The purpose of badges

When I say badges I am referring to the ongoing system that began with badges of justice in Burning Crusade and now exists as justice and valor points. Honor and conquest points are a similar system, but I do not directly address them here. One could reasonably draw comparisons to the multi-class gear tokens of Ahn'Qiraj as well.

What is the purpose of this mechanic? That's the key question for everything in a game. Presumably a mechanic with no purpose at all would get thrown out. What if the answer isn't clear because it is meant to accomplish many things at once?

Clockwork may be the appropriate analogy here. A part that is used frequently will wear out faster than one that is used rarely. A constantly-spinning gear for a minute hand will wear out sooner than the track along which the cuckoo travels once an hour. Yet a part that is used constantly may also be simple and therefore easy to replace. Swap out the gears and it returns to operation. The clockmaker may have even anticipated this and designed the clock so that those parts that wear out soonest are also the most accessible. A part with multiple roles, that is pulled in many directions, will wear out faster. But with many duties, it is interconnected, and therefore harder to replace.

Consider mounts; they increase player speed and they serve as a conspicuous status symbol. These were once intertwined, when mounts were so expensive that simply having one at all was a status symbol. Blizzard eventually made the riding skill costly and basic mounts inexpensive. Fancier mounts are much more expensive or in some other way hard to acquire. The Mount part had been redesigned into two pieces: a simple Riding piece that just makes us go faster and a simple Show-Off piece that makes us look cool. These can now be easily changed as they wear out; Blizzard can produce an endless stream of expensive and exclusive mounts without needing to remake the entire mounting mechanic.

Then there are badges. What is their purpose?

In BC they started off as a way to fill in for missing gear; they helped insulate players from the cruelty of the RNG. At this, they failed. The badge gear was inferior. Worse, it created a cruel choice. Do you spend your badges to fill in for a missing slot, which may then be filled the very next raid? Which slot? The RNG could not only torment you by withholding loot, it could do the same by giving it and making the badge purchase seem foolish. Badge gear fell behind raid drops, so another tier of badge gear was released, without any restrictions. This meant that players could use it to gear past their raid experience. Were badges meant to be an RNG fixer, an alternative progression path, or a way for players to overgear in order to reach otherwise inaccessible content? Or all three at once? Doing multiple things with a single mechanic is dangerous, as any change creates that many more ripples.

Wrath of the Lich King seemed to carry on this system, until badges became necessary for buying tier tokens. They became a gating mechanism. Or a way to fill up heroic groups, by pushing high-end raiders into trivial content. They were used for five purposes (or more, I may have missed some), doing none of them well, and causing all manner of other social problems.

Now Blizzard has simplified things. Badges can give some early gear for a bit of a boost to get into LFR, because in contrast with Wrath and Cataclysm, running LFD is now apparently a terrifying thing that the developers want players to avoid. This badge-based gear skip is redundant now that the Timeless Isle exists, but that's not causing any problems.

Badges can be used for very expensive and very tiny gear upgrades. I find this terribly unexciting, and yet, brilliant. Your fruitless RNG attempts still yield the badges that can upgrade gear. As long as you have an item that isn't going to be instantly replaced by the RNG (surely you've gotten something) and it isn't maxed out (good thing the upgrades are so expensive), then you can keep getting something from those wasted kills. It isn't the loot you wanted, but it is some advancement, some sense that you're getting somewhere, however slowly.

Badges have been simplified, trimmed down to a nice, compact, extremely slow treadmill. What more could a developer want from an MMO mechanic?

I hate the valor point cap

Back in the summer of 2011 I tried to explain the concept of the "sanity deadzone".  In this area possibilities are not entirely unreasonable, but are enough of a stretch as to be unsustainable for the typical player.  This area is bracketed on two sides.  One one side is a really trivial set of expectations, such as "log in" and on the other a blatantly absurd set of expectations "complete every heroic instance in a day. (back when they took well over half an hour)"

In the middle is the area in which we might expect players to complete it, but many will not be able to.  For example, daily quests sound quite reasonable; surely players can log in for a half hour each day to do a bit of crop planting and kill some mogu.  Each day?  But it's still not all that much time, so let's allow each day to stand.  But there are more than just Tillers and Golden Lotus.  There are nice bugs, wind serpents, other pandas, more pandas, fishing, rare fishing, PvP, and of course your daily bonus random heroic loot.  And LFR.  And that's a good thing!  These dailies have become so overused, so common, so numerous and time-consuming, that we'd never expect people to complete them all every day.

But valor...  It is a mere 1000 points per week.  I despise this limit.

On one hand, it is, at 5 valor per daily, a whopping 200 dailies per week, or 28 per day (and 4 extra to finish it off).  Granted, many of those dailies can be as easy as a bit of cooking, but even still, we're looking at 20 or so each day.  That's not reasonable.  And yet, if you're not capping valor, you're slowing yourself down by a lot and that cap is taunting you.  NOOOOOOOOB!

We can hasten this process by doing some randoms.  First of the day is 80 points.  That's 8 dailies worth, and we can wait in the queue while we do dailies.  It's a bonus bonus!  With bonus on top, unless you're a tank or healer in which case your queue is very short and you develop games such as Jump Out the Dalaran Sewer, in which you jump out the sewer in Dalaran while queuing and see if you get in before splattering.  This is why we hate DPS who don't hit ready.  Overall, a single daily random will get you over half the cap.

Throw in a couple LFR.  Those are only once a week, so they can be bunched up in time-rich times of the week, such as weekends and 2am Tuesday morning.  That's another 180 and now we're at 740.  Suddenly we're down to 52 dailies per week or about 7 per day.  And that's where the problem begins.  That's a single faction's hub.  So run your dailies for the rep you need to buy valor gear, but you're going to already be capped on valor.  Wee.  It would be nice if the valor at least showed up as justice points or gold, rather than just vanishing into the nether (and without even the nice letter from the mages who collect such things).  If you do any raiding, then you're going to cap even sooner.

Relative to the gear cost, it gets worse.  Nothing costs less than 1000.  So hop on out and grind for a  week, you have nothing to show for it.  There is the count, the progress, but that's far less satisfying than actually having an item.  Next week you jump on and grind and buy an item, before capping again.  Next week you can cap again and get another piece.  So far we're at two pieces in three weeks.  Next week you can start the cycle over again and in six weeks you'll have two rings, a belt, and some boots.  If you want a chest, head, or legs, you're looking at over two weeks per item.  Good luck in LFR!

So what would I do?

I'd raise the weekly cap to 3000.  Doing all 48 dailies (according to wowhead) would yield a bit over half the weekly cap.  No sane person is going to be doing every single daily.  That means that there is no expectation of capping for a soloist.  Even throwing in a daily heroic won't get you to the cap.  Adding in LFR won't get you there.  The overall effect is to make the cap so high that no reasonable, or even slightly unreasonable, person expects to get to it.  This is liberating.  It removes the point of reference, so that players can choose to get as many points as they want, and no more, without any sense that they are falling short.  On the other hand, for those players who really want an item, they can go for it and get it.  A higher cap allows players to play as they wish, not as an arbitrary round number tells them to.

Level 70 gear is not intended for level 70 players

Anyone remember when you could run heroics in Burning Crusade, and given some time, get some cool pieces of badge gear? I loved the axe I got, even if it did appear to be a hunter weapon.

Apparently, not working as intended! You might think that at level 70 killing a boss in a BC heroic would give justice points, the replacement for badges. You'd be wrong! Instead, they don't. Thankfully, you can run random dungeons, which wowhead says do give justice points. At level 70 you cannot queue for the normals and are instead limited to the heroics, which supposedly are seven times weekly. There are also the daily dungeon quests for 10 each, bringing the total to 20 points per day. Bosses should give 5 each, but if anyone in the group is above 70, which thanks to the dungeon finder they often are, no points. That means either a very, very slow process of manually forming groups for rarely-run content or a lot of voting to kick people who have done nothing wrong.

The net result is that any gear is absurdly expensive and slow to acquire. At level 70. But hit 85 and run all the randoms you want with bosses dropping the proper points and the tool giving even more, and then go back and buy it all. Because that makes sense. Would it have been so difficult to leave badges of justice alone? Had Blizzard done exactly nothing, there would be no problem. New content would use the justice/valor system and BC would use its old badge system. No overlap, no potential for exploitation, no bugs to worry about. If level 85 players suddenly decide they want level 70 gear for transmogrification, then add a one-way justice->badge vendor, similar to honor. As for the LK heroics, screwing up LK content is entirely consistent with Blizzard's past actions, so there's nothing to worry about.

Minecraft needs a badge system

I've been digging and digging, hoping to find some redstone. I'd like to make gates for my town and pistons are the key. Also I want a compass so I don't get quite as lost when I am searching for the redstone that I need for my compass. ... Damn. And a map. I recently learned that I can make maps, but maps require compasses, so I need a map to not get lost while finding redstone for the compass so I can make a map to not get lost while listening to the song that never ends. It keeps going on and on, my friends. Some people started singing it not knowing what it was and they'll continue singing it forever just because it is the song that never ends...

My point is that this is a perfect example of the central tendency of means theorem or something like that, which says that as we take more and more sample means we'll tend toward the population mean, and will create a normal distribution, such that I don't have my stats exam until next week so why am I worrying so soon? Anyway, spend an hour mining and your odds aren't so great, but spend ten hours mining and it gets better. Larger sample sizes decrease variance, which we could loosely think of as fairness.

It takes a lot of time for things to average out to on getting their deserved redstone ore deposits.

Clearly what minecraft needs is a badge system. Merely running through a cave, whether it has redstone or not, should give "minepoints" which can then be redeemed for a selection of desired ores. Early on players might just get iron or coal, but as they advance they could redeem the same number of points for nicer things like gold and blue dye stuff. Months down the road Notch could implement diamond ore purchases.

It makes sense after all. I mean, why should a player run through a dangerous mine and possibly leave with nothing more than a few bits of iron and possibly his life?

Or maybe this doesn't make any sense at all. While it is redstone that drives me underground, my actual enjoyment isn't in receiving redstone, but in the gameplay itself. The fun is not the reward, and certainly not when it is handed out for trivial tasks, but in the exploration and adventure. Maybe the really deep chasm I found under my town doesn't have any redstone (it may take days to fully explore), but that's not the point. I go there because it is there. I have fun figuring out routes, whether in or out or looping back on myself ten times over while fleeing skeletons and spiders before I finally find the waterfall that I used as a ladder on my way down.

Yea, I made a ladder out of a waterfall. I was facing a really deep hole and it was either jump (die), dig around and around (boring), or dump the bucket of water and swim down. I didn't actually know why I decided to bring the water. Certainly not for this. But I figured, you gotta have a bucket of water. Everyone has one.

Minecraft needs rope too.

P.S. I am going to try to make tomorrow's post about Silverpine. Or maybe Civilization. My point is that I want to mix things up and not go on a Minecraft post binge. But maybe today's post isn't actually about Minecraft anyway.

P.P.S. I did eventually find a decent bit of redstone. As is typical, I found it within seconds of whining to a friend about my inability to find redstone.

Vanilla did have heroics

In the beginning... there was vanilla WoW, which had no badge system, or heroics for that matter. After you hit the level cap, you could do some gearing up from drops in normal five-man dungeons, but that was pretty much it.

-Shintar
Did you catch it? Right there, at the end: "pretty much it." That pretty much it covers quite a lot!

Technically speaking, vanilla did not have heroics. But let's go pick apart some details, see what we can find between the hairs I'm splitting.

What were the vanilla heroics? Well let's see what a BC+ heroic is. Same instance, with trash and bosses that hit harder (irrelevant given relative loot levels), some slightly higher loot, and maybe another boss.

We called it tier .5

Officially it was Dungeon 2, but that was too easy to say compared to tier .5, and back then we believed in challenging ourselves. I once saw someone get hacked and deleted because he said "deeps". We had standards. "This type of item set is sometimes incorrectly referred to as "Tier 0.5" by players." See, I'm right.

In a nutshell, this was a long and expensive quest chain which required players to gather the full dungeon 1 set (sometimes we called it tier 0, for no good reason), and then through the quests, resulting in a half-epic set of overall higher quality, though still inferior to the tier 1 that came from Molten Core. What made this heroic?

"Same instance, with trash and bosses that hit harder (sometimes irrelevant given relative loot levels), some slightly higher loot, and maybe another boss."

The quests were all either outside (not phased) or in the usual instances. Trash was unchanged, except in one case which I'll get to. The quests upgraded the sets and required summoning new, otherwise inaccessible bosses, which dropped some special loot of their own, including pieces of a strange early attempt at a PvP set.

The new fights were not especially hard, but could at times challenge a group, somewhat like heroics not during LK. There is a notable exception, a quest which required the undead side of Stratholme (minus some trash) to be run in 45 minutes. This was not a trivial task. The place was filled with patrols that needed to be handled carefully, due to their tendency to pull adds and fear players. There was not enough time to kill all the trash, so players had to carefully pick pulls, skipping what they could, but knowing that screwing up would be more than a minor inconvenience. If you remember the special bonus at the end of Shattered Halls in BC, it was a bit like that, but harder due to not having an efficient AoE tanking class.

That's pretty much it

Vanilla had more horizontal progression. Or at least angled. Crafters could gain some impressive profits from particular reputations. Mounts weren't in a cash shop, but also in grinds, or luck. World drops mattered forever in a time when we didn't outgear them a month after release. There were ways to progress that did not involve a raid or a random heroic. I liked that. Somehow, some people didn't. I do not understand those people.

The sanity deadzone

Imagine if capping your badge points of winning required 20-40 hours per week. Would you do that? I'm guessing you'd probably do it once, on some really awful week, and never ever again. You'd also never expect anyone else to do it, ever. In other words, you'd accept that people would be gaining in badges at less than the maximum rate. You would consciously accept that less than optimal is acceptable. Why?

Because optimal would be insane. Remember this idea, we'll need it later.

Now imagine that capping your points of super instead required a mere one hour per week. Would you ever not do that? I'm guessing yes, during some really awful week, or possibly a really great week, but in some way a week that causes you to not devote a mere one hour in an entire week to capping points. But in general you'll get it done, because it's just that easy. If you didn't cap points you'd probably look pretty lazy. I mean, wow. You cannot find one hour? Lazy, stupid, worthless piece of crap. Why?

Because optimal is too easy to not do. Also remember this one.

Now put that time requirement closer to the middle, somewhere between 2 and 8 hours. Over a week these aren't insane amounts of time to play, barely over an hour a day. But are they trivial? Can you guarantee that you will have 8 hours in a week? Remember, that's barely an hour a day. Not much, not trivial. You could very easily not have that 8 hours, particularly if those 8 hours are in addition to other activities.

But it still sounds reasonable. It's a trap.

The 8 hours sounds reasonable, and I think it is, but it is not universally reasonable. And yet, because it is so reasonable, it may be universally accepted and expected. It is the sanity deadzone.

Somewhere between so absurd that we'd never expect it and so trivial we'd never fail it, there is the sanity deadzone. In this area the requirement is not so high that we'd think anyone cannot do it, but high enough that some people cannot do it (or don't care enough to).

Of course this post is about why BC had a much better badge system than now.

BC badges were in the insane range. Would you ever expect someone to cap their badges for the week? BC had 16 instances. Some were short. Some were not. Even if they were a mere 15 minutes each (nowhere close, except some SH runs on my paladin...), that's still 4 hours, every day. Plus a few dailies that gave badges. And Karazhan (decent-length raid, best one ever). And every raid after that. Capping badges for the week was not a reasonable expectation at all. Capping for the day was not either. I did every heroic in a day, once, and never ever again.

LK used something fairly close to the trivial range. One random heroic a day and the weekly random raid to cap the good badges, plus possibly ICC. With heroics down to 15-30 minutes, this wasn't so bad. But I didn't count DPS queue times, did I? So add another 15-45 minutes. Now we're in that (arbitrarily defined) sanity deadzone. To cap isn't insane, but it isn't trivial either.

This carried over, but worse, into Cataclysm. Heroics take longer and fail more, yet the daily expectation remains. Yet it has become less reasonable. Of course you can argue that the failure rate is a temporary condition of gear, but is that any comfort to the person who has now had his 10th wipe, 5th healer, and 20th tank?

This is a rare situation where the extremes are better than a moderate position. An insane cap can be ignored. A trivial cap is trivial. But in the middle you get conflict. This is the sanity deadzone.

The Badges are a Distraction

Running Karazhan in T6 (equivalent) isn't any more fun than running it in instance blues. It is still the same raid we've done for the past year.

But we have ZA! Yes, we do, and casuals don't seem to want to do it. Why would they? They can get better gear from farming Kara for badges and with few to no wipes. I want to do ZA, but there aren't many people to do it with. Somehow I doubt Sunwell will be any different. Why do challenging content when easier stuff gives the same or better rewards? This isn't an attack on casuals, they're doing what they've been taught to do: follow the gear along the easiest path. ZA could have been this path if not for badges.

What are we going to do with the badge gear anyway? It's not going to suddenly make ZA easy enough to be farmed constantly.

Blizzard, give us new content, not distracting gear that is nothing but bigger numbers in the same old instance. Give raiders more content too. It doesn't need to be the next tier of gear, frankly the tiers have come out way too quickly, we should not be at T6 so soon. Add more raids. Maybe they'll only drop sidegrades, so what? Make them fun and people will go.