"Legacy of the Ancients" quest

I like to try to do quests without having to google them first. To that end, I need there to be an in game lead in, or an NPC that has a clue about what you need and can give you a hint, regardless of how vague... that leads you in the right direction.

So. I wanted to upgrade my Lumber Mill in World of Warcraft to level 3. Easy, right? You just get the blueprint, have the required resources, and viola, your crew of master craftsmen (Who apparently don't own a level or a plumb line between them.) build it in just one hour.

Hmm. Can't buy it. I need to get an achievement first. Ok. Fine. Let's see... 75 lumber work orders. Got that! Two quests. "Legacy of the Ancients" and "Reduction in force." Ok, I have already done the second one, just by finding the fallen tree and freeing the CEO of Barov Industries. He then goes to work at the Lumber Mill and gives you the quest.

But the other one. What? Ok, the guys at the Lumber Mill might know something. After all, I'm trying to upgrade that building. It makes sense that they would have a clue how to do that. I go click on all of them... they apparently know nothing at all.

So I google it.

Apparently, there is a rare mob called a "Petrified Ancient" that you're supposed to harvest for lumber. It spawns in many locations, the vast majority are off in the weeds somewhere you would not normally go. And of course, you won't see it unless you have a Lumber Mill... so you might have seen one while questing and have never known.

So apparently, Blizzard's quest team expects you to just randomly come across a rare mob while just wandering around in the far reaches of the world. Of course you would pretty much have to be looking for lumber to cut down, too.

What the hell! What quest guy at Blizzard thought this was a good idea? Ok. So how do you find this tree? First, get the tom tom addon. Then make 4 macros, one for each of the zones you may have to search.

The first macro, all the points in Nagrand.

/way Nagrand 41 59.4 Petrified Ancient

/way Nagrand 40.6 30 Petrified Ancient

/way Nagrand 42.2 26 Petrified Ancient

/way Nagrand 65 19.2 Petrified Ancient

/way Nagrand 85.8 30.2 Petrified Ancient

/way Nagrand 73 62 Petrified Ancient

The second, all the points in talador:

/way Talador 51.2, 31 Petrified Ancient

/way Talador 52, 48.8 Petrified Ancient

/way Talador 36.6, 69.6 Petrified Ancient

/way Talador 46.8, 85 Petrified Ancient

/way Talador 57, 79.6 Petrified Ancient

The third, all the points in Spires ar Arak:

/way Spires 37.4, 30.6 Petrified Ancient

/way Spires 35.8, 47.8 Petrified Ancient

/way Spires 65.6, 46.4 Petrified Ancient

/way Spires 64.2, 59.2 Petrified Ancient

/way Spires 56.2, 76 Petrified Ancient

And lastly, the fourth, all the points in Gorgrond.

/way Gorgrond 70.6, 25.6 Petrified Ancient

/way Gorgrond 61.8, 32.2 Petrified Ancient

/way Gorgrond 57.6, 43.2 Petrified Ancient

/way Gorgrond 50.4, 42.2 Petrified Ancient

/way Gorgrond 41.6, 37.6 Petrified Ancient

/way Gorgrond 49, 50 Petrified Ancient

/way Gorgrond 73.4, 39.4 Petrified Ancient

/way Gorgrond 53, 65.4 Petrified Ancient

/way Gorgrond 41.4, 76.6 Petrified Ancient

/way Gorgrond 43.6, 92.6 Petrified Ancient

After you search a zone, the command to cleat tom tom's waypoints is:

/way reset all

I suggest just focusing on Talador, it seems to be the most running around on the ground friendly.

What's the moral of the story? Some developer probably thought he was making the quest “hard” by forcing you to explore the world to find a quest you only know exists through ancillary means (It's listed in the Achievement you need.) because, in his mind, that's what you are supposed to do. Well he is wrong. All he really did was frustrate people to the point that they posted lists of all possible spawn points on the internet for others to use.

Developers! DO NOT make shit with unnecessary difficulty for people that can just search the internet for the information to thwart you. It annoys them because they have to “break the fourth wall” to do your quest, and It makes you look lazy, incompetent, or sadistic.

Here's how it should have been done. Seed a couple of Petrified Ancients in Nagrand and remove the dead lumberjacks, they have no part in the lore. you're basically told to go there by the Foreman of the Lumber Mill, because that's “The Frontier of Lumber.” Put one near the fort, one near the Circle of Blood. Have an unrelated Rangari quest to find a strange flower that happens to grow by the one near the fort. Now you've found the Petrified Ancient without being able to interact with it just through normal questing.

Then when it's time to update the Lumber Mill. and you've done the 75 work orders, the Foreman mentions something about a “Weird petrified tree” in Nagrand. Oh! You've seen that weird looking tree! You make the connection and know what to do. Why do they need this tree? Because they're going to build the pinnacle of Lumber Mills, and need to test it out. If you STILL can't figure it out, Ok. You might have to google, but at least there were in game clues you could have caught up on.

WoW token, part 3

Back to the WoW token. The tokens are now available in the US, EU, and China regions, I will refer only to the US market because that is where I am. The tokens appear to work the same way in all three markets.

Again, as in the other 2 posts, I will refer to the the tokens separately. There is the RMT token you buy for dollars in the Item Shop, and the Game Time token you buy for gold in the Auction House.

What's new this time is the rate of swing between the price extremes in the auction house. Our friends at www.wowtoken.info shows this:

Notice how the wave is smoother, almost perfectly sinusoidal. That's not the web site smoothing it, that's the raw data, Blizzard is calculating a sine wave around the desired average and setting the price to that. Again, the “market price” is not driven directly by supply and demand, but is a calculated value set by goals Blizzard wants to achieve.

What are these goals? Possible goals include reduce illicit RMT, make cash by selling gold, create a gold sink by selling game time for gold.

The cynical among us have expressed the opinion that their goal is to grab the cash. I don't think that's what they're going for right now? But I'm fairly sure the system will eventually slide in that direction just because it can. This is the “Moral hazard” of an unregulated money printing machine.

So I ran a little experiment to probe the workings of the system. First, I waited for the price of the Game Time token to be at it's lowest and tried to buy one. Nope, all sold out. And when you try and they're not there, you're locked out from trying again for one minute. So I waited a minute and tried again. Nope. A few more times, nope. Nope. Nope. They are really out of stock. That makes sense, the price is really low and they all got bought. The price was set by Blizzard to ensure that all the RMT tokens that got converted to Game Time tokens were bought so as to not have too long a delay for the people buying the RMT tokens.

Ok. On the next part of the experiment. I then waited until the price was at it's peak and bought an RMT token in the Item Shop and listed it on the AH. It did not immediately sell, as you would expect. The price swing is so great that anyone who wants to buy a Game Time token has noticed this and knows to NOT buy when it's at the high point... come back in 12 hours and start looking for the low point.

I bought my RMT token at 11:26 pm on Sunday, May the 3rd when the price of the Game Time token was 25,742 gold. I immediately listed it for sale with the knowledge that my sale price was guaranteed. 13 and a half hours later, at 1:07 pm, it sold for 19,648 gold, just over the low point of 19,482 which occurred at 2 pm. That was a bitch because I had to sit there and watch it for hours waiting for it to sell. There was no other way to know exactly when it sold. Sometimes you have to take a beating for science! I then immediately bought a Game Time token off the AH (There were some now because the odds of mine being the last were statistically impossible, and since mine just sold, they were still in the process of being emptied from the AH.) and converted it to game time.

I got 25,742 gold for my RMT token, but the guy who bought it only paid 19,648 gold. The difference, over 6000 gold, is gold Blizzard pumped directly into the economy for cash. This goes on for every RMT token bought at the high point and sold as a Game Time token at the low point. Which I am certain is the vast majority of the tokens.

What did I learn? First, that they're not gaming the availability of the Game Time tokens. They are also not gaming the sale of the RMT tokens, either, even though they easily could seeing as how the sell price is guaranteed. They made me wait the full 13 and a half hours to get my gold. The illicit gold sellers don't make you do that, at least as far as their advertisements claim. So, of the 3 goals I suggested earlier, the ones best served are “reduce illicit RMT” and “make cash by selling gold”. “Create a gold sink by selling game time for gold” doesn't even start because the system is a gold faucet. Not a gold sink.

In my opinion, the GOOD goals are “reduce illicit RMT” and “create a gold sink by selling game time for gold.” There should NEVER be a case where you make dollars directly by injecting gold into the economy.

So Blizzard has already blown the moral hazard here. But why? Let's analyze. The tokens are different, apples and pineapples different, that's why a straight up supply and demand market won't work. A stable price won't work either, the prices need to be separate, with the amount of gold the RMT token sells for balanced against the fight against illicit gold sellers, and the price of the Game Time tokens set to remove the same amount of gold (or more) from the economy. Right now, you would have to sell more Game Time tokens than you sold RMT tokens to eliminate the gold faucet they have right now.

The morally superior position would be to guarantee that there was no profit motive by selling enough Game Time tokens to create a gold sink in addition to removing the gold created by the RMT tokens. That position would be the one that is “best for the game” and the one they should be taking.

Their system cannot do that because the tokens are linked by price, the mechanic of applying a sine wave to the price creates a QE scheme that essentially unpins the prices, but without allowing the quantities to change to compensate, creating a gold faucet. By accident or design (I'm assuming by accident.) they've created a cash grab that is injecting gold into the economy, gold the economy doesn't need and will probably respond to with inflation. How much inflation is unknown.

What I would do if I were Blizzard:

First, set the amount of gold you get for an RMT token to a stable value, set to fight illicit RMT. Give the gold to the player immediately.

Then set the price of the Game Time token to remove all that gold plus 10%. Sell as many as it takes to do that. Heavily advertise the fact that they're sacrificing subscription fees to effectively combat illicit RMT and the “good of the game” by creating a needed gold sink.

Grinding for mats

Back in the day, I used to run around collecting mats for hours at a time to then convert those mats into items through crafting. Sometimes it would be to then convert those crafted items into even more crafting mats. Here's an example:

In Howling Fjord, I studied the pattern of Cobalt Ore veins and figured out that they were in groups of 3, only one of which could be spawned at a time. So I mapped the location of all ore veins in a path that took spawn time + 1 minute to fly. I could go past 12 sets of 3 possible spawn points for ore veins in that time. Once I made a few passes of the loop, the ore spawn time would be synchronized with my flight path such that ore would spawn and I would always be there to mine it within a minute.

What can I say, I like analyzing systems and solving puzzles.

Today I can't do that. At 9:00 after I put up a blog post, I log onto WoW and run my 2 current characters through their Garrison routine. I make crafter items if I have enough mats, and I go to the AH and relist everything with a price 5% lower than the day before. I'm done in half an hour, 45 minutes tops.

And... that's... it. There is no point in trying to collect more mats. There is nothing to search for or find to further crafting. And I find that lacking. Sure, I have more time on my hands, which I should probably spend getting a PhD online, but instead I'm spending it writing blog posts no one reads. One could argue that at least doing this helps to organize my thoughts on the subject more coherently, and that it's a more productive use of my time that mining Cobalt Ore to craft into breastplates to DE into dust.

So, I have to study the system, because that is what I do. Why has WoW derailed the gathering / crafting connection? Well. It's because of assholes like me. People that would analyze the system and optimize their interaction with it to extract more resources from it. Normal people would be going around Howling Fjord finding no ore. Then they see one pop and immediately this asshole descends from the sky on the fastest flying mount possible and mines it, then flies off. Must be a bot or hacker! How could he know that ore was about to spawn?

And I'm just a minor asshole. I'm not cheating in any way to mine that ore. I just reverse engineered the algorithm that spawns the ore and positioned myself to get all of it. If I really wanted to be an asshole, I would spend 8, 10 hours a day doing it as my job, like gold farmers do. Or, I could go right to maximum asshole and write bots to harvest resources. No no, I strictly follow the rules.

So Blizzard has set up a system where everything is on cooldown. Then, in a jaw dropping display of “wuuut?” (Spoken in the voice of an Alliance Peon) allowed people to completely abuse that system by having up to 11 garrisons per account.

I want to see Blizzard step back a notch and increase the number of recipes, some off raids or drop off mobs in the world, and bring back SOME mats grinding to sink time in conjunction with the Garrisons, which would have a limit of one instance of a each crafting building per account.

And for god's sake, untie the wings on my flying mount when I get to level 100 and complete a quest!

The "rate of drift" rule

“The velocity that prices needs to drift to meet each other is directly proportional to the speed at which sales are made."

I'm going to call it the “Rate of drift” rule.

Meaning the more often an item sells, the faster it's sell order price needs to drift down and it's buy order prices need to drift up.

Ok. Lets define some terms.

"drift" is the percent move per period. "Period" is how often you update the price, or the rate at which an automatic system does it for you.

"speed at which sales are made" is the volume of sales. If 10 items are sold in a day, on average, then sales are made every 2 hours, 24 minutes when looked at statistically.

The law, then, is that your sell price should drift downward at a rate that allows the statistical possibility of a buyer to present itself during a window where your item's price is the most favorable. Or, the buyer's proxy, the buy order, which is drifting up to meet you.

The “brute force” solution is to park your ass on the AH and relist your item 1 copper lower than any other seller that deigns to post a price under yours. Thus assuring that YOURS is “next to sell.”

But the reality is that the buyer is only available when they look at the market with the intent to buy. In this case, with 10 items sold a day, it's every 2 hours, 24 minutes on average. Obviously, that's something of a simplification. People buy less in the middle of the night, for example. But in general, the law is sound. After all, it's “In the middle of the night” somewhere and for someone all the time.

Markets, if left to do so, will seek equilibrium between the law of supply and the law of demand. The “Brute force” solution of 1 copper undercutting is only efficient in the eyes of the market if the price being undercut is too high to begin with. And by “efficient” I mean “Not wrecking the market.”

The way to prevent this, and move towards market equilibrium, is to know when sales are made and how much they were made for. With that information, you can intelligently calculate the optimal rate of drift. Without knowing how many sales were made, and how much they sold for, you are flying blind.

You might say “But Eve Online has that information! Why do people still sit there and undercut?” Because the prices have to drift towards themselves to meet and there is no mechanic to do that without manually resetting the price. When you rely on the players to do it, you get an asymmetric pattern with prices drifting down (undercutting) but rarely up. People putting in the buy orders are also the sellers, speculating on the item. An auto incrementing buy order lets them step back and let the market work just like the auto decrementing sell order. The pattern must be symmetric to have balance.

WoW crafting

Now that the WoW token is out and seems to be stabilized in price here in the US, well, as stable as something that osculates at 25% of it's own value about every 24 hours, at least. I'm getting back into crafting to "earn" my account's subscription. To that end I'm building up my Warlock's Garrison. I originally didn't want to do that, but I'm getting sucked in by the lure of gold. I can see Dr. Skinner laughing at me from outside the box.

This isn't a "How to pay for your account with crafting" post. You'll have to figure that out yourself. No, this is a "What I think of crafting in WoD and how can it be improved." post.

Gathering in WoD is done. All crafting materials are obtained by cooldown in your Garrison. I can see why they would do this, it essentially eliminates botting and resource grinding. Sure, you COULD still grind ore, leather, etc. But it's pointless in that few items that you would craft to sell are made from those, instead, they are made from "work orders" and other cooldowns in your crafting buildings.

You may still be able to grind "old school" mats, and there may still be a market for that, but I'm more interested in WoD.

The first thing that you notice is that once you run your Garrison maintenance, and manage whatever auctions you have in the AH, you're basically done for the day. With 2 Garrisons running to support 4 crafting buildings, 30 to 40 minutes is all I need to get everything done. Now, I'm still going to have to trap animals for the barns at some point, but my guild runs "trap groups" once a week or so. Trapping in a guild group is the way to go. It's a fun guild activity and you get all the trapped animals you could ever need.

In my opinion, Blizzard has made a huge mistake with the Garrisons by allowing you to have more than one of each type of crafting buildings per account. I can't have a problem with allowing you to use crafting buildings without the associated crafting skill, as I think that being limited to 2 is somewhat arbitrary. But the crafting buildings should be account unique. You are already prevented from putting two of the same kind in one garrison, extending that to include the entire account doesn't seen unreasonable. If you want to set up “Craft sweatshops” with multiple craft buildings all blasting cooldowns at once, you'll need an account per set of unique buildings.

If you replace “Grinding mats” with “Daily cooldown for mats” then you need to limit the number of cooldowns you can do to one set per account. It comes down to “How many of an item can you make in a day with the cooldowns.” Let's use Blacksmithing and the “Truesteel” line of armors for my example.

If you're thinking “Bah! 640 iLevel! That's junk you can get from LFR!” then you're not looking at the big picture. The 3 iLevel 640 items you can wear are for alts leveling from level 91, and there are iLevel minimums to get into Heroic Dungeons, LFR, etc. That's what these are for. Then, after you get most of a set of raid gear, you can use the crafted ones, boosted with the crafted booster items and rerolled with the stat changing item, to fill in those few slots the RNG didn't seem to want you to have.

So as long as the AH isn't flooded with them from craft farms, they can sell for decent gold. You can do 6 work orders a day, getting 2 Truesteel ingots per when a Follower is working. That's 12. Then you get 10 from doing the daily cooldown at max level. That's 22. On top of that, you can convert Primal Spirit (Along with some of the Mine generated mats.) into a few more per day. Blacksmithing is probably the easiest for that last part in that each Truesteel Ingot made requires only 5 of each of the ores the mine produces. You can typically get 10 more per day from a level 3 mine. That's 32 Truesteel Ingots per day. Per Blacksmithing Garrison.

That would be fine if you could have only one Forge building per account. In reality? I think I'm even being TOO generous with the cooldowns here. Look at my two Garrison setup, 2 barns, both Garrisons have mines and herb gardens. That supports 4 crafting skills with all their related daily cooldowns. And that's just 2 Garrisons. A lot of people have 4 or more.

There is a movement on the WoW forums calling for one account wide Garrison. I think that would be a mistake as well. I think the way to go is to make the cooldowns themselves account wide. If the design intent is for you to have 2 crafting professions at full speed, then limit the account to 2 crafting professions worth of cooldowns.

You could even take it one step further, having only one level 3 Garrison per account. If you did that, however, you would need to allow your “alts” to visit your “main's” Garrison for the special vendors.

The ability to craft things has to cost you something. Either time spent grinding (Which causes RMT and botting problems.) or money in the form of extra playing fees.

I like taxis and teleporters

In pretty much every RPG type game, there is a way to get from point A to point B fast. Usually, you have to "explore that area first" before the warp pad / travel rune / portal spell is available to you.

Then I played Eve Online. No teleporters. You could "autopilot" your ship from one system to the next, but that was stupid in that it made you a sitting duck. At first, I thought "Ok, this is different, I can learn to like this."

But there were two overarching problems. First, if you needed something from the trade hub (Jita was closest to me, at 12 jumps away.) you had to travel for up to 30 minutes to get there. What happens is most people "live" near the hub. With the hub itself being a ridiculous mass of chaos. Going to Jita the first time wasn't so bad... but after a while it was a time sucking pain even in my fastest ship, and if I had to take the Orca, youch.

Taxis and teleporters just allow you to get to where you're going fast and without stress. Idiots can't set up traps for you to fall into along the way, and you get back to what you were doing in a hurry. Can you imagine having to take a land route in WoW to Stormshield from your Garrison? What if you had to do that every day? You'd go nuts!

Making a better market

I want to analyze "markets" in MMORPGS in an effort to design a better one. I'll point out specific traits of some games, but I'm not going to go through the list, review style. I'm more interested in the player's needs and motivations.

First up, you need a center of commerce. Whether that is an "Auction House" or a open air market in the center of town or whatever, you need a place players can go and quickly find everything they need, and sell the stuff they have. You should have all items of a single type in a single place, be that a single vendor or a single interface to a larger market system. You should not have to go to 5 different places to see all the offers for a single item you want. Selling your items should be easy and you should be able to get a fair price for them. Again, you should not have to go to 5 places to see all the offers to buy your item.

Ok. Now let's look at the players. Most players just want to buy and sell their items quickly, easily, and for a fair price. Some people just want to get rich. Ok, that's fine. If you can accommodate these players while not harming the first group, that's all good. But if there is conflict, the first group is deferred to. Lastly, there is a group that simply desires control over a specific market. These people are toxic to both of the other groups in some way, and should be discouraged.

Before I continue, it's important to clearly specify why the “control the market” group is being treated so roughly. There are two ways to “control a market”, monopoly or flooding it with cheap goods. Monopolists are easy to stop, but there is nothing you can do if someone is dedicated to flooding a market, and they have the ability to do it. A flooded market is great for people trying to buy the goods, but is terrible for people trying to sell their goods. You can slow them down, but not outright stop them.

Here are two examples of that. Someone wants to control the raid flask market in World of Warcraft. So they mercilessly farm herbs (Or use a bot to gather them.) then undercut everyone else, possibly even to the point of selling the flasks for less than the herbs would have sold for by themselves. A counter to this would be to put in a way to “salvage” the crafted item so it can be converted losslessly to it's component parts. Of course, if the component parts are being botted into the same state, the botting would have to be addressed as well. The second example, also in World of Warcraft, involves crafted armor. You craft them with components made with daily cooldowns in your Garrison, but you can have 11 Garrisons on a server, each with their own crafting buildings. The counter to this is to limit a player to one Garrison, or to one crafting building of the same type across all Garrisons and one cooldown of the crafting mat per account. Of course, if the player starts multiple accounts to have more crafting buildings and cooldowns, there is nothing you can do about it. Some people are just that driven by the need to control.

Back to the market. The next thing you need is a known normal price for every item. Eve Online does this by region, with an average transaction price for every item across that entire region. When you attempt to buy or sell an item you see the current average price. Very nice! World of Warcraft is the exact opposite, you see the “vendor price” that was assigned to it when the item was added to the game, which is almost certainly absurdly low. You are then faced with a complete lack of knowledge about the item. The exception is if you're a dealer of that item, or if there are enough of them in the market.

Next, there is the problem of unlimited craftability. If your system allows you to make as many of an item as you want, and doesn't allow that item to be salvaged back to it's component parts, then the result is markets flooded with those items. The way to make this even worse is to require the player to make a lot of items to increase their crafting skill. I like crafted items. I think most if not virtually all items in game should be made by the players themselves. I think it's absurd that some npc with the apparent intelligence of a rock living in a cave somewhere can miraculously have access to equipment superior to anything your civilization can produce.

Last, the interface. I want to have a search window that lets you select two categories, like “Armor” and “Leather”, then a text search that refines further. (Use the text search at any time if your search phrase is specific enough.) Then each item is in the form:

Item name Average sale Qty Best buy price Buy button Display details

Item name is also a mouse over that shows a tool tip detailing the useful features of the item (stats, armor values, materials it's composed of, etc.) Average sale is the average of recent sales of that item. Qty is the number of them currently for sale. Best buy price is the the price of the lowest price item in the sell list, Buy button pulls up the “Buy” dialog, where you can buy the cheapest or set up a buy order, and the Display details buttons pulls up the list of recent sales that the average is based on, the lists of buy and sell orders.

So far, this is like Eve Online, but with a slightly different interface. And shorter orders.

To sell an item, drag and drop it into a box at the bottom. That pulls up the sell order interface, where you select Start price and price rate drop. All sales have a 48 hour duration, and can be extended for 24 more hours after the first 18 hours. You can extend them forever. The cost to put in the sell order is 1/4% of the item average price and to extend the sale, 1/4%. You pay a fee of 5% when the item sells. If you cancel or allow the listing to expire, you get the item back. The defaults are Start price is average price + 10% and the start price rate drop is 5% every 24 hours.

When you extend the sale, which you must do once a day if you want the item to stay listed, you can either “let it ride”, reset to default (!0% over, 5% drop per 24 hours.) or enter new values. You need to actively monitor your market orders by checking in on them once a day. (Note: If you want to just change the settings without extending the sale, you can do that any time, but it still costs you 1/4%.)

Buy orders work similarly. Except the default is 10% under average value and drift is 5% per 24 hours up. Otherwise, the same rules apply. When you put in a buy order, the maximum possible sell price is taken and goes into escrow. There are no fees for buy orders.

If a buy order and a sell order drift into each other, a sale is automatically made and both orders are removed from the market.

If you're coming in blind and just have an item to buy or sell (The majority of people.) the best strategy is just accept the defaults and wait up to 48 hours for a sale. Of course, most buyers want their item now, and will likely accept the best current price if it's not too far from the average. If you're selling items for a living, and you know the market, you can put in carefully thought out initial values and then extend the order once a day for the duration you expect it to go.

If you start a buy or sell order with the defaults and it doesn't transact, then the market is either stale (Very few buyers.) or it has drifted off average too far. Resetting to defaults with adjust to the new average and extend the order.

If the defaults are tuned right, and the fees tuned right, the result should be a system where the majority or people trust the “average price” and either buy / sell at best price or put in a contract at defaults. The result should be a self tracking average price tracker that is difficult to manipulate.