The 0.01 trap

The 0.01 punks are not only in a cartel. They are leaving serious money on the table, despite they do what they do with the exact purpose to leave none. Their logic is simple: I want to sell for the highest available price. I can't sell higher than the other guy (because then he sells), so I sell for 0.01 lower. Logical, right?

Only for someone with the economy knowledge of a Guristas NPC. The 0.01 punks assume that sells and buys happens anyway, just the price changes. They completely ignore price elasticity.

Most items in MMOs are very price-flexible. After all everything in a video game is luxury product as playing video games is a luxury. You can't force players to accept your price, just like you can't force people to accept high refreshment prices. If Coca and Pepsi would go cartel and sell a liter of cola for $100, people would simply drink water. Also, they can't be forced to accept low buy prices: they simply stop farming it. While in real life, working has overhead and momentum (can't turn a bakery into a steel mill overnight), in MMOs an NPC grinder can change to mission running in a second. Also, he can just choose to not grind anything. Not like he'll be evicted from his station or his character starve to death.

0.01-ing is so prevalent among economically uneducated population that simple sellers and buyers (people who farmed the item for sale or buy for consumption) consider it the normal pricing. Of course they are defeated by professional (or botter) AH-campers, so they sell/buy nothing. They give up and sell to a buy order or buy from a sell order, just as the AH-camper bunch wanted. This means that they control the prices and they try to keep the buy and sell orders as far from each other as possible.

Since the buy orders are low, the farmers (who are more flexible than consumers) react by farming something else. This decreases the amount of items resulting an overdemand from consumers. They buy out the sell orders, so the next 0.01 guy can make his sell much higher, followed by the others. Since the difference between buy and sell orders grown, more and more 0.01 punks come to trade the item. If you see 20 buy orders for 50M and 30 for 150M, you see the result of this behavior. These wonderful creatures in their quest to leave no money on the table left almost all of it there. There are only a few items circulating and dozens of punks are undercutting each other, camping the AH for those 1-2 sells/day. Farmers find the item crap (due to low buy price) and buyers go cry on the forums for the developer to stop the campers.

Here I come with red underwear outside of my pants and big S on my chest with two vertical lines placed on it. Instead of placing the 21st buy order at 50000000.26 ISK, I place mine at 60M. The crowd follows. A day later I refresh to 70M. They probably curse me for ruining it for all of them. Next day: 80M. And something weird happens: the buy orders start to fill up. The farmers find 80M worthy of selling. Of course for 150M there are barely any buyers so all 0.01 guys start to accumulate items. After a few days they no longer place buy orders as they already have a dozen of the damn thing and still sold none. Then finally I get my first item which I should relist for 149999999.56 according to them. Instead I start with 140M. Then 130 and so on until I sell. The lower the prices are, the more buyers come.

At the end of the intervention I buy for 90M and sell for 110M clear from interference from the 0.01 guys. After all, who wants to camp the AH for 20M profit? Mining Veldspar pays better.

The funny thing is that I don't have any superpowers to break down the "evil capitalism". Anyone could break it. The farmer guy could list his wares at 100M instead of 149999999.85. He just don't, as he don't want to leave money on the table. The buyer guy could break it by setting a buy order at 100. But he won't as he either don't want to leave money on the table and go for 50000000.56 or buys from a sell order. Finally other businessmen could break it but they don't as they don't want to leave money on the table.

EVE is old enough and with buy orders well-designed enough to have an efficient economy. It is just too damn littered with morons who can't see further than their nose. But I'm not complaining. If they had brains, I wouldn't make 4 PLEX a day.

Finally, who else could be the moron of the day than the 0.01 punk who spent 40M to buy and sell just to figure out to whom shall he prove his utter idiocy. Thanks Mike for the screenshot:

Of course if someone sends you such moron letters, feel free to send it to me.


Thursday morning report: 85.0B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).

The key to riches: high re-investment rate

I got a very good comment to my Marie Antoinette post. My return on investment (how much ISK I make from 1M capital) isn't especially high, but I have an insane re-investment rate and that explains my really high income.

I mean I made 72B and spent only 3.6B on anything but making more money: 1.5B on playing for free on main for myself and my girlfriend, 1.1 spent on the Logi/Triage pilot and 1.0 on the titan pilot. The rest of the money were spent on creating more money in some way (trading, Rorqual industrial, selling a Nyx pilot). That's 95% re-investment rate.

The most obvious advice that any rich person would give you is: "spend less than you earn and invest the rest". If someone makes just $30K a year and invests 33% of it into a 5% yearly profit instrument, he'll be a millionaire in 37 years, so if he does it in his active life, he has a really nice pension fund. If someone makes $100K and settles with living on 20, investing the rest, he'll be a millionaire in ten years, and will have a 9M pension fund.

Most people don't invest so much and prefers to live a wealthy life now. Also, real life has must-be costs as you must eat even if you know that a dollar saved today is 7 dollars without any work by the time of retirement. In a game there aren't such costs. You can save almost all of your income. Most people just don't. They spend it on whatever they like or stop generating wealth when their wallet isn't empty.

Of course I'm not advocating my 95% reinvestment rate. But 50% is a reachable amount. To keep the books easy, I'd suggest a dedicated seller alt who lives in Jita. Such char can be near-maxed from 500M SP and a day running around for standings. You contract the ore, mission loot or whatever you gain by your moneymaking profession to this char. This char sends half of the income back to your main for spending. The other half stays there and only used for investments made to help you make money. It doesn't matter what way you use to make money, you'll see your income skyrocketing after this. For example you were mining but after you saved half income, you could soon start a second account for an Orca pilot who boosts, holds ore and protects your Hulk by shield transporters. If you were missioning, a logi second account can increase your income greatly. The point is to spend every second ISK you earn on the process of earning more. Soon you'll have more than you can spend.


Thursday morning report: 69.1B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.1 spent on logi, 1.0 on Titan, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx)

Permanent undercutting

The deep undercutting strategy is usually considered an aggressive, market-PvP way. You destroy the profit for everyone, making them leave. It works wonders on 0.01 ISK-ers as they are utilizing time to get profit. If they are not making any, they lose lot of time for nothing while you lose only a little.

However it doesn't work all the time. Some of them are just persistent. They don't play for the ISK, they 0.01 just for the sake of PvP. To feel like the king of Jita. Others look back later when you'd try to cash in. A third is not a single person but a collective of random guys who are not so dumb to sell to a laughable buy order but not so smart either to do anything more than check market details and type in the current lowerst order -0.01. You clearly can't scare them off. Of course you shouldn't give up the market to such competitors. Behold the permanent undercutting method. It's purely PvE, ignores the other sellers as players, just treat them as factors in an economic situation.

The system is based on the elastic supply and demand curve. In simple terms: if the sell price decreases, the sell volume goes up because people who couldn't afford the old price buy now. If the buy price increases, the volume goes up because more and more people find the item worthy of farming/hauling/buying from LP. Obviously the increases can't go on forever as the sell price can't be below the buy price. We can conclude that the volume is highest when the sell and buy price is the same, which is another economy 101 statement.

Obviously if the buy and sell prices are the same, the trader has no profit. Actually you have no profit if they are within the tax + broker_fee range. But usually they are very far from each other. The permanent undercutting method is the following: when you place a new buy or sell order, set it close to the existing one. Of course not 0.01 but the nearest million. When updating the price, check how many items are undercutting you. One seller with 100 items is more problematic than 10 with 1. Depending on the amount of undercutters (most of them will 0.01), make your cut, about 2-20% of the price difference of buys and sells. So if the sell is 150M, the buy is 100 and I'm undercut by a single guy with a single item, I undercut him by 1-2M. If several undercut me, I undercut by 5M. If I have to scroll to find my order or find a large-volume order above me, I undercut by 10M.

The most important part is that to wait between price updates. At least half day, but a whole is maybe better. You can effectively trade even if you update only few times a week. If you check back in 10 mins, you'll find it undercut by several 0.01, you cut again by 5-10M, few more cycles and you destroyed the profit. The point is not to sell before the 0.01 punks. That's impossible. The point of decreasing the sell price is to increase the sell volume to the point where the buyers buy out all the 0.01 punks above you and you.

You can claim that you won't sell anything since the 0.01 punks are having 0.01 buy orders above you too so they constantly buy and sell. This is technically true, but irrelevant. The buyers and sellers are not constant streams so there are always micro-swings in the market. This hour 10 guys bought and 2 sold, next hour 3 v 7. When the buyers are over-represented, the sell orders are bought out and the buy orders can't keep up. When sellers are over-represented, the opposite happens.

To make it better, the 0.01 punk utilizes his time to gain trades. Your profit/hour is (sell-buy-tax&fee)/10 seconds as you can set up a buy/sell order or update it in 10 seconds. His profit is (sell-buy-tax&fee)/time_spent_camping. As you keep cutting the price you find that after a point you don't need to undercut anymore as they choose to wait you out. Then you sell first. It usually happens with me below 4% sell-buy difference. So Accounting 5 and low broker fees are a must.

Remember, the point is that it's a permanently running strategy, not a campaign. You either make profit or have no losses (besides few seconds of time). The 0.01 punks have no chance against you, even if they are ready to camp 24/7 for no profit because they are fighting market forces and not you.


Tuesday morning report: 38.7B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on Logi/Carrier/Titan alt, 0.1 on Rorqual)
Join the goblinworks channel for trading, hauling, crafting discussions.

Reprocessing/producing: split them!

Let's say that 1 tritanium cost 6 ISK on the major hub in your zone. You find an item for mere 1 ISK on the market that you can reprocess for 10000 tritanium. Then you craft an item from that 10000 tritanum and sell it for 40000 ISK.

What is your overall profit? 39999 ISK

Are you a smart businessman making good profit? Absolutely not!

Every operation must be split into parts. A part can be any creation of an item from another (or from farming). The part should be defined in a way that it cannot be split into smaller parts which has a price tag on the market.

The example above has three parts, the first is getting the item below market price. The item has the running price of 40K, so picking it up for 1 ISK has 39999 profit. The second part is reprocessing the ISK item (20000 ISK profit) and the other is crafting the second item (-20000 ISK profit). Now it becomes obvious that the third part must be forgotten and the tritanium must be sold. If the item would have 70K running price, than the profits would be 69999, -10000, -20000, making reselling the item the best choice.

The ship manufacturers forget this now in masses, selling their ships on prices calculated from old material prices, often below current material prices. They should recognize that in the changing market holding materials is an operation itself (investing) and they shall either resell the materials on the new price or craft only if the crafting itself is profitable (calculated from running price).

Don't forget time! Neither your own worktime, nor the profit rate of your capital. For example if you work for 100M/hour, then buying an item for 10M in Rens, flying it there in half an hour, selling for 20M and flying back in another half an hour looks 10M profit, but actually it's -90, assuming you could do your normal 100M/hour activity instead. If you couldn't then your work does not worth 100M/hour. Picking up an item from a buy order and resell it for 10M more takes like 10 seconds and I often do such things, but it doesn't mean I have 1M/sec = 3.6B/hour income. My average must be calculated.

Buying 1B worth of item, saving the transport time by setting up a courier contract for 10M and selling it for 1.1B is not 90M profit if you had to wait a whole day for the courier, even if you could do something else. If your average profit rate is 5%/day, then waiting for the courier cost you 50M. Maybe you should have given a large tip to speed it up or run it yourself.

So, don't let the nice overall profit fool you, analyze every step on its own, probably half of your operation parts are on loss or pitiful profit. Cut these out and enjoy the large profits of the good parts.

EVE Business report: Saturday morning 10.5B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.1B spent on Titan project)
Sunday morning 11.3B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.1B spent on Titan project)
Monday morning 11.9B  (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.1B spent on Titan project)
Last Monday my report was "9.3B (3 PLEX behind for second account, 0.1B spent on Titan project).", so in the last week I earned 3.1B. Missing a day and locking 1B into slowly selling items taxed my income, but it's still almost a PLEX every day.

Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

I also seen a great player initiative: Save Jita! However I have doubts as the griefers are already considering their ships lost, so shooting them down won't make much difference.

1c/0.01 undercut is cartel

For long I dismissed 0.01 ISK or 1c undercutters as "punks", considering them something that happens only in MMOs, abusing the fact that it's illegal to use a bot to manage orders and also, since there is no brand or quality in game, the buyers will buy the first item in the list. So I considered them human bots who camp the game all day, updating their orders.

However they have a real world version, the cartel. By undercutting by only 0.00001% of the value of the order, they are matching prices. Their idea is that if we keep the prices all together artificially high, we all make more money. And that part is true, if everyone agrees to a cartel by not making significant undercuts, the group of the sellers as whole is getting off better.

However as competition is eternal, cartel members don't share nicely. Not in game, not in real life. They keep on competing, just not on the price but on marketing. In the game it's done by being on the top of the list, hence the camping.

When you choose to undercut by only a little, you are joining a cartel, like it or not. You give up the chance to compete by having a more efficient production or by working for lower profit rate. You agree with the rest of the cartel members that you'll just compete by marketing aka update frequency. You do it to "not leave money on the table", maximizing the possible profit.

I never joined a cartel, simply because I'm sure that I can beat my competitors and take the market for myself. I undercut deeply to break the cartel and force them to work for much lower profit than they want. So they give up and go to hell. Remember that their scheme requires lot of player hour. Selling for 100K profit at the cost of 1 update in a day (5-10 seconds) is 72M/hour. Update it 20 times and you are at 3.6M/hour, you're better off running missions. Of course they don't want to sell for 100K profit, they want to sell for 5M profit, but I can quickly make that dream pop.

Important: till the 0.01 punks have stocks, you won't sell. No point cutting again and again, you are really leaving money on the table. They must liquidate their stocks. Them giving up means they won't restock, but you can't expect them to just trash their wares. After setting a new price, you must wait until they run out. Then you can sell, or you find that some of them are still there, restocking. Then cut again.

Another thing: if they left, don't get too happy and rise the price, they'll come back (or some new one). Write down your prices and if you find your 11M sell orders empty, with the lowest seller 15M, sell for 11.2-11.5, and not 14.5.


PS: I'm back and moderating comments, 20+ from yesterday processed, feel free to continue the conversations.

Openraid.eu

I wasn't happy with the raiding in The PuG. We killed DW on Jan 23, according to MMO-Champion, we are ones of the 300K out of 5.6M who did that (way in the top 10%), what is enough to prove that it works, however clearly not as elegantly as I expected. At first we had to cancel raids due to low attendance, and also I lead most of the raids.

However something great happened that can finally make the proof complete. Mirth, one of the members of the guild (and not me), came up with the idea of using the site openraid.eu to find other people to raid with. It has the drawback that the RL has to use realID, however it makes it sure that not I will lead it.

Why is it great? The guild is called "The PuG" for a reason. I want to prove that a random selection of non-M&S is capable of performing and social bonds and structure are not necessary or even useful. They become inevitable when we have to fish jewels from the sea of idiocy. If you finally found someone with more brain than a baboon, you stick to him, try to bind him to your circles so you can keep cooperating.

/trade pugs and the Looking for Retards feature got their infamy from the amount of drooling tools that pollute it. When you are happy that there are only 3 Amalgamations on Spine, it's a good sign that LFR did not become the great feature I expected. Why? Because you have no simple (and lately not at all) way to get rid of the leeching M&S and simply because their wast numbers make finding people for a one-time raid very time-ineffective. That's why I wanted to collect these people into a guild, however that's still a social structure, no matter how hard I try to de-socialize it by rules.

However if the raid organizer openraid.eu (or any similar) works, that would remove that last problem and let people enjoy successful and M&S-free raiding without any social bonds.

Why would it work better? At first the pure thing that you have to find a site is a serious barrier from the M&S. I mean if they could find elitistjerks or a class blog, they wouldn't be terrible at the first place. Secondly such service allows you access to countless players, you don't have to go with whatever warm body to find and hope they perform better than an empty slot.

Thirdly, since such service is not in Blizzard control, they can no longer stop us from excluding M&S. Your ignore list has 49 places for a reason: it's likely that you have less than 49 personal enemies so it serves the purpose to exclude the guy who got you kicked from your social guild for not helping, but you can't use it to /ignore every below-healer DPS (noticed that the term "below tank" lost its usage?). There is 2-hours cooldown on kicking from LFD and LFR, you can't kick from Tol Barad raid, you can't /ignore guilds and so on. Blizzard actively fights excuding even the most obnoxious creatures from our own playing since those things are paying customers too and without being boosted they couldn't kill even a Stormwind Rat. On the other hand a third-party site, especially on a web platform allows the creation of auto-excusion tools that makes this not only possible but simple and intuitive. For example if I mark someone "good player I want to play again", I could automatically exclude all the M&S that he marked useless.

We will do the test run at Saturday 19:00 server time (I guess that's Paris time) with BWD HM (can't run DS yet via realID raids). Feel free to join. Message from the raid organizer: I haven't yet figured it out, but chances are that you _must_ specify a RealID email before you can see cross-realm raids on this website. If that's true and the raid isn't showing up for you. If that states true, just add any e-mail for that field, an unexisting one will also work. In case some of you would like to join directly, without registering on Openraid, my realID: inbox@helvene.ru. The link to the raid is http://www.openraid.eu/index.php/users/raid/577/

Pikachu!

One of the new feature of Mists of Pandaria will be the pet battle system. It is completely vanity and detached from the main story, there won't be raidboss-pets, you can "PvP" with other pet collectors or "PvE" with "wild pets". The rewards of these "battles" are more pets.

OK, more fun for the lolkids, who cares, the best thing about it is that they won't pollute LFR/LFD while being useless with their silly pets. Well my beloved greedy little green things, it's not true! Read what MMO-Champion wrote! No, not the part that explains that you can get rare pets that only spawn "in the spring, when it's raining, in Elwynn Forest at night". The important part is: Most pets will become tradable, even after being leveled.

Yes, you can sell these little annoying wannabe-Pikachu-thingies. And above all, you can sell leveled, aka "elite" pets. The ones that "pwn" in the dead-serious pet vs pet battles that decide who is the coolest guy on the short bus!

The pet leveling system is yet unworked, but I'm sure that there will be an optimal way that allows mass-production of these buggers for sale to the "special" kids.

Remember, while we don't think of them too high, their gold is just as good as yours. So don't just ignore the "awesome" new feature of pet battles. Pikachu will fight hard for your income!

Goblinish advice on need-greed in LFR

The PuG update: In 4.3 gear really makes difference. We cleared 7/8 farm content with a handful of wipes only.

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The post of today is a further update on my gearing page, comment it here. It's a pretty short update, but extremely important. I copied it here:

Now the loot: you did not go to LFR for the fun. LFR is not fun. LFR ranges from "OK, we done it pretty well" to "one more like that and I uninstall the game". You came for loot for normal raiding. There is one and only one goblinish advice here: need on everything. If you win something you don't really need, you can trade it. The effect of this largely depends on group size. If you queued up with a large group, your group gets lot of loot, allowing you to get trades. Many randoms refuses to trade. Even without trade, "your shard/vendor gold > the BiS of some random". You can also pay well geared guildies to come with you and need for you.

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Finally something funny: this weekend was IoC. On Friday and Saturday we chain-massacred the horde. But on Sunday we lacked people and were only 3-5 wanting to run IoC. And we lost. And lost. And lost. No matter what strategy I tried, we lost. Finally I found the solution and spammed "All to hangar." And we won. Why? Because Hangar is the only place where you don't need to drive vehicles. Driving vehicles is way too hardcore for most people who has a rich and happy real life. I mean, it's great that the keeps have only 3 doors, because out of 4 demolishers 2 will surely attack the same gate. Also, glaives are way too fun to be used to shoot boring doors when they can oneshot players! So if you are on IoC, hangar is the key. That can't be messed up by even the most "fun" players. You and your premade shall hold quarry and refinery and you'll be fine.

Random BG massacre reloaded

The PuG and PvP update: the TBBars addon is available (actually it is long ago, but I just learned it). It shows the capture status of all 3 bases if there is someone with the addon is there to report it.

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I wrote a post about the random BGs being unstable. They allow several meta-gaming tricks that practically guarantee victory at the expense of players with less meta-gaming abilities: new players and M&S. The easiest move is to create a pre-made: going in with a cooperating, non-retarded raid and smash the AFK/bridgefighting/green geared/retarded opponents.

However I also acknowledged that the above theoretical truth is practically irrelevant as most players who are capable of forming/joining such premades are not playing random BGs due to the lack of rewards. Good players have arena and rated BG teams, OK-ish players play 2v2 with some /trade guy at 1200 to get 1350 CP and let the rest rot. Therefore only new alts and rerolled characters of good players are interested in random BGs and they are way too few for having any relevant effect.

Now Blizzard went out of its mind and offers 100 CP for the first random BG win of the day and 50 for the rest of them. This means that random BGs will be a useful way to get CP for OK-ish players and undergeared alts/rerollers. Also, players who can't RBG this week due to lack of time or meta-gaming reasons (one key member missing, we would lose rating) can still cap CP via random BG.

Now, with a pre-made you can win a random BG in 10 mins, unless it's SotA and you start defending. If you play an hour a day, you can get 100+5*50 = 350 CP/hour. It's comparable to RBG where you get 400 for a win, a match can last 25 mins, and you lose every second one. It also provides a no-risk, no-pressure "pwning" fun, you don't just win, you smash your opponents. If OK-ish players join the pre-mades, they become significant factor, allowing permanently existing premades (one where people leave and join between matches, even the leader leaves at some point but the group keeps running for whole prime time).

This, mixed with the fact that in the first week everyone can use honor, which is a nice "startup marketing" campaign next to premades, the next random BG season can be the season of premades, bringing nothing but being pwned to the ones the feature want to reward: the newbies and the M&S. I for sure will organize such premades, as it's a great recruiting tool. Many players who joined our premades and experienced the effectivity of our team joined our guild too.



It would be "moron of the day", but can be named "the reason why random BGs with randoms are terrible". We did a crazy-slag defense, and the specimen and his buddy went wrong bases, then attacked the sieges at the towers. Luckily the horde was stupid enough and driven sieges only when it was too late, the towers were at 40-50% when the 15 mins passed. In the /raid he also gave stupid orders called everyone names for not following him. Luckily only his buddy followed him, the rest did as I told in /rw. This obviously bothered him, so he sent whispers, revealing his lack of knowing Armory, blatant refusal to learn and complete butchering of English:
You don't want to play with him? Join a premade!

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.

I own your guild!

Literally:


For 50000 gold I bought the infamous Tractor inc farmin noobs.

There isn't any Blizzard restriction about selling and buying guilds for in-game gold. Anyone can buy any guild that the guild master is willing to sell. The new guild master is then able to invite or kick anyone or even disband the guild. I guess only ninjaing the bank contents are forbidden.

Why did I buy this guild? It's part of a scheme I figured out about cleaning up the dead non-guilds. It seems like a selfless service to the people of the server. However I believe that the owner of the guild has significant control where the people are transferred. Of course they can go wherever they want, but they are in the dead guild because of lack of ideas in the first place, and the guild master can direct them to one guild (his own).

While the Tractor Inc is definitely not the best deposit of good players, so the amount of useful players to get is quite limited, but even a few can make the difference between 1500 and 1700 rating, from where we could lure even more players. Also, for the sake of experiment, any guild will do. Of course I keep on seeking and buying guilds, as I put on an advertisement post on the forums.

The positive in this scheme is that it mobilizes the power of gold-hungry goblins to provide services to the community: by mass inviting they collect players, they sort them and sell them to good guilds. Everyone is happy, as the guild and the player found each other. Also, owners of mass-guilds ran for the gold influx can buy out leaving or less successful competition, importing the playerbase of that guild to their own, increasing revenues and guild leveling speed.

The negative is that it opens the way to EVE style corporate takeovers: a key raider quitting for a higher guild is bad enough? Imagine if the GM selling the guild during progression season to a competitor guild (for fixed spot or a legendary), or simply a griefer buying your guild, sending you an "i own u" message and kick everyone (high level guilds cannot be disbanded)! The possibilities on the evil side - as always - are limitless.

RBG strategies: flag carrier maps

This RBG strategy page replaces the old ones about the two flag carrier maps, as we use near the same strategies. Discuss please in comments. Comments will be cleared when the page gets a serious revision.




As I mentioned it's a strategy page, that is based on the assumption that the individual players skill and gear is equal. It is possible that superior players with inferior strategy win, but it's not the topic here, so comments like "i cud sap 1 hil garrote 1 smoke the thrid owning all u nubs" will be deleted.

Step 1: Our opening move is that we all zerg for the flag on our GY side (avoid using "left" and "right", it's only good for confusion. To come on the left side of the map, you must turn right at the WSG door and also we can be paired against another ally team and then we are horde on the right side). The flag carrier has a raid mark. They can answer with 3 moves on this, all can be seen from the distance:

1. Ignore us and zerg for our flag. This case we do the same.
2. They split and some of them attack us. We dismount and wipe them. After it's sure that they are no threat (4-6 only), the flag carrier and one healer goes for the flag.
3. They all attack us (standard move of "control the mid" /trade guys). The flag carrier dismounts before they could reach us, so does everyone else and position. Keep riding when the FC is on foot is a fail. Pick your target, set your focus target, place totems, traps, AoE heals, frozen circle, send your pet, pre-hot FC, switch off crusader aura. They are 8 or 9 (EFC is either alone or with one healer), we are 10. They are riding, able to open only with instant spells while we can cast spells. We have traps, AoEs, pets on the ground, they don't. They are spread by lag and small movement mistakes, coming in a train, we are in a spread group (don't eat frost nova). We must win. After 3-4 of them are dead, the FC and one healer moves for flag, the rest keeps wiping them. Wiping 8/10 can break their moral, despite they don't have strategic disadvantage yet. /trade people can give up when it happens.

Step 2:Our flag carrier has picked their flag. Step 2 depends on what they did during Step 1:

1. We pick the flag the same time when they picked ours. The FC leaves in the front door or  tunnel and we go head on them. The goal is not to kill their FC but to wipe the rest. They can't avoid combat and unless they mirroring our strategy, they will go for the FC. So they are focusing on a shield-walling tank healed by all, while their tank and some healers are running away, we focus on their squishier DDs (arcane mage, DD shaman, DD druid). It's no wonder who will win this encounter. Use CC heavily to avoid them successfully nuking the FC. The FC should kite them around the group, priests should grip him away. Let them walk.
2. Our FC picked the flag a bit later than theirs. We wiped their 4-6 attackers. The group move mid to intercept, the FC leaves on the mid door/tunnel after he seen us moving mid. If we fail to wipe them fast enough (they were 7 with healers), or the FC was slow (all of them hit him so he couldn't run until they wiped) #3 is in effect. The FC must come to the group. The group must also keep in mind that contacting with the FC is more important than intercepting EFC. Again, if intercept is impossible #3 is in effect. We intercept the enemy flag carrier with full group. Unless we are extremely lucky, they had time to respawn, so killing the EFC is not a realistic goal. Deserves some CC, deathgrip and stun, but not more. Kill the rest, focus EFC only if they are clearly wiping. It's the call of the main assist. Don't forget to peel our FC.
3. Their unharassed FC is on the move back, while ours due to the long fight is just taking their flag, while we are wiping their last attackers. The FC returns on our GY side to the group. We go together to the mid, not even attempting to catch EFC. If their ressing DDs with some healer attack us, wipe them once more.

Step 3: Step 2 ends with our FC is in the mid surrounded by the team, their FC is in their flagroom or near to it with some escort, the rest of them is dead in their GY. The raid leader calls "split", the FC with 2 healers return to the flagroom, 1 healer with 5 DD go to attack the EFC, one DD go to their GY and AoE it to put them into combat when spawned, slowing them down. This step is very luck-dependent. They can res right front of us, before even the GY-guy reaches them, then we return back to the flag carrier in the mid-back and wait. They can res fast enough to reach their own flagroom and save the FC. Then we purposefully wipe and regroup at our GY, our FC comes to us. If we are lucky, they either res too late, or dumb enough to go for our FC instead of defending their own. The GY guy keep as many as possible in combat. When he dies, he resurrects and joins the FC defense.

Step 4: Step 3 can end with we scoring one and starting over. If you are under attack, stop fighting, die and regroup with the rest on our GY side. If they managed to save their FC or they ressed right front of us, step 3 ends with we standing in the mid-back, their FC at their flagroom with escorts, the others are somewhere in the mid. They are closer to our FC than we to theirs, so they can choose to attack. This case we fight as one zerg and wipe them. Remember to CC/stun, focus on squishy DDs, not healers. After we wipe them we split again and go for another Step 3. If they choose to not attack us, but go back to defend their EFC (either in the flagroom or at the door), we send 5 DDs and 1 healer to attack them. 2 healers and 1 DD remains with FC, next to our GY (in WSG, above the GY). These are suicide missions, their purpose is to pin them down in defense while the debuff stacks high enough on their EFC and hopefully waste their bloodlust. We can waste it too, as we wipe and the debuff will be removed. It is possible (and their only chance) that they mount an attack after wiping us. We regroup and receive them on the move. The EFC should kite them in the tunnel/around the building, LOS them while the others are slowing-attacking them. Since we are 10 v 6-8, we will eventually wipe them, the question is can the FC kite long enough to live. If they fail to counterattack and the stacks are already 6+, we keep only one healer with the FC (against lurking rogues), the rest go attack. If they have a forward defense, wipe them, if they are all with the FC, focus on FC with Bloodlust.

I believe this strategy can only be countered by itself, when the two groups go for the flag on the sides and clash in the mid, focusing on squishies. Then the stronger wins. Note that focusing the EFC is wrong as even if you can nuke him, wipe and then your FC dies too.

Tips and fails:

• Dumb Rambo is bad. Don't run out of healer range.
• Check the scoreboard! Top DPS enemies are usually PvE geared.
• Feel free to put on PvE gear when you engage the EFC who has no DD support.
• Healer standing on the top of WSG can also heal in PvE gear.
• Grab the rage buff before attack
• Mass dispel or just dispel Bloodlust
• Mana burn is nasty, use it and focus on burning priest in non-nuke zerg battles
• Fights are short burn here. Healers are usually targeted, use 2 resilience trinkets. You can even have full resi versions of 2-gemmamble gear pieces. Long, mana-streching battles are rather common in Arathi and Gilneas.
• Full rebuff when regroup.
• Tank be always on the move when they zerg on us, circle around the group.
• Always nuke the main assist target.
• When the main assist switches to EFC, rogue shall stun and smokebomb. CC healers then.
• Use battle standard

Following the steps of Al Bundy

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

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

Anyway, these obvious and simple activities work:

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

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

Gold from boots and low rating conquest farming.

Once upon a time there were the valor boots. ilvl 359 BoE feet items. With 4.2 they were transferred to the justice quartermaster vendor, so now they cost 1650 justice points.

In the AH they sell for 1000-2000G, giving 1:1 justice:gold conversion. The reason for this is the PvP itemlevel messup: from honor points you can buy slightly better items in season 10 than the season 9 conquest items. So people are converting their justice points to honor to get a tiny increase. Not me. I convert honor to justice and keep buying these boots. I also buy from others for 800 and sell as high as I can. Already got 15K income from it. I can't call it profit as the points are not free, but as they are generated by an activity I'd do anyway (Tol Barad), they are nearly free (buying shards at the vendor converts a point to 15 silvers). So go and sell boots!

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Since there are 30+ people online recently (4.2 made a miracle), and also significant new player (and AFK-kicked veteran) influx, we can seriously intensify our activities. Instead of running one thing at a time, we can run two.

On rated BG front we are far from the high levels as still many players get their "service of the alliance" achievement on every win. However we already made rated BG activity regular. Now I want to change them to everyday activity and want to allow everyone who play PvP to get rBG experience and be conquest capped every week. So the following changes are implemented by my lead (of course anyone is free to start competing schedule, but I doubt it has a point):

• Rated BGs are off the calendar, except for Sunday 15:00-21:00 which will be the dedicated "high" rating time. Here the best PvP-ers are invited and the point is to push our rating as high as possible. Of course you don't have to play 6!!! hours, you can show up anytime, and we'll get you a spot if your are good.
• On every evening for Wednesday to Saturday there will be low rated conquest farmings parallel to the normal raids. There will be no gear or experience requirements, everyone is welcomed (of course if there are 12, the leader will not pick the 0 res guy). The point is to get conquest capped and to decrease MMR. Those who are in not the raid will form a farming rBG group with a simple guideline: if you are not winning the match clearly after 10 mins of start, lose fast (can be called earlier if the superiority of the opponent is obvious). This way the MMR decreases to the region where matches are easily won. The purpose of decreasing rating is to allow new players to fight against equal opponents and learn, and to allow veterans to chain-win from low MMR on Sunday. (As rating follows stupidly MMR: high gain when win, low loss when lost, unless MMR is far below rating).
• The RBG team also serves the purpose of giving something to do to raiders waiting for a spot opening in the Firelands raid. I can't expect anyone to just idle in SW waiting for X boss to die as he'll get spot next or even worse, to idle that someone maybe fails and gets replaced. However we can easily announce: spot opened for X role, and after the BG ended the guy leaves the BG team and comes. The BG team is refilled from those who just logged or was AFK before.
• On Monday and Tuesday, 4.0 boost raid takes the form of the "B team". Those who are not in the FL raid can boost new players for gold. When spot opens, they leave BoT/BWD and join, refilled by someone just coming online. This way there is always something better to do than random BG (bleh), and random HC, as you can farm conquests instead of honors, and 359 instead of 353. There are spots opening in the FL or the "B-team" frequently, so if you wait a bit, you get a spot, no matter when you come online

So from now on,  there will be two teams running. An "A" team doing FL or rBG for high rating and a B team farming conquest points or gear, and of course experience.

WTS/WTB Shannox trash

The PuG update: 1 tank, 4 healers, 5 DD, 3 of them on legs, 2 on adds. Currently #6200. We are permanently recruiting, just read the rules.

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There is trash in almost every raid. They have several purposes, like RP (the dungeon has a better feeling if it's full of busy minions of evil), slowing progression, giving bad players something to do besides wiping and "g2g". Anyway they are here to stay.

In Firelands, there are a lot. Especially before Shannox. You just kill and kill and kill them and wait for Shannox to show up. However this trash is different. They have something of value, besides the low chance of giving a BoE (although that's still a good money this early). They give reputation until honored. They keep giving after that too, but way to little to matter. Killing them gives a 378 back at friendly and a waist on honored. No wonder that /trade is full of "LF3M 2 tanks 1 healer to FL trash run u need 999999 ilvl" spam.

Of course those who raid regularly are already honored or will be in a week. After that the trash will be just waste of their time.

How could we turn these annoying turtles, giants, dogs and scorpions into profit? There will always be people who want rep. New people, alts and casuals (and of course M&S but we don't want them). All we need is a raid leader who forms a short trash run to clear them up to the boss(es). My idea is to pay every member of the trash run X gold and this 10*X is paid by the raiders who arrive to the trash-free raid.

The trash raid starts 45 mins before the real raid, they clear up the trash, get their gold and leave. The real raid kills the boss, everyone is happy. Of course nothing stops a raider to participate in both raids. The price will obviously rise over time, as less and less people need rep, so it simply becomes a work they do for salary. The raiders pay to save time, the trashers get paid for their time on the top of the rep and trash loot.

I made the first pre-raid trash run on Monday, before Shannox firstkill, with only 3 people who participated in the real raid. The rest were non-raider or new people who had an opportunity to participate in our effort in Firelands and also to get a preview of raiding. The trash raids, similarly to the 4.0 boost raids can help new people to practice raiding without pressure while getting loot.

The pre-raid trash run also increases raid time without increasing the commitment demand from raiders. They spend the same amount of time inside as before, but it's all boss time.

How to save hundreds of gold with gems?

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

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

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

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

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

Make up to 200K with minutes of work

I usually don't have guests posts. I never had one before. I'm not seeking guest contributors. But Aurèle (twitter) was kept bugging me with his post and it's pretty good, so I publish it.


The ultimate goblin trick: how to make 200.000 gold every year in 10 minutes of work

Back in the days, I remember being broke. I was searching for a quick solution to make gold in WoW, and I stumbled upon Gevlon’s blog. After reading about the glyph industry, I dropped my professions, learned mining and herbalism, and spent the next 6 hours collecting plants and minerals to sell them at the Auction House. Once I had enough money I dropped mining and learned Inscription. Two weeks later I was making more than 10k gold per week for less than 2 hours of work. Needless to say, I became a loyal reader of this blog. The gold obsession had begun.

Recently I found what I think is the most efficient way to make gold in World of Warcraft. I’ve always wanted to set gold production on autopilot, and when Cataclysm came out I took advantage of the [cash flow] guild perk to do exactly that. My initial goal was to attain the momentum point where the guild experience cap was reached every day, and people continually invited their friends, so that the guild stayed alive and grew over time. The result?


Let me guide you through the process. First you have to create a guild. Delete all the ranks except Member. Then give your members the right to invite other members: you might think that it will cause trouble because of kiddies spamming /g with nonsense, but in my experience it doesn’t happen. Set the guild message of the day to something along the lines of “Welcome! Everybody can invite new members (press J, then “info” tab). Feel free to invite your friends! Have fun!”. The more social and you make it, the more people will be inclined to stay and invite their friends. You can also setup the Guild Search to get more members. Remember, keep it social!



Secondly, you have to invite members to your new guild. A very effective way to do this is to use this addon called Ninja Invite. It automatically invite unguilded people from your server to your guild. It also saves their name so that you don’t invite them twice. You won’t get banned using this addon. In fact Blizzard even allows players to block guild invites in the interface/controls.

I tuned the addon to invite people from level 10 to 84, which is the most effective in regard of guild experience. Once it’s up and running (don’t forget to check “Load out of date AddOns” in the selection menu), simply type “/ni start” and it will start inviting people to your guild. You can bind this command to a macro like I did, so you just have to press a button. Even better, if you’re leveling an alt or if you have a character that you play regularly that is in the guild, just press the button every 20 to 30 minutes and your guild will be growing at a crazy rate.
Now remember, your goal is not to fill the guild. Your goal is to reach momentum so that you don’t have to work anymore. It can be really fast and easy if you’re on a highly populated server, or it could be a hassle if you don’t have much time. Here are the most effective time and dates to invite in a guild:

• When an expansion pack comes out
• After a new patch, as people get back into the game
• On the weekends afternoon and evenings
• In the week days evening between 6pm and 9pm

I invited my first members the day cataclysm came out, and I probably created momentum on that first invite round, as everybody was 80 and questing. That’s how I can honestly say that I created 200k gold value in 10 minutes this year.

The guild requires maintenance, mainly because there’s a maximum number of members a guild can have: 1000. Now, you might think you would never reach that limit. But once your guild grows and people start inviting their friends, you’ll have a lot of inactive members.

One solution to clean up the mess is to use an addon that kick inactive members every now and then. I use Guild Kicker. Type “/gk” and the menu will appear, letting you kick inactive and/or low level members. An alternative solution, if you don’t play wow all year round, is to promote officers and ask them to kick people that reach an inactivity threshold. It’s less reliable, but it’s still better than nothing. In my guild we kick player that are inactive for 15 days and the guild is always filled with more than 800 members.

If you don’t want to manage the guild, or if you think you could need the cash to invest into a more profitable business (as I know some readers here can), sell it. Think about it: even if your guild generates only 2k gold per week on autopilot. That’s 100k gold per year without doing anything! You can easily sell it for year or less of profit. You’ll have to wait a couple of months before selling it, as the guild doesn’t generate cash at the creation. But remember, it’s just afk time!

Aurèle final note: I’ve found shortcuts in many things in life, from World of Warcraft to real life feats. I’m all about effectiveness and measurable results. You can follow me on twitter for my latest tips and tricks.


Gevlon's note: I did not test the addons myself so can't guarantee them being bug free (imagine what a bug can do in a guildkicker addon). But the idea itself and the methods to reach them are pretty good.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

I've never imagined that fishing can be profitable. I mean it is the simplest possible goldmaking way. It doesn't need any primary professions, gold investment, addons, goblinish skills, nothing.

All you have to do is go to the AH, and check out which fish is expensive. Tip: the materials of the top feast are likely to be in demand. Then check out where you can catch the fish and off you go. When you fished enough, sell the fish in the AH. That's all.

You can fish out 3-4 fish every minute, about 200/hour. If you can sell them for 5-10G, that's 1000-2000 gold/hour.

It's THIS simple to make gold.

So if someone asks for gold, tell him to GO FISH!


PS: I may not be able to process comments for a few days.

Disenchanting for profit

I started this to get dust, dust and more dust, hoping that it won't cost me too much gold. Well it didn't. Actually it turned out to be a goldmine. Which surprises me to no end, as this "strategy" needs no brains, no risk, no real investment gold and not even a sub-optimal profession for raiding like skinning. It's dead simple. All it needs are two addons, one is Auctioneer, what you surely have already. The other is Enchantrix, which is part of the Auctioneer suite.

All you need is switch to the search tab after a scan, select "disenchanter", press search, then buy all. You must confirm every buy (thanks Blizzard), but at the end you have lot of green and blue items in the mailbox. Disenchant them, go back to the AH, switch to Appraiser and sell them. That's all. You can do it at any downtime.

As you can see I was busy disenchanting: My profit (not income) is already 16300G on Alliance side, 6400 on horde (I transfer some dusts to horde as they don't sell fast enough), about 2K in yet unsold dusts and 1K in bids on more greens. That's 25K gold.

Let's calculate G/hour. 25K/7K = 3.5G, this is the profit on every disenchants. The time needed to disenchant is 3 secs, and another 3 to do the snatch from the AH. 1 more to list it. So the profit is 3.5G/7 secs = 1800G/hour. Nice.

Some tips to avoid inventory nightmare: have 4 enchanting bags, you can buy them cheap at bag vendors. So the greens can only fall into your backpack. Keep it clean before opening the mailbox. Also have a macro:
/cast disenchant
/use 0 1
/use 0 2
...
/use 0 16
As soon as the first green fell into your bag, press the macro key and the items one by one are disenchanted in your bag (one for every keypress). The items from the mailbox are keep falling into your bag while disenchanting. Remember, the mails can contain not just greens but unsold dusts and gold from sold dust and overbids.

At first you will build a huge dust inventory. It is because you are snipping hundreds of underpriced greens from the AH. Don't be surprised if the first scan gives 500+ greens. After you cleared the AH from greens, you will only grab new greens and the dust heap will diminish.

Up to profit fellow goblins!


PS: I may not be able to process comments for a few days.