What are these guilds?

I talked about the non-guild PvP eh. No organized activity, no social chat, no nothing. Players practically playing a single-player game. It's not the only guild here. Only on alliance side, and only by the guild finder tool I found another dozen:

• Confidental
• Eternal Abyss
• Grimly fiendish
• New breed
• Red flag
• Flying Circus
• Darnassus pride
• Angry Angels
• Dragon army
• Dragons watch
• Jinchu fan club
• The Serpent guard

The Dragon's watch is lvl25 has 995 members without a single Argoloth guild kill or even a single guild Zandalari heroic. No guild rbg either and only 370 guild-arena wins, so most players don't even arena or play with non-guildies. Totally dead non-guild.

The fun thing: these guilds hold about 2x more players than all the raiding guilds from 6/7 HM to 1/7 normal combined on Ally-Agamaggan. Half of them has a guild master who haven't logged in for a month. Yet they are not dissolved.

I'm totally puzzled because of them. Why do anyone play in these things? What do the players want from the game who are rotting in these non-guilds. And above all: how much time does it take since they get totally bored with the game they don't play?

Blizzard made the guild changes because "WoW is more fun in a guild". However they failed to prevent the forming of such non-guilds. I'm sure that most of the players here are just newbies who lost without hope. They don't even see anyone doing something remotely interesting, so they get the impression is that this game is all about smashing 10 boars 10000 times. If these players could be directed into functioning guilds (even "we dance on the mailbox naked together" is considered functioning), they would have much more fun.

Don't say that "they choose to be here", because choice requires information. Without that, there is only guessing or betting. They may not even know that there are raids and rated bgs in WoW or they wrongfully assume that they are hopelessly unprepared for these and they are exclusive to a "no-lifer" elite, despite anyone who can do a Zandalari can also do the nerfed 4.0 stuff and rated BGs exist in the 800-1200 region too. While this information is trivial to us, it is not in any official sources. NPCs just give more quests at 85, they don't say "go raid". So one can level up and get to max level without even knowing about the endgame. No wonder the player rotation is so high. Since this content needs other players, it's natural to place new players to the proximity of players who are doing it.

Some tips:

• Guild finder should be unusable under guild lvl 10. Besides these non-guilds I found about 50 lvl 1-2 guilds, with 1-5 member, obviously created by little children. These are just making the tool spammed
• Back to 10 signatures to start a guild. Only lvl 20+ should be able to sign. Way too many failguilds formed by players who are not ready to lead a guild, by spamming "10g for a signature". They could be a useful member somewhere or at least shouldn't collect clueless newbies into their black holes.
• If the guild master is inactive for 14 days, the guild mastership is transferred to the highest ranked active player
• Guild upkeep fee: 300G/day after the first week of creation. The guild "challenges" easily pay for these in a functional active guild. The gold is taken from the guild bank. If the balance goes below -2000G, the guild is disbanded.
• Guild merge feature: a guild can merge into another. The guild rep of the players is turned into the new guild's rep, the banks merged, the guild achievements (and achievement progresses) combined, so players can switch without losing any "progress".

Please spare me from the "these changes would kill my personal bank guild". Guilds are not made to give you extra storage. You are abusing the system and there isn't any valid reason for Blizzard to help you keep your bankguild for free.

Of course there must be a solution for us players too to deal with these black holes that suck up all the new players. I'm working on it.

Legendary fail

Once upon a time there was a guild, game is not over. World #171, 6/7HM. It is a Hungarian guild as you can see from the recruitment text on WoWprogress, and their sad story was published first on a Hungarian WoW site.

This guild, like many other were happily collected eternal embers to get the legendary staff. Luck shined upon them as many drops fell to the hand of the player the loot council decided to be the bearer of this weapon, and finally they got their reward, among the first ones in the World.

The Mylune-romantic story here ends, because the staff-bearer instantly transferred to the Method, saying goodbye to his friends with the following - legendary - words: "the leadership sucked for months bai", ("szar a vezetes honapok ota n acsa").

What can we learn from this story? At first, never give anything of value to someone with "happy", "lol", "pwn" and such in his name. Even if he can keep attendance and stay out of the fire, he will make some weird drama sooner or later. Something tells me that the Method will learn this the hard way and this isn't the last time when we can delight on the story of Happyjojj.

The more important is that you own only what you own. What is owned by other person is not yours, no matter how complicated social system you built to delude yourself into it. "Friendship", "solidarity", "responsibility" are all sounding good and people really mean them as long as it means "someone should behave responsibly towards me". As soon as it means "I should be responsible with others", they will instantly find loopholes and cross you over. The only exception are the "fun ppl" who really mean this crap, but they never have anything of value, exactly because of that.

If something is created in a group effort that can't be split into parts and distributed, the one receiving it must pay the other ones. So when - not "if" - he goes his merry way, he takes away nothing that is not his. There are eternal embers in the backpack of people who are no longer with my guild, despite they gained the embers in our raids. So? They paid for it.

While years of seeing socials banging their heads to the wall made me cynical, I haven't given up hope: maybe this event will teach guilds that the only reliable loot distribution system is gold bid. In every other case, someone will feel betrayed very soon.


PS: soon another bunch of people will learn that what is not theirs is not theirs, no matter how fondly they think about it.

Following the steps of Al Bundy

I haven't posted a business idea since long time, but not because I quit making gold, but simply because I did not need to come up with anything new. Since I dropped inscription, I make gold from 3 sources:

• Selling whatever odd crap I bump into during normal gameplay. It doesn't provide significant income besides the trash BoE epics from Firelands
• Selling heavenly shards. I'm practically the sole supplier of these shards on horde side, and one of the top sellers on alliance. Producing them is easy: you buy elementium and obsidium, craft Stormforged shoulders, disenchant and sell. How can all the hordies not doing this is beyond me, the profit in a single shard is over 50G and they sell in hundreds.
• Selling shoes, like the great founder of the most true political movement, the NO MA'AM. I buy 359 justice point boots from trade chat people and guildies for 700, selling them between 1000-1900G. Besides being puzzled by what other people are doing with their spare JP and honor, I also don't understand why the most useless boots are my best sellers. Rock furrow boots sell like candy, despite a 365 alternative is available for 150G after a single day of Molten Front dailies, while the second best seller is the hunter shoe, despite an equal shoe is available for 80G at Hyjal exalted and the Molten Front dailies give "old" Hyjal rep in large quantities.

Anyway, these obvious and simple activities work:

I'd try to put this sum into perspective: I got the 30K gold from quests achievement in this July, and the 25K gold looted achievement on August. So conventional play gathered me 55K. Since I had expenses, including 220K on the server first guild lvl 25, I earned 20-30x more gold via trading than via means that are used by the average player. Please note that the trading is a player-player transaction, so by definition the average player has 0 trading balance (actually -5% due to AH cut). So I managed to get 20-30x more gold than an average guy without farming, without forcing myself, just by following the business rules, the goblin way. I also hope that via this blog I could teach you the most important steps, so you are also having more than enough without farming.

PS: spare me from the "you can't use that gold, it's vanity" comments. I just figured out something really nasty what to do with it.

The new alt rule

The most criticized rule of the guild is the alt rule. I originally started with no alts at all, relaxed to one.

My reasoning is simple: if you spend time with alts, you spend less time with your main. The result is a bunch of useless lol-characters, motivated by the false sense of progression. I think it's still true in a sense that there is a strong correlation between number of characters and the strength of the main. However there is no point using correlation, when you have access to the data itself. Also, while I could surely not gear 3 characters ready to raid, others play more, or don't PvP, or don't make gold or do better than I and can. No point locking them out.

The new rule is that you can have as many alts as you want, but from those, only one can be incomplete. It would be managed with the following ranks:

• Lowbie: technical rank for rerollers who did not get their 100g yet as they are below lvl 20/60
• Member: everyone who keeps the chat rules can have a character in the guild, just like it was in the first version of the rules. No performance demands made to members.
• RaiderRbg: these characters proved to be "ready". You can have as many characters in this rank as you want, as long as they are ready. Being in this rank is not necessary to come raid or rbg, but give priority, except on 4.0 boost raids which are called boost for a reason.
• Alt: this will be an obsolete rank and will be removed after a month. In this month you can promote your main to RaiderRbg and your alt to member, or the alt to RaiderRbg. After a month the remaining alts will be kicked.
• Inviter: same as RaiderRbg but also can invite. No other differences

To get promoted to RaiderRbg you must have:

• All pieces gemmed and enchanted (top gem/enchant not needed)
• All glyph slots filled
• Gathering professions maxed for the bonus, crafting professions leveled to the point where they give the bonus, and use the bonus too
• For raiders: 340 average ilvl with PvP pieces counting -1 average, for rBG players 3000 resilience. It's really not a high demand.
• Killing Occu'thar or reaching 1200 rbg rating. It's really just to prove you are not inactive.

There would be no separate alt rank, as it doesn't really matter who sits behind the character, if the character itself has proven to be useful. The name of the "main" will be still written to the officer note, so when /guildinfo shows that the newly invited char is an alt, the main must validate the alt, to prevent socials to get several "members" invited.

I promoted some people who came into my mind, if you are not promoted and should be, contact me. Also, inviters please be extra careful when inviting a new member. Do a /guildinfo before and after inviting. If the "account" field did not increase, you invited an alt. If the guy did not mention that he is an alt, send me a mail and I kick the punk. If he did say he is an alt, ask him to log his main. Check if the main is Raider-rBG ranked and write the main's name into the officer note.

Play to win or to improve

The PuG update: Jinchu, where are you? If you are the player who played Jinchu (and stopped some months ago), or know him, please contact me via the mail. I need you for a very interesting experiment (not the one below, another). I'll cover your re-subscription costs.

---

This new permanent page is holding the (I believe valuable and revealing) results about the necessity of a third way to play, besides "to win" and "for social fun", completing my extensions to Sirlin's "play to win" theory.

It also gives a deeper meaning to the undercommunicated idea, however it stand on its own too. Even if we accept that voice chat is necessary for hard modes, due to the lot of things happening, we can agree that it's not needed in normal modes. Yet normal mode guilds use voice chat, which can mean nothing else but boosting.

The same thing is going on as with gear: the topguilds use every tiny advantage they can find, including gear and voice, and the lesser ones blame their failures on the lack of gear or "not good enough communication". If we can prove nothing else than "you don't need voice to reach 2-3/7 HM" it itself a valuable point and can be a salvation to thousands of fellow good players, who desperately trying to communicate better instead of recognizing that his guildies suck. Just like they believed "they need more gear", now they believe "they need better leading". No! They need a kick at their butt.

Come! Raid and make a difference! Remember, it's something I already, successfully done in a similar point, and now the circumstances are much better (already working guild, more HC schedule), except now I need more dedicated raiders.

Racing vs preparation phase

I have serious trouble understanding the Voice chat supporters and they have serious problem understanding me. They keep telling that Voice chat works, I keep telling that voice chat boost bads and we are not really listening to each other. Now I try to separate "raiding" into two kind: performance and preparation raiding. Such separation can clearly be done for topguilds.

Until you killed the endboss HM, you are trying to be as fast as you can. While voice boost (relatively) bad players, these are the players they have. Replacing them would be a setback, as the new guy would be completely inexperienced on the bosses. Also, replacement is not even available as everyone who is good is raiding somewhere and unlikely to want to spend his time with interviews. It's stupid to let the weak guy die in the fire or just not performing properly due to being unable to predict switches (for example the rogue who doesn't notice that Atramedes will fly up in a second and he uses his last GCD to put on the fifth combo point instead of a finisher). I mean, that guy is part of your team, for better or worse. You must use every available tool to win or you are not playing to win. If voice chat is that tool, use it. If giving them a free gem from your own, to replace his wrong gem, do it! If it's giving him a free consumable because he is out and broke too, do it! Do anything to win what doesn't get you banned!

The endboss is dead, the game is over. Your WoWprogress position is set, you can't do anything about it now. All you can do is prepare for the next patch. You gather gear and adjust your roster. In this phase the focus is not on effectively kill the farm bosses but on being as ready for the next patch as possible. I guess even the largest voice-chat fan can agree that turning off voice in preparation phase is positive, even if it cost you wiping hours on the bosses you used to oneshot. The players who wiped you, who died in the fire, who stopped being able to do their job and those who got their DPS dropped by 20% are your weakest links, while those who perform just as good as with voice are your best. If you aspire for higher ranking next patch you should find replacements to the spots of the weakest or somehow fix them.

So use everything, including blatant boosting in racing period and stop using them to pinpoint the weakest links in preparation period. We can all agree in that, right?

Now let's forget the World top guilds and focus on the average-good ones. The ones who are progressing, but will not kill the endboss HM before the next patch. The fundamental question is: are they in a permanent race, or a permanent preparation phase? When you are promoting the No1 boosting tool, you implicitly claim that they are in the race. They should use voice because it can push them from #14325 to #13789. And you are right it can!

I claim that these guilds are in a permanent preparation phase. Their race was over before the patch was downloaded. There is no point pushing to the limit to get to #13789 or even to #8756. They aren't in the top league and must stop acting like one. Keeping up the delusion that they just have to push a bit harder only leads to burnout and drama. They have two choices. One is giving up and going friendly social. Those who mean that friendship > bosskills are happy players. They are not upset on the wipe, as they expect it. They are genuinely happy when something actually dies. The other choice is fixing their problems. Replacing the weak links, showing the proper sources to the salvageable ones. For that, the best is no boosting, letting everyone show what he can do without help.

I'm no longer saying that voice chat is bad for winning the race. I'm saying that it kills all your chances to get into the group that is actually racing (can clear the HM content before next patch) unless you are already there. Voice chat with some great leader can push you from #17852 to #7519. However you are much better off replacing the 3-4 failures holding you back and force that 2-3 mediocres to step up at the cost of staying #17852 and get to top 1000 in the next patch.

Undercommunicated is a similar project to Undergeared. Undergeared proved that to get into the "raider" group from "non-raider", you need to remove or fix M&S instead of buffing them with gear. Gear does change a 7K M&S into a 10K M&S, yet we all agree that you can't raid with 10K M&S. I'm now trying to prove that to get into the "good raider" group from the "raider", you need to remove or fix M&S instead of buffing them with voice calls. Voice call does change a dead raider  into someone survived the fire with 10% HP, yet we can all agree that you can't get to the top with players who stand in the fire. After you have these players, will you need gear and voice to be one of the very best.

What is the real world analogue: if you are a janitor working for minimal wage, you don't need a mopping machine, despite it could let you clean 20% faster, probably earning 120% minimal wage. You don't need "communication skills" that let you get a job at a top company who pays 150% minimal wage to janitors. You need a school that gives you "pointless" tasks, makes your life harder with exams and books, but at the end, will separate you from the janitors and turns you into a tradesman who make 2-5x minimal wage. Then you will need good tools and communication to be closer to the 5x than to the 2x. But not before. If you are a janitor, you must study!