Systems for systems sake

When a new WOW patch comes out there are always new systems and currencies.  It isn't necessarily a problem to introduce these things as people do like having new stuff to do, and you need to gatekeep your new material to some extent.  If you don't, people will stockpile resources before the patch, buy all the new stuff in the first 10 minutes, and then complain that there is nothing to do.

Sometimes, however, they miss the mark badly.  In the latest 9.2 patch a new currency was introduced that is called Cosmix Flux.  CF is acquired from everything - dungeon runs, raids, treasures, rare monsters, pvp, all these things give it to you.  It isn't rooted in lore anywhere either, it just rains from the sky for no reason.  I like stuff that is rooted in the world - silverleaf is an herb found in a few starting zones, has a particular look, and is used for particular things.  I like that.  CF, on the other hand, comes from everywhere and has no lore or meaning.  Given that it totally fails from an immersion standpoint, it needs to be excellent on some other front.

It is not.  The main issue is that there isn't much you can do with it.  In the first week of the new patch I determined that I would need at most 12,000 CF for the near future, and that might rise to as high as 20,000 under some odd circumstances.  By the time I had calculated this I had already gathered 10,000 CF without making any attempt to hunt for it.  At the current moment I have 30,000 CF sitting around and there is literally nothing I can do with it.  I can't specifically gather it and it has no use - why does it exist at all?

If a new currency is rare and is useful for something specific that can be a good thing.  People enjoy hunting for ways to build new stuff or acquire cool toys.  A generic currency that is worthless is a total waste though - it irritates veterans as it is just one more damn thing I need to scroll past, and new players get overwhelmed by new systems.  For a system to be worth learning it has to have redeeming value, and this one has none.

Last week I concluded that Blizzard would end up using CF to patch up mistakes they made in this new patch.  Anything that was too hard to get and which players complained about would simply be put on a vendor with a cost of CF so that people would be able to get tons of it (but not infinite amounts).

Lo and behold Blizzard just announced that two old currencies which people were complaining about got added to a vendor for a cost of 3,000 CF.  It feels extremely kludgy and immersion breaking to me.  They screwed up the values badly, added a pointless currency and system creep, and now are trying to fix other issues they created (which could have been neatly solved in other ways, I might add) using their screwup.

One thing about systems in games is that every system has cognitive overhead.  To justify this overhead you absolutely must have a good reason that the system exists.  Just adding in stuff to be adding in stuff is a terrible choice, and one they should stop doing.  My currencies tab is already bursting with one hundred old, pointless currencies, and we don't need to be adding a few more every couple months.

A game is complete when there is nothing left you can trim out, not when you have added every damn thing you can think of.

Blizzard goes communist

Over the past year in WOW I have spent some time boosting people.  In the beginning I sat in channels advertising, and that was a terrible experience.  It took a long time and I got constant hate messages from people who were outraged that I would do activities in the game for gold.  Actually doing the boosting was generally fine, but the sales part of it was the worst.

Later on I stopped trying to be an entrepreneur and joined a corporation.  Lots of people realized that, just like in real life, you can be drastically more efficient by specializing and organizing.  My boosting group had bankers, managers, salespeople, and actual workers.  I did the actual work and was quite happy with my cut, though I am sure the people doing the awful sales part of the job made more money with less skill required.

Capitalism sneaks into everything, it seems.

At first glance this seems harmless enough - why not let people organize?  The issue became that all those salespeople sat in trade chat constantly blasting out "Get boosted by us, bring gold" messages all day.  Anyone joining the chat would get multiple messages a second posted by these boosting salespeople, and anyone else got drowned out.  The group finder was also infested with them, making it annoying to use for everyone else.  Just like in real life where billboards get in your face, capitalism in WOW has its downsides.  There were ways to avoid this - I had a mod to get rid of all the boosting posts in my interface - but your average new user would not know this.

Blizzard decided that unregulated capitalism like this was bad.  Time to give back some power to the workers!  They banned all large boosting groups like mine in an attempt to stop the endless spam.  It is still fine for someone to pay me to beat a dungeon for them, but operating across multiple servers in a large group is no longer allowed.  Take *that*, capitalist pigs!

This has good consequences, but also bad ones.  The good is that chat channels are going to be way less infested with advertising.  The bad is that people buying boosts are no longer buying from a large group that has a reputation to protect, and which polices the behaviour of its members.  I couldn't screw over somebody when I was boosting them from my group - I would get my gold taken away, and eventually banned.  But if I just find a random person in chat and take their gold, I can just walk away with no consequences.  Blizzard can't and won't enforce me running that person through a dungeon.  

People don't love big companies and their customer service people... but they are a lot better than getting totally scammed with no recourse.  There is an advantage to doing business with someone who cares a lot about public perception.

The other big downside is that people who want to buy boosts are now restricted in who they can buy from.  It used to be that these big communities would work across many servers, so even if you were on a small server you could buy a boost from top players on a big server.  Now you are stuck buying from whoever is on your server, and if nobody there is willing or skilled enough, you are out of luck.  This results in more people ditching the little servers to play on the megaservers, which exacerbates an already troubling trend.

I do find it funny that a big company that is thoroughly entrenched in capitalist ideology would so blatantly strike back against capitalist trends in their games.  Much like in real life, capitalism creates extra problems, but it also solves problems too.  

In any case, there is no way I am going back to sitting in chat begging for customers.  I just have to get used to being poor again.  A natural entrepreneur, I am not.

Climb on my back

In the past couple weeks I have been doing a lot of carries in WOW.  The ways it works is I am in a bunch of discord channels and an advertiser posts a run.  Boosters like me reply if the post suits them, and then we gather into a group in game and carry someone through a dungeon.  The ad will tell us how much we get paid, how difficult the dungeon will be, and who they need.

This pays extremely well.  I make 4 to 10 times as much gold carrying people as I would doing anything else in the game.  It isn't trivial to get that gold though, as you need to have a high level of skill to do dungeons with one or two people in your group who are incompetent or even afk.  The value of the gold I earn means I am being paid between 4 and 10 dollars an hour depending on the run, which isn't a great hourly rate, but I am being paid to play WOW, so I can't complain that much.  In the end though it isn't like I convert this gold to dollars, I use it to pay for all the potions and food and other junk I need to play as well as my monthly subscription.

The booster community is an interesting place.  People seem to think that I mostly get paid to carry totally incompetent people to rewards they don't deserve, but that hasn't been my experience so far.  Mostly it is people starting off a brand new character who want some good gear but who don't want to spend months trying to work their way up.  They pay some money to get carried to a bunch of good gear so they can get into the content they actually want.  The others are people who are able to do the content but who struggle to find groups.  They don't want to spend hours trying to find people to run with and then have the group fall apart.  

Instead they pay 15 bucks so that a group of friendly, highly skilled people show up and efficiently beat the dungeon with them... and at the end, the buyer gets all the loot!  I can see people looking at it like a movie ticket, where they pay a modest sum and get the experience they want.

I am not interested in buying a boost at all, ever, but I can understand people who do.

There are downsides to boosting though.  The main one is that you need advertisers who sit in trade chat and group finder and constantly spam advertise their services.  I could apply to be one of those advertisers, but I would be miserable.  Even if the gold per hour is better, and I am sure it is, I am not interested.  However, the constant spam does annoy and frustrate players who want to find groups the normal way, without paying for the service.

That spam doesn't affect me.  Trade chat is useless, and is just there for people to post memes, chuck norris jokes, and political diatribes.  I have it turned off.  I have a simple mod that blocks all of the advertisers in group finder when I am looking, so I don't even see that.  For me boosting is all upside.  I don't care if other people buy boosts in general, and I like it a lot when they pay me stacks of gold to do fun activities.  I play the game to do challenging stuff with my buddies, and I don't care if somebody else buys an achievement I worked for by opening their wallet.  The important part is the striving and the improvement, which a buyer misses entirely.

Mostly the people I run into while boosting are a lot like the people I run into anywhere else.  Generally we get along and things are fine, but occasionally I run into a jackass who annoys me.  

One thing about boosting that I often see is people complaining that boosters are giving Blizzard money, and that any new and difficult content is just Blizzard cooperating with boosters do make tons of money.  The idea is that if something is hard, buyers will purchase tons of subscription tokens for real money, sell them for gold, and use that gold to pay me to boost them.  

This makes zero sense.  If there are 1 million players who never buy boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars a month.  If most of those players are buying or selling boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars per month.  No amount of boosting can change that - everybody buys exactly 1 subscription per month.  All that happens if lots of boosting is occurring is that the best players don't pay for their subscriptions because they get subsidized by the buyers.

Boosting is here to stay, and I think we all ought to just get over it.  Focus on playing the game your way, and don't worry about what everyone else is up to.  If you don't boost, then nothing the boosting community does affects you.  Those top skilled players were not going to show up for your run anyway... if they weren't getting paid, they would just be doing something else entirely.

Cash money

Naked Man and I often lock horns about money.  Not real world money though, just the currency that we use in our RPGs.  Recently we have been talking about how our characters interact with gold and how we would like for it to work.  NM loves the idea of gold mattering to characters.  He is a big fan of them seeking out treasure to buy the things they want, keeping track of expenses, and budgeting.  In his ideal world we would each keep track of exactly how many coins we have of each denomination and have fun collecting old and obscure currencies that we can then try to convert into more useful coinage.

I, on the other hand, built a whole roleplaying system where player wealth is described simply by Destitute - Poor - Professional - Landowner - Mayor - Royal - Monarch.  What level you are at tells you what stuff you can buy and what you can own.

I often give NM trouble because in our DnD game I do a lot of rounding of money and don't bother to keep meticulous track of it.  I also complain about pricing of things when those prices don't make sense to me.  For example, early on we ended up in a big city and I wanted to learn spells.  The prices seemed ludicrous to me, because to learn a single level 1 spell was 1000g.  1000g could buy me a decent magical item, so the idea that it cost 1000g to just look at someone else's spellbook for an hour seemed absurd to me.  Who in the world is paying those prices?  The person selling the spells doesn't even expend anything when they make a sale!  These strange prices often come up because we are combining sources from a variety of editions, some of which are decades old.  This leads to some strange situations.

For example, in our last session we suddenly got rich.  Up until this point we had accumulated roughly 30,000g between all of us.  About half had been spent on various things like spell research and magic items, and the rest we were carrying around in cash.  In this session we sold a bunch of items we had gotten in our recent adventure for a total of 70,000g.  50,000g of that was in just 2 items that we were selling because they weren't much use.  It makes sense in the lore of the world that these items would be valuable and sought after - they had a history and were completely unique.  Unfortunately that windfall makes it hard for us to take money seriously otherwise.

How do you make yourself worry about small change when you randomly stumble upon single items worth as much as all the loot you have ever seen?  I think DnD has always had this sort of problem because as you level up you find more and more expensive and powerful things, and this leads to out of control inflation from the perspective of characters.  

It is hard to worry about spending 100g on something when you will randomly open a box and find 10,000g in it!

This trouble is exascerbated by our current campaign style.  We are on the clock trying to save the world from apocalypse.  Adventurers that take long breaks and choose their missions based on monetary rewards can interact with world economics in fun ways.  Do we go fight the ogres, which is easy, or do we delve into the lich's tomb, which is dangerous, but probably much more rewarding?  That is a good question.  However, our adventures are often part of saving the world and so we don't have a lot of choice.  Chasing ogres for cash isn't happening.  I suspect that interesting monetary dilemmas are extremely hard to maintain in a race to avoid armageddon.

One thing NM has wanted is for spell components to be expensive.  He likes the idea of spells that have expensive components that we have to either find or pay for as a way to bleed off some of our money.  That works for me, but it is a tricky balance to strike.  Recently I came upon a bunch of spells, some of which had expensive components.  However, the spells were extremely weak, much worse than other ones that didn't have any extra cost.  That isn't going to make for any interesting decisions - why would I pay 1000g to cast an inferior spell?

After some back and forth NM decided to improve those spells and suddenly there were some interesting choices.  A few of the spells were decidedly more powerful than similar free ones, or at least offered a unique perk.  I like that situation, as it lets me choose between free spells or spending cash on something new and exciting.  I have to decide what to prepare each day, so I face the challenges of figuring out when I will need the big guns and getting ready to spend resources on them.

There are ways to make gold interesting in a fantasy RPG, but I don't know that they end up being worth the effort.  When I think about fantasy stories none of them ever involve the characters taking months off to go fight trivial opponents to collect cash.  That isn't a bulletproof argument though, because we aren't playing a book, we are playing a game, and these are different things.  

When I am running games I don't think I am willing to put in the effort to build a complete economic system for the players to interact with.  It is just too much, and I am not interested in something half baked.  NM, on the other hand, seems dead set on including an economics simulator in his fantasy RPG.

Ethics in video games journalism

A new tier of content is coming out in WOW, and with it comes a wave of terrible reporting designed to leverage outrage for clicks.  Outrage journalism has been around forever, but I think the way our media consumption is structured these days amplifies it.

Given that it shouldn't be any surprise that when people talk about new content in video games they try to make things sound EXTREMELY BAD and VERY SERIOUS no matter what the thing actually is.  I should be expecting this, but apparently I am not entirely jaded yet.

Recently I saw a perfect example of this when Preach Gaming was reporting on something on the public test realm for the new patch. 

Characters have legendary equipment.  In the new patch we were all expecting to be able to upgrade that equipment, and that is the case.  The way this will work is when you go to the new zone you will be able to do quests that award tokens, and with enough tokens you can upgrade your gear.  You won't be able to do it all that quickly, because these tokens are limited by how many quests appear each day.  I would expect it would take a couple weeks to upgrade a legendary piece, but we don't know for certain yet.  The tokens can be sold on the auction hall too, if people are so inclined.

This news is not outrageous, or even exciting.  It is precisely what we would expect.  However, the headline was that you will have to be rich to upgrade your gear in the new patch, because wallet warriors will buy all the tokens and leave the poor people to rot.

Outrage!  Anger!  Why would blizzard only let rich people do things!

Which is of course nonsense.  The vast majority of the playerbase won't use the auction hall at all for this, and will just do quests to get their upgrades over the course of a few weeks.  If you are broke and don't want to pay any money for your upgrades.... then don't.  I certainly won't be doing so, and I have a bunch of gold saved up.

Will there be rich people blowing giant wads of cash on day 1 to upgrade gear?  Yeah, I expect so, but so what?  You don't need to beat everyone in the world to the punch, just wait a couple weeks and get your stuff at the same rate everyone else does.  Unless you are one of the elite few pushing for world first, it just doesn't matter to you that someone else is buying a tiny bit of power for a few weeks until the world catches up.

Trouble is, saying "New system in the patch is fine, and pretty much expected.  Everyone will get their stuff by playing the game normally for a little while." generates no outrage, no clicks, no engagement.  It is true and boring.  "Poor people will be cut out of the game and have no fun." gets a lot of people wound up, so creators see an incentive to put out that kind of content.

It is all kinds of sad.  Blizzard does make mistakes, no question.  Calling them out on those mistakes is fine.  But if you are ranting and frothing about every damn little thing, you have to admit that you aren't actually interested in game mechanics - you are interested in villifying someone in a desperate attempt to make yourself seem more relevant and popular.  You are trying to find meaning (and profit) in being part of a mob that is intent on destruction for destruction's sake.  Mobs typically do proclaim that they are trying to save something sacred, but once they get going that is rarely what keeps them moving.

If you really are interested in how rich people oppress the poor, the real world has no end of examples.  You don't have to make things up.  But let's be real here, people who thrive on outrage reporting aren't looking for justice; they are looking for an angle to wind up their audience with lies.

Let them play

In game communities there is a lot of judgement about how other people choose to play games.  The casuals deride the hardcore players as sweaty neckbeards with no life, and the hardcore players mock the filthy casuals and their lack of skills and dedication.

I got hit with a wave of this over the past few weeks as I have been carrying people through the Torghast dungeon in WOW.  Torghast drops important resources for crafting legendary gear and people want their shiny loot, so off to Torghast they go.  Even though most people seem to enjoy it, they often don't enjoy how challenging it can be.  They could practice harder and git gud, but many of them choose instead to pay me large sums of gold to beat the dungeon for them instead.

I have no problem with this.  

Partly this is because it is making me rich, naturally, but also I just don't see the issue.  It doesn't matter to me if they could get better by themselves or if they just can't do it.  It doesn't matter to me if they are doing easy content where they don't 'need' the legendary anyway.  They like playing the game, they want to get more powerful, and this content is being a struggle.  They would rather pay so that the experience they can have is one where some tough dwarf paladin tanks all the monsters while they shoot at them.  I would rather have the experience of having 50,000 more gold, and I don't mind being a tough dwarf paladin tanking all the monsters.

Everybody wins!

But people get really upset.  When they see my advertisements I get lots of hateful whispers with people yelling at me to get out of Looking For Group chat, or making unwarranted assumptions about my hygiene, age, marital status, and general attractiveness.

When I advertise in Torghast chat I get people yelling about how anyone who can't do the content themselves is garbage, and how they should never ever pay for a carry.  One conversation went something like this:

Me:  Selling Torghast carries for 50k gold.

Random person:  Anyone who can't do this themselves is awful.  They should quit WOW.  How can they be this bad?  If they need a carry, they should join my group, I will do it for free.  It is trivial!

I found it kind of funny.  Even if a weak player heard it, would they really want to join a group with an entitled asshat who is busy telling them how wretched they are?  Much better to pay 50,000 gold to run with someone who is helpful and non judgemental, I think.

I don't understand that desperate desire to trash talk people who play differently.  Their progress isn't affecting your progress, and if they can't do Torghast themselves they aren't going to be a high ranked player in any format.  All they are is just one more random person trying to make numbers go up and hopefully enjoying the process.  Just accept that one person's fun is not another person's fun and move on.

There is nothing to be gained by trying to push other people down to make yourself feel higher.  If you want to feel good, find a serious challenge, work hard, and overcome it.  Other people not required.

Except when those people are carrying you through dungeons for large sums of cash, I guess.  Those people you do need.

Making the money

The economy of WOW in Shadowlands has not been good to me.  When SL launched a lot of people talked about how Blizzard was making crafting powerful and important again because legendary items were going to require crafters in order to be made.  If you want a legendary ring you need a jewelcrafter, a legendary plate helm requires a blacksmith, etc.  These legendary pieces have 4 levels, and in order to learn to craft a level 2 you need to make 15 level 1s.  Then 15 level 2 pieces to learn 3, and 15 3s to learn 4.  These recipes cost a *lot* of gold to make.  For example, to get to max level making rings I will have to spend 1 million gold on materials.

This certainly makes crafting important, but it doesn't end up being good for crafters most of the time.  The trouble is that the endgame of this system is always degenerate.  Either you end up with only a tiny number of crafters who make the huge investment to get to max level and they get to gouge the server savagely, or you end up with a ton of people going broke trying to get there and then none of them can make back their investment at all and they all lose a truckload of money.

Fundamentally the issue is that one crafter can handily supply the entire server with gear.  The *only* incentive to being the second crafter in the market is to undercut other people.  You cannot increase supply or produce alternatives, you can only provide competition.  Unfortunately for every crafter who actually reaches level 4 there are 45 low level items to sell off, and there are not nearly enough buyers for that.  Most people only need one or two legendaries, and they can buy rings, necklaces, cloaks, and eight different armor slots.  All those crafters have way too much stock and not nearly enough customers.

A far better model for a crafting skill is alchemy.  You can make potions and such, like everyone can, but if you level up a particular reputation you get a daily cooldown to make a valuable resource.  Because it is only once a day you can't supply the whole server, so new people entering that market still have something to contribute.

All the legendary crafting doesn't work at all like that.  You have an enormous up front cost you may never be able to recover and what you get at the end is the privilege of fighting to undercut your rivals.  The people who camp the auction house win, and everyone else sells nothing.

Crafting systems that require camping the auction house *suck*.

WOW already rewards the auction house campers plenty, we didn't need more of that.

I got wrecked by this system.  I realized that there would be competition, but I figured I should level my ring and necklace production up to max so I could provide stuff for my guild.  I thought the auction house would be full of overpriced stuff and this would help people out.  That didn't happen though - the auction house is full of rings and necklaces priced at a fraction of the cost of materials.  I had guildies ask me to craft things for them and I told them they shouldn't get me to do it.  Buying materials for me to craft would cost them far more than simply buying the finished products.

Right now I am about halfway through level 3 on both rings and necklaces.  I have lost a good 300,000 gold so far trying to level my crafting and I have helped nobody in my guild in the process.  At this point I will probably finish up and get to level 4 in the hopes that at some point I will be able to make money from it.  I can't recover all of my losses so far, and I might as well slowly finish up my leel 3s any time the price of goods rises above the cost of materials.

It gets worse though.  I am on an extremely high population server with a massive economy.  On a small server the legendary recipes are going to be a disaster because nobody can afford to get all the way up.  The lack of customers will be crushing, and so lots of people will be locked into only getting level 1 legendary items.  There are so few buyers that crafters cannot afford to craft their way up, so everybody gets locked out of the market completely.

There are two fixes I can think of right away, but both would have needed to be in the game at launch - now is too late.  The first is to simply change that 15 to a 5.  Producing one third of the items to level up would make it an investment, but the markets would not be flooded.  Crafters who put in the time would be able to sell their goods, and competition would naturally control the prices to keep them a bit above material cost.  The other angle would be to change the system much more substantially and remove the learning system entirely.  Have a daily cooldown to product one resource, and have crafters have to use 1 of those resources for a rank 1 item, 2 for a 2, etc.  This would encourage crafters to do their cooldown and would work fine in markets of any size.  Want a plate hat?  Get a blacksmith to make their Special Bar of Ore for four days in a row and make it.  Profit for crafters, accessibility for buyers.  Best of all worlds.

Instead we are stuck with a mess of a system where a few people who gambled big get to gouge customers and the others lose their shirts, and people in small economies get screwed.  Not ideal.

No one wants to see that

There was an interesting letter to Blizzard and WOW players in general written recently by a top raiding guild called Exorsus.  They have been banned because they used an exploit to beat Mythic Helya and they wanted to explain the exploit and make some complaints about the game otherwise.  This is one of those exploits that you can totally understand a top guild using, because they had a strat that was reasonable and not an exploit in phase 1, but when they tried to do it in phase 3 of the fight it broke the fight.  Programming error, for sure, but they used it to get a kill and Blizzard punished them for it.

I am not here to argue about that exploit today though.  What I wanted to address was some of the other stuff in the letter, particularly the bits where the author asked for more support for the PVE dragonslaying part of WOW, namely big cash prizes for beating bosses first.  Along with that they want Blizzard to actually show off those races and make it more of a prestige thing.

This is an example of a person who has no clue about how entertainment works.

Imagine a tennis program on TV.  Roger Federer hits the ball, and gets an ace.  Then he hits it again, and gets an ace.  Then he hits it a third time, and does not get an ace.  But there is no opponent, just a computer and a camera checking to see if it is an ace.  When Federer misses he starts again, and he keeps restarting until he hits 20 aces in a row.  So hour after hour Federer hits the ball, checks to see if it is an ace, and his count gets higher and higher, but doesn't quite hit 20 for the victory.

Eventually Federer goes off to sleep, and then eight hours later he is back at it.  At some point within a three day span he will hit his 20 aces, celebrate like mad, and walk off the court.  Compelling TV, right?

That is what some PVE WOW players think people should want to watch.  It is fun to practice and get better at raid encounters but it is absolute shit as entertainment for the masses.  We want to watch Federer play against Nadal because we know someone will win within a few hours and the activity is varied and unpredictable, in as far as tennis can be such a thing.  Federer hitting aces and the computer verifying them is awful.  In just the same way watching a guild die to an encounter making incremental progress for 14 hours a day until they win is not entertainment.  PVP WOW actually has some followers, though not a great number by any means, because it is a far better viewer experience.

Which is why nobody is going to put up big prize money for it.  Nobody wants to see it.  What possible reason could Blizzard have for throwing enormous wads of cash at hardcore players?

They have a great reason not to though, and I don't mean "We want to keep all the money".

If you think players cheating, exploiting, and doing outrageous things to try to get world first kills is bad now, imagine how it would be if they were playing for a million dollars.  The pressure to break the rules becomes absurd when someone's rent depends on killing the boss, and the problem is that with a lot of these exploits you actually have no idea if pursuing them will get you banned or get you victory and accolades.  Sometimes people know they are cheating, but it would end up being a constant issue where players would get a kill and then Blizzard employees would have to decide if a thing was legal or not and who to give the million dollars to.

That can't end well.

In most sports they get the rules down pat pretty well because they do the same thing over and over again.  In WOW things constantly change.  Raids are new, classes shift, and the preparation part of the game is ever changing.  Coming up with a really robust set of rules under those circumstances isn't practical.

Thing is, WOW makes money off of casual players.  Blizzard wants some hardcore players out there so the casuals have something to check out on websites and addons to put into the game but trying to keep every hardcore player working their asses off has no payoff at all.  You play WOW PVE hardcore for the love of the game or you don't play.  I am not saying that is how it *ought* to be, just saying that this is how it is, like it or not.

Nobody wants to watch you slay dragons.

So slay the dragons, or not.  Cheat, or not.  But let us not fool ourselves into thinking that us doing this is entertainment for the masses, or that we are going to make big money doing it.

Testing, testing

I have all the art for Camp Nightmare ready to go and uploaded to TheGameCrafter.com.  Last night I was sitting at my computer, work completed, staring at the Confirm Order button.  All I have to do to get 100 copies of the game to launch towards my place is hit the button, pay ~$3200, and wait.  It is a nerve wracking sort of situation.

Thing is, there are two real options.  Option one is to just hit the button and hope.  I *think* I have everything done correctly, uploaded the way it should be, and all the stuff should fit.  But if 100 copies arrive and I made some silly error in the UI I could have 100 copies of junk.  I have a lot of confidence in my abilities, but there are so many things that could go wrong.  The first box I wanted to order would never have worked because it has a divided in it that makes adding in instructions infeasible.  Only way to find that out is to get screwed by it, or randomly get advice to that effect.  I dodged that bullet... but what other bullets are speeding towards me that I don't know about?

The other option is to just order a single copy and if it arrives and all is well then I can order the whole shebang.  This is the sensible choice, but it means that I won't be able to get all the copies in time for Back To The Lounge #15 which is happening in about four weeks.  I don't have to have the copies for then, I suppose, but I have been slugging away at this for so long it would feel absurd to show up at my annual gaming extravaganza without my game in tow.  Somehow it feels like defeat to have a single copy show up, examine it to see it is all well, and then go back and do the thing I should have done in the first place.

Suprisingly my money demon wasn't even able to convince me to take option 2 and be safe.  I want it done, I want the stuff here, and I sat on the fence, torn between confidence and doubt, money and desire.

Wendy, on the other hand, thought ordering all of the games at once and just hoping that all was well was a silly proposition.  There will be more years, time isn't running out, and throwing away that kind of money on a mistake is foolish, or so she says.

She is right, most certainly.

Then I found out that TheGameCrafter will only send you one test copy for your first order anyway.  They (quite sensibly!) don't want people ordering huge stacks of games and then freaking out and trying to cancel their credit card payments when a tiny error in uploading means the game is completely ruined.

So my dilemma solved itself.  No copies of Camp Nightmare to sell at Back To The Lounge... but when I do get them they will be done right.

Also if you want to play games all day with a bunch of middle aged former mathies in Waterloo this Easter Friday, then hit up that Back To The Lounge thing.

Figuring out Steam

Several game blogs I follow have talked about how they seem to have too many Steam games.  They buy a ton of games on big Steam sales but never end up playing them.  The usual story is that they have a library of one hundred Steam games but only play about five new games a year... and they are still buying twenty five new games a year because they look cool and for five bucks how can you go wrong?

My Steam library has seven games in it and all have dozens to hundreds of hours.  Sales, they don't so much work on me.

Tobold thinks this is a widespread phenomenon and that this is going to lead to some kind of massive game industry crash as people notice that they are paying for games they don't use.  Eventually people will catch on and just stop buying games at all until they have played through all of the games they have.  If we assume everyone is a perfectly logical actor and that money is extremely tight then this makes sense, but neither of those things is true.

Just look at the garment industry.  That new sweater that you bought even though you already have six sweaters?  A total waste, but what a bargain at half off!  It would be a waste of money *not* to buy it!  50% off sales still generate massive amounts of buying even though people have had awhile to try to learn that 50% isn't really 50%.  Like ten or twenty thousand years, at least.  I am pretty sure it took about fifteen minutes after the first person traded berries for a hunk of meat for someone to figure out that offering meat for ten berries then dropping the price to five berries would get people interested.  Fact is, we know that people continue to accumulate far beyond their needs, even far beyond their ability to use the thing they are buying at all.

There is every reason to think that this will apply to games in the same way.  People are going to continue to buy new shiny things at big discounts and then not have time to play them.  The people that are clever enough not to do that already aren't doing that, and last I heard Steam was making a bajillion dollars.  All those people supplying the bajillion dollars are going to keep on doing that.

You can't go too far wrong assuming everyone is going to buy crap they don't need, and Steam is assuming that in a big way.  The smart money is on that working well into the future.

A limit on spending

The WOW token hit a new low yesterday, selling for just under 19k gold.  Due to the way the system works this generated a ton of orders for tokens and that glut of orders pushed the price all the way back up to 25k, which is higher than it had been for quite awhile.  It is a bit of a bizarre economic system that is going on here where people buy in at 19k a lot and then stop buying in but the momentum generated by those purchases still matters.

Keep in mind that the way this system works is that it goes in cycles, with a lot of buyers cashing in at the lowest point in the cycle and a lot of sellers taking action at the high points.  As soon as the price starts to swing up again all the buyers stop but the bulk of the orders causes the system to keep on raising the price anyway.  Blizzard is actually creating a fair bit of gold this way, by allowing most buy orders at 20k and most sell orders at 24k, but that isn't actually a big problem.  They pump gold into the economy in any number of ways so this one extra way is no big deal.

What got me wondering though is why the token hit a new low.  It had been cycling predictably between 21k and 24k for awhile, so people are curious what changed.  My theory is this:  The token buyers are running out of months.  I know a couple people who have four accounts between them that are all paid up for the rest of 2015.  Their incentive to purchase more tokens is plummeting regardless of price because you can't just buy in infinite times.  Eventually you have to ask yourself if you are sure you are actually going to be playing in that time period!

People selling tokens don't have that limit.  They use their new found wealth to buy pets, pay for repairs, purchase gear, and any number of other things but those things are close enough to limitless that there is no practical difference.  Even if you ignore content churn the number of things to collect in WOW is immense and the amount of gold required to make it happen is astronomical.  Imagine I bought tokens to see me through the end of the year.  At the moment that would cost me something like 160k gold.  Now imagine a theoretical person on the other end of the bargain - they spend $200 and gain 160k gold.  That gold will buy 8 good pieces of gear but a new dungeon is coming out in a month or two that will have all new gear to buy and there will be a new dungeon later this year that will do the same thing.  Then they will want to drop 100k gold on a super fancy mount, and each epic pet costs 15k gold, etc. etc.  Just one person wanting to buy ALL THE THINGS could easily sell so many tokens that dozens of people like me are completely capped on our ability to buy tokens from them.

The demand is elastic to some extent though because of course there aren't just people sitting on a huge pile of gold and people sitting on a huge pile of dollars.  There are plenty of people at the margins who would buy a token for 15k but not for 21k so prices can't just collapse to nothing when all the people like me have all the subscription time they can handle.

If I am right though the price for tokens is due for a slow downward drift.  I can't predict very well what will happen just as the new patch 6.2 drops though.  There will clearly be a bunch of people resubbing by buying tokens and that will drive the price up, but there will also be a bunch of people laying down some serious cash to get the new materials and gear immediately.  Which group is larger I just can't say.  However, I bet that two weeks after the patch all of the resubbers will be done and the people wanting gold to get new shinies will still be there so I expect a huge crash in token prices around that time.

Care about the numbers

This week I had a talk with a rep from a game publishing company about making Camp Nightmare for me.  It was informative, but mostly reinforced ideas I had already come to from a bunch of different sources.  The rep made it clear that Camp Nightmare is a really good game from a cost perspective because it has a simple list of parts and can fit in a small package.  He talked a bit about how game creators tend to have a strong attachment to making their games bigger and shinier and they often get far too carried away.  Usually the prospect of their game having a $250 price tag was enough to stop them in their tracks though.

That person trying to publish a game that is way too expensive was almost me.  I love FMB to bits but it is a game that really wants miniatures to achieve the best possible look and feel.  I could get by with cardboard chits but when I imagine that game built and published I imagine it with shiny miniature worgs and elves and dragons.  FMB just isn't the game I am going to publish though, at least not when I am footing the bill!  It is the best game for me but not the best game for the public.

I got the impression that a lot of game designers have intractable opinions on how their games have to be built.  I think it is common for people to have strong ideas about exactly how they want things to look and feel and they don't want to compromise on that.  I am not so much like that though - if a publisher wanted to rebrand the game with a new theme I would be totally okay with that.  If they wanted to change about the components so the game felt and looked very different that would be fine.  But if they wanted to change the amount of Food that Veggie Soup gives you from 3 to 4?  Go To Hell.  No Touchy!  Hiss!  I take the numbers of the game quite seriously.... the rest of it, not so much.

I also got a lot of specific numbers for constructing Camp Nightmare that will inform my design choices.  Making cards in units of 54 is apparently the thing to do, and this actually works out really well because Camp Nightmare consists of two ~50 card decks and a few extraneous extra cards that help track game state.  I will fit the game into a 2 deck 108 card limit easily and without compromise.
The other number I am working with is 15 cardboard chits per sheet.  At the moment I am liking the idea of having 14 Food, 14 Wood, 14 Fun, and 33 Energy tokens for a total of 75.  (Some of those tokens are x5, though most are x1.)  My other option is to order a cheap cardstock board and use three wooden cubes to track Wood, Food, and Fun instead and just order 30 Energy tokens.  I really like the idea of not having a game board though and I think tracking things with tokens will be easier than using cubes on a flimsy board.  People always bump the board and if it is small and thin it will fly all about and the players will lose track of their resources.

I want to test the new build that uses tokens instead of a board to be sure but I think I am going to end up going with 75 tokens. 108 cards, and a rulebook as my components.  Simple, sleek, and hopefully cheap.

Competition

As I have recently become interested in figuring out the nuts and bolts of publishing a board game I have been joining facebook groups and reading blog posts and such on the topic.  I haven't found much of use in terms of actual game design but I am beginning to get an idea of what the financial side of game design looks like.

It is terrifying.

There are *so* many people out there pouring out board games and publishing them.  A few hit it big and end up on everybody's shelves but 99.99% of them go absolutely nowhere and end up in the dustbin.  Many of them do far worse than the dustbin and end up costing the designer a ton of money as they desperately try to sell their games to no avail.  Whether it be constantly travelling to conventions to try to harangue manufacturers or just laying down the cash to self publish the story is the same:  Scraping out tiny amount of money at best, or losing a bunch at worst.

Now the creation side of game design is amazing.  There are so many communities out there of people building games that work together to make all kinds of interesting things and that is a really cool thing to see.  The terrifying part is just the money side, where people try to make a business but can realistically expect to make no returns at all... even making minimum wage for the hours they put in is pretty much an impossible dream.

There are just so many of designers and games out there I can hardly imagine trying to compete with all of them.  Even if you have a really top notch game it is such a lottery to become one of the ones that actually makes a bunch of money, and obviously 90% of the games aren't in the top 10% so there is a huge amount of drek being pushed out too.

I want to get my game built, made up pretty, and produced so that people who read my writing or know me IRL can see what I have created and have fun with it.  But man, I am so not on board with pouring all of myself into that cosmic lottery and hoping for the big score.  The Stoic voice inside me tells me that putting my happiness and success so much in the hands of other people is a foolish endeavour - I should do what I know will make me happy, which is to make games that are beautiful and not worry about whether or not people out there want to hand me fistfuls of money to play them.

Its token time

The WOW token is live.  Blizzard did a good job in implementing it, mostly by making sure that it wasn't at all the same as the regular AH.  It isn't players selling to each other but rather just a floating price based on whether or not there are currently a positive or negative number of tokens in inventory.  If more have been bought the price rises and if more have been sold the price drops.  Every 15 minutes it adjusts either up 1% or down 1% based on that.

They launched with tokens costing 30k gold and just let it go.  It popped up just slightly but then went on a long slide down to about 20k on my server and is now back up around 23k.  It has only been two days so we don't know the long term trend for sure but it seems Blizzard hit the ballpark just fine.  Personally I thought the price would drop and didn't buy a token when it hit 20k hoping for it to go lower, but then it popped back up and I bought my 30 days for 23k.  Not as good as I could have done but better than buying right away.

After doing so I got curious about how long it would take me to earn that money.  Each day I run around my garrison doing chores, daily transmutes, picking flowers, sending followers out, etc.  I end up making about 2500g in 12 minutes and since I have 2 characters I rack up roughly 5000g per day.  My total time invested is probably closer to 30 mins though since I have to hit up the AH and farm wolves occasionally to feed the machine.  That puts my gold/hour at 10,000, so to fund my one month I put in 2.3 hours of time.  Since I could buy that time for $15, I am making $6.52 per hour.  Not great, even when it is post tax money.

Of course I can't think of all my money making in that light because I can't exactly exchange my gold at that rate continuously... I am capped at $15 a month.  It is also interesting that I can't amp up my production significantly because any activities I do to make gold beyond that baseline are drastically less efficient. I can run dungeons on Redcape as a tank once per day for 800 gold / hour, which is pretty great, but still not nearly as good as doing my basic activities.  There is also not much incentive to do that when I make 150,000g per month and can't possibly spend that unless I go completely nuts somehow.

Given that income I am definitely going to keep on funding my monthly fee with gold.  It will only take 15% of my income to maintain so I won't even really notice it in terms of capital accumulation.  That assumes that the price remains constant but I can't imagine it going outside my range.  I am willing to pay a lot more than 23k if I have to and it might well drop.

Here's hoping that this puts a massive dent in the illicit gold selling market.  I look forward to less hacked accounts and less gold spam as the 3rd party gold farmers are squeezed out of the market by legitimate alternatives.  Fighting them with bans never worked but I suspect legalization of their market will... where have I heard that before?

Dividing by 2

While mucking about on TheGameCrafter.com to figure out how to publish Camp Nightmare I have learned many things.  All I have been doing for now is figuring out what various parts cost and how to enter them because I don't have finished images yet but this has still been quite the education.  I discovered that adding a game board to my game raises the cost by $8, which is an enormous chunk considering I am trying to keep the cost total close to $20.  (These are costs for single units, they drop by ~40% in bulk.)  Tying up 40% of my cost in a single piece that isn't strictly required for play seems like a terrible mistake.

Instead I figured I would just use chits, mostly 1x, but with a mix of 5x as well.  Doing this for the Food, Wood, and Fun resources would mean that I could do away with the board entirely and rely on a few printed cards for rules and chits for recording things.  However, Food regularly goes up to 40 and Wood and Fun to 30 and that seems like too many chits to be dealing with.  I don't want to inundate players with a shower of tokens to record things because I know how much time is taken up in games like Sentinels of the Multiverse when keeping track of damage.

However, I have the power of mathematics!   (Imagine me standing shirtless in a thunderstorm raising a slide rule up into the air above me, surrounded by a halo of lightning.  That, friends, is the way the power of mathematics looks.)

What the power of mathematics tells me is that I can simply divide every instance of Food and Wood by 2 and reduce the number of chits I need by, say, half.  This looks good at the outset because Food and Wood come into the game via Gather Wood and Forage by default in groups of 2 so I can just reduce those to 1.  Some Gear adds odd numbers to those base values though so I will need to tweak the cards that do that a little to make sure they still work.  The Saw that adds +3 Wood to Gather Wood has to be rewritten to add +1 Wood to Gather Wood and also grant 1 Energy, for example.

These sorts of changes are things you have to play with carefully though.  At the moment swapping Day/Night costs 5 Food and gains 1 Fun.  Under the new paradigm it costs 2 Food and gains 1 Fun.  This is a superior ratio and means that rapid swapping of Day/Night to convert Food to Fun is more efficient than before.  I altered a few things so the extra Food in the game from this change is sucked up by other sources but it still has the potential to change the way people play.

Another more serious change is that when you cannot pay Food/Wood for something you have to pay Fun instead.  It used to be that Fun was roughly 5 times as valuable as Food/Wood so doing so was disastrous.  Now though Fun is only 2.5 times as valuable so it is a lot more plausible that you would want to make that trade when in a difficult situation.  When that comes up it probably means you are doing something terrible or at least you are in a bad situation so it shouldn't matter at all for high scores but it will change game decisions when the squeeze is on.

This is an interesting part of game design, where my theoretical notions of how the game should be run into the monetary realities of actually producing things.  Overall though this is likely to be a great change because it means that the pieces for Camp Nightmare fit in a much smaller area.  I won't be able to get Camp Nightmare down to the size of Hanabi, but I might well be able to get it to that same size but double the thickness.  At that point it would be something you could put in a big pocket or a purse.  That kind of portability is probably a decent selling point, I think.

Monopoly

Today I am not talking about Monopoly, one of the worst games in existence, and surely the worst game there is when considering its quality / financial success ratio, but rather a monopoly, the economic situation.  On my WOW server Sorcerous Elements (Air, Earth, Fire, Water, naturally) usually sold for about 40g for quite a while.  However, the latest patch has been out for awhile so the pressure on prices is down, and everything has been slowly drifting down in price.  I had assumed that Elements would do the same, but then I saw the current prices around 100g and was astonished.

Then I noticed that one particular seller had hundreds or even thousands of Elements, and completely controlled all Elements of certain types on the AH.  Aha, I said, someone is trying to leverage a monopoly to make a fortune.  In the past I have seen people try this but it never worked and everyone (Sorry Corporate Plunderer) who made the attempt lost their shirts in the process.  The problem in the past was that if the AH was empty of a thing people could just go make a truckload of that thing and load it up again.  The amount of money and AH camping required to defeat the entire server simply wasn't available.

But in this case things are different.  Elements come into the game at a very predictable rate.  Some people might be neglecting their production, but even if they suddenly start up again they can probably only make 2/day or so because everything is totally gated by cooldowns.  The only serious restriction you have is having to buy up all the stocks of all the people who notice the prices rising and try to cash in.  If your bankroll is absolutely tremendous that does seem plausible because other people can't just step in and try to bleed you dry.

And they will try, oh yes they will.

I don't want to make money by just playing the AH.  It isn't bringing value, it is just scooping money out of the system.  However, when I see someone making a play like this I can't help myself but want to try to milk them for every gold piece I can.  This isn't taking candy from babies, it is just making sure the monopolist has to work for any gold they might make.  I don't have a big stash of Elements, only about 200, but I am very happy to twist the monopolist into paying me off to keep their prices up.  The trick is that I can't just undercut by a tiny bit as I don't want to camp the AH.  If I go under by a fraction, they undercut me.  If I go too low, I don't get paid off.  I need to undercut by enough that the monopolist wants to buy me to out to maintain their margin but close enough to their value that I get all the money I can.

This is going to be a short action though.  I will quickly run out of resources and the AH prices will, should this work, remain massively inflated.

Unless, that is, I try to buy in myself and out monopoly the monopolist.  How crazy am I?

Ante up

I have spent a lot of time building games.  I also talk about them a lot, and thus everyone who knows me knows how much they mean to me.  This has lead to me getting an awful lot of questions about "When are you going to actually publish?"  Generally my answer is that since the self publishing game industry is pretty much a money pit for overzealous designers I don't necessarily feel obligated to publish.  I can make a thing of beauty without selling it and be happy with that, since selling it seems unlikely to generate money.

But money isn't the only thing.  I don't want to pour my dollars down a hole, but having a properly produced game that has nice art and looks beautiful would bring me great satisfaction, not to mention the smiles I would get from knowing others had it to play with.  This week I met with an artist friend who is interested in producing the art for Camp Nightmare.  He is eager to do it, but now the question of how the money gets handled comes up.  I could Kickstart the game and then publish it and send out copies to all the people who pay in... but that does involve me doing an awful lot of packaging and shipping and I know Kickstarters sometimes sink people on those costs if they aren't careful.  I could also just put it up on TheGameCrafter and get them to produce it while I take a cut.  Problem is that to do that I have to front all the money for the art first so if there isn't any interest then the outlay is all on me.

This means I suddenly have to be familiar with shipping costs, intellectual property rights for art, Kickstarter design, and a ton of other things.  It is a lot of work, and that kind of bureaucracy is a big part of why I hesitated to take the plunge before.  But this is a golden opportunity, to have someone with personal interest in the project and plenty of talent to get it done well.  If I just sit and don't do anything about it I am pretty much admitting that I won't ever do anything about it.

It is time to shove those chips in or walk away... no more checking and waiting.

Not even trying

I have been playing Candy Crush Soda for awhile now, usually just to pass time on subways or when I am otherwise unable to do other fun things.  I like it a lot and it is a fine and worthy sequel to Candy Crush Saga.  They have, however, really found a way to ratchet up the evil total to new and absurd levels.

The trick is that you start with 50 Gold Bars.  You can spend Gold to gain extra turns on a level you have just failed and sometimes gain additional bonuses to help you complete the level.  Doing so costs 9 Gold.  After 5 times where I got stuck on a mission for more than a week and used Gold to get past it I am now sitting at 5 Gold remaining.  As soon as that happened Candy Crush gave me a notice that there is a special deal going on where I can extend a failed level for a mere 6 Gold.

Isn't is just so sad that I only need 1 more measly Gold to continue?  Wouldn't it be wonderful and fun to go to the store and buy more Gold so that I don't have 5 Gold just sitting there, useless?

Useless but oh so close to being useful!

At first I wondered if that special deal was actually something that just came up randomly, but now it has been sitting there for 2 months and has never gone away.  So what they are really saying is that they will deliberately offer you a deal to get things cheaply, but that deal will always cost 1 more than the total amount you have.

Special deal, hardly any strings attached!

That right there is evil.  I am never going to pay for this game and that is in no small part thanks to this utterly ridiculous and awful policy they have in place.  The fact that they so casually try to trick me into buying stuff only strengthens my resolve to never ever buy anything.  I don't have a problem with sales and sales tactics in most cases but this is a level of assholery that I just can't tolerate.  They aren't even trying to pretend that this is just a regular sale when they leave it sitting there permanently taunting me.

I like Candy Crush Soda a lot as a game, but the monetization portion of it is just disgusting.  For me that means I will continue to play here and there but will decline to ever buy in.

Going legit

WOW is taking a page out of Eve's playbook and making game time purchaseable for in game money.  Players will be able to buy subscription time in units of 1 month and sell them on a special part of the AH with no fees for gold.  Blizzard has clearly thought a lot about this and has gone about it in a cautious and sensible fashion which I approve of greatly.

One of the big concerns people have is that buying time would involve a lot of the usual AH shenanigans.  That is, people would buy up huge amounts, drive up the price, and resell at a profit.  Or they might put a ton of orders in at high prices to confuse AH mods or any number of other practices.  However, subscriptions are much more tightly controlled than normal AH interactions and none of the obvious tactics will work.  Any time that is bought is locked to the account that bought it so no reselling is possible - the only people buying time are those that want to use it.  Also players will not be able to list time at any price they want but rather the price will be set ahead of time and it will fluctuate based on demand.  I don't know exactly how that will work but it means that players will have little control over the process aside from actually buying things they like.

This all means that people will have a great way to buy into the game and spend cash to get tons of resources without going to shady dealers.  Gold sellers that focus on account stealing, hacks, and other unethical methods to get money will be starved out as their market is gutted by players going legit.  Certainly some people will still buy stolen gold but I am pretty sure that market will be tiny by comparison.  I don't think that there is actually much benefit to the game to having people who are rich in game be able to play for free but I don't think it is much of a loss either.

There are people all afluster about how this will mean all kinds of bad things for the in game economy but I don't buy it.  They think that the possibility of making real money will cause people to suddenly start working extra hard to make gold but I can't see it - your ability to get real money out of the game is capped at $15.00 a month and that is a pretty pathetic return on time if you actually work hard to make that gold.  Anyone who is collecting a fortune is going to continue to do so and people who didn't bother before aren't going to be suddenly interested when they can make real money at a fraction of minimum wage.

In the short term there will be huge market fluctuations.  I expect a massive buy in from whales and I think there will be a huge spike in prices in the short term.  However, once the initial purchase rush is complete the total gold in the economy will have dropped due to the AH cut and prices will rapidly settle back down to where they were before.  I don't know how long it will take for that initial rush of gold transfer from the gold rich to the dollar rich to peter out but I bet it is a matter of days or a week at most.  The smart money is in buying up a bunch of common mats (especially Savage Blood) and BOE epics that will be purchased with that flood of eager, flush new buyers.  How *much* you can afford to stock is a question I can't answer though, and you had best be sure you aren't overpaying for epics in an effort to fleece the rubes.

Personally I am not going to bother speculating.  In anticipation of price spikes I am going to lay in a store of two weeks worth of goods to guard against shortages but I am not going to try to play the Savage Blood or BOE market myself.  I just want to make sure I can keep doing my thing, and that should be easy enough to do.

Former Captain Of Industry

The economy of WOW is no longer favourable to me the way it was.  In previous expansions I was a Captain of Industry, making vast fortunes in manufacturing.  Many people just buy cheap things on the AH and resell them for a profit but I was never much interested in that as it felt like I was just skimming off the top and bringing no value.  What attracted me was finding ways to make huge sums actually doing things.  I used to have a battalion of alchemists to transmute one thing into another and every day I would log in to turn life into air, earth into fire, or whatever the thing was at the time.  This was actually a good thing for the server in general because whatever I was making was the rarest thing and turning common resources into rare ones is valuable.  I also turned uncut gems into cut ones, mass produced crafted gear, and did the ore - gems - jewelry - dust - scrolls shuffle.  If I happened to acquire a gigantic fortune along the way, more's the better.

These days though manufacturing isn't what it used to be.  Cutting gems isn't going to make anybody rich because there are only a few cuts available so everybody can do everything.  Finding rare cuts and making sure they are on the AH isn't feasible.  Transmuting seems to have entirely vanished so my army of alchemists is bored with nothing worthwhile to do.  What happened is that the economy became much simpler than it used to be and that got rid of all the angles and inefficiencies I could step in and fill.  There are ways to make money certainly but mostly it seems like they don't scale.  My ability to product things for profit is extremely limited and mostly I am reduced to waiting for real time to pass.

It feels like a chunk of the game has vanished.  For most people I bet this is a good thing because I don't think they enjoyed funnelling money to me so I would produce the obscure items they wanted.  I was adding value but the rest of the WOW population likely prefers the situation where I don't add value because that value add is unnecessary.  The number of folks who really want an incredibly complex item optimization game is very small compared to the number of folks who just want to buy their stuff and get back to bashing so this is a good move on Blizzard's part I think.  The challenge of the game in terms of beating actual enemies is the same, but the logistical issues are much less.

All of which means that instead of spending an enormous stack of gold at the start of an expansion and earning it all back via manufacturing I just buy what I need and keep my hoard intact.  Thankfully I have enough saved up that unless I go crazy I will have tons of money for a half dozen expansions down the line.  I won't be broke... but some part of me misses playing the economics game.

I have traded my game of money for a game of running a garrison.  Overall for the whole playerbase this is a good thing and I approve of it from an objective design standpoint.  It is a little bit sad that I couldn't have all the games to play at once though.