WTB Chain-CC addon

I'm always planning addon functionalities. This time I came up with a pretty nasty one: Chain-CC. The addon needs to be installed by everyone in the PvP group.


At first everyone must set a priority number. People discuss it before PvP. In the match the addon watches distance and among the people who are in range picks the highest priority guy. He will be the CC-master. Obviously if he dies or gets out of range, a new CC master is chosen. If there are more than 2 people in range, a CC-master is chosen. The CC-master is notified about him being the master. He will set a focus-target. For the people in range the addon set the same focus target (if it's impossible, tell them to do manually).


When the CC-master casts a CC on the focus target, or if he presses a hotkey, the addon start calculating optimal CC-chain, figuring out who should CC next. Determines who can CC the target (must be in range, sometimes melee range), and picks the best CC for next. Best being the one that lasts longest (because not on DR), and among those the one that can't be dispelled (cyclone, stun).


When the previous CC wears off, dispelled or trinketed, the guy who must CC next is notified by a raid warning like text and audio (I suggest "Stomp now!" by Lord Rhyolith). Obviously if the prioritized CC-er gets out of range or get CC-ed himself, the addon picks another CC-er.


Of course the addon should calculate cast times, so if a mage polymorph is the next CC, "Stomp now!" arrives 1.5 secs before the last CC wears off. If the CC is broken/dispelled/trinketed, an available instant-cast CC-er is prioritized over the mage. Actually it could even watch the GCD of the players, so if I can cast 1.4 secs from now and X can cast 0.8 secs from now, X will be prioritized.


With this addon, Chain-CC-ing becomes trivial task. You just need a "/cast [target=focus,harm,nodead] whateverspell" macro keybound and blindly press the button when you hear "Stomp now!"


For zerg-like battles where 5+ people are present both side, the addon can even set 2 CC-masters and automatically sort the people into 2 CC-groups so 2 enemies are chain-CC-ed.


Anyone writes this addon is offered 100K gold what he can pick on Agamaggan-EU (and transfer away if he pleases). The addon would of course be downloadable from curse.com or some other addon site.


What is my purpose with such addon? The short goal is obviously win. However pretty soon all high rated teams would use the addon, so it wouldn't give any edge anymore. The long-term goal is completely remove the need of communication in PvP, as it cannot be matched with the pug philosophy (as it needs a dedicated leader who thinks for the others).

Naming rule discussion

It seems many people lack imagination when naming their characters.

The short question for today: Shall we allow boring (not offensive, l33t, cool, fun) words as names. Some examples: hammer, toolbox, mouse, cat, treetop, cloud, flyer, walker, swimmer, jumping.

I mean they are obviously not lolkid names, however might show lack of intelligence or care while making the character. What do you think?

The question comes from the fact that several people with such names want to get invite, some known to be good. The constant RBGs and especially the nasty Preform AV enabler massacres got us some new people and lot of others who did not get inv, mostly for naming reasons. Of course icriturass or pwnzorlol will never be invited. But I'm not so sure about "sanctuary".

The nastiest addon ever

Short weekend post. Preform AV Enabler allows you to get in a BG with more than 6 people. Not just AV but any. Imagine the carnage what happens when the 10 of you faces 10 drooling randoms on WSG. It's the perfect addon for fast gearing up for PvP, if you have the group for it. We have, feel free to join!

Don't go random BG, go rated NOW!

I noticed a very weird thing. 5 of us went to random BG. Several healers and some really good DD. People who use to excel in RBGs too. We did not slack, we played for objectives. We lost. And lost again. And again. We might still be losing if we wouldn't get Isle of Conquest what you can't really lose with 3+ (defend Quarry and Refinery, so the enemy door breaks 30% earlier).


"Obviously" the reason for the losses were the countless morons ignoring objectives, fighting at random places, abandoning flags and having no gear or skill. But the enemy contains the same kind of crap, so why did we not steamroll them? I mean on a 10 man BG we had 5 of us + 5 morons against 10 morons, clear win. We could start whining that "horde always wins" but we know it's not true, the BGs are balanced.


I would still curse the mindless bride-fighters but somehow in the next morning something came to my mind. When we had 997K/1M guild kills we went to random BG for the remaining ones, with the aim to kill, ignoring wins. We chain-won and I was even surprised back then, but considered it a "lucky streak". But now it had a very different light. I went back to the random BG alone, with an easy strategy "heal the biggest zerg". I practically ignored strategies and objectives besides obvious moves, like prioritizing FC over randoms or interrupting flag captures, avoiding healer stacking and not leaving bases as last guy. But I did not preach strategy and went where the zerg was. And the "lucky streak" came back, we won all the time.


At this point the cardinal problem with random BG became apparent: you must help the bridge-fighting, EOS-flagger, mid-HK-farmer idiots or you lose. If you go for objectives, they will still not go for objectives, they die in their stupid spot. However if you help them wipe the enemy in the idiotic place they are, they will start moving somewhere. Since maps are not so huge, sooner or later they end up near an objective (or the objective ends up near them in a flag carrier map).


With other words: even a terrible strategy is better than anarchy. The morons has a strategy and they play that strategy only: "if itz red itz ded lol". If you join them, you win the fight, if you don't you lose it. Of course the mindless grinding has little correlation to objective captures, but still non-zero. For example the AB bridge fighters usually don't wipe the enemy until they respawn. But sometimes they do and then they press on to the flag.


If you want to win random BGs (and we play for win), you must adapt to the drooling idiots, acting like them, just better (more DPS, HPS, sometimes an objective capture). You will not learn anything about BGs or strategies, actually you pick up bad habits. You should go RBG even in crafted blue PvP gear. There are 800-1000 rated BGs too. There you can not only practice with other good players, learn good habits, but also gain more honor points (400 for a win) but 400 conquest until cap (1650).


If you can't find a beginner RBG team on your server, join us, we are organizing a second (third...) group, especially for beginners. Of course you'll lose several matches as your starting MMR is 1500 but once you reached the MMR matching your beginner skills and gear, you will win 50%, then you'll start climbing up. You can find funny things when facing /trade groups: ... and you can see "funny" things when you have to fill up your roster from /trade: yes, he is a fully geared holy paladin who did not know about dispels or hand of freedom.

The true third way

The two known (democratic) economics models, the pure free market and the social democracy, have both failed. The pure free market failed 80 years ago, in the First Great Depression. The reason for failing is that the middle and upper class has a tendency for frugality, therefore they tend to consume less than they produce. However the production and consumption must be equal in the whole system. If there is more production than consumption then some of the goods will not sell, so their producers will lose their business and jobs. These people will lose their income therefore will not consume, decreasing demand for production even more. The cycle will never stop as the remaining actives are still producing more than they consume and the inactives can't consume. At the end, everyone goes bankrupt, just as it happened.

Enters the social democrat who mixes bleeding heart with the necessity of equalizing consumption and production: "let's give welfare to our fellow humans!". As the welfare leech consumes more than he produces, the system stabilizes. After the communist revolution and World War II when Lenin-Stalin and Hitler successfully mobilized the hungry and angry people, there was even more reason to fill every stomach. So the happy and stable era of social-democracy started to last forever. Well, it did not and is ending now, in the Second Great Depression (2008-?). The reason is that a low-skilled worker is unable to create enough value to have significantly more salary after tax, than the welfare. So these people quit or come up with salary demand (backed by politicians setting minimal wages) that the business cannot pay so they lose their job. The increasing swarm of inactives need higher tax from the remaining actives, pushing another bunch of actives to the point where they rather take welfare than work. As the activity rate is dropping, the political power of inactives grow, getting even more welfare at the cost of even more taxes. To make things worse, there are loans, available to both people and governments that can cover the holes for a few years until the loaners find themselves underwater: no more loans and no capital left.

The search for a third way is going on for long, showing that people are not satisified with the current systems. However they found nothing just empty PR slogans. Elevating or decreasing the tax with a little is not a new way, that's just a shift between free market and social democracy, but since both of them are fundamentally wrong, their combination can't be much better.

Let me introduce the true third way: Society-scale consumption of services. These services do not increase the quality of life of any particular person, they increase it for everyone. We all breath the fresh air, we all benefit from less crime and accidents or the advancement of science. Education - while received by a particular student - is not personal "fun", only can be used for increased productivity, which is beneficial for the society.

Let me give some examples: building a new highway is not essential to anyone. We could use the old roads. I would clearly not pay thousands of dollars in advance for a private firm to build it. However the government takes this money, builds the highway and then I will use it increasing my quality of life both when I drive on it, and by not suffering high traffic in the smaller roads nearby.

Same is true for scientific research. No one would pay, especially in advance to a "fly a man to a Moon" company. The US government taxed the citizens and sent men to the Moon. Now we all enjoy the satellite communication that spawned from the experience gathered during the space race. Our life is better because it happened and no private firm could have made it, not because they can't send people to the Moon (actually they did, as NASA contractors), but because they couldn't get customers who would paid for the service in advance.

Environment protection is another good field for the government. We all enjoy the cleaner air and water, and especially the generations to come will benefit from the preserved resources. But how do you gather customers for it for a private company? Actually here even national governments can fail as the pollution flies over borderlines.

Setting more strict security laws also increase consumption: if we would limit the speed of heavy trucks and enforce shorter driving sessions between resting sessions for truck drivers, the same cargo transfer would need more trucks and more truck drivers: more jobs for drivers and manufacturers. Of course we would have to pay for it as customers, but what we would actually pay for is the decreasing chance to be hit by a truck.

So the third way is actually forcing the people to consume services, therefore creating jobs producing these. The difference between this way and the free market is obvious: "the society" is the biggest consumer, 40-50% of the working hours of the workers of the country would be spent on creating services for it, paid from tax money. The difference between this way and the social-democracy is also apparent: you must work to get money, the government won't feed you. The government pays for services that are good to the whole society instead of giving it to leeches.

The best thing about Society-scale consumption of services is that there is no such thing as "enough security", "enough science", "perfectly educated people" or "perfect environment". Therefore there is no reason for unemployment. The government can always pay for another project that will give jobs to the people while keep increasing the quality of life of the society.

Please note that the above would not need huge government sector or abandoning the values of competition motivated by personal gain of the business owners. For example in the project of "plant forests" the government plant nothing, it buys privately owned forests, so a businessman can buy some land, employ foresters to plant it, and sell it to the government profitably when the trees grown.

We must fight against the social transfers (that gives my money to someone who did nothing for it), but not the taxing which is necessary for the government to pay for the projects that will benefit all of us.

PS: Of course there will always be some inactives. I'll post about how to handle them later (no massacre involved).

PS2: While I could not gather enough data, (link to budget comparison pages would be welcomed) I'd guess, the reason why Scandinavian countries are happy despite high tax is high society-spending relative to welfare.

"Government workers are inactives"

I think one of the reasons why pro-business ideas are not spreading as we wish is the belief of "government workers are inactives". Most pro-business parties are cutting back on government spending and fire as many "useless bureaucrats" as possible, but instead of GDP increase and deficit decrease they get the opposite, allowing socialists to come back to power.

The above statement is completely wrong and it's pretty easy to prove it. If the government would buy or nationalize a company, would the workers (who produce the same product as yesterday) become useless inactives overnight? If the government would privatize one of its facilities (like a prison or hospital), would the formerly "useless bureaucrats" become free-market certified useful workers?

A worker is useless if he doesn't work. It doesn't matter if he works for the government or a private company. The ownership of the company he works for is completely irrelevant. Of course I don't question that it's more likely to find ineffective or completely useless workers in the public sector but there is only a (limited) correlation, not causality. The causes of the less effectivity are problems with the government itself and not with the workers. I mean if they produce low quality services and you are forced to consume them, the problem is with the government forcing you to consume it and not that someone had to make them.

The largest proof of the usefulness of government workers is that we keep demanding better services. More police, better education, better health care. So those who are providing it are indeed useful, even if not optimally effective.

On the top of that, the government worker has proven to have work ethic and certain skills, therefore could be surely used in some more productive work if his current one is found to be ineffective. He is also in competition with other wannabe-workers so by getting the job he proved to be better than some other people. It's like the employees working on failed products like HD-DVD. Maybe their boss was useless, but not them, they did their jobs and they should go find another job with no shame or fear of bad resumee.

For a successful pro-market idea you must see the huge difference between the government worker (who gets your tax money for a work provided to the society, including you), and the inactive (who gets your tax money for nothing). We can and should find ideas to outsource government services to the more efficient private sector, transforming the people working on them into private company workers. We can also demand to terminate some of these services if we find them useless. But considering people useless who create useful things is wrong.

Flat fee in D3 RMAH

As you might heard there will be a flat fee on the Real money auction house. You must pay it when listing. The official reason is to stop people spamming the RMAH with crap. However the reason is irrelevant for us, the important thing is the existence of this fee.


This fee makes listing of low value items pointless. However we don't have to give up on trading these. That's what the gold AH is for. I think many people will ignore the gold AH as "RMAH is the real game". However you can trade gold on the RMAH, so there is no point ignoring the gold and the gold AH. We can get lot of gold listing various low-cost items and then cash our gold in one big purchase.


It is also possible that certain players (or their parents) refuse to use the RMAH. They can only list what they find on the gold AH. You can buy these things up and sell it on the RMAH, if gold itself is undervalued.


So there is no reason to post anything on the RMAH but large quantities of gold, large stack of tradeskill stuff and expensive items. Everything else belongs to the gold AH.


I think the question who makes the more $ in D3 will be decided here, and not at the RMAH. That's just for cashing out our gold.