98% right

I got an interesting comment from Yagamoth: "you shouldn't neglect the possibility that you/a leader could kick/blacklist ~1 out of 10 wrongfully. Meaning: You kick way more M&S than 'others', but these 'others' do not even have a remote chance to form a proper group".

This comment made me to write this post. It could be summarized as "my way from a lone anti-social who defied all authority to one who values law and order highly". In my young age people with power caused me much trouble, because (I believed) they were ignorant and arbitrary, using their power only for itself. And here I am now, preaching what I never did: "stand in the line", strike that, I'm forming my own lines, bringing order and authority where there was none (own guild, WG). What happened?

Socials happened. I believed that people - like me - are following their own interests and guys with power are simply strong competitors towards resources. Now I know that most people behave irrationally, serving long-obsolete evolutionary subroutines and the leaders are the guys who keep this ape horde from tearing each other (and me) apart, strike that, make them doing a little parts in advancement of the mankind. I know that the world without leaders (or with worse ones) would be a much worse place.

The question was: if the leaders have the power to exclude the M&S from our groups, what will happen to those who are excluded with them, simply because the leader made a mistake or was a jerk.

The answer is nasty: the leader most probably did not make a mistake. I'm not claiming that you were just as useless as the M&S, nor that they were right in the rational sense. You must understand one thing: if one is not a rational, nor a useless M&S, he is a minion of a leader. His natural state is ape-grooming: pointlessly giving and receiving positive emotions until his home falls upon him due to lack of maintenance (his instincts are enough to make him find food, but insufficient to make him plan for tomorrow).

The leader turn these apes into people who build great things. Most probably a rational designed the computer you're reading this post, but it were hundredths of minions who assembled that individual unit, transported to your country, sold it to you, supplying electricity and internet services as we speak. Without the minions the World would fall apart. Not because rationals couldn't run it, but because the ex-minions would act like raging zombies like the ones you can see after disasters: killing each other over a bottle of beer.

You were excluded because you did something that decreased the control of a leader over his minions. What you did is not rationally harmful, but remember, the means of control are irrational.

Most probably you were doing something that's banned to the minions, like passing the speed limit or driving a catapult in WG. The leader banned these things because minions couldn't handle it properly. Maybe you can. Maybe you are much better driver than the average punk. Maybe you found a spot in WG where you can hide a catapult and safely destroy a tower. It doesn't matter. One of the core routines of the socials is "inequality aversion". If a minion would see you doing this, he would automatically assume that it's allowed to him too. The truth is that you know what you're doing and he does not is unbearable to him. So the leader must punish you for doing it, despite he knows that you did nothing wrong rationally.

The other common problem is openly criticizing the leader or his orders. The other nonsense core routine of the socials is "responding to peer pressure". Most leaders use it. However it has a flaw, a single dissenter can break it. You are most probably right in what you told. The leader most probably knows that. Still, he must stop you from saying it, or his minions will respond to your opinion and stop following orders. No, they will not follow you, they will just go erratic.

The right of free speech, implemented into the legal system of enlightened countries aims exactly this: to allow people to remove unfit leaders. You have the right to rise up against an unfit leader. But you must be aware that you are doing exactly that and not just debating some random issue. When you say: "Hey! The catapult is useful!" you mean that. When I see it on the chat, I know that it means that. But the minions see "The leader is saying nonsense, stop following him!", so I must kick you.

Shall we forever obey the existing status quo and be silent in fear that we can set the minions free by mistake and turn them into mindless zombies obeying nothing but their basic instincts? Of course not. At first, there are times when the old leadership must be removed and you shall take over. If you are ready for the task, and want to lead apes, go for it!

But most importantly, as a rational, you can do practically anything as long as you keep one rule: stay under the radar of the minions! It's not hard as they are not very bright, and in dubious situations they see what they want to see. You can criticize the leader in close circles or in person, even to him. He'll most probably be happy for the feedback, as long as the minions don't see it. You can break the rules, just make sure that minions don't see you!

My purpose with this site is exactly to inspire you to break the rules! I want everyone with a bit of rationality inside to stop being a minion, and start thinking for himself. With this post I say nothing else but to keep low profile while doing so. There is no gain in setting your neighborhood on fire unless you are on a mission to de-throne the current leader and take the long, often annoying and never-ending task of leading minions yourself.


Note: "rational" and "minion" are archetypes and not actual people. Real people have a bit of both, and act mixed in real situation. So a good leader mixes rational explanation with minion-manipulation. For a post I have to write black and white to make the point visible.

Bid percentage

WoWinsider has an article up about auctioning addons. I usually don't bother to link anything there, due to different target audience. That site is targeted to a huge audience, therefore written in the "lowest common denominator" style. It's not bad, their advices are not wrong just simple and mediocre.

However this article has something plain wrong: "Bid percent is usually 100, unless you have a reason to want to take a longer time to sell your stuff for less." The mediocre answer would be "bid percent is your material cost + minimal profit expectation, so you help beginner players who have less money".

The proper answer is "bid percent is a tool for market segmentation". You provide a minimum service (he can buy your stuff for bid price if he waits 48 hours to get the item and ready to take the risk of being overbid), and you provide a premium service (instant buyout) to richer players. This way you don't leave money on the table and you still get the money of the poorer players.

If you are using zeroauctions (QA3 improvement), you already have threshold. ZA never set bid price below that. So if you set 10% bid, and your threshold is 10G, fallback 100G, no competitions up, your item will be listed for 10G bid, 100G buyout. If the competition is selling for 15G, you'll be listing for 10G bid, 14G buyout (assuming 1G undercut). You will never sell below threshold. If you consider your threshold too low, then you have a threshold problem, not a bid problem. Your threshold should be set to the value "I will be happy if people pay just this amount".

I use 70% bid percentage and often have bids. I'm happy to have them. These are sales that I wouldn't have without proper bid price. True, sometimes a competitor bids all my auctions and gets my items "low" and relist higher. Example: I list for 30/40G, he bids me, lists for 35G, gets my stuff for 30, relist them for 35, 5G profit for him. Good for him. If he wants to turn his gold into 30G glyphs for the hope of 5G profit, be my guest. I prefer the 30G liquid. What if he can sell them for 50? Then I was wrong for running with 30G threshold. Remember, he can force my buyout to 30G by listing for 31G, so he can get my glyphs anyway for 30.

So: watch your threshold, set 60-70% bid percentage and enjoy the extra income from market segmentation.
----------------------------

Since many people questioned that we can kick M&S from WG and even believe that we'll get ban for "griefing", I asked a GM:
I understand that there are people who are now worried that they or their friends will be kicked by "elitists" just for "having life" or "playing for fun". I hope the kind words of Sir Thomas will comfort them:

"Prepare yourselves, 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! HAHAHAHA!"

Chainwin and shame-lose

We've been struggling in WG with the morons, there are many losses.

Oct 31 Saturday seemed to be an ordinary day in Northrend. On weekend I often participate all battles. Log out after one, set the alarm clock and watch a movie, go to the park, clean the flat, read articles and so on. However Oct 31 wasn't ordinary. From 9 AM to 3 PM we won 4 defensive battles in a row. It was awesome! People followed the very simple strategy "be in a zerg, wipe horde, run South, destroy towers, run to the keep". There wasn't a single "lol itza game dun tell me what2 do" or rushing alone into the horde. Despite we still had 2-3 tenacity, we crushed them. We had all towers down in 8 minutes. The yards were clean from hordies, they came and died.

What happened? WGclean addon happened! Treeston/Stolenlegacy wrote it, it's still in very early phase (no UI, you have to write slash commands), but it's usable. On Friday and Saturday we were still mostly losing and I was busy typing "/wgclean ban [name] [reason]". The results were stunning. Not one went to sabotate us! About 1/4 of them put me on ignore, queued up some more, autokicked and left for good.

On the other hand 3/4 of them whispered on the second-third autokick and promised to be useful. And they were! It was stunning to see that the same guy who sent #@$#@$! class whispers in the morning asked for reinvite politely and behaved himself well in the afternoon.

Imagine a battle without lolkids, "i play 4 fun" scubs, cata-riding morons! That's what we had on Saturday. And steamrolling the horde that was used to victories. The game was like it's meant to be: competition between competent and motivated opponents.

Then on the 17:30 battle we lost. Badly. While dead, I bought up the map and saw 7 south-morons (people who can't understand that after the horde has sieges we must hold the keep, and leave the towers because we can't afford losing 1/3-1/4th of our forces. The outnumbering horde can defend the towers with 1/10 of their forces as the person in the vehicle can't fight back). I called out on their mistake and one of them replied "lol im fishing".

I just stood there devastated. The battle was lost, and not by M&S. It was my fault. For 20 minutes I was unable to recognize a fishing leech. I did not told once the South morons to stop being South morons. I spammed "all to the keep", but not once did I tell "arthasdklol leave WP and come in!" I enjoyed the game, was busy healing people, shooting goblin rockets and forgot what really make difference: removing M&S from the raid. Even an ideal hit on a siege and keeping 2-3 people alive is nothing compared the 2-3 more tenacity that our team would have if I kick 7 useless players. If 4 of them return promising to be useful, that's 4 more players!

The important thing is that the main counter-argument of socials (and fear of many rationals) is wrong. It's the "we must help them or they revolt". To have a revolution or even a riot, we need a group. Despite the M&S looks like one, it is not. While they demand solidarity from others they have none for each other. No M&S stands up for another. You can kick, exclude, abuse one and the others actually cheer on it. They are leeches and see other leeches as competitors. You can grind them down like dungeon mobs, pulling one pack at a time.

Irony: you tell the raiders the strat. There are 10 M&S saying "idc lol" (translation "I don't care and I laugh on you"). You pick one of them randomly, call him useless moron and kick him. He cries tyranny and abuse. What will the other 9 say? "idc lol".

Also, just a small part of them is hopeless, having anarchist tendencies and derive their self-esteem from disobedience to anyone. But majority of them - while lazy and dumb - want to be accepted by peers, and exclusion from their group has great punishment force on them, so we can force them to actually be useful.

Nico sent a joke. Using this addon may give you this title.

PS: Blizzard GM says: Kicking them is OK.
--------------------------

Appendix: basic usage for WGclean
Whenever a big "Clean WG" button appears, you can press it to kick a M&S. He will receive a message "WGclean: You have been kicked from WG for [reason], whisper [namelist] to discuss"
/wgclean trustadd player: adds a player as trusted. The addon will syncronize blacklist data with that player
/wgclean trustlist: lists trusted players
/wgclean trustdel player
/wgclean ban player reason: The addon will blacklist this player. Whenever he is a raid the "Clean WG" button appears.
/wgclean banlist: lists the blacklisted morons
/wgclean unban player: remove the player from the blacklist. This action do not re-invite him, you have to do it manually

The fall of the M&S

As I told last week, I believe the speculation holds the key to the destruction of the M&S. The M&S can exist because of socialist beliefs in working people. They demand to give the M&S welfare. If they would stop supporting them, the M&S would be nothing more than another outside group wanting our resources and would be handled the same way: by the armed forces of the country.

Speculation itself is a negative-sum action. People buy papers based on future expectations but these expectations are not unrelated to the expectations of other people. For normal goods elevation of the price decrease demand. For investment instruments elevation of price make people believe that others know that it's a good investment making them want to buy it more.

The typical example is the home sector. Homes are for living in, so the ultimate value of a home is how much someone would pay for living in it. That is defined by rental prices. The value of the home is defined by the opportunity cost of other safe profit providing instruments. Example: people are ready to pay $5000/year to live in that home. Safe bank deposits pay 4% interest. The home worth $125000 as having $125000 in the bank instead would provide exactly rent. If some moron asks $200K for the home I'm better off putting the money in the bank for $8000 interest, rent the same home and have $2000 profit.

The rental prices elevated a bit, but nothing near the home price skyrocketing between 1990 and 2008. People kept buying homes for much-much more than their values with the hope that they can sell it to someone else for more. How could they do it? Because banks gave them loans, accepting their (already overpriced) homes as collateral. Everyone (homeowners, banks and whoever bought the repacked home-loans) hoped that there will always be a guy who pays more for that home. The bubble had to pop.

Why is investment good for the economy? Because it provides the lie that your salary will be multiplied: "earn $20K now, invest it in a home and in 5 years you'll have $100K!". It make people overvalue the monetary rewards of their work, therefore motivate them to work harder, providing more GDP. This GDP plus makes sure that countries that make anti-speculation laws will fall behind, exactly because they tell the truth: "if you earn $20K, you'll have $20K". People work harder for the promise of $100K, even if they will never get it. The long time average GDP growth of such country is higher, despite it has collapses regularly.

So far so good, but what does it do with the M&S?

• At first it enables the idea that "one can provide for himself". In the non-speculating country, the economy grows slowly, people are in constant competition. The M&S lose the competition and goes bankrupt/don't get jobs. The constant large amount of losers make the socials feel uneasy. They don't want a fellow groupmember suffer, so they want to help them and not blame them. The "one can provide for himself" blames the losers (properly), so this thought is painful to the socials and replaced by "success depends on luck and we must help the unlucky". On the other hand in the speculative country 9 out of 10 years are boom years. In boom years there are free (lie) money for everyone, the competition is weaker so M&S can get jobs. They will be laid off when the bubble pop, and they create uncompetitive products that people buy only because the money is free. However socials see everyone who is not openly destructive to find jobs easily, so he can accept the "one can provide for himself" idea. This idea is necessary to fight M&S as it blames the failure on the loser and not on luck.
• In the non-speculating country the people openly fight against immigration as they see it as new competition for limited resources. In the speculative country, the people live in the lie that the resources are nearly unlimited, there is place for everyone under the sun, so they let immigrants in. Some of the immigrants are highly qualified and intelligent. Meeting them will slowly decrease the "we are good they are bad" social nonsense in people's head. So they will be less social.
  
• Some insider people will have social connections to the immigrants. They will start seeing them as "one of us". In the collapse period these "I like them" socials will collide with the "they are aliens, away with them" socials. They will fight between each other! Also, the immigrants who see us "them" will be more violent in demanding what they feel entitled for than an insider (and they objectively get less, so they are extra angry). This leads to several anti-social acts, damaging the social feelings in people. In a sinking ship there is no friendship, all men is for himself!
• In the collapse phase the hard working socials are forced to face that they were living in a lie. Their "made of air" money vanishes into the air, their beloved social status crumbles. From "middle manager living in a home with pool" they will fall to "unemployed guy with an underwater home" in a few weeks. They will be angry. While objectively they should blame themselves for investing into an overpriced home, they are socials, so they never blame themselves. The want a scapegoat. The speculators seems fine for that job, but they elude punishment. The irrational anger of the hard-working socials cannot vent to that direction, so it flows to the natural way: kick the weaker! They will start blaming the M&S.
• The collapse of economy, the mass lay-outs leaves the M&S hungry. They commit crimes against the hard-working guys. The robbed, beaten guy will definitely won't demand more welfare to his attackers anymore!
  

So the unavoidable collapse phases in the speculative systems forces socials - exactly because they are socials - to turn on each other, to have anti-social thoughts and actions. Every collapse will make people less and less social.
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Joost found this wonderful specimen: he begged for 30G to be able to buy a blue shield on the AH for 80G. This was his lucky day as Joost not only sent him here but helped him save 50G while getting profit for himself too. If only the specimen would know that business helps him more than begging:

Cataclysm preparation #1

Note: I promised a philosophy post for today, but then I realized that it's the Day of the Dead, holiday in many countries. People mostly read my blog in work, so I always have low visits on holidays. I post a less important (for me) post today, the promised one will come tomorrow.


Cataclysm is coming, making lot of old world stuff obsolete. A wise goblin focuses his efforts to be prepared, to do tasks now that can be done now instead of doing it when he could be leveling instead. Of course Cataclysm leveling is not a race. However there will be a huge wave of players playing again. Do you want to camp quest monsters on PvE servers and fight deadly battles for them on PvP ones? Do you want to LFD the new, much harder dungeons with Arthasdklol? There are two solutions for that: staying ahead of the wave and falling way behind it.

A tip if you choose the second: level Archeology in your free time in the first week and start leveling more intensively 2 weeks after the start when the wave is in the 83+ zones.

I choose the first way though, getting ahead of the wave. I took a week off and plan to be in the yet unpopulated 81+ zones when the wave is lolling in the starter zones. I pre-ordered a digital copy of Cataclysm (just visit battle.net, you can't miss the huge Deathwing). The pre-order allows me to download content now and practically play at 00:01, which I will definitely won't do. I'll be sleeping and start playing around 6 AM when the servers are least loaded.

However there is much to do in the game too. At first the dreaded banks. Do you have a mess in your bank? Do you have 100+ boxes in your mailbox? You are doing it wrong. The mess will take lot of your time in Cata. Make order now! Look at my bank and inventory:Noticed the "45" number on my backpack? The empty bag slot in the bank? Also my mailbox is empty. The bank bags from left to right:

1. Consumables for leveling
2. Tailoring stuff
3. Old stuff (even I have some "fun" items. No shame in that. But I fit them into one bag)
4. Herbs that I mill (I buy all kind of herbs, the bag contain 1-4 of each type)
5. Inscription stuff
6. Inscription stuff
7. Empty slot, I put my inventory bag here when I do inscription or tailoring, and place the empty bag to my inventory

Of course I have more tradeskill materials, but they are with an alt's mailbox, sorted and named (the box "Ink of the Sea" has 12 stacks of ink and not various nonsense).

I know that many of you fear his bank like the bubonic plague, but now you have time. Soon, you'll be busy with much better things than throwing out crap that's been collecting dust since Karazhan.