What the media won't tell you

http://www.glowfoto.com/viewimage.php?img=11-053403L&rand=9401&t=jpg&m=11&y=2010&srv=img6

That entire crowd? Photographers. Guy kicking window? Robbing a camera store.

I'm having a ton of fun in ICC

This title might seem to slightly contradict yesterday's title.

Yesterday's post is actually a few weeks old. Since then my guild has started doing hardmodes. They are a lot more challenging and interesting. Having to play more carefully makes it more fun, even when the mechanics are not majorly different. Such as on Marrowgar, which is essentially the same, just with more lag, thanks having so much more fire. Even still, it's more fun not falling asleep and standing in bone storm.

This raises the question: If Blizzard knows how to make these fights fun, why are the most easily accessed fights the less fun versions? It's almost like the old "most people don't see the end-game content" problem, except in this case they might not even realize what they're missing. I've said before that I didn't like the split of easymode and hardmode, with very little in the middle, but since actually seeing that hardmode (or some of it), I think there's an even worse problem of easy and boring vs. hard and interesting.

On the other hand, this might be inevitable. Interesting often means complex (not always, but it's not a terrible rule of thumb), which means that unless a mechanic is trivial, it will be harder. This does depend on the highly subjective and, in this post, undefined, meaning of interesting.

I don't like ICC

There, I said it. Hang me up high til my neck stretches too far. I don't like Icecrown Citadel.

I'm not going to waste time trying to define fun or interesting since you'd say it's wrong anyway. But the first wing is not fun, except gunship, which is easy but at least different. Festerface and Rotgut aren't much fun either. Putricide is almost fun, definitely fun as the abomination, though also quite simple and easy.

Heal dragon fight is not fun either. Run here and kill this then runthere and kill that and nothing lasts more than a few seconds. It just feels frantic without being truly difficult. Sindragosa is a bit of fun, but frost breath irritates me as a tank.

Blood council is boring as a tank or melee. But as a nuclei catcher I've had fun. Blood queen is boring. Biting is a fun idea, but in practice is just a source of stress, or in 25 a call for addons and I'm no fan of fights that demand addons or even do more than slightly encourage their use. This is part of why I hate healing.

But at least there's Arthas. Except I don't enjoy that fight either. Phase one is boring. Phase 1.5 is boring. Phase 2 is some combination of irritating RNG and excessively precise positioning. Phase 3 is boring. It's fucking irritating staring at a release button for half the fight duration while Arthas and Tirion have a shouting match. A free last 10% doesn't feel fun, it just feels like I'm doing PvP with a rogue around.

I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment, pride, joy, or even relief when I got my first kill. I just thought "oh, I ran out of health". That's no way to feel after killing the last boss of the expansion. And I'll stick with the Insane, thanks.

I cannot blame all of this on ICC. More than a little bit, I believe, comes from having spent months longer wiping in ICC than I should have. I associate it too much with needless wipes, not from mistakes, which happen, but from players just plain not trying, not listening, not grasping basic concepts of fights or even roles. So when bosses died, it did not feel like my accomplishment or our accomplishment, but simply the eventual outcome of for once someone by accident not uttterly and completely failing.

And tanking in general has been pretty much straight downhill this expansion, with only a brief period of fun and challenge back before we overheated everything. Ret DPS wasn't much better, with T10 being a lovely source of lag-based DPS loss.

While I'm at it...
Naxxramas was a giant pile of crap.
Malygos was too soon and three dimensional vehicle fights do not fit in WoW, not the audience, not the game engine.
Ulduar was fairly fun but felt like it got cut off too much from the Storm Peaks setup due to having a raid and too much tome in between, not that I'm blaming blizzard for the delay, it just didn't work well for the immersion factor.
ToC was too hyped for being basically ICC-lite. Not much fun and somehow too short to be substantial but long enough to feel like I wasted a night.
I forgot Sartharion. 3D is brilliant for nothing else than showing exactly how ridiculous gear inflation has become.

Fishing as a stat

I want to be able to reforge weapons to make them usable as fishing poles. Or the reverse. Let's say 40% weapon DPS changes to fishing, though still usable for combat. On the reverse, a fishing pole can be reforged, gaining DPS (though not the inverse of 40%, since that would end up overpowered) and will no longer be usable as a fishing pole. But it looks like a fishing pole and is perfectly suitable for beating people to death.

After all, who doesn't want to use non-fishing pole items as fishing poles? Even the goblins get to use dynamite.

The Morality of Cooking

Why do we have recipes? Why don't we all make up entirely new recipes? Why do we blindly accept the recipes of our parents with only a few changes here and there to suit new ingredients? Why do some never change recipes?

Who cares, let's talk about morality.

Our favorite social said this today

"Dangerous", "counterproductive" are measurable. "Moral" is not. It's merely a rephrasing of "my mum/teacher/priest thought it's right and told me when I was a kid and I never had the brains or time to question it".

As you can see, what we have here is someone who cannot see that morality comes in three flavors: shit someone made up, practicality that you can't yet see, and outdated ideas. This is a slight oversimplification, since these can blend and merge; an outdated idea may be resurrected and combined with shit someone made up to create a hybrid idea of unique uselessness.

Shit someone made up can covers things like religious justifications for racism. It's not a useful idea and it never was. Instead it's just shit that someone made up.

Outdated ideas are moral codes which were useful at a time but are no longer needed. For example, food restrictions, such as avoiding pork or certain seafood, can help avoid disease which was not always easily prevented or treated. These days we know how to cook properly, thanks to recipes, fire, and not wandering in a desert for 40 years or 40 generations or 40 generations of 40 years. 40 something.

Then there is practical morality. This I define as prevention for actions which trigger harmful or wasteful results. That made no sense, did it? Let's try theft for an obvious one to demonstrate the principle. Why should I not steal? Well first off, the theft may involve property damage, a harmful or wasteful result. But I can steal without causing damage, so that's insufficient. Instead the problem is that theft encourages wasteful responses: barbed wire fences, bars over windows, and rental cops. These are entirely worthless except for stopping thieves, so the thieves have not merely taken what was not theirs, they have also triggered a wasteful response.

This could be extended further, to cover things like fraud, lying, murder, war. All of these trigger unproductive responses as we try to protect ourselves from these actions. We might even venture into the production world and regulate toasters to ensure that they do not frequently catch fire, since such an object would trigger the otherwise unproductive response of men in rubber suits spraying water on houses.

This leaves out something important: what is productivity? In response I shall wave my hand, say "something about happiness", and claim that's for another day.

Short version: there's more to morality than blind adherence to pointless rules taught by the previous generation.

Now to tie in the cooking. We use recipes because previous generations have figured out practical ways to organize and cook foods. If we looked we could see all manner of practicalities behind the recipes; the way adding an oil to this otherwise fat-free food helps with absorption of vitamins in it, how a mix of beans and corn provides a better protein mix than either by itself, how cooking foods in certain ways will remove poisons and add nutritional value. These are old lessons which are useful. But ingredients change, so sometimes we need to tweak recipes. Maybe we don't have enough wheat flour, but oats in a blender can help substitute. And maybe the recipe for fried lard dipped in lard can be thrown out.

No level cap, no need to level

Imagine with me a world, a world much like the world of the World of Warcraft which we all know and love and/or hate. But imagine that in this world, you have every ability and a full talent set at level 1. And you can raid. Essentially level 1 is level 80. But you can still level. There is no PvP and all NPCs scale to your level.

At level 2 you will gain stats. But raids are designed to scale perfectly with level, so there's a level 1 Naxx and a level 2 Naxx and the difficulty between them, damage, health, adds, are all exactly in proportion to the increase from the level. The gear is stronger as well, but also in proportion, so no matter what you do, level 1 will be just as easy or hard as any other level.

A level one can see exactly the same content. The gear they get is exactly as powerful relative to their enemies. But...

But the higher level you go, the more stats you get. A level 80 might be a hundred times more powerful than a level 1. But they'll never meet in battle and never raid together.

Would people stick with level one to quickly see the content or would they level up for stats which give no benefit?

Right doesn't make Right

Dear readers,
Reading skills are important. For example, you look like a total ass if you can't even read the name of who wrote what you're quoting in your post. I'm going to leave the error there, so as to not cause any confusion with the comments. Also because I don't believe that just because I can change my posts and comments to hide stupid carelessness, doesn't mean I should.

Tamarind, this was stupid and you know it.

As long as you remain within the terms of service, you have the right do do anything in the game which you are capable of doing within the game.

I'd like to introduce what I call "you get arrested by time-traveling police".

We've all heard the "might makes right" concept and most people can at least accept that this isn't true, even if in practical terms might tends to win. Less explicitly stated is the "legal makes right" concept, or in fitting with my title "right makes right". If you can do it, it must be okay.

With that kind of thinking we'd never have any laws. If X action is not illegal, then X action must be moral. All we have to do is go back to before laws, and X action can be anything. In other words, once upon a time "right makes right" would have justified an entirely law-free world. If you think you like this idea, keep in mind this gives anyone the right to kill you, rob you, rape you, torture you. Get the idea? Then let's try something that seems sensible: if something is moral, it shouldn't be illegal.

See where we're going? Yep, it's the good old circular logic. It's not illegal so it must be moral and because it's moral we shouldn't make it illegal.

But obviously we've not used this standard forever. At some point someone recognized that a legal action is possible immoral or dangerous to others (at the very least murder laws are practical, regardless of morality). So they made it illegal. Deviating from murder, which has always been considered bad except during war or religion, meaning never, but setting aside that contradiction, let's look at slavery. Slavery was once legal, and even considered by some to be moral, since Negros need a master or else they'd never see Jesus. But thankfully, someone, many people actually, saw that legality does not define morality, nor the reverse, and that therefore while slavery was legal, it was likely not moral. So eventually slavery became illegal and we renamed it capitalism. Joking. Maybe.

Along this line we can see that what we call legal now may be illegal in the future. And so come the time-traveling police. Their job is to arrest people for what is immoral but not yet illegal.

And to loop it all back around: just because you can do something doesn't mean you should and it doesn't justify it either. I can throw this teapot (it's next to my monitor) out my window and it will likely break. It is legal. It's also stupid and counterproductive. If someone needs the law to defend their actions, lacking any other defense, they're using quicksand as their foundation.

P.S. I acknowledge that morality is a vague, slippery thing on which people are unlikely to agree absolutely. That's not my main purpose here. Instead I wanted to address the idea that once something is legal, anything goes.

P.S.S. "I would really have thought the title being “Chas’ Take on Frostgate” would have given the game away…" - Tamarind

Goodbye, Scourge

[date fail, lol]
With the coming cataclysm, it has occurred to me that a major story is almost over: the Scourge. It arose in Warcraft 3, when it was held back, barely. I suppose we won in the sense that Archimonde didn't destroy the world, but the aftermath was hardly pretty. Northern Eastern Kingdoms was wrecked and occupied by one or another undead faction. Based on their behavior I can hardly call the Forsaken a victory for Azeroth. We battled across the Plaguelands with many victories, but seemingly little progress. Even our defeat of Naxxramas only sent it northward to lay siege to an Alliance town. For some reason we ran off to Outland and seemed to forget about the Scourge, only to return when it assaulted our capitals. We survived, barely. So we went to Northrend and battled through one evil after another before finally killing Arthas and seeing Bolvar become the new Lich King as the Jailor of the Damned. The Scourge is finally defeated.

Woopee?

We have new enemies. Or enemies we've faced it before, but now as our primary focus. The Old Gods and their elemental minions. The Black Dragonflight led by Deathwing. Who knows what else will arrive to ruin the day. Meanwhile the Horde is torn apart by internal divisions while the Alliance finds itself under direct and outright attack by the Forsaken.

It's a strange new world. It's going to take getting used to.The cults will have new names and new leaders, but in the end we can rest assured they have only the most vile of intentions. Somethings never change.