Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The best thing you can do to a moron

Let's say you want to do something good to the morons around you. Seth is in this position, since one of his RL friend just told him that he makes 50G/day. Not /minute, day! He is unsure if telling this moron to farm herbs for low is a moral idea.

Well, it's the only idea that helps this guy. Giving him an hourly paid job is the best thing you can do for him.

Oh wait? You could give him gold as a gift, right? No, you can't! You simply don't have enough gold for that. I mean you could help one moron, but why him? What about the others? I make 10-12K a week (yes I know, I'm lazy). The server has 4-5K horde players. So I could give them 2-3G/week. That wouldn't be much of a help. Of course I could focus on a few, but why them, why not others. It's unjust and unfair!

On the other hand if I give him an hourly paid job, I let him have gold without losing mine, therefore losing my ability to "help" others. Theoretically I could give a job to every single players on the server (of course I lack the time, but not the gold).

What guarantees that I don't pay him too little? My competition does. If they offer higher wages, he could go there. I have no competition? Than any payment is better than nothing. BTW in WoW this is not true, since the quest givers offer infinite amount of jobs for 200-250G/hour.

There are two reasons why people run around without jobs:
  • the lack of goblins who could give them jobs
  • their own rejection against jobs. This is based on mostly an ape-subroutine "dignity".
I just thought how many employees I could have in the glyph business:
  • herb-farmers: I pay them market_price-X% for herbs, X depends on my competition's offers, my guess is 20%
  • millers: I can pay them 20-30s/milling + inking, just make sure to count the inks I get back
  • crafters: that would be the big shot. I make a queue and link it to him and he crafts them. Someone could write a queue macro that let me send my queue to someone. I give him the inks and parchments and pay him 20-30s/glyph
This way I could decrease my workload drastically.

If there would be enough goblins in the world, there would be no poor, except the outright lazy or completely retarded. There would be jobs created everywhere. Too bad we are so few, because without competition we can make so much money that we are not motivated to give jobs. I mean it's easier for me to do the whole glyphs industry alone for a week and don't touch a glyph for another 4 weeks than organizing my employees every day. I could make much more gold with that, but why? To make a goldcapped alt? If I'd had to struggle for my economic freedom, I'd employ people.

However if I'd be a nice person I would waste this time just to help them, by employing them.

25 comments:

debussy said...

Most people in game would refuse a per/hour salary because they would feel like they are somehow being scammed/exploited.

Anonymous said...

Who says you have to pay them by the hour, I pay my minions by the stack.

They have the option, either they can put their items into the AH and risk being undercut, or risk it taking a week to sell, or risk capping the market and having to lower their prices to compete.

Or they can sell every single stack to me @ 5-20% less than market (depending on what they're offering, the quantity, and the market structure of that particular industry)

I've done this with quite a few friends, they seem happy to get a quick sale and rapid profits. (Some are even making upwards of 1000g a day farming for me), and I'm very happy with selling the processed goods.

Lite said...

One guildie I pay by the stack way below market price.
Yesterday I got another supplier by selling him a Nobles Deck. The deal being me selling him the deck @ 3800 and in return he would supply me with herbs below market price.
And still I'm in constant need of more herbs with my glyph/darkmoon card/flask business.

Niz said...

I sincerely hope there will be a second part to this post, expanding on the last 3 sentences.

Tordenflesk said...

I've been thinking about hiring a guildie who's always complaining about not having gold. I'm mining/JC(450/455). So is he, but he's to lazy/doesn't have the resources to level his JC. How can i go about exploiting this? Do i buy his ore, prospect, keep the expensive gems, and give him the leveling ones for a discount? Or are there other strategies i can use?

Anonymous said...

@lite: 5 mins a day, 500 gs a day. 5 min = 1/12 hour. 6k gph. why the hell do you need more?

20% of the effort gives you 80% of the proffit. craft 500 "afk hours" a day is useless. select what you craft, select smartly and dont be too greedy. you will not be gold caped but will have gold enough to buy whatever you want with nearly no time invested.

if you take into account gevlons afk work he wont reach more tha 6k gph NEVER.

btw, for those who thing that are very clever because you buy stacks 5% under market price and that your "minions" are dumbs. your "minions" are avoiding the AH cut wich is exactly 5%. they are loosing NOTHING. and maybe selling under 10% 20% market price would be worth the pain depending on what are you selling.

im probably twice older than you. so stfu, and respect your elders.

@gevlon: you can do your crappy strategy because you sell glyphs. to list the glyphs is nearly for free, you could never do this if the AH tax were higher enough.

Unknown said...

@anonymous: Does being older give you the right to shit on others?
Why the hell should I respect someone older than me who has such a shitty attitude, if you are in fact older than me, which is something that neither of us can prove.

And I think that you are missing the point that Gevlon makes with his crafting.
The way he does it, he is free to go afk and do something else, regardless of whether it is in wow or not. The way he sees his competition doing it, they have to sit on either the AH, the mailbox or their crafting queue every time they decide to undercut and does not give them the time to do anything else, in or out of wow.

I don't see how you can fail to grasp the principle of what he is saying.

Carra said...

Having farmers can be rewarding for both sides of the agreement.

However paying them well below the market price is not a good idea. They'll run away the second they know you are ripping them off.

Just pay them the market price - 5%. It'll still make things a lot easier as you get a constant supply.

Anonymous said...

previous post was deleted. if you had read it, you wouldnt say what you say about elders or not.

about afk time. when your boss tells you to stay at home waiting for a problem to happen he pays you even if there is no problem. afk time is worked time even if you are cleaning your room the same way it is when you clean your room waiting for your boss to call you.

about mods. farming bots are not allowed, i think bots that automatize actions like posting in the AH or crafting or recovering the mail shoul be forbiden also. why? if you think it, you will find that both bots are exactly the same.

what would you do gevlon if they forbid those kinds of mods? crash. crash... or work shit loads of hours, and then clean your room insted of meanwhile. lots of work, lots of benefits. your only advantage is that a mod works instead of you, but lots of work anyway. and in any other market (other than glyphs or enchanting) any competitor can make you fall into losts without you selling one single item if you try your strategy. then you would have to tell your mod to work more and still having losts (becaouse you post so low that the AH cut owns you). then, you and your competitor would be (both of you) working with losts, so you lose all your crappy advantage that you claim to have with your strategy.

Unknown said...

You are confusing machine time with man time, or assuming that man:machine ratio has to be 1:1.

Seth said...

fyi
I actually wasn't considering the "to do or not to do", I was interested on what other people would do, my point on this has - as yours - been proved almost every post I make, If I can make profit, I don't care who I have to screw over.

Anonymous said...

Someone only knowing about World of Warcraft from your blog might get the impression it was all about making money.

Well, it is not. It's about playing a game in a fantasy setting.

If a player doesn't care about gold he is neither a moron nor a slacker. He simply enjoys a differen playstyle.

Players selling you stuff without using the AH are not "minions" but simply sellers. They suplly something you demand. As you supply glyphs to people who demand them. I don't see how this might put you in a better position than them.

Anonymous said...

umm its a game. Most people don't want to work in the game.

Besides this is exactly opposite to what you want in the real world.

I think you proved the conservative argument for creating jobs, rather than "I've got mine,you get yours" it helps the common good.

However morons are not just at the bottom. Morons at the top should have their pay cut and reinvested in their company.

Anonymous said...

Several months ago when the glyph market was more in the 15-25g range on my server and I didn't have all the glyphs resarched, I used to pay guildmates 1g per glyph they would craft for me. At the time I was getting my herbs for 10g a stack, almost to the point where my inks cost me zero gold. This was an easy way for me to gain more control over the glyph market, make more gold, and help my poor guildmates out as well. I mean 1g for a glyph combine is a huge gold/hour.

Nielas said...

That 50g/day figure seems fishy to me. If he is a level 80, pretty much anything you do will get you that amount. If you do the heroic daily and maybe another heroic, you are pretty much at 50g. Doing 4 faction dailies will get you over 50g. You pretty much just have to stand around and do nothing to earn less than 50g during a playsession.

This is also the reason why the employer-employee relationship in WoW is so rare. The average player can easily make enough gold just playing the game casually to support his/her playstyle at level cap. The players simply do not need to enter into a long term contract relationship in order to support themselves.

debussy said...

The average player only cares about having enough gold to pay for repairs/enchants/consumables. They will save up to get X item in the near future, but never past that. This in turn causes the 5% of the server population who are not impulsive buyers and think about their future to accumulate 90% of the gold, and blizzard has to keep increasing the gold reward from trivial things like dailys to keep the crowd away from goldsellers.

Kevin Marquette said...

When I see people wanting gold, I ask them about what professions they have. That will give you tips about what you can buy from them or how you can put them to work.

I sold a guy a gold making tip for 10% of his first weeks profits. That paid me 300g. Another person was a miner and I was able to get a good deal on eternal earth and shadow that he had in the bank.

Another time I just put someone to work crafting 30 of something they could make so I could relist it on the AH.

It never hurts to look at how they can make you gold while you are helping them.

Anonymous said...

In RL, the Government has made it very complicated to run a business. There are so many regulations, reports, taxes, licenses, etc. That's why so many people pay "under the table" (cash). But that's illegal, so you risk getting caught.

Also, in RL, employees are sometimes unreliable (being kind), do substandard work, have interpersonal issues, and on and on.

If they made it easier for a Goblin to run a business, maybe more would. But for now I think the effort/reward ratio is out of whack.

dozenz said...

If there were too many goblins in the world than nobody would make any money....

N said...

@dozenz

no, if there were too many goblins, EVERYONE would make money.

but fewer individuals would make dramatically more money than everyone else.

Nils said...

The only way to everyone make money is inflation.

N said...

Everyone can make money if production increases.

Let's say Joe is a farmer, Billy is a mechanic, and Rob is a manufacturer.

Joe produces food which is purchased by Billy and by Rob, Billy maintains Joe's tractors and Rob's fabrication machines, and Rob sells tools to Joe and Billy.

Now let's say that Joe inherits the neighboring parcel of land from his grandfather. Now Joe can increase his production. To do so, he'll need more tractors/tools, which means more maintenence. By increasing his production, he increases the production of the two industries that interact with him. Rob sells more tractors and tools to Joe, who requires more maintenence from Billy, who requires more tools from Rob.

In this (very simplified) example, everyone makes more money because production rises across the board. This is a Randian example of how production breeds production.

anti said...

who buys the extra food?

in the US the government effectively does by putting tarrifs on imported corn / sugar etc so maintaining artificially high prices.

comradevik said...

Anti said:
"who buys the extra food?

in the US the government effectively does by putting tarrifs on imported corn / sugar etc so maintaining artificially high prices."

Doesn't that indicate to you that regulation is bad for everyone?
The US also pays farmers subsidies to NOT produce crops.

Let's assume that we remove tariffs and stop the artificial shortage of food.
Now food prices go down, and we can start trading excess food to a developing country, let's say.. Nigeria.. which suffers from poverty and food shortages but has plenty of oil.
So now we get exchange cheap excess food for a resource that we lack. This in turns drops the cost of transporting and creating this food, which makes the food even cheaper.
There, not only did I just solve world hunger, I solved a National Security problem. We didn't need to invade the middle east, all we had to do was increase food production...

debussy said...

Just had this conversation, thought it fits the topic perfectly.

[11/04/2009]
21:57 [Angioplasty]: still level 1 you bum and you still havent logged off yet lol :)
21:58 [Pacala]: goldcaps is so so so close
21:58 [Angioplasty]: to 80?
21:59 [Pacala]: no to gold cap
21:59 [Angioplasty]: oh shit whats the cap again?
21:59 [Pacala]: when you reach gold cap it says "you have reached gold limit and cannot aquire any mor gold)
21:59 [Pacala]: 217k and change
21:59 [Angioplasty]: you dont have 217k man
22:00 [Pacala]: no i have 107k righ tnow
22:00 [Pacala]: gold cap is 217k
22:00 [Angioplasty]: thats hard to beleive buddy. let me have 2kg then is you have so much plz
22:00 [Angioplasty]: would be nice of you
22:01 [Angioplasty]: i mean if you really have that much bro
22:01 [Pacala]: i'll buy 2000g worth of herbs from you
22:01 [Angioplasty]: you could spare me 2k
22:01 [Pacala]: but i'mnot giving you hard earned gold for free
22:01 [Angioplasty]: what herbs do you want?
22:01 [Angioplasty]: will you give me now and ill go farm herbs for you
22:01 [Pacala]: adder/icethorn/lichbloom
22:01 [Angioplasty]: i can get any herb possible
22:01 [Pacala]: haha thats not how it works
22:01 [Pacala]: 100 stacks of herbs = 2000g
22:02 [Pacala]: 20g/stack
22:02 [Angioplasty]: i know i just want to get paid for motivation to go farm herb.
22:02 [Angioplasty]: not gonna steal from you bud
22:02 [Pacala]: that's not how it works sorry
22:02 [Pacala]: if you COD to me I will always buy it from you
22:02 [Angioplasty]: ok ill go farm first
22:02 [Angioplasty]: ok