Fun with Drivers

Five and a half years ago I bought this computer and was stunned by its performance, disk space, and all that fun stuff. Then five and a half years passed. Somewhere along the line I decided it needed a fresh install. I then decided that would be a huge inconvenience to reinstall all my programs and games, backing everything up and restoring it, and hoping that my preferences survive. So I didn't do anything. Still, I had the feeling that at any moment my computer could come crashing down into nothing. It didn't have any hardware problems (beside the power supply fan which sometimes rattled and I learned to fix with well-placed blows) and always came up clean on viruses, except one scare, which might have just been some WoW component getting misread anyway. So I put it off.

Disk space was getting tight oh... last year, give or take. Getting Steam didn't help since it brought in more games, but I learned to juggle the downloading and removal of local files. Still, not a fun process.

Then I finally got sick of having no space. I bought an external hard drive. Shifting my music and movies to that would free up a ton of space. Games that I don't play too often could go there as well, along with CDs. I sometimes make isos of my games because I really hate the noise of a CD drive. So yea, those take up a lot of space.

I planned ahead and copied bookmarks and documents. iTunes was backed up, though somehow incorrectly, but all the files are still around and organized properly, so it's just a very slow process of telling it to import the folder. I even had the foresight to copy my WoW folder over, thereby saving me hours or days of redownloading everything since LK.

But where did my CDs go? For five and a half years I'd been carrying around the CDs that came with the computer. The ones with XP and drivers and all that stuff that I need if the computer is going to be more than a heavy box of toxicity. Oh well, I can just use the XP CD for my mom's old computer. Pop it in, load from CD, reformat and reinstall and boom, there we go.

Why the fuck isn't the internet working? ... dot dot dash fuck! Plug and play, PLUGGED IN WHY ARE YOU NOT PLAYING!? Oh, apparently my computer needs these things called "drivers". That explains the lack of internet, awful video performance, and why the external seems to have the same transfer speed as carrier pigeon, and not the one with the flash drive on its leg like they used in South Africa to demonstrate that their web was garbage (true story, the carrier pigeon had a higher transfer speed).

No, I do not want to search the internet for ethernet card drivers. For anyone worried about AI taking over the world: just repeat that previous sentence and know why you have nothing to worry about. At least not from a Windows XP-based AI.

Thankfully Dell has a nicely organized website for downloading drivers. I snagged the ethernet driver using my dad's Mac and thankfully, the USB worked well enough that I could copy it over with a flash drive. Internets! Internet Explorer! Oh thank god, it works! Now go to firefox.com and go away, forever. Things went uphill from there as I got video drivers, USB drivers, and various drivers for things like "chipsets" and "BIOS". I don't quite know what they do, but I am certain that they are important, since I know that the time I screwed up my BIOS it was bad. This is why I need videogames, if I don't have virtual worlds to explore and break, I explore and break my own computer.

So now things are humming along. WoW is copied back over and running just fine. Anti-virus is installed. NoScript. IM. All is good in the world.

Except for one problem: I haven't gotten a desktop background yet and I have barely any icons now, so I keep thinking my computer is still starting up when it's all ready to go, since I'm expecting a cascade of icons and a draenei shaman.

What would WoW be with no raids?

Tobold seems to be suggesting that raids are not as profitable as quests and heroics, due to drawing in a much smaller audience. As my own observation, on top of that raids, since they are intended to be challenging, not just bigger, balance is much more important, requiring that much more effort. Does your average solo questing player care much about class balance? Probably not. But your average raider, they are going to care, they must care.

What would WoW be with no raids?

I have to admit, I can't quite imagine it. Would we have progressively more difficulty 5-mans and heroics? We've never quite seen that. Magister's Terrace and the three sneak attacks on Icecrown Citadel bumped things up but a tier or two, but even Halls of Reflection didn't exactly strike me as content that people would spend much time on. The gear requirements were a bit higher, but only a bit.

On the other hand, it does fit the trend. Raids have gotten progressively smaller. BC took them down to 25. LK made 10 man raids almost an alternative path to 25. Now Cataclysm has made 10 into a small version of the 25, with the same gear and shared lockouts. Could we see raids gone altogether, or dropped down to 10 man and 5 man?

Maybe not. Maybe Cataclysm and the focus on strengthening guilds is an attempt to rebuild the focus on raiding and raid sizes and challenges could even climb again.

On the other hand*, beside changes to raiding there has been the trend of progressive casualization or accessibilityization or whatever other made-up word you can think up to express a poorly-defined concept. This suggests that the trend could continue and that the emphasis on guilds is only to offset the negative side-effects of teaching us to be asocial bastards, with no actual goal.

I'm probably looking at this all wrong, to suggest that with no raids WoW would go on the path of challenging 5-mans. More likely with no raids we'd just see trivial 5-mans, slightly less trivial 5-mans, and a whole lot of very slow grinds, with only the smallest shred of an economy or player community. In other words, pretty much just the current WoW but with no raids.

* This is why President Truman infamously cut off one hand from every economist he hired. The man was brutal.

I don't think we're on the same page here

Look at this first.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/1/28/
Okay? Did you read it? It's not a quest, so you're allowed to read it. No there is not a quest map icon ....

This one took me a while to figure out. He's going to all this bother and bedevilery to get a game to run when it's already running fine. What is the problem? It runs!

Oh, 22 fps is bad. Got it.

Anyone want to buy a new computer for me?

The Sandbox in Our Heads

As sometimes happens, this is the third version of this post. The first was unbearably shitty while the second suffered from a severe lack of factual accuracy. In retrospect I should have known that study was fake after it claimed a margin of error of only a tenth of a percent when reporting that 95% of people have three or more pounds of sand in their ears from time at the beach.

I was going to write about how the concept of a sandbox is a bit silly, since ultimately the sandboxiness is determined more by our own mentality as players than the actual design of the game, baring extremes such as Minecraft which is a complete sandbox and tic tac toe which contains severe penalties for playing outside the box, such as losing and getting beat up by an enraged second grade student who is stuck inside for recess because it's raining tornadoes.

I had been playing Elder Scrols: Oblivion for the past few days, by which I mean literally multiple contiguous 24 hour cycles, not a few hours a day over multiple days, and during this time my character got very good at jumping, picking locks, and senseless mass murder. Since I had barely any clue how the game worked or what I was doing, I ended up wandering a lot, exploring, and ruining any possibility that the developers would get me to play the game correctly. I felt like I was living in a glorious sandbox entirely in my head.

Then I read wikipedia, which is of course absolutely authoritative on the subjects of video games, cartoons, and advanced physics, due to being edited by obsessive nerds, which reported that Oblivion contains sandbox elements. Incidentally, I am nearly incapable of typing the word "elements" without replacing the s with an a before realizing that I do not mean to type "elementals." There was an unacceptably strong positive correlation between my perception and reality, a truly disturbing fact which could hinder my ability to blog in the future. Thankfully, my impression that WoW is a perfectly on-rails unbreakable rope with not a single frayed end was wrong, so my perception may still be suitably disconnected from reality. Turns out you can pick up story arcs halfway in, a fact which I should have known since I'd experienced it myself, but fortunately even my own experiences were not polluting my perceptions.

In related news, this was supposed to be a serious post but I've failed completely at message control. Maybe watching two hours of Colbert Report before writing doesn't help. Thankfully, no one in the media reads my blog, because otherwise this would turn into a Special Investigative Emergency Report Special about how TV is making us all illiterate.

As I wrote more I had a realization: my earlier realizations were wrong. Sure, a game can give us rails and it can give us a sprawling highway system with poor signage and no maps, but ultimately what I actually do depends on what I decide to do. I knew that there was some very important main story arc which did not require me to commit random acts of murder, theft, and mushroom picking, but I ignored it. In fact I put it off for so long that it has become pretty damn hard to complete since my skills make no sense and I probably could have gotten some better items somewhere along the way, meanwhile the automatically leveling enemies have developed the ability to two-shot the NPCs that I think are supposed to be helping me.

It was my choice that made the game into a sandbox. Sure, it was a sandbox in the first place, but there were trails and rails in that sandbox, rails which I could have followed. But instead, by a combination of self-destructive stubbornness and incredible ignorance, I managed to stay in the sandbox.

It is player mentality which determines the sandboxiness of a game. Game design can push us toward rails or exploration, but ultimately we choose. Thinking back to Halo, there was this one spot where I'm pretty sure I wasn't supposed to be able to get that banshee (alien plane), but I did, and then I used to to shoot things in the wrong order, fly where I wasn't supposed to go, and generally pretend that I didn't have to follow the fascist rules set out by Bungie. Meanwhile in WoW my lack of awareness has caused countless deaths of alts, before I learned where I wasn't supposed to go, so then I prepared better before I went there, and am now able to count high enough to count the number of deaths.

So now I'm left with a mystery: How does a game developer encourage or discourage exploration and wandering behavior? Linear quest design will discourage it, while an open world will encourage it. Abundant information may discourage it, by making there be nothing to discover that isn't already known. Obsession with optimization will initially encourage it, as players seek every possible way, but once known and paired with abundant information, may discourage it.

In the end I can only conclude that we will explore the sandbox when we do not perceive a penalty for doing so greater than the enjoyment we derive from the exploration. From that incredibly generalized statement we can only reach one of two possibilities: either Blizzard really hates exploration, or people who like Cataclysm are really boring.

And that's this morning's semi-sarcastic random insult at possibly everyone.

Coming out as a blogger Part Two: Did you know I'm brilliant?

In part one of today's post, you skipped me ranting about writing in high school. In part two, I will discretely mention that I am awesome and also talk about my feelings. Also, I'm awesome.

I recently took this test called the GRE. I think it stands for something, but I didn't care enough to find out what. Yes, I did take a test that I don't know what it means. Hang on, okay the letter that I skipped over to find the numbers says "Graduate Record Examination." That makes no sense at all. What did any of this have to do with my records? Stupid test.

My mom was curious about how I did so well on the written portion, the Analytical Writing section. For the record (aha!), I am better at it than 94% of you. I might be misusing and misinterpreting the statistics, but those in the know just call that "applied statistics." It's sort of like how we don't call it MMDL or Mass Manipulation, Deception, and Lying, instead using the MMDL term "Marketing."

Surprising fact, when taking the test I actually got to a point, sometimes even the same point that I was trying to make.

So my mom wanted to know when I got so good at writing. Well to me it's pretty obvious: I spent 5 years or so in various formats arguing with idiots about video games. It's a lot like leveling up weapon skill before they removed the Servants of Razelikh. Find a target which is immune to all attacks, or in the case of internet forums, facts and logic, and then fire away. You will never accomplish anything, but you'll get very good at it.

Actually I think the real cause was that college writing helped me to practice analysis and get the idea into my head that things can be analyzed. Then I spent what has now been nearly three years writing about WoW and gaming in general. Just about every day, resulting in such a volume of writing that even if not all of it is particularly great, it creates a level of comfort. In high school I was intimidated by writing. Now I am comfortable with it. That removes a barrier, allowing my mind to focus on strange concepts like logic.

I didn't actually say this. Unfortunately, my mom is of the mindset that video games are entirely worthless. To suggest that they have had any positive impact, or really to even bring them up, would be provoking a pointless argument. So this blog into which I've poured much time and mental energy, remains unspoken. I can't quite seem to come out as a blogger.

Coming out as a blogger Part One: High School

This is split into two parts because it got very long. The first part is about why I hated writing. It has little to nothing to do with blogging.

If you're like me, you hated English or Literature or anything which might ever require writing in classes in high school. They inevitably involved writing about subjects which were uninteresting and only slightly less often, unwanted. It was a cruel joke when teachers would offer a selection of topics. This simultaneously gave the false hope of a desired topic and admitting that there are some topics which we enjoy less than others. I wasn't exactly bad at writing. My grades were more than adequate. But I didn't enjoy it in the slightest. Writing meant spending time researching something I didn't care about, writing about something I didn't care about, and then getting criticized by the person who caused this whole problem in the first place. Writing sucked.

The other day I got my GRE scores. They were uh, quite good. The highest in terms of being better than a certain percent: analytical writing. I know, shocking, they think I know how to write analytically. Second highest: verbal. Quantitative wasn't low, but in high school if you asked if I liked math or writing more, I'd have said math. I might have also laughed at the suggestion that writing was even in the running. Writing sucked.

Things got better in college. For one, I no longer had to write about absolutely pointless historical nothings which have been picked over a thousand times before. Oh sorry, history was the least of the problems, at least history had facts and some attempt to find an objective reality. I think the Great Gatsby should be made mandatory reading for everyone and at the end everyone is required to say "That was an interesting story. I wonder if it meant anything else?" And then they must sign legally binding agreements which say "no." Symbolism can be fun. It's a delightful thing to find. Double, triple, even quadruple meanings can be great as a way to add, let's call it reread value. To find something new the second, or tenth, time I read is enjoyable. I like that. Less fun is when the reading isn't actually enjoyable, at least not for a typical, or even atypical high school student, making even the first pass nearly unbearable, but during this being required to find, identify, interpret, and memorize, the dozens, or in the case of the Great Gatsby, hundreds per page, of symbols and analogies and oh for fucks sake there was some term we were always using which I must have blanked out because I was so sick of it.

I don't think people who love literature should be allowed to teach it. They have entirely unreasonable expectations. Their passion is wasted and counter-productive. I think instead literature should be taught by people who have a mild interest in textual analysis and like to read before bed, but aren't particularly wedded to any given interpretation of a text, nor should they have any training whatsoever in activities such as "deconstruction", whatever the hell that means.

What I'm trying to say is that I'd have rather classes included more "have you noticed this?" or "here's a new way to read this", and no hint at all of "if you didn't see this then you are stupid." In related news, my hatred of American Literature class was meant to be an introductory paragraph, not what I'm sure will turn out to be the majority of this post. I'm pretty sure I'd fail if I wrote a paper like this. Well too bad.

On the plus side, one of the girls in front of me in class was pretty hot.

CC that you can't outgear

I have a rapidly growing imaginary list of stupid expectations I had for Cataclysm. One was that we wouldn't be quickly outgearing heroics to the point of forgetting about CC, ever. I thought it would at least take another raid tier, or at least current players being fully geared up in the current. Boy was I wrong.

I was wrong in two parts. First off, I thought that there was any sustained desire on Blizzard's part to make heroics more challenging. Why I would think this I cannot fathom. It goes against the entire trend of what has made WoW so successful. Second, I failed to account for the fact that the current mob abilities don't require CC, our relative power levels do.

If those don't seem any different, try this hypothetical: Raging Boars hit for 500 and the entry level tank has 1000 effective health*. In other words, he can potentially die instantly, given two hits at once or very closely spaced. This is a bad scenario. It is literally a roll of the dice whether the tank lives or not. This can be easily fixed by CCing one of the boars or putting it on another tank. Or, a small health gain will allow him to survive simultaneous hits. In this scenario the power level called for CC or gear.

* Effective Health is essentially health multiplied by mitigation, but excluding avoidance. It is an expression of how much damage you can take before dying. It was the theoretical backing for stam-stacking, while the practical reason was that stamina is an easy way for simple-minded people to pick between tanks.

In the other scenario, there is one Raging Boar and one Boar Trainer. Boar Trainers have Death Aura which causes Raging Boars to hit for 100% of enemy health, one-shotting them. Gear cannot fix this. Instead the only way for the tank to survive is to separate the boar and the trainer. The boar could be CCed and the trainer killed first, the trainer kited out of range of the boar, or possibly the disc priest likes a challenge and uses frequent bubbling to keep the total damage he can take slightly above his health. In all of these scenarios it is player action, not player gear, which make the difference.

Somewhere in the middle, which is more desirable, since for many players the true benefit of gear is the ability to play mindlessly, is the third scenario, in which the challenge can be overgeared, but only at an extreme degree. In this scenario, the trainer's Death Aura only causes a 200% damage increase (1500 damage, exceeding even the 1000 damage of two boars at once), so that the required effective health is doubled when he is near the boars. This means that for most gear levels it will be necessary to use some form of CC, but eventually it may be possible to simple take the full damage and DPS quickly to avoid draining healer mana.

Raging Boars and Boar Trainers would make for a pretty boring instance, even for trash. So here are a few other mechanics which will make CC more desirable, hard to outgear, but not a permanent factor.

Fear: It makes us run into adds that we weren't quite expecting. Can be very bad on healers.

Mana Burn: Can really wreck a healer, both in dealing damage to them, but more importantly, in making a big mana pool and regen that much more important.

Roots and Ranged: This can cause a group to scatter, making control more difficulty, making AoE less effective, and possibly running into adds.

AoE spell reflection: If this mob is not dealt with quickly, casters, including paladins and DKs, are not going to be doing very well. Very quick focus fire with non-casters can also deal with this. The reflect would have to exclude spells or else rogues and hunters could become mandatory, and clearly that's a worst case scenario.

What's Aggro?: This is the simple one: a mob that hits hard and ignores normal aggro tables, encouraging CC, kiting, and focus fire.

To me, abilities with a cast time are desirable because they can allow for a more active, aware response of interrupts and target switching than a fire-and-forget CC. While I like kiting, it requires an instance with plenty of room to move, assuming our goal isn't to kill hunters. I admit, that might be a design goal for some players and developers.

I know that I've been making quite a few negative posts recently. These are not a build-up to some massive rage-quit post. My goal isn't to say that WoW sucks, which it doesn't. Instead my goal is to find ways that WoW can improve, which of course means become more fun for me, without alienating the currently gigantic player base. I have nothing but disdain for the angry posts which boil down to more or less: "WoW sucks and you are all stupid for playing it and someone should make my game with permanent death, xp loss, item loss, nine thousand person raids, and no elves or ponies." Those points accomplish nothing. They give developers nothing useful to go off of. For example, "dumbing down" isn't single, reversible change, nor is it even always bad. Frankly I am very glad that Ulduman has been 'dumbed down' with the addition of a map.

It's impossible to make a world if location is meaningless

Yes the title is an exaggeration of the state of WoW. It's easier to say than "World of Warcraft has progressively reduced the importance of particular locations, whether for farming, PvP, or reputation, rendering the idea of location less meaningful and along with it, the suggesting that there is a world contained in the game World of Warcraft."

I originally wanted to write about the way to set our hearthstones, to pretty much the same place. BC and LK took this to an extreme with both factions even using the same city for their hearth. But even now, why would you set your hearth to somewhere other than Orgrimmar or Stormwind? A few people go with Darnassus for the reduced traffic and general peacefulness, but those are an exception, not an indication of any larger trend. I thought of giving buffs to people based on their hearth location, with a lag time on switches so they constantly change buffs to suit what they're doing that very second. The idea was that, for example Stormwind would be a banking and diplomacy city and would give advantages when dealing with NPCs: a small rep multiplier (think 1%, not 10% of human racial) and a small benefit when buying and selling to NPCs and with AH costs (again, 1% or less). Or Ironforge could be a city for engineering, mining, and blacksmithing where they could get extra ore from smelting or lower material costs. Outside the main cities, working out of goblin towns could help with rep there (more than SW, but only for the four towns), or STV could give bonus damage against beasts and trolls. These would be balance, probably mirrored, between factions. The general idea was that if you're primarily engaged in a few activities you'd pick a hearth to help that, rather than the one that is most convenient and common.

Just to be clear: I like the championing system with tabards. It was annoying to be exalted with the relevant faction and still not have the desired loot from an instance. I'm looking at you, Baron, with your persistent insistence on dropping the wrong pants. And ever notice that more mages than tanks had Suneater? True story.* But at the same time, rep based on location made us care where we were. This would be a bad thing if we were using randoms, but when we picked instances, it made sense that we cared about location. Now I frankly don't give a shit where I end up, except that I don't much like Stonecore. I wonder if it could work to have something in between, such as certain instances giving double rep for certain factions, or rep with a faction in addition to the effect of the tabard. So the Wildhammer would care a lot when we go to Grim Batol, but not as much when we're in Tol'vir.

Does anyone farm mobs anymore? I don't really know. I haven't in quite a long time. Well, okay I lied, the other day my mage flew down to Silithus to farm essence of air. But beside that, do mobs serve any purpose beside cannon fodder for dailies and quests? Mobs used to give reputation and dropped items that were useful for said reputation. Undead and bone fragments in the Plaguelands, Cultists and texts in Silithus, various blood elves and demons in Outland.

Have you ever hunted devilsaur? I have. Those buggers are hard to find! They tend to find you instead. Materials weren't always so... generic. They might come from specific mobs types and certain locations. This wasn't quite so convenient, but it did make a skinner care about something more than half percent differences in leather rates off dragonkin and boars. It made the mob choice matter more, and therefore the part of the world.

Do you care where your character is? Does it make any difference? These days, probably not. Just pick your main city and take the portals where they go.

* It's more of a story with truthiness than truth.