Phase 3: Profit !

[Warning: Non-Gold Wow-Econ Post Ahead]

The room was lighted by the radioactive goo, Notus (My pretty banker) and I  was on a heat argument on the configuration of the P3P network sub hubs.

“You cannot put that cable there, or the power supply would leak and overpower the whole circuits, the relay would be ruined, and…” Notus raised her voice.

“No, we had done that million times the relay will regulate itself, P3PN regulator is special designed to work under such stress, they had
even spend weeks on testing that….” I try to pull her back to logic, but well, you know, those draenei are really stubborn, only second to the dwarf.

“They, who? they are busy on launching the assault, they wouldn’t care less on the regulator…. those slacking gnomish engineer…” she made a big mistake here

“Hey, space goat, maybe you can insult a gnome, but never insult our engineering expertise!” Someone had to teach the girl respect.

~~~~~~~~

*Deee Deee Deee* The phonetic Device One (PH-ONE in short) rang in the heat of argument. It’s from Big Jimm.

“Hey, buddies.  ~~Zzz~~~~ Look, I got some ~~~~Zzz~~~~

Reel-like issue to sort out,

can you write some ~~~zzz~~~ pose ~~~Zzz~~~ this week” …

You can’t rely on Radio spectrum under radio-active environment, you know?

“What Reel-Like issue ?”

“~~~Zzz~~~ Wheel knife issue ~~~Zzz~~~”

“Okay buddy, although we don’t have any spare saw disk. we’ll take care of the pose thing. And remember; don’t feed it after mid night!” I talk to the phone near to the server room door.

When I was busy talking to Big Jimm, That sneaky girl push me out of the door of the room, and shut herself inside.
Just to “protect the network from my overlooked plan”.

Guess I’ll be the one who take care of this “pose” thing….

It had been a long time, I actually wrote anything other than schematics and blue print. So I picked up my tablet on the messy schematic table and walk out of the laboratory for idea. I walked pass the busy district square between the Auction Hall and Bank, trying to find a quiet place to make up my mind.

I decided to fetch myself  a drink, trying to have a civilized discussion with that girl is really exhausting which include lots of yelling back and fourth just to make a point valid.

So I get into the Inn I used to dwell and ordered my favorite drink.

An Gnome with Aussie accent was yelling about how we should build a statue for him while other customer just gives him a nay look.

The pink hair girl continue her speech after passing me the drink. Which is something about “Cast” and Talents, some accident happened else where and Some Eternal Crab presumably around Darkshore.

A interesting story to tell, for Big Jimm’s pose I guess….

Okay, back to business. Larisa asked a question, about how sad ghost crawler find no way to set “fun” talents for the gear-score and the non-elite-jerk-build discrimination.

Quote   “if players are dumb jerks it’s not your fault!”
Larisa do mean to comfort Ghost Crawler a bit and I do agree that they are doing a great job.

However the players (especially the raid leaders) are far from dumb as contrast doing the best thing they could to organize the raids.

Are those Raid Leaders requiring Achievement/Gear Score/EJ-Build is just plain stupid and Jerk?

If you notice, in a guild environment (Social or Not), we are more tolerance to Gear Score and Talent builds. E.g. A mage can never go frost in a PUG Raid, but is possible in a guild raid? Is that all it goes is “friendly” or “Social” to let them slack (To go in low Dps)?

We all know that good raider need more than gear scores, Achievements/EJ-Build, and in suitable case Dps/HP. What make a raider good for the raid are his/her skill / judgment.

Even for a person who know Gear Score is useless, rely on Dps to judge a player.

Gevlon made a point on that post and I would like to evaluate a bit.

The Market for Lemons

The theory goes like this.

There are two kind of fruit sell in the market Peach and Lemon which had a different price due to preference of traders.

There is a catch in this market though, the tradition of this village will pack all fruit in a bag, and the buyer cannot open the bag until the transaction is over. Effectively only the sellers will know what they put in the bags. (We’ll explain this weird tradition later)

In this experiment, firstly, no buyer would offer more than 50 cents, since they’ll be rip off the seller instead sell them a lemon. But the seller will also go to sell lemon instead, since the profit margin is much higher.

In the end, no one would trade peaches, even there are profit margin on them.

(The fail on ensuring the fruit is a peach destroyed the market)

The same happened in a PUG Environment. A Raid Leader (Buyer) could only pick 10 or 25 person in a raid, and everyone else (sellers) think they are good players (Even an M&S would pretend or unintentionally believe they are good.).

There are not much method to identify the player is good or not. Until you actually drag them into group and run with them. They had try everything they can to look through the bag, no matter how remotely it indicate that the player is good. Gearscore, achievement, talent build and Dps are effectively the simplest (thus quick) indication related to a good player.

Rational Discrimination

Given a fast pace of forming a raid, a PUG Raid Leader do not have the time to listen the reasoning of every candidate’s talent plan. Let’s see the graph… (We all do love graphs don’t we?)

Now, let NEJ_Noob means number of a Player without EJ Spec is a noob and NEJ_Good is a Player with an EJ Spec is at least an average player so on….

A RL can only observe a player with or without a standard spec, but no idea on whether he’s an M&S or Average/Good Player. As we all know the pug is flooded with M&S, NEJ_Noob and EJ_Noob would be outnumbered the EJ_Good and NEJ_Good. NEJ_Good lives only at the very top of the raiding ecology or guild-ed raid,

So when RL start looking at the chart, if

EJ_Good / (EJ_Good + EJ_Noob)   >    NEJ_Good / (NEJ_Good + NEJ_Noob)

Requiring an EJ Spec is a logical choice for an informed RL. And the cycle reinforces itself. Since having a EJ Spec indicate you are informed and had a higher chance of getting into a raid, player voluntarily give up those “fun factor” to get into raid. And thus more and more good player would go into an EJ-clone spec (Since number of Good Players are always more informative than noob and M&S).

Solution

In order to break this Lemon Market, the only way is to provide a valid way to separate the good raider and the bad raider. While it may against the benefits of Blizzard (Gevlon’s Belief), it’s the only key to get the Pug out of wipe fest and otherwise meaningless grind.

Maybe we can come up with a solution as players?

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