How to save hundreds of gold with gems?

Gems have high vendor cost. A crafted blue quality gem has 3.75g to sell. This means high deposit cost on the AH. You can't sell gems like enchant stuff or glyphs. If your gems return, you lose serious amount of gold. Such losses scare most of the jewelcrafters away from the AH, leaving only some dedicated and properly funded ones who can survive the "gems returning in masses" phase until the competition gives up. From there, he can sell with high profit. It's not surprising to see cut gems 50-100G above uncut ones.

How can you bypass this problem? By mass crafting. You use only a few kind of gems. For example for PvE I use pure int, int/spi and int/crit gems, for PvP pure resi, int/resi, stam/resi. With every item upgrade I can socket a few gems.

So: buy up uncut gems and find a crafter. The easiest is using the "professions" tab of your guild interface, but can seek JC on /trade. Get 10 from each gems you use. Put it to the bank. Every time you use one, you just saved 50-100G.

Soon the gems will be stacking items, allowing you to keep them in your bags, so you can even gem in the raid when the item drops. Save gold and be faster!

Obviously you can do it for any items that you use regularly. Have a personal stash of consumables to avoid being the victim of wannabe AH monopolists.

The fact of the bad group

Tobold dismisses the common "this group sucks" claim as self-excusing: "Mathematical fact is that if you draw random team members, in 95% of the cases you get a team which is average, plus or minus 2 sigma (standard deviations)." He practically claims that those who blame a "bad group" are actually responsible for the failure and just shifting the blame.

Of course he is wrong, there are lot of bad groups, but the reason why "an average group is below average" isn't straightforward. It has two simple and one social reason.

The first reason is that good players tend to form guilds and fixed groups, removing themselves from the pool of random players. With 2 hard mode kills I'm a fairly good WoW player, up in the top 5%. Your chance to bump into me at a random Zandalari heroic is exactly 0 as I never go with a non full guild team (actually I don't go at all). On the other hand the worst players are rejected from every teams, so they are overrepresented in random groups where they cannot be booted instantly after their first stunt. The same applies to "/w for inv" guilds, where bad players are also overrepresented, as decent player wouldn't pick them with a stick. So while an average group is average, an average LFD group is below average.

The second obvious reason is that player skill is not following standard distribution. The question "did you read external sources about this game" is a yes/no question and I'm completely sure that the variation between the "no" and the "yes" group is larger than the intra-group variation of either groups. I'm also sure that the "no" group is more popular than the "yes" group. Something like this:
We have a sampling problem: since every blog and forum commenter read something about the game (the forum or the blog post), they all belong to the "yes group", so it's true that "average commenter is above average", therefore they are right when observing that "the average team is worse than me".

But even aside these, the third, non-obvious reason guarantees that most groups are bad. Actually this reason would guarantee that 80% of the 5-man groups are worse than you, even if everyone would use LFD and their skill distribution of players is normal. Vast majority of players are social, therefore feel uneasy being "jerk" with other players. Therefore the worst player of the group is rampaging free without being corrected or removed. While the wipes are technically on him alone, the observer is right to think that the group is fine with this performance, strike that, protecting the failer, and call the observer "being mean" with a "friend". Knowing this social rule, no one speaks up against the failer, therefore the group performance is limited by this guy.

You have 80% chance to not be the worst of 5, and in this care, you are right to believe that "with 4 clones of me we would perform better than with this group". Of course the other 3 not-worst players have the same right, so there are 4 players in every 5-man social group who are hindered by a "bad group".

Of course they are actually hindered by sociality, the inability to criticize, identify and fight against M&S. Where a social say "I was in a fail group" an asocial would say: "I was in a group with 2 OK and 1 good player, but we had an atrocious moron, so we sucked for 15 mins until one of us finally could initiate a votekick and get rid of that filth".

Prizes and recruiting

On PvE front: we have 2 HMs down.
On PvP front: we finally left the "3 wins a week" rBG situation and could play around 20 matches last week.

We are guarding our place on the guildox.com's EU guild achievement list. We are currently #70 with 1690 points. The new gains was Shadowmourne. If was a contract with a player from the topguild of the server. He bought us 55 exalteds, Thori'dal, got paid for these and we formed groups for him for Shadowmourne that he finally got.

Let's see what more we could get:

• "do X challenges" achievements: can't be hurried as the challenges are weekly capped.
• The Daily Grind: 52% and it would be insane to pay for them. People will do TB dailies anyway for the resistance trinket. Soon 4.2 will bring brand new dailies.
• Rating-related PvP achievements currently out of reach, Are you not entertained? prize is still 5000/G person.
• Now that's a Teamwork: 28%, now that we play rateds a lot, it will be done soon.
• 5-cap crew: 29%, working on it
• Creepjackers: 50%, will be completed on its own.
• Glaives: 30000G offered for anyone who gets them on his own. If you have Glaives and want the gold, join us (assuming you are on our server or ready to transfer)
  
• We are legendary: meta for the above ones for 25 points.
• Heroic raid achievements: Since they will keep giving valor points (like normals in Firelands, I guess they will be done soon).
• Dinner Party: on 89%, it will be completed on its own.
• Master Crafter: 80% but crafting epics just to DE would be simply insane.
• We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat: 79%, since I figured out that fishing is actually profitable, people are doing it.

We are looking for both raiders and PvP-ers, to increase these activities. Currently we can do either but not both as we don't have enough people to have 10 on a hard mode, 10 on farm, other 10 in RBG. So if you got enough of "we'll start raiding/rBG soon" guilds, join us, as we are already doing them, just with not enough intensity. Of course keeping the rules is a must.

The broken lolling theory

The broken windows theory tells that people constantly look around for clues to figure out what is allowed and what is not. It is obvious that the same person is more likely to make noise as a visitor of a football field than a visitor of a cathedral.

The theory says that by creating the signals of an ordered and policed sector, the people there will behave better, assuming that the sector is actually policed and they couldn't get away with being disorderly. On the other hand if they see signals of disorder, they will assume that here such behavior is allowed or at least tolerated and they more likely to act that way. This idea led the "zero tolerance" police approach in New York City that significantly decreased crime.

I introduced the "no lol", "no gz" and no "offtopic chit chat" rules in the guild, assuming that they are social activities, making the person more likely to defend his "image front of peers" instead of improving. The rules obviously work as alone were able to create a top 10% guild. However I was maybe wrong for the reason why they work.

Social chit chat may serve as a signal that this place is a laid-back, social place where the focus is on "having fun". In such environment people may feel appropriate or even encouraged to slack. On the other hand here, where such activities are instantly corrected and reprimanded by the people online, the people believe that they are in a professional environment where acting unprofessionally is not allowed and do their best. They actually improve because they want to have a positive image (being professionals) front of peers.

I don't have enough data to figure out which one is the underlying system. But either way: social fun and performance are negatively correlated.

---

The Pug update:

3 tanks, 3 healers 4 DD, lot of dead, and out second hard mode, placing us to #12700 position, higher than ever. And of course permanently recruiting, just read the rules.



Voice chat update: noting to update. Voice chat creates more problems that it solves. It allows us to down bosses by telling the weakest link players how to play. Currently such players wipe the raid, their mistake is pinpointed and then fixed or they are removed. If such players could be carried, soon there would be way too many of them to handle, the good players would burn out and stop playing. Same applies to rated BGs. The "no voice chat" is a crucial rule of the guild, if you don't like it, don't come.

PvE rating

Tobold wrote a very insightful post. He told that the optimal chance of win should be around 50% for several reasons: you never face with being hopelessly destroyed, nor with "grind": a streak of meaningless victories over hopeless opponents. Also, your personal contribution matters the most in an even match, while in a faceroll or a hopeless battle you being AFK would not make any difference.

However after declaring that "50% win chance is fun" he recognizes that "a perfectly balanced 50:50 win:loss PvE mob in fact has the skilled players still win all of the time, and the less skilled lose all of the time", which makes it impossible.

So we bumped into the "fun-trap" of player separation. To create the "50%-opponent", we must create a homogenous group of players, where the group-average is approximately equal to the individual-average. It is considered "common sense" that player separation is "not fun", as it separates friends (or rather "friends") from each other and also stigmatize some of the separated groups, acting as discrimination. It can be told without doubt that there isn't any AAA MMO that has a strong PvE separation of players, and most games actually make effort to let the worse possible players to complete content.

So we have a fun vs fun situation: if we don't separate players, they don't have fun because the content is either too easy or too hard, if we separate them, they don't have fun because they can't play with "friends" and others mock them for being officially scrubs or no-lifers.


Now let me offer a solution to this problem. Funnily it's not mine at all, it's Blizzard's own, used in arenas and rated BGs. You are separated according to your MMR. A 2000 MMR team is completely separated from an 1000MMR team, assuming the system works. They both get 50% win rate and they both get the same reward: conquest points. The MMR is invisible so you can't tell if the guy next to you in Stormwind is 2500 or 700 rated, nor anyone can tell it about you, no stigmatization. Visible "rating" increases over time, so 800 rating can mean a new player who won 12 matches in a row, or someone who couldn't climb higher since January. Low rating doesn't bar you from rewards, as you both get the same: conquest points. It's true that the 2500 guy gets more, but at the end, everyone will be full vicious. Socially everyone is equal, game-wise people are separated.

How could it be applied to PvE:

• Boss difficulty is decided on the fly based on the team's PvE rating.
• Your rating goes up by defeating a boss, your rating goes down by wiping on him.
• There is no need for "hard modes", as the bosses are automatically tuned. Actually there is no need for any kind of tuning, the boss can't be "too hard" or "too easy", as the proper difficulty will be adjusted after a few wipes or faceroll-kills.
• The boss drops no loot, you are awarded valor points for the kill. This is the only source of raider gear.
• The boss drops valor points based on your rating. While both the worst and the best players are equally 12/12, the former get much less points every week than top rated teams. (You can't kill more than 12 bosses due to the lockout).
• This system makes firstkills (depending on intensive playing, "no life") meaningless, and places PvE rating the measure of being top. Playing more would not give any inherent advantages besides more experience as you can't wipe 100x on the boss as every wipe decreases your rating, therefore the difficulty of the fight. 
• This would prevent good players running out of content. If you facerolled a new instance in the first week, next week the "same" place would be considerably harder, due to your elevated rating. Soon you reach the point where you are 50-50. There is always a chance to elevate your rating by getting skill and gear. The competition of guilds would intensify over time, instead of ending when the first guild clears all HMs.

PS:  Like every content on this blog, this idea is also completely free, any gaming company can implement it for free.


Answer to the most common comments: the "VP only" loot system is not inherent. The bosses can still have loot tables, and their chance to drop varies with group MMR. A 500 rating boss have 50% chance to drop an epic, a 2500 rating boss has 400% (4 loot).

The 50/50 is also variable to any ratio desired by point changes. If killing gives 50 rating and wiping takes 10, than the kill:wipe ratio will be 1:5

Why PvP?

I was writing a huge, magnificent and pathetic post (that will most probably won't be published as I suck in those things), about the one year anniversary of The PuG. Yes, our guild is almost a year old.

Then I stuck with writing something "magnificent" about our PvE progress. We killed all normal bosses, did a hard mode, progressing well for another and more are coming, it's not at all bad. But we know that "not at all bad" is not enough. We are top 16K according to WoWprogress, even if you assume 25 raiders in an average guild, there are only 400K players ahead our raiders, out of 10 million. Top 4% is really something to be proud of. Especially as we have no attendance or voice communication or more importantly any form of ilvl or achievement check. I proved that good players could be found simply by self-selection according to question: "Can I play without social fun manifesting in false kinship of lol, gz, l33tspeak and anal jokes?".

On the other hand we did not become the standard of raiding. We don't have 5-10K players in 5-10 sister guilds, no PuGs forming in all the servers to use the "magic", the only key to successful casual raiding. Why? Because having 2*4 hours a week in fixed attendance is not something that an average player can't or doesn't want to do. A 2*4 fixed attendance guild with a good raid leader instructing on Vent can and do outperform us. The fact that this scheme needs the selfless help of the raid leader who spoon feeds them is irrelevant as there are such people in proper supply on the market. The hypothetical statement "in a World where no one is selflessly helping others, The PuG would be top 100" is just as interesting as "in a World without tap water Coca Cola Company would be the most profitable company".

Because of this, our guild is a niche guild for two kind of players. One is so fed up with childish (and often abusive, racist, sexist, whateversist) jokes that he is rather giving up on 1-2 bosses and 3-4K better WoWprogress place and come to us where he can play without this crap. The other kind can't schedule his time due to work or family reasons, so can't keep even the lowest form of fixed attendance but still wants to raid.

The PvE encounters are scripted, repetitious. You need to execute them perfectly in hard mode, and with some slack in normals. This can be analyzed, repeated, ordered by a raid leader just like any mechanical job can be overseen by the manager. Self-employed, "free" plumbers are not significantly better than employed or even outright oppressed plumbers. Happier maybe, having more free time, having more money, but not better. The plumbing of the communist countries wasn't bad at all.

PvP encounters are dynamic, adaptive, unpredictable, especially on the large scale. While optimal set of moves for all 2v2 arena battles can be learned and commanded, good luck spoon-feeding 10 players at 3 different bases facing one of the billions of permutations of enemy setups. Here individual thinking ability is more important. The free scientists and engineers of the Western World have proven to be much more effective than the centrally controlled ones in the Soviet Block.

In large scale PvP we could be much more than a niche guild. We could be a world class guild in this. I will much more focus on RBGs than before. This is the place where I could unquestionably prove that the asocial idea works.

On guild achievements we are already World Class, but that only prove the obvious: for huge projects corporations with paid employees perform better than a bunch of sparkling eye volunteers.