Seal Clubbing

I came across this term for the first time a few days ago, while trying to find the formula for WN7, which sites like noobmeter.com use for rating World of Tanks players. The term is used to describe experienced players who deliberately play in low-tier tanks to win lots of battles against noobs.

As a casual noob myself, I'm perplexed by this. Surely the whole point of the World of Tanks matchmaking system is to prevent battles where inexperienced players are pitted against experienced players? If I remember back to my early battles, everybody in the battlefield was a total noob. We would be shooting at each other, driving into each other, rushing across the field in Malinovka, doing everything noobish in the book. But as I improved, so did the quality of the rest of my team, and so did the quality of our opponents. Rushing was not so common, and when it was used, it was a deliberate scouting action by a fast tank that hoped to survive, rather than an attempt to overwhelm our enemies. That's as it should be. I was no longer a total noob, so I wasn't matched with total noobs.

Now, after 3000 battles at an "adjusted avg. tier" of 2.47, according to noobmeter, I never find myself in the same battle as "seals" (noobs relative to me), nor do I find myself in the position of a"seal" being clubbed by somebody with a lot more ability than me. I find myself in battles with people of about the same ability as me, with their tanks at the same level of improvement as mine. There is no way that I could get into a battle against genuine noobs, and there's no way a player with much more ability than me would end up in the same battle as me. After 3000 low-tier battles I cannot recall any examples of seal clubbing.

So what's going on? Why are the World of Tanks forums so full of talk about seal clubbers? How can they really exist? Is it, in fact, mainly a term used by players at the top tiers to denigrate play at lower tiers? Or have I noobishly misunderstood something?

20 days of gold making - day 7- beginning again

If you were starting over again (maybe on a new server perhaps), how would you start building some capital & what goal would you set yourself?

There was a great answer to that question a few years ago by Raimondas, that I mentioned in "I become neglected". He showed how a level 10 can make his first 2000g. I particularly liked his advice for acquiring the first 20g: sell your signature to prospective guild masters!

In fact, it isn't hard making gold in Azeroth. Just sell everything!

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series

20 Days of Gold Making - Day 1. How I started

This article has been submitted to Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival for February.

Nev Jones over at Auction House Addict has an interesting idea: to get bloggers to answer twenty questions related to the WoW economy over the next twenty days. The first question is straightforward: When did you start gold making & what triggered it?

I started making gold right from the start of my time in Azeroth as a result of the quest to get more bags. At the time, I kept virtually everything, in case it might come in useful later - I didn't know that grey items would never come in useful (what a pity. Wouldn't it be great to think that some mage out in a gingerbread house in a dark forest somewhere wanted you to meet her at midnight with a basilisk heart, a poisoned spider fang and a dried scorpid eye). So I wanted to buy bigger bags. At 10g a pop, netherweave bags were a serious expense, so at first I thought, I'll be a tailor and make my own. When that looked to be a rather long-term goal, I next tried to sell stuff at auction to get the money together. That was when I started looking around for tools to help with the (still) poor auction-house interface. Markco was still running the Just My Two Copper website at the time, and a Google search brought me to an article he had written there on Auctioneer. Markco really was a trailblazer back then. Anyway I installed Auctioneer on the strength of that article.

The greatest thing about auctioneer was to build up a database, over time, of the price of items. If it did nothing other than this it would have been worth it, back in the day when I didn't know if a piece of woolen cloth was worth 1c or 1g or something in between. Once you can set sensible prices, the money will start to come in. I got the cash for my netherweave bags fairly fast after that.

I'll tell you what I put in them on day 3!

Part of the 20 days of Gold Making series