Yucata Metagame

A little over three months ago the Yucata.de website changed their metagame system from a metagame based experience system to a TrueSkill based experience system. Essentially the change was made so the risk involved in playing a game against someone low on the metagame charts disappeared and was replaced with the risk of playing someone low on the TrueSkill charts for that specific game. In the long term this change made sense since someone who is likely to beat me in a specific game is apt to have a high TrueSkill in that game. In the short term it had issues with people who were new to the game on the website because it starts everyone off at 0 and works to get you to your proper TrueSkill over time.

A lot of people raised concerns at the time on the Yucata messageboards. The common response from the people who designed the system was that we needed to wait and see because there were other gates involved in ranking up and we needed to see the whole picture to really understand what was going on. But they wouldn't tell us the whole picture because they wanted it to be a discovery process. Makes it hard to really debate with someone when you can't see the evidence from which they're building their case.

Looks like a dinosaur!

At any rate, I hit the top rank yesterday. I'm the second person to have done so and I've now seen the whole picture. The guy who got their first seemed pretty satisfied that the whole picture was good enough but I'm not as convinced. The gimmick to the deal is they added on escalating TrueSkill gates on ranking up on top of needing to earn enough ranking points. In order to hit the top level you need to get 15 different games at a TrueSkill of 1300 which is not an insignificant number. It actually took me almost three weeks to go from 13 to 15. (To be fair, those three weeks included the launch of Mists of Pandaria so I didn't really play all that much for a couple weeks.) In those 15th games I range from #1 in Rapa Nui to #34 in Yspahan so you do have to rank pretty highly in a lot of different games to hit the last marker. On top of that, there's also an escalating gate for different games won. I had to win 31 different games to get the top level, and after needing around 20 or so it became the thing holding me back from leveling up, not experience, which was what the change surrounded.

That said, I stand by my earlier comments that the system punishes people for playing established games and I am very confident I would have hit the top rank faster on a new account than I did on my current account. Certainly if I knew what the final requirement was going in it would have been really fast. It looks like it took me around 20 games with a 80+ winning percentage to get 1300 TrueSkill in a game. With 35 total levels it's not very hard to believe that I could hit that gate along the way as long as I made sure to spread out my game plays in the early levels. The only advantage an existing account had would be existing TrueSkill values. The key, however, is that TrueSkill is actually pretty fast about getting you to where you 'should' be. You'll only have a big point advantage for the first 5 or 10 games you play of any given game and then you do have to play another 10 to 15 games to hit the TrueSkill mark but I'd be able to do that in every game I know!

The claim from the designers was that the existing account would already have enough ratings to hit these gates. Well, of the 15 games I raised to that level there were 5 that I had never played until the rating change. So I guess because I wasn't diverse enough to start I got the early level punishment of established TrueSkill in the games I liked playing and the late level punishment of not enough 1300+ TrueSkill ratings. So, really, I had no advantage by sticking to my established account after all.

Putting things in perspective though, I talk about being punished at low levels and how I felt unfairly constrained but in reality I gained the first 11 point-levels in 21 days. On a new account I probably only shave off a day or two; maybe only an hour or two. The system certainly did encourage playing new games and I learned many new games on the site as a result of the system change. (Alchemist, King of Siam, Hawaii, Yspahan, Famiglia, Arktia, Rattus, Oregon, Yucata, Thurn and Taxis, Carolus Magnus, War of the Roses, Santiago de Cuba, Era of Inventions, Trias, Maori, Ponte del Diavolo, Masons, Kahuna) And my proposed change wouldn't have encouraged learning new games very much at all. Of course, needing to win 31 different games would have! Part of my initial problem was also that I was playing against re-roll accounts which actually put me at a significant disadvantage. I was better off not playing at all than playing against those people. (Ultimately at the early levels I stopped opening new games of my own and started just joining games from people established at playing the games.)

The question is... Now what? Do I start a new account to try to set a benchmark for fewest games played to top level? Do I find another site to play on? Do I make up my own goals? (Get a win in every game on the site, for example... Get my TrueSkill in every game on the site above 1000... Get #1 in more games than just Rapa Nui...)

Darkmoon Faire Cards

NOTE: I wrote this up on Sunday while investigating details of making Darkmoon Faire cards. Things may have changed in today's update with the addition of a new ink trader. So I'll need to recrunch the numbers before the Faire leaves!

Last expansion I made a lot of money on Darkmoon Faire cards. They make powerful trinkets that are very useful for initial raiding and I was the first man in on the market. Inscription was harder to level and the mats that went into the cards started out quite cheap. I'd bought the market out to make early cards and then the price of cards stabilized at the eventual higher price for volatile life. It was pretty sweet.

This time around there are some substantial differences. Inscription was a lot easier to level. The Faire came out a week later compared to expansion release so there's more time for other people to get in. The biggest difference is you can't make as many cards as you want. There's a daily cooldown to make a Scroll of Wisdom and each card takes one of those scrolls. This means each scribe can make at most one card per day. With 32 different cards the odds of actually making a full deck on your own is really slim at this point. I can make at most 19 cards before the Faire leaves this time around. As such the idea that I could make a full deck myself is pretty laughable. If I want to get involved it would either be as a seller of individual cards or by trying to trade. That would involve talking to people and I hate people...

So, assuming I'm just selling individual cards, the question is... Is this worthwhile? I need to look at other uses of the SoWs and I need to look at the value of the other materials compared to potential sale prices of the cards.

First of all, SoWs are used in only 6 patterns. Darkmoon cards, 2 boe epic offhands, and 3 boa epic staves. I have no use for a level 90 staff. I have no way to tell if the offhands are selling or not, but they look to be worth about 3000G per SoW. They're only ilvl 476 so I don't think they're a real long term use of SoW. So, unless 3000G per SoW is a high mark I doubt I'd be using my SoW on anything except for Darkmoon cards.

What about the other materials? Well, there's a 10 copper vendor item that can be trivially ignored. Then there are 10 starlight inks. These are the new uncommon tier ink from Mists herbs. As of right now there is no ink trader to trade up for them. The only way to get them is by trading a full spirit of harmony for one or by milling. What are these things worth? There are two ways to look at it... Cost of materials or value of alternative items.

Value of alternative items is the easy one. 3 inks go into one of the new boe shoulder enchants. I've been able to sell one for 600G and a few in the 330-400G range. I'm going to go with 300G as a reasonable value for the enchant so 100G per ink. The only other use for the inks are the other SoW items which I'm already ignoring.

What about cost of materials? Milling herbs gets you the normal ink and the uncommon ink. Normal ink is pretty worthless right now because there's no ink trader. I have stacks of the ink that I can't get rid of right now. They're worth about 7G on the AH (and I should probably start selling). Should an ink trader come in they're probably be worth more like 7.5G each as I could start making all my glyphs out of them. My min sell price for a glyph is 30G, they take 3 ink, and I want to get some sort of profit out of them so they have to be worth less than 10G. Lets go with 7G as the current value of this ink and look at what milling 5 herbs gets me:

Green Tea Leaf, Rain Poppy, Silkweed, Snow Lily - 50% chance of 1 normal ink, 50% chance of 1.5 normal ink
Fool's Cap - 33% chance of 1 normal ink, 33% chance of 1.5 normal ink, 33% chance of 2 normal ink

So a stack of most herbs gets me 35G worth of base ink. A stack of the good herbs gets me 42G worth of base ink. Then for the good ink...


Green Tea Leaf, Rain Poppy, Silkweed, Snow Lily - 24% chance of .5 good ink, .8% chance of 1 good ink, .6% chance of 1.5 good ink
Fool's Cap - 48% chance of .5 good ink, 1.6% chance of 1 good ink, 1.2% chance of 1.5 good ink

So a stack of most herbs will get me .548 of an ink. A stack of the good herb will get me 1.096 of an ink. So, how much am I paying for a stack and how much does that make an ink worth?

90G - 100G per ink
100G - 119G per ink
110G - 137G per ink
190G - 283G per ink
200G - 301G per ink
220G - 338G per ink

And the good herb...

225G - 166G per ink

The first thing I'm noticing here is my price for shoulder enchants is really, really low. I need to go adjust my mod. And probably not sell any more of them. With current herb prices it's actually a loss to be making these things right now.

What about the current price of ink on the AH? Looks like around 2k per ink right now... So maybe I should be milling herbs and selling ink!

Circling back, what about darkmoon cards?

Ox deck - 26k

Oxen cards - 1k-2.5k

Crane deck - unknown

Crane cards - 6k-13k

Serpents deck - unknown

Serpents cards - 4-6k

Tigers deck - unknown

Tigers cards - 7-12k

Ok, average that all out with the lower values for each deck and you're probably getting 4.5k per card. The card takes one SoW (value-3K) and 10 ink (value-1.6k if milling, 20k on the AH). So it's a loss to make the cards even if milling at current herb values assuming you only get the lower bound on the cards. 

If I really wanted one of the trinkets maybe it would make sense to work on this. (I do kinda want the strength trinket, and would really want it if I was raiding, but don't really need it for challenge modes.) But as things stand I think I'll try to liquidate my ink and see if prices make sense later on. I can only make one card per day but I can stack up SoW and make the cards in the future should it make sense then.

Initial Challenge Dungeon Run

Friday night we decided to give challenge modes a shot. No one on our server had posted any times for any of the dungeons and we wanted to at least see what was going on. Heroics have been a bit of a joke so I for one was looking forward to potentially being worried about mob abilities...

The 'easiest' of the challenge dungeons, or at least the one completed most frequently, was Temple of the Jade Serpent. There is no group finder for challenge dungeons so you have to fly there. On the way there we hit our first issue... Group composition. Turns out we had two people who only had healing gear. Two people who had predominantly tanking gear. And one DPSer. Eh, run it!

Second issue... Turns out you have to have done the heroic version before you can do the challenge mode. One of us hadn't done Jade Serpent so we'd need to find something else. How about Mogu'shan Palace which was third most completed thus far? We can all zone in! Woo!

The first pull included a mob that whirlwinded for enough damage to kill off the melee. Which is all we had for damage. Memories of TBC heroics! Woo! Turns out the whirlwind is telegraphed so you can either stun it or run away from it. Brutal, but not unfair. Some of the trash pulls were rough, some just had lots of health. But it was all doable. Bosses didn't seem too bad either. We certainly needed to group up for meteor, that sort of thing, but it again didn't seem unfair. The timer for bronze was 45 minutes and we ended up beating the final boss in 43 minutes and 32 seconds. We had tons of deaths, pulled some extra mobs, but learned a bunch. We still had time before bed... So do another one or try for silver? Try for silver! We grabbed some invis pots from the bank and went back for more.

We ended up resetting a couple of times (dying to trash puts a real damper on a speed run) but ultimately ended up getting done in 23 minutes and 33 seconds. With the silver timer being 24 minutes. Just in! But we didn't do all that much wrong, which makes the gold timer of 12 minutes pretty out there...

Now, we weren't all in full 463 gear. We had 2 healers. We botched our invis potions. (I thought they had a 10 minute cooldown for some reason but they only have a 2 minute cooldown. And it turns out speed potions aren't invis potions.) So while I don't think we could possibly have hit gold last week I do think it's possible with a bunch of work. Which is just what I want from challenge dungeons!


It turns out a couple other groups tried challenge dungeons over the weekend because we put a time up in the leaderboards. They both also tried Mogu'shan Palace which makes me think they were following our lead and that we must have picked the easiest one first... Really it was just one we could zone into! Our time still stands as the best so far, with one other bronze run existing and two runs too slow for bronze. I seem to recall a Blizzard post saying just doing the dungeon should get you bronze but I guess not!

League of Legends Season 2 Championship

I've been pretty distracted with World of Warcraft lately and this event pretty much snuck up on me. The final event of the League of Legends season started yesterday and will be taking place today and tomorrow. They're cutting down to a top 2 which will play out next Saturday. Grand prize is one miiiiiiillion dollars with a total prize pool among the 12 teams of 2 million dollars. That's some pretty sweet cash for playing a game!

I intend to spend a good chunk of this weekend (when not doing my stupid WoW dailies) watching the games, assuming the streams are being archived somewhere. Riot is streaming in HD for free which is pretty sweet.

More on Challenge Dungeons

We're starting to get to the point where we're capped on gear and want to give challenge dungeons a spin. My server still has no times listed for any dungeon so just going in and doing adequately will get our names in the lights for a brief period of time at least! As of last night I didn't have any enchants/reforging done on my gear and didn't really know what I was doing as far as a DPS plan. I just hit some buttons! I decided to do some reading to see what I could be doing differently...

I ended up spending a couple hours reading threads about death knights on elitist jerks. Stat weightings were the primary reason I was there (haste is awesome) but there were some neat tips and tricks I hadn't thought of. In particular it turns out dancing rune weapon has a 30 yard range so a blood DK can use it as an extra ranged interrupt! I don't think it's always been that way but if it has I didn't know about it!

DPS-wise I've been pretty much doing what I need to be doing. The exception is making proper use of the new execute ability. I'm not sure it's really viable in heroics but maybe challenge mode mobs will have enough health that I can start reliably timing 5 seconds before they get into the 35-0% range.

I got home from work today and saw an interview on mmo-champion with one of the guys who currently has gold times in every challenge dungeon (on another server, obviously) and it was very interesting. In order to kill things faster they ran without a healer! They used splash healing from a shadow priest, self healing from a DK tank, and copious raid cooldowns. Generally tanks get really bitter when a DK pops army of the dead but these guys were using it AS their tank a lot of the time! They don't need healing and do tons of damage themselves! The group ran two DKs and a shaman (with earth elemental totem) for lots of 'pet' tanking. They were also all engineers which I suspected might be good. It turns out engineering is the best profession for a frost DK when it comes to damage and isn't terrible for tanking either. So, I'll probably switch to engineering from mining soon. It's a shame Robb has a lot of my ore on his inactive account. 8P

World of Warcraft: Scenario Quests

Yesterday I finally got around to doing a couple of the new scenarios. (Sky hit 90 and I had a scenario quest with a weapon upgrade I could share.) I'd only found 2 scenario related quests even though there are 7 scenarios and was curious to see if there were any more of them. If so I should pick them up before doing the rest of them. On a Saturday, hopefully, since for some reason there's an achievement for doing them on Saturday. I went poking around wowhead and turned up the following...

A Brewing Storm - no quests
Brewmoon Festival - 1 quest
Crypt of Forgotten Kings - no quests
Theramore's Fall - no quests
Proving Grounds - 1 quest (This is the arena quest with a weapon reward.)
Greenstone Village - no quests
Unga Ingoo - no quests

Great. The two quests I found are the only two I could find in wowhead. Only one has a tangible reward. *sigh*

I did find lots of people complaining that they had no clue what was going on in the scenarios and why they were even there. That's what I found in the two we did. Random objectives pop up, you do them, and then you get a bag with money in it. Apparently there's a small chance of getting a 463 blue in the bag which means maybe it's worth doing them from a reward standpoint. I still want to do them because there are 27 scenario achievements but I guess it's good to know there's no critical quest rewards I'm missing out on. I guess new level 90s should pick up the arena quest and do that scenario quickly for a decent weapon upgrade but beyond that scenarios just seem like an interesting but lore-light diversion.

Final Fantasy VI: Feed A Man A Fish

Final Fantasy VI has a ton of awesome events/cutscenes as you play the game. And then it has some events that aren't all that awesome. And then there's the event right after the end of the first world which is really frustrating. In this day and age with the internet and being able to look up how it works it's merely really annoying. Back in the day it was almost game breaking.

The event in question happens on a deserted island. Your only character is Celes and she's stranded with only Cid who is dying. The only thing around to eat are fish and Cid asks you to get him some. Walk a little bit away and you can find some fish which spawn. Wade into the water and hit A to pick one up. Then you can carry it in to Cid who will eat it and whine a bit. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

How it works is there's an internal counter. If it gets high enough then Cid recovers and sends you on your merry way. If it gets low enough then Cid dies. Celes tries to commit suicide, is saved by a bird who has Locke's bandana, and moves on. If it stays between those two values then you stay stuck on the island. You have to break out of the boundaries to move on but the number is hidden and there isn't a whole lot of hints to let you know what you need to do.

The easy way out is to stop feeding Cid fish entirely. His health slowly decreases so if you just walk away for a while he'll eventually die. The Celes suicide scene is actually pretty impactful so this isn't the worst idea. Of course it does kill off Cid which isn't something any Final Fantasy fan should want to do...

In order to save Cid you need to fight his steady health decrease by feeding him fish. There are four different types of fish. Some of them raise his health, but some of them actually help kill him. So if you don't know what's going on and just keep feeding Cid all the fish you can be playing for hours. Even this time, knowing what was going on, it took me more than one bus ride to save him. I probably should have just killed him off... Especially since it meant missing this:

League of Legends: Season 2 Rewards

The second season of League of Legends is coming to a close soon and they've announced some ELO based rewards that are going out based on solo-queue, 5-man ranked team, and 3-man ranked team ratings.  October 23rd is the cut-off. What's particularly interesting is they switched from using your current rating as the qualifier to using your maximum rating as the qualifier. So if you get into a reward bracket and then lose a few games you don't lose your previous reward.

I don't know how relevant most of the rewards are but one of them, for getting gold, is a Janna skin. This should also give the champion to those (like me) who don't own her. The cut-off for gold is 1500 for solo queue and 1450 for the teams. My ratings around when the announcement went out were 1380 solo, 1409 for 3-man teams, and 1260 for 5-man teams. Close, but with only a month to go and Mists of Pandaria coming out... Not actually much time at all.

I ended up playing a lot of games the weekend before Mists came out and went on a bit of a tear. 7 straight wins and 11 of 12 was worth 126 rating and just in over 1500. Woo! I feel like I got lucky with a streak of good teammates that weren't big on sniping each other but I'll take it. So I'm good to get my free Janna. Now the question is... Can I get up to the next tier of solo queue rewards? Can I get the team ones up to gold? I think it's just a graphical advantage for doing it but apparently there's a reason to get gold in all 3.