Confusing in a brand new way for no good reason

Patch 5.0.4 (or so) is out.  It has a lot of changes.  This post is going to focus on things which I believe are objectively stupid.  This means I'm going to ignore "change sucks" things, such as the new specialization, talent, glyph system which are clearly different and confusing, but I can't yet say that they are stupid.  Let's get to it.

Glyphs: Everything I have is now a major glyph, which isn't the problem.  However there is something odd about minor glyphs now: the category doesn't make sense.  Bladed Judgement is an icon change.  Falling Avenger adds slow fall to avenging wrath.  The first is a pretty benefit while the second is potentially useful.  Focused Wrath makes holy wrath a single-target ability, which isn't merely visual or a slight buff, but a total change to how the spell works.  It might ahve looked odd having three categories of glyphs, but maybe it made sense.  Minor glyphs could do the truly minor things of appearance and reductions in the mana costs of 30 minute buffs.  Major glyphs could do something significant.  Prime glyphs even more so.  Maybe separate those and make one category "improvement" glyphs and the other "tradeoff" glyphs, since there are clear trends of some glyphs simply buffing an ability and others having an upside and downside.

Spellbook:  "What has changed" barely scratches the surface.  In fact, all it really confirmed was that the seals on my aura bar weren't a bug.  Also, "holy power is generated faster" isn't quite right: it's still generated by player actions, but the phrasing makes it sound like it's rogue-style energy that automatically fills up.  Even worse, it appears that the space needed for this worthless tab was freed up by dumping guild perks into the general spell book, creating a nice big mess.

Why does Seal of Truth say "replaces seal of command"?  We've not had seal of command in a long time.  Now I'm just plain confused.

The new spellbook is overwhelming and confusing.  It is good that I can find all my abilities in one tab rather than needing to go through three.  However, why have a huge list of the spells for other specializations?  Tie that into the specialization tool.  While we're on the subject of bad sorting, why are the spells alphabetical?  If I can't find a spell, am I really looking for "A... A... avenger's shield!" or am I looking for that one ability that throws the shield and hits multiple things in which case I'd be better off with the abilities being sorted by effect: damage, healing, buffs, etc.  Furthermore, the information on what other specializations have is scattered too much, with the spec tab giving only the faintest overview and requiring major digging into the pages-deep spellbook to figure out what is different.

"Core abilities" for protection does not include hammer of the righteous, yet somehow finds space to tell us to use holy wrath when no other ability is available.

To end on a high note, Blizzard did finally find a use for that valuable real estate freed up by removing the key ring: moving mounts and pets to their own book.

Cancel that, low note: Reset the damn talent points when you upend the entire system!

Maybe I'll have good things to say later.  Actually, since I'm not having much luck, I'll get to them now: Or not.  I had one, I swear I did, but I forgot it too soon.  And the world server is down so I can't easily look.  Oh here, the "core abilities" thing, that seems nice.  Way to go with that.

Time to stop apologizing for Guild Wars 2 because it's an 'MMO'

Remember the hullaballo about Diablo 3 needing to be always online just to play?  And then the servers would go down and the game that you'd paid for was suddenly unavailable.  People were justifiably unhappy.

And yet the Guild Wars 2 Apologists, or GWAs as I will call them despite probably not needing an abbreviation, they say that the horrible GW2 launch with servers down and logins down and that hideous bugged model of the gigantic-headed short things, is just fine.  Pay money, not play game.

Regarding spam comments

I have a spam filter on.  I forget to check it often enough.

 It apparently caught some comments. Coreus, Mana Manipulator, Laura, and Umrtvovacz all had comments eaten in the past few weeks (no clue about further back, I think they get auto-deleted after that).  Sorry about that.  They're up now.  Very late.

With that in mind, if you leave a comment and you don't see it, send me an email.  If I delete a comment I will almost always leave some sort of response such as "no trolling", in a terrible bit of hypocrisy, and unless there are many such comments, I leave it only in the "this comment has been removed by an administrator" state, rather than the super-deletion that makes it as if it was never there.

Sometime this week I'll get Guild Wars 2.  Then I can begin making unwarranted comparisons to WoW!  Someday, when another game comes out, maybe GW2 will be my go-to game for bad comparisons.

Thanks for all the comments!  Except the spam comments, I don't want to visit your website.

A better future doesn't mean the past was a hellhole

There is nostalgia, the biased view that the past was better.  And then there is the opposite, the biased view that the past was worse.  Note that I am not talking about analyzing past and present and picking the better one, but the biased process of picking one first and then shaping everything else to fit it.

Is WoW a better game than EQ?  I can't say for myself, but it seems so.  Is current WoW a better game than previous incarnations?  For me, no, I preferred BC.  That doesn't mean that I think BC was the perfect game.  It had problems.

Similarly, if you prefer the current WoW, that doesn't mean that all past versions of WoW were terrible hell-scapes of misery.  Nor does it mean that every single change to WoW was perfectly wonderfully better in all ways.

"Everything is better" is just as absurd as "everything is worse."

A good group

I've a weird habit of wanting to complete dungeon quests, even in Blackrock Depths where they appear to have gone out of their way to make Heart of the Mountain hard to complete.  Getting enough keys requires pretty much killing every dwarf in lower and upper city and they despawn on zone-out, so no saving up.  That last part is new, and I don't know why Blizzard would add something to make it harder to complete a quest at the same time that they made it easier to get the quest (used to be out in the Burning Steppes).

I managed to do this on my paladin thanks to being a tank and therefore being able to drag the group anywhere I wanted.  Usually just explaining that the quest they all had needed it was enough.  Other times people just had no clue that I was taking them on the grand tour.  Strangely I never had problems with people just in it for the loot bag at the end.  My hunter did it with the help of two friends I was leveling with: a tank and a healer, so again, we could go anywhere we wanted and didn't need anyone else if they all wanted to leave.

My mage was not so lucky.  She has no tank and healer to queue with, so it takes a while just to get in.  First group had a special flower snowflake tank who wanted to rush to the end, acknowledging that he was skipping every quest and almost the entire instance, regardless of what anyone else needed.  Sadly, there is no "report for being a douchebag" option.  The second group was going well enough, with the tank seeming to want to do the quest.  Alas, I could sense trouble.  The two other DPS wanted a speed run.  That made it obvious that "we'll do the quest after the boss" was just a blatant scam.  I tried to explain that even if they weren't being deceptive liars it was still faster to get the keys before the end boss, but no, he was going to charge bravely ahead to no clue where he was going at all.

Finally, finally!  I got a group.  A group that responded to questions regarding a full clear for the keys with affirmations and references to experience points.  Oh, glorious.  Even better, the tank responded to directions, following me, seemingly recognizing that if someone in BRD knows where they are going, you go along with them, lest you find yourself lost in endless tunnels.  It all went marvelously, with so many keys that we had enough to rob the bank without even needing to loop back after the bar.  Normally I find that we need to do some looping to get enough keys, but nope, plenty.  So we robbed the bank and looped back to the main path to the bar.  Things went well, at least until the bar when the tank had to go after a terrible incident with the Dark Keeper.  As these things go, they went downhill, until I was the only one left.

I decided to stick around.  I had a wonderful present after all: an open bank.  Finally, a new group formed.  With a little bit of confusion on their part, we finished off the bar and the Dark Keeper boozing within.  Four people got the heart of the mountain without needing to spend an hour and a half in BRD slaughtering dwarfs, which I suppose could be seen as an unfortunate loss on their part.  Still, I'd seen how tricky it was to get the quest finished, what with people rushing and not reading, so I was very happy to have been able to help out four people like that (plus the previous four).  We move along smoothly, with people again following directions.  At the end I thanked the tank for that and he thanked me for the guiding and everyone else thanked the tank for tanking.  The healer joined me in queueing for Lower Blackrock Spire.

Our tank didn't know the way and told us to say if he was going the wrong way.  I asked if that was our cue to trick him into doing upper spire too.  The healer said yes and the tank went along.  So up we went.  There were some problems regarding the healer forgetting that if we're not 85 we're not invincible and then a DC.  Still, the boss died.  I then invited them to a rousing game of Jump From Upper Spire to Lower Spire and Hope We Don't Die From the Fall.  We all survived the fall and proceeded to replicate our previous orc-killing success with the addition of troll and ogre-killing.  Things were spiffingly great.  At leat until we were afflicted with Sudden Tank Dropping Group Syndrome.  That resulted in a bit of a game of Two Mages Showing Off Their Kiting Skills followed by Klepsacovic Demonstrating His Total Knowledge of Shortcuts in LBRS, which unfortunately descended into a game of Priest Dying from a Misplaced Jump Onto Hard Surfaces and then Lava.  We got a tank, we killed a boss, then another boss, and finally the last boss at the end.

Sometimes things are pretty good.

And why should I care what happens to you?

An idea was floated by some unspeakables who suggested writing a sort of collective post, whatever that means, about individualism vs. collectivism in various games.  Bit biased from the start, don't you think?

As I see it, collective action relies on the future.  People work together for future results.  They sacrifice for the group for future results.  I give to you because at some point you will give to me.  This works best with small, tightly-knit groups, such as friends and family.  In this form it is a rational exchange.

On larger scales it gets fuzzier.  There is no guarantee of reciprocity, making the future benefit aspect unreliable.  And yet, we still act together.  Usually.  We merge on the highway in the 'zipper' formation, one from the right and one from the left and one from the right and so on.  Except that one jerk who rushes out ahead, nearly causes an accident, and then uses the shoulder of the road.  But that's why we invented police.  On the small scales, social habits will generally suffice, while on the larger scales, we need people with guns.

This was supposed to be about gaming, so fine, let's get to that bit.  The habits and instincts we have in real life also exist in games.  At least initially.  We take the habits of life and apply them as best we can in the game.  Not always consciously, but it happens.  We take turns.  We share.  Over time though, we develop new habits, habits based on the game world.  And as that game world changes, we develop even newer habits.  That's what I'm supposed to be writing about: how the changes to the game world affect collective and individual interaction.

You ain't got no life.
You ain't got no friends.
And I know you want to spend your weekend with 40 people you don't know,
And some guy named Puff telling you what to do!
- MC Raiders, Mindflame Lyrics

WoW has always been a game that you could solo to the level cap.  Certainly there was a neat feeling to seeing 60 near your name, but there's 60 and then there is 60.  The first one is merely a level higher than 59 while the second is the level where you begin to do awesome things.  In groups.  Groups which you formed yourself.

Before the dungeon finder there was the looking for group channel.  Everyone, from level [something low] to level 60 was in it, looking for groups.  You'd talk to people to form groups and then run to the instance (the latter part perhaps wasn't so good).  Then you'd spend some quality time there.  Or not.  It depended on the quality of the group and whether or not you were doing someplace good or Razorfen Kraul.

This all tended to make players more collective.  When a group took time to form, there was a strong incentive to not have to make a new one.  Quitting at the first sign of any challenge wasted more time than a bit of deadweight in the group.  So you dealt with the deadweight, trying to fix them up well enough to get through the instance.  It was to your benefit to work for the benefit of the group.  Beyond that, since groups were server-based, having a reputation as a jerk wasn't going to look good on your next guild application.

Contrast that with the current grouping system.  The queues may take time, but they take no effort, so the cost of switching groups is low.  At the first sign of a problem you can leave, without explanation, or with a bit of flaming.  The other day I ran into "learn to tank before you queue", whatever that is supposed to mean.  Since the groups are from a pool of many servers, you're not likely to see anyone again, except during some low-population leveling times, so a reputation as a jerk doesn't exist.  Even still, the most someone can do is /ignore, pushing the jerk to another group.  For the individual the problem is fixed, but not for the group.

Manually forming groups also made players more informed about the group and the needs of the players.  The player looking for a Baron 45 run (a difficult quest speed-run of Stratholme which no longer exists) was not going to be in a group with someone who wanted to farm Argent Dawn rep and needed every trash pack dead.  They knew before grouping that they had different goals.  Contrast that with a randomly-formed group where one person wants their loot bag and wants to skip everything (BRD mole machines, I'm looking at you) getting grouped with someone on their first run who wants to do the quests.

The trends are not entirely in the direction of individualism.  There is the deserter debuff, seemingly to discourage players from dropping groups too soon.  I've only experienced that debuff once, in a group where the tank wanted to skip all of BRD while I was trying to do the quests.  The vote kick system allows bad players to be removed and replaced, allowing most of the group to carry on.

However even these are somewhat individualistic.  Vote kicking just means the player requeues and ends up with another group.  Removing them benefits the individual player, but has no benefit to the pool of random runners.  It doesn't help that the vote kick message is not relayed to the kicked player.  "Keeps pulling ahead of the tank" might be useful.  But no, the kicked player has nothing.  They're just suddenly, unexpectedly not in the group anymore, for no apparent reason.  Maybe the other players were jerks, maybe they misclicked, who know?  There is little incentive for self-reflection and therefore little incentive to improve, leaving a bad player still out there, perhaps unaware of his problem.

Even fleeing disaster used to be harder.  Once upon a time you fought with every last ounce of will to prevent a wipe.  Graveyards were further away and there was no mass resurrection.  Now an imminent wipe is easily averted: drop group and you're safely far away, untouchable by NPC and PC.  I don't know about you, but I tended to bond a bit with people who had fought beside me, even if we failed, because it was the struggle that mattered; it showed the character of the player.  Maybe we'd invite that person to our guild.

That's another big thing: guild formation.  These days it seems to take place mostly through spamming invites to my unguilded alts with messages about the guild level.  I much preferred joining a guild based on having played with them, seeing how they played and interacted with others, rather than what level their guild was.  Or if they were jerks, I could yell at them in trade chat.  Then people would know, Raiders of the Twilight Latin Phrase were a bunch of jerks.

I recall an incident in which a guild member had ninjaed a BoE epic staff from a pug.  Since it was the same server there was still the ability to find them and trade it back.  We insisted on this.  We weren't going to have our guild reputation tarnished by someone stealing.  These days, would any guild care about what happens in a pug?  Even The Guild of Adorable Puppy Huggers has little ability to govern behavior in pugs.

There aren't even as many opportunities to help other players.  Once a mage portal to Orgrimmar was a great thing to have, since getting out of Maraudon was a bit of a pain and my hearthstone was set to Light's Hope Chapel.  Now I just get teleported back out to the front of the bank.  A warlock summoning or the group members getting there first meant someone was saved a potentially very long run.  There were those who refused to run, waiting for a summon, and thus did we find the lazy leeches.

All taken together this adds up to a world of individuals.  Some will prefer that.  Some will not.  Some will look at all the changes I list and insist that they are good things.  For many of those I will agree.  For example, teleporting players to the instance, while I was initially resistant, is a good thing, saving a whole lot of time.

Still, all things have costs.  We are placed in groups and lose the benefit of forming a group.  And even when nominally in a group, we are not in a group, merely a set of individuals.  Some revel in this, believing it is freedom.  I believe it is a loss of opportunity.  It is a loss of teaching and bonding, leading to fewer and fewer good players who know how to cooperate.  That's a downward cycle: with no incentive to help the group, we reject the group, acting more and more individualistically, often at the expense of the group, and as others do the same, we see the group more and more as the enemy rather than as the friend.  We comfort ourselves, and no one else, with the thought that we only need tolerate them for a short time before we roll the dice on a new random set of individuals with whom we can group alone.

The lyrics I quoted above aren't quite right.  I may have had no life, but I did have friends, and I was not with 40 people I didn't know.  Though strangely, ever single raid leader I ever had, every single group leader, every single guild leader, was named Puff.  And no one wanted vendorstrike.

Another Torture Quest

Maybe Blizzard learned from the torture quest in Borean Tundra.  For context, it was a quest in which you're tasked by some mages, who are themselves not allowed to use torture, with torturing information out of a prisoner.  Some people were not happy with this quest, giving us no choices or options, only requiring us to go ahead with the torture, or abandon the quest and the many that followed.

There is another torture quest, added with Cataclysm in the Northern Barrens.  Though that's not the right term.  It's an interrogation quest.  Note the word choice.  Interrogate. The goal of the quest is to get information and it can be done by means which do not involve the use of a neural needler.

Here are the summaries, if you hate clicking on links:
Librarian Normantis on Amber Ledge wants you to use the Neural Needler on the Imprisoned Beryl Sorcerer until he reveals the location of Lady Evanor.
- Prisoner Interrogated
 Question the nearby Razormane prisoner. If he's not there or unconscious, Togrik can revive him for you.
 - Razormane Prisoner Interrogated


Both use interrogated in the quest completion part, but the brief descriptions have a different way of phrasing it.  The Borean Tundra quest only mentions, specifically mentions, the torture device.  In contrast, the Barrens quest gives the more general word of question.  And it means it.

You get five options at first.  One is the predictably ineffective choice of demanding to know who is leading the Quilboar.  Second and third options are punching and kicking.  Fourth is to give food and the fifth is tickling.  All of these options work.  In fact, the last two options, the non-violent ones, work faster.  Apparently no one can resist tickling or criticizing food.  You even get a buff based on the actions you take, though the 'nice' buff isn't very useful.

I wonder what the extra development effort is for this compared to a few jabs of a neural needler.  I suspect it's not a terrible increase in effort.  Enough to not do it for every quest, but I think not so much that it cannot be done more often.  It's only a small change, with no impact on the quest text or rewards.  But small changes, small choices, are important to players, especially when we've got a neural needler and a willfully blind mage.

Hipster Hunter only pulling aggro ironically

I'm only generalizing based on a single aspect of appearance ironically.