"Welfare" is Stupid

Gevlon has become a man of the underdog, advocating for the handicapped players who cannot play constantly. Oh yes, he is standing up and showing that welfare is destroying WoW for those most vulnerable. Sadly, as is typical, he's managed to still be a complete asshole and wrong. Both at the same time: he's a talented guy. Let's find the fun.

"Military dictatorships where huge tax is collected and spent on the army are usually much more developed and having much higher GDP than socialist dictatorships, spending on welfare."
This ignores that military dictatorships so often have outside support or unusually valuable natural resources far in excess of their need. See Iraq, US support, and oil for more information.

"Gnomegaddon found the real reason (/bow). As you know Blizzard will implement a welfare system, where you can get Naxx25-Ulduar25 gear for no effort, just by grinding 5 mans."
This is an easy one: "No effort" followed immediately with "grinding."

"He will be much less geared than the facerolling moron, who spend his infinite free time (unaffected by working or learning) on grinding 5-mans. If Gnomegaddon logs in, sees a "LFM 1 mage to Ulduar 10", he'll have practically 0 chance to get accepted against a completely useless facerolling M&S, due to much worse gear."
As before, the M&S, with S meaning slacker, is using his unlimited free time to get better gear. So the slacker is putting in a lot of time and he's a moron for using an efficient source of gear?

If anything I see this being a boon to infrequent players. Limited time or unpredictable schedules aren't kind to raiding, but they work well with the much shorter heroics. Most guilds use some sort of system that rewards contribution to the guild, usually by some measurement of attendance such as DKP. Our gnomish friend would likely have very little DKP or other pull in the loot system, so getting gear outside of raids is a very good option.

"If some new player reaches level cap, he will be completely uncompetitive against the ilvl226 M&S. Normally, his ilvl200 blue/crafted epic would be enough to get into starter raids. I'm damn sure that you can clear the siege area with a full 200 group if they know what to do. It's proven that you can clear all T7 content in ilvl 160.

Due to the welfare system he has no other option than join the welfare leech class, stay out of raiding for months to grind enough badges just to apply."
People expecting new players to be overgeared is hardly new and not the fault of badges, it's the fault of people doing the unthinkable: wanting easy smooth runs.

"The upper class of the world (the raiders of Ulduar) are not really affected by welfare. No geared M&S will risk our positions as their skills are ridiculous. Our work will always be needed, both RL and WoW."
Wrong. This is actually really great for guilds in Ulduar or late Naxx. This means that they can recruit more easily and suffer much less from any loss of members. Easy badge gear means they don't need to scrutinize gear as closely since they can quickly gear them up if necessary. This is in fact the complete opposite of Gevlon's earlier claim that this hurts new players.

"If there would be an even field, the working person would be rewarded for his work. Even if he is poor, by the end of the day, he would be less poor. With welfare he can easily be more poor (compared to the society average) due to the fact that the lazy welfare leech got more money for doing nothing than he got for his work (after tax)."
Whether you start with no badges or 100 badges, you get the same number of badges for equal heroics. Is there a relative loss? Sure. That's a very limited perspective though. The bottom still gets higher. IRL a poor person in America is just as relatively poor as 200 years ago, or possibly even much worse, but by absolute standards they're much less likely to starve to death, end up in debtor's prison, or become an indentured servant. Moving up from the bottom to the lower middle class the difference is even bigger. Much of this is due to those damn socialist communist, anti-American safety nets called welfare.

"If there would be no welfare epics in WoW, the players would be forced to improve and "work", by becoming useful to the server community. They could only get gear by actually defeating bosses, or producing enough gold to buy BoE."
Heroics have bosses which must be defeated to get badges. Buying BoEs is nice, I won't argue with it. But the overall effect of badges is that a player can get better than naxx gear without having to run naxx, meaning that they can much more quickly be ready to help in Ulduar.

One more thing: the socialist always whine about the income differences, that the society is split into a rich and a poor class with no middle. Currently the WoW-PvE classes:

* Ulduar-raiding "rich"
* Naxx25 and Ulduar-siege raiding "upper middle"
* Naxx25 2 wings raiding "middle"
* Naxx10 raiding "poor"
* 5-man playing "very poor"

After the welfare system implemented, there will be no reward in Naxx or Ulduar. So the classes will be:

* T9 raiding "very rich"
* 5-man playing "very poor"

This allows the Naxx classes to much more easily move into the Ulduar classes and the 5-man classes can move up as well. This will do the exact opposite of what Gevlon claims. After this there will be no "poor who is not responsible for being poor" because anyone with an hour can be on the road to the gear needed for Ulduar.


I don't mean to imply by all this that I think the badge change is great. I think it's overkill. However I dislike seeing assholes pretend to be friends of the disadvantaged. I also dislike seeing people use the term welfare in WoW. Any attempt to equate 'welfare' in WoW and welfare IRL is the result of trolling or a mental defect such as virtual elitism or just plain stupidity.