I’ve promoted Greedy Goblin and his website in the past due to the very interesting economic analyses he’s put out, mostly stemming from his skill in making valid and insightful analogies between real world economics and the simplified economic model in the game of World of Warcraft.  Unfortunately, I think he’s been way off recently.  In his latest couple of articles, he’s falling into the trap of the elitist-raider mindset, and it’s leading him to make some analogies that are erroneous, inapplicable, and which lead to some incorrect conclusions.

In his latest posts, he’s attacked Blizzard’s move to change the badges dropped by lower-level raid instances.  In a nutshell, the policy change is that at some point, all instances that drop badges, from Ulduar 25 down to heroics, will drop T8 badges.  At the same time, T9 badges will be introduced for the top-end content.

Like many elitist raiders, Greedy Goblin attacks this as welfare, implying through this analogy that the “undeserving” are receiving handouts at the expense of the “deserving”.  He correctly notes that there is no taxation in World of Warcraft, so no one is directly hurt by this change.  No one is receiving less loot.  It’s not even really inflation — there may be more badges available to buy higher-end gear, but vendor prices are fixed, and the higher supply of badges should cause more BoE epics to be available on the open market, a deflationary pressure if anything.

No, what really gets the Goblin’s goat is that it is now easy for someone else to get what was hard for him to get earlier on.  It’s all about class distinction, and the reduction of the difference in gear that has him so worked up.  To the elite raider, gear is wealth, skill, social status, and self-worth all wrapped up together in a neat little package.  Having this difference reduced threatens the ego of the raider from several different directions.  It’s no surprise the hardcore are up in arms about this, but it does surprise me that GG is drinking the Kool-Aid as well.

GG attempts to rationalize his position through an odd definition of what he feels the Gross Domestic Product of WoW is, a fairly ridiculous concept on its face.  His definition, pulling from of all things World War II, is that it is the number of high-level boss kills in the game.

I think this is borderline insane.

It’s like saying that the Gross Product of a gymnasium is the number of super-heavy barbells lifted in a given day.  The hardcore bodybuilders might like that definition, but what about the guy that’s there to run on the track?  Or play racquetball?  Or hit on women?

The truth is that nothing of real value is produced in WoW through boss kills.  The boss you kill is just dead for you.  Others can freely take that boss on at any time.  And even the ones you kill only stay dead for a week — they just keep coming back as long as Blizzard cares to run the server.  And periodically, Blizzard adds new content; new high-level bosses to kill.  It never ends, and nothing permanent is ever accomplished.  You may gain skill and experience as a player, but there is no permanent achievement in the context of the gameworld beyond simply experiencing the content.

GG used to understand this.  His earlier posts talked defiantly about how he enjoyed and took pride in making money in-game as opposed to spending long hours raiding.  He’d at least acknowledge that the “M+S” and “socials” had a legitimate right to enjoy the game in the way they chose.

But now he’s a found a way to buy himself into the elite tier of raiding, and his outlook has changed.  Now he tries to define an overall value metric for in-game activity, and surprise, surprise, it’s based on how many top-level boss kills are achieved — exactly what you’d expect from a member of a top raiding guild.

Let’s look at this objectively.  There are many different servers in the game, with varying levels of hardcore raiders.  Is a high-pop server with many advanced guilds “richer”, more “affluent”, than a low-pop server with a fewer number of hardcore guilds?  Simply because Yogg-Saron is being killed 8 times per week on one and twice on the other?  Is one gym better than another just because it has more hardcore bodybuilders pumping iron, and for no other reason than that?  It’s patently absurd.

Elite raiders simply need to face the fact that Blizzard doesn’t see their $15/month as morally superior to the $15/month of the “M+S”.  Will they cater to the elite with new gear and new content?  Yes.  Will Blizzard set things up so that a permanent class difference is established and enforced by game mechanics?  Hell, no.  They want everyone to have a shot at the content that they spent cold, hard, real-world cash to develop.  That’s how they keep the masses, the paying masses, in the game.

The elite get to see content first, get the best gear first, and have the achievements and titles first.  That’s their value realized from their superior skill and effort.  But Blizzard is always going to make it so the masses can follow along at some point; they want them to see and experience the content as well.  They want them to stay in the game.

So consider it a time value of money problem, Gevlon.  It’s economics.  You used to be good at that.

Tags: Cool Link, World of Warcraft