ..Or by putting up very loud music, because you're annoyed by.. loud music!
I wonder if those people kill fish by trying to drown 'm.
@Anos
Yes, morons of the week are getting a bit stale, but it's still better then nothing. If there's just one funny one in there it's worth it.
Wooly: "hey man, you drive way too slow, so I'm going to stand still for a while... that'll teach you"
They are going to stay for a while making you stay as well. That might or might not turn out better for them than for you, depending on the circumstances.
@Kevan - what is the matter from where gold comes from? Hacked account or Chinese sweat shops. You just keep your acc secured. Not that hard.
"They are going to stay for a while making you stay as well. That might or might not turn out better for them than for you, depending on the circumstances."
I think that's a case where you have to think long term and be willing to absorb losses at the start. The guy selling glyphs for 50-80 gold will probably not want to compete in a market where the glyphs are 10-15 gold, and when the other person doesn't "learn" he is likely to abandon the market.
It's not always an automatic or fast process, but from the testimonials here it seems to work pretty well.
The only portion of the "moron of the week" that I'm getting tired of is that whole "yes you can have 900 gold" part. We get it, you're taking a common understanding and turning it around based on a literal translation (ie, I didn't say you could have MY 900 gold). It's the sort of thing that's funny the first time, and not funny the second time. Or any time after that.
demand is not completely inelastic, but it has certain strange properties.
Given a bunch of pieces on the ah at price X, there is some demand at price X-1c if I list at X-1c. There is also some supply (people who will undercut me) at X-2c, but essentially the same demand.
At X-10g, the demand is almost certainly higher, but only just barely so. The supply (of people willing to undercut me by a copper) is also probably somewhat lower, but unless the profit on the item is now very small (assuming a manufactured item -- but you can also think of farmed item profit as whatever you can make over and above dailies by farming the item, just much harder to calculate), the supply won't be much smaller.
When you get to the point where the profit has gone out of the item to produce/farm, then supply drops off dramatically -- until then, it will drop only very slowly. Think about your own behavior as a seller. Suppose you normally make 5-10g profit on a item from a few clicks and little to no risk. If it drops to 4g what do you do? Sell sell sell. 3g? Still selling. At some point you hit your margin of what takes too long to be worth making say 50s or whatever and boom, now you aren't selling.
People will have different thresholds of course, but as long as you are far away from the no-profit line, supply will remain pretty high as prices drop.
Similarly there is a huge demand buff at the point where it is profitable to buy up and resell something. Go 15-40% below market price (depending on the item's price/demand/depositrisk/supplyrisk) and suddenly you have many goblins ready to snatch up your item.
But until then -- how many people will buy a gem for 110g but not for 120g? Only Goblins when the market is 130-140g, that's who. 99% of the people who actually want the gem are not going to notice a 10% difference in price. They will buy the lowest as long as the price is reasonable -- or they consider all the normal prices unreasoanable and won't buy it for 10g less either, going without or waiting for some friend/moron to give it away for an unreasonable price.
So, in fact, this particular moron is probably close to right about sale speed. The gem isn't likely to sell much faster at 10g less than at 1g less, unless the 10g drop makes it a resell opportunity, or drops it below the price at which most people would be willing to produce the item.
This is the way the wow market works, and it's pretty suprising to me that someone with as much claimed experience as Gevlon lets his Chicago school ideas about microeconomics (based on rational actors in an environment with zero transaction costs) trump the actual experience of selling in the wow ah.
You guys claim that the Morons of the Week are getting a bit stale, repetitive, or old. Running Jokes, you say.
But we have a pair of goons claiming to be in the "18th best guild in the world" admitting to gold buying. Now there's some comedy gold!
you can add that moron too.
http://img2.imagetitan.com/img.php?image=31_wowscrnshot_112109_142945.jpg
he sold 4gems for the price of 1.
I still enjoy the morons of the week, especially since I am getting some similar noise now. I even get complaints telling me I shouldn't use Auctioneer because of my low pricing strategy, when I'm actually trying out Auctionator now. :) Trying it because of its simple and fast auction check & cancel feature, though it has its bugs.
The best part lately has been the AH campers buying out my stock. They're trying to buy out my cheap glyphs to prop up 'their' high market prices. Good luck and more power to them I say, my gold's made. And then I put up more glyphs!
Once I realized just how many AH campers there are now, what time it would cost me to make good money on a high pricing strategy, I went low. I want to play the game, not play AH tag. It's fun but not that fun. It's all right though...I made some good gold before word spread on inscription, and I'm still doing better than maintenance money now.
The min-maxing raider will certainly spend that much on upgrades, despite the vastly diminished return in terms of stats/gold. That's why they're #18 in the world, and the people who refuse to do so are #18,000.
Nick S, isn't buying gold against the ToS? How do these people get to the 18th guild in the WORLD without being banned? The point is, people can min/max all they like, but do it within the terms of service..
@anon
It's simple what makes it inelastic. You just got a new piece of gear, and need A new gem. No matter how low the prices on gems currently are, you buy A gem (not 3 or 4). This, though not universally true, is emphatically true of your normal buyers (unless you bring the price down to resalable values). So I guess, I concede that demand is not perfectly inelastic (as had he dropped the price another 5-10g the other seller would have just replayed it). However, in the price area of the example, this was not the case. Demand for the gem was inelastic, as resellers didn't want it.
@Ano
They are going to stay for a while making you stay as well
Yes, of course that is true. Using the competitor's tactic against him could very well work out better for you then for him, but that's not the point. What the angry seller is trying to accomplish is making the other guy raise his price, by lowering the price even further. If that's not irony, I don't know what is.
To me it doesn't seem smart to try to beat someone at his own game anyway, especially if it's the game that bothers you, because it's not about who's the best at it, but about who get's tired of playing first.
"Buying a single strange dust for 100G is bad enough already. Don't make it worse by begging the gold back from the seller! (by Lemontree, Ysondre-US)"
The second part is actually something i would consider goblinish.
While buying ridiculously expensive crap is stupid, trying to exploit the "i must be nice to strangers" behavior of socials is not.
@ Emma, Blizz VERY rarely bans gold buyers. Ive bought gold on numerous occasions, very large amounts and the only thing i get is some spam mail every now and then on my alt. which isnt a big deal...
Plus it makes my gold/hr @ like 600,000/hour :P
Man, The Gnome of Zurich said it so beautifully, I almost cried.
@Zeran
That is true, but i was not talking about reselling at all. If someone needs a gem but the price of the cheapest gem is too high because everyone sets the price high and undercuts by one copper, he won't buy it. He will go for a cheaper alternative or get a guildie to cut it for him. Yes, not everyone has thousands to spend blindly. Therefore, it is elastic, but not in the way you think it is(aka one person buying more than one but instead more people buying one). Thought this was really obvious, guess not.
Anti-socials don't blog.
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