This Gold-Selling Thing

So the two positions seem to be that Blizzard entering the gold-selling market would be either the end of illegal gold-sellers or the end of the game's economy. Make no mistake, I think the latter is far more likely than the former. Simply selling gold would lead to rampant, ridiculous inflation. I can't afford to fling money down that particular hole myself, but I know people who have a firehose of disposable income and nothing better to do than re-skin their toon every other day. Not even exaggerating much.

So ... what?

Well. First, I'll ask this question: how much gold would you be willing to pay to play the game for a month, for free?

A cursory examination of the current state of affairs indicates that you can buy a thousand illegal gold for about $7 US. That would make an in-game subscription worth 2200 gold. Would you pay that much? That basically means that, if you do one character's worth of Argent dailies every weekday, you get to play for free. Worth it? I'd probably do it.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is this: EVE has a model whereby players can pay real money for what are called PLEXes -- in-game tradeable items that can be redeemed for one month of play time. In this way, a player can "buy" in-game currency for real-world money by paying fifteen bucks and then selling the PLEX to another player, who then gets his month of play time without having paid any actual money.

I think that this is the safe solution to both problems. Offer some mechanism by which a player can spend real-world money to have a non-soulbound item mailed to them in game, just like the vanity pets work now. That player then goes into /2 or the Auction House, sells their [Scroll of Playtime] for, say, 2k gold, and walks away with the cash. The buyer then redeems the item, either by right-clicking on it (ideally) or through some Battle.Net hoodoo, and gets a month more playtime.

This way, Blizzard makes no additional revenue (but loses absolutely nothing either), since all that's really happening is one player is paying for another's game time, and gold isn't being manufactured, since the buyer still has to have the cash on hand to buy the whatsit. Inflation is headed off and players have a legal means to exchange real coin for digital, and since Blizzard isn't, strictly speaking, benefiting from the deal, they don't have any incentive to make players spend more money in other ways. Hell, they might even see a slight increase in subscriptions, as there might be players who aren't keen on the whole real-money thing but who would happily spend in-game gold to pay for their playtime.

The major drawback to this approach is that server population and supply and demand would influence pricing of the in-game item; since it's entirely a player-economy item, Blizzard has no practical ability to regulate how much it buys and sells for. Of course, that's kind of good news also, for a couple reasons: one, players can undercut (i.e. decide themselves how much gold their fifteen bucks should buy), and also, a self-regulating market won't have to adjust when gold supplies skyrocket in the next patch/expansion.

They'd also have to flag it such that it couldn't exist on the PTR, but that shouldn't be too difficult. Also, there's nothing strictly preventing gold-sellers from undercutting, but the players themselves could influence that by not getting too greedy with their own pricing.

Ha ha, what am I saying?

Seriously, though. Implement this, and ship each box of Cataclysm with an Authenticator, and see if account piracy doesn't take a serious fall.

You want more dangerous territory? A slicker slope? I got you covered. Make the new minipets not-Soulbound, and only give one per purchase instead of handing them out to all your toons. I don't think I have to draw a map from there, really.

Pile on a bit more gold

Here's an idea for Blizzard. I demand royalties if they use it.

Allow pet owners to buy (for real money) an in-game pet crafted to look like their own dog/cat/lizard/pot-bellied pig. Have them send in pictures, slip the texture into the game and just wrap it around a generic model. You could charge fifty bucks for it and there are people who would buy it. People will do just about anything for an extra bit of digital to follow them around, and I can't imagine the textures would take up that much space.

Just a helpful suggestion to make your mountain of solid gold a little bit taller.

On Teamwork

If there's a dark side to the new LFG, it is this: it has strengthened the illusion that World of Warcraft is a single-player game.

I want to make this absolutely clear: no matter how it seems, WoW is not a single-player game. I know it looks that way; soloing for casuals has strengthened, badges and shiny epix are available with (comparatively) minimal effort, the Argent Tournament, all of these things, sure. It's easier than ever to float on through Azeroth like a neutrino, interacting only weakly with the other real people who are sharing your virtual breathing space. It's easy to forget that there are other people at all. It's easy to gear up into full T9 without ever speaking to another player; it's easy to treat PUG runners like hirelings, marching on a grim and silent death march through heroic after badge-geysering heroic, the terse atmosphere broken only by calls for this buff or that without so much as a please. Might as well be pushing a button to make your pally buff-bot give you what you want. You ungrateful son of a bitch.

It makes me sick, the disregard for their fellow human beings some of the PUGgers show. So here I am, saying it loud and clear: the game is not about YOU. From start to finish, from the time you log on to the time you log off, you are part of a team. You are part of a community, and you have just as much responsibility to be a decent human being in Azeroth as you do in the real world. I realize that that doesn't mean much to many of you out there, that a lot of you don't have any idea what that even means. Hey, you pay your fifteen bucks a month and that entitles you to wring as much blood from the game and your fellow players as you can. Take what you can, give nothing back? Go die in a hole.

Let me elaborate on this.

Most importantly, no matter how much it might seem this way, the other people running that PUG dungeon with you are people. They're looking to have fun and gear their toon exactly like you are. Display a little empathy. Sure, they might not be from your guild or even from your server, but they are still a part of your team. They are still a part of your community. Treating them like a buff-bot or rolling on things you don't need (but they do) just because you might never see them again isn't being a team player. It's not just about you. It never was.

There's more than this, though. You know all that stuff you buy from the Auction House? It's there because other players put it there. It didn't magically appear, it isn't being seeded by Blizzard. Sure, you have to spend some of your hard-earned gold to get the stuff, but it's there because they chose to level those trade skills and make their services available. You might think you're a solo player but you're not. Try leveling through the game without visiting the AH. It'll be unpleasant and painful. Try doing decent DPS in heroics without the services of a chanter or scribe or crofter. It'll be difficult. You need these people.

Moreover, you are paying your fifteen dollars a month to play a massively multiplayer online game. There are hundreds, literally hundreds, of lush, enormous single-player RPGs out there where you can God-mode all you like and nobody will ever complain. And you know what? Most of those don't have a monthly fee. Why would you pay your money to interact with other people and then act like a bridge-dwelling troll? You are part of the world, you are paying for the privilege of being a part of the world, a world populated by other human beings. They aren't bots, they are people, and they all paid to play in this rich, densely-populated world too.

I see the way a lot of people act in PUGs. I read comments on forum posts. Many seem to think they're entitled to special consideration, that they have the right to grab two handfuls of loot and skedaddle, and to hell with helping out the team or seeing that they had a good time, and many who don't feel that way naturally have learned the behavior as a defensive, pre-emptive measure. To paraphrase Syndrome, "Once everyone's a ninja ... nobody will be."

This attitude doesn't help; it makes it worse. It creates a vicious cycle of ever-more-selfish behavior. It encourages the little trolls and selfish gits; now they've successfully reduced everyone to their level, their childish, churlish behavior has been validated and normalized. Worse, it causes damage to the community as a whole -- sure, you can find a guild and be treated decently, but woe to the man who steps out into the wild world, lest he have his loots ninjaed from him and his gear mocked with allegations of noobishness.

I've had good PUGs. I've had people who played as a team, who were cordial and competent and generous with the loot. I've also had my share of bad PUGs, full of self-important, selfish twelve-year-olds rampantly and vigorously exhibiting the behavior that inspired this post in the first place. I don't know about the rest of you but I know that I, at least, enjoy the former much more than the latter. I'd guess that the majority of you do as well.

But in order to live in such a world, we all have to do our part to create it. Don't be a loot whore. Be polite and considerate. Remember that not everyone has the ability (or desire) to chain-run heroics for six hours a day (and thus might not yet be in full T9 despite the dungeon finder being out for a whole six weeks). Don't drop group because you don't like the instance and make everyone else in the group have to wait to replace you. Don't kick a DPS because he isn't pulling 3k or has a Gear Score of under 5k. Greed on the Frozen Orbs, don't need on stuff you wouldn't, in principle, equip right away during the run you're on, and consider maybe letting someone else have the [Battered Hilt] once you've won it twice. Part of being a team player, the team that is helping you run through the dungeon, is occasionally taking one for the team.

Azeroth, the World of Warcraft, might be just a game world, but it is a world full of people who have chosen to be there and who have chosen to be part of a community with you. Don't make them regret it.

On Greed

So, the Battered Hilt. Sure, it's BoE. Sure, it's useful for (just about) every class (hello tanking weapon? Hello?) Sure, it goes on auction for 15,000 gold or so. But ...

I've seen it drop twice. Lost the roll both times. That's fine, that's the RNG. But on the second go, the warlock who won it bragged that it was "his third." As in, he'd rolled and won it twice before.

Now, am I the only one who feels that gracious looting should encourage you to take a pass once you've scored it once, whether you've used it or not? I mean, it leads to a cool quest chain and a great weapon, and the whole point of it being a (fairly predictable) drop is you shouldn't have to pay 15,000 gold to get it. Taking it twice, let alone three times (at least this early in the expansion) seems kind of douchey, to me.

Be polite, be grateful that you've already experienced your good fortune and let other people benefit. We're not helping you through Heroic Halls of Reflection so you can earn another sack of coin.

Triumph badges falling from the sky

No, seriously. If you haven't been on lately you wouldn't know, but between the new LFG and the upgrade of everything to triumph badges, it's ... well, it's like swimming in them. Combine that with the fact that a complete set of T9 costs 210 badges (low-end, ilvl 232 stuff, but still) and it becomes official: gearing up is now retarded easy.

Case in point: I hadn't played in months. I was still rocking my T7.5 (well, my ret set, my tanky set was a bit better). I started running in earnest maybe a week or so ago.

(Point of bragging pride? Even in my Naxx kit, I was still out-DPSing most of the people I met in the PUGs, most of whom were in full badge T9. Seriously, they made Ret so much fun with the changes to Seal of Command.)

(Further point? I'm a blatant meter-chaser. I admit it without shame. The thing I love most about this game is handing out very large numbers, with receiving very large numbers coming in a close second. I try to avoid being pulltastic, and I never blame the tank for my misbehavior, so that is hopefully atonement enough.)

I digress. In the space of a week I've gone from an average ilvl of 202 with two blues left over to an average ilvl of 222 with a gear score of 2450. I've gone from a 3300 DPS average overall in heroics to about 4000 - 4200. It's ... epic. I group with maybe one player a day who beats me on the meters.

Two more heroics and I get to trade in my Voltron shoulders at last.