What's the big deal with alts?

Syl has gone on an anti-alt rampage. You might think I agree, since I've unofficially added alts to my list of Things That Are Destroying WoW. But if there's one thing I love more than criticizing Blizzard with the power of hindsight and nostalgia, it's disagreeing with anyone.

So Syl, you're wrong.

And it's all your fault.

Within your personal complaints section you offered a few opinions, which I have interpreted as these:

• They cause problems with immersion and identification with a character
• Alts tend to be second-rate (poorly geared)
• They take too much time
• Excessive self-sufficiency through alts harms the player economy and the fun of it
• They're meaningless.

The immersion problem is due to a mental flaw: you're unable to properly create and segment personalities. Anyone with merely one personality is bound to have problems.

Second-rate alts are an insignificant problem which Blizzard has fixed by showering everyone and everything with gear. So thanks a lot, Syl, your endless (or one-time-only) whining about your terribly geared alts is responsible for the many loot pinatas.

The self-sufficiency bit has no obvious problems that I can blame you for.

Meaninglessness? Well thanks, because that got extended to everything. It's like when I'd complain that my brothers got more cake than me so my parents would throw away all the cake and makes us eat stale crackers instead. I was 15 before I learned that saltines are not cookies.

But you weren't done with it, were you? Then you go on to claim that playing alts doesn't make players better and in fact players tend to be good or bad (or somewhere in the middle) at the game as a whole rather than at individual aspects.

Playing alts can make players better. Can. Maybe. Possibly potentially it can happen in some circumstances. Alts can raise personal expectations. For example, when I played a paladin I learned to AoE tank (not that it was hard...) and when I made my warrior alt I decided that I would hold him to a similar standard, causing me to tank better than I would if I just said "oh well, I'm just a warrior and everyone knows warriors are stupid jerks." I suppose that example was reversed. And outdated, since it's been years since vanilla, during which every single warrior was a stupid jerk, much like in BC and LK when all moonkin were stupid jerks. But I digress.

Playing alts can help to see the game from other perspectives. While we can intellectually understand the mechanics, we don't fully understand how they affect people until we are in their shoes, literally virtually.

As for the "Good players are good players, no matter what toon they play and vice versa" claim, well that's utterly untrue. At least I hope it's untrue. I'm a terrible healer, or maybe not terrible, but not great, and easily stressed out and overwhelmed. If skill is consistent, that means I'm also bad at tanking and DPS, which would make me sad. So I think what this really comes down to is that Syl is a jerk.

But that doesn't mean alts are the greatest thing ever

What's so great about alts? It's nice to have something to tinker with and to learn a bit about how other classes see the game, but when and why did we get the idea that we must have max-level, max-profession, max-gear alts? That's not an alt, that's a second main! Is one main not good enough? Maybe we need more fun and more to do on our mains, rather than spamming alts and then getting sick of repeating quests.

-Me
In vanilla, the game of supposedly raid or die, if you aren't in a raid you might as well quit, a game where we might expect to have a ton of alts, I actually didn't have anywhere near as many as now. I had fewer and I had much different expectations for them. I expected to raid on my main (and I did) but my alts were not there to be part of some economic gaming powerhouse of achievements. They were to try out different ways to play. Some were short distractions: I'd wonder what a druid was like, play it briefly, and then know that I was much happier not playing a druid (early druids at early levels were a miserable experience).

I suppose they weren't alts at all, if we assume that "alt" is short for "alternative". They weren't alternatives. In fact, the closest thing was a warlock who, long story short, was not mine, and who briefly took the raiding spot from my shaman, since we needed a good warlock more than we need a bad healer. But the rogue, he was only around to play around a bit before I went back to playing a real class. None of the others ever got very high, since they were there for distraction rather than characters in which I would expect to invest any time or expect any achievement.

Somehow that changed. Why or when, I do not know. When I left WoW I had a plethora of alts. More than a handful of 80s, in various states of gear. None really got far since I'd quickly get sick of doing the same heroics as before, over and over, except with a longer queue time and more gear bashing. They all had maxed-out professions and functioned as a small economy unto themselves, which for the most part meant my rogue did all the money-making (JC is a bullshit profession), which the druid then stole for darkmoon decks, and then my paladin main turned them into reputation and eventually a title to reflect my insanity. In this my alts were not sources of great fun, but merely cogs in a machine. But cogs which I felt I must have.

The economic aspect makes sense to me. We gained to many more money sinks, resource sinks, that it is sensible to try to avoid them. And avoid the inconvenience. We once needed very little to get armor up and running, an enchant, maybe an armor patch at most, and it was ready to wear. Now we need gems, enchants, armor patches, glyphs (not part of gear, but part of the general theme of "you must take a dozen extra steps for no actual gain"), and now reforging. Maybe these were meant to spur the player economy. But as anyone can tell you, taxing too heavily only gives benefit until it starts to feed the black market, and alts are the black market. The analogy isn't perfect. How about how pushing someone on a swing makes them go higher, but if you push too hard they just fall off it on the ground and get mad?

In closing, I offer these insightful words:

What's so great about alts? It's nice to have something to tinker with and to learn a bit about how other classes see the game, but when and why did we get the idea that we must have max-level, max-profession, max-gear alts? That's not an alt, that's a second main! Is one main not good enough? Maybe we need more fun and more to do on our mains, rather than spamming alts and then getting sick of repeating quests.

-Me

The problem with the Starcraft MMO

As we all know, or at least are very convinced of because we desperately want to hear it and hate dissenting opinions, Blizzard is creating a MMO based on Starcraft. We know this because they have claimed that it is with a new IP, and Starcraft is new relative to Warcraft which is almost as old as me if I was younger than I am.

I want to get the jump on it and just call dibs on a few topics. Yes, you can do that. Maybe some socialist bloggers believe in sharing, but I believe in hoarding ideas. That's why my draft folder is filled with unpublished posts, such as this one that I started five months ago, hence why it is filled with obsolete Brood Wars references.

First off, I am calling dibs on any and all Ghost whining.
Energy pool: too low. All it takes is one in and out of cloak and you're practically empty. No lockdown means helpless against vehicles, as if that weren't bad enough.
Nuclear strike: Cast time is way too long. And no, this isn't the new "aimed shot from shadowmeld".

Siege tanks will end up with some major problems. Sure they have heavy armor and a lot of firepower, but not since Onyxia has stance-dancing been such a huge issue. Beside that, Thors are stealing their jobs with more damage, more health, and greater mobility.

Goliaths also will hate the lag time between ground and air attacks. Meanwhile Vikings will complain about their hybrid tax.

As of three years after release, Blizzard still has not balanced the ability of Zerg Queens to one-shot most ground biologicals. Meanwhile the queens won't stop whining that "their parasites are too easy to remove." And when patch 2.0 removes flying they will never ever shut up about it.

Starcraft is trying to convince me to meet a girl and get married

I'd done a bit of 1v1 with a couple of my friends, mostly for fun and games, with us sometimes trying out ideas with varying success. But 2v2, that would require us to go... online. Into that sinister and frightening world with with other people. People who might very well decide to brutally crush me with devastating crushingness. I was afraid. I didn't want to ruin their rankings.

For context, in the 1v1s we'd done before that day (Sunday) I'd spent about 50% of my time swearing at the keyboard. M doesn't build marines in SC2, but it does in Brood Wars. Guess which game I've played more. So yea, I had some serious problems with failure to produce marines. MMMMMMMMMMMM. Nothing? Uh... oh. A. I made it worse when I declared that A would make more sense for marauders, at which point I then started trying to use A to produce marauders, resulting in a whole lot of very very slowly produced marines coming out of barracks with tech labs. The other 50% of my time was spent weeping in despair. The rounded out .1% was spent being accidentally brilliant.

1v1 is very hard. But 2v2, that's easy! As Terran-Terran we went up against a Protoss-Zerg team. My friend focused on ground armies: infantry and tanks, while I went for the more expensive, and micro-intensive, air units, mostly banshees, or all banshees plus one raven. So she did all the charging in to her death while I got to be an obnoxious ass with banshee harassment. Pew pew pew pew, cloak and leave, pew pew pew pew, cloak and leave, repeat until victory. And a few of my helions took out an expansion (undefended).

I can do micro. I can tell units precisely where to go. I know a million little tricks. Or I figure them out quickly. I can become hyper-detail-oriented and at that time, it's pretty useful to tell units precisely which pixel to attack from. So give me the banshees and reapers and siege tanks at just the right range. Speaking of siege tanks, when we did a 1v1 and my macro fell apart completely (remember the M spam?), I found myself trapped on some island in the corner, surrounded by turrets and marines. So I did the only sensible thing: built siege tanks and blew up everything that got too close. Then I used vikings to trick the AI into chasing me back to my anti-air. I still lost, but I was very smart about my inevitable defeat!

My friend managed all the constant production and giant armies to keep track of, while I did the little movements that wrecked the enemy economy. It worked pretty damn well. Both enemies ended up bottled up and losing battles of attrition (and battles of distraction). Eventually a giant ground force rolled in and with heavy air support, smashed their lines and got to work on their main bases. It was over, and would have been even if they hadn't recognized it and surrendered.

Another game as Terran-Zerg against Protoss-Zerg went somewhat similarly. I made a lot more marines, in hopes of using some sort of medivac drop strat with gradually more and more air support, but that got too complex and suffered a setback when my first drop attempt flew right over the main enemy attacking force. So much for my good micro. But it made for a hell of a distraction, allowing my ally to get in place and wreck them. I went back to banshee harassment and ruined the protoss economy. Soon after a few vikings took out a zerg expansion and were in the process of destroying another while my zerg ally smashed through the protoss and zerg armies and was in position to destroy the zerg base. He left the game, followed soon after by the protoss. Another glorious victory.

A second person provides synergy, even if theoretically they are the same (as in the terran-terran game). The mental capabilities can fit together, stronger than alone. Obviously I should apply this same logic to my life, which means getting married. Hopefully to someone who understands my need to harass people.

Since my friends got tired of listening to my many excuses for my crushing defeat, I offer them to you.
The monitors at my friends' house are too low.
The keyboards are a different shape and height.
Chairs are different.
Build order isn't the same as SC1.
Factories cost 50 minerals less, delaying my construction of them.
SC1 doesn't have addons for barracks.
Corinthians specifically, metaphorically says that zergling rushes, and also base walling, are both abominations in the eyes of the Lord.
Fast game speed makes me cry.

In unrelated news, I should get a screenshot of it, from the replay that we hopefully still have, of an ultralisk group trying to get up my ramp, but with the front one blocking the rest. Meanwhile the front one wasn't able to AoE because a lone marine was standing a little bit down the ramp, and so this one total badass tanked the first ultralisk to at least 50% of its health (medivacs are pretty handy when only one units takes and damage at all). Earlier an SCV had bravely been mixed up with a reaper and sent to distract a baneling group. Failing to leap off the ramp in time, he instead drew half the banelings to a premature detonation. As a result, only one marine died, rather than most of the defenders. That brave, brave SCV. I could have sworn he was a reaper... But that would explain his failure to jump off the ramp when ordered.

P.S.I've ordered my own copy of SC2 and within a week or two I expect to have a newerish computer that can run it, thanks to the previously mentioned friends giving me one of their old computers. Let's all clap for them, since a newerish computer means more content, meaning putting off the day when I finally shut up.

P.P.S. Technically Starcraft isn't making any suggestions on male or female, and my state does allow civil unions, but I'm just a bit too sexist against men to marry one.

What's so bad about underwater combat?

For me it's the disorientation. I lose my sense of distance when I don't have the ground nearby. The feeling I get is a lot like when I play a different game, or different class, and I no longer know what the ranges look like, whether for spells or aggro. But it gets worse. Up-Down is hard to tell unless I'm very close and I level my camera. Until then, no clue.

I have no elegant ideas for the distance issue. A distance indicator on portraits could help, but it would seem a bit odd that my paladin can, just by looking, tell the distance of an enemy down to the tenth of a yard, especially when I as the player am completely lost.

But the height, that I can fix. Around, or possibly inside, the target circle (the green or red thing on the ground that indicates your target), add another circle which indicates relative position on the z-axis. If they are above you, white; below you, black; even, grey; with gradual lighter or darker for positions in-between. Being a color-based system it isn't going to be especially accurate, but it could help quite a bit to at least know in advance that an enemy is much higher than you.

Oh my god people are horrible

I'm a bad person who likes making bad jokes. Last night New York passed legislation to allow gay marriage. Obviously this is an excellent paring. Just think of the possibilities for making crude, insensitive, and bigoted jokes!

Let's see, I could pretend it's some sort of really awful event. Like, apocalyptic in effect if not quite in scale. And it's New York. Maybe I could make some horrible joke about how this is a second 9/11. Wait, no. No that's just too horrible. That's the sort of thing you say if you either already think you're going to burn in hell or already think you're Jesus right-hand man. So I'm not going to even bother with that. It just would not be the right thing to say.

But you know who is more horrible than me?

Other people.

So I did some googling: "gay marriage 9/11" Here's the top result, at least according to how Google chooses to show me the internets.
http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/2011/06/16852/

Skipped the second result because I misinterpreted the title.

Third result:
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=46905
By about 25 seconds in, including the intro clip: "I think a helpful way to think about this is to compare it to 9/11." In his defense, it was more of an analogy than a comparison (I should write about that one of these days), but sadly, that was the high point. Yes, he went downhill from 9/11.

But, let's all look at the bright side: These horrible people are losing. Slowly, but losing.

I was a nail in the coffin, but WoW was the hammer

A long while back I tried out SWG. I never got around to posting, or finishing, my thoughts on it. I played after NGE or whatever that was called, so I wasn't getting the supposedly better earlier version. But it was still pretty damn fun. Cities had player populations rather than loads of NPCs who give one quest and nothing ever again. And players had cities. The economy was massive, far beyond what I could easily perceive or comprehend. That's a double-edged sword, since once you're in, it's full of wonder and possibility, but a new player looks at it and wonders, "so, wtf do I do?"

I had a lot of fun when I played it for those two weeks. I even considered ever so slightly leaving WoW for it. But how can one leave WoW? You really cannot. It is always there, waiting, dominating. Well, until now (or a few months ago), for whatever reasons.

If I hadn't played WoW before, I think I'd have stuck with SWG. But I didn't. Instead I made a trial and was gone in two weeks. Another non-player. Another nail in the coffin. But WoW was the hammer.

It makes me a little sad to hear that SWG is closing, but I can't say what I actually lose from it. Maybe the evidence that that sort of game can work.

Paying for time: Part two

I didn't know there would be a part two. Blame Syl.

Maybe "timesinks" are where life really happens.

If we remove all the "unnecessary detours" in games that people consider a nuisance, what exactly are we "saving and optimizing " that time for? When you arrive faster at treasure and glory, where do you go from there? And just how much have you missed on that shorter journey?

This brings up the other side of paying for time: Paying for time. Paying for a time. This time, that time, some time.

It has been my experience that WoW suffers, not from padding, but from watering-down. Does a reputation barrier ruin the game for me? No. Why not? Because I can enjoy the reputation process. It's the process that matters, not the efficiency.

I'm just going to say this now: this post is going to get rambling and incoherent and I do not plan to fix that. I'm trying out the process of writing rather than going for the product of good writing. Like usual. :)

When I roll up to a vendor and I see that the item I want is in red, now what? Well at first I'm a bit unhappy. Shiny! Want! But let's try the roads. I could use my leet skills to hack the game and remove the rep requirement (did you know ICC was supposed to have a Sunwell event? I removed it, big regret). Now I have the shiny. So, now what? I have just been rewarded for nothing (beside my leet hacking skills, which I'm pretty sure are not the goal here). I like rewards, so I work very hard to get them, by doing nothing, since that's what gets rewards. Sure is fun, doing nothing.

I decide to hack again to remove my hack and now there is, once again, a red item with those evil words: "reputation required:" Now what? Well obviously I make a choice. Yes, a goodness to God choice (I'm not sure that's a real phrase, but let's pretend it is). Maybe it's honest to God. Don't lie to an omniscient being. Anyway, I now have a choice. Is that item and the virtual gain from it better or worse, for me personally, in all my subjective subjectivity, more or less valuable to me than the time to get it? There are often a lot of noes. But a few yeses. Yes! Now I have a goal! And a process! Let's go process that process.

And so I set off and kill a billion foozles and by now I am really, really good at killing foozles. Then I get the item and go "huh, now what?" Well duh, I go and tell everyone the story of how I killed ten billion foozles (I always lie by a factor of ten). Pixels are nice and all, but stories about those pixels go farther. Further. More distance, figuratively speaking. This blog is clear proof of that. My pixels are all totally out of reach, but stories, thoughts, ideas, and endless whining, why those are endless!

Charging for Time

I'm calling you out on this, Tesh. You're everywhere raising the scary specter of "charging for time" and how it encourages grinds and wastes of said time, in order to force more buying of time. A fair point, but how much does it actually matter?

At one extreme, if we were paying by the second, obviously there would be some major problems with grinds. Or even by the minute or hour. If a one hour grind is directly coming out of our pockets, then we will be reluctant to undertake that task. Conversely, the developers have an incentive to add many of them. It puts the players and developers in conflict.

But imagine if we paid by the decade. While I do stand by my claim that within certain limits the rate of power progression is all relative, clearly it would be unacceptable to most players if it was too slow. That means devs could not string us along on grinds and other time sinks to make leveling take years. In other words, if we paid by the decade, the devs don't have much incentive to add grinds. Unfortunately it also means they have little incentive to add content between subscription cycles, which would be a very long time. I think we can all imagine a dozen other simple reasons that a decade sub length wouldn't work well.

Now let's try a month. Is the hour delay significant? Day? Certainly week, and probably day. But it doesn't make much sense to line up month-long blocks up time with a few minutes here and there. So I propose a simple idea: complaining about "paying for time" when the time block is much larger than the grind, is bullshit.

...

I've just been informed by one of the voices that there may be additional factors here.

There are 720 hours in a 30 day month. That puts a one-hour grind at a mere .138% of the time. Which supports my "you're just being whiny about nothing" argument. However there are approximately 6-8 hours during which players are unconsciously and while vividly hallucinating, possibly about the game, are not making any progress. So let's remove a quarter of the available time, leaving us with only 540 hours, and you're still a whiner. Factoring in the unemployment rate of around 9% in the US, a one-hour commute round trip, and an 8 hour day plus half an hour for lunch, we arrive an average of another 8.645 hours unavailable for playing. At this point we have less than 10 hours per day, or 240 per month. Now that one-hour grind is edging toward significant, and by significant I mean the sort of significance you hear about when a study says that friend jelly beans in avocado was found to triple the rate of eyelash cancer, which sounds scary until you realize that the baseline rate is one in ten billion, so we're not going see a case for a few more years anyway, later if we consider the high number of people who rarely consume fried jelly beans in avocado.

The voice is telling me to skip ahead and pretend someone plays an hour a day. I think this is a good idea, because it allows me to complain about dailies.

If I have one hour each day that gives me only 30 hours for that month. In this sense, I am not buying a month, but merely 30 hours. Now the sub interval is small enough that the grind is relevant. So in that case, Tesh is right after all.

Dammit.

But I want to add this: some people have more time and enjoying 'wasting' that time. For these people, subs have a sort of double-benefit. They get a lot of time per month and the potentially resulting grinds are suitable for them.

To wrap it up into something with a point: People with a lot of time should play sub games and they should be designed for them, while people with less time should play games based on selling content packages. This somewhat corresponds with sub and f2p models, but not quite. Developers should recognize this and design their games accordingly. Players should as well and stop playing the wrong game and then whining about it, or at least recognize and accept that if they have less time they won't get as far as quickly and that's just how it is and perhaps must be for that game model.

Of course no one will ever listen to this. Players will want to pursue games that they enjoy, whether from gameplay, lore, or friends, with little regard for how the pay model affects the game. Developers will avoid 'purity' because if they can grab some of the other side without losing too much of their own, why wouldn't they? So I predict a terrible future in which sub and package games get mixed up for everyone involved, where we have grinds that half the people want and half the people don't and each half is annoyed at the other for ruining their game, while other grinds are arbitrarily removed, causing more problems between the halves.

Of course I've entirely left out any discussion of what content is, what a grind is, whether grinds can be content, whether grinds add to or detract from content, and whether my experience as a time-wasting no-life gamer is distorting my perspective.