What is the definition of "Free" in WOWS?

[Wolfswetpaws]

9 hours ago, Utt_Bugglier said:

Assigning a dollar value to your time is valid only if:

(1) The means to exchange your time for that dollar value is available to you. If your “day job” isn't offering you those hours (e.g.  a salaried position or overtime not available), then your additional time doesn’t have that value.  It only has the value of other things you could alternately pursue (Uber/Door Dash, flip burgers, private consulting, mowing lawns, etc.) In the case if hand-loading, opportunity cost with respect to the hobby might not come into play: you might have the time to shoot and WANT to shoot, in the winter, but lack of daylight, unfavorable weather & risk of finish to fine/collectible firearms, might prevent shooting, but you can use those down times to load up, when shooting is not possible.

(2) Past practice of actually doing one or more from among the possible compensated activities. If one COULD mow lawns, consult for a fee, uber drive, flip burgers, work paid overtime, etc., but never DOES so, then the dollar value argument of that person’s time is specious.

Time is an "ingredient" in a handloading recipe.
Hobbies are pursued with spare time and spare money.
Calculating the actual cost involves a decision to include or exclude one's time from the calculation process.
If included, then I suggest that one's time is worth the same as their highest paying "day job".

[Snargfargle]

2 minutes ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

 I suggest that one's time is worth the same as their highest paying "day job".

I've never considered my time worth much as I've jumped from job to job and never have made much money at any of them. This is because I guess I've got a personality flaw in that as soon as I get proficient at something I tend to get bored with it and then want to learn and do something else. It has made for an interesting life though. Conversely, my brother is a CEO who makes more in a year than I've made in any ten years. He is all about making money and will hardly change a light bulb anymore if he can pay someone else to do it. He didn't used to be this way, when we were kids he worked on farms and re-built car engines like I did. Once, back before I sold my stock in the family company, we were in a meeting when a toilet in the office building wouldn't shut off and started overflowing. It was a Sunday so my brother was having trouble on the phone getting the landlord to authorize an emergency plumber to come out. By the time he finally arranged things my cousin and I had taken the toilet valve apart, gone to a nearby plumbing supply warehouse, gotten a guy there to sell us a gasket set even though they weren't open, and fixed the problem. My brother still had the plumber replace the valve because he didn't trust our fix.   

[Daniel_Allan_Clark]

2 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

If you want to play for free, slow and steady wins the race. Events will give you Premium time and enough doubloons to purchase permanent economic booster packages to allow you to play comfortably at higher tiers.

Preach!

Though I've found that if you play slow and steady...you will gain enough skill that even without premium time or boosters...you can play comfortably at higher tiers (excluding tier 11) perfectly fine.

I have never spent money on this game (I have a hard rule about giving money to companies that engage in casino business models)...and your advice is exactly what I would share.

[Pugilistic]

1 and 2. 

I will be playing the game anyway, and the last time I altered my play for more than a few games to satisfy conditions to get something was for the original PR dockyard. 

[Utt_Bugglier]

3 hours ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

If included, then I suggest that one's time is worth the same as their highest paying "day job".

It’s worth one’s pay rate only if it is actually possible to spend that same time working the day job instead, and is getting paid for that additional time as well, as already explained.

 

[Snargfargle]

2 hours ago, Daniel_Allan_Clark said:

Preach!

Though I've found that if you play slow and steady...you will gain enough skill that even without premium time or boosters...you can play comfortably at higher tiers (excluding tier 11) perfectly fine.

I have never spent money on this game (I have a hard rule about giving money to companies that engage in casino business models)...and your advice is exactly what I would share.

Tier "11" or superships are a different ball of wax as they are designed to lose money, which is the tradeoff for them being over-powered. I have a couple of them that I've never played past the first time or two I took them out to see what what was what about them. I'd almost forgotten that I had the things.

Here is a match I just played in the United States. I removed all economic bonuses except for the Premium time I'm still using up from the 40 days I got during the holiday event. I did reasonably well, coming in at the top half of my team and my team won but as you can see, it costs a lot to play a supership.

[Snargfargle]

Speaking of "time not being worth much." I've lived on so little my entire life that I've thought about writing a book about being frugal. I'd call it "Where to take a shower for free."

I spent several months once working in a genetics lab at a certain southern university while living under a bridge that crossed a nearby river. I came in early each morning and took a cold showers in one of the emergency chemical showers of an abandoned science building. I ate old dinner rolls that I bought for 50 cents a dozen and the cheapest tuna and canned soup I could find, which cost me 25 cents a can back then. To supplement my crappy diet I took a multivitamin every day -- you could get them for free at the university health center.

I was getting paid $300 a month back then as a research assistant but a lot of that went to my truck payment and gas so there wasn't much left over for food, much less rent. At my home university, I slept on a cot in an outbuilding out at the college research station. It had a heater in it so my dermestid beetles, which I used to prepare skull specimens, wouldn't freeze. It smelled like dead animals but it was warm. The building even had a toilet in it. I took showers on my way to my office at the basketball coliseum when I could find a locker room that the coaches weren't using.

During the summers, I mostly lived in tents doing field research. Then, I actually enjoyed propping a 5-gallon jug of night-cool water into the fork of a tree and taking a cool shower because it was usually 100 degrees during the day. Once, my water jug fell out of the tree and knocked me into the mud puddle it had formed so I ended up dirtier than I was before my shower.

Every two or three weeks I'd head back to the university to get new field supplies. Then, I'd usually spend a week at home to prepare and catalog specimens and supplement my meager income by helping my Dad build whatever house he was working on that summer. Dad was a history and government teacher, four-sport coach, bus driver, and school counselor but his undergrad degree was in industrial arts and he made more money in the summers building houses than he did teaching. While I was home I also volunteered for the county EMS service, which was pretty active during the summers due to brush fires, farm accidents, and softball-related injuries.

I did play video games back then, however. When I was back at the university teaching my winter and spring classes and running the research museum, I'd usually be cataloging specimens or working on the code of the database application I was developing far into the night. Then, I'd oftentimes fire up the museum's IBM XT and play a few games of Dig Dug before heading back out to my cot at the college farm. Or, if it was too late I'd just unroll a sleeping bag and spend the rest of the night sleeping on an air mattress on the floor in my office. Nobody ever bothered me about being on campus in the middle of the night because that's what grad students normally do.

Edited January 25 by Snargfargle

[Admiral_Karasu]

3 hours ago, Utt_Bugglier said:

It’s worth one’s pay rate only if it is actually possible to spend that same time working the day job instead, and is getting paid for that additional time as well, as already explained.

 

Ah... we are back to the original PR dockyard then. It seems to have been something of a pivotal point for this game.

[kriegerfaust]

 The question is would i be spending my time more profitably doing something else if the answer is yes then you should be doing that, and it is not free if no than the game is free.  I am not the first but everything has a cost time is money and in this game money is time which one has more value to you. 

The old chestnut if you do what you enjoy you will never work a day in your life if you are not enjoying the game nothing else matters.  Simply put there are some people who would want everything open and available at the start some everything to be grindable and yet some who would love to purchase everything in the game.   

So yes it is a free to play live service game is everything free of course not but it could be worse i think someone brought up premium ammo imagine premium shells, torpedoes, bomb or even planes....shudders

[desmo_2]

You are here to play this game.

If the game sets a few in-game goalposts and awards you something if you reach them, that is free.

If you choose to spend time playing that you may not otherwise in order to obtain that free thing, that is your choice.  I suppose you could call it "play bait" rather than a purely free thing, but it is still free.

"Free" has a loose definition.

Free sofa set out by the curb?  Zero associated cost.

Free puppy?  It will cost you to feed and care for.

Buy one get one free?  Self explanatory.

[Volron]

16 hours ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

I'm not asking for THEIR definition; I'm asking for YOURS.

Oh that one is easy, nothing is "free".

[Snargfargle]

51 minutes ago, desmo_2 said:

Free puppy?  It will cost you to feed and care for.

My Dad called his last cat "The Two-thousand-dollar Cat." It just showed up on day as a kitten, like all the other cats the family ever had did. However, after ten years of $200 yearly vet licensing exams that free cat eventually cost two grand.

Edited January 25 by Snargfargle

[Andrewbassg]

11 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

My Dad called his last cat "The Two-thousand-dollar Cat."

The "price" is always in the eyes of the "buyer"....

3 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

Speaking of "time not being worth much..........

Reading both stories is quite humbling. Thank you for sharing them.

[Wolfswetpaws]

7 hours ago, Utt_Bugglier said:

11 hours ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

If included, then I suggest that one's time is worth the same as their highest paying "day job".

It’s worth one’s pay rate only if it is actually possible to spend that same time working the day job instead, and is getting paid for that additional time as well, as already explained.

We disagree.
Your time is being utilized and you are worth at least as much as you get paid at your "day job".
You don't lose your value as a human being by being under-employed or unemployed.  🙂 
Whether or not to include that value in the total cost of pursuing of a hobby is merely an accounting decision.  🙂 

[Snargfargle]

1 hour ago, kriegerfaust said:

The old chestnut if you do what you enjoy you will never work a day in your life

I used to take my fisheries students out in this area nearly every week when the snow wasn't so deep that we couldn't get in. The pay wasn't that great as an adjunct professor but, then again, I was working out here. There's way too many people in the area for my liking and and housing is way too expensive for me to have retired there though.

 

 

[Snargfargle]

When I first started working with computers, most games came published as code text in magazines. I had to spend hours keying in the code and then debugging it before I could play the game. I also had to hope that a power surge or computer crash (a common occurrence back then) didn't wipe out my efforts before I got the software saved onto a cassette tape. Those early computer games were simple compared to today's but they really followed the adage "nothing easy is worth doing." Half of the enjoyment was in finally getting the game to even play.

[ArIskandir]

1 hour ago, Snargfargle said:

When I first started working with computers, most games came published as code text in magazines. I had to spend hours keying in the code and then debugging it before I could play the game. I also had to hope that a power surge or computer crash (a common occurrence back then) didn't wipe out my efforts before I got the software saved onto a cassette tape. Those early computer games were simple compared to today's but they really followed the adage "nothing easy is worth doing." Half of the enjoyment was in finally getting the game to even play.

Fond memories. My beginning in gaming was also coding games from magazines in my C64 at 8yo. 

[Ensign Cthulhu]

2 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

When I first started working with computers, most games came published as code text in magazines. I had to spend hours keying in the code and then debugging it before I could play the game. I also had to hope that a power surge or computer crash (a common occurrence back then) didn't wipe out my efforts before I got the software saved onto a cassette tape. Those early computer games were simple compared to today's but they really followed the adage "nothing easy is worth doing." Half of the enjoyment was in finally getting the game to even play.

 

19 minutes ago, ArIskandir said:

Fond memories. My beginning in gaming was also coding games from magazines in my C64 at 8yo. 

Aah, the C64. The king of the home micros, so popular and beloved that it refuses to die (although the modern reboot is a functional keyboard in an authentic-looking shell built around USB ports and an emulator, and it won't take the original peripherals). 

Some early variants of the IBM PC used to ship with less memory than the C64, worse graphics and no sound worth speaking of, although there's no denying that even an 8088-based PC had far more growth potential in the long run. That being said, for the market the Commodore served, there are advantages to having your operating system reside in ROM.

Edited January 25 by Ensign Cthulhu

[Ensign Cthulhu]

14 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

My advise would be to not try to advance too quickly. I didn't do this and found that I needed to sell the previous tier's ship to buy the next tier's one.

The other thing that drove sell-and-replace was the relative rarity of port slots, which had to be bought with dubs or you crossed your fingers for one to turn up in a container and praised Jesus for days when you got one. 

I used to keep track of when a ship's net earnings plus the complete sale price would cover the cost of purchase, researched modules, upgrade slots etc. Sometimes, I would count credits earned in premiums to defray some of that - I still have many of the spreadsheets! Then, only after it had been ground out AND amortized, I would sell the ship; either credit-neutral or with a tiny profit. What finally killed that was snowflakes, which offered an absolute disincentive to ever sell a ship at T5 or higher, coupled with WG changing gear and literally throwing port slots at us for free in daily chain missions.