The weakness of Minecraft as an explorer game

Minecraft has one really big advantage over any other game for explorers: no one can spoil it for you. No one can pressure you to spoil it for yourself either. Everything is yours to find.

But what is there to find?

Obviously there are minerals and a few neat places. And the edge of the world where everything goes crazy.

Beside that, what is there to find?

I think the fun of exploration comes from three areas. First is uniqueness: what we find is different from what we have seen, and as an added bonus we may feel that we are one of only a few to have seen it. Second is beauty: the place we find, perhaps a view, is beautiful. Third is humanity: A pile of rocks and ancient ruins are different because of the human element, even if both are essentially just piles of rocks.

Minecraft locations lack a significant sense of uniqueness. While they are all different, most places of the same biosphere look essentially the same. Only rarely will anything really strange appear. Maybe that's actually a strength. Beyond this, the "no one else has seen this" element is missing, because while no one else has seen it, much of it isn't worth seeing, and that condition applies equally to everything from the first tree you see to the very furthest edge of the world.

Minecraft doesn't do beauty. This isn't a knock on the graphics; it just isn't a game that generates beautiful places.

There are no people in Minecraft. There are none before you and none after you. What you find is the result of chaos and is meaningless.

P.S. You might have noticed that this is the second post today and the first one has mysteriously vanished along with Kring's comment. The first post had some excessively large inaccuracies, so it may come back later after I fix it.

Bethesda knows how to play the game

I finally get it and it is fucking BRILLIANT.

Short version: Notch of Minecraft fame is making or doing something with a game called Scrolls and also Penny Arcade guy is involved, so I'm guessing this will be somewhere between the best game ever and even better than that. Bethesda is the maker of the Elder Scrolls series, or as I refer to it "Oblivion plus those other games that I didn't play." Bethesda is suing Notch or Mojang or maybe the pigmen in Minecraft, claiming that "scrolls" is copywritten because they have a copywrite on "elder scrolls" and obviously when we think "scrolls" we think "elder scrolls".

Except we don't. I mean sure, if you give me a while with a piece of paper and a word association exercise I'll get there eventually. But frankly, I'd get there a lot faster with "awesome game" than with "scrolls", because as Penny Arcade pointed out, scrolls aren't really the defining feature of the series, seeing as they are featured in Oblivion approximately once, in a side quest. Yea, the all-important scrolls aren't even part of the main plot line, but are instead relegated to an awesome, but negative karma side quest line involving stealing everything.

But games are what they make and games are what they play, and Bethesda is playing a damn smart game here.

After all this nonsense about scrolls, they have managed to shift my association. Yes, I now have a strong mental link between Elder Scrolls and scrolls. They have succeeded in manufacturing a reality.

They've also created links between "scrolls" and "frivolous lawsuits" and have reinforced my link between "corporate lawyers" and "people who should have been executed in Georgia rather than a quite possibly innocent man."

Scrolls is a god damn word. A word. Ooh, maybe I should get a copywrite on "word", and then sue anyone who ever tries to use word. Maybe I could sue Blizzard because "world" looks a bit like "word" and maybe when people are trying to buy my game Word they'll accidentally buy World of Warcraft. But with the way copywrite law works, I'd probably get sued instead, with some lawyer pretending that people bought Word when they meant to buy World of Warcraft. Meanwhile Microsoft would sit on the sidelines waiting to swoop in at the last minute and sue both of us.

People can buy free-range chickens and baby bottles with no carcinogens. I want to buy games without lawyers.

WoWing Around Again: Orcs

Grogthar sounded too much like an ogre, so I went with Grokthar.

Let's get right into it: kill boars. And so the ABOMINATIONS begin. They moved the boars. That's right, the once-convenient boar-killing area is now overrun with... a level one hare and humans with really awful stealth skill. It appears that all the boars are in someone's farm. Yea, my second quest, right after "talk to this guy", is "kill some peasant's means of survival."

The general goods vendor does a sexy dance on the cooking fire. A quest giver describes it as "embarrassing".

The level 2 rogues have fan of knives. And don't react when I kill their friends. The first part is blatantly ridiculous, but I do like that they captured the every-man-for-himself essence of the class, along with their utter refusal to initiate combat with a player at greater than 50% health.

Highforsure whined in general chat about getting dismounted. I tried to make fun of him, but was informed by the game that I do not have permission to speak. Ouch.

I hope I get to punch the lazy peons.

I GET TO PUNCH THE LAZY PEONS!

However, the sound is all screwed up. It's like a drum. It used to be a painful-sounding smack, like something important had gotten crushed and possibly some veins were setting free their long-imprisoned blood.

Did the scorpids always drop a tail? That seems wrong. What's the point of an MMO if animals always have the desired body part?

And then the zone ended.

Okay there was a bit between that, during which I attacked non-hostile demons and a big scorpion, all of which seemed to be exactly the same as before. It looks like Blizzard ran out of time, because it looks as if they did a slight rearranging of some mob locations and rewrote some quests slightly, but left most of it unchanged. Maybe the orc/troll zone was the one place that didn't suffer the 70% failure rate.

Early Durotar was about the same. Kill humans in the keep, pick up tools, kill warlocks in a cave, kill quillboar, get sent to the Barrens before you're anywhere close to done, get sent to the other cave up north while simultaneously being sent to the tower to the west. I don't mean to sound as if I am complaining. I had a good bit of fun in the area. The helping quests had that old style feel to them, by which I mean they were randomly scattered and did not at all stack up to a smooth flow from one to the next. And I accidentally killed my quest boss early because I thought it was a rare spawn. Clearly wasn't rare, since it respawned pretty quickly.

Grokthar is a protection warrior. It's not so much the protecting part that he cares about, he just likes hitting people with shields and it's an excuse to start fights. He's a blacksmith and was angry to find that he needed to fly all the way to Ogrimmar just for fine thread for some fancy copper pants. The new Orgrimmar is way too big to travel without a mount. They should add an in-city flight system. While I was in there, I wasted some time doing the fishing daily in the wrong pool. I probably should have tried to stop that kid with the balloons. His adventure cannot end well. This isn't a Pixar movie!

"Kill 12 Durotar Harpies. Any type of harpy will suffice." Way to rub it in, Blizzard. Oh yea, you know what you wrote. "Ha ha, fuckers, you spent 15 minutes in those damn canyons trying to get a respawn of the type that someone else killed first and you've gotten NONE but all you find are the type you don't need." Three times I leveled from finding chests, including one in the valley of the harpies.

Running past Brewfest, I did a few of the quests. The keg pony looked neat, so I thought I might try for that, but then I got lost trying to find the keg-thrower and remembered that I don't like the ram-racing anyway and why waste time collecting shinies on a throwaway account? This is something interesting that I've found: since this account is highly unlikely to become a full account, these characters have limits and are likely to be completely abandoned before long. Now my goal isn't racing to 85 or raiding, but to 15 and grouping. That's my primary interest now: seeing what the low-level grouping is like these days.

I did a trio of fighting quests for a guy with the title, the actual, Blizzard-given title of , helping him test his new gladiator slaves. For the record, one of them had rowed a canoe from Northrend to Azshara.

Prettier, but not better

My video card took up archaeology again, by which I mean it started displaying artifacts. I decided not to try baking it this time, because I didn't trust it anymore. So I bought a new one. My more-knowledgeable friend convinced me to buy a 1gb card that cost around $120. I had been leaning toward that $40 ones, but he used a very convincing argument, answering "yes" when I asked "if I bought this would you think I am stupid?" So now I have what may or may not be a totally badass video card. I'm leaning toward "sorta cool, but let's not get too excited about it" range. But it's still significantly better than the 256mb 8600 gts I was using before it got baked.

I did the only logical thing: I started up the games I've been playing lately, Civ V and Fallout 3, and jacked up the graphics to maximum. Everything is so damn pretty. It should be bursting into song, it looks so good. I cannot believe how good the water looks, how the light and shadows interact to produce works of art, shifting as I walk, shimmering in the smoke and flames. It is a sight to behold.

I can't honestly say it's all that much more fun. It looks nicer, but the gameplay is unchanged. The annoying bits are still annoying and the fun bits are as fun as they were before.

Only on occasion does the game change substantially, in low-light areas in which a loss of detail can mean a total loss of vision, unless of course I bump up the brightness. Atmospherically I can't say it's all that much better, except possibly in the case of Stalker, in which I'd turned off all grass and turned down the visual distance. Ironically, that may have been the better setting, since now the ground is covered in grass. It doesn't feel quite so much like a dead and twisted landscape, seeming more like a run-down neighborhood on a flat land, with slightly more guns than I'm used to. In other words, it went from post-apocalyptic Ukraine to Texas. Though the Ukrainian accent is easier to understand.

The lack of effect is even more noticeable in WoW, which was never known for it's high-end graphics, and which seems to just gain slightly prettier grass and surprisingly good water effects. But at the risk of repeating myself, this is a good thing for WoW. Hardware accessibility is underrated.

WoWing Around Again: Trolls

Let's see... troll time. Oh, gotta make that a shaman! And if I'm making a troll shaman, well, it must be named Klepsacovic.

Except some jackass TOOK MY NAME. Who the hell would do that?

*checks server*

Oh. Ner'zhul. Huh. Yep, that's where I last played, so that jackass? Me.

The place looks cool. I thought it was neat that some other initiate seemed to be coming with and then going to his own trainer. I wonder if we're going to be teamed up later.

If you're going to have non-hostile mobs, tiki target dummies are a pretty good one. Hungry cats, not quite as good. But... The damn Naga was described as WANTING TO KILL ME and what does he do? Wanders out of his cage and waits for a lightning bolt to the face to attack. Ugh. Why is it not hostile? It's a mob that stays in a cage until I specifically ask for it to come out. This is one mob that is absolutely completely 100% totally justified as a hostile mob and being described in a repetitive and redundant manner.

It seemed strange to start with mace and shield, and then my very first shaman quest reward is a staff. I feel like that would send mixed messages.

Why am I being sent to Vol'jin already? And why has everyone been talking about me? I have been here a few minutes and my total achievement is: I killed some cats who, as the quest trainer herself said, we most at risk of scratching my ankles.

After that I get two quests, with map markets on different coasts, one for crabs, the other to talk to someone. But the crabs are also right near the talking quest, so the marker is just sending people running all around. Maybe it is to ensure that I complete and turn in the quest before I run off to another island.

Capturing Swiftclaw was fun and a nice followup and route back after swimming over for the other raptors.

I got two whispers about guilds within a few minutes. None as a gnome. Racists.

I SAW ANOTHER PLAYER! She was a druid with heirlooms. She started the boss event before me. I shot a couple lightning bolts and got quest credit. It didn't make much sense. So I abandoned and started over again.

THRALL! THRALL DEFENDING GARROSH BEING A DOUCHE! *sigh* Of course this is no problem for a new player, since they won't remember Thrall being awesome and until they GO BACK IN TIME to Northrend won't know quite much of an ass Garrosh is. Or before that, aka FURTHER BACK IN TIME, in Outland, when he's a whiny crybaby.

So that's the end of the troll area. My opinion of WoW has gone all the way up to "I'd play it for free."

Coming up next, an orc mage. Seriously? An orc mage? WTF is that? Fuck it, warrior.

WoWing Around Again: Gnomes

This post is a bit of a play by play reaction. It is not short. You have been warned.

I started with gnomes. I'm not sure why. But we can't erase the mistakes of the past.

Majalah the gnome priest. I don't remember the server. It put me somewhere and I don't really care. Maybe it's a special server for people they hate for not paying them.

It's a new account because I couldn't figure out a way to use my old account. Maybe I can't. I don't care. I figure if I create a character and get really attached to it, I can remake it. If I find it too horrible to redo a mere 20 levels, that is not a good sign.

It's not off to a good start.

I'm supposedly in the middle of a very dangerous battle in Gnomeregionanon but it doesn't feel very dangerous. Anything hostile is busy fighting an NPC and the NPC doesn't seem to have much trouble. I don't think I should truly be in danger, since this is a starting area after all, but maybe at the very least, I should get attacked. Of course with all the crazed gnomes milling about (I was going to say running, but it's really more of a milling) it would be a bit too dangerous if they were all hostile. So why not make them hostile but have fewer of them? That way I get attacked without being likely to die. There we go, some illusion of danger without enough danger to quite scare anyone away, though if a tiny bit of danger is enough to scare them away, I doubt that person is going to be a contribution to the raiding game, or anything else.

Then I did a dangerous retreat to safer place, which looks equally unsafe, by which I mean not at all unsafe, just like where I started, so I don't see the need for me to have run over here, through the mulling hordes of neutral mobs.

I couldn't find the decontamination bot. I think it should have been an automatic process: run into decontamination room and the bot grabs the gnome, possibly while shouting at it for attempting to bypass decontamination protocols. After that I was told to talk to some guy for a teleport to the surface. I figured the important part was the "get to the surface", but the elevator did not complete the quest. Simple place for a minor choice and somehow Blizzard avoids it. Maybe a new new player would follow the rules and just talk to the teleporter gnome.

I seem to be a hero already. I'm not quite sure why. The S.A.F.E. Guide ran off before I could finish reading the quest.

I did like that the priest trainer told me that memory loss is a common problem after time in Gnomeland. It's just a line or two of quest text, but that's the sort of thing that can efficiently hand-wave away so many problems, such as why I have a backstory and don't know it.

The history of the Gnomerland invasion operation on the holotablepad was pretty funny. Or I'm a sucker for Star Wars references and excessively calm computers announcing doom.

I just noticed that the minimap has a marker for the current target. That's a nice touch. Maybe it's "dumbing it down", but I can't say I ever had a much fun trying to find something that I could target, but not quite see in the crowd.

Rare spawn! Gibblewilt had a bag. And a mean fireball... the guy took off almost half my health! The help feature told me that if I run out of health I'll die. The quests around the pools make a bit more sense, though I wish the living contamination was hostile. Bags auto-equip. I liked the fun of equipping bags. I don't know why, but I preferred that.

"You need to see a medic!"
"Make that a rocket scientist!"
Well done, Blizzard. This is what you do well: silliness.

The troggs are hostile. I got attacked by two at once. I wasn't likely to die, but it was still better than single-pulling neutral mobs. Someone whined in general about everyone else fucking up the daily for them.

Great Father Artcius killed me. AWESOME! Guy hits hard, easily half my health per swing. Second time around I was more careful with my health. He died. I got a bag. Woo! The respawn time on the NPCs seems a bit fast, since I think I'm the only person around.

The Paintinator has too short of a range. How does it make any sense to disable the sentry if I've already gotten close enough to aggro it and even get hit?

The battle with evil gnome wasn't all that impressive. It got worse when I saw that all the sentry bots were back. The celebration seemed lame. The music felt out of place.

Then it was off to Dun Morogh proper for the final disappointment. There are three gnomes pushing carts of rockets. Somehow, against all odds and all sense, they made it all the way to the gate without anyone exploding. Then they despawned. So much lost potential.

The first few quests were absolute garbage. Then they got better and turned into a good bit of fun, with a bit of gnomish silliness here and there, as is appropriate and expected. The big event of the area was a stunning disappointment.

So there's the gnome-specific content. It took a bit under two hours and got me about halfway to level 7. It doesn't actually take that long, but I kept tabbing out to write this and at some point, make lunch. I will use that as my measurement. I ate lunch late. So there we go, the gnome campaign was good enough to keep me playing through a bit of hunger. Not a ton, but a bit. I think that qualifies it for a thumbs-up.

Maybe this weekend I will get him up to level 20 and can tell a bit what the very early game priest experience is like. But that is for later.

What would get me to resub to WoW: Part 2

Before I say "I'll start off with", I want to start off by apologizing for the links. Blogger and Firefox are having some sort of problem together, so when I use the tool to add links it ends up deleting text and in the wrong spot. So I'm sorry about the potential need to select, copy, and paste into a new tab. Please accept my apologies and I hope to not have this problem again, as it is entirely unacceptable to demand such requirements.

I'll start off with a some assumptions, which are quite possibly wrong! The first is that I could play again, which covers both time and whatever mental state one needs to have to enjoy an MMO of the WoW-sort. Second is that my apartment will have working internet this Wednesday. On a side note, AT&T, if someone cancels because you can't activate for another month, and then you have room on the calender to activate sooner, wouldn't it be a good sales idea to call them rather than wait around on the off chance that they'll give you another chance because your competitor in the area is even worse?

This is a surprisingly difficult post to write. Maybe my assumption of the mental state is more wrong than I suspect. Too much seems to have, what's the opposite of rose-colored glasses?

Meaningful 5-mans
What the hell does that mean? I'll try out the word legitimacy. Are 5-mans legitimate content, somewhere players are supposed to be? Currently they are the equivalent of teenage summer jobs. Sure, go there for a little while, but only to save up for college or a car or because you parents won't stop nagging you otherwise. If you're not in high school, or at least college, if you are somehow a 40-year-old man with a family and you are still working at McDonalds or the local park district, something is wrong. That's what 5-mans are currently. You are expected to do them, but also to be done with them and if you have to go back, it is not a nice feeling.

In a past post I suggested that having sets from 5-mans confers legitimacy.

Blue sets, what? BC had blue-quality late-game sets. They were not fantastic at all. But some pieces were okay. My paladin used a couple pieces for a while. Other classes had similar experiences. These were not amazing sets, but sets give some sense of legitimacy, they say that this tier is one that is okay to be at. Sets indicate that the devs think you will be here a while and are okay with rewarding that. LK had no instance sets, nor did Cataclysm. It says something: don't stick around and do not, under any circumstances, feel like anything you got here is worth remembering or keeping.

http://trollshaman.blogspot.com/2011/06/leave-cataclysm-alone.html

Not everyone is expected to, or expects to, raid
This does not mean that raiding should be some closed, elite club. It does mean that people who like playing in huge groups play in huge groups and people who do not, don't. Some of it may take the form of arbitrary barriers, using them as filtering mechanisms.
http://trollshaman.blogspot.com/2011/09/its-arbitrary-sorting-mechanisms-stupid.html

I wish I could find the source, it was recently in the WoW blogosphere, something tot he effect of: "making an undesirable activity easier does not make it more fun." Nerfing raids that people don't want to do so people who don't want to raid can raid more successfully doesn't make much sense. This ties into another aspect, the expectation that everyone can and must raid. When raids are nerfed more and more, whether directly to the bosses or indirectly through gear (currently implemented with the justice points system, badges in LK), players are sent the message that they are expected to do them. And they lose more and more excuses not to. Somehow the "I don't enjoy it" reason gets side-lined, perhaps ignored, because raids are where the gear is, and the more people get driven into them, the more friends are in them, and the more pressure to follow.

Everything became about raiding. Now certainly vanilla and BC had a lot of raiding going on and a lot of raiding content. But there was not an expectation that everyone would raid or must raid. Both had players who wanted to raid but could not due to this or that problem unrelated to skill, and so changes were almost certainly to their benefit. But I suspect that a lot of players who did not particularly want to raid were driven into it by the structure of the game. Late-game (not end-game) content was thinner, in favor of fast gearing to get people into raids. This causes all sorts of problems, such as players who lack internal motivation to raid and who must instead be driven purely by loot or social pressure, neither of which are long-term formulas for fun.

http://trollshaman.blogspot.com/2011/06/leave-cataclysm-alone.html

Fewer Dailies
WoW has an exceptionally screwed up monetary system. Rather than a central authority that can decided whatever it wants for the money supply (there are some constitutional limits to printing money, but let's set those aside for now), meaning that it can inflate or deflate as desired (it's not a precise thing). WoW instead has a system in which every single person can print money. Imagine if everyone in the world had a printing press for $100 bills and if legally, none of them were counterfeit. Oh right, inflation! And then of course, we'd need to print even more bills to keep up. Rather than take away the printing presses, or at lest limit them to $100, the government instead releases a press for a $1000 bill. Woo, dailies!

I'll admit that vanilla had way too little gold. The ratio of vendor price + deposit to the market price needs to be fairly low (meaning an inflated market) for it to be worth the risk. Initially there was an inflation spree when they added the xp->gold conversion when doing quests at the level cap. This didn't get too far, since there are only so many quests in the world. BC brought in dailies. And then more dailies. Initially I think they were good, adding some needed liquidity, but eventually they become a self-reinforcing problem: players can't afford anything, so they do more dailies, which inflates prices more, and so on. LK and Cataclysm took the daily model to its logically destructive conclusion.

On top of that, dailies take the place of farming, driving up material prices, which is not inflation itself (if you're making a list of things that the Chicago school of economics doesn't get wrong, put this at one and we'll see if we find anything else), but it encourages it, as players do more dailies to compensate. I'll write about this specific economic behavior later. Beside the economic effects, dailies just aren't much fun. They are in a dead zone between exciting and perfectly mindless. Farming can be mindless and that has its place.
http://trollshaman.blogspot.com/2011/05/i-like-mindless-grinds.html

Bring back spirit plate
I don't mean for paladin healers. I mean for warriors. Once upon a time plate had spirit on it and thanks to the Regeneration troll racial, they could regenerate health, at 10% of the out-of-combat rate, while in combat. This was absolutely amazing. Just think of the healing output of that over a long fight. With the removal of spirit plate, troll tanks became harder to heal. Is it any wonder that Horde raiding guilds have been plummeting since the end of vanilla? Note: that last claim is a complete fabrication. I was just trying to get in a reference to my blog title.

But seriously, bring back spirit plate
Worthless stats are a great way to counter stat inflation. Sure, the next tier is 10% higher item level, as it needs to be to attract the loot whores, but 10% of those stats are completely useless.

Resistances were great at this as well. Fire resist would get you through a couple raids. Then it became useless. This meant that gear could progress without actually increasing in ilevel. In vanilla this took the form of nature resist for AQ and frost for Naxx. I'm not claiming that Blizzard actually took advantage of this, they didn't, as gear inflation was still happening at a significant pace in vanilla.
http://trollshaman.blogspot.com/2010/06/item-level-within-and-across-expansions.html
This needs updating for Cataclysm.

Long but transient content
Go read Rohan on transient vs. extended content
http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2011/09/major-fault-line-in-mmo-audience.html
I liked spending a few hours in an instance. I also like having some short instances of only a half hour or so. I believe these can coexist, that Blizzard does not need to make only long instances or only short instances. The rewards would need to be tuned carefully, to ensure that players can generally do the type of content they enjoy. That means that a particular faction should not come only from long or short instances, but from either, nor should either be specifically required for advancement, either by quest chains or raiding, except as one-time requirements. That means that an attunement could run through a long instance, but overall, a player who does not enjoy long instances shouldn't feel compelled to do one more than once, maybe twice.

Also, do the same for BGs. More specifically, bring back the old AV. If you don't know what that means, picture this: at the end of a BG there is a display of the length of the BG. My very first AV, which incidentally the Horde won (go Horde!), had lasted 25 hours. That was a short game. Yes, the more than one day, literally, was a short game. I loved that. Jump in, jump out, it was still there, with something going on. It allowed for players to play a little or a lot. In my case, a lot, with the better part of a weekend spent in that BG, often without it ending. Then someone complained about the inability to get the token for that BG and they gutted it.

Bring back the world
Did you know that there are entrances to the battle grounds? Probably not. In fact, since BC they stopped adding them. The three vanilla BGs have entrances and once upon a time you needed to physically go to them, much like with instances. Eventually Blizzard decided this was too inconvenient, and was almost certainly keeping players away who would have liked to PvP, so they added warmasters, NPCs who would allow you to queue for a BG from cities. Now we can queue from anywhere, for anything. One one hand, these promote a sense of world because they allow us to go out and see it at a lower cost. I can go farm and quest and explore without having to give up BGs and instances. On the other hand, they make some areas, such as the entrances, obsolete and add a sense of disconnection.

Farming is also important. Teleporting from one daily quest hub to another doesn't give a sense of scale or uniqueness to any place. But farming can do two things. First, it isn't structured. A player has to choose what to farm and know where it is, choose a path to get there, a path within he farming area. If I am crafting devilsaur gear, I will go somewhere different than if I'm crafting something with silithid scales, different from black dragonscales. Leatherworking is the most extreme example of this, but even herbalism and mining show some amount of specificity. Dark iron ore is only in one instance and two zones near it, so players will go somewhere different when they want that, or not.

Getting players out of the cities and into the world is most important for one class in particular: rogues. This class thrives on world. It isn't alone, of course. Any class can know the thrill of catching an enemy unaware, while they are distracted, and getting an easy kill. Or sometimes, being the one who appears distracted, but is in fact fully aware and ready to kill you. That may or may not have been me, back when warlocks had a plethora of CC effects and shamans were totally badass.

Community
This post is long enough already and I'm not quite sure of what Blizzard can do. I've had ideas, but I don't know if they'd actually do anything anymore. Once norms are established they are very hard to change and I suspect that the needed changes would just drive away a lot of people.

Retrying WoW
Earlier I said I planned to jump into the free pre-20 to see what that is like. That plan is still planned, but only yesterday did I finally get internet and for some reason, graduate school requires a lot of time, so I doubt I'll be starting anytime sooner than Friday evening. Thankfully, having no social life gives me plenty of free time.

Single-Payer Tax System

Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich. This isn't going to work. The problem isn't with "taxing the job creators", but with the fact that the rich are extremely good at not paying taxes. They will evade them.

This is why I propose a simpler system: a "single payer system" The name is slightly misleading, as there may be multiple players, but the goal is to keep down the total number of payers.

Here's how it works:

All federal taxes are abolished, everything from tariffs to social security taxes. In their place is the single-payer system. Under this system, near the end of the fiscal year Congress adds up how much it has spent, plus 10% to account for them being terrible at math, and then seeks to get revenues to cover it.

The revenue-gathering process is a two-step process. First step, all people in the world with incomes greater than $1 million, or USD equivalent annually or assets greater than $50 million, with corporations counted as people, are placed into an ordered list. Second step, IRS agents go down the list, taking whatever they feel like, until the spending has been paid off. In some cases, a "one point five" step may be needed: auctioning off assets which are too hard to liquidate on current markets, such as houses, cars, and the rights to ghost-write the autobiographies of taxpayers.

The FBI and CIA would be removed from the Department of Homeland Security and placed under the control of the IRS, because we're going to need a lot of intel and covert-ops capability.

The income and asset thresholds would be linked to inflation, so they will slowly rise over time.

Take note of the many benefits over the current system.
- Impossible to evade: Even if you try to hide assets the IRS will just take them anyway.
- Simplifies taxes: You never need to fill out a federal tax form ever again.
- Ensures a balanced budget: Revenues automatically rise to meet spending.
- Removes the market-distorting effects of variable taxation: capital gains, salaries, wages, and side benefits can all be confiscated equally.
- Finally validates Ron Paul's desk sign: "Don't steal, the IRS hates competition."
- Is unlikely to take my money, or yours, or that of anyone you know.
- High likelihood of taking more money from foreigner citizens than from Americans, which is like taking money from people who don't know, but even more patriotic.

Due to no longer being "internal" to the United States, the IRS would be renamed the Revenue Service.

The only possible downsides come from the Foreign Revenue Service division, which might violate international law, but with an automatically balancing budget, we will be able to afford whatever military expenditures are needed to fix this problem.

P.S. Confession: I'd meant to finish part 2 of what would get me to play WoW again, but I somehow got distracted by my education. So I hope you like tax policy. Maybe tomorrow I will have it ready. It would be easier if I just stuck to simple, worthless claims, such as "remove all the dumbing down", which is obviously completely nonsensical and imprecise.