Giving value to gold

Our guild has no blacksmith. Not one. I've never found a single blacksmith in the ally side of Maghteridon, and judging how great profit my GF has from transporting belt buckles from horde and selling them on ally, I assume there is no active blacksmith on our side. Strike that, half of the guild are rogues and I can't find one who could open a damn 325 lockbox.

One could make a killing with BS on Maghteridon-ally, by crafting and selling the buckles and enchanting rods (I transport those and sell them for 300% profit), maybe crafted i245 plate for beginner tanks, and so on. Since our guild is full of goblins, it's surprising that no one jumped on this huge opportunity. Or not. Actually they did not jump on it because they are goblins.

The value in an MMO (and in life) is time. BS is a hard to level profession, even if you have a solid AH to buy mats from. Now imagine that you have to farm or transfer from horde 90% of your materials. It would cost 10-12 hours I'd guess. Granted, after the profession is 400+, it's a cash cow. But as I wrote, gold has no value, in a sense that you don't have to farm (if you are not stupid), so getting gold does not save you from farming.

I have 20K+. How could I buy time?

• I bought epic flyer, won about a minute every wintergrasp to get into position before the fight. If there is world PvP, I can get there 1-2 minutes faster, which actually does not matter because the fight is already over. We either won, or corpses waiting for the reinforcements. Not much gain here.
  
• I can buy BoE epics. There is no good PvP BoE, but I can replace blues with higher ilvl PvE items. It might save me (or rather I can save someone I heal), but the power increase is marginal (as opposed to getting PvP item). Better PvE gear saves mana brakes in heroics, another 1-2 mins/day
• I can buy every reagent, gem, enchant I want without waiting for bargains. Oh wait, that saves me 0 mins since the problem is that there is no item on the AH for any price.
• I can buy ilvl 251 kirin tor ring for about 10K. Since I'm scribe, I have infinite teleports. The ring stats are nice, but same ilvl Ashen Verdict friendly ring will be available in a week.
  

So in terms of time, my glyph industry is pure charity. The people (in and out of guild) get glyphs (or get them much cheaper, and gold can matter for a lowbie), while I get useless gold. Of course no business can run on charity. My "charity" is paid by the blog (as business posts are very popular), but for others it's a waste.

Of course I wouldn't be much of a goblin if I would QQ over the "inevitable fall of gold". Instead I give it value. How can I do it? I offer something for gold that people want very much. If they want to buy it, they must have gold. To have gold, they must have industry. If they have industry, everyone are happy customers!

What do people want in WoW? Gear! Since we're a PvP guild, most wanted gear are bought by alternative currency (badge, honor, arena point). But not the weapons. Most of us rolled new character or transferred an alt. 99% does not run around with ilvl250+ weapons. FoS-PoS-HoR can get you to 232 with lot of farming, but no further. You need high arena rating to buy them, or you can loot them from raids.

So here comes the goblinish solution: every week we have a raid. We do the weekly raid, then we do some instance that fits to our gear. The point is speed, not kills, one-two shotting ToC and getting some PvE 245 into green slots and badges to everyone is better than downing 2 bosses in ICC in 3 hours. But soon (I mean in 1 or 2 weeks) the badge raid will go to ICC. Ashen rep and drops. Ilvl 251 weapons. In a month we can do 25 man. Ilvl 264.

This raid will be GDKP. Every drop will be auctioned, starting from 100G (so you should have at least 100G), 50G increments until 500G, 100G increments until 1500G, 250G increments until 5000G, 1000G increments upwards. The gold must be paid to me before the item is given (no "I'll pay next week", but of course you can beg in /w from friendly, helpful loan-sharks), I distribute the gold at the end of the run evenly.

Since the auction is zero-sum (the amount of gold among the raid members stays the same), you can of course easily get lot of gold from not bidding on anything. After all, one can raid ToC, and soon ICC with ilvl 200 blue weapons, right? But if you don't want that annoying moment when you die and the opponent wins with 2% HP left, pay up and get an upgrade! To pay up, start an industry! Check the AH, see what's selling, find a big void and get to work!


PS: if you don't understand why is it an "analysis" post, instead of ganking update, because it's about one of the basics of economy: the money has no internal value, it's valued after the things we can buy with it. Also it's about the importance of a stable, valuable money in the economy. There is no trading without money besides necessities.


Ganking advertisement: the first arena team in the guild reaching 2000 rating gets 1000G/person from me. So if you are a good PvP-er looking for a new home, Maghteridon-EU-Ally is your choice!

Ganking announcement: I'll offer free goldmaking tips to all guildies, /w me if interested how can you make gold with your existing profs.

I'm a proud cog in the machine

Serial ganker left Darkfall because he couldn't be competitive. As all the losers, he blames something out of his control, something "bad design". It's the standard: "no lifers win, new players have no chance" QQ.

I always watched M&S on the bridge of AB, attacking players instead of demolishers in SotA, ganking at the graveyard in WSG while losing 0:3 and so on. I simply thought they are too stupid to comprehend the point of the BG, unable to understand the basics. Many commenters told that if they have internet connection and a computer and prefer a computer game over Oprah and a six-pack, they cannot be complete retards but I lacked another explanation.

Serial ganker gave it to me: "I'm very competitive in these games. I don't want to be a cog in the machine. I want to contribute. I want to win." He wants to be a hero! Except to be hero, you mostly have to die. Sometimes a hero's death makes his side win, but mostly does not. They are remembered and celebrated but at the end of the day they are dead and they have lost.

Being a hero, being competitive are mutually exclusive with winning. The machine always wins over the lone hero. Serial ganker knows exactly how could he win: by teaming up with other newbies, acting in group. He just doesn't want to. He wants to individually win. He wants to personally matter.

I don't. I can't care less if 50+ morons comments "lol ur DPS suxxs" after undergeared posts. I know that extra mitigation, perma-sheep, slow-CS, decurse mattered more than DPS. People call such job "dispel-whore". I assume "whore" is the opposite of hero and being one is "not fun" to any social. I also miss the "fun" of massacring hordies in WG when I do the lonely job of pummeling a south tower with my demolisher (faster than siege and I can cast without CC from the gunner seat).

In both projects I'm no hero. I'm a little cog in the machine with "no fun" according to the "fun ppl". But at the end of the match I will smile on the "you won" screen while all the "fun ppl heroes" will spend the following minutes insulting each other for losing. "Lol ur DPS was low", "lol u have no gear", "lol I have more killings than u scrub", "come to org duel I show u who haz skillz". They blame each other for not being big enough heroes while they lost exactly because they were all too big heroes. The machine has defeated them and they never had a chance.

It all comes down to the marshmallow experiment: can you do a little "not-fun" action (guarding LM, destroying south towers) now, to gain a much larger gain (the victory with all its rewards) later?

If you prefer to be a cog in an always winning machine than being the last hero standing in an utter defeat, join Undergeared or Inglorious Gankers.

PS: one of the reasons of the success of WoW is that the questgivers call everyone a hero. And if someone is dumb enough, he believes them, just like to the marketeer who calls everyone "valued customer".

Why is it hard to find crafters?

Adam wrote a post about his crafting experience. He is practically the only active enchanter/JC on our server/side (If you don't know, we have a ganking guild going on Maghteridon-EU ally side where 30 people online on prime time is a lot). He doesn't know if it's "right" to craft for guildies for free.

Spinks wrote how hard it was to find a crafter for her panties.

The two things are closely related to each other and my experience to Blizzard's tolerance towards boting. And this is the reason why this post is Analysis and not Philosophy.

Survival is nerfed to the ground in WoW both by the welfare of Blizzard where you get gold for just queuing up for a HC and by the bots who sell all the mats for very low prices. They can, as they really farmed it for free, as the boter invests near zero time in farming them. He may spend some costs and time to create, level and gear the bot, but that's sunk cost. Now he has the bot running, it just makes him gold for noting.

This means that anyone who has more than 2 brain cells (so doesn't buy Mammoth or bike) has enough gold. If Adam would have to farm an hour every day just to repair his gear and buy consumables for being competitive in PvP, he wouldn't hesitate to ask gold for his services. The reason why the question can emerge at all is that he doesn't need gold. Adam enchants for free even if he charges us as the gold has no utility for him, so he gains nothing from the payment. The same thing for the BS Spinks searched for. He does not need the tip from Spinks, so why should he spend his time answering her /trade request, go to her, craft for her?

Since crafting is not related to your own needs, it becomes fully a philosophical question. I mean if you craft at all, you do it because you think it's somehow "right". I keep crafting glyphs although I have 20K+ on this server, because I want to make a post about the glyph industry in low competition. Adam may crafts for free because it's "nice" or crafts for payment because it "teaches people for business" . Neither is a selfish choice.

So the answer for Spinks: if you want to find crafter, make enough noise in the blogosphere to make Blizzard ban the bots, therefore forcing the average player to farm gold at least 10% of his playtime. This case the crafter would happily spend 5 mins crafting for you instead of spending 30 doing dailies.

The answer for Adam is that there is no rational answer from the personal point of view, and that's the goblinish point of view. The answer to charge or not depends only on your philosophy.


PS: my philosophical answer: I do charge guildies simply by selling my glyphs on the AH only and not crafting for request. Every time some guildy asks "can you do glyph of X?" I answer "If I can, it's on the AH". Maybe that's the simplest way for Adam too: buy some vellums (I can mass craft them for low tip), enchant them while waiting for BG queue and list them on the AH for material price + fee. 90% of the players use the same 1-2 enchants/slot: tuskarr, SP or Agi on gloves, SP or AP on bracer, SP or AP on weapon, 8/10 stats on chest, haste/Agi on back and so on. You can mass buy the materials (maybe at horde side), mass craft, get a bankalt, list them and make an industry. That's what I do. But of course it's not a rational answer, it's a philosophical one.

Ganking update: there is a loophole in the ganking statistics, one can easily boost his gankscore, so it's no longer used. The new measure is Wintergrasp domination.

No horde say kek in WG!

"Prepare yourself, the bells have tolled!
Shelter your weak, your young and your old!
Each of you shall pay the final sum!
Cry for mercy! The reckoning has come!"

My original idea to gank the horde into the ground was killing-reporting the bots, forcing the horde to come out to farm themselves and die. Most lvl 80 players don't farm the materials they use, just buy it from the AH cheap. The artificially low prices are allowed by bots. The idea based on the assumption of "subtle tolerance" of boting by Blizzard, meaning that if you bot without annoying other players, they look the other way. So all we have to do is getting evidence and report them, and Blizzard will be forced to ban them to keep their face. Unfortunately, Blizzard tolerates even reported bots who are farming 24/7, always the same place, always the same pattern and do nothing else. So the official position is "all go" for bots. (Yes, Historyy is still up)

Destroying the economy is therefore impossible, as it's not player, but bot-powered. While the bot can be corpsecamped, it has all the time in the world, so we surely get bored before he does.

However Blizzard given us a new opportunity: to own Wintergrasp. We can already capture wintergrasp with only 6-10 people against 60+ hordies. We have 15+ tenacity, 3 of us grind some horde for promotion, get sieges from broken temple and go for the fortress. Other 3 go to the back and kill all the horde who want to take Westpark, Eastpark or destroying the back towers. The other players (not from our guild) are graveyard-camped by 90% of the lolling hordies, while the 10% intelligent hordies are desperately - but hopelessly - try to destroy the back towers or the sieges. It sucks to be them. They are skilled players, they don't just run some PvE rotation, they use every little ability their class have to defeat us. But there is nothing they can do against 15+ tenacity, 1 vs 1 or even 1 vs 2. And they can't convince the GY camping M&S to do anything useful.

And this is the current WG. The next patch will equalize WG. If there are 30 alliance, there will be 30 horde allowed to WG. There will be a minimum cap, 25 players, so i f only 5 alliance queue in, it will be 5 vs 25 (I assume with tenacity).

On the server, there are 3-5 players interested in WG outside of our guild. The only raiding guild make premade once a week, but otherwise most of the WG population is our guild. With more members, we could provide 20+ players to WG. This means that in a 25 v 25 battle, 80% of the alliance is a PvP geared and skilled player aimed to win, following a strategy. On the other hand the 25 hordies are pug, mostly M&S attacking anything with red name above its head and has the tendency to prefer a prot paladin over a siege engine as target.

The aim of the ganking guild will be: no VoA for the horde on prime time. Every day from 18:00 to 22:00 they can't do VoA, because they won't have WG! On weekends, from 10:00 to 22:00 they can just whine and spam their /2 "why can't you just l2p WG idiots". The mighty horde will have to do VoA at 3 AM.

Please note that premades are impossible. Even if a properly geared and skilled horde guild queues up with 30 members, there will be other 30-50 M&S queued in too, the 25 spots will be distributed randomly, so the team will be 10 "premade" and 15 M&S.

What we need for that: at first, players. We currently have 15 lvl 80-es, to keep VoA, we'd need 50+ (since we will not play 24/7). We have 85 members and I kick inactives, so it means 70 more growing, active lowbies.

What can we offer: positive PvP experience. The best ally side PvP strategy is often "let's lose fast", as most of the "team" are M&S who just run around like headless chicken. Our guild can offer premades that can win BGs. Also, the best honorfarm is Wintergrasp and the very purpose of the guild is winning WG. So if you are an arena player, you can transfer your team here and you can easily get the honor needed for your offset items. If you want to be an arena player, you can gear up here easily and can also find teammates. After all it's a PvP guild.

We also run badge-raids, aimed on the weekly. We already did this week's weekly, so it's up and running. We'll have badge raid to Naxx for new lvl 80-es to gear up and ICC for the geared players to have more frost badges, PvE items, Ashen rep. Of course in Cataclysm we will move to Tol Barad, making sure that the horde can only go there around 3:00.

Important update: Gankscore is cancelled, due to a bug. It calculated World PvP deaths from (all_death_from_players-BG_death). One can cheat by killing himself in EoS by jumping down. It's a BG death but not from players. So no more gankscore!

Create a new character or transfer to Magtheridon-EU ally side and catch Gevlon. Usually online somewhere around 19:00. You can also ask around in the guild.

PS: how to measure the success? The guild calendar can be used for that. If a member participates in the battle, creates a "guild event" with the current date and time and write into the description: "WG [side][winner]". Of course if other member did it, don't double. I will simply summarize these events and post the results on Sunday. It will be like:
Monday: 17:32 Assault won
19:26 Defending won
21:40 Defending lost
Tuesday:...

Gormok oneshots a blue tank

The title was commented so many times in all undergeared posts that we thought we make them a nice picture:
The "Gormok oneshots a blue tank" idea is an M&S wishful thinking based on "what I'm too dumb to do is impossible to do". While they accept that some "lower tier" content that "does not matter" may can be done in blues, but the "real game" needs what they have (gear) and not what they don't (skill). The logs prove that poor Gormok was oneshotted. The tank HP was never low. It's not magic guys, it's just the "no-lifer" ability to switch to Snobold Wassals.

The last raid started awesomly. At first 17 lvl 80 were online. Never seen so many! Forming the raid was hard and mostly arbitrary. Those outside the raid found their way to pass their time while waiting if replacement is needed (one was needed due to DC):
First of course we went to Ulduar, 3 shotted Mimiron (one try missing since I forgot to switch log on). The first try failed because the bots made some massacre, the second failed due to trigger happy melee killing the bottom part. My unusually high damage taken came from being head tank (and the logs still don't show my elemental).

Vezax two shotted, wasn't hard at all. Then came Yogg + 3 (Mimiron stays out). Lot of people did it the first time (I think most of our members are not in HC guilds, but in casual ones, wanting more than boosting tards in ICC 4/12). On the fourth try we got P2 without a single extra add. Since only 1 person out of 4 jumped into the portal and it was 21:40, I thought we are way too tired for Yogg. So we went and oneshotted Gormok and friends.

Next week we go and clear ToC at least up to 4/5. If there are as many people online as this time, just to annoy the M&S naysayers, we'll kill Gormok25 too.

Massacre!

The ganking guild is growing well, we already have 12 lvl 80, gearing up. We'll gank more and more. Tuesday comes a detailed plan how to gank with objective, measurable criterias.

But now, I present you a personal reason to join an anti-social ganking guild: massacre!
This is from Wintergrasp what is World PvP, affecting gankscore. Do you see any death? Because I just see kills. Imagine that 6K HP lvl 65 characters are swarming at you, all you have to do is oneshot them and you get 60+ honor for each! That's WG with 10+ stacks of tenacity!

And this is Sholozar Basin. Bots are so rampart here that you can grind them without pause:Starring:
Historyy, skinning bot, well programed
Resilece, skinning bot, sometimes boter takes over and moves to another location. Bad program, tries to skin lashers
Fjuooll, terribly programmed skinning bot, just res, and don't move, attacks only creatures in range
Gutrock, Grind, not bots, but dumb enough to attack us after ganked
Deathwhish from the guild "Internet Is For pWn"
Camoscino learned that being AFK in a PvP realm is bad
Drulz from "Obey me" was in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong faction of the wrong realm

If you want to participate the first and only impact-PvP project in WoW, join now! Both low levels (even rerolls) and lvl 80-es are accepted, rules here!

PS: as you can see, it takes lot of time for Blizzard to ban Historyy