Lemonade or loan

Boxington commented to the RMAH buying: "To me, a real life analog of this situation is person A who starts a lemonade stand to get capital to start a lawn mowing service to get capital to fund ever bigger and more capital intensive enterprises (the key being they ground their way up from nothing). Person B, conversely, takes out a big loan and skips the first 5 steps of grinding to move into a small/medium sized business. Who is more rational, A or B? It's unclear unless you define carefully your definitions, but in no way is it obvious that person B is somehow skill-less, lazy or cheating. In this comparison, person B is the plex to isk converter. One might argue that they skipped the grinding part of the game (going from frigs to destroyers to cruisers, on up) and that is somehow skill-less or cheating, but that would, again, require much more specification on how we ought to play the game (and that will probably be fruitless)."

At first I couldn't answer it, but life answered it. I set up a business plan in EVE. I don't discuss it in detail until it actually works. The product of the plan sell well. I calculated the material prices and saw that they sell cheaper than the product. I figured out that I buy up those which are 10% cheaper than the break-even point, create the product and sell. So I went and start buying it. Then bang, "you can't afford it" or something. I managed to blow all my 150M ISK that is not invested into something already to raw materials. Nevermind, I create the products, sell them and I made 15M. Except, the materials are littering a whole region (I ran out of money before I finished buying in The Citadel), and they are big in size, needing lot of runs with my poor Badger II.

The money is not lost, it's in raw materials and I may even make money by holding them if their price continue to rise. Or I lose if they don't. However I did not plan to invest into them, did not research their future price and to prevent being out of cash I had to sell some books I bought for myself for future learning.

What a moron! What made me do so stupid act? I did not do anything stupid like on the first week when I went from zero to 50M by hauling, mostly rich plagioclase and pyerite. What happened?


The money these good souls gave me conspicuously match to the money "I did not have invested elsewhere". I grown naturally before. I got a small amount in one business and invested into the next. I probably made stupid things but always with little since I did not have more, as the rest were invested into something that proven itself to work, even if with lower profitability than new plan (if works). I had to try my plans out in small and fix the errors. Just because the plan is good, it doesn't mean that it's without "little" technical mistakes. My plan with the production still doesn't look bad, I was just unprepared with the logistics of it. As you naturally grow, you fix these mistakes, polish your plan. You always know where to spend the next batch of profit.

However if you get money from nothing, you put it into something that is not ready yet. You are over your head and will make the necessary mistakes on much larger scale than you should. You must start out at a lemonade stand because when (and not if) you lose a bottle of lemon juice, it will be much easier to stand up than after losing $1M investor money. This is exactly what happened with the .com business around 2000. The internet-based business, the web2 ideas weren't bad. These companies weren't scams or daydreaming idiocies. Yet they went down with lot of investors money, because the people inside did not know how to handle a company of that size. They should have started out small.

If you buy a PLEX in the item shop to have a "fast start", you probably going to waste it some stupid way and chances are that you won't be significantly ahead of those who did not do it. For the same reason I'm sure that financial investment (buying papers without being proficient on the field of the company, just because I my crystal ball told that they'll rise) will cause more bankruptcies and recessions. It gives money to people who can't handle it yet. If they could, they would have it at the first place!


PS: after two weeks of playing my balance:
Liquid: 391M
Buy order escrow: 111M
Sell order worth: 25M (They will sell for that amount, I did not price them high)
Materials waiting for processing: 43M (on current, unprocessed price)
Books, implants that I use myself and won't sell: 87M
Gifts from other players: 400M

So the wealth collected by me is 257M. Considering that a PLEX costs 500M and covers 4 weeks, I'm already making enough to play free. Of course I can't yet as I will invest this money to ships and skills to increase my revenue, but the point is that a totally fresh newbie can trade himself into free-play mode.

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Skipping combat

Side note: what is the clear sign that you like blogging and going to continue? If you have an idea you want to write about and then you look at the schedule of pre-written posts and say, "Oh, which one to delay for this". Thanks to EVE, I'm in this position now, having more than a week of posts in various states of preparation. But I must write this now. I'm already overdue.

From the title you might figured that this post is about the hate campaign against Jennifer Hepler. I did not considered it an interesting topic first, as "sexist idiots being sexists idiots" doesn't sound interesting.

Thanks to the noise they made, the idea of Ms Hepler reached me, for good as it's probably one of the best I've ever heard. It tells that you shall be able to skip combat in MMOs. Of course it should be implemented the very same way as skipping dialogs or skipping reading the license agreement: just because you skipped, it applies to you. So if I encounter a bunch of boars and choose to skip combat, I can see my combat log running with extreme speed and soon I see bunch of dead boars or a dead character on the screen.

Why would anyone be bothered by such change? What is the source of hate against the creator of the idea? I mean I don't care if someone skips reading the hilarious text of the EVE mission to transport homeless to somewhere else, out of sight. The hate and despise that the mission agent (questgiver) expresses towards the bums is perfectly written and clearly touching me. I am not running some curier mission for standing, I'm saving a a space station from the worst plight: the M&S. But if you skip it and care nothing but that few 10K ISK and 0.02 standing, I'm fine with you. I don't think you are a cheater or unorthy of rewards.

Why combat is not already skippable and be ran by auto-calculation? Why is the huge rejection against it? I mean sexist idiots are usually being sexist idiots but something has clearly kicked the beehive this time. Considering that Ms Hepler was a female game developer for years without such outrage, it must be the idea itself.

The reason lies in the hate against Strand of Ancients, it lies on the bridge of Arathi Basin and the middle of Eye of the Storm. Literally, in the form of skeletons. The optimal strategy on these maps is using vehicles, defending or capturing objectives. Yet serious part of the players clearly ignore it and initiate rather pointless PvP combat in some uninteresting area, or in EoS, to capture the flag that has near-zero outcome of the battle. These people are ready to lose in order to get into combat. For some reason this combat thing is extremely important to them. Why?

Combat is an obvious way of showing off superiority. When I win (and I dare to write "I" and not "we") Alterac Valley by directing people to the proper places and delaying the capture of Dun Baldar bunkers and flag by several minutes, my superiority is rather impersonal and theoretical. If you clearly understand what is going on in AV and you saw me calling the objectives and defending the bridge head, then you could come to the conclusion: "yes, that guy won it for us, in a sense that if we'd replace him with a random, it would have much-much bigger effect on the outcome than replacing anyone else". I'm a thinking person and I'm very happy with this definition. I am happy even if no one bothers to or capable of recognizing my performance.

If you bash someones face, you clearly and simply shown superiority over that person to him and the spectators. If some peer would be watching your monitor, he would come to the conclusion without doubt that you are superior player than your opponent, while - unless he is proficient with AV strategy - he will most likely say "he chatted a lot and AFK-ed mostly next to the bridge" watching my play.

The idea of skipping combat threatens these simple people of losing their simple and straightforward measure of worth. They would have to accept something more subtle and complicated measuring system that may or may not be possible for them, but what matters most: make gaming unable to display elite status to peers. I mean xXnubpwnzorXx is able to learn the signaling value of toplists, titles and reward mounts but his buddies clearly don't without explanation. Explaining them that "I got this dragon for killing the hardest of enemies" is more complicated and less convincing than simply killing an opponent right front of them.

The non-existence of peers makes it just worse. The social person always show off to peers, even if they are not present. The "I must wear make-up, to feel good about myself" is a simple example of showing off to non-present peers. The thinking behind it is "what would they say if they'd see me". Peers who are there are giving feedback, even with a smile or gesture. If a guy is standing next to me, I can explain him how AV works and can see the moment on his face when he understands why was I right there were I was. But if he is not there, you must go for overkill. You need a display that cannot be questioned.

These creatures wanted to devastate the "skipping combat" idea (and not the author of it), because they are social so want to impress peers and because they can't explain anything to peers since they don't have any: they are sitting behind a computer screen. Alone.

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The PuG update: remember that you can join our cross server BWD HM run!

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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/

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Running missions for profit and fun

Missions in EVE are similar to daily quests in WoW. They are boring, sometimes outright annoying and pay pocket change. Yet they are hard to avoid for any businessman because they provide not only starter ISK but standing (reputation) with the various corporations and your state and you'll need these to decrease broker fees, refinery and manufacturing costs. The formula for broker fees is BrokerFee% = (1 – 0.05*BrokerRelationsLevel)/ exp(0.1 *FactionStanding + 0.04*CorporationStanding). Running missions is something that you can do as a low-skill new player, so doing them now is much better than later when you have the skills for doing something more profitable.

There are several kind of missions, provided by agents. Security department agents send you to kill NPCs, bleh. Mining divison agents want you to travel to some spot and mine quest ore for them. If you want to be a miner, go for them (though mining is grindy with low ISK/hour and miners are favorite targets of griefers). However our favorite agents will be the distibution agents.

Their jobs are similar, though the quest texts are worth reading, some of them are really charming (my favorite is when you must transport homeless people to other station since they couldn't find an excuse to just throw them out of the airlock). They give you an item and tell you were to bring it. Or they give you a location where you must go, pick up the item and bring it back to them. For level 1 agents the range is 0-2 jumps (0 meaning another station in the same system), level 2 agents send you 0-3, level 3 ones send you to 0-5 and level 4 agents has the nasty habit to send you to the end of the world or worse: low sec systems. To make it worse, you can't just decline what you don't like. You have 1 decline chance every 4 hours, if you decline again, you lose standings with the agent and the organization which that would give standing upon completion.

So are we condemned to do 4-6 jumps for a single low-paying mission that will give you some lousy 0.01-0.03 standing (and you need 5+)? Absolutely not. Here is what you shall do: open the agent finder and check out where the highest available level of distribution agents of your target corporation sit. One by one set your destination to them, but don't fly. Open the starmap and you see a bright line from your current location to the home of the agent, showing exactly where he is. If he is in a system which connect to several ones, check the next agent. What you seek is a linear chain of systems like this: There are many dead-end systems like this. Rings and maximum 1-star "hairs" are OK too. The point is that an agent on this line can't really send you anywhere else but to the other stars on the line. Draw the map to a piece of paper, making sure that it doesn't contain more than 6-7 stars.

Now go to the end of the line and open the agent finder and configure it to find all available distribution agents in the region. They are sorted by distance so the first page always have the agents in the current system. Watch out for the rank slider on the top. The higher you set it, the higher the rewards will be, but the less agents you can access. Their accessiblity depends on existing faction and corporation standing. It's sometimes better to do lot of lvl 2 missions than a few 3 or 4. Always stick to one level, don't mix them.

Pick the first agent, dock on his stations and pick up his missions and cargo. If he would send you out of your interest zone, decline and ask again. If he sends you out again (both are unlikely), press "delay" and leave him be. Repeat it with all agents in the system unless your cargohold is full.

Some of the missions send you to the same system, complete them, grab new. After these, jump to the next system, complete all the missions that sent you to this system and pick up the ones from the agents living here. If you have empty cargo space, dock at the agents first, maybe they send you somewhere in-system, with some luck to a station where you already have something to drop. Continue this to the end of the line and start moving backwards. Never turn back for a mission, always run the pre-set route. This way you can run several missions in the same time:

Keeping the agents locations organized, planning which mission to dock first to be within the time bonus window, who are on the 4 hour cooldown, and who don't can can be declined to get a new mission (or new cooldown), who to skip when the cargohold is full (will be full, even if you have your Badger II or equivalent, fitted with cargohold expander IIs as it should) needs attention, organization skills and attention divided to several directions, making the activity challenging = fun.

And what about profit?
That's 1.2M in about half an hour, and I made it as a 5 days old newbie.

But the real reward is not money. There are "storyline agents", who contact you via notification when you did 16 missions for the same faction. They are balanced for normal gameplay, to appear once a day maybe. Since the above screenshot shows about 25 completed missions / hour, they appear very frequently for you. Keep your mission count well recorded (you can use the wallet too to count agent mission reward fields). Complete 15 missions, not 16. Actually you should complete just 14 to be sure not to trigger early. Then open the agent finder and select the corporation you want standing with, for example Caldari Navy, the owners of Jita 4-4. Set the agent type to "storyline" and the level to 1 (don't worry, the mission level won't be 1). Now go to the system where this agent is and change the agent finder settings back. Find an agent in the system or one of the neighboring systems who is on the same level as your previous 15 missions. Pick up and complete his mission (two missions if you did 14). Soon after completion your storyline agent will contact you via notification and offer his mission. This mission will give lot of corporation and faction standing. Sometimes they are mean and give you a combat quest, then hire someone to do it for you, they worth their price.

Standings explained: By default a corporation doesn't know you and you have 0 standing. By completing missions to them, you gain standings, up to 10. To use their station services you have to pay them, for example to refine veldspar into tritanium, you'd have to give them 5% of the yielded tritanium if your standing is zero. With 6.6 standing they take nothing.

The standing increase depend on the current standing. You can never reach 10.00, as the mission reward is multiplied by (1-current_standing/10). So a mission that gives 1 standing at 0 will give you 0.5 when you are 5 and 0.11 when 9.

There are two skills affecting standing: one is "social" that simply increases mission reward by 5% per rank. With Social rank 4 you get 20% bonus to missions. The other is "connections" that give a boost in a weird way: 0.04/rank/missing standing. So if your standing is 0.001 (doesn't work with 0.0), you get 0.4 standing/rank, as you have 10 points missing from the maximum. If your standing is 5, you'll get 0.2/rank. It is a huge boost at the start, allowing better deals with corporations you barely know and faster reaching the higher level agents, but the benefit diminishes as you gain standing.

You can access level 2 agents if your standing is 1 or more, level 3 at 3+, level 4 at 5+. The level 1 agents are always available. However there is a trick here: the agents don't only belong to a corporation but also to a state. So if you have high standing with your state (which is easy if you did your starter missions in all 3 hubs and did storyline missions via the mass missioning technique listed above), you can access rank 3 agents to companies where your standing is just 0.01.

By running missions you also get loyalty points that you can spend in the loyalty store (uniform guy icon in the station). The really good items (like unique ships) cost lot of points, much more than anyone shall spend doing missions. The mass missioning technique provide lot of LP, but to different corporations and they can't be combined.

There are some more skills to be considered:

• Negotiation: increases the ISK reward of missions by 5% per rank
• Diplomacy: increases the relation with hostile agents. You can get hostile if you do missions to a state that they hate. 
• Distribution connections: increases LP gain by 10% per rank for distribution agents

Please note that skillbooks are not free and learning skills takes time, so calculate if learning these skills worth the price.

One more thing you should know:  states and organizations have standing to each other. If it's positive, whenever you get standing with one, you get some with another. If it's negative, you lose standing with the other. For example the Gallente Federation has -5 standing with the Caldari state. If I gain 1 standing with Caldari, I lose 0.5 with Gallente. At -5 their ships start attacking me. You can prevent it using the Diplomacy skill or by doing missions for them (which will decrease your Caldari standing).

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The trading system of EVE

Even if you don't do "face to face" trade, you have much more things to keep in mind in the EVE auction house than in WoW.

The first difference is the existence of buy orders. When you place a buy order, the money is taken from your account and placed to the marketplace. If someone accepts your price offer, he can sell his wares instantly to you. You can of course set a sell order, when your item is put to the marketplace and the buyer can take it instantly. The system automatically match orders, so there cannot be a buy order above a sell order.

The first thing to watch is that the system will automatically try to make you accept an existing buy order, assuming that you want a fast sell:

So if you offer your skillbook on the market (you did not sell it yet, right?!), the trade window will offer you the price of the highest available buyer (green line in the bottom). It is usually (not always) a low price. You do not have to accept it, though you can if you want to sell now. However by still having those books you proved to have the most important virtues of a trader: patience.

When you try to find the "proper" price for your stuff, you can use the following tools:

• Next to the place where you can type your price there is an indicator saying "84.70% below regional average" with red letters, below it the regional average. This value can't be really off. Avoid selling for 20-50% of it and buying 120%
• The actual prices: the highest buy order is 206K, the lowest sell order is 405K. The price is somewhere between them
• Clicking the price history give you a graph how this item was sold for the previous weeks. If the price is stable, you can accept it. If it's jumpy, you can try to sell high/buy low and hope. If it's decreasing, you shall accept a lower price, if it's increasing, a higher one.

Of course these are just tools and there is no perfect formula to sell. You must figure it out. Also, time is money, sometimes it's better to take a worse deal than spending time waiting for a good deal.

The second big difference is that the marketplaces are regional. There are several regions in EVE, you can see them on your starmap. For the Caldari faction there is The Forge, The Citadel and Lonetrek. All factions have regions and you are not restricted to the regions of your faction.



Before making an important buy or sale, you should check several regions. Of course not all, not even all high-security, that would take too much travel. You should set up your residence in a system which is close to other regions. For the Caldaris, it's Jita. It's in The Forge but The Citadel and Lonetrek are both only 2 jumps away. Open your starmap and find your regions. These will be the places you'll work. If you say "I just work in Lonetrek", you are doing it wrong. You shall cover at least 2 regions, 3 is better.

Travel there with your fast ship and visit your regions. Check the prices of the items you want to buy and sell. It's easier to manage it if you put the important items to your market quickbar, so you can access their market data with a click. Get a piece of paper and write down the highest buy and lowest sell orders.

You can and shall use filters for quantity. Not for books, of course but if you trade with bulk stuff, don't get fooled by a great price with little quantity. Selling Tritanium for 10ISK would be a great business (and the screenshot would be here to ridicule the idiot who paid that money). Going 5 systems away to sell 12 (not 12.000.000) pieces of Tritanium for 10ISK would be some major idiocy. Similarly if you just sell some leftover crap, you shall not bother travelling, nor setting up a sell order, since you can have limited amount of sell and buy orders. Just accept the price or reprocess the item and sell the materials. The quantity is also a great measure of price stability. If you see lots of items sold in the 150000-160000 region and only a few over 160K, the price is somewhere there.

So you traveled the stars, found the offers of the regions. You probably saw that your books and ships sell for various prices. You might choose to accept the highest buy order or set up your own sell order in the appropriate region. Don't do it yet!

The third big difference is that in WoW the items magically transport. You can put your copper ore in the AH of Ironforge and I can buy it in Stormwind, then pick it up from my mailbox in Northrend. In EVE, the items stay where they are. To sell in Jita, you must move the item (not necessarily yourself) to Jita. The Starmap is your friend to find central regions. Selling in a dead end system probably won't find a buyer fast (unless it's underpriced). You shall also check the locations in your marketplace window. If the name of a system shows up often (like most of the orders on my screenshot is Jita), it means others picked that system and you have better chances to sell there. Not to buy of course, but hauling comes later.

Now, after moving your books to the "perfect" system, place your sell order or accept a buy. You can only accept buy orders if they are in range (green). You must travel to the buyer to accept greyed orders. Beware of quantity. If you choose to accept a buy order that wants 2 items and you carelessly sell all 3 to him, only 2 will be sold, the last one will be placed as a sell order for the same price. So you won't sell instantly, nor high. When setting up sell order, you must specify duration. The longer it is, the more likely it will find a buyer, but you can forget it and the item just sit there. A shorter order forces you to re-sell, re-evaluating the price.

You can move your ships the following way: you buy some very cheap ship, a frigate or shuttle where you are. You travel to the location to your ships, click on them, choose "make active" and fly them. Sell or reprocess the little ship that carried you here. If the ship has a number next to it, it's packaged, you must assemble it to fly. You must repackage a flying-ready ship to sell.

You sold your first books? Great, you sold items you "farmed for free". Let's do some business now! Go back to your starting star system and check the book prices there. Newbies are showered with books and they don't know what to do with them. There can be dirt-cheap books to buy, or there can be some very low buy order active. Buy the cheap and set up your own buy order which will buy you cheap books. In the buy order window you can see "range". It shows how far the buy order is active. If you set it to "3 jumps", then everyone within 3 jumps can sell you books. More morons will be reached by your order, yay! Don't! The items will not transport themselves, if your buy order is accepted 3 jumps away, you will have to go and pick them up. This can be serious inconvenience to travel several jumps for some low-price item and it can be a total disaster if your item lands on a low-security system, meaning you must travel to the land of pirates to grab it. For now, just buy the books, maybe ships from the newbies who get them on that station with no clue.

I already set up some buy orders and the ridiculously underpriced books are showering to my item hangar to be sold in Jita:

This mean two great things: one is that EVE has lot of new players. The other is that they have no idea about trading, so the fruits of their farming will be ours!

Did you train Caldari (or whatever your faction is) Industrial rank 3? Then time to go some shopping: get your Badger II (faction transport ship second class). Shop around, see the prices of all regions. Don't forget checking the price history. Since you are going to buy a ship, travel there in a frigate, you can repackage it and carry back in your industrial on the way back. If the distance between buy and sell orders is high and you aren't playing several hours a day, no need to buy now, you can set up your own buy order for 80% of the lowest sell order or something. Remember that you can set up higher range than a station for easier buy, but double-check the starmap so no low-security system is in your range.

What? No mention of relevant skills? Tomorrow. There are a lot and there are several other things about marketplace trading that you should know. For now, sell your old books and ships and get your cargo ship. If your training queue is empty, train the "trade" skill, you can't go wrong with that!

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PLEX and RMAH are NOT pay-to-cheat

I found that microtransaction games are "pay to cheat", allowing the paying players to buy godlike powers over the non-payers, constantly farming them. I believe that such model doesn't support long-time playing as one can get bored with being unstoppable soon. Also, such games don't allow the forming of a competitive community as wins are determined by paying and not being good.

However EVE Online exists and thrives for years despite having a powerful item in the shop: PLEX. It means "pilot license extension". If you use a PLEX, you get 30 days of play time. It costs more than having a month of subscription, so why bother? Because you can sell it for ingame currency. In EVE you can buy all items with the currency, so if you buy enough PLEX in the item shop, you can buy the biggest spaceship ever built, equipped with the biggest guns available. Yet the game is stable and you don't see random morons massacring players with their money-bought power.

I look forward Diablo III too, and it will have a similar feature: real money AH, allowing players to buy gear and all other items from each other. One can gear his first character into the most powerful gear available if he pays enough. Yet I think the game will be huge success.

Isn't the fact that you can buy power from money makes these game pay-to-cheat? No, because the amount of items doesn't change! The item was there before the transaction, just in the hand of another player. If your gear was in top 10%, it will still be top 10%, even if more than 10% of players make purchase in the item shop as they could only buy the existing items, and yours is top 10% of the items.

Actually the existence of such transfer makes those relatively stronger who don't participate, because the powerful item moves from the hand of a skilled player to the bad one. Which is more threat? A top level battleship in the hands of a 3 years veteran Goon, or the same ship in the hands of Arthasdkol who just stole daddy's credit card?

Also, such system is self-correcting. Since the supply of items depend on good players, if lot of bad players start to buy PLEX or gear from the RMAH, the price of the game items goes up (the price of the PLEX go down), making the purchase more and more wasteful.

So, the transaction make those who don't participate a bit stronger, the buyer much stronger and the seller weaker (but he can afford it, that's why he sold it). This system also lets good players (who are often builders of the community) to play for free, so staying in easier/longer.

PS: the new Diablo III change that allows only 10 auctions on RMAH and also 10 on gold AH may make serious AH trading impossible and allow only trading of powerful gear between players. This is annoying to us, but doesn't affect the above.

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EVE: First steps

So you decided to try out EVE? You already inside it but poor (I mean less than 100M)? Then keep reading! If you are already in it and can make a few millions per hour, skip this one, more advanced posts come later. If you haven't tried it yet, there is a free trial option and everything I tell today can be done on trial account.

The very first step is character creation. There are 4 factions who differ mostly on roleplay stuff. Each of them can learn any skills and fly any ships. However if you care about even little trading bonuses, I'd suggest the Caldari faction, for having the largest freighter (you won't fly one of those in 2 months) and having Jita, the main trade hub of the game in Caldari space, making it easier for you to gain standing (reputation) in Jita. Their downside is the crappier early transport vehicles, if you want a faster start, you can pick Minmatar and fly a Mammoth in a week (which is 50% better than the Caldari Badger II that I use). Whole cargo ship comparison here.

I won't cover UI stuff, my name isn't Aura. Also I won't cover combat related stuff. I'm not saying you shouldn't do combat, however that also need skills and skills you have in short supply.

Oh, "skills"! Whenever I use the word "skill" in an EVE-post I'm talking about the points your avatar earns. When I mean something you should know, I'll use "knowledge". In EVE you earn skills in real time. Your point earning depends on your attributes, with the starter attributes it's about 30/min (messing with attributes without knowing what are you doing is bad idea). All skills have 5 ranks, and gaining them need points. The cost and time of a simple skill:

1. 250 pt, about 8 mins
2. 1164 (combined 1414) pt, about 38 mins
3. 6586 (combined 8000) pt, about 3 and a half hours
4. 37255 (combined 45255) pt, about 21 hours
5. 210745 (combined 256000) pt, almost 5 days

And this was a simple skill. There are more complicated skills, like wholesale that allows you to have much more sell and buy orders (auctions). It needs 24 days to max out. Of course you don't have to max out all skills, so don't worry. And it's not even something huge like titan ship driving or giga-corporation management. The more branches of the game you jump into, the more time you need to get the skills and the less "skilled" you will be in each. So I'd suggest to make your choice and stick to it. If it's killing things, go for it, but then get another guide. Oh, and don't try to become smart with alts, only one alt can train skills at a time.

After character creation, you meet with your first mission agent (questgiver), Aura. Do her quests. She'll send you to another star system where you meet 5 more agents. They are the "career agents". Their missions are tailored to new players and also give superior rewards compared to the random agents you can find. I strongly recommend doing all their missions. These missions will give you not only nice amount of ISK (game credit), but also ships and skillbooks to learn. One tip: don't try to finish one line, if you face harder opponents, or you need time to learn a skill needed to continue, work on the other mission. The rewards of those will help you overcome the opponent of the previous. One more tip: there will be two missions that demands you to lose your ship. Don't forget to get a platinum  insurance before you do!

You done them all? Good! Now go to this official Wiki page (you'll read this wiki a lot, and you don't even need to alt-tab, there is a built-in web browser in the game, just press F12 and click on "open EVE Wiki"). This page shows 3 locations for every faction. They are 3 starter zones, like Mulgore, Durotar and Tirisfal glades for the horde in WoW. You've just done one of them. Now open the starmap (F10), find the starmap control icon (probably left bottom) and find the search tab. Type in the name of one of the other starting systems, and it shows you where it is, set your destination there and fly there with your best combat ship (will be a destroyer you got from the military questline, don't forget to arm it up fully). Do the quests again. Then the third time too. They will not only help you completely familiarize with the controls and UI, but provide you about 10 million ISK each. No, not in cash, mostly in ships and books. Also these missions increase standing (reputation) with an NPC corporation and your home faction. The first will be handy later, the second is essential to run missions, and we'll run some (Monday post).

Selling these will be the task for the next post, coming Thursday, where the trading basics will be covered. Trading is much more complicated in EVE than WoW and need both skills and knowledge to do even in basics. Don't sell your books for half price please!

What skills to train? Train anything the starter missions gave books or you already had them at start to rank 2 at least. Then Caldari (or whatever your faction is) Industrial. You need this skill to rank 3 to drive a Badger II transport ship (or whatever equivalent your faction has. Minmatar Mammoth needs rank 4!). This skill needs your account to be not trial anymore, so if you are on trial, you have to make up your mind while doing the starter missions. The reason for that is to prevent goldfarmers on trial accounts. If you want to continue on trial to check out the trading, learn the "trade" skill itself to rank 4 instead.

Emergency tip: if you'd ever get broke (after doing something really stupid I assume), you can always start an alt, do the starter missions again and send the wealth to your main. But let's not do anything stupid please.

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Found my "why" in EVE

Posting about EVE and reading the comments finally pinpointed a problem that worth seriously investigating. It is "ganking" or "being mean". Most games let PvP only if both parties agree and reward the loser too with some game item or currency. In EVE and in real life anyone can initiate PvP (with certain risks and costs), and the loser will be looted. Socials call this "evil" and "mean". They praise ethics against it and demand some powerful entity (usually the state in real life and the game developer ingame) to stop these "mean people".

While there is totally pointless violence both in real life and EVE, most of the violent actions are motivated by some reward. Also in real life and EVE you have costs to pay and if you just spend all day with pointless violence, you end up starving (and unable to continue violence). I don't think that anyone farms 10 hours doing something that he hates just to be able to fit a ship for pointless ganking that provides him 10 minutes of fun. I think that most of these "mean guys" are successful pirates. They gain huge amount of income from their victims and it allows them to do some wasteful ganking on the side now and then.

Who can be pirated on? The morons and slackers! I will prove that New Eden is not a hostile place. Yes, I lost a ship and will lose ships. But the amount of losses are small compared to the gains. Replacing my ship did not take more time than an average wipefest raid in WoW. The bad reputation of EVE is made by Arthasdklol who could "progress" in WoW (getting new shinies when everyone else), but in EVE he was destroyed. I don't consider pirates evil or wrong, they are a completely natural reaction for the existence of weak but fat targets. Kill a pirate and another takes his place. Kill the moron and piracy goes away!

I think that if you are not a moron or slacker, if you can think and act a-socialy, you'll be fine in EVE. I'll document my journey from rags to riches, of course without buying PLEX in the item shop. I will prove that those "terrible griefers" that make EVE "awfully unwelcoming to new players" are just preying on the morons and slackers and cause little problem to players with brain, even if they are new.

Let me clarify, I'm not trying to prove that you can progress in EVE, that's trivial (whoa, you can progress in a video game?!). I'm trying to prove that despite EVE has the reputation of mindless violence, you can progress without being better in violence. Actually you can collect masses of wealth without ever firing a gun. You can afford to hire people who will shoot for you.

Also, I will prove (no "trying" here), that M&S is abundant in EVE, even if not so obtrusively as in WoW. Maybe they are not infesting the endgame, they don't run corporations or own star systems, but they are there. The pure existence of profitable piracy proves it. And the success of goblinish businessmen will prove it too. The players of EVE like to think of themselves that they are the elite of gaming. Thinking high of yourself because of membership to any group is a very bad thing and usually leads to losses. Being great needs more than joining some group and especially more than subscribing to a video game. Arthasdklol can do that. And if he can, he does, we learned that. I mean, who else place an overpriced buy order few systems away from a normally priced sell order?
You might notice that this post had a new label, "EVE business". There will be many other like that, hopefully helping goblin-minded people to start playing this great game.


PS: Tobold always whined that he did not get donations for his blog and his work is not paid. Now look at these: You can also see that only after a week of playing I already had 50M legitimately, but of course gifts are always welcomed.

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Once upon a time it was a shame to damage below the tank

Once upon a time it was a shame to damage below the tank. Then we got WotLK "heroics" and we got used to damage dealers below the tank. Now we are happy if we see a random above the tank. Blizzard thinks it's OK and practically banned votekicks. They probably thought it can't get any worse.


Of course I was a healer. And #3 on damage. Actually, how can someone be possibly so bad? Also we had an AFK leech who was not reported. I wish someone in Blizzard sees this screenshot and ask "is this what I want to build"?

But more importantly, I wish I knew why these things play? We are not talking about bridge fighting, griefing or even blocking mailboxes anymore. What is the fun in being totally worthless, having absolutely no clue of what he is doing, being totally out of control of the outcome of the encounter he is in?

And finally we all must answer a question: "do I really want to spend my free time together with these things?"

PS: Lujzi was spamming mana burn, that's why she is low. The enemy couldn't kill us as they weren't much better. We lost after I noticed this nonsense and called to stop healing, otherwise we could keep this disaster running for lot longer.

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Long term planning

While playing EVE I try to figure out why people consider it "hard". Not because of the gameplay, I mean executing the actions isn't harder than WoW, or can even be easier, just think of the reaction time and spatial awareness demands of rated BGs and hard mode raids.

EVE is hard for the average, social guy because it requires meta-skills that are trivial to me, but for them it's just as hard as reading something on a language they barely know.

The first such difficulty is setting a goal. In WoW, you are in rails from lvl 1 to HM Deathwing. The next step is maybe not easy to do, but you always know what is it.

The second difficulty is facing your mistakes instead of just ignore them as "bad luck lol" and keep on being stupid. In WoW you can level up as a spirit geared warrior, just slower than proper players. In EVE if you insist of going to mine in low sec with a Bantam, you will surely run out of money.

The third was found yesterday while planning. For me it's quite obvious to make plans. For many people it's not. They just jump into whatever they consider fun in that moment and see how it goes. That attitude is OK in WoW. Not perfect of course, you are much better off doing Therazane quests while leveling, and not when your application is rejected by a HM guild based on your missing shoulder enchant. But that's not something you can't fix fast. Whatever activity you get into will provide you some form of character advancement and while planning can increase its speed, it's not game-breaking if you just fool around.

In EVE you are in competition with other players and to beat them you must have proper skills. I'm not talking about WASD skills, but the skills of your character. Instead of leveling up, you advance in various skills like "frigate ship commanding" or "criminal connections". You gain skill points automatically. Each skill has a point requirement and you generate points as time passes based on your attributes. No grindable activity speeds up skill point gains (besides grinding for better implants). It means that certain skills can only be acquired after months.

For example to fly a Bustard, the next step of the freighter ships, I'd have to wait 28 days. Of course if I'd start training those skills, I would be limited to my current 1-1.5M/hour hauling activity, which isn't bad for a newbie (running level 2-3 missions is about 0.3-0.5M/hour and high security hauling is semi-AFK). So after 29 days I'd be ready to fly the Bustard but wouldn't have the necessary money. I mean I may had 135M in a month, but flying a ship that costs more than 20% of your money is a capital case idiocy in EVE.

So here is what I will do: in a few days I finish training my "must have to run" skills, like accounting, broker relations, connections. Then I'll do a neural remamp. It's a change of attributes and can be done once a year except for the first 2 times which are free to let a new player fix his mistakes. Well, I'm intending to use these once in a lifetime bonuses for increased efficiency. I'll remap for maximum Memory and Intelligence, setting all other attributes to minimum. I train my industrial skills that I plan to use to make 2-3x more money without new equipment.

While I make the money, I train some mechanical skills that increase ship survival, they are Memory-Intelligence skills too, would be stupid to not use those attributes. Then I use my second free remap to max out Perception-Willpower and train the spaceship driving skills. Not only the ones needed to the Bustard, but also to the Crane, Charon and Basilisk, despite I'll be unable to fly these ships for months. Then I do my last remap and set my final attribute setup which will most likely be Charisma and Memory 21, rest 19.

Maybe I'm weird but I actually found figuring these out one of the most fun activities of the game. As a bonus I transported some more stuff to Jita while doing so. However someone who just do things as he pleases can be very easily devastated in EVE. Imagine Arthasdklol, who ran lot of missions (daily quests) to finally have 100 million and buy a Cerberus as he heard from friends that he can finally pwn with that. And after he got it, he sees this:

PS: To those who think that only ganking is the real EVE game, let me show that you can make "feed on tears" mail in the high sec, without firing a single blaster:

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Owning up your mistakes

I told that EVE Online is just as easy to in the early game as WoW. I still hold it that it's not harder to do it good. However I faced what makes it hard for a social person: in EVE you must own up your mistakes or you can't progress and have fun. In WoW if you suck, even if you suck terribly, at the level of melee arcane mage, spirit cloth warrior and so on you'll "progress" (actually you don't increase your place on the ladder as everyone else "progresses"), and you can have fun. In EVE you lose ISK and if you are dumb enough to not upgrade your clone, skill points.

I have my first EVE kill mail, and no, I haven't kill anyone, I just lost my ship. How? I went to another (high security) system and the route contained one low sec jump. I died in like 2 seconds after leaving jump cloak.

I did nothing against the pilots who destroyed my ship and my pod. My cargo hold was empty. I posed no threat to them. I did not enter restricted area. They just camped that gate and killed anyone crossing it. They are mean, bad people, BOO! These are all true, but completely useless. However a social, who thinks on the ethical level can't ignore it. Bad people are not supposed to win. I did nothing ethically wrong, so I am not at fault, there is nothing I should do better. The game sucks for allowing such behavior.

An a-social person thinks on a practical level and believes that he is in control of his life, therefore his fate is the result of his actions. I did something wrong to end up with a destroyed ship. What were the mistakes?

1. Ignoring that 0.4 security is worlds apart from 0.5. 0.5 isn't that different from 1.0. Attacks against you is responded by the NPC police who destroy the attacker, therefore you are only in danger if you carry something really valuable, or you rarely meet with some really obnoxious figure who is ready to waste currency to grief people. In 0.1-0.4 systems only the weak sentry guns responds to aggression and he loses some security standings (which will affect him only on the long run).
2. I was unaware that an empty ship still drops valuable loot. According to the killshot 1M ISK booty was collected by the pirate. This mistake made me believe that only lolkids would attack me while this attack was a profitable adventure.
3. I forgot that insurance covers the ship but not the modules. Those lost Cargohold Expander II modules cost 2x more than the ship!

These mistakes make me dumbly ignore the popup window "you are entering dangerous space, are you sure" or something and jumped there. It was my fault. Since I recognized it, I am capable to fix it. Since I can fix it, I shall not fear of happening again, while the social who reject to own up his mistake depends on blind luck. And in EVE, "bad luck" is very frequent, so he'll soon find the game "not fun".

What did I learn? At first to not enter low security systems (below 0.5). Secondly, if something is so lucrative that I just can't miss it, do the following:

1. Have a frigate and 3x Expanded Cargohold I (not II) modules in my cargohold. These modules are dirt cheap.
2. Dock at the station of the last safe system.
3. Assemble the frigate and jump. If they are random griefers who shoot on anything, I lose a frigate only.
4. If I'm not instant-killed, stay and watch. If red or yellow guys (pilots with low security standing) are standing near the gate, turn back and forget it.
5. If no one is visible, return to the station, remove the Cargohold II modules, leave them on the station, put on Cargohold I and jump with the transport ship. Start turning the ship to random directions to give time even to the slowest pirate to open fire if he wants. If he does, I lost an empty, top insured ship with only cheap modules.
6. If no one comes, go forward, pick up 1/4 of the cargo and carry back to the safe station. If they successfully attack now, I lose the naked ship and 1/4 cargo.
7. Jump again and this time carry the other 3/4. Unless a pirate just arrived or he was so smart to not attack before, I'll make the transport.
8. Dock in the station, put the Cargohold II modules back, pick up the other 1/4 cargo and the repackaged frigate and go home.

Finally to avoid scaring anyone away from EVE, let me tell that the lost value was re-farmed in one and a half hour, semi-afk, all I had to do is press "jump" on the next yellow colored gate every minute, and pick up or sell the cargo in the stations once in 10 minutes. Players of "no-loss" games are used to think of game items as very hard to get. In EVE you can lose them but you can gain them much faster than an 379 piece in WoW.

PS: could anyone tell me what the hell are they building in Jita? 90% of my transports are going there.

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You must fine the failers!

I don't really like farm raids but people need them for gear and valor points. So we run farm raids. Few days ago luck shined upon me as there were enough healers online for me to skip. So I happily logged off, knowing that the others will clean most of the place without me.

They killed 3 bosses in 1:30. Disaster. When I asked "how much fail gold you got" and the raid leader said "zero", 3 bosses did not look that bad. Actually it's a miracle they could kill anything without fail gold. I mean, what the hell did they expect?

The natural reaction to mistakes of someone who has any sociality left is "not my fault". It was lag, bad luck, someone else, bug, anything, just not me. The fail gold is not only there to compensate people for the fails of others. Its purpose is also to face the failer with his fail. It was your fault and no, it's not something irrelevant, we just wiped on a farm boss, you wasted 6-8 minutes of 9 people by being lazy, stupid or careless. Pay up!

If he, even sub-consciously believes that it wasn't his fault, he has nothing to fix. After paying they rarely do the same mistake again.

What I must do differently is calling out the failer myself. From now on, after wipes I just say "Now find the failer!" and let the others do the job. I won't pull until they don't find it, so they get use to it. Also, any other raid leader will have easier job as he only needs to call "Now find the failer!", instead of doing it himself which needs both game skills and a-sociality to confront someone in front of 8 other people.

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Space goblin

For long I avoided EVE. I even wrote a post explaining the reasons why I prefer WoW where I can reach the socials.

However for a week I had more time on my hand as usual and tried EVE. I liked it very much. For a first time I was playing a game instead of running some blogging project in a game. I'd like to talk about my first impressions as someone with less than 4 days old character (in EVE you "level up" in real time, so no matter how much you play a day you can't have higher skills). The graphics is breathtaking, the character creation has insane amount of customization (I run with a very generic face of course). There are several empires and factions, but they are not so different from each other.

The rookie missions (quests) are well-designed and teach everything. They also give about 6M ISK (credits), partially as liquid, but mostly as ships and books that you can sell. I recommend new players that after completing the starter questline, do them again, twice (location of other questgivers). You repeat important lessons and you also get 2x6M ISK, along with reputation.

Contrary to the popular belief, learning EVE is not at all complicated. I mean there are 5 "classes" in EVE, the explorer who finds hidden places, the miner who mine asteroids, the trader who buys and sells, the manufacturer who builds items from raw materials and the fighter who kill pirates (NPCs) and other players. The starting missions teach the basics. After that, there are further missions, which are similar to WoW dailies, the same ones show up at different places. The difficulty of the missions ramp up at will, you can choose how difficult you are ready to face. While you can die and lose your ship even at the starting zone, the early ships are very cheap (I mean you can buy a new one from the reward of one mission) and if you'd lose absolutely everything, the insurance company would give you a newbie ship for free which you can use to do an easy mission and you are back on your Condor/Bantham again. Also, there is insurance for losing the ship.

So I can seriously tell that getting started in EVE is not at all harder than the same in WoW. Of course I'm not talking about the endgame here. What is "hard" in EVE is the huge amount of options. In WoW you are always told what to do. You spawn front of a guy with exclamation mark on his head and he tells you to go there and kill that and then another guy shows up with an exclamation mark and it goes on up to lvl 85. Also, the aim of leveling is clear too: to get to lvl 85. In EVE, after the starter missions there is no storyline. Also, the skill training system is unaffected by your playing, so you can't play to progress your character, there is no "I must go to mine to level mining skill". You can do missions (dailies) but the question "why" is looming over your head. Why shall I get reputation with that faction? Why shall I get more skills? Why shall I mine those asteroids? Why am I killing these pirates? Why am I here?

EVE is a sandbox game, where you must find your own "why"? The "how" is not hard at all. Probably that's why they say "the learning curve ramps up", because at the start you are busy exploring the world and learning. When you are more and more proficient in what you are doing you more and more often faced with the question "why".

I did not find my "why" yet. Maybe I won't and I'll stop playing like those hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who did not upgrade their 14 days trial account. After they answered their "how", they found the game boring. The first "how" has to be answered after the starter missions. Shall I run my Cormorant against pirates? Shall I go mining? Shall I run the Heron I got to scan down hidden artifacts? Shall I run missions and elevate my standing with an empire? How shall I play?
Seriously, was it a question for a second?

However "trading" is still just a "how". I will ramp up ISK in no time and I already run a Badger II. Soon I'll have a Bustard. But to continue playing, I must find "why". I hope I will, as I like the basic idea of "no welfare, earn everything yourself" which is so different from WoW where you just have to /follow the healer to get shiny.

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The monolith

The PuG update: you must make some changes in raiding, can't raid the same bosses all the time!

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I was always thinking why game designers listen to bad players. I mean it's a sure way to make their game become worse and finally unplayable. Obviously the designers are neither idiots, nor aiming on destroying their games.

Funnily, the solution came from real world politics, while it should obviously be in the other way, as the game world is simpler. Yet it's hard to recognize things alien to us, unlike they are in our face. Like rioting protesters. The solution is quite straightforward: if you ask 10 good players where developer attention is needed or where the game needs tweaking, you get 10 different answers. One will suggest faster raid content creation, the next want more HCs, the next more tricky encounters, the next better stories, the next more sandboxy questing, the next better PvP balance, the next 0.01% balance between PvE specs in HM gear and so on.

However if you ask 10 bad players what to change, you get the very same answer 10 times: "moar shiny to me". The answers may differ in formulation, one wants more mounts while the other wants more gear and the third wants the bosses come to Stormwind and give it to him as going to a dungeon to /follow the healer is clearly too time-consuming for his rich real life. But at the end, all their needs can be satisfied by making sure that they have more shiny today than they had yesterday without them making any extra effort or improving in any way.

Since showering shiny stuff neither need complicated design, nor extra effort from developers, unlike balancing elemental shaman vs moonkin in Morchok HM where the totems don't affect the other group, the developers move toward the simplest way. This way is also seems to be the most popular as clearly it got the most votes.

For this reason, if developers listen to players, they will make the game into a mindless reward-dishing machine even if the morons and slackers who demand rewards for nothing are a numerical minority. If we have just 10% M&S, the highest vote will still be "easy rewards" followed by hundreds of different suggestions, each getting 0.1-1% votes.

The same effect plagues politics, making sure that the democratic governments won't climb out of the economic crisis: the various productive people are split into various groups (gun freedom, gun control, pro life, pro choice, save the climate, spread the democracy, better education, and so on) while the various inactive groups have one voice: "more money to us!". This way the governments cut defense costs, privatize services, fire employees, but would never touch pension or welfare money. In times of boom they increase these as they are simple (just changing a number in the budget), while saving the climate is a bit more complicated, even if we have the money and the will.

The problem in both cases is systemic: If you listen to the people, you get various ideas from the productive people and a monolithic "gimme moar" from the inactives. You must not listen to people!

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Recruiting post

Just a short reminder that The PuG is constantly recruiting. I'd like to highlight our gold bid loot system as a unique selling point which not only allow, but encourage including new (of course not incompetent) players into the raid: if I take a geared veteran, he won't bid on loot, so the pot will be low. This guarantees that you'll get a spot and not just sit on the bench while the same core people raid. Just don't forget to read the rules!

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LFM Engineer in heat pump field

I apologize to most of my readers as this post is not about WoW, games in general, business or even the M&S. It's about an engineering idea what I want to discuss but have no idea how to reach proper people on this field. However I try to write it in a way that everyone can understand my point so anyone who bothers to read it can understand.

Heat pumps are a very effective tools to heat a building. Their theoretical efficiency is around 600-1000%, and even cheap units that you can buy for your home are capable to 4-500%. What? Perpeetum mobile? Of course not, this efficiency (or more accurately Coefficient of Performance) means heat/electrical_energy. The heat pump doesn't create heat, it pumps from one place to another. When the heat moves from outdoors to indoors, we talk about heat pump heating, while the other way is called air conditioning. Its basic cycle is to compress gas, so it condenses while releasing heat (in the heated building), then lead the liquid out and de-pressurize while taking up heat (outside).

That's great, cheap and clean heating for our homes! Well, it is great and used in many places, yet it has limited use. Its problem is freezing. While theoretically you could pump heat while the outside temperature is below freezing point, actually you can't because the humidity of the air freezes on the evaporator unit, disabling it. To operate a heat pump you need a heat source that is above freezing point and has enough heat inside that it won't be frozen by the pump. So heat pump heating is more commmon in hotter zones where the winter temperature is usually not freezing (like Florida or Spain) or there is huge non-freezing water body is nearby (a lake, river, ocean). Alternatively you can build huge network of pipes or deep wells underground to suck out the geothermic heat. This has huge installation costs while the previous usages are situational: you either live in Florida or you don't.

However I found three heat sources that are never freezing and available to every household or commercial building and most industrial buildings too. If I'm right (and verifying it needs the expert) huge amount of fossil fuel can be saved, about 7-10% of the fuel used for heating buildings. That doesn't sound much but I'd like to remind you that every % decrease in heating use of fossil fuels decrease the carbon dioxide emission by about one hundred million tonnes per year. So if the idea works, it is huge.

The first heat source is waste air heat: you must ventilate the buildings to let oxigen in, carbon dioxide, humidity and bad odor out. When you do so, you lose the heat difference between the leaving warm and the entering cold air. Between 22^oC and 2^oC (which is the practical limit of a heat pump), 1m³ air contains 26kJ heat. But there is more in there as the air becomes humid from the various water sources in the heated room, like plants, breathing people, wet clothes drying and wet bathrooms. Counting with 50% relative humidity at room temperature, 1m³ air has 10g water steam inside. Steam has lot of energy, that little 10g water releases 23kJ heat if condensed. So if we don't vent the air just out of the window but drive it to the evaporator unit of a heat pump, you can recover almost 50kJ heat from every m³ air. If you replace the air fully just once in a day in an average home, you let 50*300 = 15 MJ energy go waste a day. That's about half kg of carbon dioxide.

The second heat source is heated waste water. Showering, washing, dishwashing all done by warm water that is just leaves the building into the sewers. If it would go to the evaporator unit of a heat pump, it could be recovered. An average household uses 100 liters warm water a day. That hold 100*30*4.2 = 12.6 MJ energy.

But here comes the crown jewel: if you burn fossil fuel (gas, coal, oil, wood), not all heat of the burning is gained by the building. About 15% of the energy leaves in the chimney as hot exhaust gas. There are already technologies to recover some of this energy, modern gas heaters cool down this gas to 40-50^oC, but that gas is still hot and contains lot of steam. Leading this exhaust to the evaporator of the heat pump would recover this heat. How much it is? Equal to 15% of the fossil fuel burned in a simple heater and 6% on the most advanced one. That's a lot of fuel.

Of course, like any random idea of mine are free to use. So if you find this idea useful and would like to implement somewhere, feel free to. Just watch out for one thing: maybe someone else figured this out and patented it somewhere. If you know existing usages or has a question, the comment section is here for a reason!

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Helping the worst minority

For our last LFR raid Blizzard prepared a surprise: The new thing is in the top. Despite we have not kicked anyone this week, there was a 2-hours cooldown on kicking that below tank crap. I contacted a GM and it's not a bug.

Of course a goblin always finds his way: However it's a temporary fix. Soon every good or even OK-ish player will be on votekick cooldown and from that point the worthless morons can't be kicked.

Time for whining and pointless posting on forums how bad is it, citing that most players - even if not great - are capable of completing LFR raids (look at the damage meter, only 1 is below the tank and another 4 close to them). Forcing these people to carry the worthless M&S simply doesn't work as they are incapable to. A raid with half OK and half M&S won't complete LFR, we already almost wiped on DW, as we couldn't kick the "i do as i wanna" kiddies who kept attacking the wing, providing us a wonderful tendrils+corruption+bolt combo on the platform of Nozdormu.

It is a conscious decision of Blizzard that they don't simply aim for the averagely bad players, they have a "no moron is left behind" policy, LFD/LFR is open to even the most terrible leech with no limit, not even a very low one.

What can a goblin do who still gears up? Simply use the system as intended. /follow healer and go AFK! In a few hours the raid will complete while you cleaned your room, ate or read a book. Just don't go far from the computer as you have to move every now and then to prevent becoming AFK and above all, you must press need on loot. If they want people to carry 0 DPS players, why not be one of those carried?

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Microtransactions: pay to cheat

In "free to play" microtransaction games, items of power often sold. However people don't consider how strong they are. The reason is self-deceiving: the buyers don't want to believe that they were practically given "God mode" for their money, while the free-players don't want to face that they are nothing but hopeless NPCs in this game.

For these self-deceiving reasons everyone seems to accept that these items give only "slight" buff. In the game World of Tanks the players consider buying gold ammo a "bit lame" but nothing game-breaking. No wonder no one wanted to make a decent analysis. I bought 2500 gold for 10 euros and spent it all on gold ammo in a Hetzer tank. The 2500 gold were burned in mere 53 matches, making this game rather expensive (my total 3500 games would cost 660 euros with gold ammo). Let's see the results of this tank before and after the experiment:

	Without gold ammo	With gold ammo
Win %	60	68
Win % without draws	62	71
Kill / battle	1.14	2.43
Damage / battle	443	827
XP / battle	320	676
Survive %	43.4	39.6

Ouch! The "slight" increase of power given by the item shop doubled my kills, damage and XP gains. My new winrate would place me to world top 100 (out of 500K) if I would start an account and play it with only gold ammo. My decreased survival rate tells that my godlike powers made me reckless so with more disciplined play I could get even more wins and kills.

These results mean two things: one is that any serious player must stay away from microtransaction games. The win depends only on payment and not on player skill or even luck, therefore these are not even games, they are mere "epeen machines": you throw in coin, epeen comes out.

Secondly the fact that such abominations can exist and financially thrive, tells a lot about the players who are finding it fun to massacre totally helpless opponents with their ridiculously overpowered item shop stuff. I mean, they know that they are cheating, where is the fun in winning this way? They are socials who doesn't really play to win, but to amuse (real or imaginary) peers. As long as the game company can upkeep the lie that the item shop stuff are just "quality of life" improvements, the cheater can show up front of peers as "awesome", and this is their source of fun.

PS: In the game they introduced French tanks. The Wiki says "higher tiers are more mobile and carry fast firing, high-penetration guns, which may leave players believing their grind wasn't pointless. However, most high tier French tanks lack armor." It seems a fair tradeoff. However it's just another gift to the pay-to-cheat players. Armor is irrelevant as gold ammo penetrates it. However those who pay more money for the experience conversion to get French tanks fast will get totally overpowered tanks that can easily destroy anything in the field, even tiers above them - with gold ammo. The pay-to-cheat games become more and more unbalanced and messed up with every patch, until they become simply unplayable.

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You call them newbies? I, Object!

Those who don't play World of Tanks can't get the pun, it's about the name of this tank, "Object 704". This is a Tier 9 tank destroyer, there is no bigger than this, this is an endgame tank.

One has to play 1000+ matches to get into the "endgame", the matches of the top tiered tanks, simply because you can't buy experience points in the game (you can only convert them from other tanks, but you must play them). Researching this tank needs researching all its predecessors, which takes about 410000 XP. Since an average player has about 300XP/battle, you need to play about 1300 matches even if you go straightforward to this tank.

No one would call someone after 1300!!! matches a newbie. He has several hundred hours of game experience, he is dedicated and totally a "hardcore". I'm playing with and against the most experienced players of this game. Even if I could massacre lost newbies with my Marder II, no more fooling around here, I'm just an average Joe among these super-experienced pros. Right? Oops? Despite I'm just 1/15 of the team, I can shift the win rate from the average 49% to 60! If we'd exclude draws from the results, I'd have 64% winrate. My average winrate with all tanks is 56%, placing me to the #10.5K spot out of 500K+ players. People with 60% winrate are in the top #2K and if you check the toplists, most of them are "cheating" their rating by playing low tier twink tanks mostly or even exlusively. So, I can get top results among the most experienced players. My girlfriend don't even have an Object 704 yet, so I gained these results all alone (can't wait to see our combined results).

This alone disproves the "newbie" claim, the last of the "he is bad out of his control" ideas. Socials pull this claim when all other excuses are depleted. That guy who we see being an idiot is just a lost new player and it's not his fault, we've all been new. Not anymore! If it would be true, than my superiority would be biggest with small tanks and then would diminish as I'd face better and better players. Except it doesn't. The Jagdtiger drivers are not an inch smarter than those who run around in a Panzerjager I. My winrate with the different tanks is affected only by relative tank strengths. The mid tier tanks often face enemies they can't harm, so no matter how bad the enemy player is, he'll win. Both the Marder II and the Object 704 are capable to destroy anything they face, so I can't get into a situation when I simply can't win. However I'm not overpowered as the enemy team also has equally strong tanks.

"Experience" is like "play time", a lame excuse for simple idiocy and uselessness. No matter how much time a M&S spends in the game, he'll still suck, because he is a moron or a slacker. He can be killed in the same spot 100x without him coming to the conclusion that going there is a bad idea.

So please don't use the terms "newbie", "noob" or even "E-bayer" to bad players. By doing so, you place the sub-conscious assumption that his sucking is out of his control, and by playing more he'll be better. He won't. He is unable or doesn't care to. Use "moron", "idiot" or if you are polite, "baddie". That shows correctly that he is bad, opposed to he is being bad. His real life attitude, the way he approaches the game must be changed to make him be better, giving him ingame items or game time won't help. He doesn't approach a match as a puzzle to solve, he jumps into it without considerations and see how it goes. He comments "lol" or "ffs lag" after he died in some impossible situation without gaining any new insights.

World of Tanks is a good test game for this as here your income can be negative (your repair cost can exceed your reward) and after death you don't respawn, so the usual "he plays for PvP fun" used on WoW AB bridge morons can't stand, as losing credits and watching a "you are dead" screen is surely not fun.

PS: don't ask why I spent credits to paint my tank, it's a moneymaking machine, during the 150 matches I gathered 4M credits and since I'm not planning to buy any more tanks and all my current ones are elite, I simply can't use credits anymore.

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Two suggestions

Please read these suggestions and support them if you find them worthy.

One is Valor point bid by Lyxi. I have to say, this is the first idea that is maybe even better than gold bid.

The other is from me to prevent stupid mispulls in dungeons and raids.

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I was in the hospital FFS

We lost a "wonderful" member. One that told that he has no idea about a boss after he wiped us on it. No, we did not kick him. Then why did he left? Maybe he was lying about being in the hospital. But maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe something out of his control stopped him from coming. If it wasn't his fault, shouldn't we wait for him?

Definitely not. My interest is to raid. If you can't make it in time, too bad, someone else will come. It is maybe not your fault, but nor mine. What our lovely specimen did not notice is that the damage was done and someone had to bear it. He expected us to do it. Well, we won't. Socials might would. Then go and enjoy their company. But when you are waiting for them or when they do below the tank due to "low gear lol", don't forget that they use the very same reasoning: "it's not my fault, others shall bear it".

Taking responsibility for your life is a crucial step in being a mature person, everyone knows that. But there is no recipe how to do it. There is a simple way for that among goblins: you will take responsibility for your life, simply because no one else will. No one will help you out, no one will carry you, no one will say "it's not your fault". At best you get "bad luck dude, will be better next time". When will it be better? When you make it better. It's your life after all, who else could make it better?!

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Changes kill WoW

Everyone has his favorite theory what causes WoW to fall in subscriptions. They all claim that this or change deviated from the "golden age". Surprisingly, all of them are right. Not this or that change is responsible for the decline. Changes in general are.

I was in TB for a fast win to go BH. We lost. I'm not used to lose TB, since we practically owned the place. But we did not go there for long long time. Others told that TB is usually horde controlled nowadays. However we still have queue. I mean the server has 2x more horde than ally but still ally has to wait to get in. Why?

Tol Barad on most servers are often traded. It is its normal state. Then we came and changed it to 5 minute assault wins, 15 mins 100 kill, zero death crazy Slag defenses, so the horde lolkids learned that "TB is no fun". We left long ago and die-hard horde PvP-ers got it back. But the horde lolkids did not return, despite the reason why they left is no longer true. They can't change their mind as they never made a conscious decision. They did not say: "an organized guild runs a TB ownage projects, I have no chance without similar organization so I leave". They simply went there and did not have fun, so they left. They have a bad feeling about TB and it lasts.

Every time Blizzard made a change to WoW it caused bad feeling in people who did not like it and they left. Changing it back did not help. You could go to their house and tell them that "hey, WoW is no longer bad", it wouldn't help. You can't argue feelings.

Those who tried out WoW in Vanilla and TBC and found it "too grindy" or "too hardcore" are lost to WoW. The fact that 2.3 made leveling much faster, did not bring them back. It alienated some who liked leveling. When WotLK changed raiding into "accessible", it did not lure back a single guy who quit in frustration over Lady Vashj, nor the /follow "heroics" did not make those return who couldn't finish Sethekk Halls and left. But lot of people who liked Vashj, Sethekk, Magister's terrace have left in disgust. When 4.0 made the /follow command insufficient to complete a 5-man, these people did not return. But others who liked to get rewards for nothing left in outrage. When Jindo the Groupbraker introduced the dance-based endgame, none of the "i won't farm sres for Mother" people returned. But those who liked building gear left. When DS was no longer a dancefest, it did not get Larísa back, but several "l33t" left because "itz no skill anymore".

In a game, an entertainment feature there are no second chances as people are not forced to play. If my car breaks down I still must travel, so I won't throw it away. But why bother waiting for a game fix?

A change, any change alienates people but don't "un-alienate" a single one. Design a game and stick to it! Vanilla-BC could have 15M if not changed. If WotLK would be published as a new game it could also have 15M. Maybe Firelands-game too. But the "first Vanilla, then WotLK, then Cataclysm" does not have a chance.

Of course I don't say that WoW could live 7 years if it would be still 1.0. Certain addations are welcomed, but please notice that they are not changes. These are:

• Bugfixes, balance issue fixes, graphical updates: the game was always meant to be stable, fair and good looking, these just fix errors.
• Content patches: new flavors of the same type. If you liked questing in the Barrens, you liked Blade Edge too.
• Optional side-fluffs: ponies, pets, Darkmoon and seasonal silliness. They are optional, if you don't like them, you ignore them.

I'm sure several managers and developers are thinking how to make Mists of Pandaria different to make people come back. My advice: don't! Stick to the current model, just give some new content and hope for the best. Don't alienate more people! You still have  8M and if they stay, they might lure some new players.

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Gold bid loot system CREATES casual raiding

I wrote how gold bit fits better to a non-fixed roster (casual) guild than any other. However there is much more here: using gold bid naturally makes your roster more open to players!

To understand why, first we have to recognize that there are 7 different types of armor and everyone wants only one for main spec: cloth, int leather, agi leather, int mail, agi mail, int plate, strength plate. For rings and necklaces there are 3 types, int, agi, str. For weapons there are melee, ranged and caster types. There are sub-types, but I ignore them since reforging allow to "fix" a hit-int item into a healer item which is better than a previous tier healer item.

Let's say that for an average loot you compete with 20% of the raid. This competition is inherent and does not depend on loot system. He rolls against you, he bids against you DKP or gold or the loot council can vote for him against you. The only ways to decrease this competition is to remove them from the raid or making sure to pick the most geared ones who won't need your items.

However the other 80% is not your competitor. Will they want gear or not is not your concern. But wipe count and run speed is. The more geared these players are, the faster the run, so you are still interested to pick the most geared ones. This means that always the same players go raid, even if it's not in the rules. Simple personal interests of the raid members dictate to pick them. Even if the guild is formally casual, a non-core member won't get spot unless core members are missing.

Here comes gold bid: in every other loot system the non-competing classes are loot-irrelevant. If a strength item drops, and you are a cloth caster, you get nothing. It's true for DKP too. You get your DKP for being present in the raid, if the boss would drop nothing at all, you wouldn't get less DKP. While other players bid DKP on the loot, so you get higher on the DKP ranking, it's irrelevant as those players are not your competitors. If you are a caster, you can't care less about the DKP standing of a rogue, as he'll never bid against you.

However in gold bid system you get a share from the pot after the loot you can't use. If the boss drops a strength plate and it sells for 10000G, you just got 1000G. If it would be disenchanted, you'd get 20G (as a shard goes for 200G). So unlike in all other loot systems, you are interested in bringing players who want the loot you don't. If you are a caster, and you go with full geared plate melee, you'll get 20G/str plate. If you go with people who need gear, you'll get much more!

So, if you use gold bid, 80% of the raid members would prefer the undergeared guy over the geared one, assuming he won't make too many wipes. This is the reason why everyone get a chance in our guild on farm raid. The best thing is that if the raid leader is corrupt and wants to maximize his own income, he will bring undergeared people who don't compete with him, so the guild retain a large roster, giving chance to everyone to raid except the competitors of the leader.

Theoretically this benefit could be implemented into a DKP system if it's closed. The raid members get the DKP that someone bids. If all loot is disenchanted, no one gets DKP, if there is a bid war, lot of DKP is distributed. However this has the problem of setting the initial DKP. As no DKP is created, people can't start with 0. OK, let's give 100 DKP to every member when he joins the guild. However it makes the raid open to ninjaing: the guy burns his starter 100DKP and the gquits and goes to another guild. Or simply don't raid more. In gold bid system you bring your gold with you from outside when you join.

If you want your guild to have a large roster, just implement the gold bid system and see the invisible hand handling everything else.

PS: to answer the dumbest comment "people don't need gold": if you use gold bid, gold is loot, so everyone wants it.

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