Business report

5.5K. 1.5K more than last week. Around 5-10 mins/day work, 10mins/day AFK.

I'm actually surprised how unchallenged my bag, recipe and alliance-pet businesses are. I met some competition in the bag business and someone sold cat pets in the common AH, but that's all.

It seems like a solid income with little work. It seems that there are enough niches for all businessmen, so no one is motivated to take mine.

I'm thinking about concluding this experiment.

Guild death and taxes

I love when WoW provide a simple, yet complete model of an aspect of the world. (If you visualized a huge blue dragon by the word "aspect" you shall log off for a while). I got the following reader mail:

I'm a leader of a raiding guild, currently trying Sartharion 2 drakes. After many wipes in a progression raid, several raiders run out of consumables, some even unable to repair. To fix this problem, I introduced guild bank tax: everyone shall pay 200G a week (or consumables worth 200G) into the bank, and we use this money to fund consumables and repairs of progression raids.

The problem is that more and more people claimed that they are broke and unable to pay. That's hard for me to believe. Several other raiders don't believe it too, called the non-payers slackers or even ninjas causing drama. To save the guild, I abandoned the tax idea. What was the problem and how to fix it?

You tried to introduce a "fixed fee" tax, where everyone pays the same amount. This tax is the best for rich people (I wouldn't even notice losing 200G), but the hardest for poor ones. I don't even bother to explain why this tax is terrible, I will explain why the much better flat tax is bad. I just mention that if you had not abandoned the idea, your guild would collapse.

But before that, at first we have to make sure that "tax" and "fee" are not mixed. You pay fee for a certain service and your access to the service depend on your fee. If you don't pay WoW subscription, you won't play WoW. Taxes on the other hand cover governmental services that do not depend on your personal payment. The cops will protect you even if you have not payed a single cent into their salary. Because of that, everyone sees tax as money payed for nothing. Your guildmembers thought that they will recieve the consumables even if they don't pay, so they choose to not pay.

So the short answer is: instead of trying to tax them, demand the consumables as fee. "If you don't have consumables for yourself, you must leave the raid". This way consumables will be directly connected to the service (the raid experience and the chance for loot) and people will pay.


However I assume that most of the people who claimed to be broke was broke. I think the direct reason for that was the tax itself. When they knew that they will have to pay, they really were not motivated to go grind elementals. After all, they grind for an hour for nothing since they have to pay the gbank the income. So, tax is bad.

But what if you want something that cannot be distributed, for example gear up a flame or arcane tank? This is a serious problem in RL too, since you cannot make a society where everything is based on fees. If the army defends your country, both taxpayers and non-payers are saved. They can't defend your home and let the enemy take your non-paying neighbor's land. So there must be taxes in RL and in some cases (typically gearing up a special tank) in WoW too.

There are two ways where people don't pay tax. One is illegally cheating tax. If someone chooses that, he risks prison. The other way is simply not working. You cannot tax someone who has no income.

I don't even attempt to place any morality behind the tax. There is none. The only fair way of taxing would be fixed fee (that's why all guilds who attempt tax attempt fixed fee). It's simple, it's easy to administer and it's fair: everyone gets the same service, so pay the same price. If someone does not (or cannot) pay, let's kick him out of the guild/country.

However in real life most people would not support kicking out the poor people who cannot pay tax from the country. Most would not even support kicking non-taxpayers from a WoW guild. So (very reluctantly) accepting the principle that "poor don't pay", I'd simply want to optimize tax income, minimizing the unavoidable harmful effect of tax.

The RL is much nastier than WoW. If someone would tell in WoW that "I'm broke, please everyone in the guild give me 2G/week", he would be kicked. In real life even these people are not kicked, but the requested money (welfare) is payed. The fundamental problem is that welfare rewards non-working and tax punishes working, while working is obviously good for the society.

The main point of working is salary. The cost of this salary is that the time in work and traveling to the workplace is lost from the "fun time". Of course one can have fun in work, we'll get back to that.

Let's say that there is a $5000/year welfare and a 20% flat tax. If an unemployed person takes a $10000/year job, he loses the welfare and also $2000 tax. His income will increase only by $3000/year, at the cost of working every day in some menial job. So he will rather stay inactive. If you find it impossible to believe that someone would choose to be an unemployed person, check this EU official report, on employment rate (% of work-age population)

• USA: 72%
• EU-27 (Whole European Union): 63.4% (almost 10% more zombies!)
• EU-15 (Western Europe): 66%
• "EU-12" (mostly ex-communist-EU-members with high welfare): 58% (Braaaainssss!)

Of course the bigger factor here is welfare. However tax is also a factor. If there would be no tax, the mentioned income would increase by $5000/year what is a much bigger reason for working. So taxing the poor workers has the danger that they abandon working and turn into welfare leeches. That's why I don't support flat tax. (Fixed fee tax is much-much worse as it takes 100% of the income until you reach the tax value).

Of course if we lower the taxes of the poor workers, we have to elevate the tax of the rich workers otherwise the country won't have enough income. If one has a $100000 job, it's highly unlikely that he abandons it for a $5000 welfare, even if the tax is 40% ($45000 net loss by working). It's also important to mention that in the $100000 range there are much more interesting jobs, providing fun while working, decreasing the "time cost" of working. These people also have a much better life to lose by inprisonment, so it's less likely that they try to illegally cut their taxes.

So until we reach the utopia where welfare leeches don't get anything, therefore has to work, I will be a strong supporter of progressive tax, despite it cuts my income much more than a flat tax would.

I don't know how a progressive tax could be implemented in a WoW guild, but my advice is: "the best tax is the no tax".

------

Kring mentioned VAT. Since VAT cuts into welfare money (and other tax-free money including illegal, if the purchase itself is legal), I like it much better than flat income tax.

However it has the problem that it decreases sells and production, due to increasing price. The catch is that I don't have to pay VAT after my own products. If I get my car fixed by a mechanic, I pay his salary/profit+tax, and on the top of that I pay VAT (formally they pay their taxes, but they included that into the bill). On the other hand, if I fix my car myself, I only pay my own hours (as opportunity cost) minus tax (since if I'd do my job instead I'd be taxed).

So if mechanics_hour*(1+tax)*(1+VAT) > my_hour*(1-tax), it's better for me to fix my own car. This leads to the obviously ineffective situation where the car mechanic paints his own house and the painter fixes his own car.

Of course if you make $100K, it's still better to let the mechanic fix your car. However poor people shall choose to do more and more things themselves, which means spending their time very ineffectively, producing less wealth for both themselves and to the customers as they could.

So while VAT is better than flat tax, it's still bad. I'd either get rid of it, or introduce some kind of progressive VAT that depends on the item's price compared to items of the same class. So a Chevrolet Spark could have 5% VAT, a Chevrolet Malibu could have 15% VAT, and a Chevrolet Camaro could have 50% VAT.

Good enough

As business is zero-sum action, businessmen are usually competitive people, motivated by winning. No wonder that many are way too competitive for their own good. I'm not only referring to the managers dying at the age of 40 in heart attack, but also the time (=money) wasted in stupid cockfights.

OutDPS provided a perfect example in a comment on a topic where I'm advocating that if you have 75% of the stats of the theoretical maximum, you are good enough. He wrote:

Bringing bad gear, no matter how skilled you think you are, just means that at some point you'll have to be carried by a player with skill who's willing to work for the gear.

I'm sorry to say this, but this post puts you firmly in the category of morons and slackers you're always complaining about- a skilled player can always get decent (above the minimum level for the gear check fights) gear if they're willing to work at it for a bit. The fact that you're not willing to do so means you're willing to let these pick up players you always deride carry you through content that's designed to exclude people like you.

He claims that if I'm not as geared as the others, they are carrying me, and I'm not good enough (as getting to content that is designed to exclude me). To see what's fundamentally wrong with his point, let's see Patchwerk:

In 10 mans, he has 4320000 HP and 6 mins enrage timer. Considering 3 healers, 2 tanks that as half DPS, we get 5+2*0.5=6 DPS players. To kill him before enrage, you have to provide 4320000/6/6/60=2000DPS. In 25 mans he has 13M HP, 6 mins enrage. Considering 7 healers, 3 tanks we get 13M/16.5/6/60 = 2188DPS.

This is good enough level for Patchwerk. This is an absolute value, and has nothing to do with competition with others. If you can make 2188 DPS, you are not undergeared/skilled for Patchwerk as you can carry your own weight. If everyone else perform like you, Patchy will hit the ground.

If everyone else makes 5K DPS, they are still not carrying you, as you still put in enough effort. The fact that they do much more effort does not change the outcome of the fight, just the time spent. While time = money, the most time wasted is not in longer fights but in wipes and AFK-s. So a 4K DPS who AFK for 10 mins once slows the group more than a focused 2.2K. So this argument is very weak.

In competition people can easily forget that they are here for a goal and not for competition itself. The work done to elevate 3K to 5K may increase e-peen, but completely wasted if the goal was to clear the current content.

One can hope that Ulduar needs more. Sarth+3 surely need more as you have to kill the drake before the next one lands. However that will still be an absolute number, like 2.8K, 3.2K, 4.0K. The question of that content will be the same as now: do you have enough? If yes, you are good to go.

Sydera asked in the same topic: "how would you feel about being adequate, but lowest among the druids, all of whom have good skills?". Very important question. I would feel perfectly as my goal was not to top the chart but to get the job done. The chart shows that among all people I had the best investment/return ratio. Everyone else worked harder to get the same result. Of course for someone who came not for a certain challenge, but to enlarge his e-peen (her e-tit) this result would be terrible. But I'll be doing somethin fun while he grinds for that extra 1%.

1000

Actually I passed it on Feb 26, but I wanted to be sure that it's not just a "lucky crit", but a tendency. As you can see it on the chart, it is. The Greedy Goblin, your source of information in both WoW moneymaking and objectivist-like philosophy (anti-social according to the freindly helpfull ppl) has 1000+ subscribers. I also have 28 followers in Google and around 1300 individual visitors/day, but that value highly oscillates, there was 3200 and 400 on the same week.

I'm fully aware that most of these people are not my friends and not even like me. They read the blog for the information, of because they like to argument with different ideas.

When I started this blog, I did not hoped for such visitor numbers. My plan was only to spread economic information as a "revenge" to the "friendly helpfull ppl". I hoped that I can help businessmen and wannabe businessmen to take more and more gold from them, forcing them to grind more elementals. I was the most surprised when the first philosophy posts gained more visitor count and subscriber increase than the business ones.

The responses on this blog and fellow blogs were a great help to me, so if I consider creating this blog a cost, I had more return on this cost than on any other. So here are the things I learned, the things I would be grateful to the readers if I would know the word "grateful":

• People are interested in my ideas. Most of them don't like it, but still interested. I don't have to act (or worse, be) friendly and social to be recognized, listened, and engaged in valuable conversations.
• Socializing with people does not turn me into one of the useless socials. I can do as many sucessful commenters/fellow bloggers do: socialize with skilled people. While everyone (except for me) socialize with his guildmates, some people choose wisely which guild to be in. So they can progress and have fun from the content too. So, thanks to you I've learned that socials =/= useless socials.
• I was more than happy to see how many people share my despise on the useless socials. "Facerollers", "fire-dancers", "mouseclickers", "below-tank-DPSers" are phrases form you, not me (that's M&S). I thought I was alone seeing that "no useful abilities just being nice" leads to a wrecked society. It's great to see that many people agree that the primary filter is the skill. Granted most of you demand social skills too, but you don't even consider taking an 1500DPS guy into your group, no matter how friendly he is.
  
• And my original plan worked well. Every time people wrote "this and that trick worked, I made 10K", I was happy because that's 10K minus to the M&S and that's a hell lot of elementals to grind.
  

As I mentioned before, I'm almost done with the game. I meant raiding the content. I have one little plan to do, and it will be done, I promise. The moneymaking, the quest to take all and every single copper from the M&S will continue!

Rejuvenating data

Sydera wrote a comment asking "If you only do Naxx once, how are you going to get the gear to do Ulduar?". Later she told "I am looking at Ghostboci's armory page and your gear ... wouldn't get you a very good performance in Maly 25 or Sarth 3D of either raid size ... Ulduar has some gear checks, and your current kit won't cut it."

I'm sure that it's not just her. I hear people all the time saying they need gear for this or that. I disagree, so let's make some calculations!

The picture above shows how big a rejuvenation tick is for different resto druids in tree form, with all talents but no raidbuffs or consumables. I got 1-4 bars by removing gear from myself. I made more points than 4, (1 for each removed item) forming a perfectly fitting (R=1.00) line at 485.32 + 0.6457*SP. I got bars 5-6 from this equation, using armory data, of course adding spirit*0.15 to SP. The bars are:

1. naked
   
2. M&S in random greens, 1200SP
3. Enchanted, gemmed blue quest rewards, 1600SP
4. Myself, 1913SP
5. Sydera, 2234SP
6. Tjani from Ensidia (Nihilum + SK), 2367SP
   

You don't see huge differences? Me neither. Even the "smart beginner", in enchanted, gemmed quest rewards can provide 75% of the No1 guild's member. Is 75% too low? If you want world firsts, definitely. If you want hardest achievements like Sarth+3, maybe. But otherwise? Blizzard want to open raiding to everyone. Do you think they set 5-10% gear margin? There are even achievements to do the content with 20% less people than full or in 40% less time than enrage! How could these achievements be earned if there wouldn't be at least 40% error tolerance in the original enrage timer?

Remember that Ensidia cleared HC Malygos 3 days after WotLK release. It was completely impossible for them to clear Naxx more than once, so could not get much gear from there. There were not enough high level materials available in day 3 to craft any BoE epics or even to level tradeskills that high, including enchanting. So all they had was lvl70 stuff, some quest rewards with green WotLK or epic BC gems, BC enchants with a few slvl390-400 WotLK enchants. Even my gear level was way out of reach for them. Yet they cleared it in a small amount of tries.

My gear is capable to do 85% of the output of the Ensidia druid. I am geared for Ulduar, and maybe even for the next raid too. If I am incapable to clear it, than I'm skilless. Of course one can outgear the challenge to cover his lack of skill. If you always crash your car, I'd suggest to get some driving lessons. Sydera may think grinding for an M1A2 type car would be better.

Now let's see how much effort exist behind these gears and rejuv bars:

1. leveling up
   
2. above + questing and using the rewards
   
3. above + doing full questlines, group quests, doing normal instances during leveling, 1000G on gems, enchants
4. above + craft some BoE, spend 1000G more on better gems, enchants and clear Naxx once
   
5. above + raiding every single week, enchanting upgrades, organizing a raid guild with all its terrors
   
6. I can't even imagine what effort needed to be in the No1 guild
   

I think the point is obvious: larger and larger effort for smaller and smaller improvements.

There are two consequences:

• Damaging/healing less than 75% of the No1 person can not be explained by "I'm not as geared as him". Even in full blue you must be in the 75% range. If you are not, you are either skilless, slacking or simply (despite "bring the player, not the class" nonsense), your class/spec does not fit to the fight/raid composition and the raid leader made a mistake (or had no other choice) bringing your class/spec.
• The common belief saying "you must grind this tier for gear to be able to raid next tier" is completely wrong. To answer the question: "am I geared enough?", all you have to do is open the armory of a topguild member, and check his stats. If you are in his 75% range in the key stats, you are good to go!

All progress guilds keep on raiding every week instead of just once. This may make you think that they can't be all wrong, therefore I must be wrong. However they keep on raiding when they disenchant the loot or raid with alts because they already have best-in-slots. So their raiding has nothing to do with loot. As I'm struggling with PuGs I'm starting to see what's the real reason. And I already have a plan how to prove my assumption.

PS: tanks a bit different from others as they must not be critted or one-shotted during silence effects. If DPS is 20% lower: fight is 20% longer. If tank has 20% less mitigation/HP: raid may wipe. That's why several raids let them gear before others.

PS2: I'm not advocating wearing full blues. I'm just saying hunting for best-in slots, grinding an ilvl 213 to replace an ilvl 200 epic is pointless.

Beer game

Leah wrote in a comment, "some people do see they weekly raids ... as a weekly party, a game of checkers with their friends. the raid is a setting, a framework."

It reminded me to an old memory. It made me talk to several real life people in my workplace and finally explained something that I did not understand for years. And also explained why WoW is so successful game despite its huge flaws.

Once upon a time I was an university student. I considered it a time of learning my subject, while several co-students considered it a time to be be drunk by 11AM. A group of such fellows always had poker parties. After helping out one of the poker-players in the lab (practically saving him from winning a Darwin award) I was invited to their weekend match. I read lot of material about poker to not be such a noob, practiced against a computer program and arrived at time.

Surprisingly they already consumed more alcohol than I would do if I'm to win any match. They were also not poker-champions. Soon my pocket was filled with cash despite I was not an experienced poker player. It was not hard at all. They talked a lot, did not pay attention, made bold moves against all odds (can be attributed to beer), and they seemed to be more interested in making me drink beer and "have fun", than winning the game. Soon the party became uneasy. I thought it was because they felt humiliated for being beaten by the noob. But surprisingly they kept being uneasy after I lost some rounds deliberately. So after taking some more money I made up some excuse and left. No one tried to make me change my mind. I never was invited to play again.

I thought they could not bear losing. After talking with several RL people, I finally learned that the point of the party was not playing poker. Poker was just a "beer game", a decoy for the real reason: to be together, to make friends, to hang out, to tell bad and inappropriate jokes. So to "have fun" with your friends. I never seen any point in any of the mentioned activities. I found the company of half-to-full drunken guys laughing like horses on bad jokes anything but fun.

Leah is right. WoW is slowly changing into a beer game. Besides a few "no life" HCs, no one cares about boss kills. Besides some small kids, no one cares about "phat lewt". The point of being online for most players is to meet with friends and buddies, tell dumb and inappropriate jokes while AoE-ing a 5-man, or ganking poor Faerlina. To feel that they are part of a "team", to feel that they are loved, welcomed and accepted. Game mechanics would just disturb them in these social activities, so Blizzard nicely remove them from the game. Soon you won't even have to decide what spec you play.

These social people do not even want to reach anything in the game. They just want company. The content is only a decoy and serves exactly the same purpose as the poker match I was invited: "to fill out the annoying silence when no one has anything nice to say". When the "deadly silence" arrives, everyone pretends to concentrate on his cards/bossfight until someone can finally make up one more terrible joke.

Blizzard found the way to make a blockbuster: WoW is the same as Second Life with NPCs and decoy-monsters. Anyone without any gaming skills or common sense can join and socialize without accepting that he is so desperate that he want to socialize in a computer simulation. He can pretend that he is gaming. As the world generates more and more isolated losers, the potential user-base of WoW increases. Too bad that it will slowly kill the game I found really interesting, challenging and fun.

PS: I don't think HC players are "no life". The average players, the new focus group of the game thinks so.

Malygos P3 wipes

Well, life made sure you don't end up without Feb 29 post.

I set up my first Malygos PuG, faced some old and new problems.

The old ones are the usual, DC, AFK, guys with 900SP want to get in, I simply kick them.

People all saying they know the fight, yet most DPS had no idea what sparks are for. People stand into the face of the dragon. Is it the first dragon they see?

This is annoying, but can be handled by simply watching them, warning them once and kick for the second. However healing Malygos and watching over all the DPS is not an easy issue, but still can be done, after all the regrowth cast is 2 secs and this time can be used to spin the camera like a crazy 80'es disco DJ to determine who stands away from the dead spark.

Some extra spice comes from the fact that I'm leading a raid to a content I never did. So I have no experience about the various ways how "intelligent" people can mess things up. For example I could never imagine that a DPS would not go to the spark. The spark gives 50% bonus damage. These guys love bonus damage! Than why on earth they ignore the spark??? I made a dozen new "/rw Do this do that" macros.

However I faced a new kind of problem here: pro player in PuG. Pros don't care about Naxx PuG, but happily joining Malygos10. He did the fight, he is in a topguild that either benched him this week or needed his alt or whatever. Since he did it, may even did the achievement, he thinks he shall also lead it. Too bad that they have no leading experience and are not used to ... khm ... average ... khm ... players. They expect the run to be complete in a single try and get angry when it's not. But due to lack of leadership experience, they have no idea how to find who messed up, so they address their comments to everyone. Which obviously generate further comments.

For example people die in P1. What does pro player says: "ffs noobs how did 3 died". There are two problems with this line.

• At first it's not targeted. No one knows who is adressed, so the guilty hides and the innocent gets upset. For example the healer start a long speech about how on earth he tried to save them but couldn't.
• Secondly, while it's formally a question (how did?), the mentioned people are unable to answer, exactly because they are "noobs". If he would know what killed him, he would be able to prevent being killed.
  

So the correct sentence is: "X, you got hit by arcane breath, which means you were front of the boss. You are not a tank, so you shall never be front of the boss. Do it again and be kicked!"

However to give this response, I have to dig deep to recount, check every deaths. It takes time. In this time, Mr Pro set the flames of drama high. You surely see the problem: while I could kick Mr Pro for making drama, I would lose one of the best players and he and the other pros would not even understand what did he wrong. After all, he just stated something true (some noob did something stupid). I cannot blame them for not having leadership skills nor for being upset because of the wipe caused by some noob.

Other problem: they tend to leave after a few wipe with "this group will not kill him". I talked to two of them. They were honestly surprised when I told them "there is no group, it's a PuG, we can kick the underperformers". They are so used to fixed guilds that they can't even imagine that it's not them who shall leave the group but the weak one. I don't know how to counter this problem except tell all of them in /w after they left.

PS: while it was a failure as attempt and was far from successful management-wise, it was fun for me as player. Although there were just 2 healers, and the priest was not the best, the tank always survived P1, and only those died in P2 who couldn't run under the sphere (always the same guys). So as a player I was more than happy. Much happier than I would for grinding the same old bosses in Naxx.