Valencia nodes: do not panic and have purified water

There is a recent map the Valencia expansion of BDO. Valencia is a huge (about as big as all current territories combined), but the distances between nodes are much larger than we got used to. Several new resources are introduced:

• Elder Tree (836, available): Gorgo Rock Belt, Veteran's Canyon, Iris Canyon
• Pistacio (730, missing): Gorgo Rock Belt, Erdal Farm, Valencia Plantation, Titium Valley
• Bag of muddy water (700, missing): Kunid's Vacation Spot, Leical Falls
• Nutmeg (803, available): Iris Canyon, Bazaar Farmland
• Fig (747, available): Shakatu Farmland, Akman
• Star Anise (1115, missing): Shakatu Farmland
• Freekeh (348, available): Bambu Valley, Valencia Plantation
• Teff (378, available): Atlas Farmland, Fohalam Farm, Titium Valley, Bazaar Farmland, Capotia
• Titanium (1300, missing): Gavinya Great Crater, Gavinya Volcano Zone, Crescent Shrine
• Vanadium (1300, missing): Gavinya Coastal Cliff, Gavinya Volcano Zone
• Cactus Rind (500): Northern Sand Hill, Cactus Rind
• Palm Timber (650, available): Areha Palm Forest, Titium Valley
• Date Palm (611, availabe): Erdal Farm, Valencia Plantation, Crescent Shrine
• New Excavation: Pilgrim's Sanctum: Humility, Roud Sulfur Works

We are talking about 40 work nodes. With main nodes, connections and 2-3 points per nodes we are looking at 120-150 contribution points to cover. You don't have as many ready. You are missing out! Do something now! Your empire is on fire!

No, it's not! This is isn't WoW, the new expansion doesn't obsolete the old World, just extend it. I wrote the prices of the rough materials there for a reason: while they are more expensive than old materials, they aren't "drop everything and run or you'll be poor forever". You can be completely competitive financially - therefore gear wise - without ever going to Valencia. Of curse I don't mean you shouldn't visit this breathtaking land (the most beautiful in any MMO, hands down), I mean you can visit it in your own pace without "falling behind". I rushed in and dropped a bunch of "old nodes" to have CP for Valencia and ran up and down between nodes and hired workers and ... was an idiot. Don't do that! Not because "it's a game", but because in real life you wouldn't sell your home and everything just to resettle in a new country because you heard it's cool. Be reasonable and you'll both be successful inside the game and happy as a player! There are several territories worker-wise. The first, which I would recommend to "capture" is the Altinova zone. Look at these distances:

• Khunid vacation spot: 2200 from Altinova, 3015 from Sand Grain, 3700 from Shakatu
• Veteran's Canyon: 1961 from Altinova: 2300 from Sand Grain, 3382 from Shakatu
• Gorgo Rock Belt: 1550 from Altinova, 2680 from Sand Grain, 3584 from Shakatu

To use them, you must connect the Altinova Gateway and Boulder Outpost, both are 3 pt nodes. From there you can supply these towns. Sand Grain Bazaar is at the end of the "road" if you go from the Gateway to the Outpost and keep going. It is worth exploring, connect its farm and send a get Nutmegs. Or maybe not. It's just one worker and one Nutmeg, you'll live without it.

Shakatu is on the north. It has a very good farm next to it, with 3 good nodes: 2x Fig and 1x Star Anise, the latter is needed for the desert tea. You can go there, but - just like with Sand Grain - no pressure. You'll live if you reach it only next week. If you want to use it, there is a 2 level, 2 CP lodging house in the farm, use that, not the more expensive town ones.

The Southern World I didn't explore, but I dragged myself to Altinova and Ankado Inner Harbor. These are "beyond" the desert, autopathing doesn't work. In the desert you can't use the map, your speed is slow without a camel and you lose HP without water and Tea. Finally, you can't offline travel out, so even if you produce something, it won't magically transport in the cart of a lvl 20 alt. I would strongly recommend not going there without doing the earlier land quests. You'll enjoy it more and you'll be more rich if you go in your own pace.

TSwift meme > GRR Lenny

You didn't see this coming, did you? Lenny sure didn't and had to order his mindless minion to delete the Reddit post about it (link was in the text), as the last thing he wants for it is more publicity. If you want EVE post, read it. If not, continue here.

Important disclaimer: Goons did not offer me any position. But requesting an article on their site where I was previously boycotted to be even mentioned and accepting that article and introducing me as "head of the GRR Goons Project" clearly hints something and not just that Goon leaders themselves know who did the lion's share in evicting them (hint: not Lenny). It seems all they are waiting for is an application.

I'll be honest: I'm very tempted. Not just because kicking Lenny and his multi-hundred thousand-dollars RMT empire would be fun (16T with 5$/B is $80K and this is just promotion expense, imagine their income). Not just because the reactions of Lucas Kell, Syncaine and other CFC trolls would be golden if I'd show up in their camp and above their heads. But because my goal was never to destroy but to change them into more meritocratic (some of my advises are years old) and helping them to change would be a dream coming true.

But sadly I can't help them personally. To take part of an EVE project, I have to play EVE and I have a "don't play EVE Online" page and unfortunately every word there is still true. I still can't recommend anyone to play EVE. If I can't recommend, I can't blog. If I can't blog, I won't play.

I've been playing Black Desert Online for two months and not a single BDO player told me to kill myself or called me the worst person ever lived. I didn't change for the better just because I've downloaded BDO, my play and posts are on the same level as they were in my EVE time. It just seems that the BDO players don't feel the need to call me (or each other) hateful things. Probably many of them think that my posts are worthless and do what reasonable people do: ignore them instead of posting 100+ comments on Reddit how bad they are.

You know what: I like it. I like not having to clean up dozens of blog comments with no content just hate. I like that "local" chat is game-focused and not retarded memes or porn links. And you know what I like the most: few days ago BDO devs made a huge mistake and allowed players to inject images inside the game world. Everyone who entered a city seen the image injected by the owning guild on every wall, every flag, every banner. Imagine what kind of images would appear in EVE! You know what the BDO trolls injected? The faces of Donald Trump, Kanye West, Taylor Swift and that sad frog from Reddit. Was it funny? Sure. Seeing the proud ruthums (desert orcs) holding the banner of TSwift was hilarious. Was it something that devs will handle? Yes of course, the protesters against The Donald are pretty old after a day. But was it offensive, hateful or repulsive? Absolutely not. They could inject gay porn, anime girls, "ur gay pwned", "kill urself Gevlon", swastika, IS flag or any disgusting thing and they did TSwift instead. What a community!

I want to belong there, not to EVE.

This would be a wonderful paragraph to jab against the man who poisoned my personal EVE experience and cheerleads the r/eve trolls, but he can't be responsible all alone, especially since most hate isn't targeted at me, everyone who is a bit visible get his share. Reaching that abysmal amount of toxicity was team effort of players and devs. Well, you made your bed, enjoy sleeping in it! I'm out, with a quote from the Queen-until-patched of Altinova.

BDO business: timber, ore, plywood, ingot

Blog update: I damn the moment I tried the "templates", because Blogger don't have the old plan thing anymore, so I have to live with it. And some people want larger, others want smaller. I have no idea how to change it back to the old which was ugly but worked for everyone as it was practically unformatted text. You can use CTRL+ and CTRL- to increase-decrease the page in your browser.


In Black Desert Online, if you harvest wood by going to the forest and chop a tree, or send a worker to do so, you receive timber. If you or your workers mine, you get ore. Timber and ore are used in several recipes. For example from pine timber you can craft Cedar Float, Florin Fishing Rod, Noble Wagon Flag, Noble Wagon Wheel, Pine Timber Crate, Seleth Longbow, White Horn Bow and Yuria Staff. Or you can process it into pine plank. You can't do anything else with plank then further process into pine plywood. From that, you can make Sturdy Pine Plywood, needed for alchemy stones. You can also make Noble Wagon Cover, part of one of the carts and Serendia Timber Crate which is inferior to the Calpheon one and I doubt anyone makes it. Besides the total lack of purpose of the intermediate material "plank", you can notice how much more usages unprocessed timber has than plywood. Ergo, processing timber into plywood is probably not the most profitable idea.

Except "fixed prices". You probably heard that you can't just make any random price offer in Black Desert. The prices are in fixed ranges to prevent "gauging". While banning very high prices can be explained by fighting goldsellers who would transfer silver by buying the overpriced auction of the RMT buyer, that doesn't explain the lower limits. You can't really goldsell by underpricing materials. If you list them lower, someone else than your RMT buyer snipe them, and even if the buyer gets them (because you did it at 3 AM, totally not raising red flags), he still has no silver, just a bunch of materials. Anyway, you just can't list Pine Plywood below 6300 silver. Which is great to prevent "nolifers undercut" and "work losing value". Pine timber sells around 300 silvers and you can process 5 into 2.5 planks if you have high level of processing. From 10 planks (20 timber), you can make 2.5 plywoods, so 8 timber for a plywood. That's some serious salary: 2400 silvers (-tax) if you are selling the timber and 6300-tax for selling plywood. As you need 4*10 secs for the planks, 1*10 for the plywood and get 2.5, you need 20 secs to make this, so your profit is 456K/hour and you can do it totally AFK. Way to go market regulations!

Except, everyone else noticed that and producing plywood and lists it for easy profit. The result: the whole marketplace page is full of exactly 6300 silver Pine plywoods. 86K were sold since the servers are up, since March 3. That was 120 days ago, so even if we assume that sells are evenly placed (likely not, as at the first times people had low skills and were better of purchasing than processing themselves) then 715 is sold on a day. There are 2400 listed at the moment, so if you want to sell you'll need to wait for 3 days on average. Did I mention that you only have 30 orders?

The end result is people are seeing the numbers, assume profit, produce plywood and end up with no sales. Or, there is an alternative, you can vendor it for 2880 silvers. Since vendors pay no tax, the opportunity is 2400*0.65=1560 silvers from timber sale providing 237K/hour profit. I checked every materials in the game and found the same: plywood/ingot producing is very profitable on paper, but you end up with vendoring the product since you can't sell. Granted, you still make profit, and I guess more pine ends up vendored than as Yuria Staff, but still the ordinary guy who believes that the price means something is out of luck. That 6300 silver means nothing else than "if you need pine plywood very fast, you can get them for 6300", but as most people don't want them very fast, it's meaningless. It tells nothing about selling you pine or about getting plywood efficiently.

The same can be told for all timbers, all ores, cotton, flax and fleece. Except some of them has low vendor price relative to the raw material price, so if you dumbly process your cotton, you are losing money. Ash and Maple timbers, copper and tin ores are in an even worse position: you can't sell the raw, because it's also on the lower limit of the price range and the page is full with unsold. You either process to timber/ingot to vendor, or vendor the raw. So the fixed prices only reached two things: misinforming people and making people sell to the state (vendor) instead of using their materials in production, increasing GDP. Please note that the 1-200K/hour profit for vendoring seems nice, but it comes with an opportunity cost: if you process, you can't sleep in your bed, losing 40 energy per hour, missing out on the profit coming from cooking or alchemy. Also, while "processing can be done AFK", it doesn't mean that you don't have to manage your inventory and while it's a "few minutes", it can add up.

Below you can see a table from the EU-Jordine server with all materials. As you can see most processed materials cannot be sold. The only exception is steel, which is nicely profitable (considering that you can process for an hour while AFK) and is probably missed because most people simply don't know about it. But I guess it won't be long. Other exception is Fir-Birch-Cedar, because of crates, we'll get to them sometimes this week.

The real life value of BDO economy

Blog update: I damn the moment I tried the "templates", because Blogger don't have the old plan thing anymore, so I have to live with it. And some people want larger, others want smaller. I have no idea how to change it back to the old which was ugly but worked for everyone as it was practically unformatted text. You can use CTRL+ and CTRL- to increase-decrease the page in your browser.


Black Desert Online has the most restricted economy I've ever seen. Practically all other games have free market where market exist. Sure, there are completely out-of-market progression aspects, like Soulbound gear in WoW, but people - exactly because of this - don't look at them as wares but as part of the character.

Despite I'm a free market fan, I'm enchanted by the BDO economy more than with any other game economy I encountered with and I had to find a reason why. I started blogging about WoW moneymaking 9 years ago (Jesus!) because I had a naive idea:

• Games are fair in the sense that my mage is just as strong as your mage
• Therefore differences of results can only come from merit
• I can make stupid amount of gold with trading
• I can easily point out that poor players are flat out lazy or stupid (ungemmed-unenchanted cloth wearing warrior)
• Result: people accept that making lot of money is only because of merit and not some unfairness or conspiracy or "born rich"or whatever nonsense leftists explain poverty with

Well, despite I'm closing to my 10 millionth page visit, so built a pretty successful blog, ran great projects and made lots of waves, the main goal was not achieved. Players didn't realize that the free market they encounter in games work the same way as the real life one. Morons and slackers simply dismiss the result: "im playing 4 fun" = "my complete failure in the game tells nothing about me".

The socials simply imported the real life leftist nonsense and created the "myth of nolifer", where results come from something out of the game (your mage has more time to farm than mine). This is a very pervasive myth that resits every kind of disproving. I mean even in games where clear statistics prove how much time was spent it is still claimed. I was called nolifer for doing things that don't even relate to playing time. My EVE income was very often explained on Reddit by "mindless farming for 10 hours a day", despite needed 100-200 hours a day of mindless farming. Socials don't care about logic or proofs, their basic idea is that everyone is equal, therefore being unequal can only come from luck (you can live in the basement of your parents while I am a family man with responsibilities).

So in WoW, EVE and other games people saw the fruits of free market and either covered their ears yelling "fun" or created complete nonsense excuses why it's not what it is. I have to accept that this isn't working, playing/observing video game free markets won't convince anyone who isn't already convinced.

Enters BDO with its "social economy" utopia. It's a place designed by someone who read all the labor union and leftist writer nonsense (I'm surprised that the Calpheon parliament head isn't called Bernie). A place where taxes are high to "stop the AH sharks". A place where prices are limited to "prevent gauging". A place where you can only make 30 market sell orders and only one (bugged) buy order to only allow small businesses. However this utopia turns out to be a pain to those meant to be protected by it. Every time someone cries "there isn't any Liverto on the market and someone just clicked faster when one was finally listed", someone is cursing market regulations. He sees the social democracy at work and he is clearly not amused.

I should have listened to myself earlier and realize that my original plan is wrong: M&S responds to only one stimulus, being kicked in the butt and socials only responds to one: pointing at the M&S. In EVE they could buy their damn frigate and curse the "selfish asshole" who made it available for them. In BDO they can only watch the empty shelves having not only no Liverto, but also no milk, beer, logs, bottle of water that is literally from the nearby river or other common stuff that should be obviously there.

While the M&S will probably just keep crying that "market bots take it from me", a social with functional brain can realize that there isn't enough supply for everyone, so some people must leave empty handed (and that someone is him). Playing with BDO economy has the same effect on a socialist as having to live in North Korea: he sees his utopia at work and its flaws are obvious.

And to make the victory of free market complete: these flaws only hit those who are meant to be protected by them, while the "greedy assholes" like myself are doing fine, exactly because we understand the economy. Free market is simple, regulated market is much more complicated, so understanding economy gives much bigger advantage.

I can't make a guild or group project on this idea, just blogposts, but I invite you to play BDO and see this yourself. I believe the anti-free market BDO is the best advertisement for free markets. Support this game, play this game, create content for it! The more people play it, the better for the free market idea. As for me, I'm presenting moneymaking tips and show how these tips are naturally harmful for other people and this isn't because I'm evil, but because the system rewards such harmful activities. I can always show that in case of free market, I would be better off helping other people instead of doing what I'm doing.


PS: Pearl Abyss (the dev of BDO) was not prepared for the western trolls. When you capture a territory, your guild emblem is shown everywhere in flags. Of course it's bannable to have offensive banners. But nothing stops busy redditors to fill this beautifully animated medieval World with Donald Trump, Tailor Swift and Reddit Frog posters. You see, one can be a troll without "kill yourself" and "ur gay pwnd".

Minipost: Look at me! Look at me! I'm important!

Trolls try to derail my current fight against rewriting history as an narcissist egomaniac crying for attention. There are two problems with that: at first, my claims are true or false on their own, me being a narcissist egomaniac crying for attention is irrelevant. But more importantly Lenny dropped by, and left some comments, including:
You see, he gave me and MOA credit! And he wanted me in, just I rejected his envoy. And he still wants to talk to me! Look, look, that means I'm important! I told you! I'm important! I was right all along! Look at me!

Sorry.
So, if I was just an egomaniac, I would simply accept his comment, maybe ask him to repeat it on Reddit for visibility and go on with my life. Remember, I've left EVE and stopped writing about it. By doing so, I accepted the natural way of things that I'll be totally forgotten after some time. Do you remember any names from the Guiding Hand Social Club theft? Or do you remember the name of the spy who dropped BoB Sov? All names will be forgotten.

I'm not a narcissist egomaniac crying for attention. I'm a narcissist egomaniac crying for attention who found something really nasty: Lenny is rewriting history from "Goons were a bunch of morons and slackers and met their natural fate" to "because of IWI we all united and defeated the Big Bad Goons!".

Why do I hate Falcon so much

I promise this will be my very last EVE post ever (except completely politics-free posts about EVE economy). I am sorry that I spent this week with EVE. I played BDO constantly and from next week will post about it. It's a kind of therapy for me. I'm sorry, I know you didn't need these posts. But I did.

This post grew out from an answer to a comment: "I agree that Falcon went too far in letting his personal opinion surface more than it should have. I don't think anyone can dispute that. However, I'm definitely not convinced that Falcon *hates* you and wants to ruin you."

I started to answer to it and then I realized the answer for a bigger question: why do I hate Falcon so much. Because hell, I do hate him. The short answer is: it doesn't matter if he wanted to ruin me. What matters is that he did ruin me in EVE.

Let's go back to last August: We were after the data analysis phase and MoA was financially stable. We were convinced that Goons can be defeated right now while everyone else were "Goons already won EVE". MoA - despite being rather a small group fighter - did extraordinary efforts to be able to field strategic numbers, proper fleet command and discipline. Due to everyone giving their best and half trillion already spent, they were able to take systems one by one. I really hope that someone links this post in Reddit and I ask you to be that someone, because the following objective facts are unknown to most people. Please click the dotlan links to see that I'm telling the truth, Sov changed to MoA:

• July 27: MoA captured ION-FG in Pure Blind
• Aug 6: MoA captured D2-HOS
• Aug 15: MoA captured Y-C3EQ
• Aug 17: MoA captured 7RM-N0
• Aug 18: MoA captured GA-P6C

Honestly: did you know that someone took several systems in the middle of Goon land in August? Not in Tribute, not in Vale, right in the face of Goons with only an 1000 men alliance.

Goons could not respond because anything besides total blob got massacred and increased MoA morale and participation, while calling for total blob every time MoA formed 50 was unsustainable, especially as they couldn't even get kills or deny content to MoA: while they won the timer with the blob, MoA made another or went on a roam and killed a dozen ratters. Goons were desperate. Their FCs were so frustrated that they openly cried even after a won battle (imagine him when he lost).

We believed that in a few weeks one of following things will happen:

• Goon line members burn out and Goons cannot field enough numbers to blob and MoA evicts them from Pure Blind, defeating the Imperium alone. 1000 PvP-ers and one financer broke the Imperium all alone, total, undisputable victory.
• Other groups see how weak Goons are and jump in the fray, mopping up Goons. While this would be a "war of everyone", the key role of MoA and me were still undisputed.
• Goons can keep up the fleets and stomp out MoA attempts until MoA FCs burn out. This case Goons were not that weak as I expected and we were wrong. Defeat.

What actually happened is that after I wrote the celebration post for the first capture (capturing the first system from those who "already won EVE" is something worth celebrating, right?), Falcon appeared in the reddit copy of that post and dropped his toxic comment. Then he returned two more times, making it absolutely clear that he didn't slip but delivered an "official statement of CCP". The results were disastrous, the MoA players lost motivation while Goons literally made a SotA saying "Falcon knocks Gevlon out". Goon numbers surged, MoA fell. The push died. We can't know (or prove) which of the three outcomes would happen without his action.

Back then I considered it a setback, we recover, build up again and try. The problem is that the RMT gang Lenny/IWI realized how weak Goons are and built their own project to secure their filthy business. While I believed that The Imperium could be defeated with 1000 men and the destruction of SMA by the similar size TISHU hints that I was right, Lenny hired every Tom, Dick and Harriett, regardless of merit or actual activity. At first they wanted to leave MoA out, but it turned out to be impossible as MoA once again started to take PB systems, so they "accepted" MoA in MBC, but always downplayed their efforts, despite they - once again - were fighting in the heart of the Imperium against Goons instead of pwning BASTN and FCON on the edges. On IWI-paid sites their August push or my killboard analysises - despite Lenny grudgingly admitted that he used them - simply never existed.

The point of this stupid overkill (hiring 30K when 1-2 K was needed) was to make every significant group owe the IWI gang a favor, which they badly needed against Bugartist. Their plan worked, they managed to pull most "content creators" under their flag, making them just as immune to bans as The Mittani was in his heyday. Bizarre, but true, the real target of the MBC was't Goons, but Team Security. As The Mittani invited everyone to The Imperium to watch streams, Lenny invited everyone to look bigger in front of CCP. While I am mad at Lenny for not only stealing all credit but rewriting history from "Goons were an M&S farm and got pwned" to "Goons were a terrible enemy and all forces must have united against them", I can't really blame him, he just did what's best for him and his RMT operation. The blame is on Falcon who sabotaged my project in August. If he didn't do it, Goons were defeated by MoA and later joiner groups coming for free and there were nothing left for Lenny.

Of course there is a possiblity that Goons could defeat MoA in August-September and our approach was wrong. No one can know. But one thing can't be questioned: we had the right to be measured on the battlefield against the Imperium forces. EVE is supposed to be between players and not between devs.

I don't care what Falcon meant with those posts. Was he corrupted by Goons? Was he just "edgy"? Did he have a grudge against me? Doesn't matter. What matters is the outcome: my project was completely destroyed before definitive result could arrive. I spent more than two years building it and the previous two stumbling around to learn EVE enough to run it. He, using his Dev powers destroyed it in 2 minutes. Wouldn't you hate him in my place?

Finally, considering that he wasn't removed for this, nor new rules were set to prevent it from repeating, would you play a game where he (or any other dev) can do it again at any moment?

... War Kickstarter reloaded

I'm speechless. When I read the comment of Wilhelm "My understanding is that the article will form the basis of a novelization of the war, to be funded via a Kickstarter, just to completely close the circle on events." I believed it to be meant figuratively. I took it as "they want to be remembered as". And then this happened (screenshotted if it'd disappear like MOA and me from the war against Goons): Oh my! He literally wants to create an "accurate an account of the war". He is repeating everything The Mittani did just want to do better. He distributed a big bunch of money to various opinion leaders to all sing his praise. The reason is obvious: their real money printing site "I want ISK", which is definitely RMTing (source CCP Bugartist) and probably violates several anti-gamble laws and likely never paid a dime of tax can only operate if they are "important content creators". They can count on Falcon, protecting criminals from the community is his thing.

I just have one question left to all who orbited structures, hellcamped "Fabian Defending" Goons in Saranen, hunted the elusive interceptors of Boat for countless hours: is this what you were fighting for?! Did you do all this to replace The Mittani with one who does all he did and RMTs? EN24 and Zebra are already more an "IWI propaganda site" than TMC ever was for The Mittani. I mean Matterall at least didn't personally intervene to save Mittens or the vandals from their well deserved bans.

I didn't smile this wide since Sion gave me his precious tears about the lost Kickstarter. Convincing Reddit that my well documented project never existed is one thing. Creating an official, CCP approved media piece about it when I was a source to gaming media about the Goon war a year before anyone even known Lenny existed will be a very different stunt. I mean we are talking about people outside of EVE's groupthink. People who won't be convinced just because Grath "backs the Fountain war" Telkin and Elsie "Just read @siggonK's piece about the Fountain War Kickstarter" Randolph testifies for Lenny. Everything I did was properly documented in hundreds of blogposts and Google caches and Reddit links. MoA August conquests are also documented and still visible on Dotlan. Erasing us front of the gaming media and canonizing "Goons were docked in Saranen" into "a great war" will be quite an uphill battle.

Since I'm no longer playing EVE and have absolutely no sympathy for CCP since they let Falcon run his little bully campaign (1, 2, 3) against me to save Goons from losing the same war in August, I have nothing to lose and no reason to hold back. This will be a battle I'll treasure just as much as I treasured fighting The Mittani. And this time I won't even have to haul implants or skill injectors, just send mails to editors with a big bunch of archive links and point out that Google finds nothing about Lenny from before March 2016.


Or, maybe I should take the high road and help creating this "accurate an account of the war". Let me write a chapter about a pivotal battle that changed the galaxy forever. Let its title be "Piercing the Veil". Any similarities to the works of other authors are mere coincidences:

The Imperium fleet commander dropped out of warp, 60 warships coming behind him. From the pilot capsule on the bridge of his Raptor class Interceptor, the defending Fleet Commander, Dabigredboat, watched his head-up display populate. Dozens of red-coded ship symbols appeared in rapid succession as the Raptors’s computers sorted out the hostiles. The friendlies were still in warp, according to the readout at the upper left of Boat’s tactical overlay, their ships would remain there for another eight seconds. Plenty of time for him to scope out the strength and displacement of the enemy’s forces. The star was deep into MBC space, more than 15 light years from the Pure Blind region where the major battles were being fought. A safe place to hide a string of Forsaken Hubs. Maybe crank out a few ticks, or a couple of X-types. Or so those idiots thought.

Boat felt himself grin, always a strange sensation in the gel-filled womb of the capsule. Goonswarm was about to unleash a little bit of hell, right here in the MBC's back yard. Predictably, the defending force was camping the gate—the bulk of the enemy ships within a hundred kilometers of the exit—positioned to intercept anything trying to warp to them. It was a good tactic. Against a different commander or another fleet it might have worked. But not against this fleet, and definitely not against Boat. The Raptors’s computers had finished racking and stacking the hostiles. In terms of simple numbers, the two forces were closely matched, but one look at the Imperium fleet composition turned Boat’s grin to something harder and more feral. The stupid bastards had only fielded 8 Interceptors. The rest of the enemy formation was limited to less agile combatants: Chimera class entosis ships and above. Boat had nearly 6x that many Interceptors under his command, and three times the number of fancy hats. The defending fleet must have been scraped together at the last minute, from whatever TEST could find. They couldn’t seriously expect to stop him with such an underpowered formation. His fleet could hit harder, fight longer, and repair itself more quickly. This was going to be a slaughter! He’d hammer the fuck out of TEST’s front line, then break off a formation to jam out some entosis ships that weren't immune. When that little detail was out of the way, he could bring in the real killers. Fourteen FCON carriers were staged at a midpoint cyno, waiting for downtime to jump into Deklein and run away.

Boat took another quick glance at the time readout. His fleet would be coming out of warp in about three seconds. Time to get this party started. He keyed the comm channel and spoke to his other pilots—the words coming not from his mouth, but from the neural link to the speech centers of his brain’s left frontal lobe. “All ships: orbit me and activate modules. Primary target is Crow class interceptor, hostile track alpha-zero-seven. Secondary target is the Slasher, hostile track alpha-one-nine. Engage!”

Before the last word was out, the battle was on. More than 41 GSF, 3 SMA, 10 TNT, 8 FCON, 1 LAWN and 3 Init ships popping up suddenly on his HUD (no RAZOR), appearing just as suddenly on the tactical displays of the enemy. The blood sang in Boat’s ears, his Raptor surging forward into combat; the ship’s sensors, engines, and weapons responding instantaneously to the thought-quick commands of his cerebral cortex. The space around the gate swarmed with waves of launching Imperium drones, angry metallic wasps with death-dealing stings. But then more hostiles landed! And more! Warp out! - he shouted. We're pointed! ... I'm pointed - he continued. Realizing that he'll soon be in his clone station, he uttered his epic words that were retold countless times in the centuries to come, remembering the moment when everything changed forever.

Rewriting history: Wilhelm, the genius

What makes me mad is if I don't understand something. If something don't go as I wanted but understand why, I simply do better next time. I was completely lost how the hell could Lenny claim credit for the fall of Goons. I was posting my plans years ago. I was paying for the top CFC killer for a year. Everyone knew that (and laughed on it as it was clearly impossible). And after everything I predicted came true, just as I wrote it ... a guy comes out of nowhere, claiming that he and alliances I haven't seen on the Goon killboard did it and everyone believes that it was him. This simply did not compute for me.

Then came a very unlikely genius and made it all clear: "My understanding is that the article will form the basis of a novelization of the war, to be funded via a Kickstarter, just to completely close the circle on events."

While it's obviously a parody, the parallel is perfect. The Fountain War Kickstarter was received with outrage because it was a shameless rewrite of history. It pictured Goons as great warriors who won in an epic battle against the odds, while the truth was well-known: TEST had no functioning leadership, barely any FCs and no reliable allies. I was there and we all gave our best and indeed put up a huge fight, but all was in vain and TEST was doomed to fail from the moment Booda unblued HBC. Goons merely jumped on the easy prey. Them being unable to mop TEST up in a week was rather a foreshadow of their current defeat than because TEST had a shot.

The reason people believe Lenny is that his story is much more "Kickstarter-worthy" than mine. In his narrative a hidden mastermind united various groups to stand together in an epic war against a terrible enemy. Everyone - from alliance leaders to line members - can see himself a hero in Lenny's story. He was there when the Evil Goons were finally slain. He has screenshots enthosising LAWN space. He has the combat log to prove that he was part of the pivotal battle of M-OEE8. Even if he was a line member, he mattered. If he was a leader, he was writing history: Gobbins, Vince, Grath, Progod are all heroes to be remembered still the server runs. Of course they happily play the roles of lieutenants for Lenny. If they did half the effort in destroying Goons, Goons would have lost the Fountain War.

The only problem is that Goons didn't even put up a fight. They moved to lowsec the minute they had a hunch that something is happening. They didn't even attempt to protect Vale. For M-O they brought mere 519 people, TEST had more for a moon timer. After M-O, they ran away and their combat activity was limited to interceptor trolling. Their allies - besides CO2 who left when realized that they are mere meatshield - were useless. Hell, "where is RAZOR" was a meme on r/eve. They tried to doublespeak their uselessness as "Fabian Strategy", but everyone laughed on it.

I have no chance to convince significant amount of people about the effects of GRR, because to believe me, one has to also believe the objective truth: Goons were just a bunch of ratters and miners who abandoned their allies and gave up Deklein without a fight. Therefore he - from line member to leader - wasn't an epic fighter, just a glorified ratter ganker... after years of whining how Goons already won EVE. The hate for MoA was exactly because MoA wasn't delusional: they were openly ratter gankers and because MoA fought while everyone else were whining.

Lenny isn't telling a true story only to replace my name with his. Lenny is telling a heroic epic worthy of a Kickstarter novel featuring you as a hero flying against the Big Evil Goons - financed by him. I'm telling a true story and claiming credit for a mere snowball. In this story, you are a simple bandwagoner who jumped on the snowball. No wonder which version people pick.

Of course it also means that I didn't kill them either, even if it was indeed my snowball. Since they were weak, it was only a matter of time before someone start a snowball. Hell, it could even be Lenny. If it was me, I was merely lucky and not Napoleon. My only real result (and no one questioned that) was my killboard analysis predicting and showing the weakness of Goons years before it happened. The only real result of MoA (and no one questioned that) was killing stupid amount of Goons as proof of their lack of PvP ability.

I rest my case. I now fully understand what happened. For you to see the truth only one thing is needed: to read your own posts made between Jan and March. Count how many times have you laughed on docking, SMA-abandoning, Asher-fitting, interceptor trolling Goons! Now ask the question: can anyone be a hero for defeating this crap?! Does kicking this crap really need a huge coalition with a mastermind behind it? Then you realize: you didn't take part in the Invasion of Okinava, but in the Invasion of Kiska. Sucks? Well, find comfort in the fact that I spent two years of proving it's possible, having everyone mocking me for it, and then Lenny taking credit when it turned out that I was right.

Finally: this incident only reinforces that EVE is beyond help without complete management shakeup. Lenny didn't do whatever he did to get fame or prove a point. Otherwise he had a long history of projects, successful and not. He jumped to the spotlight now to become the new Mittani: a monetizer/RMT-er who is too space-important to be banned. This is why he is paying all these opinion leaders to praise his name, this is why he is rewriting the mop-up of the Deklein ratting crap into the war of the century and above all: this is why he goes out of his way to erase me from history while he is giving out credit to every Tom, Dick and Harriett: those guys - like Bobmon - will protect him from Bugartist. I would never do that, even if he'd offer me all the credit and all his trillions. I was always fighting the dev-corrupting monetizers, therefore I'm a threat to him even when I left the game months ago. He does not need to worry now. As long as Falcon is working there, I'm not coming back.

PS: Lenny, IWI and the rest of the filthy RMTing scum shall pray every day that the tenure of Falcon will be long. Because if he is finally fired for lying to media and customers to protect criminals and running a cyberbully campaign against a customer, I might be back. And then I won't care who'll take credit for destroying the I Want ISK "business".

Rewriting history

I've left EVE online after my last project was complete and the game devs were so openly hostile that I interpreted the economy changes as another trick to help their favorites (in retrospect it was probably simple incompetence). The results of GRR seem to speak for themselves, but there are always those who want the glory for nothing. Soon after the Goons were gone and done, those who did absolutely nothing shown up to take credit. Now they posted a convoluted conspiracy theory to somehow prove how them doing absolutely nothing was actually a "fog of war" and how everything clicked in some glorious master plan.

At first, let me give my version in a nutshell.

• I've recognized that "Imperium’s leader might be losing the situational awareness" when they took highsec POCOs, so I hired some highsec mercs to take it from them in early 2014.
• I was surprised how easy it was and completed from zero in 3 months.
• I kept hiring highsec mercs for random killing and gathered killboard data.
• I realized that CFC loses only peanuts in big battles and they are vulnerable only to ratter/hauler hunters. I also found that the group killing them the most is not NC. or PL, but the barely known Mordus Angels, followed by Out of Sight.
• I started supporting MoA financially, with 700B spent overall and their numbers went up, being #1 CFC killer in 2015
• Seeing the utter inability to fight back, we got bold and took their systems in 2015 August. At this point CFC was functionally dead. I love MoA, but if MoA takes your sov, you have no real military power. MoA is (self-identified) as hunter-killer, not a line warrior. From this point anyone with more power than MoA could safely and surely defeat CFC.
• This didn't happen immediately as they got strong and open support from the corrupted dev Falcon and the push died out.
• SMA had a disagreement with IWI who wanted to punch them in the face (and not to defeat them, not to mention the whole Imperium). He did exactly what I preached, hired "no name ratter killers": TISHU
• TISHU absolutely massacred SMA who received no Imperium help and also made a huge publicity drive on Reddit
• Seeing blood in the water more and more groups arrived for easy kills
• CO2 jumped the sinking ship.
• The rest were just useless ratters and couldn't form anything over interceptors. CFC died without putting up a fight.

There is no "big conspiracy and master plan" in this. Every step rationally spawned the next without anyone planning it before. Did I plan TISHU on SMA? Hell no! Did I went to convince IWI to hire them? Absolutely not. But it was quite obvious for him to do what's already working. The fast collapse surprised me, I did expect better fight than this. But above all, this timeline contains no real human genius. It's practically: "Goons were weak, someone saw this and started a snowball".

Well, truth is simple. Rewriting history needs complicated jumps that are in large numbers in that PR article. First thing first: I don't question that Lenny paid 7T. But he paid for only one thing: for the various posters and opinion leaders to give him the credit. The main loophole in the story is Mercenary Coalition itself. It's a non-entity. I couldn't find them on the 2015 GSF killboard. Neither on the CO2 or any other Imperium killboards. The Scope literally killed more CFC than MC. Being a non existent makes them perfect actor for the non-existent master plan of Lenny. They started calling other allies, "Omega Security Syndicate (OSS) was an early joiner", which was a perfect move, since OSS also couldn't be found on the Imperium killboard above Science and Trade Institute (hey, they've beaten The Scope).

But brute force wasn't the only thing our masterminds did. With extreme amount of intelligence gathering (reading my 12 months killboard analysis) they determined that CO2 is the strongest PvP alliance in the CFC after GSF. Also the one the most away from Saranen. Our geniuses did awesome job in "making Imperium believing the coming attacks were nothing more serious than routine harassment by random opportunists". This wasn't that hard as the truth was that the coming attacks were nothing more than routine harassment from random opportunists save for MoA and TISHU. "Individual MBC alliances – from line members to FCs and even to alliance leaders – were no more aware of the overall strategic plans than their opponents" - mostly because there were no plans at all. At this time Lenny was probably not even aware of anything happening. Everything happened because it must have happened: the CFC was weak and collapsed as soon as someone kicked the door.

Their only evidence that they even existed is "The Mittani revealed the Boson leaks to the rest of the GSF directorate (leaks within leaks! Leakception!)". Please note that the irony didn't even miss the author. Please also note that this "evidence" comes from the same Mittani who is so "detached from reality" that he called his coalition to arms against a Gobbins ruse. The most interesting thing is why didn't he defeat this plan right then: by a hostile takeover or kicking of SMA, the CFC could cauterize the bleeding wound and save themselves from the snowball. The truth is that at this point the Imperium was so deteriorated that they couldn't even do that.

The article continues with a bunch of totally unrelated references full of buzzwords and abbreviations to look more scientific. Then it concludes "By the end of November the strategic leadership of the preMBC had sounded out the alliances it would need to conduct a campaign of total war against the Imperium and gained tentative support, pending a demonstration that success was possible." Which is funny because there wasn't a total war against the CFC at any point. There were no invasion fleets, no hellcamps, no grand declarations. The whole WWB was conducted by individual actors. It was like Rome - oh the irony - defeated by various barbarian tribes and not Nazi Germany defeated by the coalition of US+UK+SU. WWB wasn't really a war - as evidenced by the fact that Goons didn't even fight back - it was a mop-up done by everyone and his mother against a hollow shell that was staying afloat only by propaganda and dev corruption.

The really interesting question is why this PR stunt is done? Lenny and IWI were content being invisible for years and one day they woke up and felt the need to destroy the Imperium. Or at least to claim credit for it. Why? Because they are RMT-ers who can only stay in business if they are too big to be banned. Not me saying this, the CCP team security head does. Most "bankers" of IWI were found guilty of RMT, banned for it, but the decision of team security was overruled from above. CCP Bugartist was so sure that they are guilty, that - instead of parroting the party line as Bobmon expected - he flat out called his bosses supporters of RMT-ers, either because he was so upset by their decision, or because he wanted to cover his ass in case the authorities knock at the door of CCP (I'm sure that running an online casino without any permits is illegal. I'm also sure IWI never paid a dime of tax). Anyway, the IWI team must upkeep the appearance that they are so important content creators that they can't be just banned. They literally aspire to the position of The Mittani who made scandal after scandal but survived everything because he was "the space emperor".

As long as everyone is talking about them, they can't be banned for something so lowly as selling ISK. This is how you can beat them: just don't buy their ridiculous narrative that they secretly moved alliances with no killboard to destroy the Imperium. You don't have to believe my narrative either. The objective truth is that the Imperium was a weak collection of ratters and miners who were to die at the moment someone start throwing stones. I really hope and believe it was me and MoA with our 2014-15 campaign. But maybe it was Gobbins with his ruse. Or Stunt Flores slaying them like sheep. Maybe the leaks of the defactors. Maybe even IWI and TISHU. But definitely, absolutely not Lenny and MC.

Wealth inequity is a good thing

I claim something that nobody claimed before: the increasing wealth inequity (the rich is getting richer and the poor is getting poorer) is necessary for the GDP growth of the World. No, I don't mean that it's "righteous", as free market enthusiast often claim, because that's moral term and probably wrong: a doctor saving lives deserve more reward than a media mogul. From laws that allow innovation the wealth inequity grows automatically, but not as a by-product. If we'd do something against it, it would slow down the economic growth.

Why is inequity necessary? Because only a few people actually need material wealth to increase production. A policeman, a teacher or a shop assistant are all hard working people providing essential services, yet they need nothing but themselves to do it. If a New York City cop would arrive to Los Angeles with nothing but what he wears and apply for the LAPD, they could employ him and use him perfectly. On the other hand businessmen need money to be any useful. What could a construction company owner build without a dollar in his pocket? He need machines, he needs raw materials and he needs to pay his employees to build the first building that he sells before he sees any income. Any policy that would take his money and give to the cop would decrease his efficiency without increasing the efficiency of the cop. A construction company with 1 million dollars investment could start more buildings. How could a cop spend a million dollars to become a better cop? Buy a Lamborghini for patrol car? Dubai Police did that and then only use the cars for shows instead of actual pursuit.

Now the above doesn't explain the increased personal spending of the businessmen, but "being human" does. Do you find it "normal" that someone who tosses around a million dollar a day in his job will spend only $30K a year for personal expenses? It's theoretically possible and there are even examples of very modest and frugal billionaires, but most people (from cop to businessmen) want to buy nice things and the businessman can. Don't get me wrong, it is a waste for the World, but since both of them would have a same waste rate, it's better to leave the money with the one who can also spend it well.

Why does the wealth inequity increases? Because with startups and angel investing more and more people take the business route and they also aim at more and more people with their services. The products of the IT sector are in the hands of even the impoverished. Hell, I see smartphones in the hands of refugees. This means that the poor people are giving them their money (becoming poorer) and them receiving money (becoming more rich). But the poor is actually not more poor since he traded his money for something he sees more utility in (if he is a moron and wasted it, that's a different issue).

I believe that in an World of saints the wealth inequity would be total: the working people wouldn't have or need any wealth since they can create value with nothing at their name. They would only need salary to pay rent, buy consumables, entertainment and save for their pension and between-jobs time without actually accumulating anything. All wealth would be in the hands of those who have the best ability to allocate it into projects (please note that being moral saint doesn't make you smart or able to do stuff). Since they would be saints too, they would spend it all on the projects and would live in the same rental building eating the same food as their workers. None of us is a saint, but you get the picture.

Please note that my "Utopia" doesn't actually offers better wealth equity, it offers better wealth equity among neighbors, which has the psychological benefit, without the GDP loss.

Minipost: This was fast

I'm happy to announce that I stay in BDO, though creating a project will be delayed by the return of nameplates.

One question: I set a buy order (Pre-Order Bid), but items still appear on the marketplace and I could actually camp-buy some, way under my pre-order bid. Shouldn't items instantly go to the highest bidder in mail and not appear on the market?

The Ghillie disaster

In the most recent patch notes there is a tiny line "Name Tag will be displayed even if players equip Ghillie suit in node, siege and red battle field." This is a disaster for two reasons. In case you are unfamiliar with it, "Ghillie suit" or "Treant costume" is a cash shop item priced around $30 (depending on what pearl packs you buy) that gave a huge advantage in PvP: hid your nameplate, forcing your enemy to identify you in the battlefield, instead of just looking at a big nameplate.

Update: The price of the Ghillie was refunded!

First thing first: if they don't give a refund at least in pears, I will stop playing instantly and a "Don't play BDO!" goes right to the permanent pages. Selling an expensive power item and then nerfing it into useless vanity is flat out scamming, even if they can lawyer themselves out at court (Note: lawyering doesn't stop me from believing that they act in bad faith, stop dealing with them and warn my readers from ever dealing with them). Imagine a car dealer selling cars and then announce that you can't use them on the road.

I made a mistake when I didn't stop playing EVE in the instant CCP Falcon went publicly Goon-supporter and dragged myself in a game I no longer liked for half a year. Not again, I won't stay wishing and hoping that things get better. They never do. A refund in pearls is bad enough, but it kind of fits to the "we give only coupons as refunds/compensations to customers" from the business world. So here is what I'll do. After this goes up - unless there are automatic refunds - I open a ticket and demand refund. If it's rejected or not answered in 2 weeks, I stop playing and create a "Don't play BDO" page to warn my readers against scammers.

Don't get me wrong, I was never happy that BDO has a cash shop, but the clear results show that customers value in-game power over game access. I had to accept that only by selling items can an MMO stay profitable and decided to spend the usual $180/year ($15/month) on the game I'm playing.

Now the second problem: aside from being a cash shop item, I think Ghillie suit is the best thing that happened in MMO PvP for a long time. I always considered nameplates largely immersion braking and something that makes "target calling" mandatory. Focusing fire on the weakest or most important opponent is obviously the right choice in group combat. Nameplates remove the decision making from players and let a "fleet commander" make the decision, rendering the rest of the group nothing more than bots. In EVE, this was literally the case when players just set their ship to orbit the commander, assigned him their drones and went AFK, allowing the commander to control the movement and fire of 254 other (non-)players. Due to nameplates, individual player skill is secondary to mere obedience. This of course preferred by those who are better in obeying orders than thinking for themselves.

Putting nameplates back to node wars and sieges would make a project-making much harder. If my guild become the #1 in sieges, it would only prove that "Gevlon is a good leader and has awful lot of obedient minions". Thank you, no one cares about my bragging and "be minions" is not something I want to preach. Before you ask, "nameplates" weren't a problem in EVE, because the act of PvP was meaningless. The battle was decided before the first shot, mostly by economy and planning, so it didn't really matter if the players were in AFK Dominixes. If the BDO battles will be similarly economy-based (gear-based) than I can have a project. If it's about "who calls the names of the enemy wizards first" contest, not much.

Of course I'm still hoping that things will go well: they retract the change or they refund Ghillie buyers and the battles will be about planning and organizing and not about target calling. But I am realistic and got enough disappointments already from shady/corrupted devs, so I draw the line here, mostly for myself to avoid another half year of making up excuses why do I play a game I know to be bad.


PS: as it is currently, I like the game and play happily. I could adapt to the other changes already, for example I figured out what to do with my energy no longer needed for processing:

Moron investment in large

When I started blogging about in-game moneymaking, I was pretty naive. I assumed that people who don't make money are simply uninformed, maybe young and as they see my results, they'll learn my methods and while doing so, get some rudimentary ideas how real World business works. Of course the truth is that most of them are morons and slackers who actively avoid learning anything. Slackers just stay poor and claim "i play 4 fun". In EVE this has a huge cult, centered around frigate PvP which - in their myths - is awesome fun, instead of just "I can't afford any better". Morons on the other hand either grind their money or adopt completely stupid methods (like 0.01-ing) and openly preach their ridiculous ideas. I made peace with the fact that most people - even if exposed to obvious evidence - choose to do it the wrong way. But today I saw something outlandishly moronic and must share.

In the latest Black Desert Online patch, energy usage will be removed from processing, where you process raw timber into planks or ore into melted shard and so on. This is dumb if you ask me. The energy usage had two effects: at first made people choose between processing and doing other actions (gathering, cooking, investing energy into grinding nodes). Processing was a profession in itself with its masters who learned the skill to decrease energy usage. Secondly it stopped people from processing all day, leaving place for less skilled processers. After the patch players with low processing skills are better off selling their timber to an Artisan and buying planks back as he can make so much more planks from the same timber that it is worth paying the tax twice. A new player will have to level processing at loss.

Skilled processers are in large numbers (Artisan 1 is enough to be on the Cooking toplist, Professional 7 for Alchemy, but for Processing, you need Artisan 4). Lots of processers with no limit on how much they can work means that processed materials won't be much more expensive than raw materials. Since the 33% sales tax is still here, no processer can compete with processing my own timber. So processing will go from "best thing to do with your energy" to "well, if you have enough AFK time, do it for a few silvers". Not the best time to invest into it, right? Well, tell this to those who bought all of the raw materials out:
Let's add the fixed price ranges of BDO to make a perfect storm of moronism. A plank (melted shard) process needs 5 timber (ore) and an artisan processer can get 2.5 planks from one run. So the equilibrium price - assuming processing is free - is that the plank costs 2x more than the timber. Currently - with processing costing energy - it costs 4x more. The price ranges are fixed around these numbers. So when all these Einsteins dump their "free" planks after the patch, they'll be forced to sell for 3-4x higher than the timber as that will be the range minimum. There will be tens of thousands of planks listed on the range minimum with no one buying as they can just buy the timber for 1/3 price and process themselves! Oh, did I forgot that people stockpiled stupid amount of timber and ore because they expected this change or some other and didn't vendor them like I did (and they were right). So it's not like there will be shortage of timber after the patch.

Let's summarize the business plan of Moron Investment LDT:

1. Spend awful lot of liquid money to buy ore/timber on max price when everyone has awful lot stockpiled already
2. Spend days processing it
3. List it on an artificially high forced price while there is a cheaper alternative for prospective buyers
4. Profit???

What did I do?
I used to sell them for half as much to vendors, so I'm happy. It is possible that I could get more for them in a few days, while the "fool's gold rush" is still on. But I rather take safe moderate over risky many. With this sale I finally have a safety blanket:
I think a big bunch of morons will soon learn that if you are doing something that every Tom, Dick and Harriett can, you can only expect minimal wage. You need to sit on a limited resource or have skills that makes you a limited resource to command premium. Being able to leave the computer running on processing screen isn't that limited.

If you don't like to grind, DON'T!

Adam triggered this post, but it's been around since my WoW times. Actually my whole business idea was made around "the devil may grind". I always looked down on those who kill mobs for pitiful amounts, EVE ratters being the most pathetic of all with their 100M/hour while I made 2000 in complete safety.

But in some games you "must" grind and Adam thinks BDO is such. It's not. I haven't killed any mob besides Red Nose and Muskan in the last week. I also just downsized my daily questing by removing all normal dailies (that only give energy and contribution) and the Velia cooking dailies, leaving only Olvia alchemy and Olvia cooking. They are super fast and my alchemy isn't Artisan. But instead of bragging let me tell how not to grind:

• Identify what kind of endgame you want to do and evaluate every character progression way accordingly. If something doesn't help that progression, don't grind it! For example I'm planning to participate in node wars (assuming stuff), so PvP power of my character is important for me. But instead of believing "u must be geared" (meaning Best in Slot items everywhere in the jargon of mindless grinders), I went to Red Battlefield and found that I'm pretty competitive on lvl 52 with green gear. Unless Red Nose throws his armor on me, my armor stays green 2xHeve + 2x Steel Taritas. The only thing I'll replace is my Yuria Blade for increased accuracy Liverto. On the other hand I really wanted Ultimate: Divine Power, so I bit the bullet and grinded the damn Elrics. (It just get buffed, I don't know why) After I hit 54, I didn't see a single one of them.
• Check if the grind actually gives anything meaningful. Cooking is my main skill, I make over 1000 beers a day, so its energy efficiency and multiples are important for me. Hence I started the cooking dailies. Now I've found that a full round of Velia dailies give me 1% increase towards Artisan 9, so I'll have to do them 5 months before hitting Master level. Screw that! I'll keep slowly leveling on beer, Sute Tea and such and the much faster Olvia dailies.
• "Catchup mechanisms" (blatant nerfs to cater to M&S) are implemented in every game and now BDO got hit hard: processing won't consume energy, making energy itself is a pretty useless mechanic (unless they plan to make sub-node investments do something). Those who farmed knowledges to increase their max energy are now out of luck. The more one farmed, the more he lost. Another good reason to never grind more than absolutely necessary. Same for the "infinite mastery" skills that rewarded reaching levels over 55 now handed out over 50. Despite I condemn all nerfs, I wish to be a fly on the wall when Mr lvl 58+ reads this. Because of this...
• Check yourself against other players. BDO have direct rankings. If you are above average in X, you have little to fear as those below you will whine first if low X is a problem and X will get a nerf. My Wealth level is in the A grade, meaning that if money will be a problem for me, it'll be a huge problem for the 80% below me. My Cooking rank shows that Velia dailies were not "absolutely necessary":

If you keep these in mind, you'll resist the evil sirenes singing "u need 2 make effort". Actually, they aren't evil. They are dumb and strongly believe in their dumb idea that "u need moar [whatever]". They will be quite unpleasantly surprised if the node wars turn out to be any competitive.

Seriously, don't be this guy!

PS: me not grinding levels isn't entirely true. My main didn't. But - expecting increased weight capacity - I gave my 300 APDP gear to my lvl 26 alt and went to Monastery and oneshotted everything except violents who died in a Spear-SoJ1-2-3. Went to Bandits: I couldn't pull them fast enough. Went to Khruto Cave: too low accuracy to hit them, but they couldn't hit me either. XP came in ridiculous amounts, levelups in 20 minutes. This was a valuable test for my leveling guide, but gave too little weight capacity to be any rewarding, so I stopped leveling my alts, except the smallest one who went from 11 to 17.

PS2: Don't buy Gillie suit, they just nerf it into pointless vanity. A pretty expensive one I add, I really hope there will be a refund, even if just for pearls.

"Quality of life" = power

I purchased some "quality of life" improvements in Black Desert Online, like more storage slots in Heidel, more weight for my main, more stable slots in Velia and Olvia. I also bought some backpack slots with Loyalty points (which are coming slowly and you can buy instantly with money). I bought lodging practically everywhere, which is equal to buying contribution points. And I bought a horse ranch from contribution points for more storage carts (horse slots are available for money too).

Did any of these directly made me more powerful? No. Did they help me a lot to increase my earning power? Yes, so I get more in-game money now that I have more workers and can do more production without running out of slots. But hey, that's just in-game money and you can grind it, since your time is free! This time I don't argue with this nonsense, because the point isn't what you can grind, the point is that I earn more in-game money after paying real money than I did before. So I clearly became more powerful than I was.

"Quality of life" purchases remove interruptions from play, therefore make you be able to gain power more efficiently. Sure, it's still me who gains the power, but I do it faster now. So such payments are a multiplier. Your power gain is skill_gain*(1+payment_bonus). The first is probably more important, but ignoring the second is delusion. Imagine a drug that makes 1 hour training for an athlete as effective as 1.5 hours of training without it. It's just quality of life, as the athlete still have to train, right? Oh wait, steroids do just that and they are banned from competitive athletics.

Why isn't this obvious? Because of social self-defending delusions. If I'm a paying player, it feels much better to believe that my "skillz" earned my power. It isn't completely wrong, since you need something to multiply. Accepting that I'm progressing faster than Joe can easily be because I'm paying more cuts into my ego, so I don't believe that, I belittle payment as "just some quality of life". Those who don't pay do the same belittling because if they'd accept the truth, their rational options would be "pay" and "quit" and they want neither. On the other hand they are also free to call everyone ahead of them as "wallet warriors", regardless of their actual payment, their skill and the fact that no one forced anyone to play with a pay-to-win game.

I don't delude myself: my payment made me more powerful than an equally skilled but non-paying player. I'm not happy about this, but I have to accept the scientific result. After that my options are "not playing at all" and "playing a P2W game". Of course I can choose a "limited" P2W game, like Black Desert, where you can only spend a limited amount of money and this limit is in the range of 1 year of WoW subscription. In unlimited P2W games you can always buy something that makes you more powerful than the guy who paid a bit less. You can't pay a million dollars on BDO even if you buy everything with any function (I doubt if you can pay a thousand). On the other hand you can pay a million dollars on EVE, probably even get a special deal around $10/PLEX, getting 100K PLEX-es that can be sold for 90T, making you able to destroy two or three undefeatable empires. Or resurrect Goons. Or whatever you want, unless someone spending 1.1M is stopping you.

Talking about buying power: 5M is something that you can get in a day effortlessly from a lazily set up worker empire. Or something that you can grind in an hour or two with a good group in a max level Sausan Garrison node. Who the hell pays $11 for that? If it's a representative goldseller price, than my BDO income already beats my EVE income in goldseller $. I mean I could earn about 2B per hour in EVE and goldsellers sell that for $13. I'm surprised.

My utopia: free market, no tax, full employment, low Gini

Permanent page here, you can comment on this post. I try to answer every (non-retarded) question.

Minipost: the best wild herb farming spot

Since the AH is often void of Wild Grass and Dry Mane Grass, you must go out and gather. If you are in a bushy plain, you find Wild Herbs pretty often. But imagine a spot where they grow right next to each other in such abundance that the first already respawned when you finish with the last? That would be a good spot, right? Well, behold 17 Wild herbs on one screenshot:
Honestly, would you ever consider looking for Wild Herbs in the Parliament balcony?

Very fast dailies

Daily quests are a big source of annoyment: if you don't do them you lose valuable rewards. If you do them, you are bored by their repetitiveness. However I managed to find a way to very quickly complete 7 alchemy, a processing and 8 cooking dailies which provide skill XP and contribution points. Alchemy is an underrated skill in BDO, despite the alchemy stone is a stronger gear enhancement than one more necklace (more about stones later).

So I ride to Olvia and place my mount in the stables. It has +1 slots from the item shop (300 pearls for both Olvia and Velia), but that's far from mandatory, you can save it by leaving your mount and having a "gear cart" in Western Guard camp and go Olvia on foot. So first I take out the "alchemy result" cart: I put everything from the cart to my inventory and deposit gear, potions and other stuff not needed for alchemy or cooking. Then I open the alchemy cart: If I pick the content left from right, they are placed in the same order to my inventory. Then all I need to do is pick the quests and start doing alchemy in my residence. Just click the materials from left to right and press the button to create the quest items:
Alchemy is suffering from the constant lack of wild grass and purified water. The latter can be substituted by distilled water. Visit the market regularly and buy any River, Distilled and Purified water you can touch. Anything is better than standing by the river for an hour picking water. Wild grass shortage is solved by the fact that only the first quest needs it and its reward is Wild grass, so you can run this forever if you get the first batch. The reagents for the quests is provided by the first quest. Rough stone can also be a problem, but sometimes someone dumps it on the market. Grab it!

So, after I completed the quests, I put the materials back to the cart in the same order. Then I pick the food wagon and remove its contents, complete the quests including the Fragrant Jerky one and put them back:
Then I take out the alchemy result wagon once again, remove the gear, put back the results and put the wagon back to the stables. When I'll have a big bunch of results, I take them to the market and collector NPCs. I ride to Velia where I only need 2 wagons, but have a third, for even more convenience. I put the gear to the third, empty one. Than take out the food wagon. Completing the quests is fast, as once again I just have to click left to right:


After the quests are done, I put the materials back and take out the results wagon and add all the cooking results from the quests:
Then I pick the gear from the empty wagon and leave. While setting up these wagons took some time and about 4M silver, they'll serve me for months. I'd like to stress that doing these dailies isn't limited by combat level, you can do it as lvl 20 and you should! Besides the life skill XP that will get you lot of money, the results and byproduct collectibles give lot of silver and contribution points which allow you to buy gear. I strongly suggest to prioritize life skills over combat during leveling, as leveling is much smoother when you have 150 AP+DP at lvl 25 and 250 at lvl 40 and the workers and life skill products can make that happen!

Why the top 1% gets more and more wealth? (and more free market evidence)

It's well known that the top 1% gets more and more rich, currently owning half the wealth of the World. Why this happened, is it a problem and can it be fixed if it is?

The answer for the first is trivial: people of all wealth groups are buying products and services that mostly contribute to the income of the top 1%. If you go to the local restaurant or buy a no-name shoe, you likely support middle class people. If you buy a smartphone, a ticket for a blockbuster movie or invest your money into financial instruments, your payment will find its way to some IT billionaire, a Hollywood bigshot or a Wall Street shark. No one forces you to do the latter, but you do it, probably because you value their product higher than what the local community could offer.

It's not a problem for the World GDP. The money goes to the best producers to encourage and enable them to produce even more and better. If Apple couldn't make a fortune with the first Iphone, there wouldn't be current Iphone. Is it a problem to you? Probably yes, because - unless you work in the industries controlled by the 1% - you won't even get a slice from the sales! The car mechanic who doesn't buy a new car from his salary but an Iphone kills his own job. I've seen this in Hungary (and all in Eastern Europe) in the early 90-es: as soon as better quality Western products were available, no one bought Eastern ones, so the companies went bankrupt and the people got unemployed (green line: GDP as % of 2006):
Can we fix this? Can we make steps for wealth equity? Only by treating the source: people buying higher quality (or at least higher "brand") products that they can produce, therefore killing their own jobs. The perfect (but completely unfeasible) solution would be barter system: workers and shareholders don't get money, but products of their company and they have to trade for other products. So not everyone can run to the Iphone store on payday, the only way to get an Iphone is to find an Apple shareholder or worker and barter your product for an Iphone, guaranteeing that either someone (the Iphone owner) takes your product, keeping you in your job or an Iphone is not purchased, preventing further wealth concentration.

The implementable version is my Utopia: a system of several different "tier" regions with free movement of people and goods between them, but different government spendings, regulation and different taxes which aren't for income, sales, wealth or profit but poll taxes: "Tier 1 territory, you must pay $100K/year to live here but there are high quality schools, lots of cops and high quality demand for products" down to "Tier 5 territory, no tax at all, but only minimal education, few cops and only clearly dangerous products and conditions are banned". All territories would have their own currency, so someone working in T2 land can only buy T1 products if he finds someone who trades his T2 currency for T1 currency. If people in a lower tier land want to buy T1 goods en-masse, they devalue their currency and get stopped by the insane prices of T1 products due to the high T1/T2 currency rates, while their products become very cheap and start to sell in other lands.


PS: Black Desert Online provided another evidence how far non-free market can sink: Beer is the most sold item in BDO, because it's so important. It fuels the workers who gather practically everything. Without beer, all the production falls back to the stone age: players gathering raw materials with their hands. And it's missing from the marketplace. Why? Because its price is locked in a low range, so it's not profitable to produce it for sale. I make more money from smelting Iron Ore into shards than I could by making beer. So I make it just for myself. If you can't make it, or forgot to make it, you are out of luck, because even its materials are often missing from the marketplace. Of course if there was proper free market where the price is set higher by the high demand, I'd make beer for sale.

Price discrimination

Tobold is upset about region coding of DVDs and want to bypass it by cracking the device. What he wants is understandable: why should he pay more for the very same content than a guy in Asia?

He is wrong though. Regardless of being obviously unfair, price discrimination is a good thing and everyone - including those who pay high price - would be worse off if it was banned or en-mass circumvented by customers. To understand why, we must understand how it works: different groups of customers (or even individual customers in case of personally marketed goods) are offered different prices depending on their assumed paying ability. For example a shop gives discount to students or an airline to families or a medicine is cheaper in a third world country. They can do it because all products have "already sunk" and "not yet sunk" cost which is connected to fixed and variable costs, but not equal: all fixed costs are already sunk, but not all already sunk cost is fixed, see first example below.

The seller gains money if he sells a unit of product over its "not yet sunk" cost. Let me give a some of examples:

• If too many units were produced, their variable costs are sunk and selling a unit has zero opportunity cost. If your warehouse is full of unsold products, selling them at any price is better than trashing it.
• The aircraft will fly anyway, if you get passengers to the empty seats for any price, you get money
• The film is already made and producing one more DVD - or rather bandwidth for streaming it - has few cents of cost, so selling a copy for more than a few cents is profit.
• Medicine is already researched, producing one more pill and transporting it to Africa costs a few cents, so the cents coming from poor Africans are profit - hell, giving them for free is profit because of brand marketing value.

You might ask that if it's true, why don't they sell all units for over this cost? Because in order to keep the company afloat, their total income must cover the total production and development costs plus some profit. If they sell all of it for a few cents, they go bankrupt. So someone must pay more than a few cents.

Why you? Because you can afford it and the African guy / family guy / student cannot. So it's this way or no way. Of course, in the name of fairness, you can say "no way", but please consider the consequences. Let's say that the product costs $100M to develop and $0.1 to produce one more unit. Now they price it at $10 in US/EU and $1 in the third world, getting 10M sales both places, providing 110M income over 102M costs. If you'd stop them from doing it, they'd get 100M income over 101M costs, an unsustainable plan, so they must price the product higher (practically $11) to remain in business. Bang! While the Africans won't get anything, you get to pay their part! But you shown that no one gets unfair advantage over you, way to go, moron!

The point of price discrimination is to share the costs of production among the customers according to their ability to carry it. It's like pushing a broken down car: if your 8 years old child helps pushing it, he'll surely carry only a small part, but even this small part is more than nothing and helps. Letting a weaker one carry less weight is not welfare. Welfare is when you carry him! The poor African who pays $1 for a drug you pay $20 while the variable cost of a pill is $0.1 is still helping the production by $0.9, while a welfare recipient simply takes your tax.

For the same reason, - despite being a Randian free market fan - I'm an ardent supporter of the "price discrimination of government" aka progressive taxation. A poor worker still produces GDP and supports himself so he is a useful member of the society and we shall accept whatever little tax he can pay. The alternative is that we demand him the same tax as we pay, but he can't pay that and goes unemployed and we just got one more welfare leech!


PS: I did a group Red Nose for the first time with me and one person having 5 scrolls and other 3 having 4 scrolls (22 together). I got 58 seals, 17 armor stones, 8 weapon stones and 1M in vendortrash and crystals. All together about 10.6M. Not bad, but of course most of it came from my own quests, so doing it in group isn't mandatory, but definitely nice and fast ... after creating the party. Hint: arrive with a cart and do processing while waiting. When everyone arrived, put the materials to the cart. Then also put the vendortrash into the cart between pulls.

r/blackdesertonline/ vs r/eve

As I'm playing now BDO, I started reading r/blackdesertonline/. It's very different from r/eve: there are no memes, no "ur gay pwnd" and absolutely no politics and politically motivated up/downvoting. It's informative, civilized and almost sterile. Like I'd read some internal forum of a real world community. r/eve on the other hand is ... r/eve. We all remember Sion's meltdown over its unique culture.

It's a mystery to me. Both pages are written by "redditors" and "gamers", yet they are world apart. I can think of three reasons, but maybe I'm wrong and wish to hear your input:

1. Moderators: maybe the BDO mods are less tolerant about pointless crap and remove "fofofo" class "contributions" to the forum. Another version of the same: the automoderator is set aggressive and downvoted posts (mostly crap) is hidden fast enough before it spawns flames.
2. The playerbase is more mature. While EVE players are full of themselves and believe to be the top of gaming, actually many of them are "orbit/F1" skilled, SRP leeching lolkids whose posting contribution is at similar level. Other group of players - while skilled - are flat out assholes who play EVE only for the easy tears and their posting is made in similar manner: to annoy people.
3. Lack of reason to hate: since the Guild vs Guild feature is not yet implemented, there can be no grudges between groups. The other poster is just another player of the game the first poster loves.

I know it's not much of a post and I failed to provide anything useful, this is the rare case when I saw something interesting but couldn't solve it myself. So please help me.

PS: I hate the enchanting RNG. Using failstacks of my farming Axion Shield, I tried to make some duo accessories. I managed to lose 6!!! Pri+normal Ridell earrings, a pri+normal Rhutum Elite belt with nothing but more failstacks. With my Pri Red Coral ring, I wanted to be sure, so I elevated failstacks to the limit: 35. Or at least tried, because instead of the 35th stack, I got my +15 Axion. Probably would have lost the ring anyway. So - unless I accidently get 35 stacks somehow by doing something I can't see now, I won't enchant for duo.

PS2: After this, I removed my contribution point from the upgraded Elric Shrine. I'll be damned if I ever grind again. I will quest in Valencia, so slowly will gain XP. But if I never be 55, I can live with that. I cannot live with seeing one more Elric in my life:
Grinding Elrics from lvl 51.5 (from normal play) to 52: 2 hours
Gringing Elrics from lvl 52 to 53: 5 hours
Grinding Elrics from lvl 53 to 54: 7 hours
Going to Red Battlefield, sneak by the wall near the enemy blob, Rage Absorption, Guard, Righteous Charge into the middle of it and casting Divine Power Ultimate on the head of 2 wizzards, a ranger and 2 others and pushing the score by 300: worth every Elric.