Less is More

One advice I always hear for Inscription is "Buy Adder/Icethorn/Lichbloom". The reason is that those herbs give more Ink than the other one. There is a ratio for how much you should pay for your herbs.

When Adder's tongue costs 18g and Lichbloom costs 20g, the decision is obvious. You buy the Adder because it gives the same amount of ink. But What if Tiger's Lily is 10g/stack. What should you buy?
Well, the decision depends on whether you care about Snowfall Ink or not.

High End herbs give 1 Snowfall Ink and 6 Ink of the Sea.
Low End herbs give 0.5 Snowfall Ink and 5 Ink of the Sea.

If you care about Snowfall Ink, then the ratio is 8:5 or 1.6, so an 18g stack of Adder is the same value as 11.25stack of Tiger Lily.
If you don't care about snowfall ink, then the ratio becomes 6:5 or 1.2.

Divide the price of high-end herbs by 1.6 to find if it's more profitable to buy low end ones instead. Those are: Goldclover, Fireleaf, Tiger's Lily, Talandra's Rose and Deadnettle. 

Of Cows and Milk

I wrote a few days ago on the JMTC forums about the directly proportional relationship between herb and lotus prices. Check out the thread if you're interested.
If you're a herbalist, you might be interested in these numbers as well:
Herbs: 1.65 per node average
Lotus: 0.0825 per node
Crystallized Life: 0.4125
The Lotus works out to about 1 Lotus per stack of herbs.

Since farmers are only willing to pick herbs until they drop to a certain price(it becomes more profitable to do dailys at a certain price point) the demand for herbs largely influences the price of Lotus.

This relationship is perfect for manipulating the alchemy market.
If you find a way to increase demand for herbs significantly, (I estimate 500 or so stacks of herbs a day, and you can easily use up that much by making Decks) Lotus prices will creep down after a while because of increased supply. Then, when lotus drops, you can buy it in bulk, stop buying herbs for a few weeks, and sell the Lotus when it's expensive again.

I found out that in economics, the phenomenon is called 'Joint Supply'

Some products or
production processes have more than one use. For instance, cows can
both provide milk and be eaten. If farmers increase the number of cows
they own in response to an increase in DEMAND for milk, they are also likely to increase, a little later, the supply of meat, causing beef prices to fall.

Wasted Opportunity

If you're an enchanter, you're probably familiar with Enchanting Rods. Sometimes they are difficult to acquire, but if you ask me, they are a very well thought out item. In order for an enchanter to advance in the profession, he needs to get one of these rods. But even before he can do that, a miner has to mine the ore for the rod, the ore then has to be smelted, and a blacksmith has to create the rod. Only then the Enchanter gets to progress to the next level. This encourages trade and cooperation between players, like any MMO with a market should.

However, let's take a look at the other professions. The same miners we just mentioned require mining picks, and Blacksmith require Blacksmith Hammers. It seems ill thought out and very oversimplified that the rest of these profession items are bought from vendors.
Let's take mining for example. There could be different levels of Mining Picks, crafted by Engineers. The reagents for the first one might use some special items dropped by certain mobs. The following versions could use smelted bars. The possibilities are endless. And profession items like there aren't the only ones. What about Alchemy Vials and Tailoring threads.
And why limit this just to professions, what about food/drink that players sometimes buy.
Blizzard missed a big opportunity by trivializing a chunk of the professions.

I said I wouldn't speculate, but I did. Click the picture for link.

The probable is that which for the most part happens

Today's post is a short math lesson. If you remember probability from middle school you probably want to skip the post. If not, you might find it helpful. I decided to write about probability because so many things in the game are based on RNG(Random Number Generator). Spells/Droprates/Profession Procs all are based on RNG. It's very common to see players say:
"I made 3 Darkmoon Cards and None of them were Nobles, making cards is bad"
"I farmed 30 Stacks of Herbs and got 0 Frost Lotuses, Blizzard nerfed Frost Lotus!"
"I made flasks 20 times and it never procced. Elixir Mastery sucks!"
Or an even better one:
"I prospected 1 stack of Titanium and got 2 epic gems, prospecting titanium is awesome!"
The reply to all of these usually is "Random number generator is random". Quite insightful, eh?

So let's begin our short math lesson. Since WoW uses a random number generator, no previous draw has an effect on the next one. This makes all the calculations in the game very easy.
Let's assume that every time you kill a certain mob, you have a chance to loot 1 to 6 cloth from the mob. How many mobs do you have to kill to get 100 cloth(5 stacks)?
Got an answer? Let's see if you're right. The answer was that you need to kill 28-29 mobs on average.
How did we arrive to this conclusion? First we found the probability of getting cloth from the mob.
Each time we kill a mob we have the chance of getting = 3.5 cloth. 100 divided by 3.5 is 28.57, which was the answer to the problem.
How did I get ? Since we loot 1-6 cloth each time, and the RNG is indeed random and doesn't care about how many cloth we got last time we have to add up all the probabilities of getting cloth:

Does that mean that you are going to get 3.5 cloth each time you kill a mob? No, you might kill 300 mobs and only loot 1 cloth at a time, and somebody else might kill 300 mobs and loot 6 cloth each time. However the more cloth you loot, the more likely you are to reach this number.

You can interpret the graph the following way: 1000 mobs were looted total and the blue line shows how much cloth was looted each time. Notice that it took about 200 tries before the graph reached 3.5 and that the line didn't become completely flat until about 400 mobs were looted.

Hopefully this refreshed your memory about probability. I'll end this thread with some of the % for common drop/proc rates.

Frost Lotus: 5% chance from Northrend Herbs
Nobles Cards: 1/32 chance to get any specific card and 25% chance to get a random Nobles Card.
Prospecting Saronite Ore: 24% chance to get Rare gem (There is something special about prospecting, and there might be a followup post sometime in the future.)
Parrot Cage (Hyacinth Macaw) .07% or roughly 1:1400, which once again doesn't mean that killing 1400 will guarantee one.

Everyone's a hero in their own way

"It may not feel too classy
begging just to eat.
But you know who does that? Lassie!
And she always gets a treat!"

It's difficult to start writing this topic, since so many aspects of the game are affected by it. The issue of course is entitlement. There's a lot of discussion on casual v hardcore players, but that is not the issue. There are many players that play 3 hours per week but accomplish a lot more than players that spend 8 hours a day. The problem is that the various ways the game works and is advertised gives players a sense of entitlement to almost everything in the game. Let's examine where this sense of entitlement comes from starting from the very beginning.

When a player buys the game, he is drawn by the advertisements and box art. Both suggest that the player will be a hero in the game. This would be fine for a single player game, where the game is designed to cater to every individual playing it. But, in an immerssive synthetic reality, where you have to play and compete with millions of other players, how does the game make everyone a hero? It doesn't, the advertisement is a lie. No matter how trivial the game is some will still be casuals while others are hardcore.
Different people have different levels of intelligence, skill and devotion.

The second biggest factor that brings this sense of entitlement of players is that loss is meaningless. Dying in World of Warcraft doesn't really matter because the punishment is not severe enough. You lose a bit of armor points and you have to run back to your body(even this was nerfed since now you can run to your body faster and more graveyards were added). When you fail to kill a raid boss it doesn't matter, you can try again next week. And if you're so bad that you can't complete a dungeon, again it does not matter. The developers will just nerf the instance. For example, Occulus:

It's funny. Last week several community managers, developers, encounter
designers, and quality assurance folk logged in to the test realms to
try out the Dungeon tool by playing in pick-up groups with players via
the Random Dungeon option. One of the encounter designers was hit with
Oculus first. In jest, we all had a good laugh at the choice provided
him for his first go. No one left the group and they cleared it in a
flash, I believe getting the 20-minute achievement as well. This was
before creatures and bosses were tuned down a bit, and vehicle
gear-scaling improved on the test realms. It's anecdotal to be
sure, but players certainly didn't shy away from enjoying the time
running the dungeon with a Blizzard employee; and they had little
trouble clearing it. It's one of the faster dungeons in Wrath if done
right. Maybe we should implement a system where, every time Oculus is
selected for you in the Dungeon tool, a Blizzard employee is put in
your group. :p [...] This might not fully address your
question, but part of the reason the changes were made to Oculus was
due to the fact that players were shying away from that dungeon while
testing the Dungeon system more often than they were from other
dungeons. This is the type of data we're watching on the test realms,
particularly when features such as this come along.

Occulus is an easy enough instance, Blizzard knows it, we know it. But because the majority of the players don't know how to properly do it, the instance becomes a nightmare and nobody wanted to do it unless they were running it with friends who did it multiple times. What would have happened if Blizzard didn't nerf the instance? Probably nothing major. There would be a few people whining about it, but eventually most would learn how to quickly kill the bosses, and Occulus would be no different from Nexus. Because Blizzard didn't want to risk the launch of the new LFG tool, they chose to nerf the already easy dungeon.

Is Blizzard correct to appeal to the majority of the playerbase? Depends how you look at it.
From my perspective, it is not. I am not not a hardcore raider by any means. I am content with being just a civilian of Azeroth instead of the hero that slays Arthas. Since WoW is an immersive virtual reality I get the feeling that I contributed to the success of the top raiding guilds on my server by providing cheaper consumables, raw materials, glyphs, gems, enchants and by buying some of the items they bought from raiding.

On the other hand, WoW is not reality, it's escapism. Someone who deals with the reality of getting laid off or simply having a difficult day at work does not want to log on into a fantasy, only to make himself feel like he accomplished even less there. Looking at the game as a business model, it make perfect sense for Blizzard to trivialize the game, if it brings in more subscriptions.

Everyone's a hero in their own way:
you, and you, and mostly me, and you!

Speculation

Patch 3.3 is coming up and there is a lot of speculation as to what to stockpile and what to dump. My personal prediction is that you should buy Infinite Dust, but as far as predictions go, it's a lousy one, so I won't provide an explanation or recommend it to anyone. Other bloggers have written some pretty good analysis of patch notes. I am going to talk about specific items, but about speculation in general.

Let's assume bananas are going to cost more because of some change next patch. But the information is for free everywhere, and considering the number of people reading gold blogs these days, speculation shifts from predicting the demand for bananas next patch, to 'How many people are stockpiling them on my server".
Patch 3.3 comes out very soon, so if you've been stockpiling an item, but you see a price spike on the AH, then you're probably not the only one, and on patch day, the price of the item is actually going to go down instead of rising. Here you have two options:
1. Start selling the items you decided to stockpile before patch, let your competitors take the risk after patch.
2. Buy even more of the item to create panic buying. This second option is very risky, but high risks have high rewards. If your competitors are noticing that you're buying up a lot they might join in, spiking the prices even higher. That's when you sell.

Auctioneers stabilize the economy

I have written two previous posts about RMT and my views on the impact of gold-farmers already, but these have been just my own observations.
Post One
Post Two
Metatron also wrote a concise post that explains the buyer=>farmer=>auctioneer gold cycle.

I decided to investigate the matter further and to my surprise I found a lot of information on the matter.
I started with the WoWWiki and Wikipedia articles about gold farmers and ended up reading a lot of articles in various newspapers, blogs, research papers, and even ordered a book on the topic which I will review as soon as it comes in the mail.

The interest in MMO economies in relation to real world ones started in 2001, when Edward Castronova published a paper titled

Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier. In the paper he claimed that EverQuest had a GDP higher than China and the currency was stronger than the Yen. Since then, there have been many more studies done on the subject and I've found reading them to be quite intriguing.

Another paper on the subject that I read was Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games This one was less about the effects of gold farming on the game, and more on how and why the gold farming phenomenon exists. I'll leave it to you to read the whole thing, but I wanted to quote a few interesting parts.

"Economics sees value wherever humans decide that some construct of theirs has utility but is scarce. Synthetic world goods have utility and are scarce; thus they have value that can be measured in terms of real dollars."

The structure of gold farming firms:

"Three people do research and find the most efficient way of gold farming and power leveling, three people who are good at English do marketing and the rest are divided into four groups, the best gold farmer as group leader, farming gold."

Beyond the basic "gold farmer" epithet are many different roles that gold farmers may
play in-game (expanded from Davis 2007 and Zonk 2007):
• Hunter: these players kill non-player characters/"monsters".  They will then take
any currency dropped from the kill, and sell valuable dropped items in-game for
more currency.
• Fighter: helps the hunter to kill NPCs but does not take the drop.
• Gatherer: undertakes a non-fighting role in the game to gather resources that can
be sold for in-game currency, such as mining or wood-cutting.
• Producer: undertakes a non-fighting role in the game to manufacture items that
can be sold for in-game currency, such as blacksmithing or potion-making.
• Banker: stores assets; may also "mule" the assets from one area of the game to
another (e.g. a bank or trading location).
• Dealer: delivers the currency or item to the purchaser in the game.
• Marketer: "barkers" who generally advertise gold farming services to other
players; "peddlers" who contact individual players with advertising messages.
 Leveller: takes over a purchaser's character and plays it in order to raise it levels
(or plays a firm-owned character, raises its levels and then sells that account).
In practice, a gold-farmer's avatar may play more than one of these roles (e.g. both
marketer and dealer: Bell 2006).  Gold farmers may play these roles alone or work in
groups (e.g. Jin 2006d, Dibbell 2007).  Some of these roles (e.g. barker) seem more
likely to be automated than others.

The paper then goes into the profitability of farming gold, wages and working conditions of the workers.

The general conclusion of what I read seemed to be that "The real problem is the perception of gold farming, not the fact of gold farming" and that game companies don't do much to combat it for various reasons(all related to their profits). For one, there is a good chunk of players who will quit if they can no longer buy gold. Secondly,

"Size of effect: there are few signs that gold farmers or gold buyers have become the dominant
force in game economies.  Thus the effect they – as opposed to regular players – have on the
virtual economy will be fractional; possibly even marginal.  How regular players behave
economically matters more. "

Regular players obviously implies those who love to play the AH extensively. A regular player will pay the cost of a specific item and move on, but those of us who enjoy the buying/crafting/reselling game are the ones who control the what happens with the economy on our servers and keep the supply of an item in check, as to avoid deflation. Some of us, even find clever ways with dealing with oversupply.

Enchant Scrolls: Part Two: Fixing the Market

Last time, I wrote about how even though Enchanting has a very good potential for profit, the market was in a very bad shape on most servers. Today I'm going to write about my attempts to fix my own market.
 This post is not a guide. What I did was risky and depending on your own server you risk to lose a lot of money.

Now that we got that out of the way, I'll explain what I did. The short version is this: I bought out everyone under my threshold and set very high fallbacks in hope that someone will undercut me at a decent price. There's a bit more to it then that though.

I'll use a couple scrolls as an example to demonstrate what's going on.

Part One: How Good scrolls turn bad

a few hours later:

If you look closely, you will notice, I was selling Powerful Stats to chest for 330g. Just a few hours later I only get 285g for the same scroll. Obviously, I take a look at what's going on.

A pretty dumb thing to do if you ask me. This person undercut a well selling scroll by 45g. Two more undercuts like this, and the scroll drops below mats cost. But he's using auctioneer, not much I can do. This is why the scroll market is dead on most servers.
The fact that people feel entitled to cheap enchants doesn't help either. This gem is from linking my enchanting to someone in trade chat:

09:12 [Kenson]: how much do u charge for +28 sp on gloves?
09:13 [Zalmoxes]: 20g
09:13 [Kenson]: er...nvm then...

I don't bother linking enchanting in trade. Instead I sell them on AH.

Part Two: How bad Scrolls turn good

I used Chest - Powerful Stats to demonstrate how quickly scrolls go down below mats cost because of deep undercuts and Auctioneer. What eventually happens is people keep listing the scrolls lower and lower, and it doesn't take long until Auctioneer shows a 300g scroll selling for 70g as 'Market Price'.

I'm going to use Tuskar's Vitality as an example of how you make a bad scroll to start selling for profit.

When posting a new batch of scrolls on the AH QA alerts me that Tuskarr's Vitality was Forced to fallback price, meaning that the price fell below threshold.
Doing a quick search reveals the following:

ALL of these scrolls are below mat's cost, so what do I do? I buy them all out, and undercut the next scroll that would give me a profit.

But wait! I come back a few hours later to find that someone is using Auctioneer and thinks my price is way too high:

Cheap scrolls! I buy them out again! This part can get frustrating, with some scrolls, you can keep buying and buying and people will just list more. So I made myself a rule. If I already have 20 of a certain scroll I won't buy them out(Note: 20 of each scroll cost 171k to make...).
Buying out Tuskarr's Vitality proves fruitful however, as next time I log on:

Here are a few other Scrolls I've managed to 'rescue':

Assault to Gloves, and

Assault to boots

You have to keep repeating this buy out- re-list cycle until everyone's Auctioneer starts picking up on the updated prices and raising the market price. This is the reverse of poisoning(I'd appreciate a better link to this).
In the process you'll find out that some scrolls are very worth the effort, while others(Expertise to Gloves for example) are just going to keep piling into your inventory and are therefore not worth it.

In Part three I will talk about What addons I use, how I keep track of scrolls and a few ways to identify the scrolls that sell well and those that do not.

(clicking these images leads to other sites)

A short update on blog structure

This blog is very new and I'm still working out the format of my posts, and I would appreciate any suggestions. I wanted to let you guys know about a few guidelines for the blog.

• I'm still struggling with keeping my posts short-and-to-the-point but I hope to improve as I go.
• This blog is about World of Warcraft, specifically about the economy side of it.
• Occasionally I will make a crossover post, where I review other games/books that are not necessarily all about WOW but I think will be interesting to a large group of my readers. 

Finally, I decided to end all my post with a 'Nagus says' segment at the end which will link to an interesting blog post or website.
For those who are not fans of StarTrek, the Nagus is "the leader of the Ferengi Alliance. Virtually all decisions that affect the Ferengi must meet the approval of the Grand Nagus whose power is supported by the Ferengi Bill of Opportunities and backed by the Board of Liquidators".

The Real World doesn't Exist

This is going to be another response post to something Gevlon has written. I read most of what he writes and usually agree, but I just couldn't help but disagree on his positing about micro transactions.

Most of what I write in this post is actually just blatant plagiarism. I was in the middle of reading a 248 page paper on RMT and virtual worlds by Vili Lehdonvirta
and the timing just couldn't be better. The paper is titled "Virtual Consumption" and examines the phenomenon of paying real money for virtual goods. It is Lehdonvirta's PhD thesis.

I'll let you read the whole paper yourself, but what it argues is that virtual goods are just as real to some people as gardening tools are to a gardener.

"The idea of use-value or practical usefulness seems far removed from these tiny figures on the screen. But if usefulness is understood instrumentally, as the capacity to achieve some separately defined end, then virtual goods can be useful in their own environments, in the same way as the rake is a useful tool in the garden but not much elsewhere."

In a society where people spend more and more time online, the 'material world' does not necessarily take primacy over the virtual one.

"...the position according to which spending real money on virtual goods is insane because the goods “do not really exist” is untenable. Despite their name, virtual goods are “real” in the ontological sense that they exist in the same reality as other goods. They have a physical manifestation, often a visual form, which can be experienced by many people. They also make their presence felt through other mechanisms. Virtual goods are not figments of imagination, although they can give rise to a strong emotional or dream component in the mind of a consumer, in the same way that many brands and consumer goods seek to do. "

"For people who interact mostly in the digital world, it is the living room sofa that lacks presence and impact in most situations. If presence and impact are the measures of reality, it is the sofa that must be termed “unreal” in such a case."

"Miyamoto Shigeru of Nintendo has used the phrase “touchable images” to describe video games (Fukuda 2000, p. 6). Virtual goods are “touchable images”: not just images with meanings, but images that one can appropriate, make one’s own, and attach personal meaning to. Unlike the objects in Nintendo’s traditional video games, these images moreover exist not just on one screen, but in a virtual space where they can touch the lives of many people, and obtain a social life."

You get the idea... reality is in the eye of the beholder. People make decisions on how to spend their money based on what has value to them, not to somebody else.

"The mere fact that the goods and spaces are digital, and are part of something that has been given the label “game,” is irrelevant. Willingness to pay, to sacrifice time and effort, is the ultimate arbiter of significance when it comes to assessments of economic value."

As virtualisation and communication technology improves and becomes more and more widespread, these boundaries between reality and virtuality will only get blurrier.

(clicking these images leads to places)

Enchnating Scrolls: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (pt.1)

As many of you already know, I've been selling Enchanting scrolls on the Auction House. I will publish a two(perhaps three) part on how I do it, the problems I've encountered, and my attempts to fix them.

I first leveled enchanting in the early day of TBC, and it always seemed like a dead profession. The disenchanting part was great, and was probably my main source of income, but Enchanting items always seemed futile. Advertising in trade for the hope of getting a tip was never my idea of fun. Inscription introduced the ability to make Vellums, which allow you to turn an enchant into a scroll, but only a few people read patch notes, and it was too late by then anyway. Even now, 5 years into the game, those receiving enchants feel entitled to them, and rarely tip the enchanter. Those leveling enchanting are no better. Not only do they advertise free enchants in trade, but they also PAY OTHER PEOPLE for each skill-point they level. Enchanters that know about scrolls don't bother to calculate the cost of each enchant, and just dump in on the AH undercutting the next person.

The scroll market got so bad that when I looked into the market on my server, what Auctioneer was showing as 'Market Price', was usually 80% below the cost for mats. To illustrate why this is a problem, imagine a scroll costs 25g to make. You want to make a profit on the scroll so you factor in 5% AH cut, then you add a markup price on top, so you decide to sell the scroll for 35g. Now you come a couple hours later to find someone dumped 7 scrolls using auctioneer for 12g each. You think 'what an idiot' to yourself, buy out those scrolls and re-list them for above mats cost. Next day you find out that there are 5 more scrolls at 12g again. After a few cycles you get so frustrated that you dump everything yourself and never make scroll yourself. Except that I didn't quit, I stuck it out and attempted to fix the poisoned data in Auctioneer. (I've mostly been successful, but more on that next time).

I took some screenshots for they naysayers who were complaining about scrolls not being a good seller, so I'll use them here as well.

The enchanting market itself is very similar to glyphs, and could be especially appealing to campers(there is no deposit cost for scrolls, and only 60-70 scrolls to deal with). Once you get past the auctioneer problem, the enchanting scroll market is very interesting and brings in quite a good daily profit.
The other problem this market has is the extremely high cost of entry. I added up all the scrolls and it would cost anywhere between 8-10,000g to make 1 of each scroll. Obviously the market is not for the beginner. The high entry cost, combined with the difficulty of fixing/babysitting the market makes it only something a challenge seeking, rich goblin should even attempt.  Also, remember that once you make scrolls a profitable niche, others will quickly jump in to take advantage of your hard work.

In Part Two I will write about my attempts to fix enchanting scrolls and identify the profitable ones, and Part Three will be about the tools I've found work best for making, tracking and selling scrolls.

Five Stages of Acquisition

1. Infatuation -- "I Want it."
2. Justification — "I must have it!"
3. Appropriation — "IT'S MINE AT LAST!"
4. Obsession — "Precious!"
5. Resale — "Make me an offer."

The Auction House and The Marketplace

I’ve played World of Warcraft since vanilla days and this summer I branched out and played some Eve Online. I thought some of you might like to see a Eve vs WOW post. I’m going to focus on the trading and crafting aspects of both game.


For those who don’t know, EVE is a pvp oriented space game. The best way to get an idea of what EVE feels like, watch this video.

If you heard the statement “the real PvP happens on the AH”, that statement definitely applies to EVE. Every item in the game was created from scratch by players in the game. The ships you fly, the ammo, the equipment, even some of the stations were all created by other players or sold on the market. In fact, the games trading system is so advanced that there are player companies, IPOs, banks. Probably the most striking aspect of EVE is the attitude of the GMs towards what is considered legal and what is banable. In WoW you will quickly get banned if you get reported for being a scammer, a ninja etc. In EVE on the other hand, scams, harassment, piracy and assassinations are the norm. If you die in WOW, your items still stay in your bags. In EVE, if your ship gets destroyed, everything you had in your cargo bay is free to take. In fact, some of the scandals were so big there were reports written about them in real newspapers. Here is a story about an eve guild scam that rocked the game world. The estimated value of items lost in game would be around $16000.

“The perpetrator of the heist was the Guiding Hand Social Club (GHSC) corporation (a corporation being similar to a clan in Eve); a freelance mercenary outfit that offers their services (which usually involves corp infiltration, theft and assassination) to the highest bidder. Over a year in planning, the GHSC infilitrated their target's corp with their own members and gained their trust, as well as access to the corp hangers, with time. It all concluded in a perfectly timed climax, with a massive theft in multiple corp hangars synchronized with the in-game killing of the corporation's CEO, the primary target of the contract.”

This is another very well written story about an EVE scam. If anything it is very entertaining.

Another aspect of EVE is that there is only one server. There are around 25,000 players on at any given time. The game world is very big as well. Here is a map of EVE to give you an idea. Every dot is a separate system (a zone you warp into). Empire Space is the relatively safe area run by NPCs and the rest is player space. In player space different alliances control each region, and you are very likely to get killed the second you step in there.

Now that I gave you a brief description of what EVE feels like, I’ll briefly describe the trading.
WoW has an Auction House in every major city, but in fact they are all just one Auction House. In EVE, the market place is different in each region. In addition, you cannot mail items, they have to be transported from station to station in player ships. This creates a variety of trading opportunities. Some players make their money on studying the price differences for items in different regions and buying cheap in one place to resell in another.

Here is a screenshot of what the EVE Auction House looks like.

You will immediately notice that buying and selling are separated. You can place a ‘buy order’ for an item at the price you’re willing to pay for and if someone wants to sell their items right away, they can sell to you for that price. You can also place a ‘sell order’ where you put an item for sale at the price you want (the way you do in WOW AH). The most popular way to make money in EVE is to just sit in station, find items where the difference between buy and sell orders is large and just trade those items.

Another awesome aspect of EVE is the graphs!

You can look at an item’s price history up to a a full year back to see how much the market fluctuates and whether it is a good time to buy or sell. As you can see it not only features average high and lows, but also includes the amount that gets sold and a Donchian Channel graph. Anyone who is new and wants to evaluate a market can easily do so.

As you might have already guessed, EVE is a heaven for someone interested in trading, it even has areal economist on staff and features a Quarterly Economic Newsletter.

I’d encourage everyone to try EVE at some point. It might not be the game for you, or it could be something you immediately fall in love with. My little summary of The Marketplace does not even begin to scratch the surface of this game's depth.

Crafting session.

Just finished my weekly crafting session. Moved all the gold except 20g on each alt to the guild bank so that I can keep track of how much I make in a week.

AH Posting
12g fallback //used to be 25g but I'm hoping to get campers off my back.
3.5g threshold (I could go down to 60s but the higher the threshold the less I need to craft)
Will post 2-3 times a day at random times and let the auctions expire instead of canceling.

First image is my crafter. Bags + Bank.

Alt 2

Alt 3

All the pandas were Kung-Fu fighting

A few days ago Blizzard announced a "not so micro"-transaction store and they are testing it out with two pets. Two pets is just testing the waters, there are so many thinks one could think of that could be added to the store. There's speculation of how far Blizzard is willing to go, and the consensus is that they will not make you pay for anything game changing, but only they know, and so far Blizzard has been very very vague about the whole thing.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about whether paying real money for a virtual pet is acceptable, but most people neglected to notice an important fact: Blizzard semi-legalized gold selling. The reason I say 'semi' is because they are trying really hard to neither confirm and deny. Dozens of these pets are getting sold for gold on every server right in trade chat. Yet when you ask, blues will only respond with a link to TOS and tell you to interpret it as you like. Confirming that you find RMT(Real Money Trade) OK, along with microtransactions would be bad publicity. It will always be one of those grey areas that people on the forums will argue about.


Well l bought one today! I paid someone 6000g for the Pandaren and I found a seller in about 5 minutes. The biggest problem is trusting the other person to not scam you. However I was lucky enough. I believe eventually there will be third party services that let you transfer the pet at minimal risk.
My thoughts on the issue couldn't be clearer. I'm all for it! If you read the post I made about gold farmers, this is the best solution to the account hacking I can see them come up with. All you see in the Customer Support forums these days are people who got their accounts hacked. Goldsellers hack your account and then resell your own gold to you, they're evil.

If you say that Blizzard is OK with the pets being used to buy gold why won't they just add a direct way to purchase gold whenever you need it?

I'm gong to quote an MVP from the forums who answered this question perfectly:

Adding currency to the game in this manner (where no
one originated it, it's created at the player's beck and call) would
create a situation where it would practically be necessary to purchase
it.


I just don't understand the utter pathetic amount of laziness necessary to justify purchasing gold in this game.

The answer both IRL and game economies are the same. If you keep printing more money it's going to cause inflation.
Now if you've thought about this before, you couldn't have possibly missed the money printing press in this game - Daily Quests. In fact, Daily's were Blizzard's first attempt to *fix* the economy. I have to say, this was probably their worst decision yet. Daily quests quickly created the catch-22 that the MVP in the above quote talked about. Dailys 'added currency to the game at the player's beck and call. Probably not as fast as direct gold buying/selling would have been, but fast enough to devalue gold 'to the point where it would practically be necessary to keep running dailys. Not only that, but Blizzard raised the amount of gold everyone got from daily quests over time. Prices are so high on important items like consumables, enchants, and gems that sometimes it takes a few days to get the money to buy what you need. The people who crafted the item and sold them receive the (arguably now less valuable) gold, while the quest runners who farmed gold to buy those items have no way to get more money other than doing quests again. As a result the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Economists came up with a solution to the rich-get-richer problem a long time ago - it's called a progressive tax.
Adam Smith wrote:

 The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They
find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little
revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life
occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house
embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries
and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore,
would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of
inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It
is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public
expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more
than in that proportion.

Obviously, Blizzard can't force me to pay a tax, I pay my $15/month just like everyone else, so if I was forced something I wouldn't want to, I'd simply stop playing. However, they can create the next best thing - an incentive to give a portion of my wealth away.

By adding the pet in the middle of the transaction Blizzard ensures that no new gold is being created - just transferred from someone rich, to someone in greater need of that money. It's a wealth distribution system, and a good one at that. The reason
account hacking and botting became so popular was because there were many people tired of running dailys just to support the 'fun' aspects of the game, so they opted for the next best thing available, which was to buy gold and risk losing their account. However now there is a semi-official way to trade money for gold. The way I see it is, every pet sold is an account not hacked.

As I mentioned in the very beginning, I purchased the Pandaren Monk pet from someone else for 6000g. I'll admit the decision was impulsive, but it was not one I regret. I can justify the decision economically since by paying someone 6000g that's 6k they didn't farm from doing daily's, 6k that will be infused back into the economy without contributing to inflation. Hoarding gold, doesn't make sense from any point of view, inflation will devalue it in the long run, so something I pay 6k now might turn into 60k a year from now. Also what's the purpose of saving gold, if you're not going to use it. Buying this pet gave me a feeling of satisfaction I haven't gotten from this game in a while. In fact, I decided to set aside 5% of my profits towards such purchases in the future. I recently hit 100k and looks like my next purchase (probably lilKT) will be when I reach 200k. 
Gevlon wrote that buying pets was stupid because it's a sign of being social, and Kevmar simply didn't seem into pets that just stay there next to you! So what will? There has to be at least some thing in the game that will make you want to spend your hard earned gold on. What's the one item you're willing to spend money on and how high are you willing to go? Tella wrote about giving in and buying a Hyacinth Macaw, and wingman posted a screenshot on JMTC of someone selling a mount on the AH.

Netherweave bags, an update

On October 25 I wrote about a little experiment I started where I sent an alt 1000g and I feel like it’s time for an update.
Here are the results:

Day 1 1000g (sent from my main)
|
\/
Day 10 2181g
53 Bags
1250 bolts of Neatherweave Cloth = another 312 bags to be crafted, so the totals are
2181g + 365 bags.

I took 1000g out of the 2181g and sent it back to my main.
Bags sold for an average of 14g80s and I sold about 45 bags a day.
Using this data we can estimate how much I made the past 10 days.
The extra 365 bags, if sold for an average of 14g80s would be 5402g
So that’s a total of 6583g profit. The problem is that I can’t sell 365 bags in a day, I can only sell about 45 average, so it would take about 8-10 more days to get rid of my stock If i decided to stop and take my money out of the market.

How I was able to achieve market domination:
I simply logged on the alt twice a day and bought out all the cloth I could find under 8g and listed 30 bags each time. There still are a few competitors that manage to squeeze in a few bags here and there, but they only manage to get enough cloth to make 6-7 bags at once.

Conclusion: with only a 1000g starting capital I managed to make enough gold to buy Epic flyer + Cold Weather Flyer(If I get rid of the bags and stop buying more cloth). And this is just 1 type of bag. There’s 2-3 other bags you could craft, along with 2 types of spell-thread and a cool down you could sell. Obviously, tailoring has a good profit potential for anyone looking to support themselves in the game.

I will write one final update on Netherweave Bags on November 26, when a full month has passed.

PS: Netherweave bags require only 315 Tailoring skill and go grey at 340. The profit from selling bags could easily pay for all your expenses to level this profession all the way to 450.

Just a quick update

I haven't been neglecting the blog, but I've been too busy today and I don't know when I have will have time for a relevant post. I just wanted to take 5 minutes and post a heads up of what you're going to see here over the next few days.

1. It's been about a week since I started my little Netherweave Bag experiment and I have the data for you on that so there will be a update about my progress there.

2. I'm working on a guide about how to fix and maintain the Enchanting Scrolls market successfully and that should be ready a few days from now.

3. I'm working on a series of posts about various game that have a market/trade aspect to them and how they compare to World of Warcraft(The trading part of it). The first one in the series will be about the EVE Online Marketplace.


PS: It seems I'm having a very successful day in the game. Between glyphs, bags, cards and scrolls I've made 10-12k today so far. Also it seems like I might of found yet another farmer to supply me with herbs.
Gevlon at GreedyGoblin wrote about giving poor people in game hourly jobs and I had just the opportunity to do something like that today:

21:57 [Angioplasty]: still level 1 you bum and you still haven't 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

I checked /who Angioplasty a few times and he was in Sholazar, a bit later he whispered me about Goldclover and the other lower level cost so I explained to him about Milling and told him that I'll buy the lower herbs for 12g a stack if he can't find a buyer who will pay more.
I also explained redirected him to the flask guy about the Frost Lotuses he gets, so we'll see.

30 min later he whispers me:

22:45 [Angioplasty]: so will you buy 5k worth of herbs from me?
22:45 [Pacala]: 5000/20 = 250 stacks
22:45 [Angioplasty]: ok sounds good to me
22:46 [Angioplasty]: will you buy tonight?
22:46 [Pacala]: if you can make that much you'd actually be my hero, but ive never seen someone be able to produce 250 stacks
22:46 [Pacala]: and yes i will buy all your herbs
22:46 [Angioplasty]: im quick at tit
22:46 [Angioplasty]: it*

So, maybe he's a bit too enthusiastic... but if he farms that much I'll buy it all.

I checked on him again an hour later as I'm writting this:

23:56 [Pacala]: how's the herbing?
23:56 [Pacala]: still think you're gonna make 250 stacks?
23:56 [Angioplasty]: yea im working on it right now
23:56 [Angioplasty]: got 4 stacks already

Account security

I went ahead and purchased an authenticator today. It didn't seem like that much of a problem before since Blizzard is pretty good at restoring people's hacked accounts. However, now that I broke 100k the risk is too much for me.
Another thing I'm considering doing is transfering guild ownership to a separate account that I'm going to let expire, and only allow a single alt on my current account to withdraw max 10,000g/day.

Gold Farmers and botters are necessary in World of Warcraft and Blizzard is to blame

Disclaimer: This post is NOT about account hackers and I do NOT condone gold buying and selling.

Recently Eyonix made a sticky in the General Forums titled “Don’t buy gold”

"Buying gold makes baby murlocs cry. If that isn’t enough to dissuade you all by itself, you might be interested in checking out the informational webpage that we put together to make sure players have the facts about the negative impact of purchasing gold and using power-leveling services. Our goal is to shed some light on how these companies operate, share some of the measures we’re constantly taking to combat them, raise awareness of the detrimental effects these services have on all players -- not just the buyers -- and help protect members of our community from being targeted by them. So give it a read -- it’ll only take a few minutes. And don’t buy gold. Because you wouldn’t want little Murky’s tears on your conscience, would you?"

This is the page page Blizzard put together to inform players about why buying gold is bad.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html

There’s one statement on that page that rubbed me the wrong way.
“...use bots that make it hard for players to find the resources they need, and raise the cost of items through inflation.”

The are a few problems with that statement.

Inflation:
Farmers do not cause inflation in the game. An AH or trade transaction does not increase the amount of gold available in the game. Let’s assume that the amount of gold available on the server is 1Billion. A botter farms 100 stacks of herbs and sells them on AH. I buy 100 stacks of herbs for my own use for 2000g. The botter takes the gold he made from 100 stacks and sells it to someone else for $20USD. The ammount of gold in the game didn’t increase, it was simply moved from me --> to the botter --> to the gold buyer. Actually the amount of gold decreased if you take AH fees and deposit costs into consideration. So no, botters/gold-farmers do not cause inflation.
Then when does inflation come from? It comes from a) vendoring b)loot and c) the major one: daily quests. Blizzard are themselves responsible for the inflation in the game because they increase gold rewards from questing and vendoring items. If Blizzard wanted to reduce inflation the solution would be obvious - remove gold from dailies, replace it with gear/gems/enchants/herbs/lotuses and so on.

Now to the second point, about how botters supposedly make it harder to find the resources players need. I value my account too much to ever compromise it with something like botting, but I can easily tell who’s a botter in the game and who isn’t without leaving Stormwind.
The demand for Nobles Decks on my server is very big. I’ve been crafting about 3 Nobles Decks a day for the past month. I won’t bore you with calculations and probability of getting cards (That’s for another post) but I’ll tell you that to craft 3 Nobles Decks takes roughly 600 stacks of high end herbs (Adder/Icethorn/Lichbloom) and 288 Eternal Life. When I buy herbs from the AH I pay attention who sells them since sometimes I can whisper and agree to get them to COD their herbs to me instead of putting them on the Auction House. I’ve noticed that the average player will only farm sell 10-12 stacks of herbs a day. That makes perfect sense: 10-12 stacks of herbs + a couple eternals and a few Frost Lotuses make about the same amount of gold as dailies. They run the heroic daily dungeon and maybe 1-2 more and they are set with the amount of gold they need to buy new gems/enchants for their gear and pay for repairs/consumables. So if the average player farms 10-12 stacks, where do the rest of the herbs come from? I often buy 60-70 stacks from the same name daily. I can only assume most of these accounts are botters. The thing is, if botters wouldn’t be there, the demand would simply be higher than the supply, and prices would rise higher and higher. Don’t believe me? I’ll give you an example. On September 4, 2009 farmers disappeared. Blizzard detective one of the biggest bots and banned everyone using it. Frost Lotus prices began to creep up to 40..50..60..80g. Very few put 2+2 together and soon enough someone started a rumor that there was a stealth nerf to lotus drop rates and that’s how they explained the rising market price. But with a 5% drop-rate and people only farming about 12 stacks a day lotus was actually just very hard to come by.
So let me ask you this. Blizzard knows way better than a casual observer like me how much the average player farms a day. Why the bloody hell do they create a 5% droprate for an item that’s used in 4 different flasks that almost every raider in the game uses on a weekly basis? Again, the answer is obvious. Blizzard knows that botters will always be there and designs the game not with the averages that legitimate players farm, but the averages that rule breaking farmers output every day. Here we finally arrive to the only possible conclusion, that gathering and crafting in this game is designed with farmers and botters in mind.

One final point is about Blizzards own attitude towards botters. They have some brilliant developers and impressive detection software, but they don’t take advantage if it as much as perhaps they should have. Blizzard is famous for their banwaves. They will not ban botters for month at a time, only to ban everyone one morning and make a nice press release. Tobold wrote a blog post about such a banwave a while ago.
Banning 1-2% of the botters/year makes for a better publicity stunt than banning 100-200 new botting accounts a day and keeping the game clean.

In conclusion I’d like to say that without a doubt the game would be more enjoyable for everyone if Blizzard redesigned the harvesting/crafting parts of the game and kept banning everyone who is detected using a bot on a daily basis. However in the current version of the game, botters are actually essential to the gameplay.

Is camping the Auction House in WOW worth it?

This is going to be a short post about supply and demand. Is camping a market viable? And how much AH camping is too much camping?

Let’s assume the demand for glyphs is infinite: that is no matter how many glyphs you will post per day, they will all sell. Here camping has an obvious advantage. Being always the lowest will guarantee that you constantly sell.
Obviously this is not the case. You can only sell a certain amount of glyphs a day. Sure, always being the lowest will guarantee that you’re the one selling them. But since the amount of glyphs you can sell is limited, there’s a point where you spent more time canceling/reposting than you should have and your gold per hour decreases. This becomes more true the more competition you have. If you go past peak gold/hour you just become a griefer. You’re denying other people sales, but you’re not earning more gold than them.

Now you’re going to argue with me and say something like “But I don’t actually spend 17 hours a day on wow. I do it while I do other work”. And you would have a point, except for the fact that camping requires you to be online doing one thing - selling glyphs. While you spend that time camping a limited amount of glyph sales, I also sell bags and enchanting scrolls. At the end we probably spend the same amount of time doing stuff, but one of us makes more gold/hour. The real answer to maximizing your profit is not “CAMP MOAR” but ‘diversify’.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter if I sell 3 glyphs a day or 3 thousand. I’ll eventually sell everything and I already make more money than I can possibly spend in the game.

Why Gevlon is wrong about QA2

I was going to publish my article about my enchanting business today, however Gevlon @Greedy Goblin wrote another post about the superiority of Auctioneer and the ‘n00bz’ that use QA2 and I’d like to share my thoughts on the issue.

First a bit about my vs his settings.
Here are mine:


And here are his:

Gevlon said:

“PS2: There are some clueless who claim that since they don't undercut by 1c, they are different from other QA2 wizards. The defining characteristic is the undercut-fallback cycle. If a QA2 wizard finds the market empty, he posts on an arbitrary high fallback price, while I post on old median +25%. He welcomes undercutters back, I don't.”

Let’s take a look at these numbers and do the math. Let’s assume the median price for a glyph is 18g. If there are no other glyphs on the auction house or someone is posting glyphs for more than 25% markup he will post the 18g glyph at 22.5g. With my settings I will post the same situation at 25g. How exactly is 22g/glyph any less inviting to a undercutter than 25g? It isn’t. All glyphs cost exactly the same gold to make since they use the same amount of raw materials to make. I ran a little experiment for about two weeks where I posted every glyph at a fixed price of 3.5g. By the second week I was selling about 6 glyphs a day total(people caught on to my fixed price and were simply undercutting me by 1s). So, undercutters will ALWAYS come, regardless of my arbitrary fallback or his ‘meaningful’ median price.

We covered fallbacks, now let’s look at thresholds using the same example. Auctioneer will not post an 18g glyph for less than 10.8g My cost of the Ink of the Sea is 3g/ink if I ignore Snowfalls and -5g if I count snowfall sales(18g/stack of herbs|23g/snowfall). Personally I consider 2.5g to be my cost of Inks even though I already have 7 thousand inks paid for with snowfall sales. Ok, let’s move on further. As I said before, his settings wont post a 18g glyph for less than 10.8g. If I skipped on those sales I’d be losing a 7g potential profit (10-3g). I’m not sure about Gevlon, but I’m not going to skip out on a 7g profit no matter what I’m selling.

Median price is meaningless when you talk about glyphs.

Glyph of Nourish sells pretty well, at least on my server. The median price for the glyph is less than 6g, and I believe Gevlon actually ignores glyphs that have a low median price and doesn’t craft them. Because glyphs go up and down many times a day, the median price of a glyph is no less arbitrary than my fallbacks. Again, Gevlon is wrong.

Now that we covered how using a median price for selling glyphs is not very important let’s talk about why QA2 is actually superior, and you’re not a noob if you use it. The main reason to use QA is that it’s fast and flexible. Gevlon posts 5-6 of each glyph I believe, that’s at least 1500 glyphs total. Batch posting 1500 items is going to take a long time. Posting 1500 items with QA is going to take less than 10 minutes. QA is flexible. If I feel like I have a lot of time to craft I can drop my threshold and fallback lower and sell a larger volume. All I need to modify is two numbers and I’m back in business. Same if I want to go back to my old settings. Just change those numbers back.

Finally QA has an awesome cancel function.
Clicking the cancel button will cancel all the auctions you’ve been undercut on.
/qa cancelall will cancel everything you have on the auction house
/qa cancelall 2 (or 12, or 24) will cancel everything under a certain with less than 2,12,12 hour remaining. Very useful if there’s 2 hours left and you know you wont be able to be online for when they expire.

My last point might be a bit of a flamebait, but I don’t think Gevlon actually installed QA2 and gave it a fair chance (about a week). He just read what his commenters were saying and decided QA2 was a bad tool.

PS: The main reason Gevlon's post struck me the wrong way is not that he thinks Auctioneer is superior, but that he referred to people who use QA as 'n00bz' and 'drones'. That's like saying people who use iTunes are all idiots and the people who use foobar2k are actually somehow a lot smarter.

I try to speak chinese.

I cleared the AH of every possible herb and I start milling. Suddenly I see about 15 minutes later the AH is full of herbs for 20g/stack. I quickly buy everything and whisper the buyer.
here's the resulting conversation:



[11/01/2009]

05:28 [Jeanj]: got more herbs?

05:29 [Jeanj]: xie xie

05:29 [Lankfordbc]: mei keqi

05:30 [Lankfordbc]: duo duo ,fang mei xia

05:31 [Jeanj]: wo shi mei guo ren

05:32 [Lankfordbc]: you need i am 20G COD you?

05:33 [Jeanj]: yes, adder/icethorn/lichbloom COD

05:33 [Lankfordbc]: ok

05:34 [Jeanj]: Na hao ji le

05:35 [Jeanj]: Wo zhi hui jiang ying wen. Wo hui jiang yi dian dian zhong wen.

05:35 [Lankfordbc]: ....

05:35 [Jeanj]: ni ming bai ma?

05:36 [Jeanj]: my chinese is not good

05:38 [Jeanj]: [Tiger Lily] 12g/stack ok?

05:38 [Jeanj]: COD

05:38 [Jeanj]: [Deadnettle] 12g too

05:39 [Jeanj]: do you have [Eternal Life] ? 20g each. 400g/stack

05:39 [Jeanj]: ?

05:42 [Jeanj]: do you speak english?

05:44 [Lankfordbc]: mei you..

05:44 [Jeanj]: ni de yi si

05:45 [Lankfordbc]: no have

05:46 [Jeanj]: COD tomorrow too?

05:47 [Jeanj]: ...míngtiān?

He signed off by then. hopefully I'll get some eternals off of him tomorrow.