Greedy Goblin

Friday, May 18, 2012

Why socials can never be rich?

Syncaine is considered a troll, but I always thought differently. However I couldn't see his post about me anything but trolling for links, which he got from Evenews24.

However I felt his post somehow horribly wrong. The trolls are deliberately making posts that are wrong in obvious points and his weren't like that. Took a few days figuring out how: he accuses me with doing honest work. His proof of my utter failure is that I don't do anything that other people couldn't do. Since the purpose of the blog is to teach moneymaking tips, goblinish ideas and to prove that anyone who is poor is a moron or slacker who deserves nothing but a kick in the butt, my "failure" was inevitable. However he was hoping that I'm actually getting my money in some evil scheme, manipulating people into their doom or stealing from them. Because taking money from people is "owning them" while getting the same money from work is "sucking". Getting much more money is still sucking.

Well, he is safe from failure in real life, asking readers to help him find a job.

Syncaine is not a troll. He is a social. And this is the point when talking about M&S and market rules are not enough. A social can know economics inside out, can have 150 IQ and able to focus for 8 hours, he still be broke as he considers working a failure in life. You can tell that "work isn't a shame", but it's a lie. People really think getting a 10M worth of modules in two hours killing people in lowsec is "awesome fun" while spending the same 2 hours hauling and sorting skillbooks needs "inhuman tolerance for mind-numbing activities". The fact that it nets 40-50x more ISK with practically no risk means nothing to them. ISK means nothing to them until they can't repair their Rifter. Then they go to whine about "the grind" or ask "freindly heplfull peepz" to carry them.

A social is unable to find any fun in any technical activity, as his definition of fun is "receiving positive feedback from peers (real or imaginary)". Optimizing a distribution chain, finding out different way of doing it, finding weak links isn't something that he would try. He grinds, doing the activity mindlessly, repetitively, counting the minutes until it ends and he can finally do some "fun". No wonder that the quality of his work is terrible.

This feeds back to the "nolifer" idea, since if he can't earn more than 20M/hour, I must be playing 22 hours to get 440M a day. He can't care less that I gave exact details what I buy and sell so he could check the margins himself. I must be a nolifer and it needs no verification (just like the uselessness of a perpetuum mobile plan), since the lowly act working cannot provide great results. Only "awesome ownage" can provide billions.

As long as you wish for "the people" like and respect you, you'll be poor. You can't be rich and liked. You can't be rich and respected. Rich people are despicable in the eyes of socials, not because "they exploit people" (socials actually find that "awesome skillz" as long as the victim is not from their in-group), but because "they do and force others to do the ultimate suck: working".

To be rich in EVE (and RL) needs nothing more than saying "I don't care if everyone think I'm the biggest loser". Easy isn't it?

I remain a loser who miss on the awesome fun of roaming in 50M cruisers, blow up total strangers until podded, instead I'll do the horrors of exploring new fields of industry, making at least 15B/month (hopefully much more) and will first fly a logi, then a triage carrier, finally the titan. I never said I give up on it, I just said triage carrier first. Carrier - unlike poor titans - will surely be fielded. If it's lost, I'll just reship to another one, and jump back. In one thing he is right: I won't make anything "remarkable" in EVE.

Hopefully my ideas will. I planned and will prove that anyone who isn't a moron or slacker can make more money than he spend. I hope I can show as many people as possible the fun of creating something for themselves. To show them how enjoyable it is to set out a plan, work on it, and see it succeed. To understand how a system works and be able to predict or even control it, instead of just suffering its actions. I really hope that people would gain the real life skill of finding flow in creative work. I love my real life job and the reason why I have so much time blogging and playing is exactly that I'm very successful in it. My boss can't care less that I'm typing this from my office. The tasks he wanted from me are already done, way before they were due, with some more projects no one asked me to do, I just started them because I was interested in the problem. I can do all this not because I'm better than the average guy. Anyone can do this who can look at his work as a challenge to be overcome, a task to be completed, puzzles to be solved.

Which field could be better to learn this than a game which was designed to be fun?! A place where nothing smells, requires hard labor or demands you to perform in a noisy, hot/cold, small environment. A place where the competition is fair, where everyone starts in the same noobship or lvl 1 orc. Too bad that a social can't even find working with dragons or spaceships fun if it doesn't provide (preferably immediate) peer respect or liking.


EVE Business report: Friday morning 23.0B, that's 600M more than yesterday, I farmed 30 hours today. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.9B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to be with 60-80 fellow no-lifer losers who just can't have fun. 

16 comments:

Happy Forum said...

Inspirational! Anyone that isn't completely useless can have a place. They just have to resist spending more than they make to get ahead of the Joneses.

P.s. Will Smith is rich and liked.

Dangphat said...

You seem to consider that risk while money making is a negative, that the social should do the lest risky higher value task. The social completes the risky task due to intrinsic thrill of potentially getting blown up.

There are equivalent thrills out there for the investor, but I dont think your prudent approach to investing is particularly high risk.

In my opinion risk can be considered proportional to fun, and this can be proved biologically by looking at the endorphin release experienced by people during extreme sports or in high risk investment banking.

Why judge them for wanting to experience an endorphin release from a computer game?

Anonymous said...

"... To be rich in EVE (and RL) needs nothing more than saying "I don't care if everyone think I'm the biggest loser". Easy isn't it?"

One of your better posts. It reminds me of a little saying that I've been following for a while now:

"Happiness is being independent of the good opinion of others."

Anonymous said...

"I planned and will prove that anyone who isn't a moron or slacker can make more money than he spend."

I don't think this point needs to be proven - I'm not aware of anyone who questions that you can get pretty wealthy if you put in some effort.

The first (and often only) time people put in that effort is when they save for their first supercapital - they start trading, incursions, suicide ganking, or move into a wormhole for 2-4 weeks because they realize that their usual methods of earning ISK are too inefficient for that task.

However, once they have reached their goal (e.g. 25b for a supercarrier)they revert back to more inefficient means of income generation.

I can only speak for myself but for me ISK is strictly a tool (funny that you acknowledge that by using "what you spend" to measure isk generation) and most income earning activities are terribly dull - with the possible exception of scamming which is too much effort for an uncertain outcome for my taste.
Finding a trade opportunity or setting up that spreadsheet for the first time is fun, the day to day management of orders or production is terrible.

I do some mission running and light trading to earn enough to finance PLEX (4 accounts) and pvp ships.
Both have the advantage that I can do them while my main is in a pvp fleet and that I can walk away from them at any time (in contrast to group activities like incursions).

The downside to mission running is that it is relatively inefficient (but not as bad as most people make it sound, a lot depends on your knowledge of the market for LP store items) and that it doesn't scale well as capital is accumulated (500m mission ship vs 3b mission ship, greatly diminishing returns).

The downsides to trading are that it tends to take over my life (log in to update orders at least 2 times a day every day) and leaves me exposed to market swings if I go afk for a few days without cleaning up my orders beforehand (e.g. if I value to market I made 500-700m losses during the last few days because a market moved and I wasn't there to remove/update my buy orders - I don't like to worry about EVE when I'm on a Diablo binge).

Mission running/ratting is guaranteed money paid out within a guaranteed timeframe with basically no risk of losses.

Activities other than mission running or trading require a lot of attention (e.g. exploration) that makes them unfeasible to do on the side, pay even worse (mining), require me to be on comms and attentive (incursions and wormholes), require me to structure my RL around EVE (Industry) or have some comparable shortcomings.

These shortcomings don't matter much when you set aside a few weeks for focused income generation and then go back to normal. But they'd destroy my game (by forcing me to give up on pvp opportunities) if I would try to be more efficient all the time.

Kobeathris said...

I think it somewhat depends on what your goal is as well. If someone really enjoys incursions, for example, and they want to eventually have a 10B isk deadspace fit Machariel, sure, your methods would get them the ship faster, but that may not be what they want. They might prefer to use incursions as their income source while they are building their ship. It's some what like the difference between buying a new boat, and learning to build your own in the backyard. In both cases, you end up with a boat, but in the first case, the boat was the end, while in the second, building it was the end, and having a boat is a bit of a side effect.

Larofeticus said...

Something I don't understand is the disdain for pvp in eve. You previously put up posts about battlegrounds. Posts about world of tanks which is entirely pvp.

Yet in eve, you shun the topic, seemingly for the arbitrary reason that there is possible loss involved. Great Wot players win 60/40, which is similar to eve pvp. But in wot you always get experience and in battlegrounds you always get whatever reward even when you lose. But unlike so many other kiddie games, loss in eve has consequences and your main thing seems to be aversion to loss.

The clear solution is you should go play on the test server where there are no consequences. Or admit that the risk of loss adds satisfaction to success, which is independent of any social concerns.

Gevlon said...

@Larofeticus: I never supported l'art pour l'art PvP. I either seeked ways to farm honor or hold the "sov" of Wintergrasp/Tol Barad.

I'm not against Sov wars or profitable pirating. I'm against pointless ganking roams.

Nielas said...

One of the things that really interested me in Gevlon's approach to playing WoW was that he found a way to minimize the time he spent making gold while also becoming quite rich. That meant that he had plenty of time to run his various other projects like blue gear raiding.

I do have to wonder how big a portion of his EVE playtime is spent just making ISK. Based on the blog posts alone, it would seem to be almost all of his time. Is he doing anything else in EVE?

Anonymous said...

Lots of great posts recently.

@ Larofeticus I think you are confusing thrill with accomplishment. Risk for reward is fine. "Winning" at Russian Roulette (no slight intended; it's just the name I know it by) must be thrilling but very moronic.

P.S. I really feel sorry for the poor person who ends up hiring Syncaine IRL. /shudder

Larofeticus said...

What distinguishes sovereignty for the sake of sovereignty, from pvp for it's own?

Because the developers hardcoded a goal? Eve developers also implemented killmails and are putting the equivalent of killboards into the next patch.

It can't be the profitability of sov because the most profit comes from tech moons which require no sov, or individual 0.0 activities most of which can't be taxed.

In fact, sov and related warfare is the most wasteful activity in the game. Upkeep costs, structures, risking the loss of entire fleets up to supercapitals.

But without that waste there's no demand for manufactured goods or trade. The bedrock of the economy in eve is the same consumer behavior you despise.

Azuriel said...

Is he doing anything else in EVE?

Haven't you been reading? There isn't anything else to do in EVE. Any non-ISK-generating activity is by definition social, i.e. objectively pointless.

Nevertheless, it is an inspirational post. I just wonder if it fails the Categorical Imperative "test." That is to say, if everyone in EVE followed Gevlon's advice, if the profit margins that make the advice meaningful would actually still exist.

Gevlon said...

@Larofeticus: because it enforces fighting a prepared, worthy opponent, instead of blobbing some lost noob in a lowsec gate.

Anonymous said...

More often than not this blog's function is to show how much isk you have similar to a gear rating in WoW. I would think a "greedy" goblin would try to hide his wealth rather than show it off. Instead, posting it on every blog just ends up looking like a vain attempt for attention.

There are only two purposes for isk in Eve. One is to buy plex and the other is to pvp. Hording isk is simply a waste of time. Using it to buy shiny ships to fight and possibly die like a boss? That's respectable.

Eaten by a Grue said...

It's good that you are a hard worker in real life, but you seem to have difficulty comprehending how someone could be a hard worker in real life and a hedonistic pleasure seeker during leisure time. The things you are looking for from people are abundant in real life but are going to be short in games, because most people do not take in-game wealth (or other forms of "being productive") as seriously as you do. Also, games tend to have a built in welfare system, as most people tend to not want to worry about the costs of living in-game, as they already get that in real life.

So really, I think you are beating your head against the wall in some of the things you are trying to get out of the game.

Anonymous said...

"... I just wonder if it fails the Categorical Imperative "test." That is to say, if everyone in EVE followed Gevlon's advice, if the profit margins that make the advice meaningful would actually still exist."

That's the beautiful point: hardly anyone actually does, both in games such as EVE, and in real life. You can put information directly in front of someone, you can literally force it into their brain, but if it does not fit in with that persons own perception of reality then it will be ignored.

Anonymous said...

@Azuriel: The end result would be razor thin margins from goblin vs goblins market pvp.

The reality, of course, is that not everyone is an unfettered goblin in the pursuit of profit, therefore there are plenty of margins.