All I want for Chrismas is a giant guild airship.

It is well understood that Blizzard's response to player housing (or guild halls) in WOW was essentially that other MMO's have already done this - so unless there's a compelling reason to do it really well, they aren't going to do it.

Here's what I thought would be a compelling reason.

There was a previous wow.com article regarding future expansions The Maelstrom Lore Behind the next WOW Expansion, it was mentioned that if we can have guild boats for Maelstorm. Designated officers can get to captain the boat. Then in a recent wow.com article All the World's a Stage the Guild Hall -  there was a picture that's strikingly similar to what I was thinking about at the time.

Overcrowded Guild Airship (image via wow.com)

So I wanted to blog here my thoughts regarding using an airship as a guild hall - in fact this is something we should be able to have right now with existing assets.

Existing Assets

1. May be the guilds can start with a small version of the airship (like a goblin zeppelin - there are various models). 
2. Then upgrade to the massive gunships in Icecrown for Ogrim's Hammer (horde) and The Skybreaker (alliance) variations. 
3. The art works and model of the airships already exists. 
4. Guilds should be able to hang their banners over the sides of the airship 

Ogrim's Hammer engaging The Skybreaker over Icecrown (image via wowwiki.com)

PvP

1. Airship guns can be used for battlegrounds (Isle of Conquest, or even Wintergrasp - if they allow flight) as a siege weapon 
2. Skybreaker has a bomb on board, and Ogrim's Hammer has a rather menacing forward cannon.
3. launch aircrafts (the same as Riding the Wavelength or Static Shock Troops bombers in Icecrown) from a guild airship (hello Protoss Carrier!) 
4. Anti-aircraft weaponary for airship-vs-airship or airship-vs-aircraft scenarios 
5. ramming enemy airship! 
6. boarding! board each other's aircraft to disable it during battlegrounds 
7. Use Blastenheimer 5000 (darkmoon faire cannon) to launch players into specific drop zones (or enemy airships) 

for levelling.

1. The designated captain of the airship can decide where to park the ship - so it can act as an additional hearth location. 
2. rend-a-flyer works in the zone that the guild airship is parked in. 
3. portals to different capital cities via NPC mages - similar to how Shattrath, Dalaran functions - but without the lag 
4. npc vendors, repair, reagent, mailbox, guild bank 
5. rested state (when the airship isn't in combat) 
6. I'm guessing you'll need ropes to get back up, and parachutes to jump off

and...

1. massive gold sink for guilds that can afford this - repairs, fuel, ammo

Here's the general idea to have a decent deck.

1. start with the nature starter deck (40 cards)
2. to beat NPCs who have a 2-card advantage, you need to stop bleeding points quickly so you want to keep about 10x 1-2 coin cards. Initially don't go head-to-head with the NPC's card. Just hunt your own squares. The nature starter deck has two cards (changling sentry, changling rock warrior) that are really good defense cards that can hold the playing field until about 4-coins.
   
   Changling sentry needs 1 blue gem to activate and become awesome - don't mix in too many cards from other decks or you can't pull this off reliably. Most of the nature deck (80%+) has 1 blue gem.
3. Don't add every hero to your deck - only add the heros that support your deck well: I've found:
   • Ernie - awesome with 3 coin (artic frostfang) and 4 coin (mushroom giant warlord, bear companion) onwards.
   • Morninglory - great at fighting and reducing enemy points
   • Ari the Fish - good at fighting - better off with Erine + allies
   • Maple Sugarleaf - always ended up playing her face down for resource... when I could play her, I usually don't have a shortage of cards
4. Tricks: Spin attack is awesome at holding the enemy back at 6-9points. If they go near 10 points and you are still nowhere close it probably is game over.
5. Try to improve your overall gem average. Try to get average up to about 2.8+, but don't bloat your deck with heros that you will never use or has no synergy with your allies.
6. Personally I don't like tricks that has very low gems:
   bandage and vine tangle - only 2x gems - don't like
7. There are some tricks that are very good, even though they have low gems:
   bat attack, berserker rage (chaos)
8. I don't think you should use bandage when <4 resource... you will be chasing the game and always behind in resources - your opponent can play more expensive creatures and more tricks than you...
   (this is why I really don't like bandage)

Find me in game - "Silin Little" - I usually hang around server 1 looking for people to play and chat about cards

Implement in SilverLight

- Utilize the harddrive

- add special tools that are time based

- add time-warp portals

I had this inspiration to make a RTS chess, how would it work?

1. Take normal chess
2. Remove rules regarding turns
3. Each player can move as many units as he can at once (no moving two units simultaneously - aka two hands), and as long as each player moves at relatively similar speeds...

We have Real-Time-Strategy Chess!

• Normal rules of taking the enemy pieces apply, so if you are ready you can take them before they run off (or take you)
• I think this actually subtly changes the chess 'trading pieces' play.  It's very likely that players will form walls of pawns and the play may come to a stalemate situation where neither player wants to make the next move which may endanger his position.
• Chess games will be fast though :-)

costs = material + labour * wages (db/hr)
price = sale price (on AH, or guild)
profit = price - costs

Hence her goal had been to increase profits, directly, by decreasing costs, this mostly involves making stuff yourself to cut costs.

make your own stuff -> decrease cost -> increase profit

This is definitely one way to play.  This is the view of "I'm the boss, and I pay wages".

----

I had a different view of the economy of the game.  My view is:

costs = material
price = sale price
profit = price - costs
profit/labour = profit/labour

My goal is to increase profit/labour.  This means specifically, to avoid low profit/labour jobs and even just buy materials for those type of goods.

buy the cheapest profit/labour stuff -> make the most expensive profit/labour stuff -> increased profit/labour.

This view is "I'm the worker, and all profits are my wages"

----

I don't know if I'm successful at persuading her, but I think I'm turning her around to my line of thinking.

Her line of thinking is the common one, and it is the line of thinking that prevails in a real-world model.  But the game's economy system had one major difference from real world:

Everybody gets the same amount of labour, every day.

This means, everybody builds 10 facilities, with 24hour of labour output each.  Totaling 240 labour. You can not increase this amount.  If you own two accounts, you can consider yourself two people for the purposes of all calculations.

----

If your goal had been to make a profit of 5000 db a day, that may sound really good on paper, but perhaps you aren't doing the most profitable thing you can do.

5000db  / 240hr = 20.83 db/hr

Even if you just mine ores and sell them, you can easily make 40db/hr.  That means you can make 9600db each day.

----

Caveat:

My calculations are only valid if you can manage to sell ALL your goods within the day.  If you overproduce and the market isn't ready to consume your production, then you'll end up with a lot of capital sucked up waiting in the AH.  A particular example is the structure deeds.

Most structure deeds take 1 hour to make, and sells at a profit of 100+ db.  So in theory, you can say if I make 10 draughtsman's office and produce 240 structure deeds daily, selling at minimum 100db profit each, I'll be earning:

240 * 100 = 24000+ db daily.

The problem is of course, no one is buying that much structure deeds.  If you put up 240 structure deeds you'll likely only sell may be 10 (unless you seriously undercut your competitor's prices, which digs into your db/labour rates).  You'll end up with losing a lot of invested capital without immediate returns, causing a major cashflow problem.

jliu

Love

• Progression - see new stuff!  Experience new content (I mean, I am paying for this stuff...)
• New loot
• Different encounters
• Feeling of victory

Loath

• Drama
• Complacency - when your raiders slack off because the boss is on farm and no one is taking it seriously.  Usually dps slacks off first, then healers have extra work...
• Rostering
• Having to keep to a schedule - really screws up real-life arrangements
• No-shows (come on... 22 people and 3 healers short...)
• Server-instability
• People leaving raid/game with all the gear, and having to find replacement for these (sometimes I think PvE progression loot should be guild-bound - will fix all those raid ninjas as well).
• Attunements

Summary

To be honest here, what else is there to do really in WoW?

jliu

• Identify synergies.  Resource and the immediate factories that needs them.
• Tax.  Building in a enemy nation's ports will cost a player 40% tax.  This tax is spent on anything that requires money.  Spending 240 Doubloons?   Try 240*1.4 = 336Db
  This actually affect the cost of production by quite a bit.  That 40% tax will need to be passed onto your customers, and for someone who may be making that item in a home port, the cost would be 240*1.05=252Db
  So basically if someone's selling the same goods anywhere between 252DB~336DB (within a 35% margin) you can't even compete.
• People screwing up the market by selling under-priced goods.  I actually noticed this quite a bit.  A particular [Deed: Draftsman] cost 980Db to produce raw.  Plus tax it ends up 1008Db.
  Some insane people were selling it at 1000Db.  My suspicion is that they didn't realize they have a 5% tax that they had to pay on top of the 980Db raw cost.  In addition to a 40Db auction house fee.  So they are seriously running under-cost.
• An earlier thought we had in our construction was to reduce shipping required.  So we'd build factories near the resource gathering facilities.  This produced a situation where we had clusters of buildings on separate sides of the world, which caused a lot of back-and-forth with regards to producing goods.  During manufacturing it is quite likely that we may forget something, and having a port nearby makes it far easier to go pick it up.
• This idea ties in well with the tax problem earlier.  If the gathering facility is on alien port, then having the manufacturing facility on the same port would further increase tax on the final goods produced.  Having to build buildings on alien port is also always more expensive.
• I was proposing an alternative strategy where we lump production facilities near each other, and the only remaining long-range-hauls would be to bring in the raw materials.  This significantly reduces transporting during manufacturing.
• But this morning I was having second thoughts.  If raw materials are heavier to ship than manufactured goods, it may be that we can save more trips if we ship manufactured goods instead of raw materials.
• If you are a [Free Trader], get tax-evasion!

jliu

Wifey spend most of yesterday working out which facilities we'll need to produce a ship between the two of us.  There are a few buildings that we're considering to skip and just buy the materials we'll be needing from the auction house.

Between ship-pennants and commendations, as well as the Euro-Traders, we actually have access to a surprisingly large amount of goods available to us.

We've also divided up the facilities we'll be building and have sighted good locations to build them.  She being a free-trader gets access to advanced-facilities which requires a river, so we had to keep that in mind as well.

Secretly, I'm worried that when PvP is opened up, we'll be forced into PvP battles and she might lose her cargo.  That's going to upset her I'm sure.  (It'll definitely upset me!).

I'm planning to observe the market availabilities and shift our production line accordingly.  Goods that are too common (and thus cheaply available), I'll just get from the AH.  Goods that are rarer or expensive to produce, I'll make myself.

Day 1.

• Download for the pre-boarding party is just horrendous, took us two tries from different URL's as well as running the patch from the client before we were able to play.  FLS (Flying Labs Software) should really fix this up...
• Swashbuckling combat is very confusing at the beginning.  Gets a bit better with practice.  Boarding a ship is really NOT done well.  But I read that they are improving that particular fight in the future.
• Ship vs Ship combat is really fun, until you get your mast destroyed.  Then you are sitting duck until the enemy ships sink you.
  This was pretty awful for Wifey, she had her sails knocked out and weren't able to go anywhere, and we couldn't work out how she could just give up and restart that particular instance.  I've noticed there is a "ship surrender" action - may be that would help her avoid being sunk.
• We got to about level 3 each.

Day 2 (this is actually Friday night and Saturday morning).

• Wifey and I really gave ourselves to practice this whole ship fighting business, with some successful results.  She prefers to get into boarding range, grapple the ship and board.  Her swashbuckling skills are Florentine which is heavy on blocking and defence.
• My privateer ship is slightly faster for moving and manoeuvring, so prefer to sail around them and pound their ships for a bit.  Boarding is technically harder for me, as I sail in alongside for the board grapple I usually ate a freaking racking broadside which is really painful for my lesser-armoured ship.
  In swashbuckling, my dirty fighting style doesn't help me survive a long time, but some cheap AOE attacks (easily blocked by opponents with good balance) as well as an AOE stun helps me get the edge over the enemy captain.
• In melee fights where the odds aren't so overwhelmingly crazy (like ship boarding or fort captures), Wifey and I actually work really well.
• We got to about level 9 each.

Day 3 (Sunday night).

• With the combat system a bit more sorted out, we were braver to explore the world a bit.  We finally departed from the original port and visited the neighbouring ports, as well as start to dabble in the crafting, trading economy.
• Wifey takes a lot of joy in working out the Mathematics, so I've left that to her.
• Sailed all the way to our nation's capital.  Chased by NPC pirates that are at leave 30 levels higher than us.
• We got to about level 12.  Looking for new ship (still on our old fallback).

Day 4 (Monday night).

• Interrupted our play schedule when the game wouldn't update to the new 1.0.44 patch (we were on 1.0.35) because SOE stuffed up on the patch delivery and our clients wouldn't update.
• Reading the patch notes, it seems that FLS has removed quite a lot of newbie quests around the beginner towns.  I can understand why they did this.  We were up to level 9 without really leaving the first town via the open sea, and when we visited the nearby towns they had an equal amount of beginner quests... in WOW speak, the quests in the nearby towns were gray before we even visited the town.

Day 5 (Tuesday morning quick check)

• Sailed back to beginning world.  I attached a sail outfitting (+5% sail speed), and we caught the ocean current on our way back, with the wind behind our sails.  I clocked 86.5 knots.
• Wifey and I talked about perhaps joining up with a society (guild) to further our crafting career.  I'm keen to find a big Australian one.