Why games are unbalanced?

The Pug update: Omnitron defense system is down too, so we now have 2 (+Algaloth) boss scalps:Wowprogress says it is enough for the world position 13017. If we assume 20 raiders/guild and 4M people who bought Cataclysm, we are way in top 10%. If you want raiding, but your current "freindly heplfull" guild have problems even in HC Grim batol, or there are simply not enough healers and tanks in your guild, join! After reading the rules of course.

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I wrote how terribly Tol Barad is defense-sided. I was wrong. I participated in more successful assaults than defenses in the last days (after the end of 1800 honor times). Tol Barad is still unbalanced, but it's not clear defense-sided, like Arathi would be horde-sided with 4 points, no stables.

"Unbalanced" means that "if two players/teams of equal skill and gear would fight, the one playing with the overpowered side/class would win most of the matches". Tol Barad is completely defense-owned in most realms. It's mostly offense-owned on our realm. This is clear unbalance. But how can the same battleground defense and offense-sided? For long I did not understand this fundamental game design problem. It seems Blizzard developers did not understand it either or they wouldn't make Tol Barad the way they did.

The problem is not that Tol Barad falls into the definition of "unbalanced". The problem is that the above definition is useless. The outcome of a Tol Barad (and a wintergrasp or a zerg vs protoss) battle is highly dependent on player skill/gear despite it is equal for the opponents. It means that if two equally great team would fight for Tol Barad, attacker would always win. Between two crappy teams defense would always win. In Wintergrasp a skilled defender could easily repel an equally skilled attacker, but a bunch of moron defenders would be obliterated by equal morons on the attacker side. A scrub playing zerg can easily zerg an equally useless protoss player, despite on the high-end Starcraft is a perfectly balanced e-sport.

I can give PvE example too: all the high-end players whine that survhunter and unholy DK are overpowered, while elemental shamans, arcane mages and ret paladins are weak. On the other hand if you go to a raid that utterly fails at Algoloth, you find that the damage charts are "owned" by 8K arcanes and rets, while the "op" surv and unholy are below the tank.

The fundamental problem is that the different classes and Tol Barad/WG sides scale differently with player skill (and to a lesser extent, gear). Even a monkey can spam arcane blast and click on barrage if the screen flashes. A really good player can add little difference to the monkey. On the other hand a random M&S playing surv forgets black arrow completely, clips the lock and load, never have energy for explosive as he wasted it on arcane or multi and his pet has no talents. The good player from this is worlds apart.

One must see that the problem is unpatchable: If Blizzard would simply add a percentage nerf to survhunters to make them equal to arcane mages in hard mode raids, not only the moron, but also the casual survhunters would be significantly below their arcane guildmates.

The class unbalance is inevitable, and the way of unbalance is philosophical choice:

• In a casual/amusement game the class skills are balanced to the median or average strength. So simply the game company gathers data of all PvE group play, for example Blizzard logs DPS of all players in HCs and raids. Then they calculate the average/median and buff/nerf to make sure that they are equal at all classes. The trade-off is that in the HC realm some classes are seriously overpowered, and their power changes significantly in every little patch. The HCs must accept in a casual game that their class can turn into seriously inferior overnight and developers don't give a damn. You can be HC in such a game but have a geared alt army or be prepared that you can be benched for a whole patch.
• In an e-sport, the class skills are balanced to the equal performance of the top players. If one class is underrepresented in the world top 1000, buff it, if overrepresented, nerf it. The price is that at the beginner level, some classes just zerg other classes. You can be a casual in such games, but you must restrict your playing to the simple class or accept to be often obliterated without a chance.
• everything else is a bad game

At least to map development this problem can be bypassed: make a mirror-map, where everything is equal to the two sides. Most WoW battlegrounds are such mirror-maps. Battle for gilneas is almost mirror (WW is closer to ally than horde) and in Strand of Ancients you must play both sides. Tol Barad, and Wintergrasp are not such, therefore their failure was inevitable in a game where both casuals and HCs are present. Making a balanced, non-mirror map is theoretically impossible in a non-e-sport game. If they would give a buff to attackers then in realms with some PvP guilds defender would never win. Leave it this way: on PvE and simply M&S infested realms assault never wins.


PS: attacker's guide to Tol Barad. The defenders spawn in the middle, equally far from all bases and win even if they hold one base. The attackers on the other hand has a graveyard very close to the bases. The defender must levitate and then ride to the base, it takes about 25 secs, while a defender can join a battle 10 secs after being ressed. It means that the slider does not move if the attacker:defender ratio is around 4:5. Since the attackers have equal people as defenders, if they manage to get 1 v 1 on all bases, they win.

So the key to attacker win is to make every battle very slightly winning. If you are just obliterating the defense, you are just losing the battle, because it means that you have too much people at that base, therefore too little somewhere else. The key to victory is if you attack a base, die 5x and finally when you are starting to win, abandon that base, let your less intelligent teammates finish the job and go to the next base. If you are losing badly, call for reinforcements. If the battle is even or even slightly losing, you are fine. If you are "guarding" a base with several people, you are no better than an AFK-er. Leave just lookouts who either have far sight (shaman, hunter) or can stealth who can count the enemy and call for reinforcements. If you leave significant defenses, the defenders just ignore that base and win on the other ones.

Ethereal ink problem

If you are selling glyphs, you most know that Jessica Sellers only trades inks for Blackfallow ink. Since an inferno ink sells for 180G or more, a Blackfallow worth at least 18G (granted, this is might be a surge that will end with the Darkmoon Faire). Trading one for a lower ink is only profitable, if we can sell the glyph for more than 45G. So buying old world herbs is always preferred.

There is different supply of herbs and also different demand of inks. Some inks are used for lot of glyphs, others are just for a few. So you should have different herb buy price for all ink-groups (herbs that mill into that ink), and also different sell prices for glyphs belonging to different inks. Ethereal ink is being the weakest link: needed for lot of glyphs and having low herb supply.

I sorted out the glyphs, so in ZA, I have a group for every ink, differently priced. If you click on the "read more" at the bottom, you can get a long list, that you can copy&paste to the savedvariables/zeroauctions.lua (after deleting the old glyph groups) and next time you log in, you'll have the glyph groups. You can set the prices in the normal configuration interface.

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One more business tip: if you are a skinner, Tol Barad is your place. They hotfixed the crocolisks, they no longer give party loot, everyone must kill 8 for the quest. That's a lot of dead, looted crocks.

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Kazragor sent some old morons. I picked this for today. What can I say? I started The PuG exactly to never-ever having to suffer this filth:

My darkmoon madness

The PuG update: We have 200 accounts now! Since there is no more motivation to "defend the towers", we play for win. We take it from the horde (imagine their rage that the "puny allies" do the impossible task of capturing TB), then lock them out. There were defenses when they barely had one base. If you want a PvP guild, join!

On PvE front: I wrote that we had DD-shortage, so released 2 dragons at a time because we had the tanks. This reset we had to do something even more unorthodox: we released them all! Dragons, whelps, boss all piled up and AoE-d down. Reason: 2 shaman healers, so it was easier just to CH-spam the tanks. And we definitely lacked the DPS to single-target them down before enrage. You can join raids too! Just don't forget to read the rules.

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Many AH players were waiting for the first darkmoon faire, where people can turn in their decks for Cataclyms epic trinkets. Many reported insane profits. I still did not dare to touch this field. The whiptail and jasmine go for 8-9G on Agamaggan-ally, a stack give 1 inferno ink and 6 blackfallow ink. If I turn those into infernos too, that's 1.6/stack, so an inferno costs 100G. One card needs 10 and 30 volatile lifes, 8G each, so a card is 1250G. Even if you don't get duplicates (the cards are random), the material cost of a deck is 10K. Would I pay 10K for a single 346-359 upgrade? No way. Does it mean that others don't? Of course not, people paid 15K for a completely useless bike. But I don't believe that there are enough people who would do such a waste and can afford it to make it profitable.

The risk of making cards and not selling them was just too high. So I haven't crafted a single darkmoon card. But I did not want to skip on the profit either.

I wrote that the more populated a faction is, the lower the average raider population is. On the other hand the more populated the faction is, the more peers you have to amuse. Which means that the more populated horde has much more guys who want "epixxlol" without any chance of raiding. So I wasn't surprised that the inferno inks sell for 160G there. So I started buying herbs, crafting inks for 100G each and transferring to the horde, selling there. 60G profit/ink. Since a trinket needs 80 inks, I have 4800G profit on a trinket, without ever crafting a card. My action is risk-free. If the demand would ever drop, I would just stop buying more herbs. I have no stockpiles, which is advised on a deflating market of an early expansion.

What do I do with the gold on the horde side? Buy whatever cheap - or simply available - on horde and transfer back. I do the same with BoE epics. Buy them on ally for 5K and sell them for 10K on horde. At worse case I can still sell them for their original price, I can't get stuck with it like with the fifth "two of winds".

If your server has unbalance, transfer herbs or inks between the sides for huge profit, no risk.

A new way of heavy griefing

Before the real post, let me show three more PvP bugs, a fix and a small goldmaking tip. You most probably heard of the bridge bug: if you run into the battle on the bridge, you'll get teleported out after 10 seconds. If your faction wins in this time, you get the bonus honor. So if you are dancing in the bridge, running in an out mindlessly, you have 50% chance to be inside when the battle is won. 900 honor on average for running.

You possibly know the "alliance base bug". You arrive to Tol Barad peninsula via a portal, among friendly NPCs. The horde NPCs oneshot any ally who go near the horde base. The ally NPCs do nothing, so if you want to do dailies, you spend the first 5 minutes cleaning up annoying lolkids before you can get the quests.

What you probably haven't heard is the extra 400 resilience bug. Do you want 400 extra resilience for sacrificing practically no other stats? Roll a priest, a resto or balance druid or a resto or elemental shaman. Then buy 3 pieces of PvP gear for your main spec (resto for me) and 2 for the other spec:
You can make gold with your inflated honor points: go wintergrasp and buy meta gems. Sell them on the AH for 10G. They are pretty bad metas but many people are poor or simply not yet 85 but has a helm with meta slot. A gem costs 24 honor, so if you sell it just for 8G, you made 600G for 10 mins attacking of TB. Of course it's not a sustainable business as you can flood the AH by yourself, but if no one else is doing it, it's better to spend the honor on this than let it just be capped.

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Now let's see the nasty stuff. Let me introduce something that griefs other players more than anything I've ever done and it is profitable. Many games, including WoW, are more or less griefing-free, simply because any form of significant griefing is unprofitable so no one does it besides a few researchers like Twixt and mindless lolkids. The most obvious form of griefing is ganking, yet it is absent even in PvP servers. I sometimes bump into gankers, but they cause less annoyance than random DCs and server lags.

Blizzard wants it to stay that way. When I figured out that victory in Wintergrasp (a profitable goal) can be achieved by griefing players (kicking them from the raid), they hotfixed it. However - unintentionally - they opened a portal to a very-very dark and evil place where griefing is common and every piece of in-game currency is tainted by the cries of hundredths of noobs and casuals: EVE online.

Corporations in EVE are wealthy organizations. Many players get huge benefits from belonging to one. Benefits that are not technically their own and would lose in a second if they are banished from the corporation or it would disband. The largest EVE dramas are about such corporate takeovers.

In WoW a guild used to be just another chat channel. It only had social and organization value. Theoretically the same 10/25 raid could happen as a pug or a guild run with the same players without any in-game difference. Any value a guild had belonged to the players. Devoted officers, good raider core made a guild good. Without these people the guild was just an empty shell.

Not anymore! The guild perks and guild rewards come from the guild entity and not from the players. In other words: if everyone would gquit and form a new guild, it would be a weaker guild, despite having the same members. So the guild entity has value now. Value that can be taken or destroyed. To make it worse, guild XP (the source of guild rewards) and guild reputation (your access to them) depend only on time passed, just like in "EVE offline". No matter how good or dedicated your players are, it will take a month before you get access to the first raiding perk. So the players can't even just shrug and build the guild again. If it's lost, it's lost for months. Also, no matter how good or dedicated players you have, your guild will not catch up with another that started earlier, until that guild maxes out at 25, after 137 days. Again: destroying a guild destroys 137 real world days progression of lot of players.

Obviously I'm not talking about hacking a guild master and disband the guild, that's just annoying as the GMs will restore it. I'm talking about legitimately taking over a competing guild and destroying it from the inside. Doing so has the perspective of getting the most valuable resource for your own guild: players. Imagine that 2 HC guilds fight for server firsts, and out of the sudden, the guild leader of one of them start to bench the best players, bringing new recruits to progression or abruptly changes the loot system from well working DKP to master looter, where he practically ninjas. The members will quit of course, but unlike before Cata, they can't just re-form under a good officer. If they do so, they are back at guild level one. Good luck winning against a guild with 2x longer flasks and mass resurrection/fast corpserun!

Taking over a HM guild is probably impossible as it has a motivated leader who earned the trust of the players. Unless he quits WoW, taking guild leadership is impossible. But let's look at the casual guilds, the market where I'm fishing. The range is long from arthasdklol's xXdarkhordkillazXx to guilds that killed several raidbosses with 2x3 hours raid.

Most HC guilds are asocial in the sense that if you can't bring enough DPS or stand in the fire, you are out, no matter how nice you are. Maybe there is "social" rank for you, so you can chat, but you are definitely out of the "real" guild. However I don't know any asocial casual guilds besides The PuG and some clones of it. Casual guilds are open for many different players. While several of them filter immaturity they all welcome socializing and centered on "playing together".

So one can send in well paid agents who behave maturely. One is always helpful, the others are inciting social drama. It's easy: start gossips, he-said-she-said nonsense. They don't even have to lie, just tell what Bob said about Alice to Alice. Soon the guild master will be overwhelmed with drama. He plays for fun too, he wants a relaxed friendly guild and now he have to handle Alice calling Bob a jerk on the guild chat and ragequitting. Soon the guild master will have enough. Along came the helpful agent who is liked by everyone and offers his help. Remember, while other agents spur drama, this one does nothing but helping and helping. Soon he'll become an officer and acts very actively to help the guild get better. The agents also make "little mistakes" on raids, to make sure that there is nothing but frustration. It's only matter of time that the guild leader steps down. Remember, he is not a power-hungry person, he just want the best for his guild. He is tired and burn-out by the drama and sees that an officer is so great and tireless handling the problems. Every guild leader wants to be a simple member with no responsibilities, just playing sometimes. And he sees a perfect replacement, a very nice and helpful officer...

How do you get the agents? Many players like griefing. They just need a little gold to be focused on griefing your competitors instead of random lowbies in the Barrens. They even feel awesome about themselves having such a large impact.

I'm not saying I'm doing this. Paying agents costs lot of gold and I find buying guild achievements an easier way to attract players than operating a secret agency. But the possibility is definitely there.

Another, nastier, simpler, cheaper - granted longer - profitable grief: you start a casual guild, play casually yourself, let the guildmembers level up the guild and upon lvl25 you kick everyone and sell the guild. And the worse thing: there is nothing in the world one can do to prove that he is not planning this. Or maybe there is: I donate another 50K repair money to the guild bank. It's a very long term loan (it will take a year before the 10% cuts from loot let me take it back), so it gives a safety to members. Or, it just proves that a guild can be sold for much-much more and worth this money...

Peace in Tol Barad

Update: the free honor is over!

I have a PvP honor-bought item in every single slot where such item is available (weapon and shield is not). I have 3800 resilience, I'm honorcapped and buying various nonsense from honor. Considering that I had 4 pieces before Wednesday, that's pretty fast gearing.

The magic behind these numbers is obviously Tol Barad. Every weekday I could catch 3-4 battles, giving 2500 honor in average. On the weekend I could catch 7, providing 6000 on average. Of course defense couldn't give such results. On Agamaggan-EU I have seen or heard of two defensive victories since Wednesday. That's 96% offensive victory ratio. Before the patch I have no reliable data, but definitely 90%+ defense victories.

The key behind it is obvious: defensive teams don't even try to win, throw the match on purpose. Legal note to lurking GMs: I do not participate in any form of wintrading or suggest anyone to do so. I protect towers on defensive battles, they are legitimate objectives and no tower ever fell on my watch. Surprising amount of horde want to take our towers, it almost cost them a victory some times. But others just stand in the spawnpoint and spam "let them win".

Many people claimed that such Tol Barad flipping will be impossible for several reasons. It is impossible on several servers. Not on ours. Let me analyze the reason for success here and the reasons of failure on other servers. The words "success" and "failure" are objective. Even if your faction owns TB all the time, you get 180 honor/match if there is anyone attacking. Don't forget that if attackers have no chance to win, they don't come, so you can't come either due to the 1:1 ratio. With perfect flipping it's 900 honor/match.

At first let me enumerate who would try to defend Tol Barad:

• The noob: he has no clue what's going on. He just queue up as he found WG fun in WotLK and tries to figure out what's going on. He does not understand why the /raid is spammed "let's lose fast". He believes they are just losers who gave up too easy.
• The "theorycrafter" who just can't think: he believes that by holding TB we get 180 points more than them, while we get equal points by flipping. So by holding we slowly outgear the opposing faction and will win in BGs. He simply doesn't understand that most BG opponents are not from our server and they get nothing from out TB. The faster we gear up, the better.
• The short-sighted: "I can't participate next battle, so rather take 180 now". He doesn't understand that if flipping will be the custom, every second time he randomly plays he gets 1800 pts. If defense is custom, he won't win attack when he can play attack either.
  
• "Tit for tat" guy: he participated in a lost attack. He participated in some almost lost attacks. He believes that the other faction won't hold the agreement and next time won't give up Tol Barad. He doesn't care about the points he lose, he simply don't want to feel being tricked/defeated by peers. If he would be rational he would know that if the opposing faction refuses to lose defense 3 times out of 4, he is still better off than with constant defense victories.
• The moron: "i play 4 lulz i dun car bout points i wanna pwn".
• The daily-farmer. He doesn't care about honor, he wants to do dailies for PvE rewards (mostly exalted trinkets)
  

The above ones cannot be converted to the successful strategy. Don't even try. Luckily they are less than 20-25% of the players. Who are the rest? Mostly social sheep. They do what the others do. Of course they don't do a proper opinion survey, they follow the strategy that looks more popular or alternatively followed by more prestigious players. They also has the tendency to do what they did yesterday.

There is one more serious danger to the strategy: if the defenders who want to flip don't show up. This case the players who shown up can be dominated by the players from the list, turning the sheep to their side. Please note that personally the highest honor/hour is attacking and not coming to defense. Coming to defense is a sacrifice to upkeep the system, and has no personal benefit.

So to make things work, all you need is to win the sheep. In our server it was pretty easy as on Alliance side there is our guild in PvP and 2-3 other, mostly PvE guilds have considerable PvP branches. The others are random players from various casual guilds. At horde side there are 2 serious PvP guilds that come to every match they can. When I read patch notes and logged to a horde banker to inform hordies about the "fix", members of these guilds already knew it and supported my idea against the "lulz we own TB u never get it allyboy QQ more" morons. They also figured out that they have to be present if they want it to happen. In our side I do serious effort to make as many players as possible to queue up for defense.

The biggest proof of the importance of leadership in the flipping is the huge difference between main hours and off-hours battles. In off-hours the attackers often must fight really hard to take TB on both sides. In main hours the battle ends usually in 5-6 minutes. The difference is that on main hours it's guaranteed that officers of dominant guilds are present, make their guildies to come and also oversee that none of them sabotate the flip. These players also earned "status" among the socials, so if they say to flip, the sheep has better chance to obey than they would do to a random guy.

So to make this happen on your server, you must convince the officer corps of your guild to cooperate with other guilds on your side and set up a schedule. Optimally there is always an officer in every defensive battle who make the members come and act properly. The presence of an officer make the sheep-minded members act properly too, who would go with the rest without direct orders. Remember, the personal optimal strategy (come attack, don't come defense) can kill the system that everyone benefits from. Typical case tragedy of the commons. It can only be overcome by authority: the leaders make sure that those who benefit from the system also upkeep it.

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Blog update: I updated the mail page and added a "The PuG Hall of shame" page.

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The morons of the day are the horde morons (and the sheep following them) on Agamaggan-EU. They have the annoying habit of camping Slagworks when we attack, making the fight 5-10 minutes longer than necessary. Since we have to split at the start, they easily kill the few who go there at start and can only be zerged after Ironclad and Warden's are taken. However we figured out a weakness that allows us to win before that, even with 1 vs 2 local ratio. They - like other mindless mobs - can be tanked. Literally. While the tanks are alive, the DD and healers are not hit: