28th orc feet is so cool!

My post about the fun factor of jobs wasn't accurate. While I pointed out a problem and gave an OK solution I did not find the exact problem. Lot of commenters properly stated that while all jobs contain grind parts, they still differ in how much (un)happiness they provide. One tries to maximize his happiness or philosophical goals (helping people, defending their nation, changing the world). Choosing a job that gives some happiness or goals can be a good choice over a better paying but terribly boring or disgusting job. So one shall count the following factors when choosing his job:

• happiness gained from 1 hour work
• happiness gained from 1 hour cheap leasure
• happiness gained if he consumes 1$ in his leasure time
• working hours
• payment

So people are right when they claim that the fun factor of the job is important. However if they would do calculate with "fun", they would be happy or at least content saying "this is the smallest evil". Yet people are complaining about their jobs all the time, claiming they would be better off somewhere else or would deserve better. There are two reasons for that.

One is education: to gain certain jobs, you need formal diploma or informal "experience". One has to start this education 5-8 years before actually getting into the job. People with low patience did not do it (or slacked during education) and now they lack the diploma, so they can't take the job. This is impossible in WoW where all knowledge can be gained in a day.

The second is a hardcore social mistake: saying "fun" but meaning "cool". "Fun" is personal happiness. If something is fun, it would be fun on an isolated island. "Cool" is something that gains peer respect/acceptance/envy. There are many things that "cool" but absolutely not "fun", the best example is the stiletto heel shoes that women wear. It's an absolutely unconfortable and unhealthy footwear, but it makes them look prettier.

Socials are very motivated to "be cool" and the envious/accepting/respecting peer opinions/body language do make them feel happy. So the woman in stiletto heels may actually feel happy despite the serious discomfort because she constantly gets "whoa" looks from men and envious looks from women. So "fun" and "cool" are often the same for socials.

With jobs it does not work. Even if the job is "cool", you get the peer respect from people when you are not working. Being a top lawyer is very cool when you talk about it in a bar. Grinding legal documents alone in your office 10 hours a day on the other hand cannot be cool as there are no peers around. The stiletto heels provide the discomfort and the peer respect in the same time, while jobs provide both real (payment) and social rewards (observed successful) after the job is done. This is very similar to WoW. You can strike e-peen with whatever colored drake in Dalaran, after you grinded it. You cannot stroke anything while grinding.

The reason why socials are making terrible job choices is their "need" for being cool. The reason why they are not satisfied by their choices and feel that they are cheated is that this "need" is false. While being able to tell your ex-college mates in re-union that "I'm a game developer" does provide fun, you are usually not on a re-union. When you are not around peers, you get just the 28th orc feet.

This is very common in WoW. Being top DPS is cool. Being tank or healer is not cool. It is fun (I was always healer and found DPSing boring and repetitive), but there are no meters to get peer respect. So socials go DPS with the hopes of being cool. The price is the long queue, few DPS spots and the boring rotations.

The solution sounds easy: go for your personal "fun" and not "being cool". However this is impossible for a social, who by definition derives happiness from peer respect/acceptance/envy.
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No moron today as no proper submission was sent.

New players my ass!

About a month ago I was in one of my last random dungeons (I'm not running them anymore as I don't need badges). The tank had less HP than myself. At the start of the dungeon he told that he is new and offered that if we'd wipe because of it, he'll leave to let us get a better tank.

A rogue, with more 277 than 264 told him something like "np put vigi on the mage and lets go". The tank asked back "vigi?", but instead of "lol n00b" he got the answer "vigilance, 10% more aggro to you, but put it on the lock im arcane with -40%". Vigilance on the lock and off we went.

The rogue used ToT often and vanished many times. It wasn't hard to keep the tank up (the dungeons were designed for his gear), it was a bit harder to keep up the rogue and the mage because the tank's AoE threat was awful and the mage AoE-d with flamestrike+blizz (no -40%). Finally I told the mage to AoE with AE and stay in melee so I could simply spam CH. After a near-wipe pull (dead mage, rogue vanished at 10%) the rogue checked recount while I was ressing and recognized that the warrior is rage-starving himself with heroic strike, so he can't use thunder clap. He was told to forget HS on trash, use TC and cleave. And he did and the aggro problems almost disappeared! On bosses there was no problem as the initial ToT + HS held the aggro.

You know who was the only one abusive with the new tank? The warlock who got kicked before the last boss for doing equal damage to the "n00b tank lol".

I'm playing this game for four years and not once I've seen a genuine newbie who asked for information being bashed by anyone but "veterans" who sucked terribly themselves. Everyone, including myself is very helpful toward newbies who ask for help. We were all newbies once and we remember it. We need good players so we help them improve.

Then where is the hate that Tobold just wrote about? Why there are blogs and forums full of "hate" towards "new players"? You might figured it out, here comes the M&S. They are the "newbies" who are "bullied". Their misery start with the first response. The normal conversation is something like that:
Newbie: I'm new to the game/this role, so please be a bit understanding. I'm grateful for any tips.
Veteran: You shall change this or that talent, get this or that gem/enchant and X item is very bad for you. And use ability Y more.
Newbie: Thank you, will do the changes after this run and using Y more.

The conversation with the M&S is something like that:
M&S: [silence]
Veteran: You shall change this or that talent, get this or that gem/enchant and X item is very bad for you
M&S:

• stfu u prick i play as i wanna
• lol its justa game chill
• i cant do that i have life u now, not every1 is a nolife like u
• i just need better gear lol
  
• [ragequit]
• [silence]
• Why do you have to be mean? It's a game that should be fun. You are killing my fun. [continues doing the wrong way or leaves the group]
• /ignore
  
• ok willdo [and continues doing the wrong way]

The responsibility for negativity in the "community" is 99% on the M&S (1% truly annoying elitists, you know the kind who hovers above the landing post on whatever colored drake). The help, the understanding, the support that the leftist cry for is right there. Even in me. We want the new players to be better as we need more players. It's the M&S who don't accept help, don't show any kind of humility and insult us simply because we are not failures like them. They choose to be bad and choose to remain bad. They could stop being bad any time they want to. Help is just a "I'm new, please give some hints" away. And maybe a namechange away if they are called "icritudie" or "legolassdk".
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Peter found this guy who must be a new player with rich real life. His problem has nothing to do with WoW mechanics, but it never stopped the "freindly heplfull ppl" to find excuses for M&S:

28th orc feet is what they deserve!

Larísa wrote how much the game designers are abused, working lot of hours for low salary. She believes it's not fair and they deserve better. The games are becoming worse because these people are exhausted and losing their creativity.

I think modeling the 28th orc feet at 4 AM is exactly what they deserve. They are there because of their own bad choices. They ignore that the prices of jobs depend on supply and demand just as much as any other product. And in the gaming industry, there is huge oversupply. Since game creation is considered "creative and fun", lot of young programmer and computer artist want to get in. Lot of them are literally working for free to make games better (addon authors, machinimia artists, fansite webmasters), so why should the producers pay them better or give them better working conditions?

Their fate shows exactly what happens with someone who brings the concept "fun" into a market decision. When you choose a job you should only think about how much you'll give (working hours, travel, previous studies) and how much you'll get (salary, benefits, flexibility). If you add the unmeasurable "fun" into the decision, it will be all messed up and you'll end up doing something very much not fun: modeling the 28th orc feet at 4 AM.

In the game many commenters find the excuse "it's fun for him" to the M&S who does something very ineffectively or outright counter-effectively (catapult riding morons with tenacity in WG). The game would be a safe place to learn how to make decisions. If you do it wrong, you'll lose nothing but pixel gold or pixel items. But you should know that the same decision in real life would cost you very real money. Ignoring this fact in the spirit "itz justa game lol" will lead you to make stupid real world decisions like taking a game designer job for 30K instead of a bank job for 70K. "Fun" does not belong to any serious decisions.


Ignoring the market is common among players. There are too few tanks and healers, but they keep starting DPS because of whatever reasons. So tanks and healers get jobs easily, unless they suck to the point of uselessness, while a DPS can easily find himself in a long queue or without a raid spot. It does not mean that one cannot be a DPS, but he has to be aware of the huge competition, therefore harder time to get spots, higher performance demands. A tank with OK skills can keep his job, a 6K DPS can easily find himself benched.


Lot of real world people choose university/major the same way as a lolkid chooses his class in WoW: whatever they feel fun. They don't check how many job opportunities and how many unemployed are present in the field. They learn game development instead of industry robotics programming, despite the second gets jobs much more easier for much higher salaries.

The real world version of being unguilded and have to put up with /trade pugs is very much not fun. Maybe one could do a little practice in the safe world of games to learn the "skills" of finding a profession.

PS: Campitor in a comment gave a perfect example against the "fun is important in a job" people: the surfing instructor. If you hate surfing it's a terrible job. However if you love surfing you still won't have fun as you won't be surfing, you'll be teaching annoying and untalented people to surfing. Even if your job reminds your hobby, it is not a hobby, it's a job that you must do. Your hobby starts after the hours.
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Riddance (Solieva) of US Ragnaros found a wanding warlock with a beautiful name and obvious will to become better:PS: he has heirlooms, he is not genuine newbie.

The end of /roll

As I wrote several times, /roll is a booster loot system, since only those can roll who need upgrade. If you go to the raid with already BiS gear, you have zero chance to get anything from the raid, despite you do the biggest part of the effort to get the value (assuming skill is equal). On the other hand if you are in greens, everything is an upgrade for you, so you can roll on everything, increasing your chances for upgrades. So the chance of upgrades is directly proportional to the lack of gear, and assuming equal skill it's inversely proportional to work done.

I wrote that gold bid is not perfect, but at least it rewards people equally. While equal is still not fair (as some did more effort than others), at least equal does not punish effort and boost M&S openly. DKP systems belong to here, as they are bid systems too, they just use a local and less liquid currency (if the whole server would be one guild then DKP would be practically equal to gold bid).

Now the problem is that the M&S is dominating the servers so gold bid/DKP systems can only exist in good guilds. The "freindly social" guilds and /trade pugs stick to the booster loot system. The "go and find a good guild" is an empty advice. Hardcore guilds have certain spots open and require gear from applicants that you can only get in lesser guilds/pug. While you can definitely join The PuG, but mathematics apply here too: if 12 people want to go HM, 2 will be left out. Such people from good guilds are "forced" to pug if they want to raid.

Whining that "bad bad socials force me too boost them by /roll" is not the goblin way. The solution is breaking the bad system. Since you can trade loot in the raid, you can trade loot in the raid. If you have to go to a /roll pug, or stuck in such guild, make agreements with players that you /roll for each other. While most /roll pugs check for ninjas, you can always roll for your own spec. So warriors can roll for DKs and ret palas, hunters roll for rogues and so on. Don't forget to have lower items in your bag to put it on when you /roll for your partner, so no one notices that you have better. You can even equip it and trade only after the next boss. Even by having one guy working for you, you can double you chances.

Simply rolling for each other do not fix /roll being booster, just tricks the other players. If a full-BiS warrior and a low-geared warrior make an agreement, the full-BiS gets nothing as the low-geared can't roll anything for him (as he needs nothing). Here comes gold. The low-geared warrior can pay the high-geared to go with him to raid and roll for him.

If everyone make such trades, soon the raid turns into a gold bid raid with a strange lottery element: the item sells for it's market price, and the gold goes to the lucky one who /rolled the highest. Soon buying will become the norm and people will prefer to do it openly and get rid of the annoying lottery.

PS: if the raid leader start getting nasty and demands you to instantly enchant the drop (making it untradeable), you can still roll on everything in your spec. 20G from the vendor is exactly 20G more than you'd get if you'd pass. Break the /roll!
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Have you read the rules? I don't really know what's the point asking that question to applicants to the guild. They always say "yes". Or "yeah m8":

Education can't fix M&S

I got an interesting comment to the "don't help M&S" post, stating that education is the way to elevate them and that help should be given. For long I believed so. Actually it's WoW that changed my mind. Before playing WoW I was a hardcore for-education believer.

What changed? The leftist claim is that the "poor have no access to education and if they had they'd learn". In WoW everyone has access to education. The whole education process from elementary school (wowwiki), secondary school (tutorial posts of class blogs) to university (EJ) takes less than 4 hours. Leveling a char to 80 takes 40+, so anyone who has a lvl 80 spent plenty of time in the game, way more than enough to know everything about his class.

Have you noticed that everyone in WoW are informed players, knowing their class inside out and all they need is a little practice to teach their "muscles" to apply this knowledge? No? Then how do you expect the same people to spend 10+ years in educational facilities learning much more complicated things, even if the school is free. They refuse to spend 4 hours to learn something they actually like.

They go through school with the very same attitude as they have in WoW: "lol i haz life i don care 'bout this shit". Building them schools is completely pointless. It's nothing more than a glorified homeless shelter for them. The only thing they do there is making the life miserable for the "nerds" who actually want to learn.

One exception is elementary schools since the little kids can be motivated by the teacher as they want her love (pathetic, but true). So building elementary schools from my tax is OK. The other exception is scholarship program: giving aid to top learners to pay for college. They prove their worth by being in top 20%.

Education won't save the M&S because they don't want to be saved. They don't want to learn, they don't want to work. They want to have "fun lol", or more scientifically they want social recognition, so they are ready to learn only socially relevant information like what Paris Hilton was wearing on her last party or what is the new cool slang. They see no value in socially irrelevant information like mathematics, tradeskills (both WoW and IRL) or any kind of technology stuff. They have absolutely no motivation to learn so they won't. You can't fix them. No one can. At least not until they get everything for free as working people find it "moral" to support them.
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Nick found this ... thing. I can't really tell anything besides the obvious: his stupidity has nothing to do with WoW.